He lived for the Cheka and nothing else.
There was no humanity in him, neither pity nor love, only fanaticism and hatred.
He was terrible and implacable.”
Charley shuddered a little.
He could not but see why Lydia had told him about the terrorist, and in truth it was startling to note how close the resemblance was between the sinister man she had described and the man he had so surprisingly discovered that Simon was become.
There was the same asceticism, the same indifference to the pleasant things of life, the same power of work, and perhaps the same ruthlessness.
Charley smiled his good-natured smile.
“I daresay Simon has his faults like the rest of us.
One has to be tolerant with him because he hasn’t had a very happy or a very easy life.
I think perhaps he craves for affection, and there’s something that people find repellent in his personality which prevents him from getting it.
He’s frightfully sensitive and things which wouldn’t affect ordinary people wound him to the quick.
But at heart I think he’s kind and generous.”
“You’re deceived in him.
You think he has your own good nature and unselfish consideration.
I tell you, he’s dangerous.
Dzerjinsky was the narrow idealist who for the sake of his ideal could bring destruction upon his country without a qualm.
Simon isn’t even that.
He has no heart, no conscience, no scruple, and if the occasion arises he will sacrifice you who are his dearest friend without hesitation and without remorse.”
viii
THEY WOKE next day at what was for them an early hour.
They had breakfast in bed, each with his tray, and after breakfast, while Charley, smoking his pipe read the Mail, Lydia, a cigarette between her lips, did her hands.
You would have thought, to see them, each engaged on his respective occupation, that they were a young married couple whose first passion had dwindled into an easy friendship.
Lydia painted her nails and spread out her fingers on the sheet to let them dry.
She gave Charley a mischievous glance.
“Would you like to go to the Louvre this morning?
You came to Paris to see pictures, didn’t you?”
“I suppose I did.”
“Well, let’s get up then and go.”
When the maid who brought them their coffee drew the curtains the day that filtered into the room from the courtyard had looked as gray and bleak as on the mornings that had gone before; and they were surprised, on stepping into the street, to see that the weather had suddenly changed.
It was cold still, but the sun was bright and the clouds, high up in the heavens, were white and shining.
The air had a frosty bite that made your blood tingle.
“Let’s walk,” said Lydia.
In that gay, quivering light the Rue de Rennes lost its dinginess, and the gray, shabby houses no longer wore the down-at-heel, despondent air they usually do, but had a mellow friendliness as though, like old women in reduced circumstances, they felt less forlorn now that the unexpected sunshine smiled on them as familiarly as on the grand new buildings on the other side of the river.
When they crossed the Place St. Germain-des-Pres and there was a confusion of buses and trams, recklessly-speeding taxis, lorries and private cars, Lydia took Charley’s arm; and like lovers, or a grocer and his wife taking a walk of a Sunday afternoon, they sauntered arm in arm, stopping now and then to look into the window of a picture-dealer, down the narrow Rue de Seine.
Then they came on to the quay.
Here the Paris day burst upon them in all its winter beauty and Charley gave a little exclamation of delight.
“You like this?” smiled Lydia.
“It’s a picture by Raffaelli.”
He remembered a line in a poem that he had read at Tours:
“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.”
The air had a sparkle so that you felt you could take it up in your hands and let it run through your fingers like the water of a fountain.
To Charley’s eyes, accustomed to the misty distances and soft haze of London, it seemed amazingly transparent.
It outlined the buildings, the bridge, the parapet by the side of the river, with an elegant distinctness, but the lines, as though drawn by a sensitive hand, were tender and gracious.
Tender too was the colour, the colour of sky and cloud, the colour of stone; they were the colours of the eighteenth-century pastelists; and the leafless trees, their slim branches a faint mauve against the blue, repeated with exquisite variety a pattern of delicate intricacy.
Because he had seen pictures of just that scene Charley was able to take it in, without any sense of surprise, but with a loving, understanding recognition; its beauty did not shatter him by its strangeness, nor perplex him by its unexpectedness, but filled him with a sense of familiar joy such as a countryman might feel when after an absence of years he sees once more the dear, straggling street of his native village.
“Isn’t it lovely to be alive?” he cried.
“It’s lovely to be as young and enthusiastic as you are,” said Lydia, giving his arm a little squeeze, and if she choked down a sob he did not notice it.
Charley knew the Louvre well, for every time his parents spent a few days in Paris (to let Venetia get her clothes from the little dressmaker who was just as good as those expensive places in the Rue Royale and the Rue Cambon) they made a point of taking their children there.
Leslie Mason made no bones at confessing that he preferred new pictures to old.
“But after all, it’s part of a gentleman’s education to have done the great galleries of Europe, and when people talk about Rembrandt and Titian and so on, you look a bit of a fool if you can’t put your word in.