They walked a few steps up a dark street and then went through a narrow door; they descended a flight of stairs and Charley, to his astonishment, found himself in a large cellar with stone walls; from these jutted out wooden tables large enough to accommodate ten or twelve persons, and there were wooden benches on each side of them.
The heat was stifling and the air gray with smoke.
In the space left by the tables a dense throng was dancing to a melancholy tune.
A slatternly waiter in shirt-sleeves found them two places and took their order.
People sitting here and there looked at them curiously and whispered to one another; and indeed Charley in his well-cut English blue serge, Lydia in her black silk and her smart hat with the feather in it, contrasted violently with the rest of the company.
The men wore neither collars nor ties, and they danced with their caps on, the end of a cigarette stuck to their lips.
The women were bare-headed and extravagantly painted.
“They look pretty tough,” said Charley.
“They are.
Most of them have been in jug and those that haven’t should be.
If there’s a row and they start throwing glasses or pulling knives, just stand against the wall and don’t move.”
“I don’t think they much like the look of us,” said Charley.
“We seem to be attracting a good deal of attention.”
“They think we’re sight-seers and that always puts their backs up.
But it’ll be all right.
I know the patron.”
When the waiter brought the two beers they had ordered Lydia asked him to get the landlord along.
In a moment he came, a big fellow with the naked look of a fat priest, and immediately recognized Lydia.
He gave Charley a shrewd, suspicious stare, but when Lydia introduced him as a friend of hers, shook hands with him warmly and said he was glad to see him.
He sat down and for a few minutes talked with Lydia in an undertone.
Charley noticed that their neighbours watched the scene and he caught one man giving another a wink.
They were evidently satisfied that it was all right.
The dance came to an end and the other occupants of the table at which they sat came back.
They gave the strangers hostile looks, but the patron explained that they were friends, whereupon one of the party, a sinister-looking chap, with the scar of a razor wound on his face, insisted on offering them a glass of wine.
Soon they were all talking merrily together.
They were plainly eager to make the young Englishman at home, and a man sitting by his side explained to him that though the company looked a bit rough they were all good fellows with their hearts in the right place.
He was a little drunk.
Charley, having got over his first uneasiness, began to enjoy himself.
Presently the saxophone player got up and advanced his chair.
The Russian singer of whom Lydia had spoken came forward with a guitar in her hand and sat down.
There was a burst of applause.
“C’est La Marishka,” said Charley’s drunken friend, “there’s no one like her.
She was the mistress of one of the commissars, but Stalin had him shot and if she hadn’t managed to get out of Russia he’d have shot her too.”
A woman on the other side of the table overheard him.
“What nonsense you’re telling him, Loulou,” she cried.
“La Marishka was the mistress of a grand duke before the revolution, everyone knows that, and she had diamonds worth millions, but the Bolsheviks took everything from her.
She escaped disguised as a peasant.”
La Marishka was a woman of forty, haggard and sombre, with gaunt, masculine features, a brown skin, and enormous, blazing eyes under black, heavy, arching brows.
In a raucous voice, at the top of her lungs, she sang a wild, joyless song, and though Charley could not understand the Russian words a cold feeling ran down his spine.
She was loudly applauded.
Then she sang a sentimental ballad in French, the lament of a girl for her lover who was to be executed next morning, which roused her audience to frenzy.
She finished, for the time being, with another Russian song, lively this time, and her face lost its tragic cast; it took on a look of rude and brutal gaiety, and her voice, deep and harsh, acquired a rollicking quality; your blood was stirred and you could not but exult, but at the same time you were moved, for below the bacchanalian merriment was the desolation of futile tears.
Charley looked at Lydia and caught her mocking glance.
He smiled good-naturedly.
That grim woman got something out of the music which he was conscious now was beyond his reach.
Another burst of applause greeted the end of the number, but La Marishka, as though she did not hear it, without a sign of acknowledgement, rose from her chair and came over to Lydia.
The two women began to talk in Russian.
Lydia turned to Charley.
“She’ll have a glass of champagne if you’ll offer it to her.”
“Of course.”