Felix woke, rolled over in a flood of gold-spangled dust to find himself lapped in faultless health and spirits. Paris’ morning surprise for her children, last night’s debauch innocent as a game of kiss-in-the-ring. Last night’s resolution clarified and unimpaired. He had Boris to find and explain to him what he had meant. Claim his own. He shaved his hardly perceptible beard, whistling an air from Louise. Paris was waiting for him, had given him the day, now in mid-morning, which would only be begun by night.
He ran through his pockets. Boris’s address was lost. There were names of unknowns, scrawled on the cabaret cards, not the shred off a bill he remembered, the splendid name scrawled in sucked purple pencil— He rushed out to find his earlier boy friend.
“My dear Felix, how should I know? Those boys sleep anywhere. You might try the quays. You’ll see him about again some night.”
“I don’t mean to wait—I’ve got to find him, if I go to the police.”
“Well, I shouldn’t do that— They probably know too much about him.” Then, incautiously—“He’s probably pretty sick after last night. They say his lungs are going.”
Curiously, that fanned Felix. The older boy for the first time liked him well. Wondered if by any chance he saw in his eyes what “one would fain call master.” It was odd.
“He used to live somewhere in the nest of hotels round the Rue Buonaparte.”
“Good,” said Felix. “I’ll try them, one by one.”
Boris woke up. The young head, a little brutal and afraid in sleep, on waking lost those expressions. “Comme j’ai fait la bombe hier,” rubbing his eyes like a baby. A sixth-floor room in a cheap hotel in old Paris has no romantic quality. It was as much as Boris could do to rise nightly like some sort of phoenix out of the ashes of old clothes, torn socks, and russian newspapers. A miserably recognisable room, in a bitter world now burning under the sun-cracked roof, with no room in it for penniless, palace-reared brats. No excuse for the room either. A shameless, shameful pity of disorder, and want not above the trickery. Only on the lavabo shelf there was some sort of order, and a glass full of brushes for the bright white teeth.
What sort of boy was the english boy? Half Boris’s nature was curious, the other—it was a nature profoundly divided—had no interest. The indifference lay beneath, the under-waters of the stream that ran in and out, up so many curious creeks, round islands not fixed yet on any map.
His interest was chiefly whether the boy would be good for a few nights of Boris’s necessities; some food, unlimited drink, no sympathy, but a kind of companionship. Charm was what he liked, who had it for sole asset. Someone to laugh with. He would have laughed if he could have seen Felix, followed by the taxi he was too impatient to jump in and out of, entering and leaving shabby door after shabby door. He lay on his back and dodged the flies. He was very tired after four years of Paris. Four actual years, but he had never been able to calculate more than a day ahead, which must set ordinary time going differently. Also, what time had he in the sense of future, a bloody curtain between him and his land, his torn roots not fed by the transplanting? Over two hundred francs (the compatriot chauffeur had been merciful) of the english boy’s money stuffed away. It might also have startled him had he seen Felix a door nearer, a door further off. One hundred and fifty francs to pacify the old vache in the bureau below. If misery had turned the key on him, what of it? Get the second best shoes out of the cobblers. Forget till the money was gone, and in the next spell of rain take cold and go about sore-throated and aching. Till it was time to drink again. Drink to forget. Forget what did not matter. Yet if a fly brushed his caste dignity, he would rage childishly, and laugh and forgive and not forget.
Felix pitched into his room, his heart almost preceding him. Drew himself up and said languidly: “All right after last night?” Poverty that amazed him and he pitied, for a moment dismissing romance for sense.
“Get up and we’ll lunch. I’m not in Paris for long. I want you to come away with me.”
“Where?” said Boris.
“To my people in England.”
“I’ve always wanted to see England,” he said—“we like the english best of all races.”
Russians do not gush, and he was arranging his shame about the room; the shirt he had worn last night all he had on him, and his feet grimy and no slippers, and how to turn himself into a desirable object with Felix there; and how to get his clothes out with the bill not paid if he was really going away; and how they couldn’t make Felix a cocktail, and would probably refuse to send up so much as a bottle of Vichy; and how soon or if it would be safe to tell Felix about it. And if Felix was really a bore or not. And, suddenly, how bad it was to have to think like that.
And Felix, brimmed with grace, said:
“This was just to tell you. Meet me at the Foyot in an hour.”
In another room, in another hotel, in a chaos of elegant poverty, Scylla answered the telephone bell. Philip’s voice said:
“What made you let on you were engaged to Clarence the other night? He doesn’t seem to think so. Like to hear his letter?”
She was ready for that, through the occasional sense that one has lived through an event before it arrives.
“What’s that? I said nothing of the sort. If Lydia likes to think such rubbish. She must have written him one of her letters.”
The voice changed:
“I wish you hadn’t told her whatever you meant like that. She’s been upset.”
“Well, she might have married him herself once,” and rang off and sat still. This would not do. If their alliance was not to break up, she must get the idea out of Clarence’s head. Played into Clarence’s hands, she had: to finish her with Picus: give Clarence the game. Subtle-minded, he would know how to bitch things more than they were already bitched. All to bitch Lydia for bitching her. God, what a world! So much for Sanc-Grail cups and maidens. She felt positively superstitious over her own experiences. Then suffered under what seemed, after all, an unfair lack of grace. Then saw the cottage on Tollerdown, a desolation with something in it that raved. Translated it into possibility of annoyance, petty insult, even tragedy. Playing the Freud game, the name rose “Philoctetes.” Just the sort of rôle Clarence would pick and play badly. Did Philoctetes play well before he found his Sophocles? Oh! damn analogies. Better go down at once, make at worst an armed peace, and give him something else to think about.
A telegram:
“Arriving shortly with Russian ill to live with us.”
Nothing like Felix for letting you know. And Carston had gone to Tambourne with a plan. Picus might be there. Felix was coming back. All roads lay south again. Sleep at Starn that night and go over to Tollerdown in he morning. Have it out with Clarence. Might seduce Clarence and shut his mouth that way. Then to Tambourne and Carston’s news.
With serene courage, for she was uneasy, she made her preparations.
Picus introduced Carston to english ecclesiastical life. At last there would be something that he had been led to expect. The old man in his library looked and spoke right.
Picus said:
“I’ve told him all about it. He’s had the devil in his parish.”
“Well,” said the vicar, “I’ll go so far as to say that during the course of our long association, your father has illustrated my picture of hell. And, as usual, any heavenly landscape has been all around and so unobserved.” He examined the cup.