“He obviously found one while waiting for you,” she said. “Hotels constantly lose business to amateurs — if I did not love my métier I would have retired years ago. I don’t suppose you will want to stay here forever, but many deserted women earn enough to return to God while working for me.”
“Not to my God,” I said.
“Of course not, dear. I’m talking about Catholics.”
Then Wedder strode in. He was in one of his wild states, and demanded a talk with me in private.
“Do you want that, dear?” said Millie.
“Of course!” said I.
She led us very stiffly upstairs to this nice little room then said (to Wedder) “Out of respect for the person of your companion I am forgoing the tariff which is customarily paid in advance, but if in any way she suffers you will be made to pay to an extent you will find astonishing.”
She said this in a very French voice.
“Eh?” said Wedder, looking confused as well as wild.
In a more London voice she said, “Remember, walls have ears,” and left, shutting the door.
He then strode up and down making a speech which sounded more like the Bible than Shakespeare. He spoke about God, his mother, the lost paradise of home, hell-fire, damnation and money. He said that by stealing the five hundred friedrichs d’or I had broken his run of luck, stopped him breaking the casino’s bank and cheated him out of marriage. My theft had robbed the poor of vast sums he would have donated to charity and to the church, and deprived us of a town house in London, a yacht in the Mediterranean, a grouse moor in Scotland and a mansion in the Kingdom of Heaven. And now that he no longer wished to marry — now that he wished he were separated from me by a gulf deeper than Hell itself — he was chained by his abject poverty to the fiend who had damned him to Hell — was chained to a woman for whom he now felt nothing but hate hate hate hate hate — loathing, detestation and hate.
“But Duncan,” I cried happily cutting open the lining of my coat, “luck has returned to you again! Here are Clydesdale and North of Scotland banknotes to the value of five hundred pounds sterling — they are just as valuable as friedrichs d’or. God gave them to me because he knew something like this would happen, and I have kept them for our last moment which has now arrived. Take it all! Return to Glasgow, to your mother, to maidservants who will love your manliness more than I can, to any church of God which catches your fancy. Be free as a bird once more — fly from me!”
Instead of cheering up he tried to swallow the notes while flinging himself out of the window, but being unable to get it open he rushed through the door and tried to dive downstairs head first.
Luckily Millie had been listening from the room next door (this hotel is full of apertures) and had called out her staff. They swarmed over him and filled him with exactly the right amount of brandy. It was not easy getting him off on the train to Calais. He did not really want to leave me, but many hands make light work and off he went. Millie wanted me to keep most of the five hundred pounds but I said no: Wedder loved money more than I did and it was his reward for the weddings we had enjoyed. I would now earn what I needed by working for a living: a thing I had not done before. She said, “If that’s what you really want, dear.”
So here I am.
18. Paris to Glasgow: The Return
I am no longer a parasite. For three days I have earned a wage by doing a job as well and fast as possible, not for pleasure but cash like most people do. Each morning I sink into slumber, glad to have knocked off forty and earned four hundred and eighty francs. I am surprised at my popularity. Bell Baxter is certainly a splendid looking woman, but if I was a man there are at least a dozen here I would want more than me: soft little cuddlies, tall supple elegants, wild brown exotics. Millie describes me in our brochure as “The beautiful Englishwoman (la belle Anglaise) who will fully compensate you for the pains (travail) of Agincourt and Waterloo.” She is careful that I only deal with Frenchmen, because (she says) it might embarrass me to meet some of her English clients in later life. Perhaps she also thinks it might embarrass them! She has a lot of these at the weekends who require special services from some of our girls who are between employments at the Comédie Française. I watched one of the performances through an aperture last night. Our client was Monsieur Spankybot who arrives in a cab wearing a black mask which he never removes, though he takes off everything else. He has very elaborate requirements for which he pays a great deal, being first treated as a baby, then as a little lad on his first night in a new boarding-school, then as a young soldier captured by a savage tribe. His screams were out of all proportion to what was actually done to him.
My best friend here, Toinette, is a Socialist, and we often talk about improving the world, especially for the miserable ones, as Victor Hugo calls them, though Toinette says Hugo’s special insights are très sentimental and I should apply myself to the novels of Zola. We discuss these things at the café next door because Millie Cronquebil says politics should be detached from the hotel trade. The intellectual life of Paris is in its cafés, and our quarter (which contains the University) has cafés whose customers are writers or painters or savants of other kinds, and the academics have different cafés from the revolutionaries. Our café is mostly frequented by revolutionary hôteliers who say the rich will only disgorge through a bouleversement of the structure totale.
No time to write more. Someone’s coming.
I am writing the end of this letter in a splendid office which smells of disinfectant and leather upholstery, just like home. I left the Notre-Dame suddenly today after two hours of terrible confusion. The cause was my own ignorance. Will I ever reach the end of it?
For obvious reasons we usually rose late in the mornings, but today Millie knocked on my door soon after eight and said I should hurry downstairs at once to the Salon International because the doctor was looking at the girls there.
“An early start indeed!” thinks Bell but says aloud,
“Certainly, Millie. What doctor is this?”
“He is employed by the municipality to enforce public health regulations. Just wear your dressing-gown, dearie, and it will be over in a jiffy.”
So I joined the queue, noticing many of the girls wore nothing but their chemise and stockings. All the ones outside the alcove seemed quieter and glummer than usual so to cheer them up I said it was good for the municipality to care about our health, and I hoped Toinette (who was ahead of me) would get the doctor to prescribe something which would ease her migraine headaches. This did cheer them up — they giggled and said I had esprit, which puzzled me. But when I reached the alcove I saw an ugly little man with a ferocious scowl who was barking “Wider! Wider!” at poor Toinette like a bad-tempered drill-sergeant. She lay with her legs apart on a padded table while he pressed a thing like a spoon into her loving groove or vagina (as the Latins call it) while nearly sticking his nose and heavy moustache in after it. That was the only part of women he cared about because a moment later he said, “Pah! You may go.”