VII
"A lady," the fat concierge told me. "Been here twice. Well, a sort of lady, a ... you understand. Her cheeks—her skirt—you can see her legs up to here.... Believe me or don't believe me, but she's twin pea to your Marie. If she comes back, what shall I tell her? I won't let that sort into my house! Eh? Kick her out?"
"Oh but, M. Etienne, I am at home to-day. Let her come up."
I closed my door blushing.
Through the banisters I recognized her. Actually Marie!
"Come in...."
She went in ahead of me to the dining-room—"my dining-room," she used to call it—and seated herself deliberately. Genuine timidity hides itself behind a mask of absurd audacity.
"Marie ... Marie ... is it possible?"
She was wearing a large red straw hat turned up at one side and weighted down on the other side by a nodding mass of huge black plumes, two tall elastic antennae, the sort worn by horses drawing hearses. Under the chalky enamel you couldn't see her freckles, but her eyes, her lovely eyes of purest aquamarine, with glints of indigo from her blackened lashes, still retained their dewy look of astonishment.
Here was Marie. At last I was going to know why she was so mute and why she ran away one evening without taking along her bundle of clothes or her prayer-book. I was going to find out how a poor little servant girl rebelling against kindness could become a poor little swaggering over-dressed prostitute.
"I have come for my things."
"They are still here, Marie; I'll go and get them."
But I couldn't budge. This phenomenon coming so close to me was appalling. I looked at her. She had the soft, awkward charm of a little astonished beast. Seated there in my presence she made an ingenuous, piteous sight, like a ladybird you're afraid of crushing, or a wilful timid lamb withdrawing from your caress.
I noticed all sorts of minutiae—that she carried a cloth hand-bag, an exact copy of a bag of mine, and tied her shoe-latchets the very same way I did mine; was very neat, her shoes polished, her hands clean, her neck fairly waxed with soap. Her gaze, once aimless and imprisoned, harpooned the things in my room and withdrew freighted with discoveries.... And she gave me acid, persistent looks like the looks one woman gives another. "Has she aged?" her looks questioned, "has she changed, is she prettier?" Her eyes roved around the room. "Ah, that little étagère was not there in my time, nor that engraving.... Who's doing her work? The place looks well kept." She parted the collar of her jacket at the opening to show off her imitation brooch. The child had become feminized, she seemed older than ever.
"Why, Marie? Why?"
I couldn't restrain myself any longer. She leaned her elbow on the table. When she raised her eyes, they were underlined with red and two slow tears cut little pathways down the powder on her cheeks. I jumped up and took her hands.
"I didn't like—I didn't know what to do with myself. It wasn't my fault. No one cared about me...."
The great answer to the riddle. They all have this devouring need. What they ask of love and look for in love is "someone to care about them."
"And then my hair, my Breton dress ... everybody stared at me. 'Aren't you ashamed?' I used to think."
Another need—to be like other people, to be just as good as anyone else—why not?—to have a bag like madam and hats like the hats you see on the street....
"That's all," she added.
It was all. When women sell themselves, it is not poverty necessarily that drives them to it. You don't know the hell of jealousy that burns in all of us. There are some women who make themselves beautiful less for the sake of pleasing men than for annoying other women.
"You must be unhappy."
"Yes, ma'am."
Is a poor little thing like Marie sensual? Women are rarely sensual. If they are, they have not been so from the start; they have become so.
Her Breton accent came back. "Madam," she said in her singsong of four years ago and in the same servile tone. Now she felt like relieving herself and telling me everything. There was one man who really didn't disgust her, but he was at the front, and if only he could come back! In the meantime she practiced economies and perhaps they could fix up a home and perhaps he would marry her. But if he did not come back, then—
I had been to blame, I alone. I had been satisfied to deplore her grim silence and do nothing. But I ought to have humiliated myself so as to earn her smile. I ought by talking to her to have driven out of her heart the longing to equal and surpass which prevents us all from being human sisters. I should have....
We are all to blame for the prostitutes, we are the ones at whom the stones should be cast. Nearly all of them are little Maries with the craving for just one man, the peaceful healthy desire for a secure hearth, but we tolerate poverty, and we don't know how to talk to each other.
She put her package under her arm. I did not know what to do. I went up to her, humble of heart, and rather awkwardly kissed her cheek streaked by tears and sullied by paint.
She started, shaken by a revulsion. The liquid blue of her eyes turned sharp and aggressive, her lips narrowed; she held her little bag close like booty. Then she departed, leaving the door open for the smoky darkness of the landing to creep into my rooms. She had the untamable, sullen expression of a hunted beast.