“She doesn’t want us to go and see her,” Cartier explained carefully. “She writes that it’s the music she wants you to hear—they’ve given her a good part.”
“But you don’t know what her voice is like,” expostulated Jean impatiently. “If I were dead and Margot sang I should know it was her voice, and I should say, ‘Go slowly, little Margot, fold your wings!’ She is eager like a child, or a bird that must run up into the sky and cannot wait to get there before he sings.”
Cartier nodded; he understood Margot’s letter now. “Bring him, please bring him—it’s not me—I never was any good to him, but when I sing he’ll listen—I think it will make a difference—a difference to him, I mean.”
Cartier hoped that it might make a difference, for he remembered, as he looked at Jean, that men had gone mad for love, and he thought that they must have looked singularly like Jean, as Jean looked now.
“You’ll come,” Cartier pleaded. “You see you’ll help her; she says you’ve done such wonders for her voice. Why, it’s quite famous now! I had the pleasure of mentioning the fact to our good Liane the other night. I said, ‘You must really go and hear the little Selba, ma fille, she is getting a réclame here in Paris, and they say she owes it all to your little musician.’ Ma foi! The good Liane put back her big white teeth and wished she could bite. I was not at all sure she wouldn’t—so I ran away!”
Jean made an intense effort to listen; it seemed to him that he ought to know who Liane was; then he gave in—after all, it would be easier to give his consent than to have to talk any more. “I’ll go,” he said briefly.
It was strange on his way to the theatre that he should keep seeing Flaubert and Gabrielle in the streets, and it was trying, too, because he had to think two thoughts at once, and this is not easy without practice. It makes the mind go so quickly like the long, quivering, grey band in a threshing machine.
They would pass, Gabrielle and the fat little secretary, in a flying motor, only the next minute to turn in at a lighted café—though they might at the same time be standing on the steps of a house above the street. They even on one occasion leaned out of a window to laugh, and stood just in front of Jean on the pavement simultaneously; but one thing was always the same; they were laughing at Jean because he had not killed Flaubert and because he had not stayed with Gabrielle.
Cartier pretended not to see them; he kept his eyes carefully in front of him, and walked a little stiffly, with his hand on Jean’s arm. Jean wasn’t at all sure that Cartier was not laughing at him too; perhaps after all it would be simpler to kill Cartier; he at least was only capable of being in one place at a time.
They arrived at the big lighted hall; it was full of little tables and men smoking; there were women too, with jewels on their necks. And lights, lights everywhere, and the orchestra played soft, gay music; but they none of them had a real existence; they all seemed to Jean like a hideous game of make-believe, played in order to drag him away from his two great ideas.