Christmas Holiday (28 page)

“The first thing we did when we got out by ourselves in Paris was to go to a confectioner’s, and the boy ate six chocolate éclairs one after the other. But he paid for it.”

“Yes,” said the other seriously. “When we got out into the street I was sick. You see, my stomach wasn’t used to it. But it was worth it.”

“Did you eat very badly over there?”

The elder man shrugged his shoulders.

“Beef three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. One doesn’t notice it after a time. And then, if you behave yourself you get cheese and a little wine. And it’s better to behave yourself. Of course it’s worse when you’ve done your sentence and you’re freed. When you’re in prison you get board and lodging, but when you’re free you have to shift for yourself.”

“My friend doesn’t know,” said Lydia. “Explain to him. They don’t have the same system in England.”

“It’s like this. You’re sentenced to a term of imprisonment, eight, ten, fifteen, twenty years, and when you’ve done it you’re a libéré. You have to stay in the colony the same number of years that you were sentenced to. It’s hard to get work. The libérés have a bad name and people won’t employ them. It’s true that you can get a plot of land and cultivate it, but it’s not everyone who can do that. After being in prison for years, taking orders from the warders and half the time doing nothing, you’ve lost your initiative; and
then there’s malaria and hook-worm; you’ve lost your energy. Most of them get work only when a ship comes in to harbour and they can earn a little by unloading the cargo. There’s nothing much for the libéré but to sleep in the market, drink rafia when he gets the chance, and starve. I was lucky. You see, I’m an electrician by trade, and a good one; I know my job as well as anyone, so they needed me. I didn’t do so badly.”

“How long was your sentence?” asked Lydia.

“Only eight years.”

“And what did you do?”

He slightly shrugged his shoulders and gave Lydia a deprecating smile.

“Folly of youth. One’s young, one gets into bad company, one drinks too much and then one day something happens and one has to pay for it all one’s life. I was twenty-four when I went out and I’m forty now. I’ve spent my best years in that hell.”

“He could have got away before,” said the other, “but he wouldn’t.”

“You mean you could have escaped?” said Lydia.

Charley gave her a quick, searching glance but her face told him nothing.

“Escape? No, that’s a mug’s game. One can always escape, but there are few who get away. Where can you go? Into the bush? Fever, wild animals, starvation, and the natives who’ll take you for the sake of the reward. A good many try it. You see, they get so fed up with the monotony, the food, the orders, the sight of all the rest of the prisoners, they think anything’s better, but they can’t stick it out; if they don’t die of illness
or starvation, they’re captured or give themselves up; and then it’s two years’ solitary confinement, or more, and you have to be a hefty chap if that doesn’t break you. It was easier in the old days when the Dutch were building their railway, you could get across the river and they’d put you to work on it, but now they’ve finished the railway and they don’t want labour any more. They catch you and send you back. But even that had its risks. There was a customs official who used to promise to take you over the river for a certain sum, he had a regular tariff, you’d arrange to meet him at a place in the jungle at night, and when you kept the appointment he just shot you dead and emptied your pockets. They say he did away with more than thirty fellows before he was caught. Some of them get away by sea. Half a dozen club together and get a libéré to buy a rickety boat for them. It’s a hard journey, without a compass or anything, and one never knows when a storm will spring up; it’s more by luck than good management if they get anywhere. And where can they go? They won’t have them in Venezuela any longer and if they land there they’re just put in prison and sent back. If they land in Trinidad the authorities keep them for a week, stock them up with provisions, even give them a boat if theirs isn’t seaworthy, and then send them off, out into the sea with no place to go to. No, it’s silly to try to escape.”

“But men do,” said Lydia. “There was that doctor, what was his name? They say he’s practising somewhere in South America and doing well.”

“Yes, if you’ve got money you can get away sometimes,
not if you’re on the islands, but if you’re at Cayenne or St. Laurent. You can get the skipper of a Brazilian schooner to pick you up at sea, and if he’s honest he’ll land you somewhere down the coast and you’re pretty safe. If he isn’t, he takes your money and chucks you overboard. But he’ll want twelve thousand francs now, and that means double because the libéré who gets the money in for you takes half as his commission. And then you can’t land in Brazil without a penny in your pocket. You’ve got to have at least thirty thousand francs, and who’s got that?”

Lydia asked a question and once more Charley gave her an inquiring look.

“But how can you be sure that the libéré will hand over the money that’s sent him?” she said.

“You can’t. Sometimes he doesn’t, but then he ends with a knife in his back, and he knows very well the authorities aren’t going to bother very much if a damned libéré is found dead one morning.”

“Your friend said just now you could have got away sooner, but didn’t. What did he mean by that?”

The little man gave his shoulders a deprecating shrug.

“I made myself useful. The commandant was a decent chap and he knew I was a good worker and honest. They soon found out they could leave me in a house by myself when they wanted a job done and I wouldn’t touch a thing. He got me permission to go back to France when I still had two more years to go of my time as a libéré.” He gave his friend a touching smile. “But I didn’t like to leave that young scamp.
I knew that without me to look after him he’d get into trouble.”

“It’s true,” said the other. “I owe everything to him.”

“He was only a kid when he came out. He had the next bed to mine. He put up a pretty good show in the daytime, but at night he’d cry for his mother. I felt sorry for him. I don’t know how it happened, I got an affection for him; he was lost among all those men, poor little chap, and I had to look after him. Some of them were inclined to be nasty to him, one Algerian was always bothering, but I settled his hash and after that they left the boy in peace.”

“How did you do that?”

The little man gave a grin so cheerful and roguish that it made him look on a sudden ten years younger.

“Well, you know, in that life a man can only make himself respected if he knows how to use his knife. I ripped him up the belly.”

Charley gave a gasp. The man made the statement so naturally that one could hardly believe one had heard right.

“You see, one’s shut up in the dormitory from nine till five and the warders don’t come in. To tell you the truth, it would be as much as their lives were worth. If in the morning a man’s found with a hole in his gizzard, the authorities ask no questions so as they won’t be told no lies. So you see, I felt a kind of responsibility for the boy. I had to teach him everything. I’ve got a good brain and I soon discovered that out there if you want to make it easy for yourself the only thing is to
do what you’re told and give no trouble. It’s not justice that reigns on the earth, it’s force, and they’ve got the force, the authorities; one of these days perhaps we shall have it, we the working-men, and then we shall get a bit of our own back on the bourgeois, but till then we’ve got to obey. That’s what I taught him, and I taught him my job too, and now he’s almost as good an electrician as I am.”

“The only thing now is to find work,” said the other. “Work together.”

“We’ve gone through so much together we can’t be parted now. You see, he’s all I’ve got. I’ve got no mother, no wife, no kids. I had, but my mother’s dead, and I lost my wife and my kids when I had my trouble. Women are bitches. It’s hard for a chap to live without any affection in his life.”

“And I, who have I got? It’s for life, us two.”

There was something very affecting in the friendship that bound those two hapless men together. It gave Charley a sense of exaltation that somewhat embarrassed him; he would have liked to tell them that he thought it brave and beautiful, but he knew he could never bring himself to say anything so unusual. But Lydia had none of his shyness.

“I don’t think there are many men who would have stayed in that hell for two long years when they could get away, for the sake of a friend.”

The man chuckled.

“You see, over there time is just the opposite of money; there a little money is a great deal and a lot of time is nothing very much. While six sous is a sum
that you hoard as if it was a fortune, two years is a period that’s hardly worth talking about.”

Lydia sighed deeply. It was plain of what she was thinking.

“Berger isn’t there for so long, is he?”

“Fifteen years.”

There was a silence. One could see that Lydia was making a great effort to control her emotion, but when she spoke there was a break in her voice.

“Did you see him?”

“Yes. I talked to him. We were in hospital together. I went in to have my appendix out, I didn’t want to get back to France and have trouble with it here. He’d been working on the road they’re making from St. Laurent to Cayenne and he got a bad go of malaria.”

“I didn’t know. I’ve had one letter from him, but he said nothing about it.”

“Out there everyone has malaria sooner or later. It’s not worth making a song and dance about. He’s lucky to have got it so soon. The chief medical officer took a fancy to him, he’s an educated man, Berger, and there aren’t many of them. They were going to apply to get him transferred to the hospital service when he recovered. He’ll be all right there.”

“Marcel told me last night that he’d given you a message for me.”

“Yes, he gave me an address.” He took a bundle of papers out of his pocket and gave Lydia a scrap on which something was written. “If you can send any money, send it there. But remember that he’ll only get half what you send.”

Lydia took the bit of paper, looked at it, and put it in her bag.

“Anything else?”

“Yes. He said you weren’t to worry. He said it wasn’t so bad as it might be, and he was finding his feet and he’d make out all right. And that’s true, you know. He’s no fool. He won’t make many mistakes. He’s a chap who’ll make the best of a bad job. You’ll see, he’ll be happy enough.”

“How can he be happy?”

“It’s funny what one can get used to. He’s a bit of a wag, isn’t he? He used to make us laugh at some of the things he said. He’s a rare one for seeing the funny side of things, there’s no mistake about that.”

Lydia was very pale. She looked down in silence. The elder man turned to his friend.

“What was that funny thing I told you he’d said about that cove in the hospital who cut his blasted throat?”

“Oh, I remember. Now what was it? It’s clean gone out of my mind, but I know it made me laugh my head off.”

A long silence fell. There seemed nothing more to say. Lydia was pensive; and the two men sat limp on their chairs, their eyes vacant, like the mechanical dolls they sell on the Boulevard Montparnasse which gyrate, rocking, round and round and then on a sudden stop dead. Lydia sighed.

“I think that’s about all,” she said. “Thank you for coming. I hope you’ll get the job you’re looking for.”

“The Salvation Army are doing what they can for us. I expect something will turn up.”

Charley fished his note-case out of his pocket.

“I don’t suppose you’re very flush. I’d like to give you something to help you along till you find work.”

“It would be useful,” the man smiled pleasantly. “The Army doesn’t do much but give one board and lodging.”

Charley handed them five hundred francs.

“Give it to the kid to take care of. He’s got the saving disposition of the peasant he is, he sweats blood when he has to spend money, and he can make five francs go farther than any old woman in the world.”

They went out of the café, the four of them, and shook hands. During the hour they had spent together the two men had lost their shyness, but when they got out into the street it seized them again. They seemed to shrink as though they desired to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, and looked furtively to right and left as if afraid that someone would pounce upon them. They walked off side by side, with bent heads, and after another quick glance backward slunk round the nearest corner.

“I suppose it’s only prejudice on my part,” said Charley, “but I’m bound to say that I didn’t feel very much at my ease in that company.”

Lydia made no reply. They walked along the boulevard in silence; they lunched in silence. Lydia was immersed in thought the nature of which he could guess and he felt that any attempt on his part at small talk would be unwelcome. Besides, he had thoughts of his
own to occupy him. The conversation they had had with the two convicts, the questions Lydia asked, had revived the suspicion which Simon had sown in his mind and which, though he had tried to put it aside, had since then lurked in his consciousness like the musty smell of a long closed room which no opening of windows can quite dispel. It worried him, not so much because he minded being made a fool of, as because he did not want to think that Lydia was a liar and a hypocrite.

“I’m going along to see Simon,” he said when they had finished luncheon. “I came over largely to see him and I’ve hardly had a glimpse of him. I ought at least to go and say good-bye.”

“Yes, I suppose you ought.”

He also wanted to return to Simon the newspaper cuttings and the article which he had lent him. He had them in his pocket.

“If you want to spend the afternoon with your Russian friends, I’ll drive you there first if you like.”

“No, I’ll go back to the hotel.”

“I don’t suppose I shall be back till late. You know what Simon is when he gets talking. Won’t you be bored by yourself?”

“I’m not used to so much consideration,” she smiled. “No, I shan’t be bored. It’s not often I have the chance to be alone. To sit in a room by oneself and to know that no one can come in—why, I can’t imagine a greater luxury.”