Martha in Paris (2 page)

(“Have a ginger-biscuit?” suggested Martha.

“Oh, Mr. Joyce, didn't I offer you one?” cried Dolores.

“I am not here for ginger-biscuits!” snapped Mr. Joyce.)

—before tucking her feet more snugly under her dressing-gown. She was always careful not to catch cold, because if she caught cold she wouldn't be able to draw, because to draw she needed to be in full health. As a rule, Martha enjoyed wonderful health.

Mr. Joyce, on the other hand, continued standing. He was seventy, and the richest man in his line of business in Europe. When he entered an art-gallery, they fetched the boss. In dealing with Martha, who owed everything in the world to him, he still seized on the least advantage—such as forcing her physically at least to look up to him while he spoke.

“I have news for you,” announced Mr. Joyce.

“I'll say he has!” exclaimed Harry jovially. His idea was to give his friend a build-up; but Mr. Joyce shot him a repressive glance.

“You are going to Paris,” announced Mr. Joyce.

Now it was Dolores who looked at Harry, to stop him saying “Gay Paree” again; then they all looked at Martha eating ginger-biscuits.

“Why?” asked Martha.

“To learn to draw and to paint,” said Mr. Joyce sharply.

“I can now,” said Martha.

“Just so well as to be best in a class of twenty who cannot paint or draw at all,” snapped Mr. Joyce. “There are other reasons as well which you would not understand, being too stupid, but principally you must learn to draw. First the Antique, then the Figure,” said Mr. Joyce relishingly. “Right through the mill!”

Martha scowled.

“I've been through the Antique.”

“You have not,” contradicted Mr. Joyce. “I remember your drawing of the ‘Discobolus.' It was a very good drawing of three easels. As your last figure-drawing was a very good drawing of stove-pipes. You want to paint as well as Picasso, you must learn to draw like Picasso—who could draw like Ingres. Or do you imagine you can draw like Ingres already,” enquired Mr. Joyce, “such a little marvel as you are?”

Martha's cheeks flushed from red to beetroot. All her life she was to be rather an Other Ranks type; like them, if there was anything she hated it was sarc. Never very ready of tongue, sarcasm struck her altogether dumb. She squatted crimson and silent, her broad, blunt-fingered hands pressed tightly together in her lap, doing her best to counter, by an unwinking stare, with the Other Ranks' customary weapon of Dumb Insolence. Harry Gibson, who had worn uniform himself, recognized the technique at once; but not so Martha's tender-hearted aunt.

“Oh, Mr. Joyce!” cried Dolores reproachfully. “Can't you see she
doesn't want to leave home?
”

Martha blinked. Actually it wasn't an aspect of the matter that had occurred to her. Actually her main objection to going to Paris was that it meant a break in routine, and she needed routine, because routine left her energies undistracted from such essentials as coordinating a tangle of stove-pipes into a coherent pattern. (Martha's eye, as Mr. Joyce had perceived, omitting the model altogether, as a distraction.) But even though finding in her aunt an unexpected ally she didn't jump up with any demonstrative affection—to fling her arms, for instance, about her aunt's neck, or to bury her face in her aunt's lap. She just continued to sit where she was—as Mr. Joyce also perceived.

“So she doesn't want to leave home?” repeated Mr. Joyce thoughtfully.

“Of course not!” cried Dolores. “How could she? Hasn't she lived with us ever since she was a little tot? Ever since—” here Dolores dropped a ready tear for Martha's defunct parents, which was more than Martha ever did—“she was left all alone? Please don't think her ungrateful, Mr. Joyce, but this is Martha's
home!
And
we
don't want to lose her either—do we, Harry?”

Harry Gibson hesitated. Now the matter was actually put to him, he found he wouldn't absolutely
mind
losing Martha. He was fond of Martha in a way, but chiefly because she'd always been there and he had a large bump of philoprogenitiveness. When she was the little tot of Dolores' recollection they'd had quite a regular joke together—

(“Hi, Martha! Where's Mary?”

“In the Bible,” replied Martha.

“Best place for her!” chuckled Harry.)

—but he hadn't made that joke for some time now, and no other had taken its place … However, before his wife's appealing gaze he gave the loyal answer; or at least an affirmative grunt.

“Martha can stay with us for ever and ever,” continued Dolores earnestly. “
We
aren't ambitious for her—and in Christmas-cards I'm sure she'll always find a little niche. She can stay with us for ever and ever, painting nice things like Christmas-cards!”

Turn-coat Martha rose slowly to her feet.

“I'll go,” said Martha.

4

Any young person of eighteen Paris-bound naturally bids her friends adieu with some feeling of consequence. Since this was the end of summer, Martha's art-school was shut; but in any case she regarded all her fellow-students with equal contempt, and in fact the only two friends she bade adieu to were an ex-war-hero who sold matches outside Paddington Station, and an elderly cobbler in the same neighbourhood.

“Take a box on the house,” invited Mr. Johnson cordially. “How's life among the bourgeoisie?”

—In the old days, while Martha was still intimidating her aunt's lodgers round the corner in Alcock Road, they'd seen quite a lot of each other. Since then, owing to her improved circumstances, their encounters were rarer, but they always remained on very easy terms.

“All right,” said Martha. “I see you've still got your pitch.”

“Being a war-'ero, they'd have a job to turn me off,” said Mr. Johnson complacently.

Formal courtesies thus exchanged—

“When you were in France, did you ever go to Paris?” asked Martha.

“Not me,” said Mr. Johnson regretfully. “You 'ad to drive top brass, to get to Paris.”

“Well, it's where
I'm
going,” said Martha.

Undoubtedly it created an impression. Mr. Johnson naturally didn't (as a girl-friend might have done) hug Martha with congratulatory ejaculations; but he whistled through his broken teeth in a very gratifying manner.—He might even have expressed himself more fully, had not a customer just then come up for matches; but he was in his way as much of an artist as Martha, and scorned to accept merely the economic price when a touch of histrionic pathos could whack it up to sixpence, or even a bob. In the same instant, both he and Martha weighed an elderly ex-officer type with the same professional eye; then Martha pocketed her box and tactfully strolled on, to leave her friend looking suitably friendless.

But he was truly a friend. Urgent as he was to launch into his spiel, Mr. Johnson achieved a swift, sidelong, out-of-the-side-of-his-mouth counsel.

“Don't ever drink their tap-water,” muttered Mr. Johnson, out of the side of his deplorable mouth. “Stick to the good old
vin rouge
…”

5

Martha tramped on to Mr. Punshon's. Pushing open the door of his narrow shop, how many memories assailed her! The smell of leather and wax, the sight of all the bunches of bootlaces hanging up—(that used to tickle the back of her neck as she sat drawing Mr. Punshon's tobacco-jar)—aroused in Martha all the nostalgia she was capable of. It was Mr. Punshon who'd given her her first professional commission: a show-card at which she'd had to labour, to get soles proportionate to uppers, eyelets equivalent; he paid her sixpence for it.

“Hello,” said Martha.

Mr. Punshon pushed his spectacles up on his forehead. He was getting so old, and so short-sighted, it took him a little time to recognize her. Then he stretched forth the old tortoise-neck Martha remembered as clearly as she did his tobacco-jar or his show-cards. Seen close to, it offered such a criss-cross of intersecting lines, rubbed in with dirt like the lines of a church brass, it resembled one of Martha's own drawings.

“Domned if it ain't the Young Pachyderm!” acknowledged Mr. Punshon.—How such a flight of fancy ever occurred to him was a mystery. Possibly he'd once subscribed to an encyclopaedia in monthly parts; and Martha's personality, even as a child, had always something ruthless and tough-carapaced about it. Nonetheless, for Mr. Punshon, it was a remarkable, also uncommonly percipient, flight of fancy …

“I've just come in to say good-bye,” said Martha.

“You said good-bye before,” objected Mr. Punshon. “Several years ago I remember you coming in to say good-bye.”

“That was when I was going to Richmond,” said Martha. “Now I'm going to Paris.”

Upon Mr. Punshon the news didn't seem to make any impression at all. He was so old, Paris and Richmond were all one to him. In either, a Young Pachyderm was safely removed from his purlieus.—How she'd glared, at good paying heels-while-you-waiters, if they got between her and the tobacco-jar! Mr. Punshon often thought he'd lost quite a bit of trade by it; couldn't think now why he'd let her come—except that she was such a Young Pachyderm.

“In France,” added Martha.

—Yet he'd even shared his papers of fish-and-chips with her, recalled Mr. Punshon: an encouragement if there ever was one. Sometimes when the light was bad, recalled Mr. Punshon, they'd had quite a pleasant time going through his album together. (Like all cobblers he was a great politician; the cartoons pasted in his album, or scrap-book, ran from 1830 on. Martha had liked best the earliest and crudest.) Slowly, touched by this recollection, Mr. Punshon groped beneath his bench and hauled up the stout red volume, and fumbled it open at a Napoleon the Third, by Tenniel, in the act of defying the Austrian eagle.

“
There's
a Frenchy for you!” said Mr. Punshon triumphantly.

At that moment, however, the door opened again. (Both Martha's friends were men of affairs.) The woman who entered at once sat down and removed her shoes—evidently a heels-while-you-waiter. She glanced at Martha impatiently; nor did Mr. Punshon, pushing his spectacles down on his nose again, and reaching for a card of quarter-rubbers, seem anxious to detain Martha longer.

“Well, good-bye,” said Mr. Punshon.

“Good-bye,” said Martha. “Mr. Johnson told me not to drink tap-water.”

“My goodness, where's she off to—the North Pole?” put in the woman disagreeably.

“No, Paris,” said Martha—glaring.

“That's right, Paris,” agreed Mr. Punshon hastily. Still, he did at last perceive it an occasion for some parting word; and if he couldn't match Mr. Johnson's precision, did his vague, aged best.

“Mind you don't come to harm,” said Mr. Punshon.

6

Martha tramped on, now towards Alcock Road. She hadn't intended to go there, but there was something she suddenly remembered and wanted to look at. This was not the modest shelter of her youth; she passed by No. 5 without an upward glance at what had once been her attic-window, as without a sentimental thought for the fresco of rabbits lovingly applied by her Aunt Dolores to the walls within. What she sought was a certain grating in the gutter, whose bars, seen close to (as by one squatting on the curb), could be made, by a shift of eye-focus, to advance or retreat in the likeness of a pillared temple or a prison gate.—There it was, just past the letter-box; down Martha squatted; and in ten minutes of steady contemplation bade a final farewell to her childhood.

Chapter Two

Martha travelled to Paris alone with Mr. Joyce.—There was some little difficulty about this: at first both Harry and Dolores proposed accompanying them. Only the latter admitted her motive, which was personally to place Martha in the hands of Madame Dubois, but in fact it aroused less sympathy, in the principals, than did Harry's unspoken but perfectly apparent notion of a bit of a jolly in Gay Paree.—“But wouldn't it be
nicer
, Mr. Joyce,” pleaded Dolores, “for Madame to see Martha has someone
belonging
to her?” “She will see Martha has
me
belonging to her,” retorted Mr. Joyce—and glancing percipiently at his friend added kindly, “Perhaps another time.”

It was Mr. Joyce who paid the piper. He and Martha travelled to Paris by themselves.

They took the long sea passage from Newhaven to Dieppe. This was a pure piece of aesthetic sentimentalism on Mr. Joyce's part; he had a fancy to set Martha's feet for the first time on French soil in the prints of Boudin and Renoir, Pissarro and Sickert. In the face of Martha's peculiarly stolid demeanour, however, he kept his own counsel on the point; also, though fully alive to the occasion's momentousness, refrained from giving her advice. He suspected that during the last few days Martha'd had as much advice as she could digest, from her Aunt Dolores. So Martha had—though couched in such genteelly ambiguous terms as to leave no more solid residue than a warning against red wine. Since this was in direct opposition to the advice of Mr. Johnson (who besides having actually been to France was in Martha's opinion the more trustworthy mentor), she sensibly dismissed it from mind; all the same, her mind was temporarily closed to any more advice whatever. Mr. Joyce's taciturnity, in the train and then during the crossing, was thus very welcome; while Martha herself found nothing much to say either.

She rarely did.

Ensconced in his deck-chair, with leisure for reflection, Mr. Joyce looked at her thoughtfully. He had known her half her life: at the deepest level they were intimates: superficially, Martha never showed the least special regard for him. But then for whom did she show any special regard? Not for her aunt—whose charity had been little short of quixotic; nor for Harry Gibson, who might well have objected to so large a cuckoo in the conjugal nest. “She takes us all for granted,” thought Mr. Joyce. “She would cut us all up for india-rubber, if she needed india-rubber and we were made of india-rubber. Which is as it should be,” thought Mr. Joyce. “What are gratitude, and affection, and family-ties, to an artist, but so much clutter?”