“Give me two or three marks,” she said. “I’ve spent something in there.”
I gave her my purse. She took it and was soon back again.
“Well, now I can sit with you for a little and then I have to go. I have an engagement.”
I was alarmed.
“With whom?” I asked quickly.
“With a man, my dear Harry. He has invited me to the Odéon Bar.”
“Oh! I didn’t think you would leave me alone.”
“Then you should have invited me yourself. Someone has got in before you. Well, there’s good money saved. Do you know the Odéon? Nothing but champagne after midnight. Armchairs like at a club, nigger band, jolly fine.”
I had never considered all this.
“But let me invite you,” I entreated her. “I thought it was an understood thing, now that we’ve made friends. Invite yourself wherever you like. Do, please, I beg you.”
“That is nice of you. But, you see, a promise is a promise, and I’ve given my word and I shall keep it and go. Don’t worry any more over that. Have another drink of wine. There’s still some in the bottle. Drink it up and then go comfortably home and sleep. Promise me.”
“No, you know that’s just what I can’t do—go home.”
“Oh—you—with your tales! Will you never be done—with your Goethe?” (The dream about Goethe came back to me at that moment.) “But if you really can’t go home, stay here. There are bedrooms. Shall I see about one for you?”
I was satisfied with that and asked where I could find her again? Where did she live? She would not tell me. I should find her in one place or another if I looked.
“Mayn’t I invite you somewhere?”
“Where?”
“Where and when you like.”
“Good. Tuesday for dinner at the old Franciscan. First floor. Goodbye.”
She gave me her hand. I noticed for the first time how well it matched her voice—a beautiful hand, firm and intelligent and good-natured. She laughed at me when I kissed it.
Then at the last moment she turned once more and said: “I’ll tell you something else—about Goethe. What you felt about him and finding the picture of him more than you could put up with, I often feel about the saints.”
“The saints? Are you so religious?”
“No, I’m not religious, I’m sorry to say. But I was once and shall be again. There is no time now to be religious.”
“No time. Does it need time to be religious?”
“Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You can’t be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and all that.”
“Yes, I understand. But what was that you said about the saints?”
“Well, there are many saints I’m particularly fond of—Stephen, St. Francis and others. I often see pictures of them and of the Saviour and the Virgin—such utterly lying and false and silly pictures—and I can put up with them just as little as you could with that picture of Goethe. When I see one of those sweet and silly Saviours or St. Francises and see how other people find them beautiful and edifying, I feel it is an insult to the real Saviour and it makes me think: Why did He live and suffer so terribly if people find a picture as silly as that satisfactory to them! But in spite of this I know that my own picture of the Saviour or St. Francis is only a human picture and falls short of the original, and that the Saviour Himself would find the picture I have of Him within me just as stupid as I do those sickly reproductions. I don’t say this to justify you in your ill-temper and rage with the picture of Goethe. There’s no justification. I say it simply to show you that I can understand you. You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you’re human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies. I noticed, for example, learned sir, that you felt a slight embarrassment when it came to telling me your Goethe story. You had to make a great effort to make your ideas comprehensible to a simple girl like me. Well, and so I wanted to show you that you needn’t have made such an effort. I understand you all right. And now I’ve finished and your place is in bed.”
She went away and an old house porter took me up two flights of stairs. But first he asked me where my luggage was, and when he heard that I hadn’t any, I had to pay down what he called “sleep-money.” Then he took me up an old dark staircase to a room upstairs and left me alone. There was a bleak wooden bedstead and on the wall hung a sabre and a coloured print of Garibaldi and also a withered wreath that had once figured in a club festival. I would have given much for pyjamas. At any rate there was water and a small towel and I could wash. Then I lay down on the bed in my clothes, and, leaving the light on, gave myself up to my reflections. So I had settled accounts with Goethe. It was splendid that he had come to me in a dream. And this wonderful girl—if only I had known her name! All of a sudden there was a human being, a living human being, to shatter the death that had come down over me like a glass case, and to put out a hand to me, a good and beautiful and warm hand. All of a sudden
