XXVI
At Madame G.’s Tunda was able to meet the intimate friend of a great poet, together with other individuals.
The ladies sat with their hats on; an older lady did not remove her gloves. She accepted a small pastry with her leather fingers, inserted it between carmined lips, chewed it with porcelain teeth; whether her palate was real remained dubious. But it was not she, but the friend of the great poet, who attracted attention.
The poet’s friend, a Hungarian, had acclimatized himself in Paris as he once had in Budapest. The Hungarian accent with which he sang in French would have offended the sensitive ears of the French, had he not portrayed in these melodies episodes from the life of his great literary friend. Also, the Hungarian was a cultural peddler and polyglot from birth. He could even make his living at it; for he translated Molnar, Anatole France, Proust and Wells — each into the language required for the occasion, and fashionable comedies into all languages alike. He was known in the press gallery of the League of Nations at Geneva, as well as in the offices of the Berlin Revuetheater, theatrical agents and the editorial staffs of all the literary supplements of the great continental newspapers.
He spoke like a flute. It was wonderful how his delicate throat was able to further the interests of his Hungarian friends at the League for Human Rights. He did, in fact, accomplish a lot of good, not from any innate helpfulness but because he was compelled by his connections to be obliging.
It happened that he and Tunda left Madame G.’s house at the same time. He was one of those Middle European men who take the person they are conversing with by the arm and stand still or stop talking at every street-corner. They fall silent if the other withdraws his arm, just as an electric light goes out if the plug is pulled out of the wall.
‘Do you know M. de V.?’ he asked.
‘Not very well,’ replied Tunda.
‘What a capable man! Imagine, he has just got back from America. A trip round the world is nothing to him. He’s seen half the world already anyway. And it doesn’t cost him a penny. He’s always employed by some rich or at least influential man. As a secretary or —’
He waited a long minute, then said: ‘It’s all over with Madame G.’
He released Tunda’s arm and stood facing him as if expecting something extraordinary.
Instead Tunda said nothing.
‘But I dare say you knew that?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Then you’re not interested in the gentleman?’
‘Not especially.’
‘Then let’s go and have some coffee.’
And they went to have some coffee.
XXVII
About this time Tunda’s money began to run out.
He wrote to his brother. George replied that unfortunately he was unable to help with ready cash. Of course, his house was always open.
The boldness of the beautiful hotelière, which had so impressed Tunda, turned into derision. For beautiful, young bold hotel manageresses do not spend their lives behind gloomy, cheap, floral curtains for nothing. They expect some payment in return.
They regard the poverty of a tenant as malicious cunning, aimed at them personally by the tenant.
The conception the lower middle class has of poverty is that the poor man diligently courts it in order to inflict injury on his neighbour.
But it is precisely the lower middle class on whom the man who has nothing depends. High up behind the clouds lives God, whose infinite bounty has become proverbial. A little lower live those pampered individuals who are comfortably off, and who are so immune to any contagion from poverty that they develop those powerful virtues: sympathy for the needy, compassion, benevolence, and even freedom from prejudice. But squeezed between these noble folk and the others who need generosity most urgently, acting as insulators as it were, are the middle classes who trade in bread and provide food and lodging. The entire ‘social problem’ would be solved if only the rich, who are in a position to give away a loaf, were also the world’s bakers. There would be far less injustice if the jurists of the highest tribunals were to sit in the small criminal courts, and if police commissioners had personally to arrest petty thieves.
But life is not like that.
The hotel servant was the first to sense that Tunda’s money had run out. In the course of a long life he had developed his natural instinct for the fortunes of a fluctuating clientele to prophetic dimensions. He had seen millions of razor-blades grow blunt, millions of cakes of soap grow smaller, millions of toothpaste tubes go flat. He had seen a thousand suits make their exodus from the wardrobes. He had learned to recognize whether a man was returning hungry from the park or satisfied from a restaurant.
XXVIII
Tunda still did not know Europe. He had fought for a year and a half for a great Revolution. But only now did it become clear to him that revolutions were not waged against the ‘bourgeoisie’ but against bakers, against waiters, against small greengrocers, insignificant butchers and defenceless hotel servants.
He had never feared poverty, barely experienced it. But in the capital of the European world, the source of all the ideas and songs about freedom, he saw that even a dry crust is not to be had for nothing. There are specific sources of charity for beggars; every compassionate individual who is appealed to will put up the engaged sign!
He went once to see Madame G.
For the first time it occurred to him that there was nothing whatever between her and himself, that that afternoon, that evening in Baku, meant no more than the encounter of two persons at a railway station before they board different trains. He realized that her capacity to experience, to feel sorrow, joy, anguish, grief, ecstasy or anything that goes to make up life, had become extinct. He could not decide whether it was her possessions, the material security in which she lived, that had made her apathetic. She had the admirable and mysterious gift of touching objects and people with slender fingers and the ground with beautiful narrow feet and toes. So her every movement had its meaning, a remote, a poetic meaning, which remained outside and yet transcended any immediate purpose. She contained within herself that domain of European culture discussed by those averters of calamity, the Europeans. There was no need for any other, any more convincing evidence for the existence of a European culture than this Madame G. But to guarantee her existence, people were heartless, bakers obdurate, and the poor without bread. And she, the product of these misfortunes, did not know, was not allowed to know, was not even allowed to experience a great passion because passion is noxious to beauty. Nevertheless, the world was not as simple as Natasha had once declared. There are other antitheses than between rich and poor. But there is a kind of poverty to which one owes a multitude of experiences, even life itself, and a kind of abundance which renders everything lifeless — lifeless and beautiful, lifeless and enchanting, lifeless, happy and finite.
As though by some obligatory decree, Tunda said: ‘I love you!’, perhaps merely to announce his presence.
For what else was there for him to seek here? Like a man who loses someone, he was driven to seek — by that instinct which is sometimes stronger than the instinct of self-preservation — some last means of keeping her.
All the time he wondered what she would say if he took the liberty of asking her for money. How repulsive it would be to her, first, that he had no money, second, that he mentioned it in her presence, third, that his most immediate worry was what he was going to eat the next day! How she would despise him! How loathsome is the money we do not have! And how much more loathsome when we need it from a beautiful woman in the heart of the most beautiful city in the world. In her eyes, poverty was the epitome of unmanliness — and not in her eyes alone. This was the world where poverty meant lack of masculinity, weakness, folly, cowardice and depravity.