Eleven o'clock. Since Liu’s departure, before and after dinner, conferences with guild-master, bankers, directors of insurance companies and river transports, importers, heads of spinning mills. Al of them depended in some measure upon the Ferral group or upon one of the foreign groups that had linked their policy to that of the Franco-Asiatic Consortium: Ferral was not counting on Liu alone. Shanghai, the living heart of China, pulsated with the passage of everything that made it live; from the remotest countrysides-most of the farm-lands depended upon the banks-blood-vessels flowed like the canals towards the capital where the destiny of China was being decided. The firing continued. Nothing to do now but wait.
In the next room Valerie was lying in bed. Although she had been his mistress for a week, he had made no pretense of loving her: she would have smiled with an insolent knowing air. Nor had she revealed herself to him-perhaps for the same reason. The difficulties which beset his present life drove him into eroticism, not into love. He realized he was no longer young, and tried to convince himself that his legend made up for it. He was Ferral, and he knew women. So well, in fact, that he did not believe a word of what he told himself. He remembered Valerie saying, one day when he had spoken to her of one of his friends, an intelligent invalid, some of whose mistresses had aroused his envy: “There is nothing more appealing in a man than a combination of strength and weakness.” No one can be adequately explained by his life, he firmly believed, and he remembered these words better than all the things she had confided to him about hers.
This wealthy woman, who ran a large dressmaking establishment, was not mercenary (not yet at least). She claimed that many women achieved their sexual excitement by appearing naked before a man of their choice, and that this was fully effective only once. Was she thinking of herself? Yet it was the third time she went to bed with him. He sensed in her a pride akin to his own. “Men have travels, women have lovers,” she had said the day before. Did he please her, as he did so many women, by the contrast between his hardness and his attentiveness to her? He was not unaware that in this game he was involving what was most essential to him in life-his pride. This was not without danger with a partner who could say: “No man can speak of women, dear, because no man understands that every new makeup, every new dress, every new lover brings forth a new soul. ’’-with the appropriate smile.
He entered the room. She smiled at him from the bed, her waved hair falling in a thick mass over the round on which her head rested.
Smiles gave her that animation, both intense and abandoned, which pleasure gives. Valerie’s relaxed expression was softly melancholy, and Ferral recalled that the first time he had seen her he had said she had a blurred face-a face which matched the softness of her gray eyes. But whenever coquetry came into play the smile which half opened her curved mouth, at the corners more than at the center, harmonizing in an unexpected way with her waved masses of short hair and her eyes which at such moments grew less tender, gave her in spite of the fine regularity of her features a puzzling expression, like that of a cat wanting to be petted. Ferral was fond of animals, like all those whose pride is too great to adjust itself to men; cats especially.
He took her in his arms. She offered her mouth. Through sensuality or through horror of sentimentality he wondered, while he was undressing in the bathroom. The light-bulb was broken, and the toilet articles looked reddish, lighted by the conflagrations. He looked out through the window: in the avenue, a crowd in motion, like millions of fish under the quivering surface of a black sea; it seemed to him suddenly that the soul of this mob had left it, like the mind of a sleeper in a dream, and that it was burning with a joyous energy in those harsh flames that lighted up the outlines of the buildings.
When he came back she was dreaming and no longer smiled. Although he was used to this change of expression it gave him once again the sensation of emerging from a spell of madness. Did he want merely to be loved by the smiling woman from whom this unsmiling woman separated him like a stranger? The armored train was firing at minute intervals, as for a tri^ph: it was still in the hands of the gove^rnmental forces, as were the barracks, the arsenal and the Russian church.
“Have you seen M. de Clappique again, dear?” she asked.
The whole French colony of Shanghai knew Clappique. Valerie had met him at a dinner two days before; his whimsicality delighted her.
“Yes. I commissioned him to buy me some of Kama’s wash-drawings.”
“Can you get them at antique-dealers?”
“Not a chance. But Kama is just ret^rcing from Europe; he’ll pass through here in a fortnight. Clappique was tired, he only told two good stories: one about a Chinese burglar who was acquitted because he had wriggled through a lyre-shaped hole into the pawn-shop he was robbing; and this one: Eminent-Virtue had been raising rabbits for twenty years. His house stood on one side of the internal revenues office, his hutches on the other. On one occasion the customs-inspectors forgot to tell the other shift about his daily trip. He arrives, his basket full of grass under his ^m. ‘Hey, there! Show your basket.’ Under the grass there were watches, chains, flashlights, cameras. ‘Is that what you feed your rabbits?’ ‘Yes, Sir. And (assuming a menacing attitude toward the rabbits) and if they don’t like it, they won’t get anything else to eat today. ’ ”
“Oh!” she said, “it’s a scientific story; now I understand. The bell-rabbits, the drum-rabbits, you know, all those charming little creatures who fare so well in the moon and places like that, and so badly in children’s rooms, that’s where they come from. The sad story of Eminent-Virtue is another heart-rending injustice. And the revolutionary papers are going to make a great protest, I imagine: for you may be sure that the rabbits ate those things.”
“Have you read Alice in Wonderland, darling?”
He despised women-though he could not do without them-sufficiently to call them darling.
“What a question! I know it by heart.”
“Your smile makes me think of the ghost of the cat which never materialized. All one could see was a ravishing cat-smile floating in the air. Oh! why does a woman’s intelligence always insist on choosing some other field than its own?”
“Which is its own, dear?”
“Charm and understanding, obviously.”
She reflected:
“What men mean by that is a submissive mind. You recognize in a woman only the kind of intelligence which gives you its approval. It's so-so restful. ” “To give herself, for a woman, to possess, for a man, are the only two means that human beings have of understanding anything whatsoever. ”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you, dear, that women never give themselves (or hardly ever) and that men possess nothing? It’s a game: ‘I think I possess her, therefore she thinks she is possessed. ’ Yes? Really? Listen, I’m going to say something very wicked-but don’t you think it’s the story al over again of the cork which considered itself so much more important than the bottle?”
Moral license in a woman excited Ferral, but intellectual license only irritated him. He felt an urgent need to arouse the only feeling which gave him a certain power over a woman: Christian shame, together with gratitude for the shame endured. If she did not guess this, she guessed that he was slipping away from her, and as she was responsive, after all, to the physical desire which she could see growing, amused at the idea that she could catch him and bring him back at will, she looked at him with her mouth half-open (since he liked her smile.), expressing with her eyes the offer of herself, assured that he, like almost all men, would take her desire to seduce him for a surrender.