This too was said in a dreadful tone, with shattering indifference, and the way he stood there dripping wet and leaning against the wall, slack and exhausted to the bone, shook me so much that I had no time to waste on taking petty offence. I merely sensed, as I had from the first moment when I saw him stagger from the gaming hall, as I had felt all through this improbable hour, that here was a human being, a young, living, breathing human being on the very brink of death, and I must save him. I came closer.
‘Never mind money, come along! You can’t stay here. I’ll get you under cover. Don’t worry about anything, just come with me.’
He turned his head and I felt, while the rain drummed round us with a hollow sound and the eaves cast water down to splash at our feet, that for the first time he was trying to make out my face in the dark. His body seemed to be slowly shaking off its lethargy too.
‘As you like,’ he said, giving in. ‘It’s all one to me… after all, why not? Let’s go.’ I put up my umbrella, he moved to my side and took my arm. I felt this sudden intimacy uncomfortable; indeed, it horrified me. I was alarmed to the depths of my heart. But I did not feel bold enough to ask him to refrain, for if I rejected him now he would fall into the bottomless abyss, and everything I had tried to do so far would be in vain. We walked the few steps back to the casino, and only now did it strike me that I had no idea what to do with him. I had better take him to a hotel, I thought quickly, and give him money to spend the night there and go home in the morning. I was not thinking beyond that. And as the carriages were now rapidly drawing up outside the casino I hailed a cab and we got in. When the driver asked where to, I couldn’t think what to say at first. But realising that the drenched, dripping man beside me would not be welcome in any of the best hotels—on the other hand, genuinely inexperienced as I was, with nothing else in mind—I just told the cabby, ‘Some simple hotel, anywhere!’
The driver, indifferent, and wet with rain himself, drove his horses on. The stranger beside me said not a word, the wheels rattled, the rain splashed heavily against the windows, and I felt as if I were travelling with a corpse in that dark, lightless rectangular space, in a vehicle like a coffin. I tried to think of something to say to relieve the strange, silent horror of our presence there together, but I could think of nothing. After a few minutes the cab stopped. I got out first and paid the driver, who shut the door after us as if drunk with sleep. We were at the door of a small hotel that was unknown to me, with a glass porch above us providing a tiny area of shelter from the rain, which was still lashing the impenetrable night around us with ghastly monotony.
The stranger, giving way to his inertia, had instinctively leant against the wall, and water was dripping from his wet hat and crumpled garments. He stood there like a drunk who has been fished out of the river, still dazed, and a channel of water trickling down from him formed around the small patch of ground where he stood. But he made not the slightest effort to shake himself or take off the hat from which raindrops kept running over his forehead and face. He stood there entirely apathetically, and I cannot tell you how his broken demeanour moved me.
But something had to be done. I put my hand into my bag. ‘Here are a hundred francs,’ I said. ‘Take a room and go back to Nice tomorrow.’
He looked up in astonishment.
‘I was watching you in the gaming hall,’ I continued urgently, noticing his hesitation. ‘I know you’ve lost everything, and I fear you’re well on the way to doing something stupid. There’s no shame in accepting help—here, take it!’
But he pushed away my hand with an energy I wouldn’t have expected in him. ‘You are very good,’ he said, ‘but don’t waste your money. There’s no help for me now. Whether I sleep tonight or not makes not the slightest difference. It will all be over tomorrow anyway. There’s no help for me.’
‘No, you must take it,’ I urged. ‘You’ll see things differently tomorrow. Go upstairs and sleep on it. Everything will look different in daylight.’
But when I tried to press the money on him again he pushed my hand away almost violently. ‘Don’t,’ he repeated dully. ‘There’s no point in it. Better to do it out of doors than leave blood all over their room here. A hundred or even a thousand francs won’t help me. I’d just go to the gaming hall again tomorrow with the last few francs, and I wouldn’t stop until they were all gone. Why begin again? I’ve had enough.’
You have no idea how that dull tone of voice went to my heart, but think of it: a couple of inches from you stands a young, bright, living, breathing human being, and you know that if you don’t do your utmost, then in a few hours time this thinking, speaking, breathing specimen of youth will be a corpse. And now I felt a desire like rage, like fury, to overcome his senseless resistance. I grasped his arm. ‘That’s enough stupid talk. You go up these steps now and take a room, and I’ll come in the morning and take you to the station. You must get away from here, you must go home tomorrow, and I won’t rest until I’ve seen you sitting in the train with a ticket. You can’t throw your life away so young just because you’ve lost a couple of hundred francs, or a couple of thousand. That’s cowardice, silly hysteria concocted from anger and bitterness. You’ll see that I’m right tomorrow!’
‘Tomorrow!’ he repeated in a curiously gloomy, ironic tone. ‘Tomorrow! If you knew where I’d be tomorrow! I wish I knew myself—I’m mildly curious to find out. No, go home, my dear, don’t bother about me and don’t waste your money.’
But I wasn’t giving up now. It had become like a mania obsessing me. I took his hand by force and pressed the banknote into it. ‘You will take this money and go in at once!’ And so saying I stepped firmly up to the door and rang the bell. ‘There, now I’ve rung, and the porter will be here in a minute. Go in and lie down. I’ll be outside here at nine tomorrow to take you straight to the station. Don’t worry about anything, I’ll see to what’s necessary to get you home. But now go to bed, have a good sleep, and don’t think of anything else!’
At that moment the key turned inside the door and the porter opened it.
‘Come on, then!’ said my companion suddenly, in a harsh, firm embittered voice, and I felt his fingers span my wrist in an iron grip. I was alarmed… so greatly alarmed, so paralysed, struck as if by lightning, that all my composure vanished. I wanted to resist, tear myself away, but my will seemed numbed, and I… well, you will understand… I was ashamed to struggle with a stranger in front of the porter, who stood there waiting impatiently. And so, suddenly, I was inside the hotel. I wanted to speak, say something, but my throat would not obey me… and his hand lay heavy and commanding on my arm. I vaguely felt it draw me as if unawares up a flight of steps—a key clicked in a lock. And suddenly I was alone with this stranger in a strange room, in some hotel whose name I do not know to this day.”
Mrs C stopped again, and suddenly rose to her feet. It seemed that her voice would not obey her any more. She went over to the window and looked out in silence for some minutes, or perhaps she was just resting her forehead on the cold pane; I did not have the courage to look closely, for I found it painful to see the old lady so agitated. So I sat quite still, asking no questions, making no sound, and waited until she came back, stepping firmly, and sat down opposite me.
“Well—now the most difficult part is told. And I hope you will believe me when I assure you yet again, when I swear by all that is sacred to me, by my honour and my children, that up to that moment no idea of any… any relationship with the stranger had entered my mind, that I really had been suddenly plunged into this situation against my own will, indeed entirely unawares, as if I had fallen through a trapdoor from the level path of my existence. I have promised to be honest with you and with myself, so I repeat again that I embarked on this tragic venture merely through a rather overwrought desire to help, not through any other, any personal feeling, quite without any wishes or forebodings.