I'm Dying Laughing by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online Page B

discovered her ignorance. She wanted to be by herself until she could learn a few of the things that were ABC to the people she had just met and that were known to all artists in rebellion, all people who had been stirred up, in search of a better fate for mankind. It seemed strange to her now, looking back, that in the USA everyone was not on the march. Wasn’t it obvious that the system had failed? It was; and yet what had she been doing? She had lived from minute to minute, without an idea. She would go to the meetings—one day soon. She was shy about pushing herself into what she called the crème de la crème, she was not fit for it. She saw now that Stephen Howard’s remark about Normandy was just a joke. What was odd about it was the way it had struck to the heart.

2 LOVE STORY
    P ARIS, JUNE 1935
    F OR A WHILE EMILY’S home was the little hotel in the rue St Benoît and she trotted the streets around, the rue Jacob, rue de Fuerstenberg, rue de l’Abbaye, rue Bonaparte. At eight o’clock in the evening they got there, after thick rain and the sun had shone, the streets, drying rapidly, were glassy. There was an old house at the end of the rue St-Benoit with four windows in the attic displaying pots of greenery, and the front of this house, anciently whitened, was patchy, part age, part wet, and next was Number 40 over which was the sign Ébénisterie, cabinet-work. Houses in various heights, various whites blotted out part of the washed blue sky, a terrasse with wooden tubs—the clouds lifting still, the air fresh, someone washing a floorcloth in the gutter, streaming with clear water released from the hydrant; and in all these old houses, people sitting in small places taking the air, but modestly, no elbowing, no outcries. Opposite the old Abbaye, before the police station, was an interior with the plaster bust of a young girl, a little Greuze, some bronzes. She was at the commissariat, frankly studying it, when a man, a painter in studio gear, stopped the three policemen going on duty, saying, ‘Have you seen—?’ and later in the distance she saw the same painter in the street, anxious, nervous, shaking his hands together: and then, passing a restaurant, there he was, walking along the counter towards the table at the end where six policemen were having supper with six half-bottles of wine. The painter said to the man behind the counter, ‘Can no one tell me where it is?’ He said to the policemen, ‘Can no one tell me where it is?’ How sad.
    The houses opposite the hotel were very old. There were little stores boarded up and poor laundries, restaurants dismal in the mixed tail-end of the rue de l’Université. She walked around bursting with joy. ‘It is, it is, it is!’ Down on the quays, where the bookcases were now shut, there was clear evening light, the smoke of the Sansonnet tug on the Seine, the line of trees on the Quai de Louvre. ‘It is here, I am here, life, new life.’ When she returned to the hotel, they said there was ‘un monsieur’ waiting for her. There he was looking out through the lace curtains of the dark sitting room; Howard had come for her.
    ‘How did you know?’ she asked.
    ‘You said the rue St.-Benoît.’
    He took her to dinner. They walked across the river through the courts of the Louvre to a small dark restaurant in the Palais-Royal, the famous Véfour. ‘Uncle Maurice comes here.’
    He had arranged for her to join the American group at the conference, as a ‘private observer’ like himself, so that she could go to all the sessions with them.
    ‘But we won’t go to all. You’ll see Paris, too.’
    She became part of the American group. When Stephen did not call for her, she went to the congress herself, sitting near the front of the auditorium. She could write it up when she got back. One afternoon, it was hot. The Russian writers, sober and straitlaced, were on all the afternoon reading their forty-page dissertations, either in Russian or in