Free Christmas Holiday by W. Somerset Maugham

I?”
    “I’m here all night.”
    “But you won’t get fixed up with anybody else?”
    “Why have you got to go away?”
    He smiled a trifle shyly.
    “I’m afraid it sounds absurd, but my friend has given me a couple of tickets for the Mass at St. Eustache, and I may never have another opportunity of hearing it.”
    “Who are you going with?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Will you take me?”
    “You? But how could you get away?”
    “I can arrange that with Mademoiselle. Give me a couple of hundred francs and I’ll fix it.”
    He gave her a doubtful glance. With her naked body, her powder-blue turban and trousers, her painted face, she did not look the sort of person to go to church with. She saw his glance and laughed.
    “I’d give anything in the world to go. Do, do. I can change in ten minutes. It would give me so much pleasure.”
    “All right.”
    He gave her the money and telling him to wait for her in the entrance, she hurried away. He paid for the wine and after ten minutes, counted on his watch, went out.
    As he stepped into the passage a girl came up to him.
    “I haven’t kept you waiting, you see. I’ve explained to Mademoiselle. Anyway she thinks Russians are mad.”
    Until she spoke he had not recognized her. She wore a brown coat and skirt and a felt hat. She had taken off her make-up, even the red on her lips, and her eyesunder the thin fair line of her shaven eyebrows looked neither so large nor so blue. In her brown clothes, neat but cheap, she looked nondescript. She might have been a workgirl such as you see pouring along side streets from the back door of a department store at the luncheon hour. She was hardly even pretty, but she looked very young; and there was something humble in her bearing that gave Charley a pang.
    “Do you like music, Princess?” he asked, when they got into a taxi.
    He did not quite know what to call her. Even though she was a prostitute, he felt it would be rude, with her rank, on so short an acquaintance to call her Olga, and if she had been reduced to so humiliating a position by the stress of circumstances it behoved him all the more to treat her with respect.
    “I’m not a princess, you know, and my name isn’t Olga. They call me that at the Sérail because it flatters the clients to think they are going to bed with a princess and they call me Olga because it’s the only Russian name they know besides Sasha. My father was a professor of economics at the University at Leningrad and my mother was the daughter of a customs official.”
    “What is your name then?”
    “Lydia.”
    They arrived just as the Mass was beginning. There were crowds of people and no chance of getting a seat. It was bitterly cold and Charley asked her if she would like his coat. She shook her head without answering. The aisles were lit by naked electric globes and they threw harsh beams on the vaulting, the columns andthe dark throng of worshippers. The choir was brilliantly lit. They found a place by a column where, protected by its shadow, they could feel themselves isolated. There was an orchestra on a raised platform. At the altar were priests in splendid vestments. The music seemed to Charley somewhat florid, and he listened to it with a faint sense of disappointment. It did not move him as he had expected it would and the soloists, with their metallic, operatic voices, left him cold. He had a feeling that he was listening to a performance rather than attending a religious ceremony, and it excited in him no sensation of reverence. But for all that he was glad to have come. The darkness into which the light from the electric globes cut like a bright knife, making the Gothic lines grimmer; the soft brilliance of the altar, with its multitude of candles, with the priests performing actions whose meaning was unknown to him; the silent crowd that seemed not to participate but to wait anxiously like a crowd at a station barrier waiting for the gate to open; the stench of wet clothes and the