Duroy drew back, distracted, for he could hear the rapid rustling of skirts and a hurried step ascending from the story just beneath him. There was soon a knock at the door, which he had reclosed. He opened it, and Madame de Marelle rushed into the room, terrified and breathless, stammering: “Did you hear?”
He pretended to know nothing. “No; what?”
“How they have insulted me.”
“Who? Who?”
“The blackguards who live down below.”
“But, surely not; what does it all mean, tell me?”
She began to sob, without being able to utter a word. He had to take off her bonnet, undo her dress, lay her on the bed, moisten her forehead with a wet towel. She was choking, and then when her emotion was somewhat abated, all her wrathful indignation broke out. She wanted him to go down at once, to thrash them, to kill them.
He repeated: “But they are only work-people, low creatures. Just remember that it would lead to a police court, that you might be recognized, arrested, ruined. One cannot lower one’s self to have anything to do with such people.”
She passed on to another idea. “What shall we do now? For my part, I cannot come here again.”
He replied: “It is very simple; I will move.”
She murmured: “Yes, but that will take some time.” Then all at once she framed a plan, and reassured, added softly: “No, listen, I know what to do; let me act, do not trouble yourself about anything. I will send you a telegram tomorrow morning.”
She smiled now, delighted with her plan, which she would not reveal, and indulged in a thousand follies. She was very agitated, however, as she went downstairs, leaning with all her weight on her lover’s arm, her legs trembled so beneath her. They did not meet anyone, though.
As he usually got up late, he was still in bed the next day, when, about eleven o’clock, the telegraph messenger brought him the promised telegram. He opened it and read:
“Meet me at five; 127, Rue de Constantinople. Rooms hired by Madame Duroy.—Clo.”
At five o’clock to the minute he entered the doorkeeper’s lodge of a large furnished house, and asked: “It is here that Madame Duroy has taken rooms, is it not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will you show me to them, if you please.”
The man, doubtless used to delicate situations in which prudence is necessary, looked him straight in the eyes, and then, selecting one of the long range of keys, said: “You are Monsieur Duroy?”
“Yes, certainly.”
The man opened the door of a small suite of rooms on the ground floor in front of the lodge. The sitting-room, with a tolerably fresh wall-paper of floral design, and a carpet so thin that the boards of the floor could be felt through it, had mahogany furniture, upholstered in green rep with a yellow pattern. The bedroom was so small that the bed three-parts filled it. It occupied the further end, stretching from one wall to the other—the large bed of a furnished lodging-house, shrouded in heavy blue curtains also of rep, and covered with an eider-down quilt of red silk stained with suspicious-looking spots.
Duroy, uneasy and displeased, thought: “This place will cost, Lord knows how much. I shall have to borrow again. It is idiotic what she has done.”
The door opened, and Clotilde came in like a whirlwind, with outstretched arms and rustling skirts. She was delighted. “Isn’t it nice, eh, isn’t it nice? And on the ground floor, too; no stairs to go up. One could get in and out of the windows without the doorkeeper seeing one. How we will love one another here!”
He kissed her coldly, not daring to put the question that rose to his lips. She had placed a large parcel on the little round table in the middle of the room. She opened it, and took out a cake of soap, a bottle of scent, a sponge, a box of hairpins, a buttonhook, and a small pair of curling tongs to set right her fringe, which she got out of curl every time. And she played at moving in, seeking a place for everything, and derived great amusement from it.
She kept on chattering as she opened the drawers. “I must bring a little linen, so as to be able to make a change if necessary. It will be very convenient. If I get wet, for instance, while I am out, I can run in here to dry myself. We shall each have one key, beside the one left with the doorkeeper in case we forget it. I have taken the place for three months, in your name, of course, since I could not give my own.”
Then he said: “You will let me know when the rent is to be paid.”
She replied, simply: “But it is paid, dear.”
“Then I owe it to you.”
“No, no, my dear; it does not concern you at all; this is a little fancy of my own.”
He seemed annoyed: “Oh, no, indeed; I can’t allow that.”
She came to him in a supplicating way, and placing her hands on his shoulders, said: “I beg of you, George; it will give me so much pleasure to feel that our little nest here is mine—all my own. You cannot be annoyed at that. How can you? I wanted to contribute that much towards our loves. Say you agree, Georgy; say you agree.”
She implored him with looks, lips, the whole of her being. He held out, refusing with an irritated air, and then he yielded, thinking that, after all, it was fair. And when she had gone, he murmured, rubbing his hands, and without seeking in the depths of his heart whence the opinion came on that occasion: “She is very nice.”
He received, a few days later, another telegram running thus: “My husband returns tonight, after six weeks’ inspection, so we shall have a week off. What a bore, darling.—Clo.”
Duroy felt astounded. He had really lost all idea of her being married. But here was a man whose face he would have liked to see just once, in order to know him. He patiently awaited the husband’s departure, but he passed two evenings at the Folies Bergère, which wound up with Rachel.
Then one morning came a fresh telegram: “Today at five.—Clo.”
They both arrived at the meeting-place before the time. She threw herself into his arms with an outburst of passion, and kissed him all over the face, and then said: “If you like, when we have loved one another a great deal, you shall take me to dinner somewhere. I have kept myself disengaged.”
It was at the beginning of the month, and although his salary was long since drawn in advance, and he lived from day to day upon money gleaned on every side, Duroy happened to be in funds, and was pleased at the opportunity of spending something upon her, so he replied: “Yes, darling, wherever you like.”
They started off, therefore, at about seven, and gained the outer boulevards. She leaned closely against him, and whispered in his ear: “If you only knew how pleased I am to walk out on your arm; how I love to feel you beside me.”
He said: “Would you like to go to Père Lathuile’s?”
“Oh, no, it is too swell. I should like something funny, out of the way! a restaurant that shopmen and work-girls go to. I adore dining at a country inn. Oh! if we only had been able to go into the country.”
As he knew nothing of the kind in the neighborhood, they wandered along the boulevard, and ended by going into a wine-shop where there was a dining-room. She had seen through the window two bareheaded girls seated at tables with two soldiers. Three cab-drivers were dining at the further end of the long and narrow room, and an individual impossible to classify under any calling was smoking, stretched on a chair, with his legs stuck out in front of him, his hands in the waist-band of his trousers, and his head thrown back over the top bar. His jacket was a museum of stains, and in his swollen pockets could be noted the neck of a bottle, a piece of bread, a parcel wrapped up in a newspaper, and a dangling piece of string. He had thick, tangled, curly hair, gray with scurf, and his cap was on the floor under his chair.
The entrance of Clotilde created a sensation, due to the elegance of her toilet. The couples ceased whispering together, the three cab-drivers left off arguing, and the man who was smoking, having taken his pipe from his mouth and spat in front of him, turned his head slightly to look.
Madame de Marelle m
urmured: “It is very nice; we shall be very comfortable here. Another time I will dress like a work-girl.” And she sat down, without embarrassment or disgust, before the wooden table, polished by the fat of dishes, washed by spilt liquors, and cleaned by a wisp of the waiter’s napkin. Duroy, somewhat ill at ease, and slightly ashamed, sought a peg to hang his tall hat on. Not finding one, he put it on a chair.
They had a ragout, a slice of melon, and a salad. Clotilde repeated: “I delight in this. I have low tastes. I like this better than the Café Anglais.” Then she added: “If you want to give me complete enjoyment, you will take me to a dancing place. I know a very funny one close by called the Reine Blanche.”
Duroy, surprised at this, asked: “Whoever took you there?”
He looked at her and saw her blush, somewhat disturbed, as though this sudden question had aroused within her some delicate recollections. After one of these feminine hesitations, so short that they can scarcely be guessed, she replied: “A friend of mine,” and then, after a brief silence, added, “who is dead.” And she cast down her eyes with a very natural sadness.
Duroy, for the first time, thought of all that he did not know as regarded the past life of this woman. Certainly she already had lovers, but of what kind, in what class of society? A vague jealousy, a species of enmity awoke within him; an enmity against all that he did not know, all that had not belonged to him. He looked at her, irritated at the mystery wrapped up within that pretty, silent head, which was thinking, perhaps, at that very moment, of the other, the others, regretfully. How he would have liked to have looked into her recollections—to have known all.
She repeated: “Will you take me to the Reine Blanche? That will be a perfect treat.”
He thought: “What matters the past? I am very foolish to bother about it,” and smilingly replied: “Certainly, darling.”
When they were in the street she resumed, in that low and mysterious tone in which confidences are made: “I dared not ask you this until now, but you cannot imagine how I love these escapades in places ladies do not go to. During the carnival I will dress up as a schoolboy. I make such a capital boy.”
When they entered the ball-room she clung close to him, gazing with delighted eyes on the girls and the bullies, and from time to time, as though to reassure herself as regards any possible danger, saying, as she noticed some serious and motionless municipal guard: “That is a strong-looking fellow.” In a quarter of an hour she had had enough of it and he escorted her home.
Then began quite a series of excursions in all the queer places where the common people amuse themselves, and Duroy discovered in his mistress quite a liking for this vagabondage of students bent on a spree. She came to their meeting-place in a cotton frock and with a servant’s cap—a theatrical servant’s cap—on her head; and despite the elegant and studied simplicity of her toilet, retained her rings, her bracelets, and her diamond earrings, saying, when he begged her to remove them: “Bah! they will think they are paste.”
She thought she was admirably disguised, and although she was really only concealed after the fashion of an ostrich, she went into the most ill-famed drinking places. She wanted Duroy to dress himself like a workman, but he resisted, and retained his correct attire, without even consenting to exchange his tall hat for one of soft felt. She was consoled for this obstinacy on his part by the reflection that she would be taken for a chambermaid engaged in a love affair with a gentleman, and thought this delightful. In this guise they went into popular wine-shops, and sat down on rickety chairs at old wooden tables in smoke-filled rooms. A cloud of strong tobacco smoke, with which still blended the smell of fish fried at dinner time, filled the room; men in blouses shouted at one another as they tossed off nips of spirits; and the astonished waiter would stare at this strange couple as he placed before them two cherry brandies. She—trembling, fearsome, yet charmed—began to sip the red liquid, looking round her with uneasy and kindling eye. Each cherry swallowed gave her the sensation of a sin committed, each drop of burning liquor flowing down her throat gave her the pleasure of a naughty and forbidden joy.
Then she would say, “Let us go,” and they would leave. She would pass rapidly, with bent head and the short steps of an actress leaving the stage, among the drinkers, who, with their elbows on the tables, watched her go by with suspicious and dissatisfied glances; and when she had crossed the threshold would give a deep sigh, as if she had just escaped some terrible danger.
Sometimes she asked Duroy, with a shudder: “If I were insulted in these places, what would you do?”
He would answer, with a swaggering air: “Take your part, by Jove!”
And she would clasp his arm with happiness, with, perhaps, a vague wish to be insulted and defended, to see men fight on her account, even such men as those, with her lover.
But these excursions taking place two or three times a week began to weary Duroy, who had great difficulty, besides, for some time past, in procuring the ten francs necessary for the cake and the drinks. He now lived very hardly and with more difficulty than when he was a clerk in the Northern Railway; for having spent lavishly during his first month of journalism, in the constant hope of gaining large sums of money in a day or two, he had exhausted all his resources and all means of procuring money. A very simple method, that of borrowing from the cashier, was very soon exhausted; and he already owed the paper four months’ salary, besides six hundred francs advanced on his lineage account. He owed, besides, a hundred francs to Forestier, three hundred to Jacques Rival, who was free-handed with his money; and he was also eaten up by a number of small debts of from five francs to twenty. Saint-Potin, consulted as to the means of raising another hundred francs, had discovered no expedient, although a man of inventive mind, and Duroy was exasperated at this poverty, of which he was more sensible now than formerly, since he had more wants. A sullen rage against everyone smouldered within him, with an ever-increasing irritation, which manifested itself at every moment on the most futile pretexts. He sometimes asked himself how he could have spent an average of a thousand francs a month, without any excess and the gratification of any extravagant fancy, and he found that, by adding a lunch at eight francs to a dinner at twelve, partaken of in some large café on the boulevards, he at once came to a louis, which, added to ten francs pocket-money—that pocket-money that melts away, one does not know how—makes a total of thirty francs. But thirty francs a day is nine hundred francs at the end of the month. And he did not reckon in the cost of clothes, boots, linen, washing, etc.
So on the 14th December he found himself without a sou in his pocket, and without a notion in his mind how to get any money. He went, as he had often done of old, without lunch, and passed the afternoon working at the newspaper office, angry and preoccupied. About four o’clock he received a telegram from his mistress, running: “Shall we dine together, and have a lark afterwards?”
He at once replied: “Cannot dine.” Then he reflected that he would be very stupid to deprive himself of the pleasant moments she might afford him, and added: “But will wait at nine at our place.” And having sent one of the messengers with this, to save the cost of a telegram, he began to reflect what he should do to procure himself a dinner.
At seven o’clock he had not yet hit upon anything and a terrible hunger assailed him. Then he had recourse to the stratagem of a despairing man. He let all his colleagues depart, one after the other, and when he was alone rang sharply. Monsieur Walter’s messenger, left in charge of the offices, came in. Duroy was standing feeling in his pockets, and said in an abrupt voice: “Foucart, I have left my purse at home, and I have to go and dine at the Luxembourg. Lend me fifty sous for my cab.”
The man took three francs from his waistcoat pocket and said: “Do you want any more, sir?”
“No, no, that will be enough. Thanks.”
And having seized on the coins, Duroy ran downstairs and dined at a slap-bank, to which he drifted on his days of poverty.
At nine o’clock
he was awaiting his mistress, with his feet on the fender, in the little sitting-room. She came in, lively and animated, brisked up by the keen air of the street. “If you like,” said she, “we will first go for a stroll, and then come home here at eleven. The weather is splendid for walking.”
He replied, in a grumbling tone: “Why go out? We are very comfortable here.”
She said, without taking off her bonnet: “If you knew, the moonlight is beautiful. It is splendid walking about tonight.”
“Perhaps so, but I do not care for walking about!”
He had said this in an angry fashion. She was struck and hurt by it, and asked: “What is the matter with you? Why do you go on in this way? I should like to go for a stroll, and I don’t see how that can vex you.”
He got up in a rage. “It does not vex me. It is a bother, that is all.”
She was one of those sort of women whom resistance irritates and impoliteness exasperates, and she said disdainfully and with angry calm: “I am not accustomed to be spoken to like that. I will go alone, then. Good-bye.”
He understood that it was serious, and darting towards her, seized her hands and kissed them, saying: “Forgive me, darling, forgive me. I am very nervous this evening, very irritable. I have had vexations and annoyances, you know—matters of business.”
She replied, somewhat softened, but not calmed down: “That does not concern me, and I will not bear the consequences of your ill-temper.”
He took her in his arms, and drew her towards the couch.
“Listen, darling, I did not want to hurt you; I was not thinking of what I was saying.”
He had forced her to sit down, and, kneeling before her, went on: “Have you forgiven me? Tell me you have forgiven me?”
She murmured, coldly: “Very well, but do not do so again;” and rising, she added: “Now let us go for a stroll.”
He had remained at her feet, with his arms clasped about her hips, and stammered: “Stay here, I beg of you. Grant me this much. I should so like to keep you here this evening all to myself, here by the fire. Say yes, I beg of you, say yes.”
The Guy De Maupassant Megapack (R) Page 156