The Man in a Hurry

by Paul Morand

  “I’ve got an idea,” Hedwige announced. “I’m going to go and find the purchaser, this Monsieur Pierre Niox. I shall explain to him that this business is illegal and since he must be an honest man—”

  “Honest? An antique dealer? Look at your uncle!” cried Bonne. “That’s a ridiculous plan.”

  “Are you going to forbid me?”

  “No, I don’t forbid you. Look under the bed, Fromentine, the jack of clubs is missing.”

  CHAPTER VI

  FOR YEARS Pierre’s household duties have been performed, and performed badly, by Chantepie. Lame from having fallen off a ladder, dressed in clothes that are too long for him, his tie askew, slow and undignified, squalid and penniless, an eavesdropper and someone who is insistent without being over-zealous, Chantepie is the link that connects the domesticated chimpanzee to the domesticated man. A committed capitalist, Chantepie goes out every afternoon to check the Stock Exchange prices; and also, since his food is paid for at a fixed rate, to squabble with the animals over the scraps from the horse butcher on which he survives. Pierre kicks him out of the house at least once a month, but Chantepie refuses to leave, offering to stay without any wages, which disarms his master. Furthermore, Chantepie lends him money and their accounts are so muddled that Pierre doesn’t have time to examine them and so he settles them all in a single payment. The patient man always wears down the impatient one.

  “Chantepie, my slippers!”

  His slippers have not been polished, any more than his clothes have been brushed, his breakfast prepared, the logs sawn or the wine put into bottles. Rather than see him dawdling over these duties, Pierre attends to them himself; Chantepie follows behind listlessly, makes comments from a distance and watches as the lightning storm passes by. Pierre thunders and roars, but Chantepie doesn’t hear him because he is deaf. He lives locked into his own deafness just as Pierre is locked into his own frantic pace: all disabilities are prisons. It is due to his imperturbable lethargy that Chantepie has been able to remain with Pierre, who would have driven any other servant mad.

  Chantepie was nothing more than the ghost of a former hotel manager; his instincts were wholly antiquated. He neither stole nor pilfered; he would even have preferred to die of hunger when confronted with delicacies, like an elderly dog that is used to retrieving without biting. He never made use of his master’s cellar to get drunk, but drank a foul pear cider sent to him from the depths of his native Brittany. A few drops would be enough to make him fall over; once on the ground, his rheumatism prevented him from standing up and he would remain there, like a tortoise on its back, until Pierre came to pick him up. Moaning like a child, he allowed himself to be moved as he whined, “Monsieur is so kind!”

  For all these reasons, Pierre kept Chantepie, or more precisely, Chantepie kept Pierre.

  The impatient man washing himself is a sight to behold.

  “What delays us so much,” Pierre says to himself in a loud voice, “is that we only do one thing at a time. And that we hesitate between various actions. It has taken me twenty years to devise a system for myself and to improve my speeds, but how many gaffes I still make: I remove my pyjamas to get into the bath; I then realize that I have left the soap on the washstand… Chantepie, my soap!”

  And Chantepie brings some logs.

  “I put my pyjamas back on because I am cold; I trip over myself because my shoes get caught in my trouser leg.”

  “Monsieur should always wear slippers,” observes Chantepie, who indulges his master’s quirks, “much time would be saved; monsieur would be able to get his foot in and out more quickly.”

  “We shall have to do away with these pointless vestiges,” Pierre goes on. “Let’s start by numbering each movement: one, remove the razor blade and take advantage of the fact that my legs are of no use to me at that moment to flex my instep, which will lessen the time spent on my physical exercises; two, screw the razor with my right hand between my thumb and index finger, while the left hand squeezes the sponge in the hot water; three, shave in the bath and thus avoid the time wasted with the water.”

  Pierre is famous among his friends for the speed at which he shaves himself, two minutes twenty-eight seconds, a record that has never been beaten.

  “Four, comb your hair while drying yourself at the same time… No, let’s pause a moment, because putting a shirt over your head means having to comb your hair twice. Chantepie, put on a record, and quickly!”

  Pierre always has music playing, having read in books by Bedeau that it speeds up human efficiency.

  “Having shirts that button up from top to bottom? Madness! Eight buttons means eighteen seconds lost each day. I’ve already got rid of sleeve buttons and those dickey shirt-fronts that waste your time, and there’s no point in replacing them with other buttons. Putting your shoes on while doing your tie up at the same time, that’s child’s play. And now for trousers. All my trousers are fitted with zip fasteners.”

  “The days that the zips get stuck, monsieur loses an hour,” Chantepie remarks, “and I get the blame.”

  “Buy me some mechanic’s overalls!”

  “That’s not what monsieur should be wearing! A man like monsieur…” Chantepie sighs as he pretends to sweep with a broom that hasn’t a single bristle.

  Ever since he was at the lycée, Pierre used to dazzle his friends not so much on account of his high marks but because he already had as many braces as he did pairs of trousers, ready to be put on simultaneously. The others, with their single pairs, were well behind their impetuous classmate. Pierre had learnt at an early age the lesson of Fregoli’s dazzling displays on the stage of the Olympia, and he remembered his childish admiration when the brilliant performer would suddenly loom up stage right dressed as a conductor, vanish again while still continuing to talk to himself, only to reappear stage left thirty seconds later wearing a low-cut dress; at the end of the show, the backdrop curtain would be raised revealing, hanging from strings, 101 amazing costumes surrounded by an array of accessories: the conductor’s tailcoat along with the white gloves and the baton, and the ball gown together with the fan and the reticule. At military school, the squad of trainee officers traditionally remained in bed when the morning drum sounded and did not get up until the order came: “Everyone downstairs!” In Polytechnique jargon, that was called dressing in “quick-time”. Pierre owed his popularity to the fact that, although he was last out of bed, he was the first one downstairs. It was the absolute tops, “super quick-time”; he had achieved this pre-eminence through a whole series of inventions: collar attached to the tunic, boots full of talcum powder worn without socks; he also went to bed half dressed. Later on, he resorted to lighting a cigarette while unfolding his newspaper, to opening his post while making a phone call, with the receiver held to his ear by a raised shoulder beneath his chin.

  “There we are. I’m ready. A quarter of an hour would have been enough; it’s not bad, but it means an hour gets lost every four days, which amounts to about ninety-six hours a year devoted to cleanliness. What a waste of valuable time! One trembles to think of it. How wise I was to give up massage and manicure! The toothbrush still plays tricks on me and so does the toothpaste tube, which always bursts at the bottom. These small luxuries must be sacrificed to the greater luxury that is time. It’s the incidental things that mainly get me down: the brilliantine, the tweezers, etc. There would be good reason to see all this in a sordid spirit of economy of movement: doing away with gargling, for example; not sniffing water through the nasal fossae any longer; putting the métro tickets in my wallet beforehand.”

  Here is Pierre Niox standing between two mirrors, the one above the mantelpiece and the one on the wall. Not that he has stopped to look at himself, but while he is in this locality, let us try to grasp this elusive man from both angles. Pierre has washed his hands, but naturally he has not had time to dry them and he is doing so by waving them around like puppets. It is a good moment to examine this example of “instantaneous man” a
nd we shall not have a similar opportunity later in the day because Pierre is catching the eleven o’clock train to Brussels. The slanting light reveals him to be slender, with smoothly rounded skin, a decently shaped face, a prominent nose and surprisingly fine light-blue eyes beneath some swarthy black hair.

  The bullet that is fired from the gun does not ask itself whether it is going to make a hole in a cardboard box or shatter a skull; neither does Pierre. Reading this, you might think of him as daring. “There goes a confident man,” people will say, “who is not going to make a mess of things.” Quite the contrary, Pierre is timid because his haste has caused him many a failure alternating with huge successes. And the moral of this story shall be to show that the impatient man is punished more frequently than he is rewarded.

  Let us return to the pose: Pierre has the figure of a fencer painted for the Salon des Artistes Français in about 1895, with his locks and moustache newly waxed. With his restless hands, his tremulous lips, his very dark skin beneath which many very dark feelings stir, he could only be French. His clothes are moulded to his body and it would be impossible for a dog to bite him by seizing the seat of his trousers or his sleeve, so neat and precise is the cut.

  He walks with his hands plunged into the back pockets of his trousers, which accentuates the hollow of his abdomen. His stomach is concave and below it a watch chain glitters, casting a cold gleam over his Spanish Christ-like body.

  Pierre is now reading the newspaper. Or one could say it is reading him. It has thrown itself upon him and is devouring him. He starts at the back page, just as he begins his letters with his signature and the address on his envelopes with the name of the town or the postcode. He can’t help it. He can never help it. Continuing his perusal of the daily newspaper, he finally reaches the bold headlines on the front page and the editorial, makes a ball out of such fine prose and rolls it across the room. This habit dates from the time that Pierre owned a cat and would try to amuse it. But the cat was not amused; the cat remained forlorn, being of a contemplative breed that loathes impulsive people. The cat puts up with noise as long as it is a sound that is repeated. Being nervous, noise upsets it. The cat is purring at the moment. The cat always lives in the here and now whereas Pierre always lives in the following day. The cat thinks and doesn’t move except to defend itself. The cat simmers and never boils over. The cat is a compact creature, a slow-cooking stove. Pierre’s cat would look at its master (though is one ever the master of a cat?) with regret. He had an accommodating nature, but, having put his tail over his eyes to keep out the daylight and settled himself comfortably for the morning, he disliked Pierre’s sudden disorderly entrances and exits. If he were drinking his milk and Pierre suddenly leapt up, he would flatten his ears, lower his tail and stand sideways to drink while keeping watch with an anxious eye; then, his appetite diminished by this galloping, which caused the floorboards to quake, he would set off sadly, with a drip on his chin, to shelter beneath the chest of drawers. One day the cat had had enough. He left via the balcony and vanished.

  Having thrown away his newspaper, Pierre checked his watch: “Losing five minutes reading the paper is insane!” He thought that the best way, in accordance with the principle of two things at once if possible, would have been to read it while on the lavatory. A brilliant idea: print the dailies on toilet paper. Furthermore, Pierre never took long over these tasks; among his friends it was a classic joke:

  “He does his main business faster than others do their lesser one!”

  Pierre looked at his watch again. He lived with his eye on his wrist. Impossible to give a picture of him without this familiar gesture: his arm thrown forward to reveal his wristwatch, then folded and quickly raised towards his face so that he can read the dial. This ever so emancipated man was crucified upon the two hands of a watch; he felt ashamed of this, but has shame ever cured a vice? These tiny scissors carved his day into seconds, each of which, by dint of being too precious, comprised a total which, along with the others, was completely intolerable. On rare occasions, he became aware of his haste and was astonished by it: “Why is it that my heart is beating as though I were running to a romantic assignation whereas I’m simply going to call on my shoemaker? There must be things to slow up the systole: a false clock? Or false time? After all, we artificially create an hour in summer.” At moments like these he considered himself ridiculous and promised to live a calmer life; but he only succeeded in filling his day by wandering around pointlessly in order that he could savour its actual duration, its duration pure and simple. (In such a manner did all Henry Ford’s activity, the working hours he saved, lead to the distractions of a man of straw, to lessons in the minuet.) Placide, who was consulted one day, had suggested some remedies: a sea voyage, during which everything is adjourned (Ah! lower the anchor, otherwise I’ll leap over the guard rail!); shows with long intervals (Oh! better to kill the usherette!); angling (until the sight of the float bobbling about on its own reflection makes you feel ill); shooting (hours spent swivelling on your shooting stick while the gamekeeper grumbles: “It’s due to the wind that’s changed direction, nothing else is going to come over today”). Why not have one’s hair cut? laughed Pierre (No friction, no singeing, no drying, no this…, no that…, and especially no conversation!); wait at the counter of a bank (a French one); immerse yourself in reading L’Illustration at the dentist’s (“Sorry, I had a lady from the country with a large boil”); regattas (All right, let’s be off! The breeze is dropping now!)

  “No, we’d have to find something far more ridiculous to block out the passage of time completely: total abstention from all activity. For what consumes us is not so much forced or prolonged waiting as those imperceptible pauses and automatic gestures that make holes like a sieve in one’s day: chewing food, sharpening a pencil, sticking stamps, groping about for the button in a lift, signing a registered letter, filling the radiator with water, waiting for a dog to have done its business, comforting a woman…”

  Pierre looked at his watch for the tenth time.

  “I don’t believe it! It’s stopped. Chantepie, what time is it? What, you haven’t wound up the drawing room clock! Chantepie, you must mend your ways! As soon as I have some money I’m going to buy myself an automatic clock.”

  “As they say where I come from, monsieur, men are not made for time, but time is made for men…”

  A ring at the doorbell interrupted the manservant; he disappeared, but came back bringing a scrap of paper with a name written in pencil.

  “It saves having to have visiting cards,” he said disdainfully.

  Pierre read:

  MADEMOISELLE HEDWIGE DE BOISROSÉ

  Pierre immediately took the usual precautions. He had a whole arsenal of defensive procedures with which to protect himself from bores: he hid the chairs in a way that would deter the visitor from settling down permanently, he opened the windows to let in a chilly breeze; the lady would not stay for long. In order to be safer still, Pierre donned a fedora (it was simply a sign that he was about to go out, for he put nothing on his head outside and generally he wore no overcoat because of the time it took getting into the sleeves). He grabbed his gloves in one hand and his umbrella in the other.

  He glanced again at the piece of paper, his eyes fixed on the name.

  “This visit may produce cheap cards, but a wealth of tedium,” he thought to himself.

  He almost said “I’ve gone out”, but he could sense the presence on the other side of the wall of a solitary woman who would be determined and would return.

  “I will see this lady,” he said, dismissing Chantepie, who was standing to attention.

  Hedwige entered. Hedwige in mourning in the totally white room; merely the simple, slow movement of her feet, with just enough delicacy to make her gait seem beautiful. Unaware of what he was doing, Pierre laid his hat on the table; this woman had something about her, but what was it? Hedwige removed her veil. The crêpe material, emblem of that which no longer exists, had th
e ability to move Pierre deeply. This cinder-like substance, worn in mid-morning over this youthfulness and beauty as though to cushion the shock, attired Hedwige with a Spanish modesty, and endowed her with the melancholy of a grave that is never visited. This tall young woman, an exquisite image of misfortune tinged with the leaden effect of crêpe, resembled a pole flying the flag at half-mast.

  “It is you, monsieur, is it not, who bought the Mas Vieux from my father, Monsieur de Boisrosé?”

  Pierre admired the pearl-like complexion, not yet ravaged by the sun like the skins of fashionable girls, but so opaque with light and freshness; the slight quivering of the crêpe, its waviness and the rustle of its black material, screening the light, succeeded in enchanting him.

  “It is you?” Hedwige asked again.

  “Yes, mademoiselle,” said Pierre automatically.

  A curious feeling came over him; he felt disengaged, freewheeling, and was descending effortlessly, as though in a dream, into a sense of unfamiliar well-being. This blindingly white room, which he had just emptied and allowed his ally the cold to come into, was turning into a warm Oceanic night. Pierre was discovering a part of himself that he was unfamiliar with and in which he moved with surprising ease. He happened to notice himself in the mirror and he thought he had changed, become more attractive in appearance, more imposing. His eyes met Hedwige’s.

  “Why are you laughing?” he enquired.

  “Because you had forgotten I was there; I saw you in the mirror: when one looks at people face to face one can see them, but when one looks at them in the mirror one understands them.”

  “What you say is not at all foolish,” said Pierre. “Do you read much?”

  “Never; I don’t like cutting the pages.”

  “I cut them with my finger.”

  They burst out laughing, both of them delighted to be laughing simultaneously over something so deeply ridiculous. A picnic-like gaiety spread through this room in which the onlooker would have seen only a tall girl dressed in black and a tall young man in grey, four walls that were so white that they gave you a pain in the optic nerve and the sinus, a steel desk, two telephones, some electrical wires, an electric heater and some wax-cloth curtains.