The Man in a Hurry

by Paul Morand

  “It’s me I ought to worry about. I’m frightened of not being normal, of being unnatural. I’m not sure that an understanding between me and other people is possible. The proof: Placide and Chantepie.

  “Love is a dangerous territory for athletes. During the wars, the clearest skies were those in which the greatest number of aviators were killed. What will happen to me when I experience love?

  “For I’m ready for love just as I am for death, or for poverty; I’m not the kind to tiptoe his way around the elemental forces and the great affairs of life. I shall pay cash on the nail when the time comes for me to become involved and commit myself.

  “To do so you need to know yourself well, know who you are, what you’re worth. I believed myself to be a man like any other man, one merely endowed with a little more liveliness. Is this liveliness that I’m so proud of speed? Or is it a way of dissembling and dragging one’s feet, a delaying tactic, a way of avoiding the real answers, of substituting the great leap that every man must make into the unknown with a series of small hops? But Chantepie has left me. My cat has left me. Placide is leaving me. I have no friends. (He always dwelt on this.) Were I to ransack my bottom drawer, all I would come up with are relatives or colleagues. Am I a monster? My pulse is regular and my blood pressure is about normal. I know of no physical defects, my family background is excellent, my spinal cord would be the envy of a tightrope-walker. So why do people avoid me? Why am I left on my own? I thought of myself as a ball of fire; perhaps I’m just burnt out.”

  Pierre had reached that point where he was no longer capable of expressing himself in sentences. Or else he no longer dared to.

  He remembered something Regencrantz had said: “By moving so quickly, are you fleeing or pursuing?” “If I am fleeing,” he said to himself, “what exactly am I fleeing from?”

  When he began to tackle this riddle, the fugitive found himself surrounded by question marks that held him back like hooks.

  CHAPTER X

  “ONE BEHIND MY NECK, really hot… One behind my left leg. This one’s cold and is freezing my right leg!”

  Bonne de Boisrosé is surrounded by rubber hot-water bottles. She looks like a horse wading through a river on wineskins.

  The table has been placed at the foot of the bed, a pretty little hexagonal chess table, lent by the uncle, on which the glasses touch one another, with a place laid at each of the six sides. The Boisrosé girls are serving at table, for the maid only comes in the morning. Maids have been solicited on several occasions by means of advertisements, but the concierge had painted such a colourful picture of the Boisrosé household beforehand that they never got beyond the entrance hall.

  Fromentine has placed a white lotus flower in a celadon full of water in the centre of the table. Hedwige is putting the plates on top of the oven to warm. They have washed, for once discarding the bathrobes, morning coats, dressing gowns and other indoor clothes which they live in. Hedwige is wearing white: it’s Angélique’s dress. Angélique is in black: it’s Fromentine’s dress. Fromentine is in black and white: she has borrowed the dress from her elder sister and the tunic from her younger one; the gold necklaces are from her mother. Bonne de Boisrosé is wearing guipure, her bust resting on sheets trimmed with Valenciennes lacework, looking like a hairdresser’s model on a pedestal covered with ruffled material.

  Pierre Niox is coming to dinner. He has been invited, ostensibly to thank him for his flowers, but in reality to discuss the sale of the Mas Vieux. Madame de Boisrosé had decided that this time it should be Angélique who would raise the subject, Hedwige not having proved up to the mark since she had allowed two opportunities to pass without reaching a conclusion.

  Pierre rings the bell. It’s almost as if he is there already. He doesn’t open doors, it’s as though he were forcing his way in. He dashes through, striding past the entrance hall and the ritual introductions and into the drawing room where he is awaited, not without ceremony, since the presence of a stranger is fairly rare at Saint-Germain. Fromentine, who had opened the landing door to him, followed at a run, hoping, quite wrongly, that she would reach the drawing room at the same time as him. As soon as enters the room, Pierre exclaims:

  “So much finery and so much beauty just for me!”

  “In this way you are sure of being favoured,” Fromentine replied playfully. “Excuse me one moment, I’m going to find Hedwige.”

  Pierre was left in private conversation with Angélique. She headed astutely straight for the Mas Vieux. Pierre gave her an enthusiastic description of it in a few words.

  “I don’t know the house, unfortunately,” Angélique replied. “Father bought it when he was separated from Mamicha and he sold it without informing us. Poor Papa was very ill and was probably badly advised. So were we, we don’t have anyone to help us, we’re four women on our own who know nothing about business matters.”

  Pierre interrupted her:

  “I know what’s bothering you, but believe me, don’t worry. I have an idea… still unformed, but achievable. Your sister Fromentine teases me about my haste; this time, you see, I am taking my time.”

  “Can I not know beforehand?” asked Angélique.

  “Why do such beautiful women concern themselves with all this language of business and money? It’s for men like me to free them from their worries.”

  He was so unaccustomed to these phrases of gentlemanly chivalry that he was astonished to hear himself utter them.

  Fromentine returned, bringing Hedwige with her.

  “Come and say hello to my mother. Forgive her for receiving you lying in bed, she’s not feeling very well today.”

  Pierre feared disturbing Madame de Boisrosé and resisted; he resisted badly, because he was watching Hedwige as she spoke. He was mesmerized by women’s lips; he saw little else, initially. It was through their lips that he began to puzzle them out; it was the first real effect they made on him. Just as a deaf man uses the lips of the person he is conversing with to understand the words he is unable to hear, so it was from their lips that he interpreted their distinctive features, their affectations, the truths about them. It is the mouth, first of all, that gives her away. Pierre had had his fill of pretty, foolish mouths that never shut; despondent mouths that try to cheer themselves up by applying lipstick, but whose muscles slacken and droop; elastic, hysterical mouths that shoot off in every direction; restless mouths that muddle up the words to be spoken; tragic mouths, on stage and in speeches, looking rather like a black hole in Melpomene’s mask; fashionable mouths, advertisements for toothpaste; busy, harsh mouths that hold the purse strings; mouths that have disintegrated due to illness.

  But Hedwige had a firm, well-balanced mouth that radiated serenity and contemplation; a mouth that was in harmony with her eyes and with every part of her face and her soul.

  Fromentine was growing restless:

  “Yes, yes, you must come and see Mother,” she said. “You will be obliged to go in there since we are having dinner at the foot of her bed. It’s what we call the little dining table.”

  And she opened the bedroom door with a great shriek of laughter, pushing Pierre closer to the bed.

  “I must compliment you on your daughters, madame,” he said with a bow.

  “Three daughters, it’s a disaster. Don’t remind me, monsieur, that I have three daughters.”

  “They’re very beautiful.”

  “As far as that’s concerned, yes, they’re beautiful and they’re good,” said Madame de Boisrosé with such natural pride that it could no longer be termed pride. And with a wave of her hand she sought the agreement of her son-in-law Amyot and Monsieur de Rocheflamme, who were keeping her company.

  Pierre thought it was charming to have dinner in the bedroom. He was fascinated by this intimacy of women in its purest state, without any affectation, cunning or social concerns. The cooking resembled some sort of leisure activity, the cutlery something of a conjuring trick; saucepans, plates, bottles protruded from every corne
r and they lent this tea party an atmosphere of make-believe and entertainment. Pierre was on the point of saying: “How much quicker it is than in a restaurant!”, but he preferred not to remind them of that disastrous first evening.

  Vincent Amyot, Angélique’s husband, was a witty mind inside a ninety-kilo body. Although extremely intelligent in private, as soon as he wished to shine and make himself attractive to a stranger he lost his natural wit and expressed himself like a book, like a boring book. This former poly-technicien5 wrote articles on economic affairs for the weeklies that were brimming with authority and facile pessimism. He had tried his hand at writing detective novels and historical essays, and he wrote too much; but unlike the work of artists, musicians and orators, who overwhelm their friends and relations with exhibitions, concerts and conferences, the creations of a friend who’s a writer are always avoidable. And so no one was familiar with Amyot’s output. Apart, that is, from a few ministers of finance who, with the sensitivity peculiar to all politicians, did not absorb the lessons that he delivered with theoretical infallibility from on high, and which resulted, in practice, in a forecast of banking disasters. Pierre listened to the conversation, stock-still.

  Pierre stock-still, what an amazing sight! As motionless as a quivering arrow, as a missile in an arsenal. Pierre wasting his time, but feeling and giving the impression that he was benefiting in every respect. Pierre lethargic, Pierre munching; munching his apple tart instead of choking on it, not unscrewing the sugar sprinkler, not eating everything from the same plate, not covering his cake with salt instead of sugar. Pierre polishing his rough edges, making the most of his evening and thoroughly immersing himself in every second of it. Could it last?

  It did last, however. They savoured their food. They sipped their drinks. The ladies dipped sugar lumps in their coffee. Pierre listened to Madame de Boisrosé expressing various complaints about the present age and her daughters countering her moans with timid objections and deferential approval. They also listened to the wind howling and the red oven crackling. He listened to the polytechnicien, his thesis about the gyratory movement of long-term investments and his paradoxes that concluded with a QED. And when, in turn, Uncle Rocheflamme spoke, Pierre was quite pleased to listen to him grinding his coffee and making banal remarks, the former in between his legs, the others through gritted teeth.

  “Even so, France…” Amyot began, joining in with this very French phrase.

  “We are letting ourselves be led by circumstances,” groused Monsieur de Rocheflamme, sounding as idiotic as the radio. “It’s one of our misfortunes not to have any leaders. We have men of distinction, but no characters. Now Poincaré, he was a leader.”

  “Poincaré had substance,” said Pierre, glad to cling instinctively in this deluge of generalizations onto an actual name.

  “Yes, but he carried no conviction: I’m going to fill you in on the problem with France. All things being equal…”

  And to start with, backing his argument up with anecdotes and a few drawn-out metaphors, Amyot explained that what was lacking in the Treaty of Versailles “was heart”.

  Interspersed with peerless notions on the art of leading nations, the evening had reached its highest degree of dreariness when Pierre, benumbed and anaesthetized, suddenly felt his evil genius rising to the surface. With a firm but gentle nudge, this familiar phantom was pointing him towards the door.

  Pierre looked at the door, a large, handsome door with three panels and a gleaming doorknob that only required a hand to turn it.

  “I can’t just leave like that,” he thought, steeling himself. “It’s impossible.”

  “What the Treaty of Versailles could have been…” Amyot was expanding.

  The door appeared to open onto a magical staircase that led up a gentle slope to the street. Often, as he was falling asleep, the man in a hurry imagined a model house, a house which one would leave via gradients as speedy as toboggan runs, where a lift would transport you in your car up to the drawing room; a house from which you could send your letters and parcels straight from the window giving onto the street along spiralling chutes, as in the large stores; in which, as in the dining rooms of Ludwig II of Bavaria, the table would rise ready-laid from under the floor through a trapdoor; in which one’s clothes, by means of a system of pulleys, would dress you instantly; in which visitors, triggered by a clock, would arrive at the stated time in armchairs pulled by trolleys and would depart again on rails as soon as the most important words had been spoken, leaving the conversations recorded on wax walls.

  “Always peripheral to events, our statesmen…” Amyot was still dragging on.

  Monsieur de Rocheflamme, who was no longer even responding to his nephew by marriage, was now admiring his sister’s success. The three girls were talking among themselves. Pierre awoke with a start. He had been asleep. Nobody appeared to have noticed. For how long had he been asleep?

  “… a more sincere outlook,” Amyot continued.

  By piecing both ends of the sentence together, Pierre concluded that he had only been asleep for three words.

  He now felt a great weight upon his shoulders, as overburdened as he did when he jumped out of bed on a day crammed with anxieties and meetings. And yet, five minutes earlier, he had been happy. But his familiar and demanding phantom was continuing to lead him towards the door. He absolutely had to get a breath of air.

  “I’ve no more tobacco,” he said. “Would you mind if I went to buy some?”

  “The tobacconist’s is a long way away,” Bonne de Boisrosé pointed out.

  “We have some Virginia,” Fromentine offered.

  “Do you want some Caporal?” said Monsieur de Rocheflamme.

  “Forgive me. I’m used to a Turkish tobacco from the Levant. I’ll be back. It will only take a moment.”

  Pierre dashed down the stairs four at a time. In the street, he took a deep breath. Hundred-year-old street lamps were making circles through the mist. The avenue was deserted, the city indifferent. Pierre took to his heels. He breathed the air deep into his lungs. Never in his life had he felt so happy. His rubberized soles held the road well, his arms flew in the air, his long, well-built legs gave him total freedom. What a pleasure the party had been! He felt no qualms about causing a disturbance in a sleeping neighbourhood where the guard dogs were all barking.

  He walked past the tobacconist’s shop without going in because he had Turkish tobacco in his pocket.

  He stopped, he felt better. A clock chimed ten o’clock. His swiftness had kept him sane. He felt more inclined to be polite now and he even thought that he might enjoy going back to his hosts. He retraced his steps.

  “I had to go on foot. My car wouldn’t start,” he said by way of excuse. “You must think me extremely rude?”

  Hedwige smiled. Pierre could see that she had not been taken in, but was grateful for the effort he had made. He rejoined the group. On seeing him, Uncle Rocheflamme rushed over.

  “I’m not well established,” he said, “and you would search in vain for the name of Rocheflamme in the directory of antique dealers: it’s not there. I’m a maverick; I put independence above everything else… Look, my dear fellow, here’s something that will interest you,” he said, opening his wallet, “read this card from Waldeck-Rousseau. Yes, I had some correspondence with him. Good God, it wasn’t exactly yesterday, this was in 1901… listen.”

  He read in a very loud voice: “‘I can only approve, sir, the title of your forthcoming newspaper and I wish long life to the Indépendant. Independence means setting oneself free from other people, that is to say true freedom, freedom that a subsidy from the Ministry of the Interior might compromise’… mmm… mmm… The rest is of no importance,” Monsieur de Rocheflamme muttered.

  “Nice letter,” said Pierre, embarrassed.

  “I’ve lots of others,” the uncle went on, having rediscovered his self-assurance. “My contemporaries have been pleased to pay tribute to my public-spirited activities as well as to
my professional ones. I spent the war as pennant-bearer to General Hély d’Oissel, despite my age. But take a look at my commendation.”

  He produced a folded and torn shred of paper and handed it to Pierre.

  “Did you read it? ‘Proud and independent character…’’’

  “That’s really nice,” said Pierre.

  “One day you must come to my home and I’ll show you the pearls of my collection: I’ve got letters from the poet Edmond Rostand, from Baron Édouard de Rothschild, from the novelist Paul Hervieu and even from Rockefeller; all acknowledge my artistic ability and my natural pride; all congratulate me on never having been a slave to fashion, never tied to any one party, never dependent on anything or anyone else. Me, a servant, nay! Neither slavery, nor compromise. That’s how I am, to put it bluntly!”

  “It’s unusual,” said Pierre.

  “That’s the way I am. If ever we do business together…”

  “The centuries divide us, alas,” Pierre replied with deference and suspicion. “You deal in the eighteenth century, whilst I…”

  “I can take a step backwards, and you a step forwards. And we shall meet halfway; amid the Gothic, for example. By the way, I’ve heard of an exceptional opportunity: it’s an ivory casket…”

  Pierre thought it wise to bring him down a peg.

  “Stick to marquetry, it’s safer, and let me bury myself in barbarism on my own; for me, a language becomes decadent as soon as it is written down, and a Riesener chest is the ultimate in written style… Whereas a bronze from Luristan or a Mycenaean cup is a spoken legend.”

  “I’ve never ever seen any!” exclaimed Fromentine. “Oh, Monsieur Niox, do show me one.”

  “With pleasure,” said Pierre, relieved to be rid of the uncle. “I’ll take you to the Louvre one morning… all three of you.”

  The rest of the evening was extremely pleasant as the Boisrosé girls frolicked among themselves, without resorting to any scheming or underhand approach towards the outsider, each of them with her own particular looks, her way of moving, her grace and her warmth, while the blending of voices, the entwining of gestures and the succession of these individual melodies built up into a musical drone, into an assortment of continuously picturesque colours. Angélique, argumentative, full of ready answers, her wit restrained. Fromentine, emitting wild shrieks and shaking the corkscrew out of her frizzled hair. Hedwige, enigmatic, contained, controlling them from on high.