At this, Nanteuil, filled with joy, cast upon him a look of contempt. She feared him no longer, and she could not forgive him for having alarmed her.
She rose.
“Good evening; I have a headache. Good-bye till to-morrow, Monsieur Constantin Marc.” And she went out briskly.
Chevalier ran after her down the corridor, descended the stage staircase behind her, and rejoined her by the stage doorkeeper’s box.
“Félicie, come and dine with me to-night at our cabaret. I should be so glad if you would! Will you?”
“Good gracious, no!”
“Why won’t you?”
“Leave me alone; you are bothering me!”
She tried to escape. He detained her.
“I love you so! Don’t be too cruel to me!”
Taking a step towards him, her lips curling back from her clenched teeth, she hissed into his ear:
“It’s all over, over, over! You hear me? I am fed up with you.”
Then, very gently and solemnly, he said:
“It is the last time that we two shall speak together. Listen, Félicie, before there is a tragedy I ought to warn you. I cannot compel you to love me. But I do not intend that you shall love another. For the last time I advise you not to see Monsieur de Ligny again, I shall prevent your belonging to him.”
“You will prevent me? You? My poor dear fellow!”
In a still more gentle tone he replied:
“I mean it; I shall do it. A man can get what he wants; only he must pay the price.”
CHAPTER V
Returning home, Félicie succumbed to a fit of tears. She saw Chevalier once more imploring her in a despairing voice with the look of a poor man. She had heard that voice and seen that expression when passing tramps, worn out with fatigue, on the high road, when her mother fearing that her lungs were affected, had taken her to spend the winter at Antibes with a wealthy aunt. She despised Chevalier for his gentleness and tranquil manner. But the recollection of that face and that voice disturbed her. She could not eat, she felt as if she were suffocating. In the evening she was attacked by such an excruciating internal pain that she thought she must be dying. She thought this feeling of prostration was due to the fact that it was two days since she had seen Robert. It was only nine o’clock. She hoped that she might find him still at home, and put on her hat.
“Mamma, I have to go to the theatre this evening. I am off.”
Out of consideration for her mother, she was in the habit of making such veiled explanations.
“Go, my child, but don’t come home too late.”
Ligny lived with his parents. He had, on the top floor of the charming house in the Rue Vernet, a small bachelor flat, lit by round windows, which he called his “oeil-de-boeuf.” Félicie sent word by the hall-porter that a lady was waiting for him in a carriage. Ligny did not care for women to look him up too often in the bosom of his family. His father, who was in the diplomatic service, and deeply engrossed in the foreign interests of the country, remained in an incredible state of ignorance as to what went on in his own house. But Madame de Ligny was determined that the decencies of life should be observed in her home, and her son was careful to satisfy her requirements in the matter of outward appearances, since they never probed to the bottom of things. She left him perfectly free to love where he would, and only rarely, in serious and expansive moments, did she hint that it was to the advantage of young men to cultivate the acquaintance of women of their own class. Hence it was that Robert had always dissuaded Félicie from coming to him in the Rue Vernet. He had rented, in the Boulevard de Villiers, a small house, where they could meet in absolute freedom. But on the present occasion, after two days without seeing her, he was greatly pleased by her unexpected visit, and he came down immediately.
Leaning back in the cab, they drove through the darkness and the snow, at the quiet pace of their aged hack, through the streets and boulevards, while the darkness of the night cloaked their love-making.
At her door, having seen her home, he said:
“Good-bye till to-morrow.”
“Yes, to-morrow, Boulevard de Villiers. Come early.”
She was leaning on him preparatory to stepping down from the cab. Suddenly she started back.
“There! There! Among the trees. He has seen us. He was watching us.”
“Who, then?”
“A man — some one I don’t know.”
She had just recognized Chevalier. She stepped out, rang the bell, and, nestling in Robert’s fur coat, waited, trembling, for the door to open. When it was opened, she detained him.
“Robert, see me upstairs, I am frightened.”
Not without some impatience, he followed her up the stairs.
Chevalier had waited for Félicie, in the little dining-room, before the armour which she had worn as Jeanne d’Arc, together with Madame Nanteuil, until one o’clock in the morning. He had left at that hour, and had watched for her on the pavement, and on seeing the cab stop in front of the door he had concealed himself behind a tree. He knew very well that she would return with Ligny; but when he saw them together it was as if the earth had yawned beneath him, and, so that he should not fall to the ground, he had clutched the trunk of the tree. He remained until Ligny had emerged from the house; he watched him as, wrapped in his fur coat, he got into the cab, took a couple of steps as if to spring on him, stopped short, and then with long strides went down the boulevard.
He went his way, driven by the rain and wind. Feeling too hot, he doffed his felt hat, and derived a certain pleasure from the sense of the icy drops of water on his forehead. He was vaguely conscious that houses, trees, walls, and lights went past him indefinitely; he wandered on, dreaming.
He found himself, without knowing how he had got there, on a bridge which he hardly knew. Half-way across it stood the colossal statue of a woman. His mind was now at rest; he had formed a resolution. It was an old idea, which he had now driven into his brain like a nail, which pierced it through and through. He no longer examined it. He calculated coldly the means of carrying out the thing he had determined to do. He walked straight ahead at random, absorbed in thought, and as calm as a mathematician.
On the Pont des Arts he became aware that a dog was following him. He was a big, long-haired farm dog, with eyes of different colours, which were full of gentleness, and an expression of infinite distress. Chevalier spoke to him:
“You’ve no collar. You are not happy. Poor fellow, I can’t do anything for you.”
By four o’clock in the morning he found himself in the Avenue de l’Observatoire. On seeing the houses of the Boulevard Saint-Michel he experienced a painful impression and abruptly turned back toward the Observatory. The dog had vanished. Near the monument of the Lion of Belfort, Chevalier stopped in front of a deep trench which cut the road in two. Against the bank of excavated earth, under a tarpaulin supported by four stakes, an old man was keeping vigil before a brazier. The lappets of his rabbit-skin cap were down over his ears; his huge nose was a flaming red. He raised his head; his eyes, which were watering, seemed wholly white, without pupils, each set in a ring of fire and tears. He was stuffing into the bowl of his cutty a few scraps of canteen tobacco, mixed with bread-crumbs, which did not fill half the bowl of his little pipe.
“Will you have some tobacco, old fellow?” asked Chevalier, offering him his pouch.
The man’s answer was slow in coming. His understanding was not quick, and courtesies astonished him. Finally, he opened a mouth which was quite black, and said:
“I won’t say no to that.”
He half rose from his seat. One of his feet was shod in an old slipper; the other was swathed in rags. Slowly, with hands numb with the cold, he stuffed his pipe. It was snowing, a snow that melted as it fell.
“You will excuse me?” said Chevalier, and he slipped under the tarpaulin and seated himself beside the old man.
From time to time they exchanged a remark.
“Rotten weather
!”
“It’s what we expect at this season. Winter’s hard; summer’s better.”
“So you look after the job at night, old fellow?”
The old man answered readily when questioned. Before he spoke his throat emitted a long, very gentle murmur.
“I do one thing one day; another thing another. Odd jobs. See?”
“You are not a Parisian?”
“No, I was born in La Creuse. I used to work as a navvy in the Vosges. I left there the year the Prussians and other foreigners came. There were thousands of them. Can’t understand where they all came from. Maybe you’ve heard of the war of the Prussians, young man?”
He remained silent for a long spell and then resumed:
“So you are out on a spree, my lad. You don’t feel like going back to the works yet?”
“I am an actor,” replied Chevalier.
The old man who did not understand, inquired:
“Where is it, your works?”
Chevalier was anxious to rouse the old man’s admiration.
“I play comedy parts in a big theatre,” he said. “I am one of the principal actors at the Odéon. You know the Odéon?”
The watchman shook his head. No, he did not know the Odéon. After a prolonged silence, he once more opened the black cavern of his mouth:
“And so, young man, you are on the loose. You don’t want to go back to the works, eh?”
Chevalier replied:
“Read the paper the day after to-morrow, you will see my name in it.”
The old man tried to discover a meaning in these words, but it was too difficult; he gave it up, and reverted to his familiar train of thought.
“When once one’s off on the loose, it is sometimes for weeks and months.”
At daybreak, Chevalier resumed his wanderings. The sky was milky. Heavy wheels were breaking the silence of the paved roads. Voices, here and there, rang through the keen air. The snow was no longer falling. He walked on at haphazard. The spectacle of the city’s reviving life made him feel almost cheerful. On the Pont des Arts he stood for a long time watching the Seine flow by, after which he continued on his way. On the Place du Havre he saw an open café. A faint streak of dawn was reddening the front windows. The waiters were sanding the brick pavement and setting out the tables. He flung himself into a chair.
“Waiter, an absinthe.”
CHAPTER VI
In the cab, beyond the fortifications, which were skirted by the deserted boulevard, Félicie and Robert held one another in a close embrace.
“Don’t you love your own Félicie? Tell me! Doesn’t it flatter your vanity to possess a little woman who makes people cheer and clap her, who is written about in the newspapers? Mamma pastes all my notices in her album. The album is full already.”
He replied that he had not waited for her to succeed before discovering how charming she was; and, in fact, their liaison had begun when she was making an obscure first appearance at the Odéon in a revival which had fallen flat.
“When you told me that you wanted me, I didn’t keep you waiting, did I? We didn’t take long about that! Wasn’t I right? You are too sensible to think badly of me because I didn’t keep things dragging along. When I saw you for the first time I felt that I was to be yours, so it wasn’t worth while delaying. I don’t regret it. Do you?”
The cab stopped at a short distance from the fortifications, in front of a garden railing.
This railing, which had not been painted for a long time, stood on a wall faced with pebbles, low and broad enough to permit of children perching themselves on it. It was screened half-way up by a sheet of iron with a toothed edge, and its rusty spikes did not rise more than ten feet above the ground. In the centre, between two pillars of masonry surmounted by cast-iron vases, the railing formed a gate opening in the middle, filled in across its lower part, and furnished, on the inside, with worm-eaten slatted shutters.
They alighted from the cab. The trees of the boulevard, in four straight lines, lifted their frail skeletons in the fog. They heard, through the wide silence, the diminishing rattle of their cab, on its way back to the barrier, and the trotting of a horse coming from Paris.
“How dismal the country is!” she said, with a shiver.
“But, my darling, the Boulevard de Villiers is not the country.”
He could not open the gate, and the lock creaked. Irritated by the sound, she said:
“Open it, do: the noise is getting on my nerves.”
She noticed that the cab which had come from Paris had stopped near their house, at about the tenth tree from where she stood; she looked at the thin, steaming horse and the shabby driver, and asked:
“What is that carriage?”
“It’s a cab, my pet.”
“Why does it stop here?”
“It has not stopped here? It’s stopping in front of the next house.”
“There is no next house; there’s only a vacant lot.”
“Well, then, it has stopped in front of a vacant lot. What more can I tell you?”
“I don’t see anyone getting out of it.”
“The driver is perhaps waiting for a fare.”
“What, in front of a vacant lot!”
“Probably, my dear. This lock has got rusty.”
She crept along, hiding herself behind the trees, toward the spot where the cab had stopped, and then returned to Ligny, who had succeeded in unlocking the gate.
“Robert, the blinds of the cab are down.”
“Well, then, there’s a loving couple inside.”
“Don’t you think there’s something queer about that cab?”
“It is not a thing of beauty, but all cabs are ugly. Come in.”
“Isn’t somebody following us?”
“Whom do you expect to follow us?”
“I don’t know. One of your women friends.”
But she was not saying what was in her thoughts.
“Do come in, my darling.”
When she had entered the garden she said:
“Be sure to close the gate properly, Robert.”
Before them stretched a small oval grass-plot.
Behind it stood the house, with its flight of three steps, sheltered by a zinc portico, its six windows, and its slate roof.
Ligny had rented it for a year from an old merchant’s clerk, who had wearied of it because nocturnal prowlers used to steal his fowls and rabbits. On either side of the grass-plot a gravel path led to the steps. They took the path on the right. The gravel creaked beneath their feet.
“Madame Simonneau has forgotten to close the shutters again,” said Ligny.
Madame Simonneau was a woman from Neuilly, who came every morning to clean up.
A large Judas-tree, leaning to one side, and to all appearance dead, stretched one of its round black branches as far as the portico.
“I don’t quite like that tree,” said Félicie; “its branches are like great snakes. One of them goes almost into our room.”
They went up the three front steps; and, while he was looking through his bunch of keys for the key of the front door, she rested her head on his shoulder.
Félicie, when unveiling her beauty, displayed a serene pride which made her adorable. She revealed such a quiet satisfaction in her nudity that her chemise, when it fell to her feet, made the onlooker think of a white peacock.
And when Robert saw her in her nakedness, bright as the streams or stars, he said:
“At least you don’t make one badger you! Its curious: there are women, who, even if you don’t ask them for anything, surrender themselves completely, go just as far as it’s possible to go, yet all the time they won’t let you see so much as a finger-breadth of skin.”
“Why?” asked Félicie, playing with the airy threads of her hair.
Robert de Ligny had experience of women. Yet he did not realize what an insidious question this was. He had received some training in moral science, and in replying he derived inspiration from the
professors whose classes he had attended.
“It is doubtless a matter of training, religious principles, and an innate feeling which survives even when — —”
This was not at all what he ought to have replied, for Félicie, shrugging her shoulders, and placing her hands upon her smoothly polished hips, interrupted him sharply:
“Well, you are simple! It’s because they’ve got bad figures! Training! Religion! It makes me boil to hear such rubbish! Have I been brought up any worse than other women? Have I less religion than they have? Tell me, Robert, how many really well-made women have you ever seen? Just reckon them up on your fingers. Yes, there are heaps of women who won’t show their shoulders or anything. Take Fagette; she won’t let even women see her undress; when she puts a clean chemise on she holds the old one between her teeth. Sure enough, I should do the same if I were built as she is!”
She relapsed into silence, and, with quiet arrogance, slowly ran the palms of her hands over her sides and her loins, observing proudly:
“And the best of it is that there’s not too much of me anywhere.”
She was conscious of the charm imparted to her beauty by the graceful slenderness of her outlines.
Now her head, thrown back on the pillow, was bathed in the masses of her golden tresses, which lay streaming in all directions; her slender body, slightly raised by a pillow slipped beneath her loins, lay motionless at full length; one gleaming leg was extended along the edge of the bed, ending in a sharply chiselled foot like the point of a sword. The light from the great fire which had been lit in the fireplace gilded her flesh, casting palpitating lights and shadows over her motionless body, clothing it in mystery and splendour, while her outer clothing and her underlinen, lying on the chairs and the carpet, waited, like a docile flock.
She raised herself on her elbow, resting her cheek in her hand.
“You are the first, really you are, I am not lying: the others don’t exist.”
He felt no jealousy in respect of the past; he had no fear of comparisons. He questioned her:
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 187