One day after dinner he confided to René that he had “a lump on his arm”; it did not hurt him, but seemed to increase in size. “What must he do for it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” replied René, turning his back on the indignant old man.
With his pruning-knife or scissors in his hand, he would often pause, as though by chance, near the heap of hay on which his son sprawled for hours at a time.
“If you are ill, why don’t you go to bed?” he would say; or, “If any one comes, I beg you in your own interests to change your clothes.”
René acquired a habit of going out after each meal. A little river ran by the garden, and he would lie down among the rushes which grew on its banks. He did not indulge in day-dreams. Everything appeared to him to be painful, absurd, and hard; his grief had no charm, no beauty. He remained in this state for several weeks.
One day, as he was yawning stupidly at the water’s edge, he saw some naked children, gliding with clumsy but pretty movements from one stone to another, in the bed of the river. These little creatures, with their yellow hair, and rosy, laughing faces, calling, screaming, tumbling over one another, splashing about in the water, gave a joyous note to the dreary landscape. Longuemare called out to them on a sudden impulse, but they scuttled off, clinging on to the mossy stones by their hands and knees, diving to the muddy bottom, and not making much progress. One of them crawled into the crevice of an overhanging rock, where he thought he was safely hidden; but René caught him, and plucked him out of his hole like an eel. He could not have looked very cross, for the child was not frightened.
“Listen to — me, — you — little — savage,” — said the surgeon. “If — you — will — bring — me some — frogs, I will give you a bright new penny. You know how to catch frogs? I live over there at old Longuemare’s house.”
When he got the frogs he stayed in his room, which soon began to smell strongly of chemicals and tobacco. Daddy Longuemare would look up from weeding his borders, to the little window, outside which hung bunches of mutilated frogs strung on wires. — He — felt a — sort of — religious respect for his — son, — now — that he — was working. He took up as small a space as possible in the house, and moved about on the tips of his toes. He forbade the servant to go into René’s room while he was at work there, even to make the bed.
One day at table, as he was peeling a pear, he asked his son:
“Couldn’t I help you prepare your frogs? Wouldn’t you like me to cut you some little boards, for instance? I could paint them, and gum a layer of fine sand on them for you.”
“Gum fine sand on little boards? What on earth for?”
The father explained that he thought his son was making artistic groups of stuffed frogs.
“I have seen them most cleverly arranged,” he said, “in the naturalists’ shops in Paris, some of them had wooden swords, and were supposed to be fighting duels; some of them were playing piquet with miniature packs of cards, and some were sitting in an arbour, drinking out of doll’s glasses. They were most ingenious. I thought, my boy, you were doing things of that kind?”
He was much disappointed when he heard his son was only making experiments, which in his eyes were child’s play, only fit for schoolboys. From that moment his face resumed its anxious expression; and when, looking up from the garden, he perceived the frogs at the window, he would shake his head in a pitying manner.
One day René told him he was going away. When the two men said good-bye they assumed, each one, a gruff, off-hand tone of voice, an impassive visage and a stiff attitude; they separated with sullen firmness.
But the old man was weeping into his check handkerchief as he returned home, and his son, stretched on the bench of a third-class carriage, wiped his eyes as he filled his pipe.
At Reims two young fellows, shopmen apparently, got into the carriage. One of them was reading the Petit Journal, and telling the other the important bits of news.
“The ministerial crisis continues. — Great excitement caused at Gros-Caillou by an explosion. — The man Groult (Juste Désiré) was executed at six o’clock this morning, on the market-place at Granville.”
“What had he done?” asked the friend.
“He murdered an old man. He was accused also of having poisoned a rich Englishman, but the second crime was not proved at the trial. Don’t you remember the Groult affair?”
“No,” said the other; then after a moment’s silence:
“Does it give any details?”
“‘At four o’clock this morning the fatal engine,’” he read in a low voice — Longuemare did not catch the rest; and the owner of the newspaper, folding it up, said: “Up to the last moment he declared that the murder of his victim was not premeditated. All the same, he was an awful scoundrel.... I could do with a snack, couldn’t you?”
In Paris, Longuemare lived in a state of dull torpor. He had still a few hundred francs left from his pay in Cochin - China, so there was no immediate need for him to work. He rose at noon and went to the Luxembourg Gardens, where he would sit on a bench among the whirling leaves the autumn wind brought down. He would hold his head till his hands left their marks on his cheeks. The first cold weather made him seem more listless and heavy. He dragged through his days in the stifling atmosphere of some little café, without even reading the papers or playing billiards.
One day in spring he met an old acquaintance — Nouilhac, a big heavy fellow, a sort of half-peasant, whose father, a farmer in Auvergne, had left him a stocking full of money, which he spent with the appetite of a glutton and the stinginess of a serf; but as he was now approaching forty years of age, he was becoming more serious.
He had bought, in his own part of the country, a forgotten thermal spring, with its mouldy establishment, and was planning how to get visitors to it.
His pockets were full of bottles of mineral water, and prospectuses illustrated with vignettes showing Roman baths and a sixteenth-century piscina, copied from some old engravings. Offering a bottle to Longuemare, he said:
“Hot springs containing sulphur, chlorine, soda, arsenic, and iodo-bromine, and naturally effervescent.” Then he told a long tale about it.
The establishment was thirty miles from Clermont, on the border of a lake, at the foot of a superb basaltic mountain. The population of the village consisted of fifteen or twenty goat-herds and thirty goitrous men and women.
Nouilhac had inherited from his father three of four tumble-down dwellings in the same village, which, repainted and repaired, could be turned into cottages for visitors. The Hôtel de César opposite the baths could accommodate from thirty to forty people. Later on, a casino might be added. They must go slowly at first, but who could say what the future would bring forth. Finally, he asked Longuemare to join him. “Come,” said he; “you can be the doctor attached to the establishment.”
He had a deep respect, inspired by the unanimous opinion of their common friends, for the medical talents of the ex-army surgeon. All Longuemare’s comrades admitted that he possessed the eye and hand of a master.
His answer to Nouilhac was:
“Your baths are in a hole. No one will ever come to them, except perhaps a few scrofulous and scabby individuals, who will get worse there. If I go, it will be to stay the winter as well as the summer.”
He accepted, without disputing, the small salary Nouilhac offered. The latter considered that the doctor of the establishment would be well paid by the large international practice he was bound to make among the foreign visitors.
Longuemare spent the next day running about Paris buying the few clothes, books, and instruments he needed. Towards six o’clock in the evening, as he was coming down the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, he stopped before a Punch and Judy show. A triple row of idlers was pressing against the cord which, passed round the trunks of the trees, enclosed a space reserved for paying spectators. Behind these, small children with discouraged faces peeped between the legs of a soldier and their nurse’s skirts.
A little apart from the crowd stood a bent heavy, unhealthily fat old man, whose wan face wore an expression of desolate inertia. He was dressed in a frock-coat — too short behind and too long in front — so shabby, it was rubbed yellow at the collar and wrists. He was looking at the Punch and Judy show, or rather kept his eyes in that direction, for his look floated vaguely between sky and earth.
At the sight of Monsieur Fellaire de Sisac, Longuemare felt much moved; all his fond recollections came surging to the surface of his soul.
Fellaire shook his hand, and tried to say something, but could not find words. Longuemare, with a kind of brusque tenderness and pity, said:
“Come — come along with me.”
“It just happens that I can,” answered Fellaire; “I have no business to do this evening.”
He was living in the Rue Truffaut, in the wilds of Batignolles, he said; and added, “It is not very central, but with the trams—”
Was it a day, or a hundred years, since they had last met they wondered, as they sat facing each other in a smoky restaurant in the Rue Montmartre.
They did not speak of her, but both saw her, in imagination, beside them.
When they were eating nuts after dinner, Longuemare told de Sisac about his plans for going to Mont-Dore, and what he was going to do there, adding quite simply:
“I am going to take you with me.”
The old man, rolling his startled eyes, cried out: “What! leave Paris! It isn’t possible. One can only live in Paris — and then my business?”
Pitiful though it was, Longuemare could not help smiling.
“Come with me, there will be plenty for you to do. You will be the inspector, controller, registrar.”
These titles struck de Sisac’s fancy, and he declared that “he was willing to give his adhesion to an enterprise that, and for which — in short, if his experience could be of any use.”
They made an appointment to meet next day. Longuemare, as he recrossed the bridge, said to himself:
“I can’t help it; I keep thinking that he is my father-in-law.”
The first season at the Baths was fairly successful. Some Russians, and a French family from Lyons, came to Nouilhac’s establishment. Fellaire stood about near the spring and tasted the water from time to time with a knowing air. His occupation was not very distinctly defined. Nouilhac would certainly not have engaged him but for Longuemare, and it was with the latter’s money that he paid him.
“Let him think that you are giving him a salary,” the doctor said; “and above all, don’t let him think that it is mine he is drawing. I can manage for myself.”
He gave a few consultations to the Russians, and was occasionally called into the mountains to see some peasant who had sprained his ankle while on a Sunday spree.
The visitors left with the swallows — not in a flock as they did, but in couples, or alone, one after the other.
The winter came. Snow covered the valley. On the jagged black granite rocks, and on the coloured marble slabs, ice hung in stalactites. The pine trees in the ravines loomed like phantoms, big and shadowy through the mist. The horizon was closed in by a sea of darkness.
In the thermal establishment, the old-fashioned red and brown paint peeled off in flakes. Fellaire de Sisac played dominoes all day long with the landlord in the lower floor of the Hôtel de César, and Longuemare sat, his feet on the fire-dogs, smoking his pipe. From time to time he would feel the pulse in his left wrist with his right thumb, and murmur to himself in a low voice:
“Fever, tension, and acute pain in the hypochondriac region — cough, oppressed breathing, sympathetic pain in the right shoulder; nothing is wanting. I have developed a fine hepatic disease.”
And he smiled, for the first time for a year four months and six days.
THE FAMISHED CAT
CHAPTER I
FOR three days the November winds had been whipping the populous faubourg, now clothed in the first shadows of night. Puddles of water shone under the gas-lamps. A black mud, churned by the steps of men and horses, covered the road and the pavement. Workmen with their bags of tools on their shoulders, women returning from the cook-shop with portions of beef between two plates, scurried with bent backs before the rain with the sullen stolidity of beasts of burden.
Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse, tightly buttoned up in his black clothes, toiled with the populace along the muddy way leading to the top of Montmartre. Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse carried his head high under his umbrella, which, much dilapidated by many bygone storms, fluttered in the wind like the wing of a big wounded bird. His jaw being prominent and his forehead receding, it was easy for his face to assume a horizontal attitude; so that his eyes, without his troubling to raise them, could see the sooty sky through the holes in the silk. Walking, now with feverish haste, now with dreamy slowness, he turned into a dark and filthy alley, edged along the wall covered with mouldy trellis-work, which surrounded a bathing establishment, and after a moment’s hesitation entered an eating-house, where men, dressed like himself in torn and shabby black clothes, were silently feeding in a terrible atmosphere; the warm greasy odour of which was rendered further obnoxious by a repulsive smell of wet flannel costumes coming from the neighbouring baths.
Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse bowed to the lady at the desk in his peculiar manner, flinging his head back with a grave smile. Then, having hung up his shining and battered top-hat, he sat down before a smeary marble table and smoothed his hair with the gesture which usually accompanied his meditation. The gas burnt with a hissing sound and fell full on the man’s woolly hair and his mulatto face; the skin, with its colour half washed out by the snows and rains of European winters, looked dirty, as did also his wrinkled hands with their flat nails, marked at the ends by milky crescents. Without calling the waiter, without even looking towards the desk, he drew a newspaper from his pocket and began to read it in an audible voice. He hardly stopped to eat the calf’s-head, of which portions had already been served to the other silent and resigned guests.
Having eaten, they faded away one after the other into the darkness and rain. Only one, toothless and gloomy, lingered over his dried raisins. The mulatto having emptied his decanter, at the bottom of which was a deposit of lees and crust, wiped his mouth, folded his napkin, put his paper in his breast pocket with the air of a wrestler closing with his adversary, got up, took down his hat, and made towards the door. He was just stepping into the wet night when a small, purple-faced, oily man came out of a side door, grubby with greasy fingermarks, and limped into the dining-room. Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse saluted the restaurant-keeper with one of his backward bows.
“Good-evening, Monsieur Godet,” said the fat man. “This is bad weather we are having, and it does a deal of harm! By the way, Monsieur Godet, if you could give me something on account tomorrow, I should be much obliged. I am not the man to worry you, as you know very well, but I have a heavy payment to make at the end of the week.”
Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse replied in an accent at once oratorical and infantine, without pronouncing the r’s, that there was money owing to him, that he would draw on his editor next day without fail, that he could not think how he had come to neglect the eating-house keeper’s bill, but it was a mere trifle, anyway. The fat man, who did not seem dazzled by these promises, answered in a drawling tone:
“Don’t forget, Monsieur Godet. Good-night, Monsieur Godet.”
And Godet-Laterrasse disappeared in his turn in the darkness streaked with rain, which had already swallowed up the last lean diner in Bather’s Alley. All the ways of the world were open before him. He took that leading up the hill, which the tempest was besieging and drowning in a determined deluge. A blast of wind did its best to carry the mulatto off his feet, a traitorous gust turned his umbrella inside out. Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse re-established the concavity of this domestic apparatus, but the silk, split in every part, floated like a black flag on the denuded framework. Under this grotesque and sinister sta
ndard he climbed up the steep steps of the Passage Cotin, which had now become a mountain torrent. He could hear nothing but the splashing of his footsteps, and the mysterious utterances of the wind. Invisible to all but himself, the vague shadows of an editor and a newspaper manager fled before him in the distance. He went up eighty steps, and stopped at a little door, over which was a lantern hanging from a creaking cord, and winking like a diseased eye. Entering the house, he stole furtively past the concierge’s lodge.
A rapping against the partition called him back. He opened the glass door in an agony of apprehension. A shrill and sexless voice coming from an alcove informed him there was a letter for him on the chest of drawers. He took the letter, and going down six sticky stairs entered his room. As soon as he had lit a candle he examined the envelope suspiciously.
The post had not brought him anything pleasant for many a long day. But, when he broke the seal and began to read, his white teeth flashed out in a half smile. His childish nature, withered by poverty, brightened at the smallest piece of luck. At that moment he was glad to be alive. He turned out his pockets, and scraped together a little tobacco dust, mingled with crumbs and bits of fluff; this he stuffed into a short pipe, then he slipped voluptuously between the dirty sheets of his sofa-bed, and began to chant in a low voice the words of the letter which had so delighted him:
“DEAR SIR, — I am passing through Paris with my son Remi, whom I have brought up from Brest, where he has been at school. I thought you might prepare him for his degree. In education, as in everything, I am all for advanced ideas. Will you breakfast with us to-morrow, Saturday, at eleven o’clock, at the Grand Hotel, when we can perhaps come to some arrangement? — Faithfully yours,
“A. SAINTE-LUCIE.”
Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse, having finished chanting the letter, lighted his pipe and wrapped himself in smoke and dreams. What a caress of Fortune was this unexpected letter! He had met Sainte-Lucie in Paris towards the end of the Empire, at the house of some prominent democratic personage, and had even received a visit from him.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 293