Kitabı oku: «Germinie Lacerteux», sayfa 10

XXVII

Mademoiselle was sitting in her large armchair at the corner of the fireplace, where a few live embers were still sleeping under the ashes. Her black cap was pulled down over her wrinkled forehead almost to her eyes. Her black dress, cut in the shape of a child's frock, was draped in scanty folds about her scanty body, showing the location of every bone, and fell straight from her knees to the floor. She wore a small black shawl crossed on her breast and tied behind her back, as they are worn by little girls. Her half-open hands were resting on her hips, with the palms turned outward – thin, old woman's hands, awkward and stiff, and swollen with gout at the knuckles and finger joints. Sitting in the huddled, crouching posture that compels old people to raise their heads to look at you and speak to you, she seemed to be buried in all that mass of black, whence nothing emerged but her face, to which preponderance of bile had imparted the yellow hue of old ivory, and the flashing glance of her brown eyes. One who saw her thus, her bright, sparkling eyes, the meagre body, the garb of poverty and the noble air with which she bore all the burdens of age, might well have fancied that he was looking at a fairy on the stage of the Petits-Ménages.

Germinie was by her side. The old lady began:

"The list is still under the door, eh, Germinie?"

"Yes, mademoiselle."

"Do you know, my girl," Mademoiselle de Varandeuil resumed, after a pause, "do you know that when one is born in one of the finest houses on Rue Royale – when one has been in a fair way to own the Grand and Petit-Charolais – when one has almost had the Château of Clichy-la-Garenne for a country house – and when it took two servants to carry the silver platter on which the joint was served at your grandmother's – do you know that it takes no small amount of philosophy" – and mademoiselle with difficulty raised a hand to her shoulder – "to see yourself end like this, in this devilish nest of rheumatism, where, in spite of all the list in the world, you can't keep out of draughts. – That's it, stir up the fire a little."

She put out her feet toward Germinie, who was kneeling in front of the fireplace, and laughingly placed them under her nose: "Do you know that that takes no small amount of philosophy – to wear stockings out at heel! Simpleton! I'm not scolding you; I know well enough that you can't do everything. So you might as well have a woman come to do the mending. That's not very much to do. Why don't you speak to that little girl that came here last year? She had a face that I remember."

"Oh! she's black as a mole, mademoiselle."

"Bah! I knew it. In the first place you never think well of anybody. That isn't true, you say? Why, wasn't she a niece of Mère Jupillon's? We might take her for one or two days a week."

"That hussy shall never set foot here."

"Nonsense, more fables! You're a most astonishing creature, to adore people and then not want to see them again. What has she done to you?"

"She's a lost creature, I tell you!"

"Bah! what does my linen care for that?"

"But, mademoiselle."

"All right! find me someone else then. I don't care about her particularly. But find me someone."

"Oh! the women that come in like that don't do any work. I'll mend your clothes. You don't need any one."

"You! – Oh! if we have to rely on your needle!" said mademoiselle jocosely; "and then, will Mère Jupillon ever give you the time?"

"Madame Jupillon? Oh! for all the dust I shall ever leave in her house again!"

"Hoity-toity! What's that? She too! so she's on your black books, is she? Oho! hurry up and make another acquaintance, or else, bon Dieu de Dieu! we shall have some bad days here!"

XXVIII

The winter of that year should certainly have assured Mademoiselle de Varandeuil a share of paradise hereafter. She had to undergo the reflex action of her maid's chagrin, her nervous irritability, the vengeance of her embittered, contradictory moods, which the approaching spring would ere long infect with that species of malignant madness which the critical season, the travail of nature and the restless, disturbing fructification of the summer cause in unhealthily sensitive organizations.

Germinie was forever wiping eyes which no longer wept, but which had once wept copiously. She was always ready with an everlasting: "Nothing's the matter, mademoiselle!" uttered in the tone that covers a secret. She adopted dumb, despairing, funereal attitudes, the airs by which a woman's body diffuses melancholy and makes her very shadow a bore. With her face, her glance, her mouth, the folds of her dress, her presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from her person. At the slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle could not address an observation to her, ask her the most trivial question, give her an order or express a wish: everything was taken by her as a reproach. And thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She would wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see that mademoiselle doesn't care for me any more!" Her spite against various people vented itself in sublimely ingenious complaints. "That woman always comes when it rains!" she would say, upon discovering a bit of mud that Madame de Belleuse had left on the carpet. During the week following New Year's Day, the week when all of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's remaining relatives and friends, rich and poor alike, climbed the five flights and waited on the landing at her door for their turns to occupy the six chairs in her bedroom, Germinie redoubled her ill-humor, her impertinent remarks, her sulky muttering. Inventing grievances against her mistress, she punished her constantly by a persistent silence, which it was impossible to break. Then there would be periods of frenzied industry. Mademoiselle would hear through the partitions on all sides furious manipulation of the broom and duster, the sharp, vicious scrubbing and slamming of the servant whom one imagines muttering to herself as she maltreats the furniture: "Oh! yes, I'll do your work for you!"

Old people are patient with servants who have been long in their service. Long habit, the weakening will-power, the horror of change, the dread of new faces, – everything disposes them to weakness and cowardly concessions. Notwithstanding her quick temper, her promptness to lose her head, to fly into a rage, to breathe fire and flame, mademoiselle said nothing. She acted as if she saw nothing. She pretended to be reading when Germinie entered the room. She waited, curled up in her easy-chair, until the maid's ill-humor had blown over or burst. She bent her back before the storm; she said no word, had no thought of bitterness against her. She simply pitied her for causing herself so much suffering.

In truth Germinie was not Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's maid; she was Devotion, waiting to close her eyes. The solitary old woman, overlooked by death, alone at the end of her life, dragging her affections from grave to grave, had found her last friend in her servant. She had rested her heart upon her as upon an adopted daughter, and she was especially unhappy because she was powerless to comfort her. Moreover, at intervals, Germinie returned to her from the depths of her brooding melancholy and her savage humor, and threw herself on her knees before her kind heart. Suddenly, at a ray of sunlight, a beggar's song, or any one of the nothings that float in the air and expand the heart, she would burst into tears and demonstrations of affection; her heart would overflow with burning emotions, she would seem to feel a pleasure in embracing her mistress, as if the joy of living again had effaced everything. At other times some trifling ailment of mademoiselle's would bring about the change; a smile would come to the old servant's face and gentleness to her hands. Sometimes, at such moments, mademoiselle would say: "Come, my girl – something's the matter. Tell me what it is." And Germinie would reply: "No, mademoiselle, it's the weather." – "The weather!" mademoiselle would repeat with a doubtful air, "the weather!"

XXIX

One evening in March the Jupillons, mother and son, were talking together by the stove in their back-shop.

Jupillon had been drafted. The money his mother had put aside to purchase his release had been used up as a result of six months of poor business and by credits given to certain lorettes on the street, who had left the key under their door-mat one fine morning. He had not prospered, in a business way, himself, and his stock in trade had been taken on execution. He had been that day to ask a former employer to advance him the money to purchase a substitute. But the old perfumer had not forgiven him for leaving him and setting up for himself, and he refused point-blank.

Mère Jupillon, in despair, was complaining tearfully. She repeated the number drawn by her son: "Twenty-two! twenty-two!" And she said: "And yet I sewed a black spider into your paletot with his web; a velvety fellow he was! Oh, dear! I ought to have done as they told me and made you wear the cap you were baptized in. Ah! the good God ain't fair! There's the fruit woman's son drew a lucky number! That comes of being honest! And those two sluts at number eighteen must go and hook it with my money! I might have known they meant something by the way they shook hands. They did me out of more than seven hundred francs, did you know it? And the black creature opposite – and that infernal girl as had the face to eat pots of strawberries at twenty francs! they might as well have taken me too, the hussies! But you haven't gone yet all the same. I'd rather sell the creamery – I'll go out to work again, do cooking or housekeeping, – anything! Why, I'd draw money from a stone for you!"

Jupillon smoked and let his mother do the talking. When she had finished, he said: "That'll do for talk, mamma! – all that's nothing but words. You'll spoil your digestion and it ain't worth while. You needn't sell anything – you needn't strain yourself at all – I'll buy my substitute and it sha'n't cost you a sou; – do you want to bet on it?"

"Jesus!" ejaculated Madame Jupillon.

"I have an idea."

After a pause, Jupillon continued: "I didn't want to make trouble with you on account of Germinie – you know, at the time the stories about us were going round; you thought it was time for me to break with her – that she would be in our way – and you kicked her out of the house, stiff. That wasn't my idea – I didn't think she was so bad as all that for the family butter. But, however, you thought best to do it. And perhaps, after all, you did the best thing; instead of cooling her off, you warmed her up for me – yes, warmed her up – I've met her once or twice – and she's changed, I tell you. Gad! how she's drying up!"

"But you know very well she hasn't got a sou."

"I don't say she has, of her own. But what's that got to do with it? She'll find it somewhere. She's good for twenty-three hundred shiners yet!"

"But suppose you get mixed up in it?"

"Oh! she won't steal 'em – "

"The deuce she won't!"

"Well! if she does, it won't be from anyone but her mistress. Do you suppose her mademoiselle would have her pinched for that? She'll turn her off, and that'll be the end of it. We'll advise her to try the air in another quarter – off she goes! – and we sha'n't see her again. But it would be too stupid for her to steal. She'll arrange it somehow, she'll hunt round and turn things over. I don't know how, not I! but that's her affair, you understand. This is the time for her to show her talents. By the way, perhaps you don't know, they say her old woman's sick. If the dear lady should happen to step out and leave her all the stuff, as the story goes in the quarter – why, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have played see-saw with her, eh, mamma? We must put on gloves, you see, mamma, when we're dealing with people who may have four or five thousand a year come tumbling into their aprons."

"Oh! my God! what are you talking about? But after the way I treated her – oh! no, she'll never come back here."

"Well! I tell you I'll bring her back – and to-night at the latest," said Jupillon, rising, and rolling a cigarette between his fingers. "No excuses, you know," he said to his mother, "they won't do any good – and be cold to her. Act as if you received her only on my account, because you are weak. No one knows what may happen, we must always keep an anchor to windward."

XXX

Jupillon was walking back and forth on the sidewalk in front of Germinie's house when she came out.

"Good-evening, Germinie," he said, behind her.

She turned as if she had been struck, and, without answering his greeting, instinctively moved on a few steps as if to fly from him.

"Germinie!"

Jupillon said nothing more than that; he did not follow her, he did not move. She came back to him like a trained beast when his rope is taken off.

"What is it?" said she. "Do you want more money? or do you want to tell me some of your mother's foolish remarks?"

"No, but I am going away," said Jupillon, with a serious face. "I am drafted – and I am going away."

"You are going away?" said she. She seemed as if her mind was not awake.

"Look here, Germinie," Jupillon continued. "I have made you unhappy. I haven't been very kind to you, I know. My cousin's been a little to blame. What do you want?"

"You're going away?" rejoined Germinie, taking his arm. "Don't lie to me – are you going away?"

"I tell you, yes – and it's true. I'm only waiting for marching orders. You have to pay more than two thousand francs for a substitute this year. They say there's going to be a war: however, there's a chance."

As he spoke he was leading Germinie down the street.

"Where are you taking me?" said she.

"To mother's, of course – so that you two can make up and put an end to all this nonsense."

"After what she said to me? Never!"

And Germinie pushed Jupillon's arm away.

"Well, if that's the way it is, good-bye."

And Jupillon raised his cap.

"Shall I write to you from the regiment?"

Germinie was silent, hesitating, for a moment. Then she said, abruptly: "Come on!" and, motioning to Jupillon to walk beside her, she turned back up the street.

And so they walked along, side by side, without a word. They reached a paved road that stretched out as far as the eye could see, between two lines of lanterns, between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft handfuls of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless shadows on high blank walls. There, in the keen air, chilled by the evaporation of the snow, they walked on and on for a long time, burying themselves in the vague, infinite, unfamiliar depths of a street that follows the same wall, the same trees, the same lanterns, and leads on to the same darkness beyond. The damp, heavy air that they breathed smelt of sugar and tallow and carrion. From time to time a vivid flash passed before their eyes: it was the lantern of a butcher's cart that shone upon slaughtered cattle and huge pieces of bleeding meat thrown upon the back of a white horse; the light upon the flesh, amid the darkness, resembled a purple conflagration, a furnace of blood.

"Well! have you reflected?" said Jupillon. "This little Avenue Trudaine isn't a very cheerful place, do you know?"

"Come on," Germinie replied.

And, without another word, she set out again at the same fierce, jerky gait, agitated by all the tumult raging in her heart. Her thoughts were expressed in her gestures. Her feet went astray, madness attacked her hands. At times her shadow, seen from behind, reminded one of a woman from La Salpêtrière. Two or three passers-by stopped for a moment and looked after her; then, remembering that they were in Paris, passed on.

Suddenly she stopped, and with the gesture of one who has made a desperate resolution, she said: "Ah! my God! another pin in the cushion! – Let us go!"

And she took Jupillon's arm.

"Oh! I know very well," said Jupillon, when they were near the creamery, "my mother wasn't fair to you. You see, the woman has been too virtuous all her life. She don't know, she don't understand. And then, d'ye see, I'll tell you the whole secret: she loves me so much she's jealous of any woman who loves me. So go in, do!"

And he pushed her into the arms of Madame Jupillon, who kissed her, mumbled a few words of regret, and made haste to weep in order to relieve her own embarrassment and make the scene more affecting.

Throughout the evening Germinie sat with her eyes fixed on Jupillon, almost terrifying him with her expression.

"Come, come," he said, as he walked home with her, "don't be so down in the mouth as all this. We must have a little philosophy in this world. Well! here I am a soldier – that's all! To be sure they don't all come back. But then – look here! I propose that we enjoy ourselves for the fortnight that's left, because it will be so much gained – and if I don't come back – Well, at all events, I shall leave you a pleasant memory of me."

Germinie made no reply.

XXXI

For a whole week Germinie did not set foot in the shop again.

The Jupillons, when she did not return, began to despair. At last, one evening about half past ten, she pushed the door open, entered the shop without a word of greeting, walked up to the little table where the mother and son were sitting half asleep, and placed upon it, beneath her hand which was closed like a claw, an old piece of cloth that gave forth a ringing sound.

"There it is!" said she.

And, letting go the corners of the cloth, she emptied its contents on the table: forth came greasy bank-notes, patched on the back, fastened together with pins, old tarnished louis d'or, black hundred-sou pieces, forty-sou pieces, ten-sou pieces, the money of the poor, the money of toil, money from Christmas-boxes, money soiled by dirty hands, worn out in leather purses, rubbed smooth in the cash drawer filled with sous – money with a flavor of perspiration.

For a moment she gazed at the display as if to assure her own eyes; then she said to Madame Jupillon in a sad voice, the voice of her sacrifice:

"There it is – There's the two thousand three hundred francs for him to buy a substitute."

"Oh! my dear Germinie!" said the stout woman, almost suffocated by emotion; and she threw herself upon Germinie's neck, who submitted to be embraced. "Oh! you must take something with us – a cup of coffee – "

"No, thank you," said Germinie; "I am done up. Dame! I've had to fly around, you know, to get them. I'm going to bed now. Some other time."

And she went away.

She had had to "fly around," as she said, to scrape together such a sum, to accomplish that impossibility: to raise two thousand three hundred francs – two thousand three hundred francs, of which she had not the first five! She had collected them, begged them, extorted them piece by piece, almost sou by sou. She had picked them up, scraped them together here and there, from this one and from that one, by loans of two hundred, one hundred, fifty, twenty francs, or whatever sum anyone would lend. She had borrowed from her concierge, her grocer, her fruit woman, her poulterer, her laundress; she had borrowed from all the dealers in the quarter, and from the dealers in the quarters where she had previously lived with mademoiselle. She had made up the amount with money drawn from every source, even from her poor miserable water-carrier. She had gone a-begging everywhere, importuned humbly, prayed, implored, invented fables, swallowed the shame of lying and of seeing that she was not believed. The humiliation of confessing that she had no money laid by, as was supposed, and as, through pride, she had encouraged people to suppose, the sympathy of people she despised, the refusals, the alms, she had undergone everything, endured what she would not have endured to procure bread for herself, and not once only, with a single person, but with thirty, forty, all those who had given her something or from whom she had hoped for something.

At last she had succeeded in collecting the money; but it was her master and had possession of her forever. Her life thenceforth belonged to the obligations she had entered into with all these people, to the service her dealers had rendered her, knowing very well what they were doing. She belonged to her debt, to the sum she would have to pay every year. She knew it; she knew that all her wages would go in that way; that with the rates of interest, which she had left entirely at the discretion of her creditors, and the written obligations demanded by them, mademoiselle's three hundred francs would hardly suffice to pay the interest on the twenty-three hundred she had borrowed. She knew that she was in debt, that she should be in debt forever, that she was doomed forever to privation and embarrassment, to the strictest economy in her manner of living and her dress. She had hardly any more illusions as to the Jupillons than as to her own future. She had a presentiment that her money was lost so far as they were concerned. She had not even based any hopes on the possibility that this sacrifice would touch the young man. She had acted on the impulse of the moment. If she had been told to die to prevent his going, she would have died. The idea of seeing him a soldier, the idea of the battlefield, the cannon, the wounded, in presence of which a woman shuts her eyes in terror, had led her to do something more than die; to sell her life for that man, to consign herself to everlasting poverty.

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