I noticed, but without drawing the slightest conclusion from it, than on hearing those two words ringing in his ears and seeing the pierced throne on which Charles IV had sat at the commencement of the century, Mr. Little’s face was suddenly illuminated, as if by a flash.
As we left that cabinet, the guardian was telling me some story about Charles IV and Godoy, a story that I was translating as he went along for Mrs. Little. Neither she nor I noticed, any more than he did, the sudden absence of Mr. Little. It was not until we were at the foot of a little staircase leading down to the gardens that we observed it.
“Tom, Tom, Tom!” cried Mrs. Little, in all the tones.
But Tom did not reply.
Knowing that he was indisposed, she was seized by a veritable anguish, which infected the warden and myself to some degree.
“The poor man,” she said, “has perhaps fainted on the queens’ cushions. Let’s go back up, let’s go back up.”
Scarcely were we on the stairway again than we heard a noise of doors.
“That can’t be anyone but him,” I said to Mrs. Little. “You can see that no mishap has overtaken him.”
It was, indeed him, his face as expansive now as it had been contracted a moment before.
“Oh, Tom!” cried Mrs. Little. “What a fright you gave me!”
“How the devil were you able to lose us, my dear Mr. Little?” I said in my turn.
“The essential thing is that I’ve found you again,” he said, cheerfully.
“You look much better,” said Mrs. Little.
“Ho yes, my dear Betty, much better. I no longer feel anything.” And he added, addressing himself to me: “Ask the warden if we still have anything else to see.”
Once again, in that regard, I served as the worthy Mr. Little’s interpreter, and I learned that we had seen everything in Aranjuez except the vineyards, the plantations of fruit trees, and the meadows.
As we returned from the small palace toward the large one, along magnificent pathways bordered by trees several centuries old, I could not help looking at Mr. Little surreptitiously two or three times.
He eventually perceived that and ended up whispering mysteriously in my ear: “You’ve guessed, haven’t you, what I’ve just done?”
“I suspect so. You’ve just sat down on Charles IV’s favorite throne.”
“Exactly—but not a word about it to my wife; she’s capable of envying me.”
“And you sat down there, like that for the pleasure of sitting down there?”
“Oh, no.”
“I would have sworn it,” I said, laughing. “There was a necessity...”
“Imperious.” He added: “Never have I blessed a man as much as I blessed Charles IV for having that whim of a peerless water closet worthy of exhibition.”
“Oh, if the warden knew what you had permitted yourself,” I said, laughing harder. “It’s much more serious, you know, than sitting down on the almost-millenarian stool of the judges of Castile, as Mrs. Little was tempted to do in Burgos.”
Just as we had emerged from the small palace with our warden, two German men and three women had arrived, conducted by another warden. Suddenly remembering that circumstance, I said to Mr. Little: “You noticed those Germans; in a little while they’ll be shows the mechanism in Charles IV’s cabinet that you’ve profaned, and your profanation might not escape their sight and sense of smell.”
“Don’t say that,” said Mr. Little. “You’re giving me a cold sweat.”
Buried as she was in her meditations, Mrs. Little was finally astonished by our prolonged conversation, and doubtless finding that her husband looked poorly for a second time, she said to him: “Is it getting worse again, my love?”
“Oh no, no, thank God,” said Mr. Little.
In the meantime, and as we were walking slowly in the direction of the grand palace, we saw some kind of employee running toward us. He called to our warden: “Pedro! Pedro!”
As soon as he had reached him he spoke to him in a low voice.
Naturally, we had stopped to wait for our warden. Suddenly, the latter came back to us, without his comrade going away, and, addressing Mr. Little in a manner that seemed to me to be severe, he said to him in Spanish, with great volubility: “It appears that you dropped something in Charles IVs cabinet.”
Without understanding what the warden had said, Mr. Little had no doubt that the relief that he had given himself was being reproached as illicit, so he protested in English that he had only yielded to an absolutely pressing, utterly irresistible need, and that he had certainly not intended to offend the memory of Charles IV.
As the warden, naturally, did not understand Mr. Little’s excuses, I translated them into Spanish.
The warden then spread his arms wide and, bringing his hands together as if someone had given him frightful news, he cried: “Oh, that’s too much! What! You have taken the liberty...”
“Say,” I protested, “that he yielded to necessity, and you know very well that the necesidad carece de ley.”27
“There must be a law, Monsieur, when one is in the palace of a king,” replied the guardian Pedro with an entirely Castilian arrogance. Your friend had rendered himself guilty of a crime of lèse-majesté and it is incumbent on me to arrest him.”
“Oh!” I cried. “You’re going too far.”
Meanwhile, Mrs. Little never ceased demanding of Mr. Little, who appeared utterly downcast, without obtaining a response: “What’s going on, Tom? What’s going on?”
“In the twenty years that I’ve been a warden at the palace of Aranjuez,” Pedro went on, “I have never seen such a crime committed, never, never!”
“Perhaps you’re exaggerating,” I objected, “in calling it a crime...”
“No, Monsieur, and know that I’m risking, by not arresting your friend, losing my job.”
“Just now, however,” I said, “when you’re colleague came to tell you about the little misfortune, you did not seem so affected.”
“My colleague came to tell me that a wallet had been found in Charles IV’s cabinet and he asked me whether it was anyone in the group I was leading who had lost it. He told me nothing about the other matter; it was your friend who revealed everything himself, through your intermediation”
Once more the spur of his conscience had driven a man to confess his guilt, and I had stupidly interpreted that inopportune admission.
No doubt Mr. Little had lost his wallet while lowering or pulling up what the English call their unmentionables, and which we in France designate in a less veiled fashion.
Having checked that I still had my wallet, I asked Mr. Little to see whether he still had his.
He no longer had it.
I informed the two wardens of that, who returned it to him, not without having made me understand that they expected from the owner a recompense all the more honest because the wallet had been lost in less admissible circumstances.
Mr. Little, whose wallet contained nearly five hundred francs, gave each of the two men a French louis, and the incident was closed, temporarily at least, for, when Pedro had brought us back to the outer gate of the grand palace, and I gave him three pesetas for the trouble he had taken in showing us the curiosities, he had the impudence to raise the question of Charles IV’s cabinet again, which obliged the worthy Mr. Little to give him a duro as well.
And we left for Toledo.
VIII
Very bad news awaited Mr. Little there, in duplicate: at the telegraph office in the form of a dispatch, and at the post office in the form of a letter.
The foreman of his cheese-factory informed him that a fire had just broken out and destroyed it almost entirely.
Needless to say, Mr. Little’s establishment was insured with one of the best companies in London. Mr. Little thus did not have to fear ruination, but it was a matter of determining the amount of the disaster with the company, of having the factory rebuilt, and coming to the aid of the workers who had no work to do. Thu
s, Mr. Little thought that he could not continue his voyage in Spain, but ought to return immediately to Chester. He discussed it in my presence to Mrs. Little, who responded in her plaintive tone, without emotion: “Ho yes, Tom.”
It was truly cruel for them to leave Spain at the very moment of visiting Andalusia and its brilliant cities: Cordova, Seville, Cadiz, Granada and Valencia—which is to say, everything there is of the most curious in the Peninsula, to which they would never return.
At least they wanted to see a little of Toledo, since they were obliged to be there for a few hours, the train for Madrid not departing until the evening.
I accompanied them to the cathedral, the church of San Juan de los Rayos and the Alcazar, and after dinner I escorted them to the railway station.
It was not without a real sentiment of sadness that I separated from them. And when, by the gaslight in the waiting room of Toledo station, Mr. Little shook my right hand and said, emotionally: “Au revoir, Monsieur Le Bref,” and Mrs. Little squeezed my left, saying: “Ho yes, Monsieur Le Bref,” I felt my eyes mist over with tears.
There was not between me and the spouses Little one of those very rare sympathies that take possession of the entire being, but we already had the habit of living together, and, in the something like a month that we had been doing that, no coldness had come between us.
Mr. Little had promised to write to me when he returned to England. He kept his word. A week later I had a letter from him in Seville, and a very affectionate letter. He told me how much he and his wife regretted not having been able to go to Andalusia with me and he invited me in the most pressing manner to come and spend a month in his cottage the following spring, when the damage to the cheese-factory had been repaired.
With regard to that cheese-factory he lamented a great deal on the painful impression he had experienced on seeing it entirely in ruins, but he added that, after all, such a misfortune, reparable by insurance, was nothing compared to that other, ever-imminent misfortune, the death of his wife or his own: a misfortune against which, to tell the truth, he had tempted a kind of insurance, perishable itself, and which could easily have been the prey of flames.
In returning thus to an idea that he had already touched upon in conversation with me, he did not render it any clearer. I wondered what the devil he meant by the insurance of sorts that he had tempted against the misfortune of his death or that of his wife, and how that fantastic insurance was perishable, how it might have become the prey of flames.
I asked myself that in vain, and then the attraction of the voyage deflected me away from thinking about it, to such an extent that I said nothing about it in my reply to Mr. Little from Valencia, on the eve of the day when I was due to return to Paris.
After that we wrote to one another two or three times, at fairly long intervals, and then our friendship, like so many others, fell into desuetude.
PART TWO: IN ITALY
I
It had been four or five years since I had heard any mention of Mr. and Mrs. Little when I undertook my third voyage to Italy, from which I have just come back.
I have not been there once, and have never returned, without revisiting Pisa, the melancholy charm of which attracts me invincibly.
One day, I was in the dome of Pisa, and after having admired once again Il Sodoma’s very curious Sacrifice of Isaac, I was watching the gentle sway of the monumental lamp—an oscillation that, three centuries earlier, had put Galileo on the path to the discovery of the pendulum, and by the force of my admiration I was, so to speak, communing with that sublime mind.
I had vaguely heard other visitors approaching behind me without having had any thought of turning round to cast a glance at them.
Three words, however, pronounced in a low voice: “Ho yes, Tom!” struck me singular, like a remembrance, at first ill-defined, but which I did not take long to specify.
I turned my head and was suddenly greeted by an exclamation pronounced in English: “Ah, Monsieur Le Bref, how nice it is to see you again!”
It was the good Mr. Little who spoke to me in that fashion, who had Mrs. Little on his arm, as before during our voyage in Spain. So far as I could judge through the thick veil that she was wearing over her face, the utility of which I could not explain then, she had not aged since I had last seen her. As for Mr. Little, on the contrary, I found him much changed, almost unrecognizable.
He had extended his hand to me; I shook it very affectionately.
“Be very sure,” I said, “that I am equally glad to find myself with Mrs. Little and you.”
So saying, I bowed to Mrs. Little and extended my hand toward her.
Mrs. Little, who seemed to me more fixed and stiffer than ever, responded to my inclination of the head, after a certain hesitation, it seemed to me, and only when her husband had touched her shoulder, but neither of her hands moved toward mine.
Mr. Little, thinking, rightly, that I was surprised by that said: “Don’t be offended, my dear Monsieur Le Bref, if my wife doesn’t give you her hand. She has something out of order in her arms.”
“Oh, not at all, not at all!” I said.
And, bowing a second time to Mrs. Little, in order to show her that I did not hold it against her that she had only responded in part to my politeness, I said to her: “Fortunately, Madame, apart from your discomfort in the arms, you seem to be in good health.”
“Very well,” she replied, but only after Mr. Little had nudged her with his elbow.
That “very well” appeared to me to be a trifle cold and a trifle hard for the first words that she had addressed to me in so many years.
I knew full well that she was not loquacious, but after all, in our days in Spain, she would have added something to her “very well”—my name, for example, perhaps even modified by the epithet “dear”: “My dear Monsieur Le Bref.”
Nevertheless, I pretended to pay no attention to it. With my most smiling expression I said: “And how do you like Italy, Madame?”
“Very well.”
Again!
“Have you seen Florence?” I added.
“Ho yes, Tom,” she replied, not without hesitation and after her husband had squeezed her hand.
Why the devil was she replying to her husband when it was me who had spoken to her?
I could not help smiling at that. Mr. Little perceived it.
“Pay no attention,” he whispered to me, mysteriously, “if my wife calls you Tom. She’s unfortunately not equipped to pronounce any other name.”
The expression “equipped” astonished me.
“Pardon?”
“I said,” Mr. Little added, “that my forename, Tom, is absolutely linked to ‘Ho yes,’ in her organism, in such a way that she cannot say one without the other...”
“Oh!” I said, opening my eyes wide, for I understood less and less.
I repeated with Mr. and Mrs. Little the tour of the cathedral that I had already made. As I watched the woman walking on her husband’s arm, I was astonished that her gait, which had already seemed a little stiff in the past, had become jerky. Her footfalls produced a very strange rhythmic click.
That poor woman, I said to myself, definitely has something out of order, not only in her arms but also in her legs—and I wondered whether she might have suffered an apoplexy or might be afflicted by a softening of the spinal marrow.
She walked, however, at a fairly brisk pace, and I heard her reply to her husband several times when he pointed out a silver altar, the mosaics in the choir and the marquetry stalls: “Ho yes, Tom.”
When we emerged from the cathedral Mr. Little said to me: “Tell me, my dear Monsieur Le Bref, have you seen the baptistery and have you gone up the Leaning Tower?”
“Yes, this morning, again—for I’ve known them for a long time, having been to Pisa twice before. And you?”
“Not yet. It’s worth the trouble, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course; it’s necessary to see the pulpit sculpted by Nicola Pisano at
the baptistery and go up the tower, from which the view extends over a part of Tuscany. In addition, you know, it’s from the top of that tower that Galileo made his experiments with weight.”
“I’d very much like to go up there,” said Mr. Little.
“You’d do well...there’s only one thing to fear, which is that it might be a little to tiring for Mrs. Little, who seems to me to be quite weary already, for the tower is fifty-nine meters high.”
Mr. Little appeared to reflect momentarily, and then said: “Wait, I’ll ask my wife what she wants to do.”
On observing that Mrs. Little, who clearly must have heard her husband and me talking, had not yet emitted and personal thought and that Mr. Little had to ask her expressly what she wanted to do, I said to myself internally: What a sang-mort that woman is!
Meanwhile, the following little dialogue had taken place between her and her husband:
“Do you feel fatigued, my dear Betty?”
“Ho yes, Tom.”
“You don’t care about going up the Leaning Tower?”
“No.”
“In that case, would you care to wait for me here momentarily with Monsieur Le Bref, who will be kind enough to offer you his arm?”
“Ho yes, Tom.”
“As Mr. Little took his wife’s arm from beneath his own, I extended mine to Mrs. Little as graciously as I could, but she did not take it, so Mr. Little was obliged to pass his wife’s arm under mine himself. I was not overly astonished by that, however, already knowing that there was something hindering the movements of her arms.
Meanwhile, Mr. Little said to her: “In fact, my dear Betty, perhaps you’d be better in the carriage. What do you think?”
When he had touched her hand she replied: “Ho yes, Tom.”
“In that case, Monsieur Le Bref will be kind enough to excuse you.”
“Certainly,” I said. “You have a carriage, then?”
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