“She’s in Saint-Lazare.”
“Ill?”
“In prison.”
“Because of you,” added Nini Nichon.
“Because of me?”
“A little, my lad. She bashed Émile, the waiter, the redhead’s lover.”
“She killed him?”
“No, but she smashed a tankard in his face. We were all witnesses, big Lucie, Valentine and me.”
Charles Balin uttered a sigh of satisfaction. It was evidently just a matter of a tavern brawl, but he was interested to know all the details. His name might have been pronounced in court; he had to know what the situation was.
He offered to buy the two women a drink, provided that it was not at the Avenir.
Lucie Pognon refused; Git-le-Coeur was intractable on Saturday; it was pay day and, as in the administration of the cab company, he demanded higher fees at certain times and in certain circumstances, and she wanted to buy a dress with the twenty francs that had fallen from heaven, it was necessary for her to work.
Nini Nichon, to whom the offer of a drink was never indifferent, hastened to accept. She took him to the Clair de Lune, a dive that she called a night restaurant, but where it was nevertheless necessary to have the password to be admitted.
The hovel was worse than the Avenir, but it was too late to retreat and his companion, on familiar ground, hastened to order two well-garnished sauerkrauts.
“I’m not eating,” he objected, timidly. “Only order one.”
“Bah! I’ll eat them both,” affirmed his guest, with a coarse laugh.
He was in haste to be brought up to date.
“You remember,” she told him, addressing him as tu like a comrade, “the morning when you were unloading cabbages at Les Halles—so Mariette said, because I didn’t see anything. Well, the evening of that day, she came back to the Avenir and she wasn’t in a good mood, I can tell you, because she hadn’t made anything all evening and someone had taken, or she’d lost, all her money.
“Valentine—you know, Émile’s redhead, who’d vexed her the night before—started teasing her again because of you. She said—and how she said it!—that you were an old good-for-nothing, that you were out of prison, that you wanted to have yourself kept by the girls, that she’d been stupid to pay you a louis, etc. etc. She gave her a clout, and what a clout!
“We separated them, and nothing would have come of it if Émile hadn’t arrived. When Valentine, who’s a coward, had her lover beside her, she started coming out with horrors again on your account, and Émile pitched in even harder. Well, if you’d seen Mariette! She was whiter than that napkin! Me, who knows her and heard her grinding her teeth, I thought to myself: something bad’s going to happen here. ‘Hey,’ she finished up saying to Émile, ‘leave me in peace—you’re a liar, a dirty nark, and the thief is you!’ The other tried to raise his hand, but he hadn’t made the move when he got the beer-glass in his face and was bleeding like an ox.
“You can imagine that that caused a stink! The police came, they took them to the station. Perhaps nothing would still have come of it, but Mariette started calling Émile a nark again—for her, who isn’t stupid, that wasn’t very clever. In a police station, calling someone an informer burns the ears.
“The brigadier, offended, said she was insulting the police. She replied to that, because she doesn’t like the agents, because her father was put in front of a firing squad during the Commune. Then they arrested her; she was brought up in the police court: assault and battery, insults to the authority, the whole shebang; and she was sent down for four months.”
“Poor Mariette! It’s me who caused her that misfortune,” sighed Charles Balin.
“You can believe it! I don’t know why, perhaps you have hidden talents, but she really thought a lot of you. Look, the evening when she threw the glass of brandy in your face, you’d scarcely gone out when she regretted it and started to cry. Then we went to get a bite in Les Halles—well, it was because of you. You’ll understand that I couldn’t let her drink alone!” Laughing loudly, she added: “Me, I never miss an opportunity. Waiter! Another half.”
“You were a witness in the affair you said. Was my name mentioned in court?”
“Had to be! Émile said you were a crook, Mariette replied that it wasn’t true, that’s all.”
“Was my name pronounced?”
“I don’t remember. All I know is that Mariette hasn’t spilled the beans—you can be sure of that.”
“What! You still believe the waiter’s accusations?”
“Me? What does it have to do with me? I don’t care. It seems to me, though, that if you really were a thief, you wouldn’t have given me twenty francs, unless...” She lowered her voice and winked. “Unless you’d pulled off a big coup.”
Charles Balin shuddered with shame.
“Oh, you know, with me, nothing to fear. Look, motus,” she said, clicking her teeth with her thumbnail.
He tried to protest his innocence.
“Motus, motus,” repeated the stout whore. “After all,” she added, cynically, “perhaps you’re an honest man, but for me, you see, the most honest man is the one who pays me the most.”
A surge of disgust nauseated him—and yet that vile prostitute had given her obol to save his life!
He remained plunged in humiliating reflections, and quickly reverted to the less filthy memory or Mariette. Why had he not made enquiries earlier? He would have been able to soften the rigors of prison, return to her then, in a more opportune fashion, the service that he owed her. Why had he thought of himself first? Why had he waited to accumulate a relatively large sum? Egotism and vanity, no doubt.
The few sous brought at an opportune moment are worth a hundred times more than futile largesse! But perhaps he still had time to come to her aid.
“She was arrested the day when you came to Les Halles?”
“That same evening.”
“That was the end of July; it’s now the end of November,” he calculated. “So it’s exactly four months that Mariette has been in prison. Perhaps she’s even been released?”
“Certainly not. She’d have come to the Avenir.”
“Then she’ll be released before long?”
“Probably.”
“No one has gone to her aid during that long sojourn?”
Nini Nichon put on a tearful expression, raised her eyes to the heavens, made a gesture of desolation and swallowed the rest of her half-liter in a single draught in order to forget her chagrin.
“Not that I know,” she sighed. “Poor Mariette! We haven’t thought about her once, but the times are so hard! Lucie has her fat leech, Git-le-Coeur, and I can’t make ends meet.”
“Well, Mademoiselle, as soon as you see Mariette, tell her, please, that I’m presently a pianist at the café concert whose address I’ll give you, and that she mustn’t fail to come to find me there.
“In the meantime, be kind enough to get these twenty francs to her, so that when she comes out of prison she can eat, get a room, and come to the establishment where I’m employed. Tell her, though, not to come to join me in the orchestra, but to wait by the door until it’s time for me to leave.”
“I won’t fail,” promised Nini Nichon, putting the address in her corsage. “But the twenty francs...”
“Well?”
“I’d rather not take charge of them. I’m afraid of eating them—or, rather, drinking them.”
Charles Balin could not help smiling.
“You’re slandering yourself, Mademoiselle. You’ll remember that you might find yourself in a situation similar to your comrade’s; you’ll remember, since you were taught when you were little, that it’s necessary not to do unto others what you wouldn’t want anyone to do to you, and you’ll give Mariette the deposit I’m confiding to you.”
“You’re right,” said the prostitute, who had instinctively stopped addressing him as tu. “I’ll do as you say.”
He paid, got up and left, witho
ut having been excessively solicited by the truculent individual, who nevertheless did not fail to expend herself in further compliments on the exceptional abundance of her charms, the comfortable breadth of her bed, the prefect tranquility of her furnished hotel, the near-virginity that a long widowhood had remade for her, the benevolent dispositions to which an abundant and well-watered nourishment had given birth, the obliging attention that she would have for a friend, etc. He replied, smiling, that he did not want to be unfaithful to Mariette.
It was three o’clock in the morning. He was in haste to get back to his domicile. The sight of the place where the drama of his misery had almost reached its denouement in such a banal fashion, the conversation he had had with the prostitutes and the news that he had just learned had revived the memory of Mariette in a disturbing fashion. After the four months in prison that she had received for coming to his defense, would he have the courage to see her again coldly? Would his determination not weaken?
What’s the point? he replied to himself, immediately. Wasn’t it necessary to bring the adventure to a prompt and definitive end? Why retie bonds that he would break the day after? It would be absurd, and perhaps cruel. He no longer had the right to treat that unfortunate woman as flesh for pleasure that one takes or leaves at will, especially if, a floret of amour grown on the worst of dung-heaps, she experienced the slightest feeling of tenderness for him.
It was pretentious, at his age, to imagine such a thing, but had not her comrade in debauchery just made that claim? Had he not believed it momentarily? Great misfortunes, especially when they are enveloped in mystery, have the attraction of the gulf, and fascinate the rebellious.
Certainly, Mariette could not have the nobility of soul that gives rise to blind devotions, but the instinctive curiosity that had pushed her toward him might perhaps have engendered a rudimentary sentiment of that sort.
On the other hand, he could not think of hampering his life with such a liaison. It would have been necessary for that for him to have money for her to live on and time to devote to her.
It was infinitely probably, anyway, that even in that event, the vagabond, irremediably degraded by a long past of vices, would not accept the calm and worthy life that he would want to impose on her.
He decided, therefore, and it was the wisest course, that Mariette would remain his friend, and that he would only see her again in that light.
He had almost arrived at the Rue Vavin while philosophizing thus, along the railings of the Luxembourg, when, just as he was telling himself that he had committed an honest action and that no harm would come to him, a man surged abruptly from the shadows and seized him bodily, another gagged him with two hands, while a third robbed him. In the blink of an eye his pockets were cleaned out, and the thieves had vanished.
Surprised by the rapidity of the operation, he had not had time to utter a cry or to put up a fight. He quickly wiped his soiled lips, bruised by the brutal hands of the aggressor, and then perceived, sadly, the loss of his wallet. Fortunately, he still had a little money at home. Mariette would not be utterly disappointed when she came to the rendezvous.
Gradually, thinking that he had received neither blows nor wounds, and that the skillful professionals had been content, like conjurors, to rob him with a magisterial dexterity, he accepted his fate stoically. Who, then, could have carried out the coup? Had he been seen giving money to the two prostitutes? Had they talked too loudly about his generosity? Had they confided it to eager ears? Or had the prowlers attacked him at random?
The last supposition might have been true, but a voice sniggered in his ear that his subjection to pillage was the logical consequence of his scrupulous restitution. “Clean him out properly,” Nini Nichon must have said to the skillful pickpockets of the Clair de Lune, “but don’t do him too much harm; he might be a high-class criminal, and in any case, he’s Mariette’s friend.”
Bah! He wouldn’t die of it. Half a million francs had been stolen from him and he hadn’t been able to say anything.
Two uniformed policemen came down the street, making their regular footfalls ring on the pavement. They were arriving too late, like carabiniers in an operetta. He thought about confiding his misadventure to them, but did not take long to change his mind.
“With my luck,” he murmured, “I’m capable of getting myself arrested. As the poet says, let’s imitate the prudent silence of Conrart.”19
Chapter XVI
The Café Concert de l’Étoile, a former interior courtyard transformed into a glass-roofed hall, where “Monsieur Charles” exercised his talents as an accompanist, did not shine either in the renown of its artistes or in the luxury of its decoration. It was one of those improvised establishments in which the singing serves as an excuse for the poor quality of the fare and its slightly elevated prices. The habitual troupe consisted of three chanteuses, a baritone and two comedians, to whom occasional amateur performances sometimes lent their collaboration. The pianist, reinforced on important occasional by a cornet, a clarinet and a trombone, represented the entire orchestra. As for the public, except for Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays, when workers’ families took possession of the hall, it was composed almost entirely of regular clients: local employees and shopkeepers, art-students in search of the Gioconda, Pygmalions in quest of statues, impecunious students and litterateurs as yet devoid of glory, whom the proximity of schools and the low rents attracted to the quarter in large numbers and whose hearts came to search for pasture.
It was, in fact, notorious in a certain milieu that the habituées of the Étoile, vaguely married women, sentimental local seamstresses and kept mistresses with time on their hands, did not come there in search of fortune, but were content with a little gaiety and amour. A few of them even made a specialty of allowing themselves to be subjugated by the pseudo-actors who hung out there
The men being almost their equals, they considered before anything else the matter of their employment. It was thus that the baritone and the pianists enjoyed an incontestable primacy; whether they were young or old, elegant or dilapidated, handsome or ugly, whether their hair was blond, brown, red or white, they immediately became the prey of some amiable habituée.
Monsieur Charles, initially surprised and even flattered by the languorous stares of which he was the object, had quickly suspected the truth. Seeing the same women devouring indistinctly all the ephemeral singers of the establishment, he mistrusted the advances they made to him and, without affecting puritanical manners or a prudish virtue discordant with the rather unrestrained milieu in which the need to live had placed him, he maintained a polite reserve, not avoiding provocative conversations but opposing the most profound deafness to insinuations of a certain kind. His situation was too precarious, and he had too much pride, to chase after such adventures.
A pretty blonde, a somewhat rough-hewn former chambermaid from the Franche-Comté, who had nurtured for years an insatiable caprice for all the virtuosos who succeeded one another in Père Antoine’s establishment, had inevitably set her cap at the new arrival. Although he was not in the prime of youth, he had a distinguished air and polite manners made to flatter self-esteem. With the flair of a perverted soubrette, the lovely Annette divined in the pianist, whom her neurosis still lacked, a man of the world plunged into poverty by an unexpected catastrophe, and that supposition stimulated her monomania.
She had regular features, an advantageous and lithe figure, large gray eyes, a luxuriant bosom, ash-blonde hair, a suggestive neck and appetizing lips. She wore elegant clothes, expensive jewelry, paid ostentatiously for drinks and proclaimed, when she wanted to be heard, that she was a good and disinterested girl for whomever had the gift of pleasing her. The painters were mad about her, the sculptors licked her feet, and the poets brought out her beauty in the most impeccable sonnets, but—excluding commercial transactions, of course—a man only had the gift of pleasing her on condition of making his agile fingers fly over ivory keys. The most convulsive comedians, the m
ost eccentric clowns, the most muscular gymnasts, the most charming baritones, the most disconcerting tightrope-walkers and the most dexterous jugglers had sought the way to her heart in vain; and yet, on simply hearing a pianist, that unassailable heart, not content with opening all its doors, resonated like a statue of Memnon.
The species of indifference with which Monsieur Charles had received her first advances plunged the beautiful Annette into the deepest amazement. Although she had judged him, instinctively, superior in education and delicacy to the bashers of chords she had known thus far, she had not expected to find the slightest resistance in a man who, in view of his age and situation, was scarcely spoiled by fortune. Perhaps she had approached the matter too abruptly.
Changing tactics, therefore, instead of the frontal assaults she was accustomed to making, and which ordinary settled the matter with an immediate victory, she stood down her batteries and laid siege methodically to the heart rebellious to her initial summons.
A long week passed in insignificant skirmishes; the enemy avoided combat and remained holed up. Never had the conquest of a performer demanded so much effort. She began to get impatient; doubtless he was married or had a mistress—but, having always considered inconstancy as second nature, and infidelity as the most sacred of duties, that reason could not have any value in her eyes. Did she not have a lover who maintained her? That did not prevent her from deceiving him—on the contrary!
Perhaps the artiste, who, in spite of his gray hair, seemed to her to be as timid and desirable as a novice, dared not take advantage of the windfall? Perhaps his reserve, as a well-brought-up man, prevented him from declaring himself too rapidly? She took the baritone Fernand into her confidence, and charged him with adroitly discovering the trouble in his heart.
The baritone, a Pandarus of the Barrière, was coarsely eager to transmit the gallant message.
“You’ve had a real stroke of luck, Monsieur Charles. The most beautiful girl in the quarter, a true bourgeois morsel, is smitten with you!”
The Second Life of Doctor Albin Page 17
