Concluding the conversation, Smirnov got to his feet first. “Well, all the best,” he said to the maître. “Bonne chance.”|||| And with that he left. The maître remained seated; he lit his pipe, threw the match on the ground and watched, with inexplicably rapt attention, its fading flame against the reddish sand of the path.
It had been warm in Sebastopol, but in Moscow it was cold. It was the month of November, and Maître Rueil was wearing a fur coat. He had tracked down Monsieur Jean very quickly, who turned out to be an uncommonly obliging chap of the old-lecher variety; despite what were in a very literal sense his declining years, he was astonishingly spry, walked with a spring in his step, chuckled, chortled, pinched the maids and talked only of girls and drinking in the convivial company of students. Supposing that Maître Rueil had no Russian, on the very first day he said to the owner of a restaurant in the presence of the maître, with whom he was dining:
“He’s French. Don’t be too scrupulous when you bring the bill. We can discuss the percentage later.”
The owner smiled understandingly. “All the same, don’t be too overzealous,” coldly interjected the maître in Russian. “Excusez-moi,” muttered Monsieur Jean. “C’était une erreur. Je croyais que vous n’entendiez pas le russe,”*** he added with faux naivety. “It’s quite all right,” replied the maître with a shrug of the shoulders. “I don’t blame you.” And the maître burst into laughter: the thought that Monsieur Jean might take umbrage particularly amused him.
The maître’s profound indifference did not impede his immediate evaluation of this man—even prior to the incident in the restaurant. The maître conversed with him monosyllabically; Monsieur Jean fawned and giggled. He did, however, drive the maître around Moscow, showed him a few places where the young man who was the reason for the maître’s visit could be found, and, finally, communicated the address of the institution.
“I no longer require you,” said the maître on the third day. Monsieur Jean rejoiced, but made a sad face. “Wait, where are you going?” said the maître in sudden exasperation, seeing that Monsieur Jean was getting ready to leave. “Here”—he handed him some money—“take this for your troubles and have a drink with some girls in the company of students.” Monsieur Jean smiled and executed a complicated pas with his feet. “Still dancing?” said the maître, narrowing his eyes in contempt. “I don’t understand you; you’re a hundred years old yet you jump around. You’re old bones,” he said even more scornfully. “You’ll soon snuff it; but you’ll even go to heaven with a spring in your step. Well then, avaunt!” Monsieur Jean vanished.
The maître wasted several successive evenings in his searches. He was consumed by a feeling of disgust for everything that he did, and he began to think that the most honourable course of action would be to abort his mission and head home. “I need a rest,” thought the maître. “I need a rest.” And so he decided that if his visit to Madame Rose changed nothing, tomorrow he would pack his things and leave. Let them give the job to Smirnov. That evening, having donned his black suit, he set out for Madame Rose’s institution.
He arrived too early; nobody was there yet. He entered a long, spacious room illuminated by an enormous lamp with a beautiful shade; along the walls soft chairs had been laid out. A ballroom pianist with a dismal Jewish face played some melodies in a minor key. The salon’s tone was one of muted misery: sorrowful beauties in black gowns, holding in their hands giant roses that looked more like sunflowers, were hung along the walls; in a massive painting, The Executioner of Nuremberg, was depicted a man, bared to the waist, with curiously languid eyes, wielding an axe above the head of a youth queerly reminiscent of Schiller; the youth was being comforted by a buxom lass; fat tears were painted on her cheeks. Maître Rueil was amazed; Madame Rose’s salon was nothing more than a bordello.
“Elle va fort, quand même,”††† he thought.
Little by little the salon filled with guests. They looked to be arriving from a graveyard or a funeral service: the ladies smiled mournfully and never let go of their handkerchiefs.
“Drôle de p—,”‡‡‡ the maître told himself: he was beginning to feel puzzled.
Finally, from a side door entered a woman of around thirty in a plunging décolleté gown: this was Madame Rose. The maître recognized her immediately: two years ago in Paris she had been arrested for blackmailing a prominent businessman. She was well known by the clientele of all the fun little spots in Montmartre. They called her L’Hirondelle.§§§ She led a fairly frivolous sort of life: she danced au naturel where it was possible and permissible; she engaged in business of a rather singular nature and very freely eyed a great many things. She also remembered the maître, who had once foretold her death in poverty and every venereal disease. She approached him and, having lifted his chin with her lacquered index finger, imperiously pronounced:
“Ah, you’re here as well? Do you see? J’ai fait du chemin, moi.¶¶¶ Do you recall what you predicted for me?”
“Yes, clearly I was mistaken where the poverty is concerned,” replied the maître.
“Méchant!”||||||
She spoke with him for several minutes before moving off.
The maître was left alone. He felt very odd among this crowd of strange and ridiculous Russian people, with painted ladies slowly waltzing in the red light emanating through the lampshade. The pianist continued to play, growing pale with fatigue and chagrin; several times L’Hirondelle’s glistening skin flitted before the maître’s eyes. The young man who was the reason for his visit was not there. The maître sat in the same spot for the whole evening. Then, shaking off his gloomy torpor and deciding to send a telegram to Paris the following morning, terminating his mission, he walked out into the street. The lights sparkled in the icy puddles. By a lamp post stood a man in a fur coat, blind drunk. He cried and sang, trailing off and once again, sobbing, beginning: “Misty morn, ashen morn…”**** The maître stood beside him awhile and then walked off. The light mist, so like that of the morning in Constantinople when he dreamt of the falling building, began to ring quietly in his ears. “I’m ill,” the maître said to himself with a degree of familiarity, but this time he was neither surprised nor afraid.
Suddenly, two paces in front of him he saw a broad-shouldered figure blocking his way. “Excuse me,” said the maître; and that instant he heard the voice of the actress with whom he had journeyed aboard the ship. “That’s him!” she shouted. Suddenly the maître felt cold and indifferent. Three men threw themselves at him. Warding them off with his left arm and his legs, with his right he extracted a revolver and, already firing at the fiercer of his assailants, recognized in him the youth whose photograph he had been given back then in Paris. But it was too late; the shot rang out and rushed along the windows of the buildings and along the pavement. Just then a hand with brass knuckles came crashing down on top of the maître’s head. His eyes floating over the actress’s pale face, Maître Rueil lost consciousness.
He came to his senses only three days later. He was lying in a bed in an unfamiliar room. Reaching out his hand laboriously towards the bedside table, he groped at a slip of paper. It was a telegram from Paris: “APPRIS RÉCOMPENSE FÉLICITATIONS CONGÉ TROIS MOIS REVENEZ BERNARD”.††††
With great difficulty he recalled what had happened to him. A crazed, belated sense of regret gripped him: he saw, as though truly before him, the icy puddles, the actress, the drunkard singing “Misty morn…” and the youth at whom he had directed his revolver. All his life, now changed and unlike that which he had led until then, he would recall that trip to Moscow. And in his diary he jotted down several unexpected lines about a certain variety of seasickness, about the sad meaninglessness of journeys, and about the tear-stained faces of Moscow’s prostitutes.
* “Nice little thing, isn’t she?”
† “You’ll live to regret this.”
‡ Literally, “You’re a play-actor”; figuratively here, “That’s a good one.”
§
When I was little / I wasn’t big, / I went to school / Like the little kids.
¶ “Would you like to cuckold my lover, sir?”
|| “No, madam, I have no such desire.”
** “Is something the matter, my dear maître?”
†† “Would that I could answer you in the same way.”
‡‡ “I had to give him something.”
§§ “They fear nothing.”
¶¶ A person of independent means.
|||| “Good luck.”
*** “Forgive me. My mistake. I wasn’t aware you spoke Russian.”
††† “She’s going strong, all the same.”
‡‡‡ “D—n strange.”
§§§ The Swallow.
¶¶¶ “I’ve come a long way.”
|||||| “Wicked man.”
**** The opening lines from Ivan Turgenev’s lyric poem ‘V doroge’ (‘On the Road’), which lent its text to a popular Gypsy romance of the nineteenth century.
†††† “Learnt recompense congratulations three months leave awaiting you Bernard”.
HAPPINESS
(1932)
ANDRÉ DORIN, a pale boy of fifteen, was alone in his parents’ apartment in Sainte-Sophie, forty versts from Paris. His stepmother was at Cannes—as always at this time of year—and his father had left for Paris in the morning, warning André not to expect him for dinner: this meant that he would return in the early hours, wake André up and say to him, in his calm, happy voice, which André so loved:
“Are you asleep? Get up and sit with me awhile. First we’ll indulge in a little alcoholism, then I’ll tell you some fascinating anecdotes.”
He would make André don his pyjamas and go through to the dining room; then he would brew some coffee, carefully pour into the cups a few drops of rum and tell André a great many trifles that would seem to him ludicrous and absurd; then he would extract from his brown briefcase a book in a leather binding, hand it to André and add:
“I found this book purely by chance. Do you remember, you were talking about it and saying how much you wanted it? Imagine, I was walking across the Elysian Fields, when I saw an empty car just standing there, and inside it—that same book. I thought: my God, that’s the very one my son was telling me about—what a happy coincidence. So I opened the car door, extracted the book, hid it in my briefcase and walked off unnoticed. Can you imagine the luck of it? Only, please, show it to no one. There’s even some sort of inscription in it.”
And inside the book would be written, in his father’s even hand: “À ne pas lire la nuit, s.v.p.”*
By force of habit, Henri Dorin, André’s father, still thought of his son as a little boy and would speak to him as though he were nine or ten years old. He knew, however, that André was exceptionally mature for his years; he could see this by the books André read, by André’s questions and observations, which to him seemed unusual coming from the mouth of his young son, whom he had still recently borne on his shoulders and for whom he was ready to spend hours pulling faces, telling fairy tales and going to such efforts just to make him laugh. But André laughed exceedingly rarely. All the more often Henri Dorin thought that the older André grew, the more he came to resemble his late mother, his first wife, whom he could never forget. She was nineteen when Dorin met her, although to look at she might have been fifteen. She always wore white dresses, her footsteps were light and soundless, and Dorin would tell her that she was like one of those daytime spectres that were just as rare in the world as white robins. She was very sickly; and although she never complained, except in regard to a heightened sensitivity, Dorin took her to see a renowned professor, who told him that his wife ought to have a child; it would regenerate her entire bodily system. “Would you like to have a child?” Dorin asked her several days after this. She closed her eyes tightly and nodded. Dorin did not know then that it would be a death sentence for her.
On the night of the birth, when a different doctor, looking at him sternly, said that only a madman could hope for a happy outcome—“She’s just a girl”—Dorin was beside himself. From the moment when she was brought to the clinic—this happened late at night—until the early hours of the summer’s morning he paced around the little square in front of the building in Saint-Cloud where she had been admitted (he feared going inside yet could not leave); on the other side of the glass door, the light shone evenly in the foyer, the building was quiet, everything around was still and uneasy—and this endless waiting dragged on until the morning, when they told him that his wife was dead. He nodded, thrust his hands into his pockets and walked off, forgetting even to ask whether the child had survived; he came to his senses only two days later, having been awoken by a policeman and taken to the commissariat of the Ménilmontant neighbourhood. The policeman said that he had found the man sleeping on a bench and that, since he had no money or documentation on him, he had arrested him for vagrancy.
“What is your surname?” asked the commissioner, turning to Dorin and looking at his soiled, crumpled suit and boots that had split at the seams. Only in this instant did Dorin comprehend that his wife was dead—and for the first time he began to weep.
“You do not want to tell me your surname?” continued the commissioner. “Evidently you have good reason to want to hide it. I understand perfectly.”
“You don’t understand at all,” said Dorin. “My surname is Dorin, I’m no vagrant, nor am I a criminal. Telephone my Paris office and ask for the director.”
“Understand that if this is a joke,” said the commissioner warily, “you shall have cause to regret it.”
Nevertheless, he did telephone the office.
“Monsieur Dorin is with you?” shouted the astonished voice down the telephone.
“He wants to talk to you,” replied the commissioner and passed Dorin the receiver. Dorin ordered the car to be sent for him; twenty minutes later the chauffeur was opening the door of the heavy six-seater automobile to the unshaven man in soiled clothing, doffing his cap, bowing and saying, as always:
“Bonjour, monsieur.” The commissioner, with a bemused and at the same time satisfied look, waved them off. Having arrived home, bathed, shaved and changed his clothes, Dorin summoned to his room the housekeeper, who told him that madame was buried at Père-Lachaise and that his son was in the room allocated to the wet nurse. Only then did Henri Dorin see André for the first time. The boy was very small and weighed only six pounds. “Everything she could give,” thought Dorin, “all her fragile strength she gave to this child—and it cost her her life.”
It seemed to him then that he would dedicate all his time to his son; the thought that he could marry for a second time did not occur to him, though he was only twenty-six. For many years he lived truly thinking only of his son. However, the more André grew, the more Dorin felt the unconscious, palpable love for his son being replaced by a different feeling, no less powerful, but devoid of that original acuity, when every movement of André’s little body had reverberated in his heart. And although he continued to love his son, ostensibly as much as ever before, in recent years he had once again become susceptible to other feelings—and he realized for the first time in all this while that he was still young, rich and, to all intents and purposes, almost happy. André was a clever child, an able student and such a voracious reader that Dorin, who slept exceedingly soundly, bought for himself an alarm clock, which he set for two o’clock in the morning—so that he could wake up and go through to André’s room; he would find his son in bed with a book in his hands. “Well, monsieur,” he would say. “Is monsieur still reading?” He would prise the book from André’s hands, kiss him on the forehead and leave—and only then would André fall asleep.
Dorin married for a second time when André was fourteen. He had become acquainted with Madeleine quite by chance in a café, where he had stopped for half an hour after breakfast one day. Madeleine was perched opposite him; Dorin observed her elongated grey eyes, which from the first moment seemed mo
ist to him—everyone who so much as glanced at Madeleine had this impression—her red lips and fair hair, so finely and thoroughly curled that it recalled the beards of Assyrian kings. Dorin felt a curious stirring the instant he set eyes on Madeleine. He did not even realize that the source of this was she; suddenly he began to feel as though he had forgotten something exceptionally important, or else had failed to do something of the utmost necessity, or perhaps there had been some tragedy at home: might André be ill? Madeline sat in her seat, stirring a cup of tea long gone cold and glancing from time to time at Dorin, as though unable to decide whether or not to leave. Finally she looked at the clock, summoned the waiter, opened her long, narrow purse, like a black leathern envelope—when suddenly it transpired that the little billfold with money, which ought to have been there, had been forgotten at home. “My God, what’s to be done?” she said in a low voice. Upon hearing this, Dorin understood what the source of his anxiety had been. “Allow me,” he said after a moment’s silence. “No, no, monsieur, thank you a thousand times over. It’s simply maddening. Heavens, there couldn’t be anything more idiotic,” she said. In the end, however, she was left with no alternative. They left the café together; Dorin sat Madeleine down beside him, and after this, during the course of a whole evening and into the small hours of the morning, his yellow Chrysler was seen in various quarters of the city, and in the Bois de Boulogne, and on the road to Versailles; it was a June day, and the sultry heat was tempered by a light summer breeze; green leaves danced in the wind, the glass of the car glinted keenly, and the sun’s yellow disc skimmed, shimmering, across the black wings of the car.
The Beggar and Other Stories Page 3
