‘There we are then,’ said Eve, embracing her friend. ‘He’s safe now.’
She returned to Postel’s house in order, so she said, to clear up some doubt which had brought her back to consult so learned a juryman in the Tribunal du Commerce, and she got him to escort her home while she listened to his winnings. ‘You wouldn’t be in a mess like this if you had married me!’ This was the burden of every sentence the little apothecary uttered. When he was home again, Postel found his wife in a fit of jealousy because of Madame Séchard’s remarkable beauty. Furious at the politeness her husband had shown, Léonie was only pacified by the opinion the apothecary claimed to hold about the superiority of red-headed over dark-haired women. The latter, he maintained, were like beautiful thoroughbreds which always had to be kept in the stable. No doubt he put up a good show of sincerity, for the next day Madame Postel was in a simperingly affectionate mood.
‘We can set our minds at rest,’ Eve said to her mother and Marion, whom she found, to use Marion’s own expression, still ‘all of a flutter’.
When Eve cast an involuntary glance into the bedroom, Marion told her: ‘They’ve gone.’
17. An obdurate father
‘VERE shoult ve go?’ asked Kolb, when they were a few miles along the main road to Paris.
‘Marsac,’ David answered. ‘Since we’re half way there I’m going to make a last appeal to my father’s feelings.’
‘I myself voult razer leat a tcharche against a pattery of cannonss. Monsieur’s fazer hass no heart.’
The old pressman had no faith in his son. Like all working-class people, he judged by results. In the first place he would not admit that he had despoiled David. In the second place, without taking into account the fact that times had changed, he thought to himself: ‘I made him boss of a printing-office, the same as I had been myself. He knew a lot more about it than I did, and yet he couldn’t make a go of it!’ Totally incapable of understanding his son, he passed judgement on him and assumed a sort of superiority over this highly intelligent man by telling himself: ‘After all, I’m saving up food and drink for him.’
Kolb and David arrived at Marsac at eight o’clock and caught the old fellow as he was finishing dinner and therefore on the point of going to bed.
‘So the beaks still let you come to see me*’ he said to his son with a bitter smile.
‘How can you ant my master efer come togezzer?’ cried the indignant Kolb. ‘He iss flyink high in ze skiess and you are alvays vine-pippink… Gif him vat he neets! Zat iss vat a fazzer iss for!’
‘Now, Kolb, be off, and stable the horse with Madame Courtois so as not to bother my father with it. And learn this fact: fathers are always in the right.’
Kolb went off growling like a dog who, though scolded by his master for his vigilance, lies down – but only under protest. Then, without revealing his secret process, David offered to give his father the clearest possible proof of his discovery and proposed that he should have a stake in the concern in return for the money David now needed in order to shake free from legal pursuit, so that he might give himself up to the exploitation of his invention.
‘Come on now, how can you prove you can make fine paper out of nothing and one which will cost nothing?’ the ex-typographer demanded, throwing his son a drunken, but astute, inquisitive and avid glance, which was like a flash of lightning darting through a rain-cloud; for the old ‘bear’, keeping to his long-established practice, never went to bed without his ‘night-cap’, consisting of two bottles of excellent old wine at which, as he put it, he took a sip now and then.
‘That’s an easy matter,’ David replied. ‘I have no paper on me. I came here to get away from Doublon and, happening to be on the way to Marsac, I thought I could certainly find in your house the facilities which even a money-lender would give me. I have nothing here but the clothes I stand up in. Shut me up in a sealed-up out-house which no one can enter and in which no one can see me. And then…’
‘What!’ said the old man, casting a terrible glance at his son. ‘You won’t let me watch you while you work?’
‘My father,’ David replied. ‘You have proved to me that in business fathers don’t exist…’
‘So you don’t trust the man who brought you into the world.’
‘It’s not that. I don’t trust the man who robbed me of the means of living in it.’
‘You’re right! Everyone for himself!’ said the old man. ‘Very well, I’ll put you in my store-room.’
‘I shall take Kolb in with me, and you’ll give me a cauldron to make my pulp,’ David continued, without noticing the look his father shot at him. ‘Then you’ll go out and find me some artichoke and asparagus stalks, stinging nettles and reeds which you’ll cut from the banks of your little river. Tomorrow morning I shall come out of your store-room with some magnificent paper.’
‘If you can do that,’ cried the Bear, with a hiccough, ‘I’ll give you maybe… I’ll see if I can give you… dammit, I’ll give you twenty-five thousand francs – on condition that I get the same amount back every year.’
‘Put me to the test, I accept it!’ cried David. ‘Kolb, get on your horse, ride over to Mansle, buy me a big hair-sieve from the dry cooper and size from a grocer and get back as quickly as you can.’
‘Come on, have a drink,’ said his father, setting a bottle of wine, some bread and some left-over cold meat in front of his son. ‘Get your strength up and I’ll go and find you your supply of rags – green rags! May be they’re a bit too green! Like the grapes the fox was after!’
Two hours later, at about eleven o’clock, the old man was shutting up his son and Kolb in a little room backing on to his store-room, roofed with gutter-tiles, where he kept the utensils needed for distilling the wines of Angoulême which, as is well known, furnish all the brandies supposed to come from Cognac.
‘Why! It’s as good as being in a factory,’ said David. ‘Wood and basins, just what I need.’
‘Well, see you tomorrow,’ said old Séchard. ‘I’ll shut you in and let my two dogs loose. That way I’ll be sure no one will bring in any paper. Show me the sheets tomorrow and I declare I’ll be your partner. Then everything will be straight and above-board.’
Kolb and David let him shut them in and spent about two hours crushing and preparing the stalks with the help of a couple of planks. The fire burned bright and the water boiled. But at about two in the morning Kolb, less busy than David, heard a sound of heavy breathing which ended in a drunken hiccough. He took one of the two candles and began looking all around. Then he caught sight of old Séchard’s purple face blocking up a small square aperture cut out of the door leading from the store-room to the distilling-room and concealed behind empty casks. The wily old man had let his son and Kolb into the distilling-room through an outer door which was used for rolling out barrels for delivery. The inner door enabled puncheons to be rolled from the storeroom into the distillery without taking them round the courtyard.
‘Ah, Papa Séchard! You are tcheatink, you vant to svintle your son… Shall I tell you vat you’re toink ven you trink a pottle of goot vine? You are qvenchink ze tirst off a scountrel.’
‘Oh, father!’ said David.
‘I came to find out if you needed anything,’ said the vine-grower, almost sober by now.
‘And it iss for our sakes zat you haf brought a little latter?’ said Kolb, clearing the way to the door and opening it. The old man was in his shirt-sleeves and standing on a step-ladder.
‘You might break a limb!’ cried David.
‘I think I must be a sleep-walker,’ said the shamefaced old man as he climbed down. ‘The way you don’t trust your father gave me bad dreams. I dreamt you were in league with the devil to do something that just can’t be done.’
‘Ze only tefil here iss your lof for little colt coinss,’ said Kolb.
‘Father, go back to bed,’ said David. ‘Shut us in if you like, but don’t bother to come back. Kolb will be on guard.’
> At four o’clock David came out of the distilling-room after clearing away all traces of his operation and brought his father about thirty sheets of paper whose fineness, whiteness, consistency and strength left nothing to be desired and had as its water-mark the stronger and weaker threads of the hair-sieve. The old man took these samples and put his tongue to them like any old ‘bear’ accustomed since youth to use his palate as a test of paper. He felt them in his hands, crumpled them, folded them and tried out all the tests which typographers make on paper in order to assess its quality. Although he could find no fault, he was reluctant to admit defeat.
‘We must see how it stands up to the presses!’ he said, in order to avoid praising his son.
‘Vat a schtranche man!’ cried Kolb.
The vine-grower, now chilled down, made a pretence of hesitancy and covered it with a show of paternal dignity.
‘I don’t want to deceive you, father. I think that this paper is still likely to cost too dear, and I want to solve the problem of sizing it in the vat. That’s the only improvement I still have to make.’
‘Ho! Ho! You’re trying to take me in!’
‘However… can I tell you this much? I can certainly do the sizing in the vat, but so far the size doesn’t mix evenly with the pulp and makes the paper as rough as a brush.’
‘Very well, perfect your process of sizing in the vat and you shall have my money.’
‘My master vill nefer see ze colour of your money!’ said Kolb. It was evident that the old man wanted to pay David out for the humiliation he had suffered the previous night. His attitude grew even colder.
‘Father,’ said David after sending Kolb away. ‘I have never borne a grudge against you for having put an exorbitant price on your printing-office and making me buy it on your own valuation. I have always remembered you were my father. I have said to myself: let an old man who has toiled hard and brought me up better than I had a right to expect enjoy the fruits of his labour in peace and in the way he likes. I even surrendered my mother’s estate to you and uncomplainingly accepted the debt-encumbered existence to which you reduced me. I promised myself I would make a fine fortune without being a burden to you. Well, I have been through fire and water to make my discovery and have made it, deprived of my daily bread and tortured with debts which I had not myself incurred. Yes, I have struggled on patiently until my strength was exhausted. You ought perhaps to come to my help… But don’t bother about me. Think of my wife and the little child!…’ (At this point David could not hold back his tears) ‘and give them aid and protection. Will you be less generous than Marion and Kolb who have given me their savings?’ As he made this appeal he saw that his father was as cold as one of his imposing-stones.
‘And you want more still?’ the old man exclaimed without feeling the slightest shame. ‘Why, you’d swallow up the whole of France… Nothing doing! I’m too ignorant to dabble in inventions. All the dabbling would be done on me. The “monkey” shan’t eat up the “bear”,’ he said, reverting to printing-office slang. ‘I’m a vine-grower, not a banker. And besides, mark my words, no good can come of father and son doing business together. Let’s have dinner – you shan’t say I don’t give you anything at all!…’
David was one of those men of intense feeling who thrust their sufferings deep down and hide them from those who are dear to them, so that when grief overflows, as his did now, they have reached the limit of endurance. Eve had well understood this trait in her husband’s fine character. But his father only looked on this flood of grief welling up from David’s heart as the commonplace wailings of a child trying to get his own way with his parents: he attributed his son’s extreme dejection to the shame born of failure. When they parted, father and son were at loggerheads.
David and Kolb were back about midnight in Angoulême which they entered on foot as warily as thieves bent on burglary. At about one in the morning David slipped unobserved into Mademoiselle Basine Clerget’s house, the inviolable sanctuary his wife had prepared for him. Once inside, David was to be guarded by the most resourceful kind of compassion, that of a working-class girl. The next morning Kolb boasted that he had helped his master to escape on horseback and had only left him after seeing him into a public vehicle which was to take him to the environs of Limoges.
A considerable amount of raw material was stored in Basine’s cellar, so that Kolb, Marion, Madame Séchard and her mother need have no open contact with Mademoiselle Clerget.
18. The pack pauses before the kill
TWO days after the scene with his son, old Séchard, who had three weeks to wait before he could begin harvesting his grapes, came bustling to see his daughter-in-law, under the spur of avarice. He could not sleep, so anxious was he to find out if there was any chance of a fortune in David’s invention. He intended to keep a weather-eye open, to quote his expression. He installed himself on the floor above his daughter-in-law’s apartments in one of the little attic rooms he had reserved for his own use, and he lived there with his eyes shut to the penury from which his son’s household was suffering. They owed him rent and the least they could do was to feed him! He saw nothing strange in having his meals served on tin-plate, ‘That’s how I started,’ he answered his daughter-in-law when she apologized for not being able to serve him on silver.
Marion was forced to pledge her credit to the shopkeepers for every commodity the household consumed. Kolb took work with masons for a franc a day. The time soon came when only ten francs remained to the unhappy Eve who, in David’s interests and those of her child, was sacrificing her last resources so as to give a good welcome to the vine-grower. She still hoped that her endearing ways, respectful affection and resignation would touch the miser’s heart, but she found him always unmoved. In the end, seeing the same coldness in his eyes as in those of the Cointets, Petit-Claud and Cérizet, she tried to observe his character and divine his intentions: labour in vain! Old Séchard made himself unfathomable by maintaining a state of semi-intoxication. Drunkenness is a veil of double thickness. Under cover of tipsiness, as often shammed as real, the wretched man tried to worm David’s secret out of Eve. At one moment he would wheedle and at another intimidate her. When Eve replied that she knew nothing, he said: ‘I’ll buy an annuity and drink all my money.’ These degrading altercations wearied his poor victim and in the end, in order not to show disrespect to her father-in-law, she gave up talking to him. But one day, driven to extremities, she said: ‘Anyway, father, there’s a simple way of getting all you want. Pay David’s debt, he’ll return home, and you can come to an agreement.’
‘Ah! So that’s all you want of me,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s as well I know that.’
Old Séchard had no faith in his son, but he believed in the Cointets. He went to consult them, and they set out to dazzle him with the prospect of millions of francs to be made out of his son’s researches.
‘If David can prove that he has succeeded,’ said tall Cointet, ‘I’ll not hesitate to turn my paper-factory into a company and go in fifty-fifty with him for his invention.’
The distrustful old man gleaned so much information when taking glasses of cognac with the journeymen-printers, he so effectively sounded Petit-Claud while playing the imbecile that in the end he came to suspect the Cointets of hiding behind Métivier. He credited them with the plan of ruining the Séchard press and getting him to pay the debt by dangling the invention before him as a bait, for as a simple working-class man he was unable to guess at Petit-Claud’s complicity or the plot they were hatching to possess themselves sooner or later of this splendid industrial secret. At last the old man, exasperated at his failure to make his daughter-in-law talk or even to find out from her where David was hiding, decided one day to break open the door of the work-shop in which the rollers were cast, having now discovered that it was there that David had been conducting his experiments. He came downstairs early one morning and started tampering with the lock.
‘Hey! Papa Séchard, what are you up to?’ shou
ted Marion who had got up at dawn to go to the factory where she was working. She made one leap to the damping-shed.
‘I’m at home here, am I not?’ the old man said shamefacedly.
‘Come off it! Are you taking to burglary in your old age?… And yet you’re still sober… I’m going to tell the mistress about it straight away.’
‘Don’t say anything, Marion,’ the old man begged her, pulling two six-franc pieces out of his pocket. ‘Here…’
‘I’ll say nothing, but don’t try that on again!’ said Marion, wagging a finger at him, ‘or I’ll tell all Angoulême about it.’
As soon as the old man had gone out, Marion went upstairs to her mistress. ‘Look, Madame, I’ve squeezed twelve francs out of your father-in-law.’
‘How did you manage that?’
‘Would you believe it? He was trying to take a peep at Monsieur’s pans and supplies, hoping to find out the secret. Oh, I knew there was nothing left in the little kitchen, but I pretended to think he was going to rob his son. That scared him, and he gave me twelve francs to keep quiet.’
Just then Basine joyfully brought her friend a letter from David and handed it to her in private. It was written on magnificent paper.
My beloved Eve,
My first letter written on the first sheet of paper my process has produced is for you. I have succeeded in solving the problem of sizing in the vat! One pound of pulp costs twenty-five centimes, even supposing that the produce I use has to be grown on good land. So a twelve-pound ream of paper will use up three francs’ worth of sized pulp. I am sure of reducing the weight of books by one-half. The envelope, the letter itself and the samples enclosed were made separately.
All my love. Much-needed wealth will come our way and bring us happiness.
‘Look at these,’ said Eve, handing the samples to her father-in-law. ‘Give your son the price you get for your vintage and let him make his fortune. He’ll repay you ten times over. He has reached success!’
Lost Illusions Page 65
