‘Cash-desk!’
The old lady had been served. Valérie came running up.
‘You think it’s due today?’
They whispered as if they were in the confessional, darting anxious glances at the central cash-desk and the inspectors in their tail-coats.
‘Désiré?’
‘He’s at the office…I didn’t dare send word to him…’
‘Wait a minute…I’ll ask Monsieur Wilhems…’
It seemed to Élise that this was taking an eternity, and yet she was not in pain; she felt nothing but a vague discomfort all over her body. Two years earlier, when they used to leave the shop arm-in-arm, she and Valérie, they invariably ran into a big, shy lad with a pointed beard and severe-looking clothes.
Valérie was always the more excited of the two.
‘I’m sure it’s you he comes for.’
He was very tall, about six foot, and they were each as little as the other. How had Valérie found out who he was?
‘His name is Désiré … Désiré Mamelin … He’s a clerk in Monsieur Monnoyeur’s insurance office in the Rue des Guillemins…’
Now Valérie was explaining, explaining; Monsieur Wilhems glanced at his sometime shop-assistant and nodded.
‘Wait for me a minute … I’m just going for my hat and coat.’
A noise outside, as if two trams had collided …
‘Dear God,’ sighed Élise.
Three times in two months there had been tram accidents under her windows in the Rue Léopold. Only a few customers near the doors rushed out to see what had happened. The shop-assistants stayed in their places. A few shrill cries could be heard, then a dull murmur. Monsieur Wilhems had not so much as moved one elbow on the polished oak of the main cash-desk, and one finger was stroking his silvery moustache.
People were running past outside, in front of the screen formed by the shop windows. Valérie reappeared.
‘Did you hear?’
‘An accident…’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes, of course, Valérie…I’m sorry to have bothered you. What did he say?’
‘He’ was the omnipotent Monsieur Wilhems.
‘Come along…lean on my arm …’
‘I assure you I’m still capable of walking by myself…’
The doors opened noiselessly and they went out into the damp cold where they heard a sort of stampeding noise and saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people making for the nearby Grand Bazaar. Already there were lines of trams immobilized one behind another.
‘Come along, Élise. We’ll go along the Rue Gérardrie.’
But Élise was pushing up behind the crowd and lifting herself up on tiptoe.
‘Look…’
‘Yes…’
In front of the Grand Bazaar in the Place Saint-Lambert there was a monumental glass canopy covering the whole pavement. Now, over a distance of ten yards or more, the panes were broken, the ironwork was twisted, the lamps were out.
‘What is it, Monsieur?’ Élise asked the nearest man, in a humble voice.
‘How should I know? … I know as much as you do…’
‘Come along, Élise …’
Some policemen came running up and tried to push their way through the crowd. Behind them could be heard, first a fire-engine, then an ambulance.
‘Move along!…Move along, now!’
‘The window, Valérie…’
Two of the Bazaar’s windows were like big dark holes, and there was nothing left but a few stalactites of glass.
‘What has happened?’
The policeman she asked this time was in a hurry and did not reply. An old gentleman smoking a cigar and pushing irresistibly forward answered without looking at her:
‘A bomb…The anarchists again…’
‘Élise, please…’
Élise allowed herself to be dragged away. She had forgotten her giddiness, which had suddenly been replaced by an exceptional nervousness. She would have liked to cry, but could not manage to do so. Valérie opened her umbrella, pressed up against her, and steered her towards the Rue Gérardrie.
‘We’ll go and see the midwife…’
‘Let’s hope she’s in …’
The streets all around were deserted. Everybody had rushed over to the Place Saint-Lambert and the shopkeepers, standing on their doorsteps, were questioning passers-by.
‘On the second floor, yes.’
A visiting-card bearing the midwife’s name recommended ringing the bell three times. They rang. A curtain moved.
‘She’s in.’
The gas went on in the corridor. A fat woman tried to make out the features of her visitors in the darkness outside.
‘Oh, it’s you… You think so?…All right…Go back home, in any case…I’ll come along after you … On the way I’ll tell Dr. Van der Donck to stand by in case he’s needed…’
‘Valérie! Look…’
Some gendarmes on horseback came riding along at a trot on their way towards the Place Saint-Lambert…
‘Don’t think about that any more… Come along…’
And as they were going past Hosay’s, Valérie pushed Élise into the shop.
‘Eat something, it’ll do you good. You’re trembling all over.’
‘You think I ought to?’
Valérie chose a cake and, somewhat embarrassed, asked for a glass of port. She thought it incumbent upon her to explain:
‘It’s for my friend, who…’
‘Dear God, Valérie!’
At six o’clock Désiré left his office in the Rue des Guillemins and set off with his long, regular stride.
‘He has such a fine way of walking!’
He did not turn round, did not stop to look at the shop windows. He walked along, smoking his cigarette, looking straight ahead; he walked along as if a military band were accompanying him. His itinerary never varied. He always arrived at the same time, to a minute, in front of the pneumatic clocks, and at precisely the same spot he lit his second cigarette.
He knew nothing of what had happened in the Place Saint-Lambert, and he was surprised to see four trams following one another. Probably there had been an accident…
At twenty-five, he had never known any other woman but Élise. Before he met her, he used to spend his evenings in a church club. He was the prompter in the dramatic society.
Walking along, he came to the Rue Léopold by way of the Rue de la Cathédrale, went into the passage on the ground floor, looked up, and saw wet patches on the steps, as if several people had gone that way.
Then he rushed upstairs. When he got to the first floor, he could hear a murmur of voices. The door opened before he touched the handle. Valérie’s frightened little face appeared, a round face with the hair and eyelashes of a Japanese doll and two red spots on the cheekbones.
‘It’s you, Désiré … Hush … Élise…’
He wanted to go in. He went into the kitchen but the midwife stopped him.
‘Whatever happens, I’m having no men in here … Go and wait outside… We’ll call you when you can come in …’
And he heard Élise sighing in the bedroom:
‘Dear God, Madame Béguin, it’s Désiré already! … Where is he going to eat?’
‘What! You haven’t gone yet? … I tell you we’ll call you … Look … I’ll wave the lamp at the window…’
He did not notice that he had left his hat on a corner of the untidy table. His long black overcoat buttoned up almost to the collar and gave him a solemn look. He had the little brown beard of a musketeer.
Now the street was empty, with just a thin drizzle to give it a touch of life. The shop-windows had disappeared one after another behind their iron curtains. The men with frozen noses who distributed coloured prospectuses at the doors of the dress shops had vanished into the darkness. The trams were rarer and made more din; the monotonous noise that could be distinguished in the background was that of the muddy waves of the Meuse breaking against the p
iers of the Pont des Arches.
In the narrow streets all around, there were plenty of little cafés with frosted-glass windows and cream curtains, but Désiré never set foot in a café except on Sunday morning, at eleven o’clock, and then always at the Renaissance.
He was already scanning the windows inquiringly. He did not think about eating. He kept taking his watch out of his pocket and now and then he would start talking to himself.
At ten o’clock, he was the only person left on the pavement. He had scarcely so much as frowned on seeing some gendarmes’ helmets over in the direction of the Place Saint-Lambert.
Twice he had climbed the stairs, and strained his ears to catch some noise; twice he had fled, frightened, sick at heart.
‘Excuse me …’
The policeman at the corner of the street, standing underneath a big dummy clock with its hands fixed, had nothing to do.
‘Could you tell me the right time?’
Then with a strained, apologetic smile:
‘Time seems to go so slowly when one’s waiting … when one’s waiting for such an important event… You see, my wife …’
He smiled without quite managing to conceal his pride.
‘… Any moment now, we are going to have a child…’
He explained. He felt the need to explain. That they had seen Dr. Van der Donck, the leading specialist. That it was he who had given them the midwife’s name. That he had told them: ‘She is the one I would choose for my own wife.’
‘You understand… If a man like Dr. Van der Donck…’
Sometimes somebody would go past, keeping close to the houses, with his coat collar turned up, and his footsteps would go on echoing for a long time through the maze of streets. Under each lamp-post, every fifty yards or so, a patch of fog and rain made a circle of yellow light.
‘What are they doing over there?’
There was a lot of coming and going over in the Place Saint-Lambert. Policemen’s capes could be seen passing by. A horse-guard had galloped past.
‘The anarchists…’
‘What have they done?’
Désiré asked the question politely, but had he so much as understood?
‘They’ve thrown a bomb at the shop windows of the Grand Bazaar.’
‘With the children that come later, I suppose you feel used to it… But with the first … Especially seeing that my wife isn’t very strong … and rather nervy…’
Désiré still had not noticed that he was bare-headed. He was wearing round celluloid sleeves which fell over his hands with every movement. He had just finished his packet of cigarettes and he would have to go too far to buy another.
‘If that woman forgot to wave the lamp…She’s got so much to do!…’
At midnight, the policeman himself apologized and went off. There was no longer a soul to be seen in the street, no more trams, nothing but distant footsteps, doors shutting, bolts being pushed home.
At last, the lamp…
It was exactly ten minutes past midnight. Désiré rushed forward like a madman. His long legs threshed through space.
‘Élise…’
‘Hush!…Not so loud…’
Then he burst into tears. He no longer knew what he was doing, nor what he was saying, nor that some women were looking at him. He did not dare touch the child who was all red. The insipid smell in the flat upset him. Valérie went to empty a bucket on the entresol.
Élise, between the sheets which had just been put on the bed, the sheets she had embroidered specially for the occasion, smiled weakly.
‘It’s a boy,’ she stammered. As for him, with a complete lack of self-restraint, he said, crying all the while:
‘I shall never, never forget that you have just given me the greatest joy a woman can give a man…’
‘Désiré … Listen … What time is it?’
The child had been born at ten past twelve. Élise whispered:
‘Listen, Désiré … He’s come into the world on a Friday the thirteenth … Nobody must know … You must beg that woman …’
And that was why, the next morning, when Désiré, accompanied by his brother Arthur as a witness, went to register the child’s birth at the Town Hall, he told the clerk, with an innocent expression:
‘Roger Mamelin, born at Liége, at No. 18, Rue Léopold, on Thursday 12 February 1903.’
He added automatically:
‘Over Cession’s.’
CHAPTER TWO
WHY shouldn’t it be a guardian spirit? Why was it always at the same moment that it revealed its presence and seemed to bid them good day? Most mornings, Élise bustled backwards and forwards, but today she lay motionless in the warmth of the bed, her shoulders propped up against her pillow and Désiré’s. In the cradle, the child, who had just been fed, was breathing with a slight whistling sound. Élise was wearing her morose expression, not sad, but morose, a half-smile, partly shame, partly pity, because it was not a man’s work that Désiré was forcing himself to do just then.
The fire had not been alight for long in the stove. Its heat could be felt emerging in little waves into the cold of the morning; if you looked hard, you could even see a battle raging: the waves of warm, then hot air emanating from the stove collided, just beyond the table, with a belt of icy air which, all night long, had hung in front of the black panes of glass of the windows. A fire in the morning, especially very early in the morning, when you get up at an unaccustomed hour, does not smell the same as at other times of the day; it does not make the same noise either. The flames are brighter too, as Élise had often noticed.
And now, all of a sudden, it was as if the japanned iron had become distended, as if a guardian spirit inside had awoken and expanded to explode with a joyful ‘boom’.
Every morning this happened. And every morning there was a thin rain of pink ash, followed shortly afterwards by the singing of the water in the kettle.
It was barely six o’clock. Out in the street they had heard only one person’s footsteps, and that unknown passer-by had probably looked up inquiringly at the only lighted windows in the street. Through the window-panes nothing could be seen, not even the glow of the gas-lamps, but it was obviously pouring down, for a continuous gurgling could be heard going up and down the rain-spouts. Now and then there was a gust of wind, which showed itself by a sudden draught in the chimney and a shower of ashes falling in the tray at the bottom of the stove.
‘Dear God, Désiré …’
She had not dared to say: ‘Poor Désiré’. She was ashamed of lying there, motionless, in the bedroom, with the communicating door wide open. She was even more ashamed of the natural serenity, the glowing gaiety emanating from Désiré while he was doing the housework. Over his dark suit, he had tied a woman’s apron, a little cotton apron in a faded blue check, adorned with a flounce; not caring how ridiculous he looked, he had used some safety-pins to fasten the straps, which were too short, to his shoulders.
Now and then, holding a bucket in each hand, he went down to the entresol, so quietly that she could not hear him brushing past the wall, nor the metallic noise the bucket handle always made, and could only just make out the gentle flow of water from the tap.
He had decided to scrub the floor, for a lot of people had come the day before, and since it had been raining, they had left dirt all over the place. That Saturday had been a different day from all the rest, one of those days which leave only a confused memory: Valérie, who had asked for the day off, had not left Élise’s side; Maria Debeurre had come along during the lunch-hour, followed by Désiré’s sisters and his brother Arthur, a gay, boisterous fellow, who was forever cracking jokes, and who had insisted on offering a drink to the clerk at the Town Hall.
Madame Cession must have been furious about all this coming and going on the stairs, and the people on the first floor had kept their door firmly shut.
Everything was clean now. It was funny how men twisted dish-cloths the wrong way round, from the left to the right!
It was Sunday. That was why, while the hands of the alarm-clock went on moving, nothing could be heard outside but the timid summons of church bells ringing for the early Masses.
‘Leave it, Désiré … Valérie will see to it …’
But no! Désiré had heated some water. It was he who had washed the nappies and hung them to dry on the cord over the stove. He had remembered to cover the floor, which stayed wet a long time, with the faded floral chintz which she used to put down on Saturdays to keep it clean. He had thought of everything. For instance, following Élise’s example, he had slipped some old newspapers between the floorboards and the carpet so that the latter should not get wet.
Day dawned, but it was impossible to tell whether there was a thin drizzle falling or whether it was just fog that was filling the street. Big limpid drops were falling from the cornices. The first trams, with their lights still on, seemed to be drifting past.
‘When I think that I can’t even help you!’
They were so very much at home that morning! On the second floor of Cession’s, their flat seemed to be hanging in the air at the very end of the world. Désiré hummed to himself while he was shaving. Élise tried to banish her anxiety or sadness—she did not know quite what to call the feeling which stole over her whenever she was going to be unhappy.
When she had been a little girl and had not yet begun thinking about such things, disaster had struck at her family without warning. She had found herself practically on the streets, in deep mourning, with her mother and her sister Félicie, and her brothers and sisters scattered far and wide; and since then she had always had the impression that she was subject to a special fate, that she was not like other people. She was seized with sudden, irresistible urges to cry, and she had shed a great many tears, even during the first days of her marriage.
‘I’ve got so much into the habit of crying,’ she had tried to explain to Désiré at the time. ‘I just can’t help it.’
Wasn’t the child too red? He was breathing badly. She was sure that he was breathing badly, as if he were suffering from some obstruction, but she did not dare to say so. Soon her mother-in-law would be arriving and Élise was dreading this visit. Her mother-in-law did not like her.
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