‘Get married if you want to, son. That’s your affair, but if you want my opinion …’
A girl from the other side of the bridges, a girl so to speak without a family and in very poor health, a girl who, when she was with her sisters, spoke a language nobody could understand.
‘Valérie’s late,’ sighed Élise, looking at the clock. ‘You can go, Désiré. You mustn’t be late. I shall be quite all right waiting by myself.’
He had put on the coarse blue uniform of the civic guard and buckled his belt. Out of a white cardboard box he had taken his peculiar cap in the shape of a top hat surmounted by a reddish-brown cock’s feather, and after putting it on he climbed on to a chair—the old chair, the one on to which they always climbed—to get his Mauser rifle from the top of the wardrobe. Although the rifle was not loaded, Élise was afraid of it.
‘Go on! I tell you I shall be all right on my own…’
He waited, standing by the window which had taken on the bluey-green whiteness of winter clouds. The shutters over the shop windows remained closed. Now and then some black silhouettes slipped past the house fronts, but very few, for people were taking advantage of the fact that it was Sunday to stay in bed.
‘It’s Valérie! Off you go! You’re late.’
He kissed her and his moustache smelled of shaving-soap. He did not dare to touch the baby’s soft skin with his spiky whiskers.
‘Have I kept you waiting, Désiré?’
‘Look, Valérie. He absolutely insisted on doing the housework and washing the nappies.’
Désiré had scarcely started going downstairs when Élise got half out of bed and bent over the cradle.
‘Come and look, Valérie. Feel him. Don’t you think he’s too hot?’
‘Of course not, you silly!’
Everything seemed to be in order in the flat and yet Élise’s gaze discovered something wrong.
‘Valérie, put the wedge back in place, will you?’
It was a piece of wood a few inches long which had been slipped under one foot of the wardrobe to keep it steady, and which was knocked out of place every time the flat was spring-cleaned. A man, even Désiré, would never notice a little thing like that.
It did not matter that the streets were empty, with icy winds sweeping them from end to end, squalls of rain, and that deserted, useless look of a winter afternoon, Désiré still had the feeling that as he walked along he was being accompanied by a band which only he could hear and with which his regular stride was keeping time. Under his moustache, his thick lips were parted in a vague smile which expressed nothing but an inner satisfaction. He crossed the Meuse, came in sight of the Place Ernest-de-Bavière soon afterwards, with its terreplein of powdered brick, and went towards some groups of civic guards.
‘It’s a boy!’ he announced, making no attempt to conceal his joy.
He was happy to be chaffed, happy about everything, happy about the handshake which his captain, the little architect Snyers, thought fit to give him on this occasion before the morning’s drill. The square and not particularly handsome church-tower which could be seen a hundred yards away was that of Saint-Nicolas, the church of his parish, the parish where he had been born, where he had always lived, and the narrow street which ran into the square was his street, the Rue Puits-en-Sock, where his family still lived.
‘Shoulder arrrrms!’
Désiré was too tall, or the others too short. He tried his hardest. He saw nothing ridiculous in playing soldiers with these men, nearly all of whom he knew in everyday life, family men, clerks, workers, and local shopkeepers.
‘Stand at ease!’
In the Rue Léopold, Valérie was peeling vegetables and glancing every now and then at the fire.
‘Valérie, do you think I’ll be able to feed him?’
‘Why shouldn’t you be able to feed him?’
‘I don’t know.’
Wasn’t she the thirteenth child? Hadn’t she always heard people say … She knew that there had been a misfortune in the family, not simply bankruptcy but something shameful: her father, towards the end at least, had taken to drink and he had died of a cancer of the tongue.
Élise’s brothers and sisters had never regarded her as a normal person. A little thirteenth child whom nobody had expected, and who had turned up to complicate everything.
Louisa, the eldest, had been the only one to call the day before, and she had come empty handed. Désiré’s brothers and sisters, and mere acquaintances had all brought a present, even if it was just a bunch of grapes.
‘I prefer to give him a really good present for his First Communion,’ Louisa, whose hair was prematurely grey, had said. ‘I knew you’d have plenty of everything. As for all these things’—she was referring to the bibs, the silver spoons, the oranges and cakes—‘you never know what to do with them and they just get lost.’
‘Yes, Louisa.’
And yet Louisa was a prosperous shopkeeper at Coronmeuse.
She had stayed there half an hour, watching and shaking her head—and indeed, she must have found fault with everything. She could not stand Désiré.
‘Dr. Van der Donck promised to look in today,’ sighed Élise. ‘I’m glad he’s coming. The baby still seems too hot to me.’
‘Don’t think about that any more, silly. Look, try and read the paper to take your mind off it.’
‘What a lot of trouble I’m giving you! If I hadn’t had you to help me … Poor Valérie!’
Valérie who was always bustling around, a tiny little thing with her round head adorned with a big bun, and who did her best to help everybody! She lived with her mother and her sister at the top of the Rue Haute-Sauvenière. The three of them occupied a two-room flat, an old-maids’ flat full of shadows and warmth. Marie, the elder sister, was a dressmaker and worked by the day in one of the richest houses in the town. Valérie was at L’Innovation. Her mother, Madame Smet, who had nothing to do but look after their doll’s house, used to come and meet her after work, with a peculiar old woman’s hat on her head, the face of a Dresden doll, and mittens from which blotchy pink fingers poked out.
‘Don’t forget the sugar in the carrots, Valérie. Désiré can’t eat carrots without sugar.’
Élise did not know what to do with herself. It was the first time in her life that she had been immobilized in her bed, forced to feel useless. She was incapable of reading the newspaper Valérie had handed her, but she glanced automatically at the front page and suddenly felt surrounded by an oppressive silence.
She said nothing. She could not say anything, even to Valérie, for all that she confided everything to her, including things she would never talk about to Désiré.
On the front page of the paper there was a photograph of a pale young man with taut features, and she was sure that she recognized it, she was sure that it was this mysterious face that she had glimpsed with Léopold in the passage where she had gone to fasten her suspender.
THE ANARCHIST OF THE PLACE SAINT-LAMBERT
She had known all morning that there was something unpleasant in the air. She did not dare to cry in front of Valérie who would not understand. What on earth had Léopold been up to?
… Yesterday, as the result of a thorough investigation, the police succeeded in identifying the person responsible for the incident in the Place Saint-Lambert. He is a certain Félix Marette, of the Rue de Laveu, whose father is one of our best-known and most highly respected policemen. Every effort is being made to trace Félix Marette, who is on the run …
‘The poor things,’ sighed Valérie, seeing that Élise was looking at the paper. ‘It seems that they had no idea, that they made tremendous sacrifices to send their son to school. And when his father heard about it he said: “I’d rather see my son dead.” ’
But what about Léopold? What had Léopold, who was a full-grown man, been doing plotting with that boy in a dark passage?
There, now! The stove went boom, some ashes fell into the tray, the onions started browni
ng, and the baby turned over in his cradle.
‘Valérie, don’t you think it’s time to change him?’
Léopold, the eldest of the Peters children, had known the family in its hey-day. He had been at the University, and he had gone hunting with young men of the nobility, with armament manufacturers and notabilities.
And then, all of a sudden, he had decided that he wanted to be a soldier. At that time the only men in the army were those who had drawn an unlucky number in the conscription lottery, and Léopold, when he was twenty, had drawn a lucky number. But people had the right to sell themselves, to take the place of somebody who had been unlucky in the draw.
That was what he had done. He had donned the close-fitting uniform of the lancers. The army still employed canteen girls at that time, and the one attached to his regiment, a certain Eugénie, who had Spanish blood in her veins like the empress whose name she bore, was a magnificent specimen of womanhood.
Léopold had married her. At the same time he had cut himself off from the whole world. Somebody had seen him working as a waiter at Spa, where Eugénie had spent a season as a cook.
‘Mind the pins, Valérie. I’m terrified of pins! I always think of a baby in the Rue Hors-Château who … Somebody’s coming upstairs … There’s somebody knocking at the door, Valérie! …’
It was Félicie—and Élise’s eyes filled with tears, she could not say why—a furtive Félicie who announced straight away:
‘I managed to get away. I simply had to come and give him a kiss.’
Félicie put some parcels on the table, a bottle of port she had taken from the bar, a breakfast-set in floral porcelain, and a purse full of money.
‘No, Félicie, no money! You know perfectly well that Désiré…’
Already they were speaking Flemish, instinctively, as they did whenever they managed to meet. Félicie was only a few years older than Élise. She had been a shop-assistant like her sister. She had married Coustou, who kept the Café du Marché near the Pont des Arches; he was so jealous that he never let her go out and forbade her to entertain any of her relatives. The two women could see each other only in secret.
Valérie came and went, without understanding anything of the two sisters’ effusions. Élise could at last weep freely.
‘Aren’t you happy?’
‘Of course, my poor little Félicie.’
Félicie’s breath smelled of port. Yet before her marriage she had not been in the habit of drinking. During an attack of anaemia, the doctor had recommended stout and she had grown accustomed to it. In her café, on the Quai de la Goffe, she had too many opportunities, with bottles within easy reach from morning to night.
Élise went on crying, for no particular reason, for all sorts of reasons, because the baby was hot, because she was afraid she would not be able to feed him, because the sky was gloomy and overcast.
‘You haven’t seen Léopold lately?’
‘No. Have you?’
Élise lied. She said no.
‘I must dash. If Coustou noticed I’d gone out …’
For all that Désiré had crossed the bridges, on account of the flat they had found in the town, he had never missed Mass on Sunday at Saint-Nicholas. Even on civic guard Sundays, he left his companions just when, having finished the morning’s drill, they made for a little café nearby. He left his rifle with the sacristan who ran a little shop which sold candles and sweets. He arrived just in time for the eleven o’clock Mass, and, with his regular, elastic stride, and with a discreet nod to the people he knew—and he knew everybody—he went and took his place in his pew, the Mamelins’ pew, the last in the row and the best, the only one with a high back of solid wood which stopped the inevitable draught every time the padded door opened.
His inner band-music merged with the voice of the organ. He remained standing, very erect, too tall to kneel down in such a narrow space. Without a word, he shook hands with his neighbours and, throughout the Mass, he gazed steadily at the high altar with the choir-boys gravitating round it.
The Mamelins’ pew was the pew of the Brotherhood of St. Roch, whose statue could be seen on the first pillar, with the green mantle edged with gold, the bleeding knee and the faithful hound.
‘For … ood … ain … och … ease …’
For good St. Roch, please!
At the early Masses, it was Chrétien Mamelin, with his long white moustache and his only very slightly bent shoulders, who went from pew to pew, shaking the wooden bowl attached to a long handle so as to jingle the money in it; and every time a coin dropped into it one could hear in a minor key:
‘… ay … od … ayou …’
May God repay you!
After which, returning to his pew, old Mamelin slipped the coins one after another into the slot made specially for the purpose.
The Elevation … The Communion … Désiré’s lips moved beneath his moustache and his steady gaze remained fixed on the tabernacle.
‘Ite missa est …’
The organ … The sound of the crowd stamping across the great blue flagstones, and the rain outside, the pale daylight, the wind blowing from the Place de Bavière …
Going along a poor little alley-way, an alley-way dating back to the days of the beggars, where the children played practically naked and the dirty water ran between your feet, he came to the Rue Puits-en-Sock, the shopping street in which every house displayed a sign: a huge pair of cutler’s scissors, a pale clock, a monumental civet, and finally, over the Mamelins’ hat-shop, a top-hat painted bright red.
Désiré, who had recovered his rifle, went down the narrow, perpetually damp passage leading into the Mamelin house and crossed the yard. The kitchen was at the far side, with a whole wall of glass which had been made opaque with fake stained glass. He knew that a tiny patch of this colouring had been scratched away, that his mother was looking through this hole, and that she was announcing:
‘It’s Désiré.’
It was his hour. He recognized the smell of the stewed beef and that of the oilcloth covering the long table at which thirteen children had sat in their time.
‘Good morning, Mother.’
‘Good morning, son.’
‘Good morning, Lucien. Good morning, Marcel.’
Steam. His mother always standing, always dressed in slate-grey, with a grey complexion and steel-grey hair.
He sat down. He let the warmth seep into him, and the smells too, without feeling the need to say anything.
‘Is Élise all right?’
‘She’s all right.’
‘And the child?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell your wife that I’ll be coming to see her soon.’
All the Mamelins came like this to sit for a moment in the kitchen in the Rue Puits-en-Sock. In an armchair at the far end of the room, Old Papa, their mother’s father, sat motionless. In the half-light one could just make out a monstrous carcass, a real bear’s carcass, whose arms seemed to reach right down to the floor, and a beardless face with a stone-grey complexion, empty eyes and disproportionately large ears.
He recognized each visitor by his footsteps. Each one implanted a light kiss on a cheek as rough as sandpaper. He never spoke. At Mass time he told his beads in silence. His skin, the skin of a sometime miner, was spangled with blue dots, like encrusted fragments of coal.
Four-pound loaves, baked the day before, stood waiting for the whole family, for all the married offspring. Each one, every Sunday, came to collect his share.
‘Is Juliette keeping well?’
‘She was here just now.’
‘And Françoise?’
Here the rain, falling on a zinc platform which covered the kitchen, made a noise which was so to speak a Mamelin noise. The smells were different from those in other places. The steam went on forming dirty drops which trickled down the oil-painted walls.
When it was ten to twelve, Désiré stood up, picked up his loaves and his rifle, and went off.
He did not feel
embarrassed at carrying loaves of bread when he was in uniform, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Any more than at putting a check apron over his suit to do the housework. He walked as in an apotheosis along the narrow pavements of the Rue Puits-en-Sock with the trams passing dangerously close. Each shop exhaled its special breath at him: the chip-shop, the tobacconist’s, the cake-shop, the dairy-shop … Heavens, he had nearly forgotten! It was Sunday! He went into Bonmersonne’s to buy two tarts, an apple tart—Élise liked nothing but fruit tarts—and a rice tart for himself, since he loved sweet things.
He crossed the Pont des Arches. The Rue Léopold was dead. It came to life only during the week, like all the streets in the centre, but you could never recognize anybody, because the people you saw came from far away, from anywhere and everywhere, and only passed through, whereas the Rue Puits-en-Sock, for instance, was the vital centre of a district.
He walked carefully past the door on the first floor. The Delobels were always complaining about the noise and went to see the Cessions at the slightest excuse.
‘Is dinner ready?’
He sniffed, smiled, clambered on to the rickety chair to put his rifle back in place.
‘Well, Valérie?’
He turned to Élise.
‘Have you been crying?’
She shook her head.
‘Has she been crying, Valérie?’
‘No, Désiré, you mustn’t worry about it. You know she can’t help it.’
He knew, but he did not understand. That was why Élise had said earlier to Valérie:
‘You know, Désiré is the best of men, but he doesn’t feel things as we do.’
What did he feel? He lived. He ate. He slept. He had a good job. Starting as the youngest at Monsieur Monnoyeur’s, he had become his right-hand man and it was he who held the key to the safe.
What did it matter if he earned only 150 francs a month? Had they ever gone hungry? Well then!
‘Eat up, Désiré.’
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