There were a few yards between them; the distance increased, on account of Désiré’s great strides and Marette’s stupid hesitations.
‘Keep walking!’
Wasn’t it strange that, that particular morning, Élise should have thought about her brother? She went on thinking about him. The thought of him nagged at her mind, and she longed to talk about him to Madame Smet, who was sitting there smiling beatifically.
It was five minutes to nine when Désiré reached the corner of the Rue des Guillemins from which he could see the station clock, and three minutes to nine when he passed Monsieur Monnoyeur’s house. It was a big, gloomy house, built of freestone. The offices were a sort of annexe to this building and looked out on the Rue Sohet. The two buildings were separated by a garden.
Monsieur Monnoyeur was ill, had always been ill and sad like his mother with whom he lived and who, oddly enough, was the terror of the young ladies of L’Innovation, where she spent her afternoons.
Monsieur Monnoyeur had bought an insurance business in which to invest his money, so as not to look as if he did nothing to earn his living. Désiré was already in the business when he bought it.
Two big latticed windows looking out on to the peaceful Rue Sohet. A door studded with iron nails.
When Désiré pushed it open, at two minutes to nine, there was undoubtedly a dignity, a special satisfaction about him which made another man of him, a second Mamelin, just as real as the first and just as important, for life at the office occupied nine hours a day. It was no ordinary job, no mere means of earning a living, no unrewarding task.
Désiré had entered this office with the latticed windows at the age of seventeen, on the very day he had left school.
A partition shut off the section reserved for the public, a partition fitted with little windows as in a post office, and just crossing to the other side of this frontier gave him a feeling of satisfaction. Thick green-painted window-panes made it impossible to see the street and created an atmosphere of supernatural calm. Before even taking off his hat and coat, Désiré wound up the clock. He had a horror of clocks which had run down. He did his best to see that they never stopped.
He performed every one of his tasks with equal pleasure. When he washed his hands, in a slow, leisurely manner, in the handbasin behind the door, it was a positive joy to him.
It was another joy to take the cover off the typewriter with the double keyboard, and to change the position of rubber, pencils and papers.
Now the others could arrive.
First of all Daigne, the brother of Charles, the sacristan at Saint-Denis who had married one of Désiré’s sisters, Daigne who smelled so bad and did not take offence when people held their noses in front of him; then Ledent-the-Sad, Ledent who had three children and an ailing wife, looked after the whole family, never got enough sleep and was perpetually red-eyed; and finally Caresmel-the-Widower who had sent his two daughters to an Ursuline boarding-school and had a mistress.
‘Good morning, Monsieur Mamelin.’
‘Good morning, Monsieur Daigne … Good morning, Monsieur Ledent…’
For everybody at the office called each other Monsieur. Except for Mamelin and Caresmel who called each other by their names because they had started work within three days of one another.
This was the origin of the first reproaches Élise had addressed to her husband; it was to Caresmel that she referred when she spoke to Désiré about his lack of initiative.
‘It’s like when you had the choice between fire-insurance and life-insurance…’
Had Désiré really chosen the fire-insurance branch, as she asserted, because he was so attached to his little corner next to the window with the green panes?
It was possible. Yet he always denied it.
‘At that time, nobody could foresee the success of life-insurance.’
When Monsieur Monnoyeur had bought the business, Mamelin had been earning 150 francs a month, Caresmel only 140.
‘I’m not going to give you a rise, but I’ll give you a percentage on all the new business that passes through your hands. One of you will deal with the fire policies, the other with the life policies. As you are the senior of the two, Monsieur Mamelin, it’s for you to choose.’
He had chosen fire-insurance, a quiet business involving only very rare calls on clients. It was at that moment that life-insurance had started forging ahead.
To all appearances, nothing had changed. It was Désiré who, on the stroke of ten, went into Monsieur Monnoyeur’s office. It was he who had the key and the powers of attorney. It was he too who had the combination of the safe and locked it every evening.
Caresmel was just a clerk, a loud-mouthed, vulgar clerk. There were often mistakes in his accounts. He was frequently obliged to ask for advice. Only he made up to two hundred francs a month in commission, while Mamelin made scarcely fifty.
‘I can’t understand,’ Élise had protested, ‘why a man who is far less intelligent than you are should earn more than you do, in your own office.’
‘Good luck to him. Have we ever gone short of anything?’
‘It seems he even drinks.’
‘What he does outside the office is no concern of ours.’
And the word ‘office’, in Mamelin’s mind, had a capital letter. He loved his big ledgers, and his eyes sparkled when, with his lips quivering slightly and his finger running down the columns, he did a sum, faster than anybody else, as all his colleagues agreed. They recognized too that he had never made a mistake. That was not just idle talk. It was an act of faith.
‘Mamelin? He doesn’t need a ready-reckoner.’
After ten years of his trade, does a juggler still experience some pleasure at bringing off all his tricks, at catching all the balls in the top-hat balanced on his wooden cigar?
On the stroke of ten o’clcock, with that slightly familiar solemnity that sacristans display in the sanctuary, Désiré knocked on Monsieur Monnoyeur’s door and disappeared inside with the post which he had just finished sorting.
At the same time, the two painters in white smocks entered the Guillemins station, like workmen on their way to do a job in the suburbs, and Marette was so pale that anyone might have thought he was going to faint.
‘Two third-class tickets to Huy.’
‘Returns?’
‘Yes.’
Somewhere in the station there was a member of the secret police. The newspapers had said so. It was impossible to say whether it was this fat man walking up and down with his hands behind his back, or that gentleman with the attaché case who was gazing at the weighing-machine.
‘Will passengers for Angleur, Ougrée, Seraing, Huy, Sprimont, Andenne and Namur please take their seats.’
‘Start walking.’
During the quiet, leisurely hours of the morning, Valérie kept thinking about Élise who was so unlucky, who had an ailing child, and who was so upset because she had no milk.
‘I’m sorry to bother you again, Madame Smet. If it isn’t too much trouble for you … The fire!’
What a nightmare it was, that fire which might go out, and which the old lady would be incapable of lighting again! How had she managed to be married and raise children when she wasn’t even capable of keeping a fire alight?
The train moved off. The two workmen in smocks stood in the corridor and the passengers who pushed past them were afraid of getting paint on their clothes.
Désiré juggled with his figures. He was waiting for midday. He had set aside for himself every day an hour and a half of perfect happiness. This began on the stroke of noon, when the others went off like pigeons being released.
He stayed behind on his own, for the office remained open without a break from nine o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening. It was he who had asked for this duty which he could have delegated to somebody else.
Clients were few and far between. The office really belonged to him. He had some ground coffee in his pocket. He put some wate
r to heat on the stove, took a little enamel coffee-pot out of a cupboard as the watchman at Torset’s must do every night, and then, sitting in his corner, he opened a newspaper and slowly ate a sandwich while drinking his coffee.
By way of dessert, he tackled a difficult or delicate piece of work calling for peace and quiet.
In his shirtsleeves, with a cigarette between his lips, he felt really at home, and another rare joy awaited him at half past one.
Everybody else returned to work and he went off. Everybody else had had dinner and he was going to have his. His place was laid, his place only, at the end of the table, with dishes cooked just for him, well-done meat, carrots, peas and sweets.
His colleagues did not know this pleasure. They did not know how the town looked at three o’clock in the afternoon when everybody who worked for a living was shut up indoors.
Élise and Madame Smet watched him eat in silence. In spite of themselves, they looked at him rather as if he were a visitor from another world, and the joy he had breathed in while walking through the streets in the savoury air was foreign to them. It was like a cold draught which had disturbed the cosy calm of the flat.
It was not until Désiré had been gone for quite a while that the circle closed again, Élise resumed her morose smile and Madame Smet her interior reverie, and the slightest sound became audible once more while the two women waited patiently for the cooker’s inevitable ‘boom’.
He walked along. The sun was shining. But when it rained, the town looked just as delightful, and he had a way that was all his own of carrying his umbrella like a canopy. The three o’clock cigarette tasted good. Each cigarette had its special taste, the taste of a particular street, the taste of a particular time of day, of hunger or digestion, of the gay morning or the evening.
The slow train had stopped at Huy. The Cologne-Paris express was due to arrive. Léopold pulled his companion over to the lavatory.
‘Give me your smock.’
Because nobody had ever seen a worker in a smock get on an express. It was Léopold, with his jet-black beard, who looked like a ferocious anarchist, and Marette like a frightened child.
‘Hurry up.’
Such a child, and so frightened, that he felt a sudden need to relieve himself and disappeared behind one of the doors with a grating just as the train was entering the station.
‘Is that my train?’
‘Hurry up.’
Nobody, in this little station, was thinking about the anarchist of the Place Saint-Lambert. Léopold had bought a ticket for Paris and passed it to Marette.
‘You’ve got your wallet?’
They ran along the platform. They had no time either to shake hands or to say good-bye; the train moved off before Marette had finished buttoning his braces, and his thin, pale face disappeared into the tunnel at the first bend.
There was a train for Liége, but Léopold was thirsty. He had a drink at the station buffet. Then he crossed the square and went into a café. In a little while he would lumber out, looking for another door to push open, another café in which to sit down, and at six o’clock, after losing his buckets, his paint-pots and his brushes all over the place, he would take off his smock with a sigh of relief and beckon to the waiter, for want of the strength or the courage to speak.
‘The same again.’
Little grey-green glasses with thick bottoms, glasses of pale gin which he emptied at one gulp, repeating the same gesture:
‘Fill it up.’
Désiré locked the safe and mixed up the combination. He could have taken the tram as far as the Place Saint-Lambert. He could have walked part of the way with Daigne or Laurent. Instead, he set off alone, and this was another happy moment in his day, with the streets turning purple, the passers-by seemingly gliding along in a silent mist, the gas-lamps every few yards, the shop windows no longer attracting anybody’s attention and forming rectangles of soft light, and finally, alongside the Boulevard d’Avroy, the deserted park and the ducks lingering on the glistening water.
He decided to drop into Tonglet’s, in the Rue de la Cathédrale, opposite the church of Saint-Denis, to buy some liver pudding. Or some larded liver? He didn’t know yet. Some larded liver?
‘Give me a quarter … no, a quarter and a half of …’
Valérie was waiting for him to arrive before taking her mother home. She had not taken her coat off, had not even sat down.
‘It isn’t worth it, Élise! Désiré will be here in a minute.’
As if she were going to wear out one of the chairs; as if sitting down constituted a sort of invasion, of vulgarity, when she had simply dropped in to collect her mother.
Élise understood that.
Désiré did not understand.
And he came in, triumphantly, with a bit of the evening mist clinging to the mahogany bristles of his moustache.
‘Why don’t you stay and have supper with us, Valérie?’
‘No, Désiré, Marie’s waiting for us.’
‘Let her wait.’
‘Our supper’s ready.’
‘You can eat it tomorrow.’
What was the use of insisting? Didn’t he know that it was impossible, that it just wasn’t done, that the evening Élise had had the baby, Valérie had doggedly maintained that she wasn’t hungry?
Léopold was standing, rather unsteadily, in a square he did not know, looking for the way out, and it was a miracle that he remembered that there was a station, a train to catch.
Where was Eugénie, his wife? She had been to their flat the week before, one day when he had not been there, and she had left some food which she had doubtless taken from her employers’ home. But where was she working?
She would come back some day or other. He would find her there when he got home. She would say to him, in her funny accent, without losing her temper, in a matter-of-fact voice:
‘You’re drunk again, Léopold!’
She would have cleaned up the whole place, made the bed, and changed the sheets, which was something he never did. Perhaps it would be the next day, perhaps in a month’s time. Meanwhile, little Marette was in the train, squeezed up against the partition in a third-class compartment where the lamps had just been lit, and some country folk were offering him a piece of potted head.
‘Good-bye, Madame Smet! Good-bye, Valérie. And thank you, you know! Thank you! I feel ashamed to …’
They had gone. They walked very quietly across the first-floor landing, on account of the Delobels.
Arm in arm, like a couple of little dolls with outsize heads, they walked along past the shop windows on their way back to the flat where Marie was unpicking an old dress while she waited for them.
Désiré, with a sigh of pleasure, took off his jacket and his shoes, and put on his slippers, or rather his ecclesiastical shoes.
Conscious of having done a good day’s work, of having accomplished all that he had to accomplish, he exclaimed happily:
‘Let’s have our supper!’
And yet he was not too proud of himself, for he had seen from Élise’s eyes that she had noticed that he had bought a quarter and a half of larded liver instead of a quarter.
She did not dare to say anything and heaved an inward sigh.
CHAPTER FOUR
MILLIARDS upon milliards of creatures, over the whole surface of the world, in the air, in the water, everywhere, strive continually, second by second, with their every cell, towards an evolution they do not know, like those ants which carry across precipices burdens a hundred times bigger than themselves, trudge across mountains of sand or mud, and return a dozen times to the attack on an obstacle without ever diverging from their course.
Élise, on this particular day, a fine September Sunday, as ripe and golden as a fruit, Élise the thirteenth, Élise the anaemic, Élise who had found no other weapon for herself than her timid smile, so humble that it aroused pity, Élise who was always apologizing for being there, for existing, who was always begging pardon for causing off
ence, begging pardon for everything and nothing, who was almost ashamed of being on earth, Élise was about to wage her first battle.
Did she know this? Did she even guess, like the ant climbing an uneven slope and constantly dropping and picking up again the same grain of corn, did she guess the importance, the object of the battle she was about to wage, and did she realize that she was waging it, not only against Désiré-the-Smiler, Désiré-with-the-Fine-Walk, but against the Mamelins of the Rue Puits-en-Sock and, through them, against an entire species?
Did she already sense that she was stronger than they were, strong in her weeping eyes, in her pale, hollow cheeks, in her aching belly, in the iron prescribed for her anaemia, in her legs which kept giving way on the stairs, did she know, the little Fleming, the thirteenth-born of the Peters, what she wanted and where she was going?
She had been married for barely two years. She had always said yes to everything, but this particular Sunday, because it was necessary, because a strange force was impelling her, because she was a Peters and there were Mamelins in the world, because life was in command, she was going to fight, and fight with her own weapons.
Nobody knew this, except herself and Valérie, and Valérie, who would have liked nothing better than to obey a man, had take fright at the idea.
‘You really think so, Élise?’
There were some windows which, this particular Sunday, Élise could no longer bear to see, even though she knew that she would not be seeing them much longer. These were the twenty-eight pale windows of corrugated glass, on which, repeated over and over again, in funeral black, there were three words which looked almost obscene: Torset et Mitouron … Torset et Mitouron … Torset et…
Désiré suspected nothing. He had gone to the Rue Puits-en-Sock, after hearing Mass at Saint-Nicolas in the pew of the Brotherhood of St. Roch. He had brought home the brownish loaves baked by his mother as well as an apple tart. The hours flowed along at their usual pace and he was far from suspecting that their course was going to change.
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