Pedigree

by Georges Simenon

  ‘Place Saint-Lambert!’

  A shout which grew in volume, which was repeated over and over again, hurrying footsteps, piercing whistle-blasts. People almost expected the burgomaster or the chief of police to go into the Populaire and demand an explanation, but that was impossible, for they were forbidden to speak to one another in public.

  Some mounted policemen had drawn their swords, over towards the Place du Théâtre, where the crowd seemed to be thickest. Then, just when it was least expected, after some confused pushing, the barrier gave way, and hundreds and thousands of men and women poured into the square, jostling one another as they came.

  Should the leaders go on to the balcony and try to make themselves heard? They argued the point, in low voices, among the beermugs, the ham rolls, and the paper littering the dirty floor.

  ‘Hullo. This is the commandant of the gendarmerie speaking. Unless the strikers withdraw in good order …’

  How could they speak to them? To whom? To what? It was a human sea, growing all the time, in which you could no longer make out any individuals. The pressure of the crowd had broken a sheet of glass behind the metal shutters of L’Innovation. This noise had excited the men, and a few stones had been thrown at the frosted-glass panes of the porch.

  Somebody in the group of officials sighed:

  ‘If only it would rain!’

  At L’Innovation, Monsieur Wilhems had collected the shop assistants and the inspectors together in the basement, next to the ironmongery department, and Valérie kept thinking about Élise, all alone in the Rue Pasteur with the child.

  Everybody was waiting for something which seemed to be inevitable and, contrary to all expectations, that thing did not happen. Time went by, and the noise of stamping feet grew louder until it seemed that the whole town was being angrily trampled underfoot, that the sound was coming from all sides without a shot being fired in reply.

  The square had so to speak been divided into two. The terrace opposite the Palace of the Prince Bishops was still surrounded by the mounted gendarmes. The space in front of the Grand Bazaar was occupied by the civic guards whom the pressure of the strikers was crushing closer and closer to the shopfronts.

  Night had fallen. There were no lights anywhere except in the windows of the Populaire, where the strikers tried to recognize the shadows moving around.

  ‘Hullo! … Yes … Close your shutters … That’s an order … When they can’t see any light, they’ll go away …’

  The augurs hesitated. If they closed the shutters, they would give the impression of weakening. They decided just to put out the lamps, and once that had been done, there was darkness inside and outside, and they could go out on the balcony without being seen.

  Where did it start? It was after ten o’clock. One might have thought that the night would go by in this incoherent expectancy, or that empty stomachs and fatigue would get the better of the strikers. But then there was a vague murmur. A song, first sung softly, then growing louder, spreading from one to another, and finally intoned by thousands of voices:

  ‘…The last fight let us face…’

  At the same time, a thrust from the crowd. A few men, in the midst of the chaos, conferred in an undertone. The mayor, a tiny little man, could not see anything beyond his immediate neighbours.

  The first couplet was over. A pause. You could sense that the second couplet was about to burst forth, but then, in the short silence, there came the strident call of a bugle, bringing a lump to every throat.

  On horseback, standing in his stirrups with drawn sword, the commandant of the gendarmerie advanced as far as he could towards the crowd of men whose faces could no longer be distinguished, and after the third bugle-call his voice rang out, so clear that it must have been audible all over the Place Saint-Lambert.

  ‘First summons! Let law-abiding citizens go home. We are going to open fire.’

  A tremor went through the crowd, which moved forward, then back. A murmur arose.

  ‘Second summons! Let law-abiding citizens …’

  There were shouts as everybody gave voice to his anger.

  ‘… We are going to open fire!’

  Another silence. The bugle.

  ‘Let law-abiding citizens …’

  The shot rang out; a solitary shot, absurdly faint, and yet it resounded in every heart. Nobody knew who had fired, or at what, or whether anybody had been hit.

  ‘Present, arrrms! … Load, arrrms! …’

  Women’s screams, a scuffle, a breath of panic passing over the crowd, and another movement, forward this time, deliberate and full of hate.

  ‘Fire!’

  Had they fired into the air? Nobody knew. Nobody knew where he was going, everybody pushed, elbowed and punched in an effort to find a way out, and the mounted gendarmes charged into the crowd, their horses’ breasts thrusting the strikers aside while their bare swords zigzagged through the air like lightning.

  There was utter silence on the balcony of the Populaire, where there were a score of them crowded together, trying to understand, and peering down at the panic-stricken ebb and flow in the darkness of the square.

  Who had had the idea? Who had given the order? The fact remained that all the surviving lamps of the Grand Bazaar, Vaxelaire’s and L’Innovation lit up with the bluish crackling of carbon filaments.

  Waves of humanity disappeared through all the outlets, into all the streets, and the torrent flowed away little by little, interrupted by isolated barriers, by shots here and there, by charging horses.

  Élise was trembling, sitting by the lamp. The door of the bedroom, where the child was asleep, was half open on to the darkness. She did not know what was happening and could not hear anything except a noise like the distant rumbling of a train. She kept trembling, getting up and sitting down again, feeling ill at ease everywhere, and wondering now and then whether she ought not to give in to temptation.

  It was impossible! She could not leave the child alone. In the silence of the night, footsteps came running up. You might have thought there was a flock of panic-stricken animals outside, but as the streets grew wider and emptier, and people got further away from the Place Saint-Lambert, the pace slackened, shadows called out to one another, and groups formed up, trying to find their bearings.

  Some of these people came running along the Rue Pasteur itself, probably on their way home to Bressoux or Jupille. Élise was at her window, in the bedroom, listening. She could make out nothing but disconnected words, and longed to go downstairs and ask questions.

  Finally she made up her mind. She stole downstairs in her slippers and noiselessly opened the outside door a little way; as if on purpose, nobody came along for several long-drawn minutes.

  At last a man, a woman, a child being literally dragged along.

  ‘Excuse me, Monsieur. Has there been any shooting?’

  She startled them. The man hesitated for a moment and his wife snapped at him:

  ‘Come along!’

  Élise trembled, wept, went on waiting. She thought she could hear her son crying upstairs and, since she had left the lamp alight, she went back.

  She did not go to bed. She did nothing but keep the fire in and make coffee for when Désiré came home. And he returned at last, at six o’clock in the morning, with some of the dawn mist clinging to his moustache; he returned smiling, a smile that was a little forced.

  ‘Dear God, Désiré! What happened?’

  He put his rifle away on top of the wardrobe and emptied his cartridge pouch in which all the cartridges were still in place. There was a little cold coffee left in his flask in its brown cloth casing.

  ‘We were stuck against the houses between the Rue Gérardrie and the Rue Léopold, next to the Grand Bazaar. We couldn’t see a thing. There were some mounted gendarmes in front of us and all that we were afraid of was that the horses might back into us.’

  He smiled as he remembered something.

  ‘You know the clockmaker’s next to the chemist’s
? It’s there that we were, a whole bunch of us: Ledent, Grisard and big Martens. Grisard was the first to piddle against the shutter …’

  ‘Dear God, Désiré!’

  ‘Then everybody else did the same. It was only this morning that we noticed it was the shutter over the door. The shop is on a lower level. When they open the shop this morning …’

  He heaved a sigh of pleasure as he unbuttoned his tunic and dipped his moustache in the hot coffee.

  ‘As for the rest of it, we didn’t see a thing. They read the riot act and they fired into the air, that’s all I know. It seems that one gendarme had a bullet through his cap. They say …’

  What was the use? It wasn’t certain. The ambulance had come to the Place Saint-Lambert twice over. The civic guards, immobilized against the shop fronts, had been unable to see what was happening.

  ‘You aren’t too tired?’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  She could see that his lip was trembling in a way which was not usual with him. She pretended not to notice. She was sad, more tired than he was, and light-headed, and if it had been left to her, if it had not been time to do the housework, she would have gone to bed.

  At seven o’clock, a familiar siren announced the resumption of work at Halkin’s, and a few minutes later, while the builders were unloading bricks on the waste ground underneath the kitchen window, the first blows of the hammer on the sheet-iron rang out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FIVE minutes before … Not even five minutes … It took so little time for bad luck to strike and it was Élise who was right, she knew it, she felt it, however much people might make fun of her morose expression, her way of creeping along apologetically as if to incite fate to pity. Once, speaking with exaggerated good humour so as not to annoy his wife, Désiré had exclaimed:

  ‘You’re a regular wet blanket!’

  He would never understand, and it was all the better for him.

  Five minutes before, her life had been bright and simple. She had been crossing the Passerelle. Roughly half-way between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont des Arches, a sort of frontier between the suburbs and the centre of the town, the Passerelle was a wide wooden bridge. It was quicker. It was more familiar. It was in a sense the chattel of the inhabitants of Outremeuse, the bridge they used to cross hatless, on an ordinary errand.

  You went up a few stone steps. The planks of the bridge clattered and trembled under your feet. At the other end, you went down and, in the early morning, this descent was like a landing in a new world.

  Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, the market spread out, the vegetable market on the left, the fruit market on the right; thousands of wicker baskets forming regular streets, blind alleys, crossroads; hundreds of short-legged women who had pockets full of change in the three thicknesses of their petticoats and who kept catching hold of customers or insulting them.

  Élise heard them murmur as they smiled at her son:

  ‘He’s such a dear!’

  Or else:

  ‘That’s the little lady with the kiddy who’s so spick and span.’

  Along the quays, there were still a few old houses with high roofs, façades covered with slates, and windows with little greenish panes. There were hundreds of horses and wagons, and the horses, at that time of day—after being on the move for most of the night—had a bag of oats hung on their heads.

  Élise ventured timidly into this world which had come from somewhere else, from the surrounding countryside, a world which would disappear in a little while, at the sound of a bell, leaving nothing behind it, on the cobblestones of the quays and squares, but a few cabbage-leaves and carrot-tops.

  At last she had her push-chair! For months on end, they had kept on saying:

  ‘When we can do without the pram!’

  When, always when! When Roger would be down to only six bottles a day, when he would be able to go on to phosphatine, when they could sit him in his chair, when he began to walk, when it would no longer be necessary to carry him on the stairs …

  Élise, who suffered from backache and, now that the child could walk a little, had him on her hands all the time, knew that it was all a delusion, but it was no use telling Désiré that it would always be the same. Besides, at bottom, Désiré knew it too. He just pretended to believe …

  Just now, when she had left the Rue Pasteur with the new pushchair for its first outing, he had said gaily to her:

  ‘You see! You won’t get tired any more.’

  Then he had set off with his long stride to go and sit down for a moment in his mother’s kitchen before going on to his office. Élise had decided to make some gooseberry jam and she was almost gay, almost determined, like Désiré, to see the world in the light of this May morning. However, try as she might, her head still hung a little to one side.

  ‘What can you expect, Désiré? I’ve got so used to bad luck …’

  She could sense bad luck where it was most carefully concealed; she dug it out where nobody would have suspected its existence. The proof of that was what had happened this morning. She had just bought some red gooseberries, then some big green goose-berries enlivened by a little purple spot. She meant to drop in on Madame Pain on her way home to borrow her copper preserving pan, and then to spend the rest of the day making jam in front of the open window which the pink wall and the white masons had nearly reached, for they were building a new house behind theirs and every day the walls went up by a few rows of bricks.

  Then all of a sudden, spitefully …

  It was that, the spitefulness, the treachery of fate which upset her. She did her best. She had got up as usual at six o’clock in the morning. Anybody could come into her flat unexpectedly: everything was tidy and the soup was always simmering on a corner of the fire. Not a single child in the district was looked after as carefully as Roger. His nappies were washed more often than was necessary, and there was no insipid smell hanging about the kitchen as was so often the case in houses where there was a baby. She made all their clothes. She never bought anything ready-made. She saved money on the smallest things. And had Désiré ever come home to the Rue Pasteur without finding his dinner ready?

  This morning, the blow had had to come from Félicie.

  To crown it all, Élise had felt it coming. She ought to have followed her instinct. But just because Félicie ran a café in the middle of the market, did that mean that she could no longer buy anything in town but had to do her shopping in the Rue Puits-en-Sock like her sisters-in-law on the Mamelin side?

  The stallholders knew her and smiled at her. She was so pleasant with everybody!

  ‘You know, Valérie, if only everybody took the trouble to be pleasant!’

  It hurt her when somebody failed in this elementary duty. Even Désiré sometimes! Too many people didn’t feel things and this made it worse for those who did! They were the ones who suffered.

  She knew. Not exactly what was going to happen to her, except that she would wish that she could sink through the floor. All the same, she had a sort of premonition.

  Doing her shopping brought her gradually closer to the huge Café du Marché with its bay windows, its monumental white marble bar, its sparkling beer pulls. She had bought her goose-berries and her shopping-bag was full, hooked on to the folding push-chair which they would at last be able to take up to the flat, thus avoiding causing any annoyance to the landlady.

  She had haggled over the price and the stallholder had scarcely put up any resistance.

  ‘Ten sous? … Get along with you! … Well, just because it’s you, lady …’

  She never came to the market without a hat and yet nobody thought her bumptious. She knew that Félicie had seen her through the café windows. She had seen her husband, whom the two of them called Coucou between themselves, come out, dressed in black and wearing a bowler hat, and set off towards the centre of the town as if he were going to a funeral.

  Although Coucou was no longer there, she did not go in. She stayed outside
. She did not want Félicie to be able to reproach her one day with having come to the market without saying good day to her, but she did not want to impose herself on her either.

  Wasn’t it Félicie who had always been coming to see the Mamelins, when they lived in the Rue Léopold, to complain about her husband? To such an extent that Désiré had prophesied:

  ‘One fine day, we shall have trouble with Coucou.’

  Yet Désiré had not known everything, for instance that one morning Félicie had arrived looking like a madwoman, afraid of being followed. She had been bare-headed, with a shawl folded across her blouse, and she had brought out a little packet.

  ‘Élise, for the love of God you must keep this for me until I come and ask for it back. Whatever you do, don’t show it to Désiré.’

  The packet had remained hidden for three days on top of the wardrobe, next to the rifle.

  ‘Poor Félicie.’

  To attract her attention, Élise tapped timidly on the glass pane, and looked inside where the market women were eating eggs and bacon and rice tarts two inches thick, and drinking big bowlfuls of coffee. These women took their money out of old purses stuffed with coins and notes, without knowing exactly how much there was inside.

  Félicie was standing with her elbows on the bar, wearing a pretty white blouse with a lace insertion which emphasized the rich curve of her breasts. She was chatting with a customer of whom Élise had only a back view. Near Élise, some draymen were delivering beer through a trap-door and the air reeked of it, while the two horses pissed urine the colour of ale.

  Élise was on the point of going. She thought it would be best to leave. But suddenly her gaze met that of her sister. Félicie came towards her, turned round to say something to her companion, reached the door and opened it just as Élise was starting to smile.

  ‘Now what have you come begging for?’

  She had said that! Her eyes cold, her features motionless. Élise looked at her uncomprehendingly, unable to think of anything to say in reply. She would have given a great deal to be far away, anywhere, and never to have heard those words.