In the street, which was an ugly November grey, Isabelle’s pale face passed the window and it had scarcely disappeared before Félix Marette had a shock. On the other side of the street, on the opposite pavement, next to a draper’s shop, a man in a thick overcoat was standing with his hands in his pockets, staring at him.
It was Doms. The latter did not signal to him, did not attempt to make contact with him in any other way than by his glance which scorned to express anything.
‘I am here.’
That was all. Félix might plunge into the semi-darkness of the shop, but he knew that he remained tied as by a thread to those eyes enlarged by their double lenses.
He was so agitated that Monsieur Brois looked at him in astonishment and coughed. What could dusty Monsieur Brois do, where could he go, when he left the shop in the Rue Montmartre? It was inconceivable that a wife, children, even a sister, could be waiting for him somewhere. Nobody could ever have kissed that colourless, ageless face which smelled of paste. Monsieur Brois did not smoke, but ate cachous which he took every quarter of an hour out of a little metal box.
Marette found something to put away near the window and did not see Doms in his place; for a moment he almost felt relieved, but then he realized that he had not got rid of him.
What was he to do? He had to leave the shop. Even if it was only to go back to his attic, he had to go by way of the street.
Léopold was right. By what chance had Léopold happened to cross his path less than half an hour before the incident of the bomb? Unfortunately he knew nothing about it. He guessed the truth, but he obviously thought that it was for some other day. If only he had known, if only he had glanced at the parcel Marette was holding in one hand, how many things would have been different!
That evening, Marette had prowled in vain around the Café de la Bourse: neither Doms nor Estévant had been there. Oughtn’t they to have been there to help him? Wasn’t it up to them to play that part?
‘Come along.’
That hairy bear Léopold was lurching along in the shadows.
‘Come along, now.’
And he had led him as if by the hand. Marette would never forget that trap-door in the ceiling, the dubious-looking packet of meat which his companion had taken out of his pocket, the bed which he had given him, the fit of sobbing which had left him hot and empty with burning cheek-bones.
How had Doms managed to find him? Marette had given nobody his address; even Léopold wrote to him poste-restante under the name of Félicien Miette.
Seeing him out there in the street brought him as it were a breath of Liége, but it was not the breath of the Café de la Bourse, it was the breath of certain streets, especially the Rue du Laveu, so empty when Marette came along it at night, with the gas-lamps at regular intervals, the light in the first-floor flat of an old lady—an officer’s wife—who suffered from insomnia, and then the smell of his own house when he opened the door, the note which his father had left for him:
‘There is a cold chop in the sideboard.’
He did not know that his father, since then, had summoned up the patience to go walking beside the river for weeks on end, along the Quai des Pitteurs, so that his death should not appear suspicious.
‘Would you be so kind, Monsieur Miette, as to climb that ladder and put these blotters in the second pigeon-hole on the left, right at the top.’
He obeyed without realizing what he was doing. He was frightened. How did he know that it was not Doms who belonged to the police? There was a lot of talk of agents provocateurs. In the booklets he had been given to read, there was mention of them.
Time went by but he did not manage to control his excitement, even though he did not see Doms again on the opposite pavement. On Conservatoire days, he did not see Isabelle on her return, for she came home at a quarter past twelve, when he had already left, and he had never dared to wait for her in the street.
Monsieur Brois tied his knitted scarf round his neck, put on his shapeless overcoat, and opened his mouth to insert with great care a tiny cachou.
‘Good morning, Monsieur Vétu. Good morning, Madame.’
He had to go out, whatever happened. Marette plunged into the street, tried to mingle with the crowd, and made for the Grands Boulevards without looking around him. He had not covered fifty yards before a quiet voice beside him said:
‘How are you keeping?’
He made a blunder and pretended to be surprised. Doms simply murmured in an accusing tone of voice:
‘I thought you had recognized me.’
‘The fact is, I wasn’t sure.’
‘Where do you lunch?’
‘It all depends.’
Another clumsy lie, for he was in such a panic that he took his companion to a restaurant where he had his own napkin in a pigeon-hole and where he paid with tickets.
Doms ate at his table, and let him hand over two tickets. He did not tell him how long he had been in Paris, or why he was there. As usual, he provided no information at all, but remained calm and mysterious.
Only at the end of the meal, after wiping his lips, did he open his mouth, and Marette, realizing that the moment had come, froze in his chair.
‘I …’
A pause. Doms did it on purpose, cutting a matchstick to pick his teeth and looking vaguely at the restaurant’s customers packed one against the other, with waitresses in black and white wending their way among them.
‘I gather you have a room with a separate entrance in the house where you work.’
The blood rose to Marette’s cheeks and his temples started throbbing. This, then, was the catastrophe he had foreseen that morning, but even worse than he had imagined it.
‘That’s to say my employers …’
‘I know. I’ll wait for you this evening under the archway. I won’t disturb you very much.’
‘There’s only one bed. And then, Monsieur Vétu might come upstairs …’
‘What would he be doing up in the attic? If it came to the worst, you could tell him that I was a country cousin of yours.’
Doms looked at his watch, and picked his teeth a little longer.
‘I must be going. There are some people expecting me. I’m glad I’ve seen you again. Incidentally, did you know that Estévant is starting a review? A real review, at a real printer’s.’
A smile conveyed to the young man all the scorn Doms felt for this periodical.
‘See you this evening. Don’t forget. Let’s say at … But now I come to think of it, do you have dinner here too?’
He said yes. It was not true. In the evening, to economize, he just had a bit of cheese in a dairy-shop.
‘In that case, I’ll wait for you outside the shop and we’ll come along here. I hope I shan’t be late.’
He went to the door, then turned round and came back.
‘Now I come to think of it, let me have a few francs. Thank you. See you later!’
Marette was the first to return to the shop and, for the first time, the piano sounded over his head for a while without his hearing it.
Under the gas-jet which had just been lit, staring at Monsieur Brois’s face, he was seized by sudden fits of panic, as in his childhood nightmares, with a damp sweat on his forehead, a mad terror in his chest, and a leaden weight in his legs.
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS raining and dark. Léopold, crossing streets at an angle, was already hobbling from the feebly luminous haven of one pub to another. He could sense the approach of the holidays several days ahead. The mob getting ready to enjoy itself bewildered him and he no longer knew where to put himself, feeling grumpy and ill at ease everywhere. He grumbled and drank, going anywhere in search of a corner which the others had not yet invaded.
It was 31 December. Very soon now a little ceremony would take place at Monsieur Monnoyeur’s. Every year, it was exactly the same. On the stroke of six, Désiré coughed and motioned to his colleagues. The latter, after straightening their ties, followed him into the
office of their employer, who made a pretence of being surprised.
‘Monsieur Monnoyeur, it is our duty and pleasure, on this last day of the year, to come and offer you our best wishes for health and prosperity in the coming year.’
Monsieur Monnoyeur, thin and weasel-faced, stood up, and shook hands all round.
‘My friends … hum … my dear friends … I am deeply … deeply touched …’
The office smelled of old paper and old leather. On the mantelpiece, next to a bronze statuette, a bottle of port stood ready, with the requisite number of glasses.
‘If you have no objection, we will drink to the New Year.’
The box of cigars was ready too. Everybody took one and lit it. A little blue smoke rose into the air. They sipped the port, and outside, in the garden stripped by winter, they could see the rain falling bleakly.
‘To you and yours.’
It was all over. Monsieur Monnoyeur took the box of cigars and held it out to Désiré.
‘Do me the favour of sharing these with your colleagues.’
The share-out took place in the office. Four cigars each, not counting the one which you went on smoking on the way home and which kept a sugary taste of port.
Élise, who had not put her veil on so that she could go faster, was running through the streets like a mouse. Holding her umbrella rolled up, she slipped past a shop window, vanished into the darkness, bobbed up again for an instant under the gas-lamp, and reappeared in front of a window-display, in such a hurry that her lips were already shaping the words she was going to say to the butcher.
Madame Pain had agreed to look after Roger for an hour. She had a son of the same age, to within a month. She was a woman who did not know how to do anything in the house, who was always tired, always complaining, one of those women of whom one is not surprised to read in the paper that their child has scalded itself or been drowned in a nearby pond.
The Meuse was swollen again, the slimy, uneven planks of the Passerelle bounced up and down, you pushed through the crowd without being able to make out any faces, and the town was just a collection of luminous dots. Place Cockerill, Rue des Carmes; Élise plunged into the icy world of the meat market where the arc lamps left part of the iron girders in darkness.
‘A pound of beef, Madame Mouron, and then a roast as usual, not too big, and a marrow-bone.’
On Saturdays and on the eve of holidays, she came to the market to buy her meat, but not for anything in the world would she have gone to any butcher but her own. She pitied and rather disapproved of those women who went to different shops, either out of ignorance or in order to save a few centimes. Over meat, she maintained that you should never haggle.
She held clutched in her hand the purse which she was always so afraid of losing with the key which was inside. She counted out the coins and smiled.
‘Thank you, Madame Mouron. See you on Saturday.’
She would have been extremely surprised to learn that the fat butcher never recognized her and wondered why this customer greeted her and said good-bye so politely.
Opposite, there were the three windows of Schroefs’ shop; Élise, who did not want to look that way, sped along the current of rainy air in the street, umbrella first, her shopping-bag swinging against her hip, and just as she was turning the corner, opposite the University, she ran straight into a man, and stammered an apology.
He, with a dead cigar-stub protruding from under his grey moustache, said simply:
‘Élise!’
‘Hubert!’
It was he who had behaved badly towards her, and yet it was she who felt at a loss, smiled, looked embarrassed, and wondered whether she ought not to kiss him.
‘I’ve just been round to your flat.’
‘Dear God! And you found nobody there!’
It was Schroefs, Hubert Schroefs, her brother-in-law, Marthe’s husband. To think that she had spent three years in his house, after her mother’s death, and now he seemed such a stranger, so impressive! Admittedly the Schroefs, at that time, were not yet living in the huge Rue des Carmes building but in a humbler shop, with a single window, in the Rue André-Dumont.
Élise followed her brother-in-law, wondering what he had to say to her. He took his time. Now that she thought about it, if he had gone round to her flat when they had not seen each other for two years, indeed for over two years, ever since Élise’s marriage, that meant that something serious had happened.
‘Dear God, Hubert! Marthe? …’
He nodded and said:
‘She’s locked herself in again. She must have found my revolver in the bedside table. Just now, she threatened to fire through the door.’
He was not the man to say a single word too many, or to go to the trouble of smiling to please somebody. Anybody would have thought that he was leading her along the dark street on a leash, with his hands in his pockets, knowing that she was following him. And she was indeed following him, stumbling along, she who, a little earlier, had been in such a hurry that she could not decide which short cut to take.
‘You must speak to your sister.’
‘She wouldn’t do that, Hubert! I know Marthe.’
She could not refrain from adding:
‘She’s got everything she wants!’
The shop was full of goods, the shelves overflowing with luxury foods in golden tins or bearing golden labels. There were shop-assistants in white aprons bustling around and customers waiting. Hubert crossed the shop, his bowler-hat on the back of his head, his dead cigar between the grey hairs of his moustache and the thick bristles of his square-cut beard on which the nicotine had traced a brown circle.
He went up a few steps, opened the door of a glazed office, gave an order out of force of habit, and glanced into the yard where in the rain you could just make out a horse harnessed to a wagon which was being loaded, and some big white letters on the canvas cover: Hubert Schroefs.
Paying no attention to Élise, he went up the private staircase and asked the maid who appeared on the landing:
‘Madame?’
‘Still the same, Monsieur.’
The two children were in the dining-room, Jacques who was twelve and Germaine who was eight.
‘How they’ve grown, Hubert!’
The gas radiator was giving off a stifling heat. The chairs were covered with leather fastened with brass nails.
‘Try and talk to her, Élise. I can’t stand any more of it.’
He was really tired, with black rings under his eyes. He was a massive man, with a paunch which was already prominent; he did not give an impression of health so much as of strength, on account of his hard features and his colourless complexion.
This evening he looked flabby, and his eyes were shifty. He sent the children out of the room, slumped into an armchair, heaved a sigh, and picked up the paper.
‘Go on!’
It was almost a threat. He had done what he could. Now he was throwing in the sponge. He was as it were placing Marthe’s fate in the hands of a Peters. He had not dared to go and fetch Louisa from Coronmeuse. He had gone to the Rue Pasteur where he had never set foot before. Their quarrel did not matter to him.
‘Go on!’
Let Élise look after her sister, seeing that they were of the same blood. He was at the end of his tether and it was not the first time that he had threatened to have his wife locked up in a nursing home.
What had the landlady said to him, in the Rue Pasteur? Had he told her that he was Hubert Schroefs, the wholesale grocer?
Élise considered it natural that he should have come to fetch her, seeing that she was needed. She put her shopping-bag down.
‘Where is her room?’
‘Oh, of course. Léontine will show you.’
He had forgotten that Élise had never been inside the house in the Rue des Carmes. Did he even remember the causes of the quarrel? He had not wanted to see her marry Désiré because it would mean that she would not be able to look after the children in the eve
ning. When she thought of all the piddle that had gone on her dresses!
He lit another cigar which would go out later, and sank into a silence as heavy as himself.
‘If you only knew, Madame Élise!’
Léontine whispered to her, on the landing, next to the open door of the kitchen.
‘This time it’s really awful. It’s been going on for three days now. You know how artful she is. She gets ready to take advantage of a moment when I’m away and then she comes into the kitchen to grab anything she can lay her hands on. Though heaven knows where she got the bottles.’
A door, with no light showing under it, and there was Élise, alone on the landing, in this strange house, Élise who was in a hurry, whom Madame Pain was waiting for, Élise whose fire was going out and whose supper would not be ready on time.
She called out softly:
‘Marthe!’
She could sense something moving. She found it embarrassing that she could be heard in the dining-room where she could see a ray of light.
‘Marthe!’
She had unconsciously adopted the Flemish accent and it was in Flemish that a voice, so close to the door that Élise jumped, asked her:
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me, Marthe. It’s your sister Élise.’
‘What are you doing here? He went to fetch you, didn’t he? He’s frightened.’
‘No, Marthe. I was just passing by and dropped in to say hullo.’
Tears were flowing, but she was not crying. They were special tears, more fluid than the rest, with no bitterness in them, silent tears which came naturally to her eyes whenever it was a question of somebody in her family, Léopold, Louisa or Marthe, or when she spoke of Louis of Tongres who came to the Stock Exchange every week and had not called to see her once.
‘Open the door, Marthe. I must talk to you.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Hubert? I don’t know. I think he’s downstairs.’
‘You’re lying. I heard him come upstairs. If you’ve come here to tell lies…’
‘Please, Marthe. You’re right, he’s in the dining-room. He’s reading the paper, I tell you…’
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