The latter had come back about half past eleven. Wouldn’t she come into the kitchen to say hullo, or at least give a wave in the direction of the glazed door as she went along the hall?
She went past as if she were going along the street where nobody knew her. Did she even know that Roger existed, or wonder whether her landlady had a husband?
Mademoiselle Frida was holding a little white packet and Élise had understood why: she was going to have a cold meal in her room where there was no stove and the fire had not been lit.
‘I just couldn’t help it, Léopold, and I’m sure that you would have done the same …’
Taking advantage of the fact that Désiré was not there, she had taken up a bowl of soup. Outside the entresol door, she had stopped short at the sight of her vase, which had been put on the floor, with the flowers. She had knocked all the same.
‘What is it?’
‘Open the door for a minute, Mademoiselle Frida.’
She turned the handle, but the door had been bolted.
‘The idea, Léopold, of locking herself in as if the house wasn’t safe, or as if she had something to hide!’
The door finally opened a little way. On the table, among some open lecture-notes, there was a hunk of bread and a hard-boiled egg.
‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle Frida … I thought … I ventured to …’
The dark eyes settled on the steaming bowl.
‘What’s that?’
‘I thought that a bowl of hot soup …’
‘I didn’t ask you for anything.’
‘At your age, especially if you are studying, you need to keep your strength up. I’m sure that if your mother were here …’
‘I know better than anybody else what I need.’
‘I put some flowers in here so that the room shouldn’t look so cold.’
‘I don’t like flowers.’
‘The portrait that was on the wall was a photo of my best friend.’
‘She isn’t mine.’
Élise had not betrayed herself in front of Désiré. It was the first time, after a long month, that she had spoken to somebody about it.
She never forgot the time. Even when she neglected to shoot a glance at the hands of the alarm-clock, she remained alive to everything which marked the passage of time: the hammer at Halkin’s—which you didn’t hear as clearly here as in the Rue Pasteur—the boys coming out of the Friars’ school, the siren at Velden’s.
In twenty minutes it would be time to go and fetch Roger from the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse. Léopold was still there. It was the first time he had stayed so long. Élise frowned:
‘You hadn’t anything to say to me, Léopold?’
He grunted.
‘Eugénie’s keeping well?’
‘She’s at Ostend for the season.’
All the same, he had come for a particular reason, she could feel that, and he wasn’t happy.
‘I get on your nerves with my stories, but you know, you’re the only person I can tell them to.’
‘Yes, my girl.’
She made an effort to be brighter, and almost overdid it.
‘You know, since then, Mademoiselle Frida has been a lot better. As for Monsieur Saft, he’s so well-bred! He’s a Pole. He didn’t want me to carry up his coal-bucket or brush his shoes. It seems that in his country no woman would ever brush a man’s shoes, even her husband’s. Did you want something?’
He had opened his mouth as if to speak, but then he had put his pipe back in it straight away and had started shuffling his feet, a sign that he would be going before long.
‘To finish with Mademoiselle Frida …’
It was no longer a drama now, or at least it was no longer Élise’s drama, and she was having her revenge.
‘If anybody had told me a story like that before, I wouldn’t have believed it. Just imagine, one morning I didn’t see her go out. To begin with I thought that she hadn’t any lectures and she was taking advantage of the fact to have a morning in bed. In the afternoon, after Désiré had gone, I began to get worried; because I knew there wasn’t anything to eat in her room. It was a Thursday and Roger was at home. I put him in his chair, I went upstairs, and I knocked on her door.
‘ “Mademoiselle Frida!”
‘No answer. No noise.
‘ “It’s me, Mademoiselle. I’m a bit worried. You aren’t ill, are you?”
‘ “Go away.”
‘And the door was bolted again!
‘ “Mademoiselle Frida, tell me at least if you need anything and I’ll put it on the landing. Don’t worry, I’ll go away afterwards.”
‘I had to go downstairs again. I wasn’t able to go out to L’Innovation with Roger as I usually do on Thursdays. The child was restless and, over the kitchen, I kept hearing a sort of rattling cough.
‘When Désiré finally came home, I told him about it and he shrugged his shoulders.
‘ “If she’s ill, she’s only to say so. After all, we can’t break the door down.”
‘ “She’s got nothing to eat.”
‘ “That’s her affair.”
‘You know what Désiré’s like, Léopold.’
She speeded up the telling of her story, for fear that Léopold would go before the end, and also because Sister Adonie would soon be throwing open the doors of her chicken-coop to the sunshine in the yard.
‘The next day, seeing that things were just the same, I went to see Doctor Matray without saying anything to anybody. Seeing how pale I was, he teased me about it.
‘ “Why, Madame Mamelin, your lodger is just a hysterical young woman.”
‘She stayed locked in for three days, like Marthe when she’s having a novena …’
She bit her tongue. Dear God, there she was talking about Marthe’s novenas in front of Léopold who drank too! She didn’t know where to look. She put some more coal on the stove. It would be time soon, it was time already.
‘I’m afraid I’ve been boring you, poor Léopold.’
She would have liked to ask him again:
‘You’re sure you hadn’t got something to say to me?’
For there was no deceiving her. She knew. Unfortunately she had to go.
‘I’m not throwing you out. You can stay if you like. I’ve just got to go and fetch Roger and I’ll be back straight away.’
No. He left her on the doorstep. Out of tact, so as not to force his company on her in the street, he pretended to have some business in another direction.
‘By the way …’
There, hadn’t she been right?
‘You haven’t had any news of Louis of Tongres?’
‘You know I never see him, Léopold. Since mother died, the only time he’s remembered my existence was when he came to collect our parents’ furniture. Yet he’s in Liége every Monday, because Hubert Schroefs meets him at the Stock Exchange. Once when I was passing with Roger, I caught sight of him in the Taverne Grüber, looking at people with those little eyes of his.’
He was a queer fellow, Léopold. He stayed at his sister’s for nearly two hours. He listened to her while puffing his pipe and drinking a cup of coffee which he allowed to go cold, he waited until they were out in the street before asking a question, and now he went off without saying anything, not even good-bye; he was already far away when Élise was still talking and she could see nothing of him but his round back brushing past the houses.
She was going to be late. Monsieur Saft, so fair haired and so well dressed, turned the corner of the street and solemnly greeted his landlady as if she were a great lady. She smiled as she quickened her pace. The first day he had kissed her hand, bending in two like a puppet.
That day, which was a Monday in May, a man with hulking shoulders, a greenish bowler-hat and an old-fashioned overcoat, went to and fro, with a bearlike gait, among the groups of stockbrokers standing on the left-hand terrace of the Place Saint-Lambert, between the Café du Phare, the Populaire and the Taverne Grüber. His black beard gave off
a strong smell of alcohol, for instead of having dinner he had been drinking in every pub in the Rue Gérardrie, and his walk was sometimes so unsteady that people drew back as he passed.
What did Léopold care about the contempt of these fat, shining, self-satisfied men doing business, calling out to one another, taking notes, and occasionally plunging into the cafés where the big pots were majestically enthroned while other people were standing and gesticulating between the rows of tables?
In his pocket he was crumpling a dirty piece of paper, a letter bearing a Paris postmark, and he followed the train of his ideas, mulling over his thoughts, picturing a drama which had kept him gloomy and absent-minded for two hours in Élise’s kitchen.
Had he any money? Had he ever had any? Before Eugénie had left for Ostend, where she had a job in a boarding-house, hadn’t they spent the odd francs she had put on one side during the last few months? For a long time now he had not had a watch, and his wife didn’t possess a single jewel, not even a little gold chain.
Two or three times, scowling ferociously, he had gone up to one of the big windows of the Grüber. The first time, Louis of Tongres, whom people called the rich Peters, had been eating all by himself in front of a dazzling tablecloth, his gaze wandering over the respectful crowd, or answering a doffed hat with an imperceptible flicker of his eyelids.
Louis had tiny little eyes, or rather he had a habit of creasing his eyelids so that in the narrow slit between them you could only just distinguish the bright pupils, which were disconcertingly sharp. It had become a mannerism with him. To say yes, to express approval, to show satisfaction, he shut his eyes completely, very quickly; you had to be extremely alert to notice this sign of acquiescence, for it was as quick as the click of a camera. On other occasions, he would open his eyes a little way, and the lens remained fixed for a while, revealing a pair of cold, motionless pupils; this meant no, a no which nobody in the whole world had ever made Louis of Tongres retract.
The second time that Léopold’s helot figure had approached the bay window of the Grüber, his brother had finished his meal and was slowly picking his teeth while, on a chair in front of him, a man with a servile smile was taking documents out of a leather briefcase.
The third time, Léopold had been almost afraid that Louis, who had just lit a cigar with a wide band, was going to turn towards him and recognize him. Haloed in smoke, hunting in his waistcoat for his amber cigar-holder, listening to his companion without looking at him and answering only with his eyelids, he sat there as if he were in a shop-window, as relaxed as if he had been in his own home.
He was the king of the Limbourg forests and the fertilizer business. Little by little, he had become interested in everything that was bought and sold in his fief. Hadn’t he married the only daughter of the governor of the province, a nobleman?
Other men, facing the velvet-covered bench on which he sat motionless, had come to open their briefcases and hold out papers, to beg for a signature, an endorsement, an order; and still others were waiting, standing a little further off, when Louis Peters’ gaze slid over the bluish surface of the window against which a poor man’s bearded face was pressed.
The eyes of the two brothers met. Léopold did not move, and nobody around him had any idea of the courage the drunkard had to summon up to stay in his place while Louis stood up, knocked the ash off his cigar and, without taking his hat or picking up his papers, went towards the door.
All the Peters were short and stocky; Louis, who was more wiry than the others, looked wellnigh thin, on account of his dried-up face, his pointed nose, and the liveliness of his movements when he suddenly emerged from his immobility.
He crossed the tavern and shot like an arrow through the revolving doors; on the pavement he stopped short and nothing in him moved except his eyelids.
He waited; it was Léopold, the eldest brother with the hunched shoulders, who came forward with his oblique gait. There were groups of people around them, a thousand voices mingling together, and yet they were able to talk without anybody listening to them …
Léopold spoke, shaking slightly, his breath stinking; he said only a few words, quoted a figure: five hundred francs.
On the terrace, on the pavement, in the café, men were buying and selling boatloads of timber, trainloads of phosphates, farms complete with their flocks, whole harvests.
Léopold asked for only five hundred francs. His nose was running; he took a big red handkerchief out of his pocket and half-covered his face with it while his brother asked him two or three incisive questions.
What did he reply? That the money was not for him? That he had never needed any money? No! He did not bother to reply. He had seen the icy, wide-open eyes, and he had understood. Turning round, he plunged into the crowd, rolling from side to side.
Félix Marette could ask only Léopold for the five hundred francs, and Léopold could ask only Louis of Tongres.
Léopold bumped into passers-by without apologizing, his instinct leading him quickly to a narrow street where he found familiar smells again, to a little café where there were men leaning on the bar with the same empty, staring eyes as his.
What did the letter matter now? He would answer it later, in three days, in a week, some time or other, when his wanderings had brought him back to his ladder and the trapdoor leading to his rooms.
They were waiting and hoping in Paris. Marette had written, in a handwriting which had changed in a few months and become more deliberate: ‘We must find a solution …’
He had underlined must with a thick stroke of the pen.
He would not be able to manage otherwise. A month before, Doms had staged one of his periodical disappearing acts. Was he really in Russia, Rumania or Barcelona, as he would pretend when he returned, as threadbare, as quiet, as silently menacing as ever?
Doms was a nobody! The truth of the matter was that Doms had no money, no friends, no means, and belonged to no group or party. He was a contemptible individual whom Marette despised, even though he was forced to put him up in his attic and to buy him a meal in his little restaurant every time he asked.
Marette had discovered that truth a long time ago, by accident, one morning when he had been lying on the floor and the other man had been asleep in his bed. Félix Marette had had his eyes open a fraction of an inch, rather like Louis Peters, and Doms, thinking that he was asleep, had been himself, in the grey atmosphere of that winter morning, with the bleak daylight falling from the skylight on to the grubby sheets and the brown blanket: a Doms without spectacles, looking fatter than usual, shining with the sweat of the night, a hulking mass of pale flesh with stupid, vulgar gestures and such miserable, empty eyes that they had given Marette a shock.
For several minutes the self-styled anarchist had scratched his dirty feet, then he had put on his threadbare socks, pulled on his trousers, and stayed there limply, not knowing what to do with himself. He had taken a few sous out of his pocket and counted them, ending up by furtively plunging his hands into his friend’s pockets and extracting a few coins.
That was all. A little later, when he had put on his thick spectacles, he had become the Doms of the Café de la Bourse once more, but Marette could no longer be taken in.
He had to endure him, with impatience and disgust, and what made it worse was the knowledge that the man was nothing but a contemptible little crook, perfectly capable of denouncing a friend to the police.
Hadn’t he gone so far as to follow Marette in the street, so that now he knew everything?
His smile had been enough to tarnish the only really beautiful moment Marette had experienced till then.
It was about Christmastime. One evening when Félix had been in his attic, feverishly writing the story of his life, it had started raining so hard that water had begun pouring through the roof and he had had to move his bed.
The next morning, although it was his fate that was involved, Marette had nearly failed to notice the open umbrella which was dripping in a corn
er of the shop, after the rain had stopped.
It was Isabelle Vétu’s umbrella. He had recognized it later, and then the light had dawned; he had realized that she had gone out, probably by herself, the previous evening.
He had never thought of this simple eventuality. He had watched outside for two whole evenings. Finally he had seen a light in the shop, and Isabelle had come out on to the pavement, walking quickly in the direction of the Conservatoire where there was a concert.
While she was entering the warmth of the concert-hall, full of the smell of wet wool, he had rushed up to his room like a madman, stuffed his manuscript into his pocket, and come back to station himself between a couple of gas-lamps. A little music filtered out to him. The rain kept falling intermittently, and in between two showers the silvery light of the moon fell on him.
When the audience started coming out, he let people bump into him, trembling, afraid of missing her, standing on tip-toe. At last he caught sight of her, walking quickly; and he ran after her, finally stopping, out of breath, under a gas-lamp, in a street whose name he did not know.
‘Mademoiselle …’
A white face before him, that face which he was now capable of drawing in three or four lines. He hunted in his pocket for his papers.
‘I wanted to …’
And suddenly, as if a piece of flesh were being torn from him:
‘I love you, Isabelle … I can’t stand it any longer … I’m too unhappy … I love you, do you understand?’
He was crying, and felt ridiculous. He dropped his notebook and she bent down to pick it up at the same time as he did; unable to see anything, he went mad, clasped her in his arms, pressed her face against his wet cheek, brushed his lips against her mouth.
Then … then the most unexpected thing happened. Her mouth remained stuck to his, and looking again, he saw her face motionless against his, whiter than ever, and her open eyes close to his eyes.
‘Isabelle …’
It was too much. He had not hoped for this. Frightened by the happiness which filled him, he let go of her suddenly with an abrupt movement and ran away, bumping into a fat, fleshy figure a few yards further on.
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