"Oh! yes," said the doctor, "the bust is almost finished. It's a fine
piece of work," he added, with the air of a connoisseur.
And, relying on the compliment to cover his retreat, he was slinking
away, crestfallen; but Felicia fiercely called him back:
"Stay, you. I have something to say to you."
He saw by her expression that he must comply, under pain of an
outbreak.
"With your permission, my friend? Mademoiselle has a word to say to me.
My coupé is at the door. Get in, I will be with you in a moment."
When the studio door closed upon those heavy departing footsteps, they
looked each other in the face.
"You must be either drunk or mad to venture to do such a thing. What!
you presume to enter my studio when I do not choose to receive? Why
this violence? By what right?"
"By the right that desperate, unconquerable passion gives."
"Be quiet, Jenkins; those are words that I do not wish to hear. I let
you come here through pity, through habit, because my father was fond
of you. But never speak to me again of your--love"--she said the word
very low, as if it were a disgrace--"or you will see me no more, even
though I should be driven to die in order to escape you for good and
all."
A child taken in fault does not bend his head more humbly than Jenkins
as he replied:
"True--I was wrong. A moment of madness, of blindness. But why do you
take pleasure in tearing my heart as you do?"
"As if I were thinking of you!"
"Whether you are thinking of me or not, I am here, I see what is going
on, and your coquetry pains me terribly."
A slight flush rose in her cheeks at that reproach.
"I, a coquette! With whom?"
"With him," said the Irishman, pointing to the superb apelike bust.
She tried to laugh.
"The Nabob. What nonsense!"
"Do not lie. Do you think I am blind, that I don't understand all your
manoeuvres? You stay alone with him a long while. I was at the door
just now. I saw you." He lowered his voice as if his breath had failed
him. "What are you after, in heaven's name, you strange, heartless
child? I have seen you repel the handsomest, the noblest, the greatest.
That little de Géry devours you with his eyes, but you pay no heed to
him. Even the Duc de Mora has not succeeded in reaching your heart. And
this man, a shocking, vulgar creature, who isn't thinking of you, who
has something very different from love in his head--you saw how he went
away just now! What are you aiming at? What do you expect from him?"
"I intend--I intend that he shall marry me. There."
Coolly, in a softer tone, as if the confession had drawn her nearer to
the man she despised so bitterly, she set forth her reasons. She had
luxurious, extravagant tastes, unmethodical habits which nothing could
overcome and which would infallibly lead her to poverty and
destitution, and good Crenmitz too, who allowed herself to be ruined
without a word. In three years, four years at most, it would be all
over. And then would come debts and desperate expedients, the ragged
gowns and old shoes of poor artists' households. Or else the lover, the
keeper, that is to say slavery and degradation.
"Nonsense," said Jenkins. "What of me, am I not here?"
"Anything rather than you," she said, drawing herself up. "No, what I
must have, what I will have, is a husband to protect me from others and
from myself, to keep me from a mass of black things of which I am
afraid when life becomes a bore to me, from abysses into which I feel
that I may plunge,--some one who will love me while I work, and will
relieve my poor old exhausted fairy from doing sentry duty. That man
suits me and I have had my eye on him ever since I first saw him. He is
ugly to look at, but he seems kind; and then he is absurdly rich, and
wealth, in that degree, must be amusing. Oh! I know all about it. There
probably is some black spot in his life which has brought him good
luck. All that gold can't have been honestly come by. But tell me
truly, Jenkins, with your hand on that heart which you invoke so often,
do you think that I am a very tempting wife for an honest man?
Consider: of all these young men who ask as a favor to be allowed to
come here, what one has ever thought of asking for my hand? Never a
single one. De Géry no more than the rest. I charm, but I terrify. That
is easily understood. What can anyone expect of a girl brought up as I
was, with no mother or family, tossed in a heap with my father's models
and mistresses? Such mistresses, great God! And Jenkins for my only
protector. Oh! when I think of it! When I think of it!"
And, with the memory of that already distant episode, thoughts came to
her mind which inflamed her wrath. "Oh! yes, I am a child of chance,
and this adventurer is just the husband for me."[2]
[2] Je suis une fille _d'aventure_, et cet _aventurier_ est bien
le mari qu'il me faut.
"At least you will wait until he's a widower," retorted Jenkins
tranquilly. "And in that case you may have to wait a long while, for
his Levantine looks to be in excellent health."
Felicia Ruys became livid.
"He is married?"
"Married, why, to be sure, and father of a lot of children. The whole
outfit landed here two days ago."
She stood for a moment, speechless, her cheeks quivering.
In front of her the Nabob's broad visage, in shining clay, with its
flat nose, its sensual good-humored mouth, seemed to cry aloud in its
fidelity to life. She gazed at it a moment, then stepped toward it, and
with a gesture of disgust overturned the high, wooden stand and the
gleaming, greasy block itself, which fell to the floor a shapeless mass
of mud.
VII.
JANSOULET AT HOME.
Married he had been for twelve years, but had never mentioned the fact
to any one of his Parisian acquaintances, by virtue of an acquired
Oriental habit, the habit that Oriental peoples have of maintaining
silence concerning their female relations. Suddenly it was learned that
Madame was coming, that apartments must be made ready for her, her
children and her women. The Nabob hired the whole second floor of the
house on Place Vendôme, the previous tenant being sacrificed to Nabob
prices. The stables were increased in size, the staff of servants was
doubled; and then, one day, coachmen and carriages went to the Lyon
station to fetch Madame, who arrived with a retinue of negresses,
little negroes and gazelles, completely filling a long train that had
been heated expressly for her all the way from Marseille.
She alighted in a terrible state of prostration, exhausted and
bewildered by her long railroad journey, the first in her life, for she
had been taken to Tunis as a child and had never left it. Two negroes
carried her from the carriage to her apartments in an armchair, which
was always kept in the vestibule thereafter, ready for that difficult
transportation. Madame Jansoulet could not walk upstairs, for it made
her dizzy; she would not have an elevator because her weight made it
squeak; besides, she never walked. An enormous creature, so bloated
that it was impossible to assign her an age, but somewhere between
twenty-five and forty, with rather a pretty face, but features all
deformed by fat, lifeless eyes beneath drooping lids grooved like
shells, trussed up in exported gowns, loaded with diamonds and jewels
like a Hindoo idol, she was a most perfect specimen of the transplanted
Europeans who are called Levantines. A strange race of obese Creoles,
connected with our society by naught save language and dress, but
enveloped by the Orient in its stupefying atmosphere, the subtle
poisons of its opium-laden air, in which everything becomes limp and
nerveless, from the tissues of the skin to the girdle around the waist,
ay, even to the mind itself and the thought.
She was the daughter of an enormously wealthy Belgian, a dealer in
coral at Tunis, in whose establishment Jansoulet had been employed for
several months on his first arrival in the country. Mademoiselle
Afchin, at that time a fascinating doll, with dazzling complexion and
hair, and perfect health, came often to the counting-room for her
father, in the great chariot drawn by mules which conveyed them to
their beautiful villa of La Marse in the outskirts of Tunis. The child,
always _décolleté_, with gleaming white shoulders seen for a moment in
a luxurious frame, dazzled the adventurer; and years after, when he had
become rich, the favorite of the bey, and thought of settling down, his
mind reverted to her. The child had changed into a stout, heavy, sallow
girl. Her intellect, never of a high order, had become still more
obtuse in the torpor of such a life as dormice lead, in the neglect of
a father whose whole time and thought were given to business, and in
the use of tobacco saturated with opium and of sweetmeats,--the torpor
of her Flemish blood conjoined with Oriental indolence; and with all
the rest, ill-bred, gluttonous, sensual, arrogant, a Levantine trinket
brought to perfection.
But Jansoulet saw nothing of all that.
In his eyes she was then, she was always, down to the time of her
arrival in Paris, a superior being, a person of the highest refinement,
a Demoiselle Afchin; he spoke to her with respect, maintained a
slightly humble and timid attitude toward her, gave her money without
counting it, indulged her most extravagant caprices, her wildest whims,
all the strange conceits of a Levantine's brain distracted by ennui and
idleness. A single word justified everything; she was a Demoiselle
Afchin. And yet they had nothing in common; he was always at the Kasbah
or the Bardo, in attendance on the bey, paying his court to him, or
else in his counting-room; she passed her day in bed, on her head a
diadem of pearls worth three hundred thousand francs, which she never
laid aside, brutalizing herself by smoking, living as in a harem,
admiring herself in the mirror, arraying herself in fine clothes, in
company with several other Levantines, whose greatest joy consisted in
measuring with their necklaces the girth of arms and legs which
rivalled one another in corpulency, bringing forth children with whom
she never concerned herself, whom she never saw, who had never even
caused her suffering, for she was delivered under the influence of
chloroform. A "bale" of white flesh perfumed with musk. And Jansoulet
would say with pride: "I married a Demoiselle Afchin!"
Under Parisian skies and in the cold light of the capital, his
disillusionment began. Having determined to set up a regular
establishment, to receive, to give entertainments, the Nabob had sent
for his wife, in order to place her at the head of his house. But when
he saw that mass of stiff, crackling dry-goods, of Palais-Royal finery,
alight at his door, and all the extraordinary outfit that followed her,
he had a vague impression of a Queen Pomare in exile. The difficulty
was that he had seen some genuine women of fashion and he made
comparisons. He had planned a grand ball to celebrate her arrival, but
he prudently abstained. Indeed Madame Jansoulet refused to receive any
one. Her natural indolence was augmented by the homesickness which the
cold yellow fog and the pouring rain had brought upon her as soon as
she landed. She passed several days in bed, crying aloud like a child,
declaring that they had brought her to Paris to kill her, and even
rejecting the slightest attentions from her women. She lay there
roaring among her lace pillows, her hair in a tangled mass around her
diadem, the windows closed and curtains tightly drawn, lamps lighted
day and night, crying out that she wanted to go away--ay, to go
away--ay; and it was a pitiful thing to see, in that tomb-like
darkness, the half-filled trunks scattered over the carpet, the
frightened gazelles, the negresses crouching around their hysterical
mistress, groaning in unison, with haggard eyes, like the dogs of
travellers in polar countries which go mad when they cannot see the
sun.
The Irish doctor, upon being admitted to that distressing scene, had no
success with his fatherly ways, his fine superficial phrases. Not at
any price would the Levantine take the pearls with arsenical base, to
give tone to her system. The Nabob was horrified. What was he to do?
Send her back to Tunis with the children? That was hardly possible. He
was definitively in disgrace there. The Hemerlingues had triumphed. A
last insult had filled the measure to overflowing: on Jansoulet's
departure the bey had commissioned him to have several millions of gold
coined after a new pattern at the Paris Mint; then the commission had
been abruptly withdrawn and given to Hemerlingue. Jansoulet, being
publicly insulted, retorted with a public manifesto, offering all his
property for sale, his palace on the Bardo presented to him by the
former bey, his villas at La Marse, all of white marble, surrounded by
magnificent gardens, his counting rooms, the most commodious and most
sumptuously furnished in the city, and instructing the intelligent
Bompain to bring his wife and children to Paris in order to put the
seal of finality to his departure. After such a display, it would be
hard to return; that is what he tried to make Mademoiselle Afchin
understand, but she replied only by prolonged groans. He strove to
comfort her, to amuse her, but what form of distraction could be made
to appeal to that abnormally apathetic nature? And then, could he
change the skies of Paris, give back to the wretched Levantine her
marble-tiled _patio_, where she used to pass long hours in a cool,
delicious state of drowsiness, listening to the plashing of the water
in the great alabaster fountain with three basins one above the other,
and her gilded boat, covered with a purple awning and rowed by eight
supple, muscular Tripolitan oarsmen over the lovely lake of El-Baheira,
when the sun was setting? Sumptuous as were the apartments on Place
Vendôme, they could not supply the place of those lost treasures. And
she plunged deeper than ever in her despair. One habitué of the house
succeeded, however, in drawing her out of it, Cabassu, who styled
himself on his cards "professor of massage;" a stout dark thick-set
man, redolent of garlic and hair-oil, square-shouldered, covered with
hair to his eyes, who knew stories of Parisian seraglios, trivial
anecdotes within the limited range of Madame's intellect. He came once
to rub her, and she wished to see him again, detained him. He was
obliged to abandon all his other customers and to become the _masseur_
of that able-bodied creature, at a salary equal to that of a senator,
her page, her reader, her body-guard. Jansoulet, overjoyed to see that
his wife was contented, was not conscious of the disgusting absurdity
of the intimacy.
Cabassu was seen in the Bois, in the enormous and sumptuous calèche
beside the favorite gazelle, at the back of the theatre boxes which the
Levantine hired, for she went abroad now, revivified by her masseur's
treatment and determined to be amused. She liked the theatre,
especially farces or melodramas. The apathy of her unwieldy body was
minimized in the false glare of the footlights. But she enjoyed
Cardailhac's theatre most of all. There the Nabob was at home. From the
first manager down to the last box-opener, the whole staff belonged to
him. He had a key to the door leading from the corridor to the stage;
and the salon attached to his box, decorated in Oriental fashion, with
the ceiling hollowed out like a bee-hive, divans upholstered in camel's
hair, the gas-jet enclosed in a little Moorish lantern, was admirably
adapted for a nap during the tedious _entr'actes_: a delicate
compliment from the manager to his partner's wife. Nor had that monkey
of a Cardailhac stopped at that: detecting Mademoiselle Afchin's liking
for the stage, he had succeeded in persuading her that she possessed an
intuitive knowledge of all things pertaining to it, and had ended by
asking her to cast a glance in her leisure moments, the glance of an
expert, upon such pieces as he sent to her. An excellent way of binding
the partnership more firmly.
Poor manuscripts in blue or yellow covers, which hope has tied with
slender ribbons, ye who take flight swelling with ambition and with
dreams, who knows what hands will open you, turn your leaves, what
prying fingers will deflower your unknown charm, that shining dust
stored up by every new idea? Who passes judgment on you, and who
condemns you? Sometimes, before going out to dinner, Jansoulet, on
going up to his wife's room, would find her smoking in her easy-chair,
with her head thrown back and piles of manuscript by her side, and
Cabassu, armed with a blue pencil, reading in his hoarse voice and with
his Bourg-Saint-Andéol intonation some dramatic lucubration which he
cut and slashed remorselessly at the slightest word of criticism from
the lady. "Don't disturb yourselves," the good Nabob's wave of the hand
would say, as he entered the room on tiptoe. He would listen and nod
his head admiringly as he looked at his wife. "She's an astonishing
creature," he would say to himself, for he knew nothing of literature,
and in that direction at all events he recognized Mademoiselle Afchin's
superiority.
"She had the theatrical instinct," as Cardailhac said; but as an
offset, the maternal instinct was entirely lacking. She never gave a
thought to her children, abandoning them to the hands of strangers,
and, when they were brought to her once a month, contenting herself
with giving them the flabby, lifeless flesh of her cheeks to kiss,
between two puffs of a cigarette, and never making inquiries concerning
the details of care and health which perpetuate the physical bond of
motherhood, and make the true mother's heart bleed in sympathy with her
child's slightest suffering.
They were three stout, heavy, apathetic boys, of eleven, nine, and
seven years, with the Levantine's sallow complexion and premature
bloated appearance, and their father's velvety, kindly eyes. They were
as ignorant as young noblemen of the Middle Ages; in Tunis M. Bompain
had charge of their studies, but in Paris the Nabob, intent upon giving
them the benefit of a Parisian education, had placed them in the most
stylish and most expensive boarding school, the Collège Bourdaloue,
conducted by excellent Fathers, who aimed less at teaching their pupils
than at moulding them into well-bred, reflecting men of the world, and
who succeeded in producing little monstrosities, affected and
ridiculous, scornful of play, absolutely ignorant, with no trace of
spontaneity or childishness, and despairingly pert and forward. The
little Jansoulets did not enjoy themselves overmuch in that hothouse
for early fruits, notwithstanding the special privileges accorded to
their immense wealth; they were really too neglected. Even the Creoles
in the institution had correspondents and visitors; but they were never
called to the parlor, nor was any relative of theirs known to the
school authorities; from time to time they received baskets of
sweetmeats or windfalls of cake, and that was all. The Nabob, as he
drove through Paris, would strip a confectioner's shop-window for their
benefit and send the contents to the college with that affectionate
impulsiveness blended with negro-like ostentation which characterized
all his acts. It was the same with their toys, always too fine, too
elaborate, of no earthly use, the toys which are made only for show and
which the Parisian never buys. But the thing to which above all others
the little Jansoulets owed the respectful consideration of pupils and
masters was their well-filled purse, always ready for collections, for
professorial entertainments, and for the charitable visits, the famous
visits inaugurated by the Collège Bourdaloue, one of the tempting items
on the programme of the institution, the admiration of impressionable
minds.
Twice a month, turn and turn about, the pupils belonging to the little
Society of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, established at the college on the
model of the great society of that name, went in small detachments,
unattended, like grown men, to carry succor and consolation to the
farthest corners of the thickly-peopled faubourgs. In that way it was
sought to teach them charity by experience, the art of finding out the
wretchedness, the necessities of the people and of dressing their
sores, always more or less repulsive, with a balsam of kind words and
ecclesiastical maxims. To console, to convert the masses by the aid of
childhood, to disarm religious incredulity by the youth and innocence
of the apostles; such was the purpose of that little society, a purpose
that failed absolutely of realization, by the way. The children,
well-dressed, well-fed, in excellent health, went only to addresses
designated beforehand and found respectable poor people, sometimes a
little ailing, but far too clean, already enrolled and relieved by the
rich charitable organizations of the Church. They never happened upon
one of those loathsome homes, where hunger, mourning, abject poverty,
all forms of misery, physical and moral, are written in filth on the
walls, in indelible wrinkles on the faces. Their visit was arranged in
advance like that of the sovereign to the guard-house to taste the
soldier's soup; the guard-house is notified and the soup seasoned for
the royal palate. Have you seen those pictures in religious books,
where a little communicant, with his bow on his arm and his taper in
his hand, all combed and curled, goes to assist a poor old man lying on
his wretched pallet with the whites of his eyes turned up to the sky?
These charitable visits had the same conventional stage-setting and
accent. The machine-like gestures of the little preachers with arms too
short for the work, were answered by words learned by rote, so false as
to set one's teeth on edge. The comical words of encouragement, the
"consolation lavishly poured forth" in prize-book phrases by voices
suggestive of young roosters with the influenza, called forth emotional
blessings, the whining, sickening mummery of a church porch after
vespers. And as soon as the young visitors' backs were turned, what an
explosion of laughter and shouting in the garret, what a dancing around
the offerings brought, what an overturning of armchairs in which they
have been feigning illness, what a pouring of boluses into the fire, a
fire of ashes, very artistically arranged! When the little Jansoulets
went to visit their parents, they were placed in charge of the man with
the red fez, Bompain the indispensable. It was Bompain who took them to
the Champs-Élysées, arrayed in English jackets, silk hats of the latest
style--at seven years!--and with little canes dangling from the ends of
their dogskin gloves. It was Bompain who superintended the victualling
of the break on which he went with the children to the races,
race-cards stuck in their hats around which green veils were twisted,
wonderfully like the characters in lilliputian pantomimes whose
comicality consists solely in the size of their heads compared with
their short legs and dwarfish movements. They smoked and drank
outrageously. Sometimes the man in the fez, himself hardly able to
stand, brought them home horribly ill. And yet Jansoulet loved his
little ones, especially the youngest, who, with his long hair and his
doll-like aspect, reminded him of little Afchin in her carriage. But
they were still at the age when children belong to the mother, when
neither a stylish tailor nor accomplished masters nor a fashionable
boarding-school nor the ponies saddled for the little men in the
stable, when nothing in short takes the place of the watchful and
attentive hand, the warmth and gayety of the nest. The father was
unable to give them that in any event; and then he was so busy!