Hitherto that portly lady's hair had been black. But now, as suddenly
as darkness vanishes in a tropic dawn, it was become light. No gradual
approach of the grey, for the black had been equally artificial. The
wig is the region without twilight. Only in the swart moustache
had the grey crept on, so that perhaps the growing incongruity had
necessitated the sudden surrender to age.
To both Madame Depine and Madame Valiere the grey wig came like a blow
on the heart.
It was a grisly embodiment of their secret griefs, a tantalising
vision of the unattainable. To glide reputably into a grey wig had
been for years their dearest desire. As each saw herself getting older
and older, saw her complexion fade and the crow's-feet gather, and her
eyes grow hollow, and her teeth fall out and her cheeks fall in,
so did the impropriety of her brown wig strike more and more
humiliatingly to her soul. But how should a poor old woman ever
accumulate enough for a new wig? One might as well cry for the
moon--or a set of false teeth. Unless, indeed, the lottery--?
And so, when Madame Depine received a sister-in-law from Tonnerre, or
Madame Valiere's nephew came up by the excursion train from that same
quiet and incongruously christened townlet, the Parisian personage
would receive the visitor in the darkest corner of the salon, with her
back to the light, and a big bonnet on her head--an imposing figure
repeated duskily in the gold mirrors. These visits, instead of
a relief, became a terror. Even a provincial knows it is not
_convenable_ for an old woman to wear a brown wig. And Tonnerre kept
strict record of birthdays.
Tears of shame and misery had wetted the old ladies' hired pillows, as
under the threat of a provincial visitation they had tossed sleepless
in similar solicitude, and their wigs, had they not been wigs, would
have turned grey of themselves. Their only consolation had been that
neither outdid the other, and so long as each saw the other's brown
wig, they had refrained from facing the dread possibility of having to
sell off their jewellery in a desperate effort of emulation. Gradually
Madame Depine had grown to wear her wig with vindictive endurance, and
Madame Valiere to wear hers with gentle resignation. And now, here
was Madame la Proprietaire, a woman five years younger and ten years
better preserved, putting them both to the public blush, drawing the
hotel's attention to what the hotel might have overlooked, in its long
habituation to their surmounting brownness.
More morbidly conscious than ever of a young head on old shoulders,
the old ladies no longer paused at the bureau to exchange the news
with Madame or even with her black-haired bookkeeping daughter. No
more lounging against the newel under the carved torch-bearer, while
the journalist of the fourth floor spat at the Dreyfusites, and the
poet of the _entresol_ threw versified vitriol at perfidious Albion.
For the first time, too--losing their channel of communication--they
grew out of touch with each other's microscopic affairs, and their
mutual detestation increased with their resentful ignorance. And so,
shrinking and silent, and protected as far as possible by their big
bonnets, the squat Madame Depine and the skinny Madame Valiere toiled
up and down the dark, fusty stairs of the Hotel des Tourterelles,
often brushing against each other, yet sundered by icy infinities. And
the endurance on Madame Depine's round face became more vindictive,
and gentler grew the resignation on the angular visage of Madame
Valiere.