THE FAG END OF A NIGHT AND THE BEGINNING OF A MORNING.
When Gaillard was at last comforted and set writing poems in a corner,
the waiters were admitted, the table was cleared, and cards produced.
“Shall we go to the club?” asked Toto.
“No, play here,” answered Struve.
They played loo, and Pelisson kicked the senseless body of De Nani,
which had been pushed right under the table for propriety’s sake, when
luck went against him.
Toto played furiously, partly to drown the remembrance of his unmanly
tears, partly to be successful. His eyes burned, his cheeks were
like carnations, and his luck was frightful; but he played with the
dogged determination peculiar to him in little things, the pig-headed
obstinacy which, had it been allied with talent and poverty, might have
landed him in the Ministry or Academy.
A few men dropped in now and then, glanced at the play, saw that the
stakes were small,—for Pelisson kept them down,—and yawned out again.
“Toto,” said Struve, as the clock struck twelve, “you’ll be ruined at
this rate; better stop.”
“Go on! go on!” cried Toto, like a man pursued by wolves. “The luck
will turn.”
It turned a bit, but not for long, and the play went on till a voice
under the table asked “Where am I?” and then began moaning for a
grilled bone.
“It’s four o’clock!” cried Pelisson, glancing at the timepiece on the
mantel, as Gaillard, waking in his corner, rubbed his eyes. “It’s four
o’clock, and here comes M. le Marquis de Nani from under the table.
_Bon jour_, Marquis; I thought there was a dog under the table, and I
have been kicking at him for the last hour.”
“I dreamt I was being kicked by a mule,” said the Marquis, rising erect
and buttoning his waistcoat. “Who will dispute the truth of dreams
after this?” and he looked at his false teeth in the mirror upon the
wall.
The _garçon de nuit_ entered with the bill—a yard long.
“I have only a five-franc piece,” said Toto. “Let it stand, and bring
us up some supper, some coffee and some champagne; also cigarettes—I
want a cigarette. _Ai de mi!_ what a duffer I am! I cannot even win at
cards.”
“He who is unfortunate at cards is fortunate in love,” said De
Nani, fumbling to feel if the thousand-franc note was safe in his
pocket, whilst the waiter respread the table with all sorts of cold
things—oysters, mayonnaise, and galantine.
“I,” said Gaillard, “am unfortunate at both.”
He attacked some oysters like a wolf, whilst Struve, with the withered
rose in his coat, whistled a mournful air of Berlioz’ whilst he cut a
sardine in three and put a pinch of pepper on it.
De Nani was at the champagne again like a leech, whilst he feasted like
a man off a wreck. He looked a horribly wicked old man in the dawn,
which mixed with the electric light; the paint from his cheeks was on
his nose and chin, and his wig was awry. It was a cheerless party;
Pelisson was half asleep, and Toto as white as a ghost. Gaillard, his
cuff scribbled over with lunatic poetry, cast his mournful eyes at the
dawn peeping in white over the silent Boulevard des Capucines.
“I was once a youth,” said Gaillard. “That is what the world says to us
in the dawn. The dawn ever fills me with despair—a delicious despair.
I do not know why, but it seems forever linked to that divine forlorn
hope, love. This is the light from which we rebuild old castles and
recall vanished faces. In the faint wind that moves we hear the whisper
of voices. Fair women walk in vanished gardens, and the sound of the
dew recalls their tears.”
“Ah!” cried De Nani, “is this a harp I hear, or the voice of a mortal
man?”
“Have you read my little poem,” continued Gaillard, “commencing,
“O Love, whose every golden tress
The sunshine holds of loveliness,
What tragedy in what dark dawn
Hath lent thine eyes such mournfulness?
O——”
“Oh, stop!” said Toto. “Your poetry makes me want to commit suicide.”
“That,” said Gaillard, “shows but the beauty of it. My ambition is to
write a quatrain that will be as poisonous to hope as strychnine. Hope,
that accursed allurement born of the——Heaven! I am going to be ill; I
have swallowed a bad oyster.” “Run to the window,” commanded Toto.
“Brandy,” suggested Pelisson.
“I am better,” declared the poet. “The taste has passed. The question
is, Will it prove poisonous? _Mon Dieu!_ and the proofs of my ‘Fall of
the Damned’ are not corrected.”
“Never mind,” said Toto gloomily. “You can correct them as you are
falling. Oh, what a wretched world this is! I’m going to drown myself
in the Seine.” He rose, yawning, from his chair. “Who will follow me?”
“I will as far as the door,” said Struve, rising also. “Pelisson, where
are you for?”
“Home and go to bed,” said Pelisson, rising also. “M. de Nani—why, he’s
drunk again!”
M. le Marquis de Nani had risen from his seat, and seemed trying to
walk upstairs through the air. It was the back blow of the night.
“I never saw a man slip into drink, like a girl into her shift, so
swiftly and with such divine simplicity,” lisped Struve. “Do wash his
face, someone; he is painted like a _demi-mondaine_, and the paint has
broken loose over his nose. Can’t possibly take him into the street
such a disgraceful figure.”
They washed De Nani’s face with white wine and Toto’s handkerchief,
whilst the old man struggled and resisted like a child. It was a
mournful spectacle, and Toto did not laugh as the others did.
“That’s what’s the end of all,” he thought. “Eugh! what a beastly thing
life is!”
“Now put on his hat,” commanded Pelisson, who acted as master of the
ceremonies, “and jam it down—that’s right. I will carry his cane. Drive
him before you, and call a cab,” he cried to the _garçon_, handing him
a napoleon for _pourboire_.
They got the old man into a fiacre, weeping and protesting and
fighting like a lunatic with his keepers.
“Where shall we send him to?” asked Pelisson.
“I don’t know where he lives; send him to the Morgue, send him to the
Prefecture, send him anywhere you like,” said Toto.
“I know,” said Struve. “I have an enemy—he’s a Legitimist; I’ll send
him a drunken Marquis for a present.” And he gave the name and address
of his enemy to the driver, with half a napoleon to pay the fare. “Get
him into the house at any price,” commanded Struve; “he’s the father of
the gentleman who lives there. There goes the old nobility.”
He finished as the cab drove away, leaving a thin stream of curses on
the morning air. And little did Toto dream where those curses would
come to roost.
“What a jolly night we have had!” said Gaillard, as they parted at the
corner of the Rue de la Paix.
“And we have all done something,” said Pelisson. “You have written a
poem,—don’t have that shirt washed, they’ll sell it in strips after
you are dead,—and I have written my article, and Struve has made a
present to his enemy of De Nani, who has made a beast of himself.”
“And I,” said Toto, “have made a fool of myself.”
“That’s what you were born for,” said Pelisson. “But never mind, Toto,
you make a most charming fool.”
Then Toto found himself alone at the corner of the Rue de la Paix.
Some she-asses were passing, and he stopped the _auvergnat_ driving
them, and had a glass of milk, because that was _chic_, and when he
had drunk the milk he wished he had not, because there was no one to
look; and, besides, he was tired of being _chic_. Then, with the asses’
milk still upon his lips, he came along down the Rue de la Paix in the
direction of the river.
The change of his five-franc piece the _auvergnat_ had given him mostly
in copper; it bulged out his trousers-pocket, and made a clanking sound
as he walked. Paris was waking up, the lidlike shutters of the shops
were rising through a thousand streets; and as he passed through the
Place Vendôme several early morning cabs laden with luggage from the
Nord Station tore by.
In the Rue Castiglione he stopped. What should he do? It was too early
to go home, too late for the club; the world he knew had gone to bed,
the world he dimly knew of was waking up. A world in its shirt-sleeves,
clean, bright, busy, and apparently happy. The dinner, the supper,
the Marquis de Nani, Pelisson’s roaring voice, Struve’s lisp, and
Gaillard’s melancholic poetry, all pursued him like Eumenides of a low
sort, impotent, yet able to tease.
On the Pont de Solferino he stood to look at the river, and might have
thrown himself in had not the water looked so cold, and had he not
remembered that he was unable to swim.
Then, turning back, he came along the arcade of the Rue de Rivoli,
walking leisurely and listening to the birds singing in the trees of
the gardens of the Tuileries.
The Place de la Concorde seemed horribly immense, and the far-away
Eiffel Tower looked like a filmy giant straddling his legs, his hands
in his pockets, and wearily waiting for something to do. Crossing the
Place de la Concorde came a solitary girl carrying something in her
hand; following the girl came a man.