THE SKATING-RINK.
Where was it? Whither was she being taken? The cab had been going for
a long, long time; seated at her side, Audiberte had been holding her
hands, reassuring her and talking to her with a feverish violence. She
did not look at anything, she did not hear anything; the noise of the
wheels, the sharp tones of that shrill little voice had no sense for
her mind whatever; nor did the streets and boulevards and house-fronts
seem to her to wear their usual aspect, but were discolored by the
lively emotion within, as if she were looking at them out of the
carriage in a funeral or marriage procession.
Finally they brought up with a jerk and stopped before a wide pavement
inundated by white light which carved the crowd of people swarming here
into black sharp-cut shadows. At the entrance of the large corridor was
a wicket for the tickets, then a double door of red velvet, and right
upon that a hall, an enormous hall, which with its nave and its side
aisles and the stucco on its high walls, recalled to her an Anglican
church which she had once visited on the occasion of a marriage. Only
in this case the walls were covered with placards and advertisements
in every color, setting forth the virtues of pith helmets, shirts
made to measure for four francs and a half and announcements of
clothing-shops, alternating with the portrait of the tabor-player,
whose biography one could hear cried in that voice of a steam-valve
used by programme-sellers. They were in the midst of a stunning noise
in which the murmur of the circulating mob, the humming of the tops on
the cloth of the English billiard tables, calls for drinks, snatches of
music broken by patriotic gunshots coming from the back of the hall,
were dominated by a constant noise of roller skates going and coming
across a broad asphalted space surrounded by balustrades, the centre of
a perfect storm of crush hats and bonnets of the time of the Directory.
Hortense walked behind the Provençal girl, anxious and frightened, now
turning pale and now turning red beneath her veil, following her with
difficulty through a perfect labyrinth of little round tables at which
women were seated two and two drinking, their elbows on the table,
cigarettes in their mouths and their knees up, overwhelmed with a look
of boredom. Against the wall from point to point stood crowded counters
and behind each was a girl standing erect, her eyes blackened with
kohl, her mouth red as blood and little flashes of steel coming from a
bang of black or russet hair plastered over her brow. And this white
and black of painted skin, this smile with its painted vermilion-point,
were to be found on all the women, as if it were a livery belonging to
nocturnal and pallid apparitions which all were forced to wear.
Sinister also was the slow strolling of the men who elbowed their
way in an insolent and brutal manner between the tables, puffing the
smoke of their thick cigars right and left with the insult of their
marketing as they pushed about to look as closely as possible at the
wares. And what gave it still more the impression of a market was
the cosmopolite public talking all kinds of French, a hotel public
which had just arrived and run into the place in their travelling
clothes--Scotch bonnets, striped jackets, tweeds still full of the fog
of the Channel and Muscovite furs thawing fast in the Paris air. And
there were the long black beards and insolent airs of people from the
banks of the Spree covering satyr grins and Tartar mugs; there too were
Turkish fezzes surmounting coats without any collars, negroes in full
evening dress gleaming like the silk of their tall hats and little
Japanese men dressed like Europeans, dapper and correct, like tailors’
advertisements fallen into the fire.
“_Bou Diou!_ How ugly he is,” said Audiberte suddenly, as they passed a
very solemn Chinaman with his long pigtail hanging down the back of his
blue gown; or else she would stop and, nudging her companion with her
elbow, cry “_Vé! vé!_ see the bride!” and show her some woman dressed
entirely in white lounging on two chairs--one of which supported her
white satin shoes with silver heels--the waist of her dress wide open,
the train of her gown all which-way, and orange flowers fastening
the lace of a short mantilla in her hair. Then, suddenly scandalized
by certain words which gave her the clue to these very chance bridal
flowers, the Provençal girl would add in a mysterious manner: “A
regular snake, you know!” Then suddenly, in order to drag Hortense away
from a bad example, she would hurry her toward the central part of the
building where a theatre rose far in the back, occupying the same place
as the choir in a church. The stage was there under electric flames
which came and went in two big glass spheres away up in the ceiling,
like two gleaming, starry eyes of an Eternal Father in a book of holy
images.
Here they could compose themselves after the tumultuous wickedness
of the lobbies. Families of little citizens, the shopkeepers of the
quarter, filled the orchestra stalls. There were few women. It might
have been possible to believe oneself in some kind of an auditorium,
were it not for the horrible noise all about, which was always being
overborne by the regular rolling of the skaters on the asphalt floor,
drowning even the brass instruments and the drums of the orchestra, so
that really on the boards all that was possible was the dumb-show of
living pictures.
As they seated themselves the curtain went down on a patriotic scene:
an enormous Belfort lion made of cardboard, surrounded by soldiers
in triumphant poses on crumbling ramparts, their military caps stuck
on the ends of their guns, gesticulating to the measure of the
Marseillaise, which nobody could hear. This performance and this wild
excitement stimulated the Provençal girl; her eyes were bulging in her
head; as she found a place for Hortense she exclaimed:
“_Qué!_ we are nice here, _qué!_ But do haul up your veil--don’t
tremble so, there is no danger _wid_ me!”
The young girl did not answer, still overwhelmed by the impression of
that slow, insulting crowd of strollers where she had been confounded
with the rest, among all those livid masks of women. And behold, right
in front of her, she found those horrible masks once more, with their
blood-stained lips--found them in the grimacing faces of two clowns in
tights who were dislocating all their joints, a bell in each hand with
which they were sounding out, whilst they frolicked about, an air from
“Martha”--a veritable music of the gnomes, formless and stuttering,
very much in its place in the musical babel of the skating-rink. Then
the curtain fell again, and for the tenth time the peasant girl stood
up and sat down again, fussed about, fixed her head-dress anew and
suddenly exclaimed, as she looked down the programme: “There, the
Cordova Mount--the summer locusts, the farandole--there, there, it is
beginning, _vé, vé!_”
Rising once more, the curtain displayed upon the background of the
scenery a lilac mountain, up which mounted buildings of stone most
weird in construction, partly castle, partly mosque, here a minaret and
there a terrace; they rose in ogival arches, crenelations and Moorish
work, with aloes and palm-trees of zinc rising at the foot of towers
sharply cut against the indigo blue of a very crude sky. One may see
just such absurd architecture in the suburbs of Paris among villas
inhabited by newly enriched merchants. In spite of all, in spite of
the crying tones of the slopes blossoming with thyme and exotic plants
placed there by mistake because of the word “Cordova,” Hortense was
rather embarrassed at sight of that landscape which held for her the
most delightful recollections. And that palace of the Turk perched
upon the mountain all rose-colored porphyry, and that reconstructed
castle, really did seem to her the realization of her dreams, but quite
grotesque and overdone, as it happens when one’s dream is about to slip
into the oppression of a nightmare.
At a signal from the orchestra and from an electric jet, long
devil’s-darning-needles, personated by girls in an undress of
tightly-fitting silks, a sort of emerald-green tights, rushed upon the
stage waving their long membranous wings and whirling their wooden
rattles.
“What! those are locusts? Not much!” said the Provençal girl
indignantly.
Already they had arranged themselves in a half circle, like a
crescent-shaped mass of seaweed, all the time whirling their rattles,
which sounded very distinctly now, because the row made by the parlor
skates was softened and for a moment the noise of the lobby was hushed
in a close wall of heads leaning toward the stage, their eyes glaring
under every kind of head-dress in the world. The wretchedness which
tore Hortense’s heart grew deeper when she heard coming, at first from
afar and gradually increasing, the low sound of the tabor.
She would have liked to flee in order not to have seen what was coming.
In its turn the shepherd’s pipe sounded out its high notes and the
farandole, raising under the cadence of its regular steps a thick dust
the color of the earth, unrolled itself with all the fantastic costumes
imaginable, short skirts meant to lure the eye, red stockings with gold
borders, spangled waists, head-dresses of Arab coins, of Indian scarfs,
of Italian kerchiefs or those from Brittany or Caux, all worn with a
fine Parisian disdain of truth to locality.
Behind them, pushing forward on his knee a tabor covered with gold
paper, came the great troubadour of the placards--his legs incased in
tights, one leg yellow with a blue shoe on and one leg blue shod in
yellow, with his satin waistcoat covered with puffs and his crenelated
velvet cap overshadowing a countenance which remained quite brown
despite cosmetics, and of which nothing could be seen well except a big
moustache stiffened with Hungarian pomade.
“Ah!” said Audiberte in perfect ecstasy.
When the farandole had taken up its place on the two sides of the stage
in front of the locusts with their big wings, the troubadour, standing
alone in the centre, saluted with an air of assurance and victory under
the glaring eyes of the Eternal Father whose rays poured a luminous
hoarfrost upon his coat.
The aubade began, rustic and shrill, yet it went forward into the
halls hardly farther than the footlights; there it lived a very short
life, fighting for a moment with the flamboyant banners on the ceiling
and the columns of the enormous interior, and then fell flat into a
great and bored silence. The public looked on without the slightest
comprehension. Valmajour began another piece, which at the first sounds
was received with laughter, murmurs and cat-calls. Audiberte took
Hortense’s hand:
“Listen! that’s the cabal!”
At this point the cabal consisted merely of a few “Heh! louder!” and of
jokes of this sort, which were called out by a husky voice belonging
to some low woman on seeing the complicated dumb-show that Valmajour
employed: “Oh, give us a rest, you chump!”
Then the rink took up again its sound of parlor skates and of English
billiards and its ambulatory marketing, overwhelming the shepherd’s
pipe and the tabor which the musician insisted upon using until the
very end of the aubade. After this he saluted again, marched forward
toward the footlights, always accompanied by that mysterious grand air
which never quitted him. His lips could be seen moving and a few words
came here and there into ear-shot: “It came to me all of a sudden ...
one hole ... three holes ... the good God’s _birrd_....”
His despairing gesture was understood by the orchestra and gave the
signal for a ballet in which the locusts twined themselves about
the odalisques from Caux and formed plastic poses, undulatory and
lascivious dances beneath Bengal flames which threw their rainbow
light as far as the pointed shoes of the troubadour, who continued his
dumb-show with the tabor in front of the castle of his ancestors in a
great glory and apotheosis.
There lay the romance of poor little Hortense! That is what Paris had
made of it.
* * * * *
The clear bell of the old clock hanging on the wall of her chamber
sounded one as Hortense roused herself from the arm-chair into which
she had fallen utterly crushed when she entered. She looked around her
gentle maiden’s nest, warm with the reassuring gleams of a dying fire
and of an expiring night-lamp.
“What am I doing here? Why did I not go to bed?”
She could not remember at first what had happened, only feeling a
complete sickness through her entire being and in her head a noise
which made it ache. She stood up and walked a step or two before she
perceived that she still wore her hat and mantle; then all came back
to her. She remembered then their departure after the curtain fell,
their return through the hideous market, more brilliantly illumined
than before, among drunken book-makers fighting with each other in
front of a counter, through cynical voices whispering a sum of money
as she passed--and then the scene at the exit, with Audiberte who
wished her to come and felicitate her brother; then Audiberte’s wrath
in the coach, the abuse which the creature heaped upon her, only ended
by Audiberte humiliating herself before her, and kissing her hands for
pardon; all that and still other things danced through her memory along
with the horrible faces of the clowns, harsh noises of bells, cymbals
and rattles, and the rising up of many-colored flames about that
ridiculous troubadour to whom she had given her heart! A terror that
was physical roused her at that idea:
“No, no; never! I’d far rather die!”
All of a sudden, in the looking-glass in front of her, she caught sight
of a ghost with hollow cheeks and narrow shoulders drawn together in
front with the gesture of a person shuddering with cold. The spectre
looked a little like her, but much more like that poor Princess of
Anhalt who had so roused her curiosity and pity at Arvillard that she
had described her sad symptoms in a letter. The princess had just died
at the opening of winter.
“Why, look--look!” She bent forward, came nearer to the glass and
recalled the inexplicable kindness that everybody down there had shown
her, the fright her mother evinced, the tenderness of old Bouchereau at
her departure--and understood! Now at last she knew what it was, she
knew the end of the game! It was here without any one to aid it. Surely
it was long enough she had been looking for its coming.