There are those who pet their own misery, who derive pleasure from
dwelling upon it; there are those who gather comfort from putting off
an inevitable evil day; there are those who can borrow even a brief
agonised solace from delaying their own execution. I am not of such.
If a tooth worries me I have it out; if a painful thing has to be
done, I like to get it over as quickly and as shortly as possible. I
do not propose to myself to linger over this last chapter of Fifine’s
story: all that is essential to its elucidation is soon told.
There was the perfect night; and, then, the dawn! It opened, as I
would have had it open, dismally, ominously. A grey drizzle soaked the
streets; the shimmering of the silver night was all alloyed into a
leaden ruin; a sodden curtain hung over the whole city.
I was bound on an early visit to M. Fréron. He lived, I had
learned--_he_? _they_, when they were together--in a little dingy
suite of rooms above a curio-dealer’s shop in the Rue de Seine. We
kissed, she and I--I am terse, you see--and I left her standing and
looking after me--such eyes, my God. Down in the street I shivered; a
doleful epilogue this to the sunny story of Provence.
M. Fréron was not at home. He had stated that he would be back, in
case anybody should call, at three o’clock or thereabouts. In case any
one should call? Whom could he expect, then, this timid, invertebrate
old nobody; unless, indeed, it were some one on whom he depended for
his little extras, luxuries; some one for whom his love, perhaps,
figured a trifle cupboardly. Well, he should not suffer for me.
It was no matter. I would return about that time on the chance of
finding him. I had a plenty of small commissions to fill up the
interval; and, in fact, I did not return to the Rue de Seine until
near four o’clock.
M. Fréron, I was told, was again out. Yes, again. He had come back
punctual to his appointment, and had been almost immediately fetched
away by a sergent de ville. The man had come, and they had left
together, in a great hurry. No one knew what was his errand; it was
impossible to say how long the musician would be gone. He had departed
without a word, but looking certainly very pale and agitated.
Obviously it was no good my remaining; the interview must be
postponed. I was not much concerned over that; at the worst it
represented no more than a formal necessity, about whose issue I had
not the slightest doubt. Fifine was what she was; not what her father
had made her. I knew that much. He would not object to a paying
son-in-law, on the strength of whatever irregularities provided. He
had been known even to comment a little peevishly on the rigidity of
his daughter’s code--not rebuking it, but only feebly wondering. The
“professional” class is always a little apt to indefiniteness in these
matters; and when one is very poor----!
I turned my face for home. That should have been an occasion for joy;
yet somehow a dense oppression sat on me. I could not master it; it
increased with every step I took. It was the weather, no doubt--or was
it that sort of moral dyspepsia, common to those, I had heard, who are
realising for the first time their committal to the matrimonial
lottery? Were we really wise in throwing this sop to the social
Cerberus? And for what? Why, for nothing but that we might penetrate
into the dismal regions he guarded. What a fool I had been, maybe! She
had given me everything: the law would take away the loveliest part of
that gift, its spontaneity. Yet, if _she_ wished it; if it would make
her happier? And, then, the tender thought she had implied--the
promise----!
No, she was right, God bless her! Dismiss that as settled. But the
oppression would not lift. Damn that sergent de ville! Somehow he had
been there all the time, hurrying and hurrying through the background
of my brain; I recognised it now--
I recognized _him_, or his like, in the flesh the next moment. He
stood at the entrance to the archway in the Rue de Fleurus, officially
barring the way to a crowd of people who pressed and gloated to look
in. They hovered there, a vulturine swarm, fulsome and unclean in the
soaking twilight. What was the matter? What carrion had attracted
them? For some instinctive reason they parted to let me through; but
the man challenged me. A thought of the tragedy that I had so often
mocked at as a stage illusion had caught at my heart like a physical
agony, and it was with a thick gasp that I gave my name. He murmured
“Continuez,” looking at me curiously, as he moved to let me by, and I
went on into the dancing shadows. There were others congregated
there--officers, strangers--a confused indefinite group; but only and
for all eternity to me the white aghast face of Madame Crussol, hung
up in the dim gaslight and staring my way like a stone gargoyle.
“Comment?” I said, with an insane little giggle. “What is all this
about; and why do you look at me like that?”
And thereat the gargoyle seemed to detach itself from the wall, and to
spring at me with a shriek:--
“Go to her--she is hurt--she is dying--she has called for you!”
Go to her? Where? There was a roaring in my brain: somebody was
leading me by the arm: we were in a running cab, and a whirl of mud
and water flashed incessantly outside the windows. It was a brief
race: the Hospital was somewhere in the Boulevard de Port Royal close
by: but if it had extended over hours, I could have found no word to
say to my escort--no question to put to him. What was that moment for
idle discussion? and he could have nothing essential to tell me that
I did not know already. There was a subconscious voice going on in me
all the time, whispering of an inviolable hush; a dark soft hand
seemed to steal itself over my eyes. I never thought of vengeance.
What did the motive or the method concern me? This tragedy was one not
of the living hate but of the living love. I thought I kept saying to
myself, “But she fell asleep in my arms--but she fell asleep in my
arms,” over and over again, in a protesting monotonous amazement; but
no doubt I uttered nothing articulate.
In a moment the flash and whirr of the mud had ceased; and a muffled
throbbing and drumming succeeded. And then suddenly we were in a
dimly-lighted vestibule, and as suddenly moving on by cold clean
passages, always cold and always clean, yet intricate and eternal, and
a soft-stepped woman went eternally with us. Her soundless upspringing
had been quite in keeping with the churchlike atmosphere of the place;
she might have been the verger especial to its ghosts and tombs. And
presently we passed an open doorway from which exhaled an essence
thinly sweet and shuddering, and glancing mechanically in I saw the
flitting of dusk shapes, and shadows pierced with gleams, and a vortex
of wooden forms, going down in concentric rings to a shining altar.
But we went by, and did not stop--not until the end came in the little
quiet room with its truckle bed.
Then I knew too well; and knew from the first I had never felt one
thrill of hope. They were quite gentle with me. She had survived to
consciousness, they said--after that ineffectual attempt to extract
the bullets--only long enough to make her brief depositions and to
give them her father’s address. But many times she had whispered my
name, imploring them to send for me; and she had died with it on her
lips. Died with it on her lips--and I, loitering in the rainy street!
Her face was quite peaceful, they told me--quite peaceful and
beautiful. But I would not let them show it me. There were the living
eyes to remember; and I could not bear it. What had _this_ to do with
the vital reality, the hot vivid ecstasy of old confidences?
The father was there--aghast, tremulous, helpless. He recognised me,
and, rising from his knees, came to me, weeping:--
“You were her friend, Monsieur: you will continue to be mine for her
sake?” And then he threw up his hands--“My child, my little one, with
that voice of an angel, that sang so sweetly on the earth, and now
goes to mingle with the heavenly choirs! Never, never shall I hear
thee sing again! And what hadst thou ever done of harm to mark thee
down the prey to these cruel miscreants?”
I regarded him stonily.
“She never sang to me,” I said.
He was sobbingly, self-interestedly eager at once to explain and
propitiate--
“She would not, indeed, Monsieur, uninvited: she was ever modest as to
her own gifts: it was to the realisation of the best there was in
those she loved that she devoted her unselfish faculties.”
And his plaintive cry pierced into my heart like a knife.
* * * * * * *
“I was under the archway”--so ran those pitiful faint-spoken
depositions--“when I saw an automobile stop quickly at the entrance in
the dusk and rain. I moved to retreat; and instantly footsteps came
following me, and a voice whispered close behind: ‘Mademoiselle
Fréron, I think?’ I turned, and saw a man. His face was masked. I was
too frightened to speak. And then suddenly there was a flash and
shock, and another flash and shock, and everything went.”
Why was she in the archway at all? She had been nervous and restless
because her friend, M. Dane, had not returned from a certain
expedition, attested Madame Crussol, and had ventured out in her
anxiety to look for him. She herself, ensconced in her logement, had
not heard the stranger’s words: it was the sound of the double shot
that had brought her hurrying out. Then she had seen the poor
innocent’s body prostrate on the stones, and a man walking from it up
the yard. He walked, very cool and deliberate, towards a lighted car
that stood at the gate. She screamed; whereupon the man had turned,
showing a masked face impossible to identify, and had pointed a pistol
at her, terrifying her into silence. And in another moment he had
jumped into the car and was gone.
But the reason why this girl had been deliberately, as it seemed,
marked down for a victim to the prevailing Thuggism? Ah! that did not
appear. There was something, said the police, of the nature of a
vendetta in the methods of these bandits, and until its complications
could be unravelled, its various provocations must be held only
problematical. In the meantime all remained confusion and terror and
perplexity. For me, I was content to let it rest at that, keeping to
myself any theory I might have formulated as to a vengeance wreaked by
a half-insane morphiomaniac, through vile emissaries quick to seize on
opportunism, on the discovered head of a poor innocent instrument in
his outwitting. There had been whispers of suspicious characters seen
loafing in the neighbourhood some days before our return; there had
been whispers----
But let it all pass. Theories are not evidence; nor was I interested
in anything but the staring fact of my own desolation. A new Reign of
Terror, and ten thousand decadent aristocrats chopped by the head in
the Place de la Concorde, would not mend that inexorable fact. I was
suffering only to shake free from all the inquiries, official and
magisterial, that ensued--the siftings, the empty evidences, the
procès verbals which left things after all precisely where they had
started. It was known clearly at the end, and not much more was known,
that I had been Mademoiselle Fréron’s friend and protector, and that
I had been actually on my way to propose a formal emendation to that
understanding, when the catastrophe occurred. The exposure, so to
speak, was an acutely painful one to me--not because of its moral
aspect, which from first to last to the Parisian was quite en règle,
but because the inner holiness of our idyll seemed violated in the
publicity it brought. But at last they set me free to go and suffer my
utter loneliness unvexed; and with that and my memories I shut myself
away.