Perfect happiness exists nowhere, and Captain Mercadier, who believed
that he had found it at the Café Prosper, soon recovered from his
illusion.
For one thing, on Mondays, the market-day, the Café Prosper was
untenantable.
From early morning it was overrun with truck-peddlers, farmers, and
poultrymen. Heavy men with coarse voices, red necks, and great whips in
their hands, wearing blue blouses and otter-skin caps, bargaining over
their cups, stamping their feet, striking their fists, familiar with the
servant, and bungling at billiards.
When the Captain came, at eleven o'clock, for his first glass of
absinthe, he found this crowd gathered, and already half-drunk, ordering
a quantity of lunches. His usual place was taken, and he was served
slowly and badly. The bell was continually sounding, and the proprietor
and the waiter, with napkins under their arms, were running distractedly
hither and thither. In short, it was an ill-omened day, which upset his
entire existence.
[Illustration]
Now, one Monday morning, when he was resting quietly at home, being sure
that the café would be much too full and busy, the mild radiance of the
autumn sun persuaded him to go down and sit upon the stone seat by the
side of the house. He was sitting there, depressed and smoking a damp
cigar, when he saw coming down the end of the street--it was a badly
paved lane leading out into the country--a little girl of eight or ten,
driving before her a half-dozen geese.
As the Captain looked carelessly at the child he saw that she had a
wooden leg.
There was nothing paternal in the heart of the soldier. It was that of a
hardened bachelor. In former days, in the streets of Algiers, when the
little begging Arabs pursued him with their importunate prayers, the
Captain had often chased them away with blows from his whip; and on
those rare occasions when he had penetrated the nomadic household of
some comrade who was married and the father of a family, he had gone
away cursing the crying babies and awkward children who had touched with
their greasy hands the gilding on his uniform.
But the sight of that particular infirmity, which recalled to him the
sad spectacle of wounds and amputations, touched, on that account, the
old soldier. He felt almost a constriction of the heart at the sight of
that sorry creature, half-clothed in her tattered petticoats and old
chemise, bravely running along behind her geese, her bare foot in the
dust, and limping on her ill-made wooden stump.
The geese, recognizing their home, turned into the poultry-yard, and the
little one was about to follow them when the Captain stopped her with
this question:
"Eh! little girl, what's your name?"
"Pierette, monsieur, at your service," she answered, looking at him with
her great black eyes, and pushing her disordered locks from her
forehead.
"You live in this house, then? I haven't seen you before."
"Yes, I know you pretty well, though, for I sleep under the stairs, and
you wake me up every evening when you come home."
"Is that so, my girl? Ah, well, I must walk on my toes in future. How
old are you?"
"Nine, monsieur, come All-Saints day."
"Is the landlady here a relative of yours?"
"No, monsieur, I am in service."
"And they give you?"
"Soup, and a bed under the stairs."
"And how came you to be lame like that, my poor little one?"
"By the kick of a cow when I was five."
"Have you a father or mother?"
The child blushed under her sunburned skin. "I came from the Foundling
Hospital," she said, briefly. Then, with an awkward courtesy, she passed
limping into the house, and the Captain heard, as she went away on the
pavement of the court, the hard sound of the little wooden leg.
Good heavens! he thought, mechanically walking towards his café, that's
not at all the thing. A soldier, at least, they pack off to the
Invalides, with the money from his medal to keep him in tobacco. For an
officer, they fix up a collectorship, and he marries somewhere in the
provinces. But this poor girl, with such an infirmity,--that's not at
all the thing!
Having established in these terms the injustice of fate, the Captain
reached the threshold of his dear café, but he saw there such a mob of
blue blouses, he heard such a din of laughter and click of
billiard-balls, that he returned home in very bad humor.
His room--it was, perhaps, the first time that he had spent in it
several hours of the day--looked rather shabby. His bed-curtains were
the color of an old pipe. The fireplace was heaped with old
cigar-stumps, and one could have written his name in the dust on the
furniture. He contemplated for some time the walls where the sublime
lancer of Leipsic rode a hundred times to a glorious death. Then, for an
occupation, he passed his wardrobe in review. It was a lamentable series
of bottomless pockets, socks full of holes, and shirts without buttons.
"I must have a servant," he said.
Then he thought of the little lame girl.
"That's what I'll do. I'll hire the next little room; winter is coming,
and the little thing will freeze under the stairs. She will look after
my clothes and my linen and keep the barracks clean. A valet, how's
that?"
But a cloud darkened the comfortable picture. The Captain remembered
that quarter-day was still a long way off, and that his account at the
Cafe Prosper was assuming alarming proportions.
"Not rich enough," he said to himself. "And in the mean time they are
robbing me down there. That is positive. The board is too high, and that
wretch of a veterinary plays bezique much too well. I have paid his way
now for eight days. Who knows? Perhaps I had better put the little one
in charge of the mess, soup au café in the morning, stew at noon, and
ragout every evening--campaign life, in fact. I know all about that.
Quite the thing to try."
Going out he saw at once the mistress of the house, a great brutal
peasant, and the little lame girl, who both, with pitchforks in their
hands, were turning over the dung-heap in the yard.
"Does she know how to sew, to wash, to make soup?" he asked, brusquely.
"Who--Pierette? Why?"
"Does she know a little of all that?"
"Of course. She came from an asylum where they learn how to take care of
themselves."
"Tell me, little one," added the Captain, speaking to the child, "I am
not scaring you--no? Well, my good woman, will you let me have her? I
want a servant."
"If you will support her."
"Then that is finished. Here are twenty francs. Let her have to-night a
dress and a shoe. To-morrow we'll arrange the rest."
And, with a friendly tap on Pierette's cheek, the Captain went off,
delighted that everything was concluded. Possibly he thought he would
have to cut off some glasses of beer and absinthe, and be cautious of
the veterinary's skill at bezique. But that was not worth speaking of,
and the new arrangement would be quite the thing.