"Robert, see me upstairs, I am frightened."
Not without some impatience, he followed her up the stairs.
Chevalier had waited for Felicie, in the little dining-room, before the armour which she had worn as Jeanne d"Arc, together with Madame Nanteuil, until one o"clock in the morning. He had left at that hour, and had watched for her on the pavement, and on seeing the cab stop in front of the door he had concealed himself behind a tree. He knew very well that she would return with Ligny; but when he saw them together it was as if the earth had yawned beneath him, and, so that he should not fall to the ground, he had clutched the trunk of the tree. He remained until Ligny had emerged from the house; he watched him as, wrapped in his fur coat, he got into the cab, took a couple of steps as if to spring on him, stopped short, and then with long strides went down the boulevard.
He went his way, driven by the rain and wind. Feeling too hot, he doffed his felt hat, and derived a certain pleasure from the sense of the icy drops of water on his forehead. He was vaguely conscious that houses, trees, walls, and lights went past him indefinitely; he wandered on, dreaming.
He found himself, without knowing how he had got there, on a bridge which he hardly knew. Half-way across it stood the colossal statue of a woman. His mind was now at rest; he had formed a resolution. It was an old idea, which he had now driven into his brain like a nail, which pierced it through and through. He no longer examined it. He calculated coldly the means of carrying out the thing he had determined to do. He walked straight ahead at random, absorbed in thought, and as calm as a mathematician.
On the Pont des Arts he became aware that a dog was following him. He was a big, long-haired farm dog, with eyes of different colours, which were full of gentleness, and an expression of infinite distress.
Chevalier spoke to him:
"You"ve no collar. You are not happy. Poor fellow, I can"t do anything for you."
By four o"clock in the morning he found himself in the Avenue de l"Observatoire. On seeing the houses of the Boulevard Saint-Michel he experienced a painful impression and abruptly turned back toward the Observatory. The dog had vanished. Near the monument of the Lion of Belfort, Chevalier stopped in front of a deep trench which cut the road in two. Against the bank of excavated earth, under a tarpaulin supported by four stakes, an old man was keeping vigil before a brazier. The lappets of his rabbit-skin cap were down over his ears; his huge nose was a flaming red. He raised his head; his eyes, which were watering, seemed wholly white, without pupils, each set in a ring of fire and tears. He was stuffing into the bowl of his cutty a few sc.r.a.ps of canteen tobacco, mixed with bread-crumbs, which did not fill half the bowl of his little pipe.
"Will you have some tobacco, old fellow?" asked Chevalier, offering him his pouch.
The man"s answer was slow in coming. His understanding was not quick, and courtesies astonished him. Finally, he opened a mouth which was quite black, and said:
"I won"t say no to that."
He half rose from his seat. One of his feet was shod in an old slipper; the other was swathed in rags. Slowly, with hands numb with the cold, he stuffed his pipe. It was snowing, a snow that melted as it fell.
"You will excuse me?" said Chevalier, and he slipped under the tarpaulin and seated himself beside the old man.
From time to time they exchanged a remark.
"Rotten weather!"
"It"s what we expect at this season. Winter"s hard; summer"s better."
"So you look after the job at night, old fellow?"
The old man answered readily when questioned. Before he spoke his throat emitted a long, very gentle murmur.
"I do one thing one day; another thing another. Odd jobs. See?"
"You are not a Parisian?"
"No, I was born in La Creuse. I used to work as a navvy in the Vosges.
I left there the year the Prussians and other foreigners came. There were thousands of them. Can"t understand where they all came from. Maybe you"ve heard of the war of the Prussians, young man?"
He remained silent for a long spell and then resumed:
"So you are out on a spree, my lad. You don"t feel like going back to the works yet?"
"I am an actor," replied Chevalier.
The old man who did not understand, inquired:
"Where is it, your works?"
Chevalier was anxious to rouse the old man"s admiration.
"I play comedy parts in a big theatre," he said. "I am one of the princ.i.p.al actors at the Odeon. You know the Odeon?"
The watchman shook his head. No, he did not know the Odeon. After a prolonged silence, he once more opened the black cavern of his mouth:
"And so, young man, you are on the loose. You don"t want to go back to the works, eh?"
Chevalier replied:
"Read the paper the day after to-morrow, you will see my name in it."
The old man tried to discover a meaning in these words, but it was too difficult; he gave it up, and reverted to his familiar train of thought.
"When once one"s off on the loose, it is sometimes for weeks and months."
At daybreak, Chevalier resumed his wanderings. The sky was milky. Heavy wheels were breaking the silence of the paved roads. Voices, here and there, rang through the keen air. The snow was no longer falling. He walked on at haphazard. The spectacle of the city"s reviving life made him feel almost cheerful. On the Pont des Arts he stood for a long time watching the Seine flow by, after which he continued on his way. On the Place du Havre he saw an open cafe. A faint streak of dawn was reddening the front windows. The waiters were sanding the brick pavement and setting out the tables. He flung himself into a chair.
"Waiter, an absinthe."
CHAPTER VI
In the cab, beyond the fortifications, which were skirted by the deserted boulevard, Felicie and Robert held one another in a close embrace.
"Don"t you love your own Felicie? Tell me! Doesn"t it flatter your vanity to possess a little woman who makes people cheer and clap her, who is written about in the newspapers? Mamma pastes all my notices in her alb.u.m. The alb.u.m is full already."
He replied that he had not waited for her to succeed before discovering how charming she was; and, in fact, their liaison had begun when she was making an obscure first appearance at the Odeon in a revival which had fallen flat.
"When you told me that you wanted me, I didn"t keep you waiting, did I?
We didn"t take long about that! Wasn"t I right? You are too sensible to think badly of me because I didn"t keep things dragging along. When I saw you for the first time I felt that I was to be yours, so it wasn"t worth while delaying. I don"t regret it. Do you?"
The cab stopped at a short distance from the fortifications, in front of a garden railing.
This railing, which had not been painted for a long time, stood on a wall faced with pebbles, low and broad enough to permit of children perching themselves on it. It was screened half-way up by a sheet of iron with a toothed edge, and its rusty spikes did not rise more than ten feet above the ground. In the centre, between two pillars of masonry surmounted by cast-iron vases, the railing formed a gate opening in the middle, filled in across its lower part, and furnished, on the inside, with worm-eaten slatted shutters.
They alighted from the cab. The trees of the boulevard, in four straight lines, lifted their frail skeletons in the fog. They heard, through the wide silence, the diminishing rattle of their cab, on its way back to the barrier, and the trotting of a horse coming from Paris.
"How dismal the country is!" she said, with a shiver.
"But, my darling, the Boulevard de Villiers is not the country."