His father had come to this decision by the advice of Monsieur Marguerite, the _vicaire_ of his parish and a friend of the Abbe Bordier. The bookbinder, having a high respect for knowledge, entertained a correspondingly high idea of the status of all its ministers. a.s.sistant master struck him as an imposing t.i.tle, and he was delighted to have his son connected with an aristocratic and religious foundation.
"Your son," the Abbe Marguerite told him, "will read for his Master"s degree in the intervals of his duties, and the t.i.tle of Licencie-es-Lettres will open the door to the higher walks of teaching. We have known a.s.sistants rise to high positions in the University and even occupy Monsieur de Fontanes" chair."
These considerations had clenched the bookbinder"s resolution, and this was now the third day of Jean"s ushership.
XXII
Three months had dragged by. It was a Friday; a hot, nauseating smell of fried fish filled the refectory; a strong drought blew cold about feet encased in wet boots; the walls dripped with moisture, and outside the barred windows a fine rain was falling from a grey sky. The boys, seated at marble-topped tables, were making a hideous rattle with their forks and tin cups, while one of their schoolfellows, seated at the desk in the middle of the great room, was reading aloud, as the regulations direct, a pa.s.sage from Rollin"s _Ancient History_.
Jean, at the head of a table, his nose in his ill-washed earthenware plate, had cold feet and a sore heart. Something resembling rotten wood formed a deposit at the bottom of his gla.s.s, while the servers were handing round dishes of prunes with their thumbs washing in the juice. Now and again, amid the rattle of plates, the rasping voice of the reader, a lad of seventeen, reached the usher"s ears.
He caught the name of Cleopatra and some sc.r.a.ps of sentences: "_She was about to appear before Antony at an age when women unite with the flower of their beauty every charm of wit and intellect... her person more compelling than any magnificence of adornment.... Her galley entered the Cydnus... the p.o.o.p of the vessel shone resplendent with gold, the sails were of Tyrian purple, the oars of silver._"
Then the seductive names of _Nereids, flutes, perfumes_. The hot blood flooded his cheeks. The woman who for him was the sole and only incarnation of the whole race of womankind throughout the ages rose before his mental sight with a surprising clearness; every hair of his body stood on end in an agonizing spasm of desire, and he dug his nails into the palms of his hands. The vision caused him an unspeakable yet delicious pain--Gabrielle in a loose _peignoir_ at a small, daintily ordered table gay with flowers and gla.s.ses. He saw it all quite clearly; his gaze searched every fold of the soft material that covered her bosom and rose and fell at each breath she drew. Face and neck and lively hands had a surprisingly brilliant yet so natural a sheen that they exhaled amorous invitation as if they had been verily of flesh and blood. The superb moulding of the lips, pouting like a ripe mulberry, and the exquisite grain of the skin were manifest--treasures such as men risk death and crime to win.
It was the actress, in fine, seen by the two eyes which of all eyes in the whole world had learned to see her best. She was not alone; a man was looking at her with a penetrating intensity as he filled her gla.s.s. They were straining one towards the other.
Jean could not restrain his sobs. Suddenly he seemed to be falling from the top of a high tower. The Superintendent of Studies was standing in front of him and saying:
"Monsieur Servien, will you see about punishing that boy Laboriette, who is emptying his leavings in his neighbour"s pocket?"
XXIII
The Superintendent, with his large, flat face and the sly ways of a peasant turned monk, was a constant thorn in Jean"s side.
"_Be firm, be firm, sir_," was his parable every day, and he never missed an opportunity of doing the usher an ill turn with the Director.
The early days of Jean"s servitude had slipped by in an enervating monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud of his aristocratic name, which he scribbled in big letters on his light trousers, and overjoyed at the chance of hurting an inferior"s feelings, had from the very first day declared war against the poor usher. He used to empty ink-bottles into his desk, stick cobbler"s wax on his chair, and let off crackers in the middle of school.
Hearing the disturbance, the Superintendent would march in with the airs of a Police Inspector and bid Jean: "_Be firm, sir!
be firm!_"
Far from taking his advice, Jean affected an excessive easiness of temper. One day he caught a boy in the act of drawing a caricature of himself; he picked it up and glanced at it, then handed it back to the artist with a shrug of the shoulders.
Such mildness was misconstrued and only weakened his authority.
The usher"s miseries grew acute, and he lost the patience that alleviated his sufferings. He could not put up with the lads"
restlessness, their happy laughter and light-hearted enjoyment of life. He showed temper, venting his spite on mere acts of thoughtlessness or simple ebullitions of high spirits. Then he would fall into a sort of torpor. He had long fits of absentmindedness, during which he was deaf to every noise. It became the fashion to keep birds, plait nets, shoot arrows, and crow like a c.o.c.k in Monsieur Jean Servien"s cla.s.s-room. Even the boys from other divisions would slip out of their own cla.s.srooms to peep in at the windows of this one, about which such amazing stories were told, and the ceiling of which was decorated with little figures swinging at the end of a string stuck to the plaster with chewed paper.
De Grizolles had installed a regular Roman catapult for shooting kidney-beans at the usher"s head.
Jean would drive the young gentleman out of the room. The Superintendent of Studies would reinstate him, only to be turned out again. And each time meant a fresh report to the Director.
The Abbe Bordier, who never found patience to hear the worthy Superintendent out to the end, could only throw up his hands to heaven and declare they would be the death of him between them.
But the impression became fixed in his mind that the a.s.sistant in charge of the _Remove_ was a source of trouble.
XXIV
Sunday was a day of cheerful indolence, devoted to attending the services in the Chapel, which was filled with the scent of incense all day long. At Vespers, while the clear, boyish voices intoned the long-drawn canticles, Jean would be gazing at some woman"s face half seen in the dusk of the galleries where the pupils" mothers and sisters knelt during the office, their haughty air contradicting the humble att.i.tude. At the sound of the _Ave maris stella_, the lowly bookbinder"s son would lift his eyes to these ladies of high degree, the plainest of whom feels herself a jewel of price and cherishes a natural and unaffected pride of birth. The chants and incense, the flowers and sacred images, whatever troubles the imagination and stimulates to prayer, all these things united to enervate his spirit and deliver him a trembling victim to the glamour of these patrician dames.
But it was Gabrielle he worshipped in them, Gabrielle to whom he offered up his prayers, his supplications. All that element in religion which gives to love the fascination of forbidden fruit appealed powerfully to his imagination. Unbeliever though he was, he loved the Magdalen"s G.o.d and savoured the creed that has bestowed on lovers one amorous bliss the more--the bliss of losing their immortal souls.
XXV
Little by little the boys wearied of this insubordination, their imaginations proving unequal to the invention of any new forms of mischief. Even de Grizolles himself left off shooting beans.
Instead, he conceived the notion of brewing chocolate inside his desk with a spirit-lamp and a silver patty-pan. Jean left him in peace and reopened his Sophocles with a sigh of relief.
But the Superintendent, going by in the court, caught a smell of cooking, searched the desks and unearthed the patty-pan, which he offered, still warm, for the Reverend the Director"s inspection, with the words: "There! that"s what goes on in Monsieur Servien"s cla.s.s-room." The Director slapped his forehead, declared they would be the death of him and ordered the patty-pan to be restored to its owner. Then he sent for the a.s.sistant in charge and administered a severe reprimand, because he believed it to be his bounden duty to do so.
The next day was a whole holiday, and Jean went to spend the day at his father"s. The latter asked him if he was ready for his professorial examination.
"My lad," he adjured him, "be quick and find a good post if you want me to see you in it. One of these days your aunt and I will be going out at yonder door feet foremost. The old lady had a fit of dizziness last week on the stairs. _I_ am not ill, but I can feel I am worn out. I have done a hard life"s work in the world."
He looked at his tools, and walked away, a bent old man!
Then Jean gathered up in both hands the old work-worn tools, all polished with use, scissors, punches, knives, folders, sc.r.a.pers, and kissed them, the tears running down his cheeks.
At that moment his aunt came in, looking for her spectacles.
Furtively, in a whisper, she asked him for a little money. In old days she used to save the halfpence to slip them into the "little lad"s " hand; now, grown feebler than the child, she trembled at the idea of dest.i.tution; she h.o.a.rded, and asked charity of the priests. The fact is, her wits were weakening. Very often she would inform her brother that she did not mean to let the week pa.s.s without going to see the Brideaus. Now the Brideaus, jobbing tailors at Montrouge in their lifetime, had been dead, both husband and wife, for the last two years. Jean gave her a louis, which she took with a delight so ugly to see that the poor lad took refuge out of doors.
Presently, without quite knowing how, he found himself on the _Quai_ near the _Pont d"Iena_. It was a bright day, but the gloomy walls of the houses and the grey look of the river banks seemed to proclaim that life is hard and cruel. Out in the stream a dredger, all drab with marl, was discharging one after the other its bucket-fuls of miry gravel. By the waterside a stout oaken crane was unloading millstones, wheeling backwards and forwards on its axis. Under the parapet, near the bridge, an old dame with a copper-red face sat knitting stockings as she waited for customers to buy her apple-puffs.
Jean Servien thought of his childhood; many a time had his aunt taken him to the same spot, many a time had they watched together the dredger hauling aboard, bucketful by bucketful, the muddy dregs of the river. Very often his aunt had stopped to exchange ideas with the old stallkeeper, while he examined the counter which was spread with a napkin, the carafe of liquorice-water that stood on it, and the lemon that served as stopper. Nothing was changed, neither the dredger, nor the rafts of timber, nor the old woman, nor the four ponderous stallions at either end of the _Pont d"Iena_.
Yes, Jean Servien could hear the trees along the _Quai_, the waters of the river, the very stones of the parapet calling to him:
"We know you; you are the little boy his aunt, in a peasant"s cap, used to bring here to see us in former days. But we shall never see your aunt again, nor her print shawl, nor her umbrella which she opened against the sun; for she is old now and does not take her nephew walks any more, for he is a grown man now.
Yes, the child is grown into a man and has been hurt by life, while he was running after shadows."
XXVI
One day, in the midday interval, he was informed that a visitor was asking for him in the parlour; the news filled him with delight, for he was very young and still counted on the possibilities of the unknown. In the parlour he found Monsieur Tudesco, wearing his waistcoat of ticking and holding a peaked hat in one hand.
"My young friend," began the Italian, "I learned from your respected father"s apprentice that you were confined in this sanctuary of studious learning. I venture to say your fortune is overcast with clouds, at least I fear it is. The lowliness of your estate is not gilded like that of the Latin poet, and you are struggling with a valiant heart against adverse fortune. That is why I am come to offer you the hand of friendship, and I venture to say you will regard as a mark of my amity and my esteem the request I proffer for a crown-piece, which I find needful to sustain an existence consecrated to learned studies."
The parlour was filling with pupils and their friends and relations.
Mothers and sons were exchanging sounding kisses, followed by exclamations of "How hot you are, dear!" and prolonged whisperings.
Girls in light summer frocks were making sheep"s eyes on the sly at their brothers" friends, while fathers were pulling cakes of chocolate out of their pockets.
Monsieur Tudesco, entirely at his ease among these fine people, did not seem at all aware of the young usher"s hideous embarra.s.sment.