"She replied: "You can do as you please, but you will be ill again and will not be able to get up tomorrow." That was true, sensible and prudent, clearsighted, I must confess. Nevertheless I could not resist, and I drank my bottle. It all came from that.
"Well, I could not sleep. By Jove! it kept me awake till two o"clock in the morning, and then I went to sleep so soundly that I should not have heard the angel sounding his trump at the last Judgment.
"In short, my wife woke me at six o"clock and I jumped out of bed, hastily put on my trousers and jersey, washed my face and jumped on board _Delila_. But it was too late, for when I arrived at my hole it was already occupied! Such a thing had never happened to me in three years, and it made me feel as if I were being robbed under my own eyes. I said to myself: "Confound it all! confound it!" And then my wife began to nag at me. "Eh! what about your _Casque a meche?_ Get along, you drunkard! Are you satisfied, you great fool?" I could say nothing, because it was all true, but I landed all the same near the spot and tried to profit by what was left. Perhaps after all the fellow might catch nothing and go away.
"He was a little thin man in white linen coat and waistcoat and a large straw hat, and his wife, a fat woman, doing embroidery, sat behind him.
"When she saw us take up our position close to them she murmured: "Are there no other places on the river?" My wife, who was furious, replied: "People who have any manners make inquiries about the habits of the neighborhood before occupying reserved spots."
"As I did not want a fuss, I said to her: "Hold your tongue, Melie.
Let them alone, let them alone; we shall see."
"Well, we fastened _Delila_ under the willows and had landed and were fishing side by side, Melie and I, close to the two others. But here, monsieur, I must enter into details.
"We had only been there about five minutes when our neighbor"s line began to jerk twice, thrice, and then he pulled out a chub as thick as my thigh; rather less, perhaps, but nearly as big! My heart beat, the perspiration stood on my forehead and Melie said to me: "Well, you sot, did you see that?"
"Just then Monsieur Bru, the grocer of Poissy, who is fond of gudgeon fishing, pa.s.sed in a boat and called out to me: "So somebody has taken your usual place, Monsieur Renard?" And I replied--: "Yes, Monsieur Bru, there are some people in this world who do not know the rules of common politeness."
"The little man in linen pretended not to hear, nor his fat lump of a wife, either."
Here the president interrupted him a second time: "Take care, you are insulting the widow, Madame Flameche, who is present."
Renard made his excuses: "I beg your pardon, I beg your pardon; my anger carried me away. Well, not a quarter of an hour had pa.s.sed when the little man caught another chub, and another almost immediately, and another five minutes later.
"Tears were in my eyes, and I knew that Madame Renard was boiling with rage, for she kept on nagging at me: "Oh, how horrid! Don"t you see that he is robbing you of your fish? Do you think that you will catch anything? Not even a frog, nothing whatever. Why, my hands are tingling, just to think of it."
"But I said to myself: "Let us wait until twelve o"clock. Then this poacher will go to lunch and I shall get my place again. As for me, Monsieur le President, I lunch on that spot every Sunday. We bring our provisions in _Delila_. But there! At noon the wretch produced a chicken in a newspaper, and while he was eating, he actually caught another chub!
"Melie and I had a morsel also, just a bite, a mere nothing, for our heart was not in it.
"Then I took up my newspaper to aid my digestion. Every Sunday I read the _Gil Blas_ in the shade by the side of the water. It is Columbine"s day, you know; Columbine, who writes the articles in the _Gil Blas_. I generally put Madame Renard into a rage by pretending to know this Columbine. It is not true, for I do not know her and have never seen her, but that does not matter. She writes very well, and then she says things that are pretty plain for a woman. She suits me and there are not many of her sort.
"Well, I began to tease my wife, but she got angry immediately, and very angry, so I held my tongue. At that moment our two witnesses who are present here, Monsieur Ladureau and Monsieur Durdent, appeared on the other side of the river. We knew each other by sight The little man began to fish again and he caught so many that I trembled with vexation and his wife said: "It is an uncommonly good spot, and we will come here always, Desire." As for me, a cold shiver ran down my back, and Madame Renard kept repeating: "You are not a man; you have the blood of a chicken in your veins"; and suddenly I said to her: "Look here, I would rather go away or I shall be doing something foolish."
"And she whispered to me, as if she had put a red-hot iron under my nose: "You are not a man. Now you are going to run away and surrender your place! Go, then, Bazaine!"
"I felt hurt, but yet I did not move, while the other fellow pulled out a bream. Oh, I never saw such a large one before, never! And then my wife began to talk aloud, as if she were thinking, and you can see her tricks. She said: "That is what one might call stolen fish, seeing that we set the bait ourselves. At any rate, they ought to give us back the money we have spent on bait."
"Then the fat woman in the cotton dress said in her turn: "Do you mean to call us thieves, madame?" Explanations followed and compliments began to fly. Oh, Lord! those creatures know some good ones. They shouted so loud that our two witnesses, who were on the other bank, began to call out by way of a joke: "Less noise over there; you will interfere with your husbands" fishing."
"The fact is that neither the little man nor I moved any more than if we had been two tree stumps. We remained there, with our eyes fixed on the water, as if we had heard nothing; but, by Jove! we heard all the same. "You are a thief! You are nothing better than a tramp! You are a regular jade!" and so on and so on. A sailor could not have said more.
"Suddenly I heard a noise behind me and turned round. It was the other one, the fat woman, who had attacked my wife with her parasol.
_Whack, whack!_ Melie got two of them. But she was furious, and she hits hard when she is in a rage. She caught the fat woman by the hair and then _thump! thump!_ slaps in the face rained down like ripe plums. I should have let them fight it out: women together, men together. It does not do to mix the blows. But the little man in the linen jacket jumped up like a devil and was going to rush at my wife.
Ah! no, no, not that, my friend! I caught the gentleman with the end of my fist, and _crash! crash!_ One on the nose, the other in the stomach. He threw up his arms and legs and fell on his back into the river, just into the hole.
"I should have fished him out most certainly, Monsieur le President, if I had had time. But, to make matters worse, the fat woman had the upper hand and was pounding Melie for all she was worth. I know I ought not to have interfered while the man was in the water, but I never thought that he would drown and said to myself: "Bah, it will cool him."
"I therefore ran up to the women to separate them and all I received was scratches and bites. Good Lord, what creatures! Well, it took me five minutes, and perhaps ten, to separate those two viragos. When I turned round there was nothing to be seen. The water was as smooth as a lake and the others yonder kept shouting: "Fish him out! fish him out!" It was all very well to say that, but I cannot swim and still less dive.
"At last the man from the dam came and two gentlemen with boathooks, but over a quarter of an hour had pa.s.sed. He was found at the bottom of the hole, in eight feet of water, as I have said. There he was, the poor little man, in his linen suit! Those are the facts such as I have sworn to. I am innocent, on my honor."
The witnesses having given testimony to the same effect, the accused was acquitted.
THE SPASM
The hotel guests slowly entered the dining-room and took their places.
The waiters did not hurry themselves, in order to give the late comers a chance and thus avoid the trouble of bringing in the dishes a second time. The old bathers, the habitues, whose season was almost over, glanced, gazed toward the door whenever it opened, to see what new faces might appear.
This is the princ.i.p.al distraction of watering places. People look forward to the dinner hour in order to inspect each day"s new arrivals, to find out who they are, what they do, and what they think.
We always have a vague desire to meet pleasant people, to make agreeable acquaintances, perhaps to meet with a love adventure. In this life of elbowings, unknown strangers a.s.sume an extreme importance. Curiosity is aroused, sympathy is ready to exhibit itself, and sociability is the order of the day.
We cherish antipathies for a week and friendships for a month; we see people with different eyes, when we view them through the medium of acquaintanceship at watering places. We discover in men suddenly, after an hour"s chat, in the evening after dinner, under the trees in the park where the healing spring bubbles up, a high intelligence and astonishing merits, and a month afterward we have completely forgotten these new friends, who were so fascinating when we first met them.
Permanent and serious ties are also formed here sooner than anywhere else. People see each other every day; they become acquainted very quickly, and their affection is tinged with the sweetness and unrestraint of long-standing intimacies. We cherish in after years the dear and tender memories of those first hours of friendship, the memory of those first conversations in which a soul was unveiled, of those first glances which interrogate and respond to questions and secret thoughts which the mouth has not as yet uttered, the memory of that first cordial confidence, the memory of that delightful sensation of opening our hearts to those who seem to open theirs to us in return.
And the melancholy of watering places, the monotony of days that are all alike, proves hourly an incentive to this heart expansion.
Well, this evening, as on every other evening, we awaited the appearance of strange faces.
Only two appeared, but they were very remarkable, a man and a woman--father and daughter. They immediately reminded me of some of Edgar Poe"s characters; and yet there was about them a charm, the charm a.s.sociated with misfortune. I looked upon them as the victims of fate. The man was very tall and thin, rather stooped, with perfectly white hair, too white for his comparatively youthful physiognomy; and there was in his bearing and in his person that austerity peculiar to Protestants. The daughter, who was probably twenty-four or twenty-five, was small in stature, and was also very thin, very pale, and she had the air of one who was worn out with utter la.s.situde.
We meet people like this from time to time, who seem too weak for the tasks and the needs of daily life, too weak to move about, to walk, to do all that we do every day. She was rather pretty, with a transparent, spiritual beauty. And she ate with extreme slowness, as if she were almost incapable of moving her arms.
It must have been she, a.s.suredly, who had come to take the waters.
They sat facing me, on the opposite side of the table; and I at once noticed that the father had a very singular, nervous twitching.
Every time he wanted to reach an object, his hand described a sort of zigzag before it succeeded in reaching what it was in search of, and after a little while this movement annoyed me so that I turned aside my head in order not to see it.
I noticed, too, that the young girl, during meals, wore a glove on her left hand.
After dinner I went for a stroll in the park of the bathing establishment. This led toward the little Auvergnese station of Chatel-Guyon, hidden in a gorge at the foot of the high mountain, from which flowed so many boiling springs, arising from the deep bed of extinct volcanoes. Over yonder, above our heads, the domes of extinct craters lifted their ragged peaks above the rest in the long mountain chain. For Chatel-Guyon is situated at the entrance to the land of mountain domes.
Beyond it stretches out the region of peaks, and, farther on again, the region of precipitous summits.
The "Puy de Dome" is the highest of the domes, the Peak of Sancy is the loftiest of the peaks, and Cantal is the most precipitous of these mountain heights.
It was a very warm evening, and I was walking up and down a shady path, listening to the opening strains of the Casino band, which was playing on an elevation overlooking the park.
And I saw the father and the daughter advancing slowly in my direction. I bowed as one bows to one"s hotel companions at a watering place; and the man, coming to a sudden halt, said to me:
"Could you not, monsieur, tell us of a nice walk to take, short, pretty, and not steep; and pardon my troubling you?"