The Old Wives' Tale, Arnold Bennett [ebook reader for pc TXT] 📗

who knew how to be sympathetic. Sophia, by an accident unfortunate for the grocer, caught them in the corridor. She was beside herself, but the only outward symptoms were a white face and a cold steely voice that grated like a rasp on the susceptibilities of the adherents of Aphrodite. At this period Sophia had certainly developed into a termagant—without knowing it!

She would often insist now on talking about the siege, and hearing everything that the men could tell her. Her comments, made without the least regard for the justifiable delicacy of their feelings as Frenchmen, sometimes led to heated exchanges. When all Montmartre and the Quartier Breda was impassioned by the appearance from outside of the Thirty-second battalion, she took the side of the populace, and would not credit the solemn statement of the journalists, proved by documents, that these maltreated soldiers were not cowards in flight. She supported the women who had spit in the faces of the Thirty-second. She actually said that if she had met them, she would have spit too. Really, she was convinced of the innocence of the Thirty-second, but something prevented her from admitting it. The dispute ended with high words between herself and Chirac.

The next day Chirac came home at an unusual hour, knocked at the kitchen door, and said:

“I must give notice to leave you.”

“Why?” she demanded curtly.

She was kneading flour and water for a potato-cake. Her potato-cakes were the joy of the household.

“My paper has stopped!” said Chirac.

“Oh!” she added thoughtfully, but not looking at him. “That is no reason why you should leave.”

“Yes,” he said. “This place is beyond my means. I do not need to tell you that in ceasing to appear the paper has omitted to pay its debts. The house owes me a month’s salary. So I must leave.”

“No!” said Sophia. “You can pay me when you have money.”

He shook his head. “I have no intention of accepting your kindness.”

“Haven’t you got any money?” she abruptly asked.

“None,” said he. “It is the disaster—quite simply!”

“Then you will be forced to get into debt somewhere.”

“Yes, but not here! Not to you!”

“Truly, Chirac,” she exclaimed, with a cajoling voice, “you are not reasonable.”

“Nevertheless it is like that!” he said with decision.

“Eh, well!” she turned on him menacingly. “It will not be like that! You understand me? You will stay. And you will pay me when you can. Otherwise we shall quarrel. Do you imagine I shall tolerate your childishness? Just because you were angry last night–-”

“It is not that,” he protested.” You ought to know it is not that.”(She did.)” It is solely that I cannot permit myself to–-”

“Enough!” she cried peremptorily, stopping him. And then in a quieter tone, “And what about Carlier? Is he also in the ditch?”

“Ah! he has money,” said Chirac, with sad envy.

“You also, one day,” said she. “You stop—in any case until after Christmas, or we quarrel. Is it agreed?” Her accent had softened.

“You are too good!” he yielded. “I cannot quarrel with you. But it pains me to accept—”

“Oh!” she snapped, dropping into the vulgar idiom, “you make me sweat with your stupid pride. Is it that that you call friendship? Go away now. How do you wish that I should succeed with this cake while you station yourself there to distract me?”

IV

But in three days’ Chirac, with amazing luck, fell into another situation, and on the Journal des Debats. It was the Prussians who had found him a place. The celebrated Payenneville, second greatest chroniqueur of his time, had caught a cold while doing his duty as a national guard, and had died of pneumonia. The weather was severe again; soldiers were being frozen to death at Aubervilliers. Payenneville’s position was taken by another man, whose post was offered to Chirac. He told Sophia of his good fortune with unconcealed vanity.

“You with your smile!” she said impatiently. “One can refuse you nothing!”

She behaved just as though Chirac had disgusted her. She humbled him. But with his fellow-lodgers his airs of importance as a member of the editorial staff of the Debats were comical in their ingenuousness. On the very same day Carlier gave notice to leave Sophia. He was comparatively rich; but the habits which had enabled him to arrive at independence in the uncertain vocation of a journalist would not allow him, while he was earning nothing, to spend a sou more than was absolutely necessary. He had decided to join forces with a widowed sister, who was accustomed to parsimony as parsimony is understood in France, and who was living on hoarded potatoes and wine.

“There!” said Sophia, “you have lost me a tenant!”

And she insisted, half jocularly and half seriously, that Carlier was leaving because he could not stand Chirac’s infantile conceit. The flat was full of acrimonious words.

On Christmas morning Chirac lay in bed rather late; the newspapers did not appear that day. Paris seemed to be in a sort of stupor. About eleven o’clock he came to the kitchen door.

“I must speak with you,” he said. His tone impressed Sophia.

“Enter,” said she.

He went in, and closed the door like a conspirator. “We must have a little fete,” he said. “You and I.”

“Fete!” she repeated. “What an idea! How can I leave?”

If the idea had not appealed to the secrecies of her heart, stirring desires and souvenirs upon which the dust of time lay thick, she would not have begun by suggesting difficulties; she would have begun by a flat refusal.

“That is nothing,” he said vigorously. “It is Christmas, and I must have a chat with you. We cannot chat here. I have not had a true little chat with you since you were ill. You will come with me to a restaurant for lunch.”

She laughed. “And the lunch of my lodgers?”

“You will serve it a little earlier. We will go out immediately afterwards, and we will return in time for you to prepare dinner. It is quite simple.”

She shook her head. “You are mad,” she said crossly.

“It is necessary that I should offer you something,” he went on scowling. “You comprehend me? I wish you to lunch with me to-day. I demand it, and you are not going to refuse me.”

He was very close to her in the little kitchen, and he spoke fiercely, bullyingly, exactly as she had spoken to him when insisting that he should live on credit with her for a while.

“You are very rude,” she parried.

“If I am rude, it is all the same to me,” he held out uncompromisingly. “You will lunch with me; I hold to it.”

“How can I be dressed?” she protested.

“That does not concern me. Arrange that as you can.”

It was the most curious invitation to a Christmas dinner imaginable.

At a quarter past twelve they issued forth side by side, heavily clad, into the mournful streets. The sky, slate-coloured, presaged snow. The air was bitterly cold, and yet damp. There were no fiacres in the little three-cornered place which forms the mouth of the Rue Clausel. In the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, a single empty omnibus was toiling up the steep glassy slope, the horses slipping and recovering themselves in response to the whip-cracking, which sounded in the streets as in an empty vault. Higher up, in the Rue Fontaine, one of the few shops that were open displayed this announcement: “A large selection of cheeses for New Year’s gifts.” They laughed.

“Last year at this moment,” said Chirac, “I was thinking of only one thing—the masked ball at the opera. I could not sleep after it. This year even the churches, are not open. And you?”

She put her lips together. “Do not ask me,” she said.

They proceeded in silence.

“We are triste, we others,” he said. “But the Prussians, in their trenches, they cannot be so gay, either! Their families and their Christmas trees must be lacking to them. Let us laugh!”

The Place Blanche and the Boulevard de Clichy were no more lively than the lesser streets and squares. There was no life anywhere, scarcely a sound; not even the sound of cannon. Nobody knew anything; Christmas had put the city into a lugubrious trance of hopelessness. Chirac took Sophia’s arm across the Place Blanche, and a few yards up the Rue Lepic he stopped at a small restaurant, famous among the initiated, and known as “The Little Louis.” They entered, descending by two steps into a confined and sombrely picturesque interior.

Sophia saw that they were expected. Chirac must have paid a previous visit to the restaurant that morning. Several disordered tables showed that people had already lunched, and left; but in the corner was a table for two, freshly laid in the best manner of such restaurants; that is to say, with a red-and-white checked cloth, and two other red-and-white cloths, almost as large as the tablecloth, folded as serviettes and arranged flat on two thick plates between solid steel cutlery; a salt-cellar, out of which one ground rock-salt by turning a handle, a pepper-castor, two knife-rests, and two common tumblers. The phenomena which differentiated this table from the ordinary table were a champagne bottle and a couple of champagne glasses. Champagne was one of the few items which had not increased in price during the siege.

The landlord and his wife were eating in another corner, a fat, slatternly pair, whom no privations of a siege could have emaciated. The landlord rose. He was dressed as a chef, all in white, with the sacred cap; but a soiled white. Everything in the place was untidy, unkempt and more or less unclean, except just the table upon which champagne was waiting. And yet the restaurant was agreeable, reassuring. The landlord greeted his customers as honest friends. His greasy face was honest, and so was the pale, weary, humorous face of his wife. Chirac saluted her.

“You see,” said she, across from the other corner, indicating a bone on her plate. “This is Diane!”

“Ah! the poor animal!” exclaimed Chirac, sympathetically.

“What would you?” said the landlady. “It cost too dear to feed her. And she was so mignonne! One could not watch her grow thin!”

“I was saying to my wife,” the landlord put in, “how she would have enjoyed that bone—Diane!” He roared with laughter.

Sophia and the landlady exchanged a curious sad smile at this pleasantry, which had been rediscovered by the landlord for perhaps the thousandth time during the siege, but which he evidently regarded as quite new and original.

“Eh, well!” he continued confidentially to Chirac. “I have found for you something very good—half a duck.” And in a still lower tone: “And it will not cost you too dear.”

No attempt to realize more than a modest profit was ever made in that restaurant. It possessed a regular clientele who knew the value of the little money they had, and who knew also how to appreciate sincere and accomplished cookery. The landlord was the chef, and he was always referred to as the chef, even by his wife.

“How did you get that?” Chirac asked.

“Ah!” said the landlord, mysteriously. “I have one of my friends, who comes from Villeneuve St. Georges—refugee, you know. In fine …” A wave of the fat hands, suggesting that Chirac should not inquire too closely.

“In effect!” Chirac commented. “But it is very chic, that!”

“I believe you that it is chic!” said the landlady, sturdily.

“It is charming,” Sophia murmured politely.

“And then a quite little salad!” said the landlord.

“But that—that is still more striking!” said Chirac.

The landlord winked. The fact was that the commerce which resulted in fresh green vegetables in the heart of a beleagured town was notorious.

“And