Germinie Lacerteux Part 9

And adopting a more and more plaintive and lamentable tone as the words she hurled at Germinie cut deeper and deeper, Mere Jupillon continued: "But, my poor girl, you must have a reason, let's hear it. What did I always tell you? That it would be all right if you'd been born ten years earlier. Let's see, your date was 1820, you told me, and now it's '49.

You're getting on toward thirty, you see, my dear child. I say! it makes me feel bad to say that to you--I'd so much rather not hurt you. But a body only has to look at you, my poor young lady. What can I do? It's your age--your hair--I can lay my finger in the place where you part it."

"But," said Germinie, in whose heart black wrath was beginning to rumble, "what about what your son owes me? My money? The money I took out of the savings bank, the money I borrowed for him, the money I----"

"Money? he owes you money? Oh! yes, what you lent him to begin business with. Well! what about it? Do you think we're thieves? Does anyone want to cheat you out of your old money, although there wasn't any paper--I know it because the other day--it just occurs to me--that honest man of a child of mine wanted to write it down for fear he might die. But the next minute we're pickpockets, as glib as you please! Oh! my G.o.d, it's hardly worth while living in such times as these! Ah! I'm well paid for getting attached to you! But I see through it now. You're a politician, you are! You wanted to pay yourself with my son, for his whole life!

Excuse me! No, thank you! It costs less to give back your money! A cafe waiter's leavings! my poor dear boy! G.o.d preserve him from it!"

Germinie had s.n.a.t.c.hed her shawl and hat from the hook and was out of doors.

XXVII

Mademoiselle was sitting in her large armchair at the corner of the fireplace, where a few live embers were still sleeping under the ashes.

Her black cap was pulled down over her wrinkled forehead almost to her eyes. Her black dress, cut in the shape of a child's frock, was draped in scanty folds about her scanty body, showing the location of every bone, and fell straight from her knees to the floor. She wore a small black shawl crossed on her breast and tied behind her back, as they are worn by little girls. Her half-open hands were resting on her hips, with the palms turned outward--thin, old woman's hands, awkward and stiff, and swollen with gout at the knuckles and finger joints. Sitting in the huddled, crouching posture that compels old people to raise their heads to look at you and speak to you, she seemed to be buried in all that ma.s.s of black, whence nothing emerged but her face, to which preponderance of bile had imparted the yellow hue of old ivory, and the flashing glance of her brown eyes. One who saw her thus, her bright, sparkling eyes, the meagre body, the garb of poverty and the n.o.ble air with which she bore all the burdens of age, might well have fancied that he was looking at a fairy on the stage of the Pet.i.ts-Menages.

Germinie was by her side. The old lady began:

"The list is still under the door, eh, Germinie?"

"Yes, mademoiselle."

"Do you know, my girl," Mademoiselle de Varandeuil resumed, after a pause, "do you know that when one is born in one of the finest houses on Rue Royale--when one has been in a fair way to own the Grand and Pet.i.t-Charolais--when one has almost had the Chateau of Clichy-la-Garenne for a country house--and when it took two servants to carry the silver platter on which the joint was served at your grandmother's--do you know that it takes no small amount of philosophy"--and mademoiselle with difficulty raised a hand to her shoulder--"to see yourself end like this, in this devilish nest of rheumatism, where, in spite of all the list in the world, you can't keep out of draughts.--That's it, stir up the fire a little."

She put out her feet toward Germinie, who was kneeling in front of the fireplace, and laughingly placed them under her nose: "Do you know that that takes no small amount of philosophy--to wear stockings out at heel!

Simpleton! I'm not scolding you; I know well enough that you can't do everything. So you might as well have a woman come to do the mending.

That's not very much to do. Why don't you speak to that little girl that came here last year? She had a face that I remember."

"Oh! she's black as a mole, mademoiselle."

"Bah! I knew it. In the first place you never think well of anybody.

That isn't true, you say? Why, wasn't she a niece of Mere Jupillon's? We might take her for one or two days a week."

"That hussy shall never set foot here."

"Nonsense, more fables! You're a most astonishing creature, to adore people and then not want to see them again. What has she done to you?"

"She's a lost creature, I tell you!"

"Bah! what does my linen care for that?"

"But, mademoiselle."

"All right! find me someone else then. I don't care about her particularly. But find me someone."

"Oh! the women that come in like that don't do any work. I'll mend your clothes. You don't need any one."

"You!--Oh! if we have to rely on your needle!" said mademoiselle jocosely; "and then, will Mere Jupillon ever give you the time?"

"Madame Jupillon? Oh! for all the dust I shall ever leave in her house again!"

"Hoity-toity! What's that? She too! so she's on your black books, is she? Oho! hurry up and make another acquaintance, or else, _bon Dieu de Dieu_! we shall have some bad days here!"

XXVIII

The winter of that year should certainly have a.s.sured Mademoiselle de Varandeuil a share of paradise hereafter. She had to undergo the reflex action of her maid's chagrin, her nervous irritability, the vengeance of her embittered, contradictory moods, which the approaching spring would ere long infect with that species of malignant madness which the critical season, the travail of nature and the restless, disturbing fructification of the summer cause in unhealthily sensitive organizations.

Germinie was forever wiping eyes which no longer wept, but which had once wept copiously. She was always ready with an everlasting: "Nothing's the matter, mademoiselle!" uttered in the tone that covers a secret. She adopted dumb, despairing, funereal att.i.tudes, the airs by which a woman's body diffuses melancholy and makes her very shadow a bore. With her face, her glance, her mouth, the folds of her dress, her presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from her person. At the slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle could not address an observation to her, ask her the most trivial question, give her an order or express a wish: everything was taken by her as a reproach. And thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She would wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see that mademoiselle doesn't care for me any more!" Her spite against various people vented itself in sublimely ingenious complaints. "That woman always comes when it rains!" she would say, upon discovering a bit of mud that Madame de Belleuse had left on the carpet. During the week following New Year's Day, the week when all of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's remaining relatives and friends, rich and poor alike, climbed the five flights and waited on the landing at her door for their turns to occupy the six chairs in her bedroom, Germinie redoubled her ill-humor, her impertinent remarks, her sulky muttering. Inventing grievances against her mistress, she punished her constantly by a persistent silence, which it was impossible to break. Then there would be periods of frenzied industry. Mademoiselle would hear through the part.i.tions on all sides furious manipulation of the broom and duster, the sharp, vicious scrubbing and slamming of the servant whom one imagines muttering to herself as she maltreats the furniture: "Oh! yes, I'll do your work for you!"

Old people are patient with servants who have been long in their service. Long habit, the weakening will-power, the horror of change, the dread of new faces,--everything disposes them to weakness and cowardly concessions. Notwithstanding her quick temper, her promptness to lose her head, to fly into a rage, to breathe fire and flame, mademoiselle said nothing. She acted as if she saw nothing. She pretended to be reading when Germinie entered the room. She waited, curled up in her easy-chair, until the maid's ill-humor had blown over or burst. She bent her back before the storm; she said no word, had no thought of bitterness against her. She simply pitied her for causing herself so much suffering.

In truth Germinie was not Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's maid; she was Devotion, waiting to close her eyes. The solitary old woman, overlooked by death, alone at the end of her life, dragging her affections from grave to grave, had found her last friend in her servant. She had rested her heart upon her as upon an adopted daughter, and she was especially unhappy because she was powerless to comfort her. Moreover, at intervals, Germinie returned to her from the depths of her brooding melancholy and her savage humor, and threw herself on her knees before her kind heart. Suddenly, at a ray of sunlight, a beggar's song, or any one of the nothings that float in the air and expand the heart, she would burst into tears and demonstrations of affection; her heart would overflow with burning emotions, she would seem to feel a pleasure in embracing her mistress, as if the joy of living again had effaced everything. At other times some trifling ailment of mademoiselle's would bring about the change; a smile would come to the old servant's face and gentleness to her hands. Sometimes, at such moments, mademoiselle would say: "Come, my girl--something's the matter. Tell me what it is." And Germinie would reply: "No, mademoiselle, it's the weather."--"The weather!" mademoiselle would repeat with a doubtful air, "the weather!"

XXIX

One evening in March the Jupillons, mother and son, were talking together by the stove in their back-shop.

Jupillon had been drafted. The money his mother had put aside to purchase his release had been used up as a result of six months of poor business and by credits given to certain _lorettes_ on the street, who had left the key under their door-mat one fine morning. He had not prospered, in a business way, himself, and his stock in trade had been taken on execution. He had been that day to ask a former employer to advance him the money to purchase a subst.i.tute. But the old perfumer had not forgiven him for leaving him and setting up for himself, and he refused point-blank.

Mere Jupillon, in despair, was complaining tearfully. She repeated the number drawn by her son: "Twenty-two! twenty-two!" And she said: "And yet I sewed a black spider into your _paletot_ with his web; a _velvety_ fellow he was! Oh, dear! I ought to have done as they told me and made you wear the cap you were baptized in. Ah! the good G.o.d ain't fair!

There's the fruit woman's son drew a lucky number! That comes of being honest! And those two s.l.u.ts at number eighteen must go and hook it with my money! I might have known they meant something by the way they shook hands. They did me out of more than seven hundred francs, did you know it? And the black creature opposite--and that infernal girl as had the face to eat pots of strawberries at twenty francs! they might as well have taken me too, the hussies! But you haven't gone yet all the same.

I'd rather sell the creamery--I'll go out to work again, do cooking or housekeeping,--anything! Why, I'd draw money from a stone for you!"

Jupillon smoked and let his mother do the talking. When she had finished, he said: "That'll do for talk, mamma!--all that's nothing but words. You'll spoil your digestion and it ain't worth while. You needn't sell anything--you needn't strain yourself at all--I'll buy my subst.i.tute and it sha'n't cost you a sou;--do you want to bet on it?"

"Jesus!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Madame Jupillon.

"I have an idea."

After a pause, Jupillon continued: "I didn't want to make trouble with you on account of Germinie--you know, at the time the stories about us were going round; you thought it was time for me to break with her--that she would be in our way--and you kicked her out of the house, stiff.

That wasn't my idea--I didn't think she was so bad as all that for the family b.u.t.ter. But, however, you thought best to do it. And perhaps, after all, you did the best thing; instead of cooling her off, you warmed her up for me--yes, warmed her up--I've met her once or twice--and she's changed, I tell you. Gad! how she's drying up!"

"But you know very well she hasn't got a sou."

"I don't say she has, of her own. But what's that got to do with it?

She'll find it somewhere. She's good for twenty-three hundred shiners yet!"

"But suppose you get mixed up in it?"