CHAPTER VII.THE PASSAGE DU SAUMON.
While awaiting a more complete settling than was possible before the arrival of their furniture, which was coming by slow freight, the Valmajours had taken rooms temporarily at the famous Passage du Saumon, where from time immemorial teachers from Aps and its district have stopped, and of which Aunt Portal still retained such astonishing recollections. There, up under the roof, they had two small rooms, one of which was without light or air, a kind of wood-closet which was occupied by the men; the other was not much larger but seemed to them fine in comparison, with its worm-pierced black walnut furniture, its moth-eaten ragged carpet on the worn wooden floor and the dormer windows that let in only a bit of a sky as lowering and yellow as the long donkey-backed skylight over the Passage.
In these poor quarters they kept up the memory of home with a strong smell of garlic and fried onions, which foreign food they cooked for themselves on a little stove. Old Valmajour, who loved good eating and was also fond of company, would have liked to dine at the hotel table, where the white linen and plated salt-cellars and service seemed very handsome to him, and also to havejoined in the noisy conversations and mingled with shouts of laughter of the commercial gentlemen who at meal times filled the house to the very top floor with their noise and jollity. But Audiberte opposed this flatly.
Amazed not to find at once on their arrival the promises of Numa fulfilled and the two hundred francs an evening which had filled her little head with piles of money ever since the visit of the Parisians; horrified at the high price of everything, from the first day she had been seized with the craze that the Parisians call “fear of wanting.” For herself she could get along with anchovies and olives as in Lent—té, pardi!but her men were perfect wolves, worse than in their own country because it is colder in Paris, and she was obliged to be constantly opening hersaquette, a large calico pocket made by her own hands, in which she carried the three thousand francs that they had received for their farm and chattels.
Each coin that she spent was a struggle, a pang, as if she were handing over the stones of her farmhouse or the last vines of her vineyard. Her peasant greed and her suspiciousness, that fear of being cheated by a tenant which caused her to sell her farm instead of letting it, were redoubled in this gloomy, unknown Paris, this city which from her garret she heard roaring with a sound that did not cease day or night at this noisy corner of the city market, causing the glasses near the hotel water-bottle on the table to rattle at every hour.
No traveller lost in a wood of sinister reputeever clung more convulsively to his baggage than did Audiberte to hersaquetteas she walked through the streets in her green skirt and her Arles head-dress, which the passers-by turned to stare at. When she entered a shop with her countrywoman’s gait, the way she had of calling things by a lot of outlandish names, sayingapifor celery,mérinjanesfor aubergines, made her, a woman from the south of France, as much a stranger in her country’s capital as if she had been a Russian from Nijni Novgorod or a Swede from Stockholm.
Sweet and humble of manner at first, if she detected a smile on the face of a clerk or received a rough answer on account of her mania for bargaining, she would suddenly fly into a gust of rage; her pretty virginal brown face twitching with frantic gesticulations she would pour forth a torrent of noisy, vainglorious words. Then she would tell about the expected legacy from Cousin Puyfourcat, the two hundred francs a night to be earned by her brother, the friendship that Roumestan had for them—sometimes calling him Numa, sometimes theMenister—all this with an emphasis more grotesque than her familiarity. Everything was jumbled together in a flood of gibberish composed of thelangue d’oiltinged with French.
Then her habitual caution would return to her; she would fear that she had talked imprudently, and, seized by a superstitious terror at her own gossip, she would stop, suddenly mute, and close her lips as tightly as the strings of hersaquette.
At the end of a week she had become a legendary character in the quarter of the Rue Montmartre, a street of shops where, at their ever-open doors, the vendors of meats, green-groceries and colonial wares discussed the affairs and secrets of all the inhabitants of the neighborhood. The constant teasing of these people, the saucy questions with which they plied her as she made her frugal purchases each morning—as to why her brother’s appearance was delayed and when the legacy was coming from the Arab—all these insults to her self-respect, more than the fear of poverty staring them in the face, exasperated Audiberte against Numa, against those promises which at first she had suspected, true child of the South that she was, knowing well that the promises of her country-people down South vanish easier than those of other folks—all because of the lightness of the air.
“Oh, if we had only made him sign a paper!”
This idea became a fixture in her mind and she felt daily in her brother’s pockets for the stamped document when Valmajour set out for the Ministry, in order to be sure it was there.
But Roumestan was engaged in signing another kind of paper and had many things to think of more important than the taborist. He was settling down in his new office with the generous ardor and enthusiasm, with the fever of a man who comes to his own. Everything was a novelty to him—the enormous rooms of the Ministry as well as the large ideas necessitated by his position.To arrive at the top, to “reconquer Gaul,” as he had said, that was not so difficult; but to sustain himself satisfactorily, to justify his elevation by intelligent reforms and attempts at progress! Full of zeal, he studied, questioned, consulted, literally surrounded himself with shining lights. With Béchut, that great professor, he studied the evils of the college system and the means to extirpate the spirit of free-thinking in the schools. He employed the experience of his chief in the fine arts, M. de la Calmette, who had behind him twenty-nine years of office, and of Cadaillac, the manager of the grand opera, who was still erect after three failures, in order to remodel the Conservatory, the Salon and the Academy of Music in accordance with brand-new plans.
The trouble was that he never listened to these counsellors, but talked himself for hours at a time and then, suddenly glancing at his watch, would rise and hastily dismiss them: “Bad luck to it—I had forgotten the council meeting! What a life, not a moment to oneself! I understand—just send me your memorial right off!”
Memorials were piling up on Méjean’s desk, who, notwithstanding his good intentions and intelligence, had none too much time for current work and so permitted these grand reforms to slumber in their dust. Like all Ministers when they arrive at a portfolio, Roumestan had brought with him all his clerks from the Rue Scribe—Baron de Lappara and Viscount de Rochemaure, who gave a flavor of aristocracy to the new Ministry, butwho were otherwise perfectly incompetent and ignorant of their duties.
The first time that Valmajour came there he was received by Lappara, who occupied himself by preference with the fine arts and whose duties consisted principally in sending invitations in large official envelopes at all hours by staff officers, dragoons or cuirassiers to the young ladies of the minor theatres, asking them to supper. Sometimes the envelope was empty, being merely a pretext to display in front of the lady’s door that reassuring orderly from the Ministry the day before some debt came due.
Lappara received him with a kindly, easy air, a bit top-loftical, like that of a feudal lord receiving one of his vassals. His legs outstretched, so as not to crease his gray-blue trousers, he talked mincingly without stopping a moment the polishing of his nails.
“Not easy just now—the Minister is busy—perhaps in a few days. We’ll let you know, my good fellow!”
And when in his simplicity the musician ventured to say that his matter was somewhat urgent, that they only had enough for a short time left, the baron, carefully placing his file upon the edge of the desk with his most serious air, suggested to him to have a crank attached to his tabor.
“A crank attached to my tabor?—for what purpose?”
“Why, my dear fellow, so as to use it as a box forplaisirs(cakes) while you are out of work.”
The next time Valmajour came to see Roumestan he was received by Rochemaure. The viscount raised his head of hair frizzed with hot irons from the dusty ledger over which he was bending and in his conscientious manner asked to have the mechanism of the fife explained to him, took notes, tried to understand and said finally that he was not there for art matters, but more especially for religious questions.
After that the unhappy peasant never could find any one—they had all betaken themselves to that inaccessible retreat where His Excellency had hidden himself. Still he did not lose calmness or heart and always responded to the evasive answers and shrugging shoulders of the attendants with the surprised but steady look and shrewd half-smile peculiar to the Provençal.
“All right, I will come again.”
And he did come again. But for his high gaiters and the tabor hanging on his arm, he might have been taken for an employee of the house, he came so regularly. But each time he came it was harder than the last.
Now the mere sight of the great arched door made his heart beat. Beyond the arch was the old Hôtel Augereau with its large courtyard where they were already stacking wood for the winter and the double staircase so hard to ascend under the mocking gaze of the servants. Everything combined to harass him—the silver chains of the porters, the gold-laced caps, the endless gorgeous things that made him feel the distance that separatedhim from his patron. But he dreaded more than all this the dreadful scenes that he went through at home, the terrible frowning brows of Audiberte; that is why he still desperately insisted on coming. At last the hall porter took pity upon him and gave him the advice to waylay the Minister at the Saint-Lazare station when he was going down to Versailles.
He took his advice and did sentry work in the big lively waiting room on the first story at the hour of the Parliament train when it took on a very special look of its own. Deputies, senators, journalists, members of the Left, of the Right and all the parties jostled each other there, forming as variegated a throng as the blue, red and green placards that covered the walls. They watched each other, talked, screamed, whispered, some sitting apart rehearsing their next speech, others, the orators of the lobbies, making the windows rattle with loud voices that the Chamber was never destined to hear. Northern accents and Southern accents, divers opinions and sentiments, swarming ambitions and intrigues, the noisy tramp of the restless crowd—this waiting-room with its delays and uncertainties was an appropriate theatre for politics, this tumult of a journey at a fixed hour which would soon, at bid of the whistle, be speeding over the rails down a perspective of tracks, disks and locomotives, over a country full of accidents and surprises.
Five minutes later he saw Numa enter, leaning on the arm of one of his secretaries who carriedhis portfolio. His coat was flung open, his face beaming just as he had looked that day on the platform in the amphitheatre and at a distance he recognized the facile voice, the warm words, his protestations of friendship: “Count on me,—put yourself in my hands,—it is as good as granted....”
The Minister just then was in the honey-moon of prosperity. Except for political enmities—not always as bitter as they are supposed to be, simply the result of rivalry between public speakers or quarrels of lawyers on opposite sides of a case—Numa had no enemies, not having been in power long enough to discourage those who sought his services. His credit was still good. Only a few had begun to be impatient and dog his footsteps. To these he threw a loud, hasty “How are you, friend?” that anticipated their reproaches and in a way denied their arguments, while his familiar manner flattered the baffled office-seekers and yet kept their demands at a distance. It was a great idea, was this “How are you?” It sprang from instinctive duplicity.
At sight of Valmajour, who came swinging towards him, his smile showing his white teeth, Numa felt inclined to throw him his fatal, careless “How are you, friend?”—but how could he treat this peasant lad in a little felt hat as a friend as he stood there in his gray jacket, from the sleeves of which his brown hands protruded like those in a cheap village photograph? He preferred to pass him by without a word, with his“Ministerial air,” leaving the poor boy amazed, crushed and knocked about by the crowd that was following the great man. Still Valmajour returned to his station the next day and several days thereafter, but he did not dare approach the Minister; he sat on the edge of a bench with that touching air of sorrowful resignation that one so often sees in a railway station on the faces of soldiers and emigrants, who are going to a strange country, prepared to meet all the chances of their evil destiny.
Roumestan could not evade that silent figure on his path with its dumb appeal. He might pretend not to see it, turn aside his glance, talk louder as he passed; the smile on his victim’s face was there and remained there until the train had gone. Of a certainty he would have preferred a noisy demand and a row, when he could have called a policeman and given the disturber of his complacency in charge and so got rid of him. He, the Minister, went so far as to take a different station on the left bank of the Seine to avoid this trouble of his conscience. Thus in many instances is the greatest man’s life made wretched by some little thing of no account, like a pebble in the seven-league boots.
But Valmajour would not despair.
“He must be ill,” he said to himself and stuck obstinately to his post. At home his sister watched for his coming in a fever of impatience.
“Well,bé!have you seen the Menister? Has he signed that paper?”
His eternal “No, not yet!” exasperated her,but more his calmness as he threw into a corner his tabor whose strap left a dent on his shoulder—it was the calmness of indolence and shiftlessness, as common as vivacity among Southern nations. Then the queer little creature would fall into one of her furious fits. What had he in his veins in place of blood?—was there to be no end to this?—“Look out, or I will attend to it myself!” Very calm, he made no answer, but let the storm blow over, took his instruments from their cases, his fife and mouth-piece with its ivory tip, and rubbed them well with a bit of cloth for fear of dampness and promised to try at the Ministry again to-morrow, and, if he could not see Numa, ask to see Mme. Roumestan.
“O,vaï!Mme. Roumestan! You know she does not like your music—but the young lady, though—she will be sure to help you; yes indeed!” And she tossed her head.
“Madame or Mademoiselle, they don’t either of them care anything about you,” said the old man, who was cowering over a turf fire that his daughter had economically covered with ashes, a fire about which they were eternally quarrelling.
In the bottom of his heart the old man was not displeased at his son’s want of success, from professional jealousy. All these complications and the uprooting of their lives had been most welcome to the Bohemian tastes of the old wandering minstrel; he was delighted at first with the journey and the idea of seeing Paris, that “Paradise of females and purgatory of hosses,” as the cartersof his country put it, imagining that in Paris one would see women like houris arrayed in transparent garments and horses distorted, leaping about in the midst of flames.
Instead he had found cold, privations and rain. From fear of Audiberte and respect for Roumestan he had contented himself with grumbling and shivering in a corner, only an occasional word or wink hinting at his dissatisfaction. But Numa’s treachery and his daughter’s fits of wrath gave him also an excuse for opening hostilities. He revenged himself for all the blows to his vanity that his son’s musical proficiency had inflicted on him for ten years and shrugged his shoulders as he heard him trying his fife.
“Music, music, oh, yes—much good your music is going to do you!”
And then in a loud voice he asked if it wasn’t a sin to bring an old man like him so far—into thisSibelia, this wilderness, to let him perish of cold and hunger. He called on the memory of his sainted wife, whom, by the way, he had killed with unhappiness—“made a goat of her,” as Audiberte put it. He would whine for hours at a time, his head in the fire, red-faced and sullen, until his daughter, wearied with his lamentations, gave him a few pennies and sent him out to get a glass of country wine for himself. In the wine-shop his sorrows fled away. It was comfortable by the roaring stove; in the warmth the old wretch soon recovered his low vein of an actor in Italian comedy, which his grotesque figure, bignose and thin lips made more apparent, taken in connection with his little wiry body, like Punch in the show.
He was soon the delight of the customers in the wine-shop with his buffooneries and his boasting. He jeered his son’s tabor and told them how much trouble it gave them at the hotel; for in order to be ready for his coming out Valmajour, kept at tension by the delay of hopes, persisted in practising up to midnight; but the other tenants objected to the continual thunder of the tabor and the ear-piercing cry of the fife—the very stairs shook with the sound, as if an engine were in motion on the fifth floor.
“Go ahead,” Audiberte would say to her brother when the proprietor came to them with complaints. It was pretty queer if one hadn’t the right to make music in this Paris that makes so much noise one cannot sleep at night! So he continued to practise. Then the proprietor demanded their rooms. But when they left the Passage du Saumon, the hostelry so well known in their native province, one that recalled their native land, they felt as if their exile were heavier to bear and that they had journeyed still a bit farther North.
The night before they left, after another long, unfruitful journey taken by Valmajour, Audiberte hurried her men through dinner without speaking a word, but with the light of firm resolution shining in her eyes. When it was over she threw her long brown cloak over her shoulders and went out, leaving the washing of the dishes to the men.
“Two months, almost two months since we came to Paris,” she muttered through her clenched teeth. “I’ve had enough, I am going to speak to this Menister myself—”
She arranged the ribbon of her head-dress, that, perched over her wavy hair in high bows, stood up like a helmet, and rushed violently from the room, her well-blacked boot-heels kicking at every step the heavy material of her gown. Father and son stared at each other alarmed, but did not dare to restrain her; they knew that any interference would but exasperate her anger. They passed the afternoon alone together, hardly speaking as the rain battered against the windows, the one polishing his bag and fife, the other cooking the stew for supper over a good, big fire that he took advantage of Audiberte’s absence to kindle, and over which he was for once getting thoroughly warm.
Finally her quick steps, the short steps of a dwarf, were heard in the corridor. She entered beaming.
“Too bad our windows do not look out upon the street,” she said, removing her cloak, which was perfectly dry. “You might have seen the beautiful carriage in which I came home.”
“A carriage! you are joking!”
“Andtwo servants,andliveries—it is making a great stir in the hotel!”
Then in a wondering silence she described and acted out her adventure. In the first place and to start with—instead of going to the Minister,who would not have received her, she found out the address—one can get anything if one talks politely—of the sister of Mme. Roumestan, the tall young lady who came to see them at Valmajour. She did not live at the Ministry but with her parents in a quarter full of little, badly-paved streets that smelt of drugs and reminded Audiberte of her own province. It was ever so far away and she was obliged to walk. She found the place at last in a little square surrounded with arcades like theplacetteat Aps.
The dear young lady—how well she had received her, without any haughtiness, although everything looked very rich and handsome in the house, much gilding, and many silken curtains hung round on this side and that, in every direction:
“Ah, God be with you! So you have come to Paris? Where from? Since when?”
Then, when she heard how Numa had disappointed them, she rang for her governess, she too a lady in a bonnet, and all three set off for the Ministry. It was something to see the bows and reverences made to them by all those old beadles who ran ahead of them to open the doors.
“So you have seen him, then, the Minister?” timidly ventured Valmajour as his sister stopped to breathe.
“Seen him! I certainly have; what did I tell you, you poorbédigas(calf), that you must get the young lady on your side! She arranged the whole thing in no time. There is to be a great musical function next week at the Minister’s andyou are to play before the directors of the Conservatory of Music. And after that,cra-cra!the contract drawn up and signed!”
But the best of all was that the young lady had driven her home in the carriage of the Minister.
“And she was very anxious to come upstairs with me,” added the peasant girl, winking at her father and distorting her pretty face with a meaning grimace. The father’s old face, with its complexion like a dried fig, wrinkled up in a look of slyness which meant: “I understand; not a word!” He no longer taunted the taborist. Valmajour himself, very quiet, did not understand his sister’s perfidious meaning; he could think only of his coming appearance, and, taking down his instruments, he passed all his pieces in review, sending the notes as a farewell all over the house and down the glass-covered passage in floods of trills on rolling cadences.