“To finish your book, darling,” I told him, and then I went on quickly about how the stuff they made him write must be bad for his real work and that his book was far, far more important than any job. It’s the way I’ve been brought up, you see, but Pierre hasn’t and he didn’t even let me finish before he was shouting, “Are you crazy? Use up the money! And when it’s gone then what? Really Rose, one would think you were out of your mind! Use up the money!”
Then I had to laugh. It was all his peasant blood boiling in his veins. “Don’t you think it’s dangerous to leave it in the bank?” I teased. “Don’t you think we should bring it home and put it in a sock?” At his hurt expression I put my arms around him and kissed him, but do you know that even as I was doing this—and feeling very tender—yes, at this very moment I thought of the bugler.
TEN
Journal:
I believe I’m feeling better today. I had a long sleep last night and a reassuring dream. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a dream like that or even if you dream at all. I have troubled, or exciting, or anxious dreams. Sometimes I’m afraid when I wake up, or terribly depressed—especially when I dream of muddy water. You see, I dream that I am looking for a stream or a river that I used to swim in when a child. I search and search, but the landmarks have changed and usually some housing project has grown up there. When at last I do find it the water is a muddy trickle, a sewer that stinks. Anyway, last night it was the contrary. I was floating in water that was clear as green glass. When I awoke I felt soothed and refreshed.
Pierre was lying on his side facing me and I could feel his breath on my cheek. When I turned my head I breathed it and it had the hay smell of healthy breath. He was making little sounds and in the dusk (it was dawn) I saw how he had closed his eyes so tight that the lashes were sticking straight out of them and not lying on his cheeks at all. I moved and he said something to me but he was too much asleep to make sense. I couldn’t understand. So I lay there with my feet beside his warm feet and shall I tell you that for a while, just a while, my heart felt light?
Oh, the bliss of those few moments; the peaceful and loving bliss! Do you notice that it was me there in bed, not the doll?
Enough of that; last time I was saying how Simon sent the flowers and how Pierre was annoyed. It showed that Simon’s days were numbered both with Pierre and with Jouvence. Oh, it wouldn’t happen right away or even very soon. Jouvence was clever. They wouldn’t fire him until the end of summer. They’d keep him at his desk so that people like Pierre, people whom they really needed, could take a vacation and they’d not have to break in anyone new. But he’d go in the fall and that’s now. He’s already gone from his pedestal inside Pierre although so far there’s no replacement. But I heard they hired a well-known painter and he is supposed to change and elevate the whole appearance of Jouvence. He’s fat and has a beard. I know that much and no doubt I’ll soon know more.
I notice I had only gotten as far as April last time and next comes May and there really isn’t much to tell about May. Simon came to lunch and supper and afterwards he went out, presumably to “live.” Often Pierre and Simon worked late on the review and I think Simon tried to persuade Pierre to “live” too, because Pierre grew quite dissatisfied with me in May. I could tell by the way he criticized me in little things. But he did it tenderly and sadly as one might do to a child whose possibilities are limited through faulty blood.
Paris grew warm and lovely with racing clouds. The chestnuts blossomed on avenue and quay. Today their seeds have all blown off and lie in great mounds rather like mattress ticking. There are piles of them near the Seine. When I see them I get a feeling that if I turned on the right switch I could make the whole reel go backward like people do in funny movies. I could lift the mattress ticking from the ground and scatter it in the air and let it waft back up to the trees and be drawn inside them and so on back to the blossoms of last spring. Perhaps then my life would be reeled back along with it. But I don’t really know if I’d want that or not.
One day La Cigale came down and knocked at my door. She too had put out blossoms for spring in the form of a new turban, a bright orange one. The color tinged her face. I could see then clearly how once she’d been handsome; a big, square-boned, handsome woman, the kind they liked in those days, as one gathers from old postcards. And out of that square, muscular chest, it seemed, had come a light soprano voice. My mother’s voice on the contrary just suited her looks: dark, pure, liquid, passionate. There was something fierce in it too; an humble sort of fierceness, like a beautiful, favorite slave. But then as you know she wasn’t a favorite in the end. Why did they think she had secrets to tell? Or did they just want to think it?
Have you ever considered with all your mind the cruelty of man? People like Simon and even Pierre are forever talking about this or that injustice and cruelty, but they act as if it were only one side that did it, one political group. Or rather, that when the side they don’t like is the victim it’s good. That makes it the worst of all.
La Cigale had something she wanted to tell or to ask me, but she couldn’t get started. I told her to come in and she wouldn’t do that either. She just stood there at the threshold of the front door and smiled. I told you that the apartment wound around the courtyard so that the front and back door are cheek by jowl. La Cigale had actually rung the back-door bell. I can tell the difference in sound. There was something pathetic about that. She had such a proud, insolent nature. She must have been impertinence personified. So she must have loathed to abase herself thus. For my mother, of course, back and front door would be alike. Her noble and natural humility made them so. And there I am again comparing my darling, my beautiful mother to that old woman. I wonder why?
As I said, La Cigale stood there and smiled. I noticed that she was holding her scrapbook. Her smile was a slit, ingratiating and false, and it did not suit her at all. After a lot of hemming and hawing it finally came out that she had written an article on her life with some of her old photographs as illustrations and that she thought Pierre could get it published in Jouvence. Well, for all I knew so he might and I told her this. Then at last she came in and, sitting on the edge of the sofa very primly, she opened her book and shuffled through the pages. First of course she put on her glasses. It was impossible, it seemed, for her to find what she wanted, which I thought strange, seeing she’d come down on purpose to show it to me. Or perhaps she could not quite decide to let her life into my profane hands. While she was looking, the light from the studio window fell full on her face and I noticed that her glasses didn’t reflect it. There was no glitter. In fact they were only empty rims.
I suppose you think it was cruel of me to laugh. I can’t help it. I had to hold on to my stomach. When I laugh hard like that I have a sort of coarse, harsh, exuberant feeling and yet—and yet—
When I finally stopped and looked at La Cigale I saw she had taken off the spectacles and was holding them with two fingers right through the rims. She was grinning like a clown. “C’la donne toujours un peu de ton,” she said.
After that she had no trouble at all finding the papers she wanted. They were the only loose leaves in her scrapbook and she handed them over to me without a word. When she had gone I saw that a pressed rose had fallen out of the book onto the floor.
ROSE put away her journal with a smile. She really did feel better that day and as Bernice was doing the week’s wash, she decided to go to the market.
It was noon when she got there, the busiest hour. The market occupied two streets and formed a sort of cross. Besides the actual stores, there were outside booths and carts lining the gutters. Rose walked along with her basket thinking of La Cigale, whose actual presence now gave her no surprise.
The old woman was holding a few small, withered apples sold in the humblest of the carts. She put them on the scales herself and then argued ferociously with the vendor over their weight. The vendor, another old woman, finally gave in, and as La Cigale turned away Rose thrilled to the gleam of triumph in her eyes.
“Madame la Cigale,” she cried, “come and have an apéritif with me.”
La Cigale turned and looked Rose up and down. “What are we today?” she asked; “la femme bien, the correct little wife, or—”
“Or what?” demanded Rose, changing color. Her clear, ivory skin had suddenly a greenish tinge as though she were about to be sick.
La Cigale came closer, perhaps to savor Rose’s appearance more fully. “Oh, I think you can supply the missing words,” she said.
They went into a small bar where market people forgathered, and ordered beer. When the two lukewarm draughts were set before them La Cigale raised her glass. “To life,” she said, “to la vie d’ bohème!”
Do you still drink to that now that you are old and poor? wondered Rose to herself. La Cigale as though to answer her unspoken question said, “Oh, I know you think I am a miserable old woman. People despise me for the money I let slip through my hands—if they remember about it, that is—but better let money slip through than life itself. I lived life.”
Why do they all talk about living? thought Rose with irritation; how can one help but live if one’s alive? But aloud she only asked, “And was that worth the years from now until you die?”
“Ah, that’s another story,” said La Cigale. “One can work and be serious all one’s youth or one can sing and dance like this poor grasshopper. In the end one will be old. Not all the money in the world could make that up to any woman.” She looked at Rose full-face with her handsome old bones deserted, so to speak, by the frailer flesh above them. Downing her glass she got up and held out her hand.
“Thank you for the drink, my lost and abandoned child,” she said.
Rose stayed on there a few more minutes. The door of the café was open and the gusts of air that blew into the bar were warm and soft. Yet they were tinged prophetically with the breath of snow.
ELEVEN
When, on the first of June, Pierre went to Italy on a business trip, Simon called Rose up. The timbre of his voice made the wires vibrate. He asked her out to dine but she refused.
“My father is in town,” she said, “and he’s coming to supper.” She added in her polite manner, “Please, won’t you come too?”
This particular, grave politeness of Rose infuriated Simon so that he accepted. He was using the telephone in Pierre’s office and on putting down the receiver he turned and looked at Marie’s long bare legs which, as usual, were on the desk. “You need a shave,” he said.
Marie nonchalantly reached out and felt them. She shrugged and continued rolling the gum she had in her mouth. This habit secretly repelled her and the bubbles forced into the gum by constant chewing hurt inside her chest and made her burp, but she sternly repressed her weakness for appearance’s sake.
“Your act just doesn’t go over,” said Simon, rising.
“What’s the matter, isn’t Madame Flamand having any?” asked Marie, who had a reporter’s nose despite her affectations. Simon’s jawbones twitched. He could think of no reply that was vicious enough because what he wanted to do was blow a breath on Marie and have her calcify on the spot. He often wanted to do this to people and as so far he had not found out how to do so, he contented himself with dipping his pen in his own gall.
Mark, the father of Rose Flamand, pleased Simon. His leonine head whose shaggy locks were still thick, his straight, square features and his air (common to so many painters) of the workman, soothed this nervous man Simon. Latham however was only a shell now. He gave his daughter intent, ponderous looks that were dumb as an animal’s and it was hard to tell whether the tearful brightness of his eyes came from sorrow or premature old age. He spoke slowly in his French that had never lost its accent and, although his every word gave the impression of sense, even of nobility, he said nothing.
Nonetheless, in Simon’s eyes, Mark lent a certain stability to Rose. It was as if she had been wandering frameless until then. The presence of her father placed her, and even her clothes which Simon had so detested took on elegance. She was wearing tonight a pleated dress of silk whose boyish collar set off the dark, round, neat head. Other women by comparison now seemed diminished by fussiness, by cheaply won maturity. Yet Simon had suspected this all along about Rose. It was why she had made him angry and, partly, why he said sly things about her to Pierre. Actually Simon looked down on Pierre. He used him and people like him to make money if possible, but he did not respect him and in insulting Rose was only showing his disrespect for a man who was too stupid to know his wife’s quality. As for Pierre’s honest heart, his tenderness that was almost powerful, Simon hated those traits which gave him a sense of his own lack. He himself could not afford them despite all his talent, all his perception and brains.
At supper with Mark Latham and his daughter, Simon rested a little. Mark drew from him his venom, or rather, made its fabrication unnecessary. Mark did not know reflection and conclusion as Simon knew them. He had instinctively felt and had put his feeling on canvas in a harmonious way that was full of strength and meaning. Sarcasm, even satire, that crutch of the weak and the oppressed, was foreign to him. If a thing was brutal, ugly or ridiculous he put it down in that essence and drew no conclusions. The work spoke. He let it and was himself silent.
