Part 9

His voice would be lost in the noise of the wheels and his warning among the secrets of Providence. The cart passed. He would follow it for a moment with his eye, then resume his walk; but the drama begun in his mind would continue to unfold itself there, with a thousand catastrophes. The child had fallen. The wheels were about to pass over him. M. Joyeuse dashed forward, saved the little creature on the very brink of destruction; the pole of the cart, however, struck himself full in the chest and he fell bathed in blood. Then he would see himself borne to some chemists’ shop through the crowd that had collected. He was placed in an ambulance, carried to his own house, and then suddenly he would hear the piercing cry of his daughters, his well-beloved daughters, when they beheld him in this condition. And that agonized cry touched his heart so deeply, he would hear it so distinctly, so realistically: “Papa, my dear papa,” that he would himself utter it aloud in the street, to the great astonishment of the passers-by, in a hoarse voice which would wake him from his fictitious nightmare.

Will you have another sample of this prodigious imagination? It is raining, freezing; wretched weather. M. Joyeuse has taken the omnibus to go to his office. Finding himself seated opposite a sort of colossus, with the head of a brute and formidable biceps, M. Joyeuse, himself very small, very puny, with his portfolio on his knees, draws in his legs in order to make room for the enormous columns which support the monumental body of his neighbour. As the vehicle moves on and as the rain beats on the windows, M. Joyeuse falls into reverie. And suddenly the colossus opposite, whose face is kind after all, is very much surprised to see the little man change colour, look at him and grind his teeth, look at him with ferocious eyes, an assassin’s eyes. Yes, with the eyes of a veritable assassin, for at that moment M. Joyeuse is dreaming a terrible dream. He sees one of his daughters sitting there opposite him, by the side of this giant brute, and the wretch has put his arm round her waist under her cape.

“Remove your hand, sir!” M. Joyeuse has already said twice over. The other has only sneered. Now he wishes to kiss Elise.

“Ah, rascal!”

Too feeble to defend his daughter, M. Joyeuse, foaming with rage, draws his knife from his pocket, stabs the insolent fellow full in the breast, and with head high goes off, strong in the right of an outraged father, to make his declaration at the nearest police-station.

“I have just killed a man in an omnibus!” At the sound of his own voice actually uttering these sinister words, but not in the police-station, the poor fellow wakes us, guesses from the bewildered manner of the passengers that he must have spoken the words aloud, and very quickly takes advantage of the conductor’s call, “Saint-Philippe--Pantheon--Bastille--” to alight, feeling greatly confused, amid general stupefaction.

This imagination constantly on the stretch, gave to M. Joyeuse a singular physiognomy, feverish and worn, in strong contrast with the general correct appearance of a subordinate clerk which he presented. In one day he lived so many passionate existences. The race is more numerous than one thinks of these waking dreamers, in whom a too restricted fate compresses forces unemployed and heroic faculties. Dreaming is the safety-valve through which all those expend themselves with terrible ebullitions, as of the vapour of a furnace and floating images that are forthwith dissipated into air. From these visions some return radiant, others exhausted and discouraged, as they find themselves once more on the every-day level. M. Joyeuse was of these latter, rising without ceasing to heights whence a man cannot but re-descend, somewhat bruised by the velocity of the transit.

Now, one morning that our “visionary” had left his house at his habitual hour, and under the usual circumstances, he began at the turning of the Rue Saint-Ferdinand one of his little private romances. As the end of the year was at hand, perhaps it was the hammer-strokes on a wooden hut which was being erected in the neighbouring timber-yard that caused his thoughts to turn to “presents--New Year’s Day.” And immediately the word bounty implanted itself in his mind as the first landmark of a marvelous story. In the month of December all persons in Hemerlingue’s service received double pay, and you know that in small households there are founded on windfalls of this kind a thousand projects, ambitious or kind, presents to be made, a piece of furniture to be replaced, a little sum of money to be saved in a drawer against the unforeseen.

In simple fact, M. Joyeuse was not rich. His wife, a Mlle. de Saint-Armand, tormented with ideas of greatness and society, had set this little clerk’s household on a ruinous footing, and though since her death three years had passed during which Bonne Maman had managed the housekeeping with so much wisdom, they had not yet been able to save anything, so heavy had proved the burden of the past. Suddenly it occurred to the good fellow that this year the bounty would be larger by reason of the increase of work which had been caused by the Tunisian loan. The loan constituted a very fine stroke of business for the firm, too fine even, for M. Joyeuse had permitted himself to remark in the office that this time “Hemerlingue & Son had shaved the Turk a little too close.”

“Certainly, yes, the bounty will be doubled,” reflected the visionary, as he walked; and already he saw himself, a month thence, mounting with his comrades, for the New Year’s visit, the little staircase that led to Hemerlingue’s apartment. He announced the good news to them; then he detained M. Joyeuse for a few words in private. And, behold, that master habitually so cold in his manner, sheathed in his yellow fat as in a bale of raw silk, became affectionate, paternal, communicative. He desired to know how many daughters Joyeuse had.

“I have three; no, I should say, four, M. le Baron. I always confuse them. The eldest is such a sensible girl.”

Further he wished to know their ages.

“Aline is twenty, M. le Baron. She is the eldest. Then we have Elise, who is preparing for the examination which she must pass when she is eighteen. Henriette, who is fourteen, and Zara or Yaia who is only twelve.”

That pet name of Yaia intensely amused M. le Baron, who inquired next what were the resources of this interesting family.

“My salary, M. le Baron; nothing else. I had a little money put aside, but my poor wife’s illness, the education of the girls--”

“What you are earning is not sufficient, my dear Joyeuse. I raise your salary to a thousand francs a month.”

“Oh, M. le Baron, it is too much.”

But although he had uttered this last sentence aloud, in the ear of a policeman who watched with a mistrustful eye the little man pass, gesticulating and nodding his head, the poor visionary awoke not. With admiration he saw himself returning home, announcing the news to his daughters, taking them to the theatre in the evening in celebration of the happy day. _Dieu!_ how pretty they looked in the front of their box, the Demoiselles Joyeuse, what a bouquet of rosy faces! And then, the next day, the two eldest asked in marriage by--Impossible to determine by whom, for M. Joyeuse had just suddenly found himself once more beneath the arch of the Hemerlingue establishment, before the swing-door surmounted by a “counting-house” in letters of gold.

“I shall always be the same, it seems,” said he to himself, laughing a little and passing his hand over his forehead, on which the perspiration stood in drops.

In a good humour as the result of this pleasant fancy and at the sight of the fire crackling in the suite of parquet-floored offices, with their screens of iron trellis-work and their air of secrecy in the cold light of the ground floor, where one could count the pieces of gold without dazzling his eyes, M. Joyeuse gave a gay greeting to the other clerks and slipped on his working coat and his black velvet cap. Suddenly, some one whistled from upstairs, and the cashier, applying his ear to the tube, heard the oily and gelatinous voice of Hemerlingue, the sole and veritable Hemerlingue--the other, the son, was always absent--asking for M. Joyeuse.

What! Could the dream be continuing?

He was conscious of a great agitation; took the little inside staircase which he had seen himself ascending just before so bravely, and found himself in the banker’s private room, a narrow apartment, with a very high ceiling, furnished only with green curtains and enormous leather easy chairs of a size proportioned to the terrific bulk of the head of the house. He was there, seated at his desk which his belly prevented him from approaching very closely, obese, ill-shaped, and so yellow that his round face with its hooked nose, the head of a fat and sick owl, suggested as it were a light at the end of the solemn and gloomy room. A rich Moorish merchant grown mouldy in the damp of his little court-yard. Beneath his heavy eyelids, raised with an effort, his glance glittered for a second when the accountant entered; he signed to him to approach, and slowly, coldly, pausing to take breath between his sentences, instead of “M. Joyeuse, how many daughters have you?” he said this:

“Joyeuse, you have allowed yourself to criticise in the office our last operations in the Tunis market. Useless to defend yourself. Your remarks have been reported to me word for word. And as I am unable to admit them from the mouth of one in my service, I give you notice that dating from the end of this month you cease to be a member of my establishment.”

A wave of blood mounted to the accountant’s face, fell back, returned again, bringing each time a confused whizzing into his ears, into his brain a tumult of thoughts and images.

His daughters!

What was to become of them?

Employment is so hard to find at that period of the year.

Poverty appeared before his eyes and also the vision of an unfortunate man falling at Hemerlingue’s feet, supplicating him, threatening him, springing at his throat in an access of despairing rage. All this agitation passed over his features like a gust of wind which throws the surface of a lake into ripples, fashioning there all manner of mobile whirlpools; but he remained mute, standing in the same place, and upon the master’s intimation that he could withdraw, went down with tottering step to resume his work in the counting-house.

In the evening when he went home to the Rue Saint-Ferdinand, M. Joyeuse told his daughters nothing. He did not dare. The idea of darkening that radiant gaiety which was the life of the house, of making dull with heavy tears those pretty bright eyes, was insupportable to him. Timorous, too, and weak, he was of those who always say, “Let us wait till to-morrow.” He waited therefore before speaking, at first until the month of November should be ended, deluding himself with the vague hope that Hemerlingue might change his mind, as though he did not know that will as of some mollusk flabby and tenacious upon its ingot of gold. Then when his salary had been paid up and another accountant had taken his place before the high desk at which he had stood for so long, he hoped to find something else quickly and repair his misfortune before being obliged to confess it.

Every morning he feigned to start for the office, allowed himself to be equipped and accompanied to the door as usual, his huge leather portfolio all ready for the evening’s numerous commissions. Although he would forget some of them on purpose because of the approaching and so problematical end of the month, he did not lack time now to execute them. He had his day to himself, the whole of an interminable day which he spent in rushing about Paris in search for an employment. People gave him addresses, excellent recommendations. But in that terrible month of December, so cold and with such short hours of daylight, bringing with it so many expenses and preoccupations, employees need to take patience and employers also. Each man tries to end the year in peace, postponing to the month of January, to that great leap of time towards a fresh halting-place, any changes, ameliorations, attempts at a new life.

In every house where M. Joyeuse presented himself, he beheld faces suddenly grow cold as soon as he explained the object of his visit.

“What! You are no longer with Hemerlingue & Son? How is that?”

He would explain the matter as best he could through a caprice of the head of the firm, the ferocious Hemerlingue whom Paris knew; but he was conscious of a coldness, a mistrust in the uniform reply which he received: “Call on us again after the holidays.” And, timid as he was to begin with, he reached a point at which he could no longer bring himself to call on any one, a point at which he could walk past the same door a score of times and never have crossed its threshold at all had it not been for the thought of his daughters. This alone pushed him along by the shoulders, put heart in his legs, despatched him in the course of the same day to the opposite extremities of Paris, to very vague addresses given to him by comrades, to a great manufactory of animal black at Aubervilliers, where he was made to return for nothing three days in succession.

Oh, the journeys in the rain, in the frost, the closed doors, the master who is out or engaged, the promises given and immediately withdrawn, the hopes deceived, the enervation of hours of waiting, the humiliations reserved for every man who asks for work, as though it were a shameful thing to lack it. M. Joyeuse knew all these melancholy things and, too, the good will that tires and grows discouraged before the persistence of evil fortune. And you may imagine how the hard martyrdom of “the man who seeks a place” was rendered tenfold more bitter by the mirages of his imagination, by those chimeras which rose before him from the Paris pavements as over them he journeyed along on foot in every direction.

For a month he was one of those woeful puppets, talking in monologue, gesticulating on the footways, from whom every chance collision with the crowd wrests an exclamation as of one walking in his sleep. “I told you so,” or “I have no doubt of it, sir.” One passes by, almost one would laugh, but one is seized with pity before the unconsciousness of those unhappy men possessed by a fixed idea, blind whom the dream leads, drawn along by an invisible leash. The terrible thing was that after those long, cruel days of inaction and fatigue, when M. Joyeuse returned home, he had perforce to play the comedy of the man returning from his work, to recount the incidents of the day, the things he had heard, the gossip of the office with which he had been always wont to entertain his girls.

In humble homes there is always a name which comes up more often than all others, which is invoked in days of stress, which is mingled with every wish, with every hope, even with the games of the children, penetrated as they are with its importance, a name which sustains in the dwelling the part of a sub-Providence, or rather of a household divinity, familiar and supernatural. In the Joyeuse family, it was Hemerlingue, always Hemerlingue, returning ten times, twenty times a day in the conversation of the girls, who associated it with all their plans, with the most intimate details of their feminine ambitions. “If Hemerlingue would only----” “All that depends on Hemerlingue.” And nothing could be more charming than the familiarity with which these young people spoke of that enormously wealthy man whom they had never seen.

They would ask for news of him. Had their father spoken to him? Was he in a good temper? And to think that we all of us, whatever our position, however humble we be, however weighed down by fate, we have always beneath us unfortunate beings more humble, yet more weighed down, for whom we are great, for whom we are as gods, and in our quality of gods, indifferent, disdainful, or cruel.

One imagines the torture of M. Joyeuse, obliged to invent stories and anecdotes about the wretch who had so ruthlessly discharged him after ten years of good service. He played his little comedy, however, so well as completely to deceive everybody. Only one thing had been remarked, and that was that father when he came home in the evening always sat down to table with a great appetite. I believe it! Since he lost his place the poor man had gone without his luncheon.

The days passed. M. Joyeuse found nothing. Yes, one place as accountant in the Territorial Bank, which he refused, however, knowing too much about banking operations, about all the corners and innermost recesses of the financial Bohemia in general, and of the Territorial bank in particular, to set foot in that den.

“But,” said Passajon to him--for it was Passajon who, meeting the honest fellow and hearing that he was out of employment, had suggested to him that he should come to Paganetti’s--“but since I repeat that it is serious. We have lots of money. They pay one. I have been paid. See how prosperous I look.”

In effect, the old office porter had a new livery, and beneath his tunic with its buttons of silver-gilt his paunch protruded, majestic. All the same M. Joyeuse had not allowed himself to be tempted, even after Passajon, opening wide his shallow-set blue eyes, had whispered into his ear with emphasis these words rich in promises:

“The Nabob is in the concern.”

Even after that, M. Joyeuse had had the courage to say No. Was it not better to die of hunger than to enter a fraudulent house of which he might perhaps one day be summoned to report upon the books in the courts?

So he continued to wander; but, discouraged, he no longer sought employ. As it was necessary that he should absent himself from home, he used to linger over the stalls on the quays, lean for hours on the parapets, watch the water flow and the unladening of the vessels. He became one of those idlers whom one sees in the first rank whenever a crowd collects in the street, taking shelter from the rain under the porches, warming himself at the stoves where, in the open air, the tar of the asphalters reeks, sinking on a bench of some boulevard when his legs could no longer carry him.

To do nothing! What a fine way of making life seem longer!

On certain days, however, when M. Joyeuse was too weary or the sky too unkind, he would wait at the end of the street until his daughters should have closed their window again and, returning to the house, keeping close to the walls, would mount the staircase very quickly, pass before his own door holding his breath, and take refuge in the apartment of the photographer Andre Maranne, who, aware of his ill-fortune, always gave him that kindly welcome which the poor have for each other. Clients are rare so near the outskirts of the town. He used to remain long hours in the studio, talking in a very low voice, reading at his friend’s side, listening to the rain on the window-panes or the wind that blew as it does on the open sea, shaking the old doors and the window-sashes below in the wood-sheds. Beneath him he could hear sounds well known and full of charm, songs that escaped in the satisfaction of work accomplished, assembled laughter, the pianoforte lesson being given by Bonne Maman, the tic-tac of the metronome, all the delicious household stir that pleased his heart. He lived with his darlings, who certainly never could have guessed that they had him so near them.

Once, when Maranne was out, M. Joyeuse keeping faithful watch over the studio and its new apparatus, heard two little strokes given on the ceiling of the apartment below, two separate, very distinct strokes, then a cautious pattering of fingers, like the scamper of mice. The friendliness of the photographer with his neighbours sufficiently authorized these communications like those of prisoners. But what did they mean? How reply to what seemed a call? Quite at hazard, he repeated the two strokes, the light tapping, and the conversation ended there. On the return of Andre Maranne he learned the explanation of the incident. It was very simple. Sometimes, in the course of the day, the young ladies below, who only saw their neighbour in the evening, would inquire how things were going with him, whether any clients were coming in. The signal he had heard meant, “Is business good to-day?” And M. Joyeuse had replied, obeying only an instinct without any knowledge, “Fairly well for the season.” Although young Maranne was very red as he made this affirmation, M. Joyeuse accepted his word at once. Only this idea of frequent communications between the two households made him afraid for the secrecy of his position, and from that time forward he cut himself off from what he used to call his “artistic days.” Moreover, the moment was approaching when he would no longer be able to conceal his misfortune, the end of the month arriving, complicated by the ending of the year.

Paris was already assuming the holiday appearance which it wears during the last weeks of December. In the way of national or popular rejoicing it had little left but that. The follies of the Carnival died with Gavarni, the religious festivals with their peals of bells which one scarcely hears amid the noise of the streets confine themselves within their heavy church-doors, the 15th of August has never been anything but the Saint Charles-the-Great of the barracks; but Paris has maintained its observance of New Year’s Day.