The Age of Reason (20 page)

The man moved briskly down the hall: his knees sagged as he walked, but he kept his body stiff, though his legs moved easily beneath him. ‘You,’ thought Daniel, ‘are wearing a corset.’ He was getting on for fifty, closely shaven, with a bland countenance gently moulded by the years, a peach-coloured complexion, white hair, a fine Florentine nose, and a rather harsher, more myopic expression in the eyes than seemed quite in character: and a roving eye. His entrance caused a sensation: the four little scamps turned round simultaneously, affecting the same air of vicious innocence, and then resumed their blows on the Negro’s pelvis, but by no means with the same enthusiasm. The man surveyed them for a moment with an aloof and slightly disapproving air, then turned round and approached the football game. He twirled the metal wires, and examined the little figures with smiling curiosity as though in amusement at the caprice which had brought him there. Daniel noticed that smile, and felt a catch at his heart; all these pretences and subterfuges appalled him, and made him want to run away. But only for an instant: it was a familiar flush of feeling that soon passed. He set his back comfortably against a pillar and gazed steadily at the new-comer. On his right, the young man in a night-shirt had produced a third coin from his pocket, and for the third time resumed his silent acrobatics around the crane.

The handsome gentleman leaned over the game and slid his forefinger over the slender bodies of the little wooden players: he was not going to demean himself to make advances, he no doubt considered that he was, with his white hair and summer suit, a sufficiently delectable dish to attract all these young flies. And in fact, after a few moments’ confabulation, the fair youth detached himself from the group, and flinging his jacket round his shoulders without putting it on, strolled up to the prospective client with his hands in his pockets. He came up with a timorous, sniffing sort of air, and the expression in the eyes beneath the thick brows was doglike. Daniel looked disgustedly at his plump hips, his broad bucolic cheeks, grey and already begrimed with an incipient beard. ‘Female flesh,’ he thought, ‘as lush as dough.’ The gentleman would take him home, give him a bath, soap him, and perhaps scent him. At this thought, Daniel’s rage revived. ‘Swine,’ he murmured. The youth had stopped a few paces away from the old gentleman, and in his turn pretended to be examining the apparatus. They were bent over the wires and inspected them without looking at each other, and with an air of absorption. Then the youth appeared to take a prompt decision: he grasped a knob and one of the pegs spun round and round. Four little players described a semicircle and stopped head-downwards.

‘You know the game?’ asked the gentleman in an almond-paste voice. ‘Ah, indeed! Will you explain it to me? I don’t understand it.’

‘You put in twenty sous, and then you pull. The balls come out and you’ve got to get them into the hole.’

‘But there must be two to play, mustn’t there? I try to get the ball into the goal, and you have to stop me, eh?’

‘That’s so,’ said the young man. And he added after a brief pause: ‘One of us has to be at either end.’

‘Would you like to play a game with me?’

‘Sure,’ said the youth.

They played. And the gentleman said in a heady voice: ‘But this young man is so clever. How does he do it? He wins all the time. Do show me.’

‘It’s just knowing how,’ said the youth modestly.

‘Ah! You practise? You come here often, no doubt? I happened to look in as I passed, but I have never met you before. I should have noticed you. Yes, indeed, I should have noticed you, I am something of a physiognomist, and you have an interesting face. You come from Touraine?’

‘Yes — yes, I do,’ said the youth, rather taken aback.

The gentleman stopped playing and came up to him.

‘But the game isn’t finished,’ said the youth ingenuously. ‘You’ve got five balls left.’

‘True. Well, we can play later on,’ said the gentleman. ‘I would sooner talk to you for a bit, if you don’t mind.’

The youth smiled a professional smile. The gentleman, in order to join him, had to make a half-turn. He raised his head, and as he slowly licked his thin lips his look encountered Daniel’s. Daniel glared at him, the gentleman hastily averted his eyes, looked upset, uneasy, and rubbed his hands together like a priest. The youth had seen nothing; with open mouth, and vacant and submissive eyes he waited until he was spoken to. A silence fell, then the gentleman began to talk to him in an unctuous husky voice, but did not look at him. Daniel strained his ears, but could only catch the words — ‘villa’, and ‘billiards’. The youth shook his head emphatically.

‘It must be a posh place,’ said he loudly.

The gentleman did not answer, and flung a furtive glance in Daniel’s direction. Daniel felt invigorated by a dry, delicious anger. He knew all the rites of departure: they would say goodbye and the gentleman would go first, padding busily out of the hall. The boy would nonchalantly rejoin his little friends, deal another blow or two at the nigger’s stomach, and then go too, shuffling out after a few casual good-byes: he was the one to follow. And the old gentleman, as he paced up and down in the next street, would suddenly see Daniel appear on the heels of the young beauty. What a moment! Daniel enjoyed it in anticipation, he devoured with magisterial gaze his victim’s delicate, lined face, his hands shook, and his joy would have been complete had not his throat been so dry; indeed he was agonizingly thirsty. If he saw a chance, he would impersonate a detective of police in charge of offences against morals: he could always take the old man’s name and reduce him to a state of jitters: ‘If he asks me for my inspector’s card I’ll show him my Prefecture pass.’

‘Good morning, Monsieur Lalique,’ said a timid voice.

Daniel recoiled: Lalique was a pseudonym he sometimes used. He turned abruptly round.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked severely, ‘I had forbidden you to set foot inside the place.’

It was Bobby. Daniel had got him a job with a chemist, he had become gross and fat, he was wearing a new ready-made suit, and was no longer in the least interesting. Bobby tilted his head sideways, as a child might do: he looked at Daniel without replying, but with an ingenuous, sly smile, as though he had said: ‘Here we are again!’ It was the smile that brought Daniel’s wrath to boiling-point.

‘Will you answer me!’ said he.

‘I’ve been looking for you for three days, Monsieur Lalique,’ said Bobby in his drawling voice. ‘I didn’t know your address. I said to myself — one of these days, Monsieur Daniel will be sure to come in here...’

‘One of these days. Impertinent little beast!’ He dared to predict what Daniel might do, and laid his petty plans accordingly. ‘He thinks he knows me, he thinks he can exploit me.’ There was nothing to be done but crush him like a slug: Daniel’s image was embedded in that narrow forehead, and there it would remain forever. Despite his repugnance, Daniel felt a bond between himself and that patch of flaccid, living flesh:
it was he
who thus lived in Bobby’s consciousness.

‘You are ugly,’ he said, ‘you have lost your figure, and that suit is a disgrace, where on earth did you pick it up? It’s dreadful how your vulgarity comes out when you put on your best clothes.’

Bobby did not seem disconcerted: he looked at Daniel with wide, affectionate eyes, and continued to smile. Daniel detested the nerveless patience of poverty, its limp, tenacious, indiarubber smile: even if an angry fist crashed on to those lips, the smile would linger on the bleeding mouth. Daniel threw a furtive glance at the handsome gentleman: his look of uneasiness had vanished: he was leaning over the little blond ruffian, breathing into his hair and laughing genially. ‘It had to happen,’ thought Daniel wrathfully, ‘he sees me with this tart, he takes me for a colleague, my reputation’s gone.’ He hated this free-masonry of the urinal. ‘They imagine that everyone is in it. I, for one, would sooner kill myself than look like that old sod.’

‘What do you want?’ he asked brutally. ‘I’m in a hurry. And keep your distance, you reek of brilliantine,’

‘Excuse me,’ said Bobby placidly. ‘You were there leaning against the pillar, you didn’t look in a hurry, and that’s why I thought I would...’

‘Dear me, how correctly you talk!’ said Daniel with a burst of laughter. ‘I suppose you bought some ready-made speeches at the same time as your suit?’

These sarcasms were lost on Bobby: he had tilted his head back and was contemplating the ceiling with an air of modest enjoyment, through his half-closed eyelids. ‘He attracted me because he looked like a cat.’ At that thought Daniel could not repress a quiver of rage. Yes, indeed; in days gone by, Bobby had then attracted him. Could he therefore make claims on Daniel for the rest of his life?

The old gentleman had taken his young friend’s hand and was holding it paternally between his own. Then he said good-bye to him, tapped him on the cheek, threw a meaning glance at Daniel, and departed with long mincing strides. Daniel put out his tongue at him, but the man had already turned his back. Bobby began to laugh.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Daniel.

‘It’s because you put your tongue out at the old pimp,’ said Bobby. And he added in a fawning line: ‘You’re still the same, Monsieur Daniel, just as boyish as ever.’

‘Well, really!’ said Daniel, quite dumbfounded. A suspicion seized him, and he said: ‘What about your chemist? Aren’t you with him still?’

‘I had no luck,’ said Bobby, plaintively.

Daniel eyed him with disgust.

‘You’ve managed to get fat, though.’

The blond boy was strolling casually out of the Fair, and brushed against Daniel as he passed. His three companions soon followed him, jostling each other as they went, and laughing loudly. ‘What am I doing here?’ thought Daniel. He looked round in search of the stooping shoulders and thin neck of the young man in the night-shirt.

‘Come, tell me,’ he said absently. ‘What did you do? Did you rob him?’

‘It was the chemist’s wife,’ said Bobby. ‘She got a down on me.’

The young man in the night-shirt was no longer there. Daniel felt bored and exhausted, he was afraid of finding himself alone.

‘She got mad because I was seeing Ralph,’ pursued Bobby.

‘I told you to give up seeing Ralph. He’s a dirty little scab.’

‘Do you mean that a chap is to chuck his pals because he’s had a bit of luck?’ asked Bobby indignantly. ‘I was seeing less of him, but I wasn’t going to drop him all at once. — He’s a thief — that’s what she said: I forbid him to set foot in my shop. What are you to do with a bitch like that? I used to meet him outside so that she shouldn’t catch me. But the dispenser saw us together. Dirty little beast, I believe he’s one of them,’ said Bobby, virtuously. ‘When I was first there, it was Bobby here and Bobby there, you bet I told him off. I’ll get back on you, he said. He went to the shop and spat it all out, how he’d seen us together, and we were misbehaving, and the people had to look the other way. And the chemist’s wife, she said — What did I tell you, I forbid you to see him or you shan’t stay in our place. — Madame, I said, it’s you who give orders at the shop, but when I’m outside, what I do isn’t your business, so that was that!’

The Fair was deserted, beyond the wall the hammering had ceased. The cashier got up — she was a tall, fair-haired girl. She pattered up to a scent machine and admired herself in the glass and smiled. Seven o’clock struck.

‘It’s you who gives orders in the shop, but when I’m outside, what I do isn’t your business,’ repeated Bobby complacently.

Daniel shook himself.

‘So they threw you out?’ he said, indifferently.

‘I went of my own accord,’ said Bobby with dignity. ‘I said — I prefer to go. And without a penny in my pocket. They wouldn’t even pay me what was due, but it can’t be helped: I’m like that. I’m sleeping at Ralph’s place. I sleep in the afternoon, because he receives a lady in the evening. It’s an affair. I haven’t had anything to eat since the day before yesterday.’

He looked at Daniel with an insinuating air: ‘I said to myself — I can always try to find Monsieur Lalique, he’ll understand me.’

‘You’re a little fool,’ said Daniel. ‘You don’t interest me any more. I go all out to find you a job, and you get yourself sacked at the end of a month. Added to which, you know, don’t imagine that I believe half you tell me. You lie like a dentist at a fair.’

‘You can ask,’ said Bobby. ‘You’ll soon see if I’m not telling the truth.’

‘Ask? Ask whom?’

‘The chemist’s wife.’

‘Of course I shan’t,’ said Daniel. ‘I should hear some fine stories. Anyway, I can’t do anything for you.’

He felt shaky, and he thought, ‘I must go away,’ but his legs were numb.

‘We had the idea of doing a job of work, Ralph and I...’ said Bobby with an air of detachment ‘We thought of setting up on our own.’

‘Indeed? And you’re come to ask me to advance you the money needed for a start, eh? Keep those stories for other people. How much do you want?’

‘You’re a fine chap, Monsieur Lalique,’ said Bobby in a clammy voice. ‘I was just saying to Ralph this morning; if only I can find Monsieur Lalique, you’ll see that he won’t leave me in the lurch,’

‘How much do you want?’ repeated Daniel.

Bobby began to wriggle; ‘Well, if you could lend the amount, perhaps — and I mean
lend
— I would repay you at the end of the first month.’

‘How much?’

‘A hundred francs.’

‘Here’s fifty,’ said Daniel, ‘as a gift. And now clear out.’

Bobby pocketed the note without a word, and they stood face to face, irresolute.

‘Go away,’ said Daniel weakly.

‘Thank you, Monsieur Lalique,’ said Bobby. He made as though to go and then turned back. ‘If you want to see me, or Ralph, at any time, we live nearby, 6 Rue aux Ours, seventh floor. You’re wrong about Ralph, you know, he likes you very much.’

‘Go away.’

Bobby moved off, walking backwards, still smiling, then he swung round and went. Daniel went up to the crane and had a look at it. In addition to the Kodak and the electric lamp, there were a pair of binoculars he had never noticed. He slipped a franc into the appropriate slot, and turned the knobs at random. The crane dropped its claws and began clumsily to rake about in the pile of sweets. Daniel picked up five or six sweets in the hollow of his hand and ate them.