The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (26 page)

‘But you’re not so well off at the Ladies’s Paradise! Sacked for the slightest thing, and with a boss who looks as if he picks up the customers!’

Hutin was no longer listening to him, but was launching into a paean of praise for the shop in the Place Clichy. He knew a girl there who was so respectable that the customers didn’t dare speak to her for fear of humiliating her. Then, drawing his plate closer, he told how he had made a hundred and fifteen francs that
week. Oh! it had been a marvellous week, Favier left behind with fifty-two francs, the whole roster left behind. And it was obvious that he was blowing his money; he would not go to bed until he had got rid of the whole hundred and fifteen francs. Then, as he became tipsy, he attacked Robineau, that fool of an assistant buyer, who pretended to keep aloof to such an extent that he would not even walk with one of his salesmen in the street.

‘Shut up,’ said Liénard, ‘you talk too much, old chap.’

It had become even hotter; the candles were guttering on to the table-cloths stained with wine, and through the open windows, when the noise made by the diners suddenly subsided, a distant, long-drawn-out voice could be heard, the voice of the river and of the tall poplars which were falling asleep in the peaceful night. Baugé had called for the bill on seeing that Denise, quite white, her chin rigid with the tears she was holding back, was feeling no better; but the waiter did not reappear, and she had to go on suffering Hutin’s loud talk. Now he was saying that he was smarter than Liénard, because Liénard simply squandered his father’s money, whereas he squandered money he had earned, the fruit of his intelligence. At last Baugé paid, and the two women went out.

‘There’s a girl from the Louvre,’ murmured Pauline in the outer room, looking at a tall thin girl putting on her coat.

‘You don’t know her; you can’t tell,’ said the young man.

‘Of course I can! Look at the way she drapes herself! The midwife’s department, obviously! If she heard, she ought to be pleased!’

They were outside. Denise gave a sigh of relief. She had thought she would die in that suffocating heat, in the midst of all that shouting; and she still attributed her faintness to the lack of air. Now she could breathe. A cool breeze was descending from the starry sky. As the two girls were leaving the restaurant garden, a timid voice murmured in the shadows:

‘Good evening, ladies.’

It was Deloche. They had not seen him at the back of the outer room, where he had been dining alone, having come from Paris on foot for the sake of the walk. When she recognized his friendly voice Denise, who was feeling weak, yielded automatically to the need for support.

‘Monsieur Deloche, come back with us,’ she said. ‘Give me your arm.’

Pauline and Baugé had already gone on ahead. They were surprised. They had not thought it would happen like this, and certainly not with this boy. However, as they still had an hour before catching the train, they went right to the end of the island, walking along the bank beneath the tall poplars; and from time to time they turned round murmuring:

‘Where are they? Ah! There they are … It’s funny though.’

At first Denise and Deloche remained silent. The noise from the restaurant was slowly dying away, acquiring a musical sweetness in the depths of the night; and they went further in among the cool of the trees, still feverish from that furnace, the candles of which were being extinguished one by one behind the foliage. It was as if a wall of darkness was facing them, a mass of shadow so dense that they could not even make out the pale track of the footpath. However, they went forward quietly, and without fear. Then, as their eyes became accustomed to the dark, to the right they could see the trunks of the poplars, like dark columns supporting the domes of their branches, spattered with stars; while to the left the water shone from time to time like a pewter mirror. The wind was dropping, and they could hear nothing but the flow of the river.

‘I’m very pleased I met you,’ finally stammered Deloche, who was the first to bring himself to speak. ‘You don’t know how happy I am that you agreed to walk with me.’

And after a great many embarrassed words, with the darkness helping him, he ventured to say that he loved her. He had been wanting to write to her about it for a long time; and she would never have known it perhaps, but for this lovely night that had come to his assistance, this water singing and these trees covering them with the curtain of their shade. But she did not reply; she continued to walk with her arm in his, with the same air of suffering. He was trying to look into her face when he heard a muffled sob.

‘Oh! Good heavens!’ he went on, ‘you’re crying, Mademoiselle, you’re crying … Have I offended you?’

‘No, no,’ she murmured.

She was trying to hold back her tears, but she could not. Even at dinner she had thought her heart would burst. And now, in the darkness, she let herself go, her sobs choking her at the thought that if Hutin had been in Deloche’s place, saying such tender things to her, she would have been powerless to resist. This confession, which she was at last making to herself, filled her with confusion. A feeling of shame was burning her face as if, beneath these very trees, she had fallen into the arms of that young man who was showing off in the company of tarts.

‘I didn’t want to offend you,’ repeated Deloche, who was almost crying himself.

‘No, but listen,’ she said, her voice still trembling. ‘I’m not at all angry with you. But please never speak to me again like that… What you ask is impossible. Oh! You’re a nice boy, and I’ll be glad to be your friend, but nothing more … Your friend, you understand!’

He was trembling. After taking a few steps in silence, he blurted out:

‘In other words, you don’t love me?’

And since she was trying to spare him the pain of a brutal ‘No’, he continued in a soft, heart-broken voice:

‘In any case, I expected it… I’ve never had any luck, I know I can never be happy. At home they used to beat me. In Paris they’ve always made fun of me. You see, when you don’t know how to steal other people’s mistresses, and when you’re too clumsy to make as much money as they do, well, the best thing is to go off and die in some corner … Don’t worry, I won’t bother you any more. And as for loving you, you can’t prevent me, can you? I’ll love you without expecting anything in return, like an animal… That’s how it is, nothing ever goes right, that’s my lot in life.’

In his turn he wept. She tried to console him, and as they were pouring out their hearts to each other, they discovered that they both came from the same part of the world, she from Valognes, he from Briquebec, thirteen kilometres away. This was a new link between them. His father, a penniless bailiff who was always morbidly jealous, used to thrash him, saying he was not his child, exasperated by his long, pale face, and his flaxen hair which, he said, did not come from the family. They went on to talk about
the great pastures surrounded by quickset hedges, the overgrown paths which disappeared beneath the elms, the grassy roads like the avenues in a park. Around them the night was growing darker still, though they could distinguish the rushes by the river, the interlaced foliage, black against the twinkling stars; and they began to feel soothed, and forgot their troubles, drawn together in comradeship by their misfortune.

‘Well?’ Pauline asked Denise brightly, taking her aside when they reached the station.

From her friend’s smile and tone of tender curiosity, Denise understood. She turned very red as she replied:

‘Of course not, my dear! I told you I didn’t want to! He comes from my part of the country. We were talking about Valognes.’

Pauline and Baugé were perplexed, put out in their ideas, not knowing what to think. Deloche left them in the Place de la Bastille; like all the young probationers, he slept in the shop, and had to be back there by eleven o’clock. Not wishing to go back with him, Denise, who had been given a theatre pass, accepted an invitation to accompany Pauline to Baugé’s house. In order to be nearer his mistress he had taken a place in the Rue Saint-Roch. They took a cab, and Denise was dumbfounded when, on the way, she learned that her friend was going to spend the night with the young man. There was nothing easier; they only had to give five francs to Madame Cabin; all the girls did it. Baugé did the honours of his room, which was furnished with old Empire furniture, sent him by his father. He got angry when Denise wanted to settle up, and then in the end accepted the fifteen francs sixty she had put on the chest of drawers; but then he wanted to give her a cup of tea, and, after struggling with a kettle and spirit lamp, he was obliged to go downstairs to buy some sugar. Midnight was striking as he was pouring out the tea.

‘I must be going,’ Denise kept saying.

And Pauline would reply: ‘In a minute … The theatres don’t close so early.’

Denise felt awkward in this bachelor’s room. She had seen her friend undress as far as her petticoat and corsets, and she was watching her turn down the bed, opening it, patting the pillows with her bare arms; and these preparations for a night of love-making
upset her, and made her feel ashamed, reawakening in her wounded heart the memory of Hutin. Days like this one were certainly not good for her. Finally, at a quarter past midnight, she left them. But she left in embarrassment when, in reply to her innocently wishing them a good night, Pauline thoughtlessly exclaimed:

‘Thanks, it
will
be a good night!’

The separate entrance which led to Mouret’s flat and to the staff bedrooms was in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin. Madame Cabin would open the door and have a look to check who was coming in. A night-light was burning dimly in the hall, and Denise, standing in its glimmer, hesitated, seized with anxiety, for as she had turned the corner of the street she had seen the door close on the vague shadow of a man. It must have been the governor coming home from a party; and the idea that he was there in the dark, waiting for her perhaps, brought on one of those strange attacks of fear he still caused in her, without any good reason. Someone moved on the first floor; boots squeaked. At that she lost her head entirely; she pushed open a door which led into the shop and which was always left open for the night-watch. She found herself in the printed cotton department.

‘My goodness! What shall I do?’ she stammered out in her emotion.

It occurred to her that there was another door upstairs leading to the bedrooms, but that would mean going through the whole shop. However, she preferred to take this route, in spite of the darkness which flooded the galleries. Not a gas jet was burning; there were only a few oil-lamps hooked on to the branches of the chandeliers at irregular intervals; and these scattered lights, like yellow spots, their rays lost in the night, resembled the lanterns hung in mines. Huge shadows were floating about; she could hardly distinguish the piles of merchandise, which assumed terrifying shapes of crumbling columns, crouching beasts, lurking thieves. The heavy silence, broken by distant breathing, intensified the darkness even more. However, she found her bearings: the household linen made a long pale streak on her left, like a street of houses turning blue under a summer sky; she wanted to go straight across the hall, but she bumped into some piles of calico and thought it would be safer to go through the hosiery,
and then the woollens. When she got there she was alarmed by a noise like thunder, the loud snoring of Joseph, the porter, who was sleeping behind the mourning goods. She ran into the hall, where the glazed roof let in a dim light; it seemed to have grown larger, full of the nocturnal terror which churches have, its drawers immobile, and the outlines of its big measuring sticks forming inverted crosses. Now she was in full flight. In the haberdashery and glove departments she again nearly stepped over some of the duty porters, and she only felt safe when she finally found the staircase. But upstairs, before the ladieswear department, she was seized with terror on catching sight of a lantern, its winking eye walking along: it was a watch patrol, two firemen marking their passage on the dials of the indicators. For a minute she did not understand; she stood watching them making their way from the shawls to the furniture, then on to the underwear, terrified by the strange manœuvres, by the grating of the key, by the iron doors which clanged to with a deafening noise. When they came nearer she took refuge in the depths of the lace department, but the sudden sound of someone calling out made her leave it immediately, and run off to the communicating door. She had recognized Deloche’s voice; he slept in his department on a small iron bed which he put up himself every evening. He was not yet asleep but, his eyes still open, was reliving the pleasant hours he had spent that evening.

‘What! It’s you, Mademoiselle Baudu!’ said Mouret, whom Denise found facing her on the staircase, a little pocket candlestick in his hand.

She stammered, and tried to explain that she had just been to fetch something from her department. But he was not at all cross, he was looking at her in his paternal and at the same time inquisitive way.

‘You had a theatre pass then, did you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And did you enjoy yourself? Which theatre did you go to?’

‘I went to the country, sir.’

That made him laugh. Then he asked, stressing the words:

‘On your own?’

‘No, sir, with a girl friend,’ she replied, her cheeks burning with shame at the thought which no doubt had occurred to him.

He said no more. But he was still looking at her in her little black dress, her hat trimmed with a single blue ribbon. Would this little savage turn out to be a pretty girl? She smelt sweet from her day in the fresh air, she looked charming with her lovely hair falling over her forehead. And he who for six months had been treating her like a child, sometimes giving her advice, yielding to the ideas of a man of experience, to a malicious desire to find out how a woman might develop and go astray in Paris, was laughing no longer, but was experiencing an indefinable feeling of surprise and fear, mingled with affection. No doubt it was a lover who was making her grow more attractive. At this thought, he felt as if a favourite bird he had been playing with had just pecked him and drawn blood.