Germinie made no reply.
XXXI
For a whole week Germinie did not set foot in the shop again.
The Jupillons, when she did not return, began to despair. At last, oneevening about half past ten, she pushed the door open, entered the shopwithout a word of greeting, walked up to the little table where themother and son were sitting half asleep, and placed upon it, beneath herhand which was closed like a claw, an old piece of cloth that gave fortha ringing sound.
"There it is!" said she.
And, letting go the corners of the cloth, she emptied its contents onthe table: forth came greasy bank-notes, patched on the back, fastenedtogether with pins, old tarnished louis d'or, black hundred-sou pieces,forty-sou pieces, ten-sou pieces, the money of the poor, the money oftoil, money from Christmas-boxes, money soiled by dirty hands, worn outin leather purses, rubbed smooth in the cash drawer filled withsous--money with a flavor of perspiration.
For a moment she gazed at the display as if to assure her own eyes; thenshe said to Madame Jupillon in a sad voice, the voice of her sacrifice:
"There it is--There's the two thousand three hundred francs for him tobuy a substitute."
"Oh! my dear Germinie!" said the stout woman, almost suffocated byemotion; and she threw herself upon Germinie's neck, who submitted to beembraced. "Oh! you must take something with us--a cup of coffee--"
"No, thank you," said Germinie; "I am done up. _Dame!_ I've had to flyaround, you know, to get them. I'm going to bed now. Some other time."
And she went away.
She had had to "fly around," as she said, to scrape together such a sum,to accomplish that impossibility: to raise two thousand three hundredfrancs--two thousand three hundred francs, of which she had not thefirst five! She had collected them, begged them, extorted them piece bypiece, almost sou by sou. She had picked them up, scraped them togetherhere and there, from this one and from that one, by loans of twohundred, one hundred, fifty, twenty francs, or whatever sum anyone wouldlend. She had borrowed from her concierge, her grocer, her fruit woman,her poulterer, her laundress; she had borrowed from all the dealers inthe quarter, and from the dealers in the quarters where she hadpreviously lived with mademoiselle. She had made up the amount withmoney drawn from every source, even from her poor miserablewater-carrier. She had gone a-begging everywhere, importuned humbly,prayed, implored, invented fables, swallowed the shame of lying andof seeing that she was not believed. The humiliation of confessing thatshe had no money laid by, as was supposed, and as, through pride, shehad encouraged people to suppose, the sympathy of people she despised,the refusals, the alms, she had undergone everything, endured what shewould not have endured to procure bread for herself, and not once only,with a single person, but with thirty, forty, all those who had givenher something or from whom she had hoped for something.
Chapter XXXI
_At last, one evening about half past ten, she pushed the door open,entered the shop without a word of greeting, walked up to the littletable where the mother and son were sitting half asleep, and placed uponit, beneath her hand which was closed like a claw, an old piece of cloththat gave forth a ringing sound._
_"There it is!" said she._]
At last she had succeeded in collecting the money; but it was her masterand had possession of her forever. Her life thenceforth belonged to theobligations she had entered into with all these people, to the serviceher dealers had rendered her, knowing very well what they were doing.She belonged to her debt, to the sum she would have to pay every year.She knew it; she knew that all her wages would go in that way; that withthe rates of interest, which she had left entirely at the discretion ofher creditors, and the written obligations demanded by them,mademoiselle's three hundred francs would hardly suffice to pay theinterest on the twenty-three hundred she had borrowed. She knew that shewas in debt, that she should be in debt forever, that she was doomedforever to privation and embarrassment, to the strictest economy in hermanner of living and her dress. She had hardly any more illusions as tothe Jupillons than as to her own future. She had a presentiment thather money was lost so far as they were concerned. She had not even basedany hopes on the possibility that this sacrifice would touch the youngman. She had acted on the impulse of the moment. If she had been told todie to prevent his going, she would have died. The idea of seeing him asoldier, the idea of the battlefield, the cannon, the wounded, inpresence of which a woman shuts her eyes in terror, had led her to dosomething more than die; to sell her life for that man, to consignherself to everlasting poverty.
XXXII
Disorders of the nervous system frequently result in disarranging thenatural sequence of human joys and sorrows, in destroying theirproportion and equilibrium, and in carrying them to the greatestpossible excess. It seems that, under the influence of this disease ofsensitiveness, the sharpened, refined, spiritualized sensations exceedtheir natural measure and limits, reach a point beyond themselves, and,as it were, make the enjoyment and suffering of the individual infinite.So the infrequent joys that Germinie still knew were insane joys, fromwhich she emerged drunk, and with the physical symptoms ofdrunkenness.--"Why, my girl," mademoiselle sometimes could not forbearsaying, "anyone would think you were tipsy."--"Mademoiselle makes youpay dear for a little amusement once in a while!" Germinie would reply.And when she relapsed into her sorrowful, disappointed, restlesscondition, her desolation was more intense, more frantic and deliriousthan her gayety.
The moment had arrived when the terrible truth, which she had suspectedbefore, at last became clear to her. She saw that she had failed to layhold of Jupillon by the devotion her love had manifested, by strippingherself of all she possessed, by all the pecuniary sacrifices whichinvolved her life in the toils and embarrassment of a debt it wasimpossible for her to pay. She felt that he gave her his lovegrudgingly, a love to which he imparted all the humiliation of an act ofcharity. When she told him that she was again _enceinte_, the man whomshe was about to make a father once more said to her: "Well, women likeyou are amusing creatures! always full or just empty!" She conceived theideas, the suspicions that come to genuine love when it is betrayed, thepresentiments of the heart that tell women they are no longer inundisputed possession of their lovers, and that there is another becausethere is likely to be another.
She complained no more, she wept no more, she indulged no more inrecrimination. She abandoned the struggle with this man, armed withindifference, who, with the cold-blooded sarcasm of the vulgar cad, wasso expert in insulting her passion, her unreasoning impulses, her wildoutbursts of affection. And so, in agonizing resignation, she setherself the task of waiting--for what? She did not know: perhaps untilhe would have no more of her.
Heart-broken and silent, she kept watch upon Jupillon; she followed himabout and never lost sight of him; she tried to make him speak byinterjecting remarks in his fits of distraction. She hovered about him,but she saw nothing wrong, she could lay hold of nothing, detectnothing; and yet she was convinced that there was something and thatwhat she feared was true; she felt a woman's presence in the air.
One morning, as she went down the street rather earlier than usual, shespied him a few yards before her on the sidewalk. He was dressed up, andconstantly looked himself over as he walked along. From time to time heraised his trouser leg a little to see the polish on his boots. Shefollowed him. He went straight on without looking back. She was not farbehind him when he reached Place Breda. There was a woman walking on thesquare beside the cabstand. Germinie could see nothing of her but herback. Jupillon went up to her and she turned: it was his cousin. Theybegan to walk side by side, up and down the square; then they startedthrough Rue Breda toward Rue de Navarin. There the girl took Jupillon'sarm; she did not lean on it at first, but little by little, as theyproceeded, she leaned toward him, with the movement of a branch when itis bent, and drew closer and closer. They walked slowly, so slowly thatat times Germinie was obliged to stop in order to keep at a safedistance from them. They ascended Rue des Martyrs
, passed through Rue dela Tour d'Auvergne, and went down Rue Montholon. Jupillon was talkingearnestly; the cousin said nothing, but listened to Jupillon, andwalked on with the absent-minded air of a woman smelling of a bouquet,now and then darting a little vague glance on one side or the other--theglance of a frightened child.
When they reached Rue Lamartine, opposite the Passage des Deux-Soeurs,they turned. Germinie had barely time to throw herself in at a halldoor. They passed without seeing her. The little one was very seriousand walked slowly. Jupillon was talking into her ear. They stopped for amoment; Jupillon gesticulated earnestly; the girl stared fixedly at thepavement. Germinie thought they were about to part; but they resumedtheir walk together and made four or five turns, passing back and forthby the end of the passage. At last they turned in; Germinie darted fromher hiding-place and rushed after them. From the gateway of the passageshe saw the skirt of a dress disappear through the door of a smallfurnished lodging-house, beside a wine shop. She ran to the door, lookedinto the hall and could see nothing. Thereupon all her blood rushed toher head, with one thought, a single thought that her lips keptrepeating like an idiot: "Vitriol! vitriol! vitriol!" And as herthoughts were instantly transformed into the act of which she thought,and her delirium transported her abruptly to the crime she contemplated,she said to herself that she would go up the stairs with the bottle wellhidden under her shawl; she would knock at the door very loud andcontinuously. He would come at last and would open the door a crack.She would say nothing to him, not her name even. She would go in withoutheeding him. She was strong enough to kill him! and she would go to thebed, to _her_! She would take her by the arm and say: "Yes it's me--thisis for your life!" And over her face, her throat, her skin, overeverything about her that was youthful and attractive and that invitedlove, Germinie watched the vitriol sear and seam and burn and hiss,transforming her into a horrible object that filled Germinie's heart tooverflowing with joy! The bottle was empty, and she laughed! And, in herfrightful dream, her body also dreaming, her feet began to move. Shewalked unconsciously down the passage, into the street and to a grocer'sshop. Ten minutes she stood motionless at the counter, with eyes thatdid not see, the vacant, wandering eyes of one who has murder in hisheart.
"Well, well, what do you want?" said the grocer's wife testily, almostfrightened by the bearing of this woman who did not stir.
"What do I want?" said Germinie. She was so filled, so possessed withthe thought of what she wanted that she believed she had asked forvitriol. "What do I want?"--She passed her hand across herforehead.--"Ah! I don't know now."
And she left the shop, stumbling as she went.
XXXIII
In the torment of the life she was leading, in which she suffered thehorrors of death and of unsatisfied passion, Germinie, seeking to deadenher ghastly thoughts, had remembered the glass she had taken fromAdele's hand one morning, which gave her a whole day of oblivion. Fromthat day she had taken to drink. She had begun with the little morningdraughts to which the maids of kept women are addicted. She had drunkwith this one and with that one. She had drunk with men who came tobreakfast at the creamery; she had drunk with Adele, who drank like aman and who took a base delight in seeing this virtuous woman's maiddescend as low as herself.
At first she had needed excitement, company, the clinking of glasses,the encouragement of speech, the inspiration of the challenge, in orderto arouse the desire to drink; but she had soon reached the point whereshe drank alone. Then it was that she began to carry home a half-filledglass under her apron and hide it in a corner of the kitchen; that shehad taken to drinking those mixtures of white wine and brandy, of whichshe would take draught upon draught until she had found that for whichshe thirsted--sleep. For what she craved was not the fevered brain, thehappy confusion, the living folly, the delirious, waking dream ofdrunkenness; what she needed, what she sought was the negative joy ofsleep, Lethean, dreamless sleep, a leaden sleep falling upon her likethe blow of the sledge upon the ox's head: and she found it in thosecompounds which struck her down and stretched her out face downward onthe waxed cover of the kitchen table.
To sleep that overpowering sleep, to wallow, by day, in that midnightdarkness, had come to mean to her a truce, deliverance from an existencethat she had not the courage to continue or to end. An overwhelminglonging for oblivion was all she felt when she awoke. The hours of herlife that she passed in possession of her faculties, contemplatingherself, examining her conscience, looking on at her own shame, seemedto her so execrable! She preferred to kill them. There was nothing inthe world but sleep to make her forget everything--the congested sleepof intoxication, which lulls its victim with the arms of Death.
In that glass, from which she forced herself to drink, and which sheemptied in a sort of frenzy, her sufferings, her sorrows, all herhorrible present would be drowned and disappear. In a half hour, hermind would have ceased to think, her life would have ceased to exist;nothing of her surroundings would have any being for her, there would beno more time even, so far as she was concerned. "I drink away mytroubles!" she said to a woman who told her that she would wreck herhealth by drinking. And as, in the periods of reaction that followed herdebauches, there came to her a more painful feeling of her own shame, agreater sense of desolation and a fiercer detestation of her mistakesand her sins, she sought stronger decoctions of alcohol, more fierybrandy, and even drank pure absinthe, in order to produce a more deathlylethargy, and to make her more utterly oblivious to everything.
She ended by attaining in this way whole half days of unconsciousness,from which she emerged only half awake, with benumbed intelligence,blunted perceptions, hands that did things by force of habit, themotions of a somnambulist, a body and a mind in which thought, will,memory seemed still to retain the drowsiness and vagueness of theconfused waking hours of the morning.
XXXIV
Half an hour after the horrible meeting when--her mind having dabbled incrime as if with her fingers--she had determined to disfigure her rivalwith vitriol and had believed that she had done so, Germinie returned toRue de Laval with a bottle of brandy procured at the grocer's.
For two weeks she had been mistress of the apartment, free to indulgeher brutish appetite. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who as a general rulehardly stirred from her chair, had gone, strangely enough, to pass sixweeks with an old friend in the country; and she decided not to takeGerminie with her for fear of setting a bad example to the otherservants, and arousing their jealousy of a maid who was accustomed tovery light duties and was treated on a different footing fromthemselves.
Germinie went into mademoiselle's bedroom and took no more time than wasnecessary to throw her shawl and hat on the floor before she began todrink, with the neck of the bottle between her teeth, pouring down theliquid hurriedly until everything in the room was whirling around her,and she remembered nothing of the day. Thereupon, staggering, feelingthat she was about to fall, she tried to throw herself on her mistress'sbed to sleep; but her dizziness threw her against the night table. Fromthat she fell to the floor and lay without moving; she simply snored.But the blow was so violent that during the night she had a miscarriage,followed by one of those hemorrhages in which the life often ebbs away.She tried to rise and go out on the landing to call; she tried to standup: she could not. She felt that she was gliding on to death, enteringits portals and descending with gentle moderation. At last, summoningall her strength for a final effort, she dragged herself as far as thehall door; but it was impossible for her to lift her head to thekeyhole, impossible to cry out. And she would have died where she layhad not Adele, as she was passing in the morning, heard a groan, and, inher alarm, fetched a locksmith to open the door, and afterward a midwifeto attend to the dying woman.
When mademoiselle returned a month later, she found Germinie up andabout, but so weak that she was constantly obliged to sit down, and sopale that she seemed to have no blood left in her body. They told herthat she had had a hemorrhage of which she nearly died: mademoisellesuspected nothing. r />
XXXV
Germinie welcomed mademoiselle's return with melting caresses, wet withtears. Her affectionate manner was like a sick child's; she had the sameclinging gentleness, the imploring expression, the melancholy of timid,frightened suffering. She sought excuses for touching her mistress withher white blue-veined hands. She approached her with a sort of tremblingand fervent humility. Very often, as she sat facing her upon a stool,and looked up at her with eyes like a dog's, she would rise and go andkiss some part of her dress, then resume her seat, and in a moment beginagain.
There was heart-rending entreaty in these caresses, these kisses ofGerminie's. Death, whose footsteps she had heard approaching her as ifit were a living person; the hours of utter prostration, when, as shelay in her bed, alone with herself, she had reviewed her whole pastlife; the consciousness of the shame of all she had concealed fromMademoiselle de Varandeuil; the fear of a judgment of God, rising fromthe depths of her former religious ideas; all the reproaches, all theapprehensions that whisper in the ear of a dying agony had aroused ahorrible dread in her conscience; and remorse,--the remorse that she hadnever been able to put down,--was now alive and crying aloud in herenfeebled, broken body, as yet but partially restored to life, as yetscarcely firm in the persuasion that it was alive.
Germinie's was not one of those fortunate natures that do wrong andleave the memory of it behind them, and never feel a twinge of regret.She had not, like Adele, one of those vulgar material organizations,which never allow themselves to be affected by any but animal impulses.She was not blessed with one of those consciences which escape sufferingby virtue of mere brutishness, or of that dense stupidity in which awoman vegetates, sinning because she knows no better. In her case, anunhealthy sensitiveness, a sort of cerebral excitement, a disposition onthe part of the brain to be always on the alert, to work itself into afrenzy of bitterness, anxiety and discontent with itself, a moral sensethat stood erect, as it were, after every one of her backslidings, allthe characteristics of a sensitive mind, predestined to misfortune,united to torture her, and to renew day after day, more openly and morecruelly in her despair, the agony due to acts that would hardly havecaused such long-continued suffering in many women in her station.