Meanwhile, the news had spread through the departments. Uneasy consciences began to tremble, and even the most honest among them stood in dread of the clean sweep Mouret was making. Albert had been seen disappearing into the shopwalkers’ office. Then Lhomme had gone in, red in the face, already choking with apoplexy. Next, Madame Aurélie herself had been summoned; she was holding her head high in her shame and her face was pale, with the flabby puffiness of a wax mask. The argument went on for some time; no one knew precisely what happened: it was said that the buyer from the ladieswear department had slapped her son’s face, and that his poor old father had wept; while the governor, abandoning his usual graciousness and swearing like a trooper, had insisted on handing over the guilty parties to justice. However, the scandal was hushed up. Only Mignot was dismissed on the spot. Albert did not disappear until two days later; no doubt his mother had obtained a promise that the family should not be dishonoured by an immediate execution. But the panic had lasted for several more days, for after this scene Mouret had walked from one end of the shop to the other with a terrible look in his eye, firing immediately all those who dared even to raise their eyes.
‘What are you doing there, sir, watching flies? Proceed to the pay-desk!’
One day the storm burst over the head of Hutin himself. Favier, appointed assistant buyer, was undermining the buyer so as to take over his position. He was using the usual tactics—sending secret reports to the management, taking advantage of every opportunity to have the head of the department caught doing something wrong. Thus, one morning as Mouret was going through the silk department, he stopped, surprised to see Favier altering the price tickets of a whole stock of black velvet.
‘Why are you lowering the prices?’ he asked. ‘Who gave you the order to do that?’
The assistant buyer, who was making a great fuss over the job, as if he had wanted to catch the governor’s attention as he went by, replied with an air of innocent surprise:
‘Oh, it was Monsieur Hutin, sir.’
‘Monsieur Hutin! Well, where is Monsieur Hutin?’
When the latter had returned from the reception desk downstairs, where a salesman had been sent to fetch him, he was immediately called to account. What! He was now reducing prices on his own initiative! But he appeared greatly astonished in his turn, having merely discussed the reduction with Favier, without giving a definite order. At this the latter put on the distressed air of an employee who feels obliged to contradict his superior. However, he would gladly take the blame, if it would get him out of a fix. Things now began to look very bad.
‘You really must understand, Monsieur Hutin,’ shouted Mouret, ‘that I’ve never tolerated such attempts at independence … Only the management decides on prices!’
He continued to berate Hutin in a very harsh voice, which surprised the salesmen, for this kind of argument usually took place in private, and in any case it might really be the result of a misunderstanding. They could feel that he wanted to relieve some unavowed grudge. So at last he had caught him out, this man Hutin, who was supposed to be Denise’s lover! Now he could relieve his feelings a bit, by making him fully aware that he was the master! And he exaggerated the whole affair, ending up by insinuating that the price reductions hid certain dishonest intentions.
‘I intended to refer this reduction to you, sir,’ repeated Hutin. ‘It’s really necessary, as you know, because these velvets haven’t been selling well.’
Mouret cut him short with a final sharp remark.
‘Very well, sir, we’ll look into the matter … But don’t do it again, if you value your job.’
And he walked off. Hutin, stunned and furious, had only Favier to relieve his feelings on; he swore to him that he would go and fling his resignation in that brute’s face. Then he stopped talking about leaving, and merely raked up all the atrocious accusations which salesmen were always making against their employers. Favier, his eyes shining, defended himself, making a great show of his sympathy. He had been obliged to reply, hadn’t he? And how could anyone have anticipated such a fuss about nothing? What was the matter with the governor lately? He really was impossible.
‘Oh! We all know what’s the matter with him,’ Hutin went on. ‘It isn’t my fault if that whore in the ladieswear department is driving him crazy! … You see, old chap, that’s what it’s all about. He knows I’ve slept with her, and he doesn’t like it; or else, she wants to have me kicked out because I make things difficult for her … I can tell you she’ll know about it if she comes my way.’
Two days later, when Hutin had gone upstairs to the workroom, which was up in the attics, to give some instructions to a seamstress, he gave a slight start on seeing Denise and Deloche at the end of a corridor, leaning against an open window, and so deep in conversation that they did not look round. He noticed with surprise that Deloche was weeping, and it suddenly occurred to him that he’d caught them unawares. He withdrew silently, and, bumping into Bourdoncle and Jouve on the stairs, he told them some story about one of the fire-extinguishers which looked as if its door had been pulled off; this would make them go upstairs and run into the other two. Bourdoncle saw them first. He stopped short, and told Jouve to go and fetch the governor while he waited there. The shopwalker was forced to obey, very annoyed at finding himself involved in an affair of this kind.
They were in an out-of-the-way corner of the vast world in which the multitudes in the Ladies’ Paradise came and went. It was reached by a complicated network of stairs and corridors. The series of work-rooms in the attics had low, sloping ceilings, lit by broad bay windows cut out of the zinc roof and furnished only with long tables and huge iron stoves; there were lingerie-makers, lace-makers, upholsterers, and dressmakers, who lived there winter and summer in stifling heat, in the midst of the smells peculiar to their trades; and in order to reach this remote part of the shop it was necessary to go right through that wing of the building, turn to the left after the dressmakers, and go up five steps. The rare customers who were sometimes taken there by a salesman for something they had ordered would recover their breath, exhausted and anxious, feeling that they had been going round and round for hours and were a hundred miles away from the street.
Several times already Denise had found Deloche waiting for her. As assistant buyer she was in charge of the department’s dealings with the work-rooms where only models were made and alterations carried out; she was always going upstairs to give instructions. He would look out for her, inventing some pretext to walk after her; then he would pretend to be surprised when he met her at the work-room door. She had ended up by laughing about it; the meetings had become almost an accepted thing. The corridor ran along the side of the cistern, an enormous metal tank which contained sixty thousand litres of water; and there was another one of equal size on the roof, reached by an iron ladder. Deloche would stand talking for a moment, leaning one shoulder against the cistern, for his huge body was always exhausted and bent with fatigue. There were sounds of water, mysterious sounds which gave the metal of the tank a musical vibration. In spite of the utter silence Denise would look round anxiously, thinking she saw a shadow move across the bare walls covered in bright yellow paint. But soon the window would attract them; they would lean their elbows on the sill, and forget themselves in pleasant chatter, in endless reminiscences of the country where they had spent their childhood. Beneath them extended the immense glazed roof of the central gallery, a lake of glass bounded by the distant housetops, as if by rocky coasts. And beyond they could see nothing but the sky, an expanse of sky which, with its flights of clouds and its delicate azure blue, was mirrored in the still water of the window-panes.
On that particular day, as it happened, Deloche was talking about Valognes.
‘I was six, and my mother used to take me in a cart to the market. You know it’s a good eight miles; we had to leave Briquebec at five o’clock … It’s very beautiful there. Do you know it?’
‘Yes, yes,’ replied Denise, slowly, g
azing into the distance, ‘I went there once, but I was very little … The roads have grass verges on either side, haven’t they? And there are sheep, roaming about in pairs, trailing their tethering ropes …’
She was silent for a while, then resumed with a vague smile:
‘In our part of the world, the roads run absolutely straight for miles, between trees which make them very shady … We have meadows surrounded by hedges which are taller than I am, where there are horses and cows … We’ve got a little river, and the water’s very cold under the brushwood, in a spot I know very well.’
‘It’s just like that with us!’ Deloche exclaimed in delight. ‘There’s nothing but grassland, and everyone surrounds his piece with hawthorns and elms and feels at home, and it’s all green, a green you don’t see in Paris … Oh! I used to play for hours at the bottom of the sunken path, on the left, on the way down from the mill!’
Their voices died away, and they remained there, gazing fixedly at the sunny lake of the window-panes. From this blinding water a mirage rose up before them; they could see endless pastures, the Cotentin soaked with breezes from the ocean, bathed in a luminous haze which was melting away on the horizon in the delicate grey of a water-colour. Below them, beneath the colossal iron framework, there was the roar of the buying and selling in the silk department, the reverberation of the machine at work, the whole shop vibrating with the trampling of the crowd, the bustle of salesmen, the life of the thirty thousand people packed together there; but, carried away by their dreams, they felt this deep, muffled roar with which the roofs were resounding, and thought they were listening to the wind from the sea blowing over the pastures, shaking the tall trees as it went.
‘Mademoiselle Denise,’ stammered Deloche, ‘why aren’t you kinder to me? I love you so much!’
Tears had come into his eyes, and when she tried to interrupt him with a gesture, he continued quickly:
‘No, let me tell you this just once more … We’d get on so well together! There’s always something to talk about when you come from the same part of the world.’
He was choking with tears and at last she was able to say gently:
‘You’re not being sensible; you promised not to talk about that any more … It’s impossible. I’m very fond of you, because you’re a very nice boy, but I want to stay free.’
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he went on in a broken voice. ‘You don’t love me. Oh! You can say so, I understand, there’s nothing to make you love me … I’ve only had one good hour in my life, that evening when I met you in Joinville, do you remember? For a moment, under the trees where it was so dark, I thought I felt your arm trembling. I was stupid enough to imagine …’
But she cut him short once more. Her sharp ears had just heard the footsteps of Bourdoncle and Jouve at the other end of the corridor.
‘Listen, there’s someone coming.’
‘No,’ he said, preventing her from leaving the window. ‘It’s in the cistern: it makes all sorts of strange noises; you’d think there were people inside it.’
He went on with his timid complaints. She was no longer listening to him, once more lulled into a day-dream by his talk of love, letting her glances stray over the roofs of the Ladies’ Paradise. To the right and left of the glazed gallery, other galleries and other halls were gleaming in the sunshine, between gables pitted with windows and set out symmetrically like barrack wings. Metal structures rose up, ladders and bridges, whose lacework stood out against the blue sky; while the chimney from the kitchens was belching out enough smoke for a factory, and the great square cistern, supported in the air by iron pillars, seemed like some barbaric construction hoisted up there by the pride of one man. The roar of Paris could be heard in the distance.
When Denise returned from space, from this airy development of the Paradise where her thoughts had been floating as if in some vast retreat, she saw that Deloche had taken her hand. His face was so distressed that she did not take it back.
‘Forgive me,’ he murmured, ‘it’s all over now, it would make me too unhappy if you punished me by taking away your friendship … I swear to you that I didn’t mean to say that to you. Yes, I’d promised myself to understand the situation, to be reasonable …’
His tears were flowing once more; he was trying to steady his voice.
‘Because I know now what my lot in life is. And my luck isn’t likely to change now. I was beaten back there at home, I’m beaten in Paris, I’m beaten everywhere. I’ve been here four years now, and I’m still on the bottom rung in the department… So I wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t be upset on my account. I won’t bother you any more. Try to be happy, love someone else; yes, that would make me happy. If you’re happy, I’ll be happy … That’ll be my joy.’
He could not go on. As if to seal his promise, he had placed his lips on the girl’s hand and was kissing it with the humble kiss of a slave. She was deeply touched, and with a sisterly tenderness which toned down the pity in her words, she said simply:
‘You poor boy!’
But they gave a start and turned round. Mouret was standing there. For ten minutes Jouve had been looking for the governor in the shop. But the latter had been on the site for the new shop-front in the Rue du Dix-Décembre. He spent hours there every day, trying to take an interest in this work he had dreamed of for so long. He found a refuge from his torments among the masons laying the corner-stones and the metalworkers putting up great iron girders. Already the shop-front was rising up, outlining the vast porch, the bays on the first floor, the birth of a palace. He would go up ladders, discuss the decorations—which were to be something quite new—with the architect, climb over ironwork and bricks, and even go down into the cellars; and the roar of the steam-engine, the tick-tock of the winches, the banging of the hammers, and the clamour of the crowd of workmen in this huge cage surrounded by echoing boards succeeded in numbing his feelings for a few moments. He would leave white with plaster, black with iron filings, his feet splashed by the water from the pumps, his trouble so far from being cured that his anguish would return and make his heart beat even more loudly as the din of the building site died away behind him. It so happened, on that particular day, that a diversion had restored his gaiety: he had become fascinated by an album of drawings of the mosaics and terracotta tiles with which the friezes were to be decorated, when Jouve, out of breath and very annoyed at having to get his frock-coat dirty among the building materials, had come to fetch him. At first Mouret had shouted that they could wait for him; then, after the shopwalker had said a few words to him in an undertone, he had followed him, trembling, overwhelmed by his passion again. Nothing else existed; the shop-front was crumbling before it had been built: what was the good of this supreme triumph of his pride, if the mere name of a woman, murmured in an undertone, tortured him to this extent!
Upstairs Bourdoncle and Jouve thought it wise to disappear. Deloche had already fled. Denise stood facing Mouret alone, paler than usual, but looking straight up at him.
‘Please follow me, miss,’ he said in a hard voice.
She followed him; they went down two floors and crossed the furniture and carpet departments without saying a word. When he reached his office, he opened the door wide.
‘Go in, please, miss.’
He closed the door and went straight to his desk. His new office was more luxurious than the old one: green velvet hangings had replaced the rep, a bookcase inlaid with ivory filled the whole of one wall; but, on the other walls, the only picture was still the portrait of Madame Hédouin, a young woman with a beautiful, calm face, smiling in her golden frame.
‘Mademoiselle Baudu,’ he said finally, trying to remain coldly severe, ‘there are certain things we cannot tolerate … Good behaviour is compulsory here …’
He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully in order not to give way to the rage which was mounting inside him. It was that boy she loved, that wretched salesman, the laughing-stock of his department! She preferred the h
umblest and clumsiest of them all to him, the master! For he had clearly seen them, Denise letting him take her hand, and Deloche covering that hand with kisses.
‘I’ve been very good to you, Mademoiselle Baudu,’ he continued, making a fresh effort. ‘I hardly expected to be repaid in this way.’
From the moment she entered, Denise’s eyes had been drawn to the portrait of Madame Hédouin; and, in spite of her great confusion, she remained preoccupied by it. Every time she went into Mouret’s office her eyes met those of this lady. She was a little afraid of her, and yet she felt that she was very kind. This time, she felt as if, in her, she had a protector.