Part 57

He hesitated a second.

“To Hemerlingue’s.”

She raised her great eyes, thinking he was making game of her. Then he told her of his meeting with the baron at the funeral of de Mora and the understanding they had come to.

“Go there, if you like,” said she coldly. “But you little know me if you believe that I, an Afchin, will ever set foot in that slave’s house.”

Cabassu, prudently seeing what was likely to happen, had fled into a neighbouring room, carrying with him the five acts of The Revolt under his arm.

“Come,” said the Nabob to his wife, “I see that you do not know the terrible position I am in. Listen.”

Without thinking of the maids or the negresses, with the sovereign indifference of an Oriental for his household, he proceeded to picture his great distress, his fortune sequestered over seas, his credit destroyed over here, his whole career in suspense before the judgment of the Chamber, the influence of the Hemerlingues on the judge-advocate, and the necessity of the sacrifice at the moment of all personal feeling to such important interests. He spoke hotly, tried to convince her, to carry her away. But she merely answered him, “I shall not go,” as if it were only a matter of some unimportant walk, a little too long for her.

He said trembling:

“See, now, it is not possible that you should say that. Think that my fortune is at stake, the future of our children, the name you bear. Everything is at stake in what you cannot refuse to do.”

He could have spoken thus for hours and been always met by the same firm, unshakable obstinacy--an Afchin could not visit a slave.

“Well, madame,” said he violently, “this slave is worth more than you. She has increased tenfold her husband’s wealth by her intelligence, while you, on the contrary----”

For the first time in the twelve years of their married life Jansoulet dared to hold up his head before his wife. Was he ashamed of this crime of lese-majeste, or did he understand that such a remark would place an impassable gulf between them? He changed his tone, knelt down before the bed, with that cheerful tenderness when one persuades children to be reasonable.

“My little Martha, I beg of you--get up, dress yourself. It is for your own sake I ask it, for your comfort, for your own welfare. What would become of you if, for a caprice, a stupid whim, we should become poor?”

But the word--poor--represented absolutely nothing to the Levantine. One could speak of it before her, as of death before little children. She was not moved by it, not knowing what it was. She was perfectly determined to keep in bed in her djebba; and to show her decision, she lighted a new cigarette at her old one just finished; and while the poor Nabob surrounded his “dear little wife” with excuses, with prayers, with supplications, promising her a diadem of pearls a hundred times more beautiful than her own, if she would come, she watched the heavy smoke rising to the painted ceiling, wrapping herself up in it as in an imperturbable calm. At last, in face of this refusal, this silence, this barrier of headstrong obstinacy, Jansoulet unbridled his wrath and rose up to his full height:

“Come,” said he, “I wish it.”

He turned to the negresses:

“Dress your mistress at once.”

And boor as he was at the bottom, the son of a southern nail-maker asserting itself in this crisis which moved him so deeply, he threw back the coverlids with a brutal and contemptuous gesture, knocking down the innumerable toys they bore, and forcing the half-clad Levantine to bound to her feet with a promptitude amazing in so massive a person. She roared at the outrage, drew the folds of her dalmatic against her bust, pushed her cap sideways on her dishevelled hair, and began to abuse her husband.

“Never, understand me, never! You may drag me sooner to this----”

The filth flowed from her heavy lips as from a spout. Jansoulet could have imagined himself in some frightful den of the port of Marseilles, at some quarrel of prostitutes and bullies, or again at some open-air dispute between Genoese, Maltese, and Provencal hags, gleaning on the quays round the sacks of wheat, and abusing each other, crouched in the whirlwinds of golden dust. She was indeed a Levantine of a seaport, a spoiled child, who, in the evening, left alone, had heard from her terrace or from her gondola the sailors revile each other in every tongue of the Latin seas, and had remembered it all. The wretched man looked at her, frightened, terrified at what she forced him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming and gasping:

“No, I will not go--no, I will not go!”

And this was the mother of his children, a daughter of the Afchins! Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in the hands of this woman, that it would only cost her a dress to put on to save him--and that time was flying--that soon it would be too late, a criminal feeling rose to his brain and distorted his features. He came straight to her, his hands contracted, with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins, frightened, rushed, calling towards the door by which the masseur had just gone out:

“Aristide!”

This cry, the words, this intimacy of his wife with a servant! Jansoulet stopped, his rage suddenly calmed; then, with a gesture of disgust, he flung himself out, slamming the doors, more eager to fly the misfortune and the horror whose presence he divined in his own home, than to seek elsewhere the help he had been promised.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at the Hemerlingues’, making a despairing gesture as he entered to the banker, and approached the baroness stammering the ready-made phrase he had heard repeated so often the night of his ball, “His wife, very unwell--most grieved not to have been able to come--” She did not give him time to finish, rose slowly, unwound herself like a long and slender snake from the pleated folds of her tight dress, and said, without looking at him, “Oh, I knew--I knew!” then changed her place and took no more notice of him. He attempted to approach Hemerlingue, but the good man seemed absorbed in his conversation with Maurice Trott. Then he went to sit down near Mme. Jenkins, whose isolation seemed like his own. But, even while talking to the poor woman, as languid as he was preoccupied, he was watching the baroness doing the honours of this drawing-room, so comfortable when compared with his own gilded halls.

It was time to leave. Mme. Hemerlingue went to the door with some of the ladies, presented her forehead to the old princess, bent under the benediction of the Armenian bishop, nodded with a smile to the young men with the canes, found for each the fitting adieu with perfect ease; and the wretched man could not prevent himself from comparing this Eastern slave, so Parisian, so distinguished in the best society of the world, with the other, the European brutalized by the East, stupefied with Turkish tobacco, and swollen with idleness. His ambitions, his pride as a husband, were extinguished and humiliated in this marriage of which he saw the danger and the emptiness--a final cruelty of fate taking from him even the refuge of personal happiness from all his public disasters.

Little by little the room was emptied. The Levantines disappeared one after another, leaving each time an immense void in their place. Mme. Jenkins was gone, and only two or three ladies remained whom Jansoulet did not know, and behind whom the mistress of the house seemed to shelter herself from him. But Hemerlingue was free, and the Nabob rejoined him at the moment when he was furtively escaping to his offices on the same floor opposite his rooms. Jansoulet went out with him, forgetting in his trouble to salute the baroness, and once on the antechamber staircase, Hemerlingue, cold and reserved while he was under his wife’s eye, expanded a little.

“It is very annoying,” said he in a low voice, as if he feared to be overheard, “that Mme. Jansoulet has not been willing to come.”