________________________________________________
_ Sophia still possessed about a hundred pounds, and had she chosen
to leave Paris and France, there was nothing to prevent her from
doing so. Perhaps if she had chanced to visit the Gare St. Lazare
or the Gare du Nord, the sight of tens of thousands of people
flying seawards might have stirred in her the desire to flee also
from the vague coming danger. But she did not visit those termini;
she was too busy looking after M. Niepce, her grocer. Moreover,
she would not quit her furniture, which seemed to her to be a sort
of rock. With a flat full of furniture she considered that she
ought to be able to devise a livelihood; the enterprise of
becoming independent was already indeed begun. She ardently wished
to be independent, to utilize in her own behalf the gifts of
organization, foresight, commonsense and tenacity which she knew
she possessed and which had lain idle. And she hated the idea of
flight.
Chirac returned as unexpectedly as he had gone; an expedition for
his paper had occupied him. With his lips he urged her to go, but
his eyes spoke differently. He had, one afternoon, a mood of
candid despair, such as he would have dared to show only to one in
whom he felt great confidence. "They will come to Paris," he said;
"nothing can stop them. And ... then ...!" He gave a cynical
laugh. But when he urged her to go she said:
"And what about my furniture? And I've promised M. Niepce to look
after him."
Then Chirac informed her that he was without a lodging, and that
he would like to rent one of her rooms. She agreed.
Shortly afterwards he introduced a middle-aged acquaintance namer
Carlier, the secretary-general of his newspaper, who wished to
rent a bedroom. Thus by good fortune Sophia let all her rooms
immediately, and was sure of over two hundred francs a month,
apart from the profit on meals supplied. On this latter occasion
Chirac (and his companion too) was quite optimistic, reiterating
an absolute certitude that Paris could never be invested. Briefly,
Sophia did not believe him. She believed the candidly despairing
Chirac. She had no information, no wide theory, to justify her
pessimism; nothing but the inward conviction that the race capable
of behaving as she had seen it behave in the Place de la Concorde,
was bound to be defeated. She loved the French race; but all the
practical Teutonic sagacity in her wanted to take care of it in
its difficulties, and was rather angry with it for being so
unfitted to take care of itself.
She let the men talk, and with careless disdain of their
discussions and their certainties she went about her business of
preparation. At this period, overworked and harassed by novel
responsibilities and risks, she was happier, for days together,
than she had ever been, simply because she had a purpose in life
and was depending upon herself. Her ignorance of the military and
political situation was complete; the situation did not interest
her. What interested her was that she had three men to feed wholly
or partially, and that the price of eatables was rising. She
bought eatables. She bought fifty pecks of potatoes at a franc a
peck, and another fifty pecks at a franc and a quarter--double the
normal price; ten hams at two and a half francs a pound; a large
quantity of tinned vegetables and fruits, a sack of flour, rice,
biscuits, coffee, Lyons sausage, dried prunes, dried figs, and
much wood and charcoal. But the chief of her purchases was cheese,
of which her mother used to say that bread and cheese and water
made a complete diet. Many of these articles she obtained from her
grocer. All of them, except the flour and the biscuits, she stored
in the cellar belonging to the flat; after several days' delay,
for the Parisian workmen were too elated by the advent of a
republic to stoop to labour, she caused a new lock to be fixed on
the cellar-door. Her activities were the sensation of the house.
Everybody admired, but no one imitated.
One morning, on going to do her marketing, she found a notice
across the shuttered windows of her creamery in the Rue Notre Dame
de Lorette: "Closed for want of milk." The siege had begun. It was
in the closing of the creamery that the siege was figured for her;
in this, and in eggs at five sous a piece. She went elsewhere for
her milk and paid a franc a litre for it. That evening she told
her lodgers that the price of meals would be doubled, and that if
any gentleman thought that he could get equally good meals
elsewhere, he was at liberty to get them elsewhere. Her position
was strengthened by the appearance of another candidate for a
room, a friend of Niepce. She at once offered him her own room, at
a hundred and fifty francs a month.
"You see," she said, "there is a piano in it."
"But I don't play the piano," the man protested, shocked at the
price.
"That is not my fault," she said.
He agreed to pay the price demanded for the room because of the
opportunity of getting good meals much cheaper than in the
restaurants. Like M. Niepce, he was a 'siege-widower,' his wife
having been put under shelter in Brittany. Sophia took to the
servant's bedroom on the sixth floor. It measured nine feet by
seven, and had no window save a skylight; but Sophia was in a fair
way to realize a profit of at least four pounds a week, after
paying for everything.
On the night when she installed herself in that chamber, amid a
world of domestics and poor people, she worked very late, and the
rays of her candles shot up intermittently through the skylight
into a black heaven; at intervals she flitted up and down the
stairs with a candle. Unknown to her a crowd gradually formed
opposite the house in the street, and at about one o'clock in the
morning a file of soldiers woke the concierge and invaded the
courtyard, and every window was suddenly populated with heads.
Sophia was called upon to prove that she was not a spy signalling
to the Prussians. Three quarters of an hour passed before her
innocence was established and the staircases cleared of uniforms
and dishevelled curiosity. The childish, impossible unreason of
the suspicion against her completed in Sophia's mind the ruin of
the reputation of the French people as a sensible race. She was
extremely caustic the next day to her boarders. Except for this
episode, the frequency of military uniforms in the streets, the
price of food, and the fact that at least one house in four was
flying either the ambulance flag or the flag of a foreign embassy
(in an absurd hope of immunity from the impending bombardment) the
siege did not exist for Sophia. The men often talked about their
guard-duty, and disappeared for a day or two to the ramparts, but
she was too busy to listen to them. She thought of nothing but her
enterprise, which absorbed all her powers. She arose at six a.m.,
in the dark, and by seven-thirty M. Niepce and his friend had been
served with breakfast, and much general work was already done. At
eight o'clock she went out to market. When asked why she continued
to buy at a high price, articles of which she had a store, she
would reply: "I am keeping all that till things are much dearer."
This was regarded as astounding astuteness.
On the fifteenth of October she paid the quarter's rent of the
flat, four hundred francs, and was accepted as tenant. Her ears
were soon quite accustomed to the sound of cannon, and she felt
that she had always been a citizeness of Paris, and that Paris had
always been besieged. She did not speculate about the end of the
siege; she lived from day to day. Occasionally she had a qualm of
fear, when the firing grew momentarily louder, or when she heard
that battles had been fought in such and such a suburb. But then
she said it was absurd to be afraid when you were with a couple of
million people, all in the same plight as yourself. She grew
reconciled to everything. She even began to like her tiny bedroom,
partly because it was so easy to keep warm (the question of
artificial heat was growing acute in Paris), and partly because it
ensured her privacy. Down in the flat, whatever was done or said
in one room could be more or less heard in all the others, owing
to the prevalence of doors.
Her existence, in the first half of November, had become regular
with a monotony almost absolute. Only the number of meals served
to her boarders varied slightly from day to day. All these
repasts, save now and then one in the evening, were carried into
the bedrooms by the charwoman. Sophia did not allow herself to be
seen much, except in the afternoons. Though Sophia continued to
increase her prices, and was now selling her stores at an immense
profit, she never approached the prices current outside. She was
very indignant against the exploitation of Paris by its
shopkeepers, who had vast supplies of provender, and were hoarding
for the rise. But the force of their example was too great for her
to ignore it entirely; she contented herself with about half their
gains. Only to M. Niepce did she charge more than to the others,
because he was a shopkeeper. The four men appreciated their
paradise. In them developed that agreeable feeling of security
which solitary males find only under the roof of a landlady who is
at once prompt, honest, and a votary of cleanliness. Sophia hung a
slate near the frontdoor, and on this slate they wrote their
requests for meals, for being called, for laundry-work, etc.
Sophia never made a mistake, and never forgot. The perfection of
the domestic machine amazed these men, who had been accustomed to
something quite different, and who every day heard harrowing
stories of discomfort and swindling from their acquaintances. They
even admired Sophia for making them pay, if not too high, still
high. They thought it wonderful that she should tell them the
price of all things in advance, and even show them how to avoid
expense, particularly in the matter of warmth. She arranged rugs
for each of them, so that they could sit comfortably in their
rooms with nothing but a small charcoal heater for the hands.
Quite naturally they came to regard her as the paragon and miracle
of women. They endowed her with every fine quality. According to
them there had never been such a woman in the history of mankind;
there could not have been! She became legendary among their
friends: a young and elegant creature, surpassingly beautiful,
proud, queenly, unapproachable, scarcely visible, a marvellous
manager, a fine cook and artificer of strange English dishes,
utterly reliable, utterly exact and with habits of order ...! They
adored the slight English accent which gave a touch of the exotic
to her very correct and freely idiomatic French. In short, Sophia
was perfect for them, an impossible woman. Whatever she did was
right.
And she went up to her room every night with limbs exhausted, but
with head clear enough to balance her accounts and go through her
money. She did this in bed with thick gloves on. If often she did
not sleep well, it was not because of the distant guns, but
because of her preoccupation with the subject of finance. She was
making money, and she wanted to make more. She was always
inventing ways of economy. She was so anxious to achieve
independence that money was always in her mind. She began to love
gold, to love hoarding it, and to hate paying it away.
One morning her charwoman, who by good fortune was nearly as
precise as Sophia herself, failed to appear. When the moment came
for serving M. Niepce's breakfast, Sophia hesitated, and then
decided to look after the old man personally. She knocked at his
door, and went boldly in with the tray and candle. He started at
seeing her; she was wearing a blue apron, as the charwoman did,
but there could be no mistaking her for the charwoman. Niepce
looked older in bed than when dressed. He had a rather ridiculous,
undignified appearance, common among old men before their morning
toilette is achieved; and a nightcap did not improve it. His
rotund paunch lifted the bedclothes, upon which, for the sake of
extra warmth, he had spread unmajestic garments. Sophia smiled to
herself; but the contempt implied by that secret smile was
softened by the thought: "Poor old man!" She told him briefly that
she supposed the charwoman to be ill. He coughed and moved
nervously. His benevolent and simple face beamed on her paternally
as she fixed the tray by the bed.
"I really must open the window for one little second," she said,
and did so. The chill air of the street came through the closed
shutters, and the old man made a noise as of shivering. She pushed
back the shutters, and closed the window, and then did the same
with the other two windows. It was almost day in the room.
"You will no longer need the candle," she said, and came back to
the bedside to extinguish it.
The benign and fatherly old man put his arm round her waist. Fresh
from the tonic of pure air, and with the notion of his
ridiculousness still in her mind, she was staggered for an instant
by this gesture. She had never given a thought to the temperament
of the old grocer, the husband of a young wife. She could not
always imaginatively keep in mind the effect of her own radiance,
especially under such circumstances. But after an instant her
precocious cynicism, which had slept, sprang up. "Naturally! I
might have expected it!" she thought with blasting scorn.
"Take away your hand!" she said bitterly to the amiable old fool.
She did not stir.
He obeyed, sheepishly.
"Do you wish to remain with me?" she asked, and as he did not
immediately answer, she said in a most commanding tone: "Answer,
then!"
"Yes," he said feebly.
"Well, behave properly."
She went towards the door.
"I wished only--" he stammered.
"I do not wish to know what you wished," she said.
Afterwards she wondered how much of the incident had been
overheard. The other breakfasts she left outside the respective
doors; and in future Niepce's also.
The charwoman never came again. She had caught smallpox and she
died of it, thus losing a good situation. Strange to say, Sophia
did not replace her; the temptation to save her wages and food was
too strong. She could not, however, stand waiting for hours at the
door of the official baker and the official butcher, one of a long
line of frozen women, for the daily rations of bread and tri-
weekly rations of meat. She employed the concierge's boy, at two
sous an hour, to do this. Sometimes he would come in with his
hands so blue and cold that he could scarcely hold the precious
cards which gave the right to the rations and which cost Chirac an
hour or two of waiting at the mayoral offices each week. Sophia
might have fed her flock without resorting to the official
rations, but she would not sacrifice the economy which they
represented. She demanded thick clothes for the concierge's boy,
and received boots from Chirac, gloves from Carlier, and a great
overcoat from Niepce. The weather increased in severity, and
provisions in price. One day she sold to the wife of a chemist who
lived on the first floor, for a hundred and ten francs, a ham for
which she had paid less than thirty francs. She was conscious of a
thrill of joy in receiving a beautiful banknote and a gold coin in
exchange for a mere ham. By this time her total cash resources had
grown to nearly five thousand francs. It was astounding. And the
reserves in the cellar were still considerable, and the sack of
flour that encumbered the kitchen was still more than half full.
The death of the faithful charwoman, when she heard of it,
produced but little effect on Sophia, who was so overworked and so
completely absorbed in her own affairs that she had no nervous
energy to spare for sentimental regrets. The charwoman, by whose
side she had regularly passed many hours in the kitchen, so that
she knew every crease in her face and fold of her dress, vanished
out of Sophia's memory.
Sophia cleaned and arranged two of the bedrooms in the morning,
and two in the afternoon. She had stayed in hotels where fifteen
bedrooms were in charge of a single chambermaid, and she thought
it would be hard if she could not manage four in the intervals of
cooking and other work! This she said to herself by way of excuse
for not engaging another charwoman. One afternoon she was rubbing
the brass knobs of the numerous doors in M. Niepce's room, when
the grocer unexpectedly came in.
She glanced at him sharply. There was a self-conscious look in his
eye. He had entered the flat noiselessly. She remembered having
told him, in response to a question, that she now did his room in
the afternoon. Why should he have left his shop? He hung up his
hat behind the door, with the meticulous care of an old man. Then
he took off his overcoat and rubbed his hands.
"You do well to wear gloves, madame," he said. "It is dog's
weather."
"I do not wear them for the cold," she replied. "I wear them so as
not to spoil my hands."
"Ah! truly! Very well! Very well! May I demand some wood? Where
shall I find it? I do not wish to derange you."
She refused his help, and brought wood from the kitchen, counting
the logs audibly before him.
"Shall I light the fire now?" she asked.
"I will light it," he said.
"Give me a match, please."
As she was arranging the wood and paper, he said: "Madame, will
you listen to me?"
"What is it?"
"Do not be angry," he said. "Have I not proved that I am capable
of respecting you? I continue in that respect. It is with all that
respect that I say to you that I love you, madame. ... No, remain
calm, I implore you!" The fact was that Sophia showed no sign of
not remaining calm. "It is true that I have a wife. But what do
you wish ...? She is far away. I love you madly," he proceeded
with dignified respect. "I know I am old; but I am rich. I
understand your character. You are a lady, you are decided,
direct, sincere, and a woman of business. I have the greatest
respect for you. One can talk to you as one could not to another
woman. You prefer directness and sincerity. Madame, I will give
you two thousand francs a month, and all you require from my shop,
if you will be amiable to me. I am very solitary, I need the
society of a charming creature who would be sympathetic. Two
thousand francs a month. It is money."
He wiped his shiny head with his hand.
Sophia was bending over the fire. She turned her head towards him.
"Is that all?" she said quietly.
"You could count on my discretion," he said in a low voice. "I
appreciate your scruples. I would come, very late, to your room on
the sixth. One could arrange ... You see, I am direct, like you."
She had an impulse to order him tempestuously out of the flat; but
it was not a genuine impulse. He was an old fool. Why not treat
him as such? To take him seriously would be absurd. Moreover, he
was a very remunerative boarder.
"Do not be stupid," she said with cruel tranquillity. "Do not be
an old fool."
And the benign but fatuous middle-aged lecher saw the enchanting
vision of Sophia, with her natty apron and her amusing gloves,
sweep and fade from the room. He left the house, and the expensive
fire warmed an empty room.
Sophia was angry with him. He had evidently planned the proposal.
If capable of respect, he was evidently also capable of chicane.
But she supposed these Frenchmen were all alike: disgusting; and
decided that it was useless to worry over a universal fact. They
had simply no shame, and she had been very prudent to establish
herself far away on the sixth floor. She hoped that none of the
other boarders had overheard Niepce's outrageous insolence. She
was not sure if Chirac was not writing in his room.
That night there was no sound of cannon in the distance, and
Sophia for some time was unable to sleep. She woke up with a
start, after a doze, and struck a match to look at her watch. It
had stopped. She had forgotten to wind it up, which omission
indicated that the grocer had perturbed her more than she thought.
She could not be sure how long she had slept. The hour might be
two o'clock or it might be six o'clock. Impossible for her to
rest! She got up and dressed (in case it should be as late as she
feared) and crept down the interminable creaking stairs with the
candle. As she descended, the conviction that it was the middle of
the night grew upon her, and she stepped more softly. There was no
sound save that caused by her footfalls. With her latchkey she
cautiously opened the front door of the flat and entered. She
could then hear the noisy ticking of the small, cheap clock in the
kitchen. At the same moment another door creaked, and Chirac, with
hair all tousled, but fully dressed, appeared in the corridor.
"So you have decided to sell yourself to him!" Chirac whispered.
She drew away instinctively, and she could feel herself blushing.
She was at a loss. She saw that Chirac was in a furious rage,
tremendously moved. He crept towards her, half crouching. She had
never seen anything so theatrical as his movement, and the
twitching of his face. She felt that she too ought to be
theatrical, that she ought nobly to scorn his infamous suggestion,
his unwarrantable attack. Even supposing that she had decided to
sell herself to the old pasha, did that concern him? A dignified
silence, an annihilating glance, were all that he deserved. But
she was not capable of this heroic behaviour.
"What time is it?" she added weakly.
"Three o'clock," Chirac sneered.
"I forgot to wind up my watch," she said. "And so I came down to
see."
"In effect!" He spoke sarcastically, as if saying: "I've waited
for you, and here you are."
She said to herself that she owed him nothing, but all the time
she felt that he and she were the only young people in that flat,
and that she did owe to him the proof that she was guiltless of
the supreme dishonour of youth. She collected her forces and
looked at him.
"You should be ashamed," she said. "You will wake the others."
"And M. Niepce--will he need to be wakened?"
"M. Niepce is not here," she said.
Niepce's door was unlatched. She pushed it open, and went into the
room, which was empty and bore no sign of having been used.
"Come and satisfy yourself!" she insisted.
Chirac did so. His face fell.
She took her watch from her pocket.
"And now wind my watch, and set it, please."
She saw that he was in anguish. He could not take the watch. Tears
came into his eyes. Then he hid his face, and dashed away. She
heard a sob-impeded murmur that sounded like, "Forgive me!" and
the banging of a door. And in the stillness she heard the regular
snoring of M. Carlier. She too cried. Her vision was blurred by a
mist, and she stumbled into the kitchen and seized the clock, and
carried it with her upstairs, and shivered in the intense cold of
the night. She wept gently for a very long time. "What a shame!
What a shame!" she said to herself. Yet she did not quite blame
Chirac. The frost drove her into bed, but not to sleep. She
continued to cry. At dawn her eyes were inflamed with weeping. She
was back in the kitchen then. Chirac's door was wide open. He had
left the flat. On the slate was written, "I shall not take meals
to-day." _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER VI - THE SIEGE: PART III
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER VI - THE SIEGE: PART I
Table of content of Old Wives' Tale
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
