The Essential Guy de Maupassant Collection. Guy de Maupassant
had been forced to sell his watch, for he would no longer hold out his hand to beg of his mother. So he had no other resource left, no opening to enable him to eat the bread of any house but this which had become uninhabitable, or sleep in any other bed, or under any other roof. He presently said, with some little hesitation:
"If I could, I would very gladly sail in her."
Jean asked:
"What should hinder you?"
"I know no one in the Transatlantic Shipping Company."
Roland was astounded.
"And what has become of all your fine schemes for getting on?"
Pierre replied in a low voice:
"There are times when we must bring ourselves to sacrifice everything and renounce our fondest hopes. And after all it is only to make a beginning, a way of saving a few thousand francs to start fair with afterward."
His father was promptly convinced.
"That is very true. In a couple of years you can put by six or seven thousand francs, and that well laid out, will go a long way. What do you think of the matter, Louise?"
She replied in a voice so low as to be scarcely audible:
"I think Pierre is right."
Roland exclaimed:
"I will go and talk it over with M. Poulin: I know him very well. He is assessor of the Chamber of Commerce and takes an interest in the affairs of the Company. There is M. Lenient, too, the ship-owner, who is intimate with one of the vice-chairmen."
Jean asked his brother:
"Would you like me to feel my way with M. Marchand at once?"
"Yes, I should be very glad."
After thinking a few minutes Pierre added:
"The best thing I can do, perhaps, will be to write to my professors at the college of Medicine, who had a great regard for me. Very inferior men are sometimes shipped on board those vessels. Letters of strong recommendation from such professors as Mas-Roussel, Remusot, Flanche, and Borriquel would do more for me in an hour than all the doubtful introductions in the world. It would be enough if your friend M. Marchand would lay them before the board."
Jean approved heartily.
"Your idea is really capital." And he smiled, quite reassured, almost happy, sure of success and incapable of allowing himself to be unhappy for long.
"You will write to-day?" he said.
"Directly. Now; at once. I will go and do so. I do not care for any coffee this morning; I am too nervous."
He rose and left the room.
Then Jean turned to his mother:
"And you, mother, what are you going to do?"
"Nothing. I do not know."
"Will you come with me to call on Mme. Rosemilly?"
"Why, yes--yes."
"You know I must positively go to see her to-day."
"Yes, yes. To be sure."
"Why must you positively?" asked Roland, whose habit it was never to understand what was said in his presence.
"Because I promised her I would."
"Oh, very well. That alters the case." And he began to fill his pipe, while the mother and son went upstairs to make ready.
When they were in the street Jean said:
"Will you take my arm, mother?"
He was never accustomed to offer it, for they were in the habit of walking side by side. She accepted and leaned on him.
For some time they did not speak; then he said:
"You see that Pierre is quite ready and willing to go away."
She murmured:
"Poor boy!"
"But why 'poor boy'? He will not be in the least unhappy on board the Lorraine."
"No--I know. But I was thinking of so many things."
And she thought for a long time, her head bent, accommodating her step to her son's; then, in the peculiar voice in which we sometimes give utterance to the conclusion of long and secret meditations, she exclaimed:
"How horrible life is! If by any chance we come across any sweetness in it, we sin in letting ourselves be happy, and pay dearly for it afterward."
He said in a whisper:
"Do not speak of that any more, mother."
"Is that possible? I think of nothing else."
"You will forget it."
Again she was silent; then with deep regret she said:
"How happy I might have been, married to another man!"
She was visiting it on Roland now, throwing all the responsibility of her sin on his ugliness, his stupidity, his clumsiness, the heaviness of his intellect, and the vulgarity of his person. It was to this that it was owing that she had betrayed him, had driven one son to desperation, and had been forced to utter to the other the most agonizing confession that can make a mother's heart bleed. She muttered: "It is so frightful for a young girl to have to marry such a husband as mine."
Jean made no reply. He was thinking of the man he had hitherto believed to be his father; and possibly the vague notion he had long since conceived, of that father's inferiority, with his brother's constant irony, the scornful indifference of others, and the very maid-servant's contempt for Roland, had somewhat prepared his mind for his mother's terrible avowal. It had all made it less dreadful to him to find that he was another man's son; and if, after the great shock and agitation of the previous evening, he had not suffered the reaction of rage, indignation, and rebellion which Mme. Roland had feared, it was because he had long been unconsciously chafing under the sense of being the child of this well-meaning lout.
They had now reached the dwelling of Mme. Rosemilly.
She lived on the road to Sainte-Adresse, on the second floor of a large tenement which she owned. The windows commanded a view of the whole roadstead.
On seeing Mme. Roland, who entered first, instead of merely holding out her hands as usual, she put her arms round her and kissed her, for she divined the purpose of her visit.
The furniture of this drawing-room, all in stamped velvet, was always shrouded in chair-covers. The walls, hung with flowered paper, were graced by four engravings, the purchase of her late husband, the captain. They represented sentimental scenes of seafaring life. In the first a fisherman's wife was seen, waving a handkerchief on shore, while the vessel which bore away her husband vanished on the horizon. In the second the same woman, on her knees on the same shore, under a sky shot with lightning, wrung her arms as she gazed into the distance at her husband's boat which was going to the bottom amid impossible waves.
The others represented similar scenes in a higher rank of society. A young lady with fair hair, resting her elbows on the ledge of a large steamship quitting the shore, gazed at the already distant coast with eyes full of tears and regret. Whom is she leaving behind?
Then the same young lady sitting by an open widow with a view of the sea, had fainted in an arm-chair; a letter she had dropped lay at her feet. So he is dead! What despair!
Visitors were generally much moved and charmed by the commonplace pathos of these obvious and sentimental works. They were at once intelligible without question or explanation, and the poor women were to be pitied, though the nature of the grief of the more elegant of the two was not precisely known. But this very