Chapter One
Written for Snowy.
It was raining again.
Feuilly hated the rain, quietly but fiercely, for obstructing his work and taking his time and getting through the cracks in his walls and making his bedclothes damp. He hated it for making mould grow in the corners of the ceiling and making great grey-brown puddles of foul water and mud all over the streets. He despised it, viewed it with a lip-curling disgust, for wetting just the cuffs of his trousers and making them chafe his ankles, and for getting in his hair and for spoiling his paint and for making a horrible, continuous drip-drip-drip noise in the empty tins laid out to catch it when it fell into his room through the windows that never quite shut.
Lately, all it had done was rain, almost constantly, since the beginning of the week. He had tried at first to barricade himself in his room with his fans and his paints, and then had tried loafing at every caf� he could find, buying only enough coffee to keep from being thrown out but not enough that he would squander his precious sous and centimes, and finally, when all else failed, gone to visit a girl he knew in the Rue St. Michel and camped at her place, gloomily staring out the window at the grey sky while she put on rouge and painted her lips bright red.
"God damn it," he grumbled aloud. "Doesn't it ever let up?"
"Why should it, dearie? It doesn't have to go to work." The girl adjusted her bodice several times and rearranged her hair.
"God damn it."
"Well, you don't have to stay here. I've got to find a customer, and he'll want to come back here. It'd be rather awkward, you in the same room. Unless you want to join in. Some of them like that."
"You're disgusting."
"You should have eaten something this morning," laughed the girl. "God, you're a bastard when you're hungry. You can still get a pound of bread and potatoes for under a franc if you're clever and know where to go. Go on, why don't you? I don't need you hanging about in my rooms while I'm trying to earn my living."
"God." Feuilly groaned and stood up lankily, and a cloud of plaster dust blew off him as he did so. He had been worrying at a crack in the wall since he'd come.
"What're you doing now, ripping down my walls?"
"They don't need the help," said Feuilly, and he shook himself once over. "I don't want to go out."
"Bad luck. Try the bistro at the end of the street. Bread and potatoes, or at least bread and coffee. Good job you don't smoke like most boys of your sort; that saves you francs a year, you know."
"Yes, I know. Goodbye."
He shut the door a bit too loudly on his way out, and slipped silently down the stairs, growling and casting vicious glances at the curses scrawled on the walls that even the rain couldn't damp out, and the dust piles in the corners of the steps, and the grey, depressing light at the end of the stairwell, which was all there was to get out to. He swore several times under his breath, in Polish and in French, and hoped that all rich men in tight, dry houses might one day find themselves scrabbling for work in eternal places of rain, mixing mistily with all the foul smells and making them smell even fouler.
Without, however, anywhere to go or anything better to do with himself on a late Saturday when most of the working men were busily getting drunk in the bistros and caf�s, he made his way wearily to the place the girl had mentioned, and bought a pound of tough, tight, cakey bread, and a cup of black coffee to soak it in. The more pieces he tore roughly off and dipped, the more their crumbs made a sludgy dark mess in the cup; but it was food, at any rate, and the girl had been right about his not eating breakfast (although breakfast was regularly another cup of coffee, for dinner was the only food meal he ate in a day. Not buying tobacco didn't help as much as she made it sound it would, and Feuilly didn't waste money when he didn't need to). Men talked with one another loudly behind him, but he ignored them bitterly, and wiped out his coffee cup with his forefinger to get all there was inside.
How good it must be to have money, he thought spitefully. How very good. This was stupid and senseless of him, for hardly any of the men had more money than he did, being cobblers, waiters, dishwashers, beggars, Jews, workers, and a few special artists, such as he was, who did a certain useless craft because rich people and bourgeoisie liked it--for example, the caricature artists, the organ-grinders, the handbill distributors, the men who sold trinkets they found in rich men's gutters, the flower vendors, and the paper folders. All these were useless trades, but they caught the eyes of the casual and wealthy, who were excited by pretty rustic things. Plenty of them would imagine that the fellow with the barrel organ was the very picture of a peasant scene, give him a couple of centimes, and go on, not aware that he intended to spend it on a squalid room in a bug-infested hotel, or a few slices of dearly-bought bacon, or tobacco, or a whore. At any rate, the fellow with the barrel organ had no more money than Feuilly did; he just didn't mind squandering his on brandy and gin and having a splendid time getting drunk with his friends, while Feuilly spent his on a bit to eat and then brooded over it. It made Feuilly quite spiteful, partly because he had no friends to waste his Saturday night with, and no interest in being drunk.
He was, in fact, humiliated by drunkenness, by the loss of control and the disgusting things one said and the revolting things one did, and the stink and the vomit and the rolling in the street and the shouting of loud, stupid, blasphemous things and the weaving walk. It didn't merely irritate him; it made him feel ill. He had never actually been drunk, being far too put off it by watching other men.
Now he glared at the empty coffee cup without wishing for more, made several irritable comments to the tabletop about his fellow-man, and at last got up to go, because one could only loaf around in a bistro so long when one wasn't buying anything.
The rain was still drizzling down outside, and he escaped the Rue St. Michel in favour of the Rue St. Mathieu, which was only marginally better. At least there were a few respectable-looking establishments, and the caf�s weren't as close together or as grimy or quite as full and noisy. Feuilly wandered around for a little while as the sun went down gradually and made everything go duskish, contemplating what it would be to go into one of them; but before he had decided entirely whether he wanted to waste his money or not, he was accosted, completely unexpectedly, by a soft, shy voice of remarkable, quite pleasing, smoothness. It was someone he knew.
Feuilly's mind, clever and quick, decided in a moment to get something from the meeting. A man who has never had much money knows how to make a profit from anything, from a dead bird in the gutter or a declaration of love.
"Feuilly--? Oh, it is!"
"Yes, it's me. Hello."
"Oh, dear, you're soaking. I should offer you my umbrella to walk under, but it's not big enough for more than one. Well, perhaps--" There was a fumbling in the wet darkness, and suddenly the rain was no longer soaking the back of Feuilly's neck. "--There. Is that better?"
"Drier, at any rate; but it doesn't matter. Keep your umbrella for yourself."
"I shan't do that. Are you all right? I can't imagine you're anything short of freezing when you're wet like this. The rain's coming down in torrents now."
"I'm mildly discomforted, but a beggar is never less than that. I have a proposition to make you."
"All right. But come on, let's go in." They had paused near a large, brightly-lit caf�. "I'll buy you a drink. I'm cold myself, and men think better when they're comfortable."
"Very well," said Feuilly reluctantly, quickly weighing pride against common sense and seeing quite clearly the fact that he was out here cold and tired, and inside would not only be warm and able to sit down, but also have something to drink with the added benefit that someone else would be paying. It was too great a temptation to resit. "Very well," and he allowed himself to be shown inside, the door held open for him as the umbrella was shaken off outside and folded up. "God! It's a horrible night."
"Is it much worse than usual?"
"I hate the rain."
"Oh. Of course."
They went to the bar and Feuilly stood to the side; as he was not paying, he would not order; the responsibility went to the other fellow, partly with respect and partly relief.
"There you are. I haven't seen you lately--you are all right, aren't you?"
"Entirely," said Feuilly, which was a lie. He was tired and annoyed and out of work again, because he solicited to people out walking, and, with the rain, no one ventured. It was just another reason to despise the rain, to glare at the weather, to be disgusted with the elements, but it also meant he was hungrier than usual, and the pound of bread and black coffee had been the last of his weekly allowance to himself.
"Good. Because I was getting worried... But now. You said you had a proposition. What's wrong? Is there something I can help with?"
Feuilly wrinkled his nose at the word 'help'. "To some extent, yes. I'm running out of ideas, and you've always got thousands. You're always inspired, or at least it looks that way from your discussions with Bossuet and Joly and Rideau."
"Well, perhaps. I just work. But you, you're--?"
"Running out of ideas, yes. What do I make for my fans? It's like being one of those English sidewalk artists, you understand--it's all very well to be pretty or interesting, but one must be current. There must be some attraction in the art that amuses, entices, these rich fellows who buy my work. I haven't got it."
"In the Japanese islands they write poetry on their fans, so that it's art in two forms. One has the looked-at appeal, the picture, and the poetry, which can be read, engages the mind. There's a subtlety, too, for the picture can emulate the poetry and make something the verse by itself could never achieve. One can be ironic or sentimental or insightful, because the two things compliment each other, they make one another greater. ...Is that what you meant?"
"That's good. Do I find books with poetry in them somewhere?" Feuilly asked, plain and straightforward, looking for the right response by using guilt.
"I could write some, if you thought I could do well enough."
The right response. Feuilly gave the smallest of secret smiles, and bent his head briefly to accept the offer. "I should be pleased."
"All right. Would you like it in a week? I wish I could do it sooner, but sometimes it takes a while, and I'm not sure. At any rate, by the end of the week? I'm sure that's all right."
"It's all right with me. Thanks." He put out his hand, and his companion shook it gently, almost foppishly. Directions to a hotel in a much better part of Paris were given. They then finished their drinks more or less in silence, and parted, and Feuilly returned to his wet apartment rooms, where the tins to catch the rain had overflowed and water was trickling along the floors, and a stray cat had taken refuge in his rooms to avoid the cold outside.
On to Chapter Two.
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