CHAPTER X - La Bas [DOWN THERE]

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The day was long and hard to kill. Waking at dawn, full of thoughts of Mme. Chantelouve, he could not stay in one place, and kept inventing excuses for going out. He had no cakes, bonbons, and exotic liqueurs, and one must not be with-out all the little essentials when expecting a visit from a woman. He went by the longest route to the avenue de l'Opera to buy fine essences of cedar and of that alkermes which makes the person tasting it think he is in an Oriental pharmaceutic laboratory. "The idea is," he said, "not so much to treat Hyacinthe as to astound her by giving her a sip of an unknown elixir."

He came back laden with packages, then went out again, and in the street was assailed by an immense ennui. After an interminable tour of the quays he finally tumbled into a beer hall. He fell on a bench and opened a newspaper.

What was he thinking as he sat, not reading but just looking at the police news? Nothing, not even of hen From having revolved the same matter over and over again and again his mind had reached a deadlock and refused to function. Durtal merely found himself very tired, very drowsy, as one in a warm bath after a night of travel.

"I must go home pretty soon," he said when he could collect himself a little, "for pere Rateau certainly has not cleaned house in the thorough fashion which I commanded, and of course I don't want the furniture to be covered with dust. Six o'clock. Suppose I dine, after a fashion, in some not too unreliable place."

He remembered a nearby restaurant where he had eaten before without a great deal of dread. He chewed his way

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laboriously through an extremely dead fish, then through a piece of meat, flabby and cold; then he found a very few lentils, stiff with insecticide, beneath a great deal of sauce; finally he savoured some ancient prunes, whose juice smelt of mould and was at the same time aquatic and sepulchral.

Back in his apartment, he lighted fires in his bedroom and in his study, then he inspected everything. He was not mistaken. The concierge had upset the place with the same brutality, the same haste, as customarily. However, he must have tried to wash the windows, because the glass was streaked with finger marks.

Durtal effaced the imprints with a damp cloth, smoothed out the folds in the carpet, drew the curtains, and put the bookcases in order after dusting them with a napkin. Everywhere he found grains of tobacco, trodden cigarette ashes, pencil sharpenings, pen points eaten with rust. He also found cocoons of cat fur and crumpled bits of rough draft manuscript which had been whirled into all corners by the furious sweeping.

He finally could not help asking himself why he had so long tolerated the fuzzy filth which obscured and incrusted his household. While tie dusted, his indignation against Rateau increased mightily. "Look at that," he said, perceiving his wax candles grown as yellow as tallow ones. He changed them. "That's better." He arranged his desk into studied disarray. Notebooks, and books with paper-cutters in them for book-marks, he laid in careful disorder. "Symbol of work," he said, smiling, as he placed an old folio, open, on a chair. Then he passed into his bedroom. With a wet sponge he freshened up the marble of the dresser, then he smoothed the bed cover, straightened his photographs and engravings, and went into the bathroom. Here he paused, disheartened. In a bamboo rack over the wash-bowl there was a chaos of phials; Resolutely he grabbed the perfume bottles, scoured the bottoms and necks with emery, rubbed the labels with gum elastic and bread crumbs, then he soaped

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the tub, dipped the combs and brushes in an ammoniac solution, got his vaporizer to working and sprayed the room with Persian lilac, washed the linoleum, and scoured the seat and the pipes. Seized with a mania for cleanliness, he polished, scrubbed, scraped, moistened, and dried, with great sweeping strokes of the arm. He was no longer vexed at the concierge; he was even sorry the old villain had not left him more to do.

Then he shaved, touched up his moustache, and proceeded to make an elaborate toilet, asking himself, as he dressed, whether he had better wear button shoes or slippers. He decided that shoes were less familiar and more dignified but resolved to wear a flowing tie and a blouse, thinking that this artistic negligee would please a woman.

"All ready," he said, after a last stroke of the brush. He made the turn of the other rooms, poked the fires, and fed the cat, which was running about in alarm, sniffing all the cleaned objects and doubtless thinking that those he rubbed against every day without paying any attention to them had been replaced by new ones.

"Oh, the 'little essentials' I am forgetting!" Durtal put the teakettle on the hob and placed cups, teapot, sugar bowl, cakes, bonbons, and tiny liqueur glasses on an old lacquered waiter so as to have everything on hand when it was time to serve.

"Now I'm through. I've given the place a thorough cleaning. Let her come," he said to himself, realigning some books whose backs stuck out further than the others on the

shelve.. "Everything in good shape. Except the chimney of the lamp. Where it bulges, there are caramel specks and blobs of soot, but I can't get the thing out; I don't want to burn my fingers; and anyway, with the shade lowered a bit she won't notice.

"Well, how shall I proceed when she does come?" he asked himself, sinking into an armchair. "She enters. Good. I take her hands. I kiss them. Then I bring her into this room. I have her sit down beside the fire, in this chair. I

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station myself, facing her, on thick stool. Advancing a little, touching her knees, I can seize her. I make her bend over, I am supporting her whole weight. I bring her lips to mine and I am saved!

" ---Or rather lost. For then the bother begins. I can't bear to think of getting her into the bedroom. Undressing and going to bed! That part is appalling unless you know each other very well. And when you are just becoming acquainted I The nice way is to have a cosy little supper for two. The wine has an ungodly kick to it. She immediately passes out, and when she comes to she is lying in bed under a shower of kisses. As we can't do it that way we shall have to avoid mutual embarrassment by making a show of passion. If I speed up the tempo and pretend to be in a frenzy perhaps we shall not have time to think about the miserable details. So I must possess her here, in this very spot, and she must think I have lost my head when she succumbs.

"It's hard to arrange in this room, because there isn't any divan. The best way would be to throw her down on the carpet. She can put her hands over her eyes, as they always do. I shall take good care to turn down the lamp before she rises.

"Well, I had better prepare a cushion for her head." He found one and slid it under the chair. "And I had better not wear suspenders, for they often cause ridiculous delays." He took them off and put on a belt. "But then there is that damned question of the skirts! I admire the novelists who can get a virgin unharnessed from her corsets and deflowered in the winking of an eye -- as if it were possible! How an-noying to have to fight one's way through all those starched entanglements! I do hope Mme. Chantelouve will be considerate and avoid those ridiculous difficulties as much as possible - - for her own sake."

He consulted his watch. "Half-past eight. I mustn't expect her for nearly an hour, because, like all women, she will come late. What kind of an excuse will she make to Chantelouve, to get away tonight? Well, that is none of

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my business. Hmmm. This water heater beside the fire looks like the invitation to the toilet, but no, the tea things handy banish any gross idea."

And if Hyacinthe did not come?

"She will come," he said to himself, suddenly moved. "What motive would she have for staying away? She knows that she cannot inflame me more than I am inflamed." Then, jumping from phase to phase of the same old question, "This will turn out badly, of course," he decided. "Once I am satisfied, disenchantment is inevitable. Oh, well, so much the better, for with this romance going on I cannot work."

"Miserable me! relapsing - only in mind, alas I - to the age of twenty. I am waiting for a woman. I who have scorned the doings of lovers for years and years. I look at my watch every five minutes, and I listen, in spite of myself, thinking it is her step I hear on the stair.

"No, there is no getting around it. The little blue flower, the perennial of the soul, is difficult to extirpate, and it keeps growing up again. It does not show itself for twenty years, and then all of a sudden, you know not why nor how, it sprouts, and then forth comes a burst of blossoms. My God I I am getting foolish."

He jumped from his chair. There was a gentle ring. "Not nine o'clock yet. It isn't she," he murmured, opening the door.

He squeezed her hands and thanked her for being so punctual.

She said she was not feeling well. "I came only because I didn't want to keep you waiting in vain."

His heart sank.

"I have a fearful headache," she said, passing her gloved hands over her forehead.

He took her furs and motioned her to the armchair. Prepared to follow his plan of attack, he sat down on the stool, but she refused the armchair and took a seat beside the

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table. Rising, he bent over her and caught hold of her fingers.

"Your hand is burning," she said.

"Yes, a bit of fever, because I get so little sleep. If you knew how much I have thought about you! Now I have you here, all to myself," and he spoke of that persistent odour of cinnamon, faint, distant, expiring amid the less definite odours which her gloves exhaled, "well," and he sniffed her fingers, "you will leave some of yourself here when you go away."

She rose, sighing. "I see you have a cat. What is his name?"

"Mouche."

She called to the cat, which fled precipitately.

"Mouche! Mouche I" Durtal called, but Mouche took refuge under the bed and refused to come out. "You see he is rather bashful. He has never seen a woman."

"Oh, would you try to make me think you have never received a woman here?"

He swore that he never had, that she was the first.

"And you were not really anxious that this-first-should come?"

He blushed. "Why do you say that?"

She made a vague gesture. "I want to tease you," she said, sitting down in the armchair "To tell you the truth, I do not know why I like to ask you such presumptuous questions."

He had sat down in front of her. So now, at last, the scene was set as he wished and he must begin the attack. His knee touched hers.

"You know," he said, "that you cannot presume here. You have claims on----"

"No, I haven't and I want none."

"Why?"

"Because. . . . Listen," and her voice became grave and firm. "The more I reflect, the more inclined I am to ask

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you, for heaven's sake, not to destroy our dream. And then.

Do you 'want me to be frank, so frank that I shall doubt-less seem a monster of selfishness? Well, personally, I do not wish to spoil the--the-what shall I say ?-the extreme happiness our relation gives me. I know I explain badly and confusedly, but this is the way it is: I possess you when and how I please, just as, for a long time, I have possessed Byron, Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval, those I love---"

"You mean... .?"

"That I have only to desire them, to desire you, before I go to sleep.

"And?"

"And you would be inferior to my chimera, to the Durtal I adore, whose caresses make my nights delirious!"

He looked at her in stupefaction. She had that dolent, troubled look in her eyes. She even seemed not to see him, but to be looking into space. He hesitated. . . . In a sudden flash of thought he saw the scenes of incubacy of which Gevingey had spoken. "We shall untangle all this later," he thought within himself, "meanwhile---" He took her gently by the arms, drew her to him and abruptly kissed her mouth.

She rebounded as if she had had an electric shock She struggled to rise. He strained her to him and embraced her furiously, then with a strange gurgling cry she threw her head back and caught his leg between both of hers.

He emitted a howl of rage, for he felt her haunches move. He understood now----or thought he understood! She wanted a miserly pleasure, a sort of solitary vice. .

He pushed her away. She remained there, quite pale, choking, her eyes closed, her hands outstretched like those of a frightened child. Then Durtal's wrath vanished. With a little cry he came up to her and caught her again, but she struggled, crying, "No ! I beseech you, let me go."

He held her crushed against his body and attempted to make her yield.

"I implore you, let me go."

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Her accent was so despairing that he relinquished her. Then he debated with himself whether to throw her brutally on the floor and violate her. But her bewildered eyes frightened him.

She was panting and her arms hung limp at her sides as she leaned, very pale, against the bookcase.

"Ah I" he said, marching up and down, knocking into the furniture, "I must really love you, if in spite of your supplications and refusal - - '

She joined her hands to keep him away.

"Good God!" he said, exasperated, "what are you made of?"

She came to herself, and, offended, she said to him, "Monsieur, I too suffer. Spare me," and pell-mell she spoke of her husband, of her confessor, and became so incoherent that Durtal was frightened. She was silent, then in a singing voice she said, "Tell me, you will come to my house tomorrow night, won't you?"

"But I suffer too!"

She seemed not to hear him. In her smoky eyes, far, far back, there seemed to be a twinkle of feeble light. She murmured, in the cadence of a canticle, "Tell me, dear, you will come tomorrow night, won't you?"

"Yes," he said at last.

Then she readjusted herself and without saying a word quitted the room. In silence he accompanied her to the entrance. She opened the door, turned around, took his hand and very lightly brushed it with her lips.

He stood there stupidly, not knowing what to make of her behaviour.

"What does she mean?" he exclaimed, returning to the room, putting the furniture back in place and smoothing the disordered carpet. "Heavens, I wish I could as easily restore order to my brain. Let me think, if I can. What is she after? Because, of course, she has something in view She does not want our relation to culminate in the act itself. Does she really fear disillusion, as she claims? Is she really

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thinking how grotesque the amorous somersaults are? Or is she, as I believe, a melancholy and terrible player - around - the - edges, thinking only of herself? Well, her obscene selfishness is one of those complicated sins that have to be shriven by the very highest confessor. She's a plain teaser!

"I don't know. Incubacy enters into this. She admits - so placidly ! - that in dream she cohabits at will with dead or living beings. Is she Satanizing, and is this some of the-work of Canon Docre? He's a friend of hers.

"So many riddles impossible to solve. What is the mean-ing of this unexpected invitation for tomorrow night? Does she wish to yield nowhere except in her own home? Does she feel more at ease there, or does she think the propinquity of her husband will render the sin more Piquant? Does she loathe Chantelouve, and is this a meditated - or does she count on the fear of danger to spur our senses?

"After all, I think it is probably a final coquetry, an appetizer before the repast. And women are so funny anyway I She probably thinks these delays and subterfuges are necessary to differentiate her from a cocotte. Or perhaps there is a physical necessity for stalling me off another day."

He sought other reasons but could find none.

"Deep down in my heart," he said, vexed in spite of himself by this rebuff, "I know I have been an imbecile. I ought to have acted the cave man and paid no attention to her supplications and lies. I ought to have taken violent possession of her lips and breast. Then it would be finished, whereas now I must begin at the beginning again, and God damn her! I have other. things to do.

"Who knows whether she isn't laughing at me this very moment? Perhaps she wanted me to be more violent and bold - but no, her soul-sick voice was not feigned, her poor eyes - did not simulate bewilderment, and then what would she have meant by that respectful kiss - for there was an impalpable shade of respect and gratitude in that kiss which she planted on my hand !"

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She was too much for him. "Meanwhile, in this hurly-burly I have forgotten my refreshments. Suppose I take off my shoes, now that I am alone, for my feet are swollen from parading up and down the room. Suppose I do better yet and go to bed, for I am incapable of working or reading," and he drew back the covers.

"Decidedly, nothing happens the way one foresees it, yet my plan of attack wasn't badly thought out," he said, crawling in. With a sigh he blew out the lamp, and the cat, reassured, passed over him, lighter than a breath, and curled up without a sound.

"I had to occupy myself with Gilles de Rais and the diabolism of the
Middle Ages to get contemporary diabolism revealed to me." j-k h
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