“Yes.”
“I’ll leave them on a ledge in here. You’ll take the message, won’t you, Pidot?”
“Where to?”
“Oh, the same old place. You know-on the third floor. I hope the old lady’s still got her hair. The old bitch was proud of it. Well, goodbye and good luck, Pidot.” There was a scuffle in the urinal, and then the shuffle and pad went off in the other direction. Charlot watched the stranger go: tall and stout and black-clothed, with a limp and the kind of hat Charlot himself would have worn-so many years ago-between the Rue Miromesnil and the law courts.
On a shelf of the urinal there was a screw of paper-three hundred francs. Whoever Monsieur. Carosse was, he had the rare virtue of being better than his word. Charlot laughed: the sound was hollow among the metal alcoves. A week had gone by and he was back exactly where he had started with three hundred francs. It was as if all that time he had lived upon air-or rather as if some outwardly friendly but inwardly malign witch had granted him the boon of an inexhaustible purse, but a purse from which he could never draw more than three hundred francs. Was it perhaps that the dead man had allocated him this allowance out of his three hundred thousand?
We’ll soon test that out, Charlot thought; what’s the good of making this last a week and be only a week older and a week shabbier at the end of it? It was the hour of aperitifs and for the first time since he had entered Paris, he deliberately stepped into his own territory, the territory of which he knew every yard.
He had not until then properly appreciated the strangeness of Paris: an unfamiliar street might always have been an unfrequented one, but now he noticed the emptiness, the silent little bicycle taxis gliding by, the shabbiness of awnings and the strange faces. Only here and there he saw the familiar face of the customary stranger sitting where he had sat for years, sipping the same drink. They were like the remains of an old Bower garden sticking up in a wilderness of weeds after a careless tenant’s departure.
I am going to die tonight, Charlot thought: what does it matter if someone does recognize me? And he pushed through the glass door of his accustomed cafe and made for the very corner-the right-hand end of the long sofa under the gilt mirror-in which he had always sat as a kind of right. It was occupied.
An American soldier sat there: a young man with high cheekbones and a rough puppy innocence; and the waiter bowed and smiled and exchanged words with him as though he were the oldest customer in the place. Charlot sat and watched: it was like an act of adultery. The headwaiter, who had always stopped for a word, went past him as though he did not exist, and he too paused by the American’s table. The explanation soon came-the big bundle of notes the Yankee produced to pay with-and suddenly it occurred to Charlot that he too formerly had possessed a big bundle of notes, had been a payer; it wasn’t that he was a ghost now: he was merely a man without much money. He drank his brandy and called for another: the slowness of the service angered him. He called the headwaiter. The man tried to avoid him but at last he had to come.
“Well, Jules,” Charlot said.
The shallow eyes flickered disapprovaclass="underline" the man only liked his intimates-the payers, Charlot thought-to call him by his name.
“You don’t remember me, Jules,” Charlot said.
The man became uneasy: perhaps some tone of voice echoed in his ear. The times were confusing: some customers had disappeared altogether, others who had been in hiding had returned changed by imprisonment, and others who had not been in hiding it was now in the interests of his business to discourage. “Well, monsieur, you have not been here for some time…”
The American began to hit loudly on the table with a coin. “Excuse me,” the waiter said.
“No, no, Jules, you can’t leave an old customer like that. Leave out the beard.” He laid his hand across his chin. “Can’t you see a fellow called Chavel, Jules?”
The American beat again with his coin, but this time Jules paid him no attention, simply signaled another waiter across to take the man’s order. “Why, Monsieur Chavel,” he said, “you are so much changed. I’m astonished… I heard…” But it was obvious that he couldn’t remember what he had heard. It was difficult to remember which of his customers were heroes and which traitors and which simply customers.
“The Germans locked me up,” Chavel said.
“Ah, that must have been it,” Jules said with relief. “Paris is nearly itself again now, Monsieur Chavel.”
“Not quite, Jules.” He nodded at his old place.
“Ah, I’ll see that seat is kept for you tomorrow, Monsieur Chavel. How is your house-where was it?”
“Brinac. There are tenants there now.”
“It hasn’t suffered?”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t visited it yet. To tell you the truth, Jules, I only arrived in Paris today. I’ve barely enough money for a bed.”
“I can accommodate you a little, Monsieur Chavel?”
“No, no. I shall manage somehow.”
“At least you must be our guest this evening. Another cognac, Monsieur Chavel?”
“Thank you, Jules.” The test, he thought, has worked: the pocketbook is inexhaustible. I still have my three hundred francs.
“Do you believe in the Devil, Jules?”
“Naturally, Monsieur Chavel.”
He was moved to recklessness. “You hadn’t heard, Jules, that I am selling Brinac?”
“Are you getting a good price, Monsieur Chavel?”
Suddenly Charlot felt a great distaste for Jules: it seemed to him incredible that a man could be so crass. Had he no possession in the world for which a good price was an insufficient inducement? He was a man who would sell his life… He said, “I’m sorry.”
“What for, Monsieur Chavel?”
“After these years haven’t we all reason to be sorry for a hundred things?”
“We have no reason to be sorry here, Monsieur Chavel. I assure you our attitude has always been strictly correct. I have always made a point of serving Frenchmen first-yes, even if the German was a general.”
He envied Jules: to have been able to remain “correct”: to have saved his self-respect by small doses of rudeness or inattention. But for him-to have remained correct would have meant death. He said suddenly, “Do you know if any trains are running yet from the Gare Montparnasse?”
“A few and they are very slow. They haven’t got the fuel. They stop at every station. Sometimes they stop all night. You wouldn’t get to Brinac before morning.”
“There’s no hurry.”
“Are they expecting you, Monsieur Chavel?”
“Who?”
“Your tenants.”
“No.” The unaccustomed brandy was running along the dry subterranean channels of his mind: sitting there in the familiar cafe, where even the mirrors and cornices were chipped in the places he remembered, he felt an enormous longing just to be able to get up and catch a train and go home as he had often done in past years. Suddenly and unexpectedly to give way to a whim and find a welcome at the other end. He thought: After all, there is always time in which to die.
8
THE BELL LIKE MOST THINGS ABOUT THE PLACE WAS OLD fashioned. His father had disliked electricity, and though he could well have afforded to bring it to Brinac, he had preferred oil lamps almost until his death (saying they were better for the eyes) and ancient bells which dangled on long fronds of metal. Himself he had loved the place too much to change things: when he came down to Brinac it was to a quiet eave of dusk and silence-no telephone could petulantly pursue him there. So now he could hear the long twanging wire before the bell began to swing at the back of the house, in the room next to the kitchen. Surely if he had been in the house that bell would have had a different tone: one less hollow, more friendly, less sporadic, like a cough in a worn-out breast… A cold early-morning breeze blew through the bushes and stirred at ankle level the weeds in the drive: somewhere-perhaps in the potting shed-a loose board flapped. Without warning the door opened.