Part 2

Mr. Vincent Egg, although he was old and stout and red-nosed and shabby in his attire, wore a look that was at once timorous, fatuous, and weakly mendacious; a look that tried to tell the possible passer-by that his red nose and watery eyes bloomed and blinked in the smiles of Virginie. Virginie, although she was young and pretty and also thin of face and poverty-stricken of garb, wore a look which told you plainly and most honestly beyond a question, that she had no smiles for Mr. Egg or for any one else. They walked down the middle of the street side by side, but _that_ they could not very well help doing, for the street was both narrow and dirty, and the edges of the stone gutter down its midway offered the only clean foothold in its entire breadth. As they walked on together, Mr. Egg made a few poor-spirited attempts to start up a gallant conversation with the girl; but she made no response whatever to his remarks, and strode on in dark-faced silence, her empty wash-basket poised between her lank right hip and her thin right elbow. Mr. Egg hemmed and cleared a husky throat, and employed both his unsteady hands in setting his tall, shabby silk hat upon his head in such a manner that its broad brim might keep the sunlight out of his eyes.

Mr. Vincent Egg was in the little city of Drignan on business. His lodgings were in the rue des Quatres Mulets, because they were the cheapest lodgings he could find. There are prettier towns than Drignan, and even in Drignan there are many better streets than the rue des Quatres Mulets. But it was much the same to Mr. Egg. He took his shabby lodgings, the rebuffs of the fair, the sunlight of other men’s fortunes dazzling his weak eyes--all these things he took with an easy indifference of mind so long as life gave him the little he asked of it, namely: a periodic indulgence in alcoholic unconsciousness. A simple drunk, once a month, of at least a week’s duration, was what Mr. Egg’s soul most craved and desired; but if his fluctuating means made the period of intoxication briefer or the period of sobriety longer, he bore either event with a certain simple heroism. He wanted no “spree,” no “toot,” no “tear;” a modest spell of sodden, dreamy, tearfully happy soaking in the back-room of some cheap wine-shop where he and his ways were known--this was all that remained of ambition and aspiration in Mr. Egg’s life; which had been, for the rest, a long life, a harmless life (except in the stern moralist’s sense), and a life that was decidedly a round, complete and total failure in spite of an exceptional allotment of abilities and opportunities. Mr. Egg had been many things in the course of that long and varied life--lawyer, doctor, newspaper-man, speculator, actor, manager, horse-dealer and racetrack gamester, croupier (and courier, even, after a fashion)--and heaven knows what else beside, of things avowable and unavowable. Just at present, he was supplying an English firm of Tourist-Excursion Managers with a guide-book of their various routes, at the rate of eighteen-pence per page of small type, and his traveling expenses--third-class. He had just finished “doing up” the district last allotted to him; and, after two weeks’ of traveling about, he had spent another fortnight in writing up his notes in a dingy little lodging-house room in the rue des Quatres Mulets. He knew his ground thoroughly, and that was the cheapest place.

Such was Mr. Vincent Egg, after a half-century of struggle with the world; and something of an imposing figure he made, too, in his defeat and degradation. His nose was red, his cheeks were puffed and veined, there were bags under his bloodshot eyes, his close-cropped hair was thin, his stubby little gray moustache, desperately waxed at the ends, gave an incongruously foreign touch to his decidedly Anglo-Saxon face--and his clothes were shockingly shabby. But then he _wore_ his clothes, as few men in our day can wear clothes; and they were _his_ clothes; his very own, and not another’s. People often spoke of him, after seeing him once, as “that big, soldierly-looking old man in the white hat.” But he did not wear a white hat. His hat, which was one of the largest, one of the jauntiest and one of the oldest ever seen, had also been, in its time, one of the blackest. It was his coat that gave people an idea of his having something about him that suggested white. It was a tightly-buttoned frock-coat of an indescribable light-dirty color. Most hopelessly shabby men cling to some standard of taste in dress that was _the_ standard in their last-remembered days of prosperity. That coat--if it were one coat and not only one of a long-lived family--marked the fact that the last season of prosperity Mr. Egg had enjoyed was a season, now some twenty years gone, when the London “swells” or “nobs,” or whatever they called them then, wore frock-coats of certain fashionable light shades of fawn and mouse-color, then known, I believe, as “London Smoke” and “French Gray.” While it can not be said that Mr. Egg’s coat was familiar in every quarter of Europe (for it rarely staid long enough in any one place), it had certainly been seen in all. And more than one Austrian officer, after passing Mr. Egg in that garment of pallid, dubious and puzzling hue, had turned sharply around to satisfy himself that it was not a uniform-coat in a condition of profanation. A certain state and dignity that still clung to this coat, and the startling cleanness of his well-scissored cuffs and collars were all that remained to give Mr. Egg a hold upon exterior respectability.

With such a history, Mr. Egg was naturally well versed in the freemasonry of poverty and need. As his eyes became accustomed to the sun, he looked at the girl’s pinched face, and his tones suddenly changed. Vincent Egg spoke several languages, and he knew all their social dialects and variations. It was in friendly and familiar speech that he addressed the girl, and asked her--What was the matter? and, Was the business going ill?

If Virginie had been the poor girl you meet with in the stories written by English ladies of a mildly religious turn of mind, she would have dropped a little curtsey and said with a single tear, “Indeed, sir, I had not meant to speak, but you have hit upon the truth. The business goes very ill, indeed, and without help I do not see how my poor mother can survive the Winter.” But Virginie, obeying the instincts of her nature and her education, responded to Mr. Egg with a single coarse French adjective which is only to be rendered in English, I am afraid, by the word “stinking.”

Mr. Egg was not in the least shocked. He cast his blinking eyes about him at the filthy roadway, at the narrow old stone houses that crowded both sides of the street with the peaked roofs of their over-hanging upper-stories, almost shutting out the sky above his head, at the countless century-old stains of damp and rust and shameful soilure upon their dull faces, and he said simply:

“Fichu locale!”

Thereby he amply expressed to his hearer his opinion that if the business deserved the adjective she had accorded it, the explanation was to be found in its unfortunate location. This opened the flood gates of Virginie’s speech. She told Mr. Egg that he was entirely right about the location, and gave him a few casual corroborative details which showed him that she knew what she was talking about. She also confided to him enough of her family affairs to account for the bitterness of her spirit and her contempt for mirthful dalliance. It was nothing but the old endless story of poverty in one of its innumerable variants. This time the father, a jobbing stone-mason, had not only broken his leg in Marseilles, but on coming out of the hospital had got drunk, assaulted a gend’arme, made a compound fracture of it, and laid himself up for several months. This time the mother had a rheumatic swelling of one arm, which hindered her in her washing. This time the eldest boy had got himself into some trouble in trying to evade the performance of his term of military duty. This time the youngest child had some torturing disease of the spine that necessitated--or rather needed--an operation. And, of course, as at all times, there were five or six hungry mouths, associated with as many pairs of comparatively helpless hands, between Virginie and that youngest. And as to business, that was certainly bad. It was particularly bad of late--although it was always bad in Drignan. Virginie told Mr. Egg that he was “rudement propre,” or “blazing clean”--clean as they were not in Drignan, she assured him. In fact, it appeared, this strange English gentleman, who had paid as high as a franc-and-a-half a week for his washing, had been accepted by Virginie’s family as designed in the mercy of Divine Providence to tide them over their period of distress. His departure at the end of two weeks was a sore disappointment in a financial point of view.

Vincent Egg was a very kind-hearted man, and he listened to this recital, and uttered sympathetic ejaculations in the right places. He was sorry about the youngest child, very sorry; he had known a case like it. Perhaps, he suggested, business might pick up. Messrs. Sculry & Co., the great English managers of Tourists’ Excursions, were going to make Drignan a stopping-place for their excursions on the way to Avignon. It was going to be a stopping-place of only a few hours, but, perhaps, it might bring some business. Who knew? Virginie brightened up when she heard this, and said that was so. Those English, she remarked, were always washing--no disrespect intended to the gentleman.

“And here,” she said, as they came abreast of a narrow gateway on the other side of the street from Mr. Egg’s lodging-house, “is where I live. It is on the ground floor. Will Monsieur come in and see the baby?” And her eyes lit up for the first time with a real interest--the interest, half-proud, and half-morbid, of a poor, simple creature who longs to exhibit to the world the affliction of monstrosity which sets her poor household apart from others of its kind.

Now, Mr. Egg had not the slightest desire to see the baby, and he had no intention whatever of going in; but, glancing through the narrow doorway, he saw a succession of arches in the courtyard beyond, and some old bits of mediæval masonry, which excited his curiosity. If this were the remains of some old monastery that had escaped his notice, it might mean a half-page more--nine-pence--in his guide-book. He strolled in by Virginie’s side, heedless of her chatter. No; it was not the ruin

of an ecclesiastical structure. The courtyard was only a part of an old stable and blacksmith-shop; old, but no older probably than the rest of that old street, which might have been standing at the time of Louis XIV--though it probably wasn’t. From its proximity to a canal that marked the line of an old moat, Mr. Egg made a safe guess that it was a small remnant of the stables and farriery attached to the barracks of the original fortifications of the town.

At any rate, it was no fish for the net of Messrs. Sculry & Co.’s guide-book compiler; and he was turning to go, when Virginie, who had supposed that he was merely following in her lead, to feast his eyes upon the sick baby, said simply, as she pushed open a door, “This way, Monsieur,” and, before he knew it, he had entered his washerwoman’s room.

Although it was a ground-floor room, damp, dark and old, it was clean with a curious sort of cleanness that seems to belong to the Latin races--a cleanness that gives one the impression of having been achieved without the use of soap and water: as if everything had been scraped clean instead of being washed clean. Virginie’s mother was clean, too, in spite of her swollen and helpless arm, and the three or four children who were playing on the stone floor were no dirtier than healthy children ought to be between washes. But Mr. Egg had hardly had time to take more than cursory note of these facts before his attention was riveted by the sick child in the French woman’s arms--so pitiful a little piece of suffering childhood that a much harder-hearted man than Mr. Vincent Egg might readily have been shocked at the sight of it. As for Mr. Egg, he simply dropped into a seated posture upon a convenient bench, and stared in the fascination of pity and horror.

Mr. Egg knew little of children and less of their diseases. In the ordinary course of things, such matters were not often brought to his attention; and, to tell the truth, had he known what he was to see there, no persuasion would have induced him to enter that poor little room. Now that he did see it, however, he could not move his eyes: the spectacle had for him a hideous attraction of novelty. Virginie and her mother exhibited the poor little misshapen thing, and rattled over the history of the case with a volubility which showed that it was no new tale. For fifteen minutes their visitor sat and stared in horrified silence; and, when at last he made his way back to the street, he found that his mind was in a more disturbed state than he had known it to be in many years.

It is the people who most avoid the sight of human suffering who very often are the most sharply shocked by it when that sight is obtruded upon them. Your professional nurse soon learns to succor without lamentation: it is the person who “really has no faculty for nursing” who goes into spasms of sensibility over the sight of a finger caught in a cog-wheel, and runs about clamoring for new laws for the suppression of all machinery not constructed of India-rubber. Up to half an hour before, Mr. Egg had never wasted many thoughts upon the millions of suffering babies in this world; and now he could not turn his thoughts to anything except the particular baby that he had just seen.

And yet, as he had told Virginie, he had known of a similar case before, though it belonged to a time so long ago that it had practically faded from his mind. It was the case of his own brother, who had died in infancy of some such trouble, one of the earliest victims of an operation at that time in its earliest experimental stages. That was more than half a century ago, and Vincent Egg had no remembrance whatever of the little brother. But he did remember his first childish impression of a visit to the hospital where the little one lay--of the smell of the disinfectants and the chill of the whitewashed walls.

The heart of Mr. Egg was touched, and he felt himself moved with a strong desire to extend some help to these people who were so much worse off than he was. Yet Mr. Egg’s intellectual parts told him that there was no possibility of his doing anything of the sort. He knew, beyond any chance of fond delusion, his present position and his future prospects. He had his ticket back to Lyons, where the local branch of Messrs. Sculry & Co. had its office; he had in his valise at his lodgings just enough money for his necessary sustenance upon his journey. And not one other penny, not one soumarkee would he have until, at Messrs. Sculry & Co.’s office, his work had been measured down to the last syllable, and he had received therefor as many times eighteen-pence as he had produced pages. That would be, it was true, quite a neat little sum, but--and here came in the big BUT of Mr. Egg’s existence.

For Mr. Egg knew exactly what was going to become of that money. To draw it at all, he would have to present himself at the office in a condition of sobriety, which would be the last effort of a period of abstinence that he was beginning to find very trying. Then, so much of it must go to buying himself back into the three or four attenuated credits by grace of which he lived his poor life at Lyons; and just enough would be left to give him that fortnight of drunken stupor for which he had worked so long and so hard.

Mr. Egg needed an effort rather of the memory than of the imagination to forecast the recurrence of that familiar stupor. He could see himself leaving the spick-and-span, highly respectable office of the Lyons agency of Messrs. Sculry & Co., and hurrying off upon the few bits of business that must be attended to before he could present himself at “his” wine-shop, which was a very dirty one, indeed, kept by a certain M. and Mme. Louis Morel, in an appropriately unclean back street. There he knew just what to expect in the way of noisy, ready-handed, false-faced welcome. Then would come the tantalizingly-prolonged bargaining over the score to be settled and the score to be begun, and at last he would be free to take possession of that dark, ill-ventilated little back room which was always reserved for the periodical retirements of this regular patron of the house. It was a little room like a ship’s stateroom, hardly large enough to contain its dirty red velvet divan, its round table and its two chairs; yet for a week or a fortnight it would be his, and behind it, in the hallway, was a bed on which he could stretch himself in the hours when he felt the need of deeper slumber than the hard cushions of the divan permitted. There his few friends, outcasts and adventurers like himself, would drop in to see him, one or two at a time, to help him on his murky way with challenges to bouts of brandy-drinking, in which he would always pay for two glasses to the other man’s one. Then, as the procession of callers went on, it would grow dim and dimmer and vague and yet more vague, until it was lost in a hazy, wavering dream, wherein familiar faces of men and women stared at him from out of days so long gone by that in his dream he could fancy them happy.

That was what lay before him. Mr. Vincent Egg knew it as well as he knew that the calendar months would go on in their regular order, and the tides in the sea would continue to rise and fall. Under these circumstances, nothing was more certain than that the unfortunate family of Mr. Egg’s washerwoman need look for no help whatever from Mr. Egg’s prospective earnings. “It’s a damned shame!” said Mr. Egg to himself, slapping his thigh. And it was a shame. But there it was.

Suddenly a great thought struck Mr. Egg--a thought so great and so forcible in the blow that it dealt his mental apprehension that for three minutes he stood stock-still in the gutter in the middle of the rue des Quatre Mulets. Then somebody poured a pail of water out of a door-way and drowned him out, but he went on his way, quite indifferent to wet feet.

Mr. Vincent Egg went to his lodgings, and there extracted from his valise the very small sum of money which he had laid aside for his necessary sustenance on his trip to Lyons. This he took to a sign-painter on the outskirts of Drignan, to whom he paid the whole of it for the execution of a small but conspicuous sign-board, which he carried away with him under his arm.

* * * * *

The usual afternoon wind was blowing in Drignan, chill and raw, with a depressing flavor of a spoilt ocean about it. The sky was overcast, and everything was dismal in the dismal little town. Dismalest of all, perhaps, was a wretched little corner of waste land, between the old barrack-wall and the dirty canal behind it. A few sick, stunted, faded olive and orange trees in the lee of a mean stone wall showed that the place had at one time been a garden or courtyard. Heaps of rubbish here and there showed also that it had long outlived its usefulness. Here sat, one on each side of a tiny fire of twigs, a shabby, soldierly-looking old gentleman and a sallow, lanky young girl with a sullenly pretty face. Right in the sluggish smoke of the fire, the old man held a small sign-board still fresh from the painter’s hand, and the more the smoke took the brightness out of the new colors, the more he gazed at it with thoughtful approval. The girl said nothing; but sat and stared at the fire and listened with an air of weary and indifferent toleration while the old man repeated over and over what sounded like a monotonous narrative recitation. From time to time she nodded her head; and, at last, she began to repeat after the old man in a listless, mechanical way. It was late in the afternoon before they rose and scrambled over the heaps of rubbish to the street, where the old gentleman bade the girl good-by with what were evidently words of earnest admonition. His iteration seemed to annoy her, for finally she let slip, in a tone of anger, a specimen of the speech of the people which wasn’t exactly this; though at this we will let it go:

“Vous savez, mons vieux, je m’en fiche bien de votre Pé--Pé--Pétrarque--et de votre Laure aussi--”

Then she as quickly dropped back into her natural tone of hopeless submission to all who were less wretched than herself, and said, with something like gratitude in her voice:

“All the same, it is very kind of you, sir, I will try to do as you have told me.”

And they parted, she entering a near-by passage-way, and he going to the railroad station.

* * * * *

Mr. Vincent Egg stood in the private office of the Lyons branch of Messrs. Sculry & Co., the great Excursion Managers. He was, for him, unusually smart as to his clothes--to those who knew him, a sign that he had reached the end of his period of abstinence. The Manager of the Branch, a thin, raw, red-faced little Englishman with sandy whiskers, was looking over the proofs of the guide-book pages set up from Mr. Egg’s copy.

“Oh, ah, yes, Egg!” he said; “I knew there was something particular I wanted to speak to you about. Here it is.” And he slowly read aloud:

* * * * *

“Another and perhaps the principal attraction of Drignan is the ruin, pathetic in its dignity, of the mansion of the Conte dei Canale, the exiled Venetian, where the immortal poet Petrarch and the no less immortal lady of his love, whom he has celebrated in undying verse, met secretly, in the year 1337, to bid each other a long and chaste farewell. News of the lovers’ design having reached the ears of de Sade, the husband of the beauteous Laura, his base mind suspected an elopement, and he dispatched his liveried minions to separate the pair, and, if possible, to immolate on the altar of his vengeance the gentle and talented poet. It is supposed to be in consequence of injuries received in the resultant

struggle that Petrarch went into retirement for three years at Vaucluse (a spot which no holder of Messrs. Sculry & Co.’s 7-9 extra-trip coupon should fail to see). This exquisite chapter in the lives of the lovers over whom so many tears of sentiment have been shed, has been strangely neglected by the historians; but survives undimmed in local tradition. A full account will be found on page 329. The house is now 47 _bis_ rue des Quatres Mulets. Behind it may still be seen what remains of the magnificent orangery and olive-garden of the Conte dei Canale. Access to this is gained from the second gateway from the corner of the Passage des Porcs, and should not be confounded with the entrance to the Jardin de Perse, a resort of somewhat frivolous character, situated on the second crossing below, rue Clément V.”--

Here the Manager raised his head. “I suppose that’s for the men?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Egg; “that’s for the men.”

“Well,” said the Manager, “what about this other attraction, this Petrarch and Laura place?”