Читать книгу The Town Below - Roger Lemelin - Страница 9

The shrill sound of the police whistle gave everyone a start. Saint-Joseph housewives interrupted their washing, small lads quit their play, and idlers in the restaurants lifted mole-like faces toward the sun. What was it? The cops again? Who was their victim this time? One of the gang? All the Mulots were keen on the scent; they must rescue one of their number from the clutches of the law. They were prepared for such emergencies as this, prepared to put up an organized defence. Courtyard gates were purposely left open for refuge, and the urchins with slingshots in their mouths filled their pockets with pebbles. The big lads, meanwhile, their hands thrust into their trousers, sauntered off in the direction of the Pente Douce, as the Soyeux, cowering in their kitchens, expressed their horror of such hoodlums, who were a disgrace to the parish.

All eyes turned instinctively toward the “Cape,” for this was the shortest path by which a perilous descent could be made from the Upper Town, where most of the depredations occurred. At the top of the Cape, in front of the Dominican monastery, several priests stood waving their arms as the culprits, half leaping, half rolling, scrambled down the almost vertical embankment, scratching and tearing themselves on the shrubbery, which quickly sprang back into place behind them with a shower of pretty autumn leaves. From the balconies the fugitives looked very small indeed: like lice fleeing through the hair of some tawny giant. Then came a glimpse of their mud-spattered white shirts, tight over their enormous chests.

“Stop them! Stop them!” the monks were shouting. “Our apples! Our apples!”

Father Folbèche, the parish priest, who was engaged in watering his garden, found consolation for the shame he felt by reflecting that they at least had left him his flowers. The whistle sounded once more and a long black car drew up at the foot of the Pente Douce to await the delinquents.

“It’s the cops, fellows!” cried Denis Boucher, who was bounding along in front of the others. They hesitated furtively. Should they turn back? It was not to be thought of. And there ahead of them, in triangular formation, were three gendarmes from the police car, waiting to pounce upon them. The Mulots, large and small, had already surrounded the officers and were walking up and down, obstructing their path, asking them for matches, doing everything they could to hamper them. But when they heard Boucher’s excited cry they realized the culprits were the members of his hated, overbearing gang, and from that moment they ceased to be accomplices and became enemies, lining up to form a barricade to make it easier to capture the young upstarts who waged their own special kind of warfare, who put on so many airs over their book learning, who pretended to have no use for girls, and who, in short, were neither Mulots nor Soyeux.

It was the fugitives who launched the attack, the police bracing themselves to meet it. In three jumps Denis was upon the first officer, who made an attempt to seize him. The gendarme, however, had not reckoned with the strength of this sinewy youth of eighteen. With a sudden squirm Boucher bowled him over and continued on his headlong flight, bearing down upon the other two, a few yards farther on, who with the automobile constituted a sort of rampart. As they saw him coming they spread out a little that they might have a better chance of grabbing him; but just as he was within arm’s reach he quickly ducked and slipped through their hands like an eel. The automobile still barred his way and he did not have time to run around the end of it. In a couple of leaps he was over the hood, coming down on the pavement of the rue Franklin on the other side. Apples spilled from his shirt and the little Mulots fought with one another for possession of them. All of which happened so rapidly that the policeman who had been knocked down had not yet been able to pick himself up.

“Hurrah!” shouted the urchins enthusiastically. They were punished for this by knee thrusts in the small of their backs; for the older lads were jealous of the fascination that Boucher exercised over the younger ones. His mocking laugh could be heard in the distance; he was proud of this successful manoeuvre. In the meantime, the Langevin twins and Jean Colin had likewise managed to slip past the flurried gendarmes, whose turn it was to hesitate now. Not knowing what to do but obeying a natural impulse under the circumstances, they gave up the chase after Boucher and set out in pursuit of the other three, their handsome blue uniforms crackling while their white bell-shaped helmets danced above their foreheads, which were bathed in sweat from the unaccustomed exertion, and took on the hilarious appearance of carnival masks.

Denis had continued down the rue Montmagny. Germaine Colin offered him a refuge in her house, but he ran jauntily on past her. The two Langevins and Jean Colin, with the police close on their heels, whirled at the corner of the rue Chateauguay and dashed down that street. They had not gone far when, after pausing for a few seconds, they suddenly turned to the left. Paying no attention to the dog that yelped in summer and in winter ran in the dog-sled derby, they briskly clambered over a fence, made their way over the roofs of four sheds, dropped down into a yard, and then climbed some more fences. Unexpectedly, they found themselves in the garden belonging to the churchwarden Zépherin Lévesque, which was the envy of the parish. It was separated from the adjoining property by a veritable palisade. Anxiously, they ran over to the gate, but it was locked. As they huddled in the entryway they heard women’s voices.

“My Lise back from the convent! It’s too good to be true, my dear. What a charming life we are going to arrange for ourselves. With your education you are sure to be made president of the Daughters of Mary. I must say I’ve had my fill of that Eugénie Clichoteux who is always the centre of everything, at entertainments and in church.”

The pleasant but sulky voice of a young girl, a voice modulated by long recital of lessons, broke in upon this flow of words.

“I love you a great deal, Mama, but I cannot understand your ambitions. I’m afraid it’s going to be dreadfully boring here. The boys fighting and screaming, the women wrangling from their balconies — it seems to me that was not the way I imagined my life in the outside world would be. My girlfriends —”

“Conceited young thing!” Robert Langevin, ordinarily timid enough, was indignant.

The youths in their anxiety listened distractedly to this strange talk. Their hearts were thumping, the sweat glistening on their foreheads. They pictured to themselves a prudish young miss in glasses, with her braids under her chin, a rickety neck, and a small head that came up to a point and only needed an old lady’s bonnet to fit her out for attending a wake in some wealthy home.

“You are a woman now, my daughter, and you must learn to care for such things.” Madame Lévesque spoke in an offhand manner, inflating her voice as she uttered the most sonorous words in her vocabulary. She had been saving them up for ten years for this brilliant offspring of hers who had been graduated from a fashionable convent school. “Your girlfriends, my daughter,” she went on, “must be left to lead their own lives. If you only realized how different things are from your dreams.”

“But really, Mama, this place —?”

“You’ll come to love it, you’ll see. You will be queen here! Take your father’s case. When I first knew him he had his little aristocratic tastes. But he was a businessman. And with a few dollars, he is the leading citizen here, while at Saint-Dominique —”

“Darling Papa! I love him. Does he absolutely insist on my singing tonight?”

“Indeed he does! Monsieur le Député will be there, and Eugénie will be eaten up with jealousy. What a triumph for you. Don’t refuse, Lise.”

“Let’s do something!” said Colin, who was worried at not being able to find a hiding place.

“Break down the door!” suggested Jacques Langevin.

They hurled themselves against the solid wooden panel, but only succeeded in making a lot of noise. The sweat on their foreheads was cold, for the police were already in the garden next door.

“That must be the milkman, who wants to get into the yard,” said Madame Lévesque. “Go open the gate for him, will you, Lise?”

As the girl came out of the house she was still immersed in thinking of her new life, of the roseate dreams that she had cherished for so long and that now were clouded over with a dark uncertainty. It was, accordingly, with something of a shock that she encountered the defiant group on the other side of the gate. She was surprised at finding herself face to face with the Langevin twins, each of whom was short and ruddy with a mop of red hair. She let her eyes roam over Jean, a strapping youth with blue eyes, a nut-brown complexion, and a burnished forehead fringed with unruly curls. The habits of the convent were strong within her, and at the sight of strangers of the opposite sex she had for a moment the illusory impression of chaste precincts being violated. Blushing deeply, she dropped her gaze, too frightened for words.

“The police are after us,” Robert explained. He was flustered by Lise’s beauty.

She glanced up at them timidly. Jean Colin appeared to be paralyzed by her presence. All he could see was that mouth of hers; the future hung on what she was about to say. When she spoke, it was as if in a dream.

“Ah! So the police are after you?” She thought of the nobility of Old France, of those atrocious sans-culottes who had pursued the holy priests and the good bourgeois, so pale and haggard-looking. As a result of her reading she had some while since come to conceive of life as a possible repetition of all those chivalrous events with which the romances were so filled.

“Quick!” she murmured mysteriously, as she opened the gate leading into the rue Colomb. She put them into the garage, and they were no sooner hidden than the breathless, impatient voices of their pursuers were heard.

“You haven’t seen any young hoodlums down this way, have you, Mademoiselle?”

The marauders held their breath, Jean Colin being unaware that his right hand was resting in a puddle of oil upon the workbench.

In reply the girl mechanically stammered out a sentence or two that she had not had time to master. “Why, yes, I have! They ran through the gate there. I was afraid, so I locked it!”

“Damn it!” bellowed one of the gendarmes. “We’ve let them get away again!”

“They’re going,” whispered Jean. Nervously he ran his oil-stained hand over his damp brow; it left dark streaks behind it. There was a silence, and then the door opened part way.

“They have gone,” panted Lise. She was pale but enthusiastic.

The twins came out, lowering their heads as if to hide them. Jean was the last to appear. Lise had a smile as she caught sight of his grimy forehead, and he blushed, delighted to see that he was not wholly displeasing to her.

She wore a simple, green-dotted white dress, slightly open at the neck, which seemed to set off her youthfulness and enhance the charm of a convent-bred modesty that was at once hesitant and eager in the presence of unlooked-for discoveries. The airy brightness of her new gown was in unforgettable and joyous contrast to her black schoolgirl uniform, solemn as a cemetery, as unrelieved and unexciting as a desert; and if she so frequently dropped her long lashes, as if to imitate Lamartine’s heroines or Louis Veuillot’s young ladies, it was rather to cast a stolen glance at the folds of her dress or the crescent-shaped fastening of her bodice. Like a youth from a poor family who is sporting a new necktie, she was conscious of her graceful, supple throat. In the convent she had kept it as jealously hidden as one would a love letter, but now she was both pleased and astonished to find it thus freely-exposed to the sun. In the presence of Jean, Lise was no longer laughing. Her lips, unskilled at feigning indifference, appeared to be pouting. Was it because she had furnished shelter to outlaws, or was she thinking merely of the brown curl with which she caressed her chin?

“How nice you look!” Jean’s smile was an embarrassed one. When she did not answer, he went on in a timid voice, his head held awkwardly to one side. “We’re not really thieves, you know.” At this point a lump ran down the leg of his trousers and a big apple, barely ripe, rolled over his toes and across the courtyard pavement. He dared not pick it up for fear of seeming too concerned.

“Just see what fine ones they are! It’s the season. If the police would only leave us alone. Will you have some?” Thrusting a nervous hand into the opening of his white shirt on which mud had formed little splotches and arabesques, he selected the choicest specimen and looked about for some place to wipe it but found none. “Go ahead and eat it.”

The Langevin brothers, a bewildered look on their faces, had come back, and now made the same offer with trembling hands. Smiling, she took the fruit, all that she could hold of it. “Is that the reason why the police were after you?”

At once the same words leaped from all three mouths: “And they never catch us!” They said nothing of Boucher. Lise’s astonishment caused them to puff out their chests.

How charming was this ragamuffin bravado! The spontaneous homage of the three marauders reminded her of Maid Marian and Robin Hood’s men. The hesitant breeze of her thoughts was lost in a vague, romantic reverie that had to do with things past even as her gaze rested unseeingly on the objects about her. For her, the present served merely as an echo of the past, and since the tendency of schoolgirl dreams is toward the ideal and the unreal, Lise found herself tossing in time and space like a bit of driftwood that is always on the point of settling somewhere but never does. The light-skimming, wavering glance with which she regarded the lads in front of her reflected this inner vagueness; and then, suddenly, a startled look came into her eyes as she stared at Jean’s leg. Bending over, he perceived the hole in his trousers through which his knee was visible.

“They are my everyday ones,” he stammered. He would have liked very much to show her his fine brown suit with the stripes.

The girl was becoming conscious of her surroundings once more: the clothesline strung with underwear, handkerchiefs, diapers, towels — nearly white, all of them, and flapping in the wind like the multitudinous symbols of people without a flag. Upon the neighbouring shed a tomcat was stoically sampling the unsavoury remains of a rat as Bédarovitch the ragman went down the rue Colomb crying in his hoarse, singsong voice: “Ra-a-a-ags — Ra-a-a-ags —” Abruptly confronted with this disturbing reality, Lise dropped her armful of fruit.

“You mustn’t throw it away!” said Jean, as he bounded forward to recover the apple he had given her. “It’s the best of the lot.”

“Aren’t you coming back, Lise?” Madame Lévesque’s heavy voice was audible a short distance away.

Frightened at this, her daughter now pushed the marauders out, whispering to Jean, who was the last to leave: “Whatever you do, don’t tell anybody.”

He gave her an understanding smile. “My name,” he said, with a strange tightening of the throat, “is Jean Colin. I’ll bring you some plums tomorrow.” He came near stumbling over the threshold as he backed out.

Lise’s face was red; for the Abbé Charton was standing there, watching the youths in amazement as they emerged from the garden. Coming up to the convent miss, the amiably smiling priest studied her closely.

“I’ve brought you my arrangement of Parce Domine for three voices. Here it is.”

Glancing back, the lads laughingly whispered to one another that the Abbé Charton was making up to the family because Zépherin Lévesque had just bought an automobile. Jean Colin smiled up at the telephone poles. So the pretty stranger was going to sing that evening!

Denis Boucher kept an eye on the Mulots by way of making sure that they did not turn him in. It gave him satisfaction to see the small lads deflating the tires of the police car as the older ones dispersed. “They’re afraid!” he muttered to himself. He laughed at the sight of the gendarmes coming back empty-handed from the chase. His friends were safe. Ah! How proud he was of being the pet aversion of those Mulots! How he loved to see them tremble like rats in front of his eyes! And the same went for the Soyeux who made so much of their wealth and intellectual pretensions. Intellectuals! He had it in him to flatten them like the leaves of those books they were always talking about. As for the women! He would never love any of them but would drag them after him like logs all his life long. Only they would not be the girls of Saint-Sauveur, for they had known him when he was small and his mother used to beat him for starting fires or throwing stones at passers-by. The conquest of the world would begin at the frontiers of this “Sewer Town” (so called because of the water from the Upper Town with which it was flooded in the rainy season), of which he called himself the king. His reflections were interrupted by the Abbé Bongrain.

“Was the harvest a good one?” the priest called to him jovially. He was bringing wood to Méo Nolin, who had injured his fingers and who received donations from the Saint-Vincent de Paul Society. The Abbé Bongrain took a sort of stern pleasure in manual labour and was not in the least mindful of the twigs and bits of bark that clung to his cassock. Boucher gave him a friendly look.

“It was all right,” he said, “but there was a little rumpus. Here, catch it!”

The priest so beloved by the Mulots (he was like an almoner to them) caught the apple which Denis tossed him and, mopping the sweat from his forehead, took a hearty bite.

With a nervous laugh, the young man leaped the fence, landing in the middle of his brother Gaston’s poultry yard. The frightened hens found refuge by huddling against the weird-looking bosoms of the roosters which now began scolding because the intruder’s feet were a threat to the chickens pecking the rich soil.

A hoarse anxious cry rang out: “Careful, Denis — Crazy — my chickens!”

Gaston came running up as fast as he could, his hips swaying with his uneven gait. He had a man’s face on a child’s body, a body that looked as if someone had started to demolish it with a sledge hammer. His brow was lined with wrinkles, and he seemed to be forever engaged in solving some problem. There was a crease at the corners of his mouth that conveyed an impression of disillusionment and, at the same time of naiveté. It gave him the abnormal appearance of those who have suffered before they have lived. Rickety and useless, his long arms swung by the side of his slanting body like tropical creepers. Three years the elder, he looked up to Denis as a sort of god, bloody to avenge some mocking insult that had been offered to the invalid. When Gaston spoke of his brother, he always said “Denis” in a piping voice in which all too much pride was revealed.

Misfortune for him had been a kind of vocation. Having suffered an attack of pleurisy accompanied by a pus infection at the age of four, he had later had a severe case of the measles, which, as his mother put it, “had gone to his ears.” Becoming deaf, he had afterwards developed a falsetto voice. Later still, in the days when a thoracoplasty was regarded as a daring operation, he had undergone a rib-section. He had recovered, but from year to year they noticed that he bent over more and more, for an alarming spinal curvature had set in. His right shoulder, lacking ribs to support it, had sagged to such an extent that, the heart being imprisoned in too narrow a space, a cardiac affection had resulted. Today, the invalid found himself a prey to the slightest emotion; and here he was now, confronting his big brother and breathing hard.

Denis surveyed him thoughtfully for a moment, then offered him a couple of apples.

Gaston shook his head: “Don’t want them, not ripe.” Then he changed his mind and took them. “Still stealing? The police will get you.”

“The cops? To the devil with them, old man.” And Denis ran his hand through Gaston’s hair, rumpling it until it stood up in rigid tufts around the oversized head. The sick lad grumbled and bit his brother’s wrists.

Denis now proceeded to clear the yard of the brats who infested it, whose hands, stretched out toward his shirt front, were threatening to undress him. Laughing as he did so, he suddenly stopped short: his mother was talking to that gendarme again! Motionless, a mist in front of his eyes, the young man wet his lips. He remembered the feeling of despair that had come over him when they told him that this guardian of deserted streets had been his mother’s lover for the last four years. What had become of that beautiful legend about the love that existed between his parents, who, he had believed, cared for no one but each other? Aware of her son’s presence, Flora Boucher turned pale and took a step or two backward from the wall over which she had been leaning.

“That’s my lad, Noré. Do you think he’s big enough to get on the force?”

Denis stared at them without saying a word and began juggling his apples. By way of ridding himself of his embarrassment, Noré started speaking of Gaston’s hens, which the boy was in the habit of raffling off at ten cents a ticket when they had reached their full growth, and Flora took advantage of that situation to sell him three chances. A look of avarice distorted the invalid’s queer face as he snatched the silver coins. They would go to swell his savings toward the purchase of an automobile. Madame Boucher, who would set out with the raffle tickets as soon as one of the hens weighed eight pounds, was fast becoming a serious competitor of the Latruche sisters, who went about selling photographs of the young parish saint, a recent discovery.

“At least,” they would remark insinuatingly, “we are working for the Lord.”

As Flora was pointing out the site of the confectionery shop which they were about to open for her ailing son, Gaston painfully mounted the stairs that led to the place where he kept his savings, beneath the image of the Sacred Heart. Halfway up, he paused and put out his hand to the hollow of his hip to get his breath. Then he began counting on his fingers: “That makes five times my fingers in dollars, with three dimes. Father says I’ll need ten times my fingers. That takes time.” He sighed, and his sagging shoulders appeared to sink down to his hips. Meanwhile, the gendarme had managed to slip away without being too obvious about it. As he went off whistling, Flora, her eyes flaming, seized Denis by the arm and shook him impatiently as she had done when he was small.

“Leave me alone, will you?” he said. “Don’t be playing that farce about whipping me, to hide your embarrassment. That doesn’t go.”

Flora’s eyes were bloodshot. “Thief! Thief!” she screamed at him. “What shame! We have you educated at a private school so that you can become a clerk in an office, and you’re a bigger rowdy than the worst of the Mulots.”

“I notice you always use my apples for your jelly.” He spilled his booty on the table as the young ones came running up. Then he drew himself sharply erect.

“Yes,” he said aggressively, “that humiliates you in view of your relations with the police. But you are the real thief, for you have stolen Father’s confidence.” He pointed to Noré, who was going down the street.

Mother and son now faced each other threateningly. Theirs was a violent, unrestrained anger, one that revealed the true character of each of them.

If one had not noted a certain bagginess under the eyes, Flora Boucher might have passed for a young woman inclined to stoutness. Her shoulders were square-set and her movements forceful and abrupt, but she was pretty and it was natural for her to laugh when she was not involved in a dispute of some sort. She displayed a certain affectation which rendered her speech all the more picturesque, considering her illiterate working-class background. Since her father had been one of those men of all work who never work, while her mother with ten children to support had been compelled to go from one household to another among the “foreigners” of the Upper Town, she looked upon herself as a woman who had attained a certain rank, a certain social position. She was no longer, or rather she strove not to be any longer, a Mulote. She had arrived; she now belonged to that class of workers who, at Saint-Sauveur, may envisage the possibility of becoming churchwardens and enjoying their day of triumph. A hope that was all the better founded in her case in view of the fact that Joseph Boucher, her husband, was a calm, silent man — and therefore endowed with an air of dignity — whose parents had been middle-class people who had come down in the world.

It was originally intended that he should marry a notary’s daughter who had a dowry of eight hundred dollars. (Flora always spoke of this young woman with a contemptuous curl of her lips.) But Joseph Boucher, alas, had been born with a roving disposition and had left school to go and live in the west. Having come back to Quebec stranded, some years later, he had met Flora in the Saint-Sauveur quarter while searching for a dog which had been stolen from his aunt, a lady of means. (In speaking to the neighbouring women, Madame Boucher would frequently mention inheritances that were soon to be expected from her husband’s side of the family.) Despite his unstable temperament and because he was so sentimental and passionate, Denis’s father had quickly fallen love with Flora’s brown eyes, her coquettish ways, and her lively and exotic mannerisms; and she did indeed possess a keen intelligence and a heart of gold. When Joseph first met her, she was just recovering from the pain she had experienced in dismissing a certain jealous and exacting suitor — the same Noré, now a Saint-Joseph gendarme. She had shed many tears over it, even though the years that they had gone about together had been stormy ones.

And so Joseph, an expert in psychological sedatives, had at once begun flooding her with his free-verse compositions. How splendid! A poet all her own who could cause her to forget her sorrow! But Flora’s father, a practical-minded drunkard, was unable to see a possible drinking companion in his daughter’s “young man.” Of an evening, he would spy upon Joseph from behind his newspaper, stealing a glance at the pictures now and then, since he could not read. This young fellow was for him an antipathetic enigma, an unsociable individual with long slender hands and a pale face. By way of getting him out of the house at an early hour, he would hover around the grandfather clock, winding it energetically and coughing all the while. Then he would take off his slippers, hold them side by side in his hand, and wait.

“That lad, my girl, is too easygoing,” he would say. “He’s too sweet on you. If he doesn’t work, he has no business wanting to marry you. I’ll have to give him his walking papers.”

Inasmuch as his prospective father-in-law was near to being a colossus, Joseph was led to reflect that perhaps it would be better for him to look for a job. He would hang about the corridors of the Parliament Buildings and, just as Flora’s sisters were returning from work, would come out with a bustling air and a newspaper under his arm. Then came the war. He did the heroic thing and enlisted, and this act of gallantry on his part resulted in his being married, in view of the allotment his wife would receive. As soon as the armistice was signed, he had gone to work on the construction gang in the grain elevators along the wharf and after that had become permanently employed. His family circle today, comprising ten children, was apparently complete, and Madame Boucher with great magnanimity would distribute heaps of baby clothes to young married couples. As the tots came, Joseph had taken on a crabbed mien. There was nothing of the vers-libriste about him any longer; he rather resembled a tree that with the coming of autumn had shed its flowers, fruit, and leaves. The mother, on the other hand, seemed to blossom out, and for each new angle that became visible on her husband’s body it was as if a new curve made its appearance on hers.

As she was screaming to her son that she was a respectable woman, voices were heard calling Denis from the yard.

“That’s right,” shouted Flora, “go on to your Mulots. Ignorant lot! That Jean Colin who was born two months after his parents were married. Everybody knows what La Barloute, his mother, is.”

She began peeling the apples that had been left on the table as Colin and the Langevins gathered around Denis, and Gaston came out to join them. Denis, astonished to see them so agitated, gazed at each of them in turn. Jean, especially, was unable to stand still.

“It’s almost unbelievable,” he said. “Just imagine —” He broke off as he saw Madame Boucher, who had come to the doorway to listen. “Come over to the shed.”

They had crossed the street, for the Colins lived directly opposite the Bouchers. Gaston followed them as best he could, putting into each breath he took all the energy that a feeble person expends in trying to keep up with the others; he was breathing harder and more painfully all the time. The “shed” was a tumble-down coach house that was rotting from the ground up — how it remained standing was a miracle.

“Let’s sit in the victoria,” suggested Robert Langevin, the lazy one.

The victoria stood in the centre of the shed, as black and memory-laden as a coffin on wheels. Jean’s grandfather Colin, old man Pitou, had been a coachman for the tourist trade and it was the family’s title to fame to have an ancestor who had driven American millionaires about.

“Let’s help ourselves from the buffet,” said Jean, lifting up the carriage seat. There were the stolen apples. He watched the leader out of the corner of his eye, enjoying Denis’s curiosity. Finally he could contain himself no longer. “It was a girl who hid us,” he said. “And a pretty one!” he added in an enthusiastic tone of voice.

Denis frowned. “Who was she?”

“Père Lévesque’s girl. You know, the educated one, who was away at the convent.”

“Who is that?” asked Germaine Colin, who had just come in with a bundle under her arm. Denis gave her a look.

“Mind your own business, you,” Jean rebuked her. At sight of Denis, Germaine decided to stay.

“Sit down here,” whispered Robert.

“I just finished scrubbing one of those ceilings,” she said. “But look at the two bucks I got for it.”

“Don’t be telling us your troubles,” said big Jacques Langevin. “Listen.”

Gaston slipped a thin arm into the front of his shirt and handed Germaine an apple. “Eat it.”

Jean began his recital with that slight degree of exaggeration that expansive souls display in relating their first exploits. The Langevins interrupted him frequently, for they wished their leader to know that they too had been present. Denis was silent. His right eye was almost shut as if in mockery while the other held a reflective look.

Gaston, who did not understand all that was being said, kept his gaze fastened on Germaine’s chin, her hair, her bosom, and the holes in her stocking which afforded him a glimpse of the chapped flesh of her knees. Her face was beautiful, and her lids appeared to be drowsing above her eyes, which were young and full of life. They were like any other pair of eyes, except that they were neither blue nor grey nor black but a little of each. Her hair was faded-looking, and there were a few tarnished curls on the back of her neck, the remains of a permanent. At the corners of her thin lips a faint crease held a hint of derision: the narrow bed of a puny pride sapped by poverty. Germaine at eighteen was already old, having lost amid the mops she plied on other people’s floors that naive trust in happiness which is natural in the young. A glint of sunlight through a crevice in the roof played upon her face but was poorly reflected there owing to the dried perspiration and the grime which her features had absorbed. Beneath her rumpled, tight-fitting dress her bosom was suggestively outlined, and at sight of it Gaston’s big childlike eyes beneath his man’s forehead became so animated that one would have said the look in them was inspired by lust.

Jean was spreading his arms in declamatory fashion: “That’s just what she said to me: ‘Don’t tell anybody!’ And maybe you think she didn’t know how to talk.”

“She talked to us, too,” put in the Langevins. Denis kept silent.

“She’ll make a swell girlfriend for you, a young lady,” remarked Germaine.

At this insinuation, Denis sprang up showing his large, strong teeth; there was a gleam in his brown eyes and his face was savagely contorted.

“I was waiting for you to say that. There you are, parish love affairs again. That’s the way love gets you. Are you like all the others, then?” He turned to Jean: “And you, Colin, in love already, you who were bragging you could overcome it? Don’t you realize that it means the end of your freedom? Haven’t you noticed how the love of our parents has turned into kitchen wrangling?”

Jean blushed but said nothing. He was thinking of Lise and how she had asked him not to tell. The Langevins were protesting, their little eyes sparkling from among their freckles.

“You have to get married sometime or other. And besides, love is not always the fault of the girls!”

“Shut up, you idiots! Their charms are like glue. But I’m here to protect you, my lads.” Denis was particularly concerned with maintaining his domination over Jean, whose silence led him to believe that he was still in command. “I had faith in you,” he continued, “in a gang that would be independent of girls.”

“Those are fine words, I must say,” was Germaine’s admiring comment, “but Jean is old enough.”

“That’s no concern of yours!” Jean snapped, turning upon his sister. “This is a man’s affair.”

The dispute was interrupted by the arrival of Tit-Blanc Colin and Chaton, the worm vendor, who was Jean’s formidable rival in that business. Jean’s father was drunk and had his arm around his companion’s neck. Chaton made for the worm box and lifted the lid.

“They’re rather fat and sluggish,” he said, crushing a clod of earth with the gesture of a connoisseur. “You don’t have such an awfully large stock. For a lot of creepy worms like these I can offer you a couple of dollars.”

Jean looked him over contemptuously. “They’re not for sale. And what’s more, I can show you a thing or two, Chaton.”

Tit-Blanc solemnly raised his arm. “It’s no use, Chaton, old pal,” he said. “Those worms bring in too good money. They are bread and butter.” Slyly the drunkard made the rounds of the group, and then, suddenly, he snatched from Germaine’s hand the two-dollar bill she was twisting between her fingers.

He flourished it triumphantly as Germaine gave an anguished cry: “Father! That’s for my dress! My dress!” She burst into sobs.

With a sanctimonious smile on his lips, Tit-Blanc was about to put the money in his pocket when there came a hoarse growl. The drunkard’s arm being within reach of Gaston’s mouth, the invalid had sunk his sharp teeth into it. As his victim screamed, Gaston seized the banknote and, pantingly, handed it back to Germaine. He stood there at her side, the wraith of a man, trembling all over and scarcely knowing what he did; for this impulse to which he had yielded represented for him a week’s store of energy. “Don’t cry, Germaine, don’t cry.” And he ran his emaciated hand through the girl’s hair, lavishing upon her his invalid’s caresses, as feeble and faltering as his body. He was awkward at expressing his sympathy, for he had never forgiven himself his own sufferings.

Tit-Blanc, meanwhile, was sucking his bleeding wrist. Catching hold of Gaston’s collar, he jerked the lad violently toward him. “Damned hunchback! You’re going to pay for this!” But he had no sooner made a move in Gaston’s direction than Denis was upon him hammering him with both fists.

The elder Colin was a strong, stockily built man, and the two of them now rolled over on the floor as Grandfather Pitou, who had come up to see what the noise was about, shouted: “Give it to him Tit-Blanc! Let him have it in the belly — in the belly!”

Féda Colin, her hair standing up, dashed out of the kitchen, crying: “He’s drunk again! He’s spent all his pay once more!”

Bent over the fighting pair, Gaston anxiously followed the course of the struggle, indicating with wraithlike gestures what his brother should do to overcome his adversary.

“You bastard, I’ll kill you!” Tit-Blanc roared. Suddenly Denis got a firm hold under the older man’s head and began pounding his nose, and then Jean leaped on his friend’s back.

The fight was becoming a free-for-all when the door to the entryway opened and a grave voice rose above the din: “Is that the way you love one another?”

Abashed by the presence of the Abbé Charton, the participants in the fray fell apart. The priest, who rarely took sides in the rows of his parishioners, strode forward majestically, his eyes full of solemn dignity, his mouth quivering with sorrow.

“He struck Jamaine, he did,” said Gaston, pointing a finger at Tit-Blanc.

The Abbé laid a chubby hand on the drunkard’s hairy arm, and the elder Colin with religious unction suffered him to do so. The atmosphere was a ceremonious one, as at high mass. As for the lads, they were tired and were trying to find an excuse to leave. In the victoria, Charton and old man Pitou had begun a checker game.

Having examined Tit-Blanc’s wound, the Abbé Charton produced from the depths of his capacious pocket a box of adhesive tape, which formed a part of the worthy vicar’s ministerial equipment. Every morning, after mass and the reading of his breviary, he would stroll through the streets in search of minor injuries. He sought them out with a tranquil devotion, and the Mulots were good patients; he never missed one of their brawls, and his mouth would water at the sight of deep gashes. He felt that he was gradually becoming a physician of the poor in a cassock, a sort of Curé of Ars — but with an added distinction, that went without saying.

Each evening, at the hour when every good Christian was engaged in meditation, Oscar Charton would indulge his heart in dreams of heroism, yielding to grandiose reflections that had to do with the courage he displayed — a man of his station in life — in fulfilling the duties of his ministry. It was at such times that he felt himself lulled by a symphony of charitable thoughts to the languid accompaniment of aristocratic sighs. Between himself and reality he interposed these sentimental barricades behind which he entrenched himself in a beribboned virtue. This man, so self-satisfied, brooded upon his tastes and did not like to discuss them; any objection raised would have wearied him, and so he cherished them in silence. He was, then, in turn a solitary intellectual, an unknown musician, and a voluntary hermit among men and saints. He loved the countryside and by way of procuring rides cultivated the friendship of those among the Soyeux who had automobiles. The drama of his life occurred when he mounted the pulpit; for the Abbé Charton had a deep and solemn voice and Monsieur le Curé always assigned to him those sermons that called for a bit of pathos.

When the good priest who was also a poet felt the first murmurous titillations of an intellectual ecstasy coming on, he would flee to the silence of his room and devote himself avidly to science, literature, and music. In a fever of inspiration, he would rumple his hair, undo his collar, cast a befuddled eye over the volumes in his library, run a hand over his dusty phonograph records, snatch up his pen and bite it spasmodically, and pace the floor impatiently with a hammering tread. But all this would suddenly cease as the grating voice of Abbé Trinchu cut short his poetic fit.

“Not so much noise, Charton!” the other priest would call from the floor below.

His arms would fall to his side, and it was then that he would go out into the street, armed with his adhesive tape. Thus his life was spent between the parish house and the public thoroughfare, between the convulsions of a sterile beauty and the injured children of fecund mothers.

The Abbé Charton who was studying the Langevins and wondering what they could have been doing at Lise’s house a short while ago, now became aware of Gaston’s presence and told him to stay. The invalid, however, was anxious to leave. The priest for some time had been bothering him about taking the measure of his deformity; for the Abbé had in mind inventing a brace that would enable him to walk upright, and the poor fellow did not wish to show the holes in his back. His brother provided a distraction.

“Come along, Gaston,” said Denis, who did not care to be bandaged. He darted Tit-Blanc a contemptuous look: “Mulot! You have milk in your veins.”

Once outside, Gaston was jubilant: “You gave the swine a thrashing, eh?” Then he made a face: “Ugh! That’s some father Germaine has!”

Denis shrugged his shoulders. He was gazing absent-mindedly at the sheet-iron plaques that stood out front from the houses like ears that had come loose. There were inscriptions in black on white or vice versa, all of them the same but displaying every mistake in spelling which the French language permitted: “vers de paiche,” “vairs de pêches,” “verres de peiche,” et cetera, all of them signifying angleworms. To a schoolmaster’s eyes Jean was an educated lad, for the spelling on his sign was correct. He sold them at twenty-five cents a hundred, and although he was a city dweller he would wait for a rain with as much anxiety as any farmer. But what competition he had! It came from the small Mulots exploited by Chaton, who was bent upon monopolizing the business — the Abbé Bongrain did not hesitate to call him the “worm magnate,” which flattered his self-esteem. Chaton bought the little animals at five cents a hundred and sold them at a profit of ten cents. But he was no-good and a natural-born ignoramus, whereas Jean knew how to fatten them up. How red they were, those that he had, and how cleverly they could slip through the fingers of the clumsy fisherman!

There was a small group of vendors who were in the habit of gathering the worms of an evening in the Parc des Braves, after a rain; and the lovers upon the benches, between kisses, would rail at these imbeciles, whom they at first mistook for members of the morals squad.

Denis disdained this vulgar traffic, but he was none the less keenly aware of the constant lack of small change in his pocket. An anxiety clutched his heart: “Shall I have money one day without becoming like them?” He listened to his mother singing in a loud voice, “La Légende des Flots Bleus” and then went back to his reverie. At bottom he was glad that his friends did not have his powers of resistance where women were concerned. He thought of the entertainment that evening, what it would be like. Who was this Lise? He began laying his plans to get hold of fifteen cents.

“Father!” exclaimed Gaston. Joseph Boucher was making signs to his son, good-naturedly tapping the extended pockets of his coat. As men came home from work the Jewish peddlers were to be seen decamping from the houses with their merchandise, for it was only with the womenfolk that they bargained effectively. Denis was gazing toward the Upper Town, picturing to himself a gang so powerful that he would have to exert all his strength to remain the leader. But Jean would follow him, he could depend on that.