Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (61 page)

‘Ah! it’s you! You’ve come just in time to save me having to write to you… I’ve had enough, and I’m leaving.’

‘What do you mean, leaving?’

‘Yes. I’m leaving tonight. I’m going to Naples for the winter.’

Then, when he had dismissed the valet with a wave of his hand, he went on:

‘If you think it’s been fun for me having a father in the Conciergerie for the last six months! I’m certainly not going to wait here to see him in prison… I, who so detest travelling! Still, the weather is good there, and I’m taking with me just about all I need, so perhaps it won’t be too much of a bore.’

She gazed at him, so neat, so good-looking; and she looked at the overflowing trunks, into which no garment of wife or mistress had strayed; everything was devoted to his cult of himself; and yet she dared to risk speaking.

‘And I had come to ask a service of you…’

Then she related the story, Victor the scoundrel, raping and thieving, Victor in flight, capable of any and every crime.

‘We cannot abandon him. Come with me, let us join forces…’

He did not let her finish, he was livid, and trembling with fear, as if he had felt some dirty, murderous hand settle upon his shoulder.

‘Oh well! That’s all I needed!… A thief for a father and a murderer for a brother… I’ve delayed too long, I meant to leave last week. But it’s abominable, abominable, to put a man like me in such a situation!’

Then, when she insisted, he became insolent.

‘You just leave me alone! Since you seem to enjoy that life of grief, carry on with it! I did warn you, it’s your own fault if you’re weeping now… But as for me, you see, I’d sooner sweep the whole filthy lot into the gutter than do the slightest thing for them.’

She got up.

‘Goodbye then!’

‘Goodbye.’

And as she left, she saw him calling back the valet and attending to the careful packing of his toilet kit, in which every piece was most elegantly worked in silver, especially the basin, which was engraved with a ring of Cupids. While this man was going away to live a life of forgetfulness and idleness beneath the bright sun of Naples, she had a sudden vision of the other, prowling hungrily on some dark and dripping evening with a knife in his hand, in some remote lane in La Villette or Charonne. Didn’t this answer the question of whether education, health, and intelligence are not all, in fact, down to money? Since there is the same human mud underneath, does civilization amount to no more than the superiority of smelling good and living comfortably?

When she reached the Work Foundation, Madame Caroline felt an odd sense of revulsion at the enormous luxury of the establishment. What good were these two majestic wings, one for boys and one for girls, linked by the monumental administrative offices? What good were the courtyards large as parks, the ornate tiles of the kitchens, the marble of the dining-halls, the corridors vast enough for a palace? What good was all this grandiose charity if, in this large and salubrious environment, they could not straighten out one ill-begotten being and turn a perverted child into a decent man, endowed with healthy good sense? She went at once to see the director and pressed him with questions, wanting to know the slightest details. But what had happened remained obscure; he could only repeat what she had already heard from the Princess. Searches had continued since the day before, in the institution and the surrounding areas, without any result. Victor was already far away, galloping around the city, in the frightening depths of the unknown. He couldn’t have any money, for Alice’s purse, which he had emptied, only contained three francs and four sous. The director had, anyway, avoided bringing in the police in order to spare the poor Beauvilliers ladies the public scandal; and Madame Caroline thanked him for that, and promised that she would not contact the Prefecture either, in spite of her ardent desire to know where Victor was. Then, in despair at going away no wiser than when she had come, it occurred to her to go up to the infirmary and question the sisters. Again, she got no precise information, but up there, in the quiet little room that separated the girls’ dormitory from the boys’,
she at least enjoyed a few profoundly calming moments. A happy, boisterous noise rose from below; it was playtime, and she felt she had been unjust about the successful cures that had been obtained through the open-air life, well-being and work. There were certainly some strong and healthy men growing up here. One scoundrel to four or five men of average honesty would already be very good, given all the hazards that aggravate or diminish hereditary defects!

Left on her own for a moment by the sister on duty, Madame Caroline had moved over to the window to watch the children playing down below, when the crystal-clear voices of some little girls in the next-door infirmary attracted her attention. The door was half open and she could observe the scene without being noticed. It was a very cheerful room, this white infirmary with white walls, and four beds draped with white curtains. A big patch of sunlight added gold to the whiteness, a flowering of lilies in the warm air. In the first bed on the left, she at once recognized Madeleine, the girl who had been there, eating bread and jam, on the day she brought Victor. Madeleine kept on falling ill, wrecked by the alcoholism of her family, and of such poor blood that despite her big eyes, like those of a grown woman, she was as thin and pale as a saint in a stained-glass window. She was thirteen, and alone in the world now, her mother having died one drunken evening, after being kicked in the stomach by a man who wouldn’t pay her the six sous they had agreed on. And Madeleine, kneeling in the middle of her bed in her long white nightdress, with her fair hair flowing about her shoulders, was teaching a prayer to the three little girls from the other three beds.

‘Put your hands together like this, and open wide your heart…’

All three little girls were also kneeling among their sheets. Two were about eight or ten, and the third was under five. In their long white nightdresses, with their frail hands clasped and their serious, ecstatic faces, they looked like little angels.

‘And now repeat after me what I’m going to say. Listen carefully: ‘O God, let Monsieur Saccard be rewarded for his goodness, and may he have a long and happy life.’

Then, with cherubic voices, and an adorable childish lisping, the four little girls repeated together, in a surge of faith to which they gave the whole of their pure little being:

‘O God, let Monsieur Saccard be rewarded for his goodness, and may he have a long and happy life.’

With an angry movement, Madame Caroline was about to go into the room to make the children stop, and forbid them to go on with what she regarded as a blasphemous and cruel game. No, no! Saccard had no right to be loved, it was a stain on their childhood that they should pray for his happiness! Then she stopped, with a great shudder, and tears rose to her eyes. Why should she draw into her quarrel, into the anger of her experience, these innocent beings who as yet knew nothing of life? And hadn’t Saccard been good to them, he who was part-creator of this establishment, and who every month sent them playthings? She felt deeply disturbed, she was once more finding proof that there is no man, however guilty, who, in the midst of all the evil he may have done, has not also done much good. And she left, while the little girls took up their prayer once more, and she carried away in her ears the sound of those angelic voices, calling down blessings on that man of recklessness and disaster, whose hands, in their folly, had just ruined a whole world.

As she was at last leaving her cab on the Boulevard du Palais, in front of the Conciergerie, she realized that, in all her emotion, she had left at home the bunch of carnations she had prepared that morning for her brother. There was a flower-seller there with little bouquets of roses for two sous, and she bought one, which made Hamelin, who loved flowers, smile when she told him of her forgetfulness. That day, however, he seemed truly sad. Initially, during the first weeks of his imprisonment, he had not been able to believe there were serious charges against him. His defence appeared so simple: he had been made president against his will, and had remained apart from all financial transactions, being almost always absent from Paris, and unable to exercise any control. But conversations with his lawyer, and the approaches made by Madame Caroline, which, she said, had been a useless waste of effort, had made him see at last the alarming responsibilities laid upon him. He was going to be involved in every illegality, however slight; it would never be accepted that he was ignorant of a single one; Saccard had drawn him into a dishonourable complicity. It was then that in his rather simple faith as a practising Catholic, he had found a resignation, a tranquillity of soul that astonished his sister. When she arrived from the outside world, from her anxious efforts, from all those human beings at liberty, so shifty and hard, she was astonished to find him peaceful and smiling in his bleak cell, in which, like the great pious child that he was, he had nailed up
luridly coloured religious pictures around a little crucifix of black wood. Once one puts oneself in the hands of God there is no more rebellion, and undeserved suffering is a pledge of salvation. His only sadness came, at times, from the disastrous halting of his great enterprises. Who would take up his work again? Who would carry on with the resurrection of the East, so successfully started with the United Steamship Company and the Carmel Silver Mines Company? Who would build the network of railway lines from Broussa to Beirut and Damascus, from Smyrna to Trebizond, all that pumping of new young blood into the veins of the old world? In this too he still had faith; he said the work undertaken could not die, and he felt only the grief of no longer being the one chosen by Heaven to carry it out. His voice broke particularly when he wondered why, in punishment of what fault, God had not allowed him to create the great Catholic Bank, destined to transform modern society, that Treasury of the Holy Sepulchre, which would restore a kingdom to the Pope and in the end make all the peoples of the world into one single nation, taking the sovereign power of money away from the Jews. He also predicted the coming of that bank as inevitable and invincible; and he heralded the Just Man, with pure hands, who one day would found it. And if he seemed careworn that afternoon, it must simply have been because, in his serenity as an accused man who will be found guilty, he had realized that on getting out of prison, he would never have hands clean enough to take up again that great task.

He listened distractedly as his sister pointed out that opinion in the newspapers seemed to be growing a little more favourable towards him. Then, with no transition, and looking at her with the gaze of one newly awakened, he said:

‘Why do you refuse to see him?’

She shuddered, understanding at once that he was speaking of Saccard. With a shake of her head she said no, and again, no. Then he made a decision and said, with embarrassment, in a very low voice:

‘After what he has been to you, you cannot refuse. Go and see him!’

O God! he knew, and, she was suffused with a burning red blush; throwing herself into his arms to hide her face, she stammered at him, asking who could have told him, and how had he learned about this matter that she had thought was quite unknown, and especially, unknown to him.

‘My poor Caroline, a long time ago… Anonymous letters, horrible people who envied us… I never mentioned it to you, you are free, we no longer think the same way… I know you are the best woman on earth. Go and see him.’

And gaily, smiling once more, he took down the little bouquet of roses that he had already slipped behind the crucifix and put it back into her hands, adding:

‘Look, take that to him, and tell him I don’t hold a grudge, either.’

Madame Caroline, overwhelmed by her brother’s pitiful tenderness, and filled with simultaneous feelings of awful shame and delightful relief, resisted no more. Besides, since that morning, she had felt it had become necessary to see Saccard. How could she not inform him of Victor’s flight, and the atrocious events that made her tremble even now? From the very first day, he had listed her among the persons he wished to see; and she had only to speak her name for a warder to lead her at once to the prisoner’s cell.

When she entered, Saccard had his back to the door, sitting at a little table, covering a sheet of paper with figures. He stood up quickly and gave a cry of joy.

‘You!… Oh, how kind of you, and how happy I am!’

He had clasped her hand between his two hands, and she smiled, looking embarrassed, very moved, and unable to find the right thing to say. Then, with her free hand, she placed her little two-sous bouquet on the table, among the papers covered with figures that littered its surface.

‘You are an angel,’ he murmured in delight, kissing her fingers. At last she spoke:

‘It’s true, it was all over, and I had condemned you in my heart. But my brother wanted me to come.’

‘No, no, don’t say that! Say that you are too intelligent, too kind, that you’ve understood, and forgiven me…’

She interrupted him with a gesture.

‘I beseech you, don’t ask that much of me. I don’t know myself… Isn’t it enough that I’ve come?… And besides, I have to let you know about something very bad.’

Then at once, in a low voice, she told him of the reawakening of Victor’s savagery, his attack on Mademoiselle de Beauvilliers, his extraordinary, inexplicable flight, the uselessness, so far, of all the searches, and the little hope there was now of ever finding him again.
He listened, astonished, without a question, without a gesture, and when she fell silent, his eyes overflowed with two big tears, that streamed down his cheeks while he stammered out:

‘The wretched boy… the wretched boy…’

She had never before seen him cry. She was deeply moved and amazed, so strange were these tears of Saccard’s, grey and heavy, as if they had come a long way, from a heart hardened and clogged by years of knavery. And then suddenly, he burst out in noisy despair.

‘But it’s terrible, I’ve never even embraced him, this lad… For you know I haven’t seen him. My God! Yes, I had sworn to go and see him, and I never had the time, not a single free hour, with those accursed business affairs consuming me… Ah, it’s always like that, when you don’t do something straight away, you can be certain you’ll never do it. And now, are you sure I can’t see him? Someone could bring him here.’