II
The Jubilee was at hand. The Armand-Dubois were expecting the Baragliouls from day to day. The morning that the telegram came announcing their arrival for the same evening, Anthime went out to buy himself a neck-tie.
Anthime went out very little—as seldom as possible, because of his difficulty in getting about; Veronica used often to do his shopping for him, or the tradespeople would come themselves to take his orders from his own patterns. Anthime was past the age for worrying about the fashion. But though he wanted his tie to be unobtrusive—a plain bow of black surah—still, he liked choosing it himself. The ends of the dark brown satin spread tie, which he had bought for the journey and worn during his stay at the hotel, were constantly coming out of his waistcoat, which he always wore cut very low. This tie had been replaced by a cream-coloured neckerchief, fastened with a pin, on which he had had mounted a large antique cameo of no particular value. Marguerite de Baraglioul would certainly not consider this neckwear dressy enough; it had been a great mistake to abandon the little ready-made black bows he used habitually to wear in Paris, and particularly foolish not to have kept one as a pattern. What makes would they show him? He would not settle on anything without having seen the principal shirt-makers in the Corso and the Via dei Condotti. For a man of fifty, loose ends were not staid enough; yes, a plain bow made of dull black silk was the thing....
Lunch was not before one o’clock. Anthime came in about twelve with his parcel, in time to weigh his animals.
Though he was not vain, Anthime felt he must try on his tie before starting work. There was a broken bit of looking-glass lying on the table, which he had used on occasion for the purpose of provoking tropisms. He propped it up against a cage and leant forward to look at his own reflection.
Anthime wore his hair en brosse; it was still thick and had once been red; at the present time it was of the greyish yellow of worn silver-gilt; his whiskers, which were cut short and high, had kept the same reddish tinge as his stiff moustache. He passed the back of his hand over his flat cheeks and under his square chin, and muttered: “Yes, yes. I’ll shave after lunch.”
He took the tie out of its envelope and placed it before him; unfastened his cameo pin and then took off his neckerchief. Round his powerful neck, he wore a collar of medium height with turned-down corners. And now, notwithstanding my desire to relate nothing but what is essential, I cannot pass over in silence Anthime Armand-Dubois’ wen. For until I have learnt to distinguish more surely between the accidental and the necessary, what can I demand from my pen but the most rigorous fidelity? And, indeed, who could affirm that this wen had no share, no weight, in the decisions of what Anthime called his free thought? He was more willing to overlook his sciatica; but this paltry trifle was a thing for which he could not forgive Providence.
It had made its appearance, without his knowing how, shortly after his marriage; and at first it had been merely an inconsiderable wart, south-east of his left ear, just where the hair begins to grow; for a long time he was able to conceal this excrescence in the thickness of his hair, which he combed over it in a curl; Veronica herself had not noticed it, till once, in the course of a nocturnal caress, her hand had suddenly encountered it.
“Dear me!” she had exclaimed. “What have you got there?”
And, as though the swelling, once discovered, had no further reason for discretion, it grew in a few months to the size of an egg—a partridge’s—a guinea-fowl’s—and then a hen’s. There it stopped, while his hair, as it grew scantier, exposed it more and more to view between its meagre strands. At forty-six years of age, Anthime Armand-Dubois could have no further pretensions to good looks; he cut his hair close and adopted a style of collar of medium height, with a kind of recess in it, which hid and at the same time revealed the wen. But enough of Anthime’s wen!
He put the tie round his neck. In the middle of the tie was a little metal slide, through which a fastening of tape was passed and then kept in place by a spring clip. An ingenious contrivance—but no sooner was the tape inserted into the slide than it came unsewn and the tie fell on to the operating-table. There was no help for it but to have recourse to Veronica. She came running at the summons.
“Just sew this thing on for me, will you?” said Anthime.
“Machine-made,” she muttered, “rubbishy stuff!”
“It was certainly not sewn on very well.”
Veronica used always to wear, stuck into the left breast of her morning gown, two needles, threaded one with white cotton, the other with black. Without troubling to sit down, she did her mending standing beside the glass door.
She was a stoutish woman, with marked features; as obstinate as himself, but pleasant on the whole and generally smiling, so that a trace of moustache had not hardened her face.
“She has her good points,” thought Anthime, as he watched her plying her needle. “I might have married a flirt who would have deceived me, or a minx who would have deserted me, or a chatterbox who would have deaved me, or a goose who would have driven me mad, or a cross-patch like my sister-in-law.”
“Thank you,” he said, less grumpily than usual, as Veronica finished her work and departed.
With his new tie round his neck, Anthime engrossed himself in his work. No voice was raised; there was silence round him—silence in his heart. He had already weighed the blind rats. But what was this? The one-eyed rats were stationary. He went on to weigh the sound pair. Suddenly he started with such violence that his crutch rolled on the ground. Stupefaction! The sound rats ... he weighed them over again—there was no denying it—since yesterday, the sound rats had gained in weight! A ray of light flashed into his mind.
“Veronica!”
He picked up his crutch and with a tremendous effort rushed to the door.
“Veronica!”
Once more she came running, anxious to oblige. Then, as he stood in the doorway, he asked solemnly:
“Who has been touching my rats?”
No answer. Slowly, articulating each word, as if Veronica had ceased to understand the language, he repeated:
“Someone has been feeding them while I was out. Was it you, may I ask?”
Picking up her courage, she turned towards him, almost aggressively:
“You were letting them die of hunger, poor creatures! I haven’t interfered with your experiment in the least; I merely gave them....”
But at this he seized her by the sleeve and, limping back to the table, dragged her with him. There he pointed to his tables of records.
“Do you see these papers, Madam? For one fortnight I have been noting here my observations on these animals. My colleague Potier is expecting my notes to read to the Académie des Sciences at the sitting of May 17th next. To-day, April 15th, what am I to put down in this row of figures? What can I put down?”
And as she uttered not a word, he began scratching on the blank paper with the square end of his forefinger, as if it were a pen, and continued:
“On that day Madame Armand-Dubois, the investigator’s wife, listening to the dictates of her tender heart, committed—what am I to call it?—the indiscretion—the blunder—the folly ...?”
“No! say I took pity on the poor creatures—victims of an insensate curiosity.”
He drew himself up with dignity:
“If that is your attitude, you will understand, Madam, that I must beg you henceforth to use the back staircase when you go to look after your plants.”
“Do you suppose it’s any pleasure to me to come into your old hole?”
“Then, pray, for the future, refrain from coming into it.”
And, in order to add emphasis to his words with the eloquence of gesture, he seized his records and tore them into little bits.
For a fortnight, he had said; in reality, his rats had been kept fasting for only four days. And his irritation, no doubt, worked itself off with this exaggeration of his grievance, for at table he was able to show an unruffled brow; he pushed equanimity even to the point of holding out to his spouse the right hand of reconciliation. For he was still more anxious than Veronica that the religious and proper Baragliouls should not be offered the spectacle of disagreements, which they would certainly lay to the door of Anthime’s opinions.
At about five o’clock Veronica changed her morning gown for a black cloth coat and skirt and started for the station to meet Marguerite and Julius, who were due to arrive in Rome at six o’clock.
Anthime went to shave; he had consented to exchange his neckerchief for a black bow; that must be sufficient; he disliked ceremony and saw no reason why his sister-in-law’s presence should make him forswear his alpaca coat, his white waistcoat, spotted with blue, his duck trousers and his comfortable black leather slippers without heels, which he used to wear even out of doors, and which were excusable because of his lameness.
He picked up the torn bits of paper, pieced them together, and carefully copied them out while he was waiting for the Baragliouls.