“Ho! what a capon—what a capon of a girl—” she would sometimes say to her, trying to laugh, with her eyes brimming with rage, because she considered that this love-affair was dragging too much and believed that the young girl was hesitating for fear of meeting the reproaches and anger of her parents. Just as if that would have weighed a straw in the balance for such a free and proud nature, had there been a real love in her heart; but how can one say: “I love him,” and buckle on one’s armor, rouse one’s spirits and fight, when one does not love at all?
However, she had promised, and every day she was harassed by new demands. For instance there was that first night at the skating-rink, to which the peasant girl insisted upon taking her, whether or no, counting upon the singer’s success and the sympathy of the applause to break down the last objections. After a long resistance the poor little girl ended by consenting to skip out secretly for that one night behind the back of her mother, making use of lies and humiliating complications. She had given way through fear and weakness, perhaps also with the hope of getting her first impression back again at the theatre—that mirage which had vanished; of lighting up again, in fact, that flame of love which was so desperately quenched.
CHAPTER XV.
THE SKATING-RINK.
Where was it? Whither was she being taken? The cab had been going for a long, long time; seated at her side, Audiberte had been holding her hands, reassuring her and talking to her with a feverish violence. She did not look at anything, she did not hear anything; the noise of the wheels, the sharp tones of that shrill little voice had no sense for her mind whatever; nor did the streets and boulevards and house-fronts seem to her to wear their usual aspect, but were discolored by the lively emotion within, as if she were looking at them out of the carriage in a funeral or marriage procession.
Finally they brought up with a jerk and stopped before a wide pavement inundated by white light which carved the crowd of people swarming here into black sharp-cut shadows. At the entrance of the large corridor was a wicket for the tickets, then a double door of red velvet, and right upon that a hall, an enormous hall, which with its nave and its side aisles and the stucco on its high walls, recalled to her an Anglican church which she had once visited on the occasion of a marriage. Only in this case the walls were covered with placards and advertisements in every color, setting forth the virtues of pith helmets, shirts made to measure for four francs and a half and announcements of clothing-shops, alternating with the portrait of the tabor-player, whose biography one could hear cried in that voice of a steam-valve used by programme-sellers. They were in the midst of a stunning noise in which the murmur of the circulating mob, the humming of the tops on the cloth of the English billiard tables, calls for drinks, snatches of music broken by patriotic gunshots coming from the back of the hall, were dominated by a constant noise of roller skates going and coming across a broad asphalted space surrounded by balustrades, the centre of a perfect storm of crush hats and bonnets of the time of the Directory.
Hortense walked behind the Provençal girl, anxious and frightened, now turning pale and now turning red beneath her veil, following her with difficulty through a perfect labyrinth of little round tables at which women were seated two and two drinking, their elbows on the table, cigarettes in their mouths and their knees up, overwhelmed with a look of boredom. Against the wall from point to point stood crowded counters and behind each was a girl standing erect, her eyes blackened with kohl, her mouth red as blood and little flashes of steel coming from a bang of black or russet hair plastered over her brow. And this white and black of painted skin, this smile with its painted vermilion-point, were to be found on all the women, as if it were a livery belonging to nocturnal and pallid apparitions which all were forced to wear.
Sinister also was the slow strolling of the men who elbowed their way in an insolent and brutal manner between the tables, puffing the smoke of their thick cigars right and left with the insult of their marketing as they pushed about to look as closely as possible at the wares. And what gave it still more the impression of a market was the cosmopolite public talking all kinds of French, a hotel public which had just arrived and run into the place in their travelling clothes—Scotch bonnets, striped jackets, tweeds still full of the fog of the Channel and Muscovite furs thawing fast in the Paris air. And there were the long black beards and insolent airs of people from the banks of the Spree covering satyr grins and Tartar mugs; there too were Turkish fezzes surmounting coats without any collars, negroes in full evening dress gleaming like the silk of their tall hats and little Japanese men dressed like Europeans, dapper and correct, like tailors’ advertisements fallen into the fire.
“Bou Diou! How ugly he is,” said Audiberte suddenly, as they passed a very solemn Chinaman with his long pigtail hanging down the back of his blue gown; or else she would stop and, nudging her companion with her elbow, cry “Vé! vé! see the bride!” and show her some woman dressed entirely in white lounging on two chairs—one of which supported her white satin shoes with silver heels—the waist of her dress wide open, the train of her gown all which-way, and orange flowers fastening the lace of a short mantilla in her hair. Then, suddenly scandalized by certain words which gave her the clue to these very chance bridal flowers, the Provençal girl would add in a mysterious manner: “A regular snake, you know!” Then suddenly, in order to drag Hortense away from a bad example, she would hurry her toward the central part of the building where a theatre rose far in the back, occupying the same place as the choir in a church. The stage was there under electric flames which came and went in two big glass spheres away up in the ceiling, like two gleaming, starry eyes of an Eternal Father in a book of holy images.
Here they could compose themselves after the tumultuous wickedness of the lobbies. Families of little citizens, the shopkeepers of the quarter, filled the orchestra stalls. There were few women. It might have been possible to believe oneself in some kind of an auditorium, were it not for the horrible noise all about, which was always being overborne by the regular rolling of the skaters on the asphalt floor, drowning even the brass instruments and the drums of the orchestra, so that really on the boards all that was possible was the dumb-show of living pictures.
As they seated themselves the curtain went down on a patriotic scene: an enormous Belfort lion made of cardboard, surrounded by soldiers in triumphant poses on crumbling ramparts, their military caps stuck on the ends of their guns, gesticulating to the measure of the Marseillaise, which nobody could hear. This performance and this wild excitement stimulated the Provençal girl; her eyes were bulging in her head; as she found a place for Hortense she exclaimed: