"Very good," said he, "I say you shall."
He turned to the negresses:
"Dress your mistress, at once."
And the boor that he really was, the son of the Southern junk-dealer coming to the surface in that crisis, which moved him to the depths of his being, he threw back the bedclothes with a brutal, contemptuous gesture, tossing the innumerable gewgaws they held to the floor, and forcing the half-naked Levantine to jump to her feet with a promptitude most remarkable in that bulky personage. She roared under the outrage, gathered the folds of her tunic about her misshapen bust, fixed her little cap crosswise over her falling hair, and began to blackguard her husband.
"Never, you hear me, never—you shall never drag me to that—"
Filth poured from her heavy lips as from the mouth of a drain. Jansoulet might well have believed that he was in one of the frightful dens along the water front in Marseille, listening to a quarrel between a prostitute and a nervi, or looking on at some open-air fracas between Genoese, Maltese and Provençal women gleaning on the quay around bags of grain in process of unloading, and reviling each other at full speed in eddies of golden dust. She was the typical seaport Levantine, the spoiled, neglected child, who from her terrace, or from her gondola, in the evening, has heard sailors cursing one another in all the languages of the Latin seas, and has remembered everything. The wretched man stared at her, horrified and dismayed at what she compelled him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming at the mouth and sputtering:
"No, I won't go—no, I won't go!"
And she was the mother of his children, an Afchin!
Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in that woman's hands, that she had only to put on a dress to save him, and that time was flying, that it would soon be too late, a gust of crime rushed to his brain, distorted all his features. He rushed at her, opening and closing his hands with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins, in deadly terror, darted toward the door through which the masseur had just left the room, calling:
"Aristide!"