She rose. The door closed noisily behind her, as if to say adieu, and, supported by Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who almost carried her, she went down the five flights of the main stairway. At every landing she paused to take breath. In the vestibule she found the concierge, who had brought her a chair. She fell into it. The vulgar fellow laughingly promised her that she would be well in six weeks. She moved her head slightly as she said yes, a muffled yes.
She was in the cab, beside her mistress. It was an uncomfortable cab and jolted over the pavements. She sat forward on the seat to avoid the concussion of the jolting, and clung to the door with her hand. She watched the houses pass, but did not speak. When they reached the hospital gate, she refused to be carried. "Can you walk as far as that?" said the concierge, pointing to the reception-room some sixty feet distant. She made an affirmative sign and walked: it was a dead woman walking, because she was determined to walk!
At last she reached the great hall, cold and stiff and clean and bare and horrible, with a circle of wooden benches around the waiting litter. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil led her to a straw chair near a glazed door. A clerk opened the door, asked Mademoiselle de Varandeuil Germinie's name and age, and wrote for a quarter of an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with a religious emblem at the top. That done, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her and turned to go; she saw an attendant take her under the arms, then she saw no more, but turned and fled, and, throwing herself upon the cushions of the cab, she burst into sobs and gave vent to all the tears with which her heart had been suffocated for an hour past. The driver on his box was amazed to hear such violent weeping.
LXV
On the visiting day, Thursday, mademoiselle started at half-past twelve to go and see Germinie. It was her purpose to be at her bedside at the moment the doors were thrown open, at one o'clock precisely. As she rode through the streets she had passed through four days before, she remembered the ghastly ride of Monday. It seemed to her as if she were incommoding a sick person in the cab, of which she was the only occupant, and she sat close in the corner in order to make room for the memory of Germinie. In what condition should she find her? Should she find her at all? Suppose her bed should be empty?
The cab passed through a narrow street filled with orange carts, and with women sitting on the sidewalk offering biscuit for sale in baskets. There was something unspeakably wretched and dismal in this open-air display of fruit and cakes,—the delicacies of the dying, the viaticum of invalids, craved by feverish mouths, longed for by the death-agony,—which workingmen's hands, black with toil, purchase as they pass, to carry to the hospital and offer death a tempting morsel. Children carried them with sober faces, almost reverentially, and without touching them, as if they understood.
The cab stopped before the gate of the courtyard. It was five minutes to one. There was a long line of women crowding about the gate, women with their working clothes on, sorrowful, depressed and silent. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil took her place in the line, went forward with the others and was admitted: they searched her. She inquired for Salle Sainte-Joséphine, and was directed to the second wing on the second floor. She found the hall and the bed, No. 14, which was, as she had been told, one of the last at the right. Indeed, she was guided thither, as it were, from the farther end of the hall, by Germinie's smile—the smile of a sick person in a hospital at an unexpected visit, which says, so gently, as soon as you enter the room: "Here I am."
She leaned over the bed. Germinie tried to push her away with a gesture of humility and the shamefacedness of a servant.
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her.