Thereupon, in a corner of the room, Marie flung her arms round the young man’s neck. “Ah! my good Pierre, I have never yet kissed you,” said she; “I want it to be for something serious the first time.... I love you, my good Pierre, I love you with all my heart.”
Later that same evening, after night had fallen, Guillaume and Pierre remained for a moment alone in the big workroom. The young men had gone out, and Mere-Grand and Marie were upstairs sorting some house linen, while Madame Mathis, who had brought some work back, sat patiently in a dim corner waiting for another bundle of things which might require mending. The brothers, steeped in the soft melancholy of the twilight hour, and chatting in low tones, had quite forgotten her.
But all at once the arrival of a visitor upset them. It was Janzen with the fair, Christ-like face. He called very seldom nowadays; and one never knew from what gloomy spot he had come or into what darkness he would return when he took his departure. He disappeared, indeed, for months together, and was then suddenly to be seen like some momentary passer-by whose past and present life were alike unknown.
“I am leaving to-night,” he said in a voice sharp like a knife.
“Are you going back to your home in Russia?” asked Guillaume.
A faint, disdainful smile appeared on the Anarchist’s lips. “Home!” said he, “I am at home everywhere. To begin with, I am not a Russian, and then I recognise no other country than the world.”
With a sweeping gesture he gave them to understand what manner of man he was, one who had no fatherland of his own, but carried his gory dream of fraternity hither and thither regardless of frontiers. From some words he spoke the brothers fancied he was returning to Spain, where some fellow-Anarchists awaited him. There was a deal of work to be done there, it appeared. He had quietly seated himself, chatting on in his cold way, when all at once he serenely added: “By the by, a bomb had just been thrown into the Cafe de l’Univers on the Boulevard. Three bourgeois were killed.”
Pierre and Guillaume shuddered, and asked for particulars. Thereupon Janzen related that he had happened to be there, had heard the explosion, and seen the windows of the cafe shivered to atoms. Three customers were lying on the floor blown to pieces. Two of them were gentlemen, who had entered the place by chance and whose names were not known, while the third was a regular customer, a petty cit of the neighbourhood, who came every day to play a game at dominoes. And the whole place was wrecked; the marble tables were broken, the chandeliers twisted out of shape, the mirrors studded with projectiles. And how great the terror and the indignation, and how frantic the rush of the crowd! The perpetrator of the deed had been arrested immediately—in fact, just as he was turning the corner of the Rue Caumartin.
“I thought I would come and tell you of it,” concluded Janzen; “it is well you should know it.”
Then as Pierre, shuddering and already suspecting the truth, asked him if he knew who the man was that had been arrested, he slowly replied: “The worry is that you happen to know him—it was little Victor Mathis.”