THE GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT.
On the following Thursday morning, the bell of St. Germain-des-Prés was striking the hour of eleven when Monsieur Jules Vicot opened his eyes, instantly closed them again, and groaned. It was the hour which he disliked more than any other of the twenty-four, this of awakening, and from day to day it did not differ in essential details. The weather might be hot or cold, fair or foul, wet or dry—that was one thing and not important. What was important—what, in the estimation of Monsieur Vicot, distinguished this hour so unenviably from its fellows, was the variety of distressing physical symptoms which, in his own person, inevitably accompanied it. They were symptoms long familiar to Monsieur Vicot—a feeling under his eyelids which appeared to indicate the presence of coarse sand; a throbbing of the heart which seemed, inexplicably, to be taking place in his throat; a dull pain at his temples and back of his ears which prompted him to hold his head sedulously balanced, lest a sudden movement to right or left occasion an acuter pang; finally, a taste on his tongue which suggested a commingling of fur, blotting-paper, and raw quinces.
Presently Monsieur Vicot opened his eyes once more and fixed them upon the window, from which, from his position, nothing was visible save sky of an intense blue. Against this background a number of small reddish-brown blotches swam slowly to and fro, and among these tiny whorls of a light gray colour expanded and contracted with inconceivable rapidity. At one time these symptoms had caused him peculiar uneasiness. Now he ignored them. They were less disturbing to his equanimity than the remarkable twitching of his fingers. For two years he had made a point of keeping his hands in the side pockets of his jacket, save when he found it absolutely necessary to use them. He no longer made gestures. They are desirable as aids to expression, but only when steady.
The majority of men, in waking, apply themselves to consideration of the day which lies before them. It was Monsieur Jules Vicot's custom, on the contrary, to undertake a mental review of the night which lay behind. The review was not always complete. Often there were gaps, and, more frequently, he found himself completely at a loss to account for his return to his room on the cinquième of 70, Rue St. Benoit, and the indisputable fact that he was in bed, with his clothes reposing, with something not unrelated to order, on the solitary chair.
Now, as he surveyed it, he assured himself for the thousandth time that it was not a cheerful room. Abundant sunlight, the recompense of Nature for six flights of stairs, was its sole redeeming virtue. For the rest, everything belonging to Monsieur Vicot was applied to some use entirely foreign to the original purpose for which it had been designed. An ink-stand served him as a candlestick, his chair was at once table and clothes-rack, a ramshackle sofa played the rôle of bed, and a frouzy plush table-cover was his rug. An astonishing accumulation of cigarette-ends and empty bottles suggested slovenliness in the occupant. On the contrary, they stood for his economical instincts. It is not every one who knows that twenty cigarette-ends make a pipe-ful of tobacco, and that as many empty brandy-flasks may be exchanged for a full half-pint, but the knowledge, if rare, is useful.
"It is a pig-pen," said Monsieur Jules Vicot to himself, "and very appropriate at that!"
Then he set to work upon his matutinal review of the preceding night. His recollections were more than usually hazy. After a wretched dinner at La Petite Chaise, rendered yet more unpalatable by the proprietor's unpleasant references to certain previous repasts, as yet unpaid, came a distinct hour or so of leaning on the parapet of the Quai d'Orléans, in dreamy contemplation of a man clipping a black poodle on the cobblestones below; then another period, of gradually lessening clearness, in a little wine-shop on the Rue de Beaune; then—nothing.
"Well, I was drunk," reflected Monsieur Vicot; but again manifested his dissimilarity from the majority of men by not committing himself in respect to his intentions for the future.
He arose with an air of languor, yawned, looked dubiously at one trembling hand, shook his head, and then surveyed himself in a triangular bit of looking-glass tacked against the wall.