Mr. Vincent Egg, although he was old and stout and red-nosed and shabby in his attire, wore a look that was at once timorous, fatuous, and weakly mendacious; a look that tried to tell the possible passer-by that his red nose and watery eyes bloomed and blinked in the smiles of Virginie. Virginie, although she was young and pretty and also thin of face and poverty-stricken of garb, wore a look which told you plainly and most honestly beyond a question, that she had no smiles for Mr. Egg or for any one else. They walked down the middle of the street side by side, but that they could not very well help doing, for the street was both narrow and dirty, and the edges of the stone gutter down its midway offered the only clean foothold in its entire breadth. As they walked on together, Mr. Egg made a few poor-spirited attempts to start up a gallant conversation with the girl; but she made no response whatever to his remarks, and strode on in dark-faced silence, her empty wash-basket poised between her lank right hip and her thin right elbow. Mr. Egg hemmed and cleared a husky throat, and employed both his unsteady hands in setting his tall, shabby silk hat upon his head in such a manner that its broad brim might keep the sunlight out of his eyes.
Mr. Vincent Egg was in the little city of Drignan on business. His lodgings were in the rue des Quatres Mulets, because they were the cheapest lodgings he could find. There are prettier towns than Drignan, and even in Drignan there are many better streets than the rue des Quatres Mulets. But it was much the same to Mr. Egg. He took his shabby lodgings, the rebuffs of the fair, the sunlight of other men’s fortunes dazzling his weak eyes—all these things he took with an easy indifference of mind so long as life gave him the little he asked of it, namely: a periodic indulgence in alcoholic unconsciousness. A simple drunk, once a month, of at least a week’s duration, was what Mr. Egg’s soul most craved and desired; but if his fluctuating means made the period of intoxication briefer or the period of sobriety longer, he bore either event with a certain simple heroism. He wanted no “spree,” no “toot,” no “tear;” a modest spell of sodden, dreamy, tearfully happy soaking in the back-room of some cheap wine-shop where he and his ways were known—this was all that remained of ambition and aspiration in Mr. Egg’s life; which had been, for the rest, a long life, a harmless life (except in the stern moralist’s sense), and a life that was decidedly a round, complete and total failure in spite of an exceptional allotment of abilities and opportunities. Mr. Egg had been many things in the course of that long and varied life—lawyer, doctor, newspaper-man, speculator, actor, manager, horse-dealer and racetrack gamester, croupier (and courier, even, after a fashion)—and heaven knows what else beside, of things avowable and unavowable. Just at present, he was supplying an English firm of Tourist-Excursion Managers with a guide-book of their various routes, at the rate of eighteen-pence per page of small type, and his traveling expenses—third-class. He had just finished “doing up” the district last allotted to him; and, after two weeks’ of traveling about, he had spent another fortnight in writing up his notes in a dingy little lodging-house room in the rue des Quatres Mulets. He knew his ground thoroughly, and that was the cheapest place.
Such was Mr. Vincent Egg, after a half-century of struggle with the world; and something of an imposing figure he made, too, in his defeat and degradation. His nose was red, his cheeks were puffed and veined, there were bags under his bloodshot eyes, his close-cropped hair was thin, his stubby little gray moustache, desperately waxed at the ends, gave an incongruously foreign touch to his decidedly Anglo-Saxon face—and his clothes were shockingly shabby. But then he wore his clothes, as few men in our day can wear clothes; and they were his clothes; his very own, and not another’s. People often spoke of him, after seeing him once, as “that big, soldierly-looking old man in the white hat.” But he did not wear a white hat. His hat, which was one of the largest, one of the jauntiest and one of the oldest ever seen, had also been, in its time, one of the blackest. It was his coat that gave people an idea of his having something about him that suggested white. It was a tightly-buttoned frock-coat of an indescribable light-dirty color. Most hopelessly shabby men cling to some standard of taste in dress that was the standard in their last-remembered days of prosperity. That coat—if it were one coat and not only one of a long-lived family—marked the fact that the last season of prosperity Mr. Egg had enjoyed was a season, now some twenty years gone, when the London “swells” or “nobs,” or whatever they called them then, wore frock-coats of certain fashionable light shades of fawn and mouse-color, then known, I believe, as “London Smoke” and “French Gray.” While it can not be said that Mr. Egg’s coat was familiar in every quarter of Europe (for it rarely staid long enough in any one place), it had certainly been seen in all. And more than one Austrian officer, after passing Mr. Egg in that garment of pallid, dubious and puzzling hue, had turned sharply around to satisfy himself that it was not a uniform-coat in a condition of profanation. A certain state and dignity that still clung to this coat, and the startling cleanness of his well-scissored cuffs and collars were all that remained to give Mr. Egg a hold upon exterior respectability.
With such a history, Mr. Egg was naturally well versed in the freemasonry of poverty and need. As his eyes became accustomed to the sun, he looked at the girl’s pinched face, and his tones suddenly changed. Vincent Egg spoke several languages, and he knew all their social dialects and variations. It was in friendly and familiar speech that he addressed the girl, and asked her—What was the matter? and, Was the business going ill?
If Virginie had been the poor girl you meet with in the stories written by English ladies of a mildly religious turn of mind, she would have dropped a little curtsey and said with a single tear, “Indeed, sir, I had not meant to speak, but you have hit upon the truth. The business goes very ill, indeed, and without help I do not see how my poor mother can survive the Winter.” But Virginie, obeying the instincts of her nature and her education, responded to Mr. Egg with a single coarse French adjective which is only to be rendered in English, I am afraid, by the word “stinking.”
Mr. Egg was not in the least shocked. He cast his blinking eyes about him at the filthy roadway, at the narrow old stone houses that crowded both sides of the street with the peaked roofs of their over-hanging upper-stories, almost shutting out the sky above his head, at the countless century-old stains of damp and rust and shameful soilure upon their dull faces, and he said simply:
“Fichu locale!”