“Elle est morte et n’a point vécu.”
Who does not know the sensation that besets an ordinary man on entering a familiar room, where, during his absence, some change has been made?—a piece of furniture moved, an old hanging taken down, a new picture put up?—that teasing sense of strangeness, which, if subordinate to the business of the moment, yet persists, uncomfortably formless, till, for instance, the presiding genius of the place inquires, “How do you like the way we have moved the piano?” or something else happens to crystallise the sufferer’s mere vague feeling into a perception; after which his spirit may be at rest again?
When I woke this morning, here in my own dingy furnished room, in this most dingy lodging-house, I had an experience very like that I mean to suggest: something seemed wrong and unusual, something had been changed overnight. This was the more perplexing, because my door had remained locked and bolted ever since I had tucked myself into bed; and within the room, after all, there isn’t much to change; only the bed itself, and the armoire, and my writing-table, and my wash-hand-stand, and my two dilapidated chairs; and these were still where they belonged. So were the shabby green window-curtains, the bilious green paper on the walls, the dismal green baldaquin above my head. Nevertheless, a tantalising sense of something changed, of something taken away, of an unwonted vacancy, haunted me through the brewing and the drinking of my coffee, and through the first few whiffs of my cigarette. Then I put on my hat, and “went to school,” and forgot about it.
But when I came back, in the afternoon, I found that whatever the cause might be of my curious psychical disturbance, it had not ceased to act. No sooner had I got seated at my table, and begun to arrange my notes, than down upon me settled, stronger if possible than ever, that inexplicable feeling of emptiness in the room, of strangeness, of an accustomed something gone. What could it mean? It was disquieting, exasperating; it interfered with my work. I must investigate it, and put an end to it, if I could.
But just at that moment the current of my ideas was temporarily turned by somebody rapping on my door. I called out, “Entrez!” and there entered a young lady: a young lady in black, with soiled yellow ribbons, and on her cheeks a little artificial bloom. The effect of this, however, was mitigated by a series of flesh-colored ridges running through it; and as the young person’s eyes, moreover, were red and humid, I concluded that she had been shedding tears. I looked at her for two or three seconds without being able to think who she was; but before she had pronounced her “B’jour, monsieur,” I remembered: Madame Germaine, the friend of poor little Zizi, my next-door neighbour. And then, in a flash, the reason appeared to me for my queer dim feeling of something not as usual in my surroundings, I had not heard Zizi cough! That was it! Zizi, the poor little girl in the adjoining room,—behind that door against which my armoire stands,—who for three months past has scarcely left the house, but has coughed, coughed, coughed perpetually: so that every night I have fallen asleep, and every morning wakened, and every day pursued my indoor occupations, to that distressing sound. Oh, our life is not all cakes and ale, here in the Quarter; we have our ennuis, as well as the rest of mankind; and when we are too poor to change our lodgings, we must be content to abide in patience—whatever sounds our neighbours choose to make.
At all events, so it came to pass that the sight of Madame Germaine, in her soiled finery, cleared up my problem for me: Zizi had not coughed. And I said to myself, “Ah, the poor little thing is better, and is spending the day out of doors.” (It has been a lovely day, soft as April, though in midwinter; and my inference, therefore, was not overdrawn.) “And Madame Germaine,” I proceeded rapidly, “has come to see her; and finding her away, has looked in on me.”
Meanwhile my visitor stood still, just within the threshold, and gazed solemnly, almost reproachfully, at me with her big protruding eyes: eyes that, protruding always far more than enough, seemed now, swollen by recent weeping, fairly ready to leave their sockets. What had she been crying for, I wondered. Then I began our conversation with a cheery “Zizi isn’t there?”
“Ah, m’sieu! Ah, la pauv’ Zizi!”! was her response, in a sort of hysterical gasp; and two fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, making further havoc of her rouge. She took a few steps forward, and sank into my arm-chair. “La pauv’ petite!” she sobbed, I was puzzled, of course, and a little troubled. “What is it? What is the matter?” I asked. “Zizi isn’t worse, surely? I haven’t heard her cough all day.”
“Oh, no, m’sieu, she isn’t worse. Oh, no, she—she is dead.”
I don’t need to recount any more of my interview with Madame Germaine, though it lasted a good half-hour longer, and was sufficiently vivacious. I can’t describe to you the shock her announcement caused me, nor the chill and despondency that have been growing on me ever since. Zizi—dead? Zizi and Death!—the notions are too awfully incongruous. I look at the door that separates our rooms,—the door athwart which, in former times, I have heard so many bursts of laughter, snatches of song, when Zizi would be entertaining her——she called them “friends;” and, latterly, that hacking, unyielding cough of hers,—I look at the door, and a sort of cold and blackness seems to creep in from its edges; and then I fancy the darkened chamber beyond it, with the open window, and Zizi’s little form stretched on the bed, stark and dead,—poor little chirping, chattering, ribald Zizi! Oh, it is ghastly. And all her trumpery, twopenny fripperies round about her, their occupation gone: her sham jewels, and her flounces, and her tawdry furs and laces, and her powder-puffs and rouge-pots—though it was only towards the end that Zizi took to rouge. It is as if they were to tell you that a doll is dead: can such things die? They are not wholly inhuman, then?