This was the only reference to Cora made by either of them, and the promise actually restored Jean’s peace of mind.
Oh yes! he realised clearly now, poor fellow, that there must be “many things that he did not know about yet,” that there must be—commonplaces, no doubt, to people moving in a social sphere more sophisticated than his own—instances of cold-blooded, subtle perversity, outside the scope of his imagination.
Little by little, moreover, he grew fond of this friend, whom he could not understand; this friend once cynical, but now grown kind, who regarded life with inexplicable serenity and light-heartedness, and who had come to offer him his protection as an officer, by way of amends for the suffering he had caused him.
But Jean had no wish for protection; neither promotion nor anything else appealed to him any longer; his heart, so young still, was filled with the bitterness of this first agony of despair.
XXI
... It was at Dame Virginie-Scholastique’s. (Missionaries sometimes have veritable inspirations in naming their neophytes.) It was one in the morning; the tavern showed large and dark. As is usual with places of ill-repute, it was closed with thick doors, reinforced with iron.
A small evil-smelling lamp shed its light on a jumbled litter of objects, crowded painfully together in the dense atmosphere—red jackets and bare, black flesh, weird entanglements, broken glasses and broken bottles on the table and on the ground; red caps, negro bon-bons, spahis’ sabres, all in floods of beer and alcohol. The temperature of the hovel was that of a vapour bath. The heat was maddening, the atmosphere dense with black, or milky, smoke, and with the odours of absinthe, musk, spices, soumaré, sweat of negroes.
It must have been a hilarious revel, and surpassingly uproarious, but now it was over. There was an end to the songs and the racket. Now followed the period of reaction, of stupefaction that comes after drinking. The spahis were there, some of them dull-eyed, resting their foreheads on the table, and smiling vacuously. Others still preserved their dignity, bracing themselves against intoxication, still holding their heads erect—handsome faces with strong features, the lustreless eyes retaining their seriousness with an indescribable expression of melancholy and loathing.
Distributed among them, haphazard, was Virginie-Scholastique’s whole pack of little twelve-year-old negro girls and small negro boys.
Outside a listening ear could hear in the distance the cry of jackals prowling around the cemetery of Sorr, where for some of those now here there were places already marked out beneath the sand.