THE BLUE CHAMBER
To Madame de la Rhune
A young man was walking up and down the waiting-room of a railway station, in an agitated condition. He wore blue spectacles, and, although he had not a cold, he used his pocket-handkerchief incessantly. He held a little black bag in his left hand which, as I learnt later, contained a silk dressing-gown and a pair of Turkish pantaloons.
Every now and again he went to the door and looked into the street, then he drew out his watch and consulted the station clock. The train did not leave for an hour; but there are people who always imagine they will be late. This train was not for people in a pressing hurry; there were very few first-class carriages on it. It was not an hour at which stock-brokers left, after business was finished, to go to their country homes for dinner. When travellers began to appear, a Parisian would have recognised from their bearing that they were either farmers, or small suburban tradesmen. Nevertheless, every time anyone came into the station, or a carriage drew up at the door, the heart of the young man with the blue spectacles became inflated like a balloon, his knees trembled, his bag almost fell from his hands, and his glasses off his nose, where, we may mention in passing, they were seated crookedly.
His agitation increased when, after a long wait, a woman appeared by a side door, from precisely the direction in which he had not kept a constant look-out. She was dressed in black with a thick veil over her face, and she held a brown morocco leather bag in her hand, containing, as I subsequently discovered, a wondrous morning-gown and blue satin slippers. The woman and the young man advanced towards each other looking to right and left, but never in front of them. They came up to one another, shook hands, and stood several minutes without speaking a word, trembling and gasping, a prey to one of those intense emotions for which I would give in exchange a hundred years of a philosopher's life.
"Léon," said the young woman, when she had summoned up courage to speak (I had forgotten to mention that she was young and pretty)—"Léon, what a happy thought! I should never have recognised you with those blue spectacles."
"What a happy thought!" said Léon. "I should never have known you under that black veil."
"What a happy thought!" she repeated. "Let us be quick and take our seats; suppose the train were to start without us!..." (and she squeezed his arm tightly). "No one will suspect us. I am now with Clara and her husband, on the way to their country house, where, to-morrow, I must say good-bye to her;... and," she added, laughing and lowering her head, "she left an hour ago; and to-morrow,... after passing the last evening with her,... (again she pressed his arm), to-morrow, in the morning, she will leave me at the station, where I shall meet Ursula, whom I sent on ahead to my aunt's.... Oh! I have arranged everything. Let us take our tickets.... They cannot possibly guess who we are. Oh! suppose they ask our names at the inn? I have forgotten them already...."
"Monsieur and Madame Duru."
"Oh no! Not Duru. There was a shoemaker called that at the pension."