“You know,” I went on, “I can’t believe we’ve lost her. Seems to me she’s with us. I let myself think of her too much. I can’t help it. I loved her. God, how I loved her! I never loved any one else like that.”
She looked at me piteously, but I did not see.
And next day, in a pouring rain, I walked to the cemetery and stood for an hour by an almost indistinguishable little grave. I got back, as they say, “wet as the soup,” and contracted a severe chill. Anastasia made me stay in bed, and looked after me like a mother.
Yes, these were sad days; and there were times when I felt moved to own defeat, to acknowledge success, to accept, the fortune I had gained. Then I ground my teeth.
“No, I won’t. I’m hanged if I do. I’ll play the game, and in spite of it all I’ll win.”
CHAPTER II
THE DARKEST HOUR
The past month has been the hardest we have yet experienced. After paying the rent we had about fifty francs to keep the house going. Not that it mattered much; for we both had such listless appetites and ate next to nothing. I refused to do any more pot-boiling work. For distraction I turned again to the study of the Quartier, to my browsings in its ancient by-ways. Amid these old streets that, like a knot of worms, cluster around the Pantheon, I managed to conjure up many a ghost of bygone Bohemia. As a result I began a series of three papers which I called Demi-gods in the Dust. They were devoted to the last sad days of De Musset, Verlaine and Wilde, those strong souls whose liaisons with the powers of evil plunged them to the utter depths.
The rue Gracieuse, where we reside, is probably one of the least gracious streets of Paris. Its lower end is grubbily respectable, its upper, glaringly disreputable. It is in the latter we have our room. The houses are small, old, mean, dirty. There are four drinking dens, and the cobbles ring to the clang of wooden shoes. The most prominent building is a hôtel meublé, a low, leprous edifice with two windows real, and four false. The effect of these dummy windows painted on the stone is oddly sinister. Underneath is a drinking den of unsavoury size, and opposite an old junk shop. At night the street is feebly lit by two gas lamps that sprout from the wall.
Luckily, our window faces the rue Monge. If it fronted on the rue Saint-Médard we should be unable to live there, for the rue Saint-Médard, in spite of the apostolic nomenclature, is probably the most disgusting street in Paris.
It is old, three hundred years or more, and the houses that engloom it are black, corroded and decrepit. Its lower end is blocked by the aforesaid hostel of the blind windows, its upper is narrow and wry-necked where the Hôtel des Bons Garçons bulges into it. Between the two is a dim, verminous gulf of mildewed masonry. The timid, well-dressed person pauses on its threshold and turns back. For the police seldom trouble it, and the stranger parsing through has a sense of being in some desperate cul-de-sac, and at the mercy of a villainous, outlawed population. They crawl to their doors to stare resentfully at the intruder, often call harshly after him, and sometimes stand right in the way, with an insolent, provocative leer. A glance round shows that other figures have cut off the retreat from behind, and for a moment one has a sense of being trapped. It is quite a relief to gain the comparative security of the rue Mouffetard.