At last, through the mediation of Sylvie's customers, she found a few foreigners. She gave lessons in conversation to some Americans who treated her kindly and occasionally invited her to drive in their carriages, though they offered her an absurd remuneration, never even thinking that they ought to have paid her more. They did not hesitate to give a hundred francs for a pair of shoes, while for an hour of French they would pay a franc. (It was not impossible in those days to find people who would give lessons for fifty centimes!) Annette, who did not have the right to be exacting as yet, refused to accept this shameful treatment. But after having sought far and wide, she could find nothing better. The well-to-do bourgeoisie who, under the eye of public opinion, are willing to spend whatever is demanded for the education of their children when the teaching is public, sordidly exploit instructors in their own households. There no one sees you. You are dealing with people who are too humble to resist: for one who refuses there are ten who beg you to accept them!
Isolated, without experience, Annette was in a poor position to protect herself. But she had the practical instinct of the Rivières and she had her pride, and they would not accept the humiliating wages to which others yielded. She was not of the whining sort who complain and give in. She did not complain and she did not give in. And in the face of all expectation this attitude was successful. The human species is cowardly; Annette had a calm, rather haughty way of saying no that cut short all bargaining; people did not dare to treat her as they would have treated others, and she obtained conditions that were rather more favorable. Not greatly so. She had to go through many weary hours to earn what she spent every day. Her pupils were scattered in remote quarters, and this was before the time of the autobusses and the metro in Paris. When she came home in the evening, her feet ached and her shoes were worn out. But she was robust, and it gave her a sense of satisfaction to experience the life of toil for one's daily bread. To earn her bread was a new adventure for Annette. When she was successful in one of those little duels of the will with her exploiters, she was as well pleased with her day as a gambler who, in the pleasure of what he has won, forgets the insignificance of the stake. She learned to see men better. It was not always a pleasant sight. But everything is worth learning. She came into contact with the obscure world of toil. But her contacts were inadequate and without depth. If wealth isolates, poverty isolates no less. Every one is caught fast in his difficulties and his effort, and he sees in others not so much brothers in misery as rivals whose fortune is made at the expense of his own.
Annette divined this feeling in the women with whom she found herself thrown, and she understood it; for she was a privileged being among them. If she worked in order not to be a charge upon her sister, her sister was none the less there; she was safe from the danger of destitution. She did not know that feverish uncertainty about to-morrow. She had her child to enjoy; no one was trying to take him away from her. How compare her lot with that of this woman whose story she had learned—a teacher who had been dismissed because she, like Annette, had had the hardihood to be a mother. It was true that she had been tolerated at first on condition that she kept her maternity secret. Exiled in a post of disgrace, in the depths of the country, she had had to separate from the child of her own flesh. But she could not keep herself from running to him when he was ill. The secret was out, and the virtuous countryside made ferocious sport of her. The authorities of the university of course upheld the popular decree and threw into the street the two rebels against the code. And it was with them that Annette was disputing their meagre livelihood. She took care not to apply for the position which the other woman was seeking. But she was chosen. Just because she sought positions less eagerly, because she had less need of them. People have little respect for those who are hungry. And then the poor souls whom she supplanted treated her as an intruder who was robbing them. They knew they were unjust; but it is comforting to be unjust when you are a victim of injustice. Annette became familiar with that greatest of all wars—the war of the workers, not against nature or circumstances, nor against the rich for taking their bread away from them—the war of the workers against the workers who are snatching the bread from each other, the crumbs that have fallen from the table of the rich or from that sordid Crœsus, the State. That is the misery of miseries, most felt by women, and especially those of to-day. For they are still incapable of organization. They remain in the state of primitive warfare, the individual against the individual; instead of pooling their difficulties, they multiply them.
Annette hardened herself, and although her heart bled her eyes were aflame with joy. She strode on, sustained in her ungrateful work by its novelty, the energy she had to spend—and the thought of her child, which illumined the whole day.
[XII]
Marc spent the day in Sylvie's workshop. Aunt Victorine had flickered out shortly after they were settled. She had not been able to survive the ruin of the old home, the loss of the old furniture, the habits of a peaceful half-century. Since Annette was out of the house till evening, Sylvie took charge of the child. He was the darling of the workshop, petted by the customers and the workers, rummaging about on all fours, sitting under a table, collecting hooks and eyes and scraps of chiffon, winding skeins of silk, rolling balls, stuffing himself with sweets and smothered with kisses. He was a little boy of three or four, with golden auburn hair like Annette's, and he had been rather pale ever since his illness. Life for him was a perpetual spectacle. Sylvie could remember her own first experiences when, sitting under her mother's counter, she had listened to the customers. But the great personages, from the tops of their stilts, have too utterly different a field of vision to know what catches the eyes of a child. And its rosy ears. . . . There was quite enough to keep them busy in the workshop! Every tongue was loosened, laughing, bold, brazen. Prudery was no weakness of Sylvie and her flock. Plenty of laughing, plenty of gossip, makes the needle fly. No one thought of the child. Was it possible that he understood? He did not understand (in all probability), but he grasped things, he let nothing escape him. The child collected everything, touched everything, tasted everything. Woe to whatever lay in his way! Sprawling under a chair, he put in his mouth whatever fell from above, scraps of biscuit, buttons, fruit-stones; and he also put words there. Without knowing what they meant. Exactly, in order to find out! And he munched away and sang.
"Little pig!"
An apprentice would snatch from his fingers a ribbon he was sucking, or perhaps experimentally burying in his nose. But no one took from him the words he had swallowed. He was doing nothing with them for the present; there was nothing he could do with them. But they were not lost.
Routed out from under the furniture and the petticoats, where he was absorbed in curious studies of the fidgeting feet and the imprisoned toes curled up in their shoes, dragged back to the conventions, to his normal position in the world of grown-ups, he would remain motionless, soberly seated on a low stool between Sylvie's legs. Or, since his aunt rarely kept still, between some other pair of knees. He would lean his cheek against the warm cloth and watch, with his nose in the air and his head thrown back, those bending faces with their puckered eyes, their quick, shining, moving pupils, those mouths, biting the thread; he saw the saliva and the lower lips—they seemed to be the upper ones—gnawed by the teeth, the undersides of the nostrils, covered with little red streaks and trembling as the words came, and the fingers that flew with their needles. Suddenly a hand would tickle his chin: there was a thimble at the end of it that gave him a cold feeling in his neck. Here, as ever, nothing was lost on him; these warm and cold contacts, this downy glow, these lights that reddened and these shadows that turned to amber the bits of living flesh, yes, and this feminine odor. . . . He was certainly not aware of it himself, but that multiple consciousness, that many-faceted consciousness which is spread about the whole periphery of a child, registered everything that passed over its little printer's-roller. . . . These women never suspected that their images, complete from head to foot, were being imprinted on this little sensitive plate. But he saw them only fragmentarily: pieces were missing, as in a puzzle in which the parts are mixed up. From this resulted his strange, fleeting preferences, as lively as they were varied, which seemed capricious but were really due to his deep-seated predisposition. A clever person might have said what it was in each of these women that attracted him. He was like a regular household pet: it was the gentleness of the hands rather than the whole person that he liked. And it was the totality of these sweetnesses, the home, the workshop. He was frankly an egoist. (And rightfully: the little builder has to assemble his ego first of all.) A sincere egoist, even in his blandishments. For he was blandishing: he wanted to please and he enjoyed giving pleasure, but only to those whom he had chosen.
From the very beginning his great favorite had been Sylvie. The instinct of the domestic animal in him had at once perceived that she was the god of the household, the master who dispensed food and kisses and was responsible for the tone of the day, and whom it was a good thing to propitiate. But it was better still to be propitiated by her. And the child had observed that this privilege had been accorded to him. It never occurred to him that it might not be deserved. Thus he received without surprise but with satisfaction the agreeable and flattering homage that was rendered to him by the sovereign of the workshop. Sylvie spoiled him, adored him, went into ecstasies over his gestures, his steps, his words, his intelligence, his beauty, his mouth, his eyes, his nose; she held him up to the admiration of her customers and preened herself on his account as if he had been her own chick.