"Forbidden? Do you not know that I am the valet de ces dames?"
Have you ever seen a gendarme crumple?
IV
Twenty degrees, twenty-two degrees, twenty-five degrees of frost. A clear blue sky, brilliant sunshine, a snow-bound world.
"Pas chaud," people would declare as they came shivering into our room. Not hot! Are the French never positive? I think only when it rains, and then they do commit themselves to a "quel vilain temps."
The ice on the windows, even at the sunny side of the house, refused to thaw; the water pipes froze. Not a drop of water in the house, everything solid. Madame put a little coke stove under the tap, and King Frost laughed aloud. The tap thawed languidly, then froze again, and remained frozen. A week, two, three weeks went by. Happily there was water in the cellar.
It was ennuyant, certainly, to be obliged to fetch all the water in pails across the small garden, through the hall and up the stairs, but Madame endured it, as she endured the chilblains that tortured her feet, and the nipping cold of her kitchen. Even the frost could not harden her bubbling good humour.
King Frost gripped the world in firmer fingers, the sun grew more brilliant, the sky more blue. The Canal froze, the lock gates were ice palaces, the streets and roads invitations to death or permanent disablement. Still Madame endured. A morning came when the cold stripped the flesh from our bones, and we shook as with an ague. The Common-room door opened, desolation was upon us. Madame staggered in, fell upon a chair and, lifting up her voice, wept aloud. She was désolée. For two hours she had laboured in the cellar, she had lighted the réchaud (the little stove), she had poured boiling water over the tap, she had prayed, she had invoked the Saints and Pappa, but the water would not come. Pas une goutte! And every pipe in the Quartier was frozen, there was no water left in all the ice-bound world.
Madame in tears! Madame in a crise de nerfs! She who had coped with disasters that left us gibbering imbeciles, and had laughed her way through vicissitudes that reduced me, at least, to the intelligent level of a nerveless jelly-fish! We nearly had a crise de nerfs ourselves, but happily some hot tea was forthcoming, hot tea which in France is not a beverage, but an infusion—like tilleul, you know—and with that we pulled ourselves together. We also resuscitated Madame, whose long vigil in the cellar had frozen her as nearly solid as the pipes. Later on, she complained of feeling ill, un peu souffrante. Asked to describe her symptoms, she said she had "l'estomac embarrassé." Before so mysterious a disease we wilted. But the loan of a huge marmite from the Canteen restored her; there was water in the deep well in the Park, Pappa would take the marmite on the brouette and bring back supplies for the house. He brought them. As the marmite made its heavy way up the stairs, some one asked where the queer smell came from.