“There are moments,” answered Jean, “when one loses his head, and afterwards I don’t say one should not have regrets.”
“For the matter of losing one’s head, I know only one thing: It is that they pay you, and it is up to you always to obey whatever they command.”
The mother watched the chocolate, from which the steam rose with a warmth of strong nutriment. They loved that in the family, like a Sunday morning indulgence, like a bourgeois chocolate for holiday folk. She said, “Anyhow, let it be as it will, he’s got to eat.”
Jean went on to speak. His blue eyes had undergone the first transformation which comes in a man’s life, when he is no longer Jean, son of Pierre, pupil at the Central school, but Jean Bousset, engineer of applied chemistry. There remained in them, however, the shining of a young girl, that emotion which wakens two rays of sunlight in a spring. And now they kept a sort of supplication, like the sweetness of a naked infant.
“Oh, I know everything that you are going to say. You cannot excuse me, because you are not in my place, and I cannot condemn a movement of my heart. You know—I wrote it to you—the workers were about to go on strike. At once I said to myself that these were matters which did not concern me; because, when you are taking care of yourself, it is not necessary to look any farther. But Cousin François explained it all to me.”
“Ah, I told you so!” cried Pierre Bousset. “When you wanted to take Cousin François into your factory, I said to you: ‘Relatives, it is necessary always to keep them at a distance. They push themselves forward, and sometimes, to excuse them one is led to commit whole heaps of lowness.’”
“In truth,” said Jean, “I would never have had to complain of him. On the contrary, he wore his heart on his sleeve.”
“Oh, all drunkards are like that. One says: ‘They wear their hearts on their sleeve,’ and one does not count all the times when they lead the others away.”
“Ah, I have understood many things, father. How can I explain everything that I have understood! There are moments still when, to see and to realize—that makes in my head a noise as if the world would not stay in place. I tell you again it was François who made me understand. I saw, in the evenings. I would say to him: ‘I am bored, I haven’t even a comrade, and I eat at hotel-tables a dinner too well served.’ He said: ‘Come to my house. You don’t know what it is to eat good things, because you don’t work, and because hunger makes a part of work. You will have some soup with us, and we will tell you at least that you are happy to be where you are, and to look upon the workingman while playing the amateur.’ I said to him: ‘But I work, also. To see, to understand, to analyze, to be an engineer! You, it’s your arms; me, it’s my head and my heart that ache.’ He laughed: ‘Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! When I come home in the evening with my throat dry and I eat my soup, I also have a headache, and I laugh at you with your heart-ache. I am as tired as a wolf. What’s that you call your heart?’”
“Yes, he was right there,” said Pierre Bousset. “For my part, I don’t understand at all how you are going to pull through. You have understood a lot of things! As for me, I understand but one thing, which is you are unhappy over being too happy.”