After a moment’s waiting, the door was flung open by a coarse, red-faced, slatternly woman standing in a poverty-stricken little vestibule. She looked at the girl with curiously glazed eyes and slightly swayed as she put up a hand to dishevelled hair.
“Vous désirez?”
“Monsieur Fortinbras,” gasped Félise, scared by the abominable apparition.
“Monsieur Fortinbras?” She mimicked the girl’s clear accent.
“Oui, madame,” replied Félise.
Whereupon the woman withered her with a sudden volley of drunken abuse. She knew how Fortinbras occupied himself all day long. She did not complain. But when the gonzesses of the rive gauche had the indecency to come to his house, she would very soon put them across her knee and teach them manners. This is but a paraphrase of what fell upon Félise’s terror-stricken ears. It fell like an avalanche; but it did not last long, for suddenly came a voice well known but pitched in an unfamiliar key of anger:
“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”
And Fortinbras appeared.
As he caught sight of his daughter’s white face, he clapped his hands to his head and reeled back, horror in his eyes. Then:
“Tais-toi!” he thundered, and seizing the woman masterfully by the arms, he pushed her into some inner room, leaving Félise shaking on the threshold. In a moment or two he re-appeared, caught overcoat and old silk hat from a peg, and motioning Félise back, marched out of his home and slammed the door behind him. Father and daughter were now in the neutral ground at the end of the dim, malodorous passage.