Complete Works of Emile Zola (765 page)

‘It’s a sorry bargain you are making, my poor child. You don’t know what a very old man I am. Still, if you really wish it—’

The dinner was wildly gay. They all talked at once, and made all kinds of plans for the future, as though they were now meeting for the first time. Véronique, who had just come into the room as the engagement was being announced, went back into the kitchen and banged the door after her without saying a single word. When the dessert was laid upon the table, their noisy gaiety toned down a little and they began to talk about matters more seriously. Madame Chanteau said that the marriage could not take place for another two years, for she should prefer them to wait till Pauline was fully of age, so that there might be no risk of any suspicion that any advantage had been taken of her youth. Pauline looked aghast at this announcement of two years’ delay, but her aunt’s sense of honour touched her deeply, and she got up from her chair to go and kiss her. A date for the wedding was fixed; the two young people would have to learn to be patient, and meanwhile they would also be earning the first portion of their future millions. No doubt at all was felt as to their ultimate great wealth.

‘Pull out the drawer, aunt dear,’ said Pauline, ‘and give him as much money as ever he wants. It is as much his as mine now.’

But Madame Chanteau would not hear of this.

‘No, indeed. Not a single sou of it shall be spent un­necessarily. You know you can fully trust me for that, and I would rather have my right hand cut off than that you should be a loser. You want ten thousand francs for the works. Well, those ten thousand francs I will give you, and the rest I will keep tightly locked up. Not a sou of it shall be touched.’

‘With ten thousand francs,’ said Lazare, ‘I am quite certain of success. All the heavy expenses are already paid, and it would really be wicked not to go on with it now. You will see presently. And you, my dear, I will have you dressed in a robe of cloth-of-gold like a queen on our wedding-day.’

Their happiness and gaiety were increased by the un­expected arrival of Doctor Cazenove. He had just been attending to the injuries of a fisherman, who had crushed his fingers underneath a boat, and the family insisted upon his remaining with them and having some tea. The great news did not appear to surprise him; but, as he heard the Chanteaus launching out enthusiastically in praise of the sea-weed scheme, he glanced uneasily at Pauline, and said:

‘Yes, no doubt the idea is ingenious and worth a trial. But a safe investment in stock is better. If I were you, I should prefer being happy at once in a quiet sort of way—’

He stopped short on seeing a shadow pass over the young girl’s face, and the warm affection which he felt for her induced him to speak against his own convictions.

‘But money is very pleasant to have; so, perhaps, you had better make a lot of it. And I will certainly come and dance at the wedding. I will dance the Zambuco of the Caribbeans, a dance I don’t suppose you ever heard of. You stretch out your arms like the sails of a windmill, and then keep striking your thighs as you dance round a captive, while he is being cut up and cooked by the women.’

The months flew past. Pauline regained all her old placid cheerfulness. Doubt and uncertainty were the only things that could seriously trouble her candid and frank nature. The confession of her love and the fixing of a date for her marriage with Lazare seemed to have put an end to the disturbing feelings that had assailed her. Her engage­ment caused little difference in her relations with Lazare; they both led their old life of familiar companionship; he ever busily engaged in the advancement of his great scheme, and quite protected from sudden passion by his former adventures in Paris, and she so simple and pure-minded in her virginity and knowledge that she was shielded as by a double wall of protection.

Sometimes, indeed, they would take each other by the hand, in that big disorderly room, and lovingly smile at one another; and while they read together some treatise on Marine Botany their heads would perhaps rest tenderly against each other; or, as they examined some flask brown with bromine or some purple specimen of iodine, Pauline would lean gently against Lazare, or bend down over the instruments that littered the table and piano and bring her face near to his, or ask him to lift her up so that she might reach the topmost shelf of the cupboard. But at those moments there was nothing beyond decorous permissible tenderness, such as might have been manifested openly before the members of their family. Madame Chanteau herself said that they behaved in an extremely proper and sensible manner; and when Louise arrived, with all her pretty airs and graces, Pauline did not exhibit the slightest jealousy.

A whole year passed away in this fashion. The works were now in operation, and the worries which arose kept Pauline and Lazare from thinking about anything else. The new appliances had been set up after considerable difficulty, and the first results seemed excellent. Certainly the yield was slight, but when the system should be brought to greater perfection, and all care and energy should be shown, there was no doubt that they would quickly reach an enor­mous output. Boutigny had already found great openings for their products; more than they could supply, indeed. Success and fortune seemed ensured, and this apparent certainty carried them off their heads. From their former despondency they now rushed to the other extreme, casting money by handfuls into extensions and alterations of the works, and never feeling the least doubt that they would find it all again, melted into a huge golden ingot. Every fresh outlay seemed only to urge them on to another.

On the first few occasions Madame Chanteau refused to take any money from the drawer without notifying Pauline.

‘There are some payments to be made on Saturday, my dear,’ she would say. ‘Will you come with me upstairs, and settle what scrip we shall sell?’

‘Oh! there’s no occasion for that, aunt,’ Pauline would reply. ‘You can settle that yourself.’

‘No, my dear, you know that I never do anything without consulting you. It is your money.’

In time, however, Madame Chanteau grew less rigid in this respect. One evening Lazare told her of a debt which he had concealed from Pauline, five thousand francs spent on copper pipes which had not even been used. She had only just returned from a visit to the drawer with her niece, so she went upstairs again by herself, on seeing the despair her son was in, and took out the extra five thousand francs, on a solemn promise that he would repay them out of the first profits.

But from that day her old strictness departed, and she began to take scrip out of the drawer without consulting Pauline. She found it a little unpleasant and humiliating, too, at her age, to be continually consulting a mere child, and she rebelled against doing so. The money would all be paid back to Pauline; and, even if it did belong to her, that was no reason why one should never be able to make the slightest move without obtaining her permission. So from this time she ceased to insist on Pauline accompanying her on her visits to the secrétaire. Pauline was really happier in consequence, for, in spite of her kind and generous heart, those constant withdrawals of money perturbed her. Her common-sense began to warn her of the probability of a catastrophe, and the feelings of prudence and economy which she had inherited from her mother were now roused in opposition to all the reckless expenditure. At first she was surprised at Madame Chanteau’s silence, for she felt sure that the money was going the same way as before, with the one difference that she was not being consulted about it. After a little time, however, she felt that she preferred it to be so. It, at any rate, saved her the grief of seeing the bundle of papers grow smaller at each visit to the drawer. Between herself and her aunt there was but a quick exchange of glances at certain times; a steady anxious gaze on the girl’s part, when she guessed some further abstraction, and a vacillating look from Madame Chanteau, who felt irritated that she should be obliged to turn away her head. Thus bitterness and dislike began to arise between them.

That year, unfortunately, Davoine became a bankrupt. Though the disaster had been foreseen, it was none the less a terrible blow for the Chanteaus. They still had their three thousand francs a year arising from their investments in stock; and all that they were able to save from the wreck of the timber business, some twelve thousand francs, was at once invested, so as to bring their total income up to three hundred francs a month. In the second fortnight Madame Chanteau was driven to take fifty francs of Pauline’s money. The butcher from Verchemont was waiting with his bill, and she could not send him away without paying him. Then there were fifty francs wanted to pay for a washing-machine, and ten more for potatoes, and even fifty sous for fish. She came to the point of supplying the needs of Lazare and the works in wretched little sums, which she doled out day by day. Towards the end of each month she was often to be seen stealthily disappearing and then coming back again with her hand in her pocket, from which she reluctantly drew forth sou after sou, to make up the amount of a bill. The habit quickly grew upon her, and she soon depended entirely upon the contents of the drawer, helping herself to the money, whenever occasion required, without any hesitation. When she opened the lid of the secrétaire, however, that old piece of furniture would give a slight creak which used to affect her unpleasantly. The stupid old thing, she would say to herself. To think that during all those years she had never been able to buy a decent desk! The poor old secrétaire, which, when it had contained a fortune, had seemed to impart an air of wealth and gaiety to the house, now only irritated her, and she looked upon it as the abode of every evil, diffusing misfortune from every chink.

One evening Pauline ran into the house from the yard, crying, ‘The baker’s here! He says we owe him three days’ bread, two francs and eighty-five centimes.’

Madame Chanteau began to fumble in her pockets.

‘I shall have to go upstairs,’ she murmured.

‘Stay here,’ said the young girl carelessly. ‘I will go for you. Where’s your money?’

‘No, no, I’ll go myself. You would never find it. It is put away.’

Madame Chanteau stammered out these words, and she and Pauline exchanged a silent glance, at which they both grew pale. There was a moment of painful hesitation, and then the aunt went upstairs, quite shivering with suppressed anger, and feeling sure that her ward knew perfectly well where she was going to get those two francs eighty-five centimes. Why, she asked herself, had she always insisted upon her presence when taking the money from the drawer? The memory of her old scrupulous probity quite angered her now, convinced as she was that her niece was follow­ing her in imagination, and watching her as she opened the drawer, took out the money, and then closed the secrétaire again. After she had come downstairs and paid the baker, her anger vented itself in an attack upon the girl.

‘Good gracious! what a state your dress is in! What have you be doing with yourself? You have been drawing water for the kitchen, surely. Eh? Be good enough to let Véronique do her own work, if you please. Upon my word, I believe you have gone out of your way on purpose to make a mess of yourself. You seem to have no idea that your clothes cost money. I don’t get so much for your keep that it is easy to make both ends meet!’

And so she went on. Pauline had at first made some slight attempt to defend herself, but she soon refrained, and listened to her aunt in silence, with an aching heart. She was quite conscious that the other’s affection for her had been on the wane for some time, and when she was alone with Véronique she often gave way to tears. At those times the servant would rattle the saucepans and affect to be very busy, in order to excuse herself from taking notice or siding with one party or the other. Although she was con­tinually growling at Pauline, she was now beginning to feel some qualms of conscience and to doubt whether the girl was receiving fair treatment.

When the winter came round again, Lazare grew quite despondent. Once again his whim had changed; he began to hate the works. There had been fresh pecuniary embarrass­ments in November, and he had fallen into a perfect state of panic. He had got over previous worries, but this one seemed to reduce him to despair, to render him hopeless of every­thing; and he began to revile science. The idea of making anything out of sea-weed was ridiculous! They might improve their system as much as they liked, but they would never be able to drag out of Nature anything that Nature didn’t want them to have. He even fell foul of his master, the great Herbelin himself, who, having been good enough to visit the works at Golden Bay, had seemed quite distressed by all the elaborate appliances, which, he said, were perhaps on too large a scale to yield the results which had been obtained with careful small experiments in his own laboratory. The truth of the matter was, that, except in laboratory experiments on a small scale, no means was yet known of maintaining the low temperature which was necessary for the crystallisa­tion of the various substances. Lazare had, indeed, succeeded in extracting a certain quantity of bromide of potassium from sea-weed, but, as he could not sufficiently isolate the four or five other bodies mingled with it, the result was failure. He felt quite sick of the whole business, and confessed himself beaten. One evening, when Madame Chanteau and Pauline besought him to be calm and to make one last effort, there came a very painful scene, when unkind recriminations were indulged in, bitter tears shed, and doors banged with such noisy violence that poor old Chanteau jumped up in his arm-chair in sheer fright.

‘You will end by killing me!’ the young man screamed, as he rushed away and locked himself up in his room, com­pletely overcome by childish despair.

At breakfast-time the next morning he brought down with him a paper covered over with figures. Out of Pauline’s hundred and eighty thousand francs, nearly a hundred thousand were already gone. Was there any sense in wasting more money? It would all be lost. He was still under the influence of the previous evening’s alarm. His mother, too, now seemed inclined to back him up. She had never been able to go against him and vex him, even in his faults. It was only Pauline who still tried to discuss the matter. The announcement of the expenditure of those hundred thousand francs quite dazed her. What! they had taken more than half her fortune, and those hundred thousand francs would be utterly lost if they did not try to struggle on! But her arguments and persuasions were all in vain, and she went on talking to no purpose till Véronique had cleared the table. Then, to avoid breaking out into reproaches against them, she rushed off to her own room, quite sick at heart.