Germinie Lacerteux

LXII

Amid Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's desperate anxiety concerning her maid's health, she became conscious of a strange feeling, a sort of fear in the presence of the new, unfamiliar, mysterious creature that sickness had made of Germinie. Mademoiselle had a sense of discomfort beside that hollow, ghostly face, which was almost unrecognizable in its implacable rigidity, and which seemed to return to itself, to recover consciousness, only furtively, by fits and starts, in the effort to produce a pallid smile. The old woman had seen many people die; her memories of many painful years recalled the expressions of many dear, doomed faces, of many faces that were sad and desolate and grief-stricken in death; but no face of all those she remembered had ever assumed, as the end drew near, that distressing expression of a face retiring within itself and closing the doors.

Enveloped in her suffering, Germinie maintained her savage, rigid, self-contained, impenetrable demeanor. She was as immovable as bronze. Mademoiselle, as she looked at her, asked herself what it could be that she brooded over thus without moving; whether it was her life rising in revolt, the dread of death, or a secret remorse for something in her past. Nothing external seemed to affect the sick woman. She was no longer conscious of things about her. Her body became indifferent to everything, did not ask to be relieved, seemed not to desire to be cured. She complained of nothing, found no pleasure or diversion in anything. Even her longing for affection had left her. She no longer made any motion to bestow or invite a caress, and every day something human left her body, which seemed to be turning to stone. Often she would bury herself in profound silence that made one expect a heart-rending shriek or word; but after glancing about the room, she would say nothing and begin again to stare fixedly, vacantly, at the same spot in space.

When mademoiselle returned from the friend's house with whom she dined, she would find Germinie in the dark, sunk in an easy-chair with her legs stretched out upon a chair, her head hanging forward on her breast, and so profoundly absorbed that sometimes she did not hear the door open. As she walked forward into the room it seemed to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil as if she were breaking in upon a ghastly tête-à-tête between Disease and the Shadow of Death, wherein Germinie was already seeking, in the terror of the Invisible, the blindness of the grave and the darkness of death.

LXIII

Throughout the month of October, Germinie obstinately refused to take to her bed. Each day, however, she was weaker and more helpless than the day before. She was hardly able to ascend the flight of stairs that led to her sixth floor, dragging herself along by the railing. One day she fell on the stairs: the other servants picked her up and carried her to her chamber. But that did not stop her; the next day she went downstairs again, with the fitful gleam of strength that invalids commonly have in the morning. She prepared mademoiselle's breakfast, made a pretence of working, and kept moving about the apartment, clinging to the chairs and dragging herself along. Mademoiselle took pity on her; she forced her to lie down on her own bed. Germinie lay there half an hour, an hour, wide awake, not speaking, but with her eyes open, fixed, and staring into vacancy like the eyes of a person in severe pain.

One morning she did not come down. Mademoiselle climbed to the sixth floor, turned into a narrow corridor in which the air was heavy with the odors from servants' water-closets and at last reached Germinie's door, No. 21. Germinie apologized for having compelled her to come up. It was impossible for her to put her feet out of the bed. She had terrible pains in her bowels and they were badly swollen. She begged mademoiselle to sit down a moment and, to make room for her, removed the candlestick that stood on the chair at the head of her bed.

Mademoiselle sat down and remained a few moments, looking about the wretched room, – one of those where the doctor has to lay his hat on the bed, and where there is barely room to die! It was a small attic room, without a chimney, with a scuttle window in the sloping roof, which admitted the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Old trunks, clothes bags, a foot-bath, and the little iron bedstead on which Germinie's niece had slept, were heaped up in a corner under the sloping roof. The bed, one chair, a little disabled washstand with a broken pitcher, comprised the whole of the furniture. Above the bed, in an imitation violet-wood frame, hung a daguerreotype of a man.

The doctor came during the day. "Aha! peritonitis," he said, when mademoiselle described Germinie's condition.

He went up to see the sick woman. "I am afraid," he said, when he came down, "that there's an abscess in the intestine communicating with an abscess in the bladder. It's a serious case, very serious. You must tell her not to move about much in her bed, to turn over with great care. She might die suddenly in horrible agony. I suggested to her to go to Lariboisière, – she agreed at once. She seemed to have no repugnance at all. But I don't know how she will bear the journey. However, she has such an unlimited stock of energy; I have never seen anything like it. To-morrow morning you shall have the order of admission."

When mademoiselle went up to Germinie's room again, she found her smiling in her bed, gay as a lark at the idea of going away.

"It's a matter of six weeks at most, mademoiselle," said she.

LXIV

At two o'clock the next day the doctor brought the order for her admission to Lariboisière. The invalid was ready to start. Mademoiselle suggested that they should send to the hospital for a litter. "Oh! no," said Germinie, hastily, "I should think I was dead." She was thinking of her debts; she must show herself to her creditors on the street, alive, and on her feet to the last!

She got out of bed. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil assisted her to put on her petticoat and her dress. As soon as she left her bed, all signs of life disappeared from her face, the flush from her complexion: it seemed as if earth suddenly took the place of blood under her skin. She went down the steep servants' stairway, clinging to the baluster, and reached her mistress's apartments. She sat down in an arm-chair near the window in the dining-room. She insisted upon putting on her stockings without assistance, and as she pulled them on with her poor trembling hands, the fingers striking against one another, she afforded a glimpse of her legs, which were so thin as to make one shudder. The housekeeper, meanwhile, was putting together in a bundle a little linen, a glass, a cup, and a pewter plate, which she wished to carry with her. When that was done, Germinie looked about her for a moment; she cast one last glance around the room, a glance that seemed to long to take everything away with her. Then, as her eyes rested on the door through which the housekeeper had just gone out, she said to mademoiselle: "At all events I leave a good woman with you."

She rose. The door closed noisily behind her, as if to say adieu, and, supported by Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who almost carried her, she went down the five flights of the main stairway. At every landing she paused to take breath. In the vestibule she found the concierge, who had brought her a chair. She fell into it. The vulgar fellow laughingly promised her that she would be well in six weeks. She moved her head slightly as she said yes, a muffled yes.

She was in the cab, beside her mistress. It was an uncomfortable cab and jolted over the pavements. She sat forward on the seat to avoid the concussion of the jolting, and clung to the door with her hand. She watched the houses pass, but did not speak. When they reached the hospital gate, she refused to be carried. "Can you walk as far as that?" said the concierge, pointing to the reception-room some sixty feet distant. She made an affirmative sign and walked: it was a dead woman walking, because she was determined to walk!

At last she reached the great hall, cold and stiff and clean and bare and horrible, with a circle of wooden benches around the waiting litter. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil led her to a straw chair near a glazed door. A clerk opened the door, asked Mademoiselle de Varandeuil Germinie's name and age, and wrote for a quarter of an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with a religious emblem at the top. That done, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her and turned to go; she saw an attendant take her under the arms, then she saw no more, but turned and fled, and, throwing herself upon the cushions of the cab, she burst into sobs and gave vent to all the tears with which her heart had been suffocated for an hour past. The driver on his box was amazed to hear such violent weeping.

LXV

On the visiting day, Thursday, mademoiselle started at half-past twelve to go and see Germinie. It was her purpose to be at her bedside at the moment the doors were thrown open, at one o'clock precisely. As she rode through the streets she had passed through four days before, she remembered the ghastly ride of Monday. It seemed to her as if she were incommoding a sick person in the cab, of which she was the only occupant, and she sat close in the corner in order to make room for the memory of Germinie. In what condition should she find her? Should she find her at all? Suppose her bed should be empty?

The cab passed through a narrow street filled with orange carts, and with women sitting on the sidewalk offering biscuit for sale in baskets. There was something unspeakably wretched and dismal in this open-air display of fruit and cakes, – the delicacies of the dying, the viaticum of invalids, craved by feverish mouths, longed for by the death-agony, – which workingmen's hands, black with toil, purchase as they pass, to carry to the hospital and offer death a tempting morsel. Children carried them with sober faces, almost reverentially, and without touching them, as if they understood.

The cab stopped before the gate of the courtyard. It was five minutes to one. There was a long line of women crowding about the gate, women with their working clothes on, sorrowful, depressed and silent. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil took her place in the line, went forward with the others and was admitted: they searched her. She inquired for Salle Sainte-Joséphine, and was directed to the second wing on the second floor. She found the hall and the bed, No. 14, which was, as she had been told, one of the last at the right. Indeed, she was guided thither, as it were, from the farther end of the hall, by Germinie's smile – the smile of a sick person in a hospital at an unexpected visit, which says, so gently, as soon as you enter the room: "Here I am."

She leaned over the bed. Germinie tried to push her away with a gesture of humility and the shamefacedness of a servant.

Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her.

"Ah!" said Germinie, "the time dragged terribly yesterday. I imagined it was Thursday and I longed so for you."

"My poor girl! How are you?"

"Oh! I'm getting on finely now – the swelling in my bowels has all gone. I have only three weeks to stay here, mademoiselle, you'll see. They talk about a month or six weeks, but I know better. And I'm very comfortable here, I don't mind it at all. I sleep all night now. My! but I was thirsty, when you brought me here Monday! They wouldn't give me wine and water."

"What have you there to drink?"

"Oh! what I had at home – lime-water. Would you mind pouring me out some, mademoiselle? their pewter things are so heavy!"

She raised herself with one arm by the aid of the little stick that hung over the middle of the bed, and putting out the other thin, trembling arm, left bare by the sleeve falling back from it, she took the glass mademoiselle held out to her, and drank.

"There," said she when she had done, and she placed both her arms outside the bed, on the coverlid.

"What a pity that I have to put you out in this way, my poor demoiselle!" she continued. "Things must be in a horribly dirty state at home!"

"Don't worry about that."

There was a moment's silence. A faint smile came to Germinie's lips. "I am sailing under false colors," she said, lowering her voice; "I have confessed so as to get well."

Then she moved her head on the pillow in order to bring her mouth nearer to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's ear:

"There are tales to tell here. I have a funny neighbor yonder." She indicated with a glance and a movement of her shoulder the patient to whom her back was turned. "There's a man who comes here to see her. He talked to her an hour yesterday. I heard them say they'd had a child. She has left her husband. He was like a madman, the man was, when he was talking to her."

As she spoke, Germinie's face lighted up as if she were still full of the scene of the day before, still stirred up and feverish with jealousy, so near death as she was, because she had heard love spoken of beside her!

Suddenly her expression changed. A woman came toward her bed. She seemed embarrassed when she saw Mademoiselle de Varandeuil. After a few moments, she kissed Germinie, and hurriedly withdrew as another woman came up. The new-comer did the same, kissed Germinie and at once took her leave. After the women a man came; then another woman. One and all, after a moment's conversation, leaned over Germinie to kiss her, and with every kiss Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could hear an indistinct murmur as of words exchanged; a whispered question from those who kissed, a hasty reply from her who was kissed.

"Well!" she said to Germinie, "I hope you are well taken care of!"

"Oh! yes," Germinie answered in a peculiar tone, "they take excellent care of me!"

She had lost the animation that she displayed at the beginning of the visit. The little blood that had mounted to her cheeks remained there in one spot only. Her face seemed closed; it was cold and deaf, like a wall. Her drawn-in lips were sealed, as it were. Her features were concealed beneath the veil of infinite dumb agony. There was nothing caressing or eloquent in her staring eyes, absorbed as they were and filled with one fixed thought. You would have said that all exterior signs of her ideas were drawn within her by an irresistible power of concentration, by a last supreme effort of her will, and that her whole being was clinging in desperation to a sorrow that drew everything to itself.

The visitors she had just received were the grocer, the fish-woman, the butter woman and the laundress – all her debts, incarnate! The kisses were the kisses of her creditors, who came to keep on the scent of their claims and to extort money from her death-agony!

LXVI

Mademoiselle had just risen on Saturday morning. She was making a little package of four jars of Bar preserves, which she intended to carry to Germinie the next day, when she heard low voices, a colloquy between the housekeeper and the concierge in the reception room. Almost immediately the door opened and the concierge came in.

"Sad news, mademoiselle," he said.

And he handed her a letter he had in his hand; it bore the stamp of the Lariboisière hospital: Germinie was dead; she died at seven o'clock that morning.

Mademoiselle took the letter; she saw only the letters that said: "Dead! dead!" And they repeated the word: "Dead! dead!" to no purpose, for she could not believe it. As is always the case with a person of whose death one learns abruptly, Germinie appeared to her instinct with life, and her body, which was no more, seemed to stand before her with the awe-inspiring presence of a ghost. Dead! She should never see her more! So there was no longer a Germinie on earth! Dead! She was dead! And the person she should hear henceforth moving about in the kitchen would not be she; somebody else would open the door for her, somebody else would potter about her room in the morning! "Germinie!" she cried at last, in the tone with which she was accustomed to call her; then, collecting her thoughts: "Machine! creature! What's your name?" she cried, savagely, to the bewildered housekeeper. "My dress – I must go there."

She was so taken by surprise by this sudden fatal termination of the disease, that she could not accustom her mind to the thought. She could hardly realize that sudden, secret, vague death, of which her only knowledge was derived from a scrap of paper. Was Germinie really dead? Mademoiselle asked herself the question with the doubt of persons who have lost a dear one far away, and, not having seen her die, do not admit that she is dead. Was she not still alive the last time she saw her? How could it have happened? How could she so suddenly have become a thing good for nothing except to be put under ground? Mademoiselle dared not think about it, and yet she kept on thinking. The mystery of the death-agony, of which she knew nothing, attracted and terrified her. The anxious interest of her affection turned to her maid's last hours, and she tried gropingly to take away the veil and repel the feeling of horror. Then she was seized with an irresistible longing to know everything, to witness, with the help of what might be told her, what she had not seen. She felt that she must know if Germinie had spoken before she died, – if she had expressed any desire, spoken of any last wishes, uttered one of those sentences which are the final outcry of life.

When she reached Lariboisière, she passed the concierge, – a stout man reeking with life as one reeks with wine, – passed through the corridors where pallid convalescents were gliding hither and thither, and rang at a door, veiled with white curtains, at the extreme end of the hospital. The door was opened: she found herself in a parlor, lighted by two windows, where a plaster cast of the Virgin stood upon an altar, between two views of Vesuvius, which seemed to shiver against the bare wall. Behind her, through an open door, came the voices of Sisters and little girls chattering together, a clamor of youthful voices and fresh laughter, the natural gayety of a cheery room where the sun frolics with children at play.

Mademoiselle asked to speak with the mother of Salle Sainte-Joséphine. A short, half-deformed Sister, with a kind, homely face, a face alight with the grace of God, came in answer to her request. Germinie had died in her arms. "She hardly suffered at all," the Sister told mademoiselle; "she was sure that she was better; she felt relieved; she was full of hope. About seven this morning, just as her bed was being made, she suddenly began vomiting blood, and passed away without knowing that she was dying." The Sister added that she had said nothing, asked for nothing, expressed no wish.

Mademoiselle rose, delivered from the horrible thoughts she had had. Germinie had been spared all the tortures of the death-agony that she had dreamed of. Mademoiselle was grateful for that death by the hand of God which gathers in the soul at a single stroke.

As she was going away an attendant came to her and said: "Will you be kind enough to identify the body?"

The body! The words gave mademoiselle a terrible shock. Without awaiting her reply, the attendant led the way to a high yellow door, over which was written: Amphitheatre. He knocked; a man in shirt sleeves, with a pipe in his mouth, opened the door and bade them wait a moment.

Mademoiselle waited. Her thoughts terrified her. Her imagination was on the other side of that awful door. She tried to anticipate what she was about to see. And her mind was so filled with confused images, with fanciful alarms, that she shuddered at the thought of entering the room, of recognizing that disfigured face among a number of others, if, indeed, she could recognize it! And yet she could not tear herself away; she said to herself that she should never see her again!

The man with the pipe opened the door: mademoiselle saw nothing but a coffin, the lid of which extended only to the neck, leaving Germinie's face uncovered, with the eyes open, and the hair erect upon her head.

LXVII

Prostrated by the excitement and by this last spectacle, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil took to her bed on returning home, after she had given the concierge the money for the purchase of a burial lot, and for the burial. And when she was in bed the things she had seen arose before her. The horrible dead body was still beside her, the ghastly face framed by the coffin. That never-to-be-forgotten face was engraved upon her mind; beneath her closed eyelids she saw it and was afraid of it. Germinie was there, with the distorted features of one who has been murdered, with sunken orbits and eyes that seemed to have withdrawn into their holes! She was there with her mouth still distorted by the vomiting that accompanied her last breath! She was there with her hair, her terrible hair, brushed back and standing erect upon her head!

Her hair! – that haunted mademoiselle more persistently than all the rest. The old maid thought, involuntarily, of things that had come to her ears when she was a child, of superstitions of the common people stored away in the background of her memory; she asked herself if she had not been told that dead people whose hair is like that carry a crime with them to the grave. And at times it was such hair as that that she saw upon that head, the hair of crime, standing on end with terror and stiffened with horror before the justice of Heaven, like the hair of the condemned man before the scaffold in La Grève!

On Sunday mademoiselle was too ill to leave her bed. On Monday she tried to rise and dress, in order to attend the funeral; but she was attacked with faintness, and was obliged to return to her bed.

LXVIII

"Well! is it all over?" said mademoiselle from her bed, as the concierge entered her room about eleven o'clock, on his return from the cemetery, with the black coat and the sanctimonious manner suited to the occasion.

"Mon Dieu, yes, mademoiselle. Thank God! the poor girl is out of pain."

"Stay! I have no head to-day. Put the receipts and the rest of the money on my table. We will settle our accounts some other day."

The concierge stood before her without moving or evincing any purpose to go, shifting from one hand to the other a blue velvet cap made from the dress of one of his daughters. After a moment's reflection, he decided to speak.

"This burying is an expensive business, mademoiselle. In the first place, there's – "

"Who asked you to give the figures?" Mademoiselle de Varandeuil interrupted, with the haughty air of superb charity.

The concierge continued: "And as I was saying, a lot in the cemetery, which you told me to get, ain't given away. It's no use for you to have a kind heart, mademoiselle, you ain't any too rich, – everyone knows that, – and I says to myself: 'Mademoiselle's going to have no small amount to pay out, and I know mademoiselle, she'll pay.' So it'll do no harm to economize on that, eh? It'll be just so much saved. The other'll be just as safe under ground. And then, what will give her the most pleasure up yonder? Why, to know that she isn't making things hard for anybody, the excellent girl."

"Pay? What?" said mademoiselle, out of patience with the concierge's circumlocution.

"Oh! that's of no account," he replied; "she was very fond of you, all the same. And then, when she was very sick, it wasn't the time. Oh! Mon Dieu, you needn't put yourself out – there's no hurry about it – it's money she owed a long while. See, this is it."

He took a stamped paper from the inside pocket of his coat.

"I didn't want her to make a note, – she insisted."

Mademoiselle de Varandeuil seized the stamped paper and saw at the foot:

"I acknowledge the receipt of the above amount.