XXI
... It was at Dame Virginie-Scholastique’s. (Missionaries sometimes have veritable inspirations in naming their neophytes.) It was one in the morning; the tavern showed large and dark. As is usual with places of ill-repute, it was closed with thick doors, reinforced with iron.
A small evil-smelling lamp shed its light on a jumbled litter of objects, crowded painfully together in the dense atmosphere—red jackets and bare, black flesh, weird entanglements, broken glasses and broken bottles on the table and on the ground; red caps, negro bon-bons, spahis’ sabres, all in floods of beer and alcohol. The temperature of the hovel was that of a vapour bath. The heat was maddening, the atmosphere dense with black, or milky, smoke, and with the odours of absinthe, musk, spices, soumaré, sweat of negroes.
It must have been a hilarious revel, and surpassingly uproarious, but now it was over. There was an end to the songs and the racket. Now followed the period of reaction, of stupefaction that comes after drinking. The spahis were there, some of them dull-eyed, resting their foreheads on the table, and smiling vacuously. Others still preserved their dignity, bracing themselves against intoxication, still holding their heads erect—handsome faces with strong features, the lustreless eyes retaining their seriousness with an indescribable expression of melancholy and loathing.
Distributed among them, haphazard, was Virginie-Scholastique’s whole pack of little twelve-year-old negro girls and small negro boys.
Outside a listening ear could hear in the distance the cry of jackals prowling around the cemetery of Sorr, where for some of those now here there were places already marked out beneath the sand.
Dame Virginie, copper-coloured, thick-lipped, with woolly hair wrapped in a piece of red cotton—drunk herself—was sponging the blood from a head of fair hair. A tall spahi, with a young, fresh-coloured face, and hair the colour of ripe corn, lay there unconscious with broken head, while Dame Virginie, assisted by a black wench more drunk than her mistress, was sponging his wound with fresh water and applying compresses of vinegar. She was not actuated by motives of compassion—certainly not, but by fear of the police. She was really uneasy, Virginie Scholastique, for the blood continued to flow. It had filled a whole bowl and it would not stop, and the old harridan was sobered by her anxiety.
Jean was seated on a bench in a corner, more drunk than all the rest, yet still holding himself stiffly, his eyes staring and glassy.
He it was who had inflicted this wound with an iron latch wrenched off a door, and he was still holding the latch in his clenched hand, unconscious of the blow he had struck with it.
It was a month since his recovery, and every evening he could have been seen dragging himself from tavern to tavern, foremost among the dissolute and drunken, practising himself in the insolent airs of rake and cynic.
There was still much in this behaviour that was due to mere childishness, but the result was the same; he had travelled along a terrible road during this month of suffering. He had devoured novels, whose every detail was new to his imagination, and he had assimilated all their unwholesome extravagances. And then he had gone the round of the easy conquests of St Louis, coloured women and white, among whom his handsome person had secured for him unresisted possession.
And to crown everything, he had begun to drink.
Oh you who lead a well-regulated domestic life, seated peacefully day after day by your fireside, do not pass judgment on the sailors and spahis, men of ardent natures, whom their destiny has plunged into abnormal conditions of life upon the wide ocean, or in the far away lands of the sun, exposed to unheard of privations, to desires and temptations of which you have no conception. Do not pass judgment on these exiles, or these wanderers, whose sufferings, joys, tortured imaginings are unknown to you.
So Jean began to drink, and he drank more than the others; he drank prodigiously.
“How can he do it?” said those around him, “a man who has never been accustomed to it.”
It was precisely because he had “never been accustomed to it” that his head was stronger, and for the moment he could stand more. And this impressed his comrades greatly.
Yet through it all, in spite of the rakish airs he gave himself, like the big, undisciplined child he was, poor Jean had kept himself almost chaste.
He would not stoop to a dishonouring intimacy with negresses, and when Dame Virginie’s pupils let their hands stray over him, he pushed them away with the end of his riding whip, like unclean animals, and the miserable little creatures came to look upon him as a sort of human fetish whom they might not approach.
But he was violent when he was drunk; when he lost his head and his enormous physical strength was no longer under control, he was terrifying. He had struck that blow just now, roused by some casual jest on the subject of his love affairs, and he no longer remembered anything about it. He remained there motionless, with lack-lustre eyes, still holding in his hand the blood-stained latch.
Suddenly his eyes flashed. Now it was that old woman who was provoking his unreasoning wrath, the senseless rage of a drunken man. He half rose to his feet, threatening her in his fury. The old hag uttered a hoarse cry; she went through a minute of horrible fear.
“Hold him,” she moaned to the inert beings who were already lying asleep under the tables.
Some heads were raised; feeble, impotent hands tried to hold Jean back by his jacket, but their efforts were futile.
“Give me some drink, you old witch,” he said; “some drink, you old devil of night; you horrible old hag, some drink.”
“Yes, yes,” she answered, her voice choking with fear. “That’s it! Some drink, Sam, some absinthe, quick, to finish him off; absinthe laced with brandy.”
In these emergencies, Dame Virginie did not consider expense. Jean drank it off at one draught, flung his glass against the wall, and fell back as if struck by lightning.
He was successfully “finished off,” as the old harridan had said. He was no longer dangerous.
She was strong, was old Scholastique, sturdily built—and wholly sober now. With the help of her black wench and her little girls, she lifted Jean like a dead weight, and after rapidly searching his pockets for the last coins they might contain, she opened the door and threw him out. Jean fell like a corpse, his arms extended, his face in the sand—and the old hag, after discharging a flood of appalling abuse and savage obscenities, drew to her door, which closed heavily with a loud clang of iron.
All was still. The wind blew from the cemetery, and in the intense silence of midnight could be clearly heard the shrill howling of the jackals, the uncanny music of the body-snatchers.