The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

It was a grisly embodiment of their secret griefs, a tantalising vision of the unattainable. To glide reputably into a grey wig had been for years their dearest desire. As each saw herself getting older and older, saw her complexion fade and the crow's-feet gather, and her eyes grow hollow, and her teeth fall out and her cheeks fall in, so did the impropriety of her brown wig strike more and more humiliatingly to her soul. But how should a poor old woman ever accumulate enough for a new wig? One might as well cry for the moon-or a set of false teeth. Unless, indeed, the lottery-?

And so, when Madame Depine received a sister-in-law from Tonnerre, or Madame Valiere's nephew came up by the excursion train from that same quiet and incongruously christened townlet, the Parisian personage would receive the visitor in the darkest corner of the salon, with her back to the light, and a big bonnet on her head-an imposing figure repeated duskily in the gold mirrors. These visits, instead of a relief, became a terror. Even a provincial knows it is not convenable for an old woman to wear a brown wig. And Tonnerre kept strict record of birthdays.

Tears of shame and misery had wetted the old ladies' hired pillows, as under the threat of a provincial visitation they had tossed sleepless in similar solicitude, and their wigs, had they not been wigs, would have turned grey of themselves. Their only consolation had been that neither outdid the other, and so long as each saw the other's brown wig, they had refrained from facing the dread possibility of having to sell off their jewellery in a desperate effort of emulation. Gradually Madame Depine had grown to wear her wig with vindictive endurance, and Madame Valiere to wear hers with gentle resignation. And now, here was Madame la Proprietaire, a woman five years younger and ten years better preserved, putting them both to the public blush, drawing the hotel's attention to what the hotel might have overlooked, in its long habituation to their surmounting brownness.

More morbidly conscious than ever of a young head on old shoulders, the old ladies no longer paused at the bureau to exchange the news with Madame or even with her black-haired bookkeeping daughter. No more lounging against the newel under the carved torch-bearer, while the journalist of the fourth floor spat at the Dreyfusites, and the poet of the entresol threw versified vitriol at perfidious Albion. For the first time, too- losing their channel of communication-they grew out of touch with each other's microscopic affairs, and their mutual detestation increased with their resentful ignorance. And so, shrinking and silent, and protected as far as possible by their big bonnets, the squat Madame Depine and the skinny Madame Valiere toiled up and down the dark, fusty stairs of the Hotel des Tourterelles, often brushing against each other, yet sundered by icy infinities. And the endurance on Madame Depine's round face became more vindictive, and gentler grew the resignation on the angular visage of Madame Valiere.

IV.

'Tiens! Madame Depine, one never sees you now.' Madame la Proprietaire was blocking the threshold, preventing her exit. 'I was almost thinking you had veritably died of Madame Valiere's cough.'

'One has received my rent, the Monday,' the little old lady replied frigidly.

'Oh! la! la!' Madame waved her plump hands. 'And La Valiere, too, makes herself invisible. What has then happened to both of you? Is it that you are doing a penance together?'

'Hist!' said Madame Depine, flushing.

For at this moment Madame Valiere appeared on the pavement outside bearing a long French roll and a bag of figs, which made an excellent lunch at low water. Madame la Proprietaire, dominatingly bestriding her doorstep, was sandwiched between the two old ladies, her wig aggressively grey between the two browns. Madame Valiere halted awkwardly, a bronze blush mounting to match her wig. To be seen by Madame Depine carrying in her meagre provisions was humiliation enough; to be juxtaposited with a grey wig was unbearable.

'Maman, maman, the English monsieur will not pay two francs for his dinner!' And the distressed bookkeeper, bill in hand, shattered the trio.

'And why will he not pay?' Fire leapt into the black eyes.

'He says you told him the night he came that by arrangement he could have his dinners for one franc fifty.'

Madame la Proprietaire made two strides towards the refractory English monsieur. 'I told you one franc fifty? For dejeuner, yes, as many luncheons as you can eat. But for dinner? You eat with us as one of the family, and vin compris and cafe likewise, and it should be all for one franc fifty! Mon Dieu! it is to ruin oneself. Come here.' And she seized the surprised Anglo-Saxon by the wrist and dragged him towards a painted tablet of prices that hung in a dark niche of the hall. 'I have kept this hotel for twenty years, I have grown grey in the service of artists and students, and this is the first time one has demanded dinner for one franc fifty!'

'She has grown grey!' contemptuously muttered Madame Valiere.

'Grey? She!' repeated Madame Depine, with no less bitterness. 'It is only to give herself the air of a grande dame!'

Then both started, and coloured to the roots of their wigs. Simultaneously they realised that they had spoken to each other.

V.

As they went up the stairs together-for Madame Depine had quite forgotten she was going out-an immense relief enlarged their souls. Merely to mention the grey wig had been a vent for all this morbid brooding; to abuse Madame la Proprietaire into the bargain was to pass from the long isolation into a subtle sympathy.

'I wonder if she did say one franc fifty,' observed Madame Valiere, reflectively.

'Without doubt,' Madame Depine replied viciously. 'And fifty centimes a day soon mount up to a grey wig.'

'Not so soon,' sighed Madame Valiere.

'But then it is not only one client that she cheats.'

'Ah! at that rate wigs fall from the skies,' admitted Madame Valiere.

'Especially if one has not to give dowries to one's nieces,' said Madame Depine, boldly.

'And if one is mean on New Year's Day,' returned Madame Valiere, with a shade less of mendacity.

They inhaled the immemorial airlessness of the staircase as if they were breathing the free air of the forests depicted on its dirty-brown wall-paper. It was the new atmosphere of self-respect that they were really absorbing. Each had at last explained herself and her brown wig to the other. An immaculate honesty (that would scorn to overcharge fifty centimes even to un Anglais), complicated with unwedded nieces in one case, with a royal shower of New Year's gifts in the other, had kept them from selfish, if seemly, hoary- headedness.

'Ah! here is my floor,' panted Madame Valiere at length, with an air of indicating it to a thorough stranger. 'Will you not come into my room and eat a fig? They are very healthy between meals.'

Madame Depine accepted the invitation, and entering her own corner of the corridor with a responsive air of foreign exploration, passed behind the door through whose keyhole she had so often peered. Ah! no wonder she had detected nothing abnormal. The room was a facsimile of her own-the same bed with the same quilt over it and the same crucifix above it, the same little table with the same books of devotion, the same washstand with the same tiny jug and basin, the same rusted, fireless grate. The wardrobe, like her own, was merely a pair of moth- eaten tartan curtains, concealing both pegs and garments from her curiosity. The only sense of difference came subtly from the folding windows, below whose railed balcony showed another view of the quarter, with steam- trams-diminished to toy trains-puffing past to the suburbs. But as Madame Depine's eyes roved from these to the mantel-piece, she caught sight of an oval miniature of an elegant young woman, who was jewelled in many places, and corresponded exactly with her idea of a Princess!

To disguise her access of respect, she said abruptly, 'It must be very noisy here from the steam-trams.'

'It is what I love, the bustle of life,' replied Madame Valiere, simply.

'Ah!' said Madame Depine, impressed beyond masking-point, 'I suppose when one has had the habit of Courts-'