“It was Zulie, who beat daddy,” he replied.
Henriette turned to her husband, bewildered at first. Then a wild desire to laugh woke in her eyes, quivered on her thin cheeks, curved her lip, curled the outer edges of her nostrils, and finally issued from her mouth in a clear bubbling rush of merriment, a cascade of gaiety, as melodious and lively as the trill of a bird.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” she repeated, with little malicious cries that escaped between her white teeth and inflicted a biting agony on Parent. “She b … b … beat you. … Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! … How funny! … how funny! … Do you hear, Limousin? Julie beat him … beat him … Julie beat my husband. … Ha! … Ha! … Ha! … How funny!”
“No! No!” stammered Parent. “It’s not true … it’s not true. … It was I, on the contrary, who flung her into the dining room, so hard that she knocked the table over. The child couldn’t see. It was I who beat her.”
“Tell me again, ducky,” said Henriette to her son. “It was Julie who beat Papa?”
“Yes, it was Zulie,” he replied.
Then, passing suddenly to another thought, she went on:
“But hasn’t the child had his dinner? Haven’t you had anything to eat, darling?”
“No, mummy.”
At that she turned furiously upon her husband.
“You’re mad, absolutely crazy! It’s half past eight and Georges has not had his dinner!”
He made excuses, hopelessly lost in the scene and his explanation, crushed at the utter ruin of his life.
“But we were waiting for you, my dear. I did not want to have dinner without you. You always come in late, so I thought you would come in any moment.”
She threw her hat, which she had kept on until this point, into an armchair and broke out in a tone of exasperation:
“Really, it’s intolerable to have to deal with people who can’t understand anything or guess anything or do anything for themselves. If I had come home at midnight, I suppose the child would not have had anything to eat at all. As if you could not have understood, when it was half past seven, that I’d been hindered, delayed, held up! …”
Parent was trembling, feeling his anger getting the upper hand; but Limousin intervened, and, turning to the young woman, remarked:
“You are quite unjust, dear. Parent could not guess that you would be so late, for you never have been; and, besides, how could he manage everything by himself, after dismissing Julie?”
But Henriette had thoroughly lost her temper, and replied:
“Well, he’ll have to manage somehow, for I won’t help him. Let him get out of the mess as best he can!”
And she ran into her room, having already forgotten that her son had had nothing to eat.
Limousin became suddenly strenuous in aiding his friend. He gathered up and removed the broken glass with which the table was covered, put the knives and forks back, and settled the child in his little high chair, while Parent went in search of the housemaid and told her to serve dinner.
She arrived in some surprise; she had been working in Georges’s room and had heard nothing.
She brought in the soup, an overcooked leg of mutton, and mashed potatoes.
Parent had sat down beside his child, his brain in a whirl, his reason undermined by the catastrophe. He gave the little boy his food, and tried to eat himself; he cut up the meat, chewed it, and swallowed it with an effort, as though his throat were paralysed.
Then, little by little, there awoke in his soul a wild longing to look at Limousin, who was sitting opposite him, rolling little pills of bread. He wanted to see if he were like Georges. But he dared not raise his eyes. He made up his mind, however, and looked abruptly up at the face he knew so well, although it seemed to him that he had never studied it, so much it differed from his imagination of it. Time and again he cast a swift glance over the man’s face, trying to recognise the faintest lines and features and their significance; then, instantly, he would look at his son, pretending that he was merely giving him his food.
Two words roared in his ears: “His father! His father! His father!” They hummed in his temples with every beat of his heart. Yes, that man, that man sitting calmly on the other side of the table, was perhaps the father of his son, Georges, his little Georges. Parent stopped eating; he could not eat any longer. A frightful pain, the sort of pain that makes a man cry out, roll on the ground, and bite the furniture, tore at the very depths of his body. He longed to take his knife and plunge it into his belly. It would be a relief, it would save him; all would be over.
For how could he go on living now? How could he live, get up in the morning, eat his meals, walk along the streets, go to bed in the evening, and sleep at night, with this thought drilled into him, as with a gimlet: “Limousin, Georges’s father”? No, he would no longer have strength to walk one step, put on his clothes, think of anything, speak to anyone! Every day, every hour, every second, he would be asking himself that question, seeking to know, to guess, to surprise the horrible secret. And the child, his dear child—he could no longer see him without enduring the fearful agony of this uncertainty, without feeling himself torn to the bowels, tortured to the marrow of his bones. He would have to go on living here, stay in this house, side by side with the child he would love and hate. Yes, assuredly he would end by hating him. What torment! Oh, if only he were certain that Limousin was the father, perhaps he might succeed in growing calm, in falling asleep amid his misery, his grief! But not to know was intolerable!
Not to know, always to be trying to find out, always suffering,
