week it became a nuisance! No, indeed, a man should not exact such a task from a woman! But if it was difficult to undress, to dress again was almost an impossibility, your nerves made you want to shriek, and you felt so exasperated that you could have boxed the young man’s ears when he said, walking awkwardly around: “Shall I help you?”—Help her! Yes, indeed, how? What could he do? You only had to see him hold a pin to know he was no use.
That was probably the moment she had begun to take a dislike to him. When he said: “Shall I help you?” she could have killed him. Besides, a woman must end by hating a man who for two years has forced her to put on her clothes a hundred and twenty times without a maid.
It is true that not many men were as awkward as he was, so clumsy, so monotonous.
Baron de Grimbal would never have said in such a silly way: “Shall I help you?” He would have helped, he was so lively, so amusing, so witty. Well! He was a diplomatist; he had travelled in every country, wandered about all over, he had certainly dressed and undressed women clad according to every fashion in the world, he must have done so! …
The church clock chimed the three-quarters. She drew herself up, looked at the time and began to laugh, saying to herself: “How excited he must be!” Then she left the Square, walking briskly, but had only just reached the Place outside when she met a man who bowed and raised his hat.
“Dear me, you, Baron?” she said, surprised, for she had just been thinking about him.
“Yes, Madame.”
He asked how she was, then after a few vague remarks, said:
“Do you know you are the only one—you will allow me to say, of my lady friends, won’t you?—who has not yet been to see my Japanese collection?”
“But, my dear Baron, a woman cannot visit a bachelor?”
“What! What! That’s quite wrong when it is a question of going to see a collection of rare curios!”
“At all events, she cannot go alone.”
“And why not? I have had any number of lady visitors alone, just to see my collection. They come every day. Shall I tell you their names?—no, I won’t do that. One must be discreet even when quite innocent. In principle there is nothing wrong in going to see a man who is a gentleman, well known, and of good birth, unless one goes for some doubtful reason.
“On the whole, you are right.”
“Then you will come to see my collection.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Impossible, I am in a hurry.”
“Nonsense. You have been sitting in the Square this last half-hour.”
“You were watching me?”
“I was looking at you.”
“Really, I am in a hurry.”
“I am sure you’re not. Admit that you’re not.”
Madame Haggar began to laugh, saying: “No … no … not in a great …”
A cab passed close by which the Baron stopped and opening the door, said: “Get in, Madame.”
“But, Baron, it’s impossible, I can’t come today.”
“You are very imprudent, Madame. Do get in! People are beginning to stare at us, soon there will be a crowd: they will think I am running away with you and we shall both be arrested: do get in, I beg you!”
She got in, scared and dazed. Then he sat beside her and said to the cabman: “Rue de Provence.”
Suddenly she exclaimed: “Oh! dear, dear. I have forgotten an urgent telegram, will you take me to the nearest post office first?”
The cab stopped a little further on in the Rue de Châteaudun, and she said to the Baron: “Do get me a fifty-centimes telegraph-card.34 I promised my husband I would invite Martelet to dinner tomorrow, and had quite forgotten about it.”
When the Baron came back with the blue card, she wrote in pencil:
“Dear Friend,
“I am not well. A bad attack of neuralgia is keeping me in bed. Impossible to go out. Come and dine tomorrow evening so that I may be forgiven.
She moistened the gum, closed the telegram-card carefully and addressed it: “Viscount de Martelet 240, Rue Miromesnil,” then returning the card to the Baron, said:
“Now, will you be good enough to drop this in the special box for telegrams?”
In Port
I
Having left Havre on May 3, 1882, for a voyage in Chinese waters, the three-masted sailing-ship Notre-Dame-des-Vents re-entered Marseilles harbour on August 8, 1886, after a four years’ voyage. She had discharged her original cargo in the Chinese port to which she had been chartered, and had there and then picked up a new freight for Buenos Aires, and from thence had shipped cargo for Brazil.
Various other voyages, not to speak of damages, repairs, several months spent becalmed, storms that blew her out of her course, and all the accidents, adventures and misadventures of the sea, had detained far from her land this three-masted Norman boat now returned to Marseilles with a hold full of tin boxes containing American preserved foods.
At the beginning of the voyage she had on board, besides the captain and the mate, fourteen sailors, eight Normans and six Bretons. At the end only five Bretons and four Normans remained; the Breton had died at sea; the four Normans, who had disappeared in various circumstances, had been replaced by two Americans, a nigger and a Norwegian shanghaied one evening in a Singapore den.
The great ship, sails furled, yards forming a cross with mast stem, drawn by a Marseilles tug that panted along before her, rolled in a slight swell that died gently away in the calm waters behind her; she passed in front of the Château d’If, then under all the grey rocks of the roadstead over which the setting sun flung a reek of gold, and entered the old harbour where, ship lying by ship alongside the quays, were gathered ships from all corners of the globe, huddled together, large and small, of all shapes and riggings,
