第76章

And at that thought great shudders ran down my prone body, because, once, I had visited a famous lunatic asylum where they had shown me a poor wretch who was mad, apparently, because he thought he had been abominably fooled by a woman.They told me that his grievance was quite imaginary.He was a young man with a thin fair beard, huddled up on the edge of his bed, hugging himself forlornly; and his incessant and lamentable wailing filled the long bare corridor, striking a chill into one's heart long before one came to the door of his cell.

And there was no one from whom I could hear, to whom I could speak, with whom I could evoke the image of Rita.Of course I could utter that word of four letters to Therese; but Therese for some reason took it into her head to avoid all topics connected with her sister.I felt as if I could pull out great handfuls of her hair hidden modestly under the black handkerchief of which the ends were sometimes tied under her chin.But, really, I could not have given her any intelligible excuse for that outrage.Moreover, she was very busy from the very top to the very bottom of the house, which she persisted in running alone because she couldn't make up her mind to part with a few francs every month to a servant.It seemed to me that I was no longer such a favourite with her as I used to be.That, strange to say, was exasperating, too.It was as if some idea, some fruitful notion had killed in her all the softer and more humane emotions.She went about with brooms and dusters wearing an air of sanctimonious thoughtfulness.

The man who to a certain extent took my place in Therese's favour was the old father of the dancing girls inhabiting the ground floor.In a tall hat and a well-to-do dark blue overcoat he allowed himself to be button-holed in the hall by Therese who would talk to him interminably with downcast eyes.He smiled gravely down at her, and meanwhile tried to edge towards the front door.Iimagine he didn't put a great value on Therese's favour.Our stay in harbour was prolonged this time and I kept indoors like an invalid.One evening I asked that old man to come in and drink and smoke with me in the studio.He made no difficulties to accept, brought his wooden pipe with him, and was very entertaining in a pleasant voice.One couldn't tell whether he was an uncommon person or simply a ruffian, but in any case with his white beard he looked quite venerable.Naturally he couldn't give me much of his company as he had to look closely after his girls and their admirers; not that the girls were unduly frivolous, but of course being very young they had no experience.They were friendly creatures with pleasant, merry voices and he was very much devoted to them.He was a muscular man with a high colour and silvery locks curling round his bald pate and over his ears, like a barocco apostle.I had an idea that he had had a lurid past and had seen some fighting in his youth.The admirers of the two girls stood in great awe of him, from instinct no doubt, because his behaviour to them was friendly and even somewhat obsequious, yet always with a certain truculent glint in his eye that made them pause in everything but their generosity - which was encouraged.Isometimes wondered whether those two careless, merry hard-working creatures understood the secret moral beauty of the situation.

My real company was the dummy in the studio and I can't say it was exactly satisfying.After taking possession of the studio I had raised it tenderly, dusted its mangled limbs and insensible, hard-wood bosom, and then had propped it up in a corner where it seemed to take on, of itself, a shy attitude.I knew its history.It was not an ordinary dummy.One day, talking with Dona Rita about her sister, I had told her that I thought Therese used to knock it down on purpose with a broom, and Dona Rita had laughed very much.

This, she had said, was an instance of dislike from mere instinct.

That dummy had been made to measure years before.It had to wear for days and days the Imperial Byzantine robes in which Dona Rita sat only once or twice herself; but of course the folds and bends of the stuff had to be preserved as in the first sketch.Dona Rita described amusingly how she had to stand in the middle of her room while Rose walked around her with a tape measure noting the figures down on a small piece of paper which was then sent to the maker, who presently returned it with an angry letter stating that those proportions were altogether impossible in any woman.Apparently Rose had muddled them all up; and it was a long time before the figure was finished and sent to the Pavilion in a long basket to take on itself the robes and the hieratic pose of the Empress.

Later, it wore with the same patience the marvellous hat of the "Girl in the Hat." But Dona Rita couldn't understand how the poor thing ever found its way to Marseilles minus its turnip head.

Probably it came down with the robes and a quantity of precious brocades which she herself had sent down from Paris.The knowledge of its origin, the contempt of Captain Blunt's references to it, with Therese's shocked dislike of the dummy, invested that summary reproduction with a sort of charm, gave me a faint and miserable illusion of the original, less artificial than a photograph, less precise, too....But it can't be explained.I felt positively friendly to it as if it had been Rita's trusted personal attendant.

I even went so far as to discover that it had a sort of grace of its own.But I never went so far as to address set speeches to it where it lurked shyly in its corner, or drag it out from there for contemplation.I left it in peace.I wasn't mad.I was only convinced that I soon would be.