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Title:      "-- & Co."
Author:     Jean-Richard Bloch [1884-1947]
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0300601.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          April 2003
Date most recently updated: April 2003

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                  are enclosed by underscores (_) in this eBook

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      "-- & Co."
Author:     Jean-Richard Bloch [1884-1947]

Translated by
C K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF
[1889-1930]

First published 1929, 1930





INTRODUCTION
BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND


I am not accustomed to writing prefaces for books, even for those by
my friends. I do so only when the work affects me deeply; then from
the moment it enters the lists, I am glad to become its
herald--indeed, even to break a lance for it, should the occasion
demand it, as it does in the present instance.

I had already read Jean-Richard Bloch's _"---& Co."_ in manuscript
before the war. I reread it in its first imperfect edition, published
at the end of the war. I have just finished reading it again in the
definitive edition--each time receiving the same impact of creative
power. Each time it recalled to me the genius of Balzac. I make bold
to say, without any reservations, that here is the only French novel I
know which is worthy to take its place among the masterpieces of the
_Human Comedy_. It is in the same tradition.

The coupling of these names would be perilous to any other man, but
the personality of Jean-Richard Bloch is quite capable of standing the
comparison. Nor is it called forth merely by the choice of subject,
that is to say, the world of affairs and the astonishing mixture of
impassioned idealism with the most meticulous practical spirit which
characterizes the immortal author of _César Birotteau_. No, the
analogy is rooted in the essential art of the book, in the prodigious
_ density_ of its material.

The great majority of novelists write from a shallow inkwell.  They
but scratch the surface of reality. They seize upon nature from a
single angle, perhaps by means of external description, or through the
minds of the characters, or through use of movement or emotion. I know
scarcely a single writer who, throughout a work of any size, comes to
grips with life like an athlete, hand to hand,--who embraces the
entire mass of reality, his chosen prey, in the net of his spiritual
and intellectual perception.

Yet this is the very achievement of _"---& Co."_ The tribe of the
Simlers is modeled from human flesh. We can see them, touch them,
watch them breathe; we can even carry away the living clay in our
hands.

For me, that is the first and indelible impression produced by this
great book--even beyond the overwhelming interest of the story itself:
an exceptional power of _integral_ creation, of body plus soul. The
verb "to create" here takes on its full complement of meanings. The
author has not only imagined or observed his characters. _He has
engendered them_.

His subject is a complex one. Two or three fundamental problems are
interwoven. There is the problem of the Company swallowing the Man.
There is the racial problem of the Jew implanted in an alien soil.

The author dismisses his work too lightly. In a short comment he has
written on his book, he discusses these problems as "ideologies." He
will permit me to differ with him on this point. This "ideology" is a
social reality of a twofold significance. It poses questions of life
and death.  We cannot allow ourselves the esthetic luxury of
dismissing it too peremptorily.

Whether or not modern man will be devoured by the infernal mechanical
organization he has founded--here is a tragedy which strikes us much
more forcibly than that of the Atrides, for we must endure the effects
of it. Nor do we submit to it cheerfully. And the answer given to our
anxiety by _"---& Co."_ is by no means reassuring. We see these hardy
human forces presented to us at the beginning, like white-hot forged
iron in which resistance and malleability are balanced, and within
thirty years, these same forces are oxidized, their wheels corroded,
choked with grease left by the daily friction, by the daily repetition
of the labor of ants, the slow contagion of the strange surroundings,
with its anemia-breeding atmosphere, its routine, its apathy.  Their
spirit is broken. The Simlers have conquered Vendeuvre.  They have
become--neutralized.

One only among these men, out of some dull vital impulse, devoid of
rational volition, attempts--for a day, for an hour--to escape from
the wheel of Destiny, from the Company which is dragging him away from
his own race through a marriage of love. But the psychology of the
herd, stronger among Jews than among other men, decrees that he halt
at the first sign of opposition from the family, and that he take his
place again at the chain, irrevocably defeated.

It is understood that salvation, both as conceived in the author's
mind and in the final utterances of Ben Stern, the Simler from beyond
the seas, is only for the intransigents, the apostates who flee
through a side door. Escape is the only refuge; but it is a fatal
refuge. Because among the Israelites, the more the pressure of the
environment becomes all-embracing and suffocating, the more
irresistible grows the nostalgia for flight. In the homes of old
bourgeois families from the provinces, I was once very well acquainted
with these "caravan" dreams, visions of the vagrant rootless gypsy
life. But the dream generally found its satisfaction in having been
born; and after having cherished it a while, the visionaries would
once more turn quite tranquilly to "cultivate their garden." But among
the Israelites, escape takes the form of a violent outburst; and in
these periodic flights they swarm all over the earth.

However fully and vigorously the author has treated the problem of the
relationship between the individual and the group, between man and
society, I find that he has halted at the threshold of the second
problem: the relation of the conquering Jew to the race which in turn
conquers him.  The problem is complex and thorny, changing its form
with each country. North and South, in the Orient and in the Occident,
ethnic factors vary: any contact with Israel gives rise to strongly
diversified chemical reactions. Jean-Richard Bloch has taken the most
heterogeneous substances from two races and brought them together: a
family of Alsacian Jews and a little French community in the west of
France.  But he does not supply us with the means of discussing the
advisability or the value of this mixture, for the Simler family
haughtily declines to be drawn into the melting-pot.  We cannot draw
any valid conclusions from the few slender contacts which they have
with the native inhabitants. I might add that the atmosphere and
milieu of western France are seen in this book only from the outside.
They are painted in two strangely juxtaposed colors: idealization and
disdain.  I do not believe that the picture takes into account the
permanency and durability of the life of this fallow race whose sleep
is only the periodic relapse of an age-old system.

But however important may be the place assigned to Mlle. Le Pleynier,
that engaging figure (in my opinion, the only one which is idealized
throughout the book) is especially important in connection with the
crisis produced by her contact with Joseph Simler, and which, after a
seeming rebellion, determines the conclusive subjection of the latter
to the solid mass of the family and the Company.

The outstanding and preeminent element in this book is obviously the
Simler family. And in painting their portraits, the author is
incomparable. His treatment, his style, by emphasizing certain
qualities, by making them stand out in monumental relief, by the
abundance of the clay and the vigorous joy of the modeler who shapes
it, borders very closely on caricature, yet is majestic to the point
of being epic.  He reminds me of Daumier. There is the same firm
touch, the well-rounded flesh and muscles, the michelangelesque ardour
in the bourgeois buffoonery, the _vis comica_ (_tragica_?), the
irresistible scenic movement, the genius not only of the individual
portraiture (Hippolyte Simler is a world in himself!), but of the
_ensembles_. In this novelist there lurks a dramatic demon which since
the writing of _"---& Co."_ has sought the theatre for
self-expression. Immediately following his début as a novelist, he
showed his theatrical claws in the magnificent dialogue scenes of
_"---& Co."_ and very little alteration would be required (as is also
true of Balzac) to transplant them onto the stage. Here is supreme
comedy in which lively buffoonery and tragic emotion are both
manipulated by a master. Need I cite that magnificent scene of the
family council at the Alsacian fireside, waiting to welcome the return
of the two Simler sons after the purchase of the factory,--or the
inventory scene,--or Hip-polyte's agony, depicted in that astonishing
style which intertwines the pathetic and the burlesque, conveying
nothing short of an epic inspiration?

No matter how summary and imperfect this necessarily rapid estimate of
the novel may be, I hope that it at least permits the reader to
visualize its amplitude and its solid construction.

Nevertheless, this _Introduction_ would betray him if it were to omit
the fact that the author of _"---& Co."_ cannot possibly be confined
within the limits of this one work, which reveals but a single side of
his genius. Every book that he has since published reveals him in a
different light. One could say that, similar to those periodic revolts
which are so much an integral part of _"---& Co.,"_ he too perpetually
rebels against the form and style which he has just expressed.

To the massive structure, the heavy layers of paint, the
superabundant, compact realism endowed with flesh and brilliant
colorings of _"---& Co."_ (which is so much a part of certain Flemish
works) there is opposed the clear, glowing atmosphere, the sharp
lines, the proud contours, the incisive phrase vibrating like a
slender rapier, the flame and light of that other masterpiece: _La
Nuit Kurde_, a story perhaps suggested by the _Nouvelles Asiatiques_
of Gobineau, who would assuredly not recognize himself in the fire of
passion that he has inspired. _Sur un Cargo_ and _Locomotives_, both
of which bear the subtitle of "Travels," give a vivid picture of the
nomad escaping from civilization, regaining possession of the world
with new eyes, never at home save in the great outside world,
fraternizing effortlessly with the passersby whose paths cross his own
for a brief instant, electing a native land in some groaning tender.
And at the same time two spiritual confessions and two investigations
of the present moment are revealed, conducted with lucidity and a joy
of discovery, as if earth and water were being born anew with every
passing moment. Besides all this, not to mention _Lévy_, a book rather
in the vein of _"---& Co.,"_ and _Carnaval est mort_, scintillating
paradoxical essays, "toward the better comprehension of my time," this
devil of a man would not deny himself the luxury of a poetic comedy,
exciting and ironic, much in the style of Musset in his hours of
Shakespearian fantasy: _Dix Filles dans un pré_.

And as yet we are still at the beginning of the journey!  Jean-Richard
Bloch has barely passed his fortieth year, and he is emerging from the
furnace of the war. The war, which scarred his body with three wounds,
has instilled a world of tragic experiences and emancipating
disillusions into his spirit. It is this world which still smoulders
in a brain wherein a fever of creation and universal curiosity rages.
Some day he will begin. I await the decisive picture of our era from
this poet.

What is there to add? That I have known and loved him as a brother for
fifteen years; that these stormy fifteen years which have been the
touchstone of souls and of friendships, have only served to consecrate
our mutual faith; that within this virile artist who thinks as he
writes, and who acts as he thinks, there is a character which is the
equal of his art; and that no figure of our own age has realized as
ably as he has that harmony of the proud virtues of art and
intelligence of those two ancient but always renascent peoples, of
those spiritual aristocracies, the Orient and the Occident--France and
Israel.

ROMAIN ROLLAND.

Villeneuve, April 8, 1926.




PART ONE: 1871

I


Three men emerged from the deserted building, and took a final turn
round it. A big man, wearing a bowler hat and trinkets upon his
watch-chain which rattled against his stomach, stopped at one of the
corners. He indicated in succession the four cardinal points. His
black finger-nails connected the factory with the national traffic
system: ten minutes to the wharf, twelve to the railway, seven to the
post office, a quarter of an hour to the Chamber of Commerce.

While this guide to the four winds of industry issued from between his
cheeks, the other two men exchanged anxious glances. Their attention
was drawn to the cracks in the wall, where the cement had fallen out.

One of them had his trousers turned up over his boots.  The dust of
two days reached to his knees. Round his neck, a grey scarf took the
place of a collar. The coal-dust of a night in the train still
darkened his eyelids and accentuated the wrinkles on his face. He was
small and thin and betrayed a nervous agitation in his hands.

His companion, who was stout without being any taller, looked at him
through his spectacles without seeing him.  His lips betrayed the
rapidity of the calculations in which he was absorbed. At one moment,
with the tips of his fingers, he would pull away from the wall a patch
of yellow moss.  After which, he would push back his cheap straw hat
and mop his scalp.

They completed, in the agent's wake, their tour of the building, and
found themselves at the rusty iron gate. The stifling heat of a
thundery morning had baked the clinkers on the path and scorched their
feet through the thin soles of their boots.

The little man pointed his chin towards the end of the street. Between
the ceiling of leaden sky and the dull reverberation of the ground, it
was already dark at ten o'clock in the morning. The glitter of the
whitewashed housefronts devoured his eyelids. A day and a night in the
train, six months of insomnia and calculation were revealed, that
morning, by rings of inflammation round his eyes and two thumbs
pressed against his temples.

"What sort of neighbours would there be, here?"

The agent broke out in a panegyric of the neighbourhood.  A few yards
farther on, to the right, Morindet & Co., the well-known shirt
factory. The other long brick wall, crowned with dusty vegetation,
represented the back of Lorilleux-Pommier & Co.'s weaving-mill.
Farther on, to the left, a porch of white masonry suggested the
millions of Sabouret and Son's combing-mill. The chimney that was
vomiting smoke, and rose above the roof-tops, indicated the farthest
outpost of Chevalier-Lefombère.

These names fell from his lips with the ring of golden coins. Clouds
of smoke invaded the sky, driven by a. warm breeze from the east; he
pointed towards the clouds his fingers loaded with pinchbeck rings:

"Here you are in the heart of the business world. To make money, you
must begin by coming to a place where money is made."

A glance cast by the stout stranger at the knees of his tweed trousers
did not inspire him with a proper appreciation of this aphorism. He
turned to the gate, and opened it again. It yielded with a prolonged
wail.

"I have not shown you the porter's lodge."

He pushed open a wooden door, and took them into a one-storeyed
building. The floor was tiled. The windows let in light, heat and dust
partly from the street, partly from the reddish clinkers of the
courtyard.

The agent raised the lid of a sort of hole, from which rose a whiff of
damp air; he proclaimed:

"The cellar!"

A corkscrew stairway led to the upper floor. A sort of attic, which
was reached by a ladder, alone sheltered the upper rooms from cold or
heat. The wall-paper hanging in strips, the warped woodwork, the
broken windowpanes, a bat's nest on the upper floor, pigeons' dung
everywhere, formed the furniture of the house.

"Two rooms and an office on the first floor; office, living-room,
kitchen on the ground floor; water and gas. A porter with no family
can live here like a king."

A sort of flash passed between the two strangers; they stood for a
moment gazing into one another's eyes. Instead of a porter with no
family, this cottage was destined to lodge, should the need arise,
their father and mother, one of the sons with his wife and two
children, and the other, for the present a bachelor.

The agent turned towards them to indicate that the inspection was, in
his opinion, finished.

"Indeed!" said the thinner of the two, in a harsh tone.  And their
gaze was abruptly severed, leaving a curious amusement in the trace of
a smile upon their lips.

They set off with bowed shoulders, without another word, along the
avenues through which streamed the heat of the summer morning.

The shield of smoke had spread over the town. The side-streets opened
sluices of silence upon the prevailing din. At certain moments, the
throb of the looms beat time to those heavy sounds; a few yards
farther on the hum of the fulling-mills drowned it. A spinning-mill
shook the five storeys of a factory with its thunder of artillery. A
cast-iron sewer suddenly heated the pavement of the side-walk; it
disgorged into the gutters a soapy stream, in which a row of poor
women were dipping their soiled rags.

An employer's mansion, flanked by outbuildings, caparisoned with
balconies, carved out here and there, in the thick of the tumult an
area of silence. Through the railings, the strangers could see, as
they passed, the shaven lawn which ended in a curve before the steps.
The tall windows of the winter-garden shed upon the palm-trees a glaze
of good breeding. The curtains hung without a fold; they allowed one
to imagine the glass pendants of a lustre and the arm of a bronze
David lurking in the interior of a drawing-room.

In the open doorway of the coach-house, beyond the path of raked
gravel, a groom, bare-armed, was sluicing the flawless varnish of a
brougham. The corner of the big house only half concealed a long alley
of limes. A porter, in a royal blue coat, came out of his lodge; he
cast at the wayfarers a glance which rose from their boots to their
hats, and, having estimated the value of each of these garments,
turned away.

When they had taken thirty paces the escort of clamorous factories
closed round them again. And so they walked on for many minutes, with
aching feet and agonised hearts.

The agent walked ahead, to show his discretion, and distributed
important greetings as he went. He turned round now and again, and
attached to the factories the labels of the firms that owned them. The
figures of their illustrious balance-sheets anointed these names with
the oil of millions.

The two men advanced shoulder to shoulder. They lowered their heads
without uttering a word, because what was at stake was nothing less
than their daily bread, the work of their hands, and the devouring
thirst of their ambition.

Finally, one of them, the bigger of the two, said:

"Upon my word, the street is paved with gold."

The other made some reply, without raising either his voice or his
head.

They passed by a private house. The name uttered by the agent brought
them to a halt.

"That is a man who came from Bitche, fifty years ago, as we are coming
from Buschendorf. See where his widow lived, Joseph."

The thin stranger chewed the words as a dog snatches its food.

"In fifty years' time, will Hermine be living in a house like that?"

His big companion flung his head back to examine the house through his
spectacles. He did not smile; it was not the time for smiles.

"In fifty years, Guillaume...?"

He turned his eyes again to the house with its eight windows abreast,
the central block of which was crowned with a high, four-square slate
roof.

The official agent had joined them. He drew the gentlemen's attention
to the peculiar fact that all the chimneys which could be seen from
where they were standing vomited their smoke to the profit of the
widow or of her dynasty.

The spectacled stranger turned once again to the thin one, laid his
hand on his shoulder:

"The time has come to take our factory."

They proceeded on their way, but this time with the elastic, loping
pace of wolves in pursuit of their prey, of which one would not have
thought them capable. In the tangled skein of the trails which they
had been following all that morning, all of which had led to success,
they had at length discerned a guiding line. They had set their feet
on the spot where one of those trails had started,

"What Schermann has done, the two Simlers can do," growled the big
one. They had left the trails of other men and were beginning to trace
a line of their own.




II


A leather-covered door closed heavily behind them and imprisoned them
in a kind of tunnel. If we except the sickly-looking clerk visible
from the passage through the panes of a glazed door, at the end of a
sort of cellar, the place filled with a sweetish odour to which their
trail had led them first of all, contained absolutely no one but the
agent and their two selves.

The door was of double thickness and reinforced; the two windows were
fitted with panes of ground glass and guarded by stout bars. This
abundance of reinforcements and bars made one suppose everything that
the agent wished the public to suppose.

When there was nothing within earshot of the trio but those windows,
those bars, that door, the green files of papers, and that other thing
of which they were thinking but which they refrained from mentioning,
the two strangers exchanged another glance. It shot across the room
like a hawser flung from one vessel to another, at sea. Then they
moistened their lips with their tongues, and waited together for the
third man to let them hear the sound of his voice.

The agent turned his back to them. He had just found the right file.
He extracted from it, with a sigh, a roll of tracing-paper, which he
spread out upon the table with the polite resignation of a public
official. He would have offered with the same indifference India tea,
neckties at one franc or mechanical pianos. It was his routine. Facing
him were two individuals prepared to stake their whole existence. The
violence of his sigh had burst the fastening of his collar; one saw a
livid Adam's apple dancing up and down after his recent effort, as a
fisherman's float bobs up and down after a tug at the hook. Joseph
smiled.

"It seems to me that we cannot do better than proceed methodically and
return to the details of an enumeration which... The premises that you
have just inspected..." the agent began in a toneless voice. The thin
man thereupon thrust forward his right hand, as though he would make a
clean sweep of everything on the table.

"What do we need these things for any more?"

"Oh, Wilhelm, the plans!"

His companion had flung himself upon the drawings, the whole weight of
his body supported upon the palms of his hands. His spectacles slipped
from his nose, and fell upon the table, their stems in the air.

"Sir!" The agent had turned crimson. The plans were his flesh and
blood. He clung to them as to the proof of a noble calling. He had
engraved upon his cards: _Expert Engineer_.

"What do you want those papers for, Joseph? Don't you know that
factory by now as well as if you had built it yourself?"

"In the event of any dispute as to the buildings, Sir, or as to the
land, these plans are evidence..."

Joseph replaced his spectacles, took a footrule from his pocket and
coolly cut the expert short:

"Leave me alone, Wilhelm. Talk to this gentleman. I am listening to
you both."

He bent over the plans. The other twitched his hands in his nervous
way and shrugged his shoulders. He began with a stammer, because he
was recovering command of himself, and without looking, at first, at
the man whom he was addressing: "Have you nothing _better_ to show
us?"

"I have let you see all the premises that are vacant at present in
Vendeuvre."

"Humph! They're in fine condition!"

The agent took shelter, with a wave of his hand, behind the decrees of
Providence.

"Would you rather I showed you the plans of the little Le Pleynier
factory, up the blind alley?"

Without raising his head, Joseph made a motion with his fingers which
sent this suggestion in the wake of many others, behind the wall of
files. The agent bowed; his hour had come; he awaited in patience the
inevitable question that would bring them on to his territory. As it
happened, his two adversaries were in no mood to keep him languishing.

"What price?" barked Wilhelm.

"What price? Good gracious, I shall have to refer the matter to the
owner."

"Refer the matter? Indeed? You undertake to let premises without
finding out what price is being asked for them?"

"Excuse me, gentlemen, I do not say that. But you must not suppose
that these affairs are always so simple."

"Always, Monsieur Gabard!" Joseph asserted, looking at him over his
spectacles.

M. Gabard smiled a fixed smile: "Why, of course. We agents could wish
for nothing better. What is our object? It is to..."

"Pardon me," put in the milder voice of Joseph Simler.  "Our object,
on our side, is to proceed as rapidly as possible.  Consequently, Sir,
if it was dependent upon your kindness ...?"

Gabard heaved a sympathetic sigh: "Of course, of course.  Let us come
straight to the point. The factory which you have just inspected
belonged to the grandfather of the present owners. He managed it
himself,--but that scarcely concerns you, I suppose..."

He plunged deftly into his file: "Let us say, then...  here it is... I
come down to, to, to... 1836."

"1836?"

Joseph endeavoured too late to suppress his brother's untimely
exclamation. It had already furnished the agent with a pretext for the
digression he had been longing to make:

"When I say 1836... it dates _actually_ from 1807, having been founded
by Monsieur Poncet the great-grandfather, during the International
Blockade. He did good business there--it is a building that carries
good luck with it, gentlemen!--But having died fairly soon
afterwards..."

Joseph stood erect and laid down his footrule: "Sir, my brother has
asked you a question. We are no longer children.  I do not know what
your time is worth, but ours has a value beyond all comparison with
the interest of the story that you are telling us. Monsieur Gabard, at
what rent has the proprietor instructed you to lease the factory which
we have just been inspecting?"

"Eh, gentlemen, the proprietor, where is he? Who has the right to fix
a price? Gentlemen, do not be angry with me, but since you are no
longer novices in business, you must have heard of what is called the
tutelage of minors, the _curator ad ventrem_, the... Ah! Gentlemen, I
wish I were able to answer your question and say: The rent is so much,
there! But, but, but, ah!"

Then, taking advantage of the slight confusion which he had produced
in the enemy's ranks, he went on, with his gentle placidity:

"In 1836 died Monsieur Frédéric Poncet, himself the son of... but let
us go on; he left two sons of full age, who divided his personal
estate, and formed a partnership for carrying on the business. I refer
now to Messieurs Firmin and Alexis Poncet. On the nth of September,
1858, Monsieur Alexis died, leaving three minor children, two of them
being girls, and expressing the wish that his son, the young
Norbert-Elesban, then aged seven years, should succeed him in due
course as the partner of his uncle, Monsieur Firmin. You follow me?
But the young Norbert-Elesban happening to die himself, before
reaching his majority, in consequence of a boating accident which cost
him his life at the same time as that of his mother, Monsieur Firmin
was appointed guardian to the two surviving sisters. Six years later,
Monsieur Firmin, who was considerably junior to his elder brother,
Monsieur Alexis, and had remained a bachelor, fell in love with the
younger of his wards, Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle--oh
dear! Elisabeth-Athénais-Juliette, and married her, on the 17th of
March, 1869, he himself being aged 46 years, and the young lady 17. As
ill-luck would have it, Monsieur Firmin Poncet abandoned his home and
the management of his business to perform his duty to his country, was
appointed captain in the Departmental Militia, and was killed, at the
close of the year '70, at the battle of Orléans, leaving his
unfortunate widow two months gone in pregnancy. You see the point? Of
course, nothing could be more plain. A _curator ad ventrem_ was
appointed, as the law directs, who is, as a matter of fact, the
President of the Civil Tribunal. But, a year earlier, Mademoiselle
Marguerite-Antonine-Félicie-Odette-Anne-Marie Poncet, elder sister to
the former Mademoiselle, presently Madame Elisabeth-Athénais-Juliette
Poncet, had married Monsieur Taffoneau des Lauriers; she died on the
7th of April, 1870, after giving birth to the infant
Urbain-Félix-Alexis Taffoneau des Lauriers. I ought to add," said the
agent, in a hollow tone, "that the friendly relations between the
Demoiselles Poncet had not survived the marriage of the younger with
her uncle, a circumstance which has rendered impossible any attempt at
a settlement between this lady on the one hand and her brother-in-law
on the other, and has made necessary the judicial liquidation of so
complicated a succession."

The two Simlers had listened to this narrative with an expression in
which anger finally prevailed:

"But surely, Sir, there must be some legal tutor, a liquidator, a
magistrate of some sort who is entrusted with this succession?"

"Gentlemen, there is indeed."

"Ah!"

"There was indeed, I should have said."

"What? Is he dead too, then?"

"Thank heaven, no, but he was a man scarcely fitted to deal with
these industrial matters, and..."

"And?"

"He resigned his office, a week ago."

It was at this moment that the Simlers understood their man, the West,
its cunning, the pitfalls that are covered by so much indolence and
good nature. They exchanged a quick glance and Joseph turned crimson.
His voice became all the calmer. It was now the agent's fault if he
noticed nothing.

"Monsieur Gabard, you are making fools of us. I forgive you, since it
is by these practices that you earn your livelihood.  But as we are
obliged to earn our own, we shall bid you a humble farewell. If,
before we reach that door, you have not given us an answer as to the
price--there is the train at midday. My dear Sir, I bid you good day."

He took three steps, Guillaume two.

"Eh, gentlemen, fix it for yourselves, your price!"

They stopped short, Joseph came back to the table, laid down his straw
hat upon it, and took up the footrule which he had forgotten.

"Ten thousand, Sir!" he said with a rasping quiver in his voice.

Thereupon an innocent surprise caused the honest man's eyebrows to
rise. He gazed at each of them in turn, lowered his eyes to the
trinkets upon his watch-chain, raised them again at length to the two
men, and a smile of indulgent fatherhood played about his swollen
lips: "Ten thousand francs, gentlemen? But this factory is not to
let,--it is for sa-ale."

"For sale?"

There was no possibility of misunderstanding the cry that escaped from
the brothers. For the first time that morning the man felt that he was
playing another game than that of the ceremonial preliminaries.

Joseph was by now standing in front of him, having come round the
table. Gabard saw his spectacles gleam within eight inches of his own
eyes, and felt the warmth of his breath upon his cheeks:

"I think that it is better to end this discussion... We are not
accustomed... A whole morning you have been dragging us about... And
yet you knew what we wanted!  You cannot say that we did not explain.
You are lying, aren't you?"

"Gentlemen!"

The big man found his line of retreat barred by his armchair.

"I want no more _gentlemen_!"

"I swear to you. I have received the order to sell. Do you wish to see
it?"

"Whose order? There is no longer any liquidator!"

"But he remains in office until he has appointed his success... oh!"

Joseph had laid his two heavy paws on the man's shoulders.

"Look us in the eyes, Monsieur Gabard. We are not the sort of people
that you think us. There has been a misunderstanding.  Your trade is
cheating, ours is manufacturing, because that is our livelihood, and
now we must have that factory. I do not give you so much as a minute
to accept.  It is ten thousand francs and a fifteen years' lease. You
hear me?"

"Sir," moaned Gabard, trying to turn his face to Guillaume, and
stretching out his arm to the table. "Sir, look, there, these papers,
I am only an intermediary, I must se-ell."

Joseph gripped him by the shoulders and shook him.

"Then why all this play-acting? Why..."

But he saw all of a sudden, within an inch of his spectacles, the
livid glottis dancing up and down like a fisherman's float; he smiled
again, released the man, and turned towards the table. Guillaume was
already turning over the file. Ga-bard, sinking back in his armchair,
tried to slip his hand towards the bell.

"Don't move hand or foot, I am warning you for your good," growled
Joseph, with a significant gesture. The man took the two ends of his
collar in his hands, and began to moan piteously.

Meanwhile the other two were turning over the papers in feverish
haste.

"Certificate of marriage... death certificate... certificate ...
certificate... certificate... deed of adjudication ... certificate...
letter of 7th January, 1861...  letter... certificate...
procuration--humph--nothing. If it is not here, my dear Sir, if it is
not here..."

"Dated the 2oth of March, this year, oh! a letter from the liquidator,
oh! paper with the heading, oh! of the civil tribunal, it, oh! if is
there."

"I hope so for your sake," said Joseph coldly. Guillaume exclaimed:
"_Here it is_!" and they both bent over the letter, cheek by jowl,
Joseph keeping motionless behind his back, with his right hand, the
man in the armchair.

They read in silence, read again, and the paper rattled faintly
against Guillaume's fingertips. When he had laid it down, the two
Alsacians stood upright and withdrew from either side of the table.
Their faces were aflame, and they remained silent, refraining from
glancing at each other.

"You... you have seen it?"

"Yes."

There could be no mistaking the terms of the letter. The law was
explicit and ordered a sale.

"You have a copy of the Code?" asked Joseph. "Good. Do not move."

He followed the line of the big man's trembling finger, took a volume
from the open bookcase and turned the pages.  Guillaume chewed his
moustache. Joseph shut the book and flung it upon the table.

"That is all right."

He raised his eyes towards Guillaume and found a glance that was
awaiting his own. He saw in it no doubt all that he hoped and feared
to see, for his breath seemed to fail him, and he raised his hands to
his collar, copying the agent's gesture.

One could discern from the traces on the boots of the two men more
than one day spent in travelling, and, on their faces, an air of
exhausted covetousness. They must have been scouring France for weeks
without having found anything, and must be at their last gasp. As for
the motive which had made them emerge from Alsace, as wolves emerge
from a forest, the agent omitted to inquire, and this was his second
mistake.

"That is all right," Joseph growled again. He scanned his brother's
face with a sort of bewilderment. His brother spoke in turn, raising
his hand to his chest, to the level of his inside pocket:

"Our father, Monsieur Simler, Hippolyte Simler, cloth-weaver at
Buschendorf, Haut-Rhin, has given us authority..."

(His voice failed at the too precise memory of the power of attorney:
"I grant and confer, by this present act, full power to my sons
Guillaume and Joseph Simler, both being of full age, to conclude and
sign in my name all deeds, contracts, treaties and stipulations with
respect to the lease of a factory...." The word _lease_ does not cover
_purchase_.)

"--authority, legalised before the mayor of Buschendorf, on the 7th of
June, 1871, to... _act_ in his name. You are a dishonest man, Monsieur
Gabard, to have made us visit that factory when you knew that it was
not to let. What price... is asked for it?"

Joseph's glance raced from the agent to Guillaume and from Guillaume
to the agent. The latter bent over the table without ceasing to gaze
piteously at the two Simlers, and began in his turn to fumble among
the disorder of the file.

"Do you wish to see the liquidator's letter? It is--three hundred and
fifty thousand."

A burst of laughter interrupted him: "Three hundred and fifty
thousand!" sneered Joseph who felt his head swimming.

"Gentlemen, I am only a humble agent... a mere in-term--"

"Hold your tongue, then! Three hundred and fifty thousand?  It's
preposterous. Ha ha! The shanty is falling to pieces. It is worth, it
is worth ten thousand francs a year, two hundred thousand francs, cash
down."

"Do you wish to see the letter? I am a mere agent..."

"Hold your tongue, then! You don't make fools of people like that. Why
not double the price at once?"

Guillaume reentered the fray: "You have authority to deal, at least?"

"Stop!" Joseph cut him short. "The Code! Where is the Code? Ah,
but!... page, page... There has been a judicial liquidation, hasn't
there? _Then_, there must have been a public auction, mustn't there?
There _must_ have been a public auction? Answer, you!"

The agent raised a lifeless eye towards him: "Yes."

"_Pardi_! Give me those papers. Of course! Here is the deed of
adjudication. I had forgotten about it. Wilhelm, look at it!"

Guillaume did not understand. Joseph was furiously turning over the
bundle of stamped documents, bound in a Lyons paper with ribbons of an
artistic hue.

"_Pardi_! _Pardi_! Judgment delivered the... Ah! Civil Tribunal of
First Instance. What a fool I was! Adjudication ... listen: '_Several
candles were lighted, during the consumption of which no offer was
made_.'... I thought as much! But it is the reserve price that I want
to find... the reserve price... Ah! Reserve price.... Listen, Wilhelm,
do you know what was the reserve set on the shanty? I thought so
too.... Two hundred and seventy-five thousand, my boy, not a centime
more, and, at that figure, nobody would look at it. We offer two
hundred thousand, Gabard, my friend, cash down."

"Imp--"

"Two hundred thousand!"

"But, gentlemen..."

"There is no _but_ about it: two hundred thousand. You have your
authority, we have ours, come over here and write."

The agent raised himself upon the arms of his chair: "I cannot!"

"It is too late. You have lied to us three times. That was once too
often."

"A contract extorted by force..."

"Am I forcing you?" sneered Joseph, stepping back and spreading out
his hands with an ingenuous air. "But, tell me: what is the agent's
commission?"

Gabard turned pale: "I don't understand."

"Lie number four. What is your commission, Monsieur Gabard?"

"You know quite well."

"Tell us, all the same."

"T--t-wo per cent."

"Good!" Here Joseph rubbed his hands and gave vent to so nervous a
laugh that his brother turned to gaze at him with an air of alarm.
"But I think I saw..."

Gabard instinctively covered the papers with his arms.

"Aha? Now we understand, Master Gabard. A little letter.  ... You
didn't remember that you had left it there, I expect?"

"No! it is a lie!"

Joseph's voice rose a tone higher: "A letter from the liquidator, a
little reply, which mentions, eh?, something in the nature of a little
bit extra? People forget things.... Rash, when they have not a clear
conscience!"

Gabard's throat was beating a tattoo. Joseph advanced upon him,
followed by Guillaume who was beginning to understand:

"I say two hundred thousand, cash down."

The agent replied in a cadaverous tone: "Two hundred thousand, plus
the costs."

"Cash down."

The man, his face lowered, his hands flattened upon his papers, shook
his head:

"I cannot, Monsieur Simler. Two hundred and ten thousand, that is my
final word."

Joseph looked at the wretch, and realised that, this time, he had
spoken the truth.

"Write," he murmured simply.




III


When they came out of the agent's office, the angle of the midday sun
reduced their shadows to tiny pools at their feet. One of the pair was
buttoned up to the throat and kept his arms glued to his body. The
other, the stout one, was feeling the heat keenly.

He came to a halt on the very threshold of the house in which they had
just been gambling, heads or tails, a portion of their destiny. He
passed a finger between his collar and his throat. This caused his
back collar-stud to snap. The man swore, then raised his eyes in which
little flames of blood were dancing, and gazed for a moment at the
leaden sky: "I ask myself how the sun manages to live in a sky like
that, Guillaume." He broke out in an exaggerated laugh.  "Hey,
Guillaume, what are you thinking about? It is our sky, from to-day
onwards, that black thing up there."

He brought his hand down with a thump on Guillaume's shoulder. But his
laughter died away at the sight of the face that his companion turned
towards him.

"For the love of God, Joseph, don't laugh like that."

And Guillaume pressed his arms more tightly than ever to his meagre
chest:

"I keep asking myself what our father is going to say, and what will
be the end of all this business. Come."

He began to walk away. A white blur appeared at that moment behind
them, in the ground glass panes of the office window; the agent was
beginning to recover his spirits.

Joseph overtook his brother: "The devil take you. You have the
agreement, I hope?"

Guillaume stopped short. With a trembling hand, he unbuttoned his coat
and drew out a stamped document from the inside pocket. He squinted at
it for a moment, across his right cheek, and raised his eyes towards
Joseph. Whereupon the latter smiled a fatherly smile, and laid his
hand upon Guillaume's arm: "Don't lose it now. And don't worry any
more than you need. You have your wife and kids. But I have never
heard that where there is a pack of wool and a machine to weave it,
any Simler has ever starved. I have never felt so hot. What time does
the train go?"

"Half-past six, if I remember right."

"It is twelve o'clock. Suppose we look for some shade?"

His brother darted at him a yellowish eyeball in which an
extraordinary flame of passion blazed. Before he had finished
speaking, Joseph had, on his part, cast a hesitating glance at him.
They exchanged no more words, but set out, with the same loping pace
of hunting wolves, in a direction along, which they knew that within
six months every stone would have become familiar to them.

"Of what shall I be thinking, six months from now, when I pass by this
wall?" thought the thin one as he hopped over the gaping stones of the
pavement.

"What will be in our minds, six months from now, when we pass this
crossing?" thought the stout one, as he stepped across a gutter along
which a foul and scorching tide swirled.

The streets were empty. The factories were silent. A wagon loaded with
coal passed across the avenue farther ahead, jolting as it crossed the
gutter.

They passed by a tavern from which issued a splutter of frying food
blended with the sound of voices. As they left the door behind them,
the sound died away. There remained in the air only a very low sort of
odour which finally passed under their tongues and made their mouths
water.

They went straight ahead, casting violent glances on either side. They
recognised the channel along which they would so often have to steer.
The three chimneys of Chevalier Lefombère served as light-houses to
this strange, unpiloted navigation.

The porter of the house that had been occupied by the widow, an
immigrant fifty years ago from Bitche, was finishing his dinner. He
was sipping a glass of old Calvados and gazing at the avenue through a
pink Gloire de Dijon which decorated his window. He saw two dusty
wayfarers stop outside the railings, gaze inside with gloomy eyes,
then proceed upon their way. He never knew, in after years, that he
had seen the two Simlers at the foot of their ladder, on the very day
on which they began to climb.

At the corner of a side-street, Joseph halted. He pointed to a
building.

"That must be the place, the Cercle du Commerce. A one-storeyed
pavilion, with big windows, a garden behind railings, at the end of a
sort of square. Hey, Guillaume, that is where the big pots of the
place meet. In six months' time the porter will be bowing to the
ground before Monsieur Simler senior, when he comes in quietly to read
his _Temps_, on Sunday evenings. A different sort of place from
Buschen-dorf, I guess?"

The other displayed a sickly smile beneath his moustache.  Joseph grew
excited: "The wealth of the members of the Club amounts to one hundred
and eleven millions, you remember what we read in the guide? There are
sixty-five of them. 'To make money, one must come where money is
made.' Here we are. _Simler and Sons_: an excellent name for a firm! I
say, Wilhelm, when they are sixty-seven, in that pub, I doubt whether
the two latest recruits will add much to the wealth of these
gentlemen."

His brother's arms were pressed against the bosom in which reposed,
upon stamped paper, the stipulations of the contract. Guillaume sought
to react: "One hundred and eleven millions of clear property against
seventy-five thousand francs of initial debt... without reckoning...
what is to come...."

"You have omitted from your balance-sheet two Simlers, one stout and
one lean, each of them endowed with a keen desire to live!"

They moved on again, casting at the Club an almost joyful glance, and,
all of a sudden, at the next crossing, came upon _their_ factory.

They did not expect it so soon. It gave them a shock.

They had just passed by at least a dozen big factories in .which
the--stroke of noon had stopped all activity, as milk curdles in a
bowl. But through the railings or beneath the porches, everything
announced an untroubled prosperity.

The wagons loaded with bales of wool had halted by the sides of
weighing machines polished by use. Baskets, heaped to overflowing with
white spindles, drowsed aslant upon three handcarts at the gate of a
building. The driving bands were swaying in the air, with a supple
resilience, narrow paths of motive force at rest. No grass between the
paving-stones of the courtyards, whether because care had been taken
to weed them, or because the grass never found time to grow there. The
brick walls raised their squat elevation to four storeys without a
crack in their mortar, without a broken pane in their windows. An
acrid blackness enveloped the whole, but like a dust of superfluous
wealth.  The smell of small coal and briquettes, that of the sweat of
wool, that of the acids used in dyeing, the smell of machine oil, of
cloth damped for the presses, conveyed nothing in which the nostrils
of the brothers Simler might not rejoice.

A true festival of labour, which was better able to find its way to
their hearts than the smell of fried food. And yet they had had
nothing in their stomachs, since, their dinner overnight, save the
bitter little roll with their morning coffee, barely softened by a pat
of butter.

_It_ stood before them as though it had come there without warning
them. They had supposed that it was two blocks farther on. To tell the
truth, they did not recognise it at first.

A low and leprous wall ran along one side of a lane. The front that
faced the avenue was undistinguished. You came at once to the rusty
gate, and immediately after it to the other angle of the wall. That
was the end of the factory.

Everything was contained between these two angles, like a chest
compressed between two bony shoulders.

And suddenly they were overwhelmed by the despair, the appalling
apprehension of all the burden of their future.  Joseph, who had
recoiled to the opposite pavement, sat down upon a post, while his
heart sank to the pit of his stomach.

It was some time before they ventured to exchange a glance. And yet
they had spent part of the morning pacing this ground. There had
afterwards been the plans and the footrule. But imagination and the
passion of combat had made of them things that were powerless against
desire.

They contemplated stolidly one detail after another, and each detail
rose before them, in its solidity and its mockery.

The wall was pitted with holes, its ridge of tiles was falling to
pieces. The gate was crumbling. Deep gutters were carved through the
clinkers of the courtyard; a shower of rain would turn it into a
quagmire. The cracked doorstep. A hole filled with rubbish at the foot
of the weighing machine.  From where they were, they could see only
one corner of the main building; a scrofulous tile dangled from the
roof like a lip.

As for the lodging so suitable for a porter without a family, their
thoughts returned to it incessantly. They thought of the spacious
house in Alsace which had such ample room for them all, many as they
were; they dared not admit to themselves that this squat little cube,
with its two skylights warped by the glare of the sun, was to settle
upon their life, which would never emerge from it again.

"I... I don't quite remember how many rooms there are... there."

"We have perhaps been children... little senseless children."

Above all there was the absence of any odour. A rancid gust was wafted
to them now and then in the eddies of the air. The corpse of the
little factory opened, in the heart of the quarter, a well of silence.
Its internal shadows were rent by the teeth of the broken windowpanes.

"All the same we must reckon it up," murmured Joseph, stroking his
scalp with a distracted air. The post on which he was sitting was a
little too high for him. Only the tips of his toes reached the ground;
the hat that he was holding on his knees was shaken by a curious
tremor. He heard his brother say: "This... factory never covered a
hectare. It is... it is ridiculously small."

Joseph rose to his feet without replying. His head bare beneath the
sun, he set off along the alley with a firm step.  He moved along the
wall counting his paces. He parted his stumpy legs with the activity
of a beetle. His eyes never left the angle of the next corner, which
advanced to meet him.

His brother watched him go, with a stupid stare in his eyes, and
counted also, mechanically, his paces.

Having counted fifty, Joseph halted, struck his heel on the ground and
turned. A considerable expanse of receding wall separated him now from
the avenue, and kept him detached from it, at arm's length. He resumed
his pacing. He asked himself whether there was room for thirty paces
more before he reached the end. He had to struggle against the
temptation to shorten his steps as the corner approached.

"Sixty, sixty-one--I wasn't wasting my time the day I learned to march
in step--sixty-four, five, six--this wall can never be more than
eighty metres--seven, eight--the plans were faked, what idiots we have
been."

At eighty paces, there was still some ground left to cover.  He
hesitated, and could not help noticing at this point a slight
weakening in the masonry.

At ninety-five, the irregular lines between the paving-stones took him
as their centre, and began to circle slowly round him; then their
gyration became more rapid; space swam in a circle before his eyes;
the irregularities of the stones were transformed into curving streaks
of a prodigious immobility.

He steadied himself by placing his hand against the' wall, scorched
it, and continued on his way.

"Ninety-six, 'ty-seven, eight, nine..."

He did not know what exactly happened when he reached a hundred. For
there still remained a certain length of wall, and this contracted,
then drew back again in such a way that the corner was now within the
reach of his fingers, now recoiled until it touched the horizon.

Bent double, the purchaser of the wall and of the factory regarded
these transformations without surprise. He began nevertheless to run,
and had reached the corner of the building before he had time to pass
his fingers over it.

And the man whom he had left behind him had the strange experience of
witnessing the following spectacle: at the end of a deserted alley, a
figure clothed in brown was clinging with both hands to a dazzling
wall, while his legs trod a frenzied war-dance. Indistinct cries
reached him simultaneously:

"The plans are--correct! Hullo--Wilhelm!--A hundred and twenty-five
metres--a hundred and twenty--five--at--least!"

Then it seemed to the watcher that a window had been opened somewhere,
and that a cool draught began to circulate over the earth's surface.

He burst out laughing, turned his head round in search of somebody to
whom he might communicate the surprising length of the little wall,
saw that he was alone, and realised that the dancer in brown had taken
advantage of his inattention to disappear.

At once a miracle occurred. The factory rose a storey higher. The
porter's lodge became a commodious villa. The slender brick chimney
was transformed into a sturdy column, a hundred feet high, and ready
to stain the scorching sky with its smoke. The summer sunshine flooded
interminable rooms, suspended from the beams of their ceilings as from
the ribs of a giant.

They came together again side by side, their faces glued to the bars
of the gate. Joseph was breathless, and had turned a deep purple.

"We are--a pair of idiots.--I have--I have walked round
the--factory.--Everything is--is--is--perfect."

They spent the remaining hours that were at their disposal in rubbing
their noses against the walls of _their_ factory.  They yielded to the
intoxication of constructing their life to come in the three
dimensions of height, depth and width,--above all, width.

When they tore themselves away, their hands were blistered and they
carried, upon their sleeves, specimens of the various kinds of plaster
that had been laid on the building.

They went to find the post-office, the Chamber of Commerce, the canal
wharf, then the nearest grocery and bakery--these last out of
consideration for Hermine. They might then be seen, once again, halted
in front of the Club.

About four o'clock, a wool merchant of tertiary importance was passing
from his office to his warehouse, when he found himself confronted by
two strangers who in a guttural accent addressed him by his name.

He gave, that evening, at the Cercle du Commerce, a description of
them which remained, until the autumn, the sole documentary evidence
as to the purchasers of the Poncet factory. For it is to be remarked
that, throughout the whole summer, the agent remained scrupulously
silent with regard to them.

They were, according to M. Boulinier, two perspiring men, of
dishevelled appearance, and covered with an incredible coat of dust.
It formed, he said, a sort of mask, beneath which it was difficult to
make out their features.

They were evidently worn out; the mask was contracted over the
wrinkles of their skins; they had not shaved for several days. Both of
them spoke with a loquacity which he set down to over-excitement. The
bigger of the two seemed to have taken charge of their external
relations. He wore spectacles, and had put his collar in his pocket.
He had a strong Alsacian accent which did not add to the clarity of
his speech.

The other, a thin little man with big moustaches, interrupted him in a
staccato voice which might be described as a sort of bark.

They had explained to him that they were cloth-weavers, at
Buschendorf, in the annexed territory. As they refused to become
German subjects, Simler, their father, had sent them to France, to
find a vacant factory. They had arrived that morning, and had just
become the purchasers of the Poncet factory. Their intention was to
install their material in October and to start weaving without delay.

They had shown him a perfectly genuine letter of introduction, signed
by one Dollfuss of Mulhouse. They had brandished under his nose, with
the furious excitement of savages, the back of a stamped document,
which was the agreement of sale to them granted by the authorised
representative of the heirs of the Poncet estate.

Finally they had revealed the _ultima ratio_ of their ambition: the
two lumps of dust begged M. Boulinier to be so kind as to give his
support to their candidature for the Club.

At the thought of this, the respectable little wool-merchant could not
refrain from slapping his thighs with the palms of both his hands,
while he leaned against the back of his armchair an honest round head
swaddled in rolls of fat.

The Club listened to this tale with a barely concealed indifference.
Then M. Boulinier, who never gambled, decided, this evening, to play
the sly dog, sat down at a table, and was three hundred francs to the
good before he began to repeat the half of his tale.

The part that he still did not mention was that he had buttered the
Simlers with "My dear Sirs!", with "Will be so kind as to," with "Why,
of course!", with "The idea!", with "If you will allow me!", and that
he had incontinently offered to raise a second sponsor.

If the two Alsacians had been newborn babes, they would have left the
town convinced they had not on the face of the earth any friend more
devoted, body and soul, to their service than the little merchant
Boulinier. But they knew that a tradesman's offers are not to be
reckoned at more than twenty-five per cent of their worth, and
instinctively made use of their knowledge.




IV


In the meantime, an unexacting time-table was jolting a small train
along a railway that had been laid down upon principles of sordid
economy.

>From the summit of an embankment, the town had been visible to the
Simlers, and also _their_ factory, as soon as they were clear of the
station buildings. The two Simlers dashed towards the one window on
that side. It seized their two heads and held them in a vice-like
grip.

The sight was worth the trouble of looking at it. It had been as
ludicrous at first as a children's game with blocks.  But the slope of
the embankment joined this escorting view to the train, and combined
them both in a single reality.

The travail of the town was audible in a deep groan. The tiled roofs
spread out in sheets the reflection of the July sun.  A hot vapour
quivered on their surface.

The two hundred chimneys mentioned in the guide-book bent over it in
the attitudes of caryatids. They poured out incessant gusts of smoke.
These swelled at first where they rose, but a faint breeze from the
east took hold of them and blended them in a single cloud.

A Cardiff mine was being exhausted to feed that tide of smoke. The
clamour which darkened that patch of sky was paying six shifts of
Welshmen for their toil. Two good trains on the English railways
thrived upon it daily. Two or three marauding brigs had no other
reason for their existence, in the distribution of the universal
wealth, than to transport this ration of coal. They arrived one after
another, their heads between their shoulders, their backs astream with
water, affecting that sullen air which one contracts in steering
across bad weather. When one of them returned, her loading line in the
air, dancing over the waves with the abandon of a Gibson girl, she
assured the first collier who set eyes on her that the billows of the
Channel were rolling to his feet, that two hundred chimneys were
hungry and were waiting for him to feed them.

The Simlers were not fully acquainted with this sequence of facts; but
the silence of the black cloud was eloquent.

Moreover a sabre-blade advanced towards them at an angle over the
surface of the valley, and, as they crossed it, dazzled them with
sunlight. It was the canal. The evening light fell, rectilinear, upon
wave after wave. They had just time to observe a dozen little oblong
boxes, motionless and highly burnished. But they knew that these
objects were proceeding, breast foremost, each of them rumpling the
lacquered smoothness of the water, and that each was bringing three
hundred mouthfuls of coal, at a ton to the mouthful.

The line described a wide curve halfway up the hill. The train found
the gradient difficult. With the result that the town spun gently
round at their feet.

The town in full activity--and their factory in complete repose.
Repose was hardly the word. Their prevailing impression was that of an
open wound in the flank of the town.  An empty hole, and in that hole,
their hope.

They passed above their future abode. The dark, silent courtyard, the
dilapidated roofs, the four buildings welded together in a misshapen
rectangle came beneath them.

And as the return of the curve inclined them towards the plain, the
two men felt that they were gazing for an instant into the bowed heart
of the chimney. It gaped beneath them its humid maw, soiled, humble,
scarred on one side by lightning.  The angle of the railway-carriage
gave it the effect of sinking towards the north. It withdrew without
straightening itself. A cloud of smoke from the engine enwrapped it.
It disappeared. A corner of the building remained. A broken pane had
time to snip out a reflection of the sun, and was submerged. The gate
reappeared and vanished, like a memory.

And when the smoke had melted, when they sought with their eyes the
spot that was dearest to their hearts, the Lefombère spinning-mill
masked all that quarter of the town with its faultless alignments.

A freight train flung itself between the Simlers and the valley. Its
cars chopped up their view. The glimpses were intersected by patches
of darkness and noise, like a semaphore worked by drunken giants; some
fifteen trucks, loaded with coal, were content, for a time, to
threaten the rim of the valley with the flocking succession of their
edges; then a string of cars blocked the daylight once more, and the
train escaped by swinging up the slope, with its thunder, its
darkness, and its two rear wheels which caught up the wind.

"There'll be the devil to blame if next winter there isn't one of
those cars with the name of Simler arriving at the station," murmured
the big man, as though in apology for the hoarse sigh that he had
heaved when he saw vanish in the direction of Vendeuvre freights
addressed to other people.

Joseph made an effort to think of the future. Guillaume kept his eyes
fixedly opened upon the present. He could not help thinking back to
the factory at Buschendorf, as silent to-day as the one that had just
vanished from beneath their feet....

A squadron of Uhlans were billeted in the main building.  It was,
beneath the trees, a little elongated structure, with no upper storey,
in which the handlooms were placed. It had seemed to them both, ten
years earlier, an immensity which no human measure could calculate.

Their father paced up and down his room, his hands thrust into his
pockets, his head lowered, his mouth filled with blasphemies, and
apoplexy gathered \n a roll round his throat. He had not ceased to
rage since the Prussians had invaded the little town.

At the first report from Wissembourg, he had stopped his looms,
dismissed his workmen, locked his gate. The _pickel-hauben_, in search
of a billet, had forced the lock. The kicking of their horses
shattered the wall of the woolshed. One heard at times the dull sound
of a loom worked by some Saxon weaver, then a shout of laughter, and a
shuttle crashed through a windowpane to rebound from the pavement of
the courtyard.

Simler never left his room. His footsteps sounded all day long upon
the waxed floor. In the course of time he had worn a sort of circular
path upon it. Now and again the sound ceased. A chair crashed.

Their mother brought the weaver his food, which he swallowed between
his oaths. She remained seated, for hours on end, before her
lace-pillow, not venturing to raise her eyes.

Buschendorf had been so quickly occupied by the advance-guard of
German cavalry that the two sons had found themselves prisoners,
before they had time to escape. No one could have told whether their
father did not feel, in the midst of his humiliation and rage, a sort
of relief. In that case, the broken chairs could alone have testified
to the remorse which this sentiment inspired in him.

Guillaume and Joseph were bursting with the sense of their impotence.
They paced up and down, on the grass, along the buildings. At the
sight of a grey cloak, they went upstairs to shut themselves up in
their bedroom, and devoured the German newspapers which the conquerors
did not forget to leave lying about on the chairs.

A walk in the country was forbidden them. Sentries yawned beneath the
gates in the old walls. They were under orders to present themselves,
every afternoon, at five o'clock, at the office in the Hotel-de-Ville.
There, an elderly Captain of the Landwehr, who had come in time to
recognise them by the mere sound of their feet on the pavement, gave
himself the amusement of proceeding daily, with fresh care, to the
verification of their identity.

There were titters of laughter among those present when it came to the
scar on the chest. This was a memento left to Joseph by a shotgun
which, long ago, had burst in his hands. When the Captain ordered
Joseph to strip, and moved round him, fingering the plump flesh of his
body with his precise, magisterial fingers, the troops could hardly
contain their merriment.

One day, Joseph had flung his shirt in the man's face. A formal
intervention was needed to save him from a firing-party, or at least
from deportation to Silesia. That day, Simler senior had come down
from his room, and had not hesitated to reveal the entrance to a
second cellar, hidden behind the woodpile. The Landwehr had begun by
shouting at the top of his voice, strangling himself in his red
collar.  Old Simler's Alsacian had prevailed in the end over the
Badisch in which the magistrate chattered, and the latter's spouse had
seen her husband bring home fifteen cases of bottles of the best wine.

But when the father had retired, that night, to his room, he had
escaped suffocation only by smashing the crystal globe over the clock
on the chimneypiece, and by emptying the water-jug over his head.

And nobody could have told, even then, whether the fury of father and
sons was not due to the silence of the looms, to the suspension of
business and to the rapid approach of bankruptcy, as much as to the
misfortunes of their country.

Guillaume had arrived at this stage in his memories, when a hand was
laid forcibly on his forearm, while a lamentable wail sounded in his
ears. He blinked his eyes, recognised the setting sun, recognised the
town which was huddling out of sight in the distance, recognised the
compartment and Joseph who was thrusting towards him a face inflamed
by tides of blood.

"Listen!" said the other. From the plain a cry of superhuman distress
had risen, and in a moment had occupied the whole of space.

It quivered in the air at first, alone. But the creature that was
emitting this plaint must have stimulated others. It was taken up from
the heart of the plain by a strident note.  It broke out nearer to
them with the whistling of a shell. A herd of beasts, mortally
stricken, were uttering down there their deathcry.

The main street presented itself end on, diminished by distance.

"The end of a day; their day!" murmured Guillaume.

Labour was rendering up its soul. It was the hour at which one day
more slipped into the sum of the days that had passed since the
creation of the world. The amplitude of the cry measured the greatness
of the irreparable. The sun was sinking behind the cloud that had
invaded the atmosphere.

Then there appeared beneath the two men the little sharpened tongue of
a steel point. It waited for the train, seized it by its wheels, and
drew it violently to itself. They felt a shock, saw escape beneath the
curve of the hill four strips of gleaming metal, were hurled to the
left, and plunged, without a light, into something dark that roared.
The tunnel, distance, and the mass of a hill of blind earth fell
between them and the town.

Daylight returned to them. But the landscape which it illuminated
offered them nothing in which their passion might find solace.

It was in vain that those pine trunks stood up in serried ranks
against the gaping wound of the setting sun. In vain that the pond
which lay bleeding in the depths of a ravine shone for them with a
solitary flash and was eclipsed. In vain that the line leaped from
slope to slope, through the twilit forest, that the sound of the
train, echoing in the thickets, startled the pheasants, and made the
screech-owls perched on the tops of the beeches silently clap their
wings,--that the brakes clenched with a scream upon a slope which drew
them down towards the glimmering light of a plain.

It was in vain that they emerged from the night that had fallen to
return to a night that was beginning, that the valley unlaced for them
its bodice of hedges, orchards and roses.  Vainly did the great river
escape from a chalky cliff, lead towards them its motionless escort of
poplars, and offer them, in a quivering curve, all the light that was
dying between its banks. Vainly did the low water-meadows in which
cows were kneeling among the grass, support the tracery of lengthening
shadows. Vainly did the villages of white stone hold themselves
suspended, facing the west, and remain, with a tiny round cloud, the
last glowing shapes of the valley. Vainly did the Angélus hum round
Norman belfries like bees round the opening of a hive. Vainly did
Venus banish the last blood red streaks in order to install her
presence in the evening sky. Vainly did the daily miracle of the West
repeat itself before the eyes of these two Alsacians.

At a bend in the river, a bridge, blown up eight months earlier to
arrest the advance of Manteuffel, allowed its iron apron to trail in
the water of the stream. And the brothers Simler went on, to seek, out
there, in their native East, arguments for battle which had nothing in
common with the somnolence of the most religious of summer twilights.




V


Guillaume remembered afterwards an interminable wait by the platform
of a station. Steps had approached, along the roof of the carriage. A
rattling sound had opened, in the ceiling, an unplumbable violet
orifice in the depths of which a star was shining. But the star had
disappeared. They had witnessed a short contest between a wad of tow
upon a stick and a little yellow flame. A sharp sound. The steps had
withdrawn, leaving behind them a glass cage spotted with grease,
inside which, attached to a metal arm, the little flame was
struggling.

No matter. That feeble, agonising glimmer had been sufficient to expel
the rest of the world from the overheated box. As soon as the
lamplighter had dropped it into its place, a web of walls and
darkness, equally dense, had reformed about the travellers.

In fact, night has begun. No one is conscious how long it will last.

A force seizes the carriage and draws it on. It has gripped it one
knows not where, for the whole carriage shakes in unison. The dull
roar of a forge mounts from the earth.  Everything begins to vibrate.

It is a battle-royal. A question of transporting, to a distance of
sixty leagues, while the night lasts, three hundred tons of inert
matter, in a series of cubes.

Guillaume repeats to himself the terms of the problem.  Three hundred
tons! He shuts his eyes. The draught that, enters through the little
open windows is not sufficient to dispel the odours which are
poisoning the cell. The Alsacian rises among the jolts and unlaces his
shoes. No sooner are they liberated than his feet begin to swell. He
wriggles his toes in the white cotton of his socks, the hard creases
of which are scorching his feet.

Before lying down again he scrutinises his brother. Joseph is already
snoring. His head has slipped from the yellow travelling-bag on which
he had laid it; it has slipped down lower than his chest, to the very
edge of the seat. One of his hands is trailing on the floor, on which
an indescribable dust is stirring, to the breathless rhythm of the
forge.  Guillaume has the painful sensation that this hand is made of
gold-beater's skin. With misgivings he recognises once again in
Joseph's appearance, the marks of the paternal authority. That
instantaneous sleep, that spongy throat, those cheekbones accentuated
by the sagging of the cheeks, make him think of the excessive
reactions of that body, its notorious strength, its irresistible
gaiety, its needs as instantaneous as its passions.

He asks himself once again what is the law that urges males of the
same race to hate one another. At least he feels confusedly that there
is a question which he should ask himself.  But he has neither the
time to ask nor the habit of asking himself such questions. He is on
the point of taking Joseph's head in his hands and replacing it on its
pillow of yellow pasteboard. He changes his mind and confines himself
to touching his brother's shoulder:

"Up! Up!"

When Joseph at length opens a haggard eye, uttering in rapid
succession, like his father, a string of interjections, he sees
leaning over him a face in which it would take a very subtle mind to
discern anything but affection and pure cordiality.

Joseph has fallen asleep again. The destiny of the Simlers keeps watch
now only in the mind of Guillaume. Also doubtless, at Buschendorf,
beneath a copper lamp, old and worn, in the mind of a mother whose
anxiety accompanies their every step.

Guillaume repeats to himself the terms of the problem.  Three hundred
tons, sixty leagues. The flame of the lamp beneath which the mother,
far away, is turning the pages of her Hebrew ritual, rises with a jet
as calm as is frenzied the flame of the wick that writhes, up above
him, in its basin of oily glass.

Because everything, here, is a combat. Matter is inert. It refuses to
know anything. Matter is solid. Distance is slender and long. To make
one pass over the other. That is the whole question. Friction. Heat.
Guillaume Simler feels them as though the aching mass of his own body
were being dragged, through the night, joint by joint, over the
interminable gridiron of the metal track.

The night itself weighs upon him like a solidified mass.  Guillaume
Simler raises himself upon his elbow and tries to look out of the
window. His glance is shot back at him.  There is nothing outside but
density, a wall of warm darkness.  He strains his eyes. A tree,
lightened by a momentary flash, stands out and vanishes, with a sigh.
Nothing more.  Guillaume drops back upon the seat. His travelling-bag
slips one of its locks under his head and scratches him. The man
grumbles for a moment, turns from side to side, and continues to
explore the problem.

Guillaume Simler, by having contemplated it often, when as a boy he
came home from school after dark, knows the reason of this weariness
of a train that slackens its speed.  The train is nothing more, at
that hour, than a phantom in the heart of the summer night; one end of
it vomits smoke, flame, sparks; at the other end is the triangle of
three red lamps climbing the gradient; and behind it, a well of
silence and profundity, a vortex yawning at the foot of the
embankment, the law of gravity, against which a phantom struggles
desperately.

As a matter of fact, he had not supposed that there would be also a
wagon of coal. Nor that the merchants were in the habit of loading
their wagons so full. He watches with astonishment the efforts of an
old horse, presumably white, its head emerging from a halter that is
too large for it, to drag the enormous vehicle.

This appears at the corner of an avenue. The wagon jumps from one
paving-stone to another with the sound of a battery of guns. A man
swears as he thrashes with his whip the skeleton of his beast. And the
rays of an infernal sun writhe in every direction, enveloping the
universe in the heat of a furnace.

And now, look, after the first wagon, appears a second, then, up the
slope of a side-street, a string of others, all high, black, and
over-loaded.

Albeit the metal tires of the wheels are imitating, on the pavement,
the hammering of a forge, Guillaume feels convinced that the load will
never reach the top of the slope.  He would like to explain to the
driver of the first wagon that the law of friction prevents.... The
man has come level with him; he is indeed of abnormal stature. His
black fingers have extracted from his overalls a dirty sheet of paper
which Guillaume Simler knows well. And Guillaume Simler has no need to
give a second glance at the invoice from the railway company.

"Delivered at the station! Delivered at the station, you blockheads!
Can't you read? What do you expect me to do with all this stuff at the
house?"

The carter makes a gesture of indifference and proceeds on his way
mopping his brow with the veined back of his hand. The asphalt of the
side-walk sinks under Guillaume's thin soles. He raises an alarmed
glance at the string of wagons that are climbing towards him. He would
like to move away. He is sure of what is about to happen. But he is no
less sure that he is powerless to move away. He remains there,
watching the procession of carts from which the coal trickles down in
little avalanches, while the glittering band of the canal sears the
corner of his left eye.

And he counts them. To satisfy his conscience. A delivery must be
checked. He longs to go and pick up the crumbs of coal that are
falling from the carts. It hurts him to see so much good fuel crushed
beneath the wheels. Never has coal looked so oily, so rich. It is oily
like wool. His attention is arrested by a lump of anthracite with
flashing facets; at length a wheel catches against it; the cart
appears to be raised in the air; but the lump is cracked like a nut,
and dissolves in a rapidly subsiding cloud of dingy blackness.

Guillaume continues to count. The total is evidently correct.  What is
to be done with these three hundred tons when they reach the empty pit
over which the weighing-machine should stand?

Joseph has set off bare-headed to find a porter--a porter without
encumbrances for the lodge that will be so comfortable for him. He
seems to have entirely forgotten that it will have to house their
father, their mother, Hermine and the children. Who will attend to the
weighing? Will it be their father who will open the gate? Could not
these cursed carters keep their coal in their own store, by the canal,
confound them!

A smell begins to spread so persistently that Guillaume Simler turns
his head to look up the street. What can that little man be doing
dancing up there? Is it from bravado that he is wearing on his head
that extraordinary chimneypot of battered silk?

He opens his mouth, and puffs into Guillaume's face a stench of garlic
and decaying teeth. He is as round as a barrel. Freckles swarm on his
face like ladybirds; they apr pear to be determined to make the most
of a deep layer of dirt wedded to the vermilion of a generously
stimulated complexion. "Black, yellow, red. The Belgian flag," thinks
Guillaume, who cannot refrain from smiling.

"I... I just came to... that is to say to... present to... to
Messieurs S... Sim... ahem! _Smiler_ and C ... and C... and Company a
lew words of... ahem!  upon my word, I mean to say, of welcome."

It is not that he stammers. But he feels, at each word, so compelling
a sense of expansion, fellow-feeling, radiant sympathy, that, upon my
word, his utterance shows, I mean to say, the effects of so impetuous
a gush of feeling.

Now M. Boulinier discovers, once again, that such a display of
warm-heartedness has produced its customary effect.  The elder of the
brothers Simler remains speechless. He cannot tell whether it is in
his ears or in infinite space that the wheels of the moving carts are
rumbling. And the gate shut (will Papa have opened it?)--and the
missing balance--Where on earth has Joseph gone?

Guillaume believes that he is entitled to reply in the name of his
father, M. Simler, the sole head of the house of Smi--ahem!--of the
house of Simler, pure and simple, that the house of Simler regards
itself as greatly honoured by the sentiments which M. Boulinier has so
kindly expressed.  (If his father had opened the gate, Guillaume would
have heard the long-drawn owl-hoot which it gives when it turns on its
rusty hinges: _a-hoo-oo_!). Guillaume Simler is happy to add that, in
his own name, he, Guillaume Simler, is pleased to hope that his
relations with M. Boulinier will be maintained upon a footing which...
precisely! In short, M. Boulinier must understand that such a day as
this is not well-chosen, however delicate the sentiments to be
expressed, for coming to waste the time of a man who is engaged in
taking possession of...

Guillaume has no sooner uttered the words, than he is conscious of
their incongruity. But not for all the wealth of the house of
Rothschild, could he have refrained from speaking as he has done; nor
even from adding, coolly, that no doubt M. Boulinier will not refuse
to fill the place of the balance which is lacking from the Simler
establishment, in measuring this unexpected consignment of pit-coal
with the aid of the footrule of which he is the graceful prop.

"Ha! ha! An e-excellent joke. I cannot help congra-tulat-ing myself
upon having entered into rererelations with so, I mean to say, ha! ha!
so witty a customer."

In another moment, M. Boulinier would fall, in sheer joy, into the
arms of the stupefied Guillaume.

"But to... to enable myself to enj-oy myself more heartily, I have no
dou-ou-bt that Monsieur _S-S-Smiler_, ahem! junior, will relilieve me
of all uneasiness with regard to a little dodocument which bears the
honoured signature of his pa-apa."

Guillaume remembers then with horror that the first payment in the
contract concluded with little M. Boulinier for the supply of wool is
due this very day.

The elder of the Simler sons feels a tide of burning pitch flooding
his brain. He will have to explain to this little barrel reeking of
garlic the chain of circumstances that has led up to the postponement
of their installation until this burning July afternoon.

A damp frost descends upon Guillaume and paralyses his mind. A man
lost on foot in the heart of Central Australia is no farther from any
human aid.

He makes a brief effort to recall what he ought to have remembered.
Presently he preserves only the remotest trace of this last
enlightenment. He clings hold of the notion that there exists,
somewhere, an urgent memory, which would make everything clear.

All these efforts exhaust him. He turns away, wearily nodding his head
in which vacuity tolls like a bell. The Belgian national colours
vanish. A second neighbour, whom he did not hear approach, is standing
on his left, and leans towards him stiffly.

His cocked hat, his pale blue coat and the metal plate which shields
his heart proclaim the day of the month to Guillaume, more infallibly
than would a calendar. The messenger of the Banque de France
represents nothing more than a cipher, the fatal _thirty-one_, of
which the _three_ rears itself up, on its curly tail, with the
arrogance of a creditor certain of his claim, while the _one_, an
equivocal symbol, defies, commands and threatens.

The man opens his mouth. It emits a shriek which Guillaume compares
with astonishment to that of the factory gate: _oo-ooh_! The man
announces himself with the word by which housewives designate him:

"_Ooh_! The banker! _Oooh_!"

But already the plate of sheet-armour and the gimlet nose are no more
than an image that has receded to the end of a familiar road.

It is the Saturday evening walk. Father, in his frock coat, is wearing
an old-fashioned top-hat. Mother has her Chantilly bonnet fastened
under her chin with two ribbons of black silk. The children, tightly
breeched in their best trousers, trudge between the sorb-trees of the
footway, sullenly kicking up the dust.

It has been hot. It is still parching. Their feet are burning after
having walked too far on the too hot ground. A breath of cool air
comes from the wood round which the road turns, and flows down their
throats, at each breath, like cherry-syrup swallowed in little sips.
The children glance furtively at the suspicious shadows which lurk in
the wood. Cockchafers go blundering through the twilight with a
snoring hum. Frogs part the dusty grass of the ditch; when they think
themselves unobserved, they let fall their sonorous cry, liquid as a
drop of crystal.

But the father has halted. He is talking to an obese man whose fingers
are loaded with pinchbeck rings. Mother remains half a pace behind
him. She lends an anxious ear.

The conversation between the two men grows animated.  The stranger
points again and again at some one whom Guillaume ends by recognising,
in spite of himself. It is a question of Joseph and himself. Moreover
that dusty apathetic lump is not unknown to him.

He looks at Joseph. Joseph looks at him. They would gladly be anywhere
else. Is it because they long to drink?  They are no longer either hot
or thirsty. Is it the evening breeze that comes from the wood? Their
sweat freezes them, their teeth chatter.  The father calls them. The
stranger has extracted from his pocket a paper which he strikes
violently with the back of his right hand. Guillaume gazes at him with
a fixed stare.

"Come here!" Simler shouts at them from between his whiskers. His wife
intercedes:

"Hippolyte!"

"Silence! They must be taught a lesson! Wretches, did you hear what
Monsieur has just said? Is it true? Is it true that you have ruined
me?"

The obese man studies them with severity. The legal document, which he
clasps in his fingers, quivers with a faint rattle. One has no need of
this evidence to guess that its possessor conceals, in a pocket of his
frock coat, a flask of _schnapps_.

The silence of the guilty parties is a confession. They stand there,
both of them, their feet in the dust, like a pair of idiots. A great
tension takes the place of all sounds.  Everybody knows, from Rouffach
to Soulzmatt, what father Simler's anger can be. It bursts out all of
a sudden, like the clap of thunder a moment after the lightning. But
who would ever dream of smiling, if the father took it into his head
to shout, dwelling upon the final word:

"Fifteen minutes stop, refreshments, passengers for Orléans change
here!"




VI


The tewo Simlers travelled across Paris like lifeless parcels. Then
they submitted with resignation, at Troyes station, to passport
formalities the mere suggestion of which would, eighteen months
earlier, have been regarded as an excellent joke.

Uhlans, wearing flat-topped helmets with horsehair plumes, found great
diversion in making them spin round like teetotums. And they spun like
teetotums filled with submission, unaffected by anything that did not
threaten their future, and was not a bed on which they might lie down
and sleep.

Then there came the first tobacco-fields; their alignments took as
their centre a point on the horizon and began at once to rotate at
full speed about this centre, in such a way as to flick the travellers
with the extremities of their radii.

There was a second dusk, which forests of fir and oak packed close
about them. Then a harsh odour, greeting them in their native
language, spoke to them of great shadowy hopfields, and made them
raise their heads and gaze at each other with haggard eyes.

They arrived at Mulhouse station when they were beginning to despair
of ever again arriving at any station in the civilised world.

They took their places in the refreshment-room, at a narrow marble
table, between two open doors which engaged them in a battle of winds.
Beer was brought to them in thick glasses which became misted before
their eyes, in token of the coolness of their contents. They studied
with satisfaction the massive build, the fair complexion, the yellow
hair, and the air of studious and loyal devotion of the waiter, as he
skimmed the froth from the mugs with a little bat of white wood. And
when they had wiped off the mist with a stroke of the thumb, when the
beer revealed itself to them, through the ribs of the glass, with its
dazzling transparence, its musical sparkle, its vigorous and amber
colour, then a slight feeling of confidence arose in the hearts of the
brothers Simler.

They did not admit to themselves that they were returning to their
native land to hasten the moment in which they would abandon it for
ever. Nor that every expense which they incurred, from then onwards,
must add to the burden of their debts and constitute, strictly
speaking, a crime against their future. They allowed themselves to be
quietly invaded by the security that is given us by the land in which
we were born. They raised their mugs with a simultaneous movement,
happy to feel the handles press against the palms of their hands. They
exchanged, over the brims, a glance full of connivance, and drank.

A fringe of froth was still in the process of evaporating on their
moustaches, when they summoned the waiter again.  They ordered two
portions of larded sausages with cabbage and potatoes, followed
immediately by two stalwart veal cutlets, swimming in their own juice,
and buried in a field of haricot-beans.

Appetite came with eating. They turned ogreish glances on the bill of
fare, which the waiter had carelessly left on the table. They cleaned
the narrow dishes of white earthenware, upon which they were served,
with ample sponges of bread-crumb which their grimy fingers extracted
from the heart of the loaf.

The Simlers ordered for each of them two thick slices of galantine,
variegated like a map of the United States and fringed by tidal seas
of pale jelly, the frozen aspect of which appealed to them. A
fruit-dish, upon which big white cherries, stalks in air, bristled
with a mass of green bayonets, gave them the desire to eat to excess,
so as to dissolve the surfeit in the acid juice of the fruit.

The doors were now driving in buffets of night air, like children
playing ball. With their food and the end of this day, there entered
into them a heavy and artless gaiety.  Joseph thrust back his straw
hat; his spectacles on his forehead, like a schoolmaster's giglamps,
he began to play stupid tricks. The stupefaction of the other
travellers was immense when they saw this corpulent gentleman blow
solemnly into his glass so as to bedew his nose with the froth, and
then assume the air of a startled marmoset. Guillaume was no less
solemn in peeling the sausage-skins in bracelets, and, having hung
them upon the neck of a pursy water-bottle, shot at the corpulent
effigy the most passionate glances.

These water-drinkers, whom two glasses of beer intoxicated, devoured
their sausage-meat with the hilarity of orchard-robbing schoolboys.
Had they been able, at that moment, to call for oysters, no power
human or divine could have restrained them. Fortunately for the law of
Moses, the refreshment-room at Mulhouse did not supply oysters, and an
official flung at them suddenly, through the door, the warning that
their train was about to start.

They paid their bill in haste, filled their pockets with cherries,
and, their hands seared by the handles of their baggage, set off at a
trot in the direction of their platform.

They had no indignation left for the guard of Prussian infantry, whose
helmets reflected the light when the sentries passed beneath the
lamps. Everything seemed to them to be in order, and to be
administered with a view to universal satisfaction. No sooner were
they installed in their compartment than they fell asleep, sitting up,
like beasts of burden.

* * *

The spreading roofs of Buschendorf covered low, white houses, decked
with vines and climbing roses. And these white houses contained a
number of people who looked to the decision reached by the two
brothers for some enlightenment as to their own destiny.

For, between half the town of Buschendorf and the Simler factory,
there was a solidarity hardly less perceptible than between the white
houses of the place and their own thatched roofs.

As for telling which, the factory or Buschendorf, might be called the
roof, and which the house, that was another question.

Was it the factory that protected the houses of the town in the
manner of a kindly and benevolent roof, providing it with privacy,
shelter, warmth and light?

Or was it the town that had protected the beginnings of the factory,
providing it with the water from its wheel, the stones for its walls,
the arms of its workmen, and even the small loans to which the
vicissitudes of industry had obliged the Simlers to have recourse, at
periods which they did not care to hear mentioned?

Nobody could have given a satisfactory answer to the question.
Buschendorf and the Simler factory were two entities which the
imagination of Upper Alsace instinctively associated. People said: the
Simlers-of-Buschendorf, not so much to distinguish them from a number
of other Simlers, scattered between the Black Forest and the Meurthe,
as because these Simlers, who lived and laboured at Buschendorf, might
indeed be regarded as the most characteristic product that Buschendorf
had, up to the present, manufactured.  They embodied its spirit, its
ideal--I would go so far as to say that they were its substance, were
not certain minds always inclined towards malicious interpretations.

When two travellers in raw wool, in madder, or in fuller's soap, or
even two cattle-dealers, unconnected with the woollen trade, met upon
one of the roads that connected Buschendorf with the outer world, it
was seldom that one of them did not say:

"It is to Buschendorf that you are going, my friend? A charming little
town. You know of course Hippolyte Simler, a very capable man? No?
Then his brother Myrtil, the one who is unmarried, and has a birthmark
on the left side of his face, like that? No? Then Sarah Simler,
Hippolyte's wife, who is the daughter of Moïse Blum, the Lorrainer?
Not her, either? I shan't ask you, then, if you know Wil-helm Blum,
the cloth-merchant, Hippolyte's brother-in-law, a fine man, to be
sure, but, between ourselves, a trifle _schlemihl_. Whereas Hippolyte
Simler, there's a fellow who's afraid of nothing, a man who does very
good business, upon my word, who is very well off indeed. We shall
drink a glass of beer at Soulzmatt station, if you like, and I shall
tell you their story since they were little boys. Do you think I
haven't known them! My late father and Jonathan Simler, Hippolyte's
father, went to school together, and Jonathan often hadn't a scrap of
food in his satchel, and it was my father who used to feed him out of
his. To-day, I would be glad to exchange my satchel for his, ha!
ha!..."

Thus, once again, Buschendorf found itself associated with the
destinies of the Simler family, as though the town had sprung to life,
ready-armed, from the activity and careful forethought of the Simler
family.

* * *

It was a sober little village of two thousand inhabitants, without
luxury or pretension, and the Simler mansion was in keeping with the
rest. An old, square house, whose two storeys were modestly crowned
with a broad roof of squat, concave tiles. A bit of railing, a few
yards of path and three steps to the door were sufficient to separate
the "château" from the street.

The steps were of grimy sandstone, chipped at the edges.  The passage
of feet had long ago heaped the gravel in little mounds along the
borders in which a few pinks bloomed.  The railing was not six feet
high; it had lost all memory of its last coat of paint; every spring,
Sarah Simler would say, in an indifferent tone: "You must send me
Pouppelé to paint the railing"; and, every spring, Hippolyte would
shrug his shoulders with an air of exasperation as he answered: "It is
quite good enough as it is. Upon my word, it can wait. I need Pouppelé
myself."

And yet, neglected as it was, this strip of railing contained in
itself an aristocratic virtue sufficient to swell the Simler heart
with pride. People said to strangers: "You will have no difficulty in
finding it: a house, with a railing in front of it, on your right,
after you have passed the square, a fine, big house. You can't miss
it. Besides, you have only to ask for Monsieur Hippolyte, anybody will
show you the way at once. It is the only railing in Buschendorf."

More than once, in consequence, in delicate circumstances for pride or
dignity, the memory of three stone steps, of a few square yards of
gravel, and of a little unpainted iron gate was a comfort more
effective than any number of exhortations.

That evening, the gravel crunched under uneven steps, and two shadows
were roaming between the gate and the front door. The moon, in its
last quarter, had not yet risen.  The hesitating gait of the shadows
suggested the monotonous to-and-fro of a shuttle, upon which some one
had slowly wound a strand of anxiety.

"I repeat to you, Hippolyte was right, and you must have faith in your
sons. They will have acted for the best. I know Guillaume."

The man who spoke thus had a rumbling voice. When he turned his back
to the railings, his shoulders stamped their outline upon the bluish
wall of the house; whenever he put his left foot to the ground, his
bulk foundered suddenly, as though his foot had struck against the cam
of a loom. He was wearing a little soft cap, which his head swelled
from inside.

The woman seemed, by his side, to be of tall stature. Her hands folded
across her skirt made the only spot of light on the uniform darkness
of her figure.

"I have faith in Guillaume," she said; "Joseph too knows his duty. But
they are young, they may have taken ideas into their heads. And
Hippolyte is so absolute!"

"What was to be done? Hippolyte was not fit to go there himself."

"They should have stayed here!"

The woman's voice quivered in harsh tones. She straightened her lean
figure as she walked. The man seemed to be lowering his head.

"You are not finding fault with Hippolyte, I hope, Sarah?"

She kept him waiting for her answer during the time that it took them
to walk from the steps to the gate. Then she stopped and gazed at the
road from which no sound came.

"Who am I, to find fault with anyone? Have they consulted me?"

The man was silent in his turn, as though the words that had just been
uttered had a remote and irrefutable meaning.  It was the woman who
broke the silence, after heaving a sigh, and in a curiously lowered
tone.

"What would be the good? Stay here or go. We should have to begin
afresh, in any case. As soon as Hippolyte and Myrtil came to that
decision, and the boys agreed..."

"The Altermanns are staying."

"What difference does the Altermanns' decision make to Hippolyte and
his brother?"

The rapid, hissing accent of this retort made the cripple withdraw,
with the submission of a man who is outwitted in this sort of tactics.
He abased himself without shame:

"Certainly Hippolyte has no need to have the way pointed out to him."

And as the woman, by keeping silence, seemed to encourage him, he went
on:

"It is always he that has shown us our way. Joseph...  Joseph is his
living image. Your Guillaume takes more after you."

"I don't know. Perhaps Guillaume is more..."

The thought that occurred to her was doubtless one of those which
people suppress, for she did not continue.

A window opened in the wall a rectangle of light. Figures were visible
within, passing to and fro. As they passed, their shadows fell upon
the garden. The sacred border of pinks enhanced their distortion with
unforeseen irregularities.

One of these shadows lengthened upon the gravel path, and halted, Its
arms raised crosswise left no doubt as to the violence of the feelings
that were convulsing its person.

Sarah Simler, escorted by the cripple, was at that moment returning
from the gate towards the house. She stopped speechless to gaze at the
monstrosity endowed with life which was moving silently at her feet.
She was pointing it out to her companion, when the shadow seemed to
relax and, after a moment of hesitation, fled hotfoot towards the
sorb-tree in which it was swallowed up.

The woman could not restrain a murmur.

"Myrtil... will Myrtil never leave _him_ in peace?"

The front door of the house opened; a flood of light shot down the
steps; a figure rose up in an attitude of authority; a voice cried:

"Sarah! Sarah!--and you too, Wilhelm."

The speaker had added this name on hearing the cripple's step
crunching on the path. But it was evident that the presence or absence
of Wilhelm did not matter to him in the slightest degree.




VII


There were four of them in the room, when the cripple had shut the
door behind him.

A massive body, seated on a reclining-chair, had its back to the
light. Its head was bent forward, revealing a bloodshot neck, furrowed
with wrinkles.

The man who had summoned the other two stood erect, his fist upon the
table,

A ceremonial black cravat helped his neck to sustain his head above
its long thin column. The agile skeleton of his swarthy hands barely
emerged from the overlong sleeves of his frock coat, of military cut,
which a pair of horizontal, narrow, square, muscular shoulders brought
to an abrupt finish. Macerated as though by smallpox, his face
projected three salients, over which the skin was tightly stretched,
suggesting the ivory surface of a billiard-ball. A couple of shadowy
furrows crossed it laterally, one, the higher of the two, beneath the
ridge of his eyebrows, the other under his nose.

It was in the former that lurked the gaze of Myrtil Simler, from the
latter that issued the metallic inflections of his voice.

Contracted between his temples, his birdlike skull extended backward,
drawing after it a pair of finely shaped ears, pointed at the top. Two
ropes of brown hair started from it to lose themselves beneath his
cravat. They assured to the general effect a haughty backward thrust,
and prevented the head of Myrtil Simler from ever adopting the
inclinations typical of characters devoid of energy.

And then, a final harmony, a delicate nose, trenchant as a Moorish
scimitar, hollowed beneath the cartilage and vigorously curved,
affirmed a descent free from any mixture of blood. An aristocracy that
was not refuted by the arch of the foot, within its elastic-sided
boot.

Never did a Judge of the Supreme Court watch a Minister take his place
in the dock with an air of dignity so imperious as that of Hippolyte
Simler's brother, when he watched the entry, into the room in which he
was standing, of Sarah and the cripple.

At the moment when the latter shut the door behind him, he turned his
judicial mask towards the man with the expansive neck and uttered
these words:

"Hippolyte, here are Sarah and your brother-in-law."

Even without the raucous, hammering sound of the voice in which these
words were uttered, there would still have been reason for
astonishment. For their meaning, to all appearance anodyne, bore no
relation to the severe tone of the man who had uttered them. And most
of all, because in turning to address his brother he had brought into
the lamplight a cheek deformed with a large wine-coloured blemish,
over which a bloodshot eye hurled a glance charged with indignation.

>From the chair, without any raising of the neck, rose a loud, throaty
voice.

"What o'clock is it? Oughtn't the children to be here?"

"It is not ten yet, Hippolyte," replied the cripple, taking a step
forward beneath Myrtil's contemptuous glare. As he spoke, he drew from
his pocket an old plated-gold watch in a double case, the key of which
hung from his chain.

"They could have sent a telegram, I suppose," the neck continued.

Myrtil turned his judicial mask towards his sister-in-law, and
appeared ready to weigh the answer that he expected of her.

Sarah unfolded her hands from in front of her skirt of flowered satin.
She pushed back one of the ribbons that were hanging from her bonnet,
and sighed:

"Have a little patience, Hippolyte. The children can't have had much
of a time, themselves. Heaven knows how tired they'll be when they do
arrive. If they haven't arranged everything according to your idea,
calm yourself. You know that they will have acted for the best. Myrtil
and you will settle everything that isn't quite correct."

"Those are easy things to say at home; in business, signed, settled."

These words fell from the thin lips of Myrtil like so many
hammer-blows upon the anvil of the public conscience. Having spoken,
he drew himself sharply erect.

A hurricane ran through the neck; a roar filled the room:

"Signed? And why should they have signed? What is it that they have
signed? People don't _sign_, when they risk involving their father,
their family, their fortune."

"You gave them your power of attorney, Hippolyte," murmured the
cripple in a smooth voice. Sarah shrugged her shoulders, and moved
with unhurried step towards the sideboard, which she opened.

But there had been a movement in the chair. Hippolyte had turned
round. Something like a tide of the sea swept into the lamplight. A
mass that seemed flat because of its breadth, filigreed with red veins
in the place of cheeks, and backed by one of those thick skulls whose
monumental front makes one conscious of their density and volume.

Grey, bushy whiskers enlarged still farther the yellowish entablature
of the flesh. The features that formed his face were concentrated in
this aspect of it. With the result that the man never looked at one
save with his full face. The greater part of this plane surface was
unaffected by the movements which convulsed its centre. It seemed to
be always holding half the horizon in its gaze. Hence that fixity, in
which there was nothing human, but which suggested the slowness proper
to the movements of nature. His immobility was astronomical.

His fascinating stare rested upon the cripple. He placed him in the
centre of his field of vision, and seemed to be gripping his image
between his eyebrows, as though he had 'made an effort in order not to
overlook so meagre a figure in a vaster contemplation.

"Have you become an idiot, Wilhelm?"

At the sound of the syllables which foamed from between his whiskers,
and then rolled from his lips, the crockery on the sideboard rattled.

"An idiot, Hippolyte? What do you mean?" replied the cripple with the
utmost simplicity. But it was evident that the rumbling voice had not
prevailed.

"An idiot, or an enemy?"

"Brrrrm!" said Myrtil, drawing himself up abruptly to examine from a
greater altitude the man who was addressed in this fashion. Wilhelm
trustfully expanded ten stout fingers filled with honest conviction,
and offered the palms of his hands as a pledge of his sentiments.

"When you signed a power of attorney for your sons..."

"Who was the first to speak, in this house, of a stamped document?"
uttered the face.

"Brrrrm!" Myrtil gave his support.

"It... was I, Hippolyte, I don't dream of denying it, but..."

"But?" shouted the other. "Let me tell you what there is in that
_but_; there is this, that, at the present moment, my two sons are I
don't know where, and, I don't know where, with them, in a portfolio,
in a portmanteau, or in the drawer of a bed-table, there is the
stamped paper, at the foot of which all the world can read the
signature of Hippolyte Simler; and, you see this lamp, and this table,
and the cloth upon this table, and the silver, and the house we are
in, and the factory, the looms, the wool, my coat--by a word written
over that signature we may lose everything, destroy everything, give
away everything, and... Sarah! bring me the pen I used to sign!"

"Brrrrm!" Myrtil gave his support.

"And when I wrote those two words: Hippolyte Simler, do you know, you,
what I was writing? Listen here, it was: Simler ruined."

"You think so?" exclaimed Sarah from the other end of the room.

"What else would you have me think? My name is roaming the wide world
on a blank sheet of paper, and you haven't yet shut me up in the
madhouse? Bring me the pen, I tell you. It is the first time anybody
has seen a man divide himself in two, and sit in his chair without
moving, while he goes out proclaiming to the entire world: 'Who wants
Simler's factory? Who wants the money of the Simlers of Buschendorf?'
Have you found that pen?"

"But after all," exclaimed the cripple with more vigour than might
have been expected of him, "your signature is not roaming the world by
itself, nor in the hands of enemies.  Your children..."

"My children are my children. Is there any reason why I should make
them my masters? Why I should give them greater power over myself than
my father _selig_ ever wielded?"

Myrtil, shaken by a gust of tragic feeling, gave a jerk, in the
lamplight, to the chessboard of his face. His eyes darted from his
brother to the cripple. The latter stepped forward, casting at the
farther end of the room the despairing glance of a doctor renouncing
all hope of curing his patient. He laid his cap on the edge of the
table and said:

"If any harm should come from the power of attorney which you have
given your sons to act in your name, I allow you to blame nobody but
myself. It was I alone that advised you. I persist in believing that
they will have justified the confidence that you have placed in them."

"That is all right, Wilhelm; I know my sons better than anyone, and we
shall soon be settled, I think," replied the master of the house in an
unanswerable tone. And he turned his face towards his wife, as though
he held her personally responsible for the punctual arrival of their
two sons.

"In any case," he went on, bringing Wilhelm once more within his
horizon, "I may be mad, I am not yet weak-minded.  If I have given my
signature, I have not done so in ignorance of what I was doing.
Nobody, not even Myrtil..."

"Brrrm!" said his brother, striking the table nervously with the hand
that was leaning upon it.

"... has ever yet made me do anything that I had not already decided
to do."

A steam-roller does not make a road more smooth than was the cripple's
conscience after this admonition. As a matter of fact, he would have
been greatly surprised had anyone told him that no diplomacy could
have proceeded with a more prompt adroitness than his own in cooling
the wrath of the great Simler, and that by making the manufacturer
assume responsibility for the power of attorney, little Blum had
deprived his pride of its most stimulating nourishment.

But such subtleties, frequent as they might be, were powerless to add
to the self-satisfaction even of the man who employed them. Simler's
voice had not finished sending its stormy echoes to the four corners
of the room before an abject humility had taken up its abode in
Wilhelm's heart. He drew back his cap which in a moment of expansion
he had laid on the table, and, literally, bent his back beneath the
furious glare of the two brothers.

When Sarah brought her husband, not without hesitation, the
writing-pad and pen for which he had asked her, she too replied to her
brother's glance with an expression which confirmed their scorn:

"What can a Blum from Thionville know of the decisions and intentions
of Hippolyte Simler of Buschendorf? And even though this Blum from
Thionville be my own brother, he has only to look at himself to learn
that he is not of a stock that can set his foot where the Simlers set
theirs."

Wilhelm had no need to look at himself, in order to feel weighing upon
him, morally as well as physically, the shoulders, the eyes and the
opinion of the Simlers.

It is not necessary for a man to be a great expert in psychology in
order to know the capital value of a hunched back, a clubfoot, a pair
of startled, squinting, colourless eyes, hair of a neutral tint,
inclining to red, scanty everywhere, a skin like a cheese-scraper, and
a voice devoid of any resonance. Especially when this is your own
personal lot, and you have been putting it, for five and forty years,
to the daily proof of the vast world and its circumstances.

The vast world, indeed, in its supreme order and its perfect wisdom,
is more prone to condemn a crooked spine or a stumbling gait, than it
is to appreciate how indispensable are the goodness of a mouth free
from malice, the malice of an honest thick nose, full of sensual
kindness, the cordiality of a loyal back, and the brotherly gesture of
a stumpy, hairy hand, with square-cut nails.

For the moment, Wilhelm Blum, ill at ease as to his bodily attributes,
and embarrassed outwardly by an indefinable grey suit, had just taken
back, in his hand, the woollen headgear which in a moment of expansion
he had laid upon the table; and registered, to enrich his collection,
the look with which his sister cast him forth from the Simler clan.

Nevertheless a ring encircled one of his fingers, rather as a hoop
encircles a little barrel. And this alliance indicated marriage, a
family, a household.

The Simlers were great. But, at this moment, it did not appear that
their humble brother-in-law, the cloth-merchant Blum, enjoyed the
companionship of a woman. And yet the hour was late; if he was still
there, it was not, obviously, for any personal motive; if he opened
his mouth, it was not to discuss his own private affairs; if the
circumstances were painful for anyone, they did not seem to be so for
him.

He was there, remote from his own people, seeking the best way to
appease the wrath of Hippolyte Simler, and anxiously awaiting his two
nephews, returning from, their journey into an unknown world.

Thus it is that things happen. It is bad taste to be surprised at
them. To be touched by them is a weakness. To notice them, even,
superfluous. Wilhelm Blum knew his duty.

But a step crunched the gravel; he could not refrain from hastily
pulling out his fat onion of a watch. Myrtil with a harsh gesture
turned his head over his left shoulder. Sarah's arms dropped on the
table the writing-pad, the ink in which had turned to lead. Hippolyte
alone did not move.

"But it is not... it is not time yet," muttered the cloth-merchant.
Two sharp knocks reminded the occupants of the room that between them
and the world there was only a door.

A face whose bright eyes were supported upon heavy moustaches,
appeared.

"No news yet, Monsieur Hippolyte? Madame Hippolyte, your servant."

His eyes grew accustomed to the dim light in the room.

"Good evening, Monsieur Myrtil.--Ah!"

This "ah!" fell to Wilhelm, to whom the newcomer confined himself to
offering his hand with a marvellously skilful blend of familiarity,
protection and at the same time respect; Blum was, after all, a
brother-in-law.

"As you see, Fritz," replied Monsieur Hippolyte from his full face. A
silence fell. Then the head of the house of Simler added: "Nothing!"
in so sharp a tone that everyone started.  Fritz appeared embarrassed
at having shown his impatience.  He pursed his lip under his drooping
moustache.

"We thought, perhaps, a telegram..."

His master gazed at him fixedly, and lowered the corners of his mouth;
the effect was an astonishing expression of disdain.

"And so here is another person who can't wait. Bear this in mind,
Fritz: if you wish to succeed in life, it means waiting, and
understanding."

This fine moral uttered for the admiration of his audience, the fiery
old man at once forgot its substance. His eyebrows rose side by side,
to retain before his eyes the insignificant figure that had addressed
him, and he continued, fresh storms gathering in his voice:

"Fritz Braun, you and yours are waiting, and yet you do not know why
you are waiting, you do not know for what you are waiting. What is
your object? There must be an object in everything, even in worrying
and waiting. Have you one, you? If I go, the buildings remain, a
Prussian is sure to come to start the factory again and give you work.
You have no object, either you or your comrades, in waiting for my
sons to return."

The Alsacian remained motionless beneath this torrent of insulting
implications. He gave to the soldierly planes of his face the most
innocent expression that it was in his power to give them.

Hippolyte Simler went on, in a louder tone:

"For me--for me, my brother Myrtil, my wife, it is another question.
You see this pen, Fritz?"

Although he was accustomed to the manufacturer's unexpected outbursts,
Fritz was taken by surprise. A monstrous hand, fat to bursting-point,
reached out from the chair to the table. It covered the writing-pad,
and seized the fragile stick of firwood.

"Look, it is neither thick nor heavy. How much time does it take to
write a name with this little pen? Very well, that has been enough,
and that is why you find me, at this hour of the night, waiting still
for my sons to return without knowing whether I am still in my own
house, whether I am still a weaver, or whether I must abandon
everything to begin again, elsewhere. There you have my object, mine.
When the head is weak, a man needs strong legs. My head was weak one
day, Fritz. Perhaps other people have taken advantage of it. Let this
serve as a lesson to all those who place themselves in the--hands of
others."

A sharp crack concluded this speech. The monstrous hand made a
gesture, and the fragments of the penholder went flying to the ends of
the floor. Myrtil uttered a sharper "Brrrrm!" than usual, then a
stifling silence filled the room.  His head lowered, Wilhelm went over
in vain, in his memory, the points of his apology. Fritz Braun
endeavoured to conceal his terror beneath his sheepish air, and felt
that he knew all that there was to know. Sarah gazed at her husband
with a sombre admiration.

Fritz summoned up the courage to speak:

"Monsieur Hippolyte, it is not the opportunity that makes the thief,
nor the work that makes the workman. There are men who have confidence
in one another. You say things, and we believe them. You go ahead, the
rest follow you.  With you, one is never led astray. Monsieur
Guillaume and Monsieur Joseph are sons of whom any father might be
proud. Whatever arrangement they may have made, it will be white bread
for us. This, my comrades have not sent me to tell you. But I tell you
it all the same, both for myself, and for them. There."

It was the turn now for the fair moustaches to swell, for the level
brows to rise, and the Alsacian face assumed planes more martial than
ever.

To himself, the foreman was thinking:

"_Zum Teufel_! This devil of a man always makes one say more than one
meant."

Hippolyte held him under the impassive command of his face. Blum
looked at his own feet. Myrtil appeared strangled by his black cravat.

The duty of the alto, in a choir, is to stir our feelings by the most
difficult means. Now it was repellent to the pride of the house of
Simler to acknowledge its moral debts. It was to a woman's voice that
this duty was, as a rule, delegated.

Sarah stepped forward, with that calm and measured pace which had won
her the name of _Kônigin Simler_.

A stainless dignity enhanced the meagre stature of an aging woman. She
allowed no wrinkle to betray her feelings beneath the impeccable,
slightly yellowed varnish which seemed to be spread over the skin of
her face.  The law of the Orient, which orders everything with wisdom,
for it has known mankind since the day of Creation, has taken steps to
secure that woman shall remain the helpmeet of one man alone, and
shall not circulate from one to another, an object of coveting and a
subject of discord. And so Sarah concealed her poor grey tresses, as
she had begun by concealing, on the morrow of her wedding, the heavy
plaits of her girlhood. Her mother before her had done likewise; her
daughter-in-law had followed her example. A _front_ of black silk
framed the ivory of her brow. The ringlets that fell in front of her
ears, from beneath a rich cap of Chantilly lace, were made of false
hair. But inasmuch as deceit was born in the Continent of supple
sandals, and coquetry awaited our mother Eve at the gate of Paradise,
a thread of white silk, stitched across the _front_, imitated the
parting which divides the natural hair.

A sign of mourning which celebrates, from generation to generation,
the dispersal of the tribes.

Only the whiteness of a collar of white linen, doubled over the black
silk of her bodice, and that of her two hands folded over her bosom,
interrupted the funereal livery.

Such a woman, silent, secretive, and acknowledged as mistress in her
own house, soon acquires the air of royalty before which everyone must
bow. The shortest women find their stature increased by it. Beneath
the imperious circumflex accent which divided her brow, on either side
of a large nose, protruding and curved in a gesture of command, Fritz
Braun could see a pair of eyes which rested upon him without fear. A
velvet which emerges refreshed from beneath the hot iron, distant
memories, irony as to the present, regret for the past, a sorrrowful
calm at heart. An exact knowledge, a profound ignorance, certainty of
her own limitations, valour within them, resignation without. This
gaze of an unduly precocious child, of a mother for ever innocent and
an old woman who could still beguile, overpowered the solid virility
of the Alsacian. And the phrase of renunciation that was commonly
uttered at Buschendorf sounded in his ears: "The man who is caught
between the mouth of Hippolyte Simler and the eyes of Madame
Hip-polyte, is no longer his own master."

"We are passing through a painful time, Fritz Braun.  But you have
just uttered the only words that could soothe my husband's grief.
These are things which one does not forget. You see how we are placed.
Our whole life is in the balance. But, if you, and your friends..."

"Take care!" the foreman warned himself.

"... are on our side, I have no longer any reason to dread my sons'
return."

Braun felt a cord tighten round his throat: "If there are not forty of
us who will go with you, men, women, children, and truckle-beds, I go
back as a tier to the spinning-mill."

"I can go back there without waiting," the inward Braun replied
incontinently. "And the strangest thing of all is that she has not
done it on purpose!"

For, to the great indignation of this inward Braun, the other, the
diplomat deputed to receive information, sets himself meekly to accept
the offered sop.

"Why don't you come out and take a turn in Buschendorf, Monsieur
Hippolyte? No fear of meeting a Prussian; that lot go to bed before
the fowls. A little stroll would do you more good, upon my word, than
sitting here poisoning your blood. You would see that even at this
time of night, there are still lighted candles in the town. A candle,
that may be lighting honest folk. So, you suppose that we would have
allowed you to leave the place without drum and fife? We< don't buy
the same bread with German money as with French. Some _Preuss_ or
other may come here; if he wants labour, he will have to bring it with
him. We have never made anything but Simler cloth, and Simler cloth is
French cloth. There is old Hermann who has sold his four silver spoons
and forks, there are Gottlieb and his wife who have pawned their
furniture, there is Pouppelé who has bought a thick coat and fur
goloshes for his boy, there is Mayer who never leaves the station, so
as to be the first to see _them_ alight from the train, there are, all
along the Haupt-gasse, as many faces at the windows as there are
Baumanns, Hausers, Kapps, Zellers, Francks,--all because it is nearly
ten o'clock, at ten o'clock there is still a train from Mulhouse, and
no one must be the last to pack up his traps, if the young gentlemen
come to bid us boot and saddle.  It is mobilisation day, for us. The
war may perhaps be over, in one sense; in the other, it is only
beginning. And I who was born an Alsacian in Alsace, I swear to you
that I will never breathe easily until we have, saving your presence,
b------d out of this country."

"Upon my word, it would never have occurred to them!" incontinently
observes the inward Braun. Sarah's lip begins to tremble; she holds
out her hand. But already Myrtil has undertaken to conclude the
discussion with a manly utterance: he turns towards his brother his
three-decker profile:

"After all, you agree that it will not take us long to start work
again."

And Braun realises once again that, in the presence of a Simler, every
man, small or great, appears as a child.




VIII


It was not for want of imagining the thousand different forms which
her sons' return might take; but when, at that very moment, the
door-handle began silently to rotate, and, borrowing the tone of a
familiar voice, said: "It is I; what is the matter?" Sarah's eyes
fastened themselves upon it, and her tongue clove to the roof of her
mouth.

The door opened without a creak of its hinges. The battered end of a
leather travelling-bag appeared first of all, A sigh was heard. The
four men then became aware (Wilhelm was the first, and Fritz Braun the
second to notice) that something was happening. And Guillaume Simler
was in the room, followed immediately by Joseph, while afar off there
sounded the belated baying of a dog.

"Humph! Good evening."

It is better to pass over the incidents of the next few minutes. The
license that motherhood allowed itself, and the disregard that two
great, grimy men showed for their own dignity, are not subjects which
it is seemly to examine in detail.

Wilhelm expended a satisfaction sufficient to support the whole life
of an uncle in exclamations such as: "The boys!  The scamps!"
Meanwhile Myrtil, who was ill prepared for this unexpected change in
the situation, extended in the direction of the window the penthouse
of his brows, and imperiously summoned Fritz Braun to explain to him
by what witchcraft the gravel on the path had not crunched under the
boots of the two travellers.

"Where? Where?" Wilhelm questioned in an undertone, pressing the hand