“You might look the other way,” he warned her gloomily. “You know that none of those dancer-fellows is worth the rope they can at least fall off and break their necks, and they’re the sort of people who go about afterwards boasting that you’ve taken notice of them. Besides, you know very well you’ve been told to go to your dressing-room and change. You’ll be missing your call again.”
A group of men—journalists—noticing the look of fury on Saint-Loup’s face, came nearer, amused, to listen to what we were saying. And as the stage-hands had just set up some scenery on our other side we were forced into close contact with them.
“Oh, but I know him; he’s a friend of mine,” cried Saint-Loup’s mistress, her eyes still fixed on the dancer. “Look how well made he is, do watch those little hands of his dancing away by themselves like his whole body!”
The dancer turned his head towards her, and his human person appeared beneath the sylph that he was endeavouring to be, the clear grey jelly of his eyes trembled and sparkled between eyelids stiff with paint, and a smile extended the corners of his mouth into cheeks plastered with rouge; then, to amuse the girl, like a singer who hums to oblige us the air of the song in which we have told her that we admired her singing, he began to repeat 241the movement of his hands, counterfeiting himself with the fineness of a parodist and the good humour of a child.
“Oh, that’s too lovely, the way he copies himself,” she cried, clapping her hands.
“I implore you, my dearest girl,” Saint-Loup broke in, in a tone of utter misery, “do not make a scene here, I can’t stand it; I swear, if you say another word I won’t go with you to your room, I shall walk straight out; come, don’t be so naughty…. You oughtn’t to stand about in the cigar smoke like that, it’ll make you ill,” he went on, to me, with the solicitude he had shewn for me in our Balbec days.
“Oh! What a good thing it would be if you did go.”
“I warn you, if I do I shan’t come back.”
“That’s more than I should venture to hope.”
“Listen; you know, I promised you the necklace if you behaved nicely to me, but the moment you treat me like this….”
“Ah! Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. You gave me your promise; I ought to have known you’ld never keep it. You want the whole world to know you’re made of money, but I’m not a money-grubber like you. You can keep your blasted necklace; I know some one else who’ll give it to me.”
“No one else can possibly give it to you; I’ve told Boucheron he’s to keep it for me, and I have his promise not to let anyone else have it.”
“There you are, trying to blackmail me, you’ve arranged everything I see. That’s what they mean by Marsantes, Mater Semita, it smells of the race,” retorted Rachel, quoting an etymology which was founded on a wild misinterpretation, for Semita means “path” 242and not “Semite”, but one which the Nationalists applied to Saint-Loup on account of the Dreyfusard views for which, so far as that went, he was indebted to the actress. She was less entitled than anyone to apply the word “Jew” to Mme. de Marsantes, in whom the ethnologists of society could succeed in finding no trace of Judaism apart from her connexion with the Lévy-Mirepoix family. “But this isn’t the last of it, I can tell you. An agreement like that isn’t binding. You have acted treacherously towards me. Boucheron shall be told of it and he’ll be paid twice as much for his necklace. You’ll hear from me before long; don’t you worry.”
Robert was in the right a hundred times over. But circumstances are always so entangled that the man who is in the right a hundred times may have been once in the wrong. And I could not help recalling that unpleasant and yet quite innocent expression which he had used at Balbec: “In that way I keep a hold over her.”
“You don’t understand what I mean about the necklace. I made no formal promise: once you start doing everything you possibly can to make me leave you, it’s only natural, surely, that I shouldn’t give it to you; I fail to understand what treachery you can see in that, or what my ulterior motive is supposed to be. You can’t seriously maintain that I brag about my money, I’m always telling you that I’m only a poor devil without a cent to my name. It’s foolish of you to take it in that way, my dear. What possible interest can I have in hurting you? You know very well that my one interest in life is yourself.”
“Oh, yes, yes, please go on,” she retorted ironically, with the sweeping gesture of a barber wielding his razor. And turning to watch the dancer:
243“Isn’t he too wonderful with his hands. A woman like me couldn’t do the things he’s doing now.” She went closer to him and, pointing to Robert’s furious face: “Look, he’s hurt,” she murmured, in the momentary elation of a sadic impulse to cruelty totally out of keeping with her genuine feelings of affection for Saint-Loup.
“Listen, for the last time, I swear to you it doesn’t matter what you do—in a week you’ll be giving anything to get me back—I shan’t come; it’s a clean cut, do you hear, it’s irrevocable; you will be sorry one day, when it’s too late.”
Perhaps he was sincere in saying this, and the torture of leaving his mistress may have seemed to him less cruel than that of remaining with her in certain circumstances.
“But, my dear boy,” he went on, to me, “you oughtn’t to stand about here, I tell you, it will make you cough.”
I pointed to the scenery which barred my way. He touched his hat and said to one of the journalists:
“Would you mind, sir, throwing away your cigar; the smoke is bad for my friend.”
His mistress had not waited for him to accompany her; on her way to her dressing-room she turned round and:
“Do they do those tricks with women too, those nice little hands?” she flung to the dancer from the back of the stage, in an artificially melodious tone of girlish innocence. “You look just like one yourself, I’m sure I could have a wonderful time with you and a girl I know.”
“There’s no rule against smoking that I know of; if people aren’t well, they have only to stay at home,” said the journalist.
The dancer smiled mysteriously back at the actress.
244“Oh! Do stop! You’ll make me quite mad,” she cried to him. “Then there will be trouble.”
“In any case, sir, you are not very civil,” observed Saint-Loup to the journalist, still with a courteous suavity, in the deliberate manner of a man judging retrospectively the rights and wrongs of an incident that is already closed.
At that moment I saw Saint-Loup raise his arm vertically above his head as if he had been making a signal to some one whom I could not see, or like the conductor of an orchestra, and indeed—without any greater transition than when, at a simple wave of the baton, in a symphony or a ballet, violent rhythms succeed a graceful andante—after the courteous words that he had just uttered he brought down his hand with a resounding smack upon the journalist’s cheek.
Now that to the measured conversations of the diplomats, to the smiling arts of peace had succeeded the furious onthrust of war, since blows lead to blows, I should not have been surprised to see the combatants swimming in one another’s blood. But what I could not understand (like people who feel that it is not according to the rules when a war breaks out between two countries after some question merely of the rectification of a frontier, or when a sick man dies after nothing more serious than a swelling of the liver) was how Saint-Loup had contrived to follow up those words, which implied a distinct shade of friendliness, with an action which in no way arose out of them, which they had not, so to speak, announced, that action of an arm raised in defiance not only of the rights of man but of the law of cause and effect, that action created ex nihilo. Fortunately the journalist who, staggering back from the violence of the blow, 245had turned pale and hesitated for a moment, did not retaliate. As for his friends, one of them had promptly turned away his
