Has he finally “made” his colleague?
At least, as I guess, he’s busy making Jadin commonplace, and now the two of them are talking about doing a “sensational act,” very well remunerated, at the Crystal Palace in London! . . .
How quickly everything changes! . . .
Women, especially . . . In a few months, this one will lose almost all of her pungency, her natural, unintentional pathos.
Will an underhanded throwback to the concierges and greedy petty shopkeepers in her ancestry overtake this madcap eighteen-year-old Jadin, who gives so much of herself and her wretched money?
Why, when seeing her, do I think about the Bells, those German acrobats with an English name whom Brague and I met in Brussels?
Matchless in strength and grace in their cherry-red tights that made their light skin even paler, the five of them lived in two rooms without furniture, where they did their own cooking on a little cast-iron stove. And all day long, the agent told us, they held secret palavers, meditating over the stock-market reports, arguing fiercely over goldmines, coalmines in Silesia, and the Egyptian land bank!
Money, money, money . . .
With her empty chatter Jadin perks up our visit, which can use it.
After Bouty, who’s a little less thin, has given us news about his health and has announced that “things are shaping up” for next winter, there we are, silent and embarrassed, friends whom chance has thrown together and is now separating . . . I fiddle around with the greasepaints and pencils on the shelf with that greedy nervousness and that itch to make up well known to all who have gone on the stage . . . Fortunately the bell rings and Jadin says with a start:
“Out! Up the stairs!
The theater fireman will give you his stage box, and you’ll see how I hit it off with my song in ‘Paris at Night’!”
The sleepy fireman does indeed lend me his straw stool and his tiny box.
Seated with my nose to the grating that frames a square of warm, reddish light, I, invisible myself, can enjoy the sight of two half-rows in the orchestra, three open ground-floor boxes, and one stage box . . . a stage box in which I can make out a lady in a gigantic hat wearing pearls, rings, and sequins, and two men: Dufferein-Chautel the elder and Dufferein-Chautel the younger, both in black and white, well waxed and polished.
They’re under a glaring light, and from the grating through which I single them out they assume an unusual importance.
The woman isn’t a woman, she’s a lady: no doubt Madame Dufferein-Chautel the elder.
My admirer seems to be enjoying himself no end with the parade of female ragpickers and the female roving cabbies who follow them on and exit after a song and a brief, careless dance.
Finally, here is Jadin, announcing herself:
“And I, I’m the queen of Paris at night: I’m the streetwalker!”
I see my admirer lean forward quite briskly over his program, then lift his nose and survey my little colleague from her hair, piled up like a helmet, to her wide-mesh stockings . . .
By an odd transposition, he has become the show for me, since all I can see of little Jadin is her profile—which the blinding footlights flatten out, as if the light were nibbling at it—her black nostrils, and her foreshortened upper lip above a row of gleaming teeth . . .
With her neck stretched out like a gargoyle, tied around with a red rag, this young child suddenly resembles some lecherous phantom painted by Rops.
When, her song over, she returns to take two bows, heels together, fingers on lips, my admirer applauds her with his big brown hands, so loudly that, before exiting, she blows him a little private kiss, jutting out her chin . . .
“Hey, are you sleeping?
This is the second time I’m telling you that you can’t stay here: they’re putting up the Heliopolis set!”
“Yes, yes . . . I’m coming . . .”
It really feels to me as if I were falling asleep; or else, I’m emerging from one of those moments when a person is free of thought, just before the arousal of a painful idea: the prelude to a small moral slippage . . .
“MAKE UP your mind one way or the other, come on!
Is it all right with you or not?”
Both of them, Brague and Salomon, are hustling me about with their voice and their eyes.
The agent laughs to instill confidence in me, Brague grumbles.
A heavy hand, Salomon’s, is placed on my shoulder:
“I think it’s a really great contract!”
I hold this typewritten contract and reread it for the tenth time, in fear of discovering in its fifteen short lines some hidden trap, some shady clause . . . Most of all, I reread it to gain time.
Then I look at the window, its starched net curtains, and, beyond them, the sad, clean courtyard . . .
I look as if I’m reflecting, but I’m not.
Hesitating isn’t reflecting . . . Absentmindedly, I take the inventory of this English-style desk I’ve already seen so often, with its numerous pictures of foreign stars: ladies in half-length with plunging necklines and elaborate coiffures, wearing a Viennese smile; men in evening dress, so you can’t guess whether they’re singers or acrobats, mimes or equestrians . . .
A forty-day tour at a hundred fifty francs a day comes out to . . . six thousand francs.
A profitable deal.
But . . .
“But,” I finally say to Salomon, “I can’t see myself making you fatter by six hundred francs!
After all, ten percent is highway robbery!”
I’ve recovered my power of speech and the way to use it, together with the fitting vocabulary.
Salomon turns the color of his hair, brick red; even his unfathomable eyes blush, but from his big friendly mouth there tumbles a flood of almost romantic supplications:
“Darling! Sweetheart! Don’t start saying foolish things! . . . For a month, a month I’ve been working on your itinerary!
Ask Brague!
For a month I’ve been knocking myself out finding you first-class theaters, really top-class! . . .
I’ve arranged posters as if for . . . for . . . Madame Otero! . . .
And this is how you thank me?
Don’t you have a heart?