I escort him—I who used to precede him last year.
He drags me along in his shadow, and sometimes we also take in tow the Old Caveman, who usually goes off on his own, skinny and shabby in his jacket and too-short trousers . . . Where does he sleep?
Where does he eat?
I don’t know. When I asked Brague, he gave me a succinct reply:
“Wherever he wants.
I’m not his nursemaid!”
The other night, in Nancy, I caught sight of the Caveman in his dressing room.
On his feet, he was chomping a loaf of bread that weighed a pound, while delicately holding in two fingers a slice of headcheese. That pauper’s meal, and the voracious motion of his jaws . . . It broke my heart, and I went to see Brague:
“Brague, does the Caveman have anything to live on during the tour?
Doesn’t he make fifteen francs a day?
Why doesn’t he eat better?”
“He’s saving money,” Brague replied. “Everyone saves money while on tour!
We’re not all Vanderbilt or Renee Nere, able to splurge on five-franc hotel rooms and room-service cafe au lait!
The Caveman owes me for his stage costume; I lent him the dough for it.
He’s paying it off, five francs a day.
In three weeks he’ll be able to gorge himself on oysters and wash his feet in cocktails, if he wants. That’s his business.”
After that scolding I kept quiet . . . And I’m being thrifty, too—first of all, out of habit, and then to imitate my colleagues and not arouse their envy or their contempt.
Is this Max’s sweetheart, this diner-out reflected in the clouded mirror of a “Lorraine-style beer hall,” this traveler with a ring around her eyes, a big veil tied under her chin, and, from hat to boots, the color of the road, with an indifferent, calm, and unsociable air, like that of people who aren’t from any given place?
Is this Max’s darling, the bright darling he used to embrace while she was half-naked in a pink kimono—this weary actress who comes, in a corset and a petticoat, to look for her next day’s slip and underwear in Brague’s trunk, and to put away her spangled togs? . . .
Every day I wait for my friend’s letter.
Every day it both consoles me and disappoints me.
He writes in a simple style, but obviously without ease.
His beautiful flowery writing slows the impetus of his hand.
And, besides, his affectionateness embarrasses him, and he complains of his sadness naively:
“After telling you a hundred times that I love you, and that I’m awfully cross with you for leaving me behind, what more can I tell you?
My darling wife, my little bluestocking of a wife, you’re going to laugh at me, but I don’t care . . . My brother is leaving for the Ardennes, and I’m going along: write to me at Mother’s place, the Salles-Neuves.
I’m going there to ask for some money, money for us, for our home, my little beloved!”
That’s how he relates his doings to me, without commentaries, without frills.
He makes me a part of his life, and he calls me his wife . . .
As he suspects, his warm solicitude reaches me in a chilly manner on these sheets of paper, translated into a very well-balanced handwriting: at such a distance, what help are words to us?
We’d need . . . I don’t know . . . we’d need some vivid drawing, with burning colors . . .
*** “April 11
“That takes the cake!
Now you’re letting Blandine tell your fortune with a deck of cards!
Darling, you’re a lost man!
That woman has the habit of predicting the most picturesque catastrophes the minute I leave the house.
If I go on tour, she dreams about cats and snakes, muddy water, and folded underwear, and reads in the cards the tragic adventures of Renee Nere (the queen of clubs) with the False Young Man, the Soldier, and the Rustic!
Don’t listen to her, Max: count the days as I am doing, and smile—oh, that smile which imperceptibly wrinkles your nose!—at the thought that the first week is almost over . . .
“In a month and four days, that’s my prediction, I will ‘go a journey’ to rejoin the Sincere Man, and ‘much joy you will have of it,’ and the False Young Man will be ‘vexed’ at it, as will the mysterious ‘Dissolute Woman’—that is, the queen of diamonds.
“Here we are in Lyons for five days.
A rest, you say?
Yes, if you mean that, for four mornings in a row, I’ll be able to wake up with a start at daybreak with the wild fear that I’ll miss my train, and then fall back in bed in an unpleasant sloth that won’t let me sleep, while I listen to the very gradual awakening around me of the chambermaids, the room bells, and the cars in the street!
Darling, it’s much worse than daily departures at dawn!
I feel as if, isolated in my bed, I were present at a renewal of activity from which I was excluded, as if the Earth were starting to turn again without me . . . Besides, it’s also when alone in bed that I miss you most, with no defense against my memories, laid low by boredom and powerlessness . . .
“My dear enemy, we could have spent these five days here together . . . Don’t think this is a challenge: I don’t want you to come! . . .
Say, I’m not going to die of it, no way!
You always seem to think that I’ve already died because you’re not here!
My handsome peasant, I’m only asleep because of it, only hibernating . . .
“It’s not raining, it’s mild, muggy, and gray—quite good weather for Lyons.
It’s a little stupid, sending you a weather report in each of my letters; but if you knew how dependent our destiny and mood are on the aspect of the sky when we’re on tour!