Cousin Pons Part 36

"I have been to Mme. Cibot, sir, who knows all about things here," she said. "I asked her to tell me where everything is kept. But she almost jawed me to death with her abuse.... Sir, do listen to me...."

Schmucke looked up at the woman, and she went on, innocent of any barbarous intention, for women of her cla.s.s are accustomed to take the worst of moral suffering pa.s.sively, as a matter of course.

"We must have linen for the shroud, sir, we must have money to buy a truckle-bed for the person to sleep upon, and some things for the kitchen--plates, and dishes, and gla.s.ses, for a priest will be coming to pa.s.s the night here, and the person says that there is absolutely nothing in the kitchen."

"And what is more, sir, I must have coal and firing if I am to get the dinner ready," echoed La Sauvage, "and not a thing can I find. Not that there is anything so very surprising in that, as La Cibot used to do everything for you--"

Schmucke lay at the feet of the dead; he heard nothing, knew nothing, saw nothing. Mme. Cantinet pointed to him. "My dear woman, you would not believe me," she said. "Whatever you say, he does not answer."

"Very well, child," said La Sauvage; "now I will show you what to do in a case of this kind."

She looked round the room as a thief looks in search of possible hiding-places for money; then she went straight to Pons' chest, opened the first drawer, saw the bag in which Schmucke had put the rest of the money after the sale of the pictures, and held it up before him. He nodded mechanically.

"Here is money, child," said La Sauvage, turning to Mme. Cantinet. "I will count it first and take enough to buy everything we want--wine, provisions, wax-candles, all sorts of things, in fact, for there is nothing in the house.... Just look in the drawers for a sheet to bury him in. I certainly was told that the poor gentleman was simple, but I don't know what he is; he is worse. He is like a new-born child; we shall have to feed him with a funnel."

The women went about their work, and Schmucke looked on precisely as an idiot might have done. Broken down with sorrow, wholly absorbed, in a half-cataleptic state, he could not take his eyes from the face that seemed to fascinate him, Pons' face refined by the absolute repose of Death. Schmucke hoped to die; everything was alike indifferent. If the room had been on fire he would not have stirred.

"There are twelve hundred and fifty francs here," La Sauvage told him.

Schmucke shrugged his shoulders.

But when La Sauvage came near to measure the body by laying the sheet over it, before cutting out the shroud, a horrible struggle ensued between her and the poor German. Schmucke was furious. He behaved like a dog that watches by his dead master's body, and shows his teeth at all who try to touch it. La Sauvage grew impatient. She grasped him, set him in the armchair, and held him down with herculean strength.

"Go on, child; sew him in his shroud," she said, turning to Mme.

Cantinet.

As soon as this operation was completed, La Sauvage set Schmucke back in his place at the foot of the bed.

"Do you understand?" said she. "The poor dead man lying there must be done up, there is no help for it."

Schmucke began to cry. The women left him and took possession of the kitchen, whither they brought all the necessaries in a very short time.

La Sauvage made out a preliminary statement accounting for three hundred and sixty francs, and then proceeded to prepare a dinner for four persons. And what a dinner! A fat goose (the cobbler's pheasant) by way of a substantial roast, an omelette with preserves, a salad, and the inevitable broth--the quant.i.ties of the ingredients for this last being so excessive that the soup was more like a strong meat-jelly.

At nine o'clock the priest, sent by the curate to watch by the dead, came in with Cantinet, who brought four tall wax candles and some tapers. In the death-chamber Schmucke was lying with his arms about the body of his friend, holding him in a tight clasp; nothing but the authority of religion availed to separate him from his dead. Then the priest settled himself comfortably in the easy-chair and read his prayers while Schmucke, kneeling beside the couch, besought G.o.d to work a miracle and unite him to Pons, so that they might be buried in the same grave; and Mme. Cantinet went on her way to the Temple to buy a pallet and complete bedding for Mme. Sauvage. The twelve hundred and fifty francs were regarded as plunder. At eleven o'clock Mme. Cantinet came in to ask if Schmucke would not eat a morsel, but with a gesture he signified that he wished to be left in peace.

"Your supper is ready, M. Pastelot," she said, addressing the priest, and they went.

Schmucke, left alone in the room, smiled to himself like a madman free at last to gratify a desire like the longing of pregnancy. He flung himself down beside Pons, and yet again he held his friend in a long, close embrace. At midnight the priest came back and scolded him, and Schmucke returned to his prayers. At daybreak the priest went, and at seven o'clock in the morning the doctor came to see Schmucke, and spoke kindly and tried hard to persuade him to eat, but the German refused.

"If you do not eat now you will feel very hungry when you come back,"

the doctor told him, "for you must go to the mayor's office and take a witness with you, so that the registrar may issue a certificate of death."

"_I_ must go!" cried Schmucke in frightened tones.

"Who else?... You must go, for you were the one person who saw him die."

"Mein legs vill nicht carry me," pleaded Schmucke, imploring the doctor to come to the rescue.

"Take a cab," the hypocritical doctor blandly suggested. "I have given notice already. Ask some one in the house to go with you. The two women will look after the place while you are away."

No one imagines how the requirements of the law jar upon a heartfelt sorrow. The thought of it is enough to make one turn from civilization and choose rather the customs of the savage. At nine o'clock that morning Mme. Sauvage half-carried Schmucke downstairs, and from the cab he was obliged to beg Remonencq to come with him to the registrar as a second witness. Here in Paris, in this land of ours besotted with Equality, the inequality of conditions is glaringly apparent everywhere and in everything. The immutable tendency of things peeps out even in the practical aspects of Death. In well-to-do families, a relative, a friend, or a man of business spares the mourners these painful details; but in this, as in the matter of taxation, the whole burden falls heaviest upon the shoulders of the poor.

"Ah! you have good reason to regret him," said Remonencq in answer to the poor martyr's moan; "he was a very good, a very honest man, and he has left a fine collection behind him. But being a foreigner, sir, do you know that you are like to find yourself in a great predicament--for everybody says that M. Pons left everything to you?"

Schmucke was not listening. He was sounding the dark depths of sorrow that border upon madness. There is such a thing as teta.n.u.s of the soul.

"And you would do well to find some one--some man of business--to advise you and act for you," pursued Remonencq.

"Ein mann of pizness!" echoed Schmucke.

"You will find that you will want some one to act for you. If I were you, I should take an experienced man, somebody well known to you in the quarter, a man you can trust.... I always go to Tabareau myself for my bits of affairs--he is the bailiff. If you give his clerk power to act for you, you need not trouble yourself any further."

Remonencq and La Cibot, prompted by Fraisier, had agreed beforehand to make a suggestion which stuck in Schmucke's memory; for there are times in our lives when grief, as it were, congeals the mind by arresting all its functions, and any chance impression made at such moments is retained by a frost-bound memory. Schmucke heard his companion with such a fixed, mindless stare, that Remonencq said no more.

"If he is always to be idiotic like this," thought Remonencq, "I might easily buy the whole bag of tricks up yonder for a hundred thousand francs; if it is really his.... Here we are at the mayor's office, sir."

Remonencq was obliged to take Schmucke out of the cab and to half-carry him to the registrar's department, where a wedding-party was a.s.sembled.

Here they had to wait for their turn, for, by no very uncommon chance, the clerk had five or six certificates to make out that morning; and here it was appointed that poor Schmucke should suffer excruciating anguish.

"Monsieur is M. Schmucke?" remarked a person in a suit of black, reducing Schmucke to stupefaction by the mention of his name. He looked up with the same blank, unseeing eyes that he had turned upon Remonencq, who now interposed.

"What do you want with him?" he said. "Just leave him in peace; you can plainly see that he is in trouble."

"The gentleman has just lost his friend, and proposes, no doubt, to do honor to his memory, being, as he is, the sole heir. The gentleman, no doubt, will not haggle over it, he will buy a piece of ground outright for a grave. And as M. Pons was such a lover of the arts, it would be a great pity not to put Music, Painting, and Sculpture on his tomb--three handsome full-length figures, weeping--"

Remonencq waved the speaker away, in Auvergnat fas.h.i.+on, but the man replied with another gesture, which being interpreted means "Don't spoil sport"; a piece of commercial free-masonry, as it were, which the dealer understood.

"I represent the firm of Sonet and Company, monumental stone-masons; Sir Walter Scott would have dubbed me _Young Mortality_," continued this person. "If you, sir, should decide to intrust your orders to us, we would spare you the trouble of the journey to purchase the ground necessary for the interment of a friend lost to the arts--"

At this Remonencq nodded a.s.sent, and jogged Schmucke's elbow.

"Every day we receive orders from families to arrange all formalities,"

continued he of the black coat, thus encouraged by Remonencq. "In the first moment of bereavement, the heir-at-law finds it very difficult to attend to such matters, and we are accustomed to perform these little services for our clients. Our charges, sir, are on a fixed scale, so much per foot, freestone or marble. Family vaults a specialty.--We undertake everything at the most moderate prices. Our firm executed the magnificent monument erected to the fair Esther Gobseck and Lucien de Rubempre, one of the finest ornaments of Pere-Lachaise. We only employ the best workmen, and I must warn you, sir, against small contractors--who turn out nothing but trash," he added, seeing that another person in a black suit was coming up to say a word for another firm of marble-workers.

It is often said that "death is the end of a journey," but the aptness of the simile is realized most fully in Paris. Any arrival, especially of a person of condition, upon the "dark brink," is hailed in much the same way as the traveler recently landed is hailed by hotel touts and pestered with their recommendations. With the exception of a few philosophically-minded persons, or here and there a family secure of handing down a name to posterity, n.o.body thinks beforehand of the practical aspects of death. Death always comes before he is expected; and, from a sentiment easy to understand, the heirs usually act as if the event were impossible. For which reason, almost every one that loses father or mother, wife or child, is immediately beset by scouts that profit by the confusion caused by grief to snare others. In former days, agents for monuments used to live round about the famous cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, and were gathered together in a single thoroughfare, which should by rights have been called the Street of Tombs; issuing thence, they fell upon the relatives of the dead as they came from the cemetery, or even at the grave-side. But compet.i.tion and the spirit of speculation induced them to spread themselves further and further afield, till descending into Paris itself they reached the very precincts of the mayor's office. Indeed, the stone-mason's agent has often been known to invade the house of mourning with a design for the sepulchre in his hand.

"I am in treaty with this gentleman," said the representative of the firm of Sonet to another agent who came up.

"Pons deceased!..." called the clerk at this moment. "Where are the witnesses?"

"This way, sir," said the stone-mason's agent, this time addressing Remonencq.

Schmucke stayed where he had been placed on the bench, an inert ma.s.s.

Remonencq begged the agent to help him, and together they pulled Schmucke towards the bal.u.s.trade, behind which the registrar shelters himself from the mourning public. Remonencq, Schmucke's Providence, was a.s.sisted by Dr. Poulain, who filled in the necessary information as to Pons' age and birthplace; the German knew but one thing--that Pons was his friend. So soon as the signatures were affixed, Remonencq and the doctor (followed by the stone-mason's man), put Schmucke into a cab, the desperate agent whisking in afterwards, bent upon taking a definite order.

La Sauvage, on the lookout in the gateway, half-carried Schmucke's almost unconscious form upstairs. Remonencq and the agent went up with her.

"He will be ill!" exclaimed the agent, anxious to make an end of the piece of business which, according to him, was in progress.