Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Somebody had to write to the forty people.

It was done on the Thursday morning, by the secretary at the Bellegarde, in a hand of great distinction, upon the correct paper; and the forty people opened their letters over their breakfasts and were told that the marriage arranged between Monsieur Verso Dessendre and Mademoiselle Emma Racine would not now take place, and that Madame Dessendre regretted the inconvenience. It said nothing else whatever. It did not need to. A city of that size can get through a considerable quantity of business on a single sentence, provided the sentence is dull enough, and Lumière set to work on that one and had it in service before the middle of June.

The account it settled upon was money. There had been a difficulty over the settlement—there is always a difficulty over the settlement—and the Dessendres had gone back to Paris in a temper, and the son with them; and Councillor Racine, who had been very cool about the whole affair from the beginning, had come out of it with her seat and her dignity and no husband, which was more than several people had expected and rather less than she deserved. That was the version. It was almost entirely wrong and it was very nearly kind, and Gustave, who knew what it was worth, found himself unable to be grateful for it and unable to want it corrected.

What the city could not account for so tidily was the city engineer.

He had gone quiet. There was no other word for it, and the town looked about for a reason and found one immediately, and was so pleased with it that nobody looked any further: the man's sister had been jilted—or had jilted, opinion was divided and enjoyed being divided—and he had taken it hard, which did him credit. Grocers were gentle with him. Girard stopped telling him about his shoulder. Madame Bertrand, who could see the Racine yard from her back window and had done for thirty years, sent up a dish of something twice in July with a note about how these things pass.

It was, Gustave thought, the single most exhausting kindness he had ever been the object of. He was being condoled with, patiently and at length, over the wrong loss, by people who meant it; and there was nothing to be done but say thank you, and mean that too.

The letters began three weeks after the eight o'clock train.

The first was addressed in a small sloping hand he had never seen in his life, and it was postmarked Paris.

He stood in his own passage and looked at that for some while before he did anything else about it.

Then he opened it, and the letter inside was in a hand of which he had four examples in a tin box upstairs.

He had to sit down on the stairs. That was the humiliating part, afterwards, and he was on the third step with his back against the wall for some minutes before he was fit to read any of it; because he had spent three weeks constructing, without once admitting to himself that he was doing it, a perfectly reasonable and very well-founded position in which no letter was going to come. It had not been despair, and it had not been misery either; he had been perfectly comfortable about it, in the way a man is comfortable with a thing he settled long ago and has no intention of reopening. He had simply gone back onto the old arrangement, the one he had come to as a boy without words and had never had cause to revise until February, under which the arms and the mattress and the kitchen and the years were things that happened to other men; and a letter, arriving, was a thing which under that arrangement did not.

So he sat on his own stairs at half past seven in the evening with a piece of paper in his hand and found that he was shaking, which was ridiculous, and that he could not get through the first line twice.

I am told the correct order is to enquire after your health, it began, and I find that I do not care in the least about your health, so we shall take that as read.

Then it explained the envelope.

Her name was Julie Delacroix. She was the girl Verso had been expected to marry in '88—expected by everybody, agreed by nobody—and she had worked out for herself what he was before he had told her, and had refused, at two-and-twenty, to be used as a cover for it; and the friendship had survived that, which Gustave thought said a great deal more about her than about him. He had gone round to her rooms in his first week and asked her to her face, which he reported having found a good deal harder than asking a stranger for money. She heard me out and then said that she had been waiting eleven years to be of some use in this, and that she did not intend to be thanked for it, and that I might bring them round on Thursdays and stop looking like that.

I do not know whether I am watched, Verso wrote. I think not. I think I am nothing to him now and that is the whole of what he wanted. But I have been wrong about my father twice in my life and both times it cost somebody else, so we shall do it this way until I am certain, and then I shall do it in my own hand, and you will know from the envelope that I am sure.

I told you on that shore that you would spend a week deciding I had said it to get through an evening. I have thought about that a good deal on the train and since, and I find I was wrong about the week; I think you had it settled before the cart was out of the street. So here is the first, and there will be another, and you may count them if you like, since counting is what you do.

It was so exactly true, and so entirely unwelcome, and so precisely the thing Gustave had spent three weeks making certain nobody could observe, that he sat on his own stairs and could not do anything with it at all. He had been read again. He had been read at four hundred miles, in writing, by a man who had not been in the room while he did it—who had in fact told him on the sand that he would do it, and been ignored, and had gone away and waited to be proved right.

I think you had it settled before the cart was out of the street.

He had had it settled before the cart was out of the street.

He got up off the stairs after a while, because a man cannot sit on his own stairs indefinitely with his sisters in the house, and went into the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood there while it did nothing, which was the only thing he had.

He answered it that night. He wrote a very bad letter and burnt it, out of habit, and wrote a second one that was not much better and sent that, because it was that or lie awake.

There were eight of those before the hand on the envelope changed, and he kept every one of them, and did not put them in the tin box, because the tin box was for things that were finished.

The town went on being kind to him about his sister all that summer. He went on saying thank you, and meaning it, and posting a letter to Paris on his way to the works about every fourth day; and it did not once occur to anybody in Lumière that the city engineer, who had gone so quiet, was in fact having by some distance the most talkative year of his life.

***

Emma had been at it since June.

Gustave found that out in November, and only because he came home early with a cut hand and went into the front room for the arnica and found the table under it: the founding statute of the school at Marseille, in a printer's copy got from the prefecture; the admission regulations for this year and for several years back; a bound report of the Conseil général on technical instruction in the department; and two closely written sheets in his sister's hand which turned out, on inspection, to be a list of every clause in which the word homme appeared and every clause in which it did not.

He stood and read the top sheet with the arnica in his fist and the cut forgotten.

"It says candidates," said Emma from the doorway.

He turned round.

"All the way through. Twice in the statute and all through the regulations, and there is a paragraph about the certificate of practical training which says a candidate must have been employed not less than a year under a certificated engineer and must produce the engineer's attestation, and it says candidate there as well." She came in and put her hands flat on the table, on either side of it, and looked down at the whole spread of it. "Nobody ever wrote it down. They have not been refusing women. They have simply never had to think about it, because nobody has ever handed them one at the front door with the papers in order."

"Emma."

"I have been through the admissions since the school opened and every one of them is a boy from a lycée, and every one of them came in on the baccalaureate." She let that sit for a moment. "Which is the whole of it, Gustave, and it took me until August to see it. They have not been keeping women out. The lycée has. A girl goes to the collège and she learns a great many things and she does not learn the ones the baccalaureate is made of, because somebody decided in 1880 what girls were to be taught, and so at eighteen she has a diploma that opens nothing and she has never been refused anything in her life.

"Nobody at that school has had to think about women, because nobody has ever arrived. And the one door in that building that was never shut is the practical certificate, and it is not used, and I do not believe anybody there has read the clause since it was drafted." She straightened. "It is not a loophole. I want that said plainly, because it will be said the other way by somebody. It is the regulation. It is simply the regulation nobody has been obliged to look at."

Gustave sat down on the edge of the table, which he had been telling Maelle not to do since she was six.

"Since June," he said.

"Since June."

"You never said."

"No." She began squaring the sheets together. "Because it was going to come to nothing until about the second week of October, and there was no sense in putting it in front of that child and then taking it away again, and because—" she stopped, and set the papers down, and made herself say the rest of it, which he watched her do. "And because I have got a habit of finding a thing out and then arranging it and then informing the household, and I have been trying, since the May, to break it, and I find that the way I break it is by not doing the arranging part. Not by not doing the finding out."

"That's the same habit."

"It is a great deal less of it," said Emma, "and I should be obliged if you would not stand in my front room and improve me."

She sent for Sciel on the Wednesday, and Gustave did not work out why until they were round the kitchen table with the papers between them: because there was going to be a conversation in that room that neither he nor his sister was qualified to have, and Emma had never in her life sat down to a piece of business without the right person present.

Maelle read the top sheet, and then the second, and then went back to the top sheet. Nobody hurried her. She was seventeen that November and had been keeping the household accounts since the May in a hand you could have set type from, and she read a document the way her sister did, which was slowly and twice.

"It says candidates," she said at last.

"It does."

"So they'd have to refuse me on purpose. In writing. With a reason."

"That," said Emma, "is exactly the position I have spent since midsummer trying to put them in."

Maelle put the sheet down.

"Now the rest of it," said Gustave.

She looked up at him.

"There's a rest of it?"

"There is a considerable rest of it, and you are going to hear the whole thing before you say anything at all about whether you want it, and then you are going to go to bed and not decide until Friday." He had thought about how to do this for the better part of a week and had got nowhere, so he did it plainly. "The certificate wants a year employed under a certificated engineer. That is me. There isn't anybody else on this coast who would take you and we both know it, so it is me, and that means you would come onto the works next month on the books, at a wage, alongside Adrien and Guillaume and Alexandre."

"I know what it means—"

"You do not yet. Let me finish." He set his hands on the table. "It will cost you two things. The first is that you will do everything twice. Everything. If Alexandre brings me a set of levels with a transposition in it he is careless and I say so and it is forgotten by the end of the week. If you bring me one, it is not you that was careless, it is the whole idea of you, and it will be in the Café Mirabeau inside two days and it will still be true in three years. There is no arrangement I can make that gets round that. I have thought about it and there isn't one."

"And the second?"

"The second is me," said Gustave. "I am going to be harder on you than on any of them, in the yard, in front of the men, all year. Not fair. Harder than fair. And you will know why and I will know why and neither of us will be able to say a word about it out there."

There was a silence.

"Why," said Maelle.

"Because the moment I put my sister on that works, there is a thing people can say about me, and it is the only thing anybody has ever been able to say about me." He looked at the table. "I have got exactly one thing, Maelle. I have been signing for this city since before you could read, and in the whole of that time nobody has ever been able to say that my name on a paper meant anything except the truth about the work. Not once, about anything, to anybody. That is the whole of it. That is what I am. And the better you turn out to be the truer it will look that I put you there because you are mine. And if that sticks, then the certificate I sign at the end of the year is worth nothing, and you will have done a year for a piece of paper nobody believes."

"So it costs you as well."

"It costs me as well, and I am telling you that in advance and not afterwards," said Gustave, "because you told me in this kitchen that there is a step in the middle where somebody asks. This is the step. I am not deciding it. I would rather you did not, and I am going to sign it either way, and it is yours."

Maelle sat looking at her hands for a moment.

Then she said, to Sciel: "You've been very quiet."

"I have," said Sciel.

"Well, don't be."

"You are going to make me say it in front of your brother," said Sciel, "which I notice, and which I shall pay you out for another time." She set her cup down. "Very well. I have taught in this city since I was one-and-twenty. I have had four girls in that time who could have done anything at all with themselves, and I could name them to you now, in order. Two of them are married, which is not a tragedy and I will not have it made into one; one of them keeps her father's books and is very good at it and is not paid; and one of them I lost track of, which is the one I think about."

"Sciel—"

"Let me finish, I am being useful." She looked at Maelle. "Not one of them was stopped by a rule. That is the thing I want you to have out of this. There was never a rule. They were stopped by everybody agreeing, pleasantly, over a great many years, that the question did not arise; and by there being nobody to hand who was prepared to be disagreeable about it at the right moment and go on being disagreeable about it for as long as it took."

"And you think I should."

"I think you have got two people at this table who are prepared to be disagreeable, which is two more than any of my four ever had, and a paper that says candidates, which is more than any of them had either." Sciel turned her cup round. "And I think you should understand that you will not enjoy it. That is not a warning, it is a fact about the work. It will not be like doing the accounts and being cleverer than everybody. It will be like being looked at, every day, for years, by people who are waiting."

"I know."

"You do not," said Sciel, not unkindly. "But you will, and you will find out whether you can, and that is not a thing anybody at this table can find out for you." She picked her cup up again. "For what it is worth: I have never once thought that the arrangement was a good one, and I have never said so out loud in a room with a man in it, and I appear to be doing it now, so somebody had better put it to some use."

Maelle went up at ten and did not decide anything.

She came down on the Friday morning with her hair done and her jaw set, and stood at the end of the table where Gustave was eating, and said, "December. Next month. And you're to be exactly as horrible as you said, and if you go soft on me in that yard I shall never forgive you."

"I shan't go soft on you."

"You will want to."

"I shall want to constantly," said Gustave. "That is not the same thing."

"No," said Maelle. "It isn't."

And she sat down and took the bread out of his hand, which she had been doing since she could reach, and ate half of it standing up, and that was the whole of it settled.

He wrote to Paris that night.

It went out on the Monday and the answer came back the following week, and it was the shortest letter he had ever had from that man, and Gustave carried it about in his coat until it went soft at the folds.

Your sister has done in half a year a thing I could not have done in ten with the whole of my father's money, because it never once occurred to me that the way in was to read the paper. I have written to her separately and she will not answer it, and you are to tell her that I know she will not, and that I said it anyway.

Tell Maelle that I have been turned down by better men than the board at Marseille and that it is not as bad as it looks.

And tell her—no. I shall tell her that myself, when there is somewhere to stand.

***

The letter that changed the shape of Gustave's life arrived in the January and was, for two pages, about nothing at all.

Then, at the foot of the second page, in a smaller hand, as though the writer had gone away and come back to it:

Now a question, and you are to think before you answer it, and you are not to be kind to me about it.

I have nothing to sell. That is the whole of my difficulty. I can carry another man's fittings about in a bag and take my commission, and I shall go on doing it as long as it feeds me; but a man who carries other men's fittings is a man who will still be carrying them at sixty. What I have instead is a head full of your complaints. I have been going about with them since June and it has lately occurred to me that two or three of them are not complaints at all. They are things that want making.

So: may I have them. Not to keep. To try. I should take one to a maker and have it drawn out properly and find whether anybody will look at it; and if anybody does, then it is a thing with your name at the bottom and mine in front of it, and the money is divided as such things are divided, and I want that written down before we begin and not after.

Say no if it is no. I have thought of several reasons why you might, and the best of them is that I should be making my living out of what you say on the floor of a shed in a temper, which I am aware is not a small thing to ask of a man.

Gustave answered the same evening, at speed, and said yes to the first part and laughed at the second at considerable length. He was very funny about it. He observed that a complaint about a wagon axlebox was not property; that he had been making the same complaint to Girard for years and Girard had never once offered him a percentage of anything; that if Verso Dessendre wished to go about Paris being annoying on his behalf he was welcome to it and should send an account of the annoyance; and that he was not going to be paid for having been in a bad temper.

The answer came back and was one sentence long.

You will take the money, because work is paid for; and if you write to me again about how it is nothing, I shall find the letter you sent me in the May about a rich man being owed nine hundred and eighty francs, and I shall read it aloud, in this room, to myself, in your voice.

Gustave sat with that for some while.

The infuriating thing—the thing he turned over at intervals for a fortnight afterwards, in the yard, walking, at his own table—was that it could not be answered. He had stood in that kitchen and taken his sister's excuse away from her sentence by sentence, on the principle that what a thing is worth has nothing whatever to do with what the man paying can afford. He had been thorough about it. He had made her feel it.

He could not now stand in front of the same principle and say ah, but this is different, because it is me.

Very well, he wrote. You have become a lawyer and I hope you are ashamed.

I am not, came back. Terms enclosed. Read them properly. There is one clause in them that is wrong on purpose, and if you write and tell me which, I shall know you read it.

He found it inside a quarter of an hour—a clause about who paid for the drawings—and wrote and told him so, and got back a single line saying Good, which he was embarrassed to discover he had kept.

***

Maelle came onto the books on the second Monday in December, at a franc fifty the day, which was what Alexandre had been paid in his first year and not a sou more; and Gustave had gone to the trouble of looking that up beforehand and entering it in the book where Girard could watch him do it.

Nobody said anything at all on the first morning. He had braced himself for a great deal and got instead a yard of men being courteous in a manner he had never in his life seen any of them manage: Girard saying Mademoiselle as though setting down something breakable, and Guillaume, who did not talk, going scarlet to the ears when she asked him where the levels were kept.

It lasted a fortnight. Then they got used to her, which was worse, because getting used to her meant they began to watch her properly.

She turned out to be good.

Not brilliant, which he had half feared, brilliance in a first year being largely a nuisance and generally temporary. She was accurate and she was quick; she asked a sensible question about one thing in three; and she had the trick that cannot be taught, and that he had met perhaps twice in a working life of apprentices, of looking at a column of figures and knowing, before she could have told anybody why, that one of them was a lie.

The rest of it she had not got and would have to be given. She could not yet see a wall in her head. She took a correction as though it were a verdict. And she was slow at the parts of the work that are nothing but slog, which is the half of it nobody warns anybody about.

He said none of that to her. He said it to Paris, at unreasonable length, about twice a week.

By March she was doing the levels with Alexandre; and Alexandre, from whom she had had it at sixteen that they did not take women, said nothing whatever about it, except once, to Guillaume, in the shed, in a voice not meant to carry: "She's better at the arithmetic than I am. And I'd like it noted that I have not said one word."

Guillaume told Adrien, and Adrien told Gustave, and Gustave put it in a letter that night and got back: Tell me nothing further about that boy or I shall become fond of him at four hundred miles and it will be ridiculous.

***

The first attempt failed in the February, and the second in the March.

He had the accounts of both by post, written up as comic anecdotes, which by the fourth page they had generally stopped being: a maker at Saint-Étienne who kept Verso two hours in an anteroom and then did not appear; a man in the Rue de Provence who heard the whole thing out with great civility and then asked, kindly, whether he was the Dessendre who painted.

I said that I was not. He said, with real feeling, that he was sorry to hear it.

I am told this is ordinary and that everybody begins so. I find that I do not care whether it is ordinary. What I mind is that I sat in that anteroom composing a letter to you in my head about how badly it was going, and could not think how to write it without it being a complaint; and I find that I would sooner bore you about my own life than perform cheerfulness at four hundred miles for another two years. 

So: it is going badly. There. That is the letter.

The third attempt did not fail.

It was the oil pads in the axleboxes, which Gustave had been complaining about since the autumn on the strength of losing a day's stone every time a wagon ran hot on the Sainte-Anne road, and which he had thrown at Verso one evening on the floor of the drawing office, in a temper about something else entirely, and forgotten inside a minute. The worsted packs down within a season and stops feeding the journal. Nobody mends it, because the pad belongs to nobody's department. Every man in France knows it and not one of them has ever done anything at all about it.

Verso had written it down that night, in the street, standing up.

A pad made differently, and a keep shaped to hold it up to the journal. It has been drawn out properly by the man at Saint-Étienne from a sketch of mine so bad that he enquired, gently, whether I had been present when the wagon was described to me. The Compagnie will take four hundred on trial for the coast wagons.

I am going to say one thing about this and then leave it alone, because you will hate it.

You threw that away. On a floor. In a temper, about something else. It has been in my coat pocket since January and it is now to be made out of iron and put under wagons, and it will mend a thing that has been vexing every railwayman in this country for twenty years; and it cost you nothing to say, and you have not thought of it since.

You do that constantly. I do not believe you know that you do it.

Gustave read that in his own office with the door standing open, and did not answer for two days, which was the longest he had ever left one.

It was not the pads. It was not the four hundred. It was the last line; because he had gone about for three-and-thirty years believing, in the flat unexamined way a man believes the things nobody ever told him, that the difference between himself and the men who did large things was that they had something in them which he had not. And it had never once been suggested to him, by anybody, that the difference might be that they emptied their pockets in rooms where somebody was listening.

***

The consequence came in April, and on the face of it was a piece of paper.

I cannot go on drawing these myself. You have seen my sketches. The man at Saint-Étienne has been extremely polite about them and I have decided that I would rather be helped than admired. What I want is a proper hand on the drawings before they go to a maker; I want it to be yours; and I want it done properly and not as a favour. So it is a contract, properly drawn, quarterly, with your name upon it and a rate against each sheet. 

Before you write back that this is absurd: it is not absurd, it is ordinary. Half the engineers in France do outside work for a fee and the other half are lying about it. I have taken advice on whether it can embarrass you with the city, and the answer is that it cannot, provided the city knows.

Emma read the whole of it twice at the kitchen table with her supper going cold.

"It goes to the council," she said.

"Emma, it is fittings for goods wagons."

"It goes to the council in writing, in your own hand, before you sign anything; and it goes in this month, and not the month after you have taken the first fee." She set the paper down. "I have spent a year standing up in that chamber commending an arrangement with that family, and every man in the room has been very good about not saying anything, and they will go on being very good about it precisely as long as there is nothing they can point to. So you will point to it first. You will declare it. It will be minuted. It will be extremely dull. And in ten years, when somebody wishes to make something of it, there will be a line in a book from before it began."

"You have thought about this."

"I think about very little else," said Emma. "Write it tonight and I shall put it in on Wednesday."

So it was declared, and minuted, and nobody said one word about it, and it was exactly as dull as she had promised.

And that was how Gustave Racine came to spend his evenings that spring at his own kitchen table with a rule and a scale and the lamp pulled down, correcting another man's drawings.

They were not bad. That was the thing he had not expected and could not stop remarking on. They were the work of somebody who had been taught to see properly and then taught to render what he saw, by masters, expensively, for years, and who had hated every hour of it; and it turned out that a hand trained on the fall of cloth does very well indeed on the fall of a casting, once it is pointed at one. The proportions were right. The shading was better than anything on that works.

What was wrong was everything an engineer knows and a painter has no reason to. He drew what a thing looked like instead of what it was made of. He had no notion of a section. And he dimensioned like a man apologising.

Gustave sent the first batch back so heavily marked in red that he was ashamed of the parcel in the post office.

I am delighted, Verso wrote. Do it again. Do it worse.

By the June the sections were coming through correct. By August there was nothing left on them to write but the dimensions; and once or twice Gustave kept one, and put it in the drawer of the drawing table, and did not examine his reasons.

The reason, had he examined it, was that the man had begun signing them in the corner with his initials, in the way engineers do—in a small square hand, quite unlike his own, that had plainly been practised.

***

It is a common misapprehension among the citizens of a small port that their engineer builds one thing at a time, and a great convenience to him that they should go on thinking so.

That June Gustave Racine was, in the ordinary way of it, building none. He was arguing with the harbour board about a crane; he was refusing, for the third year, to certify a footbridge at the Rue Basse which would certainly stand for another decade and would then quite certainly not; he was two months into a dispute with a contractor at the waterworks conducted entirely by letter and with enormous mutual courtesy; and he was up and down the coast road to Sainte-Anne about stone. The northern wall was the thing everybody watched, because it was large and out of doors and could be seen from the upper town. It occupied perhaps a third of him.

Which is how he came to be at the far end of the works on the Friday afternoon, on his way to somewhere else entirely, and to stop.

The courses at the north return were not where the courses at a return go.

He looked at it for some while. By the time he had done looking there was not a man on that stretch who had not found something to do within earshot.

"Whose figure is this."

He was looking at his sister when he said it.

"Mine." Adrien had come up the wall behind him.

"I did not ask you. Be quiet." He had never in his life had to raise his voice on a works, and did not now. "Maelle. Whose figure."

"His." Her face had gone the colour of the stone. "I asked him for it."

"Why."

There was a pause, in front of twelve men.

"Because it was a small thing," said Maelle, "and I am not going to be the one who has to go and find you for every small thing."

Gustave stood with that about the length of a breath.

"The bearing at a return is not a small thing, and this wall is the proof of it. It is mine to give, because I am the man who signs for it, and there is no arrangement on this works by which it comes from anybody else, and that is not a rule about you.

"Adrien. You were asked a question outside your competence and you answered it as though it were inside, which is the worse of the two faults. Six o'clock, not now.

"Set it out again on Monday off my figure, the pair of you, and Adrien is not to talk while you do it. And nobody on this wall is to have an opinion about any of this after today; I have not the time."

Then he walked away, which was cowardice, and went up to his own office and shut the door.

He had it in pieces over the next several hours, in the way a man has anything on a works: some of it out of Adrien at six, some of it off the marking-out sheets, and the rest assembled standing at his own table with a section in front of him and the light going.

There was nothing whatever in it. Adrien had laid returns on the harbour wall for five years, where the bearing does happen to be the same as the run because of the stone, and had never once had occasion to learn why; and he had been asked a plain question by somebody he was fond of and had answered it in perfect good faith and had been entirely certain. Gustave went over that three separate times looking for a fault he could be angry about, and found none, which was a pity; he would have liked to be angry with somebody.

And his sister had asked a good question. That was the part he could not get round. She had not blundered into anything. She had had the section in front of her and had found the thing the section does not tell you, which is the whole of what a first year is for, and she had done every part of it correctly except the last, and the last part was that she had not come and found him.

He stayed at that table until nearly eight, and got no further, and went home; and at half past ten, when the house was asleep, he took the lamp into the front room and wrote to Paris.

It took him until past midnight and it was the worst letter he had ever put his name to. He did not make it funny. That was the difficulty; he had spent a year and a half making things funny at four hundred miles, and he found, with the pen in his hand, that he could not do it and could not think why he had ever wished to.

She did not come and find me because I told her not to. Not in those words. You will remember the evening I wrote to you about, with the statutes on the table and Sciel sent for—where I set out for her what it would cost her and what it would cost me, before she had decided anything, and was extremely pleased with myself afterwards for having done it honestly.

She has not asked me a question since that evening. Not one, in six months, that she could get an answer to anywhere else. I did not notice until this afternoon, standing on a wall in front of twelve men, being right.

He read it over twice and came very near to putting it in the fire; and then went out into the street with it before he could be sensible.

***

Lune came on the Sunday, with something to return, as she always did.

She sat down at the kitchen table with her hat still on, moved her cup clear of the papers pushed to the far end of it, and observed that she had not the slightest idea what any of it was.

"Levels."

"I shall take your word for it. How is she?"

"She has had a bad two days. Partly of her own making. Partly of mine, and she has forbidden me to think about my part, and I am obeying her about as well as you would expect."

Lune turned the cup round.

"When I read Greek I was the only woman at that table for two years, and a great many people were extremely kind to me, and one of them told me at the very beginning that I should have to be twice as good and that it was a shame but there it was."

"He was not wrong."

"He was not wrong, and I have never entirely forgiven him. I should have worked it out for myself inside a month. Instead I had it in my head from the first morning, and in two years I never once asked a question in that room that I could look up afterwards on my own." She set the cup down. "I have thought a great deal more about that than about the Greek."

Gustave said nothing at all.

"I do not know to this day whether he did me a service. He was honest with me." She stood and put her chair in. "But it was not the telling that did it. It was the telling, and then leaving me alone with it. Somebody ought to have said to me, at some point in those two years, that it was still permitted to ask. Nobody ever did. I expect they all supposed I knew."

She went off up the street with her hat still crooked, entirely unaware of having done anything, and Gustave stood in his own doorway for a while afterwards without shutting it.

She had been talking about herself. She had not once thought of Maelle, and had described her exactly.

He had had one instrument all his life for finding out what a thing was: look at it until you understand it. He had been looking at his sister across a supper table every evening since December, and it had taken a woman talking about herself in a hat to tell him what he was looking at.

***

The wall went up again on the Monday off his figure, correct to the millimetre, and Adrien did not talk while it was done, and the works found other things to look at within about a day and a half, as works do.

Emma looked at the pair of them across the supper table on the Monday and again on the Tuesday and said nothing at all, which cost her a great deal.

On the Tuesday evening Maelle set his tea down harder than the tea required.

"It was still my figure."

He looked up.

"I took it off him. I set it out and I signed the sheet, and I did not check it, and I could have checked it in four minutes with the section in my hand." Her arms were folded. "So you may stop. You have been going about this house since Friday like a man carrying a coffin, and it is mine, and I should like to be angry about it without you standing there being sorry at me."

"Maelle—"

"You were right on the wall. I have spent four days hating that and I have finished now."

And she went up, and left him with the tea; and Gustave sat with it going cold in front of him and understood that he had been given the raising of somebody a good deal better than himself and had had remarkably little to do with it.

***

Verso's answer came on the Wednesday, which was as fast as the mails could manage it, and was a good deal shorter than Gustave had feared.

I shall not tell you whether you were right on that wall. I was not there, and you have a foreman and a section and a sister, and I have a room in Paris.

One thing about that evening of yours and then I am done. I was told nothing, ever, by anybody. It was decided elsewhere and handed to me afterwards by people who were fond of me and who would have said, had they been asked, that they were sparing me. You know what that makes. You have had the whole of it off me.

You told her first. Whatever else was wrong with that evening, you did the thing that was never once done for me, and I will not have it called a cruelty in this correspondence.

Now say the other half. That she may ask you. She will not believe you, and she will not believe you the second time either, and you are not to be discouraged; it is not a speech, it is about a year.

Gustave put that down on the kitchen table beside his tea and did not touch either of them for some minutes.

Four days, and two people. Lune, in a hat, in this room on Sunday, with no notion whatever of what she was doing; and a man in Paris who had the whole of it off one sheet of paper written after midnight, and who had not been within four hundred miles of that wall on the Friday. They had never in their lives discussed him. They could not have compared a single word. And they had arrived at the identical sentence and posted it at him from opposite ends of France inside a week of one another.

He was a man who believed evidence. That was the whole of his trade. He had spent five days constructing a very fine case for doing nothing about any of it, and he sat in his own kitchen and watched the case come apart in his hands, and found that what he chiefly felt about it was relief.

***

He funked it twice at home, and did it in the end on the Thursday, at the works, standing up, with a section in his hand and Adrien audible through an open door—which was not how he had intended any part of it.

"You may ask me things."

Maelle did not look up from the levels.

"I am asking you now. About the coping."

"Not that." He turned the section over and put it down, and made himself go on. "Anything on this works. At any hour, about anything at all, and it does not count against you and it never did. I said the other thing to you in the kitchen and I did not say this one, and it has taken me until Thursday to work out that it wanted saying."

The pencil stopped.

"All right."

"You do not believe me."

"I believe that you mean it."

"That is not the same thing."

"No," said Maelle, and went back to the levels. "It isn't."

***

There is a particular cruelty in the post, which is that it takes no notice whatever of what is going on in a house when it arrives; and on the Monday, into a kitchen where nobody had said anything of consequence since Tuesday, came a letter from Paris with a bank draft folded inside it.

The trial is finished. Eleven hundred more, and a second company asking; and the man at Saint-Étienne has left off calling me Monsieur Dessendre and now calls me Dessendre, which I am given to understand is the entire ceremony in that trade.

Enclosed is what is yours under the terms. Do not fight me about it. I shall win.

It was not enormous. It was about a third of what the city paid him in a quarter, for work done at his own table in the evenings with a rule and a lamp; and Gustave sat in a kitchen in a house with a bad footing under it and held a piece of paper which meant that something he had thrown away one evening on the floor of his own drawing office was now under wagons on the coast line and would shortly be under a great many more.

He was pleased. He was extremely pleased, and it would not sit down anywhere near the rest of it; and the two of them went round in him all evening like two men trying to pass in a passage.

***

There is no dignity available to a man of four-and-thirty who has been told that somebody is coming and not told when, and Gustave Racine had none whatever for the whole of that November.

He knew it was to be before Christmas. He had that in writing, and had read it a great many more times than the information required, and had then been obliged to conduct himself for five weeks as a person to whom nothing in particular was happening. He was, he believed, extremely successful at this. He did not mention it to his sisters. He did not alter one detail of his habits. He merely found that he had taken to hearing the yard gate from inside his own office through a shut door, at a distance of forty feet, several times a day, when it was not the gate at all; and once, being told by Girard that a gentleman was asking for him, went out into the yard at a speed which Girard afterwards described to his wife with a good deal of enjoyment. It was a man from the gas company.

The paperwork saved him, as it generally did. There was a great deal of it that autumn: the contractor at the waterworks had at last written something actionable, and the footbridge at the Rue Basse had reached the stage at which refusing to certify it was no longer sufficient and something would have to be built, and the harbour board wanted the crane accounted for in a manner which suggested somebody on the board had been counting. He stayed late four evenings out of six and got a great deal done and was thoroughly sick of all of it.

On the Tuesday the boys went at six. He heard the gate at about twenty past, and did not look up, because he had heard the gate at about twenty past on a great many evenings that month.

Then there was a step on the boards outside that had not been made by anybody who worked there.

He got up so quickly that he took the top sheet of the waterworks correspondence with him, and it went on the floor, and stayed there for a considerable time.

The man in the doorway had had his hair cut.

That was the first thing, and it was ridiculous that it should be the first thing, and it was. It was cut short, and it was grey at the temples in a way it had not been the last time Gustave had seen it by daylight; and the beard, which had been kept short for as long as he had known the man and trimmed by the man himself in a glass, was longer now and shaped, and attended to, plainly and regularly, by somebody who was paid to attend to it. He was dressed in the manner of a person who is expected in offices, in good plain clothes made for him and not merely bought.

For about the space of one breath Gustave stood in his own drawing office and looked at Renoir Dessendre.

It went. It went as fast as it had come and left nothing behind it but the knowledge that it had happened; and what was standing in the door was a man who had put a hand on the frame and had not yet said anything at all, and whose face was doing something no photograph of Renoir Dessendre would ever have permitted.

"You have—" said Gustave.

"I am aware."

"No, you are not, or you would have shaved it off."

"I am now aware," said Verso, "having watched you find out," and then neither of them said anything else of any use for some while.

Afterwards Gustave could not have given an account of the first several minutes of it that would have satisfied a court. He knew that the door had been shut and that he had not been the one to shut it. He knew that he had got hold of the man's coat in both hands, in the manner of somebody checking that a thing is really there, and had then been extremely thoroughly kissed against the edge of his own drawing table, which had a straight-edge on it that went off onto the floor; and that at some point he had said eighteen months out loud, twice, in a voice he did not care for at all, and had been told to be quiet, and had been.

He got his hands into the shorter hair at some point, and found that it was not the same to do and did it again anyway; and the beard, which was not the beard he remembered, went along the underside of his jaw and down his throat and stopped where a collar would be, being kept away from anywhere a collar would not, which told him a good deal about the last eighteen months and a certain amount about the next hour.

He did not remark upon any of it at the time. He had a great many other things to be getting on with, and about half of what he did say was the man's name, which had been unusable at that volume for a year and a half and was now simply available, in a shut room, as often as he liked.

***

"You will want to know why November."

They had got as far as sitting down. Gustave had his back against the leg of the drawing table and Verso was on the floor beside him with his good coat under both of them and his hat somewhere in the shavings, and neither of them appeared inclined to do anything about any of it.

"I want to know a great many things. Start there."

"Because on the eleventh of last month I signed for four hundred metres of ground on the far side of the line, with a siding on it, and a lease on a building that was a rope-walk and will do for a fitting shop with about two months' work; and because the money for it is mine and not one sou of it is his, and because there is nothing on this earth that either of my parents can now do about my being here." He said it perfectly evenly, which was how Gustave knew what it had cost. "I did not write it to you because I have been wrong twice in my life about what my father could reach, and both times somebody else paid for it, and I was not going to put it on paper until it was signed."

"Four hundred metres."

"On the far side of the line. You can see your shed from the door of it." Something happened at the corner of his mouth. "That was not the reason. It is, however, the case."

Gustave sat with that for a moment.

"And the works?"

"Fittings first. Repairs when I have the shop." He turned his hand over. "There is a quarry and a harbour and a line inside three miles of that gate and every one of them buys iron from somebody, and I have spent since the spring working out why it should not be from me, and I cannot find a reason."

"You have looked into this."

"I have done very little else." A pause. "And there is one thing I have not put in a letter because you would have written back something dry about it, and I wished to see your face. My father's frontage will want engines on it inside two years. Small ones. Shunting."

Gustave looked at him.

"You are going to sell locomotives to your father."

"I am going to sell locomotives to the concession, which is a different thing in law and no different at all in any other particular, and I intend to be extremely correct about it, and to charge him the ordinary rate." He was quiet a moment. "I have thought about whether that is a small revenge. I have decided that it is, and that I do not care, and that it is also simply where the work is."

"Does he know you have taken the ground?"

"He will. Not from me." Verso looked at the floor. "I write to my mother. Once a month, since the June of last year; she wrote first and I did not answer for three weeks and then I did. She does not tell me anything about him and I do not ask, and we conduct a correspondence about the weather and about a house in the Var, and I would not have you think it is a great deal. It is the only piece of that family I have kept and I have kept it deliberately."

"I am glad," said Gustave.

"I know."

***

The lamp had got low. Neither of them had done anything about it.

"I have rooms."

"You have said."

"I have not, in fact, said. I said I had ground and a rope-walk." He turned his head. "I have rooms in the Rue Sainte-Claire, at the top, taken for six months from a widow who lives at Aubagne with her daughter and comes twice a year to look at the roof; and there is a stair to them from the side of the house which no other person in that building uses, which was the whole of my reason for taking them and cost me an extra thirty francs the month."

Gustave did not say anything, because there was nothing in his head to say it with.

"I have put that badly," said Verso, "and I am going to put it properly, because I have been rehearsing it since Arles and I shall be extremely annoyed if I do not get to. Come back with me tonight. Not for an hour. I have no meeting in the morning and no train and nobody who expects me anywhere, and I should like—"

He stopped, and started again.

"Every hour you and I have ever had was borrowed off somebody and given back at the end of it. Every one. I have counted them and I am not going to tell you the figure because you would only check it." He was not looking at him. "So: come back with me, and go to sleep in the same room, and wake up in it. That is the whole of the proposal. It is not a very grand one."

Gustave discovered that he had to look at the floor for a moment.

"I shall have to send word to the house," he said.

"Say it is the waterworks."

"It has been the waterworks for two months, they will think I have taken up with the contractor." He got up, and put his hand down, and pulled the man up off the boards. "I shall say it is the waterworks."

***

There is a difference between a night and an hour which nobody who has only ever had hours can be told about, and Gustave Racine found it out in the Rue Sainte-Claire on a Tuesday in November at the age of four-and-thirty.

It was not what happened. A good deal happened, and he had no complaints of any part of it, and the beard turned out to be a matter upon which he had opinions he had not previously suspected himself of holding and did not intend to communicate to anybody at breakfast.

It was afterwards. It was that nothing whatever came next. Nobody had to be anywhere. There was no coat to be found in the dark and no bolt to be drawn back quietly and no calculating, while still catching one's breath, of how long the other man had before he was missed; and it turned out that Gustave had been doing that calculation, every time, for two years, in some part of himself that never went off duty, and that he had not known he was doing it until the evening it stopped.

He lay in the dark in a strange room in his own city with a man's arm across him and found that he did not know what to do with any of it, and said so.

"Nor do I." The words went into his shoulder. "Go to sleep."

"I am not tired."

"You are extremely tired. You have been at the waterworks for two months."

***

He woke at ten past five, because he always did, and lay perfectly still a while working out where he was and then not needing to.

The room was cold and there was a good deal of it he could not see. He could see the window, and a chair with a great deal of expensive tailoring on it thrown over the back in a way that would have distressed the man who made it; and on the table under the window, in the grey, the shape of a stack of paper with a rule laid across it to stop it curling, which he knew to be drawings, and which he intended to be extremely rude about at the first opportunity.

Beside him the man was still asleep, on his front, with one arm out.

Gustave lay and looked at the ceiling of somebody else's room for about twenty minutes, in the ordinary cold of a November morning, in a city where he had signed for every bridge and half the drains, and thought: this is what it is. It is not anything. It is a room with two people asleep in it and a bad chair and somebody's drawings on the table, and it is going on all over this city at this minute in a few hundred houses, and nobody in any of them thinks it is remarkable, and it is the only thing I have ever wanted and I have got it until seven o'clock.

At ten to six Verso said, without opening his eyes, "I can hear you thinking. It is like living beside a mill."

"I am going to have to go at seven."

"I know."

"I am not saying it to be dismal. I am saying it because if I do not say it now I shall spend the whole of the next hour arranging how to say it."

There was a pause, and then the arm came back over him.

"Then it is said," said Verso, "and you have an hour, and you are not going to spend it being reasonable about anything whatever. Come here."

And Gustave went.

***

Nobody in that house was told anything, and by the end of the first week everybody in it knew.

Gustave was not deceitful about it. He was, on the contrary, extremely careful to be truthful in every particular, which is a thing men do when they have decided not to say something and wish to feel well about it. He said that he had a great deal on. He said that the waterworks was at last coming to a head. He said, three times in a fortnight, that he might not be back that night at all, and was not; and he said it each time in the tone of a man reporting a tiresome professional necessity—a tone somewhat undercut by the fact that the contractor at the waterworks was a married man of sixty who was in bed by nine and had never in his life been out after ten for any purpose whatever.

Maelle bore it for six days.

On the seventh she looked up from the levels at supper, entirely without preamble, and observed that it was a wonderful thing what a well-conducted piece of correspondence could do for a man's complexion.

"Eat your supper."

"I am only saying that you have been extremely cheerful since the Wednesday before last and that nobody has been cheerful about the waterworks since the waterworks was built." She turned a page. "Emma. Has anybody ever been cheerful about the waterworks?"

"Not to my knowledge," said Emma.

"There. Nobody. Not in the whole history of the city."

She was, in fairness, having a good autumn. She had been having one since about the summer, and the change had been so gradual that Gustave had not marked the day of it: she had simply begun, at some point in July, to come and find him about things, two and three times a week, with a section under her arm—and to go away again perfectly satisfied and not think about it afterwards, which was the part that mattered and the part that had taken half a year. Girard had stopped saying Mademoiselle like a man handling glass. And Alexandre had begun bringing things to her—not often, and never when Adrien was in the shed to see him do it, but he came, with a sheet in his hand and his ears red, and asked; which from Alexandre was the whole of the ceremony.

"You are not going to get anything out of me," said Gustave.

"I am not trying to get anything out of you. I am enjoying myself." She went back to the levels. "There is a difference, and you would know it if you ever did either."

***

The town, meanwhile, had a man it could not place.

He had been about the lower town for a fortnight in daylight, on business that was entirely open: a lease on the old rope-walk beyond the line, four hundred metres of ground with a siding, a builder in from Marseille to look at a roof, a great deal of time at the land registry and rather more at the notary's. None of it was hidden and none of it was announced. And the last occasion on which Lumière had looked properly at Verso Dessendre he had been a painter's son of thirty with his hair too long, who had been jilted in the most public manner available to a provincial city, and had gone to Paris and not come back.

So the town had a man in good plain clothes with his hair cut short and going grey, and the name Dessendre on a conveyance, and no announcement of any kind; and it did what any town does with that, which is to produce three versions of it inside a fortnight and believe all of them at once.

Emma brought them home over supper one evening, in the voice she used for reporting the harbour board.

"The son of that family is said to be in the city, or a cousin of that family, or a man of business acting for that family. He has bought the rope-walk, or leased it, or leased it with a view to buying, and he means to put a foundry in it, or a brickworks, or a dock for repairing wagons, which last I have some reason to think may be nearer the mark. He has been seen at the notary's. He has been seen coming out of the land registry on two occasions." She set the dish down. "Madame Bertrand, who has never been wrong about anything in her life and has never been right either, is of the opinion that he is nothing to do with that family at all and is a Marseillais."

Nobody said anything.

"The waterworks contractor," Emma went on, "settled with the city a fortnight since, before any of this began. I signed the release myself and there has been nothing whatever outstanding on it since. I mention it in case anybody at this table has been kept out late by it lately."

Maelle put her fork down and had to leave the room.

***

He was taken to see the rope-walk on the Sunday, which was the only day the ground was empty.

It ran a hundred and eighty metres along the far side of the line and had been built in the forties for spinning cable, which is to say it was a very long shed with a great deal of light in it and almost nothing else; and half the slates were down at the seaward end, and there were birds in it, and the floor was in a condition that made Gustave wince from the doorway.

"That is mine for nine years," said Verso, and surveyed it with enormous satisfaction.

"It has no roof?"

"It has a third of a roof, and the third it has is over the end I want." He walked in ahead of him with his hands behind his back, like a man showing somebody a house. "The siding comes in at that end, off the goods loop, and I have that in writing from the Compagnie and it took the best part of the summer and a great deal of being pleasant. The fitting shop goes here, where we are standing, because of the light. And down there is where a man would put an erecting shop if a man were ever in a position to think about one."

Gustave went past him and stood in the middle of the floor and looked up at the roof timbers.

"Your siding is wrong."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It comes in at the wrong end." He was walking as he said it, pacing it off without deciding to, the way he had paced off every site he had stood on since he was twenty. "You have put your fitting shop under the good roof, which is sensible, and your siding at the same end, which is not, because everything heavy arrives on that siding and has to go the length of this building to get to the shop, and everything finished has to come back down it again. Two hundred metres of carrying, both ways, every day, for nine years." He turned round. "Put your shop at the seaward end and your siding stays where it is and the carrying stops."

"The seaward end has no roof at all."

"Then roof it. You are roofing this building anyway and you have told me you have a builder in from Marseille and he is standing about doing nothing while you decide, and it will cost you less to roof the end you need than to walk two hundred metres twice a day until nineteen hundred and eight." He had got to the far wall and put his hand flat on it. "And this is not a wall. This is a screen with pretensions. If you are putting a crane in here—and you are, or you will be inside two years and you will hate yourself—you want piers, and you want them in before the roof and not after, and you want them where I am standing and where that post is."

There was a considerable silence behind him.

Gustave went on for some time. He got as far as the drainage, and the question of where a boiler shop would have to go if there ever were one, and what he thought of the state of the floor, which was a good deal; and he had begun on the door openings before it occurred to him that the man had not said anything for a quarter of an hour.

He turned round.

Verso was standing exactly where he had left him with his hands still behind his back and an expression on his face which Gustave had last seen across a broken pump on a wet morning in October, and which he had no defence against then and had developed none since.

"Go on."

"You are laughing at me."

"I am not laughing at you. I have been standing in this building for a fortnight," he said, "with a builder and a surveyor and a man from the Compagnie, all of whom were paid, and not one of them told me about the two hundred metres. You have been in it a quarter of an hour."

He said the rest of it sitting on a crate in the ruined end with the birds going about overhead.

"There is a thing I found out in Paris that I have not put in a letter, and you are not going to like the first half of it."

Gustave waited.

"Nobody wanted the pad." He turned his hat over. "They took it and paid for it and it is under a great many wagons. But in the room, every time, a man would look at the drawing and then look up and ask me who had thought of it. And I would say, a municipal engineer at Lumière. And then they wanted to know what else he had said."

"...What else I had said."

"There is a man at Saint-Étienne who has been asking to meet you since the spring. There is a director who offered in September to take you off my hands at twice what any city in France pays an engineer, and was not joking." He looked up. "I have spent a year and a half making my living out of what you think about brake gear, and not one of them has ever once wanted the drawing."

The birds went about in the roof.

"You have gone your whole life believing that the sheets in that box are a private folly," said Verso. "They are not. You are the thing they want, and nobody has ever been standing in a room to tell you so."

The birds went about in the roof.

"That is—" Gustave stopped. He found that he was on his feet without any recollection of getting there, and that his voice had come out badly, and he did not much care. "You have been selling me. In rooms. For a year and a half. Without—"

"Yes."

"I did not know a single thing about it."

"You did not," said Verso, "and I have thought about that a great deal and have not got a good answer. What I have instead is this. The couplings are mine; you drew them under a contract and I paid you for them and I have put them in front of every man I could get to look, and I shall go on doing it. Nothing out of that tin box has ever been inside a room in Paris. I have never once mentioned the engine to a living soul and I never shall, unless you put it into my hand yourself." He looked up. "I have been telling men that you exist. I do not believe that is the same thing. I am aware you may think it is."

Gustave stood in the wreck of a rope-walk with his heart going and worked at it.

It was the same thing. That was his first conclusion and it lasted about the time it took to reach the wall and come back: he had been talked about in rooms he had not been in, which is the thing that has been done to him at intervals his entire life and which he swore in a shed one January he would not have done to him again.

And then it came apart in his hands, as the case in his kitchen had come apart in June, because it was not the same thing at all. A man who tells a room that another man exists has not decided anything on his behalf. He has not settled his post or his house or his sister's paper. He has said a true thing about him, in his absence, to people who could act on it, and has left the acting to him; and Gustave had spent thirty-four years failing to do that for himself and had never once thought to be angry with anybody about it.

"Say the rest," said Gustave. "There is a rest."

"There is." Verso stood up off the crate. "Half of it. Not a post, not a fee, not consulting engineer at so much the drawing. Half. Your name on the deed and on the door and on every drawing that leaves this building, and your say on what we build and whether we build it, and the losses as well, which in the first three years will be considerable and which I want you to look at properly before you say anything at all.

"And I will not have you say yes out of—" He stopped, and started again. "There is a way out and I have written it in. If you would rather stay as you are, you stay as you are: the contract stands, the fee stands, nothing changes, and I do not raise it again this year or any other. That is not a courtesy. It is a term. I have had it drawn up that way because I have been on the other side of a proposition that has no way out of it, and I would sooner shut this building tomorrow than do it to you."

"Verso—"

"One more thing and then I have done." He was looking at the floor. "I cannot build your engine. Not this year and not next. I have got a shed with a third of a roof and no crane and no boiler shop and I shall be making couplings in it until I am forty, and the thing in that box wants a works twice this size and money I have not got and will not have for a long while.

"I know what it is. I have had it on the floor of your drawing office over both our knees and I know exactly what I am telling you I cannot do. I have thought about it on trains more than I have thought about the trade. So I am sorry, and I am asking you anyway, and I have no better argument than that in three years it might not be true any more."

He got no further, because Gustave Racine crossed that filthy floor and took hold of him.

It was not, by any reckoning, the conduct of a newly created partner in a going concern. There was a hat lost in it. There was a good deal that would have astonished the builder from Marseille had he chosen that Sunday to look at his roof; and when Verso got a hand free enough to say something into his hair about signature and consideration and the necessity, in law, of an unambiguous acceptance, he was told to be quiet in terms which were, in the strictest sense, unambiguous.

***

Sol came on the Saturday.

He had been coming rather often that autumn and had lately given up inventing errands, which Gustave privately considered the greatest single advance in the case since it opened. He arrived at about eight, was given a cup, and sat down.

What was new was Emma.

She had never in her life been anything but perfectly civil to Sol, and perfectly civil was precisely the difficulty; a woman who has been civil to a man since they were both young is a woman who has settled something and does not intend to reopen it. That autumn she had stopped being civil. She contradicted him about the harbour board. She told him his opinion of the new prefect was sentimental. And when he said something mild about the weather turning, she observed that he had been saying so since October and it had not turned once, and that she had begun to suspect he said it in order to have said something; and Sol laughed until he had to put the cup down.

Gustave, who had a mortar schedule in front of him and had taken in none of it, saw his opening and took it.

"It is a great deal warmer in this kitchen than it used to be."

Emma turned a page.

"It is the stove," she said. "It draws better since Maelle saw to the damper."

"That is not what I meant."

"I know what you meant."

And that was the whole of it while Sol was in the room, and Gustave went to bed that night believing he had got away with something.

He had not. She came into the kitchen the following evening while he was hunting for his coat, sat down at the table with her papers, and remarked, without any particular emphasis, that she sat upon the committee which licenses the lodging-houses of this city; that it was a very small city; and that a gentleman lately arrived in it had taken rooms at the top of the Rue Sainte-Claire with a stair of their own, at thirty francs the month above the rate, which she thought a great convenience to somebody.

"Emma—"

"I have said it to you and I shall not say it to anybody else, including in this kitchen, including when he is sitting in it." She did not look up. "I mention it because you have been extremely careful for a fortnight and you have not once been careful about the one thing that could be looked up in a register. Do better."

There was a silence.

"How long have you known?"

"Since the beginning of it, and I have been waiting for you to be a little less pleased with yourself, and you have not been, and I have given it up." She turned a page. "Your coat is in the passage. It has been in the passage the entire time you have been looking for it in here."

***

Four days later, in the room at the top of the Rue Sainte-Claire, at about one in the morning, they had got to the state of not moving. Gustave was lying half across Verso with his ear over his breastbone, listening to the machinery, which was one of his two or three favourite things in the world and which he had never once mentioned; and Verso had a hand in his hair and was not doing anything with it.

"I am going to look for a house."

Gustave did not lift his head.

"You have a room with a stair."

"I have a room with a stair and a widow at Aubagne and six months of it left, and it has been the best fortnight of my life, and it is not a house." The hand went on not doing anything. "And I do not want a house. I want a house with you in it. I am telling you that at one in the morning with no clothes on because I find I cannot say it in a room with chairs.

"And before you say anything: there is a way out of this one as well, and it is the same way. If it is not possible, it is not possible, and I shall take a house on my own and you will come to it whenever you can and I shall be glad of every hour of that, and I shall not raise it again. You are not to answer me tonight. I have not the smallest expectation of it."

Gustave did not say anything for a considerable time.

He was not calculating. That was the odd part, and he noticed it happening. There were a great many things to be calculated—a sister of eighteen with a certificate to sit and a school to fight; another who was chief councillor of a small city and would be made to answer in that chamber for every stone of it; a house on a hill that had been his mother's and his father's and was still, in every particular, full of them—and he could feel the whole of it standing patiently at the end of the bed waiting to be attended to.

He did not attend to it. He lay in a rented room at the top of a stair in the Rue Sainte-Claire with his ear over a heart going a good deal faster than its owner's voice had let on, and thought about the fact that he had been asked.

He got himself up onto one elbow, which took some doing, and looked at Verso.

"I am going to say one thing," he said at last, "and then I shall stop, because I have not got the words for the rest of it and I shall only spoil it."

"Say it."

"You have asked me twice this week. The works and this. Both times you had it all worked out before you opened your mouth, and both times you left me a door, and you built the door in first. Before you asked. That is what I keep coming back to, and I cannot get past it, and I do not think you know what you did."

Verso had gone very still.

"Nobody has ever done that," said Gustave. "Not once. Not about anything. In four-and-thirty years."

For a while neither of them said anything at all.

Verso did not answer that at all. He reached up and got a hand round the back of Gustave's neck and brought him down and kissed him, without any hurry whatever, in the manner of a man settling a point rather than beginning anything; and then again, and rather less like that.

"Then I shall go on doing it," he said, somewhere in the middle of it, "until it stops being remarkable."

There was no further conversation of any kind that night.

***

The rope-walk got its roof at the end of January, which was three weeks later than the builder had promised and four months earlier than Gustave had privately expected, and on the day the last slate went on both partners in the firm stood in the middle of the floor and looked up at it for some time without saying anything.

"It is a very fine roof," said Verso at last.

"It is an adequate roof. You have paid for a fine one."

"I have paid for a fine one and I intend to go on calling it a fine one, and I should be obliged if you would not stand in my building and be accurate at me."

The name had been settled at a notary's table in November, which is to say that Gustave had lost it there and had gone on losing it at intervals ever since.

"It is the ordinary usage. The engineering name goes first. Every house in the trade does it; ask anybody."

"I have asked. Fives-Lille does not do it. Batignolles does not do it."

"Those are companies and not partnerships and the cases are not comparable."

"You are lying to me about the law."

"I am lying to you about the usage," said Verso, without the smallest change of expression. "There is no law. It is in the deed."

The floor went down in February. The lathe came in March, on a wagon, and had to be got off it with sheer legs and a great deal of bad language from a carter from Marseille; and it stood in the middle of that shed like a cathedral for a week before anybody dared to use it.

And somewhere about the middle of all this it became perfectly obvious to both of them that two men could not do it.

They had known that in the abstract since November. What arrived in February was the particular: that the pads were being made under contract at Saint-Étienne and would go on being made there for a year at least, and that the moment they began making anything themselves they would want a pattern-maker, and two fitters, and a boy; and that the pattern-maker would have to be good, because everything else in that building depended on him and nothing else in that building could correct him.

Verso interviewed four. Gustave sat in on the last two, at his own insistence, and afterwards had to be talked out of the third.

"He was the best of them by a distance."

"He was the best of them and he will not last a year," said Verso. "He answered every question I put to him and not one you put to him."

"That is because your questions were about wages and mine were about a core box."

"Precisely. He has been in a shop where nobody asked him about a core box, and he has learned that the man who pays is the man to talk to, and he will be extremely comfortable here for about eight months and then he will realise that in this building the man who knows is also the man who pays, and he will not like it." He put the papers square. "Take the fourth. He was rude to you about the taper and he was right about the taper."

They took the fourth, whose name was Perrin, and who was rude about a great many things over the following years and was right about most of them.

***

The certificate had been signed on the ninth of December.

Gustave had done it at his own table at the works, with the whole yard finding reasons to be within sight of the office door, and had put down what was true and nothing beyond it. The application went to Marseille in the second week of January. The answer, when it came, was three lines long and settled nothing; and Maelle read it twice and put it in the household book between the coal accounts and the rent, where it stayed. 

She was quite different about it from the way she had been about anything else in her life. There was no talking. She went on at the works until the end of February—she had asked for that, and Gustave had put it to the new man from Toulon as a condition of the handover and got it—and then she came off the books and read, at the kitchen table, from breakfast until the lamp was lit, six days in seven.

"Ask me something," Gustave said once, in the February, unable to help himself.

Maelle did not look up.

"If I ask you something I shall want you to answer it, and then I shall have your answer in my head at the examination instead of mine." She turned a page. "Go away. I love you. Go away."

***

He did the sums all January and got nowhere with them, which was a novelty, because he had never in his life failed to get somewhere with a set of sums.

They were not difficult. That was the trouble. The house on the hill was theirs outright and had been since the parents died; the rates on it were nothing; Emma's salary would carry it standing on its head, and had been carrying most of it for years in any case. Maelle would be gone in the autumn if the examination went her way, and would be gone whether he stayed or went. There was no arithmetic in it at all.

What there was instead was a thing he could not put a figure to, which had sat in him since he was two-and-twenty and had never once been examined, and which said: you are the one who stays.

He got it out and looked at it in the middle of January and found, on inspection, that it was not even a decision he had made. It had simply happened to him in a week when he was two-and-twenty and had been running ever since, the way a clause runs on in a contract nobody has reread; and he had built the whole of his life on top of it and had called it duty, and a certain amount of it had been duty, and the rest of it had been the fact that he had not known what else he was for.

He went up to the Rue Sainte-Claire on the Monday evening and said none of this. He said something else instead.

"I want to tell my sisters."

Verso, who had been doing something at the table with a column of figures, put the pen down and turned round.

"You do not need my permission to tell your sisters anything."

"I am not asking permission. I am asking whether you would rather I did not tell them until it was settled, because once I have said it to Emma it is real, and I would not have you find out that you had been committed to something in a kitchen you were not in."

Something went across the man's face which Gustave did not catch in time.

"No," said Verso, after a moment. "No, that is not—" He stopped, and started again. "Gustave. It has been settled since I said it. It was settled in my head about a year before I said it. There is nothing whatever you can commit me to that I have not been committed to for a considerable time, and if you tell your sister tomorrow morning that I have asked you to live in a house with me, you will not be telling her anything I have not already had a notary's clerk hear, because I have had a conversation about a mortgage in which I described the arrangement in terms that would have interested him very much if he had been paying attention."

"You have been looking at houses."

"I have been walking past houses since the first week of December." He turned the pen over. "Not viewing them. I have not set foot inside one and I am not going to, because the inside of a house is a thing you look at first or it is not yours; and I have not told you because you had not answered me and I was not going to put a list in front of you to hurry you along. There is one in the Rue Montauban I have walked past so often that the woman opposite has begun to nod to me."

Gustave sat down on the end of the bed and laughed until he had to stop.

"There is one other thing," said Verso, "and I have been trying to find a way to ask it for a month and I have not found one, so I shall ask it badly.

"There are two people in this city who matter more to you than anything else in the world, and I have never once been in a room with either of them as myself." He was not looking at him. "I have sat opposite your sister over a settlement and over a concession and I have been perfectly correct on both occasions and neither of them was anything to do with me. I have been in that kitchen exactly once, in the February, in the daylight, when they were out and I had no business there.

"I should like to meet them. That is the whole of it. Not to be approved of and not to be got through—simply to have met them, properly, at a table, so that when you speak about them I am not hearing about strangers." He turned the pen over. "I have no notion how it is done and nobody in my family has ever done it. You may say no, and I shall not raise it again."

Gustave got up off the end of the bed and crossed the room and took hold of him, which was not an answer but was, by that stage, a language they both read fluently.

***

He told them on the Wednesday, at their own table, with the supper still on it.

He had thought about how to do it for four days and had got nowhere, which had at least the merit of consistency; and in the end he did it the way he had done the other one, standing up, badly, without any preparation at all.

"Verso has asked me to take a house with him. Not lodgings. A house. He asked me in November and I have not answered him, and I am not going to answer him until I have said it to the pair of you, because that is the order it goes in."

The clock did what the clock did.

Maelle put her fork down.

"Well, obviously," she said.

"Maelle—"

"No, I mean it. Obviously." She had gone slightly pink and was pressing on regardless, which she had from her brother. "You have been walking round this house for two months like a man who has swallowed a lamp. You come in at seven in the morning with your collar wrong. Last week you laughed at something Emma said about the harbour board, and it was not funny, and Emma knows it was not funny."

"It was not funny," Emma agreed.

"So obviously. Go. Of course go." Maelle picked her fork up again and put it down. "And I want it said out loud that I have thought about it and I am not being brave, and that if either of you tells me I am being brave I shall throw something."

"Nobody has said anything about brave," said Gustave.

"Good."

And then she sat for a moment with her hands flat on the table on either side of her plate, and Gustave watched her do the arithmetic, and watched her get to the end of it, and watched her decide to say it.

"It is only that the house empties," said Maelle.

Nobody said anything.

"I go in October. If they have me I go in October and if they do not have me I shall sit it again in the spring and then I shall go, so either way I go. And you go in the spring." She was speaking to the table. "And then there is one person in this house, and it is the one who has done all the arranging since our mother and father died and has never once been arranged for, and she will say that it is perfectly all right and she will mean it, and it will still be one person in a house that was built for five."

The lamp hissed.

"I am not saying do not go," said Maelle. "I have said go and I meant go. I am saying that somebody in this room has to have looked at it before it happens instead of afterwards, and neither of you was going to, so I have."

Gustave discovered that he could not speak.

It was Emma who moved, eventually; and what she did was set down the dish she had been holding for some while, and put her hands in her lap, and look at her youngest sister as though she had not seen her properly for a year.

"You are quite right," she said. "And I had no intention whatever of raising it, and I should like that on the record as well, because I have spent a great deal of this year being congratulated on my honesty and I am not honest, I am merely quick."

"Emma—"

"Let me. I shall do it badly if I stop." She put her hands flat. "Yes. I shall be alone in this house from the autumn, and I have known that since about the November, and I have been perfectly calm about it in the way that I am perfectly calm about everything, which as this family has cause to know is not the same as having thought about it.

"It is not a tragedy and I will not have it made into one. I am four-and-thirty and I have a seat and a salary and a great deal of work I like, and there are a very great many women in this city with none of those things. But I am not going to sit at this table and say that it is perfectly all right, because Maelle has just been braver than I have and it would be a poor return."

She stopped.

"And there is a person," she said, "who comes to this house rather often and whom nobody in this family has ever once discussed at this table, and I find that I have been waiting to be asked about it for about a year, and that nobody has asked, and that I am not at all certain what I should have said if anybody had."

There was a long silence.

"Emma," said Maelle, in an entirely different voice. "Do you want to be asked?"

"I do not know."

"That is not a no."

"No," said Emma. "It is not."

It was some while before anybody was fit to say anything sensible, and rather longer before the plates were cleared; and it was Maelle who got them onto the practical ground in the end, because she was eighteen and had been raised by two people who took refuge in practicalities and had learned it thoroughly.

"When would it be?"

"I should have to give the city three months. If I give it in January I am out at the end of March." Gustave turned his cup round. "There is no hurry about the house. He has been looking since December and has not told me, on the grounds that I had not answered him, which I am still working out how to feel about."

"You are going to feel wonderful about it," said Maelle. "You are going to think about it at odd moments for a fortnight and be unbearable. We have all seen you do it."

"Thank you."

"There is one condition," said Emma.

Gustave looked up.

"It is not a condition. It is a request, and I have been working out how to make it since about the autumn, and I have not managed it until this minute." She began stacking the plates. "Ask him to supper. Here, at this table.

"There is a man in this city who matters more to you than anybody living, and I have never met him. I have met a party to a settlement and I have met a party to a concession and I was extremely civil to both of them and neither of them was him." She set the plates down. "I should like to have met him. That is the whole of it."

Gustave put his hand over his eyes for a moment.

"He asked me to ask you," he said. "On Monday. He has been trying to work out how to ask it for a month."

Emma stood with the plates in her hands.

"Then we are both of us idiots," she said, "and Maelle is the only person of sense in this house, and I should be obliged if nobody ever repeats that outside this room."

***

He gave the city his notice on the sixteenth of January.

He walked up to the Rue Sainte-Claire afterwards with the copy of it in his pocket, in the rain, and did not go in at once; he stood at the bottom of the stair for a moment, in the dark, being a man of four-and-thirty about to say a thing he had been unable to say at any point in the preceding three months.

Then he went up.

"Yes," he said, from the door. "The answer is yes. To the house, and to living in it, and to the whole of it. I have told my sisters and they have told me to go, and Emma wants you to supper on Sunday and she wants it said at her own table why you are there, and I have got three months to work and then I have not got a post, and I am frightened of about half of that and I am saying yes to all of it."

Verso stood up so fast that the chair went over.

Neither of them did anything about the chair for a considerable time.

***

They looked at seven houses in the February and Verso did not go through the door of one of them ahead of him.

That had been settled in a rented room in January and he kept to it with a rigidity Gustave found by turns touching and extremely inconvenient, since it meant standing about on a great many doorsteps in the rain while an agent talked, waiting for a municipal engineer to go in first.

Four of the seven were impossible. One was damp from the ground up and Gustave said so inside a minute and was thanked by the agent, insincerely. One had been divided into lodgings and would have cost more to put back than to build. One was at the bottom of the town, where a man who has spent his working life on the drainage of Lumière does not live if he can help it.

The seventh was in the Rue Montauban, which runs along the shoulder of the upper town without ever quite committing itself to it.

It was not a grand house and had not been built for anybody grand: a walled garden about the size of a good drawing office, three rooms below and four above, and at the back a low outbuilding with a north light which had belonged to a maker of spectacle frames and had stood empty for years.

Verso went into that outbuilding, and came out again, and conducted the remainder of the viewing in a state of transparently false composure which deceived nobody in the party, least of all the agent.

"The light," he said, on the way down the hill, for the fourth time.

"It is a very good light."

"It is a north light. There is not another north light in the upper town."

Gustave said that it was extremely fortunate, and let him go on.

They took it at the beginning of March and were in it by the end of the month.

He would not find out until the middle of April, from the agent himself, met in the street and disposed to be chatty, that the gentleman had given his requirements in the December and had never once mentioned a north light. What he had asked for was something high on the shoulder of the town, with the basins in sight of it, and the coast road, and the line going out south.

He had watched trains from the harbour wall and from the end of the north cut, and once from the top of a ladder on the Basin-Neuf gates with Girard shouting at him from below; and as a boy through a gap in a fence in the Rue Basse, with his father holding on to the back of his coat. He had never in his life watched one from inside a building that belonged to him.

He would stand at the window of the front room that evening until it was properly dark, and he would say it—badly, to the glass, in the manner in which he said everything that cost him anything, and without turning round: that he had been looking at trains out of other men's windows since he was old enough to be lifted up to one, and that he had never once thought a man of his sort got given a window of his own to do it from, and that he did not know what to do about somebody having gone and bought him one and then talked about the light.

And he would be answered from behind, with two arms round his middle and a chin on his shoulder, and nothing said at all; and he would stand there in his own front room with a man holding on to him for no reason whatever, and it would go through him like heat off a stove, and outside in the dark the eight o'clock would go out along the coast road, and neither of them would move.

***

Verso came to supper on the Sunday before they moved.

Gustave had been managing that prospect for a fortnight and had got nowhere with it, since there was no version of the evening he could rehearse: he had sat at that table with his sisters every night of his life and had sat at a great many tables with that man, and the two things had never been in the same room and he had no notion what would happen when they were.

What happened was Maelle.

She had the door open before the knock had finished and had got out good evening and we have been extremely curious inside four seconds; and then, having plainly decided beforehand upon a line and being unable to hold it any longer, she said, "Is it true you carried me down a staircase?"

There was a pause in the passage.

"It is," said Verso.

"I have no memory of it whatever and I have been told about it a great many times, and I should like to say thank you properly, because I was sixteen and extremely stupid and nobody has ever let me say it." She had gone scarlet. "Thank you. Come in. That is the whole of the speech and I have been practising it since Thursday."

After that it was easy, which nobody had expected.

Emma fed him. Maelle argued with him about the quarry road and was right about part of it and was told so. Verso, who had spent a month working out how to ask to be asked, sat at that table and was asked nothing at all of any consequence, and was given a second helping, and was made to say what he thought about the harbour board; and Gustave sat at his own table with a fork in his hand and watched the man he loved being handed dishes by his sisters in the room where he had learned to read, and did not trust himself to speak for a considerable part of the evening.

At the door, afterwards, Emma shook hands with him.

"I have shaken your hand a great many times," she said, "and every one of them was business, and I have wanted for a long while to do it once when it was not. Good night, Monsieur Dessendre."

"Madame."

"Emma," said Emma. "Good night."

***

Of the winter's business, two things were still outstanding by the May.

The acknowledgement had come in the February, in three lines which gave nothing whatever away and did not refuse. The examination was to be sat in the June. She had stopped talking about it in the March, which Gustave recognised, having watched his other sister do the identical thing in a chamber about a concession, and about which he said nothing at all.

And on the last day of March he had ceased to be the city engineer of Lumière. The council accepted the notice without comment and appointed a man from Toulon who was competent and would do. Emma abstained on the appointment, on the record, for the obvious reason, and made the reason part of the minute. He was given, on his last afternoon, a very ugly clock.

He had signed for that city since before Maelle could read. He had built the Basin-Neuf gates and the north cut and the wall and half the drains, and he found when it came to it that he was not sentimental about any of it except the pumps, and did not intend to tell anybody about the pumps.

Racine et Dessendre went onto the gate of the works in the February, in a plain hand, and he lost the argument about the order of it once more on the day it was painted.

***

The piano came down from the Rue Sainte-Claire on a cart with the rest of it and went into the room at the front, which Gustave had been assuming since about December and had never once said aloud.

He did not notice it at all on the first night, which he was not proud of afterwards and could not entirely be sorry about. He had been reading about that piano in letters for a year and a half. It stood against the wall under the window with a candle on it and a great deal of paper on the lid, in a room he was in for nine hours, and he could not have told anybody the next morning whether there had been one in the building.

He saw it properly on the third or fourth evening, and asked; and at some point that night, without being asked to, the man sat down at it in his shirtsleeves and played for about ten minutes, and put his hand into the hole in the middle of it twice without appearing to notice, and went on.

Gustave had listened to it two or three evenings a week ever since and had never once mentioned the hole.

It had been made in 1861 and bought off a cart in Paris because it was the first object in Verso's life that had ever been entirely his; and he could now, without noticing the expenditure, have bought an instrument of the sort his father kept in a shut room and had never once let him make anything of.

He had this one mended instead. A man came out from the town in the second week of April and took two days over it and charged rather more than the piano was worth, and Gustave, who priced everything, priced that and said nothing at all.

The note came back.

What Gustave chiefly remembered about the weeks afterwards was the sound of a man playing round a hole that was no longer there: reaching the place, and flinching very slightly, and going through it; and doing it again the next evening, and the next, for about a month, until one evening he got to it and did not flinch and simply went on, and did not appear to know that anything had happened at all.

***

What Gustave had not expected—what he had not once considered in all the eighteen months of letters, and was rather ashamed of not having considered—was how good the man was.

He had begun to find it out before ever they moved, in the February, standing at the back of his own fitting shop while Verso dealt with a buyer from a company at Nîmes: a large, slow, extremely shrewd person who had come three hundred kilometres with the settled intention of getting the price down and had brought a subordinate to be disagreeable for him. Gustave watched the whole of it from beside the lathe with his arms folded and a growing sensation of being present at something.

Verso conceded the delivery date inside two minutes, which cost nothing and was what the man had actually come for. He then declined, over and over, pleasantly, at increasing length, to discuss the price at all—not refusing it, merely never arriving at it—until the subordinate had run out of disagreeable things and had begun, visibly, to want his lunch. He agreed to a quantity nobody had asked about. He mentioned, once, in passing, and in a tone of the purest idle courtesy, that the Compagnie had taken four thousand of the pads on the coast wagons; and he did not mention it again, and did not need to.

They shook hands at the price Verso had written in pencil on the back of an envelope before the man arrived, which Gustave had watched him do.

"You were terrifying," he said afterwards.

"I was polite."

"You were terrifying. I have sat across a table from your father and I know what I am looking at."

It was out of his mouth before he had heard himself say it, and he would have given a good deal to have it back; but Verso only picked up the envelope, and looked at it, and said, "Yes. I have thought about that. I have decided that it is a tool and that it was in the house I grew up in and that I did not choose to be handed it, and that I intend to use it on people who can afford it and not on anybody I am fond of. If I ever use it on you, you are to tell me, and I shall stop."

"And if you cannot stop?"

"Then you are to tell me twice," said Verso, and put the envelope in his pocket.

The other thing came on more gradually and was worse, in the sense that it could not be answered.

The man could do the work.

Not as an engineer; he had no mathematics past what he had taught himself out of books in a rented room and would never have any, and he knew it, and said so, cheerfully, roughly twice a week. But he had been reading machinery since an October two and a half years gone. He had been drawing under correction from a hard critic every week for a year. He had spent eighteen months in rooms with makers who do not suffer amateurs for very long, and had made his living by being right about iron; and the consequence, which Gustave met almost daily that spring, was a man who could look at a casting and say what was wrong with it, and be right, and not be able to tell you why.

"It wants more metal at the shoulder."

"It does. How do you know that."

"I do not know it. I have looked at a great many of them." Verso put it down. "You will have to tell me the reason and then I shall know it properly, and next time I shall be insufferable about it."

And Gustave went home that evening and got out the last of the letters from Paris, which were in a box now and not in the tin one, and read six of them over; and found that the man had spent a year and a half describing himself as a fool who could not draw a straight line, and had not once—not in a single letter, out of a hundred and more—said I am becoming good at this.

***

The invitations began to stop in the April.

Madame Reyer's went first, which Gustave had expected—he had privately allowed her a fortnight from the removal to the Rue Montauban, and she took rather longer than that, and he was obliged to concede that he had underestimated her. There was no unpleasantness. There was no letter. There was simply, at the second Thursday in April, no card; and none in May; and Gustave found that he minded a good deal less than he had spent the whole of the winter preparing to.

The second one cost more, because it was money. A contractor in the upper town who had put work through Gustave's office for years, and had been perfectly warm about the new firm as lately as the February, went quiet in April and gave his year's ironwork to a house at Aubagne at a price everybody in the trade knew to be worse. He said nothing about it. He went on saying good morning in the street. That was, in its way, the whole of it.

Gustave put the figure in the book with the others and did not mention it for three days, and then did, because there was now somebody in the house to mention it to.

"How much."

"Eleven hundred and forty in the year, about. It is not the money."

"No," Verso agreed. "It is not the money."

They sat with that for a while at their own table, in a house with a walled garden, in a city where a great many people went on being perfectly pleasant to both of them; and neither of them said anything further about it, then or afterwards. It had been paid. It went on being paid, quietly, for years, in cards that did not come and orders that went elsewhere; and nobody ever once said a word to either of their faces, which is precisely how such things are paid in a small port, and precisely how much it costs.

***

Sciel came to dinner at the end of April and brought Juliette, who was ten and who had heard a great deal about the garden.

Gustave was more nervous about that evening than he had any business being, and knew it, and could not do anything about it. He had known Sciel since before the parents died. She had sat him down in her own kitchen and told him what marriages were and what they cost, in the November before any of it, and had been kind to him in a manner that did not feel like kindness at the time; and she had never in all that while been in a room with Verso Dessendre.

It went perfectly well for about a quarter of an hour, in the way such things do, and then Juliette asked Verso, with the directness of ten years old, whether it was true that he could draw; and was told that it was, and that he would show her; and the pair of them disappeared into the outbuilding with the north light and did not reappear for fifty minutes.

Which left Sciel and Gustave in the garden with the coffee.

"Well," said Sciel.

"Well."

"He is not what I had arranged in my head." She turned her cup round. "I had a man got up out of everything you said about him in that kitchen for a year and a half, and he was very tall and very cold and I disliked him extremely, and I have spent this evening being introduced to somebody else entirely."

"He is not cold."

"He is not anything I expected." A pause. "I told you, that November, that nobody gets the whole of it, and that people build a life out of two-thirds and are glad of it. Do you remember."

"I remember every word of it."

"I have thought about that conversation a good deal since," said Sciel, "and I should like it noted that I was right, and that it is the ordinary case, and that I would say the same thing again tomorrow to any other man in this city." She drank her coffee. "And that I was wrong about you, and that I am extremely pleased about it, and that you are not to make me say any of this a second time."

From the outbuilding came the sound of a ten-year-old laughing at something.

"He has been at that painting since the week we came here," said Gustave. "He thinks I do not know."

"And do you?"

"I have not looked at it. He asked me not to." He put his cup down. "It is the only thing he has ever asked me not to do."

***

The small engine had begun back in the March, and had no business existing at all.

It began because a quarry at Sainte-Anne with a mile of track in it had a locomotive that was thirty years old and was going to die, and because the man who owned the quarry had said, in Gustave's hearing, that he would sooner deal with somebody down the road than with Le Creusot; and because Gustave had gone home that evening and taken the tin box off the shelf and not opened it for two days.

What was in that box was an express. Seven sheets, eleven winters, a machine for going very fast along a coast: the beautiful useless thing that moves. It was not buildable by two men with a fitting shop and a bought-in boiler and no erecting crane, and would not be for years, and he had known that since he was twenty-five.

What he did instead, in April, at the drawing table in the outbuilding with the north light, with the other man's easel turned to the wall behind him, was take it apart.

He took the valve gear off it, which was the best thing in it and the reason the whole had never been affordable, and he made it smaller and stupider and cheaper and kept the part that mattered. He threw away the bogie. He shortened the frames until they were ugly and then went on shortening them. He did the sums for a boiler he could buy from a maker at Marseille instead of one he would have to have made, and hated every one of them, and did them again.

And what came out at the end of five weeks was an eight-ton four-wheeled quarry engine of no beauty whatever, which would pull forty tons up a one-in-fifty all day for twenty years, and which two men with a rope-walk and a bought-in boiler could actually build.

He was looking at the general arrangement one evening in the May when Verso came in with two glasses and stood behind his shoulder and did not say anything for a long time.

"It is not the one in the box."

"No," said Gustave. "The one in the box is a great deal handsomer and nobody on this earth is going to pay for it this century." He put the pencil down. "This one is going to be built, and the man at Sainte-Anne is going to pay for it, and there will be another after it if we do not disgrace ourselves; and I have got the valve gear into it, which is the only part of that box I ever cared about, and it will be the first time anything I have drawn has existed anywhere but in a tin."

Verso put a glass down by his hand.

"It wants a name," he said. "The maker's plate goes on the smokebox and the quarry will want the name on it and I have been putting off asking you for a fortnight, because I know what is in that box and I know what you have had to do to it, and I am not going to pretend that is nothing."

Gustave looked at the drawing for a while.

He thought about a street at the end of October with the light going, and a girl's voice coming up out of the lower town singing something and being carried off on the wind before you could get hold of the words. He thought about a shut-up room in December with a candle behind the man's head and a piano nobody had tuned in years, and about eleven bars of it going wrong in the same place twice. He thought about a shed in January and a man humming off-key with his eyes shut, and about a bed on the left-hand side at two in the morning with nobody in the house awake to hear him getting to the end of the line.

Then he picked up the pencil and wrote it in the corner of the sheet, in the small square capitals he used for a title block, and turned the drawing round.

LA CLAIRE.

He looked up.

That was the whole of it. He said nothing, having nothing to say that would not have been smaller than the drawing, and because he had spent his life being unable to ask for things and had got as far as this one and could get no further. He simply turned the sheet round and looked up at the man standing over his shoulder, and waited to be told whether it would do.

Verso did not say anything either.

He put his hand flat on the drawing board beside the sheet, and stood there a moment; and then he bent down and put his mouth against the side of Gustave's head, above the ear, and stayed there rather longer than the occasion strictly required.

"Yes," he said, when he could. "It will do."

***

It was finished at the end of the month, and he was told to come out to the outbuilding after supper and not before.

There was a good deal of ceremony about it. The lamp had been moved. The easel had been turned round and then covered over again with a cloth, which Gustave privately considered outrageous; and Verso stood beside it doing something unnecessary to his cuffs, in a state of such transparent and unbearable nervousness that Gustave very nearly said something kind and had the sense not to.

"I have been at it since we came here and it is not good."

"Take the cloth off."

"It is not good. I want that said first. I have not touched one since the thing they hung up in my father's house, and you know exactly what I think about that, and this one shows it in several places and I can tell you where every one of them is."

"Verso. Take the cloth off."

He took the cloth off.

It was Sainte-Anne.

It was Sainte-Anne at the other end of the day from the one in the Bellegarde: the tide a long way out and going further, the shine on the wet sand, the weed on the rocks, the headland losing itself in the grey. It was the same coast and the same water and, so far as Gustave could see, very nearly the same brush; and it was not serene, and nobody looking at it for one second would have called it that.

There were two figures on the sand.

They were small, and they were a long way down the shore, and they were turned away; and they were not doing anything remarkable whatever. One of them was standing with his hands in his pockets looking out at the water. The other was standing next to him. That was all. There was a great deal of light on the sand and a great deal of weather coming in over the headland, and two men standing on a beach in the middle of it not doing anything at all.

Nobody who did not know would ever have known. It would hang in a room and be a seascape with figures, which is the commonest thing in the world; and every visitor to that house for the next forty years would look at it and say something civil about the light.

Gustave stood in front of it for a long time.

"You said," he managed eventually, "that you would paint it again. And that I might tell you whether it had anybody in it now."

"I did."

"On the path. Going back up. In the April."

"I remember what I said," said Verso, "and I have remembered it every day for two years, and I should be obliged if you would say the thing, because I have been standing here for a quarter of an hour and I cannot feel my hands."

Gustave turned round.

He thought about a great many things he might say, and discarded all of them; and what came out at the end was not any of them, and was said in a voice that was not steady, and was—he understood afterwards, walking back across the garden in the dark with the man's arm through his—the only answer he had ever owed anybody and never given.

"It has," he said. "It has got somebody in it. It has got both of us in it, and it is going to go on having both of us in it, and I love you, and I am sorry it took me two years to say so in a room."

And Verso Dessendre, who had been standing to attention beside his own easel like a man before a tribunal, came across the floor and put his face down into the hair of a municipal engineer of Lumière—retired, aged four-and-thirty, of the firm of Racine et Dessendre, iron founders and railway fitters, of the ground beyond the line—and stayed there.

Outside the north light the garden went on being a garden. Down the hill the lamps were coming on along the basins, and somewhere beyond them the last train of the evening was going out along the coast road south, the way it had gone every evening of Gustave Racine's life; and neither of them went to the window to watch it, because there was no longer the smallest reason to.