Light | Page 4

about. As soon as I am there my

aunt overflows with noisy tears.
Not daring to speak again, I sit down in my usual corner.
Over the bed I can make out a pointed shape, like a mounted picture,
silhouetted against the curtains, which slightly blacken the window. It
is as though the quilt were lifted from underneath by a stick, for my
Aunt Josephine is leanness itself.
Gradually she raises her voice and begins to lament. "You've no
feelings, no--you're heartless,--that dreadful word you said to me,--you
said, 'You and your jawing!' Ah! people don't know what I have to put
up with--ill-natured--cart-horse!"
In silence I hear the tear-streaming words that fall and founder in the
dark room from that obscure blot on the pillow which is her face.
I stand up. I sit down again. I risk saying, "Come now, come; that's all
done with."
She cries: "Done with? Ah! it will never be done with!"
With the sheet that night is begriming she muzzles herself, and hides
her face. She shakes her head to left and to right, violently, so as to
wipe her eyes and signify dissent at the same time.
"Never! A word like that you said to me breaks the heart forever. But I
must get up and get you something to eat. You must eat. I brought you
up when you were a little one,"--her voice capsizes--"I've given up all
for you, and you treat me as if I were an adventuress."
I hear the sound of her skinny feet as she plants them successively on
the floor, like two boxes. She is seeking her things, scattered over the
bed or slipped to the floor; she is swallowing sobs. Now she is upright,
shapeless in the shadow, but from time to time I see her remarkable
leanness outlined. She slips on a camisole and a jacket,--a spectral
vision of garments which unfold themselves about her handle-like arms,
and above the hollow framework of her shoulders.

She talks to herself while she dresses, and gradually all my life-history,
all my past comes forth from what the poor woman says,--my only near
relative on earth; as it were my mother and my servant.
She strikes a match. The lamp emerges from the dark and zigzags about
the room like a portable fairy. My aunt is enclosed in a strong light. Her
eyes are level with her face; she has heavy and spongy eyelids and a
big mouth which stirs with ruminated sorrow. Fresh tears increase the
dimensions of her eyes, make them sparkle and varnish the points of
her cheeks. She comes and goes with undiminished spleen. Her
wrinkles form heavy moldings on her face, and the skin of chin and
neck is so folded that it looks intestinal, while the crude light tinges it
all with something like blood.
Now that the lamp is alight some items become visible of the dismal
super-chaos in which we are walled up,--the piece of bed-ticking
fastened with two nails across the bottom of the window, because of
draughts; the marble-topped chest of drawers, with its woolen cover;
and the door-lock, stopped with a protruding plug of paper.
The lamp is flaring, and as Mame does not know where to stand it
among the litter, she puts it on the floor and crouches to regulate the
wick. There rises from the medley of the old lady, vividly variegated
with vermilion and night, a jet of black smoke, which returns in
parachute form. Mame sighs, but she cannot check her continual talk.
"You, my lad, you who are so genteel when you like, and earn a
hundred and eighty francs a month,--you're genteel, but you're short of
good manners, it's that chiefly I find fault with you about. So you spat
on the window-pane; I'm certain of it. May I drop dead if you didn't.
And you're nearly twenty-four! And to revenge yourself because I'd
found out that you'd spat on the window, you told me to stop my
jawing, for that's what you said to me, after all. Ah, vulgar fellow that
you are! The factory gentlemen are too kind to you. Your poor father
was their best workman. You are more genteel than your poor father,
more English; and you preferred to go into business rather than go on
learning Latin, and everybody thought you quite right; but for hard
work you're not much good--ah, la, la! Confess that you spat on the

window.
"For your poor mother," the ghost of Mame goes on, as she crosses the
room with a wooden spoon in her hand, "one must say that she had
good taste in dress. That's no harm, no; but certainly they must have the
wherewithal. She was always a child. I remember she was twenty-six
when they carried