The Grey Wig | Page 3

blush, drawing the
hotel's attention to what the hotel might have overlooked, in its long
habituation to their surmounting brownness.
More morbidly conscious than ever of a young head on old shoulders,
the old ladies no longer paused at the bureau to exchange the news with
Madame or even with her black-haired bookkeeping daughter. No more
lounging against the newel under the carved torch-bearer, while the
journalist of the fourth floor spat at the Dreyfusites, and the poet of the
entresol threw versified vitriol at perfidious Albion. For the first time,
too--losing their channel of communication--they grew out of touch
with each other's microscopic affairs, and their mutual detestation
increased with their resentful ignorance. And so, shrinking and silent,
and protected as far as possible by their big bonnets, the squat Madame
Dépine and the skinny Madame Valière toiled up and down the dark,
fusty stairs of the Hôtel des Tourterelles, often brushing against each
other, yet sundered by icy infinities. And the endurance on Madame
Dépine's round face became more vindictive, and gentler grew the
resignation on the angular visage of Madame Valière.

IV
"Tiens! Madame Dépine, one never sees you now." Madame la
Propriétaire was blocking the threshold, preventing her exit. "I was
almost thinking you had veritably died of Madame Valière's cough."
"One has received my rent, the Monday," the little old lady replied
frigidly.
"Oh! là! là!" Madame waved her plump hands. "And La Valière, too,
makes herself invisible. What has then happened to both of you? Is it
that you are doing a penance together?"
"Hist!" said Madame Dépine, flushing.
For at this moment Madame Valière appeared on the pavement outside
bearing a long French roll and a bag of figs, which made an excellent

lunch at low water. Madame la Propriétaire, dominatingly bestriding
her doorstep, was sandwiched between the two old ladies, her wig
aggressively grey between the two browns. Madame Valière halted
awkwardly, a bronze blush mounting to match her wig. To be seen by
Madame Dépine carrying in her meagre provisions was humiliation
enough; to be juxtaposited with a grey wig was unbearable.
"Maman, maman, the English monsieur will not pay two francs for his
dinner!" And the distressed bookkeeper, bill in hand, shattered the trio.
"And why will he not pay?" Fire leapt into the black eyes.
"He says you told him the night he came that by arrangement he could
have his dinners for one franc fifty."
Madame la Propriétaire made two strides towards the refractory
English monsieur. "I told you one franc fifty? For déjeuner, yes, as
many luncheons as you can eat. But for dinner? You eat with us as one
of the family, and vin compris and café likewise, and it should be all for
one franc fifty! Mon Dieu! it is to ruin oneself. Come here." And she
seized the surprised Anglo-Saxon by the wrist and dragged him
towards a painted tablet of prices that hung in a dark niche of the hall.
"I have kept this hotel for twenty years, I have grown grey in the
service of artists and students, and this is the first time one has
demanded dinner for one franc fifty!"
"She has grown grey!" contemptuously muttered Madame Valière.
"Grey? She!" repeated Madame Dépine, with no less bitterness. "It is
only to give herself the air of a grande dame!"
Then both started, and coloured to the roots of their wigs.
Simultaneously they realised that they had spoken to each other.

V
As they went up the stairs together--for Madame Dépine had quite

forgotten she was going out--an immense relief enlarged their souls.
Merely to mention the grey wig had been a vent for all this morbid
brooding; to abuse Madame la Propriétaire into the bargain was to pass
from the long isolation into a subtle sympathy.
"I wonder if she did say one franc fifty," observed Madame Valière,
reflectively.
"Without doubt," Madame Dépine replied viciously. "And fifty
centimes a day soon mount up to a grey wig."
"Not so soon," sighed Madame Valière.
"But then it is not only one client that she cheats."
"Ah! at that rate wigs fall from the skies," admitted Madame Valière.
"Especially if one has not to give dowries to one's nieces," said
Madame Dépine, boldly.
"And if one is mean on New Year's Day," returned Madame Valière,
with a shade less of mendacity.
They inhaled the immemorial airlessness of the staircase as if they were
breathing the free air of the forests depicted on its dirty-brown
wall-paper. It was the new atmosphere of self-respect that they were
really absorbing. Each had at last explained herself and her brown wig
to the other. An immaculate honesty (that would scorn to overcharge
fifty centimes even to un Anglais), complicated with unwedded nieces
in one case, with