The Grey Wig | Page 3

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 D��pine and the skinny Madame Vali��re toiled up and down the dark, fusty stairs of the H?tel des Tourterelles, often brushing against each other, yet sundered by icy infinities. And the endurance on Madame D��pine's round face became more vindictive, and gentler grew the resignation on the angular visage of Madame Vali��re.

IV
"Tiens! Madame D��pine, one never sees you now." Madame la Propri��taire was blocking the threshold, preventing her exit. "I was almost thinking you had veritably died of Madame Vali��re's cough."
"One has received my rent, the Monday," the little old lady replied frigidly.
"Oh! l��! l��!" Madame waved her plump hands. "And La Vali��re, too, makes herself invisible. What has then happened to both of you? Is it that you are doing a penance together?"
"Hist!" said Madame D��pine, flushing.
For at this moment Madame Vali��re 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 Propri��taire, dominatingly bestriding her doorstep, was sandwiched between the two old ladies, her wig aggressively grey between the two browns. Madame Vali��re halted awkwardly, a bronze blush mounting to match her wig. To be seen by Madame D��pine 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 Propri��taire made two strides towards the refractory English monsieur. "I told you one franc fifty? For d��jeuner, yes, as many luncheons as you can eat. But for dinner? You eat with us as one of the family, and vin compris and caf�� 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 Vali��re.
"Grey? She!" repeated Madame D��pine, 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 D��pine 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 Propri��taire 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 Vali��re, reflectively.
"Without doubt," Madame D��pine replied viciously. "And fifty centimes a day soon mount up to a grey wig."
"Not so soon," sighed Madame Vali��re.
"But then it is not only one client that she cheats."
"Ah! at that rate wigs fall from the skies," admitted Madame Vali��re.
"Especially if one has not to give dowries to one's nieces," said Madame D��pine, boldly.
"And if one is mean on New Year's Day," returned Madame Vali��re, 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 a royal shower of New Year's gifts in the other, had kept them from selfish, if seemly, hoary-headedness.
"Ah! here is my floor," panted Madame Vali��re at length, with an air of indicating it to a thorough stranger. "Will you not come into my room and eat a fig? They are very healthy between meals."
Madame D��pine accepted the invitation, and entering her own corner of the corridor with a responsive