In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [76]
The officer had only just disappeared when I saw some private soldiers of various arms go in, which further strengthened my suspicions. I was now, however, extremely thirsty. I should probably be able to get something to drink inside and at the same time I might attempt, although I felt nervous at the prospect, to assuage my curiosity. And so, but not, I think, primarily from curiosity about the officer I had seen, I hesitated no longer but climbed the little staircase at the top of which the door of a sort of hall stood open, no doubt on account of the heat. I thought at first that I might fail to discover very much, for from the staircase, where I remained in shadow, I saw several people come and ask for a room and receive the answer that there were absolutely none left. The objection to these people, I guessed, was simply that they did not belong to the nest of espionage, for a moment later a common sailor presented himself and was promptly given room No. 28. From where I stood in the darkness I could, without being seen, observe a few soldiers and two men of the working classes who were chatting tranquilly in a stiflingly hot little room, gaudily decorated with coloured pictures of women cut from illustrated magazines and reviews.
These men, as they chatted quietly together, were expounding patriotic ideas: “After all, you’ve got to do what the other blokes do,” said one. “Well, you can be jolly sure I don’t mean to get killed,” was the reply of another, who evidently was going off the next day to a dangerous post, to some expression of good wishes which I had not heard. “I reckon, at twenty-two, after only doing six months, it would be a bit hard,” he exclaimed in a voice in which could be heard, even more plainly than the desire to go on living, the assurance that his reasoning was correct, as though the fact that he was only twenty-two could not fail to give him a better chance of survival, as though it were out of the question that he should be killed. “It’s terrific in Paris,” said another; “you’d never know there’s a war on. How about you, Julot, d’you still mean to join up?” “Of course I do, I can’t wait to take a pot-shot or two at these filthy Boches.” “This Joffre, you know, he’s just a man who sleeps with the politicians’ wives, he’s never done a thing himself.” “That’s a dreadful way to talk,” said a slightly older man, an airman, and then, turning to the workman who had just made the statement: “I should advise you not to talk like that in the front line, the poilus would soon do you in.” The banality of these scraps of conversation did not inspire me with any great wish to hear more, and I was about to make my entrance or go back down the stairs when I was jolted out of my indifference by hearing a series of remarks which made me shudder: “I’m amazed the boss isn’t back yet, damn it, at this hour of the night I don’t know where he’s going to find any chains.” “Anyhow, the chap’s already tied up.” “Tied up? Well, he is and he isn’t. Tie me up like that and I’d soon untie myself.” “But the padlock’s closed.” “Of course it’s closed, but it’s not so impossible to open it. The trouble is the chains aren’t long enough. Don’t you try and tell me, I was beating the stuffing out of him all last night until my hands were covered with blood.” “Are you doing the beating tonight?” “No. It’s not me, it’s Maurice. But it’ll be me on Sunday, the boss promised me.” I understood now why the strong arm of the sailor had been needed. If peaceable citizens had been turned away, it was not because the hotel was a nest of spies. An appalling crime was about to be committed, unless someone arrived in time to discover it and have the criminals arrested. And yet the whole scene, in the midst of this peaceful and threatened night, was like a dream or a fairy-tale, so that it was at once with the pride of an emissary of justice and the rapture of a poet that I at