had really been deposited there, in his presence. So he told La Couteau that he would go down with her, take a cab, and bring her back.
“All right; that will suit me. Let us be off! It’s a pity to wake the little one, since he’s so sound asleep; but all the same, we must pack him off, since it’s decided.”
With her dry hands, which were used to handling goods of this description, she caught up the child, perhaps, however, a little roughly, forgetting her assumed wheedling good nature now that she was simply charged with conveying it to hospital. And the child awoke and began to scream loudly.
“Ah! dear me, it won’t be amusing if he keeps up this music in the cab. Quick, let us be off.”
But Mathieu stopped her. “Won’t you kiss him, Norine?” he asked.
At the very first squeal that sorry mother had dipped yet lower under her sheets, carrying her hands to her ears, distracted as she was by the sound of those cries. “No, no,” she gasped, “take him away; take him away at once. Don’t begin torturing me again!”
Then she closed her eyes, and with one arm repulsed the child who seemed to be pursuing her. But when she felt that the agent was laying him on the bed, she suddenly shuddered, sat up, and gave a wild hasty kiss, which lighted on the little fellow’s cap. She had scarcely opened her tear-dimmed eyes, and could have seen but a vague phantom of that poor feeble creature, wailing and struggling at the decisive moment when he was being cast into the unknown.
“You are killing me! Take him away; take him away!”
Once in the cab the child suddenly became silent. Either the jolting of the vehicle calmed him, or the creaking of the wheels filled him with emotion. La Couteau, who kept him on her knees, at first remained silent, as if interested in the people on the footwalks, where the bright sun was shining. Then, all of a sudden, she began to talk, venting her thoughts aloud.
“That little woman made a great mistake in not trusting the child to me. I should have put him out to nurse properly, and he would have grown up finely at Rougemont. But there! they all imagine that we simply worry them because we want to do business. But I just ask you, if she had given me five francs for myself and paid my return journey, would that have ruined her? A pretty girl like her oughtn’t to be hard up for money. I know very well that in our calling there are some people who are hardly honest, who speculate and ask for commissions, and then put out nurslings at cheap rates and rob both the parents and the nurse. It’s really not right to treat these dear little things as if they were goods — poultry or vegetables. When folks do that I can understand that their hearts get hardened, and that they pass the little ones on from hand to hand without any more care than if they were stockin-trade. But then, monsieur, I’m an honest woman; I’m authorized by the mayor of our village; I hold a certificate of morality, which I can show to anybody. If ever you should come to Rougemont, just ask after Sophie Couteau there. Folks will tell you that I’m a hardworking woman, and don’t owe a copper to a soul!”
Mathieu could not help looking at her to see how unblushingly she thus praised herself. And her speech struck him as if it were a premeditated reply to all that Victoire had related of her, for, with the keen scent of a shrewd peasant woman, she must have guessed that charges had been brought against her. When she felt that his piercing glance was diving to her very soul, she doubtless feared that she had not lied with sufficient assurance, and had somehow negligently betrayed herself; for she did not insist, but put on more gentleness of manner, and contented herself with praising Rougemont in a general way, saying what a perfect paradise it was, where the little ones were received, fed, cared for, and coddled as if they were all sons of princes. Then, seeing that the gentleman uttered never a word, she became silent once more. It was evidently useless to try to win him over. And meantime the cab rolled and rolled along; streets followed streets, ever noisy and crowded; and they crossed the Seine and at last drew near to the Luxembourg. It was only after passing the palace gardens that La Couteau again began:
“Well, it’s that young person’s own affair if she imagines that her child will be better off for passing through the Foundling. I don’t attack the Administration, but you know, monsieur, there’s a good deal to be said on the matter. At Rougemont we have a number of nurslings that it sends us, and they don’t grow any better or die less frequently than the others. Well, well, people are free to act as they fancy; but all the same I should like you to know, as I do, all that goes on in there.”
The cab had stopped at the top of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau, at a short distance from the former outer Boulevard. A big gray wall stretched out, the frigid facade of a State establishment, and it was through a quiet, simple, unobtrusive little doorway at the end of this wall that La Couteau went in with the child. Mathieu followed her, but he did not enter the office where a woman received the children. He felt too much emotion, and feared lest he should be questioned; it was, indeed, as if he considered himself an accomplice in a crime. Though La Couteau told him that the woman would ask him nothing, and the strictest secrecy was always observed, he preferred to wait in an anteroom, which led to several closed compartments, where the persons who came to deposit children were placed to wait their turn. And he watched the woman go off, carrying the little one, who still remained extremely well behaved, with a vacant stare in his big eyes.
Though the interval of waiting could not have lasted more than twenty minutes, it seemed terribly long to Mathieu. Lifeless quietude reigned in that stern, sad-looking anteroom, wainscoted with oak, and pervaded with the smell peculiar to hospitals. All he heard was the occasional faint wail of some infant, above which now and then rose a heavy, restrained sob, coming perhaps from some mother who was waiting in one of the adjoining compartments. And he recalled the “slide” of other days, the box which turned within the wall. The mother crept up, concealing herself much as possible from view, thrust her baby into the cavity as into an oven, gave a tug at the bell-chain, and then precipitately fled. Mathieu was too young to have seen the real thing; he had only seen it represented in a melodrama at the Port St. Martin Theatre.* But how many stories it recalled — hampers of poor little creatures brought up from the provinces and deposited at the hospital by carriers; the stolen babes of Duchesses, here cast into oblivion by suspicious-looking men; the hundreds of wretched workgirls too who had here rid themselves of their unfortunate children. Now, however, the children had to be deposited openly, and there was a staff which took down names and dates, while giving a pledge of inviolable secrecy. Mathieu was aware that some few people imputed to the suppression of the slide system the great increase in criminal offences. But each day public opinion condemns more and more the attitude of society in former times, and discards the idea that one must accept evil, dam it in, and hide it as if it were some necessary sewer; for the only course for a free community to pursue is to foresee evil and grapple with it, and destroy it in the bud. To diminish the number of cast-off children one must seek out the mothers, encourage them, succor them, and give them the means to be mothers in fact as well as in name. At that moment, however, Mathieu did not reason; it was his heart that was affected, filled with growing pity and anguish at the thought of all the crime, all the shame, all the grief and distress that had passed through that anteroom in which he stood. What terrible confessions must have been heard, what a procession of suffering, ignominy, and wretchedness must have been witnessed by that woman who received the children in her mysterious little office! To her all the wreckage of the slums, all the woe lying beneath gilded life, all the abominations, all the tortures that remain unknown, were carried. There in her office was the port for the shipwrecked, there the black hole that swallowed up the offspring of frailty and shame. And while Mathieu’s spell of waiting continued he saw three poor creatures arrive at the hospital. One was surely a workgirl, delicate and pretty though she looked, so thin, so pale too, and with so wild an air that he remembered a paragraph he had lately read in a newspaper, recounting how another such girl, after forsaking her child, had thrown herself into the river. The second seemed to him to be a married woman, some workman’s wife, no doubt, overburdened with children and unable to provide food for another mouth; while the third was tall, strong, and insolent, — one of those who bring three or four children to the hospital one after the other. And all three women plunged in, and he heard them being penned in separate compartments by an attendant, while he, with stricken heart, realizing how heavily fate fell on some, still stood there waiting.