“Good. I am going to the barge,” he said. Then he called, “Chipette!”
A little girl in a black apron with her hair in two tight pigtails that stood out behind her tiny bullet head as she ran, came through the door from the back part of the house.
“There, give that to your mother,” said the old brown man, putting some coppers in her hand.
“You'd better stay here where it's warm,” said Andrews yawning.
“I have to work. It's only soldiers don't have to work,” rattled the old brown man.
When the door opened a gust of raw air circled about the wine shop, and a roar of wind and hiss of sleet came from the slush-covered quai outside. The cat took refuge beside the stove, with its back up and its tail waving. The door closed and the old brown man's silhouette, slanted against the wind, crossed the grey oblong of the window.
“But you work a lot a lot, don't you; M'sieu Jean?” said Chipette, putting her chin on the table beside the books and looking up into his eyes with little eyes like black beads.
“When I'm grown up I shan't work a bit. I'll drive round in a carriage.”
Andrews laughed. Chipette looked at him for a minute and then went into the other room carrying away the empty coffee bowl.
In front of the stove the cat sat on its haunches, licking a paw rhythmically with a pink curling tongue like a rose petal.
Andrews whistled a few bars, staring at the cat.
“What d'you think of that, Minet? That's la reine de Saba... la reine de Saba.”
The cat curled into a ball again with great deliberation and went to sleep.
Andrews began thinking of Jeanne and the thought gave him a sense of quiet well-being. Strolling with her in the evening through the streets full of men and women walking significantly together sent a languid calm through his jangling nerves which he had never known in his life before. It excited him to be with her, but very suavely, so that he forgot that his limbs were swathed stiffly in an uncomfortable uniform, so that his feverish desire seemed to fly out of him until with her body beside him, he seemed to drift effortlessly in the stream of the lives of all the people he passed, so languid, from the quiet loves that streamed up about him that the hard walls of his personality seemed to have melted entirely into the mistiness of twilight streets. And for a moment as he thought of it a scent of flowers, heavy with pollen, and sprouting grass and damp moss and swelling sap, seemed to tingle in his nostrils. Sometimes, swimming in the ocean on a rough day, he had felt that same reckless exhilaration when, towards the shore, a huge seething wave had caught him up and sped him forward on its crest. Sitting quietly in the empty wine shop that grey afternoon, he felt his blood grumble and swell in his veins as the new life was grumbling and swelling in the sticky buds of the trees, in the tender green quick under their rough bark, in the little furry animals of the woods and in the sweet-smelling cattle that tramped into mud the lush meadows. In the premonition of spring was a resistless wave of force that carried him and all of them with it tumultuously.