‘Anything going to-day, comrade?’ hungry-looking Jules asked of hungry-looking Hector, just outside the grounds of the Hotel Beau-Rivage.
‘Pas de chance,’ hungry-looking Hector responded, with a shake of his shaggy head. ‘No work since a fortnight. It is, look you, these bourgeois!’
But the word bourgeois did not mean to those unkempt and starveling Provençaux at all the same thing that the English journalist has made it mean to the English reader. To you, dear gentlemen, it implies practically an underbred person, whose tastes are less noble and exalted than your own; to Jules and Hector, it connoted rather a man in a black coat — good, bad, or indifferent: a person not a workman, a riche, an eat-all, a member of the capitalist or idle classes. Sons of the southern proletariat themselves, born to a slender and precarious diet of garlic and olives, with a substratum of sour bread, and an occasional rinsing of petit vin bleu, they made no petty discrimination of trade or profession, no invidious distinction of banker or brewer, merchant or manufacturer, doctor or advocate, poet or painter. If you wore a blue blouse or a coarse grey shirt with a crimson sash, you were an ouvrier and a brother; if you wore a black coat and a starched white collar, you were a sacré bourgeois, and an enemy of humanity. ’Tis a simple creed, with much to recommend it. It may occasionally go wrong — all creeds are fallible — but in the main it answers to a genuine distinction of life and function — from the point of view of starveling Jules and starveling Hector, bien entendu!
‘What hast thou eaten to-day?’ hungry Jules inquired, with a keen glance from under his black penthouse eyebrows. His sharp beady eyes were naturally deep-set, but a long course of starvation had made them still further recede into dim recesses of darkling shadow.
Hungry Hector shrugged his shoulders — or rather his shoulder-bones. ‘What would you have?’ he answered, with the philosophy of hunger. ‘Like this, like that! Here a crust, there a cabbage-stalk! As the unemployed live. ’Tis not a banquet, convenons.’
Hungry Jules seized him energetically by the ulna — only anatomical language can fairly describe the various salient portions of those two thinly-draped skeletons. ‘Look in there!’ he cried hoarsely, pointing through the window. ‘They feast, those bourgeois! They have eaten already soup, and fish, and calves’ feet in béchamel; and now the men in the white chokers are offering them roast lamb. C’est trop fort, n’est-ce pas, camarade?’
Hungry Hector leaned forward and inspected the diners with glistening eyes that half started from his head. Some of the pampered children of luxury actually turned up their noses at hot roast lamb! ‘Décidément, c’est trop fort,’ he answered, horrified. His righteous indignation was fast rising to boiling-point.
Inside, at the table, young Doctor Hughes, of London, that amiable consumptive, who had worn himself to death in the underpaid service of the poor of Whitechapel, was sitting with his wife, toying idly with the food on the plate before him. Minna’s eyes were fixed upon him. ‘Don’t you think, dear,’ she whispered, ‘you could eat just a mouthful or two of this nice roast lamb? Do try! It’s so good for you.’
Trevor Hughes turned it over with a listless fork, and inspected it. ‘I never can eat the Riviera lamb,’ he answered, stifling a sigh. ‘It’s killed too young; and it’s so lean and skinny.’
‘But you ate no soup, and you ate no fish,’ Minna murmured, with tears in her eyes. She saw only too plainly that his appetite was failing.
‘The soup was cold and greasy,’ Trevor explained, not peevishly, but in an apologetic voice; ‘and the fish was loup. I cannot eat loup. You know it disagrees with me.’
Minna knew it did — and trembled. For day by day more and more things disagreed with him. She began to wonder with a tremulous fear what she could give him to live upon.
‘If only we could get away to Algiers,’ she murmured low, ‘you might recover your appetite. But here, on the Riviera, none of the food seems to suit you.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Trevor answered. And he knew too well why. He had seen more than enough of such cases in Whitechapel.
Jules seized Hector’s arm again. ‘And see,’ he cried. ‘See! Those lackeys bring in something else to offer them! Sacred name of a dog, I swear to you, it is chicken!’
‘Do these people eat chicken every day?’ Hector asked, half beside himself with astonishment, his lantern jaws dropping rapidly as his hungry mouth watered.
‘Do they eat chicken every day? Ma foi, yes, they do: unless in its place they eat duck or partridge. Figure to yourself, partridge! I have watched them here for a week, and you will not believe such shameful luxury — the luxe effréné des bourgeois! Every evening that goes they sit down to the same feast — soup, fish, an entrée, a joint, a rôti — and sweets — and dessert. Mon dieu, c’est effrayant!’
Hector grasped his short knife. Poverty had not been able to deprive him of that. ‘C’est pas mal,’ he exclaimed again. ‘But they shall pay for it, those mouths there! Bloodsuckers that drink up the life-blood of the people. And me dine on cabbage-stalks! I swear to you, they shall pay for it!’
‘What do you mean?’ hungry Jules exclaimed, seizing his ulna once more with a certain greedy and convulsive eagerness.
Hector opened the knife stealthily, a strange gleam in his eye. ‘The first bourgeois who leaves the room!’ he whispered between his set teeth, holding it up, blade downward, and striking the air with a vicious thrust. ‘They are all of them equally culpable. Le premier venu, c’est compris?’
Minna looked at her husband tenderly. ‘A little bit of chicken, darling?’ she murmured low. ‘I’m sure you can eat just a mouthful off the wing. Such nice white meat! Do let me give you some.’
Trevor shook his head with a sad smile. ‘No, no, dear,’ he answered with a weary, dreary look. ‘I couldn’t touch a mouthful. You know I detest the table d’hôte poulet.’
‘You’re not going?’ she cried, seeing him rise with the weary, dreary look still deepening on his face.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘The room’s so hot. I shall stroll out into the garden. It’s nice and cool there, and the air seems to do me more good than anything.’
‘Then I shall go with you,’ Minna cried, and rose from the table to accompany her husband.
‘Tiens, Hector,’ Jules whispered, as husband and wife emerged from the hotel door. Vois-tu? un bourgeois!’
A sudden blind rush. A knife gleaming in the air. A scream of horror from Minna. A gurgle of blood; a red stream; a sigh. And the tragedy was complete. There was one bourgeois the less alive on earth; and one friend of humanity stood back, with gnashed teeth, awaiting arrest by the guests and the concierge.
‘A horrible crime!’ you say. Yes, no doubt, a horrible crime — from the ethical side, a crime of the first magnitude. But from the psychological side, which is how human actions rather strike me, a regrettable result of incompatibility in the matter of standpoint. Those two saw things differently — no more than that. If each could have seen with the other’s eyes — well, most crimes are so, and most blunders also.