The Little Man From Archangel Read Online Free PDF

it.'
    'Thank you. I will be in again next Thursday without fail.'
    Outside in the sun of the street and the shade of the covered market the clientele had changed insensibly. Early in the morning there was a preponderance of working-class women doing their shopping after taking their children to school. It was also the time for the vans from the hotels and restaurants.
    As early as nine o'clock, and especially around ten o'clock the shoppers were better dressed, and at eleven some of them brought their maids with them to carry the parcels.
    The shavings in the gutter, trampled underfoot, were losing their golden hue to turn brown and sticky, and were now becoming mixed with outer leaves of leeks, carrots and fish heads.
    Gina had taken no change of clothes with her, no underclothes, not even a coat, though the nights were still cool.
    If she had been intending to stay in the town, on the other hand, would she have had the nerve to take his most valuable stamps?
    After seven o'clock in the evening, there were no more buses to Bourges, nor for anywhere else, only a train at 8.52 which connected with the Paris train, and, at 9.40, the slow train from Moulins.
    The station employees knew her, but he didn't dare go and question them. It was too late. He had twice spoken of Bourges and he was obliged to stick to it.
    Why had he behaved in this way? He could not account for it. It was not from fear of ridicule, because everyone, not only in the Place du Vieux-Marché, but throughout the town, knew that Gina had had many lovers before marrying him. It could not have passed unnoticed, either, that since her marriage she had had several adventures.
    Was it a sort of shame that had prompted him to reply, first to Le Bouc, then to Palestri:
    'She has gone to Bourges.'
    Shame which was born of shyness? What happened between him and Gina did not concern anybody else, and he believed himself to be the last person to have any right to discuss it.
    But for the disappearance of the stamps he would have waited all day, then all night, hoping from one moment to the next to see her return like a dog which has run away.
    The room upstairs had not been done, and the strong box had not been closed, so he went up, made his bed as meticulously as when he was a bachelor and the maid was away.
    It was as a maid that Gina had come into the house. Before her there had been another, old Léonie, who at the age of seventy still put in her eight or nine hours a day with different employers. In the end her legs had swollen up. Latterly she could hardly manage to climb the stairs, and as her children, who lived in Paris, did not care to look after her, Doctor Joublin had put her in a home.
    For a month Jonas had been without anyone, and it didn't worry him unduly. He knew Gina, like everyone else, through having seen her pass by, or from selling her an occasional book. At that time she had behaved in a provocative manner with him as she used to with all men, and he blushed every time she came into his shop, especially in summer, when it seemed to him that she left behind her a trace of the smell of her armpits.
    'Haven't you got anyone yet?' Le Bouc had asked him one morning when he was having his coffee in the little bar.
    He had never understood why Le Bouc and the others from the Square did not use the familiar tu with him, for they nearly all used it among themselves, calling one another by their Christian names.
    They didn't call him Milk, however, almost as if it were not his name, nor Monsieur Milk, but, nearly always, Monsieur Jonas.
    And yet at the age of two he was living in the Square, just next door to Ancel's, the butcher's, and it was his father who had converted the fishmonger's, 'A La Marée,' now kept by the Chenus.
    It was not because he had not been to the communal school either, like most of them, but to a private school, then to the lycée. The proof was that they were already addressing his father before him as Monsieur Constantin.
    Fernand