Carmen by Prosper Mérimée (best book club books TXT) 📖

was thrust into her chemise. She had another acacia blossom in the corner of her mouth, and she walked along, swaying her hips, like a filly from the Cordova stud farm. In my country anybody who had seen a woman dressed in that fashion would have crossed himself. At Seville every man paid her some bold compliment on her appearance. She had an answer for each and all, with her hand on her hip, as bold as the thorough gipsy she was. At first I didn’t like her looks, and I fell to my work again. But she, like all women and cats, who won’t come if you call them, and do come if you don’t call them, stopped short in front of me, and spoke to me.

“‘Compadre,’ said she, in the Andalusian fashion, ‘won’t you give me your chain for the keys of my strong box?’

“‘It’s for my priming-pin,’ said I.

“‘Your priming-pin!’ she cried, with a laugh. ‘Oho! I suppose the gentleman makes lace, as he wants pins!’

“Everybody began to laugh, and I felt myself getting red in the face, and couldn’t hit on anything in answer.

“‘Come, my love!’ she began again, ‘make me seven ells of lace for my mantilla, my pet pin-maker!’

“And taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me. I didn’t know which way to look. I sat stock-still, like a wooden board. When she had gone into the factory, I saw the acacia blossom, which had fallen on the ground between my feet. I don’t know what made me do it, but I picked it up, unseen by any of my comrades, and put it carefully inside my jacket. That was my first folly.

“Two or three hours later I was still thinking about her, when a panting, terrified-looking porter rushed into the guard-room. He told us a woman had been stabbed in the great cigar-room, and that the guard must be sent in at once. The sergeant told me to take two men, and go and see to it. I took my two men and went upstairs. Imagine, sir, that when I got into the room, I found, to begin with, some three hundred women, stripped to their shifts, or very near it, all of them screaming and yelling and gesticulating, and making such a row that you couldn’t have heard God’s own thunder. On one side of the room one of the women was lying on the broad of her back, streaming with blood, with an X newly cut on her face by two strokes of a knife. Opposite the wounded woman, whom the best-natured of the band were attending, I saw Carmen, held by five or six of her comrades. The wounded woman was crying out, ‘A confessor, a confessor! I’m killed!’ Carmen said nothing at all. She clinched her teeth and rolled her eyes like a chameleon. ‘What’s this?’ I asked. I had hard work to find out what had happened, for all the work-girls talked at once. It appeared that the injured girl had boasted she had money enough in her pocket to buy a donkey at the Triana Market. ‘Why,’ said Carmen, who had a tongue of her own, ‘can’t you do with a broom?’ Stung by this taunt, it may be because she felt herself rather unsound in that particular, the other girl replied that she knew nothing about brooms, seeing she had not the honour of being either a gipsy or one of the devil’s godchildren, but that the Senorita Carmen would shortly make acquaintance with her donkey, when the Corregidor took her out riding with two lackeys behind her to keep the flies off. ‘Well,’ retorted Carmen, ‘I’ll make troughs for the flies to drink out of on your cheeks, and I’ll paint a draught-board on them!’ * And thereupon, slap, bank! She began making St. Andrew’s crosses on the girl’s face with a knife she had been using for cutting off the ends of the cigars.