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Title: Thérèse
Author: François Mauriac
Translator: Eric Sutton
Release date: May 22, 2024 [eBook #73670]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Boni & Liveright Inc, 1928
Credits: Carol Brown, Lukas Bystricky and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THÉRÈSE ***
THÉRÈSE
[Illustration: _Thérèse_
_By_
FRANCOIS
MAURIAC
_New York_
_Boni & Liveright_
_1928_]
THÉRÈSE BY FRANÇOIS MAURIAC
TRANSLATED BY ERIC SUTTON
COPYRIGHT 1928 BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
Lord have pity, O have pity on those who
know not what they do. O Creator of the
world, can there be any in whom the image
of humanity is destroyed, even in the eyes
of Him, who alone knows why they exist, HOW
THEY HAVE MADE THEMSELVES WHAT THEY ARE,
and how they could have made themselves
otherwise.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.
_I shall be told, Thérèse, that you do not exist, but I know you do,
for I have been watching you for years, and I have often stopped you
and unmasked you as you passed me by._
_When I was young, I remember seeing your little white thin-lipped
face, as you stood in a stifling Assize Court, at the mercy of lawyers
not half so pitiless as the fine ladies who had come to see your agony._
_Later on, I found you in the drawing-room of a country house, looking
drawn and pale, bored by the attentions of your aged parents and your
simple-minded husband. “But what can be the matter with her?” said
they: “she has everything she can possibly want.”_
_Since then, I have so often admired you as you passed that strong hand
of yours so wearily across your firm broad brow. I have so often seen
you prowling, like a wild animal, back and forwards behind the living
bars of the family in which you are imprisoned, watching me with your
evil melancholy eyes._
_Many will be surprised that I have been able to conceive a creature
yet more odious than all my other heroines. Why, they ask, do I never
write about good kind people in whose hearts there is no secret? Alas!
where there is no secret there is no story; and I know the secrets of
those hearts that are tainted with the clay that covers them._
_I could have wished, Thérèse, that sorrow should bring you to God; and
I have long wanted you to be worthy of the name of Saint Locusta. But
many, though they believe in the downfall and redemption of our poor
tormented souls, would have cried “Sacrilege.”_
_I can only hope that on that street where I bid you farewell you are
not alone._
THÉRÈSE
THÉRÈSE
CHAPTER I
The lawyer opened a door. Thérèse Desqueyroux, as she stood in that
remote corridor of the law-courts, felt the fog upon her face and
inhaled it deeply. She was afraid some one might be waiting for her,
and hesitated to go out. A man with his coat collar turned up appeared
from the shadow of a plane tree, and she recognised her father.
“All right,” cried the lawyer; “case dismissed”; and, turning to
Thérèse, he added, “You can go out now; no one is there.”
She went down the damp steps; the little Square seemed indeed deserted.
Her father did not kiss her, did not even look at her. He asked a few
questions of Duros, the lawyer, who answered in low tones, as though he
were afraid of being overheard. She just managed to catch what they
were saying.
“I shall get the official notification to-morrow.”
“I suppose nothing can go wrong now?”
“No, nothing; it’s all over.”
“I suppose after my son-in-law’s statement, it was a certainty?”
“Well, I’m not so sure.... You never can tell.”
“But after he’d said definitely that he had not counted the drops....”
“My dear Larroque, in affairs of this kind the victim’s evidence....”
Here Thérèse broke in; “But there wasn’t any victim.”
“I meant by victim, the victim of his own imprudence, Madame.”
The two men stared at her for a moment as she stood there motionless,
wrapped in her cloak, and looked curiously at her expressionless
face. She asked where the carriage was; her father had arranged for
it to wait on the Budos road, outside the town, so as not to attract
attention.
They crossed the Square, where leaves from the plane trees were
sticking to the rain-soaked benches. Fortunately the days had grown
much shorter: besides, to get to the Budos road, they could go through
the most unfrequented streets of the little provincial town. Thérèse
walked between the two men (she was nearly half a head taller than
either of them), and they began a further discussion as if she had not
been there; but finding the intervening feminine presence inconvenient
they began unconsciously to elbow her out of the way. She accordingly
dropped a little behind, and took the glove off her left hand so as to
be able to pick the moss off the ancient stone walls at her side. From
time to time a workman on a bicycle, or a trap came past, and she drew
close in to the houses to avoid being splashed with mud. But Thérèse
was hidden by the gathering dusk, and no one recognised her. The smell
of fog and baking bread was for her not merely the usual evening smell
of a little town; it was the perfume of the life that had been restored
to her at last. She shut her eyes to savour the moist leafy fragrance
of the sleeping earth, and tried not to listen to the words of the
short bandy-legged gentleman who did not once turn his head towards his
daughter. She might have fallen at the roadside and neither he, nor
Duros, would have noticed it. They were no longer afraid to raise their
voices.
“Monsieur Desqueyroux’s statement was all that could be desired, but
there was that prescription,--in point of fact, it was a question of
forgery. And it was Doctor Pédemay who had brought the charge....”
“But he withdrew it.”
“I know; but her explanation--this mysterious individual who handed her
a prescription....”
Thérèse walked more slowly, not because she was tired, but to get out
of earshot of these phrases that had been dinned into her brain for so
many weeks; but it was no use. She could not help hearing her father’s
raucous accents:
“I told her over and over again that she _must_ try to think of
something else.”
He was quite right, he had indeed said so very often. But what was he
worrying about now? What he called the honour of the name, was safe:
the whole story would have been forgotten by the time of the Senatorial
elections, Thérèse thought to herself, as she did her best not to
catch up the two men; but in the heat of the discussion, they stopped,
gesticulating at each other, half-way down the street.
“My advice to you, Larroque, is to face the thing out: take the
offensive in next Sunday’s _Semeur_: I’ll see about it if you like. Get
them to put in a notice headed ‘An Infamous Rumour’ or something like
that.”
“I don’t agree with you, my dear fellow: as a matter of fact there is
no case to answer, the prosecution obviously had not a leg to stand
on; they did not even consult hand-writing experts. I am sure the
best thing will be to say nothing, and hush it all up. I will do what
is necessary and I won’t spare expense: we can’t afford to have any
scandal, for the sake of the family.”
They had walked on again by this time, and Thérèse did not hear Duros’
answer. She inhaled the damp night air once more as though she were
afraid of choking; and suddenly there came before her mind the unknown
face of her maternal grandmother Julie Bellade: it was indeed unknown,
for neither the Larroque nor the Desqueyroux families possessed a
single likeness of her, and nothing was known about her except that she
had one day disappeared. Thérèse realised that she too might have been
wiped out of existence, and later on not even her little daughter Marie
would have been allowed to find in an album the likeness of one who had
brought her into the world. At that moment Marie was already asleep in
a room at Argelouse, where Thérèse would arrive late that evening: she
would listen in the darkness to the murmur of that childish slumber;
she would lean over the bed and her lips would drink in the sweetness
of that sleeping life like a draught of clear water.
The carriage stood waiting by the ditch at the edge of the road; the
hood was raised and the two lamps lit up the skinny hind quarters of
the horses. Beyond it towered two dark walls of forest. The tops of
the lower tiers of pines on either side met overhead, and the road
vanished into the darkness under that dim archway. Above it gleamed
the sky, fretted by a network of myriad branches.
The coachman watched Thérèse with greedy curiosity. When she asked him
if they would get to Nizan station in time to catch the last train, he
said they would if they started at once.
“I shall not need to trouble you again, Gardère.”
“Has Madame no more business here, then?”
She shook her head, while the man still devoured her with his eyes.
Would she be looked at like that for the rest of her life?
“Well, are you glad?” asked her father. He seemed at last to have
noticed her presence. Thérèse glanced at that sallow bilious
countenance, those cheeks bristling with a coarse growth of
whitish-yellow hair, so painfully distinct in the light of the carriage
lamps.
“I have suffered so much,--I am worn out ...” she began, in low tones;
but she soon relapsed into silence. It was no use talking; he was not
listening, he was not even looking at her. He cared very little about
Thérèse’s feelings. One thing and one thing only mattered to him; his
upward progress to the Senate might be impeded and even endangered by
this wretched daughter of his: all women, in his opinion, were either
hysterical or stupid. Fortunately her name was no longer Larroque: she
was a Desqueyroux. Now that they had managed to avoid a trial at the
Assizes, he breathed again: but it would be difficult to prevent his
enemies keeping the wound open. He would go and see the Prefect the
very next day. Thank Heaven, he could do what he liked with the Editor
of the _Lande Conservatrice_. There was that story about those little
girls!... He took Thérèse’s arm:
“Get in at once, you’ve no time to lose.”
Then the lawyer, perhaps out of malice, or possibly not liking to let
Thérèse go without saying a word to her, asked if she was going back
to Monsieur Bernard Desqueyroux that very evening. As she replied,
“Of course I am; my husband is expecting me,” she realised for the
first time since she had left the Law Courts that she would, in fact,
in a few hours, cross the threshold of the room in which her husband
was lying, still rather ill, and that this was the beginning of an
indefinite succession of days through which she must live in this man’s
company.
She had been staying with her father, just outside the little town,
while the case had been under investigation, but she had, of course,
often made this journey; on the previous occasions, however, she had
been intent upon the necessity for giving her husband an exact account
of what had happened, and her mind was full of Duros’ last words of
advice, as she had got into the carriage, on the answers Monsieur
Desqueyroux was to make when he was again questioned. Thérèse had then
felt no distress or awkwardness at finding herself face to face once
more with the sick man: what they had to consider was not what had
really happened, but what they had better say, or not say. Husband and
wife had never been so closely united as they were by the preparation
of this defence,--drawn together across the infant body of their little
daughter Marie. They concocted, for the judge’s benefit, a simple and
coherent story, calculated to convince that logical mind. She used
to get into the same carriage that was waiting for her this evening:
but to-night she dreaded the end of that journey through the darkness
which in those days she had found so tedious. She remembered how, the
moment she got into the carriage, she longed to be back in that room at
Argelouse, and she used to go over in her mind the instructions she was
to pass on to her husband: he was to be sure, for instance, to say that
she had told him one evening about that prescription which an unknown
man had asked her to take to the chemist’s, on the pretext that he did
not like to go himself because he owed money there,--but Duros did not
advise that Bernard should go so far as to pretend that he remembered
remonstrating with his wife for doing such a foolish thing.
Now that the nightmare had been exorcised, what would Bernard and
Thérèse talk about that evening? She saw in her mind’s eye the
desolate house in which he was awaiting her: she pictured the bed
in the centre of that stone-floored room, and the lamp, turned low,
standing on a table among a litter of newspapers and medicine bottles.
The house-dogs, awakened by the noise of the carriage, bark and are
quiet: and then the silence would descend once more, the awful silence
of those nights when the wretched Bernard lay racked by frightful
paroxysms of vomiting. Thérèse tried to imagine the first moment, not
far distant now, when their eyes would meet; and then the ensuing
night, the next day, the day after, and the weeks to come, in that
house at Argelouse, where they would no longer need to compose a
presentable version of the drama they had lived. There would be nothing
now between them,--except what had really been there, really, and in
very truth. Thérèse lost her nerve, and stammered, turning towards the
lawyer,--though her words were intended for the older man:
“I expect to stay a few days with Monsieur Desqueyroux, and then, if he
goes on improving, I shall come back to my father.”
“Not a bit of it, my dear,” said Monsieur Larroque, and as Gardère
began to fidget on his seat, he added, lowering his voice: “Have you
taken leave of your senses? You can’t possibly leave your husband at
such a time. You must be inseparable,--inseparable, I tell you, for the
rest of your lives.”
“Of course, father: what could I have been thinking of? Then you will
come to Argelouse?”
“But I shall expect you over for the fair on Thursdays as usual,
Thérèse. You will go on coming as you always did.”
She must surely understand that any departure from existing usages
would be fatal. She must realise that, once and for all. He felt sure
he could depend upon her, she had done the family enough harm already.
“You must do exactly what your husband tells you, and then you won’t go
far wrong.”
And he hurried her into the carriage.
Thérèse noticed the lawyer’s outstretched hand, with its coarse dark
nails:
“All’s well that ends well,” said he, and indeed he really meant it.
If the case had gone any further he would not have got much out of it.
The family would have called in Maître Peyrecave of the Bordeaux Bar:
so everything was for the best.
CHAPTER II
Thérèse loved the musty leathery smell of old carriages: and she did
not mind having left her cigarettes behind, for she hated smoking
in the dark. The carriage lamps lit up the sloping banks each side
of the road, a strip of ferns and undergrowth, and the feet of the
giant pines. At intervals, heaps of stones by the wayside cut across
the moving shadow of the carriage. Sometimes a country cart passed
them, and the mules instinctively moved to the right-hand side of the
road without a sign from the sleeping muleteer. Thérèse began to feel
that she would never reach Argelouse; she hoped she never would. It
was more than an hour in the carriage to Nizan, where she got into
the little local train that stopped, heaven knows how long, at every
station. And from Saint Clair, where she got out, to Argelouse, she
had to drive ten miles in a trap, for the road was such that no car
could be driven along it at night. Fate could rise up at any one
of these stages and set her free. Thérèse indulged herself with the
fancy that had come over her the day before the Judge had given his
decision, supposing the charge against her had been confirmed: the
possibility of an earthquake. She took off her hat, leaned her pale
cheeks and little throbbing head against the pungent leather, and
let her body sway to the jolting of the carriage. Until that evening
she had been living on her nerves: now that she was safe she began
to realise the extent of her exhaustion. Her hollow cheeks, gaunt
cheek-bones, sunken lips, and low broad forehead, were surely the
features of one convicted,--although her fellow-men had not pronounced
her guilty,--convicted and condemned to eternal solitude. That charm
of hers, which every one used to say was irresistible,--was it not the
conscious charm of those who must be always on the watch to conceal
their secret torment, the stabbing agony of the wound within them? In
the darkness of that jolting carriage, on that highway through the dark
pine-forest, sat a young woman, now without her mask, whose face, as
she passed her hand wearily across her forehead, was the face of one
burning at the stake. What would be the first words of Bernard whose
perjury had saved her? He would probably not ask any questions that
evening,--but to-morrow? Thérèse shut her eyes, opened them again, and,
like horses when they drop into a walk uphill, tried to realise the
terrible ascent that lay before her. Well, well, she would not look
ahead; it would perhaps be easier than she thought; she would not look
ahead at all,--just sleep.... But she is no longer in the carriage ...
who is that behind the green-baize table? ... the examining Judge ...
what, again? But surely he knows that it is all over. No, he shakes
his head: the case cannot be dropped, a new fact has come to light.
A new fact? Thérèse turns away so that her enemy shall not see her
confusion. “Cast your mind back, Madame: In the inner pocket of that
old cloak,--the one you used only in October for pigeon-shooting, was
there nothing forgotten or concealed?” She cannot speak, the words
stick in her throat. Without taking his eyes off his victim, the Judge
lays upon the table a tiny packet sealed with red wax. Thérèse knows by
heart the formula written on the label, which he proceeds to read out
with terrible distinctness.
Chloroform: 10 grammes.
Aconitine: 2 grammes.
Digitaline: 20 centigrammes.
And the Judge bursts out laughing....
The brake rasped against the wheel, and Thérèse awoke. Her heaving
lungs were full of mist,--they must be driving down to the “White
Brook.” So, in her girlhood, she used to dream that, by some mistake,
she had had to take her junior certificate examination over again; and
when she awoke this evening she felt as relieved as she used to do in
those far-off days: just a touch of anxiety because the decision was
not yet official, though she realised, of course, that her lawyer had
to be notified first.
* * * * *
She was free: what more could she want? It would be perfectly simple to
put herself right with Bernard. She would make a clean breast of the
whole thing, omitting nothing. She would have to tell the whole story,
without concealment, and tell it that very evening. This resolution
made her feel positively cheerful. Before she got to Argelouse, she
would have time to ‘prepare her confession,’ as her pious little friend
Anne de la Trave used to say every Saturday of their happy holidays
together. Indeed, her innocent little sister Anne played no mean part
in this tragedy. These simple creatures do not know in what strange
happenings they are involved by day and night, and what poisoned
growths spring up under their childish footsteps.
The girl was quite right when she had said, as she so often did to
Thérèse, then a sceptical, and mocking schoolgirl: “You can’t think
how relieved you feel when you have confessed and been forgiven,--when
you can begin all over again with a clean slate.” Indeed, the moment
Thérèse had made up her mind to tell the whole story she did feel a
sort of delicious relief. She would tell Bernard everything: she would
say....
Yes, but what should she say? How should she begin? Could any words
express that confused succession of desires, resolves, and impulses?
“How do people behave,” she thought, “when they acknowledge their
crimes? I don’t acknowledge mine: I didn’t want to commit it. I don’t
know what I did want. I never knew the meaning of that dreadful force
within me, and yet outside me: and I was myself horrified at all the
destruction it left behind.”
A smoky oil lamp lit up the plaster walls of the Nizan station and
a carriage outside it: and all about them gathered the encompassing
darkness. A train standing in the station whistled and hooted dismally.
Gardère took Thérèse’s bag and again stared at her greedily. His wife
must have told him to watch carefully how she was looking and behaving.
For the benefit of Monsieur Larroque’s coachman Thérèse instinctively
assumed that smile that made people say: “Never mind whether she is
pretty or plain, you cannot resist her charm.” She asked him to take
her ticket, because she did not like to cross the waiting-room, where
two farmers’ wives were sitting with baskets on their knees swaying to
the rhythm of their knitting-needles.
When he brought back the ticket she told him to keep the change. He
touched his cap, and then, gathering up the reins, he turned to have a
last, long look at his master’s daughter.
The train was not yet made up. In the old days, at the beginning of the
long vacation, or on the way back to school, Thérèse Larroque and Anne
de la Trave enjoyed this stop at Nizan station. They used to eat ham
and eggs at the local inn and walk with their arms round each other’s
waists down that road that looked so dark this evening: but in those
vanished years Thérèse always saw it white under the moonlight. And
how they used to laugh at their elongated shadows as they melted into
each other! They talked, of course, about their mistresses and their
school-friends, one standing up for her convent and the other for her
school. “Anne!” Thérèse uttered the name aloud in the darkness. She
must begin by telling Bernard about Anne. Her Bernard was one of the
most precise of men: he classified all emotions, kept them rigidly
apart, and ignored the complicated network of sensations that unites
them. How could he follow her into those shadowy places where she had
lived and suffered? Yet she must try to make him: the only thing to do,
when she went into the room later on, would be to sit on the edge of
the bed and take him, step by step, through the whole story until he
should stop her and say: “Now I understand; get up; I forgive you.”
She felt her way through the station-master’s garden where she
could smell the chrysanthemums without seeing them. The first class
compartment was empty, and in any case the lamp was much too dim to
reveal her face. She could not read: but Thérèse must have found any
novel insipid in comparison with the terrible story of her life. She
might die of shame, despair, remorse, or exhaustion,--but of boredom,
never.
She sat back in her corner and closed her eyes. It was incredible that
a woman of her intelligence should not be able to make the tragedy
intelligible. When her confession was over, Bernard would of course
raise her to her feet and say: “Go in peace, Thérèse: be of good
comfort: deeds that are over and done shall never part us now, we will
wait for death together in this house at Argelouse. I am thirsty: go
down into the kitchen and make me a glass of orangeade: I shall drink
it at a draught; no matter what it looks like, nor even if it tastes
like my morning chocolate of those days! Do you remember how sick I
used to be, darling; and how kindly you held my head, as you stared
at that dreadful greenish liquid? You were never frightened when I
fainted. And yet how pale you were that night when I noticed that
my legs had gone dead and stiff! I was shivering, do you remember?
And that old fool Doctor Pédemay who was so astonished because my
temperature was so low and my pulse so feverish....”
“No,” Thérèse thought to herself, “he won’t have understood. I shall
have to begin at the very beginning.”
But where is the beginning of our acts? The thread of our fate, when
we try to lay it bare, is like one of those plants that cannot be torn
up with all its roots. Should Thérèse go back to her childhood? But
childhood itself is an end and a fulfilment.
* * * * *
Thérèse’s childhood;--snow at the source of a stream now utterly
defiled. At school she appeared to live aloof from those petty
tragedies that tormented her companions. The mistresses often held up
Thérèse Larroque as an example to the rest. “Thérèse,” one of them
said, “is an unusually high moral type: she knows it: and her pride
in that fact is quite enough to keep her straight without any fear of
punishment.”
“But was I happy?” Thérèse asked herself. “And was I sincere? All
my life before my marriage has, as I look back on it, this air of
innocence, in contrast, no doubt, to the ineffaceable contamination of
my marriage. My life at school, before I became a wife and a mother,
seems a paradise, though I did not realise it then. How could I know
that in those years before my life began I was living my real life?
Pure I was: an angel if you like: but a very passionate angel! Whatever
my mistresses may have said, I knew what suffering was and I made
others feel it. I enjoyed the pain I gave and the pain that my friends
inflicted: my suffering was a pure emotion, untainted by remorse: and
indeed, there was pain and joy in most simple pleasures.”
But Thérèse was satisfied if she could feel herself worthy of Anne
when she met her once more in the summer heats, under the oak trees
of Argelouse. She must be able to say to this little offspring of the
Convent: “I can be as pure as you are without all those wreaths and
ribbons.” Besides, Anne de la Trave’s purity was mainly ignorance.
The ladies of the Sacré-Cœur drew many veils between their little
charges and the world. Thérèse despised them for confusing virtue and
ignorance. “You don’t know anything about life, darling,” she used
often to say, in those far-off summers at Argelouse. Those lovely
summers; Thérèse, as she sat in the little train, that had at last
begun to move, realised that she must go back to them if she was to
get a clear view of what had happened. It is incredible, but true,
that in those pure dawns of our lives the most dreadful storms are
already threatening in the distance. Those azure mornings are an evil
omen for the weather of the afternoon and evening. They portend wrecked
flower-beds, broken branches, and muddy ruin everywhere. Thérèse did
not reflect, or come to a decision at any period of her life; there
were no sharp turnings; she went down an imperceptible slope, gradually
at first, and then faster. The lost woman of this evening was identical
with the radiant creature of those summers at Argelouse, where she was
now returning in secret and under cover of the night.
How wearisome it all was! Where was the use in trying to uncover the
hidden springs of acts accomplished? She could see nothing through the
carriage window except the reflection of her pale expressionless face.
There came a sudden break in the monotonous rhythm of the little
train: the engine gave a prolonged whistle and cautiously drew in to
a station. An arm held up a swaying lantern: there followed shouted
utterances in the local dialect, and squeals from sundry pigs that
were being taken off the train: Uzeste already. One more station
and then Saint Clair: thence she must drive the rest of the way to
Argelouse. Thérèse had very little time left to prepare her defence.
CHAPTER III
Argelouse is literally one of the ends of the earth,--one of those
places beyond which you cannot go; in those parts they call them
“_Quartiers_.” A few farms, with no church or cemetery, scattered round
a field of rye, over five miles from the market-town of Saint Clair,
with which it is connected by a single road in very bad repair. This
road, such as it is, fades away beyond Argelouse into sandy tracks: and
thence, until the sea, there is nothing but fifty miles of marshes,
lagoons, young pines, and sandy heath; and by the end of winter the
very sheep look as grey as that bleak landscape.
The best families in Saint Clair come from these lost lands. Towards
the middle of the last century, when the sale of resin and timber began
to swell their scanty profits from flocks and herds, the grandparents
of those living to-day moved to Saint Clair, and their ancestral
homes at Argelouse were used as farm buildings. The carved beams of
the gables, and here and there a marble mantelpiece, bore witness to
their ancient dignity. Every year they came nearer to collapse, and
one of the roofs had sagged lower and lower until its eaves nearly
touched the ground. Two of these ancient habitations, however, still
housed their proprietors. The Larroque and the Desqueyroux families
left their homes at Argelouse just as they had received them from their
predecessors. Jerôme Larroque, Mayor and County Councillor of B., whose
principal residence was just outside that small provincial town, would
never allow any alterations at the estate at Argelouse, which had come
to him through his wife (who had died in child-bed while Thérèse was
still a baby), and where he thought it quite natural that his young
daughter should like to spend her holidays. She used to go there at
the beginning of July, under the tutelage of an elder sister of her
father’s, one Aunt Clara, a deaf old maid, who also liked the lonely
place because, as she used to say, she did not have to be constantly
watching people’s lips to make out what they were saying, and because
she knew that there was nothing to listen to except the wind in the
pines. Monsieur Larroque was pleased, because Argelouse relieved him
of his daughter’s company and brought her into contact with Bernard
Desqueyroux whom she was one day to marry, in accordance with the
wishes of both families, though the understanding was not as yet
official.
Bernard Desqueyroux had inherited from his father a house at Argelouse,
next to that belonging to the Larroques: he was never seen there until
the shooting season began, and he did not sleep there until the month
of October, when he went pigeon-shooting in the neighbourhood. In the
winter this sedate young gentleman studied law in Paris; and in the
summer he did not spend much time with his family. He could not endure
Victor de la Trave, his mother’s second husband, who had not had a
penny when she married him, and whose extravagance was the scandal of
Saint Clair; and his half-sister Anne seemed too young to deserve any
attention from him. Nor did he think much more about Thérèse. Every
one regarded their marriage as inevitable because it seemed such a pity
not to combine the two estates, and he very sensibly shared the common
opinion on this point. But he left nothing to chance, and took a pride
in the management of his life. “If a man is unhappy he has only himself
to blame,” this slightly corpulent youth was wont to observe. Until his
marriage he divided his time equally between work and pleasure; and
although he by no means neglected food, drink, and sport, he worked
“like a galley slave,” so his mother said. A husband, he thought, ought
to be better informed than his wife: and Thérèse’s intelligence was
already famous. She was doubtless clever, but Bernard knew the kind of
arguments to influence a woman: moreover, as his mother pointed out,
it was not a bad thing to “have a leg in both camps,” and old Larroque
might be useful to him.
At twenty-six years of age Bernard Desqueyroux, after a few visits to
Italy, Spain, and Holland, which he had carefully “got up” beforehand,
would marry the richest and the cleverest girl in the neighbourhood,
though not perhaps the prettiest: (“Never mind whether she is pretty or
plain, you can’t resist her charm!”)
Thérèse smiled at the caricature of Bernard that she drew in her mind:
she reflected that he was, in point of fact, better than most of the
young men she could have married. The women of those moorlands by the
sea are much superior to the men, who see no one but each other after
they have left school and hardly ever lose their boorishness. Their
hearts are in their country, and in spirit they never leave it. They
are never really happy anywhere else: they would feel that they were
being utterly false to it if they gave up their country clothes, the
local dialect, and the rustic habits of their home. Under Bernard’s
thick skin there was certainly a sort of goodness of heart. When he
was at the point of death the tenants said there wouldn’t be another
gentleman left when he had gone. Yes, he was certainly kind, just,
and fundamentally honest. He never talked of what he did not know;
he accepted his own limitations. In his younger days he had not
been bad-looking, this unlicked Hyppolytus, though he was far less
interested in girls than in the hares he coursed on the moors.
Yet it was not Bernard that Thérèse, with half-closed eyes and leaning
her head against the carriage windows, pictured to herself bicycling
along the road from Saint Clair to Argelouse, about nine o’clock,
before the heat of the day had reached its height; not her cold-blooded
suitor, but his little sister Anne, her face all afire in the
sunshine;--the grasshoppers were already calling from pine to pine, and
the murmurous hum of the moorland, like the roar of a furnace, began to
rise up to the sky; and myriads of flies hovered above the tall heather.
“You’d better put your cloak on to come into the drawing-room,” she
used to say, “it’s like an ice-house”: and Aunt Clara added: “I’ll
give you something to drink, dear, when you aren’t quite so hot.” Anne
shouted futile words of greeting to the deaf old lady: and Thérèse
said: “Don’t make yourself hoarse, darling, she understands everything
from the way you move your lips.” But Anne insisted on articulating
every word, distorting her young lips in the process, and the Aunt
made all sorts of meaningless replies, until the friends had to run
away so as to be able to laugh unobserved.
In the far corner of the darkened carriage Thérèse looked back upon
those innocent days,--innocent, but gladdened by a fleeting happiness,
half understood: and she could not know that this transient gleam
was all the happiness ever to be hers. Nothing warned her that her
fate was laid in a darkened drawing-room, encompassed by the pitiless
summer, on a red-plush sofa by the side of Anne, who sat poring over a
photograph album on her knees. Why was she so happy? She and Anne had
hardly a single taste in common. Anne hated reading, and did nothing
but sew, chatter, and giggle. She had not an idea in her head, while
Thérèse devoured with equal voracity the novels of Paul de Kock, the
_Causeries du Lundi_, the _History of the Consulate_, indeed all that
miscellaneous literature that lies about in cupboards in a house in
the country. Sometimes Anne got up to see whether the heat had passed:
but as the light burst through the half-open shutters, like a splash
of molten metal, it seemed to burn the matting on the floor and they
had to shut everything up once more and crouch indoors. Even at
sunset, when only the feet of the pines glowed in the level rays, and
a last persistent grasshopper could still be heard deep down among the
herbage, the heat still hovered stagnant under the oak trees. The two
friends lay stretched upon the grass at the edge of the field, as they
might have sat down on the shore of a lake. Stormy clouds called up
fleeting pictures as they passed; but before Thérèse could make out the
winged lady that Anne saw in the sky, it had changed, she said, into
some strange elongated beast.
In September they could go out after the midday meal and explore that
land of thirst: there was not a drop of water to be seen at Argelouse.
They had to walk far into the sandy country before they reached the
sources of the little river called La Hure, where they bubble up
among the alder trees in a low-lying meadow. The girls’ bare feet
were benumbed by the icy water, but they soon grew burning hot again,
before they were even dry. Like the darkened drawing-room at home, one
of the huts used in October by the pigeon-shooters, gave them shelter.
They had nothing to say, not one word: they sat in virgin contemplation
while time fled by, and no more thought of moving than a sportsman who
signals for silence when the birds are coming over. They felt as though
the slightest gesture would have put to flight their chaste ingenuous
happiness. Anne was the first to break the spell,--it was growing dark
and she wanted to go out shooting larks: Thérèse, though she detested
the sport, followed her, for she could not bear to lose a minute of her
company. Anne went into the entrance hall and took down her .24 which
had no recoil. Her friend watched her standing in the field of rye
apparently aiming at the sun. Thérèse stopped her ears: a sudden wild
cry broke the blue stillness, and the huntress picked up the wounded
bird, squeezed it carefully, and, as she was actually brushing the warm
feathers against her lips, choked it.
“You will come to-morrow, won’t you?”
“Oh, no, I mustn’t come every day.”
Anne did not want to see her every day: this was perfectly sensible and
Thérèse could say nothing; indeed, it would not have occurred to her to
object. Anne said she would rather not come back. No, there was nothing
to prevent her, but why should they see each other every day? They
would end, she said, by hating the sight of each other. “You’re quite
right,” Thérèse replied, “don’t make an obligation of it. Come back
when you feel like it,--when you have nothing better to do,” and the
girl jumped on her bicycle, and disappeared down the darkening road,
ringing her bell.
Thérèse walked back towards the house. The tenants greeted her from
a distance, though the children stared at her and said nothing. It
was that hour of the evening when the sheep stand scattered under the
oak trees, and then rush together into a huddled mass when they hear
the shepherd’s cry. Her Aunt was looking out for her on the doorstep,
and, as deaf people will, talked incessantly, so as to prevent Thérèse
saying anything to her. What was this despair in her heart? She did not
want to read; she did not want to do anything, and wandered out of
doors once more....
“Don’t go far away,” said the Aunt; “dinner will soon be ready.”
She went back to the edge of the road, there was not a soul in sight,
as far as the eye could reach. Some one rang the bell for her at the
kitchen door. Perhaps the lamp would have to be lit that evening, she
thought. Indeed, this rather haggard-looking girl felt she was living
in as deep a silence as her deaf companion, who sat motionless with her
hands crossed before her on the table-cloth.
* * * * *
But what would Bernard make of this vague world, Bernard who belonged
to the blind and ruthless race of men who know their own minds? As
soon as she began, Thérèse thought, he would break in with: “Well, why
did you marry me, then? I wasn’t running after you.” It was certainly
true that he had shown no signs of impatience. Thérèse remembered that
Bernard’s mother, Madame Victor de la Trave, used to unburden herself
to the casual visitor somewhat as follows:
“He was quite ready to wait, but she would have him. No, she’s not
_quite_ all we could wish, I’m sorry to say: for instance, she smokes
far too much,--just a pose, of course. But she’s a good girl and
absolutely straightforward: and we shall soon put a few wholesome ideas
into her head. Of course, there _are_ disadvantages about the marriage.
Yes, her grandmother Bellade,--I know all about it, but that’s all
forgotten now, isn’t it? Indeed it wasn’t really a scandal, it was so
carefully hushed up. Do you believe in heredity? The father has no
religion, of course, but he has always set her an excellent example: a
saint in a tweed suit, so it seems. Besides, he’s a most influential
person and one needs all the help one can get in these days. There’s
always something one has to ignore. And--strange as it may seem--she is
richer than we are! And she worships Bernard, which is all to the good.”
It was true,--she had worshipped Bernard: no attitude called for less
effort on her part. As they sat in the drawing-room at Argelouse, or
lay under the oak trees, she had only to look up at him with eyes that
she knew so well how to fill with amorous innocence. Such a victim at
his feet flattered the young gentleman but did not surprise him. “Don’t
play with her,” his mother would say to him, “she’s eating her heart
out.”
“I married him because....”
Thérèse, with bent brows and her hand over her eyes, tried to remember.
There was the childish joy of becoming Anne’s sister-in-law. But it
was Anne who was especially delighted with the idea: such a bond meant
little to Thérèse. There was indeed another motive,--and why should
she blush for it? She was far from indifferent to Bernard’s five
thousand acres. It was always said of her that “property was in her
blood.” At the end of interminable dinners, when the liqueurs were put
on the table, Thérèse often stayed behind with the men, absorbed in
their talk about tenants, pit props, resin and turpentine. Valuations
and estimates roused her to enthusiasm. The lordship over so vast a
stretch of forest had certainly dazzled her. Besides, she thought, he,
too, had fallen in love with her pines. But perhaps Thérèse had been
influenced by a deeper feeling which she now tried to bring to light:
in this marriage she had possibly looked less for power and possessions
than safety. Surely it was something like panic that had hurried her
into it. She had shown the practical instincts of a housewife from her
earliest childhood, and she was impatient to occupy her proper place in
life and society, once and for all. She wanted to be protected against
she knew not what. She had never seemed so sensible as at the time of
her betrothal: she was becoming part of the family unit, part of the
social scheme: she was entering an Order. She was flying for safety.
* * * * *
In that springtime of their betrothal they were walking along the sandy
road that leads from Argelouse to Vilméja. The dead leaves on the oak
trees still stained the pure azure of the sky: the ground was strewn
with dead ferns, and the acid green of the new shoots could be seen
here and there above the surface. “Mind your cigarette,” said Bernard,
“you might very well start a fire: the soil is quite dried up.”
She asked him whether it was true that ferns contained prussic acid:
Bernard said he did not know whether they contained enough to poison
any one, and enquired affectionately whether she wanted to die: and
she laughed. He expressed the hope that she would try and be more
natural: and Thérèse remembered that she had shut her eyes, while two
great hands clasped her small head, and a voice said in her ear: “There
are still some notions inside this that shouldn’t be there.” And she
answered: “Then you must get rid of them, Bernard.”
They watched the builders adding another room to the farm-house at
Vilméja. The owners, who came from Bordeaux, wanted to get it ready for
their youngest son who, they were told, had got consumption and could
not last long. His sister had gone the same way. Bernard looked on the
Azévédos with the utmost contempt. “They swear by all that’s holy,”
said he, “that they are not of Jewish extraction, but you have only
got to look at them! Consumption, too, and Heaven knows what else.”
Thérèse was entirely mistress of herself. Anne would come back from
the Convent at San-Sebastian for the wedding: she and young Deguilhem
were to take the offertory. She had asked Thérèse to describe the
bridesmaids’ dresses by return of post: in fact, she wanted some
patterns, as she said it was to everybody’s interest that she should
not choose anything that clashed with the rest. Thérèse had never known
such peace, or what she thought was peace: it merely meant that the
reptile in her bosom was half asleep and torpid.
CHAPTER IV
The day of the wedding was stifling, and it was on that very day, in
the narrow church at Saint Clair, where the women’s whispering drowned
the wheezes of the harmonium and their scents overpowered the incense,
that Thérèse felt that she was lost. She had been in a trance when she
entered the cage, and at the sound of the heavy door, as it shut behind
her, the poor child awoke. Nothing was changed, but she felt that never
again would she walk and dream alone. She was embedded in that dreadful
family, where she would smoulder like a malignant fire creeping through
the heather and setting one pine alight and then another, until the
forest is a mass of flaming torches. There was not one face in all that
crowded church on which she cared to rest her eyes, except Anne’s:
but the girl’s childish glee made Thérèse draw back. Surely Anne must
realise that they would be parted that very evening, and not in space
alone: but because of what Thérèse must suffer, that inexpiable thing
that her body must so soon endure. Anne stayed behind on the shore
in the company of those as yet immaculate: Thérèse was to go down
among the herd whom use has soiled. As she bent down in the sacristy
to kiss the little laughing lips, she became suddenly aware of the
insignificance of this creature who had been, for her, the centre of a
world of fantastic joys and sorrows: in those few seconds, she measured
the infinite disparity between the dark forces in her heart and this
pretty powdered face.
Long afterwards, at Saint Clair and at B., every one who spoke of those
magnificent celebrations (more than a hundred tenants and servants had
sat down to eat and drink under the oak trees) always alluded to the
fact that the bride (“Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you
can’t resist her charm!”) looked ugly, almost repulsive. “She wasn’t
like herself,” they would say: “she seemed another person.” To them she
merely looked different from usual; and they put it down to the white
wedding-dress and the heat. They did not know that it was her real face.
Late in the day of that half-rustic wedding, groups of country people,
the girls conspicuous in their gay dresses, made the car of the newly
married pair slow down while they cheered them; the road was strewn
with acacia blossoms, and they passed a number of country carts
pursuing a somewhat zigzag course, driven by certain cheerful fellows
who had clearly had a glass or two of wine. As she recalled the night
that followed, Thérèse murmured: “It was horrible”: then, correcting
herself; “No, not so horrible as all that.”
After all, she did not suffer much while they were travelling in the
Italian lakes. She was absorbed in the game of keeping her secret. A
fiancé is easily deceived, but a husband--! Any one can tell lies:
but physical lying is a different art. It is not given to every one
to imitate desire, delight, and the happy lassitude of love. Thérèse
discovered how to bend her body to these impersonations, and she took
a bitter pleasure in so doing. In that unknown world of sensations,
which a man was now compelling her to explore, she could imagine that
she, too, might have found a possible happiness. What would it have
been like? When we stand before a landscape shrouded in rain and try to
picture what it would have looked like in sunshine, so Thérèse became
acquainted with desire.
Her young husband Bernard, with his vacant eyes, always worried because
the numbers on the pictures did not correspond with those given in
Baedeker, content if he had seen the sights in the shortest possible
time,--what an easy dupe he was! He was pent up in his pleasures, like
those little pigs that are so charming to watch through the palings of
their sty, snuffling with satisfaction, in their trough (“I was the
trough”: thought Thérèse). He had their hurried, fussy, serious look:
he was methodical. “Do you really think we should do that?” ventured
Thérèse sometimes, in her stupefaction. He laughed and reassured her:
Where had he learnt to classify everything affecting the body,--to
distinguish the honest man’s caresses from those of the sadist? He was
never in a moment’s doubt. One evening in Paris, where they stopped on
their return journey, Bernard ostentatiously left a music-hall at which
the performance shocked him: “And to think that foreigners see that!
Disgraceful! And that is what they judge by....”
Thérèse marvelled that this modest fellow was the same man whose
patient ingenuities of the darkness she would, in less than an hour,
have to endure.
“Poor Bernard--no worse than another. But desire transforms the being
that lays hands on us into a monster quite unlike himself. Nothing
divides us from our accomplice but his frenzy: I have always seen
Bernard wallowing in his pleasure: and I,--I lay like one dead, as if
this epileptic madman might have risked strangling me if I had moved an
inch. More often than not, at the supreme moment, he suddenly realised
he was alone; and the dismal ecstasy came abruptly to an end. Bernard
retraced his steps and found me lying as if I had been thrown up on a
sea shore, cold and with clenched teeth.”
One letter from Anne and one only: the child did not care about
writing;--but, it so happened that there was not a line that Thérèse
did not read with pleasure. A letter is far less an expression of our
real sentiments than of those we ought to feel if our letter is to be
welcome. Anne complained that she could not go in the direction of
Vilméja since young Azévédo had come; she had seen his wheeled chair
among the ferns; consumptives made her shudder.
Thérèse read the letter over and over again and did not expect any
others: so she was much surprised when they got their letters (the day
after the interrupted evening at the music-hall) to recognise Anne de
la Trave’s writing on three envelopes. Various “Postes Restantes” had
sent this bundle of letters on to Paris, for they had not stopped at
several places on their programme: “they were in a hurry,” Bernard
said, “to get back to their nest”; but the real reason was that they
could not endure each other any longer. He was dying of boredom
away from his guns, his dogs, and the inn, where the bitters and
pomegranate syrup tasted better than anywhere else; and he was sick
of this cold mocking woman who never seemed to be enjoying herself
and could not talk about anything interesting!... Thérèse wanted to
get back to Saint Clair, like a convict, who has grown tired of his
temporary cell, becomes curious about the island in which the remainder
of his life is to be spent. Thérèse had carefully deciphered the date
stamped on each of the three envelopes; and she was just opening the
first when Bernard uttered an exclamation, shouted several words which
she did not catch, for the window was open, and as their hotel was at a
street corner the motor-buses changed gears immediately outside. He had
stopped shaving to read a letter from his mother. Thérèse could still
see his “cellular” vest and his muscular bare arms: the pale skin, and
then the sudden coarse crimson of the neck and face. The July morning
was already heavy with sulphurous heat: the smoky sunshine made the
house fronts opposite, beyond the balcony, look grimier still. He had
come up to Thérèse, and shouted: “This is too much. Your little friend
Anne is going it! Who’d have said that my young sister....” And as
Thérèse looked at him questioningly:
“She’s fallen in love with the Azévédo boy: can you believe it?
Yes, really; that consumptive fellow for whom they were enlarging
Vilméja.... She says she’ll wait until she’s of age.... Mother says she
is completely mad. I only hope the Deguilhems don’t know anything about
it. Young Deguilhem would be quite capable of giving up the marriage
altogether. Have you got letters from her? Now we shall know all about
it then: aren’t you going to open them?”
“I want to read them in order. Besides, I couldn’t show them to you.”
This was just like her: she complicated everything. However, the
essential point was that she should bring the girl to her senses again.
“My parents are relying on you. She’ll do anything you tell her.... Oh
yes, she will.... You can save the situation.”
While she was dressing, he would go out to send a telegram and book two
seats on the Southern Express: and she might begin to pack the trunks.
“Why aren’t you reading the child’s letters? What are you waiting for?”
“I’m waiting till you have gone.”
Long after he had shut the door Thérèse had remained lying on the sofa
smoking cigarettes, and staring at the great letters of blackened
gilt, fixed to the balcony opposite: then she had torn open the first
envelope. No: it could not be that sweet little fool, that light-headed
little Convent girl who had conceived these words of flame. It could
not be that chilly little heart,--for such it was, and Thérèse ought to
know!--which had poured forth that Song of Songs, that long ecstatic
lamentation of a woman possessed, of a body almost stricken down with
joy, from the first encounter.
“_... When I met him, I could not believe it was he: he
was chasing one of the dogs and shouting. How could I have
imagined it was the invalid ... but he isn’t an invalid:
he is simply taking precautions, because of his family
history. He isn’t even delicate,--only rather thin: and of
course he’s used to being spoilt and pampered ... you would
not recognise me: I actually go and fetch his overcoat as
soon as it gets cooler._”
If Bernard had come back into the room that minute, he would have
noticed that the woman sitting on the bed was not his wife, but some
one he did not know, a strange and nameless creature. She threw away
her cigarette, and tore open a second envelope.
“_... I don’t care how long I have to wait: I don’t mind
what they say: indeed, I don’t mind anything since I have
been in love. They are keeping me at Saint Clair, but
Argelouse is not so far off that Jean and I cannot meet.
Do you remember the pigeon-shooters’ hut? Why, it was you,
darling, that chose beforehand the places where I was
to know such happiness.... Oh, please don’t think we do
anything we should not. He is so considerate. You have no
idea what a boy of his kind is like. He has studied and
read a great deal, like you: but I don’t mind that in a
young man and I never think of teasing him about it. I do
not know what I would give to be as clever as you are. Oh,
my darling, I wonder what your happiness can be like, if
the mere approach to it is so exquisite. When I sit beside
him in the hut, where you used to like to take our lunch,
and his hand lies still on my heart,--and I put my hand
on his (it is what he calls: ‘the last caress allowed’),
I feel happiness within me like something that I could
touch. I tell myself that there is yet another joy beyond
this one; and when Jean goes away, quite pale, the memory
of our caresses, the thought of the next day and all that
it will bring, makes me deaf to the complaints and prayers
and insults of those poor people who do not know ... have
never known: Darling, forgive me: I talk to you about this
happiness as if you did not know it either: and yet I am
only a novice beside you: and also I am sure that you will
be on our side against these cruel people._”
Thérèse opened the third envelope: only a brief scrawl.
“_Do come, darling: they have separated us, and I am
not allowed out of sight. They believe that you will be
on their side. I have said that I will abide by your
judgement. I will explain everything: he is not ill....
I am happy though I suffer. I am happy to suffer because
of him and his suffering is a joy to me because it is the
proof of his love for me...._”
Thérèse read no further. As she slipped the sheet into the envelope,
she saw a photograph inside it that she had not noticed; she stood near
the window and examined the face: it was that of a youth whose head,
owing to his thick hair, seemed too large for him. Thérèse recognized
the place where the photograph had been taken: an embankment on which
Jean Azévédo stood up like David (behind him was a stretch of heath on
which sheep were pasturing). His coat was over his arm: and his shirt a
little open ... (“the last caress allowed”). Thérèse raised her eyes
and was amazed at the reflection of her face in the mirror. It cost her
an effort to unclench her teeth and swallow. She rubbed her temples and
forehead with eau-de-Cologne.
“She knows that joy ... what about me, why shouldn’t I know it too?”
The photograph lay on the table: she caught the glitter of a pin beside
it.
“I did that. I actually did that.” ... In the jolting train, now
moving faster down a gradient, Thérèse said slowly to herself: “It is
two years ago since, in that hotel bedroom, I picked up the pin and
ran it through the boy’s photograph in the region of the heart,--not
violently, but coolly, as if I was doing something quite ordinary;--and
then I threw the photograph down the lavatory; and pulled the plug.”
When Bernard came back he had remarked how serious she looked, like
some one who has been thinking something over, and decided what to
do. But she ought not to smoke so much, he said: she was poisoning
herself. Thérèse said that too much importance should not be attached
to a young girl’s fancies. She promised to bring her to a right view
of things. Bernard wanted Thérèse to reassure him,--full of the joy
of feeling the return tickets in his pockets; and more especially
gratified that his family had already asked for his wife’s help. He
announced that, cost what it might, for the last luncheon on their trip
they would go to some restaurant in the Bois. In the taxi he talked
about his plans for the shooting season; he was in a hurry to try the
dog that Balion was breaking in for him. His mother wrote that since
the mare had been fired she did not limp any more.
* * * * *
There were not yet many people in the restaurant, where the innumerable
waiters made them nervous. Thérèse still remembered the smell--a blend
of geraniums and vinegar. Bernard had never tasted Hock (“Good Lord,
they don’t give it away: still, Christmas only comes once a year!”).
Bernard’s broad shoulders prevented Thérèse seeing much of the room.
Behind the great plate-glass windows, motor-cars slid up and stopped,
more silently than in a film. She watched what she knew to be the
temporal muscles moving behind Bernard’s ears. After the first few
glasses he got flushed: for some weeks now this handsome cavalier from
the country had had no means of working off his daily ration of food
and drink. She did not hate him but how she longed to be alone to think
about her pain and find exactly where it lay. She simply wished he was
somewhere else, so that she might no longer have to force herself to
eat and smile, compose her face, and veil the fire that must be blazing
in her eyes: so that her mind might dwell freely on her mysterious
despair.... Some one has escaped from the desert island where you
thought to have her with you till the end; she crosses the abyss that
divides you from the world and is gone;--to another planet, ... and
yet: No.... Who has ever been able to do that? Anne was always one of
those who were content with life as it came: it was a changeling whose
sleeping head Thérèse had watched lying on her lap, in their solitary
holidays together: she had never known the real Anne de la Trave, the
one who was now meeting Jean Azévédo in the deserted shooting-hut
between Saint Clair and Argelouse.
“What is the matter? You aren’t eating. You mustn’t leave anything:
it would be a shame considering the price it costs. Is it the heat?
You aren’t going to faint, I hope. Or perhaps you’re feeling sick ...
already?”
She smiled ... with her lips only. She said she was thinking about
Anne’s adventure (she had to talk about Anne). And as Bernard said he
was not bothering himself any longer now that she had the matter in
hand, his wife asked him why his parents were opposed to the marriage.
He thought she was laughing at him, and begged her not to begin her
paradoxes.
“In the first place, you know very well they are Jews: Mother knew his
grandfather, the one who refused to be baptised.”
But Thérèse pretended that these Portuguese-Jewish names were the
oldest in Bordeaux:
“The Azévédos were great people when our ancestors were miserable
shepherds, shivering with fever by their marshes.”
“Look here, Thérèse: don’t argue for the pleasure of arguing: all Jews
are the same ... and besides they’re a degenerate family--consumptive
to the marrow, everybody knows it.”
She lit a cigarette with a gesture that had always offended Bernard:
“Well, then, tell me what your grandfather, and your great-grandfather
died of. When you married me did you bother to enquire what illness
carried off my mother? Don’t you suppose that we should find enough
consumptives and syphilitics among our ancestors to poison the
universe?”
“You go too far, Thérèse, let me tell you. Even when you’re joking and
trying to get a rise out of me, you ought to respect the family.”
He positively gobbled with annoyance, trying to be impressive and, at
the same time, not to look foolish. But she persisted:
“Really, our families make me laugh: they’re too ridiculous. They’re
terribly shocked when a thing like this is publicly known, but they’re
quite indifferent to all the horrors no one talks about.... Why, you
yourself use the expression ‘secret diseases,’ don’t you? Surely
the diseases most dangerous to the race are just precisely those.
Our families never think of them, though they are so very clever
at bundling anything unpleasant out of sight. If it wasn’t for the
servants we should know nothing about them: fortunately there are the
servants....”
“I shan’t answer you. When you start off like this, the best thing to
do is to wait until you’ve finished. With me, it doesn’t matter so very
much. But it won’t do at all at home, you know. We don’t make jokes
about the family.”
The family! Thérèse let her cigarette go out. With staring eyes, she
saw before her that cage with its innumerable and living bars, a cage
set with ears and eyes, in which she would crouch motionless, her chin
on her knees, and her arms clasping her legs, and wait for death.
“Come, come, Thérèse, don’t look like that: if you could see
yourself....”
She smiled and put on her mask again.
“I wasn’t serious ... how silly you are, darling.” But when Bernard
tried to come near to her in the taxi, she evaded him and kept him off.
The last evening before they returned home, they went to bed at nine
o’clock. Thérèse took a cachet, but she was too impatient for sleep and
it would not come. For an instant, her mind began to sink beneath the
surface when Bernard, with unintelligible mumblings, turned over; and
she felt his great fiery body against her own. She pushed it from her
and, shrinking from that odious warmth, she lay on the extreme edge of
the bed: but after a few minutes, he again rolled towards her as if the
flesh in him survived his absent spirit and, even in sleep, fumbled for
its accustomed prey. She again thrust him back, roughly this time, but
he did not wake.... Oh! if she could push him away once and for all,
hurl him out of bed into the darkness!
Through the Paris night, the motor-horns answered each other like the
dogs and cocks at Argelouse when the moon is up. Not a breath of air
rose from the street. Thérèse turned on a lamp and, with her elbow on
the pillow, looked at this motionless being asleep beside her--her
twenty-seven-year-old husband: he had pushed aside the bed-clothes,
and she could not hear him breathing. His tumbled hair straggled over
his smooth young forehead. He slept, like Adam, naked and unashamed,
a deep and seemingly eternal sleep. The woman threw the sheet over
him, got out of bed, looked for one of the letters that she had only
half-read, and brought it to the lamp.
“_If he told me to follow him, I would leave everything and
not look back. We stopped at the edge, the furthest edge of
the last caress, but because he wanted to, not because I
insisted; it is really he who resists me, and I who long to
reach those unknown limits the mere approach to which, he
often tells me, is beyond all joys there are: but he won’t
go any further: he is proud of being able to stop where he
says others cannot help letting themselves go._”
Thérèse opened the window, tore up the letters into tiny pieces,
bending out over the stone abyss through which, in that hour before
the dawn, rumbled a solitary dung-cart. The scraps of paper fluttered
down, and came to rest on the balconies of the lower storeys.
That odour of herbage that she could smell--she wondered from what
countryside it had blown hither to this asphalt desert? She pictured
the splash of her crushed body on the pavement, surrounded by an
eddy of policemen and loiterers.... (“You’re too imaginative to
kill yourself, Thérèse!”) In truth, she did not want to die; there
was a task before her now--not of vengeance or of hatred; but that
little fool away at Saint Clair, who thought happiness possible, must
learn, like Thérèse, that happiness does not exist. If they possess
nothing else in common, let them at least have this: boredom, no
rational occupation, nothing to look forward to but the sordid daily
round,--irremediable solitude.
The dawn lit up the roofs; she rejoined her motionless companion on the
bed; but the moment she lay down beside him he drew nearer.
She awoke, clear-headed and self-possessed. What were these wandering
desires? Her family had asked for her help and she would do as they
wished; then she could not go astray. Thérèse agreed with Bernard
when he said that if Anne missed the Deguilhem marriage it would be a
disaster. The Deguilhems did not belong to their world: the grandfather
had been a shepherd.... Yes, but they had the finest pines in the
district: and, after all, Anne was not particularly well off: she had
nothing to expect from her father except the vines in the marsh, near
Langon--which were under water one year out of two. Anne must on no
account miss the Deguilhem marriage. The smell of chocolate in the room
upset Thérèse; this slight feeling of sickness confirmed other signs:
she was going to have a baby already. “Much better to have it at once,”
said Bernard, “and then we won’t have to think anything more about it.”
And he eyed respectfully the woman who bore within her the sole owner
of innumerable pines.
CHAPTER V
Saint Clair! They would soon be there.
Thérèse measured with her eye the distance that her thought had
traversed; could she get Bernard to follow her so far? She did not dare
to hope that he would consent to move so slowly along that tortuous
road. And yet the essential had not yet been spoken:
“Even when I have brought him as far as this, I shall still have
everything to tell him.” She brooded over the enigma that was herself,
she passed in review the young married women of her class whose virtues
were so highly praised by every one, at the time she settled down at
Saint Clair; and she reconstructed the first weeks of her life in the
cool dark house of her parents-in-law. The shutters were always closed
on the side looking on to the Market Square; but, on the left, through
a barred window, could be seen the garden, on fire with heliotrope,
geraniums, and petunias. Thérèse came and went, a confidant and an
accomplice, between the La Trave couple ambushed in the depths of a
little dark sitting-room, on the ground floor, and Anne wandering in
the garden which she was forbidden to leave. She said to the La Traves:
“Try and conciliate her by giving way a little, suggest that you should
all go abroad for a time before anything is settled: I’ll see that she
obeys you on this point: and while you are away, I’ll do what I can.”
What would she do? The La Traves gathered that she would strike up an
acquaintance with young Azévédo: “A direct attack is hopeless, mother.”
So far as Madame de la Trave knew, nothing had come out as yet, thank
Heaven. The postmistress, Mademoiselle Monod, was the only person in
the secret: she had intercepted several of Anne’s letters: “but that
girl’s like a grave.... Anyhow, she daren’t give anything away.”
“Let us try to give her as little pain as possible....” Hector de la
Trave used to say: but he who used to give way to Anne’s absurdest
caprices, could only agree with his wife, saying: “You can’t make
omelettes without breaking eggs ...”: and again: “She’ll be grateful
to us one day.” Yes, but before that day came, wouldn’t she collapse?
And the pair sat in silence with troubled eyes: they pictured their
child wasting away in the blazing sunshine, and turning with loathing
from all food: trampling on the flowers that she could not see and
pacing back and forwards along the railings like a fawn looking for a
way of escape.... Madame de la Trave shook her head: “I can’t drink her
meat-juice instead of her, can I? She stuffs herself with fruit in the
garden so as to be able to leave her plate empty at meals.”
And Hector de la Trave: “She would blame us later on for having given
our consent ... even if only for the sake of the unhappy children that
she might bring into the world....”
His wife was annoyed with him for seeming to try and find excuses for
the girl: “Fortunately the Deguilhems are not back yet. We may think
ourselves lucky that they’re most anxious for the marriage....”
They waited until Thérèse had left the room to ask each other: “But
what can they have put into her head at the Convent? She has had
nothing but good examples here; we have supervised her reading....
Thérèse says that there is nothing worse for turning young girls’ heads
than the love stories in the Sunday Reading Series ... but then she’s
so paradoxical.... Besides, I’m thankful to say Anne never did care
about reading: she is quite domesticated on that point. I believe if
we could only manage to get her a change of air. Do you remember how
much good Salies did her when she had bronchitis after the measles? We
will go wherever she likes, I can’t say more than that. Really, I’m
truly sorry for the child.” Monsieur de la Trave sighed dubiously:
“Well, but a holiday with us.... Nothing, nothing,” he added hurriedly
in answer to his wife who, being a little deaf, had asked him what he
had said. From the refuge of his wife’s fortune, in which he had come
so comfortably to rest, what memories of passionate pilgrimages did the
old gentleman suddenly call to mind, what hallowed hours of his amorous
youth?
Thérèse had then gone out into the garden to Anne, whose last year’s
dresses had already grown too loose for her. “Well?” cried the girl,
as soon as her friend came up. The ashes on the garden paths, the dry
harsh grass of the lawns, the smell of the parched geraniums, and Anne
herself more wasted than any plant on that August afternoon,--Thérèse
could recall every detail of the scene. Sometimes stormy showers forced
them to take refuge in the hot-house, while the hailstones rattled on
the glass roof.
“Why do you mind going away, since you don’t see him?”
“I don’t see him, but I know he is living and breathing four miles
away. When the wind is in the east, I know he hears the church bell
at the same time as I do. Would you not care whether Bernard was at
Argelouse or Paris? I don’t see Jean, but I know he’s not far off. On
Sunday, at Mass, I do not even try to turn my head, because we can
only see the altar from where we sit, and we are shut off from the
congregation by a pillar. But as we go out....”
“Wasn’t he there on Sunday?”
Thérèse knew it; she knew that as Anne was being led away by her mother
she had searched in vain among the crowd for a face that was not there.
“Perhaps he was ill.... They stop his letters. I’m not allowed to know
anything.”
“Still, it’s strange he can’t find some means of getting a word to you.”
“If you only would, Thérèse.... Yes, I know your position is
delicate....”
“Agree to go away, and then, perhaps....”
“I can’t go away from him.”
“But he’ll go away in any case, darling. He’ll be leaving Argelouse in
a few weeks.”
“Oh, don’t, don’t. It’s too dreadful. And not a word from him to help
me to live. I can’t bear it much longer: every moment I can’t help
remembering the words of his that made me happiest: but I have said
them over to myself so often, I’ve begun to be not quite sure whether
he really did say them. Why, I can still hear his voice as he said to
me, when we last met: ‘There is no one in my life but you....’ That is
what he said,--or it may have been:--‘You are what is dearest to me in
life.’ I can’t remember exactly.”
And with knitted brows she tried to recall the echo of those consoling
words whose meaning seemed to her so overwhelming.
“Well, tell me what the young man is like.”
“You can’t imagine.”
“Is he so unlike the others?”
“I should like to describe him ... but he is so much beyond anything I
could say.... After all, you might think him quite ordinary.... But I’m
sure you wouldn’t.”
She could no longer see any individual traits in the youth whose image
glowed with all the love she bore him. “Passion,” thought Thérèse,
“would make me more clear-sighted: nothing would escape me in the human
being I wanted for my own.”
“Thérèse, if I gave in about this trip, you would see him, wouldn’t
you, and tell me exactly what he said? And you would take my letters
to him? If I go away, if I can bear to go away....” Thérèse left
the kingdom of light and fire and penetrated once more, like some
ill-omened wasp, into the study where the parents waited until the heat
had passed, and their daughter’s resistance had broken down. It was not
until after many such comings and goings that Anne finally consented
to go away. And Thérèse would no doubt never have succeeded had it not
been for the imminent return of the Deguilhems. The girl trembled at
this further danger. Thérèse said to her more than once that, “for a
rich young man, Deguilhem wasn’t at all bad.”
“But, Thérèse, I’ve hardly looked at him: he wears glasses, he’s
bald,--why, he’s an old man.”
“He’s twenty-nine.”
“Exactly what I said, he’s an old man,--and besides, old or not....”
* * * * *
At dinner in the evening, the La Traves were talking about Biarritz,
and began to consider the question of hotels. Thérèse watched Anne, a
body without movement and without soul. “Make an effort”; Madame de la
Trave kept on saying: “you can if you try.” Anne raised the spoon to
her lips with a mechanical gesture. There was no light in her eyes.
Nothing and nobody had any existence for her except the one who was not
there. Sometimes a smile wandered over her lips at the recollection of
a word or caress of Jean Azévédo at the time when they used to sit in
that hut with its walls of heather, and those strong fingers, stronger
than he knew, tore her blouse a little....
Thérèse looked at Bernard’s head and shoulders bent over his plate: as
he was sitting with his back to the light she could not see his face;
but she heard him slowly masticating, ruminating that sacred substance,
his food. She left the table. Her mother-in-law said: “She would sooner
we did not take any notice of her: I should like to make a fuss of her,
but she does not care to be looked after. These feelings of sickness
are the least she can expect in her condition. But she may say what she
likes; she does smoke too much.” And the good lady recalled her own
memories of pregnancy. “I remember when I was expecting you, I had to
sniff an india-rubber ball: it was the only thing that would settle my
stomach.”
“Thérèse, where are you?”
“Here, on the seat.”
“Ah, yes; I can see your cigarette.”
Anne sat down, leaned her head against a motionless shoulder, looked
up at the sky, and said: “He sees these very stars, he hears the
Angelus....”
And she asked Thérèse to kiss her. But Thérèse did not bend down to
that confiding little face. She merely asked:
“Are you unhappy?”
“Not this evening: I have realised that by some means or another I
shall come to him again. The main thing is that he should know it; and
he will know it through you: I have made up my mind to go away. But
when I return, no walls shall keep me back: sooner or later, I shall
lay my head upon his heart: I am as sure of that as I am that I’m
alive. No, Thérèse, no: you, at least, must not talk morality to me, or
about the family....”
“I’m not thinking of the family, darling, but of him: you can’t drop
into a man’s life just like that: he has his family, too, his own
interests, his work, a love-affair perhaps....”
“No, he once said to me: ‘There is only you in my life ...’ and another
time: ‘Our love is the only thing I care for now....’”
“Yes, now....”
“You don’t suppose he was only thinking of the present moment, do you?”
Thérèse had no longer any need to ask her if she was unhappy. She could
feel her misery in the darkness: but she did not pity her. Why should
she? How delightful it must be to repeat a name, a Christian name, that
stands for a certain being to whom one’s heart is bound so closely! The
mere thought that he is living, breathing, and sleeping at night with
his head upon his folded arm; that he wakes at dawn, and his young body
moves through the mists of morning....
“Why, you’re crying, Thérèse: is it because of me? You must be fond of
me.”
The child had knelt down and laid her head against Thérèse’s side,
when she suddenly started back:
“I felt something moving against my forehead....”
“Yes, it began to move a few days ago.”
“The little one?”
“Yes, it’s alive already.”
They had come back to the house, with their arms round each other
as they used to do along the road to Nizan, or Argelouse. Thérèse
remembered that she had been afraid of that fluttering burden. How many
passions were to make their way into that as yet unformed flesh. She
saw herself as she had sat that evening in her bedroom, by the open
window (Bernard had shouted up from the garden: “Don’t light the lamp
because of the mosquitoes”). She counted the months before the birth,
she would have liked to have known a God who might answer her prayer
that this unknown creature, still intermingled with her body, might
never see the light.
CHAPTER VI
It was strange that Thérèse only remembered the days that followed the
departure of Anne and of the La Traves as of a period of torpor. At
Argelouse, where it had been agreed that she should find the best means
of working on Azévédo and making him give the girl up, she thought of
nothing but rest and sleep. Bernard had agreed not to live in his own
house, but in Thérèse’s, which was much more comfortable and where
Aunt Clara spared them all the worries of housekeeping. What did other
people matter to Thérèse? Let them arrange their own affairs. She
refused to emerge from her stupor until the child was born. Bernard
annoyed her every morning by reminding her of her promise to see Jean
Azévédo. But Thérèse snubbed him: she began to be less able to endure
his company. It may be that her pregnancy, as Bernard believed, had
something to do with her ill-humour. He himself was just undergoing
the first attacks of an obsession so common in the men of his race,
though it rarely shows itself before the thirtieth year: the fear
of death, that seemed at first so astonishing in a young man of his
solid physique. But what could one say when he protested: “You don’t
know what I feel like.” Men like him, mighty eaters, sprung from a
lazy and overfed race, have only the appearance of strength. A pine
tree planted in a manured field shoots up quickly: but very soon the
heart of the tree grows rotten, and it must be cut down in the height
of its strength. “It’s nerves”: people would say to Bernard: but he
himself felt the flaw in the metal. Besides, though it was almost
inconceivable, he hardly ate, he was no longer hungry. “Why don’t you
see a doctor?” He shrugged his shoulders with affected indifference:
as a matter of fact, uncertainty seemed to him less terrible than a
possible verdict of death. In the night Thérèse was sometimes awakened
with a start by his gasps for breath: Bernard’s hand sought hers and he
laid it against his left chest so that she could feel the intermittent
beating of his heart. She lit the candle, got up, and poured some
valerian into a glass of water. How lucky it was, she thought, that
this mixture was harmless! Why wasn’t it mortal? Nothing really
soothes, and brings sleep, unless it does so for all eternity. Why was
this querulous creature so frightened of what would bring him relief
once and for all? He went to sleep before she did. How could she lie
and wait for sleep beside this great carcass whose snorings sometimes
turned to choking agony? Thank God, he no longer came near her,--he
thought love-making the most dangerous of all activities for his heart.
The cocks of dawn brought the farms to life. The Angelus of Saint Clair
tinkled in the east wind; Thérèse’s eyes at last closed. Then the
man’s body began to stir once more: he dressed himself quickly, like
a peasant (he scarcely put his head into cold water). He crept like
a dog down to the kitchen, sniffing after the scraps in the larder:
breakfasted on the remains of a bird, or a wedge of cold spiced meat,
or even on a bunch of grapes and a crust of bread rubbed with garlic:
his only decent meal in the day. He threw some bits to Flambeau and
Diane whose jaws were chattering. The mist had the smell of Autumn.
It was the hour when Bernard was no longer in pain, when he felt his
all-powerful youth once more within him. The pigeons would soon be
coming over: it was time to see about the decoy-birds, and take their
eyes out. At eleven o’clock he found Thérèse still in bed.
“Well: and the Azévédo boy? You know my mother is waiting for news at
Biarritz, at the Poste Restante.”
“And your heart?”
“Don’t talk about my heart. You’ve only got to start talking about it
and I begin to feel it again. That shows it’s nervous: don’t you think
so?”
She never gave him the answer he wanted.
“You never know: you alone can say what you feel like. There’s no
reason because your father died of angina pectoris ... especially at
your age.... Evidently the heart is the weak point of the Desqueyroux
family. How absurd you are, Bernard, with your fear of death! Don’t you
ever feel as I do, profoundly convinced of your own uselessness? No?
Don’t you think that the life of people like us is already terribly
like death?”
He shrugged his shoulders: her paradoxes were really too tiresome. It
is easy enough to be witty, he said: you have only to say exactly the
opposite to what is sensible. But she was wrong to waste her efforts on
him: she had better save herself for her interview with young Azévédo.
“You know he is going to leave Vilméja about the middle of October?”
* * * * *
At Villandraut, the station before Saint Clair, Thérèse thought: “How
shall I persuade Bernard that I was never in love with that young
man? He will certainly believe I adored him. Like every one who knows
nothing about love, he imagines that a crime like mine could only be a
crime of passion.”
Bernard would have to understand that at that time she was far from
hating him, although she often found him a nuisance: but she did
not suppose that any other man could help her. Bernard, all things
considered, was not so bad. She hated the descriptions in novels of
marvellous creatures that no one ever meets in real life. The only
outstanding personality she thought she had ever known was her father.
She tried to persuade herself that this obstinate, suspicious old
radical was something of a figure. He was a man of many interests:
manufacturer, landed proprietor (besides a saw-mill at B----, he
handled his own resin and that of his numerous relatives in a factory
at Saint Clair)--but, above all, a politician, whose brusque manner
had done him harm but made him much respected at the Prefecture. And
how he did despise women! He even despised Thérèse, when every one was
praising her intelligence. And now since the tragedy: “They’re all
hysterics when they aren’t fools,” he used to say to his lawyer. And
this old anticlerical had his ideas of decency. Though he would often
hum a refrain from Béranger, he could not endure certain subjects
being mentioned in his presence,--indeed, he blushed like a schoolboy.
Bernard had heard from Monsieur de la Trave that Monsieur Larroque had
been a virgin when he married: “and since he has been a widower I
have always understood there was never any talk of a mistress. He’s a
character, your father!”
Yes, he was a character. But if Thérèse’s view of him, at a distance,
was rather highly coloured, as soon as he was with her, she took the
measure of his mean soul. He seldom came to Saint Clair, but more
often to Argelouse, as he did not like meeting the La Traves. In their
presence, although politics were forbidden, the old stupid quarrel
began the moment the soup was brought in and soon became embittered.
Thérèse would have been ashamed to take part in it: she took a pride
in never opening her mouth, except when they touched on the religious
question. Then she rushed to Monsieur Larroque’s assistance. Everybody
shouted, so much so that Aunt Clara caught a few scattered phrases,
joined the mêlée and, in the raucous tones of the deaf, let loose all
the fury of the hardened radical, “who knows all about what goes on in
convents”; she was, Thérèse thought, really more of a believer than any
of the La Traves, but she was in open war against the Almighty who had
allowed her to be deaf and ugly, and to die without ever having known
love nor passion. Since one day when Madame de la Trave had left the
table, by common consent they avoided metaphysics. However, politics
were quite enough to make them all lose their tempers; though they all,
whether they belonged to the Right or the Left, were in full agreement
on this essential principle: “Property is the only good thing in the
world, and the ownership of land is the only thing worth living for.
Must we give up anything and, if so, how much?”
Thérèse, “who had property in her blood,” was quite willing for the
question to be put in that cynical way, but she hated the pretences
under which the Larroques and the La Traves masked their common greed.
When her father announced his “irrevocable devotion” to democracy, she
would interrupt him, with “Oh, spare us that sort of thing; we are
all friends here.” She said that lofty sentiments in politics made
her feel sick: the horror of the class-war was not very obvious in a
country where the poorest own property, and their only ambition is to
own more: where the common love of land, sport, eating and drinking,
draws every one together, middle-class and peasant, in the closest
fellowship. Moreover, Bernard had some education: he was generally
considered a very promising young man, and Thérèse even congratulated
herself on the fact that he was a man one could talk to: “A good deal
above the average in fact.” Such was the view she took of him until the
day of her meeting with Jean Azévédo.
* * * * *
It was the time of year when the coolness of the night lasts through
the morning: and by the early afternoon, hot as the sun had been, a
faint mist foretold the dusk. The first pigeons were beginning to come
over, and Bernard hardly ever came home before evening. On that day,
however, after a bad night, he had gone straight off to Bordeaux to get
himself examined.
“I was feeling at peace with the world,” thought Thérèse: “I was
walking along the road, I forget at what time, because a woman who
is going to have a baby ought to take a little exercise. I avoided
the woods where shooting was going on because you have to stop every
minute, whistle, and wait until you hear a shout for you to go on: but
sometimes a long whistle answers yours: a flight of birds has settled
among the oaks, and you must crouch down and wait. Then I came back:
I was dozing in front of the fire in the drawing-room or the kitchen,
and Aunt Clara was bringing me anything I wanted. I paid no more
attention to the old creature, who was always droning out stories about
the kitchen and the farm, than a goddess does to her serving-maid:
she talked and talked so as not to have to try and listen: mostly
depressing anecdotes about the peasants whom she looked after with a
sort of cynical kindness: old men who could do no more than die of
hunger, others condemned to work until they died, sick men with none
to care for them, and women broken by toil and exhaustion. Aunt Clara
quoted some of their most shocking remarks in the ingenuous rustic
patois, with a sort of amusement. As a matter of fact, I was the only
person she cared for, though I never even noticed her kneel down,
unlace my shoes, take off my stockings, and warm my feet with her old
hands.
“Balion came for orders when he was going in to Saint Clair on the
following day. Aunt Clara drew up the list of commissions, and put
together the prescriptions for the sick of Argelouse. ‘You will go to
the chemist in the first place; Darquey will want quite the whole day
to make them all up....’”
* * * * *
“My first meeting with Jean.... I must remember every detail: I had
decided to go to that deserted shooting-hut where I used to eat my
lunch with Anne and where I knew, since then, she had so loved to
meet her Azévédo. No, I did not look upon it as a pilgrimage. But the
pines in that neighbourhood have grown so tall that it is no longer
possible to watch for pigeons there, so I ran no risk of disturbing
the sportsmen. That shooting-hut was useless now, for the surrounding
forest hid the horizon; the tree-tops were no longer far enough apart
to reveal those broad vistas of sky against which the watcher sees the
rising flights of birds. How well I remember: the October sun was
still hot: I toiled along that sandy road, tormented by flies. And how
heavy I felt! I longed to sit down on the mouldering bench inside the
hut.”
As I opened the door a young man came out, bareheaded; at the first
glance I recognised Jean Azévédo, and at first I thought I was
intruding on a rendezvous, his expression looked so confused. I wanted
to go away but he would not let me; it was strange that he was so
intent on my remaining: ‘Not at all, please come in, Madame; I assure
you that you are not disturbing me in the least.’ Why did he ask me
if one could see from outside what was going on inside the hut? I was
astonished that there was no one there when I went in, as he insisted.
Perhaps the shepherdess had fled by another exit? But I had not heard
the rustle of a single twig. He, too, had recognised me, and he was
the first to mention Anne de la Trave’s name. I was sitting down; he
standing up, just as in the photograph. I looked through his tussore
shirt at the place where I had stuck the pin: mere curiosity, without
any warmer feeling; I remembered without the slightest irritation what
Anne had written to me: ‘I press my hand against the place where I can
feel his heart beating ... what he calls the last caress allowed.’
Handsome? A high forehead, the velvet eyes of his race,--cheeks too
large;--and, what I so dislike in young men of his age,--spots, the
signs of overheated blood; a general unpleasant clamminess; and worst
of all, moist palms,--which he had to wipe with a handkerchief before
shaking hands. But he had fine burning eyes, and I liked his wide
mouth, always a little open to display his pointed teeth, like a puppy
panting with the heat.
And how did I behave? I was very strong on the family, I remember.
I already tried to be very severe and accused him in grave tones,
‘of bringing distress and dissension into an honourable household.’
Heavens! how I remember his amazement, his boyish burst of laughter:
‘So you think I want to marry her? You think I aspire to that honour?’
I was astounded as I measured with a glance the abyss between Anne’s
infatuation and the young man’s indifference. He defended himself
vigorously: why on earth should he not yield to the charm of a
delightful child? He was not aware that flirtations were forbidden,
and just because there could not be the slightest question of marriage
between them, this one had seemed to him quite innocuous. Of course,
he had pretended to share Anne’s intentions.... And when I tried to
wave all this haughtily aside, he vehemently burst out that Anne
herself could bear him witness that he had been careful not to go too
far; that in any case he was quite sure that Mademoiselle de la Trave
owed him the only hours of true passion that she was likely to know
in her dreary existence: ‘You tell me she is unhappy, Madame; but do
you think that she has anything better to look forward to than this
same unhappiness? I know you by reputation: I know you aren’t like
the people round here, and I can talk to you frankly. Before she sets
out on her dreadful voyage in one of those old houses of Saint Clair
I have provided Anne with a stock of sensations and dreams,--enough
to save her, perhaps, from despair and, in any case, from becoming
brutalised.’ I forget if I was irritated by this shocking conceit and
affectation, or even if I noticed it. As a matter of fact he spoke
so quickly that at first I did not follow what he said; but my mind
soon got used to his flow of speech: ‘Fancy thinking I could possibly
want such a marriage; settle down in this sandy desert, or burden
myself with a girl of her age in Paris? I shall always have the most
delightful recollections of Anne; and at the moment, when you surprised
me, I was indeed thinking of her.... But how can one tie oneself down,
Madame? Each minute should bring its own joy,--and a different one.’
“This combination of intelligence and the greed of a young animal in
one and the same being seemed so strange to me that I listened without
interrupting him. Yes, I was certainly fascinated: cheaply enough, in
all conscience, but I was. I remember the trampling of hooves, the
tinkling of bells, the wild cries of the shepherds which announced
the approach of a herd of cattle. I told the young man that our being
together in the hut might perhaps seem odd: and I wanted him to answer
that it would be best to keep quiet until the herd had passed; I should
have enjoyed the silence side by side, the feeling that we shared a
secret (for I, too, was becoming exacting, and wanted each minute
to bring me something that would help me to live). But Jean Azévédo
opened the door of the hut without protest and politely withdrew. He
only followed me to Argelouse after having made certain that I saw no
objection in it. How quickly we seemed to get home again, although my
companion found the time to touch on many subjects: and he threw a
strangely fresh light on those I thought I knew something of: on the
religious question, for instance; as I was repeating what I used to
say at home, he broke in: ‘Yes, no doubt ... but it’s more complicated
than that....’ Indeed, some of his remarks seemed admirably new and
illuminating.... Were they really so admirable?... I am pretty sure
I should think it all poor stuff to-day: he said that he had long
believed that nothing was of any importance except the search for,
the pursuit of, God: ‘One must set forth across the sea; and avoid
like the plague those who think they have found what they want, settle
down, and build themselves shelters to sleep in; I have long despised
them....’”
* * * * *
“He asked me if I had read the _Life of Father de Foucauld_ by René
Bazin: and as I pretended to laugh, he assured me that the book had
been a revelation to him: ‘Perhaps,’ he added, ‘to live dangerously, in
the deeper meaning of the words, lies not so much in seeking God, as in
finding Him, and having discovered Him, living within His orbit.’ He
described to me, ‘the great adventure of the mystics,’ and complained
of his temperament that prevented him attempting it; ‘he could not
remember having ever been pure.’ Such shamelessness, such absence of
reserve, was such an utter change from our rustic caution, the silence
which we all maintain about our inner life. The gossip of Saint Clair
does not go below the surface: hearts are never laid bare. What do I
really know about Bernard? There must be infinitely more in him than
that caricature which seems adequate when I have to bring him to mind.
Jean talked, and I said nothing: nothing came to my lips but the usual
phrases of our family discussions. Just as in these parts, all the
vehicles are built to the same gauge, that is to say, broad enough for
the wheels to fit exactly into the ruts made by the farm carts, all my
thoughts until that day had been built to fit the mental gauge of my
father and my parents-in-law. Jean Azévédo was wearing no hat. I can
still see his shirt open over his boyish chest, his rather heavy neck.
Was I physically attracted at all? Oh, no, indeed! But he was the first
man I had met for whom the life of the mind counted above everything.
His masters, his Paris friends, whose sayings or whose books he so
constantly mentioned, prevented my thinking of him as in any way
unique: he was one of a large and distinguished company,--‘those who
live,’ as he called them. He quoted names, not imagining for a moment
that I might not know them; and I pretended that it was not the first
time I had heard them.
“When the fields of Argelouse came into sight at the turn of the
road: ‘Already!’ I cried. Smoke from burning grass drifted over the
surface of the desolate soil now barren of its rye; through a gap in
the embankment poured a herd of cattle looking like a stream of dirty
milk, and they wandered off over the sandy heath. Jean had to cross
the fields, to reach Vilméja, and I said: ‘I’ll come with you: I’ve
been so thrilled by all this.’ But we found no more to say to each
other. The rye stubble hurt me through my country sandals. I had the
feeling that he wanted to be alone, no doubt to follow up at leisure
some thought that had come to him. I pointed out that we had not
talked about Anne; he assured me that we were not free to choose the
subjects of our conversations, nor even of our meditations: ‘or else,’
he said loftily, ‘one would have to submit to the methods invented by
the mystics.... Creatures like ourselves always are borne upon the
stream, and walk down inevitable slopes....’ He related everything, in
fact, to what he was reading at the moment. We agreed to meet again to
arrange some method of dealing with the question of Anne. He talked
absent-mindedly, and when I asked him a question, did not answer:
suddenly he bent down, and with a boyish gesture picked a mushroom,
showed it me, and then put it to his nose and lips.”
CHAPTER VII
Bernard was on the door-step waiting for Thérèse to return: “There’s
nothing wrong with me at all,” he shouted, as soon as he saw her dress
in the darkness: “Can you imagine that a man of my physique could be
anæmic? It’s incredible, but I am: you can’t rely on appearances: I’m
to follow a treatment ... the Fowler treatment: It’s arsenic ... the
main thing is to get back my appetite.”
* * * * *
Thérèse remembered that she had felt no irritation at first: everything
connected with Bernard seemed to make less impression on her than usual
(as if the blow had been dealt her from further off). She did not
hear him: for her body and her soul were turned towards another world
full of eager creatures who wanted to know and to understand,--and,
in a phrase which Jean had repeated with an air of deep satisfaction,
“to become what they really were.” And when at dinner, she at last
mentioned her meeting, Bernard cried, “Why, you hadn’t said anything
about it: what an odd girl you are! Well, and what did you decide?”
She devised on the spot the plan which was, in fact, adopted. Jean
Azévédo agreed to write a letter to Anne in which he would contrive
as gently as possible to make it clear that all was over. Bernard had
jeered when Thérèse had maintained that the young man did not want the
marriage in the least: an Azévédo not want to marry Anne de la Trave!
“Why, you must be mad! He knows very well there’s nothing doing: people
like that don’t take a risk when they know they must lose. You’re still
very simple-minded, my child.”
Bernard would not have the lamp lit because of the mosquitoes; so he
did not see Thérèse’s look. “He had recovered his appetite,” as he
said. The Bordeaux doctor had saved his life already.
* * * * *
“Did I see Jean Azévédo many times after that? He left Argelouse about
the end of October.... We took perhaps five or six walks together;
the only one that stands out was the one we spent in concocting the
letter to Anne. The simple-minded youth insisted on what he thought
were soothing, pacifying phrases: of course I could see how dreadful
they were, though I did not say so. But our last expeditions are
all confused in one single memory. Jean Azévédo described Paris and
his friends to me, and I imagined a kingdom in which the law was
self-realization. ‘Here you are condemned to deceit until you die.’
Did he speak such words intentionally? Of what did he suspect me? He
thought I should never stand that stifling atmosphere: ‘Look,’ he
said, ‘at the vast level frozen surface under which every soul in this
place is embedded: sometimes it cracks and you can see the dark water
beneath: some one has struggled and disappeared; the ice sets again....
Yet here, too, each one is born with his own law within him: here, too,
each man’s destiny is his alone; and yet you are all victims of this
same gloomy fate. Some resist: hence the tragedies about which our
families do not talk. There is a great deal about which we do not talk!’
“‘Indeed, yes,’ I cried. ‘I have sometimes asked about some great-uncle
or grandfather, whose photographs have disappeared from all the albums,
and I have never got any answer except once, when I was told: ‘He
disappeared: he was forced to disappear.’”
“Did Jean Azévédo dread this destiny for me? He assured me that it
would have never occurred to him to talk about such matters to Anne,
because apart from her affections, she was quite a simple soul, with
little power of resistance, and would soon have sunk into slavery: ‘But
you! I feel in all your words a hunger and thirst for truth.’ Shall I
report faithfully all these conversations to Bernard? It is madness to
hope that he would understand a word of them. He must realise, in any
case, that I did not surrender without a struggle. I remember arguing
against the lad that he was adorning with clever phrases what in fact
was moral degradation. I even had recourse to memories of the lectures
on ethics at the _Lycée_. ‘Self-realisation?’ I repeated: ‘but we
only exist in so far as we make ourselves what we are.’ Azévédo denied
that there was any degradation worse than that of self-betrayal. He
maintained there was not a hero nor a saint, who had but once or twice
explored the mysteries of his soul, without soon reaching all its
limits: ‘We must go beyond ourselves to find God,’ he would say. And
again: ‘To accept ourselves as we are, compels the best among us to
meet ourselves face to face, openly and in fair fight. And that is why
it often happens that these enlightened souls become converted to the
narrowest creed.’”
She would not discuss with Bernard the justification for this
morality;--she would even admit that these were doubtless the
feeblest sophisms; “but he must understand, he must make an effort
to understand, how deeply a woman like myself could be affected by
them and what I felt in the evening in the dining-room at Argelouse:
Bernard, ensconced in the neighbouring kitchen, was taking off his
boots, and relating in dialect the result of the day’s shooting. The
captive pigeons struggled in the heaving bag on the table: Bernard
ate slowly, full of the joy of his reconquered appetite,--lovingly
counted out the drops of ‘Fowler’: ‘That is health,’ he used to say.
There was a large fire burning and at dessert he had only to turn his
chair to stretch out his feet, in their felt shoes, to the flames.
His eyes closed over _La Petite Gironde_. Sometimes he snored, but as
often as not I did not even hear him breathe. Balionte’s slippers still
shuffled about the kitchen; then she brought in the candlesticks. After
that, silence: the silence of Argelouse. People who do not know those
deserted moors do not know what silence is: it encircles the house as
if embodied in that thick mass of forest in which nothing lives, except
from time to time a hooting owl (we seem to be listening in the night
to the sound of the sob we dare not utter).
“It was more especially after Azévédo’s departure that I became
acquainted with that silence. So long as I knew that when it was
daylight Jean would come once more, his presence robbed the outer
darkness of its terror: while he slept near by, the moor and the
night were populous. The moment he had left Argelouse, after that
last conversation when he arranged to meet me in a year’s time, full
of hope, he said, that I should then know how to free myself (I still
do not know whether in this he spoke lightly, or whether he meant more
than he said. I rather suspect that our young friend from Paris could
not endure the silence, the silence of Argelouse, and that his regard
for me was a regard for the only available audience), as soon as I had
left him, I felt as though I was entering an endless tunnel, plunging
into a darkness that grew ever thicker: and sometimes I wondered
whether I should reach the open air before I were suffocated. Until my
baby was born, in January, nothing more happened.”
* * * * *
Here, Thérèse hesitated: and she tried to detach her thoughts from
what took place in the house at Argelouse the day following Jean’s
departure: “No,” she thought: “that has nothing to do with what I shall
soon have to explain to Bernard; I have no time to lose on trails that
lead nowhere.” But the thought would not be dismissed; it haunted her
mind. Thérèse will never destroy the memory of that October evening.
Bernard was going to bed on the first floor: Thérèse was waiting
until the log was quite burnt out before she joined him,--happy to
be alone for a moment: what was Jean Azévédo doing at that hour?
Perhaps he was drinking in that little bar he had told her about, or
perhaps (the night was so warm) he was driving in a motor-car, with a
friend, through the deserted Bois de Boulogne. Perhaps he was working
at his table, while Paris murmured far away: the silence was his own
handiwork,--he had won it against the turmoil of the world: it was
not imposed on him from without like the silence which was stifling
Thérèse: it was his own, and reached no further than the light of
the lamp, or the shelves packed with books.... Such were Thérèse’s
thoughts, when suddenly the dog barked, then began to howl, and a
familiar, but exhausted voice soothed him outside in the vestibule.
Anne de la Trave opened the door: she had walked from Saint Clair in
the dark--her shoes were full of mud. Her eyes blazed in her worn
little face. She flung her hat on to a chair: and asked: “Where is he?”
Thérèse and Jean, when the letter had been written and posted, had
thought the affair was over,--far from supposing that Anne would not
let go,--just as if any human creature listened to reasons or to
reasonings, when its whole life was at stake! She had succeeded in
eluding her mother and got into a train. She had made her way along the
dark Argelouse road by the strip of clear sky between the tree-tops.
“She must see him again: if she could see him again, he was hers once
more: she _must_ see him.” She had stumbled along, twisting her feet in
the cart tracks, she was in such a hurry to reach Argelouse. Thérèse
told her that Jean was gone and was now in Paris. Anne shook her head,
she did not believe it: she could not let herself believe it, if she
was not to collapse with fatigue and despair:
“You are lying as you have always lied.”
And as Thérèse protested, she added:
“Oh, you’ve got the family spirit with a vengeance! You pose as
emancipated, but since your marriage you’ve become a woman of the
family, pretty quick.... Yes, yes, of course, you did it for the
best: you betrayed me to save me, didn’t you? I will spare you your
explanations.” As she was opening the door, Thérèse asked her where she
was going.
“To Vilméja, to his house.”
“I tell you he left it two days ago.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She went out; Thérèse then lit the lantern hanging in the entrance hall
and went out after her:
“You’re going wrong, my little Anne: you’re on the road to Biourge.
Vilméja is over there.”
They made their way through the mist. Dogs began to bark. The oaks of
Vilméja at last, and the house, not asleep, but dead. Anne prowled
round the empty sepulchre, and hammered on the door with both fists.
Thérèse, standing motionless, had put the lantern down on the grass.
She watched her friend’s slender ghost clinging to each window on the
ground floor. Anne was no doubt whispering a name to herself, but not
calling it aloud, for she knew that it was quite useless. For a few
moments she was hidden behind the building; then she reappeared, went
up to the door, and sank down upon the threshold, and hid her face in
her knees which she clasped with her arms. Thérèse lifted her up and
led her away. Anne kept on saying, as she stumbled along: “I shall go
to Paris to-morrow morning: Paris is not so very big: I shall find him
in Paris....” But she spoke like an exhausted child who had already
given up hope.
Bernard, awakened by the sound of their voices, had put on a
dressing-gown and was waiting for them in the drawing-room. Thérèse was
wrong to banish the memory of that scene that broke out between brother
and sister. This man, who could seize a poor worn-out child so roughly
by the wrists, drag her up to a room on the second floor, and bolt the
door, is your husband, Thérèse: that Bernard, who, in two hours’ time,
will be your judge. The spirit of the family inspired him, and not for
one instant did he waver. He always knew, in every sort of situation,
what was due to the family. You, in the agony of your remorse, Thérèse,
are preparing a long appeal: but only men with no principles can
listen to a reason that is not their own. Bernard will laugh at your
arguments: “I know what I have to do.” He always knows what he has to
do. If he sometimes hesitates, he says: “The family have discussed it
and we have decided that....” How can you doubt that he has prepared
his sentence: Your destiny is fixed for ever: you may as well go to
sleep.
CHAPTER VIII
After the La Traves had brought Anne back, defeated, to Saint Clair
Thérèse had not left Argelouse until just before her baby was born. She
knew the silence of the place only too well during those interminable
November nights. A letter addressed to Jean Azévédo had remained
unanswered. He doubtless considered that this country-bred creature
was not worth the trouble of a correspondence. In the first place,
a pregnant woman is never an agreeable recollection. Perhaps, at a
distance, this foolish fellow, who would have been captivated by poses
and sham complications, thought her dull. But what could he understand
of that deceptive simplicity of mind, that frank expression, those bold
unhesitating gestures? In point of fact, he believed her capable, like
little Anne, of taking him at his word, and leaving everything for his
sake. Jean Azévédo mistrusted women who surrendered too soon to give
the assailant time to raise the siege. Nothing dismayed him so much
as victory, and the fruits of victory. Yet Thérèse made an effort to
live in this young man’s world: but some books which Jean admired, and
which she had got from Bordeaux, she could not understand. How empty
her life was! She was not to be asked to work at baby-linen: “That was
not her business,” Madame de la Trave used to say. Many women die in
childbirth in the country. Thérèse made Aunt Clara cry by assuring her
that she would end like her mother, that she was certain she would not
escape. She did not fail to add that she was content to die: which was
untrue! She had never longed so ardently to live: nor had Bernard ever
displayed so much solicitude for her. “He was not concerned about me,
but about what I carried within me. He used to say, in his dreadful
accent: ‘Have some more soup ... don’t eat any fish ... you have
walked enough to-day....’ I did not care: I was no more touched than a
foreign nurse might be who is pampered for the quality of her milk. The
La Traves revered in me a sacred vessel: the mould which held their
offspring; there was not a doubt that, if necessity arose, they would
have sacrificed me to the life I held within me. I lost the feeling of
individual existence. I was nothing more than the branch that bore the
fruit which, in the family’s opinion, was all that counted.”
* * * * *
“Until the end of December we had to live in darkness. And as if the
darkness of the pines were not enough, rain unceasing encompassed the
gloomy house with its myriad moving rods. When the only road to Saint
Clair threatened to become impassable, I was conveyed into the town,
where the house was hardly less dark than that of Argelouse. The old
plane trees on the Square still defended their leaves against the
gusts of wind and rain. Aunt Clara, who could not live anywhere but
at Argelouse, was not able to look after me: but she often made the
journey, in any sort of weather, in her rustic dog-cart, and brought me
all those little dainties that I used to be so fond of as a girl, and
that she thought I still liked, little grey balls of rye and honey,
called _miques_: and the cake that goes by the name of _fougasse_ or
_roumadjade_. I only saw Anne at meals, and she never spoke to me now:
resigned, so it would seem, and broken, she had lost all her youthful
freshness at a blow. Her hair, drawn too far back, revealed ugly pallid
ears. The Deguilhem boy’s name was not mentioned, but Madame de la
Trave asserted that if Anne did not yet say yes, neither did she say
no. Ah! Jean had judged her rightly: it had not taken long to bridle
her and break her in. Bernard was not so well because he had begun to
drink _aperitifs_ again.
“What did these creatures round me talk about? They discussed the
clergyman a great deal, I remember (we lived opposite the presbytery).
They wondered, for instance, ‘why he had crossed the Square six times
in the course of the day, and each time he had had to come back a
different way.’”
* * * * *
As a result of certain remarks of Jean Azévédo, Thérèse paid a little
more attention to the priest, who was still young, and not on good
terms with his parishioners who found him stand-offish: “He’s not the
kind we want here”: In the course of his rare visits to the La Traves,
Thérèse noticed his white temples and high forehead. He had no friends.
How did he spend his evenings? Why had he chosen this life? “He is
very punctilious,” said Madame de la Trave: “He prays every evening:
but he is wanting in unction. I don’t think he is genuinely devout. He
doesn’t really do anything in the Parish.” She deplored the fact that
he had given up the Church Lads’ Brigade: and the parents complained
that he did not go with the children to the football-field. “It’s all
very well for him to be buried in his books, but a Parish soon goes to
pieces.” Thérèse used to go to church to hear him preach (“My dear,
you’ve decided to go just when your condition would have excused you”).
The Curé’s sermons, which dealt with dogma or morals, were impersonal.
But Thérèse was struck by an intonation, a gesture, or a word that
seemed specially significant.... Ah! perhaps he could have helped her
to unravel the confusion of her soul: unlike the rest, his also had
been a tragic rôle: to his own inner solitude was added the isolation
that the cassock brings upon its wearer. What comfort did he draw from
those daily rites? Thérèse would have liked to have been present at
Mass during the week when, with no other witness but a choir-boy, he
bent muttering over a piece of bread. But such a proceeding would have
seemed odd to her family and the neighbours, who would have raised the
cry of “Conversion.”
* * * * *
Much as Thérèse suffered at that time, it was just after the birth of
the child that she began to find life really unendurable. There was no
outward sign of this, no scene between Bernard and herself: and she
behaved with more deference to her parents-in-law than her husband
himself. There lay the tragedy: there had been no reason for a rupture:
it was impossible to conceive an event that would have prevented things
taking the course that led to death. Misunderstanding presupposes some
common ground of conflict; but Thérèse never came into contact with
Bernard and still less with her parents-in-law; their words barely
reached her: she hardly conceived it necessary to answer them. Had
they even a vocabulary in common? They attached a different meaning to
the most unimportant words. If Thérèse was ever tempted into saying
something she really meant, the family had agreed, once and for all,
that the poor child could not resist a paradox. “I pretend not to
hear,” Madame de la Trave used to say: “and if she persists, not to
take any notice. She knows it’s no good trying it on us.”
None the less, Madame de la Trave found it hard to tolerate Thérèse’s
affectation of hating people to exclaim over her likeness to little
Marie. The usual cries of “She’s the very image of you!...” produced
violent reactions which she could not always conceal. “She’s not
like me in the least,” she would insist. “Look at her dark skin, and
jet-black eyes: you can see from my photographs I was pale when I was a
baby.”
She would not have it that Marie was like her. She refused to possess
anything in common with this flesh that had now parted company with
her own. People began to be aware that she was not exactly remarkable
for her maternal affection. But Madame de la Trave maintained that she
loved her daughter in her own way: “Of course we can’t expect her to
bathe the child or change her napkins: that wouldn’t be like her: but
I have seen her sit for a whole evening by the cradle, not smoking, so
as to watch the baby asleep.... Besides, we have a very reliable nurse:
and then Anne is there. Ah! She’ll make a wonderful little mother....”
It was true that, since a child had come into the house, Anne had begun
to live again. A cradle always attracts women: but Anne especially
loved to look after the infant. So as to have freer access to her,
she had made peace with Thérèse, though nothing remained of their old
affection but certain familiarities of address. The girl particularly
dreaded Thérèse’s maternal jealousy: “The child knows me better than
her mother: she laughs as soon as she sees me. The other day, I had
her in my arms; she began to scream as soon as Thérèse wanted to
take her. She likes me so much better that I feel quite embarrassed
sometimes....”
Anne need not have felt embarrassed. At that moment in her life,
Thérèse felt as aloof from her daughter as from everything else. She
saw human beings and inanimate things, her own body and even her mind,
like a mirage or vapour suspended outside her. In this void, Bernard
alone assumed a dreadful reality: his corpulence, his nasal voice,
his peremptory tone, his self-satisfaction. If she could only get
away.... But how? And where? Thérèse was overcome by the first heat of
summer. She had not the slightest presentiment of what she was about
to do. What did happen that year? She could not remember a single
incident, a single quarrel: she remembered having loathed her husband
more than usual, on the day of Corpus Christi, when she watched the
procession through the half-closed shutters. Bernard was almost the
only man behind the canopy. The village had become a desert in a few
moments, just as if there had been a lion, not a lamb, let loose in the
streets.... People went behind doors so as not to be obliged to take
their hats off or fall on their knees. Once the danger had passed, the
doors began to open one by one. Thérèse observed the Curé, who was
walking with his eyes nearly shut, carrying the strange object in both
his hands. His lips moved: to whom was he speaking with that dejected
air? And immediately behind him walked Bernard, “doing his duty as
usual.”
* * * * *
Weeks followed without a drop of rain. Bernard lived in terror of
fires, and his heart was troubling him again. More than twelve hundred
acres had been burnt in the Louchat district: “If the wind had been in
the north my Balisac pines would have been done for.” Thérèse waited
for some blow to fall from that unchanging sky. It would never rain
any more.... One day the whole forest round them would burst into
crackling flames, and even the town would not escape. How is it that
the villages in the Landes country are never burnt down? She thought it
unfair that the flames should always fall upon the pines and never on
the human population. At home, there were endless discussions on the
causes of the disaster: a cigarette-end very likely, or perhaps some
one had done it for revenge? Thérèse dreamt that she got up one night,
went into the forest where the undergrowth was thickest, threw away
her cigarette, and waited until the sky of dawn was darkened with vast
clouds of smoke.... But she banished the thought, for love of the pines
was in her blood: it was not upon the trees that her hatred lay.
* * * * *
The time had now come when she must face the act she had committed.
What explanation should she give to Bernard? She could only remind
him, point by point, how the thing happened. It was the day of the
great fire at Mano. Various men came into the dining-room where the
family were having a hasty lunch. Some said that the fire seemed a very
long way from Saint Clair: others insisted that the tocsin should be
rung. The torrid air was full of the smell of burning resin and the
face of the sun looked dull and tarnished. Thérèse saw Bernard once
more, sitting with his head turned, listening to Balion’s report, and
his strong hairy hand poised absent-mindedly above the glass as the
“Fowler’s drops” fell into the water. He swallowed the physic at a
gulp before Thérèse, who was stupefied with the heat, had thought to
warn him that he had doubled his usual dose. Every one but herself had
left the table; she stayed on, cracking almonds, indifferent, untouched
by all this anxiety, without interest in the tragedy, as indeed in any
tragedy that was not her own. The tocsin did not ring. Bernard came
back at last: “For once you were right not to be anxious: the fire is
over towards Mano.... Have I taken my drops?” he asked, and without
waiting for the answer he began again to pour them out into his glass.
She said nothing, no doubt from laziness or fatigue; what was her
intention in that instant? “I couldn’t have really meant not to answer.”
* * * * *
And yet that night, when Doctor Pédemay questioned her on the incidents
of the day, as she stood by Bernard’s bedside, where he lay vomiting
and groaning, she did not mention what she had seen at table. It
would, however, have been easy, without compromising herself, to have
reminded the doctor about the arsenic which Bernard was taking. She
might have said something of this sort: “I did not think about it at
the moment.... We were all distracted by the fire ... but I would
swear, now, that he took a double dose....” She remained dumb: she did
not even feel moved to speak. The deed which during lunch had been
unwitting began then to emerge from the depths of her being,--as yet
incomplete, but half-endured with consciousness.
After the doctor’s departure she had watched Bernard as he lay asleep
at last: she thought to herself: “There is nothing to prove it was
_that_; it may be an attack of appendicitis, though there were no
other symptoms ... or an attack of gastric influenza.” But Bernard was
up again two days later. “It looks as if it must have been _that_.”
Thérèse would not have sworn to it; she would like to have been sure.
“Yes, I had no sort of feeling of being at the mercy of a horrible
temptation: it was merely a matter of curiosity rather dangerous to
satisfy. The first day on which I poured the ‘Fowler’s drops’ into his
glass, before he came into the room, I remember saying to myself:
‘Just once, so as to make quite sure.... I shall know if it was that
which made him ill. Just once and no more.’”
* * * * *
The train slowed down, whistled for some time, and then moved on again.
Two or three lights in the distance: Saint Clair station. But Thérèse’s
self-examination was at an end: she had taken the plunge and the dark
waters had closed over her head. What followed was murder, and Bernard
knew as much about it as she did: the sudden recurrence of his trouble,
and Thérèse watching over him day and night, although she seemed at
the end of her strength and incapable of swallowing anything, so much
so that he persuaded her to try the Fowler treatment, and she got a
prescription from Doctor Pédemay! Poor Doctor! He was astonished by the
greenish liquid that Bernard brought up: he would not have believed
that there could be such a discrepancy between an invalid’s pulse and
his temperature: he had many times observed, in cases of para-typhoid,
a regular pulse, notwithstanding a high degree of fever;--but what
could be the meaning of this violent pulse with a temperature below the
normal?... Gastric influenza, no doubt (influenza covers everything).
Madame de la Trave contemplated calling in an eminent consultant but
did not want to hurt the doctor’s feelings as he was an old friend;
besides, Thérèse was afraid of giving Bernard a shock. Still, about the
middle of August, after a more than usually alarming attack, Pédemay
of his own accord asked for a second opinion; fortunately, on the very
next day Bernard was better: and three weeks later they were talking of
convalescence.
“A fortunate escape,” said Pédemay. “If there had been time to call in
the great man, he would have got all the credit for the case.”
Bernard had himself taken to Argelouse, in the conviction that the
pigeon-shooting would cure him. Thérèse was much exhausted about this
time: Aunt Clara was in bed with an acute attack of rheumatism: two
invalids and one child to look after, not to mention all Aunt Clara’s
various avocations that had to be attended to. Thérèse took particular
care to see that the Argelouse poor did not suffer from the aunt’s
illness. She went around to all the farms, and, just as her aunt did,
saw that all the prescriptions were made up, and paid for the medicines
out of her own pocket. It did not occur to her to be depressed because
the Vilméja farm was shut. She thought no more of Azévédo, nor of any
one at all. She was travelling alone through a tunnel at lightning
speed, and she was at the darkest point. She must not think: she must
dash, like an animal, through the darkness and smoke and get out into
the free air once more.
* * * * *
At the beginning of December Bernard was again laid up with the same
complaint: one morning he awoke shivering, his legs lifeless and cold.
Ah, what happened then! A consultant fetched one evening from Bordeaux
by Monsieur de la Trave: his long silence after he had examined the
sick man (Thérèse held the lamp and Balionte still remembers that
she looked whiter than the sheets): on the dim landing, Pédemay,
lowering his voice in case Thérèse might be listening, explaining
to his colleague that Darquey the chemist, had shown him two of his
prescriptions falsified: on the first a criminal hand had added:
_Fowler drops_; on the other appeared fairly large doses of chloroform,
digitaline and aconitine. Balion had brought them to the pharmacy
together with many others. Darquey, in a panic at having sent out these
poisons, rushed round the next day to see Pédemay.... Yes, Bernard knew
all this as well as Thérèse herself. He had been hurriedly conveyed
in an ambulance to a nursing-home at Bordeaux: and from that day he
had begun to get well. Thérèse had remained alone at Argelouse; but
lonely as she was, she was aware of a kind of vast and ominous murmur
bearing down on her, and she crouched like an animal that hears the
hounds drawing near; she felt as if she had been brought down in a
frantic race,--as if when near the goal, her hand already outstretched
to clasp it, she had been suddenly dashed to the ground and both her
legs broken. Her father had come one evening, and begged her to make
a clean breast of it: all might yet be saved. Pédemay had agreed to
withdraw his charge, and pretended to be no longer sure whether one of
the prescriptions was not entirely from his hand. As for the aconitine,
chloroform and digitaline, he could not have prescribed such heavy
doses: but since no trace of them had been found in the patient’s
blood....
Thérèse remembered the scene with her father, by Aunt Clara’s bed. The
room was lit up by a wood fire; none of them wanted a lamp. In her
monotonous childish voice she delivered a lesson, the lesson that she
went over again and again during her sleepless nights. “I met a man on
the road who did not come from Argelouse, and who said to me that since
I was sending some one to Darquey’s, he hoped I would not mind sending
his prescriptions too: he owed money to Darquey and did not want to go
to the shop.... He promised to come to the house for the medicine, but
he did not tell me his name nor his address....”
“Try to think of something else, Thérèse, for God’s sake, for the sake
of the family: wretched woman, try to think of something else.”
Old Larroque repeated his adjurations with obstinate emphasis; the deaf
woman, half raised upon her pillows, and feeling that a mortal menace
was weighing on Thérèse, groaned out: “What is he saying to you? What
do they want you to do? Why are they hurting you?”
She had found enough strength to smile at her aunt and hold her hand,
while, like a little girl at her catechism, she recited: “It was a man
on the road: it was too dark for me to see his face; he did not say
what farm he belonged to....”
He had come another evening for the medicine; but unfortunately no one
in the house had seen his face.
CHAPTER IX
Saint Clair, at last. No one recognised Thérèse as she got out of the
carriage. While Balion was giving up her tickets she went round outside
the station through some stacks of timber and got on to the road where
the carriage was waiting.
This carriage had become her refuge; along that jolting road she was
no longer afraid of meeting any one. Her whole story, so carefully
constructed, collapsed: nothing remained of the confession she had
prepared. No; she had nothing to say in her defence, not even a reason
to give: the simplest thing would be to say nothing, or merely answer
questions. What had she to fear? That night would pass like all the
rest: the sun would rise to-morrow: she was sure all would be well
whatever happened. And nothing could be worse than that indifference,
that utter apathy that cut her off from the world and from her very
existence. It was truly death in life: she had tasted death as far as a
living woman may.
Her eyes, now accustomed to the darkness, recognised at a turn of the
road the farm where certain low buildings looked like animals crouching
and asleep. It was here that Anne used to be frightened of a dog that
would always run under the wheels of her bicycle. Further on, a clump
of elders revealed a glimpse of water; and on the days of fiercest heat
a breath of coolness fanned the girl’s cheeks at this point. A child
on a bicycle, whose teeth gleamed under her sunbonnet, the sound of a
bell, and a voice crying: “Look, I’m letting both my hands go!” And
this blurred image, from those days now past for ever, was all that
Thérèse could find to comfort her fainting heart.
She repeated mechanically, in time with the rhythm of the horse’s
hooves: “useless ... endless ... hopeless.” Ah! the only possible
gesture,--Bernard would never make it. Supposing he did open his arms
without asking her any questions! If only she could lay her head on a
human breast, if only she could weep against a living body!
She noticed the embankment on which Jean Azévédo had sat, one hot day.
To think she had believed that some place existed in the world in
which she could have fulfilled her destiny among beings who would have
understood her, perhaps admired and loved her! But loneliness had eaten
into her like a leper’s sores: “No one can help me. No one can hurt me.”
* * * * *
“Here is Monsieur, and Mademoiselle Clara.”
Balion drew in the reins. Two shadows came forward. So Bernard, though
still very weak, had come to meet her--impatient to know that all was
well. She half-rose from her seat, and cried out before they met: “Case
dismissed.”
Merely replying, “Of course!” Bernard helped the aunt to climb into the
carriage and took the reins. Balion was to go back on foot. Aunt Clara
sat between husband and wife. They had to shout to her that it was all
settled (she had, in fact, only the vaguest knowledge of the tragedy).
The deaf woman began one of her usual interminable discourses; she
said _They_ had always played the same game and that it was the Dreyfus
affair all over again. “If you keep on throwing mud, some of it will
always stick. _They_ were terribly powerful and the Republicans were
very wrong not to keep their eyes open. As soon as these poisonous
brutes are given the least chance, they’re on you at once....”
These fatuities relieved the pair from the necessity of exchanging a
single word.
Aunt Clara, breathing heavily, went upstairs carrying a candle in her
hand:
“Aren’t you going to bed? Thérèse must be worn out. You will find a cup
of bouillon and some cold chicken in your room.”
But husband and wife remained standing in the entrance-hall. The old
lady saw Bernard open the door of the drawing-room, stand aside for
Thérèse, and disappear after her. If she had not been deaf, she would
have done a little eavesdropping ... but there was nothing to fear from
her, buried, as she was, alive. She put out her candle, however, went
downstairs again, and looked through the keyhole. Bernard was moving a
lamp: his face was fully in the light, and he looked both nervous and
solemn. The aunt saw the back of Thérèse seated; she had thrown her
toque and mantle on to an arm-chair: her wet shoes were steaming in
front of the fire. For one instant she turned her head to her husband
and the old lady was glad to see she was smiling.
* * * * *
Thérèse was smiling. In the brief interval of space and time between
the stable and the house, walking at Bernard’s side, she suddenly saw,
or thought she saw, what she ought to do. The mere proximity of the
man had destroyed her hope of explaining herself, or of giving him
her confidence. How we distort the creatures we know best as soon as
they are no longer there! During the whole of this journey, she had
unconsciously been trying to create an image of a Bernard capable of
understanding her;--but at the first glance he appeared to her just
as he really was, one who had never once in his life put himself in
another’s place; one who had never made the effort to get outside
himself to see what his opponent was seeing. Indeed, would Bernard even
listen to her? He paced the long, low, damp room, and the flooring,
which was rotting here and there, creaked beneath his steps. He did
not look at his wife,--he was bursting with a speech he had long
since prepared. And Thérèse, too, knew what she was going to say. The
simplest solution is always the one we never think of. She would say,
‘I am going to disappear, Bernard. Don’t worry about me. I will go out
into the night at once, if you like. I am not afraid of the forest or
the darkness. They know me: we know each other. I was created in the
image of this arid land in which nothing lives except the birds that
pass over it and stray wild boars. I consent to my expulsion; burn all
my photographs; let even my daughter no longer know my name, let me be
in the eyes of the family as if I had never been.’
And Thérèse opened her mouth, and said, “Let me disappear, Bernard.”
At the sound of her voice Bernard turned. He hurried back from the far
end of the room, the veins of his face swollen:
“What,” he stuttered, “do you dare to express an opinion? Not another
word! Your business is to listen, to receive my orders and obey what I
shall decide once and for all.”
He stammered no more, having now got into touch with his carefully
prepared phrases. Leaning against the mantelpiece, he spoke in measured
tones, taking a piece of paper from his pocket and referring to it now
and then. Thérèse was no longer frightened; she wanted to laugh: he
was ridiculous,--a purely comic figure. She cared little for what he
was saying in that disgusting accent of his that made every one laugh
except at Saint Clair. She would go. Why all this melodrama? It would
not have mattered in the least if this fool had disappeared from the
ranks of living men. She noticed his ill-kept nails against the paper
that shook in his hands: he had no cuffs on his shirt, he was one of
those absurd oafs who are out of their proper station, and whose lives
are of no value to anything or anybody. It is only from habit that one
attaches infinite importance to a man’s existence. Robespierre was
right: and Napoleon, and Lenin.... He saw her smile: lost his temper,
raised his voice, and she was obliged to listen:
“I’ve got you; do you understand? You will have to obey what the Family
has decided, or else....”
“Or else ... what?”
She no longer troubled to feign indifference: she assumed a tone of
bravado and mockery: “Too late!” she cried. “You have given evidence
in my favour: you can’t go back on it. You will be convicted of
perjury....”
“Another piece of evidence can always be discovered. I have such a
further proof in my desk. There is no statute of limitations for
evidence, thank God!”
She shuddered:
“What do you want of me?” she asked.
He consulted his notes, and for a few seconds Thérèse sat listening to
the stupendous silence of Argelouse. The hour of cock-crow was yet far
off: no living water flowed in that desert, not a breath of wind moved
the countless tree-tops.
“I am not giving way to any personal considerations. I am disregarding
myself: the Family alone counts. The interests of the Family have
always dictated all my decisions. I have consented for the honour of
the Family, to cheat the justice of my country. God will be my judge.”
* * * * *
This pompous tone made Thérèse feel ill. She felt like asking him to
express himself more simply.
“It is of importance, for the sake of the Family, that the world should
think our relations all they should be, and that I should not seem
to throw any doubt upon your innocence. On the other hand, I want to
protect myself as far as possible....”
“Are you afraid of me, Bernard?”
“Afraid? No: I merely regard you with horror. But,” he went on: “I
shall waste no time; what I am saying, I say once and for all: we shall
leave this place to-morrow and go and live near by in the Desqueyroux
house: I will not have your aunt living with us. Your meals will be
brought to your room by Balionte. You are forbidden to enter any other
room: but I shall not prevent you going for walks in the woods. On
Sunday we shall be present together at High Mass in the Church of Saint
Clair. You must be seen walking with me: and on the first Thursday of
the month we shall go in an open carriage to the fair at B----, and to
visit your father, as we have always done.”
“And Marie?”
“Marie leaves to-morrow with her nurse for Saint Clair, and after that
my mother will take her to the South. We will invent some reason of
health. You can hardly have supposed she would be left with you? We
must put her in safety, too! If I had gone, she would have had the
property when she was twenty-one. After the husband, the child ...
naturally!”
Thérèse had got up: she stifled a cry:
“So you think it was for the pines that I....” So among the many secret
springs of her action, this imbecile had not been able to discover one;
and he invented the lowest....
“Why, of course: for the pines ... what else? I defy you to produce
another motive.... However, it is of no importance and no longer
interests me; I ask myself no more questions. You are nothing: all that
exists is the name you bear, alas! In a few months, when every one is
convinced of our good relations, and Anne has married young Deguilhem,
... you may be aware that the Deguilhems are insisting on some little
delay and asking for time to think matters over ... then I shall at
last be able to go and live at Saint Clair: you will stay here. You
will be neurasthenic, or something....”
“Mad, perhaps?”
“No, that would injure Marie. But we shall find plenty of plausible
reasons.... And that is all.”
Thérèse murmured: “At Argelouse ... until I die....”
She went to the window and opened it. At that moment Bernard was
really happy; this woman who had always intimidated and humiliated
him, this evening he had her at his feet. How abject she must feel!
His moderation made him feel quite pleased with himself. Madame de la
Trave constantly told him he was a saint: the whole Family praised his
noble character: and indeed he began for the first time to realise
his own nobility of mind. When, with many precautions, Thérèse’s
attempt on his life had been disclosed to him in the nursing-home, his
self-possession, which had been so highly commended, had cost him but
little effort. Nothing seems really serious to those who are incapable
of love; because he was without love, Bernard had only felt the sort
of tremulous joy that follows an escape from great danger: the sort
of sensation a man might have who had been told that he has lived for
years, without knowing it, in the company of a homicidal maniac. But
that evening Bernard was conscious of his strength: he dominated life.
He marvelled how every difficulty gives way before a clear and upright
mind: even so soon after all this turmoil he was ready to maintain
that “no one is ever unhappy except by his own fault.” See how he
had dealt with the most appalling tragedy as if it had been the most
ordinary matter of business. It would hardly be known: he would save
his face: no one would sympathize with him any more, and he hated
sympathy. There is nothing humiliating about having married a criminal
when one has the last word. Besides, a bachelor life is no bad thing,
and the proximity of death had marvellously increased in him his taste
for landed property, shooting, motor-cars, and things to eat and
drink;--for life, in short.
Thérèse remained standing before the window: she could catch a glimpse
of white gravel, and smell the chrysanthemums, which were protected
from the cattle by wire-netting. Beyond them a dark mass of oaks
hid the pines: but the night was full of their resinous odour: like
a hostile army, invisible but near at hand, Thérèse knew that they
surrounded the house. These warders, whose muttered lamentations she
could hear, would watch her wasting away through the winters, and
gasping through the summer heats: they would be the witnesses of her
slow strangulation. She shut the window once more and went up to
Bernard.
“Do you think you will keep me here by force?”
“As you like ... but let me tell you this: you won’t leave this house
except in handcuffs.”
“What nonsense! I know you: don’t make yourself out worse than you
are. You will not expose the Family to such shame. You need not try to
frighten me.” Whereupon, with the air of a man who has well weighed
everything, he explained to her that to leave the house was to confess
her guilt. In that case, the Family could only avert disgrace by
amputating the diseased member, rejecting and disowning it in the face
of the world.
“That was, in fact, the decision my mother wanted us to make, I may
tell you. We were on the point of letting justice take its course; and
if it had not been for Anne and Marie.... But there is still time.
Do not give your answer in a hurry: I will give you till to-morrow
morning.”
“I have my father still,” said Thérèse in a whisper.
“Your father? But we’re in entire agreement. He has his career, his
politics, the ideas he stands for: his only thought is to hush up the
scandal at whatever cost. You must realise what he has done for you:
it was entirely due to him that the enquiry came to nothing. Besides,
he must have made his express wishes known to you.... Hasn’t he?”
Bernard’s voice was no longer raised, he became almost courteous. It
was not that he felt the slightest compassion. But this woman, whom he
could not even hear breathing, was at last prostrate: she had found
her true place. All was now in order. Another man’s peace of mind
would not have survived such a blow: Bernard was proud to have made
so successful a recovery: any one may be deceived; indeed everybody,
for the matter of that, had been deceived by Thérèse, even Madame de
la Trave, who was usually such a penetrating judge of character. The
fact was that in these days people do not take sufficient account of
principles: they no longer realise the dangers of an education, such as
Thérèse had received; a perverted creature, no doubt; still, it is no
use saying,--“if she had believed in God” ... fear is the beginning of
wisdom.
Such were Bernard’s thoughts. And he reflected, too, that all the
neighbours, greedy to enjoy their shame, would be greatly disconcerted
every Sunday by the sight of so harmonious a household! He was
almost impatient for Sunday to come so that he might observe their
expressions!... Moreover, justice would still be done. He took the
lamp, and as he raised it, the light fell upon Thérèse’s averted head:
“Aren’t you going up yet?”
She did not seem to hear him: and he went out, leaving her in darkness.
At the bottom of the staircase Aunt Clara sat crouching on the lowest
step. As the old woman stared at him, he smiled with an effort, and
took her arm to raise her. But she resisted,--like an old dog against
the bed of its dying master. Bernard placed the lamp on the paved
floor, and shouted in the old woman’s ear that Thérèse was already
feeling much better, but that she wanted to be alone for a few minutes
before she went to bed.
“It is just one of her moods, you know.”
Yes, the aunt knew: it was always her ill-luck to go into Thérèse’s
room just at the moment when she wanted to be alone. Indeed, in the
past, the old lady had often felt she was not wanted immediately
she had opened the door. She got up with an effort and, leaning
on Bernard’s arm, went up to her room, which was over the large
drawing-room. Bernard went in after her, carefully lit a candle on
the table, kissed her on the forehead, and then withdrew. The aunt
never took her eyes off him. What did she read on the faces of men
whose voices she could not hear? She left Bernard the time to get to
his room, and opened her door again gently ... but he was still on
the landing, leaning against the banisters, rolling a cigarette; she
hurriedly went in again, her legs trembling and so breathless that she
had not the strength to undress. She remained lying on her bed, with
staring eyes.
CHAPTER X
In the drawing-room, Thérèse was sitting in the dark. There were still
some embers alive under the ashes of the fire. She did not move. Now
that it was too late, stray passages from the confession she had
prepared during her journey, floated to the surface of her mind; but
she could not find fault with herself for not having used it. As a
matter of fact, the story was too well constructed, and had but little
reference to reality. The importance she had chosen to attach to young
Azévédo’s conversation was mere foolishness. As if that could have had
the slightest effect! No, she had obeyed some inner inexorable law: she
had failed to destroy this family, so she herself would be destroyed;
they were right to consider her a monster, but she thought them
monstrous, too. Without appearing to do so they now intended gradually
and methodically to crush her out of existence. Henceforth, this
powerful family machine would be used against her,--because she had not
understood how to dislocate the mechanism, nor get out of reach of its
ruthless wheels. It was useless to look for any reason other than the
fact that they were what they were, and she was herself. “All those
efforts,” she thought, “to wear a mask and a disguise, and impersonate
a wife, which I could only keep up for less than two years, I imagine
other women, no different from me, carry on until they die, saved,
perhaps, by use and wont, drugged by habit, and stupefied into slumber
against the maternal and all-powerful bosom of the Family. But I ... I
... I....”
She got up, opened the window, and felt the chill of dawn. Why not
escape? She had only to get out of the window. Would they pursue her?
Would they again deliver her up to justice? It was a risk worth taking.
Anything was better than the interminable agony. Thérèse had already
drawn up a chair against the window. But she had no money; thousands
of pines were hers, but they were useless: she could not touch a penny
except through Bernard. She could do nothing but take to the moors,
as Daguerre had done, that hunted murderer for whom Thérèse as a child
had felt so much pity. (She remembered the gendarmes whom Balionte had
entertained in the kitchen at Argelouse)--and it was the Desqueyroux
dog who had got on the poor wretch’s track. He had been picked up
half-dead with hunger in the heather; and Thérèse had seen him lying
bound in a haycart. He was said to have died on the ship before he
reached Cayenne. A ship ... a convict settlement.... They were quite
capable of giving her up, as they had said. That evidence that Bernard
pretended he had,--it was a lie, no doubt; unless he had discovered
that package of poisons in the pocket of the old cloak.
Thérèse decided to make certain. She felt her way to the staircase:
as she went up it she saw more clearly, the light of dawn was shining
through the windows above her. There, on the attic landing, was the
cupboard where the old clothes were hanging,--the ones that never
appeared, because they were only used during the shooting season. There
was a deep pocket in that faded mantle: Aunt Clara used to put her
knitting in it in the times when she also used to go out and watch for
the pigeons to come over. Thérèse slipped her hand into it and drew out
the packet sealed with wax:
Chloroform: 10 grammes.
Aconitine: 2 grammes.
Digitaline: 20 centigrammes.
She read the words and figures over again. Death: she had always
had a terror of death. The essential thing was not to contemplate
death,--only to think of the necessary preliminaries: pour out the
water, dissolve the powder, drink it off, lie down on a bed, and close
her eyes: she must not look further than that. Why be more afraid
of the sleep that was death, than of any other sleep? If she was
shivering, it was only because the early morning air was chilly. She
went downstairs again, and stopped at the door of the room in which
Marie slept. The nurse’s snores were like the grunts of an animal.
Thérèse pushed the door back: the growing daylight filtered through the
shutters, and the narrow iron bed gleamed white in the darkness. Two
tiny fists were lying on the sheet: a baby profile was buried in the
pillow. Thérèse recognised that ear; it was a little too large,--just
like her own. They were right, a replica of herself lay there, sunk in
slumber. “I shall go away,--but that part of me remains; a fate that
must be fulfilled to the end, and not one iota omitted.” All manner
of dumb desires and blind inclinations, laws of the blood that none
may escape,--in these she must survive. Thérèse had read of desperate
people carrying off their children to death with them: worthy citizens
let their paper fall, exclaiming “How can such things be possible?”
Because she was a criminal, Thérèse knew too well that they were
possible, and that for very little.... She knelt down, and laid her
lips against a little outstretched hand; she was amazed at something
that surged up from her inmost being, rose up to her eyes, and burned
her cheeks: a few poor tears,--she who never wept!
Thérèse got up, looked at the child once more, then went into her own
room, filled a glass with water, broke the wax seal, and hesitated
between the three packets of poison.
The window was open. The crowing of the cocks seemed to cleave the
mist, which still clung to the pines in transparent strips. The land
lay bathed in the dawn. How could she say farewell to so much light?
What was death? No one knew what it was. Thérèse was not quite certain
that it meant annihilation: she was not sure that there was no one
there. She loathed herself for feeling such terrors; she who did not
hesitate to hurl a fellow-creature into nothingness, was scared of it
herself. How her cowardice humiliated her! If that Being existed (and
in one brief instant she saw before her that dreadful Corpus Christi
procession, that solitary figure weighed down under his golden cape,
the thing that he carried in both hands, and his look of dejection);
since He exists, let Him turn aside the murderous hand before it is too
late; and if it is His will that a poor blind soul should pass that
bourne, let Him give a loving welcome to the criminal whom He created.
Thérèse poured the chloroform into the water: its name was more
familiar to her and made her feel less frightened because it called up
images of sleep. She must be quick: the house was awakening: Balionte
had taken down the shutters in Aunt Clara’s room. What was she shouting
to the deaf woman? The servant usually knew how to make herself
understood by a movement of the lips. A noise of doors and hurried
steps; Thérèse had only just the time to throw a shawl over the table
to hide the poisons. Balionte came in without knocking.
“Ma’m’iselle is dead! I found her dead, on her bed with all her clothes
on. She is cold already.”
* * * * *
In spite of everything, a rosary was placed between the fingers of the
old unbeliever, a crucifix on her breast. Tenants came in, knelt down,
and went out, not without long looks at Thérèse who was standing at
the head of the bed: (“And who knows if it wasn’t she who did it?”)
Bernard had gone to Saint Clair to tell the Family and to make the
necessary arrangements. He must have thought that this accident came
at an opportune moment and would distract people’s attention. Thérèse
looked at the body, the old faithful body that came and lay down in her
path at the very moment she was going to hurl herself to death. Chance:
coincidence? If any one talked about free-will, she used to shrug her
shoulders. People said to each other: “Did you see? She didn’t even
pretend to cry.” Thérèse was speaking silently to her who was no longer
there: she must live, but like a corpse in the hands of those who hate
her. She must try and look no further.
At the funeral Thérèse took her proper place. On the following Sunday,
she entered the church with Bernard who instead of going down the
aisle, as his custom was, ostentatiously walked up the nave. Thérèse
did not raise her crêpe veil until she had reached her place between
her mother-in-law and her husband. She was hidden from the congregation
by a pillar: opposite her was only the choir. She was hemmed in on
every side: the mass of the congregation behind her, Bernard on the
right, Madame de la Trave on the left, only the choir lay before her,
as the arena stretches away in front of the bull when he emerges from
the darkness: that empty space where between two children stood a man,
disguised and muttering, with parted hands.
CHAPTER XI
In the evening Bernard and Thérèse came back to Argelouse to the
Desqueyroux house, which had hardly been inhabited for years. The
chimneys smoked, the windows did not fasten properly, and the draughts
blew under the doors where the rats had gnawed them. But the autumn was
so lovely that year, that Thérèse did not at first suffer from these
inconveniences. Bernard was out shooting until the evening: no sooner
had he come back, than he settled down in the kitchen and took his
dinner with the Balions: Thérèse could hear the clatter of forks and
the monotonous sound of voices. Night falls quickly in October. She had
read the few books she had brought with her over and over again, and
she was tired of them. Bernard did not reply to her request that he
would send on an order to his bookseller at Bordeaux: he only allowed
Thérèse to renew her supply of cigarettes. She sat and stirred the
fire ... but the thick resinous smoke made her eyes smart and irritated
her throat, which had already been injured by tobacco. No sooner had
Balionte fetched away the remains of a hurried meal, than Thérèse put
out the lamp and went to bed. How many hours she lay there before
sleep came to her deliverance! The silence of Argelouse prevented her
sleeping: she preferred the windy nights,--the confused murmur of the
pines is full of human kindness. It soothed the turmoil of her mind.
The wild nights of the equinox sent her to sleep better than the nights
when all was still.
However interminable the evenings seemed, she sometimes came back to
the house before dusk had fallen,--either because, at the sight of her,
a mother had seized her child by the hand and dragged it roughly back
into the farmyard,--or because some herdsman, whose name she knew, had
not answered her greeting. Oh, how good it would be to lose herself,
to drown herself in the deepest depths of some populous city! At
Argelouse, there was not a shepherd that did not know her story (even
Aunt Clara’s death was laid to her charge). There was not a threshold
that she would have dared to cross: she went out by a back door, and
avoided houses; the distant rumble of a cart was enough to make her
hurry down a side road. She walked quickly, with the beating heart of
a driven bird; and she lay down in the heather to wait until a bicycle
had passed.
On Sunday, at Mass at Saint Clair, she did not feel this terror, and
was conscious of a respite. Public opinion in the town seemed more
favourable. She did not know that her father and the La Traves had
depicted her as an innocent victim wounded to death. “We are afraid
that the poor girl will never get over it: she refuses to see any one
and the doctor says that she must not be opposed. Bernard is constantly
with her, but her mind is affected....”
* * * * *
On the last night of October a violent wind from the Atlantic raved
among the pines for many hours, and Thérèse lay between sleeping and
waking listening to its ocean roar. But at daylight she was awakened
by quite another sound of lamentation. She pushed open the shutters
and the room was still dark: a dense steady rain streamed down on
to the roofs of the out-buildings and the leaves of the oak trees,
which had hardly yet begun to fall. Bernard did not go out that day.
Thérèse sat smoking; she threw away her cigarette, went out onto the
landing, and heard her husband wandering from one room to another on
the ground floor: a smell of pipe-smoke reached her room, overpowered
that of Thérèse’s light tobacco, and she recognised the smell of her
old life. The first day of bad weather.... How many would she have to
live through, sitting at the corner of that fire-place by the dying
embers? In the corners of the room the paper was peeling off the damp
walls, on which could still be seen the marks of the old pictures which
Bernard had taken away to adorn the drawing-room at Saint Clair,--and
the desolate rusty nails. On the mantelpiece, in frames with a triple
border of tortoiseshell, stood photographs as pallid as if the dead
they represented had died a second death. Bernard’s father, her
grandmother, Bernard himself as a boy, with bobbed hair. There was
still the whole day before her which she must spend in that melancholy
room; and weeks, and months to follow.
As it began to grow dark, Thérèse could bear it no longer; she opened
the door quietly, went downstairs and into the kitchen. There she saw
Bernard sitting on a low chair before the fire. He got up suddenly;
Balion stopped cleaning a gun; Balionte dropped her knitting. All three
of them looked at her with such an expression that she asked:
“Are you afraid of me?”
“Didn’t you know you were forbidden to enter the kitchen?” She did not
reply and turned towards the door. Bernard called her back.
“However, as you have come, I should like to tell you that my presence
here is no longer necessary. We have been able to work up a good deal
of sympathy at Saint Clair; people think you, or pretend to think you,
rather neurasthenic. It is understood that you prefer to live alone and
that I often come to see you. After this you need not come to Mass.”
She stammered out that she did not mind coming; to which he replied
that her likes and dislikes were not in question. The desired result
had been obtained:
“And since the Mass means nothing to you....”
She opened her mouth, seemed about to speak, but said nothing. He
would not give way, lest a word or a gesture of hers might compromise
a success so quick and so unexpected. She asked how Marie was. He said
she was very well, and that she was leaving to-morrow for Beaulieu with
Anne and Madame de la Trave. He was going to spend a few weeks there
himself; two months at the most. He opened the door and stood aside for
Thérèse to pass.
In the dark dawn she heard Balion harnessing the horses; then
Bernard’s voice, the trampling of hooves, and the rattle of the
departing carriage. And then the rain,--on the roofs, on the clouded
window-panes, on the desolate fields, on fifty miles of moor and marsh,
on the shifting sanddunes by the sea shore, and on the sea.
Thérèse lit a cigarette from the one she had just finished. About four
o’clock she put on a mackintosh and went out into the rain. But the
darkness frightened her and she came back to her room. The fire was
out, and as she was shivering, she went to bed. About seven o’clock
Balionte brought her up an egg, fried, on a slice of ham, but she
would not eat it; the taste of fat had begun to make her feel sick!
Never anything but potted meat or ham. Balionte said that she had
nothing better to give her: Monsieur Bernard had forbidden her to have
game. She complained that Thérèse made her go up and down stairs for
nothing (she had something the matter with her heart and her legs were
swollen). The work was really too much for her; she only did it for
Monsieur Bernard’s sake.
Thérèse was feverish that night, and in her abnormally clear
imagination she evolved a complete existence in Paris: she saw once
more the restaurant in the Bois where she had been; this time she was
not with Bernard, but with Jean Azévédo and some young women. She
put down her tortoiseshell cigarette case on the table, and talked
frankly and freely, to the faint accompaniment of an orchestra. She
could see the circle of admiring faces, listening eagerly but without
astonishment. One woman said: “That is so like me.... I have felt that,
too.” A literary man took her aside, and said: “You ought to write down
everything that comes into your head; we will publish it in our review
and call it ‘The Diary of a Woman of To-day.’”
A young man who was desperately in love with her, took her home in
his car. They were driving back along the Avenue du Bois; she felt no
emotion whatever, but she took a certain pleasure in the agonised young
body close beside her. “No, not this evening,” she said to him. “I’m
dining with a friend this evening.” “What about to-morrow evening?” “I
can’t to-morrow either.” “Are your evenings never free?” “Hardly ever
... I might almost say never.”
* * * * *
There was one being in her life who made the rest of the world seem
insignificant; some one unknown to any one in her circle; very humble
and obscure; but Thérèse’s whole existence revolved round this sun
whom she alone could see, and whose warmth reached no other flesh but
hers. The murmur of Paris was like the wind in the pines. This body
that lay so close to hers, light as it was, prevented her breathing;
but she would sooner stifle than send him away. (And Thérèse made the
gesture of an embrace--she clasped her left shoulder with her right
hand and drove the nails of her left hand into her right shoulder.)
She got up, crossed the room barefooted, and opened the window; the
night outside was not cold; but she could hardly bring herself to
imagine that a day must come when it would rain no more. If she had
had any money she would have escaped to Paris, gone straight to Jean
Azévédo and confided in him; he would know how to get her work. If she
could only be a woman alone in Paris, earning her living and dependent
on no one...! Oh to be without a family! She would choose _her own
people_ as she pleased,--the tie should not be one of blood, but of
the mind, and even of the flesh as well; she would discover her true
relations, however few and scattered they might be.... She went to
sleep at last, with the window open. The cold damp dawn awoke her; her
teeth chattered, and she could not bring herself to get up and shut the
window,--she could not even put out her arms and draw up the bedclothes.
That day she did not get up or even do her hair. She swallowed a few
mouthfuls of potted meat and drank some coffee so as to be able to
smoke,--tobacco on an empty stomach did not agree with her. She tried
to recapture her imaginings of the night; and, indeed, at Argelouse the
day was almost as quiet and as dark as the night. In these days, the
shortest in the year, time disappears under the pall of rain, and one
hour melts into the next; dusk passes into dusk in unalterable silence.
But Thérèse had no desire for sleep, and her dreams became more and
more vivid; she searched her past methodically for forgotten faces,
lips that she had loved from afar, vague forms that casual encounters,
or the chances of the night, had brought into contact with her young
body. She moulded an image of happiness, invented an imaginary joy,
and used all the fragments of her experience to build up an impossible
love.
“She never gets up now, and she leaves her potted meat and her bread,”
said Balionte to Balion some time after this: “but she finishes the
bottle fast enough. She’d drink as much as you’d let her have, she
would. And then she burns the sheets with her cigarettes. She’ll end
by setting the house on fire. She smokes so much that her fingers and
nails are all yellow, just as if she’d dipped them in arnica. It’s a
shame, so it is!--those sheets were woven at home.... She won’t get
clean ones very often, I can tell you.”
She added that she was perfectly willing to sweep the room or to make
the bed: it was the creature’s fault for pretending to be ill and not
getting up. It was not worth Balionte’s trouble, with her swollen legs
and all, to carry up jugs of hot water; she found them in the evening
standing at the bedroom door where she had put them in the morning.
Thérèse’s thoughts began to be less absorbed in the unknown being that
she had evoked for her delight; she grew weary of her happiness, and
sated with imaginary pleasure, so she conceived another way of escape.
All manner of people knelt about her humble bed; a child of Argelouse,
one of those who ran away when she came near, was brought dying into
Thérèse’s room; she laid her nicotine-stained fingers on him, and he
got up cured.
She had other and less exalted dreams. She planned a house by the
seaside, saw in her mind’s eye the garden, and the terrace, arranged
the rooms, chose each piece of furniture one by one, tried to make up
her mind where she would put what she had brought from Saint Clair,
and argued with herself over the choice of materials. Then the scene
would fade, the outlines grew confused, and nothing was left but an
arbour and a bench beside the sea. And there Thérèse was sitting, her
head against the shoulder of one who sat beside her; she got up, as
the bell rang for dinner, and went into the darkened arbour with some
one walking at her side who suddenly flung his arms about her and drew
her to him. A kiss, she thought, must bring time to a standstill; she
imagined that in love there must be seconds that last for ever. So she
imagined; but she would never know. Once more she sees the white house
and the well; she hears the harsh voice of the pump; the courtyard is
full of the fragrance of heliotrope; dinner will be a rest before the
joys of the evening and the night, which she dares not conceive, for
they pass so far beyond the powers of the human heart. Thus, the love
of which Thérèse, of all women, had been utterly frustrated, possessed
and pervaded all her being. She could hardly hear Balionte’s hoarse
cries. The old creature was trying to convey to her that Monsieur
Bernard would come back from the South one day or another without
letting them know. And what would he say when he saw that room? It was
little better than a pig-sty! Madame must get up whether she liked it
or not.
As she sat on the bed, Thérèse stared with amazement at her
skeleton-like legs, and her feet looked enormous. Balionte wrapped
her in a dressing-gown and pushed her into an arm-chair. She reached
out for the cigarettes, but her hand dropped nerveless at her side.
A cold sunlight came through the open window. Balionte bustled
about with a broom in her hand, breathing heavily and grumbling to
herself,--Balionte who must have had a good heart, because it was
always said that every Christmas the death of the pig which she had
been fattening made her cry. She could not bear Thérèse not to answer
her: in her eyes silence was an insult, a mark of contempt. But Thérèse
was no longer mistress of her speech. When she felt against her body
the coolness of the clean sheets, she thought she had said, “Thank
you,” though as a matter of fact she had not uttered a word. “You
won’t burn these, I think,” said Balionte to her sharply as she left
the room. Thérèse was afraid that she had taken away the cigarettes
and put out her hand towards the table: they were gone. How could she
live without smoking? She could not exist without the constant touch
of these small, dry, warm objects against her fingers. She must have
their odour always in her nostrils, and fill the room with the fragrant
mist that she had inhaled and ejected from her lips. Balionte would
not come back until the evening; a whole afternoon without tobacco! She
closed her eyes and her yellow fingers moved mechanically as though
they held a cigarette.
At seven o’clock Balionte came in with a candle, and put the tray on
the table: milk, coffee, and a piece of bread. “So you don’t want
anything else?” And she waited maliciously for Thérèse to ask for her
cigarettes; but Thérèse’s face was turned steadfastly to the wall and
she did not move.
Doubtless Balionte had neglected to shut the window properly: a gust
of wind blew it open, and the cold night air filled the room. Thérèse
could not rouse herself to throw off the bedclothes, get up, and run
barefooted to the window. She lay, motionless, huddled up, the sheets
drawn up to her eyes, and the icy breath only touched her forehead
and her eyelids. Argelouse was full of the vast murmur of the pines,
their noise was like the noise of the ocean, but it did not seem to
break the silence of that place. Thérèse reflected that if she meant
to make a friend of pain, she should not have buried herself beneath
the bedclothes. She tried to push them back a little, but could not
bear the cold for more than a few seconds. She tried again, and endured
a little longer,--and so on, as if it had been a game. Thus, though
it was not deliberate, physical pain became her occupation and--who
knows?--her reason for existing in the world.
CHAPTER XII
“A letter from the master.”
As Thérèse did not take the envelope that she held out, Balionte
pressed it on her: Monsieur had surely said when he was coming back,
and she must know, so as to have everything in readiness.
“If Madame would like me to read it.”
“Oh, read it, read it,” said Thérèse. And, as she always did when
Balionte was in the room, turned her face to the wall. However, what
Balionte managed to decipher, aroused her from her lethargy.
“_I have been glad to hear from Balion’s reports that all
is well at Argelouse...._”
Bernard announced that he was coming back by road, but that as he
expected to stop at several places on the way he could not fix the
exact date of his return.
“_It will certainly not be later than December 20th. Do
not be surprised to see me return with Anne and young
Deguilhem. They became engaged at Beaulieu, but it is not
yet official; young Deguilhem is anxious to see you first.
A mere question of formality, so he assures me; for my
part, I have a feeling that he wants to form an opinion on
you know what. I am sure you are intelligent enough to pass
the test. Remember that you are ill, and that your mind is
affected. Anyhow, I rely on you. Try not to damage Anne’s
happiness, or compromise the happy issue of a project so
satisfactory for the Family in every respect; you will not
lose by it: if you fail me I should not hesitate to make
you pay dearly for any attempt to wreck the scheme; but I
am sure I have nothing to fear on that score._”
It was a beautiful day, clear and cold. Thérèse got up, obedient to
Balionte’s injunctions, and took a turn in the garden leaning on her
arm, but she found it very difficult to finish a scrap of chicken for
her dinner. There were ten days left before December 20th. If Madame
would consent to make an effort, it was quite long enough to get on
her legs again.
“One can’t say that she doesn’t try,” said Balionte to Balion. “She
does what she can. Monsieur Bernard knows how to break in a dog that
won’t obey him. You know that iron collar he puts on them? Well, it
didn’t take him long to make her crawl. But he’d better not be too sure
of her....”
Thérèse was, in fact, making a great effort to try to give up dreaming
and sleeping, and come back to life again. She forced herself to walk
and eat, but especially to get her brain clear once more, and to look
at men and things with the eyes of the flesh;--and just as though she
were coming back to a stretch of heath which she had set on fire,
treading upon the ashes and walking among the burnt and blackened
pines, so she would try to speak and smile among that Family,--her
family.
On the eighteenth, about three o’clock, on a cloudy but fine afternoon,
Thérèse was sitting in her room in front of the fire, her head leaning
against the back of the chair, and her eyes shut. She was awakened by
the throbbing engines of a motor-car; she recognised Bernard’s voice
in the entrance-hall and also Madame de la Trave’s. When Balionte,
completely out of breath, had pushed open the door without knocking,
Thérèse was already standing up before the mirror. She was putting
rouge on her cheeks and lips. “I must not frighten the poor young man,”
she said to herself.
But Bernard had made a mistake in not going up to see his wife at
once. Young Deguilhem, who had promised his family “to keep his eyes
extremely wide open,” reflected that this was, “to say the least of
it, a rather significant piece of neglect.” He drew a little aside
from Anne and turned up his fur collar, remarking that “it was not
worth trying to warm these country drawing-rooms.” “Have you no cellar
below?” he asked Bernard. “If not, your floor will always rot unless
you lay down a bed of cement....”
Anne de la Trave was wearing a grey squirrel cloak, and a felt hat
without any ribbon or bow. (“But,” as Madame de la Trave said, “it cost
more just as it was, than our hats did with all their feathers and
aigrettes. It is the best felt, certainly: it comes from Lailhaca, but
it is a Reboux model.”) Madame de la Trave stretched out her boots to
the fire, and her face, at once arrogant and weak, was turned towards
the door. She had promised Bernard she would be equal to the situation,
but she had warned him that she would not kiss Thérèse. “You cannot
ask your mother to do that, it will be dreadful enough for me to have
to touch her hand. My feeling is this: what she did was awful enough,
God knows; but it isn’t that that revolts me the most. One already
knew that there were people capable of committing murder ... but it’s
her hypocrisy! That really is awful! Don’t you remember what she said:
‘Mother, do take this chair, you will be more comfortable....’ And
don’t you remember when she was so frightened of giving you a shock?
‘The poor darling has such a horror of death, a consultation would be
the end of him....’ God knows I didn’t suspect anything; but ‘poor
darling,’ coming from her, did surprise me....”
At present, in that Argelouse drawing-room, Madame de la Trave was
only conscious of the embarrassment that every one was feeling; and she
noticed young Deguilhem’s goggle eyes fixed on Bernard.
“Bernard, you ought to go and see what Thérèse is doing ... perhaps she
is feeling worse.”
Anne, who seemed indifferent and aloof from anything that might happen,
was the first to recognise a familiar step, and said: “I hear her
coming down.” Bernard, with a hand against his heart, was seized with
a palpitation; he was a fool not to have come the day before; he ought
to have arranged the scene with Thérèse in advance. What would she say?
She was quite capable of upsetting everything without precisely doing
anything that she could be called to account for. How slowly she came
downstairs! They were all standing up, turned towards the door, which
Thérèse at last opened.
Bernard was to remember, for many years after, that at the approach
of that wasted form, that small, white, painted face, his first
thought was: _The Assize Court_. But not because of Thérèse’s crime.
In a flash, he saw before him that coloured picture from the _Petit
Parisien_, which among so many others adorned the wooden closets in
the garden at Argelouse; while amid the buzz of flies, and the shrill
voices of the grasshoppers on a blazing day of summer, his boyish eyes
stared so earnestly at that red and green drawing which depicted a poor
wretched girl who had been imprisoned and starved by her parents at
Poitiers.
So now, he watched Thérèse as she stood there, bloodless and emaciated,
and realised his folly in not having got rid of this terrible
woman,--as one flings into the water an infernal machine which may
burst at any moment. Whether consciously or not, Thérèse suggested
tragedy,--worse than that in fact: the tragedies of the Sunday
Newspapers. She could be nothing but criminal or victim....
The Family broke into a murmur of astonishment and pity, so obviously
genuine, that young Deguilhem began to doubt his conclusions and did
not know what to think.
“It is quite simple,” said Thérèse. “The bad weather stopped my going
out, so I lost my appetite. I was hardly eating at all. It’s much
better to get thin than fat.... But I want to talk about you, Anne, I
am so delighted....”
She took Anne’s hands (she was sitting down and Anne was standing)
and looked at her. In that face, which looked so ravaged, Anne could
clearly recognise the expression whose persistence used to irritate her
in days gone by. She remembered how she used to say. “When you have
finished looking at me like that!”
“I am delighted to hear of your happiness, my little Anne.”
As she uttered the word “happiness” she smiled faintly at young
Deguilhem,--his bald head, his curly moustache, his sloping shoulders,
his tight little coat, and his fat little legs under the black-and-grey
striped trousers. (Oh well! A man like any other,--just a husband!)
Then once more she rested her eyes on Anne and said:
“Take your hat off.... Ah, now I recognise you, darling.”
Anne now saw quite close to her those slightly twisted lips, those
eyes that were always dry, those eyes that could not weep; but she did
not know what Thérèse was thinking. Young Deguilhem was saying that
winter in the country was not so dreadful for a woman who is fond of
her home:
“There are always so many things to do in a house.”
“But you don’t ask for any news of Marie.”
“That’s true.... Tell me about Marie....”
Anne seemed once more distrustful and hostile; she had been saying for
months, in the same tone as her mother: “I would have forgiven her
anything, because, after all, she is ill; but I cannot forgive her
indifference about Marie. When a mother takes no interest in her child,
you can invent any excuses you like for her, I think it is disgraceful.”
Thérèse read the young girl’s thoughts: “She despises me because I did
not begin by talking about Marie. How can I explain? She would not
understand that I can think of nothing but myself, that I am my only
interest. Anne, of course, is simply waiting to have children so as
to efface herself in them as her mother does, and all the women of the
Family. But I want to find myself again; I am trying to make my own
acquaintance.... Anne will forget our youth together, the caresses of
Jean Azévédo, with the first howl of the brat which that little object
will beget upon her without even troubling to take off his coat. The
ambition of the women of the Family is to lose all their individual
existence. This complete self-sacrifice for the species is a fine
thing; I feel the beauty of that absorption, that self-annihilation ...
but I--No!...”
She tried not to listen to what people were saying, and to think of
Marie: the child must be able to talk now: “Perhaps it would amuse me
for a few minutes to listen to her, but I should soon get tired of it,
and want to be alone with myself again.”
“I suppose Marie talks by now?” she asked Anne.
“She repeats anything you like. It’s great fun; whenever she hears a
cock crow, or the noise of a motor-horn, she puts up her little finger
and says: Do you hear the music?’ She’s a perfect little love.”
Thérèse thought to herself; “I must try to listen to what they are
saying: my head feels quite empty; what is young Deguilhem talking
about?” She made a great effort and tried to attend.
“My men at Balisac don’t work like they do here: only four barrels of
stuff, while the Argelouse men get in seven or eight.”
“Well, with resin at its present price, they really must be lazy.”
“Do you know that these people can earn a hundred francs a day
sometimes? ... but I think we are tiring Madame Desqueyroux.”
Thérèse was resting her head against the back of her chair. Everybody
got up. Bernard decided that he would not go back to Saint Clair. Young
Deguilhem agreed to drive the car which the chauffeur would bring back
to Argelouse the following day with Bernard’s luggage. Thérèse made an
effort to get up but her mother-in-law prevented her.
She shut her eyes, and heard Bernard say to Madame de la Trave:
“Really, that Balion pair are beyond everything! I’ll let them have
something they won’t forget.” “Take care, don’t do anything in a hurry;
we don’t want them to go away, they know a little too much: and then
don’t forget the estates: Balion’s the only person who really knows the
boundaries.”
And Madame de la Trave added in reply to some remark of Bernard’s that
Thérèse did not hear:
“All the same, be careful, don’t trust her too far; watch her
movements, and never let her go into the kitchen or dining-room
alone.... No, she hasn’t fainted: she’s asleep, or pretending to be....”
Thérèse opened her eyes again: Bernard stood in front of her; he held
a glass and said: “There, drink that: it’s a glass of port, it will do
you good.” And as he always did what he had made up his mind to do he
went into the kitchen, and proceeded to lose his temper. Thérèse heard
Balionte’s raucous _patois_ and thought: “Bernard has clearly been
frightened: I wonder why?” At that moment he came back.
“I think you would eat with more appetite in the dining-room than in
your own room. I have given orders for your place to be laid there
again.”
This was the Bernard she had known at the time of the enquiry: the
ally who wanted to save her at any price. And now he was unreservedly
anxious she should get well. Yes, it was clear he had been frightened.
Thérèse watched him, sitting opposite her, and stirring the fire, but
she could not guess what those great round eyes of his were seeing in
the flames:--the red and green drawing from the _Petit Parisien_.
Incessant as the rain had been, not a single puddle was left in the
sand of Argelouse. In the very depths of winter, after an hour’s
sunshine, one could walk dry-shod in country sandals, along the
road, on that dry and yielding carpet of pine-needles. Bernard was
out shooting all day, but came back to meals: he was anxious about
Thérèse, and more attentive than he had ever been. There was but
little constraint in their relations. He made her weigh herself every
three days, and not smoke more than two cigarettes after each meal.
On Bernard’s advice Thérèse took long walks: “Exercise is the best
digestive,” he would say.
She was no longer afraid of Argelouse: it seemed as though the pines
were moving further off, opening their ranks, and signalling to her to
make her escape.
One evening Bernard had said to her: “I am only asking you to wait
until Anne’s marriage: we must be seen in company once more by the
whole neighbourhood: after that you will be free.” She had not been
able to sleep during the following night: her joy made her restless and
her eyes would not close. At dawn she heard the innumerable cocks, who
did not seem to be answering each other: they were all crowing together
and filling earth and heaven with their united clamour. Bernard would
let her loose into the world, just as in days gone by he had let loose
on the moors that wild sow he had not been able to tame. When Anne
was at last married, people might say what they liked: Bernard would
fling Thérèse into the depths of Paris and then hurriedly retire; this
was understood between them. There would be no divorce or official
separation; some reason of health would be invented for the sake of
appearances,--“She is never well except when she is travelling.” And
Bernard would render, every All-Saints’ Day, an exact account of the
income from the sale of her resin.
Bernard did not question Thérèse about her plans, let her go and hang
herself somewhere else. “I shan’t have any peace,” he said to his
mother: “until she is off the premises.” And she had replied: “I’ve
no doubt she will take her maiden name again ... however, if she gets
into trouble, you will be dragged into it fast enough.” “But Thérèse,”
he said, “only kicked in harness; no one could be more sensible when
she had her freedom.” In any case, they must take the risk. That was
Monsieur Larroque’s opinion also. All things considered, it was better
that Thérèse should disappear; she would be more quickly forgotten, and
people would get out of the habit of talking about her. Silence was the
essential thing. This notion was so firmly fixed in their minds that
nothing could have uprooted it. They must get Thérèse out of harness;
and how impatient they were to do it!
Thérèse loved to watch the close of winter despoiling the already
barren land, though the oaks had never shed their stubborn mantle of
dead leaves. She discovered that the silence of Argelouse had no real
existence. In the calmest weather the forest moaned like a sorrowing
human soul, and lulled itself to sleep: and the nights were full of a
murmur that never ceased. In her future life; that unimaginable life
before her, there would be dawns so barren that she would perhaps
regret the hour of awakening at Argelouse: that marvellous clamour
of myriad cocks. She would remember, in the summers to come, the
grasshoppers by day and the crickets by night. Paris: no longer the
torn and battered pines, but human beings to be feared: a world of men,
no longer a world of trees.
Husband and wife were astonished that their relations were so little
constrained. Thérèse reflected that people become endurable as soon
as we are sure we can get away from them. Bernard was interested in
Thérèse’s weight,--but also in her conversation. She spoke more freely
in his company than she had ever done: “In Paris ... when I am in
Paris ...” she would begin: she would live in a hotel and perhaps look
for a flat. She would take up a course of study, and go to lectures
and concerts; “begin her education all over again.” Bernard never
thought of watching her, and ate his soup and drank his wine, quite
unconcerned. Doctor Pédemay, who sometimes met them on the Argelouse
road, said to his wife: “What is so amazing is that they don’t look as
if they were acting.”
CHAPTER XIII
On a warm morning in March, about ten o’clock, the stream of humanity
had begun to move, and was already surging against the Café de la Paix
outside which Bernard and Thérèse were sitting. She threw away her
cigarette, and carefully stamped it out, as people from the Landes
always do.
“Are you afraid of setting fire to the pavement?” Bernard laughed
constrainedly. He was annoyed with himself for having accompanied
Thérèse to Paris. As it was so soon after Anne’s marriage he had, of
course, done so out of deference to public opinion,--but mainly because
his wife had wished it. He told himself she had a positive flair for
false situations: so long as she remained in his life, he was always
in danger of being manœuvred into doing foolish things of this kind;
the wretched woman still had some sort of influence even on a solid and
self-respecting person like himself. At the very moment of parting,
he could not resist a feeling of sadness, which he would never have
admitted: nothing could have been more foreign to his character than an
emotion of this kind, inspired by any one; but inspired by Thérèse,--it
was inconceivable. He was so impatient to be rid of all disturbing
influences! He would not breathe freely until he was in the train
going South. The car would meet him that evening at Langon: and on the
Villandraut road, almost immediately outside the station, the pines
began. He watched Thérèse’s profile, and her eyes that sometimes fixed
upon a face in the crowd and followed it until it disappeared; and he
said abruptly:
“Thérèse ... I wanted to ask you....”
He turned his eyes away,--he had never been able to withstand her look,
and went on hurriedly: “I should like to know ... was it because you
hated me ... because you couldn’t bear the sight of me?...”
He listened to his own words with amazement and annoyance. Thérèse
smiled, then looked at him fixedly and gravely. At last! Bernard had
asked a question, the very question that would have been the first to
come into Thérèse’s mind had she been in his place. That confession,
so carefully prepared, in the victoria along the Nizan road, and then
in the little local train to Saint Clair, that patient meditation in
the darkness, her efforts to reach the mainspring of her act,--all that
exhausting cross-examination of her conscience, was perhaps on the
point of bearing fruit. She had, unconsciously, disturbed Bernard’s
peace of mind. She had confused him: and now he was questioning her
like some one who is in doubt, and cannot see clearly. He was less
self-assured, and therefore more sympathetic. Thérèse gazed at this
unknown creature with a kind, almost maternal expression. However, she
replied in a bantering tone:
“Didn’t you know it was to get your pines? Yes, I wanted to be in sole
possession of your pines.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“If I ever did believe that, I don’t believe it any more. Why did you
do it? You might as well tell me now.”
Her eyes stared into vacancy: on that pavement, on the bank of that
stream of mud and huddled human bodies, before taking the plunge and
joining in the struggle, or allowing herself to sink beneath the
surface, she saw a gleam like the light of breaking dawn: she envisaged
a return to the sad and desolate country,--a whole life passed in
meditation and striving after perfection, in the silence of Argelouse
... the adventure of the soul, the quest for God.... A Moorish vendor
of carpets and glass necklaces thought she was smiling at him, and came
up to her: and she said in the same bantering tone:
“I was going to answer: ‘I don’t know why I did it’; but now I believe
I do know. Perhaps it was to see a look of uneasiness, curiosity, in
those eyes of yours: the expression I have noticed in them for the last
moment or two:--just to upset your self-satisfaction, in fact!”
“I suppose you can’t be serious even now,” he grumbled, in a tone which
reminded Thérèse of her honeymoon. “Do tell me: why did you?”
She smiled no more, and in her turn asked a question:
“I suppose a man like you, Bernard, always knows why he does a thing?”
“Naturally ... why, of course ... at least, I think so.”
“Indeed, I should so have wished you to know everything. If you only
knew how I have tortured myself to try and see clearly.... But, you
see, all the reasons I could have given you,--the moment I had uttered
them, they would have seemed unconvincing....”
“But,” said Bernard, impatiently, “there must have been a day when you
made up your mind ... when you actually did the thing?”
“Yes, the day of the great fire at Mano.”
Their heads were close together, and they were talking in low tones. As
they sat there, at that meeting of the Paris highways, under the soft
sunlight, and in a slightly chilly wind that smelt of foreign tobacco,
and stirred the red and yellow awnings, it seemed so strange to recall
that stifling afternoon, the horizon dense with smoke, the tarnished
blue of the sky, the penetrating torch-like odour that rises from
burning pine-forests,--and her own drowsy heart in which the crime
began to take on the semblance of a purpose.
“This is how it happened: it was in the dining-room, which was dark, as
it always is at midday: you were talking with your head slightly turned
towards Balion, forgetting to count the drops that fell into your
glass.” Thérèse was not looking at Bernard, absorbed in her anxiety
not to omit the most trifling circumstances; but she heard him laugh
and turned towards him: Yes, he was laughing in his stupid way: “No,
what do you take me for,” he said! He did not believe her,--and indeed
what she was saying was hardly credible. He grinned, and she recognised
the old Bernard, full of self-confidence and worldly wisdom. He had
recovered himself and once more she knew that she was lost.
“So the idea came to you,” he said jeeringly, “just like that, all of a
sudden, by the intervention of the Holy Ghost.”
How he loathed himself for having questioned Thérèse. It meant the
loss of all the accumulated contempt that he had heaped upon the
wretched woman. She was raising her head again! Why had he yielded to
that sudden longing to understand? Just as if there was anything to
understand in these hysterical creatures. But he had spoken without
thinking....
“Listen, Bernard, I’m not telling you this to persuade you of my
innocence, far from it!”
Her self-accusation was full of a strange and passionate sincerity: to
have been able to act, as she had done, in a kind of trance, for months
past, she must, she thought, have conceived and brooded over thoughts
of crime. Besides, when once the deed was done, with what savage
lucidity of purpose and persistence she had pursued her aim!
“I only felt cruel when my hand trembled. I hated myself for prolonging
your sufferings; I felt I must bring the business to an end, and
quickly too! I obeyed a dreadful sense of duty,--yes, it was almost
like a duty.”
“Oh, these are phrases,” Bernard broke in. “Just try and tell me, once
and for all, what you wanted: come, now!”
“What I wanted? Indeed it would be easier to say what I did not want. I
did not want to play a part, move like an automaton, talk in formulæ,
be eternally false to a Thérèse who.... No, Bernard, it’s no use: you
see how hard I am trying to tell the truth. How is it that everything I
tell you rings so false?...”
“Don’t talk so loud: the man in front of us turned round just now.”
All Bernard wanted now was to get away: but he knew the fantastic
creature too well: hair-splitting was a favourite occupation of hers.
Thérèse, too, realised that her companion, who for one brief second had
come near to her, had again receded into the infinite distance. But
she persisted, called in the aid of her lovely smile, and spoke with
certain low and husky intonations he had always liked.
“But now, Bernard, I feel clearly that the Thérèse who stamps out her
cigarette because a spark will set the undergrowth on fire, the Thérèse
who liked to count the pines, and look after her resin:--the Thérèse
who was proud to marry a Desqueyroux, to hold a place in one of the
best families of the district, glad at last to settle down, as the
phrase goes;--that Thérèse is as real as the other, and as alive: No,
there was no need to sacrifice her to the other.”
“What other?”
She did not know what to answer, and he looked at his watch.
“I must come back sometimes, I suppose, on business ... and to see
Marie,” she said.
“What business? I look after the Family property. You will have your
place at all the official ceremonies at which, for the honour of the
Family and in Marie’s interests, we must be seen together. In as large
a Family as ours there are often weddings, I am glad to say, and
funerals as well. I shall be surprised, for instance, if Uncle Martin
lasts until the autumn: that will be an opportunity, since you seem to
be getting tired of your independence already.”
* * * * *
A policeman on horseback came up with a whistle at his lips, opened an
invisible sluice, and an army of pedestrians hurried across the dark
roadway before the wave of taxis submerged them once more. “I ought to
have gone out one night,” she thought, “on to the great moors of the
South, like Daguerre: I ought to have walked through the stunted pines
of that evil land,--walked until I was exhausted. I should not have had
the courage to keep my head under water in one of the pools, as that
Argelouse shepherd did last year, because his daughter-in-law starved
him. But I could have lain down in the sand and shut my eyes.... It is
true the crows and ants don’t wait until....”
She watched the stream of humanity, that living mass, in which her body
would so soon be plunged and borne helpless away. She could do nothing
now. Bernard pulled out his watch again.
“A quarter to eleven: just time to call at the hotel....”
“You won’t be very warm travelling.”
“No, and I shall have to cover myself up this evening in the car.”
She saw in her mind’s eye the speeding car, and seemed to feel the cold
wind that smells of marshes, waste resin, burnt grass, mint, and mist.
She looked at Bernard and smiled that smile that made the women of her
country say in former days: “You can’t pretend she’s pretty, but then
she is so charming.” If Bernard had said: “I forgive you; come ...”
she would have got up and followed him. But Bernard, after a momentary
feeling of irritation at his own emotion, was now only conscious of
his detestation of anything odd, anything that departed from the daily
round of behaviour and conversation. Bernard was made to fit the
tracks, like his own carts; he could not move outside the ruts: and
only when he had found them again, that very evening in the dining-room
at Saint Clair, would he find peace and quiet once more.
“I want to ask your pardon for the last time, Bernard.” She spoke with
great earnestness and with the intonation of despair,--a last effort to
reopen the conversation: “Say no more,” he protested.
“You will feel very lonely: though I am away, there is still my empty
place: it would have been better for you if I had died.”
He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and in a tone of something like
joviality, begged her not to worry herself about him:
“Every generation of the Desqueyroux family has had its old
bachelor, and I was meant for one of them. I have all the necessary
qualities--you’d be the last to deny that, wouldn’t you? I am only
sorry that we had a daughter, because the family name will die out. It
is true that even if we had stayed together, we should not have wanted
another child,--so all is really for the best. Don’t get up: stay where
you are.” He hailed a taxi, and came back to remind Thérèse that he had
paid for the drinks.
* * * * *
She stared for a long time at the dregs of port at the bottom of
Bernard’s glass; and then once more began to watch the passers-by. A
few seemed to be walking up and down waiting for someone. One woman
turned back twice, and smiled at Thérèse: she looked like a work girl,
or she was disguised as one. It was the hour when the girls came out of
the dressmakers’ shops. It did not occur to Thérèse to move: she was
perfectly content and not in the least depressed. She decided not to go
and see Jean Azévédo that afternoon,--and heaved a sigh of relief: she
did not want to see him. More talk--more formulæ and phrases! She knew
Jean Azévédo; but those whose company she wanted, she did not know: she
was merely certain that they would not insist on conversation. Thérèse
was no longer afraid of solitude. She was content to remain silent and
still: and just as, if her body had been lying stretched out upon a
heath in her own country, ants and crows would have gathered round it,
so here she felt herself the centre of some dark activity that eddied
about her.
She felt hungry, got up, and saw her youthful figure reflected in a
tailor’s shop window: her tightly fitting travelling-dress suited her
admirably: but her face, with its high cheek-bones and peaked nose,
still bore the dreadful traces of those days at Argelouse. “I don’t
look old,” she thought. She lunched (as so often in her dreams) in
the Rue Royale. Why should she go back to the hotel since she didn’t
want to? A warm feeling of satisfaction stole over her, thanks to that
half-bottle of Pouilly. She called for cigarettes. A young man, sitting
at the next table, handed her his lighter, and she smiled. To think
that hardly an hour ago she wanted to plunge, in Bernard’s company,
into the dark Villandraut road, between the rows of menacing pines! She
cared no more for one country than another, pines or poplars, plain or
ocean. Nothing interested her except living creatures, beings of blood
and flesh. “It is not the stone-built city that I love, nor lectures
nor museums, but the living forest that stirs within it, racked by
passions more furious than any storm. The lamentations of the pines of
Argelouse, at night, were so strangely moving because they seemed so
nearly human.”
Thérèse had drunk a little and smoked a great deal; and she smiled to
herself like a woman who at last is happy. She made up her cheeks and
her lips with great care: and then went out into the street,--to seek
what she might find.
THE END
Transcriber’s Note:
Words may have inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been
left unchanged. Obsolete and alternative spellings were left unchanged.
Four misspelled words were corrected.
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Obvious printing errors, such as partially printed letters
and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of
sentences and abbreviations were added.
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