In his heart, nevertheless, there remained a sort of acrimonious discontent with himself and the countess. Would they not be made uncomfortable in their daily relations by the suspicion he would constantly feel that they harbored? Would he not be obliged to watch with tiresome and scrupulous attention every word, every act, every glance, his most insignificant attitudes towards the young girl? For all he might do, all he might say, would become suspicious to the mother.
He returned home out of sorts and began to smoke cigarettes with the impetuosity of a man who is irritated and uses ten matches to light his tobacco. In vain did he try to work. His hand, his eyes, and his mind seemed to have lost the habit of painting, as if they had forgotten it, as if they had never known and practiced that art. He had taken out a little canvas, already begun, which he desired to finish—a street corner and a blind man singing—and he looked at it with an indifference he could not overcome, with such powerlessness to continue it that he sat before it, palette in hand, and forgot it, although still contemplating it with steadfast and abstracted intentness.
Then suddenly his impatience at the tediousness of the waning hour, at the interminable minutes, began to gnaw at him with its intolerable fever. Since he could not work, what should he do till the hour of his dinner at the Cercle? The thought of the street wearied him beforehand, filled him with disgust for the sidewalks, the passersby, the carriages and shops, and the thought of paying calls that day, to no matter whom, awoke in him an instantaneous hatred for all the people he knew.
So what should he do? Should he pace up and down his studio, looking at every turn towards the clock, at the hand displaced every few seconds? Ah! He knew those journeys from the door to the cabinet filled with trifles. In the hours of fervor, of impulse, of animation, of fruitful and facile execution, those goings and comings across the large room, brightened, invigorated, warmed by work, were delightful recreations; but in the hours of powerlessness and nausea, in the miserable hours when nothing seemed worth the trouble of an effort or a motion, it was the odious tramp of the prisoner in his cell. If only he could have gone to sleep but for an hour on his divan. But no, he would not sleep; he would agitate himself until he trembled with exasperation. Whence came this sudden access of ill temper? He reflected, “I am becoming horribly disturbed to get into such a state through such an insignificant cause.”
Then, he thought he would take a book. The volume of La Légende des siècles was still on the iron chair where Annette had laid it down. He opened it, read two pages of verse without comprehending it. He understood it no more than if it had been written in a foreign tongue. He was obstinate, and began over again only to find that the meaning made really no impression on him. “Come,” said he to himself, “it seems that my wits have left me.” But about six o’clock it flashed through his mind that he must dally until dinnertime. He had a warm bath prepared and stretched himself out in it, softened, relieved by the tepid water, and remained there till his valet, who was bringing the linen, awakened him from a doze. He then went to the Cercle, where he found his usual companions, who received him with open arms and exclamations, for they had not seen him for several days.
“I am just in from the country,” he said.
All those men except the landscape artist Maldant professed a profound scorn for the fields. Rocdiane and Landa, it is true, went hunting there, but on the plains or in the woods they only enjoyed the pleasure of seeing pheasants, quails, or partridges falling like bundles of feathery rags under their shot, or little rabbits done to death, turning head over heels, like clowns, five or six times in succession, showing at every caper the white, tufted tails. With the exception of these autumn and winter sports, they thought the country wearisome. Rocdiane would say, “I prefer fresh women to fresh peas.”
The dinner was, as usual, noisy and jovial, enlivened by discussions in which nothing unexpected can arise. Bertin, to divert himself, talked much. They found him droll, but as soon as he had taken his coffee and played a sixty-point game of billiards with the banker Liverdy, he strolled a little while from La Madeleine to the rue Taitbout, passed three times before the Vaudeville, asking himself whether he should go in, almost hailed a cab to take him to the Hippodrome, changed his mind and went off in the direction of the Nouveau Cirque, then made an abrupt half turn, without any purpose, object, or pretext, walked up the boulevard Malesherbes, and moderated his pace as he approached the residence of the Countess de Guilleroy. “She may think it strange to see me come back this evening,” he thought. But he felt reassured as he reflected that there was nothing surprising in his calling to get news of her a second time.
She was alone with Annette, in the little drawing room at the back, and still working on the blanket for the poor.
As she saw him enter, she said simply, “Oh, it’s you, my friend.”
“Yes, I was feeling uneasy, I wanted to see you. How are you?”
“Thank you, quite well.” She waited an instant, then added with marked intention, “And you?”
He began to laugh with an easy air as he answered, “Oh, I’m very well. There wasn’t the slightest foundation for your fears.”
Putting her knitting down, she raised her eyes and gradually rested them slowly upon him—an earnest glance of supplication and doubt.
“So much the better,” she answered, with a somewhat forced smile.
He sat down, and for the first time in that house he was seized with an irresistible uneasiness, a sort of mental paralysis even more complete than what had possessed him that day in front of his canvas.
The countess said to her daughter, “You may continue, child, it won’t disturb him.”
“What’s she doing?”
“She’s studying a fantasia.”
Annette rose to go to the piano. He followed her with his eyes, unconsciously, as he always did, finding her so lovely. Then he felt the mother’s eyes upon him and quickly turned his head, as if he were looking for something in the darkest corner of the room.
From her worktable the countess took a little gold case he had given her, opened it, and offered him some cigarettes. “Smoke, my friend, you know I enjoy it when we’re alone here.”
He complied, and they listened to Annette’s music. It was the music of a bygone taste, light and graceful. One of those pieces to which the artist was inspired on a soft moonlit evening, in springtime.
Olivier asked, “Whose music is that?”
“Schumann’s,” the countess replied. “It’s little known now, and it’s charming.”
The desire to look at Annette was growing stronger, yet he didn’t dare. It was the smallest movement he needed to make, just an inclination of his neck—he could see the two candle flames lighting the score sideways—but he figured the countess’s watchful attention read everything so clearly that he preferred to remain motionless, his eyes looking up before him, interested, so it seemed, in the thread of gray tobacco smoke.
The countess whispered, “Is that all you have to say to me?”
He smiled. “You mustn’t mind. You know how music hypnotizes me; it drinks my thoughts. I’ll speak in a little while.”
“By the way,” she said, “I studied something for you before mother died, but you haven’t heard it yet. I’ll play it when the little one’s finished. I want you to hear how strange it is.”
The countess had real talent, and a subtle comprehension of the emotion that flows through sound. It had always been one of her surest powers over the painter’s sensibility.
As soon as Annette had finished Schumann’s Pastoral Symphony, the countess rose, took her place, and awakened a strange melody through her fingers, a melody of which every phrase seemed a complaint, even manifold complaints, changing, numerous, then interrupted by a single note, continually recurring, dropping into the evident melody, shattering it like an incessant, persecuting cry, the insatiable call of importunity.
But Olivier was looking at Annette, who had just seated herself in front of him,
and he heard nothing, understood nothing.
He was looking at her without thinking, feasting upon the sight of her as upon a good and habitual thing of which he had just been deprived, drinking her in wholesomely, the way we drink water when we’re thirsty.
“Well!” said the countess. “Is it not beautiful?”
Awakened, he cried, “Admirable, superb. By whom?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“What! You don’t know? Even you?”
“No, indeed.”
“By Schubert.”
He answered, in a tone of profound conviction, “That doesn’t surprise me, it’s superb. You’d be charming if you began over again.”
She did so and he, turning his head, again began to gaze at Annette, but listening to the music as well, so that he might enjoy two luxuries at the same time.
Then when the countess had resumed her seat, in simple accord with man’s duplicity he withdrew his eyes from the fair profile of the young girl who was knitting opposite her mother on the other side of the lamp.
But if he didn’t see her, he tasted the sweetness of her presence, as one feels the nearness of a warm hearth, and the desire to dart rapid glances at her, only to let them fall immediately upon the countess, was goading him like the desire of the schoolboy who sneaks to the street window as soon as the master has turned his back.
He left early, for his tongue shared the paralysis of his mind, and his persistent silence might have been understood.
As soon as he was out in the street a need to wander seized him, for whenever he listened to music it continued in him afterward as a sort of musing that now seemed the melodies dreamed—a more precise sequel. The song of the notes returned, intermittent and fugitive, carrying isolated measures weakened, distant as an echo, then they were silent, seeming to leave thoughts in order to give a meaning to motifs, to seek a sort of ideal and tender harmony. He turned left onto an outer boulevard; perceiving the magical illumination of the Parc Monceau, he entered the central allée circled by electric moons. Two park guardians trotted slowly past; now and then a belated cab drove by; at the foot of a bronze mast supporting a resplendent globe a man bathed in bluish light sat on a bench reading a newspaper. Other lamps on the lawn among the trees shed their old, penetrating beams into the foliage and on the turf, animating this great city garden with a pale illumination.
Bertin, his hands clasped behind his back, strolled along the sidewalk and remembered his first promenade with Annette in this same park: It had been the first time he recognized in the girl’s words her mother’s voice. Sinking now onto a bench where he could inhale the cool respiration of the sprinkled lawns, he was assailed by all the passionate expectations that transform the souls of striplings into the incoherent canvas of love’s unfinished romance. There had been a time when he had known such evenings, those evenings of roving whims when he let his fancy wander into imaginary adventures and was astonished to feel the return of sensations that were no longer of his age.
But like the obstinate note of Schubert’s melody, the thought of Annette, the vision of her face beneath the lamp, and the countess’s strange suspicion took possession of him again and again. In spite of himself he continued to occupy his heart with this question, to sound the impenetrable depths where human sentiments germinate before their birth. This obstinate research excited him, this constant preoccupation of his thoughts by the young girl seemed to open a path for tender reveries of his soul. He could no longer dismiss her from his mind; he bore a sort of evocation of her within himself, as formerly, when the countess left him, he kept the strange feeling of her presence within the walls of his studio.
Suddenly impatient at the domination of a memory, he murmured as he stood up, “It was stupid of Any to have told me all that: now she’ll make me think of the little one.”
He returned home, uneasy with himself. When he had gone to bed he felt that sleep would never come, for a fever ran through his veins, and the spirit of reverie was fermenting in his heart. Fearing that enervating insomnia induced by the soul’s agitation, he thought he would try a book. How many times the briefest reading had served him as a narcotic! He got up and stepped into the library to choose a profitable and soporific book, but his mind, aroused in spite of itself, eager for any emotion whatever, sought on the shelves an author’s name that would respond to his state of exaltation and expectancy. Balzac, whom he adored, said nothing to him; he disdained Hugo, scorned Lamartine who invariably left him moved, and pounced upon Musset, the poet of youth. He took a volume and carried it to bed, to read a few pages at random.
When he returned to bed he began to drink, with a drunkard’s thirst, those flowing verses of an inspired poet who, like a bird, sang the dawn of existence, and with breath only for the morning, was silent at the glaring light of day—verses of a poet who was, above all, a man intoxicated with life, breathing rapture in glowing and simple ecstasies of love, the echo of all young hearts bewildered with desire.
Never had Bertin so understood the physical charm of these poems that stir the senses and scarcely move the mind. His eyes upon those vibrating verses, he felt his soul was but twenty, buoyant with hope, and he read almost the entire volume in boyish intoxication. The clock struck three, and he was astounded at his wakefulness. He rose to close the window he had left open and to carry his book to the table in the middle of the room, but as the night’s cold draft touched him, a pain, which the seasons at Aix had not fully cured, shot along his back like a signal, like a warning, and he flung the poet aside, impatiently muttering, “What an old fool!” Then he blew out the light and returned to bed.
The next day he didn’t go to the countess’s, and even took the energetic resolution not to return for two days. But whatever he did, whether he tried to paint or undertook to walk, or dragged his melancholy from house to house, everywhere he was harassed by the persistent presence of those two women.
Having forbidden himself to go and see them, he found comfort in thinking of them, and he let his mind and his heart fill with memories of them. And it often happened that in that sort of hallucination in which he lulled his solitude the two faces approached each other, different as he knew them to be, then passed one before the other, mingled, melted together, forming now but one face, somewhat confused, which was no longer the mother’s, not quite the daughter’s, but that of a woman worshipped once, now, ever.
Thus he felt remorseful for giving himself up to the sway of these emotions, which he knew to be both powerful and dangerous. To escape them, to force them back, to free himself from this sweet and captivating dream, he directed his thoughts toward all sorts of fancies and theories, toward all possible subjects for reflection and meditation. In vain! All the roads of distraction he followed brought him back to the same point, where he met a fair young face that seemed to lie in wait for him. It was something vague and inevitable that was besetting him, recalling and arresting him, however circuitous the road by which he might choose to flee.
The confusion of these two beings, which had so troubled him on the evening of their walk at Roncières, was reviving again in his memory, when, ceasing to reflect and reason, he evoked them and undertook to comprehend what strange emotion was stirring his being.
He said, “Let’s see, do I love Annette more than I should?” And searching his heart, he felt it burning with affection for a woman who was quite young, who had Annette’s features, but who was not she.
And he reassured himself in a cowardly manner, thinking, “No, I do not love the little one. I am the victim of her likeness.”
Still, the two days spent at Roncières remained in his soul like a source of warmth, of happiness, of intoxication, and their least details came back to him, one by one, with precision, more enjoyable even than in reality. All at once, threading the course of these recollections, he saw again the road they followed on going out from the cemetery, the young girl gathering flowers, and he suddenly remembered then that
he had promised her a cornflower of sapphires as soon as they returned to Paris.
All his resolution took flight, and, without further struggle, he took his hat and went out, quite overcome at the thought of the pleasure he would afford her.
The Guilleroys’ footman answered him when he presented himself. “Madame is out, but mademoiselle is at home.”
He was delighted. “Tell her I would like to speak with her.”
He slipped into the drawing room with light steps, as if he had feared detection.
Annette appeared almost immediately. “Good morning, dear master,” said she with gravity.
He began to laugh, shook hands with her, and sitting down near her said, “Guess why I’ve come?”
She thought a few seconds. “I don’t know.”
“To take you and your mother to the jeweler’s to choose the sapphire cornflower I promised you at Roncières.”
The young girl’s face lit up with pleasure. “Oh, Maman has gone out,” she said. “But she’ll return soon. You’ll wait, won’t you?”
“Yes, if she’s not too long.”
“Oh! What insolence: too long, with me. You treat me like a little child.”
“No,” said he. “Not as much as you think.” He wanted to please her, to be gallant and witty, as in the most dashing days of his youth, one of those instinctive desires that stimulate all the powers of charming and cause a peacock to spread its tail and a poet to write verses. Phrases came to his lips, quick, vivacious, and he spoke as he knew how to speak in his best moments. The young girl caught his spirit and answered him with all the mischief and frolicsome shrewdness that were latent within her. Suddenly, as he was discussing an opinion, he exclaimed, “But you’ve already told me that—often—and I answered you—”
She interrupted him with a peal of laughter. “Well, you no longer say tu to me. You take me for Maman.”
Like Death Page 17
