Chapter V
THEN began the era of the great silence which, for forty years past, has scarcely ever been broken. Nothing of this collapse appeared on the outside. Everything went on as it had done in the days when I was happy.
We remained nevertheless united in the flesh; but the phantom of Rodolphe was no longer born of our embrace, and you never mentioned that fearful name again. He had come at your summons, he had hovered over our bed, he had accomplished his work of destruction. Now he could afford to keep quiet and await the long sequence of effects, the chain of consequences.
Perhaps you felt that you had been wrong to speak. You had no idea that it mattered very much; you simply thought that it was wiser to banish that name from our conversation. I do not know whether you noticed that we no longer talked as we used to do, at night. There was an end to our endless talks. We never said anything again without thinking about it first. Each of us was on guard.
I used to waken in the middle of the night; I used to be awakened by my suffering. I was linked to you like the fox to the trap. I imagined the conversation we might have if I had shaken you roughly, if I had thrown you out of bed.
“No,” you would have cried, “I didn’t lie to you, because I was in love with you.”
“Yes, as a makeshift, and because it is always easy to use physical attraction, which means nothing, to make the other person believe that one loves him. I am not a monster. The first girl that came along who loved me could have done what she liked with me.”
Sometimes I groaned in the darkness; and you did not waken.
Your first pregnancy, moreover, made any explanation idle, and little by little changed the relations between us. It was before the grape-gathering. We went back to town, and you had a miscarriage and had to lie quiet for several weeks. In the spring you became pregnant again. We had to take great care of you.
So began those years of pregnancies, accidents and births that provided me with more pretexts than I needed to draw away from you. I plunged into a life of secret debauchery—very secret, for I was beginning to appear in court a good deal, I was “at my business,” as Mamma said, and it was a question for me of being careful of my reputation. I had my hours and my habits. Life in a provincial town develops in the debauchee the wily instinct of hunted game.
Don’t be afraid, Isa: I shall spare you what you hold in horror. You need not fear any picture of that hell into which I descended almost every day. You threw me back into it, you who had pulled me out of it.
Even if I had been less prudent, you would have seen nothing but passion in it. From the moment of Hubert’s birth you revealed your true nature: you were a mother, nothing but a mother. Your attention was turned away from me. You no longer saw me; it was absolutely true that you had no eyes except for the children. By giving you them I had accomplished all that you expected of me.
So long as the children were small and I took no interest in them, no conflict could arise between us. We met only in those ritual performances in which bodies act by force of habit—in which a man and a woman are both thousands of miles away from their own flesh.
You did not begin to perceive that I existed until I, in my turn, began to hover round these little ones. You did not begin to hate me until I claimed to have rights over them. Rejoice over the confession which I dare to make to you: paternal instinct did not impel me. Very soon I became jealous of that passion which they had awakened in you. Yes, I wanted to take them from you in order to punish you. I gave myself high-minded reasons; I put forward the demands of duty. I did not want a bigoted woman to warp the minds of my children. But that’s what it really was!
Shall I ever get to the end of this story? I began it for you; and already it seems unlikely that you will go on following me. Fundamentally, it is for myself that I am writing. Old lawyer that I am, I put my case in order; I assemble the evidence of my life—of this case that I lost.
Those chimes....Tomorrow, Easter. I shall come down in honour of this holy day, I promise you. “The children are complaining that they never see you,” you told me this morning. Our daughter Geneviѐve was with you, standing beside my bed. You went out and left us alone together: she had something to ask me. I had heard you whispering in the passage. “It would be better if you spoke first,” you told Geneviѐve....
It was about her son-in-law, of course, that blackguard Phili. How clever I was in changing the conversation, in order to prevent the question from being put! Geneviѐve went away without having been able to say anything to me. I know what she wanted. I overheard it all, the other day. When the drawing-room window is open, underneath mine, I have only to lean out a little.
It is a question of advancing the capital that Phili needs to buy a share in a stockbroking firm. An investment just like any other, of course....As though I had not seen the storm blowing up; as though it were not a matter now of putting one’s money under lock and key!...If only they knew how much I have made, this last month, because I sensed a slump in stocks!...
They have all gone to Vespers. Easter has emptied the house and the fields. I am left alone, an old Faust cut off from the joy of life by cruel old age. They do not know what old age is.
At lunch they were all ears to catch what fell from my lips about the Stock Exchange and business. I was talking especially for the benefit of Hubert, so that he should pull up, if he has time. How anxiously he listened to me....There’s a man who cannot hide the game he’s playing!
He emptied the plate you piled up for him, with that obstinacy of poor mothers who see their children devoured by anxiety and still make them eat, as though that were so much to the good, so much saved out of the wreck! And he snapped at you, as I used to snap at my mother.
And the care with which young Phili kept my glass filled; and the pretended solicitude of his wife, little Janine! “Grandfather, you shouldn’t smoke. Even one cigarette is too much for you. Are you sure that they haven’t made a mistake, that this coffee is really de-caffeined?” She plays her game badly, poor girl, she rings false. Her voice, the way she speaks, give her away entirely. You too, when you were a young woman, used to be affected. But from the time of your first pregnancy you became yourself again.
Janine, for her part, to the day of her death will be a lady who keeps herself abreast of the times, repeats whatever she hears that strikes her as distinctive, borrows opinions about everything and understands nothing about anything. How can Phili, so earthy, a gay dog of a fellow, stand living with that little idiot? No, I’m wrong! Everything is false about her, except her passion for him. She plays her part so badly just because nothing counts in her eyes, nothing exists, except her love.
After lunch we all sat on the steps. Janine and Phili looked at Geneviѐve, Janine’s mother, with a beseeching air; and she in her turn looked at you. You made an almost imperceptible sign of refusal. Then Geneviѐve got up and asked me:
“Papa, would you like to come for a walk with me?”
How afraid you all are of me! I took pity on her. Though I had originally made up my mind not to stir, I got up and took her arm. We walked round the meadow. The family watched us from the steps. She went to the heart of the matter at once.
“I wanted to talk to you about Phili.”
She was trembling. It is a frightful thing to make one’s children afraid. But do you suppose that one is free, at sixty-eight, to have anything but an implacable air about him? At that age the expression of the features no longer changes; and the soul is discouraged when it cannot express itself externally....
Geneviѐve got what she had ready to say off her mind quickly. It was, in fact, a question of a share in a brokerage firm. She insisted upon the very point best calculated to turn me against her. According to her, the fact that Phili had nothing to do was compromising the future of Janine’s wedded life with him. Phili was beginning to stray.
I told Geneviѐve that, in the case of a fellow like her son-in-law, his “share in a stockbrokers” would never serve to su
pply him with alibis. She defended him. Everybody loves him, this Phili of ours. “You mustn’t be harder on him than Janine is....” I protested that I neither judged nor condemned him. The gentleman’s amorous career did not interest me in the least.
“Does he take any interest in me? Why should I take any interest in him?”
“He admires you tremendously....”
This brazen lie enabled me to get off what I had in reserve.
“That, my dear daughter, doesn’t prevent your Phili from calling me ‘the old crocodile.’ Don’t deny it; I’ve heard him behind my back, many a time....I don’t reject the name: crocodile I am, and crocodile I shall remain. There is nothing to expect from an old crocodile, nothing—except his death. And even dead”—I was rash enough to add—“even dead, he may still act like one.” (How I regret having said that, having given her any ground for suspicion!)
Geneviѐve was overwhelmed. She offered excuses—as though I attached any importance to the insulting nickname. It is Phili’s youth that is hateful to me. How can she conceive what he represents, in the eyes of a hated and despairing old man—this triumphant youth, who has been intoxicated from his adolescence with something that I have not tasted in half a century of life?
I hate, I detest all young people: but him more than anybody else. Like a cat that creeps in silently through the window, he penetrated velvet-footed into my house, lured by the scent. My grand-daughter did not bring him a very good dowry, but she had, by way of compensation, great “expectations.” The expectations of our children! To obtain them, they have to pass over our bodies.
While Geneviѐve was sniffing and dabbing at her eyes, I said to her in an insinuating tone:
“But after all, you have a husband, a husband who deals in rum. Our good Alfred has only to make a position for his son-in-law. Why should I be more generous than you are yourselves?”
She changed her tune to talk to me about poor Alfred. What contempt, what disgust! According to her, he was a spiritless fellow who was reducing his commitments more and more every day. In his business, which used to be so big, there was no room for two left today.
I congratulated her on having a husband like that. When the storm is approaching, one must shorten sail. The future was with those who, like Alfred, saw small. To-day lack of big ideas was the first requisite in business. She thought I was making fun of her, though as a matter of fact this is what I most seriously believe—I, who have my money under lock and key, and do not even run the risks of the Savings Bank.
We went back to the house. Geneviѐve did not dare to say any more. I was not leaning on her arm any longer. The family, sitting in a circle, watched us coming, and no doubt were already in course of interpreting the unfavourable signs. Our return evidently interrupted a discussion between Hubert’s family and that of Geneviѐve’s. Oh, what a fine battle there would be about my fortune if I ever agreed to let go of it!
Only Phili was standing up. The wind stirred his rebellious hair. He was wearing a shirt open at the neck, with short sleeves. I have a horror of these youths of today, and of our athletic girls. His infantile cheeks turned purple when, in reply to Janine’s silly question: “Well, did you have a nice talk?” I answered gently: “We talked about an old crocodile....”
Once more, it is not because of this insult that I hate him. People do not know what old age means. You cannot imagine such a torture as this: to have had nothing out of life, and to await nothing but death—and to feel that there may be nothing beyond this world, that no explanation exists, that the word of the enigma will never be given us....
But you—you have not suffered what I have suffered, and you will never suffer what I am suffering now. The children do not look forward to your death. They love you in their own way; they are fond of you.
It was all at once that they took your side. I used to love them. Geneviѐve, that fat woman of forty who has just tried to extract four hundred thousand-franc notes out of me for her blackguard of a son-in-law—I remember her as a little girl on my knee. As soon as you saw her in my arms, you called her away....
But I shall never get to the end of this confession if I go on mixing up past and present like this. I must try and introduce a little order into it.
Chapter VI
I do not think that I hated you from the very first year that followed the disastrous night. My hatred was born, little by little, in proportion as I better appreciated how indifferent you were towards me, and that nothing existed in your eyes apart from those wailing, bawling, greedy little beings.
You did not even notice that, at the age of less than thirty, I had become a civil law barrister with more work than he could do, already hailed as a young master at this Bar, the most distinguished in France after that of Paris. Beginning with the Villenave case (1893), I also revealed myself as a great criminal lawyer (it is very rare to excel in both branches), and you were the only person deaf to the universal echo of my pleading. That was also the year in which our misunderstanding became open hostility.
That famous Villenave case, if it set the seal upon my triumph, also tightened the vice which stifled me. Perhaps I still had some hope left. It brought me the proof that I did not exist in your eyes.
Those Villenaves—do you even remember their story?—after forty years of married life, loved one another with a love which had passed into a proverb. People said: “united like the Villenaves.” They lived with an only son, aged about fifteen, in their château of Omon, just outside the town, entertaining very little, sufficient to one another. “A love such as one reads about in books,” your mother used to say, in one of those ready-made phrases of which her grand-daughter Geneviѐve inherited the secret.
I would swear that you have forgotten all about the drama. If I tell it to you, you will jeer at me, as you used to do when, at table, I recalled my examinations...but that can’t be helped!
One morning, the servant who was doing the downstairs rooms heard a revolver shot on the first floor, a cry of pain. He dashed upstairs. The door of his master’s and mistress’s room was locked. He overheard low voices, confused sounds of things being moved, hasty steps in the lavatory. After a moment or two, while he was still rattling the handle, the door opened. Villenave was lying on the bed, in his nightshirt, covered with blood. Madame de Villenave, with her hair down, wearing a dressing-gown, was standing at the foot of the bed, with a revolver in her hand. She said: “I have wounded Monsieur de Villenave. Hurry up and get the doctor, the surgeon, and the police superintendent. I won’t move from here.”
They could get nothing out of her but that confession: “I have wounded my husband,” which was confirmed by Monsieur de Villenave, as soon as he was in a condition to speak. He also refused to give any further information.
The accused declined to choose an advocate. As the son-in-law of a friend of theirs, I was entrusted with her defence; but, in my daily visits to the prison, I could get nothing out of that obstinate woman. The most ridiculous stories circulated round the town about her. For my part, from the very first day I had no doubt about her innocence. Yet she charged herself, and the husband who loved her permitted her to charge herself. Oh, the flair of men who are not loved for getting on the track of passion in others!
That woman was entirely possessed by conjugal love. She had not fired at her husband. Had she made a rampart of his body by mistake, in the effort to defend him against some rejected lover? Nobody had entered the house since the night before. There was nobody who was in the habit of visiting them...well, I need not go over the whole of that old story for you.
Until the morning of the day when I had to plead, I had decided to confine myself to a negative attitude and to show simply that Madame de Villenave could not have committed the crime of which she was accused. It was, at the last moment, the testimony of young Yves, her son, or rather—for his testimony in itself was of no importance and threw no light—the beseeching and imperious way in which his mother kept looking at him until he ha
d left the witness-stand, and the kind of relief which she revealed then, that suddenly rent the veil for me.
I denounced the son, that sickly adolescent, jealous of his too much loved father. I threw myself, with impassioned logic, into that now famous improvisation, in which Professor F., on his own admission, found the essential germ of his system, and which transformed both the study of the psychology of adolescence and the therapeutics of its neuroses.
If I recall this memory, my dear Isa, it is not because I cherish the hope of arousing, forty years afterwards, an admiration which you never felt at the moment of my triumph, when the newspapers of two hemispheres were publishing my picture. But at the same time as your indifference, at that crucial moment in my career, gave me the measure of my loneliness and my solitude, I had also had under my eyes for weeks, I had had inside the four walls of a cell, that woman who sacrificed herself, not so much to save her own child as to save the son of her husband, the heir to his name.
It was he, the victim, who had implored her: “Accuse yourself....” She had carried love to the point of making the world believe that she was a criminal, that she had tried to kill the only man she had ever loved. Conjugal love, not maternal love, had impelled her....(The sequel showed that clearly: she separated from her son, and on one pretext or another always lived apart from him.)
I might have been a man loved as Villenave was. I saw a good deal of him, too, at the time of the case. What did he possess more than I? He was handsome enough, and well born, no doubt; but he cannot have had much brains. His hostile attitude to me after the trial showed that. And I had a kind of genius. If I had had, at that moment, a wife who loved me, to what heights might I not have risen?
One cannot preserve one’s faith in himself all alone. We must have a witness of our prowess: somebody who notes the hits, who counts the points, who crowns us on the day of rewards—just as before, on prize-day, when I was loaded down with books, my eyes searched for my mother in the crowd, and, to the sound of military music, she laid the golden laurels on my freshly cropped head.
Viper's Tangle Page 5
