I might do my best to prepare myself in advance and repeat my lesson: the thing was too much for my strength of will.
“Seven millions! Marinette, you can’t think of it; one doesn’t give up seven millions. There isn’t a man in the world worth the sacrifice of even a part of that fortune!” And, when she claimed that she put happiness above everything, I assured her that nobody could be happy after the sacrifice of a sum like that.
“Oh,” she cried, “what’s the sense of your hating them? You belong to the same species.”
She set off at a gallop, and I followed her at a distance. I was judged; I had lost. That mad taste for money—what has it not spoiled for me! I might have found in Marinette a little sister, a friend....
And you expect me to sacrifice the one thing to which I have sacrificed everything else? No, no, my money has cost me too dearly for me to abandon a halfpenny of it to you before I breathe my last sigh.
Yet you are tireless. I wonder whether Hubert’s wife, to whose visit I had to submit on Sunday, was delegated by you, or came of her own accord. That poor Olympia! (Why did Phili nickname her Olympia? In any case we have forgotten her real name....)
I rather think that she said nothing to you about her approach to me. You have not adopted her; she is not a woman of the family. This person, indifferent to everything which does not constitute her narrow world, which does not touch her directly, is not familiar with the laws of the “tribe”; she does not realise that I am the enemy. It is not kindness or natural sympathy on her part: she never thinks of other people, even to hate them.
“He is always very nice to me,” Olympia protests when my name is mentioned before her. She does not feel my hardness; and, as it happens that, out of a spirit of contradiction, I defend her against all of you, she has persuaded herself that she attracts me.
From her confused conversation, I gathered that Hubert had unloaded in time, but that all his personal property and his wife’s dowry had been required to meet his commitments. “He says that he is bound to get his money back, but that he needs an advance....He calls it an advance on inheritance.”
I nodded my head, I assented, I pretended to be a thousand miles away from understanding what she wanted. How innocent I am, at times like that!
If poor Olympia only knew what I had sacrificed for money, when I still had a little of my youth left! On those mornings of my thirty-fifth year, we used to come back, your sister and I, letting our horses walk, along the road between the sulphated vines. To that mocking young woman I talked about the millions that she must not lose. When I escaped from the haunting thought of those menaced millions, she laughed at me with contemptuous friendliness. When I tried to defend myself, I plunged in deeper.
“It is in your own interest that I insist, Marinette. Do you think I am the kind of man to be obsessed by his children’s future? Isa, if you like, does not want your fortune to disappear from under their noses. But I...”
She laughed, clenched her teeth a little, and ventured:
“It’s true that you’re horrid enough.”
I protested that I was thinking only of her happiness. She shook her head with disgust. Fundamentally, without her confessing it to herself, it was maternity, rather than marriage, that she wanted.
She despised me. But after lunch, when, despite the heat, I left the dark, cool house where the family drowsed, stretched out on leather couches and wicker chairs; when I half opened the heavy shutters of the French window and slipped out into the blue on fire, I did not need to turn round: I knew that she would come too. I heard her steps in the gravel. She walked badly, twisting on her high heels on the hard surface. We leant over the parapet of the terrace. She invented a game of keeping her bare arm on the burning stone as long as possible.
The plain, at our feet, surrendered itself to the sun in a silence as deep as when it sleeps in the moonlight. On the horizon the Landes formed an immense black arc, on which the metallic sky weighed down. Not a man, not a beast would emerge until the fourth hour. The flies quivered where they lay, no less immobile than the single smoke in the plain, which no breath of wind stirred.
I knew that this woman who stood there beside me could not love me, that there was nothing about me which was not hateful to her. But we alone were breathing, in that enchanted estate, within a barrier of torpor. This young, suffering human being, closely watched by a whole family, sought my eyes as unconsciously as a heliotrope turns towards the sun.
Nevertheless, to the smallest disturbing word I should have received no other reply but a mockery. I knew very well that she would repulse the shyest approach with disgust. So we stood there side by side, on the edge of that immense vat in which the future grape-harvest fermented in the sleep of leaves turning blue.
And you, Isa—what did you think about those morning rides, those colloquies at an hour when the rest of the world reposed? I know what you thought, because one day I overheard you. Yes, through the closed shutters of the drawingroom I heard you telling your mother, who was staying at Calèse (and had come there, no doubt, to reinforce the watch on Marinette):
“He has a bad influence over her, from the point of view of ideas...but otherwise, he occupies her, and there’s no harm in it.”
“Yes, he occupies her; that’s the essential thing,” replied your mother.
You were both pleased that I should occupy Marinette. “But after the holidays,” you said more than once, “we must think of something else.”
Whatever contempt I may have inspired in you, Isa, I despised you much more for saying that. No doubt you did not imagine that there could be the least danger. Women never remember what they no longer experience.
After lunch, on the edge of the plain, it was true, nothing could happen; for, empty though the world was, we were both, so to speak, as though we stood before a drop-screen. Even if it were only a peasant who did not surrender himself to siesta, he would have seen, as motionless as lime-trees, that man and that woman facing the incandescent earth, who could not have made the least movement without touching one another.
But our nocturnal walks were less innocent. I remember an evening in August. Dinner had been stormy on account of Dreyfus. Marinette, who, together with myself, represented the retrial party, had now surpassed me in the art of routing out Abbé Ardouin and compelling him to take sides. After you had spoken with exaltation about an article of Drumont’s, Marinette, in her voice of a child at catechism, inquired:
“Monsieur l’Abbé, is it permissible to hate the Jews?”
That evening, to our greater joy, he did not resort to vague evasions. He spoke about the greatness of the Chosen People, their exalted rôle as a witness, their predicted conversion, the forerunner of the end of time. And when Hubert protested that one must hate the executioners of Our Lord, the abbé replied that every one of us had a right to hate but one executioner of Christ: “Ourselves, and nobody else.”
Taken aback, you retorted that, with these fine theories, there was nothing to be done but hand over France to the foreigners. Happily for the abbé, you went on to Jeanne d’Arc, who reconciled you. From the steps one of the children cried: “Oh, what a lovely moon!”
I went out on to the terrace. I knew that Marinette would follow me. As a matter of fact, I heard her low-voiced “Wait for me....” She came out with a “boa” round her neck.
The full moon was rising in the east. Marinette admired the long oblique shadows of the elms on the grass. The peasants’ houses bore the brightness with closed eyes. Dogs were barking. She asked me whether it was the moon that made the trees so still. She said to me that everything was created, on such a night, for the torture of the lonely.
“An empty setting!” she said. How many lips were united at that hour, how many shoulders close together, how much intimacy!
I saw, quite clearly, a tear trembling on her lashes. In the immobility of the world, there was nothing living but her breath. It always came a little panting....
Wha
t remains of you this evening, Marinette, dead in 1900? What remains of a body buried these thirty years? I remember the scent of you that night. To believe in the resurrection of the flesh, perhaps one must have conquered the flesh. The punishment of those who abuse it is that they cannot even imagine that it will rise again.
I took her hand, as I might have taken that of an unhappy child; and, like a child, she leant her head on my shoulder. I took her because I was there, as the soil takes a peach that falls. Most human beings choose one another scarcely more than trees which grow side by side, whose branches merge through their mere growth.
But what was infamous in me, at that moment, was that I thought of you, Isa; that I dreamt of a possible revenge: to make use of Marinette to make you suffer. Fleetingly as the idea flashed through my mind, it is nevertheless true that I conceived this crime.
We took a few uncertain steps out of the zone of moonlight, towards the thicket of pomegranate-trees and syringa. Fate would have it that, just then, I heard a sound of footsteps in the vinewalk—that path which Abbé Ardouin followed every morning on his way to Mass. It was he, no doubt....
I thought of what he had said to me one evening: “You are very good....” If he could have read my heart at that moment! Was it, perhaps, the shame that I felt which saved me?
I took Marinette back into the moonlight, and made her sit down on a bench. I dried her eyes with my handkerchief. I said to her what I might have said to Marie, if she had fallen and I had picked her up, in the lime-tree walk. I pretended not to have noticed whatever there might have been a little disturbing in her abandon and in her tears.
Chapter IX
THE next morning she did not go out riding. I went to Bordeaux (I used to go and spend two days a week there, despite the legal vacation, so as not to discontinue my consultations).
When I was catching the train to return to Calèse, the Southern Express was in the station, and great was my astonishment to see, through a window of the coach labelled “Biarritz,” Marinette, without a veil, wearing a grey tailor-made costume. I remembered that a friend of hers had been pressing her for some time to go and stay with her at Saint Jean de Luz. She was looking at an illustrated paper, and did not notice my signals.
That evening, when I told you about this, you paid little attention to what you took to be only a brief break. You said that, shortly after I left, Marinette had received a telegram from her friend. You seemed surprised that I did not know all about it. Did you, perhaps, suspect us of a clandestine meeting in Bordeaux?
In any case, little Marie was in bed with fever. She had been suffering, for some days, from a looseness of the bowels that made you anxious. I owe it to you to say that, when one of your children was ill, nothing else mattered.
I should like to pass quickly over what followed. After more than thirty years, it is only with an immense effort that I can bear to think about it.
I know of what you accuse me. There is no doubt about it that, if we had called in Professor Arnozan, he would have diagnosed a typhoid condition in that supposed attack of influenza. But think over your recollections. Just once, you suggested to me: “Suppose we call in Arnozan?” I answered you: “Doctor Aubrou says that he is dealing with more than a score of cases of the same type of influenza in the village... You did not even press the point.
You claim that you begged me, the very next day, to telegraph to Arnozan. I should remember it if you had done so. It is true that I chewed the cud of those memories to such an extent, for days and nights, that I cannot find my way about in them now. Let us agree that I was a miser...but not to the point of being mean when it was a question of Marie’s health. It is by so much the less likely since Professor Arnozan worked for love of God and mankind. If I did not call him in, it was because we were sure that it was merely an attack of influenza “which had gone to her bowels.”
That fellow Aubrou made Marie eat to keep up her strength. It was he who killed her; it was not I. No, we were quite agreed. You never insisted that we should get Arnozan, you liar. I am not responsible for Marie’s death. It’s horrible that you should accuse me of it; and you believe it! You have gone on believing it.
That pitiless summer! The delirium of that summer, the insistence of the grasshoppers!...
We could not succeed in getting any ice. For endless afternoons I wiped her little sweating face that drew the flies. Arnozan came too late. We changed the treatment only when she was utterly lost.
Perhaps she was delirious when she repeated: “For Papa! For Papa!” You remember how she cried: “My God, I am only a child...” and then she went on: “No, I can still bear it.” Abbé Ardouin gave her Lourdes water to drink.
Our heads came together over that exhausted body, our hands touched. When it was all over, you thought that I had no feeling.
Do you want to know what was going on inside me? It is a strange thing that you, the Christian woman, could not tear yourself away from the corpse. They begged you to eat something; they kept on telling you that you would need all your strength. But they had to use force to get you out of the room. You stayed sitting there right up against the bed. You touched her brow, her cold cheeks, with groping hands. You put your lips to that still living hair; and sometimes you fell on your knees, not to pray, but to lean your forehead upon those stiff, icy little hands.
Abbé Ardouin lifted you up, and talked to you about those children who one must be like to enter into the Kingdom of the Father. “She is alive; she can see you, she is waiting for you.” You shook your head; these words did not even reach your brain; your faith served you for nothing.
You thought only of that flesh of your flesh which was going to be buried, and was on the eve of corruption; while I, the unbeliever, in the presence of what remained of Marie, felt all that is signified by the word “remains.”
I had the irresistible sense of a departure, of an absence. She was not there anymore; it was not she any more. “Seek ye Mary? She is no longer here....”
Later, you accused me of forgetting quickly. But I know what snapped in me when I kissed her, for the last time, in her coffin.
It was not she any more, though. You despised me because I would not go with you to the cemetery, where you went nearly every day. “He never sets foot in it,” you kept on saying. “And yet Marie was the only one he seemed to love a little. He has no heart.”
Marinette came back for the funeral, but she left again three days later. Pain blinded you. You did not see the danger that threatened you in that direction. But still, you had the air of being relieved by your sister’s departure.
Two months later, we had the news of her engagement to that man of letters, the journalist whom she had met at Biarritz. It was too late to ward off the blow. You were implacable—as though a hatred that you had suppressed suddenly burst forth against Marinette. You refused to know that “person”—quite an ordinary man, like any number of others. His only crime was that he baulked your children of a fortune, from which he derived little advantage himself, since most of it went to Philipot’s nephews.
But you never reasoned. You never had the shadow of a doubt. I never knew anybody who could be so serenely unfair as you. God knows what peccadilloes you confessed!—and there was not a single one of the Beatitudes which you did not spend your life in denying. You had no scruples about assembling false witness to fling at the objects of your hatred—as in the case of your sister’s husband, whom you had never seen, and about whom you knew nothing at all. “She was the victim, at Biarritz, of a fortune-hunter, one of those hotel rats, you know....” That was what you said.
When the poor girl died in childbirth (no, no, I don’t want to judge you as harshly as you judged me about Marie!) it is not enough to say that you showed scarcely any regret. Events had put you in the right: it was bound to end like that; she had gone to her death; you had nothing with which to reproach yourself; you had done everything you possibly could; the unfortunate girl knew perfectly well that her family wou
ld always take her back into its bosom, that it was ready for her, that she had only to lift a finger.
At least you could do yourself that much justice: you had nothing whatever to do with it. It had cost you something to be firm; “but there are times when one has to trample on one’s feelings.”
No, I don’t want to reproach you. I recognise that you were good to Marinette’s son, to little Luc, once your mother, who looked after him until her death, was no longer there to concern herself about him. You took charge of him during the holidays. You went to see him, once every winter, at his school outside Bayonne. You “did your duty, since his father would not do his....”
I have never told you how I came to meet Luc’s father, at Bordeaux, in September, 1914. I was looking for a safe-deposit at a bank. Parisians in flight had taken all there were. Finally the manager of the Crédit Lyonnais told me that one of his clients was going back to Paris, and might let me have his. When he told me the client’s name I discovered that it was Luc’s father with whom I had to deal.
Oh no, he was not the monster whom you imagined! I sought in vain, in that man of thirty-eight, emaciated, haggard, gnawed by the fear of being conscripted after all, him whom I had met at Marinette’s funeral and with whom I had talked about business. He talked to me quite open-heartedly. He was living, in marital relations, with a woman with whom he wanted to spare Luc contact. It was in the boy’s interest that he had turned him over to his grandmother Fondaudège....
My poor Isa, if you had only known, you and the children, what I offered that man, that day! I don’t mind telling you now. He was to keep the safe in his own name; I was to have his power of attorney. All my disposable fortune was to be deposited there, with a document attesting that it belonged to Luc. As long as I lived, his father was not to touch the safe. But after my death, he was to take possession of it, and you would have known nothing about it....
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