Obviously I should have been handing myself over to the man, myself and my fortune. How I must have hated you at that moment! Well, he didn’t choose to do it. He didn’t dare. He talked about his honour.
How could I have been guilty of such a madness? At that time, the children were approaching thirty, they were married, they were definitely on your side, turned against me on every possible occasion. You were working in secret: I was the enemy.
God knows that with them, with Geneviève especially, you were not on the best of terms. You reproached her with leaving you always alone, with never consulting you about anything. But against me the common front was established.
Everything passed off, for that matter, in a minor key, except on solemn occasions. Then there were terrible battles, such as over the children’s marriages. I did not want to give them a dowry, but merely an income. I did not choose to let the families concerned know the state of my fortune. I gained my point, I had the whip hand, and hatred made me firm—hatred, but also love: the love that I had for Luc. The families concerned put up with it, in any case, because they had no doubt that the fortune was enormous.
But my silence made you anxious. You wanted to be sure. Geneviève tried sometimes to get on the soft side of me—that poor clumsy fool, whom I could hear clattering along in her clogs from miles away! Often I said to her: “When I am dead, you will bless me,” just for the pleasure of seeing her eyes gleam with greed. She repeated those miraculous words to you. The whole family went into a trance.
Meanwhile I was seeking a means of leaving you nothing except what it was impossible to hide. I thought only of little Luc. I even had the idea of mortgaging the land....
Well, after all, it happened once that I let myself be taken in by your pretences. It was during the year that followed Marie’s death. I fell ill. Certain symptoms recalled those of the disease that had carried away our little one. I detest being nursed, and I have a horror of doctors and medicines. You never rested until I reconciled myself to going to bed and getting Arnozan.
You nursed me devotedly, that goes without saying, but also anxiously, and sometimes, when you asked me how I was feeling, it seemed to me that what I could discern in your voice was pain. When you put your hand on my brow, you did it in the same way as for the children. You wanted to sleep in my room. If I was restless during the night, you got up and gave me a drink.
“She’s fond of me,” I thought; “who would have believed it?...Is it because of what I make, perhaps?” But no, you didn’t love money for itself....Unless it was that the children’s position would be disimproved by my death? That seemed more likely. But it wasn’t that, either.
After Arnozan had examined me, you talked to him on the terrace, with that rise in your voice which has given you away so often.
“Please tell everybody, Doctor, that Marie died of typhoid. Because of the death of my two poor brothers, it got about that it was consumption which carried her away. People are so nasty, they will never let go of a thing. I tremble to think that this may do the gravest harm to Hubert and Geneviève. If my husband had been seriously ill, it would have given substance to all this gossip. He made me anxious for some days: I was thinking about the children.
“He, too, you know, had an affected lung before his marriage. That’s known; everybody knows it; people take such pleasure in these things! Even if he died of an infectious disease, they wouldn’t believe it, any more than they did in Marie’s case. And my poor little ones would have to pay for it.
“It made me mad when I saw him taking such little care of himself. He wouldn’t even go to bed! As though he had nobody to think about but himself! But he never thinks of anybody else, not even the children....No, no, Doctor, a man like you couldn’t believe that men like him exist. You’re just the same as Abbé Ardouin, you never think evil of anybody.”
I laughed all to myself, in my bed, and, when you came back, you asked me why. I answered you in these words, in current use between us: “Oh, nothing.”
“What are you laughing about?”—“Oh, nothing.”
“What are you thinking about?”—“Oh, nothing.”
Chapter X
I return to this document after an attack which has held me at the mercy of all of you for nearly a month. As soon as illness disarms me, the family circle presses closer round my bed. There you all are, watching me.
Last Sunday, Phili came to keep me company. It was hot; I answered in monosyllables; I lost the thread of ideas....For how long? I cannot say. The sound of his voice aroused me. I saw him in the dimness, with his ears pricked up. His young wolf’s eyes were gleaming. On his forearm, above his wrist-watch, he wore a gold chain. His shirt was half-open over his childlike chest.
I fell into a stupor again. The creaking of his shoes awakened me, and I watched him through half-closed lids. His hand was groping at my jacket, in the neighbourhood of the inside pocket where I keep my note-case. My heart pounded madly, but I forced myself to remain motionless. Were his suspicions aroused? He went back to his chair.
I pretended to awaken. I asked him whether I had been asleep long.
“Just a few minutes, Grandfather.”
I experienced that terror of lonely old men when a young man lurks around them. Am I going mad? It seemed to me that the fellow was capable of killing me. Hubert admitted, one day, that Phili was capable of anything.
Isa, you see how wretched I am. It will be too late, when you read this, for you to show me any pity. But it comforts me to hope that you may feel a little. I do not believe in your everlasting Hell; but I know what it is to be damned upon this earth, to be a man reprobated, a man who, whichever way he goes, goes the wrong way; a man who has always gone the wrong way: somebody who does not know how to live—not at least in the sense in which worldly people understand living; somebody who lacks the art of life in the absolute sense of the phrase.
Isa, I’m suffering. The south wind burns up the air. I am thirsty, and I have nothing but the lukewarm water in the dressing-room. I have millions, but not a glass of cold water.
If I endure the presence of Phili, terrifying though it is to me, the reason, perhaps, is that he reminds me of another boy, a boy who would be in his thirties by now, little Luc, our nephew. I have never denied your virtues; and that boy gave you occasion to exercise them. But you did not love him: there was nothing of the Fondaudèges about him, about that son of Marinette, that boy with his jet-black eyes, with his hair growing low on the forehead and smoothed down on the temples in “kiss-curls,” as Hubert called them.
He was not a good worker, at that school in Bayonne where he was a boarder. But that, you used to say, was no business of yours. It was quite enough that you had to take charge of him during the holidays.
No, it wasn’t books that interested him. In this countryside, where there is next to no game, he still succeeded in bringing down something almost every day. The hare, the only hare of the year, that had its lair on our land—he always ended by laying it at our feet. I can still see his triumphant gesture in the main path through the vineyard, his clenched fist holding the beast with its bleeding snout by the ears. I used to hear him setting off at dawn. I opened my window; and his fresh voice came to me through the mist: “I’m going to pick up my night-lines.”
He used to look me straight in the face, his eyes did not fall before mine, he was not afraid of me. Such an idea never entered his head.
If, after I had been away for a day or two, I came back unexpectedly and smelt an odour of cigars about the house; if I found the drawing-room without a carpet and all the signs of an interrupted party—as soon as my back was turned, Geneviève and Hubert invited friends, organised “surprise-parties,” despite my formal prohibition; and you were an accomplice in their disobedience, “because,” you said, “one must return hospitality...”—in these cases, it was always Luc who was sent to me, to disarm me.
He found the terror which I inspired comic. “I went into the drawing-room while
they were dancing and shouted: “Here’s uncle! He’s coming by the short-cut...’ You should have seen them pack up! Aunt Isa and Geneviève rushed the sandwiches into the pantry. What a scamper!”
He was the only person in the world, that boy, to whom I was not a bugbear. Sometimes I went down to the river with him when he was fishing. Always running and jumping at other times, he could stay motionless, for hours, waiting, transformed into a willow—and the movements of his arm were as slow and silent as those of a branch.
Geneviève was right when she said that he wasn’t “literary.” He never troubled himself to go and see the moonlight on the terrace. He had no “feeling” for Nature because he was Nature itself, merged in it, one of its forces, one of its living springs among other springs.
I used to think of all the elements of tragedy in his young life: his mother dead, that father of his who must not be mentioned among us, his boarding-out, his loneliness. Very much less would have made me overflow with bitterness and hatred. But joy gushed out of him. Everybody was fond of him. How strange that seemed to me—me, whom everybody hated! Everybody loved him, even I. He smiled at everybody, and also at me; but not more than at anybody else.
In that utterly instinctive being, what struck me most of all, as he grew up, was his purity, his ignorance of evil, his disregard of it. Our children were good children, I must admit. Hubert was a model boy, as you put it. In that respect, I recognise that your education bore fruit. But if Luc had had time to become a man, would he have given as little trouble?
Purity, in him, did not seem to be acquired or conscious. It shone upon him, like the dew upon the grass. If I linger over this, it is because it awakened an echo deep down within me. Your paraded principles, your assumptions, your airs of disgust, your pursed mouth would never have given me any consciousness of evil, such as was conveyed to me by that boy, all unknown to myself. It was not until long afterwards that I realised this.
If humanity, as you imagine, bears upon it the brand of original sin, no human eye could have discerned it in Luc. He emerged from the hands of the potter intact and perfect in his grace. But I—in his presence I could feel my own deformity.
Should I say that I cherished him like a son? No, for what I loved in him was that I did not see myself in him. I know very well what Hubert and Geneviève have got from me: that greed of theirs, that primacy in their life of temporal possessions, that capacity for contempt (Geneviève treats Alfred, her husband, with an implacability which bears my mark). In Luc, I was sure of not bumping up against myself.
During the rest of the year I scarcely thought of him. His father looked after him during the Christmas and Easter holidays, and the long vacation brought him back to us again. He left our countryside in October, with the other birds.
Was he pious? You said of him: “Even in a little animal like Luc, one finds the influence of the Fathers. He never misses his Communion on Sundays....I admit that his act of contrition does not take him long; but, after all, nobody is asked for more than he has it in him to give.”
He never talked to me about such things; he never made the least allusion to them. His conversation was always about the most concrete matters. Sometimes, when he pulled out of his pocket a knife, a float or a whistle to lure larks, his little black rosary fell on the grass, and he picked it up again quickly. Perhaps, on Sunday mornings, he seemed a little quieter than on other days, less volatile, less imponderable, as though charged with an unknown substance.
Among all the links that bound me to Luc, there was one that will surprise you a little. It happened sometimes, on those Sundays, that I recognised, in that young faun who leapt no longer, the brother of the little girl who fell asleep a dozen years earlier, our Marie, very different from him as she was—she who could not bear one to kill an insect, whose greatest pleasure it was to carpet the hollow of a tree with moss and place a statue of the Virgin there—don’t you remember?
All the same, in Marinette’s son, in him whom you called the little animal, it was our Marie who came to life for me again—or, rather, the same spring that burst forth in her, and that went underground again with her, welled up at my feet once more.
When the war broke out, Luc was not quite fifteen. Hubert was mobilised in the auxiliary services.
The medical boards, before which he appeared philosophically, gave you anxious moments. Upon the narrowness of his chest, which had given you nightmares for years, all your hopes now depended. When the monotony of office life, and also some jeers, inspired him with a keen desire to see active service, and he made some moves in that direction, you went so far as to talk openly about what you had been at such pains to dissimulate. “With his throwback...” you kept on saying.
My poor Isa, don’t be afraid of my throwing stones at you. I never interested you, and you never paid any attention to me; but, during that period, you did so even less than at any other time. You had no idea how anxiety rose in me as the campaign went on through the winter. Luc’s father had been mobilised for civil service, and we had the boy with us not only during the long vacation, but also for Christmas and Easter. The war filled him with enthusiasm. He was afraid that it would be over before he reached the age of eighteen.
He, who had never opened a book before, devoured military text-books, studied maps. He developed his body methodically. At the age of sixteen, he was already a man—a hard-trained man. There was a fellow who had no tears to shed over the wounded or the dead! Out of the saddest stories about life in the trenches that I gave him to read, he made up for himself the image of a terrible, magnificent sport, which one would not always have the right to play. He would have to hurry.
Oh, how afraid he was of being too late! He already had the authorisation of his idiot of a father in his pocket. And I, as his fatal birthday on January 18 approached—I followed old Clemenceau’s career feverishly, I watched it like those parents of prisoners who looked forward to the fall of Robespierre, hoping that the tyrant would fall before their sons came up for judgment.
When Luc was in camp at Souges, during his period of instruction and training, you sent him woollens and dainties; but you used some words that awakened the instinct of murder in me, my poor Isa, when you said: “Poor young fellow, of course it would be very sad...but he, after all, wouldn’t leave anybody behind him....” I know that you did not mean to hurt when you said this.
One day, I realised that there was no hope that the war would come to an end before Luc went to it. When the front was broken on the Chemin des Dames, he came to say goodbye to us, a fortnight earlier than he expected.
Well, I must pluck up courage here to recall a horrible memory, which still awakens me at night and makes me cry aloud. That day I went to my study to get a leather belt, specially made by the harness-maker from a model which I had given him myself. I climbed on a stool and tried to pull towards me the plaster head of Demosthenes which stood on top of my book-case. I could not move it. It was full of gold pieces which I had hidden there after mobilisation. I plunged my hand into that gold, the thing to which I was most attached in the world, and I stuffed the leather belt full of it. When I got down off the stool, that boa-constrictor, swollen with metal, was hanging round my neck and bearing down upon my nape.
I offered it shyly to Luc. He did not understand at first what I was giving him.
“What do you expect me to do with that, Uncle?”
“It will be useful to you in billets, or if you are taken prisoner...or in lots of other circumstances. One can always do something with money.”
“Oh,” he said, with a laugh, “I have enough to carry with all my kit....How do you suppose I could load myself down with all that gold? The first time I go up the line I should have to hide it in the woods.”
“But, my dear fellow, at the beginning of the war everybody who had any gold took it with him.”
“That was because they didn’t know what they were in for, Uncle!”
He was standing up in the middle of the r
oom. He had thrown the belt of gold on the couch. That strong boy—how frail he looked in a uniform too big for him! From its gaping collar emerged his drummer-boy’s neck. His cropped hair robbed his face of any character of its own. He was prepared for death, he was “all correct” like so many others, indistinguishable, already anonymous, already vanished.
For an instant his eyes fixed themselves on the belt; then he handed it back to me with an expression of mockery and contempt. He kissed me, though.
We went to see him off at the door. He turned round to shout to me to “take all that to the Bank of France.” I could not see anything anymore. I heard you laughing and saying to him:
“Don’t be too sure of that! It’s too much to ask him!”
The door closed, and I stood motionless in the hall. You said to me:
“Confess that you knew he wouldn’t take your gold. It was an empty gesture.”
I remembered that I had left the belt on the couch. A servant might find it; one never knows. I hurried upstairs, and put it around my shoulders again to empty its contents into the head of Demosthenes.
I scarcely noticed the death of my mother, which occurred a few days later. She had been half-witted for years, and was no longer living with us.
It is now that I think of her, every day, the mother of my childhood and my youth: the image of what she became is effaced. I, who detest cemeteries, go to her grave sometimes. I do not take any flowers now, for I found that they were stolen. The poor go and sneak roses for the benefit of their own dead. I should have to go to the expense of a railing; and everything is so dear nowadays.
Luc, for his part, has no grave. He disappeared; he was a “missing.” I have in my note-case the only letter he had time to send me: “Everything all right, have received parcel. Love.” He wrote: “love.” At least I got that word from my poor child.
Chapter XI
TO-NIGHT a choking feeling awakened me. I had to get up and drag myself to my chair. There, in the tumult of a howling wind, I read over these last few pages—stupefied by the backgrounds in myself which they illuminated.
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