Before writing any more, I leant at the window. The wind had dropped. Calèse slept without a Breath under all the stars. Suddenly, about three hours after midnight, again there came a squall, rumblings in the sky, heavy, icy raindrops. They rattled on the slates to such an extent that I was afraid they were hail. I thought my heart had stopped beating.
The vines have barely “passed their flower.” The future harvest covers the slopes. But it seems that its fate may be that of those young animals which the hunter ties up and leaves in the darkness to attract beasts of prey. Growling clouds are prowling around the exposed vines.
But what does the harvest matter to me now? I have nothing left to harvest in this world. I can only learn to know myself a little better.
Listen, Isa. Among my papers you will discover, after my death, my last wishes. They date from the months that followed the death of Marie, when I was ill and you were concerned about the children. You will find in them a profession of faith couched in terms something like these:
“If, at the time of my death, I accept the ministry of a priest, I protest in advance, being in full possession of my faculties, against the abuse which will have been made of my mental and physical weakness to obtain of me that which my reason rejects.”
Well, I owe you this confession: it is, on the contrary, when I study myself, as I have been doing for the past two months, with a curiosity which is stronger than my disgust; it is when I feel myself most fully in possession of my faculties that the Christian temptation torments me. I can no longer deny that a route exists in me which might lead me to your God.
If I succeeded in being satisfied with myself, I could combat this demand upon me better. If I could despise myself unreservedly, the issue would be decided once and for all. But the hardness of the man I am, the dreadful destitution of his heart, this gift which he possesses of inspiring hatred and creating a desert around himself—none of these things prevails against hope....
Can you believe me, Isa? Perhaps it was not for you, the righteous, that your God came, if He did come, but for us. You have never known me; you have never known the kind of man I was. These pages that you have read—have they made me less hateful in your eyes? You must see, at least, that there exists in me a secret chord: that which Marie set vibrating, simply by nestling in my arms; and also little Luc, on Sundays, when he came back from Mass, sat down on the bench in front of the house, and gazed at the meadow.
Oh, above all don’t imagine that I have any very high idea of myself! I know this heart of mine—this heart; this tangle of vipers. Stifled under them, steeped in their venom, it goes on beating under the swarming of them: this tangle of vipers that it is impossible to separate, that needs to be cut loose with a slash of a knife, with the stroke of a sword. “I am not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
To-morrow, it may be that I shall deny what I confess to you here, as I have denied, this night, my last wishes of thirty years ago. I have seemed to hate with an undying hatred all that you profess, and I still continue to hate those who arrogate to themselves the name of Christians; but is it not because so many of them demean a hope, disfigure a countenance, that Countenance, that Face?
By what right do I judge them, you will ask me—I, who am an abomination? Isa, is there not in my baseness something that resembles, more than their virtue does, the Sign that you adore?
What I have just written is doubtless, in your eyes, a preposterous blasphemy. You must prove it to me. Why do you not speak to me? Why have you never spoken to me? Is there, perhaps, some word of yours that would open my heart?
To-night, it seems to me that it is not yet too late to begin our lives over again. What if I do not wait until I am dead to hand over these pages to you? What if I adjured you, in the name of God, to read them to the end? What if I saw you coming back to my room, with your face bathed in tears? What if you opened your arms to me? What if I asked your pardon? What if we fell on our knees together?
The storm seems to be over. The stars that herald the dawn are fluttering. I thought that it was raining again, but it was the drops falling from the leaves. If I lie down on my bed, would I stifle again? In any case, I cannot write any more, and sometimes I lay down my pen and let my head loll against the hard back....
A hiss like that of a beast, then a great din, together with a glare, have filled the sky. In the panic silence that followed, bombs have burst on the slopes, exploded by the vine-growers to scatter the hail-clouds or dissolve them into water. Fusees have gone up from that corner of the darkness where Barsac and Sauternes tremble in expectation of the scourge. The bell of Saint Vincent’s, which drives away the hail, is tolling at top speed, like somebody who sings at night because he is afraid—and, suddenly, on the slates, that noise like a handful of pebbles....
Hail! Once I would have leapt to the window. I hear shutters being flung open. You have just shouted to a man hurrying across the courtyard: “Is it bad?” He replied: “Luckily it’s mixed with rain, but it’s coming down hard.” A frightened child has run barefoot down the passage.
I have calculated by force of habit: “A hundred thousand francs lost....” But I have not stirred. Once nothing would have kept me back from going out—just as when they found me, one night, in the midst of the vines, in my slippers, with a blown-out candle in my hand, letting the hail fall on my head. Some profound peasant instinct drove me there, as though I sought to stretch myself out and cover the stoned vines with my body.
But to-night—here I am, become a stranger to what used to be, in the deepest sense, my virtue. At last I am detached. I do not know what, I do not know who, has detached me, Isa, but the cables are broken: I am drifting.
What force is drawing me? A blind force? Love? Perhaps love....
PART THE SECOND
Chapter XII
Paris, Rue Bréa.
WHAT made me put this document in my baggage? What have I to do now with this long confession? All is over between me and my family. She for whose benefit I have been exposing myself here in all my nakedness can no longer exist for me. What is the good of going on with this work?
It is that sub-consciously, perhaps, I find a consolation, a sense of deliverance, in it. What a light those last lines, written on the night of the hail, shed upon me! Must I not have been on the brink of madness?
No, no, let me not speak of madness here! Let madness not even be named. They are capable of making use of it against me, if these pages should fall into their hands.
These pages are no longer addressed to anybody. I must destroy them as soon as I feel that I am getting worse...unless I bequeath them to that unknown son whom I came to seek in Paris. I was burning to reveal his existence to Isa, in those pages where I referred to my love affair of 1909. I was on the point of confessing that my mistress went away pregnant, to hide herself in Paris....
I thought that I was being generous because I sent the mother and child six thousand francs a year, before the war. The idea of increasing this sum never entered my head. It is my own fault if I have found here two enslaved human beings, diminished by degrading toil.
Because they live in this district, I am staying at a boarding-house in the Rue Bréa. Between the bed and the wardrobe, I have hardly room to sit down to write. Besides, what a din! In my time Montparnasse was quiet. Now it seems to be inhabited by mad people who never go to bed. The family was making less noise on the steps at Calèse, that night when I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears....
What is the good of going back on that? Still, it would be a relief to pin down that cruel memory, even if only for a little time....For that matter, why should I destroy these pages? My son, my heir, has a right to know me. Through this confession I should be lessening, to some small extent, the distance at which I have kept him ever since he was born.
Alas! two meetings with him sufficed for me to make up my mind about him. He is not a man to find the least interest in this document. What could he make of it, that clerk, that
understrapper, that dull fellow who bets on horses?
During the night journey from Bordeaux to Paris, I imagined the reproaches which he would address to me and prepared my defence. How one lets oneself be influenced by the cheap conventions of the novel and the theatre! I was sure that I should have to deal with an illegitimate son full of bitterness and grandeur of soul. Sometimes I endowed him with the hard nobility of Luc, sometimes with Phili’s good looks. I was prepared for anything, except that he should resemble me. Are there any fathers to whom it is a pleasure to be told: “Your son is so like you?”
I measured the hatred which I have for myself when I saw this spectre of myself rise before me. I cherished, in Luc, a son who did not resemble me. There is only one respect in which Robert differs from me: he has shown himself incapable of passing any examination whatever. He had to give up any hope of doing so, after repeated failures. His mother, who had worked herself to death, despises him for it. She cannot refrain from rubbing it in. He hangs his head. He cannot get over the loss of all that money. In that respect he is certainly my son.
But what I have to offer him, this fortune of mine, is beyond the limits of his narrow imagination. It does not mean anything to him; he simply cannot believe in it. As a matter of fact, his mother and himself are afraid. “It’s not legal....We might be caught....”
That fat, washed-out woman, with faded hair, that caricature of her whom I loved, looks at me with eyes still very beautiful. “If I had met you in the street,” she tells me, “I wouldn’t have known you....”
And I—should I have known her? I was afraid that she might be resentful, revengeful. I was prepared for anything, except this dreary indifference of hers. Soured, dulled by eight hours a day of typewriting, she is afraid of scandal. She has retained a sickly dread of the Law with which she once got into trouble.
Yet I have explained the procedure to them clearly. Robert takes a safe in his own name at a bank. I deposit my fortune there. He gives me his power of attorney to open the safe, and undertakes not to touch it himself until my death. Naturally I require him to sign a declaration that everything the safe contains belongs to me. After all, I cannot put myself in the hands of this stranger. The mother and son object that, when I am dead, this document will be found. The fools are not prepared to trust me.
I have tried to make them understand that we can rely upon a country lawyer like Bourru, who owes everything to me, and with whom I have done business for forty years. He has in his care an envelope on which I have written: “to be burned the day of my death,” and which will be burned, I am quite sure, with all it contains. In it I will put Robert’s declaration. I am the better assured that Bourru will burn it, inasmuch as that sealed envelope contains documents which he has an interest in seeing out of the way.
But Robert and his mother are afraid that, after my death, Bourru will not burn anything and proceed to blackmail them. I have thought of that, too: I will put in their own hands evidence that will send Bourru to prison if he blinks an eye. The document will be burned by Bourru in their presence, and only then will they surrender to him the weapon with which I shall provide them. What more do they want?
They simply cannot grasp it. There they are, pig-headed, that idiot and that imbecile, to whom I offer millions and who, instead of grovelling at my feet, as I expected, go on arguing, cavilling....What if there is a bit of a risk? The game is well worth the candle. But no—they will not sign the paper. “It would be bad enough with the income-tax people, to start with....We should get into difficulties....”
Oh, how I must hate the others, that I don’t slam the door in their faces, the two of them! They are afraid of the “others,” too. “They’ll find out....They’ll bring an action against us....” Already Robert and his mother imagine that my family has put the police on the alert, and that I am being watched. They refuse to see me except at night or in out-of-the-way places. As though, in my state of health, I could sit up all night and spend my life in taxis!
I do not believe that the others are suspicious. This is not the first time that I have been away alone. They have no reason to believe that the other night, at Calèse, I was present, unseen, at their council of war. In any case, they have not tracked me down yet. This time there is nothing to prevent me from attaining my end. If only Robert would agree to act, I could sleep in peace. But the coward will not take the risk.
This evening, July 13, an orchestra is playing in the open air. At the end of the Rue Bréa couples are dancing. Oh, for peaceful Calèse! I remember the last night I spent there. Despite the doctor’s prohibition, I had taken a tablet of veronal, and I slept soundly.
I awakened with a start and looked at my watch. It was an hour after midnight. I was startled to hear several voices. My window was open. There was nobody in the courtyard, or in the drawing-room. I went into the dressing-room, which faces north, on the same side as the steps. It was there that the family, contrary to their custom, were sitting up late. At that late hour they had no suspicion of anybody overhearing them. Only the windows of the dressing-room and the passage open in that direction.
The night was still and warm. In the intervals of silence, I could hear Isa’s rather short Breathing, the scraping of a match. Not a Breath of wind stirred the black elms. I did not dare to lean out, but I could recognise each of my enemies by his or her voice and laugh. They were not arguing. A remark from Isa or Geneviève was followed by a long silence. Then suddenly, at a word from Hubert, Phili flared up, and they were all talking at once.
“Are you quite sure, Mamma, that the safe in his study contains only papers of no value? A miser is always imprudent. Remember that gold he wanted to give young Luc....Where was he hiding it?”
“No, he knows that I know the combination of the safe, which is: ‘Marie.’ He never opens it except when he has to consult an insurance policy or a tax return.”
“But, Mother, it might give us a clue to the sums he is hiding.”
“There is nothing there but papers relating to the estate, I am quite sure of it.”
“And that’s terribly significant, don’t you think? It makes one feel that he has taken all possible precautions.”
Phili murmured, with a yawn:
“Oh, what a crocodile! Just my luck to have stumbled upon a crocodile like that!”
“And if you want to know what I think,” declared Geneviève, “you won’t find anything in the safe at the Credit Lyonnais, either. What do you say, Janine?”
“But after all, Mamma, one would say, sometimes, that he loves you a little. When you were young, didn’t he ever show himself kind? No? None of you has ever known how to take him. You haven’t been very clever. One should have got round him, made a conquest of him. I could have done that, I am sure, if he hadn’t such a horror of Phili.”
Hubert interrupted his niece sourly:
“It is certainly true that your husband’s rudeness is going to cost us dearly.”
I heard Phili laugh. I leant out a little. The flame of a match lit up his two hands, his smooth chin, his thick lips for a moment.
“Come, come, he didn’t wait for me to have a horror of you!”
“No, but before then he didn’t dislike us so much....”
“Remember what Grandmamma told us,” Phili went on, “his attitude when he lost his little girl....He didn’t seem to care....He never set foot in the cemetery....”
“No, Phili, you’re going too far. If he ever loved anybody in the world, it was Marie.”
But for that protest of Isa’s, made in a faint, trembling voice, I should not have been able to restrain myself. I sat down on a low chair, leaning forward, with my head against the window-sill. Geneviève was speaking.
“If Marie had lived, none of all this would have happened. At the worst he would only have favoured her....”
“Come, come, he would have got his claws into her like everybody else! He’s a monster. He has no human feelings.”
Isa protested again:
“I must ask you, Phili, not to speak about my husband like that before me and his children. You owe him some respect.”
“Respect? Respect?”
He muttered something like:
“If you think it’s fun for me to have got into a family like this....”
“Nobody asked you to,” his mother-in-law told him drily.
“But such expectations were flashed before my eyes....Hullo, here’s Janine crying! What’s the matter? What have I said wrong now?”
He growled: “Oh, come now!” on a note of exasperation. I heard nothing more than Janine sniffling. A voice which I could not identify murmured: “What stars!” The clock of Saint Vincent’s struck two.
“Children, we must go to bed.”
Hubert protested that they could not Break up the meeting without having settled anything. It was high time to act. Phili backed him up. He did not think that I could last much longer. Then there would be nothing to be done. I would have laid all my plans....
“But after all, my poor children, what do you expect me to do? I’ve tried everything. I can’t do any more.”
“Yes, you can!” said Hubert. “You could very well....”
What was he whispering? I was missing the very thing I most wanted to know. From Isa’s tone I gathered that she was shocked, scandalised.
“No, no, I wouldn’t like to do that!”
“It’s not a question of what you would like, Mamma, it’s a question of saving our patrimony.”
There were more indistinct murmurs, cut short by Isa.
“It’s very hard, my child.”
“But Grandmamma, you can’t go on being his accomplice. He can disinherit us only with your permission. Your silence implies approval of him.”
“Janine, my dear, how dare you?...”
Viper's Tangle Page 10
