The elms along the roads and the poplars in the meadows make up two broad surfaces, one above the other, and between their sombre lines the mist gathers—the mist and the smoke of bonfires, and that immense breath of earth after it has drunk. For we find ourselves suddenly in the middle of the autumn; and the grapes, on which a little moisture remains caught and shining, will never recover that of which the August rains robbed them.
But for us, perhaps, it is never too late. I have to keep on telling myself that it is never too late.
It was not out of devotion that, the day after my return here, I went into Isa’s room. Mere idleness, that complete lack of occupation which I never know whether I like or dislike in the country—that alone moved me to push open the unlatched door, the first at the top of the staircase, to the left. Not only was the window wide open, but so, too, were the wardrobe and the cupboard. The servants had swept the place clean, and the sun devoured, even in the remotest corners, the impalpable remains of a destiny that was finished.
The September afternoon buzzed with awakened flies. The thick, round lime-trees looked like damaged fruit. The blue, deep at the zenith, paled towards the sleeping hills. A trill of laughter burst from a girl whom I could not see; sun-hats moved about at the level of the vines; the grape-harvest had begun.
But the miracle of life had departed from Isa’s room; and at the back of the cupboard a pair of gloves, an umbrella, had the air of dead things. I looked at the old stone chimney-piece which carries, sculptured on its tympan, a rake, a spade, a sickle and an ear of corn. These old-time chimneys, in which great logs can burn, are blocked during the summer by big screens of painted canvas. This one represented a yoke of labouring oxen. One day, when I was a little boy, I had slashed it with a pen-knife in a fit of temper.
It was only leaning against the chimney. As I was trying to settle it in its proper place, it fell forward and revealed the black square of the hearth, full of ashes. Then I remembered what the children had told me about that last day of Isa’s at Calèse. “She was burning papers; we thought there was a fire....”
I realised, at that moment, that she had felt death coming. One cannot think about his own death and other people’s at one and the same time. Obsessed by the idea of my approaching end, how could I have worried about Isa’s high blood pressure? “It’s nothing—just old age,” those fools of children kept on saying.
But she, that day when she made that big fire, knew that her hour was at hand. She had wanted to disappear entirely. She had effaced the least vestiges of herself. I stared, in the hearth, at those grey embers, that the draught barely stirred. The tongs that she had used were still there, between the hearth and the wall. I seized them, and foraged in that heap of dust, in that nothingness.
I dug into it, as though it concealed the secret of my life, of our two lives. In proportion as the tongs penetrated into them, the ashes became harder. I assembled a few fragments of paper which the thickness of the leaves had protected; but I rescued only odd words, broken phrases, whose meaning was impenetrable.
They were all in the same handwriting, which I barely recognised. My trembling hands applied themselves to the task. On a tiny fragment, dirtied with soot, I was able to make out this word: PAX. Beneath a little cross was a date: “February 23, 1913,” and: “my dear daughter....”
Out of other fragments I attempted to reconstitute the characters that were written on the margin of the burned page; but all that I obtained was this: “You are not responsible for the hatred which this child inspires in you. You would be to blame only if you yielded to it. But on the contrary you drive yourself....”
After repeated efforts, I succeeded in reading this much more: “... judge the dead harshly...the affection that he has for Luc does not prove...” Soot covered the rest, except these sentences: “Forgive without knowing what you have to forgive. Offer for him your....”
I should have time to think it over later. I had no other thought but that of finding something more. I went on foraging, bending over, in a position which stopped my breathing. At one moment the discovery of a moleskin notebook, which appeared to be intact, excited me; but none of its leaves had been spared. On the verso of the cover, I could make out only these few words in Isa’s handwriting: Spiritual Nosegay; and, underneath: “I am not called He Who condemns, My name is Jesus.” (Christ to Saint Francis de Sales).
Other quotations followed, but they were illegible. In vain did I bend for long over that dust; I could obtain nothing more. I straightened myself up and looked at my blackened hands. I saw, in the glass, my brow smeared with ashes. A desire for walking took possession of me, as in the days when I was young. I went downstairs, forgetful of my heart.
For the first time for weeks, I made my way towards the vines, half-stripped of their fruits, which were nodding into sleep. The country-side was volatile, limpid, airy as those bluish balloons that Marie once used to blow up at the end of a straw. Already the wind and the sun were hardening the cart-ruts, the deep imprints of the oxen.
I walked on, bearing with me the image of that unknown Isa, a prey to strong passions which God alone had possessed the power to master. That housewife had been a sister eaten up by jealousy. Little Luc had been hateful to her...a woman capable of hating a little boy...jealous because of her own children? Because I preferred Luc to them? But she had hated Marinette....
Yes, yes, she had suffered through me. I had possessed the power to torture her. What madness this was! Marinette was dead, Luc was dead, Isa was dead—dead, dead! And I, an old man still on my feet, but on the brink of that grave into which they had gone down—I rejoiced in the fact that a woman had not been indifferent to me, that I had stirred these depths in her.
It was laughable; and, indeed, laugh I did, all to myself, leaning against a vine stake, face to face with the wan waste of mist in which villages with their churches, roads and all their poplars, were swallowed up. The light of the setting sun blazed a difficult trail through that buried world.
I felt, I saw, I had it in my hands—that crime of mine. It did not consist entirely in that hideous nest of vipers—hatred of my children, desire for revenge, love of money; but also in my refusal to seek beyond those entangled vipers. I had held fast to that loathsome tangle as though it were my very heart—as though the beatings of that heart had merged into those writhing reptiles.
It had not been enough for me, throughout half a century, to recognise nothing in myself except that which was not I. I had done the same thing in the case of other people. Those miserable greeds visible in my children’s faces had fascinated me. Robert’s stupidity had been what struck me about him, and I had confined myself to that superficial feature. Never had the appearance of other people presented itself to me as something that must be broken through, something that must be penetrated, before one could reach them.
It was at the age of thirty, or at the age of forty, that I should have made this discovery. But today I am an old man with a heart that beats too slowly, and I watch the last autumn of my life putting the vines to sleep, stupefying them with smoke and sunshine.
Those whom I should have loved are dead. Dead are those who might have loved me. As for the survivors, I no longer have the time, or the strength, to set out on a voyage towards them, to discover them. There is nothing in me, down to my voice, my gestures, my laugh, which does not belong to the monster whom I set up against the world, and to whom I gave my name.
Was it exactly these thoughts that I was going over in my mind, as I leant against that vine stake, at the end of a vineyard, opposite the slopes resplendent with Yquem, on which the declining sun rested? An incident, which I must record here, doubtless made them clearer to me; but they were in me already, that evening, while I made my way back to the house, steeped to my very heart in the peace that filled the earth.
The shadows lengthened. The whole world was nothing but an acceptation. In the distance, hills lost in the gloaming looked like bowed shoulders. They were awa
iting the mist and the night, perhaps to lie down, and stretch themselves, and fall into a human sleep.
I hoped to find Geneviève and Hubert in the house. They had promised to have dinner with me. It was the first time in my life that I looked forward to seeing them, that I found enjoyment in it. I was impatient to show them my new heart.
I must not lose a moment in getting to know them, in making myself known to them. Should I have time to put my discovery to the test before I died? I would go straight to the hearts of my children, I would pass through everything that had separated us. The tangle of vipers was at last cut through. I should advance so quickly into their love that they would weep when they closed my eyes.
They had not arrived. I sat down on a bench, near the road, listening for the sound of a car. The longer they delayed, the more I wanted them to come. I had a return of my old bad temper. Little they cared about keeping me waiting! What did it matter to them if I suffered on their account? They did it on purpose....
I pulled myself up. Their lateness might be due to some reason which I did not know, and it was not likely that it was the precise reason whereby, through force of habit, I nurtured my resentment. The bell rang for dinner. I went to the kitchen to tell Amélie that we had better wait a little longer.
It was very rare for me to be seen under those blackened rafters from which hams hung. I sat down beside the fire, in a wicker chair. Amélie, her husband and Cazau, the handy man, whose loud laughter I had heard in the distance, had fallen silent as soon as I came in. An atmosphere of respect and terror surrounded me.
I never talk to servants. It is not that I am a difficult or exacting master; they simply do not exist in my eyes, I never even notice them. But this evening their presence comforted me. Because my children had not come, I was quite ready to have my meal at a corner of the kitchen table, where the cook was carving the joint.
Cazau took himself off, and Ernest put on a white jacket to wait on me. His silence oppressed me. I tried to find something to say. But I knew nothing about these two people who had devoted themselves to us for the past twenty years. Finally I remembered that their daughter, married at Sauveterre in Guyenne, used to come and see them, and that Isa did not pay her for the rabbit she brought, because she had some meals in the house. I spoke rather quickly, without turning my head.
“Well, Amélie, how is your daughter? Still at Sauveterre?”
She bent her weather-beaten face towards me and stared at me.
“Monsieur knows that she is dead....It will be ten years on the 29th, Saint Michael’s Day. Surely Monsieur remembers?”
Her husband, for his part, said nothing, but he looked at me sternly. He thought that I was pretending to have forgotten. I stammered: “I beg your pardon....my old head....” But, as always when I am shy and embarrassed, I chuckled a little—I could not help chuckling. The man announced, in his usual voice: “Dinner is served.”
I got up at once, and went and sat down in the diningroom, opposite the shade of Isa. Here was Geneviève, then Abbé Ardouin, then Hubert....I looked, between the window and the sideboard, for Marie’s high chair, which had served for Janine and for Janine’s daughter. I endeavoured to swallow a few mouthfuls. The stare of that man who waited on me was horrible to me.
In the drawing-room they had lit a fire of vine-branch faggots. In that room every generation as it withdrew had left, as a tide leaves its shells, albums, caskets, daguerreotypes, astral lamps. Dead knick-knacks littered the tables. The heavy stamp of a horse in the darkness, the sound of the wine-press that adjoins the house, almost broke my heart.
“My little ones, why didn’t you come?” The moan rose to my lips. If the servants had heard me through the door, they must have believed that there was a stranger in the drawing-room; for this could not be the voice, or the words, of the old wretch who, they imagined, had pretended on purpose not to know that their daughter was dead.
All of them, wife, children, masters and servants, had formed a conspiracy against my soul. They had dictated this hateful rôle to me. I had painfully adopted the attitude which they demanded of me. I had conformed to the model which their hatred laid down for me.
What madness, at sixty-eight, to hope to swim against the stream, to impose upon them a new idea of the man that, nevertheless, I am, that I always have been! We only see what we are accustomed to seeing. You, too, my poor children, I do not see you either.
If I were younger, the lines would be less marked, the habits less deeply rooted; but I doubt whether, even in my youth, I could have broken the spell of this enchantment. One needed some strength, I said to myself. What kind of strength? Someone.
Yes, Someone in Whom we are all one, Who would be the guarantor of my victory over myself, in the eyes of my family; Someone Who would bear witness for me, Who would have relieved me of my foul burden, Who would have assumed it....
Even the elect do not learn to love all by themselves. To get beyond the absurdities, the failings, and above all the stupidity of people, one must possess a secret of love which the world has forgotten. So long as this secret is not rediscovered, you will change human conditions in vain.
I thought that it was selfishness which made me aloof from everything that concerns the economic and the social; and it is true that I was a monster of seclusion and indifference; but there was also in me a feeling, an obscure certitude, that all this serves for nothing to revolutionise the face of the world. The world must be touched at its heart. I seek Him Who alone can achieve that victory; and He must Himself be the Heart of hearts, the burning centre of all love.
I felt a desire which perhaps was in itself a prayer. I was on the point, this evening, of falling on my knees, with my arms on the back of a chair, as Isa used to do, in those summers of long ago, with the three children pressing against her skirts. I used to come back from the terrace towards that illuminated window, walking silently and, invisible in the dark garden, look at that group at prayer. “Prostrate before You, O my God,” Isa would recite, “I give You thanks that You have given me a heart capable of knowing You and loving You....”
I remained standing in the middle of the room, hesitating, as though I had been hit. I thought of my life; I contemplated my life. No, one could not swim against such a stream of mud. I had been a man so horrible that I had never had a single friend.
But, I said to myself, was it not because I had always been incapable of disguising myself? If all men went through life as unmasked as I had done for half a century, perhaps one would be astonished to find how little difference in degree there was among them.
In fact, nobody goes through life with his face uncovered—nobody at all. Most people ape highmindedness, nobility. Unknown to themselves, they are conforming to types, literary or otherwise. The saints know this: they hate and despise themselves because they see themselves as they really are. I should not have been so despised if I had not been so frank, so open, so naked.
Such were the thoughts that pursued me, this evening, as I wandered about the dimly lit room, where I stumbled against a heavy piece of furniture of mahogany and rosewood, a piece of jetsam sanded up in the past of a family, where so many bodies, today returned to dust, had sat and lain stretched. Children’s boots had dirtied the divan when they buried themselves in it to look at the Monde Illustré in 1870. The stuff was still black at the same place. The wind prowled round the house, laying flat the dead leaves of the lime-trees. They had forgotten to close the shutters of a bedroom.
Chapter XIX
THE next day, I awaited the arrival of the postman anxiously. I paced up and down the walks, as Isa used to do when the children were late and she was worried.
Had they quarrelled? Was one of them ill? I fretted myself to death. I became as clever as Isa at developing and harbouring obsessions. I marched among the vines, with that absent-minded air of remoteness from the world of those who are going over and over a source of anxiety; but, at the same time, I remember that I noticed this change in mysel
f, and was pleased to find that I was anxious.
The mist was a sound-box. One could hear the plain, but not see it. Wag-tails and thrushes made merry in the rows where the grapes had not yet gone rotten. Luc as a child, at the end of his holidays, had loved these fleeting mornings....
A line from Hubert, dated from Paris, did not reassure me. He had been obliged, he told me, to leave in a hurry: a rather serious matter which he would tell me about on his return, fixed for the next day but one. I imagined financial difficulties. Had he, perhaps, been guilty of some illegality?
By the afternoon I could not stand it any longer. I had myself driven to the station, where I took a ticket for Bordeaux, though I had given my word not to travel alone again. Geneviève was now living in our old house. I met her at the door, in the act of taking leave of a stranger, who must have been a doctor.
“Didn’t Hubert tell you?”
She took me into the waiting-room, where I had fainted, the day of the funeral. I breathed again when I heard that it was a matter of an escapade of Phili’s. I had feared something worse. He had gone off with a woman “who had a hold on him,” after a distressing scene in which he had left Janine with no hope. They could not get the poor girl out of her state of prostration, which worried the doctor. Alfred and Hubert had followed the fugitive to Paris. According to a telegram which she had just received, they could do nothing with him.
“When I think that we allowed them such a large income....Of course we weren’t taking any risks; we did not give them control of any capital. But the income was considerable. God knows Janine showed herself weak enough with him; he could get anything he liked out of her. When I think that he used to threaten to desert her, because he believed that you would not leave us anything; and it’s now, when you have handed over your fortune to us, that he makes up his mind to take off—how do you explain that?”
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