Indiana (Oxford World's Classics)

by George Sand

  Madame Delmare said nothing. Ralph made an effort to extract a word from her.

  ‘And you, Indiana,’ he said in a choking voice, ‘do you still feel friendship for me?’

  These words revived all the filial affection, all the childhood memories, all the habits of intimacy which united their hearts. They fell weeping into each other’s arms and Ralph almost fainted, for in that strong body, in that calm, reserved personality, seethed powerful emotions. He sat down so as not to fall and remained silent and pale for a few moments. Then he grasped the Colonel’s hand in one of his and Indiana’s in the other.

  ‘At this moment of a separation which may last for ever, be frank with me,’ he said. ‘You are refusing my proposal to accompany you on my account and not on yours?’

  ‘I swear to you on my honour that in refusing you, I am sacrificing my happiness to yours,’ said Delmare.

  ‘For my part’, said Indiana, ‘you know that I would never want to leave you.’

  ‘God forbid that I should doubt your sincerity at such a moment,’ replied Ralph. ‘Your word is enough for me. I am pleased with you both.’

  And he left them.

  Six weeks later the brig Coraly set sail from Bordeaux. Ralph had written to his friends that he would be in the town towards the end of their stay there, but in his usual way his style was so laconic that it was impossible to know whether he intended to bid them a last farewell or to go with them. They waited for him in vain till the last moment, and when the captain gave the signal for departure Ralph still had not appeared. Ominous forebodings added to the dull pain which oppressed Indiana’s heart when the last houses of the port disappeared amongst the foliage of the coast. She shuddered at the thought that henceforth she was alone in the world with a husband she hated, that she would have to live and die with him, without a friend to comfort her, without a relative to protect her against his brutal domination.

  But when she turned round, she saw on the deck behind her Ralph’s calm, kindly face smiling at her.

  ‘So you are not deserting me?’ she said, her face bathed in tears, and throwing her arms round his neck.

  ‘Never!’ replied Ralph clasping her to his heart.

  XXIII

  LETTER from Madame Delmare to M. de Ramière

  From Bourbon Island, 3 June 18.

  ‘I had resolved to weary you no more with my memory, but on arriving here and reading the letter you sent me the day before my departure from Paris, I feel that I owe you a reply, for in the throes of dreadful distress I went too far. I was mistaken about you and ought to make amends to you not as a lover but as a man.

  Forgive me, Raymon. At that terrible moment of my life, I took you for a monster. One single word, one single look from you, banished for ever all trust, all hope, from my heart. I know I can no longer be happy but I still hope not to be reduced to despising you. That for me would be the final blow.

  ‘Yes, I took you for a deceiver, for the worst possible kind of man, for an egoist. I detested you. I was sorry that Bourbon Island wasn’t further away so that I could fly further from you, and indignation gave me the strength to drain my cup of misery to the dregs.

  But since I’ve read your letter, I feel better. I don’t regret you but I don’t hate you any more and I don’t want to leave your life in remorse for having destroyed mine. Be happy, be carefree. Forget me. I’m still alive and perhaps I’ll live a long time.

  ‘In fact you’re not to blame. It’s I who was out of my mind. Your heart was not unfeeling but it was closed to me. You didn’t lie to me, it’s I who was mistaken. You didn’t commit perjury nor were you insensitive, you just didn’t love me.

  ‘Oh, good God! You didn’t love me! How then should one love you? But I’ll not stoop to complain. I’m not writing to you to poison the calm of your present life with an odious memory. Nor am I writing to implore your compassion for ills which I have the strength to bear alone. Now that I know your proper role better I write, on the contrary, to absolve and pardon you.

  ‘I shan’t amuse myself by refuting your letter; that would be too easy. I shan’t reply to your remarks about my duties. Don’t worry, Raymon. I know what they are and I didn’t love you little enough to transgress them unthinkingly. You don’t need to tell me that mankind’s contempt would have been the price of my sin; I knew that very well. I was not unaware that the stain would be deep, indelible, and extremely painful, that I would be rejected on all sides, cursed and covered with shame, and that I wouldn’t find a single friend left to pity and comfort me. My only mistake was to have confidence that you would open your arms to me and that, there, you would help me to forget the scorn, the distress, and the desertion of my friends. The only thing I didn’t foresee was that you might refuse my sacrifice after letting me complete it. I had imagined that was impossible. I went to your house thinking you would repulse me at first out of principle and duty, but with the conviction that when you learned the inevitable consequences of the step I had taken, you would feel bound to help me bear them. No, I never really thought you would abandon me alone to the consequences of such a dangerous decision, and would let me harvest its bitter fruits instead of gathering me to your heart and giving me the protection of your love.

  ‘Then, how I would have defied them, those distant murmurings of a world powerless to harm me! Strong in your love, how I would have braved hatred! How weak my remorse would have been, and how the passion you inspired would have stifled its voice! With my mind filled entirely with thoughts of you, I would have forgotten myself. Proud in the possession of your heart, I wouldn’t have had the time to blush for mine. One word, one look, one kiss from you, would have been enough to absolve me, and the memory of men and laws could have found no place in such a life. The fact is that I was mad, that, as you cynically said, I had learned about life in novels written for ladies’ maids, in those optimistic, childish fictions in which the heart becomes interested in the success of crazy enterprises and impossible joys. That remark of yours, Raymon, was horribly true. What frightens and devastates me is that you are right.

  ‘What I can’t explain so well is that the impossibility was not the same for both of us, that I, a weak woman, drew strength from my exalted feelings to put myself alone in an improbable fictional situation, and that you, a generous-hearted man, didn’t find in your will the strength to follow me there. Yet you shared the dreams of the future, you assented to these illusions, you nourished in me a hope that could not be realized. For a long time, you had listened to my childish plans, to my pygmy’s ambitions, with a smile on your lips and joy in your eyes, and your words were all love and gratitude. You, too, were blind, lacking in foresight, boastful. How is it that your reason didn’t return till you saw the danger? I thought that danger charmed the eyes, stimulated one’s resolve, made fear impotent! But there, you trembled at the crucial moment! Have you men, then, only the physical courage which faces death? Aren’t you capable of the moral courage which accepts misfortune? You, who explain everything so admirably, explain to me, please.

  ‘Perhaps it’s because your dream wasn’t the same as mine, for with me courage was love. You had imagined you loved me and you woke up surprised at such a mistake on the day I came trusting in mine. Good God! What a strange illusion yours was, since you didn’t then foresee all the obstacles which struck you at the moment of action, since you only mentioned them to me for the first time when it was too late.

  ‘Why should I reproach you now? Is one responsible for the fluctuations of one’s feelings? Did it depend on you to love me for ever? Definitely not. My fault was not to have been able to make you feel affection for me longer and more seriously. I seek the reason for this and cannot find it in my heart, but none the less it exists apparently. Perhaps I loved you too much; perhaps my affection was demanding and tiring. You were a man; you loved independence and pleasure. I was a burden to you. Sometimes I tried to control your life. Alas! Those were very petty faults to explain such a cruel desertion!r />
  ‘So enjoy the liberty you have reclaimed at the expense of my whole life. I shall not disturb it again. Why didn’t you give me this lesson earlier? I would have been hurt much less, and you, too, perhaps.

  ‘Be happy; that’s the last wish of my broken heart. Don’t urge me any more to think of God; leave that to the priests, whose task it is to touch the hardened hearts of the guilty. As for me, I have more faith than you have. I serve the same God but I serve Him better and with a purer heart. Yours is the god of men, the king, the founder, and protector of your race; mine is the God of the universe, the creator, the support, and hope of all creatures. Yours has made everything for you alone; mine made all species for each other. You think yourselves masters of the world; I think you are only its tyrants. You think God protects you and authorizes you to usurp the empire of the earth; but I think He allows it for a short time and the day will come when His breath will scatter you like grains of sand. No, Raymon, you don’t know God, or rather, let me repeat what Ralph said to you one day at Lagny: it’s that you believe in nothing. Your education, and your need for an irrefutable authority with which to oppose the brutal power of the masses, have made you adopt without scrutiny the beliefs of your fathers. But the feeling of the existence of God has never reached your heart; perhaps you’ve never prayed to Him. I have only one belief, probably the only one you don’t have; I believe in Him. But the religion you have invented, I reject. All your morality, all your principles, are but the interests of your society that you have erected into laws and that you claim emanate from God Himself, just as your priests have set up the rites of church worship to establish their power and wealth over the nations. But all that is lies and blasphemy. I who invoke God, I who understand Him, I know very well that there is nothing in common between Him and you and that it is by clinging to Him with all my strength that I can detach myself from you who continually strive to overturn His works and sully His gifts. It ill becomes you, you know, to invoke His name to crush the resistance of a weak woman, to stifle the lament of a broken heart. God doesn’t want the creatures of His hands to be oppressed and crushed. If He deigned to descend so far as to intervene in our petty concerns, He would break the strong and raise up the weak. He would spread His large hand out over our unequal heads and make them level like the surface of the sea. He would say to the slave: “Cast aside your chain and flee to the mountains, where I have placed water, flowers, and sunshine for you.” He would say to the king: “Throw your purple robes to the beggars for them to use as mats, and go and sleep in the valley, where I have spread out carpets of moss and heather for you.” He would say to the powerful: “Bend the knee and carry the burden of your weaker brethren, for henceforth you will need them and I shall give them strength and courage.” Yes, these are my dreams; they are all of another life, of another world, where the ruffian’s law will not bear down on the head of the peace-lover, where at least resistance and flight will not be crimes, where man can escape man as the gazelle escapes the panther, without the chain of the law being stretched out round him to force him to come and throw himself beneath his enemy’s feet, without the voice of prejudice being raised in his distress to insult his suffering and say to him: “You are a base coward because you would not bend the knee and crawl.”

  ‘No, don’t speak to me of God, you, of all people, Raymon. Don’t invoke His name to send me into exile and reduce me to silence. In submitting, it is to the power of man that I am yielding. If I listened to the voice that God has placed at the bottom of my heart, and to the noble instinct of a strong, bold nature which is perhaps the real conscience, I would flee to the desert, I would be able to do without help, protection, and love. I would live for myself alone in the heart of our beautiful mountains. I would forget the tyrants, the unjust, and the ungrateful. But alas! Man cannot do without his own kind, and even Ralph cannot live alone.

  ‘Farewell, Raymon! May you live happily without me. I forgive you the harm you have done me. Speak of me sometimes to your mother, the best woman I have ever known. Be assured that there is no anger or desire for vengeance against you in my heart. My grief is worthy of the love I had for you.

  Indiana.’

  The unfortunate woman was boasting. Her deep, calm grief was merely the feeling for her own dignity when she was addressing Raymon. But when she was alone, she gave herself up freely to her consuming, impulsive passion. At times, however, vague gleams of blind hope appeared in her troubled eyes. Perhaps she never entirely lost all confidence in Raymon’s love, in spite of the cruel lessons of experience, in spite of the terrible thoughts which, every day, indicated his coldness and indolence when his interests or pleasures were no longer concerned. I think that if Indiana had been willing to appreciate the bare truth, she would not have dragged out the exhausted, blighted remnant of her life for so long.

  Woman is naturally foolish. To counterbalance the outstanding superiority which her sensitive perceptions give her over us men, it seems that heaven has intentionally placed in her heart a blind vanity, a stupid credulity. Perhaps to gain a hold over so subtle, flexible, and perceptive a creature, it’s a matter only of knowing how to praise her and of flattering her amour propre. At times, men who are the most incapable of gaining any kind of ascendancy over other men, exercise absolute dominion over the minds of women. Flattery is the yoke which makes those ardent, frivolous heads bow so low. Woe betide the man who wants to be frank in love! He will have Ralph’s fate.

  That would be my reply if you told me that Indiana is an exceptional character and that the ordinary woman has neither her cold stoicism nor her exasperating patience in conjugal resistance. I would tell you to look at the other side of the coin and to see the pitiful weakness, the clumsy blindness, she shows in her relationship with Raymon. I would ask you where you’ve found a woman who wasn’t as ready to be deceived as to stay deceived, who couldn’t bury in the depths of her heart the secret of a hope she so thoughtlessly ventured to entertain on a day of passionate excitement and who, in the arms of one man, again became as childishly weak as she could be strong and invincible in the arms of another.

  XXIV

  MADAME Delmare’s home had, however, become more peaceful. Many of the difficulties which had been aggravated formerly by the officious zeal of her false friends had disappeared with these eager mediators. Sir Ralph with his silence and apparent non-intervention was more skilful than all of them in letting fall those little nothings of private life which are blown up with the help of the breeze of gossip. Moreover, Indiana lived almost always alone. Her house was in the mountains above the town, and every morning M. Delmare, who had a warehouse at the port, went there for the whole day to attend to his trade with India and France. Sir Ralph, who had no other home than theirs but found ways of making it materially comfortable without his gifts being noticed, was busy with natural-history study or supervised work on the plantation. Indiana resumed the indolent habits of Creole life, and spent the heat of the day in her Indian chair and the long evenings in the solitude of the mountains.

  In truth, Bourbon is simply an enormous cone, with a base whose circumference measures about one hundred miles, and with gigantic peaks which rise to a height of ten thousand feet. From nearly every point of that impressive mass, the eye can discern in the distance, behind the steep rocks, behind the narrow valleys and the tall, straight trees, the unbroken horizon enclosed by the blue girdle of the sea. From the windows of her room, Indiana could see the white sails on the Indian Ocean between two rocky peaks of a wooded mountain opposite the one where her house was situated. During the silent hours of the day, this sight attracted her and gave a tinge of permanent, steady despair to her melancholy. That splendid view, far from casting its poetic influence over her thoughts, made them bitter and gloomy. Then she would lower her raffia window-blind and retreat even from the daylight to shed bitter, scalding tears in her secret heart.

  But when, towards evening, the land breeze began to rise and bring her the scent of the flo
wering rice-fields, she would go out into the savannah, leaving Delmare and Ralph on the verandah to enjoy the aromatic faham* infusion and slowly puff out their cigar smoke. Then, from the top of some accessible peak, the extinct crater of a former volcano, she would go and watch the declining sun, which set the red vapours of the atmosphere aglow and scattered, as it were, a dust of gold and rubies over the rustling tops of the sugar cane and the gleaming sides of the reefs. She rarely went down into the gorges of the Saint-Gilles river* because, although it pained her, the sight of the sea had fascinated her with its magnetic mirage. It seemed to her that beyond those waves and that distant haze the magic vision of another land would be revealed to her. At times the coastal clouds assumed strange shapes for her; at times she would see a white breaker rise up from the ocean and form a long line which she took for the façade of the Louvre; at times two square sails, emerging suddenly from the mist, aroused the memory of the towers of Notre-Dame de Paris when a dense fog rises from the Seine and surrounds the bases of the towers and makes them look as if suspended in the sky; at other times it was wisps of pink cloud which, with their changing shapes, assumed all the capricious architectural forms of a very large town. Indiana’s mind was lulled in the illusions of the past and she would begin to quiver with joy at the sight of that imaginary Paris whose realities had marked the most unhappy time of her life. A strange giddiness would then take hold of her. Poised at a great height above the coast and seeing the gorges that separated her from the ocean disappear beneath her eyes, it seemed to her that she was being thrust swiftly into space and was making her way through the air towards the marvellous city of her imagination. In this dream, she clung to the rock which was her support, and for anyone who might have seen her eager eyes, her breast panting with impatience, and the terrifying expression of joy on her face, she would have shown all the symptoms of madness. Yet, this was her happy time and the only moments of contentment on which the hopes of her day were centred. If a whim of her husband’s had disallowed these solitary walks, I don’t know what thoughts would have sustained her, for, in her, everything was linked to a certain ability to create delusions, to an ardent aspiration towards something that was not memory, nor expectation, nor hope, nor regret, but desire in all its consuming intensity. She lived thus for weeks and months beneath the tropical sky, loving, knowing, cherishing only a shadow, going only more deeply into a dream.