Instead of going straight into the kitchen, he had gone to take the notice down, and when he had finally approached Élise, he had been so pale and wooden-faced that she had recoiled.
‘Listen, Désiré, it isn’t my fault … Everybody’s selling it … Schroefs advised me to, and it was him who did the notice … His cellar is full of wine and he’s afraid it might be confiscated one of these days … He lets me have it for a mark …’
Désiré had not eaten his dinner, had not opened his mouth. Élise had not pressed the point, and for a long time the name of Hubert Schroefs had not been spoken in the house.
While Élise was bustling about the house in the Rue de la Loi, Roger, at Embourg, was running along the burning main road, his feet half buried in the dust.
He was twelve and a half. He had just finished his first year at the Collège Saint-Louis and had won several prizes. He was wearing very short trousers which revealed a pair of legs scratched by brambles, and an open-necked tussore shirt. His hair, in summer, looked fairer than ever in contrast to his sunburnt face.
He was running along at top speed, pushing a wheelbarrow in which a big girl of fifteen was roaring with laughter.
The road was deserted and a glaring white. They had already left the village behind, and at a bend where the wheelbarrow started pitching dangerously, Roger caught sight of a shapely figure, a young woman in a lace blouse and a skirt trailing in the dust, walking slowly along in the shade of a flowery parasol.
Try as he might, the obstacle attracted him, the wheelbarrow dragged him along, and it was at the feet of the startled young woman, who stepped back with a cry, that the vehicle overturned, tipping its load into the white dust.
In spite of the joy which filled him, he was going to stammer out an apology when a voice which seemed to be coming from far away, from a world which he had long ago forgotten, exclaimed in a tone of shocked indignation:
‘Roger! Dear God! …’
He stood there in amazement. The young woman was his cousin Aimée, the youngest daughter of Aunt Louisa of Coronmeuse, who had passed her examination at the training college and was now teaching at the Filles de la Croix.
All the pallor and delicacy of Romanticism were to be found in her long face, which was so narrow that it was nothing but a profile. Aimée was an ethereal creature, so unsubstantial that she suffered agonies when circumstances obliged her to eat in front of a stranger.
And now another voice, in which deference was fighting with a violent urge to burst out laughing, said:
‘Mademoiselle!’
‘Renée! … What is the explanation of this? … You, here, dressed like that! … You, in a wheelbarrow!’
They stood there, in the dazzling sunshine, in the middle of the graceful curve of the road.
‘I hope that your parents do not know you indulge in this sort of amusement?’
‘They’ve left me at Embourg for four days, Mademoiselle. They’re coming to fetch me on Sunday. I’m staying at Madame Laude’s, with Roger.’
It was one of those moments when, for no particular reason, your heart leaps in your breast, when nothing else exists but the joy of living which lifts you up, makes your eyes sparkle, burns your eyelids.
‘Are you coming, Roger?’
Cousin Aimée tried to intervene.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the wood!’
‘Listen a moment …’
They both burst out laughing together, as if they had given each other the cue. They could not help it. With her school dress covered with dust, Renée threw herself into the wheelbarrow, and as Roger pushed it along, his strength increased tenfold by pleasure, she lay back with her legs up in the air.
‘Did you see her, Roger, did you see her?’
‘She’s your teacher, is she?’
‘You know what we call her at the Filles de la Croix? Mademoiselle Modesty. It suits her, doesn’t it? But how can she possibly be your cousin?’
They were mad. The world was theirs, the sun shone only for them, it was for them that the birds were singing, and they laughed as they looked at one another, bursting with gaiety while the shapely figure with the parasol made its undulating way towards the village church.
Leaving the wheelbarrow at the side of the ditch, they went into the wood which covered the slope along the road and connected it to the Thiers des Grillons. They ran about and played hide-and-seek. They cupped their hands and drank water from the spring, from their spring, for although they had found it only the day before, it already belonged to them. Then they noticed a big holly bush with red berries.
‘Do you want some?’
‘You’ll prick yourself.’
‘What do I care?’
To reach the biggest branches, he plunged bravely into the bush, hoisting himself up and wriggling about while Renée, her lovely lips half open and as red as holly berries, watched him, breathing hard.
‘Come down. You’ve got enough.’
He wanted more, and went higher up and further into the prickly bush. When he finally managed to disentangle himself, his legs and hands were streaked with blood and there was a long crimson gash across one cheek.
‘Let me wipe you. Yes, do. Women were made to look after men.’
She was a splendid creature, a golden-skinned brunette, already mature at fifteen. Her shining black hair fell in untidy curls on to her shoulders.
‘Lie down here…. Keep still …’
And, kneeling beside him, she mopped up the blood with her handkerchief, which she had soaked in the spring.
‘Am I hurting you?’
‘No.’
‘Just a bit?’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t sting?’
‘No.’
‘You’re just saying that to be brave.’
‘I say it because it’s true. I can’t feel anything.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘To get you some holly.’
‘You like me?’
He blushed, felt embarrassed, made no reply. It was only inside, with his eyes shut, that he said:
‘I love you.’
And then, for the first time in his life, he felt a pair of lips press against his mouth. It was so unexpected, so wonderful that tears filled his eyes, while an indistinct voice whispered in his ear:
‘You like me?’
His only reply was to hold Renée’s head against his with both hands, stroking her cheek with his cheek, nuzzling her black hair and breathing in its scent.
‘Are you happy?’
He did not understand why she was breathing hard, why she was enveloping him so tightly with her firm body. She pressed against him from head to foot, lying on top of him, and he could feel her cool legs intertwined with his. He did not move, and blushed again, feeling ashamed. He no longer knew exactly what was happening but he would have liked it to last for a long time, for ever. An unfamiliar warmth filled him, his hands shook, above all else he was afraid that she would say something or look at him, for he felt that all the strange and wonderful things taking place within him must be visible on his face.
It was a dream. As in a dream, the sense of time disappeared, the sense of place too, and yet he could still hear the spring flowing and now and then there was a crackling sound in the undergrowth, an animal probably, a squirrel or a weasel coming to look at them. He felt hot, he was impregnated with a smell of saliva and wet skin, hair was tickling him and for a moment he had his mouth full of it, then all of a sudden he went tense, perhaps intending to cry out or to free himself. She restrained him with the pressure of her hand on his arm, biting his lip savagely as if to order him to stay still, and seconds went by, minutes perhaps, of a life which had no connection with the life he had known before. He was frightened. He was ashamed. His lip hurt. He felt dizzy. It was too violent. It could not last another second without his going mad, and sure enough, he suddenly went stiff and lay there as if he were dead.
Whe
n at last he summoned up the courage to open his eyes, Renée, satisfied, smiled at him with her bleeding lips, and he hid his head against her chest and burst out sobbing.
How long did he stay like that? A voice murmured in his ear:
‘Are you happy?’
He could only squeeze her in reply. He tried to nod his head.
‘You’re a little boy, aren’t you? You’re my own little boy.’
And it was like a little boy that, with his lip swollen from crying and a great joy, a mad pride shining through his tears, he finally said yes.
It was on account of those four days at Embourg, on account of the wheelbarrow, on account of that scorching morning when they had laughed so much at the prudish dismay of Cousin Aimée who had come to pay a call and been so ill rewarded, on account of Renée that, one morning, abandoning the Collège Saint-Louis and the classics, Roger had walked up the Rue Saint-Gilles with the awkwardness and nervousness of a new boy, looking for the Collège Saint-Servais.
The Rue Sainte-Veronique, where the institution of the Filles de la Croix was to be found, was quite close to the Rue Saint-Gilles. Renée had said to him, during the last night at Embourg, when he had gone to her bedroom by climbing from one window to the other along the narrow zinc ledge over Madame Laude’s café:
‘Come to see me after school outside the Filles de la Croix. The maid meets me every day, but she’s a girl we can fix. We’ll go along the Boulevard d’Avroy. In winter, it’s as dark as anything along there.’
‘You’re sure the maid won’t say anything?’
Oh yes, she was sure, all too sure, alas! But he did not know about that yet.
What a task he had had to perform in one month, before October and the beginning of term! In order to change schools, he had to give up the classics, for, while it was true that there were two colleges in the town, each was reserved for boys from one bank of the Meuse.
‘Mother, I don’t want to be a priest any more.’
‘What’s that you’re saying? I bet it’s Madame Laude who’s put that idea into your head.’
For Madame Laude did not believe in God and was fond of making coarse jokes about the priesthood.
‘It isn’t Madame Laude. It isn’t anybody. I just don’t want to be a priest any more, I want to become an officer.’
For, like that, he would have to study science, and science was taught only at the Collège Saint-Servais. He had thought it over for a long time. He had carefully chosen a profession which did not require a costly outlay, nor a long period at university which his parents would not be able to afford.
Finally, there was the glamour of uniform and rank to which, he was well aware, his mother was extremely susceptible.
‘You know perfectly well, Roger, that it isn’t possible. If you don’t want to be a priest any more, you won’t be allowed the fifty-per-cent reduction in fees.’
‘It appears that other boys have had it.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Friends of mine.’
They had been to see Brother Médard and Roger had held his ground. They had paid another visit to the Dean, then to the Headmaster of the Collège Saint-Louis, then to the Collège Saint-Servais.
For a whole month, he had lived in anguish, all his energies directed towards a single objective, without ever seeing Renée, whose parents had taken her to Ostend.
The miracle had happened. He had won. The Jesuits of the Rue Saint-Gilles had reduced his fees, not by half, but by a third, possibly to get rid of Élise.
‘You understand, Louisa, if he hasn’t got the vocation, we can’t force him. There’s nothing worse than a bad priest. As an officer, he’ll have a safe career, and once they’ve won their epaulettes they’ve got nothing to worry about.’
The Rue Saint-Gilles, at the other end of the town, was a narrow shopping street like the Rue Puits-en-Sock, with the same tram rolling along between the pavements. And yet, right from the start, Roger had felt out of place there.
The first day, he had tried to go into the huge stone building flanked by a chapel where he had gone with his mother. He had lifted the bronze knocker and the noise had reverberated as if in an empty house; a long time afterwards, the door had been opened a little way into a grim corridor, and a bewildered lay brother had looked at the boy without understanding what he wanted. Then, when he had explained, the man had pointed up the street.
‘The pupils’ entrance is up there.’
Roger had spent a long time looking for it, refusing to believe that it was that common, badly painted door squashed between a couple of shops, which he had taken to be the entrance of a stable or a shed.
What did he care about the hostility of the setting and of all those schoolboys to whom he was a stranger? At four o’clock, he would run off towards the Rue Sainte-Véronique—for she came out of school at four o’clock too, but he would take care to be one of the first out and catch up with her. He would see Renée, and all he was worried about was the maid who had to be won over; he wondered how much money would be necessary to do that.
Renée did not come home from her holidays until about 15 October. Roger had been unable to refrain from talking about her to his new schoolmates, and he refused to believe them when they all claimed to know her, clenching his fists when, at the mere mention of her name, the bigger boys exchanged winks and dug each other in the ribs.
One evening when he was galloping along behind the girls coming out of the Filles de la Croix, he felt his heart beating wildly, for it was Renée, who, in front of him, accompanied by a maid carrying her books, had just passed under a gas lamp.
She was wearing her school dress with the wide pleats, and a round, shining, uniform hat with a hard brim; there was something different about her, he could not say what, and he had been following her for some time before he realized that she had her hair up, coiled in thick plaits at the back of her neck.
She turned left, into a dark, empty street. He quickened his pace, already opening his mouth to speak to her, and trembling at the knees. When he turned the corner, the maid was walking along the kerb by herself, a little way ahead, while Renée, clinging to a man’s arm, was keeping close to the houses.
Two years had passed since then, two years that he had been a pupil at Saint-Servais. Father Renchon had just reminded him that it was half past three, and there he was, leaving the classroom, the light from which followed him for a moment while he opened and shut the door.
He could not have said why the school, just then, reminded him so vividly of the Linière, why a whiff of his early childhood came back to him, why his head felt heavy, his limbs numb, his mind half-way between dream and reality, as when, on Thursday afternoons, he used to come home with his mother from Aunt Louisa’s.
It was a winter memory for, just as they were leaving the shop with its warm, almost syrupy light, Roger always felt a certain anguish on the threshold of the dark embankment, where a fine, icy rain hung in the air like a fog.
They turned round to say a last good-bye to Aunt Louisa, who stood framed in the doorway, and perhaps also to have a last look at the reddish rectangle of the shop-window, for afterwards there was nothing but a huge, wet, mysterious world in which gas lamps surrounded by a misty halo flickered here and there. As for what there was on their left, on the far side of the terrace with the four rows of bare trees, where you could hear the waves of the swollen Meuse, that was absolute darkness, chaos, the end of the world.
They walked fast, for Élise too was in a hurry to reach the Pont Maghin and the rows of reassuring shops. Half-way home, they came to those walls of blackened brick, soaring to dizzy heights, and perforated with high, narrow windows like cathedral windows. They were not real windows with curtains and the kindly appearance of houses that are lived in; they were grey-green holes, the window-panes were made of dirty frosted glass, some of them were missing, and behind you could sense an emptiness as vast as in a church.
In that inhuman emptiness, where the l
ight of arc-lamps swung from side to side, you could hear the noise of machines, of metals making contact, of steam hissing; Roger knew, from having seen them come out on the stroke of six, when the siren sounded, that there were thousands of girls inside, dirty, common, hatless girls from the back-streets, who bustled about endlessly, tiny creatures at the bottom of the abyss, crushed by the space above them and surrounded by mechanical monsters.
He had almost the same hard, hostile impression of the world from which he was emerging now, from which he seemed to be escaping by himself, and which a few minutes earlier, in the director of studies’ office, he had thought he was leaving for good.
Wearing his wet overcoat and holding his satchel, he walked along the endless gallery in which identical windows revealed to him the same sight of bare walls, of dark coats hanging in a row, of black benches, of pupils sitting uncomfortably but motionless in the harsh light.
Beyond the iron balustrade there was the darkness of a courtyard so huge, so bare that you hesitated to venture out into it, and to reach it you had to go down a steep iron staircase which had a factory sound.
From the staircase, and from the yard which he walked across diagonally, you could see nothing of the ordinary world. On one side there were the blank walls of the festival hall which was only rarely opened. At the far end, there was a wall as implacable as that of any prison, and on the left, the gigantic building which he had just left and which reminded him of the Linière, with its three storeys of classrooms connected by iron staircases and galleries.
How many windows could you see at once, all as bare as one another, all emitting the same cold light? Perhaps a score on each floor; he had never counted them. There was nothing to distinguish one classroom from the next, and occasionally he still made a mistake, as all the pupils did.
There were too many of the latter, over a thousand. You could not get to know all the faces, indeed you could scarcely know all the masters by sight; the pupils formed a vast crowd in which little boys in sailor suits darted in and out of the legs of young men with moustaches.
At playtime, every class, every group was obliged to find a corner somewhere for itself, so that in that strictly geometric yard, without a single tree in it or a single handful of earth, enclosed by thousands of identical bricks all carefully cemented together, there were places where Roger had never set foot, zones surrounded by an invisible frontier which were so to speak forbidden territory for him.
Pedigree Page 45
