Lucifer

by Maurice Magre

  The illuminated window was thus a bad omen. Either Eveline was still reading and it was necessary to wait longer, or she had woken up at the sound Laurence had made, and an argument had ensued. Laurence had foreseen the possibility and counted on being able to override any protest on her sister’s part.

  The shutters of the window were partly open, and several times I thought I saw shadows passing over the panes. I concluded that the second hypothesis was the correct one. I examined without joy what might happened if Eveline, indignant, went to wake Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf, and if he launched himself on Laurence’s tracks just as she was joining me in the garden.

  From the place where I was, I could see the entrance door; Laurence could not get out without my being aware of it. I knew that the door in question was not locked, in order to permit the guests to go in and out as they pleased.

  “The entrance door doesn’t make any noise when it closes,” Laurence had told me, while listing the facilities that she would have in leaving without her nocturnal departure being noticed.

  My nervousness became so great that it was impossible for me to wait any longer without doing something, even something insensate. I parted the branches of the hedge that separated the little road from the garden, at the exact spot where Monsieur Althon had nearly launched himself through a few days before. I took a few steps on a gravel path, which creaked as I approached the perron. Only then did I think of my imprudence. The night was warm and someone, afflicted by insomnia, might have gone out to sit down on a bench or wander in the garden. A domestic who had spent the evening in the vicinity might come back. I listened anxiously, but I did not hear any noise.

  Then I opened the door, which was indeed silent. It opened into a vast hallway full of darkness. I had no fixed idea and I certainly would not have gone any further had I not heard whispering, words spoken in a low voice and something that might resemble the noise of a struggle between two individuals. I remembered that I only had to go around a table to reach the bottom of the staircase that was at the back of the hallway and led up to the first floor. The noise was coming from the corridor that divided the first floor in two and on to which the bedrooms opened.

  I learned all the details of the scene later from Laurence.

  Laurence, as she had planned, had made a semblance of going to sleep early. Her sister had renounced The Interior Castle without any difficulty and had gone to sleep. Laurence had then got dressed silently; she already had her hand on the doorknob when Eveline leapt out of bed in her night-dress. Doubtless the priest carrying the Holy Sacrament and his choirboy had exchanged a few words as they went past the house and the unusual noise had woken her up.

  She exclaimed: “What’s that?” She turned on the electric light and was amazed to see her sister upright, ready to leave. Laurence had put on an automobile jacket and was holding a small bag in her hand, which did not permit any pretext of taking a walk in the garden. In any case, Eveline had understood immediately. One might have thought that she had had a presentiment.

  Her first words were: “You shan’t go.”

  Laurence was surprised at first by her energy, for she thought that her sister would be only too glad to be rid of her. But not at all. She had been mistaken about Eveline’s sentiments. However, her resistance did not seem to come from a sincere love, but from a rigorous notion of duty.

  Laurence did not deny that she was leaving for good, and an argument ensued.

  “It resulted from that,” Laurence told me, “that I was a monster of ingratitude, that I had cut Madame de Saint-Aygulf’s life short, that my conduct was the cause of my father’s unhappiness. I provoked all the men, it appears. My sister, who took so much care to avoid talking to me, took advantage of the opportunity to tell me in a few minutes everything that she had had in her heart for years. I scarcely replied in order not to prolong the scene, and everything she said confirmed me in my resolution to leave, because I understood even more how my father and my sister had always considered me as a being far inferior to them, an instinctive beast whose deviations it was necessary to fear.”

  Laurence thought that I was waiting. She opened the bedroom door in order to go. She knew that Eveline would be stopped by the fear of an outcry, an immediate scandal.

  “I’m going to tell our father,” the latter had said.

  She had really decided to do nothing about it, but abruptly, she had been gripped by a resolution. She had seized her sister bodily and tried to make her go back into the bedroom, doubtless with the intention of locking the door. They had started to struggle silently, exchanging insults in low voices, face to face.

  That was the noise I heard in the dark hallway where I was. Then, holding the banister, I began to climb the stairs. I stopped when I discovered the length of the corridor. It was illuminated by a night-light, and a bright light coming from the sisters’ bedroom launched an oblique projection, as in the theater, over the character in the process of playing the drama.

  Astonishment nailed me to the spot. Was struck me was the impressive beauty of Eveline. Her night-dress, stuck to her body, was transparent. Her hair, which she had never wanted to cut, fell in ashy sheaves over her bare shoulders. She gave the impression of a sort of angel struggling hand to hand with a woman in an automobile costume, in a picture by some modern painter. Only the stony hardness of her face contradicted her angelic estate.

  Neither of the two sisters could see me. I heard Eveline say: “You’re a worthy daughter of your mother.”

  And Laurence whispered a few words that included my name, and she added: “It’s because you’re jealous! Admit it!”

  Both of them remained immobile, as if to give the poison of the words time to envenom the wounds inflicted.

  Their grip relaxed. The last blows had been struck. That hardness of Eveline’s features gave way to an expression of disgust for the baseness of soul that such a hypothesis supposed. And as she released Laurence, her night-dress, whose epaulettes had broken in the struggle, suddenly slid along her body and she found herself completely naked.

  For a second I had the vision of that perfect body, which I had so often delighted in imagining, in the license of dreams.

  But Laurence was already going past me at a run.

  I followed her and I caught up with her on the perron. She feared being too late and no longer finding me on the road. She started to run through the garden with me. How fast she went! How urgently she wanted to be far away!

  A suavity came from the odor of the trees, the clarity of the sky and a light breeze in the foliage. I sensed my companion’s momentum, that she was animated by a wild intoxication of liberty. We had launched ourselves into the pathway between the old eucalypti, which was the shortest route to reach the auto.

  “The Essenes,” Laurence told me, laughing. She said it in a loud voice, in a tone of bravado. She had a desire to shout it.

  I had never sensed so clearly the relationship between the eucalypti with the pale trunks and the acetic old men in procession. I was impressed by it. I saw Laurence, beside me, looking to the right and left, as if she were scanning impotent enemies attacked to the ground by roots. She must have been thinking about many tedious evenings, meals without wine, and the humiliations that she owed them. And she laughed in escaping them. But I had the sensation that the ancient ascetics were marching in two parallel lines toward wisdom, and was afflicted by seeing myself traveling so rapidly toward a goal so different from theirs.

  I uttered a sigh of relief when we reached the road. The auto was still there. The driver was asleep. I woke him up, and we set forth.

  When Laurence huddled against me, I felt something hard in the pocket of her coat; I asked her what it was.

  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she replied.

  The driver sounded his horn loudly. We went past the choirboy and the priest holding the Holy Sacrament, who were coming back. They had both stopped to let us pass and the vehicle brushed the cross that the choirboy was holding tilted
forward.

  Did that further encounter have a hidden meaning? I had marched behind God a little while before. Now I had obliged him to stop, to receive the dust that I was raising and I was overtaking him. What symbolism did that conceal? Assuredly none. I did not believe in God, at least in that religious form. I leaned forward to tell the driver to go as fast as he could, and I took Laurence in my arms.

  I would have liked to think of her when my lips encountered hers. I did not even imagine the possibility of not thinking about her. But the image of Eveline naked, such as I had just perceived her under the looseness of her ash-blonde hair, presented itself before me with an imperious clarity. In the shadow, I could not distinguish Laurence’s features, or her eyes; I saw, as if they were against my face, the features hardened by anger and the blue eyes full of profundity, of Eveline.

  Jealous, Laurence had said to her sister, and Eveline had received that word like an insult, which wounded her and was simultaneously revelatory. Why not? Had I not for a long time observed in myself a bizarre power, a faculty of attraction external to myself. Who could tell whether Eveline’s scorn in my regard might be simulated? And the night-dress had fallen at the same moment, as if the forces that rule coincidence had wanted her body to be laid bare when her soul was laid bare for the first time.

  I counted on reaching during the night a small hotel beyond Toulon, to which I had telegraphed that morning. I had promised myself a great pleasure in that arrival at first light, with Laurence, in the middle of the palm-trees that surrounded the threshold. We could be there at about five o’clock. The sun would be about to rise. I imagined the sleeping porter who would open up to us and to whom I would say: “It’s me who sent a telegram to reserve a room overlooking the sea.”

  I saw the banal drawing-room, the narrow staircase, the corridor with shoes outside the doors and a room with an enormous bed, whose windows I would open in order to respire the ineffable odor of algae and youth that a beach exhales at sunrise.

  But the expectation of such things, which ought to have been delectable, was spoiled for me. I had Laurence in my arms, fully dressed, and I could see Eveline, naked. The speed of the automobile contributed by its vertigo to trouble the notion I had of reality. We went past villas with their pleasant gardens, we traversed villages and pine woods. Sometimes, a minuscule bay where a boat was asleep on a little sand, stood out to our left. I embraced the two sisters at the same time; and sometimes preceding me, sometimes following me, dominating the wooded hills or floating over the sea, there was a Holy Sacrament of dream, whose significance was incomprehensible.

  And that was the epoch of my life when the blindfold I had over my eyes thickened, to the point where I was like a blind man—even worse, for a blind man has developed his tactile qualities, he distinguishes the difference between objects, even the most significant, in a surprising fashion, by touching them. But I, not content with not seeing, palpated the most divine substance with my hands and remained ignorant of its quality.

  Now that everything appears different to me, I excuse the error of others by measuring mine. I am not scornful, as before, of people who exercise the functions of judges, who handle money in banks, those who make huge profits in great industries by making poorly paid men toil—all those who sustain the rickety and counterfeit edifice of society. They deceive themselves as I deceived myself. They believe in an illusion and if by chance they touch reality, it is with a hand so coarse that they cannot discern anything of its delicate grain.

  Glory to the apparition of light that permits one to gaze at life not from the outside but as if one were placed in its very heart. It does not come, as many expect, in the manner of a revelation. It comes slowly, it comes belatedly, and only when one had traversed great darkness. It comes from a constant interrogation, from the comparison of actions with one another, from the observation of causes and effects. No luminous star hangs over the door of the person who receives it. The lover of the marvelous is initially deceived by the simplicity of the phenomenon, but he soon perceives that the phenomenon is rare, although simple. He searches for someone who has experienced it like himself, in order to be able to talk about it and be understood. He does not encounter the person for whom he is searching. He feels alone.

  Glory to the power of life that isolates a man in the midst of his fellows, in order that he might be transformed!

  We had been living together in Paris for a month, and Laurence had not begun to address me as tu. After numerous trials she had finally given up.

  “It’s not because you intimidate me,” she told me, “and it’s not because you’re older than me. It seems to me”—she searched for her words and discovered herself while speaking—“that I only have the faculty of being familiar with poor people.”

  That was true. But poor people inspired more than familiarity in Laurence; they gave birth in her to a spontaneous affection. I only noticed that at length. Lack of money was a bizarre entitlement by which one almost certainly gained Laurence’s heart. In every new person she met, she only considered the external signs of poverty, and if she did not perceive those signs, a certain distance resulted.

  As she and I had thought, Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf made no attempt to retrieve his daughter. The latter had, in any case, reached the age of majority a few months before. He had, on the contrary, written to her to signify a kind of malediction upon her. It was Kotzebue who seemed to have been most afflicted by Laurence’s departure. A young man named Lucien Duperré, who had spent the summer with him in the Midi, had come to see me without any apparent motive, but in reality to transmit his words to me and in order to be able to give him a few details about my life with Laurence.

  “It’s necessary to acquit my commission,” he said to me, with embarrassment.

  I would have preferred not to hear anything.

  “Speak,” I said, however, smiling indifferently.

  “He said precisely this: ‘Tell him that I know the hidden reason for what he had done. His action is the direct consequence of a signature he gave more than fifteen years ago. I consider him as doomed.’”

  I relied that Kotzebue’s opinion left me indifferent. The young man departed rapidly and Laurence declared that she had a horror of young men who wore a gold chain around their ankles and dressed like fashionable engravings.

  I was obliged to renounce seeing almost all my friends, who were also Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf’s. Laurence and I would henceforth neglect the spirits, the Essenes, and the members of all the groups who accord, in principle, more importance to the future life than real life.

  “Finally! Not to see lunatics any longer! What a relief!” she cried.

  I renewed acquaintances with former comrades of whom I had lost sight somewhat. I invited them to dinner, I made them unexpected politenesses in order to attract them. They were people like anyone else, with cars and mistresses, who frequented music-halls and were not preoccupied with any philosophy. To my great surprise, Laurence welcomed them coldly. She found the women too stupidly infatuated with their jewelry and clothes, and she felt even more distant from the men. I searched for the reason and thought I discerned it eventually in Laurence’s touchstone for judging people by their fortune.

  One evening, when I was going home at about seven o’clock, I ran into a fellow name Falou, whom I had once known in the Latin Quarter and had met several times since, in a tobacconist’s shop in the Rue Jouffroy. He was a Bohemian who lived on expedients. He was in the process of buying a few loose caporal cigarettes, which is not an indication of wealth. He hid them precipitately from my sight. I was struck by his expression, more wretched than usual, and something odd in his attitude.

  He had never interested me, but I had lost the greater part of my relationships and I wanted to create new ones in order to distract Laurence.

  “Come to dinner with me,” I said. “I’m having a few friends round.”

  I understood, by the dignity with which he refused, that he was not certain of d
ining that evening. He excused himself for not having the time to put on his dinner jacket, but I ended up dragging him along.

  Laurence was smiling but distant, and during the first part of the evening she did not seem to notice Falou. He was the last to remain. The conversation died away sadly. He was about to get up to take his leave when Laurence’s attitude to him suddenly changed. She began to consider him with a visible sympathy and insisted on him staying a while longer, in spite of the bleak character of his speech. I could not find any other explanation for that action than this:

  The taciturn Falou was sitting facing Laurence and me and had his legs crossed. The warmth of the dinner, without brightened is sad visage, had communicated a certain abandonment to him and a forgetfulness of the prudence necessary to a poor man. He had allowed the sole of a boot to show in which a hole traced a large design. I surprised Laurence’s gaze posed on that hole and I was initially ashamed on my friend’s behalf, knowing the pitiless severity of young women in that order of ideas, but the result I feared was not produced and it was the opposite that occurred.

  “He’s very nice,” Laurence said to me when he had gone. And when she learned that Falou was a poor devil, cultivated but weak and incapable of earning a living, who had no situation, no resources and no family, I saw a glint in her eyes and she declared, to the scorn of all plausibility, that Falou was the most agreeable of my friends and that it was necessary to invite him frequently.