out older than he is! I say, is it a quotation from your next book?
It’ll be tasty.... Go on downstairs. I’ll get my cloak and follow you.”
“I thought you had given up seeing him,” said Vincent to Robert on the
staircase.
“Who? Brugnard?”
“You said he was so stupid....”
“My dear friend,” replied Passavant, pausing on a step and holding up
Molinier, for he saw Lady Griffith coming and wanted her to hear: “you
must know there’s not a single one of my friends whom I’ve known a
certain time, that hasn’t given me unmistakable proofs of imbecility.
I assure you that Brugnard resisted the test longer than a great many
others.”
“Than I, perhaps?” asked Vincent.
“Which doesn’t prevent me from being your best friend ... as you see.”
“And that’s what’s called wit in Paris,” said Lilian, who had joined
them. “Take care, Robert; there’s nothing fades quicker.”
“Don’t be alarmed, dear lady; words only fade when they’re printed.”
They took their places in the car and drove off. As their conversation
continued to be very witty, it is useless to record it here. They sat
down to table on the terrace of a hotel overlooking a garden where the
shades of night were gathering. Under cover of the evening, their talk
grew slower and graver; urged on by Lilian and Robert, Vincent found
himself at last the only speaker.
XVII
THE EVENING AT RAMBOUILLET
“I SHOULD take more interest in animals if I were less interested in
men,” Robert had said. And Vincent had replied:
“Perhaps you think them too different. Every single one of the great
discoveries in zoology has left its mark upon the study of man.
The whole subject is interlinked and interdependent, and I believe
that a novelist who also prides himself upon being a psychologist
can never turn aside his eyes from the spectacle of nature and
remain ignorant of her laws without paying for it. In the Goncourts’
Journal, which you gave me to read, I fell upon an account of a visit
they paid to the Zoological houses in the Jardin des Plantes, in
which your charming authors deplore Nature’s--or the Lord’s--lack
of imagination. This paltry blasphemy merely serves to show up the
stupidity and incomprehension of their small minds. On the contrary,
what astonishing diversity! It seems as if Nature had essayed one after
the other every possible manner of living and moving, as if she had
taken advantage of every permission granted by matter and its laws.
What a lesson can be read in the progressive abandonment of certain
palæontological experiments which proved irrational and inelegant;
the economy which has enabled some forms to survive explains why the
others were abandoned. Botany is instructive, too. When I examine a
plant, I observe that at the place where each leaf springs from the
stem, a bud lies sheltered, which is capable in its turn of shooting
into life the following year. When I remark that out of all these
buds, two at most are destined to come to anything, and that by the
very fact of their growth they condemn all the others to atrophy, I
cannot help thinking that the case is the same with men. The buds which
develop naturally are always the terminal buds--that is to say, those
that are farthest away from the parent trunk. It is only by pruning
or layering that the sap is driven back and so forced to give life
to those germs which are nearest the trunk and which would otherwise
have lain dormant. And in this manner, the most recalcitrant plants,
which, if left to themselves, would no doubt have produced nothing but
leaves, are induced to bear fruit. Oh! an orchard or a garden is an
excellent school! and a horticulturist would often make the best of
pedagogues! There is more to be learnt, if one can use one’s eyes, in
a poultry-yard, or a kennel, or an aquarium, or a rabbit warren, or a
stable, than in all your books, or even, believe me, in the society of
men, where everything is more or less sophisticated.”
Then Vincent spoke of selection. He explained how in order to obtain
the finest seedlings, the ordinary plan is to choose the most robust
specimens; and then he told them of the fantastic experiment of one
audacious horticulturist, who, out of a horror of routine--it really
seemed almost like a challenge--took it into his head, on the contrary,
to select the most weakly--with the result that he obtained blooms of
incomparable beauty.
Robert, who had at first listened with only half an ear, like a person
who merely expects to be bored, now made no attempt to interrupt. His
attention delighted Lilian, who took it as a compliment to her lover.
“You ought to tell us,” said she, “of what you were saying the other
day about fish and their power of accommodation to the different
amounts of salt in the sea.... That was it, wasn’t it?”
“Except for certain regions,” went on Vincent, “the sea’s degree of
saltness is pretty constant; and marine fauna as a rule tolerates only
very slight variations of density. But the regions I was telling you
about are nevertheless not uninhabited; the regions I mean are those
which are subject to intense evaporation and in which, therefore, the
proportion of water to salt is greatly reduced--or, on the contrary,
those where the constant inflow of fresh water dilutes the salt and,
so to speak, un-salts the sea--those that are near the mouths of great
rivers, or such enormous currents as the Gulf Stream. In such regions
the animals called _stenohaline_ grow enfeebled to the point
of perishing; and as they become incapable of defending themselves,
they inevitably fall a prey to the animals called _euryhaline_,
so that the _euryhalines_ live by choice on the confines of the
great currents, where the density of the water varies and where the
_stenohalines_ meet their death. You understand, don’t you, that
the _stenos_ are those which can exist only in water whose degree
of saltness is unvarying; whilst the _eurys_....”
“Are the pickles,” interrupted Robert,[3] who always referred
everything back to himself, and only took an interest in that part of a
theory which he could turn to account.
“Most of them are ferocious,” added Vincent gravely.
“I told you it was better than any novel!” cried Lilian, ecstatically.
Vincent seemed transfigured--indifferent to the impression he was
making. He was extraordinarily grave and went on in a lower tone as if
he were talking to himself:
“The most astonishing discovery of recent times--at any rate the one
that has taught me most--is the discovery of the photogenic apparatus
of deep-sea creatures.”
“Oh, tell us about it!” cried Lilian, letting her cigarette go out and
her ice melt on her plate.
“You know, no doubt, that the light of day does not reach very far
down into the sea. Its depths are dark ... huge gulfs, which for a
long time were thought to be uninhabited; then people began dragging
them, and quantities of strange animals were brought up from these
infernal regions--animals that were blind, it was thought. What use
would the sense of sight be in the dark? Evidently they had no eyes;
they wouldn’t, they couldn’t have eyes. Nevertheless, on examination
it was found to people’s amazement that some of them _had_ eyes;
that they almost all had eyes, and sometimes antennæ of extraordinary
sensibility into the bargain. Still people doubted and wondered: why
eyes with no means of seeing? Eyes that are sensitive--but sensitive
to what?... And at last it was discovered that each of these animals
which people at first insisted were creatures of darkness, gives
forth and projects before and around it its _own_ light. Each
of them shines, illuminates, irradiates. When they were brought up
from the depths at night and turned out on to the ship’s deck, the
darkness blazed. Moving, many-coloured fires, glowing, vibrating,
changing--revolving beacon-lamps--sparkling of stars and jewels--a
spectacle, say those who saw it, of unparalleled splendour.”
Vincent stopped. No one spoke for a long time.
“Let’s go home,” said Lilian suddenly; “I’m cold.”
Lady Lilian took her seat beside the chauffeur, so as to be sheltered
by the glass screen. The two men at the back of the open carriage
carried on their own conversation. Robert had hardly spoken during the
whole of the dinner; he had listened to Vincent talking; now it was his
turn.
“Fish like us, my dear boy, perish in calm waters,” said he to begin
with, giving his friend a thump on the shoulder. He allowed himself
a few familiarities with Vincent, but would not have suffered him to
reciprocate them; for that matter, Vincent was not disposed to. “Do
you know, I think you’re simply splendid! What a lecturer you’d make!
Upon my word, you ought to quit doctoring. I really can’t see you
prescribing laxatives and having no company but the sick. A chair of
comparative biology, or something of that sort is what you want.”
“Yes,” said Vincent, “I have sometimes thought so.”
“Lilian ought to be able to manage it. She could get her friend the
Prince of Monaco to interest himself in your researches. It’s his line,
I believe. I must speak to her about it.”
“She has suggested it already.”
“Oh, so I see there’s no possibility of doing you a service,” said he,
pretending to be vexed. “Just as I wanted to ask you one for myself,
too.”
“It’s your turn to be in my debt. You think I’ve got a very short
memory.”
“What? You’re still thinking of that five thousand francs? But you’ve
paid it back, my dear fellow. You owe me nothing at all now--except a
little friendship, perhaps.” He added these words in a voice that was
almost tender, and with one hand on Vincent’s arm. “I want to appeal to
it now.”
“I am listening,” said Vincent.
But at that, Passavant immediately protested, as if the impatience were
Vincent’s, and not his own:
“Goodness me! What a hurry you’re in! Between this and Paris there’s
time enough surely.”
Passavant was particularly skilful in the art of fathering his own
words--and anything else he preferred to disown--on other people. He
made a feint of dropping his subject, like an angler who, for fear of
startling his trout, makes a long cast with his bait and then draws it
in again by imperceptible degrees.
“A propos, thank you for sending me your brother. I was afraid you had
forgotten.”
Vincent made a gesture and Robert went on:
“Have you seen him since?... Not had time, eh?... Then it’s odd you
shouldn’t have asked me yet how the interview went off. At bottom, you
don’t in the least care. You don’t take the faintest interest in your
brother. What Olivier thinks and feels, what he is, what he wants to
be, never concerns you in the least....”
“Reproaching me?” asked Vincent.
“Upon my soul, yes. I can’t understand--I can’t swallow your
indifference. When you were ill at Pau, it might pass; you could only
think of yourself; selfishness was part of the cure. But now.... What!
you have growing up beside you a young nature quivering with life,
a budding intelligence, full of promise, only waiting for a word of
advice, of encouragement....”
He forgot as he spoke that he too had a brother.
Vincent, however, was no fool; the very exaggeration of this attack
showed him that it was not sincere and that his companion’s
indignation was merely brought forward to pave the way for something
else. He waited in silence. But Robert stopped short suddenly; he had
just surprised in the glimmer of Vincent’s cigarette a curious curl of
his lip, which he took for irony; now there was nothing in the world he
was more afraid of than being laughed at. And yet, was it really that
which made him change his tone? I wonder whether the sudden intuition
of a kind of connivance between Vincent and himself.... He assumed an
air of perfect naturalness and started again in the tone of “there’s no
need of any pretence with you”:
“Well, I had a most delightful conversation with young Olivier. I like
the boy exceedingly.”
Passavant tried to catch Vincent’s expression (the night was not very
dark); but he was looking fixedly in front of him.
“And now, my dear Molinier, the service I wished to ask you....”
But, here again, he felt the need of marking time, something like an
actor who drops his part for a moment with the assurance that he has
his audience well in hand, and wishes to prove that he has, both to
himself and to them. He bent forward therefore to Lilian, and speaking
in a loud voice as if to accentuate the confidential character of what
he had been saying, and of what he was going to say:
“Are you sure, dear lady, that you aren’t catching cold? We have a rug
here that’s doing nothing....”
Then, without waiting for an answer, he sank back into the corner of
the carriage beside Vincent, and lowering his voice once more:
“This is what it is. I want to take your brother away with me this
summer. Yes; I tell you so frankly; what’s the use of beating about the
bush between us two?... I haven’t the honour of being acquainted with
your parents and of course they wouldn’t allow Olivier to come away
with me unless you were to intervene on my behalf. No doubt you’ll find
a way of disposing them in my favour. You know what they’re like, I
suppose, and you’ll be able to get round them. You’ll do this for me,
won’t you?”
He waited a moment, and then, as Vincent kept silent, went on:
“Look here, Vincent.... I’m leaving Paris soon.... I don’t know for
where as yet. I absolutely must have a secretary.... You know I’m
founding a review. I have spoken about it to Olivier. He seems to me
to have all the necessary qualities.... But I don’t want to look at it
merely from my own selfish point of view: I also think that this will
be an opportunity for him to show all his qualities. I have offered
him the place of editor.... Editor of a review at his age!... You must
admit that it’s unusual.”
“So very unusual, that I’m afraid my parents may be rather alarmed by
it,” said Vincent at last, turning his eyes on him and looking at him
fixedly.
“Yes; you’re no doubt right. Perhaps it would be better not to mention
that. You might just put forward the interest and advantage it would
be for him to go travelling with me, eh? Your parents must understand
that at his age one wants to see the world a bit. At any rate, you’ll
arrange it with them, won’t you?”
He took a breath, lighted another cigarette, and went on without
changing his tone:
“And since you’re going to be so nice, I’ll try and do something for
you. I think I can put you on to a thing which promises to turn out
quite exceptionally.... A friend of mine in the highest banking circles
is keeping it open for a few privileged persons. But please don’t
mention it; not a word to Lilian. In any case I can only dispose of
a very limited number of shares; I can’t offer them both to her and
you... Your last night’s fifty thousand francs?...”
“I have already disposed of them,” answered Vincent rather shortly, for
he remembered Lilian’s warning.
“All right, all right....” rejoined Robert quickly, as though he were
a little piqued; “I’m not insisting.” Then with the air of saying: “I
can’t be offended with you,” he added: “If you change your mind, send
me word at once ... because after five o’clock to-morrow evening, it’ll
be too late.”
Vincent’s admiration for the Comte de Passavant had become much greater
since he had ceased to take him seriously.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: Robert here makes a pun impossible to translate.
_Dessalé_ (literally _unsalted_) is a slang expression
meaning something like _unscrupulous_.
--Translator’s note.]
XVIII
EDOUARD’S JOURNAL: SECOND VISIT TO LA PÉROUSE
_Two o’clock._ Lost my suit-case. Serves me right. There was
nothing in it I cared about but my journal. But I cared about that too
much. In reality, very much amused by the adventure. All the same,
I should like to have my papers back again. Who will read them?...
Perhaps now that I have lost them, I exaggerate their importance. The
book I have lost came to an end with my journey to England. When I
was over there, I used another one, which I shall give up writing in,
now that I am back in France. I shall take good care not to lose this
one, in which I am writing now. It is my pocket-mirror. I cannot feel
that anything that happens to me has any real existence until I see it
reflected here. But since my return I seem to be walking in a dream.
What a miserable uphill affair my conversation with Olivier was! And
I had been looking forward to it with such joy.... I hope it has left
him as ill-satisfied as it has me--as ill-satisfied with himself as
with me. I was no more able to talk than to get him to talk. Oh, how
difficult the slightest word is, when it involves the whole assent of
the whole being! When the heart comes into play, it numbs and paralyses
the brain.
_Seven o’clock._ Found my suit-case; or at any rate the person who
took it. The fact that he is Olivier’s most intimate friend makes a
link between us which it rests only with me to tighten. The danger is
that anything unexpected amuses me so intensely that I lose sight of my
goal.
Seen Laura. My desire to oblige people becomes more acute if there is
a difficulty to be encountered, if a struggle has to be waged with
convention, banality and custom.
Visit to old La Pérouse. It was Madame de La Pérouse who opened the
door to me. I have not seen her for more than two years; she recognized
me, however, at once. (I don’t suppose they have many visitors.) She
herself for that matter is very little changed; but (is it because
I have a prejudice against her?) I thought her features harder, her
expression sourer, her smile falser than ever.
“I am afraid Monsieur de La Pérouse is in no state to receive you,”
said she at once, with the obvious desire of getting me to herself;
then, taking advantage of her deafness in order to answer before I had
questioned her:
“No, no; you’re not disturbing me in the least. Do come in.”
She showed me into the room where La Pérouse gives his music lessons,
the two windows of which look on to the courtyard. And as soon as she
had got me safely inside:
“I am particularly glad to have a word with you alone. Monsieur de La
Pérouse--I know what an old and faithful friend of his you are--is in a
state which causes me great anxiety. Couldn’t you persuade him to take
more care of himself? He listens to you; as for me, I might as well
talk to the winds.”
And thereupon she entered upon an endless series of recriminations: the
old gentleman refuses to take care of himself, simply in order to annoy
her; he does everything he oughtn’t to do and nothing that he ought; he
goes out in all weathers and will never consent to put on a muffler; he
refuses to eat at meals--“Monsieur isn’t hungry”--and nothing she can
contrive tempts his appetite; but at night, he gets up and turns the
kitchen upside down, cooking himself some mess or other.
I have no doubt the old lady didn’t invent anything; I could make
out from her tale that it was her interpretation alone which gave an
offensive meaning to the most innocent little facts and that reality
had cast a monstrous shadow on the walls of her narrow brain. But does
not her old husband on his side misinterpret all his wife’s attentions?
She thinks herself a martyr, while he takes her for a torturer. As for
judging them, understanding them, I give it up; or rather, as always
happens, the better I understand them, the more tempered my judgment
of them becomes. But this remains--that here are two beings tied to
each other for life and causing each other abominable suffering. I
have often noticed with married couples how intolerably irritating the
slightest protuberance of character in the one may be to the other,
because in the course of life in common it continually rubs up against
the same place. And if the rub is reciprocal, married life is nothing
but a hell.
Beneath her smoothly parted black wig, which makes the features of
her chalky face look harder still, with her long black mittens, from
which protrude little claw-like fingers, Madame de La Pérouse has the
appearance of a harpy.
“He accuses me of spying on him,” she continued. “He has always needed
a great deal of sleep; but at night he makes a show of going to bed,
and then when he thinks I am fast asleep, he gets up again; he muddles
about among his old papers, and sometimes stays up till morning reading
his late brother’s letters and crying over them. And he wants me to
bear it all without a word!”
Then she went on to complain that he wanted to make her go into a home;
which would be all the more painful to her, she added, as he was quite
incapable of living alone and doing without her care. This was said in
a tearful tone, which was only too obviously hypocritical.
Whilst she was continuing her grievances, the drawing-room door opened
gently behind her and La Pérouse came in, without her hearing him.
At his wife’s last words he smiled at me ironically, and touched his
head with his hand to signify she was mad. Then, with an impatience--a
brutality even--of which I should not have thought him capable, and
which seemed to justify the old woman’s accusations (but it was due too
to his having to raise his voice to a shout in order to make himself
heard):
“Come, Madam,” he cried, “you ought to understand that you are tiring
this gentleman with your talk. He didn’t come to see you. Leave the
room.”
The old lady protested that the arm-chair she was sitting in was her
own and that she was not going to quit it.
“In that case,” went on La Pérouse with a grim chuckle, “_we_ will
leave _you_.” Then, turning to me, he repeated in gentler tones,
“come, let us leave her.”
I made a sketchy and embarrassed bow, and followed him into the next
room--the same one in which I had paid him my last visit.
“I am glad you heard her,” he said; “that’s what it’s like the whole
day long.”
He shut the window.
“There’s such a noise in the street, one can’t hear oneself speak. I
spend my time shutting the windows and Madame de La Pérouse spends
hers opening them again. She declares she’s stifling. She always
exaggerates. She refuses to realize that it’s hotter out of doors than
in. And yet I’ve got a little thermometer; but when I show it to her,
she says that figures prove nothing. She wants to be right even when
she knows she’s wrong. Her main object in life is to annoy me.”
He himself, while he was speaking, seemed to me a little off his
balance; he went on with growing excitement:
“Everything she does amiss in life she sets down as a grievance against
me. All her judgments are warped. I’ll just explain to you how it is:
You know our impressions of outside images come to us reversed and that
there’s an apparatus in our brains which sets them right again. Well,
Madame de La Pérouse has no such apparatus for setting them right. In
her brain they _remain_ upside down. You can see for yourself how
painful it is.”
It was certainly a great relief to him to explain himself and I took
care not to interrupt him. He went on:
“Madame de La Pérouse has always eaten much too much. Well, now she
makes out that it’s I who eat too much. If she sees me presently with
a bit of chocolate (it’s my chief nourishment) she’ll be certain to
mutter, ‘Munching again!...’ She spies on me. She accuses me of getting
up in the night to eat on the sly, because she once surprised me making
myself a cup of chocolate in the kitchen.... What am I to do? When
I see her opposite me at table, falling ravenously upon her food, as
she does, it takes away my appetite entirely. Then she declares I’m
pretending to be fastidious just to torment her.”
He paused, and then in a sort of lyrical outburst:
“Her reproaches amaze me!... For instance, when she is suffering
from her sciatica, I condole with her. Then she stops me, shrugs her
shoulders and says: ‘Don’t pretend you have a heart.’ Everything I do
or say is in order to give her pain.”
We had seated ourselves, but all the time he was speaking, he kept
getting up and sitting down again, in a state of morbid restlessness.
“Would you believe that in each of these rooms there are some pieces of
furniture which belong to her and others to me? You saw her just now
with her arm-chair. She says to the charwoman, when she’s doing the
room, “No, that’s Monsieur’s chair; don’t touch that.” And the other
day, when by mistake I put a bound music-book on a little table which
belongs to her, Madam knocked it on to the ground. Its corners were
broken.... Oh, it can’t last much longer.... But, listen....”
He seized me by the arm, and lowering his voice: