Thérèse loved the musty leathery smell of old carriages: and she did
not mind having left her cigarettes behind, for she hated smoking
in the dark. The carriage lamps lit up the sloping banks each side
of the road, a strip of ferns and undergrowth, and the feet of the
giant pines. At intervals, heaps of stones by the wayside cut across
the moving shadow of the carriage. Sometimes a country cart passed
them, and the mules instinctively moved to the right-hand side of the
road without a sign from the sleeping muleteer. Thérèse began to feel
that she would never reach Argelouse; she hoped she never would. It
was more than an hour in the carriage to Nizan, where she got into
the little local train that stopped, heaven knows how long, at every
station. And from Saint Clair, where she got out, to Argelouse, she
had to drive ten miles in a trap, for the road was such that no car
could be driven along it at night. Fate could rise up at any one
of these stages and set her free. Thérèse indulged herself with the
fancy that had come over her the day before the Judge had given his
decision, supposing the charge against her had been confirmed: the
possibility of an earthquake. She took off her hat, leaned her pale
cheeks and little throbbing head against the pungent leather, and
let her body sway to the jolting of the carriage. Until that evening
she had been living on her nerves: now that she was safe she began
to realise the extent of her exhaustion. Her hollow cheeks, gaunt
cheek-bones, sunken lips, and low broad forehead, were surely the
features of one convicted,--although her fellow-men had not pronounced
her guilty,--convicted and condemned to eternal solitude. That charm
of hers, which every one used to say was irresistible,--was it not the
conscious charm of those who must be always on the watch to conceal
their secret torment, the stabbing agony of the wound within them? In
the darkness of that jolting carriage, on that highway through the dark
pine-forest, sat a young woman, now without her mask, whose face, as
she passed her hand wearily across her forehead, was the face of one
burning at the stake. What would be the first words of Bernard whose
perjury had saved her? He would probably not ask any questions that
evening,--but to-morrow? Thérèse shut her eyes, opened them again, and,
like horses when they drop into a walk uphill, tried to realise the
terrible ascent that lay before her. Well, well, she would not look
ahead; it would perhaps be easier than she thought; she would not look
ahead at all,--just sleep.... But she is no longer in the carriage ...
who is that behind the green-baize table? ... the examining Judge ...
what, again? But surely he knows that it is all over. No, he shakes
his head: the case cannot be dropped, a new fact has come to light.
A new fact? Thérèse turns away so that her enemy shall not see her
confusion. “Cast your mind back, Madame: In the inner pocket of that
old cloak,--the one you used only in October for pigeon-shooting, was
there nothing forgotten or concealed?” She cannot speak, the words
stick in her throat. Without taking his eyes off his victim, the Judge
lays upon the table a tiny packet sealed with red wax. Thérèse knows by
heart the formula written on the label, which he proceeds to read out
with terrible distinctness.
Chloroform: 10 grammes.
Aconitine: 2 grammes.
Digitaline: 20 centigrammes.
And the Judge bursts out laughing....
The brake rasped against the wheel, and Thérèse awoke. Her heaving
lungs were full of mist,--they must be driving down to the “White
Brook.” So, in her girlhood, she used to dream that, by some mistake,
she had had to take her junior certificate examination over again; and
when she awoke this evening she felt as relieved as she used to do in
those far-off days: just a touch of anxiety because the decision was
not yet official, though she realised, of course, that her lawyer had
to be notified first.
* * * * *
She was free: what more could she want? It would be perfectly simple to
put herself right with Bernard. She would make a clean breast of the
whole thing, omitting nothing. She would have to tell the whole story,
without concealment, and tell it that very evening. This resolution
made her feel positively cheerful. Before she got to Argelouse, she
would have time to ‘prepare her confession,’ as her pious little friend
Anne de la Trave used to say every Saturday of their happy holidays
together. Indeed, her innocent little sister Anne played no mean part
in this tragedy. These simple creatures do not know in what strange
happenings they are involved by day and night, and what poisoned
growths spring up under their childish footsteps.
The girl was quite right when she had said, as she so often did to
Thérèse, then a sceptical, and mocking schoolgirl: “You can’t think
how relieved you feel when you have confessed and been forgiven,--when
you can begin all over again with a clean slate.” Indeed, the moment
Thérèse had made up her mind to tell the whole story she did feel a
sort of delicious relief. She would tell Bernard everything: she would
say....
Yes, but what should she say? How should she begin? Could any words
express that confused succession of desires, resolves, and impulses?
“How do people behave,” she thought, “when they acknowledge their
crimes? I don’t acknowledge mine: I didn’t want to commit it. I don’t
know what I did want. I never knew the meaning of that dreadful force
within me, and yet outside me: and I was myself horrified at all the
destruction it left behind.”
A smoky oil lamp lit up the plaster walls of the Nizan station and
a carriage outside it: and all about them gathered the encompassing
darkness. A train standing in the station whistled and hooted dismally.
Gardère took Thérèse’s bag and again stared at her greedily. His wife
must have told him to watch carefully how she was looking and behaving.
For the benefit of Monsieur Larroque’s coachman Thérèse instinctively
assumed that smile that made people say: “Never mind whether she is
pretty or plain, you cannot resist her charm.” She asked him to take
her ticket, because she did not like to cross the waiting-room, where
two farmers’ wives were sitting with baskets on their knees swaying to
the rhythm of their knitting-needles.
When he brought back the ticket she told him to keep the change. He
touched his cap, and then, gathering up the reins, he turned to have a
last, long look at his master’s daughter.
The train was not yet made up. In the old days, at the beginning of the
long vacation, or on the way back to school, Thérèse Larroque and Anne
de la Trave enjoyed this stop at Nizan station. They used to eat ham
and eggs at the local inn and walk with their arms round each other’s
waists down that road that looked so dark this evening: but in those
vanished years Thérèse always saw it white under the moonlight. And
how they used to laugh at their elongated shadows as they melted into
each other! They talked, of course, about their mistresses and their
school-friends, one standing up for her convent and the other for her
school. “Anne!” Thérèse uttered the name aloud in the darkness. She
must begin by telling Bernard about Anne. Her Bernard was one of the
most precise of men: he classified all emotions, kept them rigidly
apart, and ignored the complicated network of sensations that unites
them. How could he follow her into those shadowy places where she had
lived and suffered? Yet she must try to make him: the only thing to do,
when she went into the room later on, would be to sit on the edge of
the bed and take him, step by step, through the whole story until he
should stop her and say: “Now I understand; get up; I forgive you.”
She felt her way through the station-master’s garden where she
could smell the chrysanthemums without seeing them. The first class
compartment was empty, and in any case the lamp was much too dim to
reveal her face. She could not read: but Thérèse must have found any
novel insipid in comparison with the terrible story of her life. She
might die of shame, despair, remorse, or exhaustion,--but of boredom,
never.
She sat back in her corner and closed her eyes. It was incredible that
a woman of her intelligence should not be able to make the tragedy
intelligible. When her confession was over, Bernard would of course
raise her to her feet and say: “Go in peace, Thérèse: be of good
comfort: deeds that are over and done shall never part us now, we will
wait for death together in this house at Argelouse. I am thirsty: go
down into the kitchen and make me a glass of orangeade: I shall drink
it at a draught; no matter what it looks like, nor even if it tastes
like my morning chocolate of those days! Do you remember how sick I
used to be, darling; and how kindly you held my head, as you stared
at that dreadful greenish liquid? You were never frightened when I
fainted. And yet how pale you were that night when I noticed that
my legs had gone dead and stiff! I was shivering, do you remember?
And that old fool Doctor Pédemay who was so astonished because my
temperature was so low and my pulse so feverish....”
“No,” Thérèse thought to herself, “he won’t have understood. I shall
have to begin at the very beginning.”
But where is the beginning of our acts? The thread of our fate, when
we try to lay it bare, is like one of those plants that cannot be torn
up with all its roots. Should Thérèse go back to her childhood? But
childhood itself is an end and a fulfilment.
* * * * *
Thérèse’s childhood;--snow at the source of a stream now utterly
defiled. At school she appeared to live aloof from those petty
tragedies that tormented her companions. The mistresses often held up
Thérèse Larroque as an example to the rest. “Thérèse,” one of them
said, “is an unusually high moral type: she knows it: and her pride
in that fact is quite enough to keep her straight without any fear of
punishment.”
“But was I happy?” Thérèse asked herself. “And was I sincere? All
my life before my marriage has, as I look back on it, this air of
innocence, in contrast, no doubt, to the ineffaceable contamination of
my marriage. My life at school, before I became a wife and a mother,
seems a paradise, though I did not realise it then. How could I know
that in those years before my life began I was living my real life?
Pure I was: an angel if you like: but a very passionate angel! Whatever
my mistresses may have said, I knew what suffering was and I made
others feel it. I enjoyed the pain I gave and the pain that my friends
inflicted: my suffering was a pure emotion, untainted by remorse: and
indeed, there was pain and joy in most simple pleasures.”
But Thérèse was satisfied if she could feel herself worthy of Anne
when she met her once more in the summer heats, under the oak trees
of Argelouse. She must be able to say to this little offspring of the
Convent: “I can be as pure as you are without all those wreaths and
ribbons.” Besides, Anne de la Trave’s purity was mainly ignorance.
The ladies of the Sacré-Cœur drew many veils between their little
charges and the world. Thérèse despised them for confusing virtue and
ignorance. “You don’t know anything about life, darling,” she used
often to say, in those far-off summers at Argelouse. Those lovely
summers; Thérèse, as she sat in the little train, that had at last
begun to move, realised that she must go back to them if she was to
get a clear view of what had happened. It is incredible, but true,
that in those pure dawns of our lives the most dreadful storms are
already threatening in the distance. Those azure mornings are an evil
omen for the weather of the afternoon and evening. They portend wrecked
flower-beds, broken branches, and muddy ruin everywhere. Thérèse did
not reflect, or come to a decision at any period of her life; there
were no sharp turnings; she went down an imperceptible slope, gradually
at first, and then faster. The lost woman of this evening was identical
with the radiant creature of those summers at Argelouse, where she was
now returning in secret and under cover of the night.
How wearisome it all was! Where was the use in trying to uncover the
hidden springs of acts accomplished? She could see nothing through the
carriage window except the reflection of her pale expressionless face.
There came a sudden break in the monotonous rhythm of the little
train: the engine gave a prolonged whistle and cautiously drew in to
a station. An arm held up a swaying lantern: there followed shouted
utterances in the local dialect, and squeals from sundry pigs that
were being taken off the train: Uzeste already. One more station
and then Saint Clair: thence she must drive the rest of the way to
Argelouse. Thérèse had very little time left to prepare her defence.