Argelouse is literally one of the ends of the earth,--one of those
places beyond which you cannot go; in those parts they call them
“_Quartiers_.” A few farms, with no church or cemetery, scattered round
a field of rye, over five miles from the market-town of Saint Clair,
with which it is connected by a single road in very bad repair. This
road, such as it is, fades away beyond Argelouse into sandy tracks: and
thence, until the sea, there is nothing but fifty miles of marshes,
lagoons, young pines, and sandy heath; and by the end of winter the
very sheep look as grey as that bleak landscape.
The best families in Saint Clair come from these lost lands. Towards
the middle of the last century, when the sale of resin and timber began
to swell their scanty profits from flocks and herds, the grandparents
of those living to-day moved to Saint Clair, and their ancestral
homes at Argelouse were used as farm buildings. The carved beams of
the gables, and here and there a marble mantelpiece, bore witness to
their ancient dignity. Every year they came nearer to collapse, and
one of the roofs had sagged lower and lower until its eaves nearly
touched the ground. Two of these ancient habitations, however, still
housed their proprietors. The Larroque and the Desqueyroux families
left their homes at Argelouse just as they had received them from their
predecessors. Jerôme Larroque, Mayor and County Councillor of B., whose
principal residence was just outside that small provincial town, would
never allow any alterations at the estate at Argelouse, which had come
to him through his wife (who had died in child-bed while Thérèse was
still a baby), and where he thought it quite natural that his young
daughter should like to spend her holidays. She used to go there at
the beginning of July, under the tutelage of an elder sister of her
father’s, one Aunt Clara, a deaf old maid, who also liked the lonely
place because, as she used to say, she did not have to be constantly
watching people’s lips to make out what they were saying, and because
she knew that there was nothing to listen to except the wind in the
pines. Monsieur Larroque was pleased, because Argelouse relieved him
of his daughter’s company and brought her into contact with Bernard
Desqueyroux whom she was one day to marry, in accordance with the
wishes of both families, though the understanding was not as yet
official.
Bernard Desqueyroux had inherited from his father a house at Argelouse,
next to that belonging to the Larroques: he was never seen there until
the shooting season began, and he did not sleep there until the month
of October, when he went pigeon-shooting in the neighbourhood. In the
winter this sedate young gentleman studied law in Paris; and in the
summer he did not spend much time with his family. He could not endure
Victor de la Trave, his mother’s second husband, who had not had a
penny when she married him, and whose extravagance was the scandal of
Saint Clair; and his half-sister Anne seemed too young to deserve any
attention from him. Nor did he think much more about Thérèse. Every
one regarded their marriage as inevitable because it seemed such a pity
not to combine the two estates, and he very sensibly shared the common
opinion on this point. But he left nothing to chance, and took a pride
in the management of his life. “If a man is unhappy he has only himself
to blame,” this slightly corpulent youth was wont to observe. Until his
marriage he divided his time equally between work and pleasure; and
although he by no means neglected food, drink, and sport, he worked
“like a galley slave,” so his mother said. A husband, he thought, ought
to be better informed than his wife: and Thérèse’s intelligence was
already famous. She was doubtless clever, but Bernard knew the kind of
arguments to influence a woman: moreover, as his mother pointed out,
it was not a bad thing to “have a leg in both camps,” and old Larroque
might be useful to him.
At twenty-six years of age Bernard Desqueyroux, after a few visits to
Italy, Spain, and Holland, which he had carefully “got up” beforehand,
would marry the richest and the cleverest girl in the neighbourhood,
though not perhaps the prettiest: (“Never mind whether she is pretty or
plain, you can’t resist her charm!”)
Thérèse smiled at the caricature of Bernard that she drew in her mind:
she reflected that he was, in point of fact, better than most of the
young men she could have married. The women of those moorlands by the
sea are much superior to the men, who see no one but each other after
they have left school and hardly ever lose their boorishness. Their
hearts are in their country, and in spirit they never leave it. They
are never really happy anywhere else: they would feel that they were
being utterly false to it if they gave up their country clothes, the
local dialect, and the rustic habits of their home. Under Bernard’s
thick skin there was certainly a sort of goodness of heart. When he
was at the point of death the tenants said there wouldn’t be another
gentleman left when he had gone. Yes, he was certainly kind, just,
and fundamentally honest. He never talked of what he did not know;
he accepted his own limitations. In his younger days he had not
been bad-looking, this unlicked Hyppolytus, though he was far less
interested in girls than in the hares he coursed on the moors.
Yet it was not Bernard that Thérèse, with half-closed eyes and leaning
her head against the carriage windows, pictured to herself bicycling
along the road from Saint Clair to Argelouse, about nine o’clock,
before the heat of the day had reached its height; not her cold-blooded
suitor, but his little sister Anne, her face all afire in the
sunshine;--the grasshoppers were already calling from pine to pine, and
the murmurous hum of the moorland, like the roar of a furnace, began to
rise up to the sky; and myriads of flies hovered above the tall heather.
“You’d better put your cloak on to come into the drawing-room,” she
used to say, “it’s like an ice-house”: and Aunt Clara added: “I’ll
give you something to drink, dear, when you aren’t quite so hot.” Anne
shouted futile words of greeting to the deaf old lady: and Thérèse
said: “Don’t make yourself hoarse, darling, she understands everything
from the way you move your lips.” But Anne insisted on articulating
every word, distorting her young lips in the process, and the Aunt
made all sorts of meaningless replies, until the friends had to run
away so as to be able to laugh unobserved.
In the far corner of the darkened carriage Thérèse looked back upon
those innocent days,--innocent, but gladdened by a fleeting happiness,
half understood: and she could not know that this transient gleam
was all the happiness ever to be hers. Nothing warned her that her
fate was laid in a darkened drawing-room, encompassed by the pitiless
summer, on a red-plush sofa by the side of Anne, who sat poring over a
photograph album on her knees. Why was she so happy? She and Anne had
hardly a single taste in common. Anne hated reading, and did nothing
but sew, chatter, and giggle. She had not an idea in her head, while
Thérèse devoured with equal voracity the novels of Paul de Kock, the
_Causeries du Lundi_, the _History of the Consulate_, indeed all that
miscellaneous literature that lies about in cupboards in a house in
the country. Sometimes Anne got up to see whether the heat had passed:
but as the light burst through the half-open shutters, like a splash
of molten metal, it seemed to burn the matting on the floor and they
had to shut everything up once more and crouch indoors. Even at
sunset, when only the feet of the pines glowed in the level rays, and
a last persistent grasshopper could still be heard deep down among the
herbage, the heat still hovered stagnant under the oak trees. The two
friends lay stretched upon the grass at the edge of the field, as they
might have sat down on the shore of a lake. Stormy clouds called up
fleeting pictures as they passed; but before Thérèse could make out the
winged lady that Anne saw in the sky, it had changed, she said, into
some strange elongated beast.
In September they could go out after the midday meal and explore that
land of thirst: there was not a drop of water to be seen at Argelouse.
They had to walk far into the sandy country before they reached the
sources of the little river called La Hure, where they bubble up
among the alder trees in a low-lying meadow. The girls’ bare feet
were benumbed by the icy water, but they soon grew burning hot again,
before they were even dry. Like the darkened drawing-room at home, one
of the huts used in October by the pigeon-shooters, gave them shelter.
They had nothing to say, not one word: they sat in virgin contemplation
while time fled by, and no more thought of moving than a sportsman who
signals for silence when the birds are coming over. They felt as though
the slightest gesture would have put to flight their chaste ingenuous
happiness. Anne was the first to break the spell,--it was growing dark
and she wanted to go out shooting larks: Thérèse, though she detested
the sport, followed her, for she could not bear to lose a minute of her
company. Anne went into the entrance hall and took down her .24 which
had no recoil. Her friend watched her standing in the field of rye
apparently aiming at the sun. Thérèse stopped her ears: a sudden wild
cry broke the blue stillness, and the huntress picked up the wounded
bird, squeezed it carefully, and, as she was actually brushing the warm
feathers against her lips, choked it.
“You will come to-morrow, won’t you?”
“Oh, no, I mustn’t come every day.”
Anne did not want to see her every day: this was perfectly sensible and
Thérèse could say nothing; indeed, it would not have occurred to her to
object. Anne said she would rather not come back. No, there was nothing
to prevent her, but why should they see each other every day? They
would end, she said, by hating the sight of each other. “You’re quite
right,” Thérèse replied, “don’t make an obligation of it. Come back
when you feel like it,--when you have nothing better to do,” and the
girl jumped on her bicycle, and disappeared down the darkening road,
ringing her bell.
Thérèse walked back towards the house. The tenants greeted her from
a distance, though the children stared at her and said nothing. It
was that hour of the evening when the sheep stand scattered under the
oak trees, and then rush together into a huddled mass when they hear
the shepherd’s cry. Her Aunt was looking out for her on the doorstep,
and, as deaf people will, talked incessantly, so as to prevent Thérèse
saying anything to her. What was this despair in her heart? She did not
want to read; she did not want to do anything, and wandered out of
doors once more....
“Don’t go far away,” said the Aunt; “dinner will soon be ready.”
She went back to the edge of the road, there was not a soul in sight,
as far as the eye could reach. Some one rang the bell for her at the
kitchen door. Perhaps the lamp would have to be lit that evening, she
thought. Indeed, this rather haggard-looking girl felt she was living
in as deep a silence as her deaf companion, who sat motionless with her
hands crossed before her on the table-cloth.
* * * * *
But what would Bernard make of this vague world, Bernard who belonged
to the blind and ruthless race of men who know their own minds? As
soon as she began, Thérèse thought, he would break in with: “Well, why
did you marry me, then? I wasn’t running after you.” It was certainly
true that he had shown no signs of impatience. Thérèse remembered that
Bernard’s mother, Madame Victor de la Trave, used to unburden herself
to the casual visitor somewhat as follows:
“He was quite ready to wait, but she would have him. No, she’s not
_quite_ all we could wish, I’m sorry to say: for instance, she smokes
far too much,--just a pose, of course. But she’s a good girl and
absolutely straightforward: and we shall soon put a few wholesome ideas
into her head. Of course, there _are_ disadvantages about the marriage.
Yes, her grandmother Bellade,--I know all about it, but that’s all
forgotten now, isn’t it? Indeed it wasn’t really a scandal, it was so
carefully hushed up. Do you believe in heredity? The father has no
religion, of course, but he has always set her an excellent example: a
saint in a tweed suit, so it seems. Besides, he’s a most influential
person and one needs all the help one can get in these days. There’s
always something one has to ignore. And--strange as it may seem--she is
richer than we are! And she worships Bernard, which is all to the good.”
It was true,--she had worshipped Bernard: no attitude called for less
effort on her part. As they sat in the drawing-room at Argelouse, or
lay under the oak trees, she had only to look up at him with eyes that
she knew so well how to fill with amorous innocence. Such a victim at
his feet flattered the young gentleman but did not surprise him. “Don’t
play with her,” his mother would say to him, “she’s eating her heart
out.”
“I married him because....”
Thérèse, with bent brows and her hand over her eyes, tried to remember.
There was the childish joy of becoming Anne’s sister-in-law. But it
was Anne who was especially delighted with the idea: such a bond meant
little to Thérèse. There was indeed another motive,--and why should
she blush for it? She was far from indifferent to Bernard’s five
thousand acres. It was always said of her that “property was in her
blood.” At the end of interminable dinners, when the liqueurs were put
on the table, Thérèse often stayed behind with the men, absorbed in
their talk about tenants, pit props, resin and turpentine. Valuations
and estimates roused her to enthusiasm. The lordship over so vast a
stretch of forest had certainly dazzled her. Besides, she thought, he,
too, had fallen in love with her pines. But perhaps Thérèse had been
influenced by a deeper feeling which she now tried to bring to light:
in this marriage she had possibly looked less for power and possessions
than safety. Surely it was something like panic that had hurried her
into it. She had shown the practical instincts of a housewife from her
earliest childhood, and she was impatient to occupy her proper place in
life and society, once and for all. She wanted to be protected against
she knew not what. She had never seemed so sensible as at the time of
her betrothal: she was becoming part of the family unit, part of the
social scheme: she was entering an Order. She was flying for safety.
* * * * *
In that springtime of their betrothal they were walking along the sandy
road that leads from Argelouse to Vilméja. The dead leaves on the oak
trees still stained the pure azure of the sky: the ground was strewn
with dead ferns, and the acid green of the new shoots could be seen
here and there above the surface. “Mind your cigarette,” said Bernard,
“you might very well start a fire: the soil is quite dried up.”
She asked him whether it was true that ferns contained prussic acid:
Bernard said he did not know whether they contained enough to poison
any one, and enquired affectionately whether she wanted to die: and
she laughed. He expressed the hope that she would try and be more
natural: and Thérèse remembered that she had shut her eyes, while two
great hands clasped her small head, and a voice said in her ear: “There
are still some notions inside this that shouldn’t be there.” And she
answered: “Then you must get rid of them, Bernard.”
They watched the builders adding another room to the farm-house at
Vilméja. The owners, who came from Bordeaux, wanted to get it ready for
their youngest son who, they were told, had got consumption and could
not last long. His sister had gone the same way. Bernard looked on the
Azévédos with the utmost contempt. “They swear by all that’s holy,”
said he, “that they are not of Jewish extraction, but you have only
got to look at them! Consumption, too, and Heaven knows what else.”
Thérèse was entirely mistress of herself. Anne would come back from
the Convent at San-Sebastian for the wedding: she and young Deguilhem
were to take the offertory. She had asked Thérèse to describe the
bridesmaids’ dresses by return of post: in fact, she wanted some
patterns, as she said it was to everybody’s interest that she should
not choose anything that clashed with the rest. Thérèse had never known
such peace, or what she thought was peace: it merely meant that the
reptile in her bosom was half asleep and torpid.