Bernard was on the door-step waiting for Thérèse to return: “There’s
nothing wrong with me at all,” he shouted, as soon as he saw her dress
in the darkness: “Can you imagine that a man of my physique could be
anæmic? It’s incredible, but I am: you can’t rely on appearances: I’m
to follow a treatment ... the Fowler treatment: It’s arsenic ... the
main thing is to get back my appetite.”
* * * * *
Thérèse remembered that she had felt no irritation at first: everything
connected with Bernard seemed to make less impression on her than usual
(as if the blow had been dealt her from further off). She did not
hear him: for her body and her soul were turned towards another world
full of eager creatures who wanted to know and to understand,--and,
in a phrase which Jean had repeated with an air of deep satisfaction,
“to become what they really were.” And when at dinner, she at last
mentioned her meeting, Bernard cried, “Why, you hadn’t said anything
about it: what an odd girl you are! Well, and what did you decide?”
She devised on the spot the plan which was, in fact, adopted. Jean
Azévédo agreed to write a letter to Anne in which he would contrive
as gently as possible to make it clear that all was over. Bernard had
jeered when Thérèse had maintained that the young man did not want the
marriage in the least: an Azévédo not want to marry Anne de la Trave!
“Why, you must be mad! He knows very well there’s nothing doing: people
like that don’t take a risk when they know they must lose. You’re still
very simple-minded, my child.”
Bernard would not have the lamp lit because of the mosquitoes; so he
did not see Thérèse’s look. “He had recovered his appetite,” as he
said. The Bordeaux doctor had saved his life already.
* * * * *
“Did I see Jean Azévédo many times after that? He left Argelouse about
the end of October.... We took perhaps five or six walks together;
the only one that stands out was the one we spent in concocting the
letter to Anne. The simple-minded youth insisted on what he thought
were soothing, pacifying phrases: of course I could see how dreadful
they were, though I did not say so. But our last expeditions are
all confused in one single memory. Jean Azévédo described Paris and
his friends to me, and I imagined a kingdom in which the law was
self-realization. ‘Here you are condemned to deceit until you die.’
Did he speak such words intentionally? Of what did he suspect me? He
thought I should never stand that stifling atmosphere: ‘Look,’ he
said, ‘at the vast level frozen surface under which every soul in this
place is embedded: sometimes it cracks and you can see the dark water
beneath: some one has struggled and disappeared; the ice sets again....
Yet here, too, each one is born with his own law within him: here, too,
each man’s destiny is his alone; and yet you are all victims of this
same gloomy fate. Some resist: hence the tragedies about which our
families do not talk. There is a great deal about which we do not talk!’
“‘Indeed, yes,’ I cried. ‘I have sometimes asked about some great-uncle
or grandfather, whose photographs have disappeared from all the albums,
and I have never got any answer except once, when I was told: ‘He
disappeared: he was forced to disappear.’”
“Did Jean Azévédo dread this destiny for me? He assured me that it
would have never occurred to him to talk about such matters to Anne,
because apart from her affections, she was quite a simple soul, with
little power of resistance, and would soon have sunk into slavery: ‘But
you! I feel in all your words a hunger and thirst for truth.’ Shall I
report faithfully all these conversations to Bernard? It is madness to
hope that he would understand a word of them. He must realise, in any
case, that I did not surrender without a struggle. I remember arguing
against the lad that he was adorning with clever phrases what in fact
was moral degradation. I even had recourse to memories of the lectures
on ethics at the _Lycée_. ‘Self-realisation?’ I repeated: ‘but we
only exist in so far as we make ourselves what we are.’ Azévédo denied
that there was any degradation worse than that of self-betrayal. He
maintained there was not a hero nor a saint, who had but once or twice
explored the mysteries of his soul, without soon reaching all its
limits: ‘We must go beyond ourselves to find God,’ he would say. And
again: ‘To accept ourselves as we are, compels the best among us to
meet ourselves face to face, openly and in fair fight. And that is why
it often happens that these enlightened souls become converted to the
narrowest creed.’”
She would not discuss with Bernard the justification for this
morality;--she would even admit that these were doubtless the
feeblest sophisms; “but he must understand, he must make an effort
to understand, how deeply a woman like myself could be affected by
them and what I felt in the evening in the dining-room at Argelouse:
Bernard, ensconced in the neighbouring kitchen, was taking off his
boots, and relating in dialect the result of the day’s shooting. The
captive pigeons struggled in the heaving bag on the table: Bernard
ate slowly, full of the joy of his reconquered appetite,--lovingly
counted out the drops of ‘Fowler’: ‘That is health,’ he used to say.
There was a large fire burning and at dessert he had only to turn his
chair to stretch out his feet, in their felt shoes, to the flames.
His eyes closed over _La Petite Gironde_. Sometimes he snored, but as
often as not I did not even hear him breathe. Balionte’s slippers still
shuffled about the kitchen; then she brought in the candlesticks. After
that, silence: the silence of Argelouse. People who do not know those
deserted moors do not know what silence is: it encircles the house as
if embodied in that thick mass of forest in which nothing lives, except
from time to time a hooting owl (we seem to be listening in the night
to the sound of the sob we dare not utter).
“It was more especially after Azévédo’s departure that I became
acquainted with that silence. So long as I knew that when it was
daylight Jean would come once more, his presence robbed the outer
darkness of its terror: while he slept near by, the moor and the
night were populous. The moment he had left Argelouse, after that
last conversation when he arranged to meet me in a year’s time, full
of hope, he said, that I should then know how to free myself (I still
do not know whether in this he spoke lightly, or whether he meant more
than he said. I rather suspect that our young friend from Paris could
not endure the silence, the silence of Argelouse, and that his regard
for me was a regard for the only available audience), as soon as I had
left him, I felt as though I was entering an endless tunnel, plunging
into a darkness that grew ever thicker: and sometimes I wondered
whether I should reach the open air before I were suffocated. Until my
baby was born, in January, nothing more happened.”
* * * * *
Here, Thérèse hesitated: and she tried to detach her thoughts from
what took place in the house at Argelouse the day following Jean’s
departure: “No,” she thought: “that has nothing to do with what I shall
soon have to explain to Bernard; I have no time to lose on trails that
lead nowhere.” But the thought would not be dismissed; it haunted her
mind. Thérèse will never destroy the memory of that October evening.
Bernard was going to bed on the first floor: Thérèse was waiting
until the log was quite burnt out before she joined him,--happy to
be alone for a moment: what was Jean Azévédo doing at that hour?
Perhaps he was drinking in that little bar he had told her about, or
perhaps (the night was so warm) he was driving in a motor-car, with a
friend, through the deserted Bois de Boulogne. Perhaps he was working
at his table, while Paris murmured far away: the silence was his own
handiwork,--he had won it against the turmoil of the world: it was
not imposed on him from without like the silence which was stifling
Thérèse: it was his own, and reached no further than the light of
the lamp, or the shelves packed with books.... Such were Thérèse’s
thoughts, when suddenly the dog barked, then began to howl, and a
familiar, but exhausted voice soothed him outside in the vestibule.
Anne de la Trave opened the door: she had walked from Saint Clair in
the dark--her shoes were full of mud. Her eyes blazed in her worn
little face. She flung her hat on to a chair: and asked: “Where is he?”
Thérèse and Jean, when the letter had been written and posted, had
thought the affair was over,--far from supposing that Anne would not
let go,--just as if any human creature listened to reasons or to
reasonings, when its whole life was at stake! She had succeeded in
eluding her mother and got into a train. She had made her way along the
dark Argelouse road by the strip of clear sky between the tree-tops.
“She must see him again: if she could see him again, he was hers once
more: she _must_ see him.” She had stumbled along, twisting her feet in
the cart tracks, she was in such a hurry to reach Argelouse. Thérèse
told her that Jean was gone and was now in Paris. Anne shook her head,
she did not believe it: she could not let herself believe it, if she
was not to collapse with fatigue and despair:
“You are lying as you have always lied.”
And as Thérèse protested, she added:
“Oh, you’ve got the family spirit with a vengeance! You pose as
emancipated, but since your marriage you’ve become a woman of the
family, pretty quick.... Yes, yes, of course, you did it for the
best: you betrayed me to save me, didn’t you? I will spare you your
explanations.” As she was opening the door, Thérèse asked her where she
was going.
“To Vilméja, to his house.”
“I tell you he left it two days ago.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She went out; Thérèse then lit the lantern hanging in the entrance hall
and went out after her:
“You’re going wrong, my little Anne: you’re on the road to Biourge.
Vilméja is over there.”
They made their way through the mist. Dogs began to bark. The oaks of
Vilméja at last, and the house, not asleep, but dead. Anne prowled
round the empty sepulchre, and hammered on the door with both fists.
Thérèse, standing motionless, had put the lantern down on the grass.
She watched her friend’s slender ghost clinging to each window on the
ground floor. Anne was no doubt whispering a name to herself, but not
calling it aloud, for she knew that it was quite useless. For a few
moments she was hidden behind the building; then she reappeared, went
up to the door, and sank down upon the threshold, and hid her face in
her knees which she clasped with her arms. Thérèse lifted her up and
led her away. Anne kept on saying, as she stumbled along: “I shall go
to Paris to-morrow morning: Paris is not so very big: I shall find him
in Paris....” But she spoke like an exhausted child who had already
given up hope.
Bernard, awakened by the sound of their voices, had put on a
dressing-gown and was waiting for them in the drawing-room. Thérèse was
wrong to banish the memory of that scene that broke out between brother
and sister. This man, who could seize a poor worn-out child so roughly
by the wrists, drag her up to a room on the second floor, and bolt the
door, is your husband, Thérèse: that Bernard, who, in two hours’ time,
will be your judge. The spirit of the family inspired him, and not for
one instant did he waver. He always knew, in every sort of situation,
what was due to the family. You, in the agony of your remorse, Thérèse,
are preparing a long appeal: but only men with no principles can
listen to a reason that is not their own. Bernard will laugh at your
arguments: “I know what I have to do.” He always knows what he has to
do. If he sometimes hesitates, he says: “The family have discussed it
and we have decided that....” How can you doubt that he has prepared
his sentence: Your destiny is fixed for ever: you may as well go to
sleep.