In the evening Bernard and Thérèse came back to Argelouse to the
Desqueyroux house, which had hardly been inhabited for years. The
chimneys smoked, the windows did not fasten properly, and the draughts
blew under the doors where the rats had gnawed them. But the autumn was
so lovely that year, that Thérèse did not at first suffer from these
inconveniences. Bernard was out shooting until the evening: no sooner
had he come back, than he settled down in the kitchen and took his
dinner with the Balions: Thérèse could hear the clatter of forks and
the monotonous sound of voices. Night falls quickly in October. She had
read the few books she had brought with her over and over again, and
she was tired of them. Bernard did not reply to her request that he
would send on an order to his bookseller at Bordeaux: he only allowed
Thérèse to renew her supply of cigarettes. She sat and stirred the
fire ... but the thick resinous smoke made her eyes smart and irritated
her throat, which had already been injured by tobacco. No sooner had
Balionte fetched away the remains of a hurried meal, than Thérèse put
out the lamp and went to bed. How many hours she lay there before
sleep came to her deliverance! The silence of Argelouse prevented her
sleeping: she preferred the windy nights,--the confused murmur of the
pines is full of human kindness. It soothed the turmoil of her mind.
The wild nights of the equinox sent her to sleep better than the nights
when all was still.
However interminable the evenings seemed, she sometimes came back to
the house before dusk had fallen,--either because, at the sight of her,
a mother had seized her child by the hand and dragged it roughly back
into the farmyard,--or because some herdsman, whose name she knew, had
not answered her greeting. Oh, how good it would be to lose herself,
to drown herself in the deepest depths of some populous city! At
Argelouse, there was not a shepherd that did not know her story (even
Aunt Clara’s death was laid to her charge). There was not a threshold
that she would have dared to cross: she went out by a back door, and
avoided houses; the distant rumble of a cart was enough to make her
hurry down a side road. She walked quickly, with the beating heart of
a driven bird; and she lay down in the heather to wait until a bicycle
had passed.
On Sunday, at Mass at Saint Clair, she did not feel this terror, and
was conscious of a respite. Public opinion in the town seemed more
favourable. She did not know that her father and the La Traves had
depicted her as an innocent victim wounded to death. “We are afraid
that the poor girl will never get over it: she refuses to see any one
and the doctor says that she must not be opposed. Bernard is constantly
with her, but her mind is affected....”
* * * * *
On the last night of October a violent wind from the Atlantic raved
among the pines for many hours, and Thérèse lay between sleeping and
waking listening to its ocean roar. But at daylight she was awakened
by quite another sound of lamentation. She pushed open the shutters
and the room was still dark: a dense steady rain streamed down on
to the roofs of the out-buildings and the leaves of the oak trees,
which had hardly yet begun to fall. Bernard did not go out that day.
Thérèse sat smoking; she threw away her cigarette, went out onto the
landing, and heard her husband wandering from one room to another on
the ground floor: a smell of pipe-smoke reached her room, overpowered
that of Thérèse’s light tobacco, and she recognised the smell of her
old life. The first day of bad weather.... How many would she have to
live through, sitting at the corner of that fire-place by the dying
embers? In the corners of the room the paper was peeling off the damp
walls, on which could still be seen the marks of the old pictures which
Bernard had taken away to adorn the drawing-room at Saint Clair,--and
the desolate rusty nails. On the mantelpiece, in frames with a triple
border of tortoiseshell, stood photographs as pallid as if the dead
they represented had died a second death. Bernard’s father, her
grandmother, Bernard himself as a boy, with bobbed hair. There was
still the whole day before her which she must spend in that melancholy
room; and weeks, and months to follow.
As it began to grow dark, Thérèse could bear it no longer; she opened
the door quietly, went downstairs and into the kitchen. There she saw
Bernard sitting on a low chair before the fire. He got up suddenly;
Balion stopped cleaning a gun; Balionte dropped her knitting. All three
of them looked at her with such an expression that she asked:
“Are you afraid of me?”
“Didn’t you know you were forbidden to enter the kitchen?” She did not
reply and turned towards the door. Bernard called her back.
“However, as you have come, I should like to tell you that my presence
here is no longer necessary. We have been able to work up a good deal
of sympathy at Saint Clair; people think you, or pretend to think you,
rather neurasthenic. It is understood that you prefer to live alone and
that I often come to see you. After this you need not come to Mass.”
She stammered out that she did not mind coming; to which he replied
that her likes and dislikes were not in question. The desired result
had been obtained:
“And since the Mass means nothing to you....”
She opened her mouth, seemed about to speak, but said nothing. He
would not give way, lest a word or a gesture of hers might compromise
a success so quick and so unexpected. She asked how Marie was. He said
she was very well, and that she was leaving to-morrow for Beaulieu with
Anne and Madame de la Trave. He was going to spend a few weeks there
himself; two months at the most. He opened the door and stood aside for
Thérèse to pass.
In the dark dawn she heard Balion harnessing the horses; then
Bernard’s voice, the trampling of hooves, and the rattle of the
departing carriage. And then the rain,--on the roofs, on the clouded
window-panes, on the desolate fields, on fifty miles of moor and marsh,
on the shifting sanddunes by the sea shore, and on the sea.
Thérèse lit a cigarette from the one she had just finished. About four
o’clock she put on a mackintosh and went out into the rain. But the
darkness frightened her and she came back to her room. The fire was
out, and as she was shivering, she went to bed. About seven o’clock
Balionte brought her up an egg, fried, on a slice of ham, but she
would not eat it; the taste of fat had begun to make her feel sick!
Never anything but potted meat or ham. Balionte said that she had
nothing better to give her: Monsieur Bernard had forbidden her to have
game. She complained that Thérèse made her go up and down stairs for
nothing (she had something the matter with her heart and her legs were
swollen). The work was really too much for her; she only did it for
Monsieur Bernard’s sake.
Thérèse was feverish that night, and in her abnormally clear
imagination she evolved a complete existence in Paris: she saw once
more the restaurant in the Bois where she had been; this time she was
not with Bernard, but with Jean Azévédo and some young women. She
put down her tortoiseshell cigarette case on the table, and talked
frankly and freely, to the faint accompaniment of an orchestra. She
could see the circle of admiring faces, listening eagerly but without
astonishment. One woman said: “That is so like me.... I have felt that,
too.” A literary man took her aside, and said: “You ought to write down
everything that comes into your head; we will publish it in our review
and call it ‘The Diary of a Woman of To-day.’”
A young man who was desperately in love with her, took her home in
his car. They were driving back along the Avenue du Bois; she felt no
emotion whatever, but she took a certain pleasure in the agonised young
body close beside her. “No, not this evening,” she said to him. “I’m
dining with a friend this evening.” “What about to-morrow evening?” “I
can’t to-morrow either.” “Are your evenings never free?” “Hardly ever
... I might almost say never.”
* * * * *
There was one being in her life who made the rest of the world seem
insignificant; some one unknown to any one in her circle; very humble
and obscure; but Thérèse’s whole existence revolved round this sun
whom she alone could see, and whose warmth reached no other flesh but
hers. The murmur of Paris was like the wind in the pines. This body
that lay so close to hers, light as it was, prevented her breathing;
but she would sooner stifle than send him away. (And Thérèse made the
gesture of an embrace--she clasped her left shoulder with her right
hand and drove the nails of her left hand into her right shoulder.)
She got up, crossed the room barefooted, and opened the window; the
night outside was not cold; but she could hardly bring herself to
imagine that a day must come when it would rain no more. If she had
had any money she would have escaped to Paris, gone straight to Jean
Azévédo and confided in him; he would know how to get her work. If she
could only be a woman alone in Paris, earning her living and dependent
on no one...! Oh to be without a family! She would choose _her own
people_ as she pleased,--the tie should not be one of blood, but of
the mind, and even of the flesh as well; she would discover her true
relations, however few and scattered they might be.... She went to
sleep at last, with the window open. The cold damp dawn awoke her; her
teeth chattered, and she could not bring herself to get up and shut the
window,--she could not even put out her arms and draw up the bedclothes.
That day she did not get up or even do her hair. She swallowed a few
mouthfuls of potted meat and drank some coffee so as to be able to
smoke,--tobacco on an empty stomach did not agree with her. She tried
to recapture her imaginings of the night; and, indeed, at Argelouse the
day was almost as quiet and as dark as the night. In these days, the
shortest in the year, time disappears under the pall of rain, and one
hour melts into the next; dusk passes into dusk in unalterable silence.
But Thérèse had no desire for sleep, and her dreams became more and
more vivid; she searched her past methodically for forgotten faces,
lips that she had loved from afar, vague forms that casual encounters,
or the chances of the night, had brought into contact with her young
body. She moulded an image of happiness, invented an imaginary joy,
and used all the fragments of her experience to build up an impossible
love.
“She never gets up now, and she leaves her potted meat and her bread,”
said Balionte to Balion some time after this: “but she finishes the
bottle fast enough. She’d drink as much as you’d let her have, she
would. And then she burns the sheets with her cigarettes. She’ll end
by setting the house on fire. She smokes so much that her fingers and
nails are all yellow, just as if she’d dipped them in arnica. It’s a
shame, so it is!--those sheets were woven at home.... She won’t get
clean ones very often, I can tell you.”
She added that she was perfectly willing to sweep the room or to make
the bed: it was the creature’s fault for pretending to be ill and not
getting up. It was not worth Balionte’s trouble, with her swollen legs
and all, to carry up jugs of hot water; she found them in the evening
standing at the bedroom door where she had put them in the morning.
Thérèse’s thoughts began to be less absorbed in the unknown being that
she had evoked for her delight; she grew weary of her happiness, and
sated with imaginary pleasure, so she conceived another way of escape.
All manner of people knelt about her humble bed; a child of Argelouse,
one of those who ran away when she came near, was brought dying into
Thérèse’s room; she laid her nicotine-stained fingers on him, and he
got up cured.
She had other and less exalted dreams. She planned a house by the
seaside, saw in her mind’s eye the garden, and the terrace, arranged
the rooms, chose each piece of furniture one by one, tried to make up
her mind where she would put what she had brought from Saint Clair,
and argued with herself over the choice of materials. Then the scene
would fade, the outlines grew confused, and nothing was left but an
arbour and a bench beside the sea. And there Thérèse was sitting, her
head against the shoulder of one who sat beside her; she got up, as
the bell rang for dinner, and went into the darkened arbour with some
one walking at her side who suddenly flung his arms about her and drew
her to him. A kiss, she thought, must bring time to a standstill; she
imagined that in love there must be seconds that last for ever. So she
imagined; but she would never know. Once more she sees the white house
and the well; she hears the harsh voice of the pump; the courtyard is
full of the fragrance of heliotrope; dinner will be a rest before the
joys of the evening and the night, which she dares not conceive, for
they pass so far beyond the powers of the human heart. Thus, the love
of which Thérèse, of all women, had been utterly frustrated, possessed
and pervaded all her being. She could hardly hear Balionte’s hoarse
cries. The old creature was trying to convey to her that Monsieur
Bernard would come back from the South one day or another without
letting them know. And what would he say when he saw that room? It was
little better than a pig-sty! Madame must get up whether she liked it
or not.
As she sat on the bed, Thérèse stared with amazement at her
skeleton-like legs, and her feet looked enormous. Balionte wrapped
her in a dressing-gown and pushed her into an arm-chair. She reached
out for the cigarettes, but her hand dropped nerveless at her side.
A cold sunlight came through the open window. Balionte bustled
about with a broom in her hand, breathing heavily and grumbling to
herself,--Balionte who must have had a good heart, because it was
always said that every Christmas the death of the pig which she had
been fattening made her cry. She could not bear Thérèse not to answer
her: in her eyes silence was an insult, a mark of contempt. But Thérèse
was no longer mistress of her speech. When she felt against her body
the coolness of the clean sheets, she thought she had said, “Thank
you,” though as a matter of fact she had not uttered a word. “You
won’t burn these, I think,” said Balionte to her sharply as she left
the room. Thérèse was afraid that she had taken away the cigarettes
and put out her hand towards the table: they were gone. How could she
live without smoking? She could not exist without the constant touch
of these small, dry, warm objects against her fingers. She must have
their odour always in her nostrils, and fill the room with the fragrant
mist that she had inhaled and ejected from her lips. Balionte would
not come back until the evening; a whole afternoon without tobacco! She
closed her eyes and her yellow fingers moved mechanically as though
they held a cigarette.
At seven o’clock Balionte came in with a candle, and put the tray on
the table: milk, coffee, and a piece of bread. “So you don’t want
anything else?” And she waited maliciously for Thérèse to ask for her
cigarettes; but Thérèse’s face was turned steadfastly to the wall and
she did not move.
Doubtless Balionte had neglected to shut the window properly: a gust
of wind blew it open, and the cold night air filled the room. Thérèse
could not rouse herself to throw off the bedclothes, get up, and run
barefooted to the window. She lay, motionless, huddled up, the sheets
drawn up to her eyes, and the icy breath only touched her forehead
and her eyelids. Argelouse was full of the vast murmur of the pines,
their noise was like the noise of the ocean, but it did not seem to
break the silence of that place. Thérèse reflected that if she meant
to make a friend of pain, she should not have buried herself beneath
the bedclothes. She tried to push them back a little, but could not
bear the cold for more than a few seconds. She tried again, and endured
a little longer,--and so on, as if it had been a game. Thus, though
it was not deliberate, physical pain became her occupation and--who
knows?--her reason for existing in the world.