The hotel guests slowly entered the dining-room and took their places.
The waiters did not hurry themselves, in order to give the late comers
a chance and thus avoid the trouble of bringing in the dishes a second
time. The old bathers, the habitues, whose season was almost over,
glanced, gazed toward the door whenever it opened, to see what new faces
might appear.
This is the principal distraction of watering places. People look
forward to the dinner hour in order to inspect each day's new arrivals,
to find out who they are, what they do, and what they think. We
always have a vague desire to meet pleasant people, to make agreeable
acquaintances, perhaps to meet with a love adventure. In this life of
elbowings, unknown strangers assume an extreme importance. Curiosity
is aroused, sympathy is ready to exhibit itself, and sociability is the
order of the day.
We cherish antipathies for a week and friendships for a month; we see
people with different eyes, when we view them through the medium of
acquaintanceship at watering places. We discover in men suddenly, after
an hour's chat, in the evening after dinner, under the trees in the park
where the healing spring bubbles up, a high intelligence and astonishing
merits, and a month afterward we have completely forgotten these new
friends, who were so fascinating when we first met them.
Permanent and serious ties are also formed here sooner than anywhere
else. People see each other every day; they become acquainted
very quickly, and their affection is tinged with the sweetness and
unrestraint of long-standing intimacies. We cherish in after years the
dear and tender memories of those first hours of friendship, the memory
of those first conversations in which a soul was unveiled, of those
first glances which interrogate and respond to questions and secret
thoughts which the mouth has not as yet uttered, the memory of that
first cordial confidence, the memory of that delightful sensation of
opening our hearts to those who seem to open theirs to us in return.
And the melancholy of watering places, the monotony of days that are all
alike, proves hourly an incentive to this heart expansion.
Well, this evening, as on every other evening, we awaited the appearance
of strange faces.
Only two appeared, but they were very remarkable, a man and a woman
--father and daughter. They immediately reminded me of some of Edgar
Poe's characters; and yet there was about them a charm, the charm
associated with misfortune. I looked upon them as the victims of fate.
The man was very tall and thin, rather stooped, with perfectly white
hair, too white for his comparatively youthful physiognomy; and
there was in his bearing and in his person that austerity peculiar to
Protestants. The daughter, who was probably twenty-four or twenty-five,
was small in stature, and was also very thin, very pale, and she had the
air of one who was worn out with utter lassitude. We meet people like
this from time to time, who seem too weak for the tasks and the needs of
daily life, too weak to move about, to walk, to do all that we do every
day. She was rather pretty; with a transparent, spiritual beauty. And
she ate with extreme slowness, as if she were almost incapable of moving
her arms.
It must have been she, assuredly, who had come to take the waters.
They sat facing me, on the opposite side of the table; and I at once
noticed that the father had a very singular, nervous twitching.
Every time he wanted to reach an object, his hand described a sort of
zigzag before it succeeded in reaching what it was in search of, and
after a little while this movement annoyed me so that I turned aside my
head in order not to see it.
I noticed, too, that the young girl, during meals, wore a glove on her
left hand.
After dinner I went for a stroll in the park of the bathing
establishment. This led toward the little Auvergnese station of
Chatel-Guyon, hidden in a gorge at the foot of the high mountain, from
which flowed so many boiling springs, arising from the deep bed of
extinct volcanoes. Over yonder, above our heads, the domes of extinct
craters lifted their ragged peaks above the rest in the long mountain
chain. For Chatel-Guyon is situated at the entrance to the land of
mountain domes.
Beyond it stretches out the region of peaks, and, farther on again the
region of precipitous summits.
The “Puy de Dome” is the highest of the domes, the Peak of Sancy is
the loftiest of the peaks, and Cantal is the most precipitous of these
mountain heights.
It was a very warm evening, and I was walking up and down a shady path,
listening to the opening, strains of the Casino band, which was playing
on an elevation overlooking the park.
And I saw the father and the daughter advancing slowly in my direction.
I bowed as one bows to one's hotel companions at a watering place; and
the man, coming to a sudden halt, said to me:
“Could you not, monsieur, tell us of a nice walk to take, short, pretty,
and not steep; and pardon my troubling you?”
I offered to show them the way toward the valley through which the
little river flowed, a deep valley forming a gorge between two tall,
craggy, wooded slopes.
They gladly accepted my offer.
And we talked, naturally, about the virtue of the waters.
“Oh,” he said, “my daughter has a strange malady, the seat of which is
unknown. She suffers from incomprehensible nervous attacks. At one time
the doctors think she has an attack of heart disease, at another time
they imagine it is some affection of the liver, and at another they
declare it to be a disease of the spine. To-day this protean malady,
that assumes a thousand forms and a thousand modes of attack, is
attributed to the stomach, which is the great caldron and regulator
of the body. This is why we have come here. For my part, I am rather
inclined to think it is the nerves. In any case it is very sad.”
Immediately the remembrance of the violent spasmodic movement of his
hand came back to my mind, and I asked him:
“But is this not the result of heredity? Are not your own nerves
somewhat affected?”
He replied calmly:
“Mine? Oh, no-my nerves have always been very steady.”
Then, suddenly, after a pause, he went on:
“Ah! You were alluding to the jerking movement of my hand every time I
try to reach for anything? This arises from a terrible experience which
I had. Just imagine, this daughter of mine was actually buried alive!”