"Et partout le spectre de l'amour,
Et nullepart l'amour."
The train was crawling down to Fontainebleau. Annette sat opposite her
companion, looking not at him but at the strange country through which
they were going. How well she knew it! How often she had gone down to
Fontainebleau. But to-day all the familiar lines were altered. The
townlets, up to their eyes in trees, seemed alien, dead. Presently the
forest, no longer fretted by the suburbs, came close up on both sides of
the rail. What had happened to the oaks that they seemed drawn up in
serried lines to watch her pass, like soldiers at a funeral! A cold
horror brooded over everything. She looked at her companion and withdrew
her eyes. He had said he was better than the Seine. But now she came to
meet his eyes fixed on her, was he better? She was not sure. She was not
sure of anything, except that life was unendurable and that she did not
care what happened to her.
There had been sordid details, and there would be more. He had said it
would be better if she had a wedding ring, and he had bought her one.
The shopman had smiled offensively as he had found one to fit her. She
set her teeth at the remembrance. But she would go through with it. She
did not care. There was nothing left in the world to care about. It was
Dick Le Geyt who, thoughtless as he was, had shown some little thought
for her, had taken her to a restaurant and obliged her to eat, had put
her into the train, and then had waylaid and dismissed his valet, who
brought his luggage to the station, and who seemed at first determined
not to let his master go without him, indeed was hardly to be shaken
off, until Dick whispered something to him, when the man shrugged his
shoulders and turned away.
Annette looked again at her companion. He had fallen suddenly asleep,
his mouth ajar. How old and shrunk and battered he looked, and how
strangely pinched! There was something unnatural about his appearance. A
horrible suspicion passed through her mind that he had been drinking.
She suddenly remembered that she had once heard a rumour of that kind
about him, and that he had lost a race by it. She had to waken him when
they reached Fontainebleau, and then, after a moment's bewilderment, he
resumed all his alertness and feather-headed promptitude.
Presently she was in a bedroom in an old-fashioned inn, and was looking
out of the window at a little garden, with tiny pebbled walks, and a
fountain, and four stunted, clipped acacia trees.
The hotel was quite full. She had been asked some question as to whether
the room would do, and she had said it would. She had hardly glanced at
it. It was the only room to be had. And Dick's luggage was carried up to
it. The hotel-people took for granted his baggage was hers as well as
his. She remembered that she had none, and smoothed her hair
mechanically with her hands, while an admiring little chamber-maid
whisked in with hot water.
And presently, in the hot, tawdry salle a manger, there was a meal, and
she was sitting at a little table with Dick, and all the food was
pretence, like the tiny wooden joints and puddings in her doll's house
which she used to try to eat as a child. These were larger, and she
tried to eat them, but she could not swallow anything. She wondered how
the others could. And the electric light flickered, and once it went
out, and Dick laughed. And he ordered champagne for her and made her
drink some. And then, though he said he must not touch it, he drank some
himself, and became excited, and she was conscious that a spectacled
youth with projecting teeth turned to look at them. There was a
grey-haired Englishwoman sitting alone at the nearest table. Annette saw
her eyes rest on her for a moment with veiled compassion.
All her life afterwards, she remembered that evening as a nightmare. But
it was not a nightmare at the time. She was only an on-looker: a dazed,
callous spectator of something grotesque which did not affect her--a
mirthless, sordid farce which for some obscure forgotten reason it was
necessary for her to watch. That she was herself the principal actor in
the farce, and that the farce had the makings of a tragedy, did not
occur to her. She was incapable of action and of thought.
Later in the evening she was in her bedroom again, sitting with her
hands in her lap, vacantly staring at the wall with its mustard-coloured
roses on a buff ground, when two grinning waiters half carried, half
hustled in Dick, gesticulating and talking incoherently. They helped him
into bed: the elder one waited a moment, arms a-kimbo, till Dick fell
suddenly asleep, and then said cheerfully and reassuringly--
"C'est ca, madame," and withdrew.
Annette got up instinctively to go too, but she remembered that she had
nowhere to go, that it was close on midnight, that she was in her own
room with which she had expressed herself satisfied, that she and her
companion were passing at the hotel as husband and wife. She felt no
horror, no sense of the irremediable folly she had committed. She stood
a moment, and then drew the curtain and sat down by the window, looking
out, as she had sat all the previous night in her little bedroom in her
father's cabaret, out of which she had slunk like a thief as soon as it
was light. Her spellbound faculties were absorbed in one mental
picture, which was to her the only reality, as the cobra is the only
reality to the dove. She forgot where she was. She forgot the heavy
breathing of her companion, stirring uneasily in his sleep. She saw
only, as she had seen all day, the smoking, hideous ruin of that
wonderful castle of dreams which she had built stone by stone during the
last year, into the secret chamber of which she had walled up that shy,
romantic recluse her heart: that castle of dreams in which she paced on
a rainbow mosaic, which she had tapestried with ideals and prayers and
aspirations, in the midst of which there was a shrine.
There was nothing left of it now, worse than nothing, only a smoking,
evil-smelling hump of debris, with here and there a flapping rag of what
had once been stately arras or cloth of gold. It had reeled and crashed
down into the slime in a moment's space. The thunder of its fall had
deafened her to all other noises; its smoke had blinded her to all other
sights. Oh! why had she let herself be dissuaded from her only refuge
against this unendurable vision seared in upon her brain? It had been
agony. It would be agony again. If Dick had let her alone, she would be
at rest now, quite away from it all, her body floating down to the sea
in the keeping of the kind, cool river, and her outraged soul
escaped--escaped.
But she would do it still. She would creep away a second time at dawn,
as soon as the house was stirring. There must be a river somewhere--if
not a big river, a little one with deep pools. She would find it. And
this time she would not let herself be dissuaded. This time she would
drown herself, if the water were only knee-deep. And her mind being made
up, she gave a little sigh, and leaned her aching forehead against the
glass.
The man in the bed stirred, and feebly stammered out the word "Annette"
once and again. But Annette did not hear him, and after a time he
muttered and moved no more.
And when the dawn came up at last, it found Annette, who had watched for
it wide-eyed all night, sunk down asleep, with her head upon the sill.