The paths were now visible. One of them, in front of the house, made
an oval round a lawn, which looked, at the moment, like a patch of
weeds, with all sorts of flowers in the uneven grass--buttercups,
moon-daisies, cranes-bill and centaury; there were rushes, too, and
nettles, hemlock and plants of lingwort that looked like long thin
girls in white hats.
Encoignard, the gardener from Valognes, was contemplating this wildness
with a melancholy eye:
"It will have to be ploughed, M. Des Boys, or at least well hoed. Then
we'll sift the earth we've broken up, level it down and sow ray-grass.
In two years it will be like a carpet of green velvet."
Eyeing the landscape, he went on:
"Lime trees! You ought to have a segoya here and over there an
araucaria. And what's that? An apple-tree. That's quite wrong. We'll
have that up and put a magnolia grandiflora there. You want an English
garden, don't you? An English garden oughtn't to contain anything but
exotic plants. Lilacs and roses.... Why not snow-ball trees? Ah,
there's a nice spotted holly. We might use that perhaps."
"I don't want anyone to touch my trees," said Rose, who had drawn near.
"She's right," said M. Des Boys.
"Think of pulling up lilacs," Rose went on, "pulling up rose-trees."
"But I mean to put prettier flowers in their place, Mademoiselle."
"The prettiest flowers are the ones I like best."
She picked a red rose and put it to her lips, kissing it as though it
were something sacred and adored.
M. Des Boys looked at his daughter with astonishment.
"Well, M. Encoignard, we must do what she wants. Hervart, what do you
think about it?"
"I think that one ought to leave nature as unkempt as possible. I
also think that one ought to love the plants of the country where
one lives. They are the only ones that harmonise with the sky and the
crops, with the colour of the rivers and roads and roofs."
"Quite right," said M. Des Boys.
"Xavier, I love you," Rose whispered, taking M. Hervart's arm.
The inspection of the garden was continued, and it was decided that M.
Encoignard's collaboration should be reduced to the ordinary functions
of a plain docile gardener. One or two new plants were admitted on
condition that the old should be respected.
M. Hervart had got up early and had been strolling about the garden
for some time past. He had spent half the night in thought. All the
women he had loved or known had visited his memory with their customary
gestures and the attitudes they affected. There was that other one who
seemed always to have come merely to pay a friendly call; it needed
real diplomacy to obtain from her what, at the bottom of her heart, she
really desired. Between these two extremes there were many gradations.
Most of them liked to give themselves little by little, playing their
desire against their sense of shame M. Hervart flattered himself that
he knew all about women; he knew that who let herself be touched will
let herself be wholly possessed.
"A woman," he said to himself, "who has been as familiar as Rose has
been, or even much less familiar, ought to be one who has surrendered
herself. Perhaps she might make me wait a few days more, but she would
belong to me, she would let her eyes confess it and her lips would
speak it out. Such a woman would even be disposed to hasten the coming
of the delightful moment, if I had not the wit to prepare it myself.
Rose, being a young girl and having only the dimmest presentiments of
the truth, does not know how to hasten our happiness; otherwise she
most certainly would hasten it. She belongs, then, to me. The question
to be answered is this: shall I go on smelling the rose on the tree, or
shall I pluck it?"
The poetical quality of this metaphor seemed to him perhaps a little
flabby. He began to speak to himself, without actually articulating
the words, even in a whisper, in more precise terms.
"Well, then, if I take her, I shall keep her. I have never thought of
marrying, but it's no good going against the current of one's life. It
may be happiness. Shall I lay up this regret for my old age: happiness
passed dose to me, smiling to my desire, and my eyes remained dull and
my mouth dumb? Happiness? Is it certain? Happiness is always uncertain.
Unhappiness too. And the fusing of these two elements makes a dull
insipid mixture."
This commonplace idea occupied him for a while. Every joy is transient,
and when it has passed one finds oneself numb and neutral once again.
"Neutral, or below neutral? A woman of this temperament? I can still
tame her? Yes, but what will happen ten years hence, when she is
thirty? Ah, well, till then...!"
M. Des Boys carried off Encoignard into his study. Left alone, Rose and
M. Hervart had soon vanished behind the trees and shrubberies, had soon
crossed the stream. They almost ran.
"Here we are at home," said Rose and, very calmly, she offered her lips
to M. Hervart.
"She's positively conjugal already," thought M. Hervart.
Nevertheless, this kiss disturbed his equanimity--the more so since
Rose, in gratitude no doubt to M. Hervart for his defence of her old
garden, kept her mouth a long time pressed to his. She was growing
breathless and her breasts rose under her thin white blouse. M. Hervart
was tempted to touch them. He made bold, and his gesture was received
without indignation. They looked at one another anxious to speak but
finding no words. Their mouths came together once more. M. Hervart
pressed Rose's breast, and a small hand squeezed his other hand. It
was a perilous moment. Realising this, M. Hervart tried to put an end
to the contact. But the little hand squeezed his own more tightly and
in a convulsive movement her knee came into contact with his leg. The
tension was broken. Their hands were loosened, they drew away from one
another, and for the first time after a kiss, Rose shut her eyes.
M. Hervart felt a pain in the back of his neck.
He began thinking of that season of Platonic love he had once passed
at Versailles with a virtuous woman, and he was frightened; for that
passion of light kisses and hand-pressures had undermined him as more
violent excesses had never done.
"What will become of me?" he thought. "This is a case of acute
Platonism, marked by the most decisive symptoms. All or nothing!
Otherwise I am a dead man."
He looked at Rose, meaning to put on a chilly expression; but those
eyes of her looked back at him so sweetly!
His thoughts became confused. He felt a desire to lie down in the grass
and sleep, and he said so.
"All right, lie down and sleep. I'll watch over you and keep the flies
away from your eyes and mouth. I'll fan you with this fern."
She spoke in a voice that was caressingly passionate. It was like
music. M. Hervart woke up and uttered words of love.
"I love you, Rose. The touch of your lips has refreshed my blood and
brought joy to my heart. When I first touched you, it was as though I
were clasping a treasure without price. But tell me, my darling, you
won't take back this treasure now you have given it?"
M. Hervart was breathing heavily. Rose shook her head and said, "No, I
won't take it back;" and to prove that she meant it she leaned towards
him, as though offering her bosom; M. Hervart lightly touched the stuff
of her blouse with his lips.
Seeing her lover's lack of alacrity, Rose, without suspecting the
mystery, at least guessed that there was a mystery.
"No doubt," she thought, "love needs a rest every now and then. We will
go for a little walk and I'll talk to him of flowers and insects. We
should do well, perhaps, to go back to the garden, for it would be very
annoying if they took it into their heads to come and look for us." They
got up and walked round the wood meaning to go straight back to the
house.
M. Hervart seemed to be in an absent-minded mood. He was holding Rose's
hand in his, but he forgot to squeeze it. His thoughts were, none the
less, thoughts of love. He looked about him as though he were searching
for something.
"What are you looking for? Tell me; I'll look too."
M. Hervart was looking for a nook. He inspected the dry leaves, peeped
into every nook and bower of the wood. But he felt ashamed of his quest.
"Yet," he thought, "I must. I love her and these innocent amusements
are really too pernicious. Shall I go away? That would be to condemn
myself to a melancholy solitude, with, perhaps, bitter consolations.
Marry her, then? Certainly, but it can't come off to-morrow, and we are
too much aquiver with desire to wait patiently. And suppose, when we
are engaged, we have to submit ourselves to the law of the traditional
sentimentality.... No, let us be peasants, children of this kindly
earth. Let us, like them, make love first, at haphazard, where the
paths of the wood lead us; then, when we are certain of the consent of
our flesh, we will call our fellow men to witness."
He went on looking and found what he wanted, but when he had found, he
started searching again, for he was ashamed of himself.
"Perhaps," he thought, answering his own objections, "one may have to
behave like a cad in order to be happy. What, shall I submit myself
to the prejudices of the world at the moment when life offers to my
kisses a virgin who is unaware of them? I will have the courage of my
caddishness."
Time passed and his eyes examined the heaps of leaves with decreasing
interest. His imagination returned pleasantly to the joys of a little
before, and he longed to be able to lay his trembling hand once more on
Rose's breast and to drink her breath in a kiss.
M. Hervart was recovering all his self-possession. He concluded:
"Well, it's very curious adventure and one that will increase the sum
of my knowledge and of my pleasures."
Rose, feeling the pressure of his fingers, had the courage, at last, to
look at him. He smiled and she was reassured.
"You won't leave me, will you?" she said. "Promise. When we are
married well live wherever you like, but till then, I want you near me,
in my house, in my garden, my woods, my fields. Do you understand?"
"Child, I love you and I understand that you love me too."
"Why 'too'? I loved you first; I don't like that word; it expresses a
kind of imitation."
"It's true," said M. Hervart. "We fell in love simultaneously. But the
convention is that the man falls in love first and the woman does no
more than consent to his desires."
"What can you want that I don't want myself?"
"Delicious innocence!" thought M. Hervart.
He went on:
"But perhaps I want still more intimacy, complete surrender, Rose."
"But am I not entirely yours? I want you in exchange, though, Xavier, I
want you, all of you."
M. Hervart did not know what to say. He became quite shy. This charming
ingenuousness troubled his imagination more than the images of pleasure
itself.
"She doesn't know," he thought. "She hasn't even dreamed of it. What
chastity and grace!"
He answered:
"I belong to you, Rose, with all my heart...."
"What were you thinking of a moment ago? You seemed far away."
"I was just feeling happy."
"You must have had such a lot of happinesses since you began life,
Xavier. You have given happiness, received it...."
"I have just lived," said M. Hervart.
"Yes, and I'm only a girl of twenty."
"Think of being twenty!"
"If you were twenty, I shouldn't love you."
M. Hervart answered only by a smile which he tried to make as young, as
delicate as possible. He knew what he would have liked to say, but he
felt that he could not say it. Besides, he wondered whether Rose and he
were really speaking the same language.
"This conversation is really absurd. I tell her that I want her to
surrender herself to me, and she answers--at least I suppose that's
what she means--that she has given me her heart. Obviously, she has no
idea of what might happen between us.... What do these little caresses
mean to her? They're just marks of affection.... All the same there
was surely desire in her movements, her kisses, her eyes. And her body
trembled at the urgent touch of my lips. Yes, she knows what love is.
How ridiculous! All the same, if we go to work cleverly...."
"You mustn't believe, Rose," he said out loud, "that I have ever yet
had occasion to give my heart. That doesn't always happen in the course
of a life; and when it does happen, it happens only once.... A man has
plenty of adventures in which his will is not concerned.... Man is an
animal as well as a man...."
"And what about women?"
"The best people agree," said M. Hervart, "that woman is an angel."
Rose burst out laughing at this remark, apparently very innocently, and
said:
"I can't claim to be an angel. It wouldn't amuse me to be one, either.
Angels--why, father puts them in his pictures. No, I prefer being a
woman. Would you love an angel?"
M. Hervart laughed too. He explained that young girls had a right to
being called angels, because of their innocence....
"When one is in love, is one still innocent?"
"If one still is, one doesn't remain so long."
They could say no more. They had come back to the stream and there
they caught sight of M. Des Boys showing his domains to two gentlemen,
one of whom seemed to be of his own age, while the other looked about
thirty.