This was indeed a singular revelation.
For some time I had commenced to work, as soon as daylight appeared, on
a picture, the subject of which was as follows:
A deep ravine, steep banks, dominated by two declivities, lined with
brambles and long rows of trees, hidden, drowned in that milky vapor,
clad in that musty robe which sometimes floats over valleys, at break of
day. And at the extreme end of that thick and transparent fog, you see
coming or, rather already come, a human couple, a stripling and a
maiden, embraced, inter-laced, she, with head leaning on him, he,
inclined towards her, and lips to lips.
A first ray of the sun glistening through the branches, has traversed
that fog of the dawn, has illuminated it with a rosy reflection, just
behind the rustic lovers, on which can be seen their vague shadows in a
clear silver. It was well done, yes, indeed, well done.
I was working on the declivity which led to the Val d'Etretat. This
particular morning, I had, by chance, the sort of floating vapor, which
was necessary for my purpose. Suddenly, an object appeared in front of
me, a kind of phantom; it was Miss Harriet. On seeing me, she took to
flight. But I called after her saying: "Come here, come here,
Mademoiselle, I have a nice little picture for you."
She came forward, though with seeming reluctance. I handed her my
sketch. She said nothing, but stood for a long time, motionless,
regarding it; and, suddenly, she burst into tears. She wept
spasmodically, like men who have been struggling hard against shedding
tears, but who can do so no longer, and abandon themselves to grief,
though still resisting. I got up, trembling, moved myself by the sight
of a sorrow I did not comprehend, and I took her by the hand with an
impulse of brusque affection, a true French impulse which impels one
quicker than one thinks.
She let her hands rest in mine for a few seconds, and I felt them quiver
as if her whole nervous system was twisting and turning. Then she
withdrew her hands abruptly, or, rather tore them out of mine.
I recognized that shiver, as soon as I had felt it; I was deceived in
nothing. Ah! the live shiver of a woman, whether she is fifteen or fifty
years of age, whether she is one of the people or one of the _monde_,
goes so straight to my heart that I never had any compunctions in
understanding it!
Her whole frail being trembled, vibrated, swooned. I knew it. She walked
away before I had time to say a word, leaving me as surprised as if I
had witnessed a miracle, and as troubled as if I had committed a crime.
I did not go in to breakfast. I went to make a tour on the banks of the
Falaise, feeling that I would just as lieve weep as laugh, looking on
the adventure as both comic and deplorable, and my position as
ridiculous, fain to believe that I had lost my head.
I asked myself what I ought to do. I debated with myself whether I ought
to take my leave of the place and almost immediately my resolution was
formed.
Somewhat sad and perplexed, I wandered about until dinner time, and I
entered the farm house just when the soup had been served up.
I sat down at the table, as usual. Miss Harriet was there, munching away
solemnly, without speaking to anyone, without even lifting eyes. She
wore, however, her usual expression, both of countenance and manner.
I waited, patiently, till the meal had been finished, when, turning
towards the landlady I said: "See here, Madame Lecacheur, it will not be
long now before I shall have to take my leave of you."
The good woman, at once surprised and troubled, replied in a quivering
voice: "My dear sir, what is it I have just heard you say? you are going
to leave us, after I have become so much accustomed to you?"
I regarded Miss Harriet from the corner of my eye. Her countenance did
not change in the least; but the under-servant came towards me with eyes
wide open. She was a fat girl, of about eighteen years of age, rosy,
fresh, as strong as a horse, yet possessing the rare attribute in one in
her position--she was very neat and clean. I had embraced her at odd
times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide,
nothing more.
The dinner being at length over, I went to smoke my pipe under the apple
trees, walking up and down at my ease, from one end of the court to the
other. All the reflections which I had made during the day, the strange
discovery of the morning, that grotesque love and passionate attachment
for me, the recollections which that revelation had suddenly called up,
recollections at once charming and perplexing, perhaps, also, that look
which the servant had cast on me at the announcement of my
departure--all these things, mixed up and combined, put me now in a
jolly humor of body, recalling the tickling sensation of kisses on the
lips, and in the veins, something which urged me on to commit some
folly.
Night having come on, casting its dark shadows under the trees, I
descried Céleste, who had gone to shut the hen coops, at the other end
of the enclosure. I darted towards her, running so noiselessly that she
heard nothing, and as she got up from closing the small traps by which
the chickens got in and out, I clasped her in my arms and rained on her
coarse, fat face a shower of kisses. She made a struggle, laughing all
the same, as she was accustomed to do in such circumstances. Wherefore
did I suddenly loose my grip of her? Why did I at once experience a
shock? What was it that I heard behind me?
It was Miss Harriet who had come upon us, who had seen us, and who stood
in front of us, as motionless as a specter. Then she disappeared in the
darkness.
I was ashamed, embarrassed, more desperate at having been surprised by
her than if she had caught me committing some criminal act.
I slept badly that night; I was completely enervated and haunted by sad
thoughts. I seemed to hear loud weeping; but in this I was no doubt
deceived. Moreover, I thought several times that I heard some one
walking up and down in the house, and who had opened my door from the
outside.
Towards morning, I was overcome by fatigue and sleep seized on me. I got
up late and did not go downstairs until breakfast time, being still in a
bewildered state, not knowing what kind of face to put on.
No one had seen Miss Harriet. We waited for her at table, but she did
not appear. At length Mother Lecacheur went to her room. The English
woman had gone out. She must have set out at break of day, as she was
wont to do, in order to see the sun rise.
Nobody seemed astonished at this and we began to eat in silence.
The weather was hot, very hot, one of those still, boiling days, when
not a leaf stirs. The table had been placed out of doors, under an apple
tree; and from time to time Sapeur had gone to the cellar to draw a jug
of cider, everybody was so thirsty. Céleste brought the dishes from the
kitchen, a ragout of mutton with potatoes, a cold rabbit and a salad.
Afterwards she placed before us a dish of strawberries, the first of the
season.
As I wanted to wash and refresh these, I begged the servant to go and
bring a pitcher of cold water.
In about five minutes she returned, declaring that the well was dry. She
had lowered the pitcher to the full extent of the cord, and had touched
the bottom, but on drawing the pitcher up again, it was empty. Mother
Lecacheur, anxious to examine the thing for herself, went and looked
down the hole. She returned announcing that one could see clearly
something in the well, something altogether unusual. But this, no doubt,
was pottles of straw, which, out of spite, had been cast down it by a
neighbor.
I wished also to look down the well, hoping I would be able to clear up
the mystery, and perched myself close to its brink. I perceived,
indistinctly, a white object. What could it be? I then conceived the
idea of lowering a lantern at the end of a cord. When I did so, the
yellow flame danced on the layers of stone and gradually became clearer.
All the four of us were leaning over the opening, Sapeur and Céleste
having now joined us. The lantern rested on a black and white,
indistinct mass, singular, incomprehensible. Sapeur exclaimed:
"It is a horse. I see the hoofs. It must have escaped from the meadow,
during the night, and fallen in headlong."
But, suddenly, a cold shiver attacked my spine, I first recognized a
foot, then a clothed limb; the body was entire, but the other limb had
disappeared under the water.
I groaned and trembled so violently that the light of the lamp danced
hither and thither over the object, discovering a slipper.
"It is a woman! who ... who ... can it be? It is Miss Harriet."
Sapeur alone did not manifest horror. He had witnessed many such scenes
in Africa.
Mother Lecacheur and Céleste began to scream and to shriek, and ran
away.
But it was necessary to recover the corpse of the dead. I attached the
valet securely by the loins to the end of the pulley-rope, and I lowered
him slowly, and watched him disappear in the darkness. In the one hand
he had a lantern, and held on by the rope with the other. Soon I
recognized his voice, which seemed to come from the center of the earth,
crying:
"Stop."
I then saw him fish something out of the water. It was the other limb.
He then bound the two feet together, and shouted anew:
"Haul up."
I commenced to wind him up, but I felt my arms crack, my muscles twitch,
and I was in terror lest I should let the man fall to the bottom. When
his head appeared at the brink, I asked:
"Well, what is it?" as though I only expected that he would inform me of
what he had discovered at the bottom.
We both got on to the stone slab at the edge of the well, and, face to
face, we hoisted the body.
Mother Lecacheur and Céleste watched us from a distance, concealed from
view behind the wall of the house. When they saw, issuing from the hole,
the black slippers and the white stockings of the drowned person, they
disappeared.
Sapeur seized the ankles of the poor chaste woman, and we drew it up,
sloping, as it was, in the most immodest posture. The head was shocking
to look at, being bruised and black; and the long, gray hair, hanging
down tangled and disordered.
"In the name of all that is holy, how lean she is!" exclaimed Sapeur, in
a contemptuous tone.
We carried her into the room, and as the women did not put in an
appearance, I, with the assistance of the stable lad, dressed the corpse
for burial.
I washed her disfigured face. To the touch of my hand, an eye was
slightly opened, which regarded me with that pale regard, with that cold
look, with that terrible look that corpses have, which seemed to come
from beyond life. I plaited up, as well as I could, her disheveled hair,
and I adjusted on her forehead, a novel and singularly formed lock. Then
I took off her dripping wet garments, baring, not without a feeling of
shame, as though I had been guilty of some profanation, her shoulders
and her chest, and her long arms, as slim as the twigs of branches.
I next went to fetch some flowers, corn poppies, blue beetles,
marguerites, and fresh and perfumed herbs, with which to strew her
funeral couch.
I being the only person near her, it was necessary for me to perform the
usual ceremonies. In a letter found in her pocket, written at the last
moment, it was ordered that her body was to be buried in the village in
which she had passed the last days of her life. A frightful thought then
pressed on my heart. Was it not on my account that she wished to be laid
to rest in this place?
Towards the evening, all the female gossips of the locality came to view
the remains of the defunct; but I would not allow a single person to
enter; I wanted to be alone; and I watched by the corpse the whole
night.
I looked at the corpse by the flickering lights of the candles, this
miserable woman, wholly unknown, who had died lamentably and so far away
from home. Had she left no friends, no relations behind her? What had
her infancy been? What had been her life? Whence had she hailed thither
thus, all alone, wanderer, lost like a dog driven from its home? What
secrets of sufferings and despair were sealed up in that disagreeable
body, in that spent, tarnished body--tarnished during the whole of its
existence, that impenetrable envelope which had driven her far away from
all affection, from all love?
How many unhappy beings there are! I felt that there weighed upon that
human creature the eternal injustice of implacable nature! It was all
over with her, without her ever having experienced, perhaps, that which
sustains the greatest outcasts--to wit, the hope of being loved for
once! Otherwise, why should she thus have concealed herself, fled from
the face of the others? Why did she love everything so tenderly and so
passionately, everything living that was not a man?
I recognized, also, that she believed in a God, and that she hoped to
receive compensation from the latter for all the miseries she had
endured. She had begun now to decompose, and to become, in turn, a
plant. She who had blossomed in the sun, was now to be eaten up by the
cattle, carried away in seeds, and flesh of beasts, would become again
human flesh. But that which is called the soul, had been extinguished at
the bottom of the dark well. She suffered no longer. She had changed
her life for that of others yet to be born.
Hours passed away in this silent and sinister communion with the dead. A
pale light at length announced the dawn of a new day, when a bright ray
glistened on the bed, shed a dash of fire on the bed clothes and on her
hands. This was the hour she had so much loved, when the awakened birds
began to sing in the trees.
I opened the window to its fullest extent, I drew back the curtains, so
that the whole heavens might look in upon us, and bending towards the
glassy corpse, I took in my hands the mutilated head; then, slowly,
without terror or disgust, I imprinted a kiss, a long kiss, upon those
lips, which had never before received any.
* * * * *
Léon Chenal remained silent. The women wept. We heard on the box seat
the Count d'Etraille, who blows his nose, from time to time. The
coachman alone had gone to sleep. The horses, which felt no longer the
sting of the whip, had slowed their pace and dragged along softly, and
the brake, hardly advancing at all, became suddenly torpid, as if it had
been charged with sorrow.