"Everything that you can imagine," was his answer.
He introduced me to her. She was very pleasant, on easy terms with me,
as was natural, and begged me to look upon their house as my own. But I
felt that he, Blérot, did not belong to me any longer. Our intimacy was
cut off definitely, and we hardly found a word to say to each other.
I soon took my leave, and shortly afterwards went to the East,
returning by way of Russia, Germany, Sweden, and Holland, after an
absence of eighteen months from Paris.
The morning after my arrival, as I was walking along the boulevards
to feel the air of Paris once more, I saw a pale man with sunken cheeks
coming toward me, who was as much like Blérot as it was possible for an
emaciated tubercular man to resemble a strong, ruddy, rather stout man. I
looked at him in surprise, and asked myself: "Can it possibly be he?" But
he saw me, uttered a cry, and came toward me with outstretched arms. I
opened mine and we embraced in the middle of the boulevard.
After we had gone up and down once or twice from the Rue Drouot to the
Vaudeville Theatre, just as we were taking leave of each other,--for
he already seemed quite done up with walking,--I said to him:
"You don't look at all well. Are you ill?"
"I do feel rather out of sorts," was all he said.
He looked like a man who was going to die, and I felt a flood of
affection for my dear old friend, the only real one that I had ever had.
I squeezed his hands.
"What is the matter with you? Are you in pain?"
"A little tired; but it is nothing."
"What does your doctor say?"
"He calls it anæmia, and has ordered me to eat no white meat and to take
tincture of iron."
A suspicion flashed across me.
"Are you happy?" I asked him.
"Yes, very happy; my wife is charming, and I love her more than ever."
But I noticed that he grew rather red and seemed embarrassed, as if he
was afraid of any further questions, so I took him by the arm and pushed
him into a café, which was nearly empty at that time of day. I forced him
to sit down, and looking him straight in the face, I said:
"Look here, old fellow, just tell me the exact truth."
"I have nothing to tell you," he stammered.
"That is not true," I replied, firmly. "You are ill, mentally perhaps,
and you dare not reveal your secret to anyone. Something or other is doing
you harm, and I mean you to tell me what it is. Come, I am waiting for you
to begin."
Again he got very red, stammered, and turning his head away, he said:
"It is very idiotic--but I--I am done for!"
As he did not go on, I said:
"Just tell me what it is."
"Well, I have got a wife who is killing me, that is all," he said
abruptly, almost desperately as if he had uttered a torturing thought,
as yet unrealised.
I did not understand at first. "Does she make you unhappy? She makes
you suffer, night and day? How? What is it?"
"No," he replied in a low voice, as if he were confessing some crime;
"I love her too much, that is all."
I was thunderstruck at this unexpected avowal, and then I felt inclined
to laugh, but at length I managed to reply:
"But surely, at least so it seems to me, you might manage to--to love
her a little less."
He had got very pale again, but finally he made up his mind to speak
to me openly, as he used to do formerly.
"No," he said, "that is impossible; and I am dying from it, I know; it
is killing me, and I am really frightened. Some days, like to-day, I feel
inclined to leave her, to go away altogether, to start for the other end
of the world, so as to live for a long time; and then, when the evening
comes, I return home in spite of myself, but slowly, and feeling
uncomfortable. I go upstairs hesitatingly and ring, and when I go in I
see her there sitting in her arm-chair, and she says, 'How late you are,'
I kiss her, and we sit down to dinner. During the meal I think: 'I will go
directly it is over, and take the train for somewhere, no matter where';
but when we get back to the drawing-room I am so tired that I have not the
courage to get up out of my chair, and so I remain, and then--and then--I
succumb again."
I could not help smiling again. He saw it, and said: "You may laugh, but
I assure you it is very horrible."
"Why don't you tell your wife?" I asked him. "Unless she be a regular
monster she would understand."
He shrugged his shoulders. "It is all very well for you to talk. I
don't tell her because I know her nature. Have you ever heard it said of
certain women, 'She has just married a third time?' Well, and that makes
you laugh as you did just now, and yet it is true. What is to be done? It
is neither her fault nor mine. She is so, because nature has made her so;
I assure you, my dear old friend, she has the temperament of a Messalina.
She does not know it, but I do; so much the worse for me. She is charming,
gentle, tender, and thinks that our conjugal intercourse, which is wearing
me out and killing me, is natural and quite moderate. She seems like an
ignorant schoolgirl, and she really is ignorant, poor child.
"Every day I form energetic resolutions, for you must understand that I
am dying. But one look of her eyes, one of those looks in which I can read
the ardent desire of her lips, is enough for me, and I succumb at once,
saying to myself: 'This is really the end; I will have no more of her
death-giving kisses,' and then, when I have yielded again, like I have
to-day, I go out and walk and walk, thinking of death, and saying to
myself that I am lost, that all is over.
"I am mentally so ill that I went for a walk to Père Lachaise cemetery
yesterday. I looked at all the graves, standing in a row like dominoes,
and I thought to myself: 'I shall soon be there,' and then I returned
home, quite determined to pretend to be ill, and so escape, but I could
not.
"Oh! You don't know what it is. Ask a smoker who is poisoning himself
with nicotine whether he can give up his delicious and deadly habit.
He will tell you that he has tried a hundred times without success, and
he will, perhaps, add: 'So much the worse, but I would rather die than go
without tobacco.' That is just the case with me. When once one is in the
clutches of such a passion or such a habit, one must give oneself up to
it entirely."
He got up and held out his hand. I felt seized with a tumult of rage,
and with hatred for this woman, this careless, charming, terrible woman;
and as he was buttoning up his coat to go away I said to him, brutally
perhaps:
"But, in God's name, why don't you let her have lovers rather than
kill yourself like that?"
He shrugged his shoulders without replying, and went off.
For six months I did not see him. Every morning I expected a letter of
invitation to his funeral, but I would not go to his house from a
complicated feeling of anger against him and of contempt for that woman;
for a thousand different reasons.
One lovely spring morning I was walking in the Champs-Elysées. It was
one of those warm afternoons which make our eyes bright and stir in us a
tumultuous feeling of happiness from the mere sense of existence. Some one
tapped me on the shoulder, and turning round I saw my old friend, looking
well, stout, and rosy.
He gave me both hands, beaming with pleasure, and exclaimed:
"Here you are, you erratic individual!"