he did not resist it.
He was not angry with her, but if he had caught her in the act he would
have broken her back. He did not expect from her what she could not give
him, frankness and faithfulness. Since she pleased him, and as long as
she pleased him, all was well. But he considered himself free to break
with her when she no longer pleased him.
Annette had more scruples. She was a woman, and she knew better what was
going on in Noémi's heart. Noémi might be false and vain and she might
deceive Philippe, but she loved him. No, for her it was not just a game,
as he had said it was. She was bound to him as if he were a part of her
own flesh, not merely by the fiery bond of sensual pleasure, but from
the bottom of her heart, for good or evil. Good and evil. In love
nothing counts but the strength of love, that imperious magnet that
draws soul and body together, one being into another being. She clung to
him as the aim and purpose of her life, as what she had wanted, wanted,
wanted through long years. A woman does not always know why she has
fallen in love. But because she has fallen in love she cannot liberate
herself. She has expended too much of her strength and her desire to be
able to transfer them to another object. She lives like a parasite on
the being she has chosen. It would be necessary to cut into them both to
separate them.
A suspicion began to eat its way into Noémi. A mere nothing, at first,
the nibbling of a mouse. There was no change in their life. Philippe,
hard as ever, always in a hurry, with little desire to talk, listened to
her without hearing her, absorbed, with a flame in his eyes. Just at
this time he was deep in a very disagreeable affair, a bitter
controversy in which he had involved himself. Noémi knew about it, but
the last thing she wanted was to be kept informed of these bothersome
matters. When he was in the midst of them he thought of nothing else,
and he neglected her. She had only to wait and let him fast; he would
come back to her later with more appetite than ever. But he was fasting
too long now! At other times she had amused herself by enticing him in a
way that moved Philippe to rebuff her, for it annoyed him to be
distracted when he was engrossed in something; but although she had
protested loudly at his rudeness she had not been angry. She had been
like a child playing with a fire-cracker; the more noise it made the
more it diverted her. But this time, calamitously, the fire-cracker had
not gone off. . . . Noémi's provocations had met with nothing but
indifference. Philippe did not even notice them. . . . The mouse of her
suspicion went away, came back, took up its abode in her. It nibbled so
far that it reached the quick. There came a day when Noémi cried out.
They were both in bed, one morning, side by side. His eyes were open.
She had just awakened, but she pretended to be asleep and she watched
him. Instinctively she felt that the reflection of another face was
passing over this one. (For, unaware of it as we may be, the outer
casing of the mind is moulded by the image that dwells in it.) Her
jealous attention was instantly caught. From under her lowered lids her
eyes pierced him like a gimlet as she lay there, motionless, continuing
to breathe regularly as if she were sleeping; she keenly studied this
man who was so far away, so near, this man who belonged to her, this
eternal stranger whose thigh was touching her own and between whom and
herself lay an impassable world. No, she was not mistaken, there was some
other anxiety in his mind aside from his ideas. . . . Anxiety? . . . She
saw him smile. He was thinking of another woman. To snatch him
away from this phantom, to test her own power, she groaned as if she was
dreaming and rolled over against him. He drew away from this body that
was seeking him, assured himself that she was asleep, rose noiselessly,
dressed and went out. She had not moved. . . . But the door was not
closed before she sat up in bed with her face distorted. She beat her
breasts with her little fists, stifling a cry of rage and anguish.
From this moment she was a huntress. Tense, quivering, she looked about,
she sought the scent. The nails of her clenched hands hurt her; she was
burning to tear the enemy to pieces. . . . Oh, silently, gently. . . .
To tear the woman's heart out. . . . But she could not find this heart.
Where was it hidden? She beat the woods, explored with feverish
minuteness the circle of his acquaintances. With her painted, youthful
smile hiding her sharp teeth, she did not miss the least alteration of
Philippe's face in the presence of the other sex, while she watched the
hands, the eyes, the vocal inflections of every one of them, while the
hunting-dogs that she carried in her heart were constantly casting about
for the scent. . . . But the trail was always false and the animal
escaped.
The strange aberration persisted which, from the beginning, had led her
to place Annette outside the field of her suspicions. For weeks she had
forgotten her. Annette never appeared. She felt guilty and, far from
being proud, she was humiliated at the thought of Noémi because of her
secret victory, her stolen victory. She avoided any reappearance at the
Villards' house, and she would have found plenty of excuses if Noémi
had expressed any desire to see her again. But Noémi expressed nothing
of the kind; she had too much on her mind to remember Annette.
She had tried in van to convince herself that Philippe's caprice would
pass. But, far from passing, the all too evident symptoms of his
disaffection became even more marked: a cold inattention to what she
said and how she looked, to the very presence of his little wife, at
times a complete indifference--even when Noémi tried to force the fact
of her existence upon him, a bored weariness, an unconcealed disgust
that avoided any importunate contact. . . . She quivered with rage and
slighted love! . . . She could not hide from herself any longer the
seriousness of this misfortune. She became frantic. But she was careful
always to force herself not to show it. . . . Always, always to be gay,
sure of herself and of him, always to keep offering him the bait which
he would not even look at! She was eating her heart out. . . . And
against this intangible enemy there rose within her a furious hatred.
Unable as she was to lay hold of her, she could have beaten her own head
against the wall. She had watched everyone, everyone, in vain--everyone
but Annette. Annette was the last person she would have thought of.
And it was Annette who betrayed herself.
She was walking along the street when, twenty steps away, she saw Noémi
coming towards her. Noémi did not see her. She was walking with her
eyes empty, her head bent; her pretty face was pale and looked older and
careworn. She was not conscious of herself at this, moment or of
anything about her; for days she had been like a monomaniac who, with a
dejected rage, turns the grindstone of a fixed idea. Annette was shocked
at the sight of her. She might have passed close beside her without being
noticed, or have retraced her steps, but in her clumsy haste she left
the sidewalk and crossed the street. This movement broke the continuous
flow of the passing people and mechanically attracted Noémi's
attention. She recognized Annette, who was trying to avoid her, and,
following her with her eyes, she saw Annette furtively glance at her
from the other side of the street and then turn her head away. It was
like a blinding light. . . . She was the woman!
She stopped with her heart in her mouth, her nails driven into the palms
of her hands, clenching her teeth, bristling like a cat with its back
arched; there was murder in her eyes. The look of a passer-by reminded
her that she was in a world where people live by falsehood, the world
which, for once, she had left. She returned to it. But ten steps farther
on she laughed cruelly. She had caught her. . . .
XLIII
Annette had been completely upset by the sight of Noémi. Ever since she
had surrendered herself she had been tormented by remorse. Not that she
considered herself at fault for loving the man who loved her: their love
was true, it was healthy, it was strong. It had no need of excuse or
pretence. No social convention weighed in her mind against it. In the
fever of her passion she would not even admit that she had any duty
towards Noémi. She was Philippe's real wife. She could not recognize
the other one who had not been able to share in his work and his
struggles and make him happy. But all this assurance did not alter the
fact that someone else paid the price of her own happiness, that she had
destroyed the happiness of another. She had tried to believe that Noémi
was too frivolous to suffer very much and that she would not find it
very hard to give him up. But she knew this was not so, and all she
could do was to avoid thinking of Noémi. The self-centredness of the
first days of passion had made this possible.
But it was no longer possible now that she had met Noémi. Annette had
the unfortunate gift of being able to pass outside herself and enter
sympathetically, in spite of her own passions, into the passions of
others--especially into their sufferings, which a glance revealed to
her. . . .
She went home almost as much obsessed as Noémi by the anxiety that was
devouring her. She could not satisfy herself with words; she could not
fortify herself with the rights of love. Noémi, too, was in love, and
Noémi was suffering. Has the love that suffers less rights than the
love that causes the suffering? It is not a question of rights. One of
the two must suffer, she or I!
She! Annette's passion left her no choice. . . . But it was far from
pleasant.
At least this suffering should not be aggravated! It was wrong to
prolong it as they did, to let the wound grow worse without applying a
firm hand to it, operating upon it, dressing it. To dodge the frank
confession, to throw upon Noémi all the misery of discovering her
misfortune, was cowardly and cruel. From the very first day Annette had
insisted to Philippe, "I am unwilling to conceal myself." Then how had
she allowed herself to slip from day to day into this undignified
situation? . . . It was her own faint-heartedness all the time.
"We must speak," she said to Philippe.
But the moment Philippe was willing to speak she prevented him. She was
afraid of his brutal frankness. He threw away like a squeezed lemon what
he no longer loved. His old bonds annoyed him. "Come," he said, "let's
make an end of it."
And Annette replied, "No, no, not to-day." She saw the suffering he was
going to cause. Gracious heavens! How painful a thing it was to destroy
a heart!
Philippe had plenty of other things to think about! His days were filled
by an implacable warfare against public opinion and a press that was
aroused against him. This was no time for Annette to bother him with her
own troubles. He was engaged in a perilous campaign. He had taken the
initiative in a league for birth-control. He abhorred the shameless
hypocrisy of the ruling bourgeoisie who, without the slightest interest
in improving the hygiene or alleviating the poverty of the
working-classes, were only interested in increasing their numbers, so
that there would be plenty of fodder for factory and cannon. So far as
they are concerned, they are careful not to threaten their prosperity
and complicate their life by having too many children themselves. But
they are not at all disturbed if a badly regulated birth-rate
perpetuates poverty, sickness and slavery among the common people. They
make a national and religious duty of this. Philippe was well aware of
the fury he would arouse, but no danger had ever stopped him. He rushed
straight into them, though they were greater than he expected.
He had made himself hated by a multitude: first by his colleagues, the
pontiffs, whose vanity, doctrines and interests were wounded, then by
the rivals he supplanted and even some of his own adherents, to whom he
had not hesitated to tell the unvarnished truth. For he was not the man
to exchange easy compliments with people who praised him, and gratitude
was the least of his faults. He took what was due to him and he gave
only what he thought was deserved--which was not very much. Solange
alone excepted, the title of benefactor did not greatly impress him. No
favoritism! So he could only expect to be attacked hard and defended
weakly. He embarrassed the manœuvres of the profiteers of the ideal.
Every time some noble, philanthropic, filibustering scheme was
organized, they could be sure that he would place himself in opposition
to it. He took a scandalous pleasure in punching the noses of the
virtuous at their sly tricks. In this way he had earned in respectable
quarters, the (_sotto voce_) reputation of a bad character, a destroyer,
an anarchist. These whispers had not yet ventured as far as the public
ear--the monstrous ear of _Pasquino_, the slanderous press. They were
awaiting the right moment. _Eccolo_! The beautiful occasion had
come! . . . It was an explosion of patriotic anger. All the papers took
part in it. The echo of the public indignation reached Parliament, where
immortal words were pronounced vindicating the right of the poor to a
plentiful family. A few exalted souls proposed a law that would deal
rigorously with all propaganda that tended directly or indirectly to
reduce the population. The exaggerations of a free-and-easy press, in
which the egoism of the pleasure-lover took precedence over all
humanitarian reasons, furnished arguments to discredit the cause.
Philippe found his adherents among the enemies of society. To every
volley he replied straightforwardly himself in one of the great
newspapers. But there was danger that this tribune would fail him, for
letters of protest flooded the paper. He gave lectures; he spoke at
riotous meetings. His vehemence equalled that of his opponents. They
were on the watch for some imprudent utterance that would enable them to
overpower him. But this formidable wrestler remained the master of his
passions and did not allow himself to be carried an inch beyond what he
wanted to say. He achieved an enormous notoriety; he was all the rage
with some and an object of scorn and hatred to others. He found it easy
to breathe in the dust of the combat.
In the midst of this tempest of what account was Noémi?
XLIV
Noémi hastened homewards. She was remembering Philippe's first meeting
with Annette, when she had been present--her own stupidity and their
treachery. She was furious. Scarcely had she found herself between the
walls of her apartment than she gave way to her rage. It was like a
water-spout. In the twinkling of an eye everything was laid waste.
Anyone who saw her, weeping, convulsed, would have had difficulty in
recognizing her, with her pretty face distorted with anger, biting and
tearing her handkerchief, making havoc of the papers on her husband's
writing-table, avenging her suffering on the little dog that ran to her
to be petted and the paroquet she was ready to strangle. . . . But she
had taken care to lock herself in. The rôle of Fury should certainly be
played in private. It was not beautifying. It made her look hard, old
and worn out. But to see herself in the mirror, without witnesses, ugly
and wicked, did not displease her; it almost gave her comfort. This,
too, was a form of vengeance. She began to pity herself and her face,
and, distracted from her violence by this compassion, she rolled on the
carpet and sobbed loudly. . . . This could not last long, for Philippe
would be coming in; she must hurry, take double mouthfuls, weep quickly,
weep for all she was worth. . . . She continued to sob in great gusts,
but the worst part of the storm was already over. The little dog
returned, unresentfully, and licked her ear. She hugged him, moaning,
and sitting on the carpet petted one of his feet and fell silent. She
was thinking. Suddenly, with her mind made up, she rose to her feet,
fastened up the hair that had fallen over her eyes, picked up the
objects that were strewn about the room, rearranged the scattered
papers, carefully composed her face and her dress. Then she waited.
Philippe found her calm and appreciative. At first she tried the
simplest weapons. In the course of their talk she innocently let fall a
few offensive words about her detested rival. In a sweet voice she said
two or three atrocious things about Annette--about her outward
appearance, of course. The moral question was secondary; even when the
spirit is what one loves, it is the body that makes love. Noémi was
expert in finding in a woman's beauty the things that make her seem
ugly, things which, once they have been seen, cannot be forgotten. This
time she surpassed herself. To poison the image of the rival in the eyes
of a lover is an inspiring task. . . . Philippe never flinched.
Then she changed her tactics. She defended Annette against various bits
of gossip; she praised her virtues. (Eulogies have no consequences!) She
tried to make him talk, to make him take off his mask, to open battle
with her on the field where she was awaiting him. But Philippe remained
as indifferent to the good things she said as to the evil.
She brought into action all her amorous allurements. She tried to arouse
Philippe's jealousy; she threatened, laughingly, to pay him back if he
ever deceived her and to pay him double. He pleaded a business
engagement and got up to go.
Then anger seized her again. She cried out that she knew everything,
that he was Annette's lover. She threatened him, upbraided him, besought
him, talked about killing herself. He shrugged his shoulders and,
turning his back, walked to the door without a word. She ran after him,
caught him by the arms, forced him to turn around and, with her face
against his, in an altered voice, said, "Philippe! . . . You don't love
me any longer. . . ."
He looked her in the eyes and said, "No!" Then he went out.
If Noémi had been distracted, she now became possessed. For hours her
head whirled with insane fury. She thought of every absurd, ferocious
means of avenging herself. To kill Philippe. To kill Annette. To kill
herself. To dishonor Philippe. To defame Annette. To make Annette suffer.
To throw vitriol over Annette. . . . What joy to disfigure her! . . .
To strike at her through her honor. To strike at her through her
child. To write, send anonymous letters. . . . Feverishly she scribbled
a few lines, tore them up, began again, tore them up again. . . . She
was just as ready to set fire to the house.
But she did not do so. Calming herself gradually, she collected her
strength and the true genius of a woman in love came into play.
She saw plainly that she could do nothing with Philippe directly. He
would pay her for this some day! . . . But for the moment he was
inaccessible. Consequently, she must deal with Annette. . . . She went
to see Annette.
She did not know what she was going to do. She was ready for anything.
She had taken her revolver in her hand-bag. On the way she rehearsed in
her mind scenes that she later discarded. For her instinct led her to
foresee Annette's replies and correct her plan in accordance with them.
Even at the last moment she changed everything. A flood of rage rose in
her as she climbed the stairs, panting, almost running; and through the
material of the bag she clenched the weapon in her fist. But when the
door opened and she found herself before Annette, she understood at a
glance. . . . One gesture, one word of violence, would exasperate
Annette, and she would be all the more implacable in following her
passion.
All trace of Noémi's anger instantly disappeared. And red, as if she
were out of breath from having climbed the stairs too quickly, she flung
herself, laughing, on Annette's neck. Surprised at this outburst,
annoyed by this embrace, Annette kept her reserved manner. The other,
once in the apartment, walked unceremoniously into the bedroom and
rapidly assured herself that Philippe was not there. Then she sat down
on the arm of the chair and addressed little, tender words to Annette,
who stood stiffly beside her. As she talked she even passed one arm
about Annette's waist and played with her collar. Suddenly she
burst into tears. . . . At first Annette thought she was still
pretending. . . . But, no! This was serious; these were real
tears. . . .
"Noémi, what is the matter with you?"
With her face pressed against Annette's breast, she did not answer; she
continued to weep. Annette, bending over this great grief, tried to calm
her. Finally Noémi raised her head and moaned through her sobs: "Give
him back to me."
"Who?" asked Annette, startled.
"You know!"
"But . . ."
"You know, you know! I know you love him and I know he loves you. . . .
Why did you take him away from me?"
More tears. Annette, with stricken heart, heard Noémi plaintively
recall the confidence, the affection, she had shown her, and she could
not answer, for she was reproaching herself; and these sad reproaches,
which had no violence in them, struck her heart. But when Noémi said
bitterly that Annette had abused her friendship to deceive her, she
tried to clear herself, saying that love had come in spite of her and
had overpowered her. There was nothing pleasant for Noémi in these
confessions, and she endeavored to turn them aside; she pretended to
help Annette to justify herself and seemed to believe that Philippe was
chiefly to blame. She spoke of him in the most outrageous way to assuage
her own bitterness and make him odious or at least suspect in Annette's
eyes. But the latter rose to his defence. She would not allow anyone to
accuse Philippe of being the aggressor. He had been frank. She, she
alone, had committed the error of not permitting him to confess. Then
Noémi, filled with hatred, redoubled her accusations. Annette opposed
her. The dispute grew bitter. One would have said that, of the two,
Annette was Philippe's real wife. And Noémi seemed suddenly to become
aware of this. She lost all her discretion and cried out in a new rage,
"I forbid you to speak to him! I forbid you! He is mine."
Annette, shrugging her shoulders, said, "He belongs neither to you nor
to me. He belongs to himself."
"He is mine," Noémi repeated passionately. "I shall keep him." She was
claiming her rights.
"There are no rights in love," said Annette, harshly.
"He is mine," Noémi cried again. "I shall keep him."
"I am his," Annette replied. "You have kept nothing."
The two women glared at each other with hatred in their eyes, Annette
steeled in egoism and hardness, Noémi burning to strike Annette. She
hated every inch of her, from her head to her feet. She wanted to insult
her ugliness, lash her with the cruellest words, the most irreparable
words. It would have been such a satisfaction. But she stopped short;
she would have lost too much!
Stooping down quickly to pick up the bag that had fallen at her feet,
she pulled out the revolver and turned it . . . against whom? . . . She
did not know yet. . . . Against herself! . . . At first it was a feint,
but when Annette flung herself upon her to seize her arm what had been
pretence became real. The two women struggled; Noémi fell upon her
knees with Annette bending over her. It was not easy to restrain the
desperate little creature. She really meant to kill herself now. . . .
Although, if the weapon had touched Annette's bosom, with what delight
she would have fired at her. . . . But Annette struck her hand aside,
the gun went off, the bullet lodged in the wall. And Noémi never knew
which of the two she had aimed at. . . .
She had dropped the weapon and she struggled no more. The nervous
reaction had set in. She fell now, sobbing and prostrated, at Annette's
feet: she was in hysterics. From the first Annette had suspected
intuitively that Noémi was acting a part . . . up to a certain point.
(But does one ever know just to what point?) And she had been dully
irritated by this nonsense about suicide. . . . But how could she doubt
the suffering of this poor little broken thing? She struggled to remain
hard, to turn away, but she could not; she was ashamed of her suspicions
and, with her heart full of pity, she knelt down by Noémi, lifted up
her head, tried to console her, saying maternally, "My child. . . .
Come, come! . . ."
She took her in her strong arms and raised her up. She felt this young
body, shaken by sobs, abandoning itself, defenceless, and she thought,
"Is it possible that I am the one who causes this suffering?"
Another voice said to her, "Would you not buy your love at the cost of
any amount of suffering?"
"My own suffering, yes."
"Your own and other people's. Why should the others be privileged?"
She looked at Noémi as she held her, half-fainting. . . . So light! . . .
A bird! . . . It seemed to her that she was her daughter and, without
quite meaning to do so, she pressed her in her arms. Noémi opened her
eyes and Annette thought, "If she were in my place would she spare me?"
But Noémi turned towards her a broken look. Annette laid her in her
_chaise longue_, and, standing beside her, placed her hand on her head.
(Noémi shivered at the hateful contact, but she did not show it.) She
asked her, as if she were addressing a weeping child, "So you love him
very much?"
"I love nothing but him."
"I, too, love him."
Noémi gave a jealous start. "Oh," she said harshly, "but I am young.
You, you" (she hesitated), "you have had your life, you can get on
without him."
Annette repeated to herself, bitterly, the words she had not uttered:
"It is because I shall soon be old that I cling to this last hour of
youth, this supreme light, and will not give it up. . . . Ah! If I had
the treasure of youth before me as you have!"
But she added, sadly, "I should make a mess of it a second time, I
suppose."
Noémi had seen Annette's face darken and she was afraid she had
imperilled the frail advantages she had just gained. She said hastily,
"I know quite well that he loves you, that you are beautiful"--("Liar!"
thought Annette)--"that you are superior to me in many things that he
likes. I cannot even hate you because, in spite of everything, I love
you"--("Liar! Liar!" repeated Annette)--"The match is not equal. It
isn't fair! No . . . I am only a poor, weeping woman. I don't amount to
anything. I know it. . . . But I love him, I love him, I can't live
without him. What do you think will become of me if you take him away?
Why did he love me once if it was only to abandon me? I can't endure
it. He is my whole life. Everything else is nothing to me."
There was nothing false in her tone now, and Annette pitied her again.
She was insensible to the rights Noémi invoked over her husband; she
did not believe in the rights of one being over another, in these
contracts of mutual proprietorship that people sign for life. But she
was distressed by these tricks of cruel nature who, when she separates
two hearts that have loved each other, never removes love from both
hearts at once--no, but rather takes pains that one of the two shall
cease to love before the other, so that the most loving is always
sacrificed. And it was hateful to her to further the schemes of the
great torturer. "Life belongs to the strongest. Yes, love does not
hesitate. To attain its end it tramples everything else under foot. Woe
to the weak! . . . But why is it that I can't say this? I should like
to, but the words stick in my throat, I cannot. It revolts me. Is it
because I do not love enough? I am old, as she says. I belong in the
ranks of the weak. . . . No! No! No! It's a trick! . . . By what right
does she come and step between happiness and me? I will not give up to
her my bit of happiness! . . . Her tears, what are her tears to
me? . . . I will trample on her!"
But as she looked angrily at Noémi lying there, Noémi, who was
watching her through her tears, took the hand, the arm that hung down by
the back of the chair, pressed it against her cheek and begged, "Let me
keep him!"
Annette tried to free herself. Noémi held her fast. Rising in her
chair, she slid her two hands up Annette's arm, forcing her to bend over
and look at her. "Let me keep him!"
Annette snatched herself away from the fingers that gripped her. She
rebelled. "No! No! I will not. He needs me."
"He needs nothing but himself," said Noémi, bitterly. "He loves nothing
but himself. He finds his pleasure in you as he once found it in me. He
will leave you as he left me. He is not attached to anything."
She judged him hardly and profoundly. Annette was struck by her
intelligence. With what acuteness, born of bitterness and suffering, had
he been read to the depths by this little creature who seemed so
frivolous and heedless! Some of her terrible observations corresponded
only too well with the apprehensions that her own experiences had
awakened in Annette. "And yet you love him?" she said.
"I love him. He does not need me. It is I who need him. . . . Ah! Do you
suppose I don't suffer in needing a man who has no need of me, a man who
despises me, whom I despise? . . . I do despise him! I despise him! But
I can't live without him. . . . Why did I ever know him? It was I who
wanted him. I wanted him, I caught him. . . . And I am the one who is
caught. If only, if only I had never known him! Ah, but I can't wish
that! . . . I haven't the strength. I am too much in love. He holds me
completely. I hate him. I hate love. Why, why does one love?"
She stopped, exhausted, with her hunted eyes wandering, seeking to the
right, to the left, a way of escape. They bowed their heads, these two
women, enslaved under the yoke of the savage force.
Noémi took up her refrain in a dull, heavy tone, "Let me keep him."
Annette felt a will as tenacious and adhesive as a devilfish clinging to
her limbs with its arms covered with suckers. She snatched herself away
from it again and cried, "I will not."
There was a flash of anger in Noémi's eyes and her fingers clenched.
Then in a soft, plaintive voice, she said, "Love him! Let him love you!
But don't take him away from me. Let us both keep him, you and I."
Annette made a gesture of repulsion.
Noémi's fury flashed up again. "Do you think it doesn't disgust me? You
disgust me. I detest you. But I don't want to lose him."
Annette moved away from Noémi and said, "I do not detest you. You are
suffering and I am suffering. But it is base to divide in love. I am
willing to be the victim. I am willing to be the executioner. I am not
willing to be base. To save what I love I am not willing to surrender
half of it. I give everything. I want everything. Or I want nothing."
Noémi, clenching her teeth, cried from the depths of her heart.
"Nothing!" (For even while she was offering to yield a share, she
counted on regaining everything.)
Then, with a bound, she rose from her chair, ran to Annette as she stood
there, and, falling on her knees, clasped her legs. "Forgive me! I don't
know, I don't know what I am asking. I don't know what I want. But I am
unhappy. I cannot endure it. . . . What am I to do? Tell me! Help me!"
"Help you! I!" said Annette.
"You. To whom can I go for help? I am alone. Alone with that man who is
not interested in you, even when he loves you, in whom you cannot put
any trust. . . . And, before he came, a mother who was interested in
nothing but herself, in her pleasures. . . . No one to advise me. ... I
haven't a single friend. . . . When I saw you I thought you would be
one. And you have been my worst enemy. . . . Why have you done me this
injury?"
Annette was overwhelmed. "My poor child, it wasn't my fault. I didn't
wish it. . . ."
Noémi seized upon this compassionate word, "Your child, you said. . . .
Yes, be a mother, an older sister to me! Don't hurt me! Advise me. Tell
me what I should do. I don't want to lose him. . . . Tell me, tell
me. . . . I will do anything you say. . . ."
She was speaking only half falsely. She was so accustomed to shamming
what she felt that she felt what she shammed. And her love, her grief,
her need of Annette, her hope of touching her, were certainly real. Even
this confidence she showed in her--the last card she had to play. She
played it with a passion of despair. And even as she unbosomed herself,
she did not lose sight of the disquietude that Annette's face could not
conceal. Annette was weakening. Noémi's self-abandonment disarmed her.
She no longer had the strength to reply. She was not deceived, however.
The sugary tone of some of her adversary's inflections threw light on
the latter's duplicity. She let her talk. She read her depths. She was
thinking, "What shall I do? Sacrifice myself? What a sell! I will not. I
don't like this woman. She lies, she hates me. But she is suffering."
And she stroked the head of the kneeling enemy, who continued to groan
and watch her, following her vacillating will as if it were her prey,
with a shiver of fear, of acute breathless half-sanguinary joy, and who,
at the right moments, pressing to her lips those hands that she would
gladly have bitten, repeated, tirelessly, "Let me keep him!"
Annette, with lowered brows, wanted to drive her away. She saw in those
eyes trickery and grief, falsehood and love, a desperate hope. She
smiled with weariness, pity and disgust for herself, for them both--for
everything; and, turning aside her head, she said in a moment of
weakness, "Keep him!"
No sooner had she said it than she wished to take it back. But
Noémi bounded to her feet and embraced Annette with frantic
protestations. . . . (She had never hated her so much! At last she
had her! . . . Had her?) Annette was already saying, "No, no! . . ."
Noémi pretended not to hear. She called her darling, her best friend.
She vowed eternal gratitude, eternal love. She laughed and cried. But
she did not waste her time in vain effusions. She wanted to know what
Annette would do to get rid of Philippe.
Annette rebelled. "I said nothing."
"You did say it. You did say it. You promised me. . . ."
"A word that escaped me. . . . You dragged it from me by surprise."
"No, you can't take it back. You said 'Keep him.' You said it, Annette.
Tell me that you said it! You can't deny it. . . ."
"Leave me, leave me," said Annette, exhausted. "Don't torment me. I
can't. I can't."
She sat down, crushed, while Noémi, standing beside her, continued to
harass her. Their rôles had changed. Annette refused to give him up;
her love had taken root in her. Noémi did not care about this. Annette
could keep her love if she did not keep Philippe. She wanted Annette to
break with him at once, without waiting. And she could suggest ways of
breaking with him; her head was full of them. She urged her, cajoled
her, begged her, tried to force her, embraced her, deafened her with her
flow of words; she appealed to her generous heart, besought, adjured,
demanded, dictated the replies. . . .
Annette, rigid and frozen, would not say another word. She did not even
try to stop this torrent. Her lips were tightly pressed together, her
eyes dull. . . . At last Noémi became silent in the face of this
immobility. She took her hands--they were cold and damp. "Answer,
answer!" she said.
Without looking at her, Annette murmured, "Leave me." (Her voice was so
low that Noémi read it on her lips rather than heard it.)
"You want me to go away?" she replied.
Annette nodded.
"I am going, but you have promised?"
Annette repeated wearily, "Leave me, leave me. . . . I need to be
alone. . . ."
Noémi hastily rearranged her hair before the mirror. Then, turning
towards the door, she said, "Good-bye, you have promised. . . ."
Annette made a final gesture of protest, "No, I have promised nothing."
Noémi felt herself again flooded with anger. After all this effort! But
her instinct told her that she must not move too quickly or stretch the
cord too tight. . . . All the same, the blow had its effect. She left.
She had seen the weakness of the enemy. She would trample on her.
XLV
Annette remained for some time motionless in the spot where Noémi had
left her. She was exhausted after this long scene. She would have
resisted better if the attack had not surprised her at a moment when she
was already shaken by the double wear and tear of passion and incessant
work, the uninterrupted fever aroused in her stormy soul by her
participation in Philippe's struggles, the repressed remorse, the
anguish that was concealed beneath her exhaustion of mind and body. This
weakness gave Noémi her strength. She found the field prepared and an
ally in her adversary.
Noémi herself played little part in Annette's anxieties. She cared
little for her as a woman. As a rival she did not care about her at all.
She considered her false, perfidious, heartless, and with jealous
injustice she now denied what she had at first enjoyed, her charm.
Everything about her seemed factitious except her grief. Besides, it
mattered very little whether it was Noémi or someone else. . . . "She
is a living creature who suffers, and I, I cause this suffering. . . ."
And a strange pity preyed upon Annette's heart.
This tendency had developed, during the last few years, from the sight
of so much misery, from her connection with those two deaths, Odette's
and Ruth's. She had been mysteriously shaken by them. A weakness. She
called it unhealthy and perhaps it was so. One could not live if one had
to pause over the sufferings of the world. All happiness is nourished on
the unhappiness of someone else. Life devours life, as larvæ devour the
living prey in which they are laid. And everyone drinks the blood of
all. . . . Annette had once drunk it without thinking of it, and this
blood brought warmth and joy to her body. While she was young she had
never thought of the victims. From the moment when she had said to
herself, as she thought of them, "I must be hard," she had begun to
weaken. She felt this; she could only be hard intermittently now. She
was growing old. Ten years earlier she would not have had a moment's
hesitation because of the harm she was doing Noémi. "My happiness is my
right. Woe to anyone who touches it! . . ." She would have had no need
to seek for pretexts. Now, in order to snatch from life her share of
happiness, she had to find other reasons than her happiness. She was no
longer sufficient unto herself. She had found the strength to brush
aside, without scruple, the other less fortunate competitors in the hunt
for bread. This bread was her son's; she was upheld by the animal
instinct that makes a creature bristle to defend its young and feed them
on the flesh of its fellow-animals. But the other animal instinct, the
love of self--taking and keeping for oneself--was dying down and only
asserted itself now by fits and starts. Maternity, by usurping the place
of this other instinct, had partially destroyed it.
In the present crisis her son was no help to her. Far from it! He was
one anxiety and remorse the more. Annette could not lie to herself, her
passion took no account of her son. She felt guilty towards him, and she
had taken pains to hide everything from him. She knew the child. In the
past she had observed the jealousy that led him to drive his claws into
those whom she loved. She did not blame him for this. She was glad that
he wanted to be the only one to love her. . . . But to-day she was
defending her treasure--against whom? Against her treasure! Passion
against passion. She did not wish to sacrifice either of the two. And as
both of them were jealous, obstinate, domineering, she had to hide from
each the secret of the other. Had she succeeded? Marc detested the
"other fellow." He knew nothing--of that she was sure--but although he
did not know, had not his instinct told him? She was ashamed to conceal
herself and she was even more ashamed that he might suspect. . . . No,
he suspected nothing; it was for other reasons that he hated
Philippe. . . .
As for Philippe himself, he did not do Marc the honor of thinking about
him at all. In marrying Annette he would have been quite willing to take
two or three brats into the bargain. It made no difference to him either
in his feelings or financially; there was no need to be grateful to him
for it. He did not dislike Marc; he thought him fairly bright, rather
lazy, not very keen; he might have subjected him to a sharp discipline,
but he felt no need to concern himself with the child, and he made this
plain. He had a way of talking of him, a rough humor that wounded
Annette to the quick. Accustomed to the coarse things of life, he had no
idea of the consideration that a proud, sensitive nature demands, of the
things that offend its sense of decency. In the bluntest, rudest terms
he would give the boy, in his mother's presence, harsh warnings and
medical advice that made both the child and the mother blush. The mother
more than the child. Philippe's theory was that nothing must be
concealed from the boy. This was also Annette's theory. And Marc's as
well. But there are ways of putting things! Annette suffered in her very
flesh. Marc, who was humiliated, stored up the bitterest resentment.
Between him and Philippe there never could be anything but
misunderstanding. Their two temperaments were too different. Annette
could foresee the clashes, the endless discords. A terrible thought for
her, the passionate lover and mother!
There was no one to whom she could turn for help in making up her mind.
She had to decide alone, egoistically. Well, didn't she have the right
to think of herself too? A right is nothing if one does not maintain it.
Was she maintaining hers? . . . Yes, at moments, like a lioness, when
she saw youth, happiness, life about to be swallowed up. . . .
Happiness? . . . There was no question of happiness in a union with a
man like Philippe! Something less or something more, incomparably more
for a woman like Annette: a full, bold, intelligent life, not a life of
repose slumbering in its security, but great winds, storms, action,
struggles--with the world--with him--a life of trouble and fatigue--but
together--life--a life worthy of being lived, with death at the end,
when one was worn out and happy to leave the hard, fertile days behind,
happy to have had them. . . . That was glorious!! But one must have the
strength. . . . She had it, enough to carry the burden, once it was well
adjusted, with her head up, to the end. But in order to adjust it she
had to be helped and even forced a little. Philippe must place the
burden on her head, impose it on her. He must say, "Carry it! For me!
You are necessary to me. . . ." With these words she could surmount all
her remorse. . . . Was she necessary to Philippe? He had said so during
the first days when he had wanted to win her. He no longer said it, and
Annette would have liked to hear it again and again, to be convinced.
She saw him full of himself, used to working alone, fighting alone,
extricating himself alone, putting all his pride into it; he would have
felt humiliated if he had had to seek help. So she said to herself,
"What am I good for?" It is the bounty of love not only to give us faith
in someone else but to give us back faith in ourself. May it be
charitable to us!
This was a feeling that Philippe seldom entertained. Like most of his
kind, this great doctor of the body paid little attention to maladies of
the soul. He never gave a thought to the doubts that preyed upon this
woman whose body lay by his side. He should not have left her the time
to question herself. . . . Make an end of it, marry her! . . . Annette
would whisper to him softly, "Let's go away together, so that I can
never take myself back!"
But Philippe was no longer in a hurry. He was passionate, yes, but he
had many other passions that were of far more importance to him: his
ideas, his struggles, the controversy that was absorbing him at the
moment when Annette would have liked him to think of nothing but
herself. He had no intention of stirring up a conjugal scandal and
hampering himself with a noisy divorce-case before he had emerged from
the fire of the present battle. He had made up his mind to keep his
promises. But later! Annette must have patience. It was easy enough for
him to be patient. He enjoyed her. He was quite willing to leave things
as they were. He flattered himself that he could impose the same
forbearance upon Noémi. He flattered himself too much! He did not wish
to see how intolerable this waiting was to the two women. . . .
"Naturally," thought Annette, "a man--a man worthy for us to love--will
never love us as much as his ideas, his science, his art, his politics.
A naïve egoism that thinks it is disinterested because it incarnates
itself in ideas. The egoism of the brain, more murderous than that of
the heart. How many hearts have been broken by it!"
She was not surprised at this, for she knew life; but it hurt her. If it
had only been a question of suffering she would have accepted it,
however, perhaps even with that secret enjoyment of self-sacrifice which
is familiar to women and which they willingly consider the price of
love. But not to the point of sacrificing her self-respect and her son's
honor in a humiliating situation. It hurt her that Philippe did not feel
this. Of course he was not sensitive. She knew what he thought of women
and love. He could not help thinking as he did; he had been shaped by
his education and his rough experiences, and it was for this that she
loved him. But she had flattered herself with the hope that she would
change him. Instead, she perceived that day by day she was losing her
power over him. And worst of all, over herself. Annette felt herself
invaded by the demon of sensuality; day by day she became less the
mistress of her will, more enslaved.
The duel of passion only preserves its nobility as long as there is
equality between the combatants. When one is conquered the other abuses
his victory and the vanquished becomes debased. Annette was at that
poignant moment which precedes and determines defeat. She knew it: her
strength would not sustain her any longer. Philippe knew this also, and
his attitude showed it. It made no difference that he cared just as
much--perhaps more, for Annette; he showed less consideration for her
and he made brutal use of what belonged to him. He treated her like a
conquered province. With all his days absorbed in his regular and
passionate life of toil and his nights by Noémi (for he wished to keep
up appearances), he saw Annette only during brief and burning
encounters. No intimacy of the heart. He maintained, cynically, that she
had the best of it all.
She wanted to tear herself away from this degradation in which her
senses were accomplices, but every day they became more imperious. Once,
when she wished to flee from their tyranny, they refused to obey with a
violence that dismayed her. A woman of such fervent energy who, after
having severely disciplined and repressed her passions for ten years,
opens the door of their cage at the most fiery moment of the stormy
summer, runs the risk of being destroyed.
Annette could only retrieve herself by forcing Philippe to respect the
wife she wished to be--the companion "_rei humanœ atque divinœ_"--the
equal. She asked Philippe, she besought him in anguish, to give her up
till the time came when they could love and marry openly. Philippe
refused: he was as unwilling to be hampered in his passions as in his
public life. He was unwilling either to do without Annette or to marry
her at a time that did not suit him. He pretended to consider Annette's
attempt to leave him as a rather degrading manœuvre to attach him to
her. And this although he knew very well what a whole-hearted gift she
had made of herself! She was insulted by the outrageous suspicion--and
she gave herself again with a despairing passion and disgust.
As for himself, he would see nothing of all this. He came back,
demanding his own selfish rights as a lover, never realizing that,
although she consented to them, every one of these carnal victories left
a wound in his partner.
Annette was degraded in her own eyes. She ceased to give herself; she
prostituted herself to love. Unless she flung herself off the slope down
which her mad body was sliding, she was lost. . . .
One afternoon she fled. She went to Sylvie's and asked her to let her
child stay with her for a few days, pleading as an excuse that she had
to go away. Sylvie asked for no explanation; one glance was enough. This
woman, whose curiosity was so often indiscreet, and who was unable in so
many ways to understand her sister's ideas, had an instinct for love and
its tragic tricks. In the days of the old intimacy with Annette, she had
never confided to her the secrets of her own love affairs, and she did
not expect Annette to open herself to her. She knew that every woman has
a right to her hours of silence, her great hours, and that at such times
no one can help her. One must save oneself alone or perish alone. She
offered her sister the shelter of a little house she owned in the
suburbs, near Jouy-en-Josas. Annette was touched, and she kissed her and
accepted. In this little rustic house, on the edge of the woods, she
shut herself up for a fortnight. She had not even told Marc where she
was going. Her retreat was known only to Sylvie.
Scarcely had she left Paris and its enchanted circle than she perceived
the excesses of the past few weeks and passed judgment on them. She was
terrified by them. She, this mad creature, this miserable slave drunk
with her own servitude! Passion, the destroyer of the soul! . . . Its
clasp loosened. She breathed again, this evening, she saw and felt once
more the fields, the woods, the calm of the earth. For two months an
opaque red veil had concealed the living world from her. Even those
closest to her, her son, had come to seem far away. . . . But when she
reached the house in the fields, the veil was torn away in the rays of
the setting sun. She heard the bells, the birds, the voices of the
peasants; she wept with relief. . . . In the middle of the night,
however--she had fallen asleep exhausted--she awoke suddenly with a pang
of anguish. She felt about her throat the coils of the serpent.
She spent her days in a succession of humiliating tortures, bland
impulses, moments of sudden, keen, absolute clairvoyance that pierced
the great deception. She had a perpetual feeling of insecurity. Even
though she was prepared and armed, a mere nothing would have caused her
to give way. She prolonged her absence.
She was not without danger of imperilling her situation. In this sudden
eclipse, she was losing her lessons. The little clientele that she had
gathered with so much trouble was passing into other hands. Sylvie
forwarded letters and information to her sister, but she added nothing
but good news about the child's health. She avoided giving her any
advice. Annette alone was to judge.
Annette knew full well that she ought to return, but she still
lingered. . . . It was in vain that she stayed on; she could not
prevent her thoughts from returning to Philippe. What was he
doing? Wasn't he hunting for her? . . . From him nothing had
come. She dreaded any news, and she sought for it. She dismissed
him from her mind, she thought she had freed herself. But he had
not given her up and suddenly he rose before her.
One evening she was wandering, idle, full of haunting thoughts, under
the arbor that skirted the low wall of the garden, when, between the
branches, she saw an automobile coming towards her in the distance down
the white road. And she thought, "It's he!" . . . She stepped back out
of sight. The car drove past along the wall to the end of the little
yard. Annette, with her heart tightening, listened to its roaring, heard
it slow down. Thirty paces farther on the road forked and the car
stopped. Annette, behind the screen of leaves, ventured to glance, out
and saw the back of the man who was hesitating, turning round, exploring
the horizon. She recognized him. Terror seized her. She ran and flung
herself behind a hedge of box and sank down upon the ground, her nails
scratching the earth; she lowered her head and the blood flooded her
cheeks as she thought, "He is going to take me again!" She wanted to say
"No" and her blood cried "Yes!" She felt the dry turf crumbling under
her fingers, and, with her face buried in the boxwood, she tried to stop
the roaring of the blood in her ears so that she could listen to the
steps on the other side of the wall. She heard the car starting off
again. She ran to the corner of the garden on the road and cried,
"Philippe!"
The car disappeared at the turn.
The next day Annette went back to Paris. Did she know what she wanted or
what she was going to do? Sylvie looked at her pityingly and said to
herself, "It's no better." But she did not question her.
Annette, full of gratitude, remained seated without speaking, her body
broken with fatigue, in a corner of her sister's room, seeking peace in
this warm presence. Sylvie came and went, leaving her to recover herself
in the silence. At last Annette got up to go home. As she was about to
leave, Sylvie, placing her hands on either side of her forehead, looked
at her a long time, shook her head and said, "If you can't do otherwise,
submit; don't struggle any longer. It will pass. Everything passes, the
good, the bad and we ourselves. . . . How little it all matters!"
But to Annette it mattered a great deal. The question was not merely
between Philippe and herself. It was between her and herself. To return
to Philippe and confess herself conquered by him would have given her a
bitter pleasure. But what terrified her was a deeper, more intimately
personal defeat that would have no witness but herself. She carried her
mortal adversary within her. Never once, for many years, had she failed
to realize this, though from pride and prudence perhaps she had pleased
herself by not thinking of it. This gulf of desire and sensual delight
that a former life (her father's?) had dug within her. . . . Everything
that gave her strength and pride of life, her will, her healthy soul,
the free, pure breath that bathed her lungs, everything was being sucked
down into it. _Mors antmœ_. . . . And Annette, whose reason did not
seem to believe in the soul, did not wish her soul to die.
Carried back to Paris, where Philippe was, like a captive on some
Assyrian bas-relief, with a rope about her neck, she did not look for
Philippe. She avoided him.
Philippe, as much possessed by Annette as Annette was by him, had come
and knocked at her door in her absence. He was indignant over this
sudden departure. He would not admit that she could escape him. He tried
to find her address. He had Sylvie's and he went to see her. The first
glance was a declaration of war. Sylvie had understood. Armed with a
bitter defiance, she sized Philippe up with her own eyes and not with
those of Annette--a man who would be dangerous as an enemy and more
dangerous as a lover, the kind of man who destroys what he loves. She
knew that sort and she would never have anything to do with them. To
Philippe's peremptory questions regarding Annette's whereabouts, she
replied coldly that she knew nothing about them, taking pains that he
should see that she knew everything. Philippe made an effort to conceal
his annoyance. He tried to wheedle her. Sylvie remained stolid. He went
away in a rage.
He wasted no time in beating the bushes for her, and it never entered
his head to cover himself with dust travelling in a car to
Jouy-en-Josas. He did not even look for Annette. He had no intention of
sacrificing his days in a vain pursuit. He was sure she would come back.
But that she should fail him, that she should allow herself to upset him
at such a moment as this, was more than he could forgive; and his
resentment, no less than a furious need of diversion, flung him back
upon his wife. It was a provisional reconciliation and humiliating
enough to this woman who was only a substitute. For it was only for want
of something better; he was waiting for the other one.
But Noémi was not going to be proud when her advantage opposed it. She
did not waste her time. The ordeal had revealed to her former
mistakes. She had realized that to hold a man it is not enough to make
him love you. You must flatter his pride and his whims. Philippe was
astonished at the interest she showed in his present campaign,
astonished that she had even taken the trouble to find out about it. He
suspected her motives, but whether Noémi's interest was real or not, it
was very agreeable to him. It pleased him to discover Noémi's
intelligence. She no longer concealed it. It was through this that
Annette had ousted her. She made use of these weapons and improved on
them. Unlike Annette, she did not trouble to go to the bottom of the
dispute. She left this to her husband and master. She limited her rôle
to suggesting the most skilful tactics for assuring him the victory.
Philippe admired her ingenuity.
At this moment the controversy was at the most violent stage. Noémi,
overcoming the repugnance and boredom that she felt at these quarrels
between men, perceived that she must fling herself resolutely into the
arena. She set to work upholding, with the wittiest effrontery, in
drawing-rooms, the daring arguments her husband had launched. Her grace,
her humor, her laughing enthusiasm, her impishness, her passionate
earnestness, caused some slight scandal and a great deal of amusement.
She won over to her side a number of young women who were delighted to
show how free they were from social prejudices. The skilful Noémi took
pains not to break with appearances. Even while she gave them the most
disrespectful raps, she contrived to procure indulgence for herself in
the camp of morality and respectable people. She gravely maintained that
the right of the poor to have no children had its counterpart in the
duty of the rich to supply the State and Society with them. It required
self-possession to say this and not lose her assurance, for during seven
years of married life she had never found the time to fulfil this duty
herself. But she was heroic. She discovered this now.
XLVI
Philippe was not slow in discovering that Annette had come back. He
tried to find her in her apartment at the hours when he knew she was
alone. But Annette distrusted herself. He found the door shut. In spite
of his resentment and his distractions, his passion had not weakened.
Annette's resistance exasperated him. He was not the man to let himself
be dismissed.
Annette caught sight of him a few steps away in the street. She turned
pale, but she did not try to escape from him. They approached each
other. He said, with decision, "You are going home. I am going with
you."
"No," she replied.
Together they entered a small square that backed upon a church. A dusty
tree barely concealed them from the stream of passers-by in the street.
They had to restrain themselves.
"You are afraid of me."
"No," she said, "of myself."
Philippe was burning with passion and resentment. But when his hard
glance encountered Annette's, which did not avoid him, he perceived the
suffering that she was firmly controlling. His anger melted, and in a
softened voice he asked, "Why did you run away?"
"Because you are killing me."
"Don't you know what it is to love?"
"I do know, and that is why I ran away. I am afraid of hating you."
"Well, hate me, if you like. Hating is a way of loving."
"Not for me," she said. "I can't endure it."
"You are not so weak that you can't endure both the good and evil of a
complete love."
"I am not so weak, Philippe. I want a complete love. Body and soul. I
don't want merely half."
"The soul is all nonsense," he said.
"Then to what purpose have you devoted all your energy? For what have
you sacrificed yourself, ever since you were born, if not to your Idea?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Delusion!" he said.
"You live by it. I have mine too. Don't kill it."
"What do you want?"
"I want us to avoid seeing each other till the day when we decide
whether we are to unite our lives or not."
"Why?"
"Because I don't want, I don't want to hide any longer. I don't want any
more sharing. I don't want it, I don't want it."
But she did not utter her deepest reason. ("If I gave in once more, I
should soon cease to have the will to desire anything else. I should no
longer belong to myself. I should be a toy that is broken after it has
been spoiled.")
But he was incapable of understanding this instinctive revolt against
one's enslavement to one's deadly desires. He could see in it nothing
but defiance and a feminine trick to get the best of him. If he did not
put this into words, he did not by any means conceal his feeling. When
Annette perceived this, she made an impetuous movement to leave him.
Philippe, trembling with impatience and the effort he was making not to
betray it to the eyes of passers-by, seized Annette's arm, pressed it
and said in a furious voice which he tried to muffle, "As for me, I will
not, will not give you up. I will see you. Be still! Don't answer. . . .
We can't talk here. . . . I shall come and see you this evening."
"No, no!" she said.
"I shall come," he said. "I cannot live without you. Nor can you live
without me."
"I can," she said, rebelliously.
"You lie!"
They struggled, without moving, in low, violent voices, lashing each
other's souls. They measured each other with their eyes. Philippe's gave
way. "Annette!" he besought her.
But her cheeks still burned with the brutal lie he had given her, the
shame of thinking that she really had lied. She stiffened, freed herself
from the hand that held her, and went away.
In the evening Philippe came. She had spent the whole day in terror of
this moment, in terror lest she might not have the strength to keep her
door shut. For she did not want to face again this pitiless passion. She
was convinced of the impossibility of living with this torch fastened to
her breast. She must tear it away while the strength still remained to
her. Did enough still remain? She loved him, she loved the flame that
was consuming her. The next day she would love the shame and the outrage
to which she had submitted. She blushed to admit it to herself, but even
in her revolt against him that morning there had been an element of
sensual delight.
She recognized his steps as they came up the stairs. She heard him ring
and did not move from her chair. He rang again and knocked. Annette,
with her arms hanging and her shoulders flung back, kept repeating to
herself, "No! No!"
Even had she wished to rise and open the door her breath would have
failed her.
She heard nothing more. Had he gone away? She was on her feet before she
had even thought of it. She slipped with tottering, noiseless steps to
the door. A board in the floor creaked. Annette stopped. Some seconds
passed. . . . Nothing stirred. But she was aware of Philippe's presence
watching behind the door. And Philippe knew that Annette was listening
on the other side. There was a heavy silence. They were spying on each
other. . . . Philippe's voice, close to the door, said, "Annette, you
are there. Open!"
Annette, leaning against the wall, felt her heart give way. She did not
answer.
"I know you are there. Don't try to hide! Annette, open! I must speak to
you."
He lowered his voice so as not to be heard on the stairway, but a flood
of mingled passions was rising in him. He was on the point of shaking
the door.
"I must see you. . . . Whether you wish it or not, I mean to come
in. . . ."
Silence.
"Annette, I hurt you this morning. Forgive me! . . . I want you. What do
you want me to do? Tell me. I will do it. . . ."
Silence. Silence.
Philippe clenched his fists. He could have strangled her. With his mouth
against the door, he growled, "You are mine. You haven't the right to
take yourself back.
"Think hard!" he said. "If you don't open, it is finished for ever.
"Annette, my Annette!" he said.
"Coward!" he said furiously. "You are afraid to see me. You are only
strong behind a closed door."
"Why do you torture me?" said a voice behind the door.
Philippe was silent.
"My friend," the tired voice went on, "you are killing me."
Philippe was touched, but his wounded pride was unwilling to show it.
"What do you want?" he said.
"Mercy!" she answered.
The tone of her voice touched him, but he did not understand. "What do
you need?"
"Leave me!" she said.
His anger sprang up again. "You are driving me away?"
"I am begging you for peace. Peace! . . . Leave me alone for a few
weeks."
"You don't love me any longer?"
"I am defending my love."
"Against whom? Against what?"
"Against you."
"Madness! . . . You will open to me."
"No!"
"I demand it. I want you."
"I am not your prey."
Quivering, she held herself straight and proud. Her eyes defied him
through the door. Though he could not see them, these eyes pierced him.
"Good-bye!" he cried to her.
She heard him go away, and her blood froze. He would never forgive.
XLVII
He did not forgive. Philippe did not return.
Annette kept repeating to herself, "It had to be, it had to be. . . ."
But she could not accept it. She longed to see Philippe once more, to
make him understand, gently--why had he been so furious?--that she was
not leaving him, that she was jealously defending her love, their love,
their common pride which he was destroying with unconscious brutality.
She wanted them both to have a chance to collect themselves, to recover
themselves amid the torrent of passion that was rolling them along with
its mud and foam, so that they might consider things and make up their
minds with perfect liberty. If he finally chose her, let it be in a
fashion compatible with his wife's and his own self-respect.
But Philippe would never forgive a woman he loved who had raised a
barrier against his will. If he had belonged to another social class he
would have violated her. Confined as he was in the cage of his own,
obliged to handle with tact this world he wished to master, his wounded
passion turned into an exasperated denial of itself. Losing the woman,
he destroyed the feeling he had for her. This, as he knew, would strike
her to the heart. For his instinct told him that, in spite of
everything, Annette loved him.
After three months of burning solitude, of a bitter and tormented
self-communion, of hope, renunciation, pride, servility of soul, inner
reproaches, after three months of hopeless, sterile waiting, Annette
learned one day from the delighted Solange of the happiness that had
fulfilled the longings of the Villard household. Noémi was about to
have a child.
XLVIII
Annette would have liked to take refuge with her child and hide her
unhappy head under the wing of the love which, they say, never fails
one--that of the son for the mother. Alas, it fails like all the others.
Annette could not look to Marc for a sign of tenderness or even
interest. Never had the young boy seemed colder, more indifferent, more
unfeeling. He saw nothing of the torments that ravaged his mother. To be
sure, she did her best to conceal them from him. But she concealed them
so badly! He might have seen them in her eyes, hollow as they were with
sleeplessness, in her pale face, in her thin hands, in her whole body,
which was wasted by cruel passion. He saw nothing. He did not even look.
He was concerned with nothing but himself, and what took place in him he
kept to himself. He saw her only at meal-times, when he never said a
word; the efforts Annette made to talk only made him more obstinate in
his silence. She could scarcely induce him to say good-morning and
good-night at the beginning and the end of the day, for he had made up
his mind that all such things were mere affectation, and he only agreed
to them--and that not every day--for the sake of peace. He would
hastily offer his mother's lips a bored forehead, and when he did not go
out to school or on some affair of his own--it was not easy to get him
to tell about the latter--he shut himself up in his workroom, a
store-room, about the size of a large wardrobe, wedged in between the
dining-room and his bedroom; and it was a mistake to disturb him there.
At the table or in the sitting-room, he seemed like a stranger. Annette
said to herself bitterly, "If I died he would not even weep."
And she thought of the dream she had once conceived of the dear little
companion, blood of her blood, pressed close against her, divining,
sharing, without words, all the secrets of her heart. How lacking in
affection he was! Why was he so hard? One would have said at moments
that he was angry with her. Why? Because she loved him too much?
"Yes, that is my weakness, loving too much. People do not need it. It
bores them. . . . My son does not love me! He is only too anxious to
leave me. My son is so little my son! He feels nothing of what I feel.
He feels nothing!"
During these very days Marc's young heart was aflame with love and
poetry. He had fallen madly in love with Noémi. It was one of those
childish loves that are so absurd and all-consuming. He hardly knew what
he wanted of this woman: was it to see her, feel her, touch her, taste
her? Of course, he never dreamed of what possession meant: he was the
possessed one. Marc almost fainted when he touched the little hand that
Noémi held out to him, touched it with his lips and the tip of his
nose, the greedy puppy's nose that inhaled, in the frail flower of the
wrist, the intoxicating mystery of the feminine body. For him she was a
living fruit and flower. He was dying with desire to implant his teeth
in it--very gently--dying of terror lest he might yield. Once--oh,
shame!--he did yield. . . . What was going to happen? Red and trembling,
he expected the worst: public humiliation, indignant words, an
ignominious dismissal. But she burst out laughing, called him "puppy,"
boxed his ear, rubbed his nose once, twice, three times, over the spot
he had bitten, saying, "Beg my pardon, little wretch!"
From that moment she had amused herself playing with the young animal.
She meant no harm, she meant no good. She enjoyed exciting the young
lover. For her it was a matter of no moment. She never suspected how
serious it might be for the boy. But for him (for him who, in spite of
appearances, was the true child of Annette) it was tragic.
Since the first time he had seen her, she had been for him the forbidden
Paradise, that marvellous mirage, woman, which appears before the
awakening glance of an innocent child. The fascinating image is shaped
as much from what exists as from what does not exist, as much from what
he sees as from what he does not see, what he does not know, what he
fears and desires, what he wants and what he does not want, the
terrifying attraction that thrills the adolescent body at the ecstatic,
brutal appeal of nature. As for Noémi's features, he probably did not
see one of them just as it was. But each of her features and each of her
movements, the folds of her dress, the curls of her hair, her voice, her
perfume, and the gleam of her eyes, everything stirred in his hungry
heart and body the wild, leaping waves of joy and hope, cries of
happiness, the need of tears.
On the very day when the heart-broken Annette saw him so hard, so
hostile, so icy, when her awkward effort to learn the cause, to drag out
of him one word, one single word of affection, had brought down upon her
a cutting reply--on just that day the young boy had had his most moving
revelation of the enchanted dream. For eight days he had been living in
a state of intoxication. Noémi, whom he continued to see, without his
mother's knowing it, and who used him as a little spy who innocently
brought her word of all the movements in the enemy's camp--Noémi, whom
he had once surprised in her drawing-room, looking at herself, as she
talked, in a tiny mirror hidden in the folds of her handkerchief, had
amused herself painting his pale lips with her lipstick. He had had in
his mouth the taste of the beloved mouth. And ever since he had carried
it on the tongue that sucked it; he was impregnated with it. He saw this
pomegranate red, this ever-open mouth with the lip drawn up, too short
and too restless to meet the other lip, which was as full as a
cherry--saw it everywhere on that morning when, leaving his mother's
apartment, after rudely slamming the door, he decided to play hockey
from school and go for a walk. It blossomed in the cloud-orchard of the
beautiful July sky, in the little playful ripples of a fountain, in the
absent-minded smiles of passing women. It obsessed him.
He was walking at random, with his blond head bare to the summer wind.
But, abstracted as he was and full of his own fancies, his lynx-eyes
recognized his Aunt Sylvie, in the distance, coming towards him on the
other sidewalk. He hastily turned off into a side street. The last thing
he wanted was to meet her. Not that he was afraid of being caught
playing truant: she would have been much more likely to laugh at that.
But when he had a secret, with her--it was not like this with his
mother!--he never felt safe. Of secrets of this kind, his instinct told
him, Aunt Sylvie was an expert reader.
She had not seen him. He breathed freely again. He could enjoy his love
the whole morning. And as he strolled along--his love did not prevent
him from halting before the shop-windows to look at a necktie, a trifle
of some kind, an illustrated paper--his steps led him unawares straight
to his goal. He was like those pigeons in Paris that fly every morning
over the great piles of dusty houses seeking the green gardens and cool
old trees. The boy was seeking them too. He felt the need of their
rustling shade.
He went down the Mont Sainte-Geneviève and, leaving the old, crowded
streets, found himself in the clear, calm spaces of the Jardin des
Plantes before he was aware that this was the spot to which he had
wished to come.
There were few people here at this hour. A handful of scattered
strollers. Paris hummed like a hive in the distance. The blue vibration
of a beautiful summer morning. He picked out a bench that was hidden at
the foot of a group of trees, and he closed his eyes on his treasure. He
pressed his long, feverish, adolescent hands against his breast as if he
wished to shelter his heart from rash eyes. What was he hiding, what
thing so precious that he scarcely dared to think of it? A remark Noémi
had thoughtlessly uttered, a remark of which he had made a world. . . .
The last time he had seen her she had thrown him a chance smile. She had
been scarcely aware of the boy's presence, for her attention was
absorbed in the great things that had happened (the reconquest of
Philippe, the humiliation of Annette, the final victory! . . . "But one
never knows! Nothing is certain. Let us be satisfied with to-day! . . .")
She sighed from fatigue, relaxation, pleasure. Marc asked her why.
Amused by the boy's alarmed, ingenuous gaze, she said, with another
great sigh, to puzzle him, "It's a secret."
"What secret?"
A malicious thought darted through her mind and Noémi replied, "I can't
tell you. You must guess."
Trembling with emotion, he said, "I don't know. Tell me."
She lowered her lids over her languorous eyes. "No, no, no!"
Blushing, stammering, he was afraid to understand.
To keep up the game, she assumed a mysterious air and said, "Would you
like to have it?"
In his emotion he was ready to cry, "No!"
"Well, not to-day. . . . I'll tell you some other time."
"When?"
"Soon."
"How soon?"
"Soon. . . . Next week, when you come to dinner."
The week had passed. This was the evening, Marc was thinking, when he
was to see her again. He was only living in the expectation of that
moment. He had lived it through twenty times in advance! He never dared
to go to the end of the scene. It was too agonizing. . . . But to linger
on the way was so sweet! On the garden-bench he gave way to his languor.
A clock struck noon. Behind a screen of trees the sand of a sunny path
crunched under the feet of a little girl who passed singing. Further on,
in an aviary, some exotic birds were chirping in a strange, agitating
language. From far away, on the Seine, came the long-drawn-out sound of
the siren of a tug. And noiselessly, without seeing him, two lovers
passed him slowly with their arms entwined as they walked, a tall, dark
girl and a pale young workman whose lips touched and who devoured each
other with their eyes. Holding his breath, the boy gazed after them till
their path turned, and as they disappeared he sobbed with happiness, the
happiness that had passed, the happiness that was coming. The happiness
that was in them, in everything that surrounded him, in this July
noon--in his own burning heart which embraced it all.
He went home in the halo of this moment of ecstasy. It was infinitely
greater than the feminine image that had aroused it. The shadow of
Noémi melted into a golden bath, and he had to make an effort to summon
it up again. Marc tried to do so, but it escaped him. He was cheating
himself, pretending to find under this happiness, which was so intense
that it was painful, in everything that filled his heart to overflowing,
the boundless hopes, the heroic resolutions, the strength and good will
that bore him up like wings as he ran upstairs, four steps at a time.
But the moment he caught sight of his mother's severe face--he was
three-quarters of an hour late for lunch--the glory faded. He fell back
beneath the sullen cloud of silence.
Annette did not try to talk to him. She had her own burden of anxieties,
and she could not share his. Her son, sitting opposite her at table,
seemed self-centred and far away. He ate ravenously. He was hungry and
eager to finish so that he could plunge back again into his daydreams.
Annette thought, "I am nothing to him but the person who gives him his
food."
She no longer had even the courage to protest. She felt abandoned.
Towards the end of the meal he became aware that he had not spoken, and
he felt vaguely remorseful. But he was afraid that if he said a word she
would begin to question him. He thrust his badly folded napkin into its
ring, rose hurriedly, and, taking care not to catch his mother's eye,
went out . . . or was going out, when, on a sudden impulse, he asked--he
was sure, for Noémi had told him, but he wanted confirmation--"It's
tonight we are dining at the Villards'?"
Annette, who was still sitting there, motionless and dejected, said,
without looking up, "We are not dining out."
Marc stopped, astonished, on the threshold. "What! They told me so!"
"Who told you?"
In his embarrassment the boy did not answer. His mother knew nothing
about his visits to Noémi. He hastened to turn aside the question with
another question, "But when are we going, then?"
Annette shrugged her shoulders. There were never going to be any more
dinners at the Villards'. Noémi had said, for fun, "Next week," as she
might have said, "In the year forty."
Marc let go of the door-knob and turned back in distress. Annette looked
at him, saw how disappointed he was, and said, "I don't know."
"What! You don't know?"
"The Villards have gone away," said Annette.
"No!" Marc cried.
She did not seem to hear him. Marc laid an impatient hand on his
mother's arm, which was stretched out over the table, and besought her,
"It isn't true?"
Annette roused herself from her torpor, rose and began to clear the
table.
"But where, where?" cried Marc, overwhelmed.
"I don't know," said Annette. She gathered up the dishes and went out.
Marc stood there, haggard, before his ruined dream. He did not
understand. This sudden departure, without a word of warning. . . .
Impossible! . . . He started to follow his mother, to drag some
explanation out of her. But, no! He stopped short. . . . No, this wasn't
true! He understood now. . . . Annette had discovered his love. She
wanted to separate them. She was lying, she was lying! Noémi had not
gone away. . . . And he hated his mother.
He slipped out of the apartment, tumbled down the stairs, walked, ran,
with a beating heart, to the Villards'. He was going to make sure that
they had not left. And as a matter of fact, they were there. The footman
said that Monsieur had just gone out; Madame was tired and was not
receiving anyone. But Marc urged that she would let him have a moment's
conversation with her. The servant returned. Madame was sorry, but it
was impossible. The boy insisted, feverishly, that he must see her just
for a moment; he had something very important to tell her. . . .
Meanwhile, he said all sorts of incoherent things, stuttering and
choking in a broken voice, making awkward gestures; he blushed, he was
on the point of weeping. The curious, mocking eyes of the impassive
footman made him lose the thread of his ideas. He was pushed towards the
door. He resisted stupidly, crying out that he forbade anyone to touch
him. The servant told him to get out, said that if he did not hold his
tongue he would telephone to the concierge and have him taken down by
force. . . . The door closed behind him. Ashamed and furious, he
remained on the threshold, unable to make up his mind to leave. And as
he leaned mechanically against the door, he saw it was not shut tight
and was yielding. He pushed it open and stepped inside again. He meant
at all costs to reach Noémi. The vestibule was empty. He knew where the
room was and slipped into the corridor. He heard Noémi's voice from
within. She was saying to the footman, "Never in the world! He bores me
to death! You did quite right in pushing him out, the little fool!"
He found himself back on the landing. He fled, he wept, he ground his
teeth, he was distracted. He sat down, choking, on one of the steps of
the staircase. He did not want people to see him crying in the street.
Wiping away his tears, he assumed an air of calm that covered his mad
grief and, without knowing where he was going, he set out for home
again. He was desperate. To die, he wanted to die! Life was no longer
posable. It was too ugly, too base, it lied, everything lied. He could
not breathe. As he crossed the Seine he thought of flinging himself into
it. But another unfortunate had been ahead of him. The banks looked as
if they were blade with flies. Thousands of women and children were
leaning over the parapet, eagerly watching as the drowned man was drawn
out. What feelings stirred them? A very few felt a sadistic thrill. A
few more felt pity. The immense majority felt the attraction of the
unusual event, idle curiosity. A good number, perhaps, looked into their
own hearts to see how a person suffers ("how I might suffer"), to see
how a person dies ("how I might die"). Marc perceived only a base
curiosity, and it horrified him. Kill himself, yes, but not in public!
He was like Annette. He had a shy, fierce pride; he could never make a
spectacle of himself before this rabble, never be mauled by their hands,
violated in his nakedness by their dirty glances. He clenched his teeth
and hurried home, hurried faster, resolved to kill himself.
In the course of the minute searches which, during his mother's
absences, he had devoted to the apartment he had found a revolver. It
was Noémi's; Annette had picked it up after she had left and placed it,
too carelessly, in a drawer. He had appropriated it and hidden it. His
mind was made up. As, with a child, an act, whenever it is possible,
immediately follows the thought, Marc meant to carry out his resolution
at once. Re-entering the apartment as noiselessly as he had gone out, he
shut himself up in his room and loaded the revolver as he had seen a
schoolmate do: the latter, who was hardly older than himself, had
carried one of these dangerous playthings in his pocket and, holding it
between his legs, in the Greek class, had explained to his attentive
neighbors how to handle it. The weapon was ready now. Marc was prepared
to fire. . . . Where should he place himself? He must not miss. There,
standing before his mirror. . . . But afterwards where would he
fall? . . . It would be better to sit here, leaning on the table, with the
mirror in front of him. He unhooked the mirror, placed it on the table,
and propped it up with a dictionary. . . . There, he could see himself
perfectly. He took the revolver and pressed it. . . . Where? Against the
temple; they say that's the best place. . . . Would it hurt very much?
He did not give a thought to his mother. His passion, his sufferings and
the preparations completely occupied him. . . . His eyes in the mirror
touched his heart. . . . Poor Marc! . . . He felt the need of
expressing, of making known before he disappeared, what he had suffered
from the world and how much he despised it. . . . The need of avenging
himself, of leaving regrets behind him, of arousing admiration. . . . He
hunted up a big sheet of school-paper, folded it across--he was in a
hurry--and wrote in his uncertain, laborious, childish script, "_I
cannot live any longer, for she has betrayed me. The whole world is
wicked. I don't love anything any longer, so I would rather die. All
women are liars. They are mean. They don't know how to love. I despise
her. When they bury me I ask them to put this paper over me: 'I die for
Noémi_.'"
At this dear name he wept; he pressed his handkerchief against his mouth
in order not to make a noise. He wiped away his tears, reread his lines,
and thought gravely, "I mustn't compromise her."
Then he tore up the sheet and began again. Almost in spite of himself he
breathlessly dashed off his despairing lines. When he reached the
sentence "_They don't know how to love_," he continued, "_I have known
and I die_." In the midst of his grief he was very much pleased with
this phrase: it almost consoled him. It disposed him to be kind to those
he was leaving behind him, and he ended generously, "_I forgive you
all_." He added his signature. A few seconds more and all would be over;
he would be delivered, and he saw in advance the fine effect it would
produce. But just as he was passing the pen once more over the childish
flourishes where the ink had failed, the door of the little room opened
suddenly behind him. He had just enough time to hide the weapon and the
papers under his arms. Annette saw only the mirror placed against the
dictionary and she thought Marc was admiring himself. She made no
comment. She seemed terribly tired and, in a low voice, as if she were
exhausted, she said she had forgotten to buy milk for dinner and that
Marc would be very kind if he would spare her the trouble of climbing up
and down the four flights by going after it. As for him, he had only one
idea, that she should not see what his arms covered. He did not wish to
move and replied roughly that he did not have the time; he was busy.
With a sad smile, Annette closed the door and went out.
He heard her slowly descending the stairs. (She had looked worn out.) He
was seized with remorse. He could not forget the expression of her face
and her tired voice. . . . He threw the revolver hastily into a drawer,
buried the _farewells to life_ under a pile of books and rushed out of
the apartment. He jostled his mother on the stairs and called to her, in
a cross voice, that he was going to do the errand. Annette came upstairs
again, her heart somewhat lightened. She was thinking that the boy was
not as contrary as he seemed. But she had been pained by his rudeness
and his harshness. Heavens, how unaffectionate he was! . . . Well, so
much the better for him! Poor child, he would suffer less from
life. . . .
When Marc came back, he had quite forgotten his intention to commit
suicide. It gave him no pleasure to find the famous Testament,
imperfectly hidden, on his table. He hastened to place it completely out
of sight in the bottom of a band-box. He dismissed the depressing
thought. He felt now how cowardly, how cruel, it would have been to his
mother, whose health worried him. But he expressed his concern clumsily;
he did not know how to ask her about it and she did not know how to
reply. Through misplaced pride he did not want to show his real
feelings; it would have seemed as if he were awkwardly performing a mere
polite duty. And she, as proud as himself, did not want to worry him,
and she turned the conversation away from it. So they both fell back
into their silence. Freed from his anxiety, Marc now felt that he had
the right to be angry with his mother because for her he had sacrificed
his suicide. . . . He was well aware that he no longer felt the least
desire for this; but he needed to avenge himself for what he had
suffered. When you cannot avenge yourself on others you do so on your
mother; she is always there, at hand, and she does not strike back.
So they remained walled-up, each one absorbed in his own grief. And
Marc, whose own sorrow had begun to weigh upon him, felt his animosity
against Annette's increasing. He was relieved when he heard the
door-bell announcing Aunt Sylvie--for he knew her ring. She had come to
take him to a performance of Isadora's, for she had suddenly gone crazy
over dancing. In spite of the duty that he felt to retain in his soul
and also on his face--especially on his face--the fatal mark of the
ordeal through which he had passed, he could not hide his joy at
escaping. He ran to dress, leaving the door open so as to lose none of
the gay talk of his aunt, who, the moment she had arrived, had launched
into a frivolous story. And Annette, who was forcing herself to smile,
though she was broken-hearted, thought, "Can this be the woman who cried
her heart out a year ago over her child's body? Has she forgotten?"
She did not envy this elasticity. But her son's laugh, as he answered
Sylvie's sallies from the other room, evidenced an equal gift of
forgetfulness. Annette, who was pained by this apparent heartlessness,
did not know that she too possessed this cruel and marvellous gift. When
Marc reappeared, beaming, ready to start, she could not command her face
enough to conceal her harsh disapproval. Marc was more hurt by this than
he would have been by out-and-out censure. He avenged himself by
exaggerating his gaiety. He became almost noisy and seemed in such a
hurry to get away that he forgot to say good-bye to his mother. He
thought of it after he had gone out. Should he go back? Let her worry!
He pouted. It comforted him to leave behind him that reproachful face,
that sadness, the depressing atmosphere he felt in the house, and the
disturbing traces of the day's troubles. . . . That immense day! . . . A
whole world! . . . Several lifetimes in a few hours, the peak of joy and
the depths of despair. . . He ought to have been crushed under such a
load of emotions, but it weighed no more on the elastic adolescent than
a bird weighs on a branch. The bird flies away, the branch swings back
and sways in the wind. They had flown away, the joys and sorrows of the
day that was past! Only a dream remained of them. To enjoy the new joys
and the new sorrows, he hastened to efface it.
But Annette, who had no means of knowing what was passing through his
head, Annette, who, like him, was a passionate soul, attributed
everything to herself; and, as she listened to his laughter receding
down the stairs, she was struck to the heart by his joy at leaving her.
She thought he hated her, for her passion always exaggerated things in
every way. . . . She was a burden on him, yes, that was quite clear. He
longed to be free from her. When she was dead he would be happier. . . .
Happier! . . . She would be happier too. It stabbed her through and
through, this absurd thought that her son, her child, might desire her
death. . . . (Absurd? Who can tell? In his innermost heart, in a
moment's madness, what child has not desired his mother's death?) . . .
The terror of this intuition, striking Annette at this moment when she
was holding on to life with one weak hand, was a mortal blow to her.
All day she had been devastated by the furious return of her passion.
Now that her decision had been made and carried out, the irreparable
deed consummated, now that she had deliberately done her duty, she no
longer had the strength to resist the attack of the enemy within. And
the enemy had rushed upon her like a torrent.
She was a party to it. She had opened the gates to it. When all is lost,
one has at least the right to enjoy one's despair! My suffering concerns
only myself. Let me feel the whole of it. Bleed, bleed, my heart! Let me
stab you by forcing you to see again all you have lost! Philippe. . . .
He was there before her. . . . The evocation was so strong that she saw
him, spoke to him, touched him. . . . He, everything that she loved in
him, the attraction of that which resembles and that which is opposed to
us, the antagonistic union, burning with the double fire of love and
combat, the embrace and the struggle: they are the same thing. And this
illusory embrace had such a carnal violence that the possessed soul,
possessed by love, bent like Leda beneath the swan. The flood of passion
ebbed despairingly. Then came those agonies that are part of the life of
every woman who is made for love and to whom her share of love has been
refused--agonies that come at this time of life when, if a love dies,
she thinks that love itself is dying. On this night Annette, alone in
her room, abandoned by her son, with her passion mutilated, suffered
tortures in the destitution of her heart, and the haunting belief that
love was lost forever, that life was lost without love, gripped her by
the throat. It did not give her a moment's respite. She drove it away;
it returned. Annette tried in vain to fill her mind with other things.
She picked up her work, tossed it aside, got up, sat down. With her head
on the table, she wrung her hands. The fixed idea maddened her. She had
reached that point of suffering when to escape from herself a woman is
ready for the worst aberrations. Annette felt that she was on the verge
of madness, and she was aware, in her delirium, of a savage impulse, the
frightful desire to go down into the street and to debase herself in her
fury, destroy her body and her tortured heart, prostitute herself to the
first man she met. When she became aware of this bestial thought, she
cried out in horror; and as a result of this horror the infamous idea
would not relax its grip. Then, like her son, she thought of killing
herself. She could no longer control her obsession. . . .
She rose and went towards the door, but to reach it she had to pass
close to the open window; she decided that, once there, she would fling
herself out! . . . A strange instinct of purity that wished to save her
soul from pollution! That illusory soul! Her reason was not duped by the
conventional morality. But her instinct was stronger and it saw more
clearly. . . . Entirely occupied by her double obsession--the door and
the window--she did not see what was close to her. Walking towards the
window, she struck herself violently in the stomach against the sharp
corner of the sideboard. The pain was so severe that she could not
breathe. Doubled over, with her hands on the wounded spot, she felt a
keen, revengeful joy that her stomach had been struck. She would have
liked to break to pieces in her body the blind and drunken master, the
tiger-god. . . . Then the reaction came. She sank down on a low chair
that fitted in between the sideboard and the window, and her strength
failed her. Her hands were icy, her face beaded with perspiration; the
beating of her disordered heart wavered. Ready to slip into the abyss,
she had only one thought, "Quicker, quicker! . . ."
She fainted.
XLIX
When she opened her eyes again--(When was it? After a few seconds? . . .
A gulf . . . )--her head was thrown back as if on a block, her neck was
lying against the window-sill, her body wedged into the narrow angle of
the wall. She opened her eyes and over the dark roofs, in the July
night, she saw the stars. . . . One of them pierced her with its divine
gaze.
Silence, unprecedented, vast as a plain. . . . Yet the wagons were
rolling by in the street below; the glasses on the sideboard vibrated.
She heard nothing. . . . Suspended between earth and sky. . . . "_A
noiseless fight_." . . . "_She was not entirely awake_. . . ."
She put off the moment. She was afraid of finding again what she had
left behind--the horrible lassitude, the torment, the snare of love:
love, maternity, implacable egoism, that of nature who cares so little
for my troubles, who only watches till I awaken so as to break my
heart. . . . Never to wake again! . . .
She became conscious, none the less. And she saw that the enemy was no
longer there. Her despair had vanished. . . . Vanished? No, it was still
there, but it was no longer in her. She saw it outside. She heard its
rustle. . . . Magic. . . . A terrible music disclosing unknown
spaces. . . . Paralyzed, Annette heard, as if some invisible hand were
conjuring it up in the room, the sound of sobbing, the Fatum of a Chopin
prelude. Her heart was flooded with a joy she had never before experienced.
It had nothing but the name in common with the poor joy of everyday life
which is afraid of pain, which only exists because it denies pain,
denies that immense joy which is also pain. . . . Annette listened with
closed eyes. The voice stopped. There was an expectant silence. And
suddenly from the torn soul a wild cry of deliverance flew upward as if
on wings. As a diamond leaves its track on a piece of glass, it streaked
across the vault of the night. In her exhaustion, as she lay on her hard
pillow, Annette, on the threshold of this night of sorrow, gave birth to
a new soul. . . .
The silent cry whirled far away and disappeared in the abyss of thought.
Annette remained silent and motionless. A long time. . . . At last she
rose, her neck aching, her limbs stiff. But her soul was delivered. An
irresistible force pushed her towards the table. She did not know what
she was going to do. Her heart was in her throat. She could not keep it
all to herself. She took up her pen and, in a whirlwind of passion,
without metre, in a rough and jerky rhythm, in a single torrent, she
poured out the flood of pain. . . .
You have come, your hand holds me,--I kiss your hand.
In love, in fear,--I kiss your hand.
Love, you have come to destroy me. I know it well.
My knees tremble. Come, destroy!--I kiss your hand.
You eat the fruit and fling it away: bite my heart, it is yours!
Blest be the wound your teeth make!--I kiss your hand.
You want me--all; but, possessing all, you will possess nothing.
You leave nothing but ruins.--I kiss your hand.
To-morrow your hand, caressing me, will kill me.
Even as I kiss it, I await the mortal stroke of your hand.
Kill me! Strike! In doing me evil, you will do me good.
You deliver me, destroyer.--I kiss your hand.
Every blow that makes me bleed breaks a bond.
You tear away the chains with the flesh.--I kiss your hand.
You break the prison of my body, murderer,
And through the breach my life escapes.--I kiss your hand.
I am the broken soil from which rises the grain
Of the sorrow that you sowed.--I kiss your hand.
Sow the sacred sorrow! May all the sorrow of the world
Come to ripeness in my breast.--I kiss your hand, I kiss your
hand. . . .
Tempest, sea-waves crashing against the rocks, a soul laden with spray,
flashing with lightning, a surf foaming with passions and tears dashed
up towards the sky. . . .
And at the last cry of the wild birds the soul fell back suddenly. And
Annette, exhausted, flung herself on her bed and slept.
L
When morning came, nothing remained of the sorrows of the night but a
light snow that melted in the sun. . . . _Cosi la neve al sol si
disigilla_. . . . And the aching peace of a body that has fought and
knows it has conquered.
She felt satiated, satiated with her grief. Grief is like passion. To
deliver oneself from it, one has to glut oneself with it. But few people
have the hardihood to do this. They feed the snarling dog with crumbs
from their table. The only people who conquer grief are those who dare
to embrace its excess, who say to it, "I take you to myself. You shall
bring forth children through me. . . ." That powerful embrace of the
creative soul, as brutal and fertile as actual possession. . . .
On the table Annette found what she had written. She tore it up. These
disordered words had become as unbearable to her as the feelings they
expressed. She did not want to disturb the sense of well-being that
pervaded her. She had a feeling of relief, as if a knot, a link of the
chain, had just been broken. . . . And in a flash she had a vision of
the chain of servitudes from which, one by one, the soul slowly frees
itself through a series of existences, its own and those of others (they
are all the same). . . . And she asked herself: "Why, why these eternal
attachments, these eternal ruptures? Towards what liberation does desire
drive us in its sanguinary progress?"
It was only for a moment. Why worry about what is going to happen? It
will pass, just like what has already happened. We know quite well that,
no matter what happens, we shall make our way through. As the saying
goes, that old heroic utterance of prayer and defiance: "May God only
not lay upon our shoulders heavier burdens than we can bear!"
She had borne hers, that of a day. Well, one day at a time! . . . She
was eased in heart and body. . . . To strive, _to seek_, NOT _to find,
and not to yield_. . . . "It's all right. It's all right. . . . I
haven't wasted my time. . . . Leave the rest to to-morrow!"
She rose. She was naked, and from over the roofs the morning sun bathed
her body and the room. . . . She was happy. . . . Yes, in spite of
everything!
Everything about her was just as it had been yesterday: the sky, the
earth, the past and the future. But everything that had crushed her
yesterday was radiant to-day.
Marc had come home very late in the evening. He had enjoyed himself
without his mother, and now he felt remorse at having left her alone and
made her sit up for him. For he knew that Annette would not go to bed
until he had returned, and he had expected an icy reception. Although he
was in the wrong he assumed as he went upstairs--if only for that
reason--an attitude of defiance. With an insolent smile on his lips,
although at bottom he was not sure of himself, he picked up the key from
under the doormat and opened the door. Hanging up his coat in the
vestibule, he listened. Silence. Nothing stirred. Noiselessly, he
tiptoed into his room and went to bed. He felt relieved. Serious matters
could wait until to-morrow! But before he was entirely undressed he was
seized with anxiety. This stillness was not natural. . . . Like his
mother he had a vivid imagination and one that was easily disturbed. . . .
What had happened? . . . He was a thousand miles from suspecting the
deadly storms that had raged that night in the room adjoining his own.
His mother was inexplicable and disturbing to him. He never knew what
she was thinking. Seized with alarm, in his nightshirt and bare feet, he
went and pressed his ear to Annette's door. He was reassured. She was
there. She was asleep; her breathing was loud and uneven. He pushed open
the door, fearing that she was ill, and stole up to the bed. By the
light from the street he saw her, stretched out flat on her back, with
her hair over her cheeks, with that tragic face which, in nights of old,
had stirred the curiosity of her companion Sylvie. Her breast rose and
fell heavily, harshly, violently, with difficulty. Marc was seized with
fear and pity for all the weariness and suffering he divined in this
body. Bending over the pillow, in a low, trembling voice, he murmured
"Mamma."
As if she had heard the call from far away in her sleep, she made an
effort to free herself and groaned. The child drew back, frightened. She
relapsed into her immobility. Marc went back to bed. The thoughtlessness
of his age, the fatigue of the day, got the better of his anxiety. He
slept without waking until morning.
When he got up, the fancies and fears of the past evening returned. He
was surprised that his mother was not yet visible. As a rule, she came
into his room to kiss him and say good-morning while he was in bed. She
had not come in this morning. But he heard her coming and going in the
neighboring room. He opened the door. Kneeling on the floor, she was
dusting the furniture and did not turn round. Marc said good-morning to
her. She turned her smiling eyes on him and said, "Good-morning, my
dear." Then she went on with her work, paying no more attention to him.
He expected she would ask him about his evening. He detested these
questions, but when she did not ask them he was vexed. She went into her
room, put it in order and finished dressing. It was time for her
classes; she was getting ready to go out He saw her looking at herself
in the mirror, with dark circles about her eyes, her face still showing
lines of fatigue, but with a light in her eyes! Her mouth was smiling.
He was astonished at the sight. He had expected to find her sad and he
was even ready to pity her in his heart; this disturbed his plans. The
little man's logic was upset by it.
But Annette had her own logic. "The heart has its reasons" which a sense
higher than reason understands. Annette had ceased to worry about what
others might think. She knew now that you must not ask others to
understand you. If they love you, it is with their eyes closed. They
don't close them often! . . . "Let them be as they wish to be! Whatever
they are, I love them. I cannot live without loving them. And if they
don't love me I have enough love in my heart both for myself and for
them."
She smiled into the mirror with a smile that came from far deeper depths
than her eyes, smiled at the fire of which they were a spark, at eternal
Love. She let her arms fall from her head, turned towards her son, saw
the child's troubled face, remembered his evening out, took hold of the
tip of his chin, and, letting the syllables drop, said gaily, "You were
dancing? I'm so glad! And now you must sing!"
She laughed as she saw his amazed expression, caressed him with her
eyes, kissed him on his nose and, picking up her bag from the table,
went out, saying, "Good-bye, my little cricket!"
In the vestibule he heard her whistling a careless tune. (It was a
talent he envied her even while he despised it, for she whistled much
better than he.)
He was indignant! This indecent gaiety after all the evening's
anxiety. . . . She had escaped him. He denounced the eternal
caprices of women, their lack of seriousness, as he had heard
others do . . . "_la donna mobile_."
He was about to go out when a piece of paper in the scrap-basket caught
his attention. At a distance the sharp, prying eyes of the rapacious
child unthinkingly deciphered a few words on a fragment of the sheet. He
stopped short. . . . These words. . . . His mother's writing! He picked
them up, read them feverishly, at random at first, one at a time. These
flaming words! . . . As they were torn into bits, the emotion they called
up, interrupted in the midst of its flight, was all the more
fascinating. . . . He gathered them together, rummaged in the basket for
the smallest fragments, took them all and patiently pieced them
together. His hands trembled at the secret he had captured by surprise.
When he had assembled all the pieces and was able to grasp the poem as a
whole, he was completely taken aback. He did not understand it very
well, but the wild fervor of this solitary song revealed to him unknown
depths of passion and grief that exalted and dismayed him. Was it
possible that these stormy cries had come from his mother's breast? . . .
No, no, it wasn't possible! He wouldn't have it. He told himself that
she had copied them from a book. . . . But from what book? He couldn't
ask her. . . . And yet, suppose it wasn't taken from a book . . . ? The
tears came, the need of crying out his emotion, his love, a longing to
throw himself into his mother's arms, at her feet, to open his heart to
her, to read her own . . . And he couldn't do it. . . .
When his mother came home at noon for lunch, the boy, who had spent the
whole morning reading and copying the torn fragments and had thrust them
in an envelope into his breast, said nothing to her. Sitting at his
table, he even refrained from rising and turning his head towards her
when she entered. The more burning was his desire to know, the stiffer
was the constraint that led him to conceal his anxiety under a mask of
insensibility. If, after all, these tragic words were not Annette's!
Doubt returned to him at the sight of his mother's tranquil face. . . .
But the other, the upsetting doubt, persisted all the same. . . .
Supposing they were hers? . . . This woman, my mother? . . . Facing her
at table, he did not dare look at her. . . . But when her back was
turned and she moved about the room, looking for something, carrying a
plate, he stared at her eagerly with questioning eyes that asked: "Who
are you?"
He could not define his troubled, fascinated, uneasy impression. But
Annette, full of her new life, noticed nothing.
LI
In the afternoon they went out, each about his own business. Marc
watched his mother in the distance. He was torn by conflicting feelings:
he admired her, he was irritated by her. . . . Women were too much for
him! Women, every woman. At times they were so close, at other times so
very far away! A strange race. . . . Nothing about them is like
ourselves. One never knows what is going on in them, why they laugh, why
they cry. He scorned them, he despised them, he needed them, he pined
for them! He was angry with them just because of this obsession. He
could have bitten the neck of that woman who was walking by as he had
bitten Noémi's wrist--as he would have liked to bite it--till the blood
flowed! At this sudden memory his startled heart gave a leap. He
stopped, turned pale and spat with disgust.
He crossed the Luxembourg Gardens, where the young men were playing. He
looked at them enviously. The best part of him, his secret desires, went
out towards manly activity, without love, without women--sport, heroic
games. But he was weakly: an unjust fate, his illness as a child, had
placed him in a position of inferiority in the race of his own
generation. And his sedentary life, his books, his dreams, the
companionship of women, the two sisters, had poisoned him with this
venom of love, transmitted by his mother, his aunt, his grandfather, by
all the blood of the Rivières. How he would have liked to spill that
blood, to open his veins! Ah, how he envied those young men with their
beautiful limbs, empty of thought, full of light!
All the riches that were his he despised. He could think of nothing but
those of which he was deprived, the games and contests of harmonious
bodies. And in his injustice he did not see that other contest which his
mother was waging so close to him. . . .
She walked on. The summer was pouring its splendid waves over the city.
The blue gaze of the sky bathed the tops of the houses. . . . How good
it would have been to be far away from the city in the fields! . . . But
that was more than she could ask for: Annette did not have the means to
leave Paris. No doubt Marc would be able to go off for a few weeks with
his aunt to some beach in Normandy. But Annette would not go; her pride
would not allow her to be a charge on her sister. Besides, ever since
the days when she had seen them with her father, she had felt an
aversion for summer-resorts, with all their bored people, those
flirtations of the idle and the curious. She would stay at home alone.
She did not mind this. She carried within herself the sea and the sky,
the sunsets behind the hills, the milky fogs, the fields stretching out
under the shroud of moonlight, the calm death of the nights. In the
August afternoon, breathing the warm air, amid the uproar of the streets
and the flood of human beings, Annette crossed Paris with the quick,
sure step, the light, rhythmical step of other days, noting everything
as she passed and yet very far away. . . . In the great, dusty street,
shaken by the wheels of the heavy autobusses, she was wandering in her
thought under the vaults of the forest in that Burgundian countryside
where she had spent her happy childhood, and her nostrils caught the
odor of bark and moss. She was walking over the fallen autumn leaves. A
rain-laden wind swept through the stripped branches, brushing her cheek
with its damp wing; a bird's song flowed magically through the silence;
the rain-laden wind passed her. . . . Through these woods the young
Annette passed also with her weeping lover, and there was the hawthorne
hedge, there were the bees about the abandoned house. . . . Joys and
sorrows. . . . So far away! She smiled at her own youthful image to
which suffering was still so new. . . . "Wait, my poor Annette, you are
only at the beginning. . . ."
"Do you regret nothing?"
"Nothing!"
"Neither what you have done nor what you have failed to do?"
"Nothing, deceitful spirit! Were you trying to spy out my regrets? You
will find that your labor is lost! I accept everything, everything I
have had and everything I have not had, my whole lot, wise and foolish.
Everything has been as it should have been, the wise and the foolish.
One makes mistakes: that is life. But it is never quite a mistake to
have loved. Although age is overtaking me, my heart, at least, has no
wrinkles. And although it has suffered, it is happy to have loved." And
her grateful mind turned, with a smile, to those whom she had loved.
There was much tenderness in this smile and not a little French irony.
Touched as she was at the thought of them, Annette perceived, curiously
enough, the ridiculous side of all these torments, her own and those of
others . . . that pitiful fever of desire and waiting! For what was she
waiting? An end of love, for herself. For the others, too, in their
turn!
She saw the others, her son, with his burning hands, quivering to grasp
the uncertain future; Philippe, dissatisfied with the commonplace food
that society offered his devouring hunger; Sylvie, trying to forget and
looking to the future that would fill the gaping emptiness of her heart;
the multitude of ordinary people yawning over the boredom of their life;
and youth, restless youth, wandering and waiting. . . . For what was it
waiting? Towards what were its hands stretched out?
Liberated from herself, she looked at all these burden-bearers, saw that
herd, that mob in the streets, hastening, running, each ignoring every
one else, each as if pursued by the sheep-dogs, and, under the apparent
disorder, the sovereign rhythm--all believing they directed themselves,
all directed. . . . Towards what? Whither was he leading them, the
invisible shepherd? . . . The good shepherd? . . . No! Beyond good and
evil. . . .
She gave her lessons as usual, patient and attentive, listening kindly,
explaining clearly, making no mistakes. Even as she spoke, the dream
continued to envelop her. Whoever has formed the habit finds it easy to
live two lives at a time, one on a level with the ground, with other
men, the other in the depths of the dream that is bathed by the inner
sun. One neglects neither of them. One reads them both with a glance as
a musician's eye reads a score. Life is a symphony: each moment of life
sings in several parts. The reverberation of this warm harmony brought
the color to Annette's face. Her pupils to-day were astonished at her
youthful air, and they conceived for her one of those strong attachments
which the young feel for their elders, the Heralds of life, and which
they dare not confess. Annette knew nothing of the wake of love that her
passing left that day in the hearts of those who were near her.
She came home towards evening in the same aerial state. With her light
heart, she felt as if she were moving on air. She could not have
explained it. The powerful enigma of a woman enveloped in her own
radiance, in a joy without apparent reason, even in the face of reason!
Everything that surrounds her, the whole external world is, at these
moments, only a theme for the free improvisations of the passionate
fantasy of her dreams.
She threaded her way, in the streets, through anxious groups of people.
The newsboys were running about shouting the news which the passers-by
were discussing. She saw and heard nothing. From a passing tram someone
shouted something to her; she recalled who it was a moment
later--Sylvie's husband. Without hearing what he said she had replied
with a gay wave of her hand. . . . How excited everyone was! . . . Once
more she had the brief sense of a dizzy current which, like the whirling
spirals of star-dust, was rushing through a crevice in the vault into
the abyss that drew it down. . . . What abyss? . . .
She climbed up to her apartment. Marc was awaiting her on the threshold,
his eyes shining, and behind him, Sylvie, very much excited. They were
eager to tell her the news. . . . What was it? Both spoke at once; each
of them wanted to be the first. . . .
"But what on earth are you trying to tell me?" she said, laughing.
She distinguished one word, "War."
"War? What war?" But she was not surprised. . . . The abyss. . . . "So
it was you? For a long time I have felt your breath drawing us
down. . . ."
Their exclamations went on. To please them she roused herself--a
little--from her somnambulistic state. . . . "War? Well, so be it! War,
peace, it's all life, all part of the game. . . . I'll take my
share! . . ."
She was a good player, the enchanted soul!
"I challenge God!"
THE END