Thérèse

After the La Traves had brought Anne back, defeated, to Saint Clair Thérèse had not left Argelouse until just before her baby was born. She knew the silence of the place only too well during those interminable November nights. A letter addressed to Jean Azévédo had remained unanswered. He doubtless considered that this country-bred creature was not worth the trouble of a correspondence. In the first place, a pregnant woman is never an agreeable recollection. Perhaps, at a distance, this foolish fellow, who would have been captivated by poses and sham complications, thought her dull. But what could he understand of that deceptive simplicity of mind, that frank expression, those bold unhesitating gestures? In point of fact, he believed her capable, like little Anne, of taking him at his word, and leaving everything for his sake. Jean Azévédo mistrusted women who surrendered too soon to give the assailant time to raise the siege. Nothing dismayed him so much as victory, and the fruits of victory. Yet Thérèse made an effort to live in this young man’s world: but some books which Jean admired, and which she had got from Bordeaux, she could not understand. How empty her life was! She was not to be asked to work at baby-linen: “That was not her business,” Madame de la Trave used to say. Many women die in childbirth in the country. Thérèse made Aunt Clara cry by assuring her that she would end like her mother, that she was certain she would not escape. She did not fail to add that she was content to die: which was untrue! She had never longed so ardently to live: nor had Bernard ever displayed so much solicitude for her. “He was not concerned about me, but about what I carried within me. He used to say, in his dreadful accent: ‘Have some more soup ... don’t eat any fish ... you have walked enough to-day....’ I did not care: I was no more touched than a foreign nurse might be who is pampered for the quality of her milk. The La Traves revered in me a sacred vessel: the mould which held their offspring; there was not a doubt that, if necessity arose, they would have sacrificed me to the life I held within me. I lost the feeling of individual existence. I was nothing more than the branch that bore the fruit which, in the family’s opinion, was all that counted.”

“Until the end of December we had to live in darkness. And as if the darkness of the pines were not enough, rain unceasing encompassed the gloomy house with its myriad moving rods. When the only road to Saint Clair threatened to become impassable, I was conveyed into the town, where the house was hardly less dark than that of Argelouse. The old plane trees on the Square still defended their leaves against the gusts of wind and rain. Aunt Clara, who could not live anywhere but at Argelouse, was not able to look after me: but she often made the journey, in any sort of weather, in her rustic dog-cart, and brought me all those little dainties that I used to be so fond of as a girl, and that she thought I still liked, little grey balls of rye and honey, called miques: and the cake that goes by the name of fougasse or roumadjade. I only saw Anne at meals, and she never spoke to me now: resigned, so it would seem, and broken, she had lost all her youthful freshness at a blow. Her hair, drawn too far back, revealed ugly pallid ears. The Deguilhem boy’s name was not mentioned, but Madame de la Trave asserted that if Anne did not yet say yes, neither did she say no. Ah! Jean had judged her rightly: it had not taken long to bridle her and break her in. Bernard was not so well because he had begun to drink aperitifs again.

“What did these creatures round me talk about? They discussed the clergyman a great deal, I remember (we lived opposite the presbytery). They wondered, for instance, ‘why he had crossed the Square six times in the course of the day, and each time he had had to come back a different way.’”

As a result of certain remarks of Jean Azévédo, Thérèse paid a little more attention to the priest, who was still young, and not on good terms with his parishioners who found him stand-offish: “He’s not the kind we want here”: In the course of his rare visits to the La Traves, Thérèse noticed his white temples and high forehead. He had no friends. How did he spend his evenings? Why had he chosen this life? “He is very punctilious,” said Madame de la Trave: “He prays every evening: but he is wanting in unction. I don’t think he is genuinely devout. He doesn’t really do anything in the Parish.” She deplored the fact that he had given up the Church Lads’ Brigade: and the parents complained that he did not go with the children to the football-field. “It’s all very well for him to be buried in his books, but a Parish soon goes to pieces.” Thérèse used to go to church to hear him preach (“My dear, you’ve decided to go just when your condition would have excused you”). The Curé’s sermons, which dealt with dogma or morals, were impersonal. But Thérèse was struck by an intonation, a gesture, or a word that seemed specially significant.... Ah! perhaps he could have helped her to unravel the confusion of her soul: unlike the rest, his also had been a tragic rôle: to his own inner solitude was added the isolation that the cassock brings upon its wearer. What comfort did he draw from those daily rites? Thérèse would have liked to have been present at Mass during the week when, with no other witness but a choir-boy, he bent muttering over a piece of bread. But such a proceeding would have seemed odd to her family and the neighbours, who would have raised the cry of “Conversion.”

Much as Thérèse suffered at that time, it was just after the birth of the child that she began to find life really unendurable. There was no outward sign of this, no scene between Bernard and herself: and she behaved with more deference to her parents-in-law than her husband himself. There lay the tragedy: there had been no reason for a rupture: it was impossible to conceive an event that would have prevented things taking the course that led to death. Misunderstanding presupposes some common ground of conflict; but Thérèse never came into contact with Bernard and still less with her parents-in-law; their words barely reached her: she hardly conceived it necessary to answer them. Had they even a vocabulary in common? They attached a different meaning to the most unimportant words. If Thérèse was ever tempted into saying something she really meant, the family had agreed, once and for all, that the poor child could not resist a paradox. “I pretend not to hear,” Madame de la Trave used to say: “and if she persists, not to take any notice. She knows it’s no good trying it on us.”

None the less, Madame de la Trave found it hard to tolerate Thérèse’s affectation of hating people to exclaim over her likeness to little Marie. The usual cries of “She’s the very image of you!...” produced violent reactions which she could not always conceal. “She’s not like me in the least,” she would insist. “Look at her dark skin, and jet-black eyes: you can see from my photographs I was pale when I was a baby.”

She would not have it that Marie was like her. She refused to possess anything in common with this flesh that had now parted company with her own. People began to be aware that she was not exactly remarkable for her maternal affection. But Madame de la Trave maintained that she loved her daughter in her own way: “Of course we can’t expect her to bathe the child or change her napkins: that wouldn’t be like her: but I have seen her sit for a whole evening by the cradle, not smoking, so as to watch the baby asleep.... Besides, we have a very reliable nurse: and then Anne is there. Ah! She’ll make a wonderful little mother....” It was true that, since a child had come into the house, Anne had begun to live again. A cradle always attracts women: but Anne especially loved to look after the infant. So as to have freer access to her, she had made peace with Thérèse, though nothing remained of their old affection but certain familiarities of address. The girl particularly dreaded Thérèse’s maternal jealousy: “The child knows me better than her mother: she laughs as soon as she sees me. The other day, I had her in my arms; she began to scream as soon as Thérèse wanted to take her. She likes me so much better that I feel quite embarrassed sometimes....”

Anne need not have felt embarrassed. At that moment in her life, Thérèse felt as aloof from her daughter as from everything else. She saw human beings and inanimate things, her own body and even her mind, like a mirage or vapour suspended outside her. In this void, Bernard alone assumed a dreadful reality: his corpulence, his nasal voice, his peremptory tone, his self-satisfaction. If she could only get away.... But how? And where? Thérèse was overcome by the first heat of summer. She had not the slightest presentiment of what she was about to do. What did happen that year? She could not remember a single incident, a single quarrel: she remembered having loathed her husband more than usual, on the day of Corpus Christi, when she watched the procession through the half-closed shutters. Bernard was almost the only man behind the canopy. The village had become a desert in a few moments, just as if there had been a lion, not a lamb, let loose in the streets.... People went behind doors so as not to be obliged to take their hats off or fall on their knees. Once the danger had passed, the doors began to open one by one. Thérèse observed the Curé, who was walking with his eyes nearly shut, carrying the strange object in both his hands. His lips moved: to whom was he speaking with that dejected air? And immediately behind him walked Bernard, “doing his duty as usual.”

Weeks followed without a drop of rain. Bernard lived in terror of fires, and his heart was troubling him again. More than twelve hundred acres had been burnt in the Louchat district: “If the wind had been in the north my Balisac pines would have been done for.” Thérèse waited for some blow to fall from that unchanging sky. It would never rain any more.... One day the whole forest round them would burst into crackling flames, and even the town would not escape. How is it that the villages in the Landes country are never burnt down? She thought it unfair that the flames should always fall upon the pines and never on the human population. At home, there were endless discussions on the causes of the disaster: a cigarette-end very likely, or perhaps some one had done it for revenge? Thérèse dreamt that she got up one night, went into the forest where the undergrowth was thickest, threw away her cigarette, and waited until the sky of dawn was darkened with vast clouds of smoke.... But she banished the thought, for love of the pines was in her blood: it was not upon the trees that her hatred lay.

The time had now come when she must face the act she had committed. What explanation should she give to Bernard? She could only remind him, point by point, how the thing happened. It was the day of the great fire at Mano. Various men came into the dining-room where the family were having a hasty lunch. Some said that the fire seemed a very long way from Saint Clair: others insisted that the tocsin should be rung. The torrid air was full of the smell of burning resin and the face of the sun looked dull and tarnished. Thérèse saw Bernard once more, sitting with his head turned, listening to Balion’s report, and his strong hairy hand poised absent-mindedly above the glass as the “Fowler’s drops” fell into the water. He swallowed the physic at a gulp before Thérèse, who was stupefied with the heat, had thought to warn him that he had doubled his usual dose. Every one but herself had left the table; she stayed on, cracking almonds, indifferent, untouched by all this anxiety, without interest in the tragedy, as indeed in any tragedy that was not her own. The tocsin did not ring. Bernard came back at last: “For once you were right not to be anxious: the fire is over towards Mano.... Have I taken my drops?” he asked, and without waiting for the answer he began again to pour them out into his glass. She said nothing, no doubt from laziness or fatigue; what was her intention in that instant? “I couldn’t have really meant not to answer.”

And yet that night, when Doctor Pédemay questioned her on the incidents of the day, as she stood by Bernard’s bedside, where he lay vomiting and groaning, she did not mention what she had seen at table. It would, however, have been easy, without compromising herself, to have reminded the doctor about the arsenic which Bernard was taking. She might have said something of this sort: “I did not think about it at the moment.... We were all distracted by the fire ... but I would swear, now, that he took a double dose....” She remained dumb: she did not even feel moved to speak. The deed which during lunch had been unwitting began then to emerge from the depths of her being,—as yet incomplete, but half-endured with consciousness.

After the doctor’s departure she had watched Bernard as he lay asleep at last: she thought to herself: “There is nothing to prove it was that; it may be an attack of appendicitis, though there were no other symptoms ... or an attack of gastric influenza.” But Bernard was up again two days later. “It looks as if it must have been that.” Thérèse would not have sworn to it; she would like to have been sure. “Yes, I had no sort of feeling of being at the mercy of a horrible temptation: it was merely a matter of curiosity rather dangerous to satisfy. The first day on which I poured the ‘Fowler’s drops’ into his glass, before he came into the room, I remember saying to myself: ‘Just once, so as to make quite sure.... I shall know if it was that which made him ill. Just once and no more.’”

The train slowed down, whistled for some time, and then moved on again. Two or three lights in the distance: Saint Clair station. But Thérèse’s self-examination was at an end: she had taken the plunge and the dark waters had closed over her head. What followed was murder, and Bernard knew as much about it as she did: the sudden recurrence of his trouble, and Thérèse watching over him day and night, although she seemed at the end of her strength and incapable of swallowing anything, so much so that he persuaded her to try the Fowler treatment, and she got a prescription from Doctor Pédemay! Poor Doctor! He was astonished by the greenish liquid that Bernard brought up: he would not have believed that there could be such a discrepancy between an invalid’s pulse and his temperature: he had many times observed, in cases of para-typhoid, a regular pulse, notwithstanding a high degree of fever;—but what could be the meaning of this violent pulse with a temperature below the normal?... Gastric influenza, no doubt (influenza covers everything).

Madame de la Trave contemplated calling in an eminent consultant but did not want to hurt the doctor’s feelings as he was an old friend; besides, Thérèse was afraid of giving Bernard a shock. Still, about the middle of August, after a more than usually alarming attack, Pédemay of his own accord asked for a second opinion; fortunately, on the very next day Bernard was better: and three weeks later they were talking of convalescence.

“A fortunate escape,” said Pédemay. “If there had been time to call in the great man, he would have got all the credit for the case.”

Bernard had himself taken to Argelouse, in the conviction that the pigeon-shooting would cure him. Thérèse was much exhausted about this time: Aunt Clara was in bed with an acute attack of rheumatism: two invalids and one child to look after, not to mention all Aunt Clara’s various avocations that had to be attended to. Thérèse took particular care to see that the Argelouse poor did not suffer from the aunt’s illness. She went around to all the farms, and, just as her aunt did, saw that all the prescriptions were made up, and paid for the medicines out of her own pocket. It did not occur to her to be depressed because the Vilméja farm was shut. She thought no more of Azévédo, nor of any one at all. She was travelling alone through a tunnel at lightning speed, and she was at the darkest point. She must not think: she must dash, like an animal, through the darkness and smoke and get out into the free air once more.

At the beginning of December Bernard was again laid up with the same complaint: one morning he awoke shivering, his legs lifeless and cold. Ah, what happened then! A consultant fetched one evening from Bordeaux by Monsieur de la Trave: his long silence after he had examined the sick man (Thérèse held the lamp and Balionte still remembers that she looked whiter than the sheets): on the dim landing, Pédemay, lowering his voice in case Thérèse might be listening, explaining to his colleague that Darquey the chemist, had shown him two of his prescriptions falsified: on the first a criminal hand had added: Fowler drops; on the other appeared fairly large doses of chloroform, digitaline and aconitine. Balion had brought them to the pharmacy together with many others. Darquey, in a panic at having sent out these poisons, rushed round the next day to see Pédemay.... Yes, Bernard knew all this as well as Thérèse herself. He had been hurriedly conveyed in an ambulance to a nursing-home at Bordeaux: and from that day he had begun to get well. Thérèse had remained alone at Argelouse; but lonely as she was, she was aware of a kind of vast and ominous murmur bearing down on her, and she crouched like an animal that hears the hounds drawing near; she felt as if she had been brought down in a frantic race,—as if when near the goal, her hand already outstretched to clasp it, she had been suddenly dashed to the ground and both her legs broken. Her father had come one evening, and begged her to make a clean breast of it: all might yet be saved. Pédemay had agreed to withdraw his charge, and pretended to be no longer sure whether one of the prescriptions was not entirely from his hand. As for the aconitine, chloroform and digitaline, he could not have prescribed such heavy doses: but since no trace of them had been found in the patient’s blood....

Thérèse remembered the scene with her father, by Aunt Clara’s bed. The room was lit up by a wood fire; none of them wanted a lamp. In her monotonous childish voice she delivered a lesson, the lesson that she went over again and again during her sleepless nights. “I met a man on the road who did not come from Argelouse, and who said to me that since I was sending some one to Darquey’s, he hoped I would not mind sending his prescriptions too: he owed money to Darquey and did not want to go to the shop.... He promised to come to the house for the medicine, but he did not tell me his name nor his address....”

“Try to think of something else, Thérèse, for God’s sake, for the sake of the family: wretched woman, try to think of something else.”

Old Larroque repeated his adjurations with obstinate emphasis; the deaf woman, half raised upon her pillows, and feeling that a mortal menace was weighing on Thérèse, groaned out: “What is he saying to you? What do they want you to do? Why are they hurting you?”

She had found enough strength to smile at her aunt and hold her hand, while, like a little girl at her catechism, she recited: “It was a man on the road: it was too dark for me to see his face; he did not say what farm he belonged to....”

He had come another evening for the medicine; but unfortunately no one in the house had seen his face.