CHAPTER XIII
On a warm morning in March, about ten o’clock, the stream of humanity had begun to move, and was already surging against the Café de la Paix outside which Bernard and Thérèse were sitting. She threw away her cigarette, and carefully stamped it out, as people from the Landes always do.
“Are you afraid of setting fire to the pavement?” Bernard laughed constrainedly. He was annoyed with himself for having accompanied Thérèse to Paris. As it was so soon after Anne’s marriage he had, of course, done so out of deference to public opinion,—but mainly because his wife had wished it. He told himself she had a positive flair for false situations: so long as she remained in his life, he was always in danger of being manœuvred into doing foolish things of this kind; the wretched woman still had some sort of influence even on a solid and self-respecting person like himself. At the very moment of parting, he could not resist a feeling of sadness, which he would never have admitted: nothing could have been more foreign to his character than an emotion of this kind, inspired by any one; but inspired by Thérèse,—it was inconceivable. He was so impatient to be rid of all disturbing influences! He would not breathe freely until he was in the train going South. The car would meet him that evening at Langon: and on the Villandraut road, almost immediately outside the station, the pines began. He watched Thérèse’s profile, and her eyes that sometimes fixed upon a face in the crowd and followed it until it disappeared; and he said abruptly:
“Thérèse ... I wanted to ask you....”
He turned his eyes away,—he had never been able to withstand her look, and went on hurriedly: “I should like to know ... was it because you hated me ... because you couldn’t bear the sight of me?...”
He listened to his own words with amazement and annoyance. Thérèse smiled, then looked at him fixedly and gravely. At last! Bernard had asked a question, the very question that would have been the first to come into Thérèse’s mind had she been in his place. That confession, so carefully prepared, in the victoria along the Nizan road, and then in the little local train to Saint Clair, that patient meditation in the darkness, her efforts to reach the mainspring of her act,—all that exhausting cross-examination of her conscience, was perhaps on the point of bearing fruit. She had, unconsciously, disturbed Bernard’s peace of mind. She had confused him: and now he was questioning her like some one who is in doubt, and cannot see clearly. He was less self-assured, and therefore more sympathetic. Thérèse gazed at this unknown creature with a kind, almost maternal expression. However, she replied in a bantering tone:
“Didn’t you know it was to get your pines? Yes, I wanted to be in sole possession of your pines.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“If I ever did believe that, I don’t believe it any more. Why did you do it? You might as well tell me now.”
Her eyes stared into vacancy: on that pavement, on the bank of that stream of mud and huddled human bodies, before taking the plunge and joining in the struggle, or allowing herself to sink beneath the surface, she saw a gleam like the light of breaking dawn: she envisaged a return to the sad and desolate country,—a whole life passed in meditation and striving after perfection, in the silence of Argelouse ... the adventure of the soul, the quest for God.... A Moorish vendor of carpets and glass necklaces thought she was smiling at him, and came up to her: and she said in the same bantering tone:
“I was going to answer: ‘I don’t know why I did it’; but now I believe I do know. Perhaps it was to see a look of uneasiness, curiosity, in those eyes of yours: the expression I have noticed in them for the last moment or two:—just to upset your self-satisfaction, in fact!”
“I suppose you can’t be serious even now,” he grumbled, in a tone which reminded Thérèse of her honeymoon. “Do tell me: why did you?”
She smiled no more, and in her turn asked a question:
“I suppose a man like you, Bernard, always knows why he does a thing?”
“Naturally ... why, of course ... at least, I think so.”
“Indeed, I should so have wished you to know everything. If you only knew how I have tortured myself to try and see clearly.... But, you see, all the reasons I could have given you,—the moment I had uttered them, they would have seemed unconvincing....”
“But,” said Bernard, impatiently, “there must have been a day when you made up your mind ... when you actually did the thing?”
“Yes, the day of the great fire at Mano.”
Their heads were close together, and they were talking in low tones. As they sat there, at that meeting of the Paris highways, under the soft sunlight, and in a slightly chilly wind that smelt of foreign tobacco, and stirred the red and yellow awnings, it seemed so strange to recall that stifling afternoon, the horizon dense with smoke, the tarnished blue of the sky, the penetrating torch-like odour that rises from burning pine-forests,—and her own drowsy heart in which the crime began to take on the semblance of a purpose.
“This is how it happened: it was in the dining-room, which was dark, as it always is at midday: you were talking with your head slightly turned towards Balion, forgetting to count the drops that fell into your glass.” Thérèse was not looking at Bernard, absorbed in her anxiety not to omit the most trifling circumstances; but she heard him laugh and turned towards him: Yes, he was laughing in his stupid way: “No, what do you take me for,” he said! He did not believe her,—and indeed what she was saying was hardly credible. He grinned, and she recognised the old Bernard, full of self-confidence and worldly wisdom. He had recovered himself and once more she knew that she was lost.
“So the idea came to you,” he said jeeringly, “just like that, all of a sudden, by the intervention of the Holy Ghost.”
How he loathed himself for having questioned Thérèse. It meant the loss of all the accumulated contempt that he had heaped upon the wretched woman. She was raising her head again! Why had he yielded to that sudden longing to understand? Just as if there was anything to understand in these hysterical creatures. But he had spoken without thinking....
“Listen, Bernard, I’m not telling you this to persuade you of my innocence, far from it!”
Her self-accusation was full of a strange and passionate sincerity: to have been able to act, as she had done, in a kind of trance, for months past, she must, she thought, have conceived and brooded over thoughts of crime. Besides, when once the deed was done, with what savage lucidity of purpose and persistence she had pursued her aim!
“I only felt cruel when my hand trembled. I hated myself for prolonging your sufferings; I felt I must bring the business to an end, and quickly too! I obeyed a dreadful sense of duty,—yes, it was almost like a duty.”
“Oh, these are phrases,” Bernard broke in. “Just try and tell me, once and for all, what you wanted: come, now!”
“What I wanted? Indeed it would be easier to say what I did not want. I did not want to play a part, move like an automaton, talk in formulæ, be eternally false to a Thérèse who.... No, Bernard, it’s no use: you see how hard I am trying to tell the truth. How is it that everything I tell you rings so false?...”
“Don’t talk so loud: the man in front of us turned round just now.”
All Bernard wanted now was to get away: but he knew the fantastic creature too well: hair-splitting was a favourite occupation of hers. Thérèse, too, realised that her companion, who for one brief second had come near to her, had again receded into the infinite distance. But she persisted, called in the aid of her lovely smile, and spoke with certain low and husky intonations he had always liked.
“But now, Bernard, I feel clearly that the Thérèse who stamps out her cigarette because a spark will set the undergrowth on fire, the Thérèse who liked to count the pines, and look after her resin:—the Thérèse who was proud to marry a Desqueyroux, to hold a place in one of the best families of the district, glad at last to settle down, as the phrase goes;—that Thérèse is as real as the other, and as alive: No, there was no need to sacrifice her to the other.”
“What other?”
She did not know what to answer, and he looked at his watch.
“I must come back sometimes, I suppose, on business ... and to see Marie,” she said.
“What business? I look after the Family property. You will have your place at all the official ceremonies at which, for the honour of the Family and in Marie’s interests, we must be seen together. In as large a Family as ours there are often weddings, I am glad to say, and funerals as well. I shall be surprised, for instance, if Uncle Martin lasts until the autumn: that will be an opportunity, since you seem to be getting tired of your independence already.”
A policeman on horseback came up with a whistle at his lips, opened an invisible sluice, and an army of pedestrians hurried across the dark roadway before the wave of taxis submerged them once more. “I ought to have gone out one night,” she thought, “on to the great moors of the South, like Daguerre: I ought to have walked through the stunted pines of that evil land,—walked until I was exhausted. I should not have had the courage to keep my head under water in one of the pools, as that Argelouse shepherd did last year, because his daughter-in-law starved him. But I could have lain down in the sand and shut my eyes.... It is true the crows and ants don’t wait until....”
She watched the stream of humanity, that living mass, in which her body would so soon be plunged and borne helpless away. She could do nothing now. Bernard pulled out his watch again.
“A quarter to eleven: just time to call at the hotel....”
“You won’t be very warm travelling.”
“No, and I shall have to cover myself up this evening in the car.”
She saw in her mind’s eye the speeding car, and seemed to feel the cold wind that smells of marshes, waste resin, burnt grass, mint, and mist. She looked at Bernard and smiled that smile that made the women of her country say in former days: “You can’t pretend she’s pretty, but then she is so charming.” If Bernard had said: “I forgive you; come ...” she would have got up and followed him. But Bernard, after a momentary feeling of irritation at his own emotion, was now only conscious of his detestation of anything odd, anything that departed from the daily round of behaviour and conversation. Bernard was made to fit the tracks, like his own carts; he could not move outside the ruts: and only when he had found them again, that very evening in the dining-room at Saint Clair, would he find peace and quiet once more.
“I want to ask your pardon for the last time, Bernard.” She spoke with great earnestness and with the intonation of despair,—a last effort to reopen the conversation: “Say no more,” he protested.
“You will feel very lonely: though I am away, there is still my empty place: it would have been better for you if I had died.”
He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and in a tone of something like joviality, begged her not to worry herself about him:
“Every generation of the Desqueyroux family has had its old bachelor, and I was meant for one of them. I have all the necessary qualities—you’d be the last to deny that, wouldn’t you? I am only sorry that we had a daughter, because the family name will die out. It is true that even if we had stayed together, we should not have wanted another child,—so all is really for the best. Don’t get up: stay where you are.” He hailed a taxi, and came back to remind Thérèse that he had paid for the drinks.
She stared for a long time at the dregs of port at the bottom of Bernard’s glass; and then once more began to watch the passers-by. A few seemed to be walking up and down waiting for someone. One woman turned back twice, and smiled at Thérèse: she looked like a work girl, or she was disguised as one. It was the hour when the girls came out of the dressmakers’ shops. It did not occur to Thérèse to move: she was perfectly content and not in the least depressed. She decided not to go and see Jean Azévédo that afternoon,—and heaved a sigh of relief: she did not want to see him. More talk—more formulæ and phrases! She knew Jean Azévédo; but those whose company she wanted, she did not know: she was merely certain that they would not insist on conversation. Thérèse was no longer afraid of solitude. She was content to remain silent and still: and just as, if her body had been lying stretched out upon a heath in her own country, ants and crows would have gathered round it, so here she felt herself the centre of some dark activity that eddied about her.
She felt hungry, got up, and saw her youthful figure reflected in a tailor’s shop window: her tightly fitting travelling-dress suited her admirably: but her face, with its high cheek-bones and peaked nose, still bore the dreadful traces of those days at Argelouse. “I don’t look old,” she thought. She lunched (as so often in her dreams) in the Rue Royale. Why should she go back to the hotel since she didn’t want to? A warm feeling of satisfaction stole over her, thanks to that half-bottle of Pouilly. She called for cigarettes. A young man, sitting at the next table, handed her his lighter, and she smiled. To think that hardly an hour ago she wanted to plunge, in Bernard’s company, into the dark Villandraut road, between the rows of menacing pines! She cared no more for one country than another, pines or poplars, plain or ocean. Nothing interested her except living creatures, beings of blood and flesh. “It is not the stone-built city that I love, nor lectures nor museums, but the living forest that stirs within it, racked by passions more furious than any storm. The lamentations of the pines of Argelouse, at night, were so strangely moving because they seemed so nearly human.”
Thérèse had drunk a little and smoked a great deal; and she smiled to herself like a woman who at last is happy. She made up her cheeks and her lips with great care: and then went out into the street,—to seek what she might find.
THE END