Thérèse

Thérèse loved the musty leathery smell of old carriages: and she did not mind having left her cigarettes behind, for she hated smoking in the dark. The carriage lamps lit up the sloping banks each side of the road, a strip of ferns and undergrowth, and the feet of the giant pines. At intervals, heaps of stones by the wayside cut across the moving shadow of the carriage. Sometimes a country cart passed them, and the mules instinctively moved to the right-hand side of the road without a sign from the sleeping muleteer. Thérèse began to feel that she would never reach Argelouse; she hoped she never would. It was more than an hour in the carriage to Nizan, where she got into the little local train that stopped, heaven knows how long, at every station. And from Saint Clair, where she got out, to Argelouse, she had to drive ten miles in a trap, for the road was such that no car could be driven along it at night. Fate could rise up at any one of these stages and set her free. Thérèse indulged herself with the fancy that had come over her the day before the Judge had given his decision, supposing the charge against her had been confirmed: the possibility of an earthquake. She took off her hat, leaned her pale cheeks and little throbbing head against the pungent leather, and let her body sway to the jolting of the carriage. Until that evening she had been living on her nerves: now that she was safe she began to realise the extent of her exhaustion. Her hollow cheeks, gaunt cheek-bones, sunken lips, and low broad forehead, were surely the features of one convicted,—although her fellow-men had not pronounced her guilty,—convicted and condemned to eternal solitude. That charm of hers, which every one used to say was irresistible,— was it not the conscious charm of those who must be always on the watch to conceal their secret torment, the stabbing agony of the wound within them? In the darkness of that jolting carriage, on that highway through the dark pine-forest, sat a young woman, now without her mask, whose face, as she passed her hand wearily across her forehead, was the face of one burning at the stake. What would be the first words of Bernard whose perjury had saved her? He would probably not ask any questions that evening,—but to-morrow? Thérèse shut her eyes, opened them again, and, like horses when they drop into a walk uphill, tried to realise the terrible ascent that lay before her. Well, well, she would not look ahead; it would perhaps be easier than she thought; she would not look ahead at all,—just sleep.... But she is no longer in the carriage ... who is that behind the green-baize table? ... the examining Judge ... what, again? But surely he knows that it is all over. No, he shakes his head: the case cannot be dropped, a new fact has come to light. A new fact? Thérèse turns away so that her enemy shall not see her confusion. “Cast your mind back, Madame: In the inner pocket of that old cloak,—the one you used only in October for pigeon-shooting, was there nothing forgotten or concealed?” She cannot speak, the words stick in her throat. Without taking his eyes off his victim, the Judge lays upon the table a tiny packet sealed with red wax. Thérèse knows by heart the formula written on the label, which he proceeds to read out with terrible distinctness.

• Chloroform: 10 grammes.
• Aconitine: 2 grammes.
• Digitaline: 20 centigrammes.

And the Judge bursts out laughing....

The brake rasped against the wheel, and Thérèse awoke. Her heaving lungs were full of mist,—they must be driving down to the “White Brook.” So, in her girlhood, she used to dream that, by some mistake, she had had to take her junior certificate examination over again; and when she awoke this evening she felt as relieved as she used to do in those far-off days: just a touch of anxiety because the decision was not yet official, though she realised, of course, that her lawyer had to be notified first.

She was free: what more could she want? It would be perfectly simple to put herself right with Bernard. She would make a clean breast of the whole thing, omitting nothing. She would have to tell the whole story, without concealment, and tell it that very evening. This resolution made her feel positively cheerful. Before she got to Argelouse, she would have time to ‘prepare her confession,’ as her pious little friend Anne de la Trave used to say every Saturday of their happy holidays together. Indeed, her innocent little sister Anne played no mean part in this tragedy. These simple creatures do not know in what strange happenings they are involved by day and night, and what poisoned growths spring up under their childish footsteps.

The girl was quite right when she had said, as she so often did to Thérèse, then a sceptical, and mocking schoolgirl: “You can’t think how relieved you feel when you have confessed and been forgiven,—when you can begin all over again with a clean slate.” Indeed, the moment Thérèse had made up her mind to tell the whole story she did feel a sort of delicious relief. She would tell Bernard everything: she would say....

Yes, but what should she say? How should she begin? Could any words express that confused succession of desires, resolves, and impulses?

“How do people behave,” she thought, “when they acknowledge their crimes? I don’t acknowledge mine: I didn’t want to commit it. I don’t know what I did want. I never knew the meaning of that dreadful force within me, and yet outside me: and I was myself horrified at all the destruction it left behind.”

A smoky oil lamp lit up the plaster walls of the Nizan station and a carriage outside it: and all about them gathered the encompassing darkness. A train standing in the station whistled and hooted dismally. Gardère took Thérèse’s bag and again stared at her greedily. His wife must have told him to watch carefully how she was looking and behaving. For the benefit of Monsieur Larroque’s coachman Thérèse instinctively assumed that smile that made people say: “Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you cannot resist her charm.” She asked him to take her ticket, because she did not like to cross the waiting-room, where two farmers’ wives were sitting with baskets on their knees swaying to the rhythm of their knitting-needles.

When he brought back the ticket she told him to keep the change. He touched his cap, and then, gathering up the reins, he turned to have a last, long look at his master’s daughter.

The train was not yet made up. In the old days, at the beginning of the long vacation, or on the way back to school, Thérèse Larroque and Anne de la Trave enjoyed this stop at Nizan station. They used to eat ham and eggs at the local inn and walk with their arms round each other’s waists down that road that looked so dark this evening: but in those vanished years Thérèse always saw it white under the moonlight. And how they used to laugh at their elongated shadows as they melted into each other! They talked, of course, about their mistresses and their school-friends, one standing up for her convent and the other for her school. “Anne!” Thérèse uttered the name aloud in the darkness. She must begin by telling Bernard about Anne. Her Bernard was one of the most precise of men: he classified all emotions, kept them rigidly apart, and ignored the complicated network of sensations that unites them. How could he follow her into those shadowy places where she had lived and suffered? Yet she must try to make him: the only thing to do, when she went into the room later on, would be to sit on the edge of the bed and take him, step by step, through the whole story until he should stop her and say: “Now I understand; get up; I forgive you.”

She felt her way through the station-master’s garden where she could smell the chrysanthemums without seeing them. The first class compartment was empty, and in any case the lamp was much too dim to reveal her face. She could not read: but Thérèse must have found any novel insipid in comparison with the terrible story of her life. She might die of shame, despair, remorse, or exhaustion,—but of boredom, never.

She sat back in her corner and closed her eyes. It was incredible that a woman of her intelligence should not be able to make the tragedy intelligible. When her confession was over, Bernard would of course raise her to her feet and say: “Go in peace, Thérèse: be of good comfort: deeds that are over and done shall never part us now, we will wait for death together in this house at Argelouse. I am thirsty: go down into the kitchen and make me a glass of orangeade: I shall drink it at a draught; no matter what it looks like, nor even if it tastes like my morning chocolate of those days! Do you remember how sick I used to be, darling; and how kindly you held my head, as you stared at that dreadful greenish liquid? You were never frightened when I fainted. And yet how pale you were that night when I noticed that my legs had gone dead and stiff! I was shivering, do you remember? And that old fool Doctor Pédemay who was so astonished because my temperature was so low and my pulse so feverish....”

“No,” Thérèse thought to herself, “he won’t have understood. I shall have to begin at the very beginning.”

But where is the beginning of our acts? The thread of our fate, when we try to lay it bare, is like one of those plants that cannot be torn up with all its roots. Should Thérèse go back to her childhood? But childhood itself is an end and a fulfilment.

Thérèse’s childhood;—snow at the source of a stream now utterly defiled. At school she appeared to live aloof from those petty tragedies that tormented her companions. The mistresses often held up Thérèse Larroque as an example to the rest. “Thérèse,” one of them said, “is an unusually high moral type: she knows it: and her pride in that fact is quite enough to keep her straight without any fear of punishment.”

“But was I happy?” Thérèse asked herself. “And was I sincere? All my life before my marriage has, as I look back on it, this air of innocence, in contrast, no doubt, to the ineffaceable contamination of my marriage. My life at school, before I became a wife and a mother, seems a paradise, though I did not realise it then. How could I know that in those years before my life began I was living my real life? Pure I was: an angel if you like: but a very passionate angel! Whatever my mistresses may have said, I knew what suffering was and I made others feel it. I enjoyed the pain I gave and the pain that my friends inflicted: my suffering was a pure emotion, untainted by remorse: and indeed, there was pain and joy in most simple pleasures.”

But Thérèse was satisfied if she could feel herself worthy of Anne when she met her once more in the summer heats, under the oak trees of Argelouse. She must be able to say to this little offspring of the Convent: “I can be as pure as you are without all those wreaths and ribbons.” Besides, Anne de la Trave’s purity was mainly ignorance. The ladies of the Sacré-Cœur drew many veils between their little charges and the world. Thérèse despised them for confusing virtue and ignorance. “You don’t know anything about life, darling,” she used often to say, in those far-off summers at Argelouse. Those lovely summers; Thérèse, as she sat in the little train, that had at last begun to move, realised that she must go back to them if she was to get a clear view of what had happened. It is incredible, but true, that in those pure dawns of our lives the most dreadful storms are already threatening in the distance. Those azure mornings are an evil omen for the weather of the afternoon and evening. They portend wrecked flower-beds, broken branches, and muddy ruin everywhere. Thérèse did not reflect, or come to a decision at any period of her life; there were no sharp turnings; she went down an imperceptible slope, gradually at first, and then faster. The lost woman of this evening was identical with the radiant creature of those summers at Argelouse, where she was now returning in secret and under cover of the night.

How wearisome it all was! Where was the use in trying to uncover the hidden springs of acts accomplished? She could see nothing through the carriage window except the reflection of her pale expressionless face.

There came a sudden break in the monotonous rhythm of the little train: the engine gave a prolonged whistle and cautiously drew in to a station. An arm held up a swaying lantern: there followed shouted utterances in the local dialect, and squeals from sundry pigs that were being taken off the train: Uzeste already. One more station and then Saint Clair: thence she must drive the rest of the way to Argelouse. Thérèse had very little time left to prepare her defence.