Thérèse

Argelouse is literally one of the ends of the earth,—one of those places beyond which you cannot go; in those parts they call them “Quartiers.” A few farms, with no church or cemetery, scattered round a field of rye, over five miles from the market-town of Saint Clair, with which it is connected by a single road in very bad repair. This road, such as it is, fades away beyond Argelouse into sandy tracks: and thence, until the sea, there is nothing but fifty miles of marshes, lagoons, young pines, and sandy heath; and by the end of winter the very sheep look as grey as that bleak landscape.

The best families in Saint Clair come from these lost lands. Towards the middle of the last century, when the sale of resin and timber began to swell their scanty profits from flocks and herds, the grandparents of those living to-day moved to Saint Clair, and their ancestral homes at Argelouse were used as farm buildings. The carved beams of the gables, and here and there a marble mantelpiece, bore witness to their ancient dignity. Every year they came nearer to collapse, and one of the roofs had sagged lower and lower until its eaves nearly touched the ground. Two of these ancient habitations, however, still housed their proprietors. The Larroque and the Desqueyroux families left their homes at Argelouse just as they had received them from their predecessors. Jerôme Larroque, Mayor and County Councillor of B., whose principal residence was just outside that small provincial town, would never allow any alterations at the estate at Argelouse, which had come to him through his wife (who had died in child-bed while Thérèse was still a baby), and where he thought it quite natural that his young daughter should like to spend her holidays. She used to go there at the beginning of July, under the tutelage of an elder sister of her father’s, one Aunt Clara, a deaf old maid, who also liked the lonely place because, as she used to say, she did not have to be constantly watching people’s lips to make out what they were saying, and because she knew that there was nothing to listen to except the wind in the pines. Monsieur Larroque was pleased, because Argelouse relieved him of his daughter’s company and brought her into contact with Bernard Desqueyroux whom she was one day to marry, in accordance with the wishes of both families, though the understanding was not as yet official.

Bernard Desqueyroux had inherited from his father a house at Argelouse, next to that belonging to the Larroques: he was never seen there until the shooting season began, and he did not sleep there until the month of October, when he went pigeon-shooting in the neighbourhood. In the winter this sedate young gentleman studied law in Paris; and in the summer he did not spend much time with his family. He could not endure Victor de la Trave, his mother’s second husband, who had not had a penny when she married him, and whose extravagance was the scandal of Saint Clair; and his half-sister Anne seemed too young to deserve any attention from him. Nor did he think much more about Thérèse. Every one regarded their marriage as inevitable because it seemed such a pity not to combine the two estates, and he very sensibly shared the common opinion on this point. But he left nothing to chance, and took a pride in the management of his life. “If a man is unhappy he has only himself to blame,” this slightly corpulent youth was wont to observe. Until his marriage he divided his time equally between work and pleasure; and although he by no means neglected food, drink, and sport, he worked “like a galley slave,” so his mother said. A husband, he thought, ought to be better informed than his wife: and Thérèse’s intelligence was already famous. She was doubtless clever, but Bernard knew the kind of arguments to influence a woman: moreover, as his mother pointed out, it was not a bad thing to “have a leg in both camps,” and old Larroque might be useful to him.

At twenty-six years of age Bernard Desqueyroux, after a few visits to Italy, Spain, and Holland, which he had carefully “got up” beforehand, would marry the richest and the cleverest girl in the neighbourhood, though not perhaps the prettiest: (“Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you can’t resist her charm!”)

Thérèse smiled at the caricature of Bernard that she drew in her mind: she reflected that he was, in point of fact, better than most of the young men she could have married. The women of those moorlands by the sea are much superior to the men, who see no one but each other after they have left school and hardly ever lose their boorishness. Their hearts are in their country, and in spirit they never leave it. They are never really happy anywhere else: they would feel that they were being utterly false to it if they gave up their country clothes, the local dialect, and the rustic habits of their home. Under Bernard’s thick skin there was certainly a sort of goodness of heart. When he was at the point of death the tenants said there wouldn’t be another gentleman left when he had gone. Yes, he was certainly kind, just, and fundamentally honest. He never talked of what he did not know; he accepted his own limitations. In his younger days he had not been bad-looking, this unlicked Hyppolytus, though he was far less interested in girls than in the hares he coursed on the moors.

Yet it was not Bernard that Thérèse, with half-closed eyes and leaning her head against the carriage windows, pictured to herself bicycling along the road from Saint Clair to Argelouse, about nine o’clock, before the heat of the day had reached its height; not her cold-blooded suitor, but his little sister Anne, her face all afire in the sunshine;—the grasshoppers were already calling from pine to pine, and the murmurous hum of the moorland, like the roar of a furnace, began to rise up to the sky; and myriads of flies hovered above the tall heather.

“You’d better put your cloak on to come into the drawing-room,” she used to say, “it’s like an ice-house”: and Aunt Clara added: “I’ll give you something to drink, dear, when you aren’t quite so hot.” Anne shouted futile words of greeting to the deaf old lady: and Thérèse said: “Don’t make yourself hoarse, darling, she understands everything from the way you move your lips.” But Anne insisted on articulating every word, distorting her young lips in the process, and the Aunt made all sorts of meaningless replies, until the friends had to run away so as to be able to laugh unobserved.

In the far corner of the darkened carriage Thérèse looked back upon those innocent days,—innocent, but gladdened by a fleeting happiness, half understood: and she could not know that this transient gleam was all the happiness ever to be hers. Nothing warned her that her fate was laid in a darkened drawing-room, encompassed by the pitiless summer, on a red-plush sofa by the side of Anne, who sat poring over a photograph album on her knees. Why was she so happy? She and Anne had hardly a single taste in common. Anne hated reading, and did nothing but sew, chatter, and giggle. She had not an idea in her head, while Thérèse devoured with equal voracity the novels of Paul de Kock, the Causeries du Lundi, the History of the Consulate, indeed all that miscellaneous literature that lies about in cupboards in a house in the country. Sometimes Anne got up to see whether the heat had passed: but as the light burst through the half-open shutters, like a splash of molten metal, it seemed to burn the matting on the floor and they had to shut everything up once more and crouch indoors. Even at sunset, when only the feet of the pines glowed in the level rays, and a last persistent grasshopper could still be heard deep down among the herbage, the heat still hovered stagnant under the oak trees. The two friends lay stretched upon the grass at the edge of the field, as they might have sat down on the shore of a lake. Stormy clouds called up fleeting pictures as they passed; but before Thérèse could make out the winged lady that Anne saw in the sky, it had changed, she said, into some strange elongated beast.

In September they could go out after the midday meal and explore that land of thirst: there was not a drop of water to be seen at Argelouse. They had to walk far into the sandy country before they reached the sources of the little river called La Hure, where they bubble up among the alder trees in a low-lying meadow. The girls’ bare feet were benumbed by the icy water, but they soon grew burning hot again, before they were even dry. Like the darkened drawing-room at home, one of the huts used in October by the pigeon-shooters, gave them shelter. They had nothing to say, not one word: they sat in virgin contemplation while time fled by, and no more thought of moving than a sportsman who signals for silence when the birds are coming over. They felt as though the slightest gesture would have put to flight their chaste ingenuous happiness. Anne was the first to break the spell,—it was growing dark and she wanted to go out shooting larks: Thérèse, though she detested the sport, followed her, for she could not bear to lose a minute of her company. Anne went into the entrance hall and took down her .24 which had no recoil. Her friend watched her standing in the field of rye apparently aiming at the sun. Thérèse stopped her ears: a sudden wild cry broke the blue stillness, and the huntress picked up the wounded bird, squeezed it carefully, and, as she was actually brushing the warm feathers against her lips, choked it.

“You will come to-morrow, won’t you?”

“Oh, no, I mustn’t come every day.”

Anne did not want to see her every day: this was perfectly sensible and Thérèse could say nothing; indeed, it would not have occurred to her to object. Anne said she would rather not come back. No, there was nothing to prevent her, but why should they see each other every day? They would end, she said, by hating the sight of each other. “You’re quite right,” Thérèse replied, “don’t make an obligation of it. Come back when you feel like it,—when you have nothing better to do,” and the girl jumped on her bicycle, and disappeared down the darkening road, ringing her bell.

Thérèse walked back towards the house. The tenants greeted her from a distance, though the children stared at her and said nothing. It was that hour of the evening when the sheep stand scattered under the oak trees, and then rush together into a huddled mass when they hear the shepherd’s cry. Her Aunt was looking out for her on the doorstep, and, as deaf people will, talked incessantly, so as to prevent Thérèse saying anything to her. What was this despair in her heart? She did not want to read; she did not want to do anything, and wandered out of doors once more....

“Don’t go far away,” said the Aunt; “dinner will soon be ready.”

She went back to the edge of the road, there was not a soul in sight, as far as the eye could reach. Some one rang the bell for her at the kitchen door. Perhaps the lamp would have to be lit that evening, she thought. Indeed, this rather haggard-looking girl felt she was living in as deep a silence as her deaf companion, who sat motionless with her hands crossed before her on the table-cloth.

But what would Bernard make of this vague world, Bernard who belonged to the blind and ruthless race of men who know their own minds? As soon as she began, Thérèse thought, he would break in with: “Well, why did you marry me, then? I wasn’t running after you.” It was certainly true that he had shown no signs of impatience. Thérèse remembered that Bernard’s mother, Madame Victor de la Trave, used to unburden herself to the casual visitor somewhat as follows:

“He was quite ready to wait, but she would have him. No, she’s not quite all we could wish, I’m sorry to say: for instance, she smokes far too much,—just a pose, of course. But she’s a good girl and absolutely straightforward: and we shall soon put a few wholesome ideas into her head. Of course, there are disadvantages about the marriage. Yes, her grandmother Bellade,—I know all about it, but that’s all forgotten now, isn’t it? Indeed it wasn’t really a scandal, it was so carefully hushed up. Do you believe in heredity? The father has no religion, of course, but he has always set her an excellent example: a saint in a tweed suit, so it seems. Besides, he’s a most influential person and one needs all the help one can get in these days. There’s always something one has to ignore. And—strange as it may seem—she is richer than we are! And she worships Bernard, which is all to the good.”

It was true,—she had worshipped Bernard: no attitude called for less effort on her part. As they sat in the drawing-room at Argelouse, or lay under the oak trees, she had only to look up at him with eyes that she knew so well how to fill with amorous innocence. Such a victim at his feet flattered the young gentleman but did not surprise him. “Don’t play with her,” his mother would say to him, “she’s eating her heart out.”

“I married him because....”

Thérèse, with bent brows and her hand over her eyes, tried to remember. There was the childish joy of becoming Anne’s sister-in-law. But it was Anne who was especially delighted with the idea: such a bond meant little to Thérèse. There was indeed another motive,—and why should she blush for it? She was far from indifferent to Bernard’s five thousand acres. It was always said of her that “property was in her blood.” At the end of interminable dinners, when the liqueurs were put on the table, Thérèse often stayed behind with the men, absorbed in their talk about tenants, pit props, resin and turpentine. Valuations and estimates roused her to enthusiasm. The lordship over so vast a stretch of forest had certainly dazzled her. Besides, she thought, he, too, had fallen in love with her pines. But perhaps Thérèse had been influenced by a deeper feeling which she now tried to bring to light: in this marriage she had possibly looked less for power and possessions than safety. Surely it was something like panic that had hurried her into it. She had shown the practical instincts of a housewife from her earliest childhood, and she was impatient to occupy her proper place in life and society, once and for all. She wanted to be protected against she knew not what. She had never seemed so sensible as at the time of her betrothal: she was becoming part of the family unit, part of the social scheme: she was entering an Order. She was flying for safety.

In that springtime of their betrothal they were walking along the sandy road that leads from Argelouse to Vilméja. The dead leaves on the oak trees still stained the pure azure of the sky: the ground was strewn with dead ferns, and the acid green of the new shoots could be seen here and there above the surface. “Mind your cigarette,” said Bernard, “you might very well start a fire: the soil is quite dried up.”

She asked him whether it was true that ferns contained prussic acid: Bernard said he did not know whether they contained enough to poison any one, and enquired affectionately whether she wanted to die: and she laughed. He expressed the hope that she would try and be more natural: and Thérèse remembered that she had shut her eyes, while two great hands clasped her small head, and a voice said in her ear: “There are still some notions inside this that shouldn’t be there.” And she answered: “Then you must get rid of them, Bernard.”

They watched the builders adding another room to the farm-house at Vilméja. The owners, who came from Bordeaux, wanted to get it ready for their youngest son who, they were told, had got consumption and could not last long. His sister had gone the same way. Bernard looked on the Azévédos with the utmost contempt. “They swear by all that’s holy,” said he, “that they are not of Jewish extraction, but you have only got to look at them! Consumption, too, and Heaven knows what else.”

Thérèse was entirely mistress of herself. Anne would come back from the Convent at San-Sebastian for the wedding: she and young Deguilhem were to take the offertory. She had asked Thérèse to describe the bridesmaids’ dresses by return of post: in fact, she wanted some patterns, as she said it was to everybody’s interest that she should not choose anything that clashed with the rest. Thérèse had never known such peace, or what she thought was peace: it merely meant that the reptile in her bosom was half asleep and torpid.