CHAPTER V
Saint Clair! They would soon be there.
Thérèse measured with her eye the distance that her thought had traversed; could she get Bernard to follow her so far? She did not dare to hope that he would consent to move so slowly along that tortuous road. And yet the essential had not yet been spoken:
“Even when I have brought him as far as this, I shall still have everything to tell him.” She brooded over the enigma that was herself, she passed in review the young married women of her class whose virtues were so highly praised by every one, at the time she settled down at Saint Clair; and she reconstructed the first weeks of her life in the cool dark house of her parents-in-law. The shutters were always closed on the side looking on to the Market Square; but, on the left, through a barred window, could be seen the garden, on fire with heliotrope, geraniums, and petunias. Thérèse came and went, a confidant and an accomplice, between the La Trave couple ambushed in the depths of a little dark sitting-room, on the ground floor, and Anne wandering in the garden which she was forbidden to leave. She said to the La Traves:
“Try and conciliate her by giving way a little, suggest that you should all go abroad for a time before anything is settled: I’ll see that she obeys you on this point: and while you are away, I’ll do what I can.” What would she do? The La Traves gathered that she would strike up an acquaintance with young Azévédo: “A direct attack is hopeless, mother.” So far as Madame de la Trave knew, nothing had come out as yet, thank Heaven. The postmistress, Mademoiselle Monod, was the only person in the secret: she had intercepted several of Anne’s letters: “but that girl’s like a grave.... Anyhow, she daren’t give anything away.”
“Let us try to give her as little pain as possible....” Hector de la Trave used to say: but he who used to give way to Anne’s absurdest caprices, could only agree with his wife, saying: “You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs ...”: and again: “She’ll be grateful to us one day.” Yes, but before that day came, wouldn’t she collapse? And the pair sat in silence with troubled eyes: they pictured their child wasting away in the blazing sunshine, and turning with loathing from all food: trampling on the flowers that she could not see and pacing back and forwards along the railings like a fawn looking for a way of escape.... Madame de la Trave shook her head: “I can’t drink her meat-juice instead of her, can I? She stuffs herself with fruit in the garden so as to be able to leave her plate empty at meals.”
And Hector de la Trave: “She would blame us later on for having given our consent ... even if only for the sake of the unhappy children that she might bring into the world....”
His wife was annoyed with him for seeming to try and find excuses for the girl: “Fortunately the Deguilhems are not back yet. We may think ourselves lucky that they’re most anxious for the marriage....”
They waited until Thérèse had left the room to ask each other: “But what can they have put into her head at the Convent? She has had nothing but good examples here; we have supervised her reading.... Thérèse says that there is nothing worse for turning young girls’ heads than the love stories in the Sunday Reading Series ... but then she’s so paradoxical.... Besides, I’m thankful to say Anne never did care about reading: she is quite domesticated on that point. I believe if we could only manage to get her a change of air. Do you remember how much good Salies did her when she had bronchitis after the measles? We will go wherever she likes, I can’t say more than that. Really, I’m truly sorry for the child.” Monsieur de la Trave sighed dubiously: “Well, but a holiday with us.... Nothing, nothing,” he added hurriedly in answer to his wife who, being a little deaf, had asked him what he had said. From the refuge of his wife’s fortune, in which he had come so comfortably to rest, what memories of passionate pilgrimages did the old gentleman suddenly call to mind, what hallowed hours of his amorous youth?
Thérèse had then gone out into the garden to Anne, whose last year’s dresses had already grown too loose for her. “Well?” cried the girl, as soon as her friend came up. The ashes on the garden paths, the dry harsh grass of the lawns, the smell of the parched geraniums, and Anne herself more wasted than any plant on that August afternoon,—Thérèse could recall every detail of the scene. Sometimes stormy showers forced them to take refuge in the hot-house, while the hailstones rattled on the glass roof.
“Why do you mind going away, since you don’t see him?”
“I don’t see him, but I know he is living and breathing four miles away. When the wind is in the east, I know he hears the church bell at the same time as I do. Would you not care whether Bernard was at Argelouse or Paris? I don’t see Jean, but I know he’s not far off. On Sunday, at Mass, I do not even try to turn my head, because we can only see the altar from where we sit, and we are shut off from the congregation by a pillar. But as we go out....”
“Wasn’t he there on Sunday?”
Thérèse knew it; she knew that as Anne was being led away by her mother she had searched in vain among the crowd for a face that was not there.
“Perhaps he was ill.... They stop his letters. I’m not allowed to know anything.”
“Still, it’s strange he can’t find some means of getting a word to you.”
“If you only would, Thérèse.... Yes, I know your position is delicate....”
“Agree to go away, and then, perhaps....”
“I can’t go away from him.”
“But he’ll go away in any case, darling. He’ll be leaving Argelouse in a few weeks.”
“Oh, don’t, don’t. It’s too dreadful. And not a word from him to help me to live. I can’t bear it much longer: every moment I can’t help remembering the words of his that made me happiest: but I have said them over to myself so often, I’ve begun to be not quite sure whether he really did say them. Why, I can still hear his voice as he said to me, when we last met: ‘There is no one in my life but you....’ That is what he said,—or it may have been:—‘You are what is dearest to me in life.’ I can’t remember exactly.”
And with knitted brows she tried to recall the echo of those consoling words whose meaning seemed to her so overwhelming.
“Well, tell me what the young man is like.”
“You can’t imagine.”
“Is he so unlike the others?”
“I should like to describe him ... but he is so much beyond anything I could say.... After all, you might think him quite ordinary.... But I’m sure you wouldn’t.”
She could no longer see any individual traits in the youth whose image glowed with all the love she bore him. “Passion,” thought Thérèse, “would make me more clear-sighted: nothing would escape me in the human being I wanted for my own.”
“Thérèse, if I gave in about this trip, you would see him, wouldn’t you, and tell me exactly what he said? And you would take my letters to him? If I go away, if I can bear to go away....” Thérèse left the kingdom of light and fire and penetrated once more, like some ill-omened wasp, into the study where the parents waited until the heat had passed, and their daughter’s resistance had broken down. It was not until after many such comings and goings that Anne finally consented to go away. And Thérèse would no doubt never have succeeded had it not been for the imminent return of the Deguilhems. The girl trembled at this further danger. Thérèse said to her more than once that, “for a rich young man, Deguilhem wasn’t at all bad.”
“But, Thérèse, I’ve hardly looked at him: he wears glasses, he’s bald,—why, he’s an old man.”
“He’s twenty-nine.”
“Exactly what I said, he’s an old man,—and besides, old or not....”
At dinner in the evening, the La Traves were talking about Biarritz, and began to consider the question of hotels. Thérèse watched Anne, a body without movement and without soul. “Make an effort”; Madame de la Trave kept on saying: “you can if you try.” Anne raised the spoon to her lips with a mechanical gesture. There was no light in her eyes. Nothing and nobody had any existence for her except the one who was not there. Sometimes a smile wandered over her lips at the recollection of a word or caress of Jean Azévédo at the time when they used to sit in that hut with its walls of heather, and those strong fingers, stronger than he knew, tore her blouse a little....
Thérèse looked at Bernard’s head and shoulders bent over his plate: as he was sitting with his back to the light she could not see his face; but she heard him slowly masticating, ruminating that sacred substance, his food. She left the table. Her mother-in-law said: “She would sooner we did not take any notice of her: I should like to make a fuss of her, but she does not care to be looked after. These feelings of sickness are the least she can expect in her condition. But she may say what she likes; she does smoke too much.” And the good lady recalled her own memories of pregnancy. “I remember when I was expecting you, I had to sniff an india-rubber ball: it was the only thing that would settle my stomach.”
“Thérèse, where are you?”
“Here, on the seat.”
“Ah, yes; I can see your cigarette.”
Anne sat down, leaned her head against a motionless shoulder, looked up at the sky, and said: “He sees these very stars, he hears the Angelus....”
And she asked Thérèse to kiss her. But Thérèse did not bend down to that confiding little face. She merely asked:
“Are you unhappy?”
“Not this evening: I have realised that by some means or another I shall come to him again. The main thing is that he should know it; and he will know it through you: I have made up my mind to go away. But when I return, no walls shall keep me back: sooner or later, I shall lay my head upon his heart: I am as sure of that as I am that I’m alive. No, Thérèse, no: you, at least, must not talk morality to me, or about the family....”
“I’m not thinking of the family, darling, but of him: you can’t drop into a man’s life just like that: he has his family, too, his own interests, his work, a love-affair perhaps....”
“No, he once said to me: ‘There is only you in my life ...’ and another time: ‘Our love is the only thing I care for now....’”
“Yes, now....”
“You don’t suppose he was only thinking of the present moment, do you?”
Thérèse had no longer any need to ask her if she was unhappy. She could feel her misery in the darkness: but she did not pity her. Why should she? How delightful it must be to repeat a name, a Christian name, that stands for a certain being to whom one’s heart is bound so closely! The mere thought that he is living, breathing, and sleeping at night with his head upon his folded arm; that he wakes at dawn, and his young body moves through the mists of morning....
“Why, you’re crying, Thérèse: is it because of me? You must be fond of me.”
The child had knelt down and laid her head against Thérèse’s side, when she suddenly started back:
“I felt something moving against my forehead....”
“Yes, it began to move a few days ago.”
“The little one?”
“Yes, it’s alive already.”
They had come back to the house, with their arms round each other as they used to do along the road to Nizan, or Argelouse. Thérèse remembered that she had been afraid of that fluttering burden. How many passions were to make their way into that as yet unformed flesh. She saw herself as she had sat that evening in her bedroom, by the open window (Bernard had shouted up from the garden: “Don’t light the lamp because of the mosquitoes”). She counted the months before the birth, she would have liked to have known a God who might answer her prayer that this unknown creature, still intermingled with her body, might never see the light.