Thérèse

Bernard was on the door-step waiting for Thérèse to return: “There’s nothing wrong with me at all,” he shouted, as soon as he saw her dress in the darkness: “Can you imagine that a man of my physique could be anæmic? It’s incredible, but I am: you can’t rely on appearances: I’m to follow a treatment ... the Fowler treatment: It’s arsenic ... the main thing is to get back my appetite.”

Thérèse remembered that she had felt no irritation at first: everything connected with Bernard seemed to make less impression on her than usual (as if the blow had been dealt her from further off). She did not hear him: for her body and her soul were turned towards another world full of eager creatures who wanted to know and to understand,—and, in a phrase which Jean had repeated with an air of deep satisfaction, “to become what they really were.” And when at dinner, she at last mentioned her meeting, Bernard cried, “Why, you hadn’t said anything about it: what an odd girl you are! Well, and what did you decide?”

She devised on the spot the plan which was, in fact, adopted. Jean Azévédo agreed to write a letter to Anne in which he would contrive as gently as possible to make it clear that all was over. Bernard had jeered when Thérèse had maintained that the young man did not want the marriage in the least: an Azévédo not want to marry Anne de la Trave! “Why, you must be mad! He knows very well there’s nothing doing: people like that don’t take a risk when they know they must lose. You’re still very simple-minded, my child.”

Bernard would not have the lamp lit because of the mosquitoes; so he did not see Thérèse’s look. “He had recovered his appetite,” as he said. The Bordeaux doctor had saved his life already.

“Did I see Jean Azévédo many times after that? He left Argelouse about the end of October.... We took perhaps five or six walks together; the only one that stands out was the one we spent in concocting the letter to Anne. The simple-minded youth insisted on what he thought were soothing, pacifying phrases: of course I could see how dreadful they were, though I did not say so. But our last expeditions are all confused in one single memory. Jean Azévédo described Paris and his friends to me, and I imagined a kingdom in which the law was self-realization. ‘Here you are condemned to deceit until you die.’ Did he speak such words intentionally? Of what did he suspect me? He thought I should never stand that stifling atmosphere: ‘Look,’ he said, ‘at the vast level frozen surface under which every soul in this place is embedded: sometimes it cracks and you can see the dark water beneath: some one has struggled and disappeared; the ice sets again.... Yet here, too, each one is born with his own law within him: here, too, each man’s destiny is his alone; and yet you are all victims of this same gloomy fate. Some resist: hence the tragedies about which our families do not talk. There is a great deal about which we do not talk!’

“‘Indeed, yes,’ I cried. ‘I have sometimes asked about some great-uncle or grandfather, whose photographs have disappeared from all the albums, and I have never got any answer except once, when I was told: ‘He disappeared: he was forced to disappear.’”

“Did Jean Azévédo dread this destiny for me? He assured me that it would have never occurred to him to talk about such matters to Anne, because apart from her affections, she was quite a simple soul, with little power of resistance, and would soon have sunk into slavery: ‘But you! I feel in all your words a hunger and thirst for truth.’ Shall I report faithfully all these conversations to Bernard? It is madness to hope that he would understand a word of them. He must realise, in any case, that I did not surrender without a struggle. I remember arguing against the lad that he was adorning with clever phrases what in fact was moral degradation. I even had recourse to memories of the lectures on ethics at the Lycée. ‘Self-realisation?’ I repeated: ‘but we only exist in so far as we make ourselves what we are.’ Azévédo denied that there was any degradation worse than that of self-betrayal. He maintained there was not a hero nor a saint, who had but once or twice explored the mysteries of his soul, without soon reaching all its limits: ‘We must go beyond ourselves to find God,’ he would say. And again: ‘To accept ourselves as we are, compels the best among us to meet ourselves face to face, openly and in fair fight. And that is why it often happens that these enlightened souls become converted to the narrowest creed.’”

She would not discuss with Bernard the justification for this morality;—she would even admit that these were doubtless the feeblest sophisms; “but he must understand, he must make an effort to understand, how deeply a woman like myself could be affected by them and what I felt in the evening in the dining-room at Argelouse: Bernard, ensconced in the neighbouring kitchen, was taking off his boots, and relating in dialect the result of the day’s shooting. The captive pigeons struggled in the heaving bag on the table: Bernard ate slowly, full of the joy of his reconquered appetite,—lovingly counted out the drops of ‘Fowler’: ‘That is health,’ he used to say. There was a large fire burning and at dessert he had only to turn his chair to stretch out his feet, in their felt shoes, to the flames. His eyes closed over La Petite Gironde. Sometimes he snored, but as often as not I did not even hear him breathe. Balionte’s slippers still shuffled about the kitchen; then she brought in the candlesticks. After that, silence: the silence of Argelouse. People who do not know those deserted moors do not know what silence is: it encircles the house as if embodied in that thick mass of forest in which nothing lives, except from time to time a hooting owl (we seem to be listening in the night to the sound of the sob we dare not utter).

“It was more especially after Azévédo’s departure that I became acquainted with that silence. So long as I knew that when it was daylight Jean would come once more, his presence robbed the outer darkness of its terror: while he slept near by, the moor and the night were populous. The moment he had left Argelouse, after that last conversation when he arranged to meet me in a year’s time, full of hope, he said, that I should then know how to free myself (I still do not know whether in this he spoke lightly, or whether he meant more than he said. I rather suspect that our young friend from Paris could not endure the silence, the silence of Argelouse, and that his regard for me was a regard for the only available audience), as soon as I had left him, I felt as though I was entering an endless tunnel, plunging into a darkness that grew ever thicker: and sometimes I wondered whether I should reach the open air before I were suffocated. Until my baby was born, in January, nothing more happened.”

Here, Thérèse hesitated: and she tried to detach her thoughts from what took place in the house at Argelouse the day following Jean’s departure: “No,” she thought: “that has nothing to do with what I shall soon have to explain to Bernard; I have no time to lose on trails that lead nowhere.” But the thought would not be dismissed; it haunted her mind. Thérèse will never destroy the memory of that October evening. Bernard was going to bed on the first floor: Thérèse was waiting until the log was quite burnt out before she joined him,—happy to be alone for a moment: what was Jean Azévédo doing at that hour? Perhaps he was drinking in that little bar he had told her about, or perhaps (the night was so warm) he was driving in a motor-car, with a friend, through the deserted Bois de Boulogne. Perhaps he was working at his table, while Paris murmured far away: the silence was his own handiwork,—he had won it against the turmoil of the world: it was not imposed on him from without like the silence which was stifling Thérèse: it was his own, and reached no further than the light of the lamp, or the shelves packed with books.... Such were Thérèse’s thoughts, when suddenly the dog barked, then began to howl, and a familiar, but exhausted voice soothed him outside in the vestibule. Anne de la Trave opened the door: she had walked from Saint Clair in the dark—her shoes were full of mud. Her eyes blazed in her worn little face. She flung her hat on to a chair: and asked: “Where is he?”

Thérèse and Jean, when the letter had been written and posted, had thought the affair was over,—far from supposing that Anne would not let go,—just as if any human creature listened to reasons or to reasonings, when its whole life was at stake! She had succeeded in eluding her mother and got into a train. She had made her way along the dark Argelouse road by the strip of clear sky between the tree-tops. “She must see him again: if she could see him again, he was hers once more: she must see him.” She had stumbled along, twisting her feet in the cart tracks, she was in such a hurry to reach Argelouse. Thérèse told her that Jean was gone and was now in Paris. Anne shook her head, she did not believe it: she could not let herself believe it, if she was not to collapse with fatigue and despair:

“You are lying as you have always lied.”

And as Thérèse protested, she added:

“Oh, you’ve got the family spirit with a vengeance! You pose as emancipated, but since your marriage you’ve become a woman of the family, pretty quick.... Yes, yes, of course, you did it for the best: you betrayed me to save me, didn’t you? I will spare you your explanations.” As she was opening the door, Thérèse asked her where she was going.

“To Vilméja, to his house.”

“I tell you he left it two days ago.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She went out; Thérèse then lit the lantern hanging in the entrance hall and went out after her:

“You’re going wrong, my little Anne: you’re on the road to Biourge. Vilméja is over there.”

They made their way through the mist. Dogs began to bark. The oaks of Vilméja at last, and the house, not asleep, but dead. Anne prowled round the empty sepulchre, and hammered on the door with both fists. Thérèse, standing motionless, had put the lantern down on the grass. She watched her friend’s slender ghost clinging to each window on the ground floor. Anne was no doubt whispering a name to herself, but not calling it aloud, for she knew that it was quite useless. For a few moments she was hidden behind the building; then she reappeared, went up to the door, and sank down upon the threshold, and hid her face in her knees which she clasped with her arms. Thérèse lifted her up and led her away. Anne kept on saying, as she stumbled along: “I shall go to Paris to-morrow morning: Paris is not so very big: I shall find him in Paris....” But she spoke like an exhausted child who had already given up hope.

Bernard, awakened by the sound of their voices, had put on a dressing-gown and was waiting for them in the drawing-room. Thérèse was wrong to banish the memory of that scene that broke out between brother and sister. This man, who could seize a poor worn-out child so roughly by the wrists, drag her up to a room on the second floor, and bolt the door, is your husband, Thérèse: that Bernard, who, in two hours’ time, will be your judge. The spirit of the family inspired him, and not for one instant did he waver. He always knew, in every sort of situation, what was due to the family. You, in the agony of your remorse, Thérèse, are preparing a long appeal: but only men with no principles can listen to a reason that is not their own. Bernard will laugh at your arguments: “I know what I have to do.” He always knows what he has to do. If he sometimes hesitates, he says: “The family have discussed it and we have decided that....” How can you doubt that he has prepared his sentence: Your destiny is fixed for ever: you may as well go to sleep.