Delphi complete works of.., p.276
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 276
He felt that he was enveloped in her dress, that he was impregnated with the perfume, the warmth, of that woman’s embrace, intoxicated by that farewell kiss, which left in his mouth the taste of fever and of tears.
And she, feeling that he was weak, murmured, “Just a little while, only a little while.”
A signal on the track. It was the train!
How had he the strength to tear himself free, to rush to the station whose lamps gleamed through the leafless branches? He was still overcome with amazement as he sat panting in a corner of the carriage, gazing out through the window at the lighted windows of the little house and a white figure at the gate. “Adieu! adieu!” And that cry banished the speechless dread he had felt at that curve in the track of seeing his mistress in the place she occupied in his dream of death.
Putting out his head, he watched their little summer house recede and grow smaller and rise and fall in the inequalities of the ground, until it was no more than a wandering star. Suddenly he felt a prodigious joy and sense of relief. How freely he breathed, how lovely the whole valley of Meudon was, and those broad black hillsides ending far away in a twinkling triangle of innumerable lights, descending toward the Seine in regular lines! Irène was waiting for him there, and he was flying to her with all the speed of the train, with all his lover’s eagerness, with all his impulsive yearning for a new and honorable life.
Paris! He called a cab to be driven to Place Vendôme. But under the gaslight he scrutinized his clothes, his shoes covered with mud, a thick, clogging mud, his whole past which still held him fast by burdensome and degrading bonds. “Oh, no! not to-night.” And he drove to his old lodging-house on Rue Jacob, where Le Fénat had taken a room for him near his own.
XIII.
THE NEXT DAY Césaire, who had taken upon himself the delicate commission of going to Chaville to get his nephew’s books and other property, to consummate the rupture by moving out of the house, returned very late, just as Gaussin was beginning to tire himself out with all sorts of wild and sinister conjectures. At last a cab with a rail around the top, heavy as a hearse, turned the corner of Rue Jacob, loaded with corded boxes and an enormous trunk which he recognized as his own, and his uncle entered, mysterious and heartbroken.
“I took plenty of time, in order to pick up everything at once and not have to go there again.” He pointed to the boxes which two porters were placing in different parts of the room. “Your clothes and your linen are in this one, your papers and books there. Nothing is missing but your letters; she begged me to let her keep them, so that she could read them over again, could have something from you. I couldn’t see that there was any danger in that. She’s such a soft-hearted girl!”
He sat down on the trunk, breathing hard, sponging his forehead with his brown silk handkerchief, as large as a napkin. Jean dared not ask him for details, in what mood he had found her; the other furnished none for fear of making him sad. And they filled that painful silence, pregnant with things unexpressed, by remarks as to the sudden change in the weather, which had grown much colder since the preceding day, as to the depressing aspect of that bare, desert suburb of Paris, planted with factory chimneys, and with enormous cast-iron cylinders, used as storehouses by market-gardeners.
“Did she give you nothing for me, uncle?” Jean asked after a while.
“No; you need have no fear. She won’t bother you; she has chosen her course with much determination and dignity.”
Why did Jean detect in those few words a suggestion of blame, a rebuke for his harshness?
“I tell you,” continued the uncle, “job for job, I prefer La Mornas’s claws to that unhappy creature’s despair.”
“Did she cry much?”
“Oh, my dear boy — And so hard, so heartily, that I sobbed myself as I sat opposite her with no strength to—” He blew his nose and shook off his emotion with a shake of the head like an old goat. “However, what can you expect? It isn’t your fault; you couldn’t pass your whole life there. Things are settled quite as they should be; you leave her some money and her furniture. And now, on with the courting! Try to arrange your marriage in good season. Such affairs are too serious for me. The consul will have to take a hand in it. As for me, I can only deal with left-handed connections.” He was suddenly seized by a fresh paroxysm of melancholy, and added, as he stood with his forehead against the window, looking out at the low clouds from which the rain poured down upon the roofs, —
“I tell you, the world is growing dismal; in my day we used to part more cheerfully than this.”
When Le Fénat had gone, accompanied by his elevating machine, Jean, deprived of that restless, talkative good-humor, had a long week to pass, an impression of emptiness and solitude, all the dark bewilderment of widowhood. In such cases, even without regret for a vanished passion, you seek for your double, you miss him; for the life together, the sharing of table and bed, create a network of invisible, subtle bonds, whose strength is disclosed only by the effort and the pain of breaking them. The influence of close association and habit is so marvellously penetrating that two persons who live the same life end by resembling each other.
His five years with Sappho had not as yet moulded him to that extent; but his body retained the marks of the chain and felt its heavy, dragging weight. And just as it happened on several occasions that his steps turned instinctively toward Chaville when he left his office, so, in the morning, he would feel on the pillow beside him for the heavy masses of black hair, released from their comb, upon which his first kiss was wont to fall.
The evenings especially seemed interminable to him in those furnished lodgings which recalled the early days of their liaison, the presence of another mistress, reserved and silent, whose little card surrounded the mirror with an alcove perfume, and with the mystery of her name: Fanny Legrand. Thereupon he would leave the house and try to tire himself out, to distract his thoughts with the music and glare of some petty theatre, until old Bouchereau should give him the right to pass three evenings a week with his fiancée.
They had reached an understanding at last. Irène loved him, Unclé was content; the marriage was to take place early in April, at the end of the course of lectures. They had the three winter months to see each other, to become acquainted with each other, to desire each other, to make the fond and charming paraphrase of the first glance, which binds hearts together, and the first avowal, which causes unrest.
On the evening of his betrothal, Jean, returning home without the slightest inclination for sleep, felt an impulse to arrange his room so as to give it an orderly, hard-working appearance, obeying the natural instinct to make our life correspond with our thoughts. He put his table in place and his books, which he had not as yet unpacked, and which were tossed pell-mell into one of those packing-boxes made in haste, the Code between a pile of handkerchiefs and a gardening jacket. As he was arranging the books, a letter in his mistress’s handwriting, with no envelope, fell from between the leaves of a Dictionary of Commercial Law, the book he consulted most frequently.
Fanny had intrusted it to the hazard of his future labors, distrusting the too short-lived emotion of Césaire, and thinking that she would gain her object more surely in that way. He determined not to open it at first, but yielded at the very mild, very reasonable words with which it began, her agitation being evident in the trembling of the pen, the unevenness of the lines. She asked but one favor, a single one, that he would return to her from time to time. She would say nothing, she would reproach him with nothing, neither with his marriage nor with the separation, which she knew to be absolute and final. But if she could only see him!
“Remember that it was a terrible blow to me, and so sudden, so unexpected! I am just as if some one had died, or I had been burned out, — I don’t know which way to turn. I weep, I expect you, I gaze at the place where my happiness used to lie. No one but you can accustom me to this new situation. As an act of charity, come and see me, so that I may feel not so entirely alone. I am afraid of myself.”
Those lamentations, that imploring summons, ran through the whole letter, with the constantly recurring refrain, “Come, come.” He could fancy himself in the clearing in the heart of the woods, with Fanny at his feet, and that piteous face raised to his under the pale violet sky of-evening, all haggard and soft with tears, that mouth opening in the darkness to cry out. It was that that haunted him all night, and disturbed his sleep, and not the intoxicating bliss he had brought from Place Vendôme. It was that worn, aged face that he constantly saw, despite all his efforts to place between it and him the face with pure outlines, the cheeks like a carnation in flower, which the declaration of love tinged with a little red flush under the eyes.
That letter was dated a week before; for a whole week the unhappy creature had been awaiting a word or a visit, the encouragement she sought in resigning herself to her fate. But how did it happen that she had not written since? Perhaps she was ill; and his former fears returned. He thought that Hettéma might be able to give him news of her, and, relying upon the regularity of his habits, he went and waited for him in front of the Artillery headquarters.
The last stroke of ten was striking at Saint Thomas d’Aquin’s when the stout man turned the corner of the little square, with his collar turned up and his pipe between his teeth, and holding the latter with both hands to warm his fingers. Jean watched him approaching in the distance, deeply moved by all the memories that the sight of him recalled; but Hettéma greeted him with a repugnance which he hardly tried to conceal.
“It’s you, is it? Perhaps we haven’t cursed you this week! — and we went into the country to lead a tranquil life.”
As he stood in the doorway, finishing his pipe, he told him that on the preceding Sunday they had asked Fanny to dinner with the child, whose day it was to be at home, hoping to turn her mind from her miserable thoughts. The dinner passed off very cheerfully: she even sang something to them at dessert; then about ten o’clock they separated, and the Hettémas were preparing to go comfortably to bed, when some one suddenly knocked on the shutters, and little Josaph cried in a terrified voice, —
“Come quick; mamma’s trying to poison herself!”
Hettéma rushed to the house and arrived in time to take the phial of laudanum from her by force. He had had to fight, to throw his arms around her and hold her, and at the same time defend himself against the blows of her head and her comb, which she aimed at his face. In the struggle, the phial broke, the laudanum was spilled on everything, and there was no harm done beyond the spotting and perfuming of clothes with the poison. “But you can understand that such scenes, a whole drama of sensational news-items, don’t suit peaceful folks like us. So, it’s decided, I’ve given my notice, and next month I move.” He replaced his pipe in its case, and with a very affable adieu disappeared under the low arches of a small courtyard, leaving Gaussin thoroughly bewildered by what he had heard.
He pictured to himself the scene in that chamber which had been theirs, the terror of the little one calling for help, the rough struggle with the stout man, and he fancied that he could taste the bitter, sleep-producing flavor of the spilled laudanum. The horror clung to him all day, aggravated by the thought of the isolation that was soon to be her lot. When the Hettémas had gone who would restrain her hand when she made another attempt?
A letter arrived, and comforted him to some extent. Fanny thanked him for not being so hardhearted as he chose to appear, since he still took some interest in the poor abandoned wretch. “He told you, did he not? I tried to die; it was because I felt so lonely! I tried, but I could not; he stopped me; perhaps my hand trembled, — the fear of suffering, of becoming ugly. Oh, how did that little Doré have the courage? After the first shame of failure, it was a joy to think that I could still write to you, love you at a distance, see you again; for I have not lost the hope that you will come once, as one goes to see an unhappy friend in a house of mourning, for pity’s sake, simply for pity’s sake.”
Thereafter there came from Chaville every two or three days letters of varying length, a journal of sorrow which he had not the heart to send back, and which enlarged the sore spot in that tender heart made by a pity without love, no longer for the mistress, but for the fellow-creature suffering because of him.
One day her theme was the departure of her neighbors, those witnesses of her past happiness, who carried away so many souvenirs. All that she had now to remind her of it was the furniture, the walls of their little house, and the servant, poor uncivilized creature, as little interested in anything as the thrush, which huddled sadly in a corner of his cage, shivering with the cold.
Another day, when a pale sunbeam shone through her window, she awoke joyful in the firm conviction, “He will come to-day!” Why? for no reason, just an idea. She at once set about making the house attractive, and herself coquettish in her Sunday dress and with her hair arranged as he liked it; and then she counted the trains from her window until evening, until the last trace of light had vanished, and listened for his footstep on the Pavé des Gardes. She must be mad!
Sometimes just a line: “It rains; it is dark; I am alone, and I am weeping for you.” Or else she would content herself with placing in the envelope a poor little flower, all drenched and stiff with frost, the last flower from their little garden. That little flower, picked from under the snow, conveyed the idea of winter, of solitude and abandonment, better than all her lamentations; he could see the place, at the end of the path, and a woman’s skirt brushing against the flower-beds, wet to the hem, sauntering to and fro in a solitary promenade.
The result of this pity, which tore his heart, was that he still lived with Fanny notwithstanding the rupture. His mind was there, he pictured her to himself every hour of the day; but, by a singular freak of his memory, although it was only five or six weeks since their separation, and the most trivial details of their home were still present to his mind, from La Balue’s cage, opposite a wooden cuckoo won at a country fair, to the branches of the walnut-tree which tapped at their dressing-room window in the lightest breeze, the woman herself no longer appeared to him distinctly. He saw her in a sort of mist, with a single detail of her face clearly marked and painful to see, — the deformed mouth, the smile punctured by the gap once filled by the missing tooth.
Thus withered and aged, what would become of the poor creature by whose side he had slept so long? When the money he had left her was spent, where would she go, to what depths would she descend? And suddenly there rose before him in his memory the wretched street-walker he had met one night in an English tavern, dying of thirst before her slice of smoked salmon. She whose attentions, whose passionate and faithful affection he had so long accepted, would become like her! And that thought drove him to despair. But what could he do? Because he had had the misfortune to meet that woman, to live some time with her, was he doomed to keep her forever, to sacrifice his happiness to her? Why he, and not the others? In the name of what principle of justice?
Although forbidding himself to see her, he wrote to her; and his letters, purposely matter-of-fact and dry, afforded glimpses of his emotion beneath soothing and prudent counsels. He urged her to take Josaph away from the boarding-school, to keep him at home with her to divert her thoughts; but Fanny refused. What was the use of inflicting her sorrow, her discouragement, on that child? The little fellow had quite enough of it on Sunday, when he prowled from chair to chair, wandered from the living-room to the garden, conscious that some great misfortune had cast a blight upon the house, and not daring to ask any more questions about “Papa Jean,” since she had told him, sobbing, that he had gone away and would not come back.
“All my papas go away, don’t they?”
And that remark of the little foundling, repeated in a heartrending letter, weighed heavily on Gaussin’s heart. Soon the thought that she was at Chaville became so oppressive to him that he advised her to return to Paris, to see people. With her sad experience of men and separations, Fanny saw in that suggestion simply a shocking egotism, a hope to rid himself of her forever by one of those sudden fancies for which she had been famous; and she stated her views frankly: —
“You know what I said to you long ago. I will remain your wife in spite of everything, your faithful and loving wife. Our little house encompasses me with you, and I would not leave it for anything on earth. What should I do in Paris? I am disgusted with my past, which keeps you away from me; and then just think what temptation you would expose us to! Do you think you are very strong, pray? Then come, bad boy, once, only once.”
He did not go; but one Sunday afternoon, when he was alone and working, he heard two little taps at his door. He was startled, recognizing her abrupt way of announcing her presence, as of yore. Fearing to find some order below, she had ascended the stairs at a breath, without asking any questions. — He crept to the door, his footsteps muffled in the carpet, and heard her breathe through the crack, —
“Are you there, Jean?”
Oh, that humble, broken voice! Once again, not very loud, “Jean!” then a sighing groan, the rustling of a letter, and the caress and farewell of a kiss thrown through the door.
When she had descended the stairs, slowly, stair by stair, as if expecting to be recalled, then, not before, did Jean pick up the letter and open it. Little Hochecorne had been buried that morning at the Children’s Hospital. She had come with the father and some few persons from Chaville, and had been unable to resist going up to see him or to leave these lines written beforehand. “What did I tell you? If I lived in Paris, I should be on your stairs all the time. Adieu, my dear; I am going back to our home.”
As he read, his eyes blurred with tears, he recalled a similar scene on Rue de l’Arcade, the grief of the discarded lover, the letter slipped under the door, and Fanny’s heartless laughter. So she loved him better than he loved Irène! Or is it true that man, being more involved than woman in the conflicts of business and of life, has not, like her, the exclusiveness of love, the forgetfulness of and indifference to everything save her one absorbing passion?
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