CHAPTER XXXIV. “I SEE THE OTHER WITH YOU ALWAYS!”
At nine o’clock, in the yard of the little house, she observed M.
Fusellier sweeping, in the rain, while smoking his pipe. Madame
Fusellier came out of her box. Both looked embarrassed. Madame Fusellier
was the first to speak:
“Monsieur Jacques is not at home.” And, as Therese remained silent,
immovable, Fusellier came near her with his broom, hiding with his left
hand his pipe behind his back--
“Monsieur Jacques has not yet come home.”
“I will wait for him,” said Therese.
Madame Fusellier led her to the parlor, where she lighted the fire. As
the wood smoked and would not flame, she remained bent, with her hands
on her knees.
“It is the rain,” she said, “which causes the smoke.”
Madame Martin said it was not worth while to make a fire, that she did
not feel cold.
She saw herself in the glass.
She was livid, with glowing spots on her cheeks. Then only she felt that
her feet were frozen. She approached the fire. Madame Fusellier, seeing
her anxious, spoke softly to her:
“Monsieur Jacques will come soon. Let Madame warm herself while waiting
for him.”
A dim light fell with the rain on the glass ceiling.
Upon the wall, the lady with the unicorn was not beautiful among the
cavaliers in a forest full of flowers and birds. Therese was repeating
to herself the words: “He has not yet come home.” And by dint of saying
this she lost the meaning of it. With burning eyes she looked at the
door.
She remained thus without a movement, without a thought, for a time the
duration of which she did not know; perhaps half an hour. The noise of
a footstep came to her, the door was opened. He came in. She saw that he
was wet with rain and mud, and burning with fever.
She fixed on him a look so sincere and so frank that it struck him. But
almost at once he recalled within himself all his sufferings.
He said to her:
“What do you want of me? You have done me all the harm you could do me.”
Fatigue gave him an air of gentleness. It frightened her.
“Jacques, listen to me!”
He motioned to her that he wished to hear nothing from her.
“Jacques, listen to me. I have not deceived you. Oh, no, I have not
deceived you. Was it possible? Was it--”
He interrupted her:
“Have some pity for me. Do not make me suffer again. Leave me, I pray
you. If you knew the night I have passed, you would not have the courage
to torment me again.”
He let himself fall on the divan. He had walked all night. Not to suffer
too much, he had tried to find diversions. On the Bercy Quay he had
looked at the moon floating in the clouds. For an hour he had seen it
veil itself and reappear. Then he had counted the windows of houses with
minute care. The rain began to fall. He had gone to the market and had
drunk whiskey in a wine-room. A big girl who squinted had said to him,
“You don’t look happy.” He had fallen half asleep on the leather bench.
It had been a moment of oblivion. The images of that painful night
passed before his eyes. He said: “I recalled the night of the Arno. You
have spoiled for me all the joy and beauty in the world.” He asked her
to leave him alone. In his lassitude he had a great pity for himself. He
would have liked to sleep--not to die; he held death in horror--but
to sleep and never to wake again. Yet, before him, as desirable
as formerly, despite the painful fixity of her dry eyes, and more
mysterious than ever, he saw her. His hatred was vivified by suffering.
She extended her arms to him. “Listen to me, Jacques.” He motioned to
her that it was useless for her to speak. Yet he wished to listen to
her, and already he was listening with avidity. He detested and rejected
in advance what she would say, but nothing else in the world interested
him.
She said:
“You may have believed I was betraying you, that I was not living for
you alone. But can you not understand anything? You do not see that if
that man were my lover it would not have been necessary for him to talk
to me at the play-house in that box; he would have a thousand other ways
of meeting me. Oh, no, my friend, I assure you that since the day when I
had the happiness to meet you, I have been yours entirely. Could I have
been another’s? What you imagine is monstrous. But I love you, I love
you! I love only you. I never have loved any one except you.”
He replied slowly, with cruel heaviness:
“‘I shall be every day, at three o’clock, at our home, in the Rue
Spontini.’ It was not a lover, your lover, who said these things? No! it
was a stranger, an unknown person.”
She straightened herself, and with painful gravity said:
“Yes, I had been his. You knew it. I have denied it, I have told an
untruth, not to irritate or grieve you. I saw you so anxious. But I lied
so little and so badly. You knew. Do not reproach me for it. You knew;
you often spoke to me of the past, and then one day somebody told you
at the restaurant--and you imagined much more than ever happened. While
telling an untruth, I was not deceiving you. If you knew the little that
he was in my life! There! I did not know you. I did not know you were to
come. I was lonely.”
She fell on her knees.
“I was wrong. I should have waited for you. But if you knew how slight a
matter that was in my life!”
And with her voice modulated to a soft and singing complaint she said:
“Why did you not come sooner, why?”
She dragged herself to him, tried to take his hands. He repelled her.
“I was stupid. I did not think. I did not know. I did not wish to know.”
He rose and exclaimed, in an explosion of hatred:
“I did not wish him to be that man.”
She sat in the place which he had left, and there, plaintively, in a
low voice, she explained the past. In that time she lived in a world
horribly commonplace. She had yielded, but she had regretted at once.
If he but knew the sadness of her life he would not be jealous. He
would pity her. She shook her head and said, looking at him through the
falling locks of her hair:
“I am talking to you of another woman. There is nothing in common
between that woman and me. I exist only since I have known you, since I
have belonged to you.”
He walked about the room madly. He laughed painfully.
“Yes; but while you loved me, the other woman--the one who was not you?”
She looked at him indignantly:
“Can you believe--”
“Did you not see him again at Florence? Did you not accompany him to the
station?”
She told him that he had come to Italy to find her; that she had seen
him; that she had broken with him; that he had gone, irritated, and that
since then he was trying to win her back; but that she had not even paid
any attention to him.
“My beloved, I see, I know, only you in the world.” He shook his head.
“I do not believe you.”
She revolted.
“I have told you everything. Accuse me, condemn me, but do not offend me
in my love for you.”
He shook his head.
“Leave me. You have harmed me too much. I have loved you so much that
all the pain which you could have given me I would have taken, kept,
loved; but this is too hideous. I hate it. Leave me. I am suffering too
much. Farewell!”
She stood erect.
“I have come. It is my happiness, it is my life, I am fighting for. I
will not go.”
And she said again all that she had already said. Violent and sincere,
sure of herself, she explained how she had broken the tie which was
already loose and irritated her; how since the day when she had loved
him she had been his only, without regret, without a wandering look or
thought. But in speaking to him of another she irritated him. And he
shouted at her:
“I do not believe you.”
She only repeated her declarations.
And suddenly, instinctively, she looked at her watch:
“Oh, it is noon!”
She had often given that cry of alarm when the farewell hour had
surprised them. And Jacques shuddered at the phrase which was so
familiar, so painful, and was this time so desperate. For a few minutes
more she said ardent words and shed tears. Then she left him; she had
gained nothing.
At her house she found in the waiting-room the marketwoman, who had come
to present a bouquet to her. She remembered that her husband was a
State minister. There were telegrams, visiting-cards and letters,
congratulations and solicitations. Madame Marmet wrote to recommend her
nephew to General Lariviere.
She went into the dining-room and fell in a chair. M. Martin-Belleme was
just finishing his breakfast. He was expected at the Cabinet Council and
at the former Finance Minister’s, to whom he owed a call.
“Do not forget, my dear friend, to call on Madame Berthier d’Eyzelles.
You know how sensitive she is.”
She made no answer. While he was dipping his fingers in the glass bowl,
he saw she was so tired that he dared not say any more. He found himself
in the presence of a secret which he did not wish to know; in presence
of an intimate suffering which one word would reveal. He felt anxiety,
fear, and a certain respect.
He threw down his napkin.
“Excuse me, dear.”
He went out.
She tried to eat, but could swallow nothing.
At two o’clock she returned to the little house of the Ternes. She
found Jacques in his room. He was smoking a wooden pipe. A cup of coffee
almost empty was on the table. He looked at her with a harshness that
chilled her. She dared not talk, feeling that everything that she could
say would offend and irritate him, and yet she knew that in remaining
discreet and dumb she intensified his anger. He knew that she would
return; he had waited for her with impatience. A sudden light came to
her, and she saw that she had done wrong to come; that if she had been
absent he would have desired, wanted, called for her, perhaps. But it
was too late; and, at all events, she was not trying to be crafty.
She said to him:
“You see I have returned. I could not do otherwise. And then it was
natural, since I love you. And you know it.”
She knew very well that all she could say would only irritate him. He
asked her whether that was the way she spoke in the Rue Spontini.
She looked at him with sadness.
“Jacques, you have often told me that there were hatred and anger in
your heart against me. You like to make me suffer. I can see it.”
With ardent patience, at length, she told him her entire life, the
little that she had put into it; the sadness of the past; and how, since
he had known her, she had lived only through him and in him.
The words fell as limpid as her look. She sat near him. He listened
to her with bitter avidity. Cruel with himself, he wished to know
everything about her last meetings with the other. She reported
faithfully the events of the Great Britain Hotel; but she changed the
scene to the outside, in an alley of the Casino, from fear that the
image of their sad interview in a closed room should irritate her lover.
Then she explained the meeting at the station. She had not wished to
cause despair to a suffering man who was so violent. But since then
she had had no news from him until the day when he spoke to her on the
street. She repeated what she had replied to him. Two days later she had
seen him at the opera, in her box. Certainly, she had not encouraged him
to come. It was the truth.
It was the truth. But the old poison, slowly accumulating in his mind,
burned him. She made the past, the irreparable past, present to him, by
her avowals. He saw images of it which tortured him. He said:
“I do not believe you.”
And he added:
“And if I believed you, I could not see you again, because of the idea
that you have loved that man. I have told you, I have written to you,
you remember, that I did not wish him to be that man. And since--”
He stopped.
She said:
“You know very well that since then nothing has happened.”
He replied, with violence:
“Since then I have seen him.”
They remained silent for a long time. Then she said, surprised and
plaintive:
“But, my friend, you should have thought that a woman such as I, married
as I was--every day one sees women bring to their lovers a past darker
than mine and yet they inspire love. Ah, my past--if you knew how
insignificant it was!”
“I know what you can give. One can not forgive to you what one may
forgive to another.”
“But, my friend, I am like others.”
“No, you are not like others. To you one can not forgive anything.”
He talked with set teeth. His eyes, which she had seen so large, glowing
with tenderness, were now dry, harsh, narrowed between wrinkled lids and
cast a new glance at her. He frightened her. She went to the rear of
the room, sat on a chair, and there she remained, trembling, for a long
time, smothered by her sobs. Then she broke into tears.
He sighed:
“Why did I ever know you?”
She replied, weeping:
“I do not regret having known you. I am dying of it, and I do not regret
it. I have loved.”
He stubbornly continued to make her suffer. He felt that he was playing
an odious part, but he could not stop.
“It is possible, after all, that you have loved me too.”
She answered, with soft bitterness:
“But I have loved only you. I have loved you too much. And it is for
that you are punishing me. Oh, can you think that I was to another what
I have been to you?”
“Why not?”
She looked at him without force and without courage.
“It is true that you do not believe me.”
She added softly:
“If I killed myself would you believe me?”
“No, I would not believe you.”
She wiped her cheeks with her handkerchief; then, lifting her eyes,
shining through her tears, she said:
“Then, all is at an end!”
She rose, saw again in the room the thousand things with which she had
lived in laughing intimacy, which she had regarded as hers, now suddenly
become nothing to her, and confronting her as a stranger and an enemy.
She saw again the nude woman who made, while running, the gesture which
had not been explained to her; the Florentine models which recalled
to her Fiesole and the enchanted hours of Italy; the profile sketch by
Dechartre of the girl who laughed in her pretty pathetic thinness. She
stopped a moment sympathetically in front of that little newspaper
girl who had come there too, and had disappeared, carried away in the
irresistible current of life and of events.
She repeated:
“Then all is at an end?”
He remained silent.
The twilight made the room dim.
“What will become of me?” she asked.
“And what will become of me?” he replied.
They looked at each other with sympathy, because each was moved with
self-pity.
Therese said again:
“And I, who feared to grow old in your eyes, for fear our beautiful
love should end! It would have been better if it had never come. Yes,
it would be better if I had not been born. What a presentiment was that
which came to me, when a child, under the lindens of Joinville, before
the marble nymphs! I wished to die then.”
Her arms fell, and clasping her hands she lifted her eyes; her wet
glance threw a light in the shadows.
“Is there not a way of my making you feel that what I am saying to you
is true? That never since I have been yours, never--But how could I? The
very idea of it seems horrible, absurd. Do you know me so little?”
He shook his head sadly. “I do not know you.”
She questioned once more with her eyes all the objects in the room.
“But then, what we have been to each other was vain, useless. Men and
women break themselves against one another; they do not mingle.”
She revolted. It was not possible that he should not feel what he was
to her. And, in the ardor of her love, she threw herself on him and
smothered him with kisses and tears. He forgot everything, and took her
in his arms--sobbing, weak, yet happy--and clasped her close with the
fierceness of desire. With her head leaning back against the pillow, she
smiled through her tears. Then, brusquely he disengaged himself.
“I do not see you alone. I see the other with you always.” She looked at
him, dumb, indignant, desperate. Then, feeling that all was indeed at
an end, she cast around her a surprised glance of her unseeing eyes, and
went slowly away.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A woman is frank when she does not lie uselessly
A hero must be human. Napoleon was human
Anti-Semitism is making fearful progress everywhere
Brilliancy of a fortune too new
Curious to know her face of that day
Disappointed her to escape the danger she had feared
Do you think that people have not talked about us?
Does not wish one to treat it with either timidity or brutality
Does one ever possess what one loves?
Each had regained freedom, but he did not like to be alone
Each was moved with self-pity
Everybody knows about that
Fringe which makes an unlovely border to the city
Gave value to her affability by not squandering it
He could not imagine that often words are the same as actions
He studied until the last moment
He is not intelligent enough to doubt
He does not bear ill-will to those whom he persecutes
He knew now the divine malady of love
Her husband had become quite bearable
His habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth
(Housemaid) is trained to respect my disorder
I love myself because you love me
I can forget you only when I am with you
I wished to spoil our past
I feel in them (churches) the grandeur of nothingness
I have to pay for the happiness you give me
I gave myself to him because he loved me
I haven’t a taste, I have tastes
I have known things which I know no more
I do not desire your friendship
Ideas they think superior to love--faith, habits, interests
Immobility of time
Impatient at praise which was not destined for himself
Incapable of conceiving that one might talk without an object
It was torture for her not to be able to rejoin him
It is an error to be in the right too soon
It was too late: she did not wish to win
Jealous without having the right to be jealous
Kisses and caresses are the effort of a delightful despair
Knew that life is not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope
Laughing in every wrinkle of his face
Learn to live without desire
Let us give to men irony and pity as witnesses and judges
Life as a whole is too vast and too remote
Life is made up of just such trifles
Life is not a great thing
Little that we can do when we are powerful
Love is a soft and terrible force, more powerful than beauty
Love was only a brief intoxication
Lovers never separate kindly
Made life give all it could yield
Magnificent air of those beggars of whom small towns are proud
Miserable beings who contribute to the grandeur of the past
Nobody troubled himself about that originality
None but fools resisted the current
Not everything is known, but everything is said
Nothing is so legitimate, so human, as to deceive pain
One would think that the wind would put them out: the stars
One who first thought of pasting a canvas on a panel
One is never kind when one is in love
One should never leave the one whom one loves
Picturesquely ugly
Recesses of her mind which she preferred not to open
Relatives whom she did not know and who irritated her
Seemed to him that men were grains in a coffee-mill
She pleased society by appearing to find pleasure in it
She is happy, since she likes to remember
Should like better to do an immoral thing than a cruel one
Simple people who doubt neither themselves nor others
Since she was in love, she had lost prudence
So well satisfied with his reply that he repeated it twice
Superior men sometimes lack cleverness
That sort of cold charity which is called altruism
That if we live the reason is that we hope
That absurd and generous fury for ownership
The most radical breviary of scepticism since Montaigne
The door of one’s room opens on the infinite
The past is the only human reality--Everything that is, is past
The one whom you will love and who will love you will harm you
The violent pleasure of losing
The discouragement which the irreparable gives
The real support of a government is the Opposition
The politician never should be in advance of circumstances
There is nothing good except to ignore and to forget
There are many grand and strong things which you do not feel
They are the coffin saying: ‘I am the cradle’
To be beautiful, must a woman have that thin form
Trying to make Therese admire what she did not know
Umbrellas, like black turtles under the watery skies
Unfortunate creature who is the plaything of life
Was I not warned enough of the sadness of everything?
We are too happy; we are robbing life
What will be the use of having tormented ourselves in this world
Whether they know or do not know, they talk
Women do not always confess it, but it is always their fault
You must take me with my own soul!
End of Project Gutenberg’s The Red Lily, Complete, by Anatole France