Annette left Sylvie's apartment intending never to enter it again. She was weeping. She was burning with shame and rage. These two passionate natures could not cease to love each other without almost hating each other.
Impossible for Annette to remain under the same roof with her! If she had had the means she would have moved the next day. Happily for her, she had to yield to practical necessities: to give notice, to look for another apartment. In her first fury she would have preferred to place her furniture in storage and camp out in a hotel. But this was not the moment to squander her money. She had very little laid aside; what she earned was spent as she went along; even when she had no recourse to her sister's aid, the feeling that she could appeal to her in case of need gave her a security that spared her any too keen anxieties over the future. When she came to reckon up what she must have in order to live, she was obliged to recognize, to her mortification, that if she were thrown upon her own resources her actual work would not suffice to support her. Living with her sister and taking some of their meals together lightened her expenses. The child's clothes were given him by Sylvie, and Annette paid only for the material of her own dresses. And this was not to mention the things she borrowed or those which, while they belonged to one, served for two, the small gifts, the Sunday excursions, the little extra pleasures that brightened the daily monotony. And then the credit which her sister enjoyed in the neighborhood gave Annette the benefit of a certain latitude in paying her bills. Now she would have to count upon paying cash for everything. The beginning would be hard. The moving, the deposit, the expenses of settling. And the great question, who was going to look after the child? A contradictory question: for she had to earn money for the child, and in order to earn it she had to leave home, and who would take care of him? Annette had to admit that she would never have surmounted these difficulties if they had come earlier, when Marc was very young. How did other women manage? Annette was sorry for the unhappy souls, and she felt humiliated.
Place the child in a boarding-school? He was old enough to go to school now. But she was unwilling to shut him up in one of those menageries. What she had heard about those old-time institutions (things have been somewhat improved since then), what she instinctively surmised about this physical and moral promiscuity, had led her to regard it as a crime to put one's child into them. She wanted to believe that the boy would be unhappy there. Who could say? Perhaps he would have been very glad to get away from her. But what mother can believe that she is a burden to her child? She was not even willing to leave him at one of these schools for his meals. She told herself that this was because of Marc's delicate health; he needed special food; she had to watch over his diet. But it was extremely fatiguing to come home from lunch when her lessons obliged her sometimes to run to the other end of Paris. Going, coming, always in movement. And the lessons did not bring in enough money. Some urgent expense was always turning up upon which she had not reckoned. The boy was growing very large, and Annette regretted that he was not like those little beans which never grow faster than their shells. She had to clothe him. Nor could she permit herself to neglect her own appearance; her occupation would have prevented this if her pride had not done so. So she had to find new resources. Copying to be done at home, the work of some foreigner or a translation to be revised (an ungrateful task, poorly remunerated); secretarial work, one or two mornings in the week (also poorly remunerated); but all these things, taken together, were enough. To earn money by any means! Annette did many things at once. She made herself hated by the hungry rivals whom she thrust out of her way in her pursuit of bread. But this time the devil could take the hindmost. No more sentimentality! She had no time for it. You cannot go back and pick up those who have fallen. It was true that she sometimes had the vision in passing of some strained face that stared at her with hostile eyes, some evicted competitor whom she would gladly have helped in other days. A pity, but she did not have the time. She had to get there first. She knew now where to find work, and she knew the shortest way to it. Her diplomas, her degree, gave her an assured superiority. And she was not unaware that she had advantages on another side, the personal side, her eyes, her voice, her way of dressing, her skill in handling her clients. Between her and other applicants they rarely hesitated. Those that were sacrificed could not forgive her.
Her new life was established on a healthily rigorous system. No empty room for useless thoughts. From one day to another, every day was as full as a nut, full and hard. After the trepidation of the first weeks, when she did not know whether she could manage to live and keep her child alive, she became used to it, she grew more confident, she even ended by finding pleasure in the difficulties she had overcome. No doubt, in the rare moments when the necessity of acting no longer held her mind tense, when at night she laid her head on her pillow, there were times before she went to sleep when her accounts, the thought of her budget, weighed upon her. . . . If she dropped on the road? . . . If she fell ill? . . . I won't. . . . Peace, I must sleep. . . . Happily, she was tired; sleep did not keep her waiting And when the day returned, there was no longer room for those "ifs" and apprehensions. No more room for that which enervated, enfeebled, broke the soul. Penury and toil put everything in its proper place—that which belonged to the necessary and that which belonged to luxury.
The necessary: daily bread. Luxury: the problems of the heart. . . . Could she have imagined it? These problems seemed to her now of secondary importance. All very well for those who have too much time on their hands! She had neither too much nor too little. Just enough. One thought for each thing she did, and not one to spare. So, full of strength, she felt like a well-trimmed ship that is launched on the waves.
She was in her thirty-third year, and nothing had yet wasted her energies. She perceived that she not only did not need protection but that she was stronger without it. The difficulty of her life invigorated her. And its first benefit was in liberating her from the obsession of Julien, from the nostalgia of love, which, dull or violent, had poisoned all her past years. She realized how satiated she was with sentimental dreams, sweet things, tender things, hypocritical sensuality; merely to think of them was repugnant to her. To be occupied with the rough facts of life, to undergo its wounding contact, to be obliged to be hard herself—that was good, it was vivifying. A whole part of herself, the best part perhaps, certainly the healthiest, was born again.
She no longer dreamed. She no longer tormented herself, even about her child's health. When he was ill she did what had to be done. She did not think about it beforehand. She no longer thought about it, indefinitely, afterwards. She was ready for everything, she was confident. And that was the best medicine. Dining these first years of desperate toil she was not ill a single day, and the child caused her no real anxiety.
Her intellectual life was no less curtailed than her emotional life. She scarcely had time to read any longer. She might have suffered from this, but she did not. Her mind made up the deficiency from its own resources. She had enough to do to sort and arrange her new discoveries. For during these first months she discovered a great deal; she discovered everything. And yet in what respect had things changed? As for work, she had been very familiar with that—or she had thought she was familiar with it. And this city, these people were just the same to-day as yesterday.
Between one day and the next, however, everything had changed. From the moment she had begun to seek her bread she had made the real discovery. It had not been love, not even maternity. She carried these things within her, but her life had expressed only a small portion of herself. Hardly had she passed into the camp of poverty, however, than she discovered the world.
The world varies, according as one considers it from above or from below. Annette was in the street now, between the rows of houses that stretched away on both sides: she saw the asphalt, the mud, the menace of the motor-cars and the flood of passers-by. She saw the sky above (rarely luminous)—when she had the time! The space between vanished: all that had formed the object of her life hitherto, society, conversation, theatres, books, the luxury of pleasure and the intelligence. She knew very well that they were there and she might have enjoyed them, but she had other things to think about. Watching her steps, looking out for herself, hurrying. . . . How all these people ran! . . . From above one saw nothing but the meandering of the river: it seemed calm, and one did not notice the strength of the current. The race, the race for bread. . . .
A thousand times Annette had thought of the state in which she found herself to-day, in the world of toil and poverty. But what she had thought then bore no resemblance to what she thought now that she was taking part in it.
Yesterday she had believed in the democratic axiom of the Rights of Man, and it had seemed to her unjust that the masses should be deprived of them. To-day, the injustice—if there remained any question of just and unjust—was that rights existed for the privileged. There are no rights. Man has no right to anything. Nothing belongs to him. He has to conquer everything anew every day. That is the Law: "Thou shalt earn thy bread in the sweat of thy brow." Rights are the deceitful invention of a fallen combatant, to sanction the spoils of his past victory. Rights are nothing but the strength of yesterday, heaping up its treasures. But the living right, the only one, is work. The conquest of every day. . . . What a sudden vision of the human battlefield! It had no terrors for Annette. The courageous soul accepted this combat as a necessity; and she found it just because she was "in form," young and robust. If she conquered, so much the better! If she was conquered, so much the worse! (She would not be conquered. . . .) She had not given up pity, but she had given up weakness. The first of her duties was "Don't be pusillanimous!"
By the new light of this law of labor, everything became dear to her. The old faiths were put to the test, and a new morality rose on the ruins of the old, cemented on this heroic foundation. The morality of freedom, the morality of strength, not of Pharisaism and debility. And examining under this light the doubts that troubled her, especially that which lay deepest in her heart, "Have I the right to my child?" she answered, "Yes, if I can keep him alive, if I can make a man of him. If I can do this, everything will be all right. If I cannot, everything will be wrong. This is the only morality; everything else is hypocritical."
This inflexible decision redoubled her vigor and her joy in the struggle.
She was meditating in this fashion one day as she was walking about Paris, going from one task to another. The walking excited her mind. Now that her daily activity was methodically regulated, her dreams resumed their rights. But they were waking dreams, clear, precise, dreams that had nothing misty about them. The more limited her time was, the more she made of these slight intervals; like ivy the hours climbed up, covering the walls of the days. Annette brought her enlarged conceptions of the true human morality face to face with the experiences of her day. Work and poverty had opened her eyes. She had a new perception of the untruthfulness of modern life which she had not seen when she was caught in it. The monstrous futility of this life—nine-tenths of this life—particularly for women. . . . Eating, sleeping, procreating. . . . Yes, a tenth part had some use. But the rest? . . . This "civilization"? What people call "thinking"? Is man—vulgus umbrarum—really made for thought? He wants to persuade himself that he is, he puts himself into the attitude for it, and he believes that he holds it, as by consecrated exploits. But he does not think. He does not think over his newspaper, or in his office, before the wheel on which his everyday activities revolve. The wheel turns with him, turns empty. Did they think, those young girls whom Annette had undertaken to teach? What was the meaning of the words they heard, read, uttered? To what did their life reduce itself? A few immense, depressing instincts brooding in their torpor under a mass of playthings. Desire and enjoyment. . . . Thought was also one of their playthings. Who was deceived by it? Themselves. The garment of this civilization, its luxury, its art, its movement and its noise—(that noise! one of its masks, to make itself believe that it was hurrying toward some end! what end? It hurried in order to stupefy itself)—what lay beneath it? Emptiness. People gloried in it. They gloried in their tinsel, in their chatter, in their trinkets. How rare were the men who revealed the shining light of Necessity! To the eternal brute in man the voice of its gods and its sages says nothing or is only one triviality the more. It never escapes from the confines of its desire and boredom. Like man himself, human society is a meretricious structure. Custom holds it together. A touch can lay it in ruins. . . .
Tragic thoughts. But they could not depress the ardent Annette. It is the inspiration within that gives joy or sadness, not ideas. Under an untroubled sky an anæmic soul perishes of melancholy. A vigorous soul, exposed to storms, wraps itself as happily in shadows as in sunlight. It knows quite well that they alternate. Annette came home sometimes crushed with fatigue and the feeling of a dark future. She would go to bed and sleep; in the middle of the night some ridiculous dream would wake her up laughing. Or, more often, in the evening, as she sat with her brow bent over her work and the fingers followed their path, her brain, following its path in turn, would suddenly pick up some absurd thought and she would be full of merriment. She had to take care not to laugh too loudly in order not to awaken Marc. "I'm an idiot," she said, as she dried her eyes. But her heart was lightened. These childish relaxings, these sudden reactions, were a wholesome heritage that came to her from her family. When the heart is full of clouds, the wind of joy rises and drives them away.
No, she had no need of distractions, books. Annette had enough to read in herself. And the most thrilling of books was her son.
He was approaching his seventh year. He had adjusted himself to the change of his surroundings much more readily than might have been expected. Disagreeable or not, it was a change. He had cast his skin like a little snake. Ungrateful childhood! All Sylvie's indulgences and all her petting—she was so certain of her power over him!—were as if they had never been. After forty-eight hours he no longer even thought of them.
What pleases or displeases a child is never what you expect. The first thing Marc appreciated in his new life was the school whither his mother sent him pityingly—and the hours of solitude when there was nobody to watch him.
Annette had established herself in a little apartment on the fifth floor on the populous Rue Monge. A steep stairway, small rooms, noise from without; but there was space above the roofs, and she needed this. The noise did not disturb her; she was a Parisian, accustomed to movement; it was almost necessary to her; she could think all the better in the midst of the hurly-burly. Perhaps her nature had also been transformed with maturity: the plenitude of physical life and regular work had given her a poise, a nervous solidity, which she had never known, but which would not endure forever.
The apartment consisted, on the street side, of Annette's bedroom, which served as a sitting-room (the bed formed a divan), Marc's little room, and a narrow recess, a sort of corner-closet. Across the passage, which was dark at midday, was the dining-room over the court and a kitchen that was practically filled by the stove and the sink.
Between the mother's room and that of the child the door remained open, and Marc was too small to protest. He was at the undecided age that floats between the sexlessness of early infancy and the first uncertain awakening of the little man. He was no longer in the one stage and not yet in the other. He would still run from his own bed to his mother's on Sunday morning; and on great days he would allow her to dress him from head to foot. On other days he would have fits of rudeness and shyness. And he was full of curiosity also. Especially he had attacks of secretiveness which he did not wish to have disturbed. He would slyly shut his door. Annette would open it again. He could not make a movement that she did not hear. It was unbearable! So he wouldn't move at all. Then she would forget him for a little while. Not for long! . . .
Happily, Annette was not always there. She had to go out. Marc went to his school, which was not far away. Annette took him there in the morning, and when she was free (rarely) in the afternoon. But she could not come for him to take him home again, for this was the hour of her lessons. He had to come home alone, and this made her anxious. She had tried to arrange with a neighboring family for the servant to bring Marc home when she brought their child. But this did not suit Marc, and he slipped away beforehand. So, proud and timorous, he would come back alone and all alone shut himself up in the apartment. Good times till his mother's return! Annette scolded him for his independence. But although she would never have admitted to herself that she had this evil feeling, she was not too sorry that he should be able to get along without comrades. She distrusted comrades. She did not want anyone to spoil her son. . . . Her son! Was she quite sure that he was hers? Of course she made an effort to repress her egotistical love. No longer, as in the days when he was very small, did she feel the blind, gluttonous need of absorbing the little being in her passion. She saw in him now a personality. But she persuaded herself that she had the key of this personality, that she knew better than he its laws and its happiness; she wanted to carve it in the image of her secret God. Believing, like most mothers, that she was incapable of creating what she desired herself, she dreamed of creating it through him who had sprung from her blood. (That eternal dream, eternally frustrated, of Wotan!)
But in order to shape him, she had to catch him. Not let him escape! She did everything to envelop him. Too much. Every day he escaped more. She had the discouraging impression that every day she knew him less. One thing she knew well: his body, his physical health, his illnesses, the least symptoms. She had an intuition that never deceived her. She would hold him before her, bathe him, touch him, care for him . . . this dear fragile body of the little hermaphrodite. He looked transparent. But what was inside him? She devoured him with her eyes and her hands; he was entirely at her mercy.
"Heavens, how I love you, little monster! And do you love me?"
"Yes, Mamma," he replied politely.
But what was he thinking in his heart?
At seven Marc had scarcely a feature of his family. In vain had Annette explored him, sought for some resemblance, tried to imagine one. . . . No, he was not like her, either in the shape of his forehead, or in his eyes, or in that swelling of the lips, so characteristic of the Rivières, and especially of Annette, as if the will, the inner ardor, had expanded them. The only point in common was the color of the iris, and this was lost in a strange world. . . . What world? . . . The father's? The Brissots'? Scarcely. At least, not yet. Jealously Annette said, "Never!"
And yet would she have been so displeased to find some trace of Roger in her son's features? Would it not have given her an obscure pleasure? She remembered the man to whom she had given herself with a mixture of bitterness and unconfessed attraction—an attraction less for the real Roger than for him of whom she had dreamed. In fact, it was to this dream that she had given herself. If she had seen him again in the image of her son, she would have had a strange feeling of victory, the feeling that she had wrested from him this form she loved in order to animate it with her own soul. Yes, as long as Marc's spirit was like her own, she would have been glad to find Roger's features in him.
But he resembled neither Roger nor herself. Roger's face, which lacked the original expression of the Rivières, had a simple, regular beauty of line: it was an easy book to read. But this child's face, the meaning of this expression . . . how describe it? It was so fleeting. . . .
Pretty, delicate features, but not well proportioned, the narrow brow, the effeminate chin, eyes a little aslant, the nose—whose did it resemble, this long, tapering, finely arched nose?—and the wide, thin mouth with pale, slightly crooked lips? . . . Even when he was motionless he seemed to be moving; his air was uncertain and changing. . . . No doubt he was seeking for his form: he was still fluctuating, but in what direction would he decide to go? Or would he decide not to have any direction?
Since his serious illness, he had been a child who at a first glance would have been called nervous and impressionable (as perhaps he was). But as you watched him, he disconcerted you with his calm ways, his air of indifference, his reserved expression. Not disagreeable, not sulky, not saying no. . . . "Yes, Mamma." . . . But you saw at once that he was not paying any attention to what you said. He had not heard it. . . . Or had he heard it? It was hard to be sure. . . . And he looked at his mother to see what was going to happen next, and she looked at him. . . . The little sphinx! . . . All the more a sphinx because he didn't know that he was one. He knew no more about himself than Annette knew about him, though this was the last thing to cause him any anxiety. When you are seven you have ceased trying to understand yourself and have not yet begun to do so again. On the other hand, he was trying to understand her, his mistress and servant. And he had the time for this because she shut him up with herself for days together. They observed one another mutually. But she was no match for him.
Annette deceived herself in thinking that he did not resemble any one she knew. There were astonishing similarities between his spirit and that of his grandfather Rivière. But Annette, though this occurred to her, had known very little about her father. He had charmed her so much that she had never seen the real Raoul Rivière. She had merely had a few suspicions, especially since she had read the famous correspondence. She had not wanted to dwell on this. Even if she had to bolster them up, she preferred to keep the pious and tender memories that had been momentarily shaken. Besides, she had only known the Raoul of the last phase. But if old Rivière had been able to return and inspect the little love-child, as he would have known so well how to do, he would have said, "I am beginning again."
He was not beginning again. Nothing ever begins again. He had merely come back in certain details.
What mischievous tricks blood plays! Over Annette's head the two confederates shook hands. And one of the most striking traits which the frank Annette had transmitted from the grandfather to the grandchild was a remarkable aptitude for dissembling. Not through any need to deceive. Raoul Rivière had enough good-natured contempt for his contemporaries and felt strong enough never to have any fear of showing himself, when it pleased him, quite without disguise. (It had often pleased him, and people would quote ferocious words of his that carried all before them.) No, this was a gratuitous pleasure, a delight in the burlesque, a theatrical tendency, a malicious taste for concealing his moral identity in order to mystify people. The child, innocently of course, had inherited this. His soul, which was still full of inconsistencies and very heterogeneous, with nothing of the buffoon in its depths, had slipped at birth into this malicious attitude, and it used the organs that Nature had made for it. Just as it would have tried its beak, its claws or its wings if it had passed into the body of a woolly or feathered animal, so, enveloped as it were in a fold of one of old Rivière's coats, it revealed once more the wiles of the grandfather.
Marc was guarded in the presence of grown-ups, and he could read in them everything that concerned him. On that side his faculty of attention was keen. When he saw what they imagined he was, he became it—at least unless they irritated him or he wanted to amuse himself and was seized with the whim of being contrary.
One of his occupations was to take apart the mechanism of these living playthings, look for their hidden springs, their weak points, try them, play with them, make them go. This was not very difficult, for they were stupid and unsuspicious. And first of all, his mother.
She puzzled him. There was something enigmatic about her. He had heard allusions to this subject in Sylvie's workshop, when he was sitting under the feet of the working-girls, who were not thinking of him. He did not understand much of it. But this added to the mystery, and he interpreted it. Divining, discovering. In this alert little ferret-like body, motionless, with shining eyes, the mind was always working.
Now that he was shut up with her, often for days, because of his ill-health, his winter colds and the greedy affection of his mother, she was his principal resource. He watched her curiously while he sang to himself, moving about, pursuing his other occupations—for a child's intelligence, like its body, is lithe and hard to hold. No matter if he is facing the other way, he sees you with eyes in the back of his head, and his cat's ears turn like weathercocks at the sound of your voice. If this all-observing attention chases three or four hares at a time, it never loses the trail, it amuses itself, it knows very well that to-morrow it will begin again. . . . The hare allowed herself to be caught. Expansive, easily carried away, prodigal in her feelings, Annette was never niggardly. She spent herself without calculation.
At one moment she spoke to him as to a very little child, and she hurt his feelings: he thought her ridiculous. Again she would speak to him as to a companion of her thoughts, too old for his age, and she wearied him: he thought her a bore. Sometimes she let herself think out loud, carried on a monologue before him, as if he could understand it. Then he thought her queer, and he watched her with a severe, mocking look. He did not understand her; but people who do not understand never surrender their right to judge.
He had adopted an artificial attitude that was convenient for him because he could apply it to all cases: the impertinent, absent-minded politeness of a well-brought-up child who appears to listen because he must, but who is not in the least interested in all these things, who has his own concerns and, when you speak to him, waits till you have finished. At other times he amused himself playing at kissing her so as to give her pleasure. He knew that his mother was nearly bursting with happiness. The foolish woman responded with all her heart. When she fell into his snares, he had a sort of affectionate contempt for her. When she busied herself in a way that he had not foreseen, he was annoyed, but he had more respect for her.
He was incapable of playing one part very long. A child is too yielding and is always jumping from one thing to another. A moment after he had pretended to be so warm-hearted and had enchanted her with his effusions, he unblushingly betrayed his indifference in the harshest way. Annette was completely upset.
There came a time when she ceased to be deceived or provoked any longer, especially at the rare moments when a vague suspicion warned her that Marc was obstinately posing. Then, nervously and violently—we ask modern pedagogues to forgive us—she spanked him. Truly she was going against all good principles and affronting the dignity of her child! From the point of view of an Anglo-Saxon, poor Annette dishonored herself forever. But we old French people don't go quite so far as that. Qui bene amat. . . . The maxim still flourishes in bourgeois families that have preserved some tincture of Latin. We have all been "well loved." And at bottom we believe, three-quarters of the time, like Annette's boy, that we are getting more than our deserts. But it is also true that if, like him, we continue to love those who spank us, the spanking results in their losing a little of their prestige. Let us admit that perhaps it is for this reason that we—Marc and we—provoke them!
He had a fine time afterwards playing the part of the outraged victim. And Annette reproached herself for abusing her power. She felt that she was at fault. She would try to find a way back into his good graces. He would wait for her to come to him. . . .
The triumph of weakness! It is a weapon that women are expert in handling. But the most feminine of the two in this case was the child. This young morsel of flesh, still all bathed in the maternal milk, was more than half feminine, and it had all the wiles and tricks of a girl. Annette was disarmed. Beside the little rogue she was the strong sex. The stupid strong sex, which is ashamed of its strength and tries to win forgiveness for itself. The contest was not equal. The child made a fool of her.
But he was no artful comedian amusing himself. Like his grandfather, he had more than one nature. Very few had been able to see what lay hidden beneath the mocking mask of old Rivière, the drama concealed by that jesting cynicism, that appetite for play-acting which is sometimes characteristic of conquering spirits. Raoul had had his dark depths which he never revealed. They exist more often than one might suppose under the Gallic laugh. One keeps them to oneself. Annette, who had her own secrets, had never told them to her father, and his secrets she had known no more than she knew those of her son. They all remained walled up in their own inner lives. A strange reserve. People blush less at exposing their vices and their appetites—Raoul had fairly paraded his—than the tragedy of the soul.
Of this latter Marc had his share. A child who lives alone, without brothers or companions, has time to wander about these caves of life. Very deep and vast were the caves of the Rivières. The mother and the child might have met in them. But they did not see each other; they passed very close to each other more than once, imagining that they were very far apart. Both of them, with eyes bandaged, Annette's by the demon of passion that still held her, the child by the egoism that was natural to his age—both were in the dark. But Marc as yet was only at the entrance of the cavern; he was not, like Annette, seeking for the Way out, bruising himself against the walls; he was crouching on one of the first steps, dreaming of the future. Incapable of explaining it to himself, he was building his life.
He had not had to go far to find the redoubtable wall before which the terrified ego recoils. Death. The wall rose on all sides. Illness skirted it like an encircling road. It was vain to seek for a passage through it. The wall was massive and had no breach. It had not been necessary for any one to tell Marc that the wall was there. Instantly, in the shadow, he had scented it, like a horse with his mane rising. He had spoken to no one about it. No one had spoken to him. The whole world was in agreement on the subject.
Annette, like the young women of to-day, was a bad teacher who, as a girl, had heard a great deal of talk about teaching, and was not unwilling to talk about it as a matter of conscience. She attached more importance to the method of bringing up children than the mothers of former days who had gone about it blindly. But once the child was there, she had found herself helpless before the thousand and one surprises of life, incapable of playing her part, making up theories which she did not apply, or which she abandoned at the first attempt. In the end she had let them all go and fallen back upon instinct.
The religious problem was one of those that had troubled her, and she had not been able to reach any practical solution of it for the child. Most of the friends of her youth, in the rich, republican bourgeoisie, had been brought up with religion by their mothers, without religion by their fathers. They did not even feel the clash of the two conceptions. (The two get along together very well in the world, like many other contradictory facts, for neither feeling has a third dimension.) She herself had gone to church, as she had gone to school: she had taken her first communion, as she had taken her diploma, conscientiously, without emotion. The ceremonies at which she had been present in her wealthy parish seemed to her to belong to the order of the world. She had separated from them when she separated from the world.
Modern society—and the Church is one of its pillars—has succeeded so well in denaturing and weakening the great human forces that Annette, who bore within her a richer faith than that of a hundred devotees, imagined she was not religious. For she confounded religion with prayer-wheels and the ceremonies of an obsolete exoticism, a luxury of soul for the rich, a snare for the eyes and that consolation for the heart of the poor which assures the foundations of their poverty and of society.
Since she had given up her religious observances, she had never felt the need for them. It did not occur to her that when she had her fiery transports of conscience, her passionate monologues, she was really saying mass.
She did not think of giving her son what she had gone without herself. Perhaps the question would not even have occurred to her if, paradoxically, Sylvie had not brought it up. Sylvie, who had no more religion than a Parisian sparrow, would not have considered herself married without the concurrence of the Church; and it seemed to her indecent that Annette should not have her son baptised. Annette had not thought of this. But she had it done so that Sylvie might be the godmother. Then she thought no more of the matter, and things remained where they were until Julien's arrival. That Julien had a practical faith did not give Annette one, but it rendered the faith worthy of respect in her eyes and brought her attention back to the problem she had neglected. What was she to do for Marc? Send him to church? Teach him a religion in which she did not believe? She asked Julien, who was scandalized; he affirmed emphatically that the child had to be instructed in the divine truths.
"But if they are not truths for me? Must I tell lies when Marc asks me questions?"
"No, don't tell lies, but allow him to believe. It's for his good."
"No, it couldn't be for his good for me to be dishonest. And what authority would I have when he found it out? Wouldn't he have the right to reproach me for it? He would not believe in me any longer. And how do I know whether this faith he would learn would not thwart his real development later?"
Here Julien's brow darkened, and Annette hastened to change the subject. But what was she to do? She could not, as her Protestant friends advised, give her son a course in all the religions and leave him to choose for himself when he was sixteen years old. . . . Annette burst out laughing at this idea. What a strange conception of religion, as if it were a subject for an examination!
In the end Annette had done nothing. She walked about with Marc, went into churches, sat down in a corner, marvelled with him at the upspringing forest of these lofty trunks of stone, the underwood gleams that filtered through the stained-glass windows, enjoyed the flight of the vaults, the distant chanting, the vague accompaniment of the organ. It was a veritable bath of reverie and self-communion.
Marc did not dislike going about in this way, with his hand in his mother's, listening, whispering. It was sweet, it was warm, it was delightful. . . . Yes, if it didn't last too long. This sentimental somnolence bored him. He needed to move about and think of definite things. His little mind worked away, observed, noticed this crowd of praying people, watched his mother, who did not pray. And without expressing them he made his own reflexions. He asked few questions, much fewer than most children would have asked, for he was very proud and he was afraid of saying something naïve.
But he did ask, "Mother, who is God?"
"I don't know, my dear," she replied.
"Then what do you know?"
She smiled and pressed him against her. "I know that I love you."
Yes, the old story. He knew this, but it was not worth coming to church for.
He was not very sensitive and he had no taste for the vague soulfulness in which "these women" delighted. Annette, when she had her child beside her, when she was without too many material cares, during an hour of relaxation earned amid the tasks that pursued her, was happy. She did not have to go very far to find God: he was in her heart. But Marc had found in his heart nothing but himself, Marc: everything else was mere foolishness. He had to be clear about things. Just what was this God? The man up there over the altar, with his girlish petticoat and his gilded shell? The verger with his staff and his exposed calves? Those painted-up images—one in each chapel—that grinned at you with their sickly smiles like embarrassed ladies whom he didn't like?
"Mamma, let's go on."
"But isn't this beautiful?"
"Yes, it's beautiful enough. Let's go home."
What was God? . . . He no longer insisted on asking his mother. When grown-ups confess that they do not know something, it is because they are not interested in it. . . . He continued his rather impatient inquiry alone. He heard prayers, "Our Father who art in heaven"—a localization that excited the scepticism of the more wide-awake of these modern cubs for whom heaven was on the point of becoming a new field of sport. He thumbed the Bible, along with other old stories, with a bored curiosity, asked a few questions, caught a few replies, here and there, with a negligent air—"God, some invisible person who created the world." That was what they said. It was too far off. And not clear. He was like his mother: God did not interest him. One king more or less. . . .
But what did interest him was his own existence, and what threatened it, and what was going to happen to it afterwards. Some dull conversations with Sylvie that had taken place in his presence had very early aroused his attention. The shivering pleasure with which these girls spoke of accidents, sudden deaths, sicknesses, burials, chattering all the time! . . . Death excited them. The animal instinct of the child bristled at this word. He would have liked to question his mother about it. But Annette, who was very healthy, never spoke of death and never thought about it, at this period of her life. She had plenty of other things to do! Earning the little boy's living. When, from morning till evening, she had to think of the here and now, the beyond seemed a luxury. It only becomes essential when those one loves have passed to the other side. Her son was here. For the rest, if she lost him neither life nor death would have had any value for her. She was too passionate to be satisfied with an immaterial world, a world without a beloved body.
Marc saw her, vigorous, intrepid, busy, heedless of these fears; and he would have been ashamed to betray his weakness. So he was obliged to help himself alone. This was not easy. But, as one may suppose, the child did not embarrass himself with problems of complicated thought. He reduced the question to its proper dimensions. Death meant the disappearance of others. Let them disappear: that was their affair. But was it possible that he might disappear?
Once he overheard Sylvie say, "Oh, well, we're all going to die. . . ."
He asked, "I too?"
"Oh," she laughed, "you have time enough."
"How much?"
"Till you are old."
But he knew very well that they buried children too. Besides, even if he were old he would still be himself. Some day Marc would die. . . . It was terrifying. Was there no possible means of escaping it? Somewhere he must find something like a nail in a wall, something he could cling to, a hand he could grasp. "I don't want to disappear."
The need of this hand might have led him to God, as it leads so many others, this outstretched hand that men in their anguish see projected into the night. But that his mother did not seem to be looking for this support was enough to drive away his thought. Even while criticising Annette, he felt the influence of her attitude. That in spite of what was awaiting her she could remain calm did not reassure him, but it obliged him to stand as straight as she did. No matter if he was a nervous, puny little boy, rather stubborn, he was not Annette's child for nothing. . . . Since she, a woman, is not afraid, I must not be afraid.
But it was not given to him, as it was given to these grown-ups, not to think about it. Thought comes and goes; you cannot keep it down, especially at night, when you cannot sleep. Well, then, he had to think of it and not be afraid: "What is it like to be dead?"
Naturally he had no means of knowing. Save for a few pictures in the museum, he had been spared every kind of funereal spectacle. Stiff in his little bed, he felt the walls of his body. How could he find out? An imprudent word revealed to him, quite close by, a window that opened on the abyss into which he burned to look.
One summer day he was dawdling by the window. He caught some flies and was pulling off their wings. It amused him to see them floundering about. It did not occur to him that he was doing them any harm; he was playing a game. They were living toys, and it made no difference if he broke them. . . . His mother surprised him at this occupation. With the violence that she was unable to repress, she seized him by the shoulders and shook him, exclaiming that he was a disgusting little coward.
"What would you say if someone broke your arms? Don't you know that these creatures suffer just as you do?"
He pretended to laugh, but he was astounded by this. It had not occurred to him. These creatures were like him! He did not feel the least pity for them. But he looked at them now with other eyes, troubled, attentive, hostile. . . . A fallen horse in the street. . . . A howling dog that had been run over. . . . He watched. . . . The need of knowing was too strong for his pity to be awakened. . . .
At Easter, as the child, after a gray, damp winter that had been neither cold nor sunny, had suffered from a mild, but insidious, attack of influenza that had drained all the color from his cheeks, Annette rented for a fortnight a room in a farmhouse in the valley of Bièvres. It contained only one big bed for herself and the child. He did not like this very much: but she had not asked for his advice. Happily, he was alone during the day; Annette went back to Paris for her work, and she left him in the care of the landlady, who paid very little attention to him. Marc would quickly vanish into the fields. He looked around him, rummaged about, tried to grasp, from animals and things, some secret that concerned him; for everything in nature he related to himself. Wandering through the woods, he heard some boys making a noise in the distance. He was not looking for the company of other children; he was not strong enough, and he would have wanted to dominate them. But he was attracted just the same. He approached and saw that there were four or five of them forming a circle about a wounded cat. The animal's back was broken, and the children were amusing themselves poking it, tormenting it, prodding it with the ends of their sticks. Without stopping to think, Marc threw himself into the group and struck about him with his fists. When the surprise was over, the band fell upon him shouting. He beat a retreat, but he remained a few steps away, hidden behind some bushes, and stopped his ears. He could not make up his mind to leave. . . . He returned. The young scoundrels hailed him with jeers, "Hello, skinny! Are you afraid? Come over here and see him croak!"
He came. He did not want to seem a milksop. Besides, he wanted to see. The animal, with its eyes glazed and half torn away, was lying on its side, its hindquarters rigid, already dead; its chest was panting and its head trying to lift itself while it moaned in distress. It could not die. The children were convulsed with laughter. Marc looked at it, petrified. Then suddenly he seized a stone and struck with it furiously at the creature's head. A raucous cry broke from him. He struck, struck harder, like a madman. He was still striking when all was over. . . .
The boys looked at him, embarrassed. One of them tried to make a joke. With blood on the fingers that were still grasping the stone, Marc, pale, with knitted brows, a wicked look in his eye and a trembling lip, stared at them. They went away. He heard them laughing and singing in the distance. Setting his teeth, he walked home, and once at home he said nothing about it. But at night, in bed, he cried. Annette took him into her arms. The soft body was trembling.
"What is this wicked dream? My angel, it's nothing."
He was thinking, "I killed it. I know what death is."
The terrifying pride of knowing, of having seen and destroyed! And another feeling, which he could not comprehend, a feeling of horror and attraction. . . . The strange bond that unites the slayer and the slain, the fingers daubed with blood and the broken head. . . . To which of the two did the blood belong? . . . The animal was no longer suffering. . . . He still felt its last agonies. . . .
Happily, at this age, the mind cannot cling very long to the same thought. It would have been dangerous if this had become a fixed idea. But other images passed and their current refreshed his brain. The idea remained, however, in the depths of him: its presence betrayed itself, from time to time, in sombre gleams, bubbles of air that slowly mounted from the mud of the brook. Under the soft crust of his nature a hard core was hidden: death, the force that kills. . . . I am killed and I kill. . . . I will not let myself be killed! Victory to the strongest! I shall fight!
Pride, an obscure pride that sustains its weakness, like a suit of armor. Whence did this steel come if not from his mother—the mother for whom he felt contempt nevertheless because of her effusiveness and because he wound her around his finger? He was not unaware of it. Even in the days when his preference had been all for Sylvie, who petted him, he had recognized Annette's superiority. And he may have imitated her. But he had to defend himself against the encroachments of this personality who loved him too much, who got in his way and threatened his life. He remained in arms against her, and held her at a distance. She too was the enemy.
Sylvie had disappeared from the horizon. When the first months of resentment were past, she had a certain feeling of remorse as she thought of the difficulties against which her sister was struggling. She was waiting for Annette to come and ask her for help: she would not have refused it, but she was not going to offer it. But rather than ask for it Annette would have allowed herself to be cut to pieces. The two sisters were at swords' points. They had seen each other in the street and avoided each other. But once when Annette had met little Odette with one of the workers, she had not resisted an affectionate impulse; she had taken the child in her arms and devoured her with kisses. On her side, Sylvie, seeing Marc passing one day on his way home from school—he appeared not to see her—stopped him and said, "Well, don't you recognize me any more?"
One can imagine the high and mighty manner this little animal assumed as he said, "Good afternoon, aunt."
All by himself he had made his little reflexions, and, just or unjust, he had thought it best to identify himself with his mother's cause. "My country, right or wrong." Sylvie was completely taken aback. She asked, "Well, are things going as they should?"
He replied coldly, "Everything is going very well."
She watched him as he walked stiffly off, blushing from the effort he had imposed on himself. He was neat and nicely dressed. . . . The mean little thing! "Everything is going very well." She could have boxed his ears.
That Annette could manage her own affairs without her added to Sylvie's indignation. But she lost no opportunity to hear about her, and she did not give up the idea of lording it over her some day. If she could not do so actually, she could at least do so in thought. She was not unaware of the austere life which her sister led; and she did not understand why Annette condemned herself to it. She knew her well enough to be aware that a woman of her type was not made for this moral restraint, this joyless life. How could she force her nature in this way? What obliged her to live like a widow? In the absence of a husband she had no lack of friends who would be happy to lighten her troubles. If she had agreed to this, Sylvie would perhaps have respected her sister less, but she would have felt closer to her.
She was not the only one who did not understand Annette. Annette understood hardly any better herself the reasons for her monastic life, the fierce dread that led her to draw back, not merely from the possibility, but from the mere idea of one of those natural pleasures that no religious or social law could have prevented her from enjoying. (She did not believe in the morality of the Church, and was she not mistress of herself?)
"What am I afraid of?"
"Of myself."
Her instinct did not deceive her. For such a nature, filled with passions, desires, blind sensuality, there is no such thing as innocent pleasure, there is no play without consequences. The least shock would deliver her over to forces of which she was no longer the mistress. She had known long before the moral perturbation caused by her brief, passing encounters with love. The dangers would be very different to-day! She would no longer resist. If she gave herself up to pleasure, she would be utterly swept away by it; she would lose the faith she needed. . . . What faith? Faith in herself. Pride? No. Faith in that inexplicable, that divine something that was within her and that she wanted to transmit unsullied to her son. Such a woman has no choice, outside the strict discipline of marriage, between an absolute moral restraint and the frankest abandonment to her passionate instincts. Everything or nothing. . . . Nothing!
And yet, at moments—in spite of her transports of proud fervor—for several months this agonizing thought gripped her by the throat:
"I am wasting my life."
Marcel Franck reappeared. Chance threw him in Annette's path; he had ceased to think of her, but he had not forgotten her. He had had a number of amorous adventures. They had not left too many marks on his flexible heart—only a few lines, like fine scratches, about his clever eyes. But they had left him with a certain fatigue, a good-natured contempt for his easy conquests and for the conqueror. Scarcely had he caught sight of Annette than he felt again the old sensation of freshness and certitude that strangely attracted this blasé sceptic. He explored her eyes; she too had seen life! In the depths of her glance there were submerged lights, paths where vessels had been, shipwrecks. But she seemed calmer and more assured. And he again regretted this wholesome companion who had already escaped him twice. He was not too late! Never had they seemed more ready to understand each other.
Without questioning her, he was able to find out in his own circumspect way about her resources and her occupations. A little later he offered her some work that was very well remunerated: it consisted in arranging notes for the catalogue of a private collection of works of art of which he had charge. A natural excuse for spending a few hours each week with her. They were able to work and talk at the same time. The intimacy of the past was soon reëstablished.
Marcel never asked Annette about her life, but he talked about himself. This was the best way of finding out what she thought. The comic side of his love affairs offered a variety of subjects in which he delighted. He enjoyed making Annette his amused confidante, although she scolded him a little. He was the first to make fun of himself, as he made fun of everything; and she laughingly listened to his free confessions, for she was very tolerant where she herself was not concerned. He understood this to mean something else, and it gave him pleasure to see this gay intelligence that was so indulgent to life. He no longer found in her any trace of the moral pedantry, the intolerance of the young girl who is rather circumscribed by her virtue. While they exchanged their ironical reflexions, it occurred to him that it would be charming to form an attachment with this witty friend, to share with her the adventure of life. How? In any way she chose. Mistress, wife, as she wished. He had no prejudices. Just as he had attached no importance to Annette's "blossoming maternity," so he was not concerned with any encounters she might have had since then. He would never torment her with any exacting surveillance; he had no curiosity about her secret life. Let every one have his own secrets and his share of liberty! He only asked that in their life together she should be laughing and intelligent, a good comrade of his interests and pleasures. (And in pleasure he included everything, intelligence, affection and the rest.)
He thought so well of this that he spoke to her about it one evening in the library when they had finished their work and the sun, through the trees of an old garden, was gilding the tawny bindings of the books. Annette was completely surprised. What, he had come back to that; it was not finished? "Oh, my friend," she said, "how kind you are! But it can't be thought of any more."
"Oh, yes, it can be thought of," he said. "Why shouldn't it be?"
"Well, really, why not?" Annette said to herself. "I'm glad to talk to him, to see him. But, no, it's impossible! It cannot even be discussed."
Franck sat facing her on the other side of the table, his blond beard in the sunlight. With his two arms on the table, he took Annette's hands and said, "Think about it for five minutes! . . . There . . . I shall say nothing. . . . We have known each other for how many years? . . . Twelve? . . . Fifteen? . . . I don't need to explain myself. Everything I can say you know."
She did not try to disengage her hands; she smiled and looked at him. Her clear eyes were fixed upon him and yet did not see him because they had already gone beyond him. She was looking into herself. She thought, "This is not even to be discussed? Everything should be discussed! Why is it impossible? He doesn't displease me. He is a handsome fellow, attractive, good enough, intelligent, agreeable. How easy life would be! . . . But I could not live his life with him. He is pleasant, and everything pleases him. But he respects nothing, men, women, love or Annette. . . ." (It was she who was speaking, for she saw herself from outside.) "He is certainly not ungenerous so far as delicate attentions and social respect are concerned. He gives them to me in good measure. Perhaps he even treats me with special favor. . . . But what a complete sceptic! Is there anything he takes seriously? He delights in his absolute lack of faith in human nature. He discounts its weaknesses with a complacent and sympathetic curiosity. I think he would be disappointed if the day came when he was obliged to respect it. A good soul! Yes, life would be easy with him—so easy that I should no longer have any reason to live."
Beyond that she no longer put her thought into words. But the thought pursued her, and her mind was made up.
Franck had let her hands drop. He felt that his cause was lost. He got up and walked to the window, and with his back to the window-pane he philosophically lighted a cigarette. He was behind Annette; he saw her motionless, her arms stretched over the table, as if he were still in front of her. Her beautiful blond neck and her round shoulders. . . . Lost! . . . For whom, for what, was she keeping herself? Some new Brissot-foolishness? No, he knew that Annette's heart was free. Well, then? She was not cold. She needed to love and be loved!
Above all, she needed to believe. . . . To believe in what she did, in what she wanted, in what she was seeking, in what she was dreaming, to believe in what she was, in spite of all disgusts and disappointments, to believe in herself and in life! Franck destroyed respect. Annette could more easily endure not being respected than losing respect—her own—for life. For this is the source of energy. And without the strength to act, Annette would have been nothing. For her the passivity of happiness was death. The essential distinction between human beings consists in this, that some are active, the rest passive. And of all the forms of passivity, the most mortal for Annette would have been that of a mind tranquilly established, like Franck's, in the comfort of a doubt that no longer recognized doubt, but voluptuously surrendered itself to the indifferent stream of nothingness. Suicide! No, she refused that. Then what did she think her life would be? Perhaps nothing very happy or very complete. Perhaps it would utterly miss fire. But whether it missed or not, it would be an effort towards an end. . . . Unknown? Illusory? Perhaps. No matter! The effort was not illusory. . . . And let me fall by the wayside so long as it is my wayside!
She became aware of the long silence and realized that Franck was no longer there. She turned, saw him, smiled, rose and said, "Forgive me, my friend! Let us remain as we are. It is so good to be friends!"
"And not better otherwise?"
She shook her head. "No!"
"Well," he said, "here I am blackballed at the third examination!"
She laughed and, going to him, said mischievously: "Would you like at least to have what I refused you at the second examination?" And putting her arm about his neck she kissed him. An affectionate kiss. But there was no mistaking it—the kiss of a friend.
Franck was not deceived by it. "Well," he said, "let me hope that in twenty years I shall be admitted."
"No," said Annette, laughing. "There's an age-limit! Marry, my friend. You have only to choose. All the women are waiting for you."
"But not you."
"I'm going to remain a bachelor-girl."
"You'll see, you'll see. For your punishment you will marry when you are over fifty."
"Frère, il faut mourir.' Before then."
"Until then, the life of a nun."
"You don't know what delights it has.”
Annette was bragging. It was not all delightful. She often felt cramped in her cloistered life. She was the kind of nun who would not have found it too much to have an abbey to manage and a God to love. The abbey was reduced to a fifth-floor apartment and God to her child. This was very little and yet it was immense. It was not what she was meant for, but she made a great deal of it. All her dreams turned round it, and with this sort of treasure she was well provided. If her everyday life was apparently puritanical and poor, she had her revenge in the life of her imagination. There, soundlessly and without friction, the eternal "enchantment" continued to flow.
But how enter these retreats of the soul? The inner dream is not woven of words. And to make oneself understand, to understand oneself, one must use words. . . . That heavy, sticky paste which dries on the tips of the fingers! To understand herself, Annette sometimes felt the need of securing her dreams by telling them over to herself in a soft voice. But these recitals were not faithful transcriptions—scarcely transmutations; they took the place of the dreams without really resembling them. Lacking the power to seize the spirit in its flight, the brain makes up stories for itself that keep it busy and deceive it about the great fairyland, the inner drama.
An immense liquid plain, a flooded valley brimming over, a shoreless river of fire, water and clouds. All the elements were still mingled there, a thousand currents as confused as hair on a head; but there was a force that curled these long dark locks that were spangled with gleaming lights. It was the countless-faceted Spirit and its troop of dreams, led by the silent shepherd to the shadowy pastures of Hope: Desire, the king of the worlds. A resistless gravitation drove them to the greedy slope, now gentle, now abrupt, that drew them down.
Annette felt the enchanted river flowing; she rolled and unrolled on her distaff the skein of the entwined currents; she abandoned herself to it and played with the feline force that carried her on. . . . But when the reasoning powers were suddenly aroused and wished to control the play, they found that Annette, torn from her dream, was merely seeking for another that she might enter. So she soberly invented one out of the elements of her disciplined days—her memories, figures from the past, the romance of the life she had already lived or was still to live perhaps. . . . And Annette tried to make herself believe that the great dream was pursuing her. She knew it had fled, but she was not troubled. Like the bridegroom in the Gospel, it would return at an hour that no man knew.
How many feminine souls there are whose hidden genius expresses itself like hers in this inner stream! If one could read below the surface one would often find there dark passions, ecstasies, visions of the abyss. Yet all one sees is the correct middle-class woman, tranquilly going on from day to day, attending to her affairs, coolly and sensibly, mistress of herself and sometimes even, by reaction, assuming as Annette did before her pupils and her son (though he was never deceived), an almost excessive appearance of cold, moralistic reasonableness.
No, she did not deceive the child. He had sharp eyes. He was able to read between the lines. He too knew what dreams were. Every day he had hours when he was like a king, entirely alone with his dreams, alone in the apartment. Annette, who was always imprudent, carelessly left at the disposal of the child a quantity of books, debris from the shipwreck of her library and that of the grandfather. They were of every sort. For several years she had not had the leisure to hunt through them. The little boy took charge of that. Every day, on his return from school, when his mother was not there, he would set out on the chase. He read at haphazard. Quite early he had learned to read quickly, very quickly; he galloped down the slope of the pages, pursuing his quarry. His school-work suffered from this; he was classed as a poor, scatter-brained student who never knew his lessons and skimped his duties. The teacher would have been very much surprised if the little poacher had recited what his eyes had caught in his game-preserve. He had even caught the "classics" in his snare, and what a different scent they had! Everything he gathered freely in this way, in the unknown, had for him the taste of beautiful forbidden fruit. There was nothing that could soil him yet in these encounters, nothing that could even enlighten him too brutally. His eyes passed merrily round dangerous corners without even seeing the carnal bait in the trap. But, happy and carefree, he felt the breath of warm life in his face; in this forest of books his nostrils caught the adventure and the eternal struggle of love.
Love, what is love for a child of ten? All the happiness one does not possess, that one will possess—that one is going to seize. . . . What will it look like? With a few scraps of what he has seen and heard, he tries to construct its image. He sees nothing. He sees everything. He desires everything. To possess everything. To love everything. (To be loved! For him that is the real meaning of love. . . . "I love myself. I must be loved. . . . But by whom?") His memories give him no aid. They are too close for him to be able to see them well. At his age there is no past, or so little of a past. The present is the theme with its thousand variations.
The present? The child lifts its eyes and sees its mother. About the round table, under the warm light of the oil lamp, they are sitting together. Evening, after dinner. Marc is studying—supposed to be studying—his lessons for to-morrow; Annette is mending a dress. Neither of them is thinking of what he is doing. They are trusting to their machines, their willing servants. The dream rolls on. Annette follows the current. The child observes her as she dreams. . . . That is a more interesting spectacle than the lessons his lips are repeating.
Marc seemed never to have noticed what was going on about him during these years; he could not have explained any of his mother's occupations. Yet nothing had escaped him. Julien's love. Her love for Julien. He had been obscurely aware of it. And a jealousy of which he was not conscious made him rejoice, like a little cannibal who dances about the stake, in the disastrous climax. His mother remained his. His property! Did he care so much about her? He had only appreciated her when someone else had wanted her. He looked at her—those eyes, that mouth, those hands. In the manner of children who lose themselves in a detail as in a world—and they are not always wrong—he studied each of her features. One shadow of an eyelid, the curling of a lip, are mysterious and vast landscapes. They fascinate the mind of the child. His glance hovered like a bee up and down the half-open mouth. . . . The red door. . . . It plunged into the depths, it emerged again. Searching so closely, he forgot what he was looking at, the woman herself. . . . A stupor full of affection. . . . He roused himself to remember (ugh) to-morrow's lesson, a boy he disliked, a bad mark he had hidden from his mother. . . . And then his attention was caught again by the gleam of the lamp in the shadow of the room, by the silence of the chamber amid the rumbling of Paris—that sense of a little island, of a ship at sea, and the expectation of shore, of what he was going to find, what he was going to carry away on the ship that would be full of his treasures, his hopes, the spoils of life he was going to capture. Among these he counted his mother, her beautiful blond hair and her arched eyebrows. . . . The little Viking! How much he suddenly loved her! With the ardor of a lover, but one who had kept the gift of divine ignorance! And at night, lying awake, he listened to her breathing. . . . All this mysterious life troubled him, absorbed him. . . .
So they both dreamed; but she was in mid-ocean and accustomed to the long voyage. He was just setting out, and everything was a discovery for him. And as everything was new to him, he saw with a keener eye, and often he saw further. He had moments of astonishing seriousness. They did not last. He was like an animal: suddenly this penetrating glance would waver. He would not be there any more! But in the moments when he fastened on his comrade-mother his young new force of attention and love, shut up with her in a burning silence, his whole being was impregnated with the odor of this soul: he divined without comprehending them her faintest tremors, and he touched as if by lightning the secrets of her heart.
Soon he would lose the key. He would no longer be interested. He would no longer be able to see. There were two beings in him: the light from within and the shadow from without. As the body of the child develops, the shadow increases with it and covers the light. As he climbs, he turns his back on the sun; he seems most a child when he is least one; and when he is grown-up, his view is more limited. For the moment Marc still enjoyed a magic clairvoyance of which he was completely unaware. Never had he been closer to Annette; not for many years would he be so close again.
Towards the end of this period the attraction she had for him became stronger than his distrust. He no longer resisted the impulse that flung him suddenly, face, eyes and mouth, against his mother's breast. Annette discovered with rapture that her child loved her. She had given up hope of this.
Several months passed, as delicious as a mutual first love. The honeymoon of the child and the mother. The ravishing purity of this love, carnal as all love is, but carnal without sin. A living rose.
It passes. It passes, the matchless hour. They pass, these years of close intimacy, severe discipline, a crowded life. These rich years. Annette, with all her strength intact, unimpaired. The child with all the flower of his little universe.
But a mere vibration of the air will be enough to throw this harmony of souls into confusion. Is the door shut?
One Sunday morning Annette was at home alone. Marc was playing ball with a friend in the Luxembourg Gardens. Annette was doing nothing; she enjoyed being able to rest without talking, without moving, sitting in her armchair on this day of rest; the flood of her thoughts followed its meandering course. A little stiff with weariness, she let herself float along. Someone knocked. She hesitated to open the door. Disturb this hour of silence? . . . She did not move. The knock came again; there was an insistent ring. She rose regretfully. She opened the door. . . . Sylvie! For months they had not seen each other. . . . Annette's first movement was one of joy, and Sylvie's face responded to her cordial expression. Then the memory of their grievances, their strained relations returned, and they were embarrassed. They exchanged polite questions, asked about each other's health. They spoke to each other without any formality, and in both their questions and their replies the forms of their language were familiar, but their hearts remained cold. Annette was thinking, "What has she come for?" And Sylvie, if she knew, did not seem to be in any hurry to say. All the time, while speaking of this and that, she showed that she was preoccupied with some thought she was trying to defer, but which at last came out. "Annette," she said suddenly, "let's put an end to this! There have been mistakes on both sides."
Annette, in her pride, would not admit that there were any on hers. Strong, too strong, in her right, and not forgetting the injustice that had been done her, she said, "There were none on my side."
Sylvie did not like to go halfway and have no one come to meet her. In a tone of vexation she said, "When you have made mistakes, you should at least have the courage to recognize them."
"I recognize yours," said Annette, obstinately.
Sylvie was offended and she poured out all her old accumulated reproaches. Annette replied haughtily. They were on the point of saying the harshest things to each other. Sylvie impatiently rose to leave, but she sat down again, saying, "Stupid thing! Nothing will ever make her admit that she was wrong."
"When it isn't true," said Annette, not budging an inch.
"At least, for politeness' sake, don't make me the only one who has done wrong!"
They laughed.
They looked at each other now with softened, twinkling eyes. Sylvie made a wry face at Annette. Annette's eyes were full of amusement. But they did not lay down their arms.
"Vixen!" said Sylvie.
"I don't admit it," said Annette. "It was you who—"
"Well, let's not begin again. Listen, I am frank; wrong or right, I would not have come back here just for myself. I can't forget either—"
In spite of what she had just said, she had again begun to remember jealously, half in fun, half seriously, with a mixture of bitterness and humor, that Annette had tried to turn her husband's head. Annette shrugged her shoulders.
"Well," Sylvie ended by saying, "you may be sure that if it had been only on my own account I should not have come!"
Annette studied her curiously. Her sister said, "It was Odette who sent me."
"Odette?"
"Yes. She asked why we never saw Aunt Annette any longer."
"Really? She thought of me?" said Annette, astonished. "Who reminded her of me?"
"I don't know. She saw your photograph in my room. And then you must have made an impression on her when she met you, I don't know where, on the street, or in your house perhaps. . . . Intriguer! Looking as if you weren't interested, with that secretive manner of yours! You know very well you carry away people's hearts."
(She was only half joking.)
Annette remembered the tender little body she had caught up as she passed, on that chance encounter, and lifted in her arms, the little dewy mouth that clung to her cheek.
"Well," Sylvie went on, "I told her that we had quarrelled. She asked why. I told her to hold her tongue. This morning, in bed, when I came in to kiss her, she said to me, 'Mamma, I wish you wouldn't be angry with Aunt Annette.' I said, 'Let me alone.' But she was unhappy. So I kissed her and said, 'Do you care as much as all that for your aunt? What difference can it make to you? What an idea! Well, if you care so much about it, I shan't be angry any more.' She clapped her hands and said, When will she come?' 'When she wishes.' 'No, I want you to go straight away now and tell her to come.' So I started out. The little wretch! She does what she likes with me. . . . Now you must come. We are expecting you for dinner."
Annette, with lowered eyes, said neither yes nor no. Sylvie was indignant: "I hope very much you won't have the heart to make me beg you."
"No," said Annette, lifting radiant eyes that were filled with tears.
They kissed each other passionately, half lovingly, half angrily. Sylvie bit Annette's ear. Annette cried out, "So you are biting now! Suppose it were I whom you call crazy. But it's you. Are you angry?"
"Yes, I am," said Sylvie. "How can you expect me not to hate you? You steal from me everything I have, my husband, my daughter. . . ."
Annette burst out laughing. "Keep your husband. He means nothing to me."
"Nor to me either," said Sylvie. "But he is mine. I forbid anyone to touch him."
"Why not put a sign on him?"
"You are the one I should like to put it on, you ugly old thing! . . . What is it about you that attracts them? They all fall in love with you."
"Oh, no."
"Yes, they do. All of them, Odette, that silly Leopold. . . . Other people. . . . Everybody. . . . And I too! I detest you! I wish I could get rid of you. But it can't be done. There's no way of shaking you off!"
They held each other's hands and laughed as they looked at each other, this time as sisters.
"You silly old thing!"
"You don't realize what a true word that is!"
It was a fact. They had both aged, and they both noticed it. Sylvie stealthily exhibited a false tooth which she had had made without saying anything about it. And Annette had a lock of white hair on her temple. But she did not hide this.
"You poseur!" said Sylvie.
So they were on the best of terms again, just as in the old days. And to think that without the little girl they would never have seen each other again!
That evening Annette, with Marc, went to dinner. Odette had hidden herself: they could not find her. Annette set about looking for her; she discovered her behind a big curtain. Stooping to pick her up, as she crouched on her heels, calling her pet names, she held out her arms to the child. The little girl turned her head to one side, unwilling to look at her; then there was an explosion; she threw herself on Annette's neck. At table, where she had the happiness to be placed beside her aunt, she remained tongue-tied: she was overcome by what had happened. At the very end she took an interest in the dessert. They drank to their restored friendship, and as a joke Leopold offered a toast to the future marriage of Marc and Odette. Marc was annoyed by this; his ambitions were loftier. But Odette took it seriously. After dinner the two children tried to play together, but they did not understand each other. Marc was contemptuous, Odette was mortified. The parents, as they talked, heard slaps and tears. They separated the combatants. Both were sulking. Odette was unnerved by the emotions of the day. She had to go to bed, and she crossly refused to do so. But Annette suggested carrying her in her arms, and the child allowed herself to be taken. Annette undressed her and put her in bed, kissing her plump little legs. Odette was in ecstasy. Annette stayed by her till she was asleep—which was not long. Then, finding Marc on Sylvie's knees, she said to her sister, "How would you like to make an exchange of the children?"
"All right!" said Sylvie.
In the bottom of their hearts neither of them would have exchanged. Marc might have suited Sylvie better, and Odette might have suited Annette. But neither would have been "her own."
The children were much more ready to accommodate themselves to an exchange. They had heard it spoken of jokingly and they clamored for it. To please them it was arranged. On Saturday evening the exchange took place between the two mothers. Odette spent Saturday night and all day Sunday at Annette's, and Marc at Sylvie's; on Sunday evening they were restored to their rightful owners. In the interregnum they were scandalously spoiled, and naturally enough they returned home grumbling. Their tenderest affections they had reserved for the one who was not their everyday mother.
Odette enchanted Annette by her fondling ways, her little confidences, her endless prattle. Annette had been deprived of this. Marc had the passionate temperament of his mother, but he knew better how to repress it; he did not like to surrender himself, especially to those who were closest to him, for they abused his confidence. With strangers it was less dangerous, for they misunderstood you anyway. Odette, like Sylvie, had endearing, expansive ways, but she had a very loving heart; she said out loud what Annette longed to hear. When the sly little creature perceived this, she doubled the dose; she awakened the echo of what Annette had thought as a child. At least, Annette imagined this, and she loved her partly because of this suggestion. Listening to her, she dreamed of her own early years which she unconsciously falsified, for she threw into them the burning clearness of her thoughts of to-day.
These blessed Sunday mornings! The little girl lay in the big bed. (It was a holiday for her to spend the night nestling in the arms of her aunt, who received the thumps from her feet without flinching and was afraid to breathe lest she should awaken her.) She watched Annette dressing; she chattered like a sparrow. She was sole mistress of the bed, and, having affirmed her possession of it, she stretched across it and carried on while her aunt's back was turned. But Annette, arranging her hair before the mirror, laughed as she saw in its depths the little bare legs in the air and the rough brown head on the pillow. This attitude did not prevent Odette from following each of her gestures and making comic observations on her toilet. Amid her prattle the child made grave reflexions that were most unexpected and irrelevant and made Annette prick up her ears: "What did you say? Say it again."
She could not remember. . . . So she made up something else, not as good as the first thing she had said. Or, more often, she was seized with a sudden transport of affection.
"Aunt Annette! Aunt Annette!"
"Yes, what is it?"
"I love you. . . . Heavens and earth, how I love you!"
Annette laughed at the energy she put into it.
"Impossible!"
"Oh, I love you madly!"
(For, sincere as she was, she was also a born actress.)
"Nonsense! I like it better without the madness."
"Aunt Annette, I want to hug you!"
"Just a minute."
"Right away. I want to. Come here, come here!"
"Yes."
She calmly finished combing her hair.
Odette turned over in bed in a pet, throwing the bedclothes in all directions.
"Ah, that woman has no heart."
Annette burst out laughing, dropped her comb, ran to the bed.
"Little masquerader, where did you pick that up?"
Odette hugged her furiously.
"Come, come, you're suffocating me. See, you've pulled my hair down again. I shall never manage to get dressed to-day. You monster, I don't want to have anything more to do with you!"
The little girl's voice became anxious; she was on the point of crying.
"Aunt Annette! Love me! . . . I want you to love me! I implore you to love me!"
Annette pressed her in her arms.
"Ah," said Odette, with a pathetic accent, "I would give my blood for you!" (A phrase from some newspaper serial she had heard read in the workroom.)
When Marc was a witness of these effusions, he pouted disdainfully; and, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders raised, he marched off, assuming a superior air. He despised this babbling, this feminine sentimentality that poured everything out. As he declared to one of his small friends, "These women are silly."
At bottom, he was annoyed by the signs of affection that his mother lavished on Odette. When he was the object of them, he repulsed them; but it did not please him to have someone else get the benefit of them.
Of course, he had his aunt, and with her he could take his revenge. In fact, he did take it. To punish his mother's ingratitude he was ten times more lovable with Sylvie than Annette had ever seen him. But it must be admitted that, although Sylvie petted him, he was disappointed. Sylvie treated him as a child, and he could not endure it. He did not like her to imagine that she gave him pleasure by taking him every Sunday to the cake-shop. He was certainly not indifferent to the cake, but he did not like to have anyone insult him by believing that he attached any importance to it. Besides, he felt too much that his aunt regarded him as a personage of no importance: she was entirely unreserved with him, and, while Marc's curiosity was satisfied, his self-esteem was not. For he noticed the difference. It would have pleased him if Sylvie had taken him into her private life, not as a boy, but as a real man. In short, although he would not have admitted it to himself, he lost his illusions when he saw Sylvie at close range. The careless girl never suspected for a moment what was going on in the pure and troubled brain of the ten-year-old boy, the fabulous image he had manufactured of woman, and the shock of his first discoveries. Sylvie took no more account of her acts and her talk in his presence than she would have done before some pet animal. (We have no evidence, after all, that a pet animal is not often shocked.) Through an instinct of defence against the disillusionments which the damaging of his idol caused him, there unfortunately developed in him certain precocious ideas that were quite naïvely cynical, ideas upon which it is better not to dwell. He tried to appear (in his own eyes; for the present he did not think of appearing so in the eyes of others) a blasé man. But with all the blind senses of an eager and innocent child, he uneasily breathed in the enigmatical charm, the animality, of the feminine being. He felt for woman a disgusted attraction.
Attraction. Repulsion. Every real man knows them. At this period of life the dominating sentiment of the two in Marc was repulsion. But even this repulsion had a sharp savor that made the other sentiments and the children of his own age seem tasteless to him. He despised Odette and regarded this little girl as beneath his dignity.
She was a very little girl in reality, and yet, strangely, a woman. In spite of the theories of those illustrious pedagogues who divide childhood into chambered compartments, one for each faculty, everything already exists in the young child from its earliest infancy, everything that one is and will be, the double Being of the present and the future (to say nothing of the immense, impenetrable past that determines both). Only, to catch a glimpse of it, one must have one's eye open. In the half-light of dawn it appears only in gleams.
These gleams were more frequent in Odette than in most children. A precocious fruit. Very healthy physically, she carried within her a little world of passions that were too great for her. Whence had they come? From some region that lay behind Annette and Sylvie? Annette was reminded of herself at Odette's age. But she was mistaken; she had been much less precocious; and when, observing Odette, she recalled the forgotten passions of her own childhood, she antedated, in all good faith, the feelings that belonged to her fourteenth and fifteenth years.
Odette was an aviary, filled with a sound of restless wings. Little invisible loves passed through her; their flight left lights and shadows behind it. She was placid and hysterical by turns; without any reason she would begin to sob, then burst out laughing; then she would have a feeling of lassitude, of indifference to everything; then again, no one knew why, at a word, at a gesture, interpreted to suit herself, she would be happy again, so happy! . . . Overwhelmed with happiness, drunk with it, like a thrush that is gorged with grapes, she would talk, she would talk. And then, in the twinkling of an eye, she would vanish; no one knew what had become of her; they would find her again in a corner of the store-room, hiding, enjoying the inexplicable happiness she hardly understood herself. This flock of birds came and went in her soul; they succeeded one another in a flash.
One never knows how far children are entirely sincere in their emotions: as they come to them from far away, much further back than themselves, they are at first astonished to witness them, and they become actors who play with them experimentally. This power of unconsciously dividing their emotions is an intuitive process of self-preservation, permitting them to carry a burden which, without this, would crush their frail shoulders.
Odette felt, for this person or that, and sometimes for nobody, transports of passion to which she spontaneously gave a theatrical expression, not always out loud, but in a whispered monologue for her own relief; in simulating the feeling she deadened the shock. These impulses were directed most frequently towards Annette or Marc—towards the two together; and she often said Annette when she meant Marc, because Marc made fun of her, Marc despised her, and she hated him. Then she would have a paroxysm of humiliated and jealous suffering, a desire for vengeance. . . . Why? What harm could she do him? The worst harm of all. How could she reach him? . . . Alas, she had only the claws of a child. It was exasperating. Since she could do nothing (for the moment) she would pretend to be indifferent. But it was hard to be able to do nothing; and it was hard also to be indifferent when one always had a desire to laugh or weep. Such a constraint was against nature: Odette was in despair over it. She was prostrated till suddenly a peremptory reawakening of her childish gaiety and the need of movement threw her back again into her play.
Annette watched, divined, sometimes imagined, these miniature despairs, and she pityingly remembered her own. How she too had consumed herself with the fever of loving, desiring, tormenting herself, and for whom, for what? What purpose could this all serve? It was so out of proportion with the object, which was limited by the nature of things! What a squanderer of energy! And what a force of love she spent at random! Some people had too much, others not enough. Annette, like Odette, was one of those who had too much, and her son was one of those who did not have enough. He was the lucky one, poor little fellow!
He was not so poor! The life of his affections was not less rich than Odette's, nor were the struggles of his mind less lively—though he said nothing about them. Nor were his feelings less violent, though their ardor tended in another direction. Yes, he was indifferent to the things that occupied these women. His spirit was agitated, however, by very different passions. Intellectually richer and much less absorbed by the more backward life of his senses, this little man, who felt the obscure flood of desire rising in him, was turning his energies, like a true man, towards action and domination. He dreamed of conquests beside which that of a feminine heart would have seemed to him very paltry—if at this time of his childhood he had thought of such a thing. The boys of the preceding generations had dreamed of soldiers, savages, pirates, Napoleon, adventures on the sea. Marc dreamed of aeroplanes, automobiles and wireless. About him the thought of the world danced a giddy round; a delirious movement made the planet vibrate; everything was running and flying, cleaving the air and the waters, revolving, whirling. A magic of mad invention was transmuting the elements. No more limits to power; consequently, no more to the will. Space and time—pass the juggler's ball!—were volatilized, spirited away by the swiftness of things. They did not count any more. And men still less. What counted was will, limitless will. Marc scarcely knew the rudiments of modern science. He read, without understanding it, a scientific review to which his mother subscribed; but without realizing it he had been bathed from his birth in the miracles of science. Annette did not perceive this, for she had learned science in the scholastic way; she had not breathed it in as a living thing. She saw the figures written in chalk and the numbers on the blackboard, the arguments. Marc's imagination was filled with fabulous forces. Just because he was not embarrassed by his reason he was carried away by a poetic enthusiasm as vague and ardent as that which filled the sails of the Argonauts. He dreamed of extraordinary exploits: piercing the globe with a tunnel from one side to the other, rising without motor-power into the air, connecting Mars with the earth, pressing a button and jumping over to Germany—or some other country (he had no particular preference). With such mysterious words as volts, amperes, radium, carburator, which he used at random, very coolly, he conjured up the tales of the Thousand and One Nights. How the devil could his mind stoop from such a height to a silly little girl?
But body and mind are twin brothers that do not keep step. In their double growth there is always one of the two—it is not always the same one—that loiters on the road while the other gallops on ahead. Marc's body remained that of a child; and while the spirit roamed about aloft a cord held him by the foot and brought him down again where it was pleasant to amuse himself. Then, for want of anything better, he would condescend to play—he would even play with his whole heart, without condescension, with the silly little girl. These were happy interludes.
They did not last long. There were too many inequalities between the two children, not only in their age, nor because she was a girl. Their temperaments were too different. Odette, who was not pretty, and rather suggested her father, though she had Annette's eyes and a chubby, well-rounded figure, with her flattish nose, was a robust, healthy child whose warmth of feeling did not disturb her physical equilibrium but seemed the natural overflow of an abounding vitality. She had escaped all the little ailments of childhood. Marc, on the contrary, had been stamped by the illness of his first year; and although later the soundness of his constitution was to come out on top, this struggle of the organism, in which he was often beaten, had spoiled part of his childhood. He had remained susceptible to the least chill and was often checked by slight returns of bronchitis or fever. His self-respect suffered from this, for all his instincts were those of pride and strength.
Towards the end of 1911, one year after the reconciliation of the two sisters, Marc had one of those winter illnesses, complicated by influenza, that caused a passing anxiety. Odette went to see him when he was in bed. She had been forbidden to do so for fear of infection, but she had found a way of slipping into the room one evening when the two mothers were busy in the next room. She was full of sympathy, and Marc, who was a little feverish, let himself go as he had never done before. He was restless.
"What are they saying, Odette?" (He imagined they were hiding from him the gravity of his illness.)
"I don't know. They don't say anything."
"What does the doctor say?"
"He says it isn't anything."
He was somewhat relieved, but he was still suspicious.
"Is that true? No, it isn't true. They're concealing it from me. . . . I know very well what I've got."
"What have you got?"
He was silent.
"Marc, what have you got?"
He retreated into a proud and hostile silence. Odette was in agony. She ended by believing that he was very ill, and her anxiety communicated itself to him. With that passionate exaggeration of hers which assumed melodramatic forms she clasped her hands.
"Oh, Marc, I implore you, don't be so ill. I don't want you to die."
Nor had he the least desire to do so. He liked to be condoled with, but he had not wanted as much as all this! Hearing uttered what he feared himself, he was frozen with fright. He did not want to show this, but he did show it.
"You see, you're hiding it from me. You know. I am very ill."
"No, no, I don't want it to be so. I don't know. I don't want you to be very ill. . . . Oh, Marc, don't die! If you die, I want to die with you!"
She flung herself on his neck, weeping. He was very much moved, and he too wept; he did not know whether it was because of her or himself. At the sound the mothers ran in scolding and separating them. They felt very close together at that moment.
By the following morning, however, Marc had thought things over. He was no longer anxious; he was even annoyed—for to drive away his fears they had made fun of him—to have shown himself a coward; he blamed Odette for having led him, by her stupid anxiety, into betraying these signs of weakness. And then he heard her laughing and saw her passing his door, overflowing with health. He was angry with her because of this health. She had too much of it. He envied her and he was humiliated.
After he was well again, he continued for a long time to feel mortified for having betrayed himself before his cousin's eyes. He was the more so because he had really been afraid and she had seen it. Once her emotion had passed, Odette maliciously remembered it all. She had seen him off his high horse, a timid little boy. She only liked him better for this. But he could not forgive her.
Marc was well again. Odette was flourishing. The previous summer she had proudly made her first communion. (It was about this date that the Church, like Joconda in search of innocence, had sniffed with its great distrustful nose the air of the time and made up its mind that there was no such thing as real innocence after the age of seven.) Odette considered herself a woman and tried to appear one by toning down her impetuosity, the impetuosity of a young tethered goat—though at any moment, with a caper, the little horned creature would escape from one's hands. . . . Sylvie was happy; her business was going well. And Annette, who found in her sister's household nourishment for the need of affection which her age and her ordeal had somewhat tempered, seemed to have reached a haven of peace. Everything was hopeful.
One warm afternoon, between three and four o'clock, at the end of October, one of those radiant days when the unveiled light seems as naked as the stripped trees, the windows were open to let in the rays of an autumn sun as mild and golden as honey. It was the day after Odette's eighth birthday. Annette was at Sylvie's. In the room over the court, they were looking out together and examining materials, gossiping and gravely occupied with their investigation. Odette was on the other side of the passage, in the room at the end that overlooked the street. Just a few minutes before, the inquisitive child had peeped through the half-open door to see what they were doing. They had pretended to scold her and had sent her back again to finish a little piece of work before they all had tea together. Marc was at school; they were expecting him home again in half an hour.
The moments were flowing along smoothly, without a ripple, without a wave, unhastingly, as if they were to flow this way for the rest of their lives. They felt so calm that they did not even think of enjoying it. It was natural! In the ivy on the wall of the court the happy sparrows were chirping. The last flies of autumn were humming their content, warming their torpid wings in the lingering rays of sunlight. . . .
They heard nothing, nothing. Yet they both became silent at the same moment, as if the fragile thread on which their happiness was suspended had broken.
There was a ring at the door.
"Marc, so soon? No, it's too soon."
A ring. Someone was knocking again. What a hurry some people are in! We're coming!
Sylvie went and opened the door, and Annette followed her a few steps behind.
At the door the concierge, out of breath, was shouting and waving her arms. At first they did not understand.
"Madame doesn't know . . . the terrible thing that's happened. The little girl . . ."
"Who?"
"Mademoiselle Odette. . . . That poor little darling."
"What? What?"
"She's fallen."
"Fallen!"
"She's down below."
Sylvie screamed. She pushed the concierge aside and dashed downstairs. Annette would have followed her, but her legs failed her; she had to wait till her heart would allow her to walk. She was still upstairs, leaning over the baluster, when from the street the wild cries of Sylvie came to her.
What had happened? Probably Odette, who did not like to work and was dawdling and rummaging about, had leaned out of the window to see if Marc was coming and had fallen. The poor little thing had not even had the time to understand. . . . When Annette, tottering, at last reached the street, she saw a great crowd gathered. Sylvie, like a madwoman, was holding in her arms the little broken body, with its legs and head hanging like a slaughtered lamb. The brown hair veiled the fractured skull; nothing was to be seen but a little blood at the nose. The eyes were still open and seemed to be asking. Death had replied.
Annette would have thrown herself on the ground, screaming with horror, if Sylvie's wild fury had not absorbed all the misery of the world. She had fallen on her knees on the sidewalk, almost lying on the child, whom she lifted up and shook with mad cries. She called to her, she called to her, she denounced . . . Whom? What? Heaven, the earth. . . . She was foaming with despair and hatred.
For the first time Annette saw in her sister the frantic passions that Sylvie bore without knowing it in the depths of her nature, passions that her life till then had spared her from expressing. And she recognized them as those of her own blood.
The wildness of this grief prevented her from yielding to her own. She was obliged, by reaction, to remain strong and calm, and she did so. She took Sylvie by the shoulders. The screaming woman struggled with her; but Annette, leaning over her, lifted her up; and Sylvie, submitting to this commanding gentleness, became silent, raised her head, saw the circle about her, threw a fierce glance towards it and, with the child in her arms, reentered the house without a word.
She had crossed the threshold. Annette was going in after her when she saw Marc at the corner of the street on his way home; and, in spite of her lacerated love for the poor little girl, her heart bounded in her breast. What a joy that it wasn't he!
She ran to Marc to prevent him from seeing. At her first words, Marc turned pale and clenched his teeth. She led him away from the scene; she told him that Odette was seriously hurt. But he, with the distrustful intuition of a child, knew that she was dead; and with his clenched fists he tried to drive the terrible thought away. In spite of his agitation, he was still thinking of himself, his own attitude and the people who were passing. He noticed that his mother was walking bareheaded beside him in the street and that people were looking at them, and this embarrassed him. His annoyance contributed to calm him. When they had gone halfway, Annette, seeing that he was steadier, told him to go home alone. She returned hastily to Sylvie. She found her prostrated, sitting in a state of collapse in a corner, near the bed of the little dead girl, unable to hear or understand, breathing noisily like a wounded animal. Her workers were busy with the child. Annette bathed the little body, dressed it again in white linen, laid it back in the bed, just as on those faraway evenings—yesterday—eternally far away, when she had listened to the whispered confidences of the child. When this was finished, she went over to Sylvie and took her hand. Moist and cold, the hand lay limply in hers. Annette pressed these fingers from which the life seemed to have withdrawn, but she did not have the courage to whisper a tender word, for it could not have penetrated through the wall of despair. Nothing but the sisterly contact of their bodies could make her pity slowly find its way through. She wrapped her arms about her, her forehead resting on Sylvie's cheek; and her tears dropped on her sister's neck as if to melt the ice that enveloped her heart. Sylvie was mute and did not stir; but her fingers were feebly beginning to respond to the sisterly hand when her husband arrived. Annette went away.
She returned to Marc and told him the truth. It was not news to him. He did not seem very much moved; he was afraid of his emotion and was anxious to keep his air of assurance. He should not have been obliged to speak, for as soon as he opened his mouth his voice began to tremble; he ran and hid himself in his room to cry. Annette perceived with a mother's insight the anguish of this childish heart in its first encounter with death, and she avoided speaking of the redoubtable subject; but she took him on her knees as she had done when he was a baby. And he, with no thought of complaining at being treated as a baby, took refuge in the warmth of her breast. After they had calmed each other, lulling their fear to sleep and feeling that there were two of them to protect each other, she put him to bed and begged him to be a brave little man, not to be frightened if she had to go out and leave him alone for a part of the night. He understood and promised.
She set out through the dark for the house of tragedy. She wanted to watch by the dead child. Sylvie had emerged from her dejected insensibility. She had not returned to her first furious despair, but the spectacle was not less painful. Her mind was a little unbalanced. Annette saw a smile on her lips. Sylvie raised her eyes as she heard her coming in, looked at her, went to her and said, "She is sleeping."
She took her hand and drew her over to the bed. "See how beautiful she is!"
Her face lighted up, but Annette saw a shadow of anxiety passing over her brow; and when, after a moment, Sylvie repeated in an undertone, "She is sleeping well, isn't she?" Annette met the feverish glance that was waiting for her to say, "She is sleeping. Yes." She said it.
They went and sat down in the adjoining room. The husband was there with one of the workers. They forced themselves to talk in order to occupy their attention. But Sylvie's wounded mind was running away from itself, leaping from one subject to another, without stopping. She had taken up some work which at every moment she threw down again; she took it up and threw it down to listen for sounds from the sleeper's room. Again she said, "How she sleeps!"—her eye wandering over the others in order to convince them, to convince herself. Once she returned to the little bed, and, leaning over the child, uttered endearing words to it. This was cruel for Annette. She wished Sylvie would be silent. Leopold, in a low voice, implored her not to disturb the illusion.
The illusion fell of itself. Sylvie, coming back to her place, took up her work and did not speak again. The others were talking around her, but she no longer heard them. They in turn became silent. A sombre hush hovered over them. Suddenly Sylvie cried out. Without words. A long cry. Throwing herself down on the table, she struck her head against it. Hurriedly they removed the needles and the scissors. When her speech came back to her, it was to curse God: she did not believe in Him, but she had to have someone against whom to avenge herself! Her eyes blazed, and she hurled vulgar oaths at him.
Exhaustion followed. They carried her to bed. She did not stir again. Annette remained beside her until she was unconscious.
Then she went home again, utterly worn out. The streets were pale with early dawn. Marc had not slept. She lay down shivering. But just as she was about to get into bed—it was too much, all she had suffered and had to repress during the last twelve hours!—she ran in her nightgown and bare feet into her son's room and passionately kissed his mouth, his eyes, his ears, his neck, his arms, his hands. "My dear, my dear little boy," she said. "You, you are not going to leave me?"
He was very much upset, disturbed, frightened. He wept with her, more for himself than for the others, though he wept for the others too. He realized now what he had lost; he wept over the affection he had never desired. He remembered the evening when he had been ill and Odette had come in to see him. He was stricken with affection and sorrow. But he thought, "I'm still alive anyway!"
Annette trembled at the thought of beginning another day like the last. Her strength was not equal to it. But the day that followed did not have the terrifying violence of the previous hours. Human suffering, when it reaches its zenith, must descend again. One dies or becomes used to it.
Sylvie had recovered her self-possession. She was livid, with hard lines about her nostrils and lips which later, as they grew fainter, left scars behind. But she was calm, active, busy, with her workers, cutting and sewing her mourning clothes. She gave orders, oversaw things, worked; and her hands, like her expression, were sure and precise. She fitted Annette's dress. Annette was afraid to utter a word that would recall the funeral. But Sylvie spoke of it coldly. She would not leave the details to anyone else. She decided everything. She preserved her unnatural calm to the very end of the ceremony, but with a cold and concentrated rage she had set herself against any religious service. She could not forgive! . . . Till then she had been vaguely sceptical, indifferent, not hostile; and while she laughed at it a little, she had been moved without confessing it on the day when she had seen her beautiful little girl dressed in white for her first communion. . . . Exactly! She had been tricked. . . . That dastardly God! She could never forgive him.
Annette was expecting that the inhuman constraint which Sylvie had imposed upon herself would be paid for by a fresh crisis when they returned to the house. But she was not allowed to stay with her sister. Sylvie harshly forbade it. Annette's presence was intolerable to her. . . . Annette had her son!
On the following day the anxious husband came to tell Annette that Sylvie had not gone to bed. She had not wept, she had not groaned, she was eating her heart out in silence. She had relentlessly resumed her work in the shop, a mechanical duty that was more imperative than life. No one would have perceived her state of mind except for certain accidents, errors that had never happened before. She cut a gown wrongly and afterwards destroyed it without a word, and she hurt her fingers with her scissors. They induced her to go to bed at night, but she remained sitting upright without sleeping, and she did not reply when they spoke to her. And every morning, before appearing in the workroom, she made a visit to the cemetery.
This went on for fifteen days. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, she disappeared. Customers came in and waited. At supper-time she had not returned. Ten, eleven o'clock passed. Her husband feared that something desperate had happened. Towards one o'clock she came in, and that night she slept. No one could find out anything from her. But the next evening she vanished again, and on the two following days she did the same thing. She talked now; she seemed to have relaxed. But she did not say where she had gone. The workers gossiped. Her good husband shrugged his shoulders with pity and said to Annette, "If she is deceiving me I can't be angry with her. She has suffered too much. . . . And besides, if it can only save her from her obsession, well, all right!"
Annette succeeded in catching Sylvie as she was going out, and she tactfully made her understand the anxiety, the suspicion, the pain, which her wanderings caused. Sylvie, who did not want to be stopped at first, seemed to be indifferent to what people might think, but she was touched by her husband's kindness; and, as if she felt a sudden need of unbosoming herself, she led Annette into her room and shut the door. She sat down close beside her and in a low, mysterious voice, with shining eyes, confessed that she went every evening to a circle of initiates who gathered about a table in order to talk with her little girl. Annette listened, horrified, without daring to betray her feelings, while Sylvie, in a soft voice, recounted the child's replies. There was no longer any need to urge her to talk; she delighted in the joy of repeating to herself out loud the puerile words into which she had transfused all the blood of her heart. Annette could not destroy an illusion that gave her sister life. Leopold was ready to encourage her: for his sound common sense this was as good as any other religion. Annette asked the advice of the doctor, who told her to let the sorrow wear itself out.
Sylvie was radiant now. Annette asked herself if she would not have preferred a noble despair to this preposterous joy that profaned death. In the workroom Sylvie no longer concealed her relations with the world beyond the grave; the workers made her describe the séances; it gave them all the shivering pleasure of a popular novel. When Annette came in, she heard them mingling their lively reflexions with the account of the last conversation Sylvie had had with Odette; one apprentice was laughing at it behind the material she was folding up; and Sylvie, so lately an expert in the handling of irony, saw nothing as she babbled away, absorbed in her phantasmagory.
She did not stop there. One evening, without saying anything to Annette, she took Marc with her. She had come to feel once more an exalted affection for him. The moment she saw him her face lighted up. Annette, not finding Marc in the house, guessed what had happened. But she took care not to make him tell her about it when he came in, very late, depressed and unnerved. The child cried in his dreams. Annette lifted him up, calmed him, stroked his head with her tender hands.
In the morning she severely demanded an explanation from Sylvie. Her son was involved, and she spoke directly to the point. This time she did not conceal her disgust and aversion for these dangerous follies, and she angrily forbade her sister to mix the little boy up in them. Sylvie, who, at other times, would have replied in the same tone, bowed her head with an equivocal smile, avoiding Annette's furious look; she did not feel instinctively sure enough of her revelations to expose them to her sister's passionate criticism. She would discuss nothing, she promised nothing; she had a sly, wheedling manner, like that of a scolded cat that still means to do just what it chooses.
She did not venture, however, to carry Marc off again. But she did confide to him what she had heard in her séances; and it was very difficult to prevent their meetings, which Marc distrustfully kept as secret as his aunt. Sylvie told Marc that Odette spoke of him. It was this that bound her to the young boy: Odette had bequeathed him to her. She transmitted messages between the two children. Marc did not really believe in all this; the critical sense of his grandfather defended him against these absurdities, but his imagination was stirred. He listened, interested, repelled. Even while he lent himself to this unwholesome game, he condemned Sylvie severely; and he extended his condemnation to women in general. But this atmosphere of the grave was poisonous for a boy of his age. The horrible buffoonery of life and death gave him a precocious, haunting obsession. He felt surrounded by an odor of decayed flesh. He had moments of suffocation; and, as his mind was not yet strong enough to defend him, his feverish, preadolescent vitality reacted by taking refuge in his troubled instincts, which roved about like animals in the night. A redoubtable flock they were! It seems as if, by a sort of embryogenesis, the psychic organism passes in its evolution through the whole series of animal forms—has to pass through the most bestial stages before it reaches the point where they can be sublimated by intelligence and human will. Fortunately, this return to our savage origins is brief; it is a procession of spectres, and the best thing is to stand aside and let them pass as quickly as possible, doing nothing to arouse their shadowy consciousness. But this hour is not without its dangers, and the most loving watchfulness cannot protect the child from them. For this little Macbeth is the only one who sees the spectres. For the others, those who are closest to him, Banquo's seat remains empty; they perceive the fresh voice, the pure features of the child, but they do not see the formidable shadows that pass in the depths of its limpid eyes. The curious spectator himself hardly sees them. How can he recognize them, since they issue from a world in which he was not born, these instincts of possession, violence and even crime? There is no perverse thought that he does not touch, that he does not taste with the tip of his tongue. Neither of the two women who petted Marc dreamed what a little monster it was they held so close to them.
Little by little Sylvie grew calm. The accounts of her séances ceased to have a mysterious character; she spoke of them unfeelingly, hurriedly. She did not care to dwell on them. Soon she even ceased to mention them except with a certain constraint. And suddenly she stopped speaking of them altogether; she no longer replied to questions. Had she met with some disillusionment she did not wish to acknowledge? Or was she tired of them? She told no one. But in the long conversations she continued to have with Marc the occult world held less and less of a place, and it ended by disappearing. She seemed to have recovered her equilibrium. The passing of the ordeal was only evident to those about her by the appearance of a slight change in her age, an expression that was not more refined through suffering, but rather more material, by features that were a little heavier and a somewhat fuller figure. She still had the same grace, and she was brighter than ever. The powerful need to live avenges itself for the agony that has been endured. And new pains and new pleasures, the leaves of the falling days, the dust of the road, little by little covered the grave in her heart.
A deceptive appearance.
Life began again in the Rivière household. But the catastrophe had made a breach in their souls.
The disappearance of a child is a very small event in the general order of things. We are surrounded by death; it should never surprise us. From the moment when we begin to look about us, we see it at work and grow accustomed to it. We think we grow accustomed to it. We know that some day it will come and work its will in our own homes, and we foresee our misery. But there is so much more than misery! Let each one look into his own heart! There are few who will not recognize the revolution that a death has produced in their whole existence. It marks a change of eras . . . Ante, Post Mortem. . . . A being has disappeared. Life in its entirety is affected, a whole kingdom of beings, yesterday the kingdom of the day and to-day that of the shadow. If this little stone, this one stone, falls from the vault, the whole vault falls. Nothingness has no measure. If this little I is nothing, no I is anything. What I love is nothing; I who love am nothing. For I only exist because I love. The unreality of everything that breathes becomes suddenly apparent. And everyone is aware of this, though not in the same fashion, everyone, with all his organs, his instinct, his intelligence, whether he faces it directly or averts his eyes and flees from it.
On the family tree from which the little branch of Odette had been broken off the other branches continued to grow. But the development of three at least of the four was altered.
The least affected was the father. On the day of the funeral his grief was painful; his throat and his chest panted like those of a fallen horse. But a fortnight later he was already caught up again by his business and the powerful demands of his physical life; he was working, eating twice as much as ever, travelling, forgetting.
Of the two women Annette seemed to be the real mother. She could not be consoled. Her grief became all the more bitter the more the traces of the little girl were obliterated. Odette for her was like a chosen child, a child created not of her flesh, but of her need of affection, more hers than Sylvie's, more hers than her son. She accused herself of not having loved her enough, of having begrudged the caresses of which this eager little heart had never had enough. And she persuaded herself that she alone preserved the memory of the child to which the others were false.
Sylvie exhibited now a strange, busy, agitated gaiety. She talked in a high voice, with a wearisome flow of words, flashes of jocularity, harsh tittle-tattle that made her little group of workers burst out laughing. Marc quietly drank it all in when he happened to be there and heard it flying about him. He too had relaxed; he was working less, loafing, running about the streets, always looking for opportunities to do nothing and laugh. His organism was shielding itself against the terror within. . . . What outsider could have suspected it? We are impenetrable to one another; we seem indifferent; we want to unbosom ourselves and we cannot do so. . . . "There is no communion possible in suffering."
But Annette, whose intense devotion to the dead child made her unjust to the living, saw only their egoism. In every way it was trying to return to life and let the stone of memory drop to the bottom; and she was angry with them.
One day, however, one Sunday when Marc had gone out with Leopold to a ball-game, Annette, arriving at Sylvie's, found the door of the apartment open. She went in and heard a long, heavy groan. Sylvie, alone in her closed room, was talking and moaning. Annette withdrew on tiptoe; she reclosed the door on the landing and rang. Sylvie came and opened it; her eyes were red; she said it was a cold and talked with a noisy, rather vulgar animation. She began to tell one of those eternal indecent stories of which she seemed to have an endless supply. Annette's heart sank. Was it possible she was pretending? She was only half pretending. It was herself, far more than others, whom she wished to deceive. An utter despair, without a gleam or an outlet, had brought her to a sort of jocose contempt for life. If she did not want to die, there was no other alternative but forgetfulness and this mask of careless cynicism which had ended by replacing the features of the true face. Nothing meant anything. Nothing was worth the trouble. Propriety, honor, were all humbug! Nothing was worth taking seriously. Laugh at life! Enjoy yourself! Work alone continued to exist, for work was a necessity, and one couldn't get along without it.
Many other things continued to exist beneath all this devastation. Instinct in Sylvie was sounder than thought, and when she threw away everything else Annette and her son remained in her flesh and blood. They were only one person, these three! But this instinctive, almost material, love did not prevent her from cherishing bad feeling. Sylvie had no more tenderness for Annette than she had for herself. She was aggressive and full of mockery in her attitude to her sister, whose earnestness and silent sadness, heavy with memories, irritated her like an unspoken reproach.
A reproach indeed. Annette did not have the charity to spare her. She saw clearly, however, that Sylvie was fleeing from her misery as a hunted animal flees from a dog, and she pitied her. She pitied the misery of human nature, but she despised it for seeking safety at the expense of its dearest treasures, for being always ready to betray its sacred affections in order to elude the savage pursuit of suffering. She was embittered by this; for in her own heart she heard the call of this cowardice in the presence of life, and she scourged it.
Consequently, during these months that followed the disaster, she imposed upon herself an austere discipline of the heart, a proud, pessimistic restraint that concealed her wounded love.
After the dark winter Easter had come. That Sunday morning Annette was wandering about Paris. The sky had blossomed again; the air was motionless. With her soul wrapped in its mourning, she heard the nostalgic calls of the church-bells; and their sonorous net caught her up in its meshes, drew her outside the flood of this indifferent age to the beach where the dead God lay. She entered a church. She had scarcely taken two or three steps before she was stifled by her tears; she had repressed them so long, and they were flowing again. On her knees, with bowed head, in a corner of a chapel, she let them flow. Never had she felt as now the tragedy of this day. She listened to the organ, to the hymns, the hymns of joy. . . . Joy! . . . Sylvie's laughter, with her soul weeping in its depths. . . . Ah, she realized it so clearly to-day: there was no resurrection for the poor dead! And the despairing love for one's own, that age-old love, wearing itself out denying their death. . . . How much more grand and religious this poignant verity was than an illusory resurrection! That passionate self-deception, that heart-breaking self-deception, which could not consent to losing one's beloved ones.
She could not share her thoughts with anyone. Shut up in herself, with the little dead girl, she defended her against the second, the most terrible, of deaths, oblivion. She reacted harshly against herself and against the others. And as every reaction against a way of thinking leads by its recoil to a contrary reaction, her attitude of reproach provoked those who felt themselves hurt by it to exaggerate their own. And the breach widened.
It became almost complete between the mother and the son. Marc grew further and further away from Annette. For years the antagonism had been growing more evident, but until these latter days it had remained, on the child's side, veiled, hidden, cautious. During the long period when he had lived so intimately with Annette, he had been very careful not to fall into any argument with her; he would have been no match for her, and above everything else he wanted peace. He let his mother talk. Thus, one by one, she revealed her weaknesses to him, while he revealed nothing. But now that he had found an ally in his aunt, he no longer concealed his hand. How many times in the past his mother, losing patience with this little mollusc, who drew his mind back into his shell when she wanted to reach it, had said to him, "Come out of your hole! Let's have a glimpse of your head. Don't you know how to talk?"
He knew, Annette could have her satisfaction. He talked now. . . . It would have been better if he had continued to be silent! . . . What a little wrangler! Ah, he no longer hesitated to contradict her. He allowed nothing to pass from his mother's mouth without obstinately cavilling at it. And in what an impertinent tone!
This had happened all of a sudden; and no doubt Sylvie, by maliciously encouraging this warfare, was partly responsible for it. But the real cause lay deeper. This change of attitude corresponded with a change of nature, for the crisis of puberty was approaching. The child was transformed. In a few months he had assumed another character, and his rude and crotchety ways were interspersed with returns of his old taciturnity. There was nothing left of the polite, conciliatory, rather crafty silence of the child who wanted to give pleasure; one felt now something hostile and bristling in him. . . . His brusque, off-hand manner, his flagrant impoliteness, the inexplicable harshness with which he responded to affectionate advances, made Annette's sensibility bleed. Sufficiently armed against the world, she was not at all so against those whom she loved; a single rude word from her son wounded her to tears. She did not show this, but he was not unaware of it. He went on; he seemed to be seeking for things that might be unpleasant to his mother.
He would have been ashamed to behave so with people for whom he cared nothing. But to her he was certainly not indifferent. He clung to her. How? Like the living fruit which, when the hour has come, breaks away from the mother's womb. He was made of her flesh, and to make this flesh his own he tore it.
Marc had many elements that belonged by nature to another race than his mother's. But, strangely enough, it was not through these different elements that he most came into conflict with his mother: it was through those he had in common with her. For his jealous desire for independence was not yet in possession of a personality that properly belonged to him, and every resemblance to his mother seemed to him a sort of threat of annexation. So, to defend himself, he tried to be different. Whatever she said, whatever she did, he was the opposite. Because she was loving, he was insensible; because she was confiding, he shut himself up; because she was passionate, he was cold and cutting. And everything that she fought, everything that was repugnant to Annette's nature—ah, how well he knew these things!—became attractive to him, and he made haste to let Annette know it. Because she cared about her morality, the wilful child considered it the proper thing to regard himself as unmoral and made a point of proclaiming, "Morality is all fiction."
So he declared to his mother, and the credulous Annette took it seriously. She attributed it to the deplorable influence of Sylvie, who amused herself by casting disorder into the little soberly cultivated brain. . . . There they go into the flower-beds, a handful of wild seeds! And she raked the smooth paths the wrong way. She had plenty of good reasons for persuading herself that she was acting in the interest of the child. "That poor little fellow, shut up in a greenhouse, kept locked up in a box! We're going to take him out of his flower-pot!" Even while she loved her sister, she took a lively and cruel pleasure in stealing away from her this heart that was a slip of her own.
The shrewd self-interest of the child in everything that concerned him had perceived the duel that was being waged between the two sisters, and naturally he exploited it. He cunningly kept his favors for Sylvie, and he was much pleased by the jealousy which he aroused in his mother. Annette no longer concealed this. She justified it, with more reason than Sylvie, as being in Marc's interest. Sylvie loved the child and she had plenty of common sense. Her light wisdom was just as good as the weightier wisdom of some other people, but it was not suitable for a boy of thirteen, and the good he got from it was dangerous. If she sharpened in him the appetite for life, she did not give him respect for it; and when respect vanishes too early, look out for a smash! Sylvie was no person to form Marc's taste, except in the matter of clothes. She took him to silly movies and music-halls from which he brought back bewildering songs and images that left little room for serious thoughts, and his work showed the effects of it. Annette was angry and forbade Sylvie to take Marc out. This was a good way of sealing the alliance of the nephew and the aunt. Marc felt that he was persecuted; he discovered that, in our time, the profession of being an oppressed people is remunerative; and Annette learned, to her cost, that of the oppressor is not all tranquillity.
On every occasion Marc now made her feel that he was a victim and that she abused her strength. Well, so be it! She would abuse it to keep him in line. She would not tolerate the frivolity of his language, the unseemly habit he had picked up of making fun of everything, his impertinent blague. To subdue it she opposed him with her severe principles. He had a fine blow to give her in return. For a long time he had been waiting for the chance.
One day when he was finding support in his aunt's words against some prohibition of his mother's, Annette impatiently told him that Sylvie had the right to say and do what she wanted; one couldn't condemn her, but what was good for her was not good for him. He was not to take her as a model. "She is not to be imitated in everything."
Marc listened to the tirade and said carelessly, "Yes, but she has a husband."
Annette could not reply at first; she did not want to understand. What had he said? No, it wasn't possible! And then a blush spread over her forehead. Sitting there, with her hands motionless over her work, she did not stir. Nor did he make any further movement. He was not very proud of what he had said, of what was about to happen. The silence continued a long time. A flood of anger rose in Annette's vehement heart. She let it pass. Pity, irony, took its place. She sighed contemptuously. "Little wretch!" she thought. And at last, as her fingers resumed their task, she said, "And no doubt you consider that a woman without a husband who works to support her child is less worthy of respect?"
Marc lost his poise. He did not reply. He did not excuse himself. He was mortified.
That night Annette did not sleep. So she had sacrificed herself in vain! That the world should blame her was in the order of things. But he to whom she had given everything! How had he known? Who had breathed this thought into his ear? She could not be angry with him, but she was overwhelmed.
Marc slept peacefully. He was not free from remorse, but the sleep was stronger than the remorse. After a good night he would have forgotten it if he had not encountered it again in his mother's anxious look. It annoyed him that his mother had not forgotten as he had. He was sorry, but he could not make up his mind to say so; and, since he was uncomfortable, his childish logic made him angry with his mother.
They did not allude to the scene. But after it things were no longer as they had been before. They were constrained when they kissed each other. Annette no longer treated him wholly as a child.
How had he known? Conversations at school had made him reflect on the name he bore, which was that of his mother. Old allusions, picked up as they had passed in old days in the workshop, which he had not understood, became clear now. Some imprudent words of Sylvie to her sister, in the child's presence. And the enigma this mother was for him, at once irritating and fascinating him, through the aura of passions which, without the power to discern them, his puppy-instinct had scented. Over it all he had built a strange, vague fairy-tale which did not hang together very closely. His birth puzzled him. How could he find out about it? The reply that hurt his mother was partly a trap he was setting for her. In his heart there was a mingled curiosity and bitterness in regard to what had happened, about which he knew nothing. He had never dared to question Sylvie on the subject, for he was proud on his mother's behalf and he suspected that she had been wronged. But he thought he had the right to be angry with her because of the important secret she was hiding from him. This secret stood like a stranger between herself and him.
A stranger indeed. Marc never suspected that at moments he invoked before his mother's eyes the stranger, his father, and, even worse, the other Brissots. For in the secret warfare that went on henceforth between the mother and the young boy the latter instinctively armed himself with everything he could find, in his own nature, that was opposed to Annette. Thus, without knowing it, he sometimes disinterred and used against her various traits he had inherited from his Brissot ancestry: the famous condescending smile, the self-satisfaction, the waggish philistinism the hostile certitude of which nothing could shake. A shadow, a reflexion on the water. Annette recognized them and thought, "They have caught me!"
Was he really a stranger? No, he was not. The weapon, the inherited traits, yes; but the hand that held it was of Annette's substance. And that rebellious hand was clenched in that opposition between two beings who were too closely related, too much akin, which was only one of the thousand tricks of Love and Destiny.
He had no friends. This boy of thirteen, who spent every morning and afternoon in a class with thirty other children, was isolated from his comrades. When he was smaller, he had enjoyed chattering, playing, running, shouting. For a year or two now, he had had fits of speechlessness, a sudden hunger for solitude. This did not mean that he had ceased to feel the need of companions. He may even have needed them more than before. Exactly! He needed them too much; he expected too much and he had too much to give. And there were bristles everywhere in this spring thicket. A bridling self-esteem. A mere nothing wounded it, and he was afraid of being wounded and especially of showing it. That was a weakness, and he had to take care not to give the enemy a hold over him. (There is an enemy in every friend.)
What he had grasped, or rather imagined, regarding his civil status, his mother's past, kept him in an absurd, ridiculous, towering state of torment. His reading contributed to this; he was convinced that he was a "natural" child. (His romantic books called him by a harsher name.) He found a way of taking pride in this. He almost went so far as to catch in the archaic insult the wild, musty scent of nobility. He considered himself interesting, different from other people, solitary, just a little damned. It would not have displeased him to find himself among the Satanic bastards of Schiller and Shakespeare. This would have given him the right to despise the world, with lofty tirades—in secret.
But when he found himself in the world again—in his class at school, among his comrades—he was intimidated, weighed down by his secret, suspicious that they might guess it. His strange ways, his fated look, the thin voice that was beginning to break, his pretty girlishness, blushing, yet insolent as a young cock, excited the attention and the ill-will of his companions and even exposed him to the shameful advances of one of those little scamps who persecuted him with his half-comic, half-serious, proposals. He was completely upset by this; that night he was sick with revolt and disgust. He did not want to go back to school again, and he could not tell his mother the reasons; he had to win respect for himself unaided. He said to himself, "I shall kill him."
His riotous mind was excited by a deep ground-swell.
He had reached the time when the reproductive forces awaken. They fascinated him and terrified him. The strange innocence of his mother existed there beside him without seeing or suspecting anything. He would have died of shame if she had seen or suspected. And alone, despising himself, he surrendered frantically to the terrible solicitations of the degrading instinct. . . . But what could the child do, a poor child delivered over to these mad forces? This monstrous nature puts into a thirteen-year-old body the brutal fire which for want of nourishment devours it. There are natures which find salvation in throwing themselves wholly, through a contrary excess, into an ascetic exaltation of the spirit which often entails physical ruin. The young people of our time, more fortunate than their elders, have begun to practise the virile discipline of athletics. Marc would have asked nothing better than this, but there again nature was against him. He was not strong enough. Ah, how he envied the strong! How jealously he loved their beauty! . . . So much that he hated it. . . . He would never be like them.
Desires, all the desires, pure, impure, a chaos! . . . All the hostile demons! He would have been the plaything of chance—nothing could have helped him—had it not been for a basis of moral health and decency—rather, the grandeur that is unaware of its own capabilities, that divine something, the result of the sufferings, the valor, and the long patience of the best of the race, which will not endure the shame of defilement, the disgrace of falling, which has an anxious instinct for what is vile and cowardly, which follows its trail inward, into all the sinuosities of one's thought, which does not always escape stains, but never fails to condemn them, to condemn oneself, to brand oneself and punish oneself.
Pride! All praise to pride! Sanctus . . . In childish natures like this pride is health. It is the affirmation of the divine in the mire, the principle of salvation. In a solitude without love who would struggle without pride? Why struggle, if one does not believe one has supreme blessings to defend, and that for them one must conquer or die! . . .
Marc was determined to conquer. Conquer what he understood and what he did not understand. Conquer what he was ignorant of and what was repugnant to him. Conquer the enigma of the world and his own baseness. Ah, here as elsewhere, he was incessantly conquered. In his effort to work, to read, to concentrate, he slipped beyond his own control, he found himself out of hand. He always lacked the strength. . . . It was there, but it was hardly formed, unequal to the task and the demands of the will. He was devoured by desires and curiosities, healthy, unhealthy, that plagued him on all sides, weltering as he was in torpor, incapable of doing anything or determining anything. He wasted his time, and he was always in a hurry. Already his future filled his mind, the choice of a career; for he knew that it would be necessary for him to decide early, and he had no grounds for deciding; he floated through everything, equally interested and indifferent, attracted and disgusted. He wanted and he did not want; he was not even capable of wishing or of not wishing. The machine was not running aright. It would bound forward and suddenly stop, and he would find himself sprawling on the ground.
Then he looked around him. And this child who was suffering and devouring himself was quicker than anyone else to perceive the emptiness and the ennui of an age that had begun its journey to destruction. He had a keen sense of the abyss.
But his mother saw none of all this. She saw a sulky, overweening, rebellious, childish boy, morbidly susceptible, grandiloquent, always making trouble, who sometimes took delight in uttering obscenities, and at other moments was shocked at a mere free expression. Above all, she was irritated by his sneers. She had no suspicion of his feeling of bitterness, still less of his defiance of an evil fate. He felt cruelly the injustice of his lot; he was (or thought himself) without strength, without beauty, without talent, good for nothing; he ended by swamping himself, adding to his real defects others that he imagined; he conspired with all the outward signs that were able to humiliate him. . . . Those two little working-girls who laughed as they passed him were laughing, he thought, at him; he did not suspect that they were laughing just to arouse his interest, that they rather liked his blushing, shyly girlish air. He thought he saw in the eyes of his teachers a contemptuous pity for his mediocrity. He thought his more robust comrades despised his weakness and were showing up his cowardice; for since he was excessively nervous, he had his moments of pusillanimity; and, as he was sincere, he confessed this to himself and felt that he was dishonored. As a means of self-punishment, he secretly compelled himself to commit dangerously imprudent acts that brought the cold sweat to his brow and rehabilitated him a little—so little!—in his own eyes. It was at himself, often, that this little Nicodemus was sneering, at himself and his own weaknesses. But he was angry with the world that had made him what he was, and especially with his mother.
She did not understand his hostile air. . . . What an egoist he was! He thought only of himself.
He thought only of himself? What would have become of him if he had not thought of himself? If he had not helped himself, who would have helped him?
They remained alone, walled up, side by side. The day of confidences was past. Annette was beginning to repeat the lamentation of mothers, "How much more loving he was when he was younger!"
And he was saying to himself that mothers only love their children for their own amusement. No one loves anyone but himself.
No, everyone wants to love the other person. But when one is in danger one must think of oneself. One will think of the other afterward. How can one save the other if one hasn't saved oneself? And how can one save oneself if one lets the other hang about one's neck?
Annette, pushed aside by her son, became as hard as he. When the heart is deliberately closed to love, the mind, freed by the absence of the object that nourishes its affection, is driven to satisfy its intellectual hunger and its need of action. She worked all day, read in the evening, and at night slept soundly. Marc spitefully envied and despised the health of this vigorous woman, the faculty she seemed to have for escaping self-torment.
Annette, however, suffered from the privation of not being able to share her thoughts with a companion. She filled the void by work, by actively forgetting. . . . But work for work's sake is itself so empty! . . . And upon whom can one spend those unused forces one feels in oneself?
Sacrifice! . . . That need of sacrifice! . . . Annette found it everywhere about her, often pathetic, sometimes absurd. For as a good observer she incessantly explored faces and souls every day and all day long; she distracted herself from her own troubles by throwing herself into those of others. Perhaps curiosity prevailed over pity during this period when her heart was petrified (as she thought) by the spectacle of so much suffering, and especially so many defeats and abdications.
Among women who are struggling as she was to wrest from society the means of existence, how many are broken, far less by the harshness of things than by their own weakness and abnegation! Almost all are exploited by some affection and cannot exist without being exploited. One would say that this is their only reason for living—the reason for which they die. . . .
One of them sacrifices herself to an old mother or an egotistical father. Another, to a vulgar husband or some man who deceives her. Another, another—myself!—to a child who does not love her, who will forget her, who will betray her to-morrow perhaps. . . . Well, what does it matter? If I find a joy in being betrayed by him, imposed upon, forgotten? "If it pleases me to be beaten!" Ah, derision, trickery! . . . And the others envy you, those who have no one to whom to sacrifice themselves! They marry a dog, a cat, a bird. Each one has her idol. If you must have one at any price, God would serve better. He, at least, amounts to something. . . . I too have my God, my unknown God, my hidden truth, and this passion that drives me on to seek it. . . . Deceptive, perhaps, like the others. But I shall not know it till I have reached it. And if this is deceptive, at least it is elevated and worth the trouble.
Annette revolted against the absurdity of some sacrifices. No, nature does not wish the best to be sacrificed to the most unworthy. And if she did wish it, why should I submit to it? But she does not wish it! She wishes one to sacrifice oneself to the best, to the grandest, to the strongest.
Sacrifice at any price, to the worst as to the best, perhaps even to the worst by preference, because the sacrifice is thus most complete, sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice—yes, that is conformable enough to the idea people have of God . . . Credo quia absurdum . . . Like master, like man! This God is indeed he who rests on the Seventh Day, finding that which he has made is well made. If one had listened to him, the chariot of man would have stopped at the first turn of the wheel. All the progress of the world is made against his will . . . Fiat! We shall drive the chariot on. It may crush us, but at least we wish it to go forward.
A tragic incident increased Annette's aversion to these immolations that seemed to her so pointless—immolations of those who were worth more to those who were worthless.
She had recently been in competition, for a course for foreigners at an institution at Neuilly, with a young woman whose strong-willed rustic face had attracted her. She tried to strike up a conversation with her. But she was suspicious and could think of nothing but getting Annette out of the way. At that time Annette, who was still unused to these struggles that repelled her, had held up her own end badly; indeed, through her desire to make a friend, she had withdrawn in the interest of her rival. The latter had shown her no gratitude for this. Nothing counted for her but her own advantage. An ant eagerly hastening to heap up her gains. Annette did not interest her.
Annette had lost sight of her, and when, six years later, chance brought them again into one another's presence, they had both changed. Annette was no longer disposed to be generous, or rather fastidious. . . . Life is as it is. . . . I am not able to modify it. I want to live. You must take second place.
The struggle began. It did not last long. At the first blow the rival was knocked out. How she had aged! Annette was struck by her ravaged look. She had remembered her as a brunette with ruddy cheeks marked with two or three little black dots like raisins in bread, a solid peasant girl, short-waisted, thick-set, a face with fine, dry features, which, if it had not been so sullen, would not have lacked a certain grace—a stubborn brow, abrupt, always hurried movements. She saw now a thin, shrivelled face, a hard glance, a bitter mouth, hollow cheeks, young but blighted like scorched grass.
The disputed situation was that of secretary to an engineer: it required only two mornings of attendance each week to go through the business correspondence and receive visitors. Annette encountered Ruth Guillon in the antechamber, and their hostile eyes met.
"You have come for this place," said Ruth Guillon. "It has been promised to me."
"It has not been promised to me," said Annette. "But I have come for this place."
"No use, it's going to be given to me."
"Whether it's useless or not, I've come. It belongs to the one who gets it."
A moment later Annette was called into the engineer's office and chosen. She was known as an accurate, intelligent worker.
As she came out she ran into Ruth and passed her coldly. Ruth stopped her and asked, "You are going to have it?"
"I have it."
She saw the other's forehead redden strangely. She was expecting some violent remark, but Ruth said nothing. Annette continued on her way, and the other followed her. They descended the stairs. As she reached the street, Annette, turning round, threw a rapid glance towards her defeated rival, and Ruth's dejected air touched her. In spite of her resolution to be hard, she went back and said to her, "I'm sorry. One has to live."
"Oh, I'm quite aware of that," said the other. "Some have all the luck. I never have any."
Her tone had entirely changed. Dejection without animosity. Annette made a movement to take her hand, but Ruth drew back her own.
"Come, don't feel badly! One day one of us loses; another day it will be the other."
"It's every day with me."
Annette recalled their first encounter when Ruth had succeeded in getting the place. Ruth did not reply and walked along dejectedly beside Annette.
"Couldn't I help you?" said Annette.
The blush overspread her forehead again. Wounded pride, emotion? Ruth said dryly, "No!"
"It would give me pleasure to do so," Annette insisted.
And with a familiar gesture she seized her arm. Ruth was surprised and pressed Annette's hand nervously under her arm, and, turning her head, she bit her lip. Then she tore herself away in irritation and walked off.
Annette let her go, following her with her eyes. She understood her: yes, one has no right to offer one's pity to one who does not ask for it.
A few days later, entering a dairy, she saw Ruth making some purchases. She held out her hand to her. This time Ruth took it, but with an icy air. She made an effort, however, to appear less sullen; she uttered a few common-place words, and Annette, satisfied with this ungenerous advance, replied. The two women discussed the prices of the things they had bought. Annette, though she did not show it, was astonished that Ruth spent more than she on fresh eggs and special milk. Ruth was a little ostentatious in paying in front of her. As they went out, Annette said, "How much it costs to live!" She almost excused herself for the eggs she had bought, saying, "They're for my child."
Ruth, with a lofty air, remarked, "Mine are for my husband."
Annette knew nothing about the other's life. "Is he ill?" she asked.
"No, but he is very delicate."
She spoke proudly of the care that his health required. Annette, who knew how touchy Ruth was, did not ask her any questions, but waited for her to speak. Ruth said nothing more and they were about to separate when Annette remembered. . . . She offered Ruth a job—the revision of some work by a foreigner—which had been offered to her and which she did not have time to undertake. Ruth at once showed the liveliest gratitude: money played in her life a capital rôle. Annette asked for her address in case she had other orders to pass on to her. Ruth hesitated and replied evasively.
"It's only to be of service to you," said Annette impatiently. "In any case, I live myself—" And she gave her address.
Ruth reluctantly gave her own. Annette felt rebuffed and decided to think no more about her.
But Ruth came and looked her up a few weeks later. She excused herself for having seemed so unfriendly. And this time she confided to her a little, not much, about her life. Born of a family of rich farmers, she had quarrelled with her father because she had wanted to come to Paris and teach. Her father had wounded her pride and she had sworn never to accept anything from him. She wanted to earn her own living. She had worn herself out. In spite of her energy, thinking was too much for her; she labored at her books like an animal at the plough; the blood swelled her temples; she was obliged to stop in a state of congestion. An incipient neurasthenia forced her to give up the examinations she was just ready to pass. She fell back upon giving private lessons. She was succeeding, with difficulty, in earning her living when she fell in love with a man whom she married and who became simply one burden the more. But this she did not say; Annette learned it elsewhere. She was acute enough to divine a part of the truth in the course of the discreet questions she asked her new friend. She saw that the husband had no occupation: he was an "intellectual," an "artist," a "writer." And she did not have to go very far to find what he wrote. Verses! . . .
Ruth had no more taste than any other little provincial soul. But the poetry overawed her.
She was in no haste to introduce her "artist." She kept him at home. But from this time forward she saw Annette more often—too often. She ended by overwhelming her with testimonials of friendship, flowers, attentions that were seldom very well inspired and only irritated Annette. She had no middle way: it was all or nothing with this passionate soul. She had never had a woman friend; she had never confided in anyone. From the moment when she made up her mind to like Annette she monopolized her. Annette was bored to death by this affection, and she realized that the husband would not find it easy to bear.
At last she succeeded in surprising and catching a glimpse of the precious bird: a dull, insignificant man with vague blue eyes who gave the impression that he was a secret devotee of absinthe. Very vain and far from sure of himself, utterly mediocre, he was anxious for Annette's good opinion. He did not love his wife, but he found it convenient to be pampered by her and assumed languishing, piteous, sad airs in the name of his health, his unrecognized talents and the envy of his fellow-writers. Annette pierced him through and through with her clear eyes. He was cautious with her and moderated the jeremiads for which the silent irony of his listener was waiting. But Ruth swallowed everything whole; she was incapable of judging and as proud as Artaban. . . . "Let her keep her illusions. She needs some one to love, a man to protect. She has a passionately domestic soul. She would lie down under his feet. . . ." But sometimes she quarrelled with him bitterly. Once, as Annette was climbing the stairs, she heard the "poet" bawling and whining. Ruth was slapping her husband.
Annette no longer had any doubt that the best part of Ruth's money was spent for José's loafing and absinthe. He played the races also. Ruth never complained: she struggled to save up enough for him to publish a volume of his poems. But he was in no hurry to write them. And when, one day, she went over her accounts she discovered that he had stolen three-quarters of the money: he had robbed himself!
That day, with her pride utterly broken, she confessed her misery to Annette. She would not have spoken if it had concerned herself alone. But for years she had been wearing herself out for him—"for his glory," as she said. And he had destroyed it himself!
One confidence leads to another. Annette ended by learning almost all of Ruth's sufferings. Her health was ruined. She was growing weaker every day and less able to restrain her thoughts. As death approached her eyes were opened and she realized the inanity of this man and his lack of affection. José was hardly ever at home any more. He would steal away, finding no pleasure in the society of a sick, disappointed wife.
When her last days came, Ruth had no illusions left. She declared, however, with sincere pride, that she regretted nothing and that she would do it all over again.
"That has killed me. But I have lived by it."
She did not believe in anything; she expected nothing, either in this world or in the other. . . .
Annette was alone with her when she lay on her deathbed. A hemorrhage of the brain had struck her down.
José, who had fled at the approach of death, showed his timorous face a few moments afterwards. He had a brief moment of feeling. After he had wept, his first words were, "But what in heaven's name is to become of me?"
"You'll find someone else to support you," said Annette.
He threw her a spiteful glance. And he let Annette pay the funeral expenses.
"There you are!" Annette thought, by the bedside of the dead woman. "She was a tower of pride, will, ascetic devotion. . . . What good did it all do? What a mess! Giving oneself to a dog! Poor Ruth was hard. She was not hard enough. One must be harder still.”
Reaction against the deception of the heart—my accursed heart which is only there to delude me. My head and my senses will and know. My heart is blind. It is my business to direct it. Reaction against love, and against sacrifice, and against goodness.
In everyone's life, as in the life of society, there are phases of feeling that succeed one another without resembling one another. Their first law, indeed, is not to resemble one another. While one phase is in the ascendant, everyone shares in it with complete seriousness, feeling nothing but contempt for the ridiculousness of the phases that have passed out of date and convinced that his phase is and will always be the best. . . . Annette passed in this way through a phase of hardness.
But whatever one's garment may be, the human being remains the same. One cannot get along without others. The proudest needs his share of affection; and the more circumstances oblige one to shut oneself in, the more one's treacherous mind conspires to betray one.
Annette felt very strong. Strong in her experience and her intelligence, firm, practical, disillusioned. She was sure now that she could live by her will—of course, by working, but the work too was her will. She did not fear any lack of this. She did not need anyone's help. Nor was she going to put herself out either to please or to displease.
She had found herself in competition lately with a new kind of rival, men. She gave lessons to boys to prepare them for school and examinations. She was successful, but along with her success came the increasing animosity of those to whom she was preferred. They considered themselves thwarted. There was no question of gallantry any more. The most destitute of consideration were the married men: their wives spurred them on. They slandered Annette: what would they not insinuate in regard to the means by which she managed to reach the best places? Annette, with her hard, attractive smile on her lips, followed her own road, scornful of public opinion.
At bottom, however, there was the invisible stamp of the wear and tear exacted by these long years of merciless toil. Her fortieth year was approaching. Life had passed and she had not realized it. An obscure feeling of revolt was rising within her. All this lost life, this life without love, without action, without luxury, without any rich joy. . . . And all that she had missed she had been so completely fitted to enjoy!
What was the use of thinking of it? It was too late now!
Too late?