“What do you do now that you are a widower?” demanded Sœur Miriam as Paul put on his shirt after a refill. What indeed?
He went for walks. He sat inside and outside cafés. On two consecutive afternoons he attended the showing of the same indifferent film in the village. One evening at his invitation Pierre, Mme. Anniette’s assistant, came to drink a glass of port in his room. Handkerchief gripped between his teeth, tears rolling down his cheeks, he related the story of his life, an odyssey of relapses, of défaillances, of slender ambitions ever thwarted by the condition of his health. “Une fois tutu, Monsieur Davenant, on l’est pour toute la vie,” he concluded, wiping his eyes.
“Ça ne va pas avec le moral ça ne va pas du tout,” said Mme. Anniette after lunch, the fourth day after Michèle’s departure. Paul lay back on the divan in her little bed-sitting-room, sipping the coffee she had just given him. “Il faut faire quelque chose,” said Mme. Anniette. There was, she explained, a little hotel on the lake, not far from Annecy, which was clean, attractive, and where special terms were allowed for clients whom she recommended. There would be no effort required from Paul—she would reserve the accommodation, buy the ticket and pack the cases. A few days ‘en plaine’ and he would return invigorated and refreshed.
Mme. Anniette did all that she had promised and more. She pressed Paul’s clothes for the journey, relined his jacket and bought him a copy of La Symphonie Pastorale to read on the train. And the next morning she and Pierre accompanied him to the station and stood waving until the cremaillère had disappeared from sight.
The same evening, just when supper was over, Paul reappeared at the châlet; he offered no explanation for his return other than the drawn and desperate cast of his features. Mme. Anniette quickly laid a place between the sergeant and the Alsatian electrician and cooked an omelette. When Paul had finished eating, he went at once to his room.
This time there could be no question about it. Paul was lying face downwards, his head buried in the pillow. The sound of breathing, of muffled movement was very close. A spanner? An iron spike? To move, to cry out, would be to precipitate the blow and impair its accuracy. Better to lie still and let the skull be cleanly crushed. Paul tensed as he felt the rush of air across his neck. The instrument skimmed his hair. He could no longer control himself. Scream after scream. He woke up.
Complete darkness. This is the way the mind snaps. This is the way the mind snaps. This is the way … “My dear friend …” Paul was drinking port, after dinner, in the junior common room of his college. “My dear friend …” Laughter. “Joan of Arc and her voices …” More laughter. “If that were all I heard, I——” He broke off as the duvet slipped from his bed. “Now watch what will happen!” he murmured in a confidential aside. To retrieve the duvet he stretched out his hand to the floor. Under the tips of his fingers, in a sudden glow of light, something inert shot into instantaneous, threshing defiance. Paul recoiled, then, propelling himself on his arms, tried to throw himself over the side of the bed on to whatever was there. But he could not open his eyes. He tried to tear back the lids. With screams on his lips, he awoke a second time.
The curtains now showed transparent against the windows. “Oh God, what can I do, what can I do?” he repeated, sitting up and holding his head in his hands. What caused these hallucinated nights? He drank nothing, he avoided before sleeping the sort of reading which might tend to stimulate bad dreams. Was there still somewhere in his body a pocket of treacherous morphia discharging itself, drop by drop, into his brain? How long had passed between his two wakings? Paul stared at the hand which had sought to retrieve the duvet. What had it nearly touched? Then he shuddered with the sudden conviction that what had passed had not been the product of his imagination. He got out of bed and started on the search of his room which would lead, finally, to the outer door and the untroubled, immaculate surface of the snow.
The sergeant was in excellent spirits. (An ancien thoracé in his early fifties, he had lost nine ribs and was thin as a filleted eel. He worked in the local garage.) Hat on the back of his head, shirt-sleeves rolled above the forearm, chair tilted, he cried: “Shut up, Fritz, and eat your sausages!” He shot a glance at his petit chou, a plump, half-witted, middle-aged femme-de-chambre, who called for him in the evenings. Too timid to come to the dining-room with “toutes les grandes personnes”, the petit chou sat on the sergeant’s bed, and watched the scene through the half-open door. The sergeant opened and closed his hand at her—she burst into smothered laughter.
“Mais c’est pas joli,” said Fritz. (Ten years younger than the sergeant, he walked with a limp and lacked a kidney. He boasted that he had had T.B. in every part of his body except the lungs.)
“Eat, I tell you!”
“Ah, no!”
Mme. Anniette had killed a chicken and had served it with rice. Fritz was disconsolate that because he had only just arrived and because, moreover, he had said that he would not be back for supper, all the chicken had been eaten.
“I like chicken. When have I said I didn’t like chicken?” he demanded, though no one had suggested the contrary. He slipped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.
“Eat! Eat!” The sergeant was ecstatic.
“He never tells you what he’s going to do, and then if things don’t go as he planned he howls like a spoiled child.” Mme. Anniette forked some more sausages on to Fritz’s plate. Fritz stared at them gloomily.
“Oh, la, la! He’s still thinking of his chicken,” chuckled the sergeant, shaking from side to side and tugging at his moustaches. “Le brave Fritz is still thinking of his chicken!” He again opened and shut his hand at the petit chou, and she collapsed face downwards on the duvet to stifle her laughter.
“I’m very fond of chicken,” muttered Fritz, stuffing the sausages into his mouth.
“And was it good? Oh, la—la!” The sergeant smacked his lips, rubbed his stomach and raised his hat.
Fritz masticated loudly the last of the sausages.
“I want some more. I’m still hungry.”
“You eat enough for five people,” protested Mme. Anniette. She piled his plate with potatoes.
“He’s not a Fritz—he’s a pig!” cried the sergeant, winking at Paul.
Fritz snorted, guzzled and lowered his face into the plate as though it were a trough. The petit chou, who had just recovered her poise, let out a shriek and re-buried her face in the duvet.
“That’s enough, Fritz,” said the sergeant severely. There were times when he resented Fritz’s success with the petit chou.
Paul got up from the table. “Bon soir, m’sieu,” said the sergeant and Fritz together. The petit chou peered out at him, then crouched back behind the door. He heard her laughter as he closed the front door.
He went to his room and to bed. There was no object in trying to read; he took a sedative and turned out the light. Michèle. By the end of the first long, solitary afternoon he had known that he loved her without reserve or reservation. How had he believed even for a few hours that his feelings had changed to indifference? What was this demon of perversity which even the worst rigours of his sickness had failed to exorcise? And his despair and loneliness had mounted during the succeeding days until at last he had become incapable of any degree of objectivity, believing that deliberately, calculatedly and progressively he had alienated himself from her love. What chance was there, he asked himself, that she would return? Her health was restored and her parents could ill afford the sanatorium fees. What would become of him? He could not contemplate life without her. He must not think about it, it was no good thinking. He turned on his side. The panic in the station and in the streets of the little town near Annecy, the suspicion, hostility and insight into his condition in the shops, restaurants and hotel …. Was he, like Pierre, going to be forced to pass the remainder of his life in the mountains? Again he turned. There must be a position in which the mind as well as the body could be rested. Where was there any rest? Perhaps he and Michèle should return to England whilst he had still the balance of his uncle’s legacy. Perhaps he should try and take his degree and then find employment. Could he ask Michèle to wait? What was the use of asking Michèle anything, since he had lost her? His hand went up to his forehead.
The side door to the passage which connected with his room opened and shut—his brain registered the sound but not the implications. Then suddenly he sat upright in his bed. He was not dreaming, he had not even been to sleep. He listened, suspended his breathing. Nothing. Trembling slightly, he lay down again. A board creaked outside his door. He seized his torch, which he kept by his bedside.
The door opened. There was more creaking of boards. He shone the torch. The beam illuminated the sickly face and disorderly red hair of Dr. Bruneau.
“Turn off that torch, you’re blinding me,” said Dr. Bruneau.
“What do you want?”
“I happened to be passing.” Dr. Bruneau found the switch for which he had been groping. “Ah! That’s better,” he said. He took off his raincoat and shook it over the floor. “It’s snowing—the winter’s started again.” He looked about him. “Very much as I’d expected—wooden walls, a few bibelots and hessian curtains. Is there very much noise?”
“Very much noise?”
“I mean from one room to another.” Dr. Bruneau tapped one of the walls with his knuckles. “Tight as a drum, and thin as paper. A very primitive piece of construction. It’s my guess that one would hear every sound. Is there anyone next door to you?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Who else is here besides you? The patronne? A servant?”
“An assistant and two lodgers.”
“Anciens malades?”
“Yes.”
“The patronne must have a thriving business! On a quiet night do you hear voices from the other rooms? Or sounds?”
“Sounds?”
“Sounds, cher monsieur,” said Dr. Bruneau impatiently, waving his right hand and clicking his fingers. “If someone gets in or out of bed, and the bed creaks, do you hear it?”
“I don’t know. I never really——”
“Or if they knock over a chair or kick their slippers across the room.”
“I——”
“Sh!” Dr. Bruneau put his ear against the wall and raised his hand. “I can’t hear anything. Are they all in bed?”
“I expect so.”
“Who sleeps above you?”
“The patronne.”
“And how many rooms are vacant?”
“Three or four.”
“Sh!” Dr. Bruneau again applied his ear to the wall. “I can hear breathing. I can distinctly hear breathing.”
“It’s probably my own.”
“Well, stop breathing.”
Dr. Bruneau at last appeared satisfied. “I may be joining you here—that is, if I am really convinced there is no noise,” he explained. Then, as Paul gave a slight gasp, he added quickly: “No, it’s unfair of me to raise your hopes. The thing is that the Société has given me notice to quit my room in the autumn, and by then you’ll probably be far away.” He sat down on the end of the bed and playfully seized one of Paul’s blanket-covered feet and wagged it. “Now tell me truthfully, are you pleased to see me? We meet less often than we used to, don’t we? Oh, before I forget, I had a funny dream a few nights ago. It was that you’d relapsed and were back again at Les Alpes, and I was looking after you. Quite nostalgic, really. But they say dreams go by opposites, don’t they?” He grinned, showing his gums. “Now tell me what you’re doing. I hope that you are using your freedom profitably—les beaux jours won’t last for ever. What are you reading?”
He got up and examined Paul’s shelves. “Same old books—Proust, Stendhal, Dostoievsky. Not precisely what I would call ‘avant-garde’. You’re a century behind, cher monsieur. You see yourself in front of a décor of samovars and racing droshkys or dining by candlelight chez la Princesse de Noailles, whereas in reality you’re just another of Chekov’s dreary, eternal students. Can’t you grasp that you are living in the world of a romantic young boy still at his lycée?
“Develop, grow up, cher monsieur,” he exhorted, throwing his arms apart. “Make yourself understand that you are separated from all these nineteenth-century neurotics by two wars and your own nearly mortal illness. Do you study politics? Have you any knowledge of political institutions? Are you preparing yourself for the future in order that you may be of service to the world as I, in my humble way, have been of service to you and many others?”
He put on his raincoat and buttoned it up to the neck. “Why do you lie with the light out at only ten o’clock? It’s your body which needs resting, not your mind. Think of Pasteur, think of Koch, think of Einstein. What would they have done if they had not kept their minds supple and receptive? Be encouraged by the example of great men—you too have your mite to contribute, however slight and insignificant.” Then, with a nod, he went out into the night.
Mme. Anniette had read two books in her life and had read them alternately throughout her life—a biography of Beethoven and a biography of Napoleon. They had furnished her with more exact knowledge than the majority of people possess on any subject, and she would draw on it to provide Paul with advice or to point out the consolations of his situation. “Pensez au pauvre Beethoven, vieux, sourd et sans le sou,” she would say, or “Pensez à Napoleon, traqué, trahi et jetté sous les griffes de ses cruels ennemis!”
She urged him not to remain alone in his room. On the evenings when there was a broadcast of a play all the members of the châlet would, as a matter of course, assemble about her wireless set, Paul lying on the divan, the sergeant opening and shutting his hand at the petit chou (who preferred to listen from behind his bedroom door), Fritz and Pierre on the floor (the latter with his head within three inches of the speaker). Mme. Anniette, whether unravelling her knitting, her accounts or her thoughts, would follow and commentate the play’s action, saying: “Mais écoutez-moi ça!” or “Mais quel salaud, celui-là!” Every sentiment expressed would be approved or disapproved; she would retort to unsympathetic characters in their own coin or, more ominously, content herself with saying: “Attendez, mon vieux! Est-ce que vous allez attraper quelque chose tout à l’heure!”
And when Paul was alone, she would call on him and seek to distract him by relating anecdotes of her childhood or by discoursing on the background and history of Brisset’s prominent citizens. Sometimes seeking to alleviate his depression she would succumb to it. A discourse in praise of human nature would become progressively modified during its delivery until at last she would cry: “Tout le monde est vil. Il n’y a que des escrocs. On vous roule partout!” And at times, as she developed her theme of resignation and acceptance, her own feelings would break out in a cry of: “Work! Work! Work! Why? What for? To earn money to protract still further this sale comédie of existence? Monsieur Davenant, I swear to you that if I believed my body contained still five years of life I would hang myself from that hook in the ceiling!” And, her stance Promethean, her shoulder-straps straining, she would point dramatically to a small metal plug that would not have borne the weight of a bird-cage.
With Michèle’s return no more than a few days distant, Paul’s sense of anticipation was equalled only by his apprehension—her single communication since her departure had been a brief and non-committal card. He feared that each post might bring news that she was not returning to France, and once he obtained access to her room at the Universel to reassure himself that her belongings were still there, that they had not, at the order of her parents, been packed and sent back to Liège.