THE next day, I awaited the arrival of the postman anxiously. I paced up and down the walks, as Isa used to do when the children were late and she was worried.
Had they quarrelled? Was one of them ill? I fretted myself to death. I became as clever as Isa at developing and harbouring obsessions. I marched among the vines, with that absent-minded air of remoteness from the world of those who are going over and over a source of anxiety; but, at the same time, I remember that I noticed this change in myself, and was pleased to find that I was anxious.
The mist was a sound-box. One could hear the plain, but not see it. Wag-tails and thrushes made merry in the rows where the grapes had not yet gone rotten. Luc as a child, at the end of his holidays, had loved these fleeting mornings....
A line from Hubert, dated from Paris, did not reassure me. He had been obliged, he told me, to leave in a hurry: a rather serious matter which he would tell me about on his return, fixed for the next day but one. I imagined financial difficulties. Had he, perhaps, been guilty of some illegality?
By the afternoon I could not stand it any longer. I had myself driven to the station, where I took a ticket for Bordeaux, though I had given my word not to travel alone again. Geneviève was now living in our old house. I met her at the door, in the act of taking leave of a stranger, who must have been a doctor.
“Didn’t Hubert tell you?”
She took me into the waiting-room, where I had fainted, the day of the funeral. I breathed again when I heard that it was a matter of an escapade of Phili’s. I had feared something worse. He had gone off with a woman “who had a hold on him,” after a distressing scene in which he had left Janine with no hope. They could not get the poor girl out of her state of prostration, which worried the doctor. Alfred and Hubert had followed the fugitive to Paris. According to a telegram which she had just received, they could do nothing with him.
“When I think that we allowed them such a large income....Of course we weren’t taking any risks; we did not give them control of any capital. But the income was considerable. God knows Janine showed herself weak enough with him; he could get anything he liked out of her. When I think that he used to threaten to desert her, because he believed that you would not leave us anything; and it’s now, when you have handed over your fortune to us, that he makes up his mind to take off—how do you explain that?”
She stopped in front of me, with her brows arched and her eyes dilated. Then she went and leant against the radiator, put her finger-tips together, and rubbed her hands.
“Of course,” I said, “it’s a rich woman in the case....”
“Not at all!—a teacher of singing....But you know her yourself; it’s Mme Vélard. Not in her first youth, and no better than she should be. How do you explain that?” she repeated.
She started talking again without waiting for my reply. At that moment Janine came into the room. She was in her dressing-gown. She put up her forehead for me to kiss. She was no thinner; but in that heavy, graceless face despair had wiped out everything that I disliked. This poor creature, so affected, so mannered, had become terribly stark and simple. The harsh light of a lamp fell full upon her without her blinking an eye. “You know?” was all she asked me; and she went and sat down on the chaise-longue.
Did she listen to her mother’s conversation, that interminable harangue which Geneviève must have been dinning into her ears ever since Phili’s departure?
“When I think....”
Every period began with this “When I think,” astonishing in a person who thought so little. They had consented to this marriage, she said, despite the fact that at the age of twenty-two Phili had already dissipated a nice fortune which he had inherited very young—as he was an orphan, without near relations, he had had to be released from trusteeship. The family had closed their eyes to his life of debauchery...and this was the way in which he rewarded them....
An irritation was coming to life in me which I tried to control in vain. My old maliciousness opened an eye again. As though Geneviève herself, Alfred, Isa, all their friends, had not harried Phili, had not dazzled him with promises by the thousand!
“The most curious thing about it,” I growled, “is that you really believe what you are saying. But you know perfectly well that you all ran after the fellow.”
“Come, come, Father, you’re surely not going to defend him....”
I protested that there was no question of defending him. But we had been wrong in thinking this fellow Phili even lower than he really was. No doubt it had been rubbed into him too much that, once the fortune was assured, he would put up with anything and there would be no more danger of his taking himself off. But people are never as bad as we think they are.
“When I think that you defend a wretch who deserts his young wife and his little daughter....”
“Geneviève,” I cried in exasperation, “you misunderstand me. Make an effort to understand me. To abandon one’s wife and daughter is a bad thing, that goes without saying; but the culprit might have yielded to baser motives rather than to higher ones....”
“So then,” repeated Geneviève, aghast, “you think it noble to desert a woman of twenty-two and a little girl....”
There was no getting her beyond that. She simply did not understand what I was talking about.
“No, you’re too much of a fool...unless you refuse to understand on purpose....All I am saying is that Phili appears to me less despicable since....”
Geneviève cut me short, crying to me to wait until Janine had left the room before insulting her by defending her husband. But the girl, who so far had not opened her lips, intervened in a voice which I barely recognised.
“Why deny it, Mamma? We treated Phili as though he were lower than dirt. You remember, once the division was decided upon, we thought we had him where we wanted. Yes, he was just like a dog which I was to keep on a lead. I had reached the point where I ceased to suffer because he didn’t love me. I had him; he was mine; he belonged to me; I held the purse-strings; I had the whip-hand over him. It was your own expression, Mamma. Remember that you said to me: ‘Now you have the whip-hand over him.’
“We thought that he wouldn’t put anything above money. Perhaps he thought so himself; but in the end his resentment, his sense of humiliation, were too much for him. It isn’t as though he loved this woman who has taken him away from me. He told me so when he was going away, and he threw so many cruel things in my face that I’m sure he was speaking the truth. But she didn’t despise him; she didn’t lower him in his own eyes. She gave herself to him, she didn’t take him. But I—I was offered to him.”
She repeated these last words, as though she were flagellating herself. Her mother shrugged her shoulders, but she was glad to see her in tears. “That will do her good.
“Don’t be afraid, my dear,” she went on; “he’ll come back to you. Hunger drives the wolf out of the woods. When he has roughed it long enough....”
I was sure that sentiments such as these aroused Janine’s disgust. I got up and picked up my hat. I could not bear to spend the evening with my daughter. I gave her to understand that I had hired a car and that I would drive back to Calèse. Suddenly Janine said:
“Take me with you, Grandfather.”
Her mother asked her whether she had gone mad. She must stay where she was. The lawyers wanted her. Besides, at Calèse, “grief would get the better of her.”
On the landing, where she followed me out, Geneviève reproached me heatedly because I had encouraged Janine’s passion for Phili.
“If she succeeds in getting rid of that fellow, confess that it would be a good riddance. One can always find grounds for annulment of marriage; and, with her fortune, Janine could make a brilliant match. But, in the first place, she must get him out of her system. And you, who used to detest Phili—you go out of your way to sing his praises in front of her!...Oh no, above all things she must not go to Calèse. You would send her back to us in fine shape! Here, we shall succeed in taking her mind off it in the end. She will forget....”
Unless she dies, I thought; or unless she lives a life of misery, with a pain that is always the same, over which Time is powerless. Perhaps Janine belongs to that race of women whom an old lawyer knows well: those women in whom hope is a disease, who are never cured of hoping, and who, after twenty years, still keep looking at the door, with the eyes of a faithful dog.
I went back to the room where Janine was still sitting, and I said to her:
“Any time you like, my child....You will always be welcome.”
She showed no sign of having understood me. Geneviève came back and asked me suspiciously: “What are you saying to her?” I heard afterwards that she accused me of having, during those few seconds, “perverted” Janine and amused myself “by putting all kinds of ideas into her head.”
But I went down the staircase, treasuring in my memory what the girl had said to me: “Take me with you...” She had asked me to take her with me. I had said, instinctively, about Phili just what she needed to hear. I was the first person, probably, who had not hurt her.
I walked about Bordeaux, luminous in a day of harvest-home. The pavements of the Cours de l’Intendance, damp with mist, were shining. The voices of noon drowned the clamour of the trams. The smell of my childhood was missing. I might have found it again in those more sombre districts of the Rues Dufour-Dubergier and de la Grosse Cloche. There, perhaps, some old woman, at the corner of a dark street, still clutched to her bosom a steaming pot of those boiled chestnuts which smell of aniseed.
No, I was not melancholy. Somebody had listened to me, understood me. We had come together. That was a victory. But I had failed with Geneviève: there is nothing that I can do against a certain quality of stupidity. One can readily reach a living soul behind the saddest of faults and failings; but vulgarity is insurmountable.
No matter, I would make up my mind to it: one could not roll away the stone from all these tombs. I should be very happy if I succeeded in penetrating just one soul, before I died.
I slept at a hotel, and did not return to Calèse until the following afternoon. A few days afterwards, Alfred came to see me, and I learnt from him that my visit had had unhappy results.
Janine had written Phili a crazy letter, in which she declared that all the faults were on her side, blamed herself, and asked his forgiveness. “Women never do anything but the wrong thing....” My fat friend did not dare to say it to my face, but he was certainly thinking: “She is beginning her grandmother’s follies over again.”
Alfred gave me to understand that any suit was lost in advance, and that Geneviève held me responsible for the fact. I had purposely made Janine pig-headed. I asked my son-in-law, with a smile, what my motives could possibly have been. He told me—protesting that he did not agree with his wife’s opinion in the least—that I had acted, according to her, out of malice, for revenge, perhaps through “sheer wickedness.”
The children did not come to see me anymore. A letter from Geneviève informed me, a fortnight later, that they had had to send Janine to a nursing home. There was no question of her being mad, of course. They had great hopes of this isolation cure.
And I, too—I was isolated; but I was not in pain. Never had my heart given me such a long respite. During this fortnight and well beyond it, a radiant autumn lingered in the world. No leaf had fallen yet, and the roses bloomed again.
I ought to have suffered because, once more, my children shunned me. Hubert put in an appearance only to talk business. He was cold and correct. His manner remained courteous, but he kept himself on his guard. The influence which my children accused me of having won over Janine had made me lose all the ground I had gained. I had become once more, in their eyes, the enemy, a treacherous old man, capable of anything. Finally, the only one who might have understood me was shut up, segregated from the living.
And yet, I experienced a sense of profound peace. Bereft of everything, isolated, living under a terrible threat of death, I remained calm, interested, active-minded. The thought of my sad life did not overwhelm me. I did not feel the weight of those wasted years....
It was as though I were not a very ill old man; as though I still had before me a whole lifetime; as though this peace which possessed me were Someone.