Mme De Freppel was at home, expecting her daughter. Catherine had been at school in Paris for four years; except for the shortest visits, she had not been at home during all that time. Now that she was coming for good, Mme de Freppel had given her a large room instead of the little one where she slept on her visits, and furnished it at more cost than she would ever spend on herself. Looking round it, she felt excited, eager to have her daughter under her roof. She refused to admit another feeling, waiting behind her love and eagerness. It was familiar. It was the feeling that had driven her to send the child to a foster-mother when she was two years old. Until then she had looked after her devotedly; she did everything, prepared her meals, bathed her. Abruptly, with only the excuse that the child needed a change, she handed her over to the other woman. Why? Her husband was going to England and she went with him, desperate to be rid of her settled life. The calm she had thanked heaven for when she married Comte de Freppel was making her ill. When they left behind the dull little château near Blois, she felt a burden roll from her. Yet she missed her child, and wept bitterly when she thought about her.
As soon as they went back, she hurried to bring Catherine home. And a year later left her again, with a nurse, when she went to Switzerland for two years: this time the excuse was her husband’s health.
Less than a quarter of Catherine’s childhood was spent with her mother. She was eight when her mother went off to stay at Seuilly with her friend Mme Vayrac. Mme de Freppel went for one week. At the end of five months she came home only to say she Was not coming; she had had enough of the Freppel life, the only thing she now wanted from it was her daughter.
M. de Freppel refused. Then began the terrible scenes the child felt without seeing them. She saw her father come out of the library where he had been talking to her mother for three hours. It was her mother’s voice she had heard, talking, talking, weeping. A servant who passed the french window said that M. le Comte was backing across the room, his wife clinging to him by her arms, her head fallen back, her body dragging on the floor. After this scene, Mme de Freppel left the house, with her daughter, without any of their clothes—she was afraid he would change his mind. . . .
Looking round her daughter’s new room, Mme de Freppel hoped, with a guilty confusion, that Catherine would not make too many demands. The girl must stay at home now. A young woman of seventeen cannot be handed about like a parcel. She opened the cupboards where she had hung dresses for Catherine to try, and looked into the drawers with their piles of underclothes and silk stockings. She had never bought so many things for herself.
She heard the carriage and went down. Catherine was coming into the hall. Hurrying forward, she took the girl in her arms. Catherine was smiling gaily. She kissed her mother, then drew back.
“I’d forgotten what the garden is like,” she said.
It was as if she had said, I don’t want to answer questions. A child had gone away and a young woman had returned. There would not be any need for her mother to pretend to be interested in boring games, no need to make an excuse for having to go out or go away.
As they went upstairs together, Mme de Freppel was thinking, At last I have her, she’s only mine; she’s here. She would not admit yet that a friendly young woman is not a daughter. . . . Now that no demands were made on her, why did she hope for them?
“Do you like your room?”
“It’s beautiful,” the girl said lightly. She walked to the window without looking at anything. “Oh, you can see the river.”
“I thought you’d like that,” her mother said.
She began to open drawers and cupboards. “I’ve bought you new things.”
Catherine turned round. “That’s very kind of you, mother,” she said, smiling.
“Come and look at them.”
The girl praised everything—as though she knew that her mother, because she had been very anxious to do things well, must be praised. Then she walked about the room a little. Pleased, her mother saw that she was graceful. Charming, too, with dark eyes and a pale skin. Her mouth—with the light emphasis of a signature—was a clear scarlet.
“You must never use a lipstick.”
“I don’t. But why not?”
“You don’t need it.”
She drew Catherine in front of the glass. There was a likeness between them—thank heaven, the girl had neither the long Freppel nose nor the Freppel sallowness—but the differences were as clear. All she had never had, or had lost early, of smoothness, freshness, elegance, her daughter had and with it a certain young delicacy, ardent and appealing. Mme de Freppel did not say: She is what I might have been—because it never occurred to her that her life could have been different. She was not willing to exchange a day of her past, not even the most ignominious, against an easier. She had been given as her counters hunger and stratagems—very well, she had not wasted them, and her youth, ah, her youth, had, because of them, a taste sharper than happiness.
“They taught you to walk at the convent,” she said.
“We had to practise along a line drawn on the floor,” Catherine said, laughing.
“Are you glad to be at home?” No—she had not meant to ask that.
“Of course!”
The Huet woman, Mme de Freppel thought, has no children. An access of pride seized her. It was not what she had expected—to be thankful simply that she had had a child. But it would pass, in place of the impatient tenderness she used to feel when the child was living in the house. Another thought followed it. Catherine would marry. And she must make the right marriage. Her husband must be secure in society, so secure that his mother-in-law would be accepted. . . .
I shall be safe at last, her mind cried. Catherine, with her beauty, her untried youth, her—she admitted it—gentle friendly indifference, would give her the security she had never had yet. She closed her eyes, opening them to find her daughter watching her with an indulgent smile.
“Before I knew you were coming today, I’d asked two people to lunch. I’m sorry they will be here—but perhaps you’ll like them. And I want you to meet people.”
Catherine seemed a little vexed. “Why need I meet people? I’d much rather not.”
“What are you going to wear?” her mother said.
She began taking the new dresses out of the wardrobe. Catherine came over to her, smiling, and put them back one after the other. She refused to try them on.
“Not now, mother. Tomorrow. I won’t do it now. If this dress I’m wearing won’t do for your guests I can eat in the kitchen with Sophie—as when I was little. By the way, I hope we still have Sophie?”
“Of course,” Mme de Freppel said.
She was afraid to insist. In the past she had always given in to Catherine because in a month or a day or two she would be sending her away; until then the child must be happy. It was too late to begin using her with the authority of a mother. . . . There are other ways of guiding a young girl.
“You look very nice,” she said lightly. “Your frock is much too short, but never mind, we’ll see about all that tomorrow. Now come down to lunch.”
Only one of the guests had arrived. Abbé Garnier was over-whelmingly polite to the young girl. He questioned her in his resounding voice—you could only suppose that his body was hollow—about the convent.
“And what a-ah shall you do? Do you contemplate social service, as it’s fashionable to call it now?”
“I shall do war work,” Catherine said in a low voice. “I hope I can nurse.”
“Admirable, admirable——”
“No, she’s too young,” Mme de Freppel interrupted.
“But very exacting,” Garnier continued, “most exacting. You mustn’t let enthusiasm get the better of you. It’s never wise. Let me tell you a little story....”
He was interrupted again, by the hurried entrance of Jacques de Saint-Jouin. The young officer apologised effusively for coming late, clasping his hands boisterously with an air of penitence. He dropped it at once when he was presented to Catherine, and saluted carelessly, smiling into her face as though she and he were already close friends. The young girl gave him a composed smile; he turned from her at once and talked to his hostess. He went on talking when they were at table, with a confidence and good-humour which Mme de Freppel seemed to find charming. She looked encouragingly at Catherine, who was silent.
“Have you heard the latest?” Saint-Jouin smiled. “I’ve persuaded Madeleine Souzy to come for my show, and a delicious creature called Esther I-forget-what, a Jewess, of course, I’m told too ravishing, with a voice like a corncrake. I adore women with hoarse voices. Then there’s the Spanish pianist, I forget his name too, but he’s quite first-class and he’ll set off the rubbish. It’s going to cost the earth, although they’re unpaid. But there are the fares and hotel expenses, and dinner. My mother, who has a head for money—why not, since it was all her money? My maternal grandparent, you know, was a mine-owner, I fancy very grim—I expect you know her, my dear Abbé, she does all the good works imaginable; she gave a ciborium last year to her church, very handsome, I’m told; I didn’t happen to see it but I know the trouble she went to to match the garnets. My mother is an admirable woman.”
He paused to put food into his mouth. Garnier seized his chance.
“Yes, yes, I know your mother. I knew your father slightly, the late Comte de Saint-Jouin. A very a-ah cultivated man.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t say he was that,” Saint-Jouin said, smiling. “I never saw my father open a book in his life. Once, when someone spoke about Ravel in his hearing, he said, ’I never drank that, what is it? . . .’ I do happen to know better than that,” he went on modestly: “I had a friend once who was quite a musician; I must say it all bores me rather.”
“What do you prefer?” Catherine asked mildly. It was the first time she had spoken.
The young man looked at her with a smile full of admiration. “I expect you’re very learned; girls are nowadays. It’s disgraceful, but I’ve always been too fond of riding.”
“A healthy sign, if I may say so,” Garnier boomed. “We need simplicity in this country. If we had been simpler, stronger, we should not have found ourselves in this a-ah crisis. Hitler has many faults, no one is more clearly aware of them than I am, but I must admit, we must all admit, he understands how to govern. Don’t mistake me, I deplore violence. But, I insist, order is better than disorder. This is a lesson we shall have to learn, and perhaps—who knows?—Herr Hitler himself may be the instrument of our reformation.”
“If only,” Mme de Freppel exclaimed, “if only we could be done with this war.” She turned to the young officer. “Tell me honestly. Do you think we can win? Even then we shall all be ruined. I’m in despair.”
Saint-Jouin did not answer immediately. He had been struggling for some time with the piece of chicken on his plate, making shameless efforts to cut away a sheath of gristle. The food was as bad as all Mme de Freppel’s meals, but since, when a dish was brought in, she always said, “I had such trouble to get a bird . . .” or it might be—“a sirloin; you have no idea how difficult it is, living so far out of the town: I hope you’ll enjoy it,” no one dared refuse. Saint-Jouin dropped his knife.
“Despair? I imagine this bird died of it.”
“Your habits are those of the mess,” Mme de Freppel said smoothly. She turned to the Abbé and began to talk to him about the Bishop. “He seems tired and frailer, the war is telling on him, poor man. . . . Don’t you find him much older?”
Catherine was making no attempt to talk to Saint-Jouin. Can she be stupid? her mother thought. . . . No, there was a wilful indifference in the girl’s way of looking in front of her, half listening, with a half smile. She was refusing to make an effort. And the young officer, although obviously he admired her, made none, either. Mme de Freppel had never felt before that she was old enough to be Saint-Jouin’s mother. Now, suddenly, she felt that the abyss separating her from two of the people at her table was not her experience, not the harshness of her life, not the past, but simply and only her age. . . . With an effort, she went on talking.
Garnier listened to her with an absent smile. He had reached the point of supreme satisfaction and pride he always reached at some moment of his social visits. He came in nervously, suspicious, determined not to be made a fool of. Slowly he became drunk with the sense of his power. He knew so much. Resting an elbow on his learning, he talked. And talked. Never without an object. He always saw hovering in front of him the further place he desired to reach—where he would be absolutely safe. There I can be frankly myself, he thought. There I can strike. . . . He suffered—he did not know it—from the duel going on in his soul between the astute peasant and the loyal priest. As a boy, as a young priest, the peasant drove him to respect the energy and solidity of the Church. His superiors recognised in him one of those priest-politicians who can be purified by use. Later, a whole series of false steps put him out of the way of being used. His energy was fretting him to death: he was so thin that the boys in the Abbey choir called him “the Pipe.” He did not know this when he listened to the ambiguous purity of their voices, and felt tears coming into his eyes.
The day he heard that the Bishop of Euxerre was dying, he pointed that way all the force of his longing for safety, all the devotion of his insulted spirit. The Prefect, he knew, was a friend of the Minister; it was without a sense of incongruity that he laid hands on Bergeot’s mistress as a useful instrument. He was so sure of his honesty.
He interrupted her without scruple.
“Charming, charming. How well you put it. . . . Now if I may turn to another subject. Not, I flatter myself, unimportant. You know how attached I am to the Morvan. I was born there, the happiest days of my childhood were passed in that country of tenacious peasants.... I think it could be impressed on the Minister that I can render a unique service. Special qualifications are not a-ah to be despised in these times.”
At first Mme de Freppel had been puzzled. Suddenly she understood. She looked at Garnier with admiration.
“I should like to be in a position to bring together the stabler elements of society in these times,” Garnier went on in a mild voice. “You were telling me how much you would enjoy meeting the present Duchesse de Seuilly. In my obscure position, of course. . . . But at Euxerre—you know, don’t you? that the family pays regular visits to their estate near Euxerre—anything I could do, I should be charmed. Charmed....”
She saw that Catherine was smiling at something Saint-Jouin had said to her. Encouraged, the young man made another remark. His eyes sparkled and he gesticulated with both hands, pressing the tips on his breast.
She turned back to Garnier.
“About the Duchesse de Seuilly. You were saying? ...”