Nerves
The diners slowly entered the big hotel dining room and took their places. The waiters refrained from hurrying, so as to give the latecomers a chance, and avoid the trouble of handing the dishes round a second time. The old bathers, the habitués, whose season was almost over, looked intently at the door whenever it opened, to see what new faces might appear.
That is the chief amusement of watering-places. One goes to dinner to inspect each day’s new arrivals, to guess what they are, what they do and what they think. We all have a vague wish to meet pleasant people, to make agreeable acquaintances, even to meet with a love adventure. In this jostling life, neighbours, strangers, assume considerable importance. Curiosity is aroused, sympathy awaits its opportunity, and the desire to make friends is always alert.
We cherish dislikes for a week and friendship for a month; people are seen with different eyes when viewed through the medium of a meeting at a watering-place. After an hour’s chat in the evening after dinner, under the trees of the park where the healing spring bubbles, superior intelligence and outstanding merits are suddenly discovered in human beings, but a month later we have completely forgotten the new friends we found so charming at the first meeting.
Permanent and serious ties are also formed there sooner than elsewhere. You meet every day and soon get to know one another, and growing affection is mingled with the pleasure and unrestraint of long-standing intimacy. You never forget the sweetness and compassion of early friendship, the first conversations which end in the discovery of a soul, the first glances charged with questions and replies, and secret thoughts not yet uttered by human lips, or the first heartfelt confidence, the delightful feeling of opening our hearts to those who seem to open theirs to us in return.
And the sadness of watering-places, the monotony of days all alike, make this blossoming of affection all the more complete.
Well, that evening, as on every other evening, we were waiting for the arrival of newcomers.
Only two arrived, a man and woman—father and daughter—but they looked very unusual. They immediately reminded me of some of Edgar Poe’s characters; and yet they had a charm, the charm of unhappiness; and I imagined them as the victims of fate. The man was tall and thin, rather bent, with hair that was too white for his age; his bearing and his person betrayed the grave, austere manners peculiar to Protestants. The daughter, aged about twenty-four or five, was short, very thin, very pale, and seemed worn out, tired, and overwrought. Occasionally you meet people who seem too weak for the tasks and needs of daily life, too weak to move about, to walk, to do any of the daily round. The young thing was rather pretty, with a transparent, spiritual beauty. She ate extremely slowly as if she could hardly move her arms.
It was surely she who had come to take the waters.
They sat facing me, on the other side of the table, and I noticed at once that the father had a very curious nervous contraction. Every time he wanted to reach anything, his hand made a rapid hook-like movement, a kind of wild zigzag, before it could get hold of what it wanted. After a few minutes this twitching tired me to such an extent that I turned my head away so as not to see it.
I also noticed that the young girl kept a glove on her left hand, during meals.
After dinner I went for a stroll in the grounds of the bathing establishment. We were in the little Auvergne village of Châtel-Guyon, hidden in a gorge at the foot of the high range from which so many boiling springs flow, arising from the deep bed of extinct volcanoes. Over there, above our heads, the cones, extinct craters, raised their stunted heads above the rest of the long mountainous chain, for Châtel-Guyon lies at the beginning of the land of the Dôme.
Farther away lies the country of the peaks, and farther still the country of the Plombs.
The Puy-de-Dôme is the highest of the volcanic ones, the Pic of Sancy the highest of the rocky peaks, and the Plomb de Cantal is the highest point of the gigantic mass of Cantal.
It was a very warm evening. I was walking up and down the shady raised path that overlooked the grounds and listening to the music of the casino when I caught sight of the father and daughter slowly coming in my direction. I bowed as one bows to one’s hotel companions at a watering-place; and the man, stopping, asked me:
“Could you suggest a short walk, sir, pleasant and, if possible, not hilly? Forgive me for bothering you.”
I offered to take them to the valley through which the little river flows, a deep valley forming a narrow gorge between two steep, craggy, wooded slopes. They accepted my offer.
And, of course, we talked of the virtue of the waters.
“Oh,” he said, “my daughter has a curious illness whose origin is a mystery. She suffers from unaccountable nervous attacks. Sometimes she is supposed to be suffering from heart disease, sometimes from a liver attack, and sometimes from disease of the spine. Now this complicated malady with its numerous forms and numerous modes of attack, is placed in the stomach, the great centre and great regulator of the body. That’s why we are here. For my part, I think it is nervous trouble. In any case, it is very sad.”
Immediately I remembered the violent twitching of his hand and asked him:
“But is it not due to heredity? Are you not suffering from your nerves?”
He replied quietly: “Me? … Certainly not … my nerves have always been very steady. …”
Then suddenly, after a pause, he continued:
“Ah! you mean the contraction of my hand every time I want to take hold of anything? That is the result of a terrible experience I had. Just imagine, this child has been buried alive!”
I could only utter an “ah,” full of surprise and emotion.
He continued:
“This is the story, a quite simple one. For some time Juliette had suffered from severe heart attacks. We believed that her heart was diseased, and were prepared for the worst.
“One day she was carried into the house cold, lifeless, dead. She had fallen unconscious in the garden. The doctor certified that life was extinct. I kept watch for two nights and a day; with my own hands I laid her in the coffin which I accompanied to the cemetery, where it was placed in the family vault, in Lorraine in the depth of the country.
“It had been my wish to have her buried with her jewellery, bracelets, necklaces, rings—all of the presents I had given her—and dressed in her first ball dress.
“You may easily imagine my state of mind when I got back home. She was the only one left, for my wife had been dead for many years. Half mad, completely exhausted, I went up to my room and sank into an easy-chair, incapable of thought, too weak to move. I was nothing but a suffering, vibrating machine, a thing that had been flayed alive; my soul was like an open wound.
“My old valet, Prosper, who had helped to lay Juliette in her coffin, and dress her for her last sleep, silently entered the room and asked:
“ ‘Will Monsieur have something?’
“I shook my head.
“ ‘Monsieur is wrong. Something will happen to Monsieur if he does not take care. Will Monsieur allow me to put him to bed?’
“I answered: ‘No, leave me alone,’ and he retired.
“The hours slipped by unperceived. Oh! What a terrible night! It was cold, the fire had died out in the huge grate, and the wind, the winter wind, frozen and laden with ice, beat against the windowpanes with a fiendish regularity.
“The hours slipped by unperceived. There I was, unable to sleep, broken, crushed, with eyes wide open, legs outstretched, body limp and inanimate, and my mind stupefied. Suddenly the big front door bell rang. The start I gave made the chair creak under me. The solemn, heavy sound rang through the empty building as through a vault. I turned round to see what time it was and found it was two o’clock. Who could possibly be coming at that time?
“Impatiently the bell rang again twice. No doubt the servants were afraid to get up. I took a candle, went downstairs and was going to ask: ‘Who’s there?’ but felt ashamed of such weakness and slowly drew the heavy bolts. My heart was beating rapidly, I was afraid. I opened the door abruptly and distinguished a white figure standing in the darkness, rather like a phantom.
“I drew back, paralysed with anguish, stammering:
“ ‘Who—who—who are you?’
“A voice replied: ‘It is I, father.’
“It was my daughter.
“I really thought I must be mad, and I retreated backward before the advancing spectre: I moved away, making a sign with my hand as if to drive the phantom away, that peculiar gesture which you have already noticed and which I have never got rid of.
“ ‘Don’t be frightened, father; I was not dead,’ the apparition said. ‘Somebody tried to steal my rings and cut off one of my fingers; the blood began to flow and that brought me to life again.’ And then I saw that she was covered with blood.
“I fell on my knees, choking with sobs and panting for breath.
“When I had regained a little self-control, though I was still too distraught to realise the terrible happiness that had befallen me, I made her go up to my room, put her in the easy-chair, and pulled the bell violently for Prosper to light the fire, get something to drink, and summon assistance.
“The man entered, stared at my daughter, gasped with alarm and horror, and dropped dead on the ground.
“It was he who had opened the vault, who had mutilated and then left my child, unable to destroy the traces of his theft. He had not even taken the trouble to replace the coffin in its niche, feeling quite convinced that I would not suspect him in whom I trusted absolutely.
“You see, sir, what an unhappy couple we are.”
He was silent. Night had fallen, enveloping the little desolate mournful valley in its gloom, and a kind of mysterious dread came over me at being in the company of these strange beings: the dead returned from the grave, and the father with his alarming gestures.
What could I say? I murmured:
“What a horrible thing!”
Then, after a moment’s silence, I added: “Let us go back, I think it’s rather cold.” And we returned to the hotel.