The Olive Orchard
I
When the shore-loafers of the small Provençal port of Garandou on the Bay of Pisca, between Marseilles and Toulon, caught sight of Abbé Vilbois’ boat coming back from fishing, they went down to the beach to help him draw it in.
The Abbé was alone in the boat, rowing like a seaman, with unusual energy, in spite of his fifty-eight years. His sleeves were turned up over his muscular arms, his cassock drawn up, gathered tightly between his knees and unbuttoned at the top, his shovel hat on the seat beside him and a pith helmet covered with white linen on his head, he looked like one of those solidly built, fantastic priests from the tropics, more suited for adventure than for saying Mass.
Occasionally he looked behind to make sure of his landing, then pulled again with great energy, rhythmically and steadily, just to show the poor Southern sailors how men from the North could row. The boat shot forward, touching the sand, over which it glided as if it were going to climb up the beach on its keel, then stopped dead, and the five men who were watching drew near; they were good-natured, cheerful, and on good terms with their priest.
“Well,” said one of them with a strong Provençal accent, “had a good catch, your Reverence?”
Abbé Vilbois shipped his oars, took off his helmet, put on his shovel hat, dropped his sleeves over his arms, buttoned up his cassock and, resuming his priestly attitude—the bearing of the officiating priest of the village—he replied proudly:
“Yes, indeed, very good, three catfish, two eels, and a few rockfish.”
Going up to the boat and leaning over the gunwale, the five fishermen examined the dead fish with an expert air—the fleshy catfish, the flat-headed eels—hideous sea serpents—and the violet rockfish with zigzag stripes and gold bands, the colour of orange peel.
One of the men said: “I will carry them to the house, your Reverence.”
“Thanks, my good man.”
Shaking hands, the priest started off, followed by the one fisherman, the others staying behind to look after the boat.
The priest, robust and dignified, strode along with big, slow steps. As he still felt warm from his vigorous rowing, he took off his hat whenever he reached the slight shade of the olive-trees, to expose his square-cut brow with its straight, white hair cut short—more the brow of an officer than of a priest—to the tepid night air now slightly freshened by a faint sea breeze. The village revealed itself up on the cliff in the middle of a wide valley that ran down like a plain towards the sea.
It was a night in July. The dazzling sun, nearing the crest of the distant hills, stretched out the priest’s long shadow on the white road, buried under a shroud of dust; his exaggerated shovel hat, reflected in a broad, dark patch in the neighbouring field, seemed to clamber up the tree-trunks on the way, and drop quickly to the ground again, creeping about among the olives.
From under Abbé Vilbois’ feet rose a cloud of that fine, floury dust that covers the roads of Provence in summer, curling around his cassock like a veil and colouring its hem with a faint wash of grey over the black. He strode along with the slow, measured gait of a mountaineer making an ascent. His unruffled eyes gazed upon the village of which he had been the curé for twenty years, the village he had picked out and obtained as a great favour, and where he hoped to die. The church—his church—crowned the wide circle of houses huddled together around it with its two uneven, square towers of brown stone whose profiles had stood out for centuries over the beautiful Southern valley, more like the donjons of a fortified castle than the steeples of a church.
The Abbé was pleased because he had caught three catfish, two eels, and a few rockfish. This would be a new, minor triumph over his parishioners, who respected him chiefly because he was the strongest man in the country, in spite of his age. These little harmless vanities were his greatest pleasure. With a pistol he could cut off a flower from its stalk, sometimes he fenced with his neighbour, the tobacconist, who had been a regimental fencing-master, and he rowed better than anyone on the coast.
In addition to which, Baron Vilbois, who at the age of thirty-two had become a priest after an unfortunate love affair, had been a man of the world, well known and a leader of fashion.
Descended from an old royalist family of Picardy, staunch Churchmen, whose sons had been in the Army, the Church, and the Law for several generations, his first intention was to enter holy orders on his mother’s advice, but his father’s objections prevailed, and he decided to go to Paris, study law, and then try for some important post at the Law Courts.
As he was finishing his course, his father died of pneumonia caught on a shooting expedition on the marshes, and his mother died shortly after of grief. Having thus suddenly inherited a large fortune, he gave up his plans of adopting any profession whatever and was content to live the life of a man of means. He was a handsome youth, whose intelligence was limited by the beliefs, traditions, and principles he had inherited from his family, together with the physical strength of a native of Picardy; everyone liked him, he was popular in the more serious circles of society and enjoyed life in the way that a wealthy, highly respected, conventional young man does.
Unfortunately, after a few meetings at a friend’s house, he fell in love with a young actress, a student from the Conservatoire who had made a brilliant first appearance at the Odéon.
He fell in love with the violence and passion of a man destined to believe in absolute ideas. He fell in love, seeing her through the medium of the romantic part in which she had won great success the day she appeared in public for the first time.
She was pretty, naturally perverse, with the ways of a spoilt child that he called her angel-ways. She gained complete ascendancy over him, turning him into a raging maniac, a frenzied lunatic, one of those miserable beings whom the glance or the skirt of a woman consumes at the stake of a mortal passion. He made her his mistress, forced her to leave the stage, and loved her for four years with an ever-growing passion. Indeed, he would have married her in spite of his name and the family tradition of honour had he not suddenly discovered that she was deceiving him with the friend who had introduced them to each other.
The blow fell with all the more force because she was enceinte and he was awaiting the child’s birth to make up his mind to get married.
When he possessed all the proofs—letters accidentally found in a drawer—he accused her of infidelity, treachery, and double-dealing, with the brutality of a semi-savage.
But this child of the Paris streets, impudent and vicious, feeling as sure of her second lover as she did of Vilbois, as bold as those viragoes of the revolution who climb the barricades out of sheer bravado, defied and insulted him, pointing to her condition when she saw him raise his hand.
He stopped and turned pale, remembering that a child of his was there within that polluted flesh, in that defiled body, that unclean creature: his child!
He threw himself at her to destroy them both, to blot out the double shame. Frightened at the ruin of her future, stumbling about under the force of his blows and seeing his foot ready to kick the swollen womb with its human embryo, she cried with hands outstretched to save herself:
“Don’t kill me. It is not yours, it is his.”
He started back, stupefied and overcome, his anger momentarily fading, while his foot hovered in midair, and he stammered:
“What … what are you saying?”
Wild with fright at the signal of death she had caught in his eyes and at the man’s terrifying gesture, she repeated:
“It is not yours, it is his.”
Quite overwrought, he muttered between clenched teeth:
“The child?”
“Yes.”
“You are lying.”
And again he lifted his foot for a crushing blow, while his mistress, now on her knees, tried to move away, murmuring all the time:
“But I tell you it is his. If it was yours, would not I have had it long ago?”
This argument struck him as being truth itself. In one of those flashes of thought when all the arguments on a question are seen together in a blinding clearness, precise, unanswerable, conclusive, irresistible, he was convinced, he knew that he was not the father of the wretched waif-child she was carrying; and relieved, freed, suddenly almost at rest, he gave up the idea of killing the jade.
He said more gently:
“Get up, go away, never let me see you again.”
Quite subdued, she obeyed and went away.
He never saw her again.
He went away too. Down to the South, to the sun, and stayed in a village in the middle of a valley on the Mediterranean. He was attracted by an inn facing the sea, took a room there, in which he stayed for eighteen months, lost in grief and despair, and living in complete isolation. He lived there obsessed by the memory of the woman who had betrayed him, of her charm, her physical appearance, her unbelievable witchery, and filled with longing for her presence, her caressings.
He wandered through the valleys of Provence, seeking relief for his aching head with its burden of memory in the sun that filtered gently through the dull grey leaves of the olive-trees.
In this solitude of suffering the old piety, the steadied fervour of his early faith, revived in his heart. Religion, which had once seemed to him a refuge from the unknown, now appeared as a haven of escape from life’s treachery and cruelty. He had never lost the habit of prayer, to prayer he therefore clung in his great sorrow, going regularly to the darkened church at dusk, where a solitary speck of light shone down the chancel from the lamp, the holy guardian of the sanctuary and symbol of the Divine Presence.
To Him he confided his trouble, to his God, telling Him all about his sorrow. He craved for advice, pity, help, protection, consolation, putting more and more feeling into his prayers, which grew in fervour from day to day.
His wounded heart, ravaged by carnal love, was bare and throbbing, longing for tenderness, and little by little, through prayer and piety, by giving himself up to that secret communion of the devout with the Saviour who brings consolation and is a sure refuge to those in distress, the love of God entered in him and drove out the intruder.
He went back to his early plans and decided that what remained of the life he had intended to devote to the Lord in its youth and purity should now be given to the Church.
He became a priest. Through family influence he was appointed priest of the Provençal village into which luck had thrown him, and having given a large part of his fortune to benevolent institutions, only retaining sufficient to enable him to be of use, and a help to the poor until he died, he settled down to a quiet life full of good works and of care for his fellow creatures.
He was a narrow-minded priest, but kind to his people, a religious leader with a soldier’s temperament, a guide who forcibly led the sinner into the narrow way: the poor blind sinner lost in the forest of life where all our instincts, our desires, our tastes, are bypaths which lead us astray. But much of the man of old days remained. He still liked violent exercise, sport and fencing, and he detested all women with the unreasoning fear of a child before some hidden danger.
II
The sailor who was with the priest felt the usual southern longing for a chat, but dared not begin, for the Abbé exercised great authority over his flock. At last he ventured:
“So you are comfortable in your little house, your Reverence?”
The bastide was one of those tiny houses frequented in summer by the Provençals of town and country in search of fresh air. The Abbé had rented this retreat in the middle of a field, five minutes’ walk from the presbytery, which was too small and enclosed in the centre of the parish, right up against the church.
Even in summer he did not live regularly at the cottage: he only went there occasionally for a few days to be amongst the fields and trees and to do some pistol-practice.
“Yes, my friend,” said the priest. “I am very comfortable there.”
The low dwelling, looking as if it had grown like a Provençal mushroom, appeared among the trees. It was painted pink, its surface being speckled over with stripes and spots, split up into little bits by the olive leaves and branches from the trees in the open field.
At the same moment they saw a tall woman moving about in front of the door, getting the little dinner-table ready as she went backwards and forwards, with methodical leisureliness setting the cloth for one, a plate, table-napkin, piece of bread, and glass. She had on the little cap worn by the women of Arles: a pointed cone of black silk or velvet from which grows a white starched mushroom.
When the Abbé was within hearing distance, he called out:
“Eh, Marguerite?”
She stopped to look round and, recognising her master, said:
“Oh, it’s you, your Reverence?”
“Yes, I am bringing a good haul, you must grill me a catfish at once, cooked in butter, only butter, you hear?”
The servant, who had come to meet the two men, examined the fish the sailor was carrying, with an expert eye.
“But we have already got a chicken cooked with rice.”
“Never mind that, tomorrow’s fish is not as good as fish fresh from the sea. I am going to have a really choice meal, it does not often happen; moreover, it is not a great sin.”
The servant picked out the fish and, as she was carrying it away, turned round:
“A man has been here three times to see you, your Reverence.”
Showing no interest, he asked:
“A man! What kind of man?”
“Well, the kind of man whose looks do not recommend him.”
“What! a beggar?”
“Perhaps, I don’t know. I rather think he is a maoufatan.”
Abbé Vilbois laughed at the Provençal word meaning a bad lot, a tramp, for he knew how frightened Marguerite was, and that when she was at the cottage she was always thinking they were going to be murdered.
He gave the sailor a few pence, and was preparing to wash his face and hands (having kept his old habits of neatness and cleanliness), when Marguerite called out from the kitchen, where she was scraping the blood-flecked scales that came away from the fish like tiny pieces of silver:
“There he is!”
The Abbé turned towards the road and saw a man, who seemed in the distance to be very badly dressed, walking towards the house with very small steps. He awaited him, still smiling at his servant’s fright, thinking: “Upon my word, she must be right, he certainly looks a bad lot.”
Without hurrying, the unknown individual drew near, hands in his pockets, and his eyes fixed upon the priest. He was young, with a fair, curly beard, and hair that fell in curls beneath his soft felt hat, a hat so dirty and crushed that no one could have guessed its original colour and shape. He wore a brown overcoat, trousers that hung in a fringe over his ankles, and string-sandals that gave him a slack, silent, disquieting walk—the hardly perceptible slouch of the tramp.
When a few steps away from the priest, he took off the ragged cap that covered his head with a flourish, exposing a withered, dissolute, but well-shaped head, bald on the top—a sign of fatigue or of early debauchery, for the man was certainly not over twenty-five.
The priest immediately took off his hat too, for he felt that this was no ordinary vagabond, or unemployed, neither was he the habitual jailbird wandering about between two prisons who had forgotten all speech except the mysterious language of the convict.
“Good day, your Reverence,” said the man. The priest replied simply: “Good day,” not wishing to call this doubtful, ragged passerby “sir.” They stared at each other; the fixed steady look of the tramp made Abbé Vilbois feel uncomfortable, distressed as one feels when facing an unknown enemy, and overpowered by one of those strange feelings of uneasiness that send shivers through body and blood. At last the vagabond said:
“Well! do you recognise me?”
The priest replied, very astonished:
“Me? Not at all, I don’t know you.”
“Ah! You don’t know me. Look at me again.”
“What is the good of looking at you? I have never seen you before.”
“That is true enough,” said the other ironically, “but I will show you someone you do know.”
He put on his hat and unbuttoned his coat, under which his chest was bare. A red sash wound round his thin waist held his trousers up over his hips.
He took an envelope from his pocket—an envelope marked with every possible kind of stain, the sort of envelope that tramps keep tucked away in the lining of their clothes, and in which they put all kinds of identification papers, which may be genuine, faked, stolen, or legally correct, and which are the highly valued defences of their individual liberty in case of any meeting with the police. From the envelope he drew a photograph about the size of a letter (such as were formerly used). It was yellowish and crumpled with much handling, faded by the heat of the body against which it had been kept.
Holding it up to the Abbé, he asked:
“And this, do you know it?”
The Abbé took two steps forward to see better, then stopped; he turned pale, profoundly distressed, for this was a photograph of him taken for her in the bygone days of his love.
Still he did not understand and made no reply.
The vagabond repeated:
“Do you recognise this?”
The priest stammered:
“Well, yes.”
“Who is it?”
“Me.”
“It is really you?”
“Certainly.”
“Right; now look at your photograph, then look at me.”
The miserable priest had already seen that the two—the man in the photograph and the man standing at his side laughing, were as alike as two brothers, but still he did not understand and stammered:
“What do you want me to do?”
With a note of spite in his voice the beggar said:
“What do I want? Well, first of all I want you to recognise me.”
“But who are you?”
“What am I? Ask the first comer on the road, ask the servant; if you like, let us go and ask the mayor of the village and show him the photograph; he will laugh about it, I can tell you that. Ah! you refuse to recognise me as your son, Papa curé?”
The old man, lifting his arms with a biblical and despairing gesture, moaned:
“It can’t be true.”
The young man drew nearer and, facing him, said:
“Ah! It can’t be true. Ah! you priest, you must stop telling lies, do you hear?”
The expression on his face was threatening, his fists were doubled up, he spoke with so much violence that the Abbé, moving further away, asked himself which of the two was making a mistake.
However, he insisted again:
“I have never had a child.”
The other retorted:
“And you never had a mistress either?”
The old man with great determination uttered one word: making a dignified assent:
“Yes.”
“And this mistress was not with child when you turned her out?”
The old feeling of resentment, stifled twenty-five years ago—not really stifled but confined deep down in the lover’s heart—suddenly burst asunder the whole fabric of his religious belief, of his resigned devotion to his God, as well as his complete renunciation of worldly things: all that he had built up round it with so much care; and beside himself with rage, he shouted:
“I turned her out because she had deceived me and was with child by another, otherwise I would have killed her, sir, and you too.”
The young man hesitated, surprised at the sincerity of the curé’s outburst; he said in a gentler tone:
“And who told you the child was another’s?”
“She did, she herself, while defying me.”
Without questioning this statement, the vagabond said with the casual manner of a street-boy pronouncing judgment:
“Just so! Then Mamma made a mistake when she defied you, that is all there is to be said.”
Quickly regaining self-control after his sudden outburst, the Abbé began to question the boy:
“And who told you that you were my son?”
“She did when she was dying, your Reverence. … Besides, what about this!”
And he held the little photograph up to the priest.
The old man took it, and with anguish in his heart he spent some time comparing the unknown passerby with his old photograph—there could be no further doubt that the youth was indeed his son.
He was seized with a feeling of distress, an intensely painful, indefinable feeling like remorse for some old crime. He understood a little of what had happened, and guessed the rest, and again he saw the brutal scene of their parting. To save the life threatened by the man she had wronged, the woman—the deceitful, faithless female—had thrust this lie at him. … And the lie had succeeded. A son of his had been born, grown up, and turned into this sordid road tramp stinking of vice as a he-goat stinks of the beast.
He said in a low voice:
“Will you go for a short stroll with me so that we may clear the matter up?”
The other sneered:
“Will I? That is what I came for.”
They went off together, side by side, through the orchard. The sun had gone down and the keen freshness of the Southern twilight spread its invisible cooling cloak over the countryside. The Abbé shivered; raising his eyes to Heaven in the usual orthodox way, he saw all around him, trembling against the sky, the small grey leaves of the holy tree which had sheltered under its frail shadow the greatest of all suffering—the one and only moment of Christ’s weakness. A short prayer of desperation burst from him, spoken with that inner voice that never passes the lips, with which believers call upon the Saviour: “O God, help me.”
Then, turning towards his son:
“So then, your mother is dead?”
As he said the words: “Your mother is dead,” a new wave of grief swept through him, making his heart sink, a curious torment of the flesh unable to forget a cruel echo of the torture he had suffered; as she was dead, the most painful feeling of all seemed to be the faint stirring within him of that delirious, short-lived happiness which had left nothing behind it but the scar of remembrance.
The young man replied:
“Yes, your Reverence, my mother is dead.”
“Long ago?”
“Three years ago.”
Another doubt troubled the priest.
“Why did you not come sooner and look for me?”
The other hesitated.
“I could not. I was prevented. … But excuse me for interrupting the secrets which shall be revealed later on, with as many details as you please, to say that I have had nothing to eat since yesterday morning.”
The old man was filled with pity, and quickly holding out his hands, he said: “Oh, my poor child.”
The young man took the outstretched hands, which closed over his thin, moist, feverish fingers, and replied with his habitual flippancy:
“Good! Really, I begin to think we shall get on together in spite of what has happened.”
The curé started walking again.
“Let us go and dine,” he said.
Suddenly he remembered with a vague feeling of pleasure that was odd and confused, the beautiful fish he had caught, which with the chicken and rice would make a good meal for the wretched youngster.
The Arlesian, anxious and beginning to grumble, was waiting for them at the door.
“Marguerite,” cried the Abbé, “take away the table and carry it into the room, quickly, quickly, and set the cloth for two, but quickly.”
The servant did not move, scared at the thought that her master was going to dine with the criminal.
Then, Abbé Vilbois himself began to take the things away and remove what had been set for him into the only room on the ground floor.
Five minutes later he was seated opposite the vagabond before a tureen full of cabbage soup that sent up a faint cloud of boiling steam between their faces.
III
When the plates were full, the tramp started to swallow his soup greedily in quick following spoonfuls. The Abbé was not hungry now, so he trifled with the delicious soup, leaving the bread at the bottom of the plate. He asked suddenly:
“What is your name?”
The man laughed, glad to be satisfying his hunger.
“Unknown father,” said he, “I have no surname except my mother’s family name, which you have probably not forgotten. On the other hand, I have two Christian names, which, by the way, certainly do not suit me: Philippe Auguste.”
The Abbé turned pale and asked with a strangled voice:
“Why were you given those Christian names?”
The vagabond shrugged his shoulders.
“Surely you can guess why. After leaving you, Mamma wanted to make your rival believe that I was his child, and he did believe it until about my fifteenth year. Then I grew too much like you. He repudiated me, the scoundrel! I had been given the two Christian names, Philippe Auguste, and if I had had the luck not to be like anybody, or simply to have been the son of a third unknown ne’er-do-well, I should now be known as the Viscount Philippe-Auguste de Pravallon, the recently acknowledged son of the Count of that name, a senator. As for me, I christened myself ‘No Luck.’ ”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because there were discussions in my presence, and violent they were, you may be sure. Ah! that is the sort of thing that teaches you life.”
A still more painful and stricken feeling than he had yet suffered in the last half-hour oppressed the priest. It was the beginning of a form of suffocation that would grow worse and worse until it killed him, caused not so much by the things he was told as by the way they were told, and by the brutish face of the outcast that gave emphasis to them. Between this man and himself, between his son and himself, he began to feel that swamp of moral filth that works as a deadly poison on certain beings. This was his son? He could not believe it. He wanted every proof, every possible proof; he must learn all, hear all, listen to all, and suffer all. Again he thought of the olive-trees surrounding his little house, again he murmured: “Oh, God help me!”
Philippe-Auguste had finished his soup, and asked:
“Is there no more to eat, Abbé?”
The kitchen being outside the house in an annex, Marguerite could not hear the curé’s voice, so he warned her of his needs by a few strokes on a Chinese gong that hung behind him on the wall.
He picked up a leather hammer and struck the round metal plaque several times. At first a faint sound escaped from it, which grew gradually and, gaining in weight, turned into the vibrating, sharp, violent, horrible, strident clamour of beaten copper.
The servant appeared. Her face was drawn, she glared at the scoundrel as if, with the instinct of a faithful dog, she felt a presentiment of the drama that was hanging over her master. In her hands she held the grilled fish, which sent out a delicious odour of melted butter. The Abbé divided the fish from head to tail and offered the back fillet to the child of his youth.
“I caught it a short time ago,” he said, a remnant of pride hovering in his distress.
Marguerite stayed in the room.
The priest continued:
“Bring some wine, good wine, some of the white wine of Cape Corsica.”
She succeeded in hiding her disgust but he was obliged to repeat sternly:
“Now then, two bottles.” For when he offered wine to a guest—an unusual pleasure—he always offered himself a bottle too.
Philippe-Auguste said, beaming:
“A jolly good idea. I have not had a meal like this for a long time.”
The servant came back in two minutes’ time. Two minutes that had seemed as long as a twofold eternity to the Abbé: the desire to know everything was scorching his blood and consuming it like hellfire.
The bottles were uncorked, and still the servant lingered with eyes fixed on the young man.
“Leave us,” said the curé.
She pretended not to hear.
He repeated, with a certain harshness:
“I ordered you to leave us alone.”
Whereupon she left the room.
Philippe-Auguste ate the fish greedily, while his father, watching him, became more and more surprised and distressed at the degradation he saw in the face so like his own. The morsels that the Abbé Vilbois lifted to his lips refused to pass his contracted throat, and he chewed them slowly, casting about in his mind for the most urgent of the questions that crowded upon him.
He ended by saying:
“What did she die of?”
“Of lung trouble.”
“Was she ill long?”
“About eighteen months.”
“How did she get it?”
“No one knows.”
A silence fell upon them. The Abbé was lost in thought. He felt troubled by many things that he wanted to know, for since the day of his violent attack upon her, he had heard nothing. It was true that he had not wanted news; he had resolutely buried all memory of her and of his days of happiness. But now that she was dead, he felt a sudden violent desire to know everything, a jealous desire, almost a lover’s desire.
He resumed:
“She was not alone, was she?”
“No, she was still living with him.”
The old man shrank within himself.
“With him, with Pravallon?”
“Of course.”
The man who had been betrayed calculated that the very woman who had deceived him had lived over thirty years with his rival.
Almost in spite of himself, he stammered:
“Were they happy together?”
The young man replied, grinning:
“Well, yes, though there were ups and downs. It would have been all right but for me. I have always spoilt everything.”
“How’s that, and why?” said the priest.
“I have already told you. Because he believed I was his son until I was about fifteen. But he was no fool, the old man, he himself discovered the likeness, and then there were rows. He accused Mamma of landing him in a mess. Mamma retorted: ‘Am I to blame? When you took me, you knew quite well that I was the other’s mistress.’ The other being you.”
“Oh, so they talked about me sometimes?”
“Yes, but they never mentioned your name when I was present, except at the end, the very end. The last days when Mamma knew she was done for. They had no confidence in me.”
“And you … did you soon learn that your mother was living an irregular life?”
“What do you think? I am not a fool, you bet, I never was. You guess these things directly, as soon as you know something of life.”
Philippe-Auguste was pouring out one glass of wine after another. His eyes lighted up, intoxication quickly followed his long fast. The priest noticed this and was going to make him stop drinking, when he remembered that drink made men reckless and talkative, so he took the bottle and refilled the young man’s glass.
Marguerite brought in the dish of chicken and rice. As she placed it on the table, she fixed her eyes on the tramp, then indignantly said to her master:
“Just look how drunk he is, your Reverence.”
“Leave us alone and go away,” said the priest.
She went out slamming the door.
He asked:
“What did your mother say about me?”
“The usual thing that is said about the man you leave; that you were not easy to live with, a worry to a woman, and that you would have made her life very difficult with your ideas.”
“Did she say that often?”
“Yes, sometimes in a roundabout way so that I should not understand, but I guessed what had happened.”
“And you, how were you treated in the home?”
“Me? Very well at first, but very badly later on. When Mamma saw that I was a spoilsport, she chucked me out.”
“How?”
“How! Quite easily. I played some pranks when I was about sixteen, so the idiots put me into a reformatory to get rid of me.”
He put his elbows on the table, resting his cheeks on his hands, and quite drunk, his wits upside-down in drink, he suddenly felt that irresistible wish to talk about himself that turns a drunkard into a drivelling braggart. He was smiling prettily with all a woman’s charm. The Abbé recognised the perverse charm of the boy’s smile, he not only recognised it, he also felt the spell of the charm—hateful but caressing—that had conquered and ruined him in the past. For the moment the child was more like his mother, not in feature, but in the alluring and insincere expression of his face, and more especially in the attraction of that misleading smile that seemed to open a door on all the incredible baseness of his nature.
Philippe-Auguste continued:
“Well, well! I have had a life, I have, ever since I left the reformatory, a curious life for which a novelist would pay a large sum. Really, old Dumas with his Monte Cristo never imagined stranger adventures than have happened to me.”
He was silent, thinking things over with the philosophical seriousness of the meditative drunkard, then he said slowly:
“If you want a boy to turn out well, no matter what he has done he should never be sent to a reformatory, because of the people he has to mix with. I had a jolly good idea, but it failed. One night about nine o’clock I was wandering around with three pals, all four of us rather the worse for drink, on the main road near Folac ford, when what should I see but a carriage full of people asleep!—the man who was driving and his family; they lived at Martinon and were returning home after dining in town. I seized the horse by the reins and forced it on to the ferryboat, then pushed the boat into the middle of the river. That made a noise, and the driver woke and, not able to see anything, whipped up his horse. Off it went and jumped into the stream with the carriage. They were all drowned! My pals informed against me. At first they laughed like anything as they watched me at work. We never thought it would turn out so badly. All we had hoped for was a bath, something to laugh about.
“Since that I have done worse out of revenge for the first joke, which, I must say, did not deserve punishment. However, there is nothing worth telling. I will only tell you about my last trick because I know that will please you. I paid him out for you.”
The Abbé looked at his son with terrified eyes and stopped eating.
Philippe-Auguste was going on with his story.
“No,” the priest said, “not now, presently.”
Turning round, he struck the strident Chinese cymbal and made it cry out.
Marguerite came at once.
Her master gave his orders so harshly that she bowed her head, afraid and docile:
“Bring us the lamp and all that is still to be put on the table; after that you must not come back unless I strike the gong.”
She went out, came back again and put a white china lamp on the tablecloth, a big piece of cheese, some fruit, and then left the room.
The Abbé said with determination:
“Now I am listening.”
Quite undisturbed, Philippe-Auguste filled up his plate with dessert and filled his glass with wine. The second bottle was nearly empty although the curé had not touched it. The young man, his mouth sticky with food and drink, stammering, resumed:
“The last one, well, here you are. It is pretty bad. I had returned home … where I stayed in spite of them because they were afraid of me … afraid of me. … Ah! You must not annoy me. … You know … they were living together and yet not together. He had two homes, he had, one the senator’s, the other the lover’s. But he lived at Mamma’s more than he did at his own home, because he could not do without her. Ah! … she was shrewd, she was knowing, Mamma … she knew how to hold a man, she did! She had taken him body and soul, and she kept him to the end. What fools men are! Well, I had returned and gained the mastery over them because they were afraid of me. I know my way about when necessary, and as for spite, cunning, and violence, I am anyone’s match. Then Mamma fell ill and he settled her in a beautiful place near Meulan in the middle of a park as big as a forest. That lasted about eighteen months … as I have already told you. Then we felt the end approaching. He came from Paris every day, he was full of grief, no doubt about it, real grief.
“Well, one morning they had been jabbering for nearly an hour, and I was wondering whatever they could be chattering about so long, when they called me; and Mamma said:
“ ‘I am on the point of death, and have something I want to tell you, in spite of the Count’s opinion’—she always called him the Count when she spoke about him—‘it is the name of your father, who is still alive.’
“I had asked for it more than a hundred times … more than a hundred times … my father’s name … more than a hundred times … and she had always refused to tell me. … I even think that I struck her one day to make her talk, but it was no use. And then, to get rid of me, she said that you had died penniless, that you were a good-for-nothing, an error of her youth, a maiden’s slip, any old thing. She told the story so well that I swallowed it whole, the story of your death.
“As she was saying: ‘It is your father’s name,’ the other, who was sitting in an armchair, repeated three times, just like this:
“ ‘You are wrong, you are wrong, you are wrong, Rosette.’
“Mamma sat up in bed. I can still see her with the red spots on her cheeks and her bright eyes, for she loved me in spite of all; she said to him:
“ ‘Then do something for him yourself, Philippe.’
“When talking to him she always called him ‘Philippe’ and me ‘Auguste.’
“He started shouting out like a madman:
“ ‘For that blackguard, never, for that rogue, that jailbird, that … that … that …’
“He called me all kinds of names just as if he had done nothing else all his life except look for names for me. I nearly lost my temper, when Mamma bade me be quiet, and said to him:
“ ‘Then you want him to die of hunger, as I have nothing to give him.’
“He replied, not at all worried:
“ ‘Rosette, for thirty years I have given you thirty-five thousand francs a year, that makes over a million. Because of me you have led the life of a rich woman, a well-loved woman, and, I dare to add, a happy woman. I owe nothing to this blackguard who has spoilt our last years together, and he will get nothing from me. Useless to insist. Let him know the name of the other one, if you wish. I am sorry, but I wash my hands of the matter.’
“Then Mamma turned towards me. I said to myself: ‘God … I am going to get my own father back … ; if he has any cash, I am a saved man. …’
“She continued:
“ ‘Your father, the Baron of Vilbois, is now known as the Abbé Vilbois, curé of Girandou: near Toulon. He was my lover when I left him for this man.’ She then told me everything except how she had tricked you about her pregnancy. But, there it is, women never tell the truth.”
He sniggered, unconcerned, displaying all his vileness. He went on drinking and, with a still smiling face, continued:
“Mamma died two days … two days later. We followed her coffin to the grave, he and I … wasn’t it comical! … eh! … he and I … and three servants … that was all. He was weeping like a cow … we were side by side … you would have said it was Papa and Papa’s dear boy.
“Then we went home. Only the two of us. I said to myself: ‘I must be off, without a halfpenny.’ I had just fifty francs. What could I do to pay him out?
“He touched my arm and said:
“ ‘I want to speak to you.’
“I followed him to his study. He sat down before his table and plunged into tears, said that he would not treat me as badly as he had told Mamma he would; he begged me not to worry you. … As for that, that is our business, yours and mine. … He offered me a thousand-franc note … a thousand … a thousand … what could I do with a thousand francs … me … a man like me? I saw there were lots more in the drawer, a whole heap. At the sight of all that paper, I felt I wanted to do for someone. I held out my hand to take his gift, but instead of accepting his charity I sprang upon him, threw him down, strangling him until his eyes bulged out, then when I saw the end was near I gagged and trussed him, undressed him and turned him over, then … Ah! … Ah! Ah! … I jolly well paid him out for you! …”
Philippe-Auguste coughed, choking with joy; the boy’s lip curled with ferocious gaiety and reminded Abbé Vilbois of the smile of the woman for love of whom he had lost his head.
“After?” he said.
“After … Ah! Ah! Ah! … There was a big fire in the grate … it was December … in cold weather … she died … Mamma … a big coal fire … I took up the poker … made it all hot … you see … I made crosses on his back, eight, ten, I don’t know how many, then I turned him over again and made the same number on his belly. Wasn’t it funny, eh, Papa! That is how convicts were marked in the old days. He wriggled like an eel … but I had gagged him well, he could not make a noise. Then I took the notes—twelve of them—with my own that made thirteen … but they brought me no luck. Then I made off telling the servants not to disturb the Count until dinnertime as he was asleep.
“I was sure he would say nothing about it from dread of exposure, as he was a senator. But I was mistaken. Four days later I was pinched in a Paris restaurant. I got three years in jail. That is why I could not come and see you sooner.”
He was still drinking and spluttering and could hardly pronounce one word clearly.
“Now … Papa … Papa curé! Isn’t it funny to have a curé for a papa! … Ah! Ah! must be kind, very kind to the darling boy, because darling boy is out of the common … and he played a lovely trick … didn’t he? … a lovely one … on the old man …”
The same feeling of rage that had maddened Abbé Vilbois in that final scene with the mistress who had betrayed him, seized him now towards this abominable wretch.
He who, in God’s name, had dealt out forgiveness to many shameful secrets whispered in the privacy of the confessional, was pitiless, merciless towards himself, he had ceased to call upon an all-merciful Father to help him, for he understood that no protection from heaven or earth could save anyone so afflicted with misfortune.
All the fire of his passionate heart and of his stirring blood, subdued by the discipline of his station in the Church, awoke in an irresistible revolt against this wretch—his own son—against this likeness to himself, and more to that unworthy mother who had conceived the boy in her own likeness—and, more than all, against the fatality which had riveted this scoundrel to his paternal foot like the fetters of a galley-slave.
He saw, he foresaw all this in a flash of clear-sightedness, shocked from his twenty-five years of pious tranquillity and rest into action.
Suddenly aware that he must take a high tone with this criminal and terrify him at the first words, he said through teeth clenched with anger, taking no account of the drunken state of the wretch:
“Now that you have told me all about it, listen. You must go away tomorrow morning. You must live in a place that I will choose and that you may not leave without my permission. I will make you a small allowance, just enough to live upon, for I have no money. If you disobey me once, this arrangement will come to an end and I will deal with you …”
Although stupefied by wine, Philippe-Auguste understood the threat, and the criminal within him rose instantly to the surface. Hiccuping, he spat out some words:
“Ah! Papa, no use trying it on with me. … You are a curé … I’ve got you in my power … you will take it quietly, like the others.”
The Abbé started, the muscles of the old Hercules were aching to seize the bully, to bend him like a reed, and show him that he must submit to authority.
Pushing the table against the boy’s chest, he shouted:
“Take care, take care. … I am afraid of nobody, not I.”
Losing his balance, the drunkard rocked on his chair, then feeling that he was going to fall and that he was in the priest’s power, with a villainous look on his face he stretched out his hand towards a knife that was lying on the cloth. Abbé Vilbois noticed the movement and gave the table a violent push that sent his son head over heels on to the floor, where he lay on his back. The lamp rolled along the ground and went out.
For a few seconds a thin tinkle of glasses jingling against each other sounded through the darkness, then the creeping of soft bodies over the stone floor, then silence.
With the crash of the fallen lamp, black night, swift and unexpected, had fallen upon the two, leaving them dazed as in the presence of some unspeakable horror.
The drunkard, crouching against the wall, never stirred; the priest remained on his chair, plunged in the blackness of the night that was gradually swallowing up his anger. The veil of darkness thrown over him stayed his anger and brought his furious outburst of temper to an end; other ideas took their place, black and sad as the darkness around him.
Silence reigned, a silence as dense as that of a closed tomb, in which nothing seemed to live or breathe. Not a sound came from without, no sound of wheels in the distance, no sound of a dog barking, not even the rustle of a slight breath of wind among the branches or the tapping of a twig against the walls.
The silence dragged on; it might have been an hour. Then suddenly the gong rang. It rang as if struck by a single hard stroke, sharp and loud, followed by a curious noise of something dropping and of an overturned chair.
On the alert, Marguerite rushed to the room, but on opening the door she drew back in terror of the impenetrable darkness. With pounding heart, and trembling all over, she called out in a low voice, panting for breath:
“Your Reverence, your Reverence.”
There was no answer, not a sound.
“My God, my God, what have they done, what has happened?”
She dare not go in nor dare she go back to fetch a light: she was seized with a wild desire to run away, to escape, to scream, although her limbs shook so violently that she could hardly stand. She repeated:
“Your Reverence, your Reverence, it is I, Marguerite.”
Suddenly, in spite of her fear, she felt she must save her master. One of those sudden fits of bravery that occasionally give women strength to perform heroic deeds filled her soul with the recklessness of terror, and running back to the kitchen, she fetched her lamp.
She stopped just inside the room. The first thing she saw was the vagabond lying against the wall, asleep or apparently asleep, then she saw the broken lamp, then under the table the black feet and black stockinged legs of Abbé Vilbois, whose head must have knocked the gong as he fell over on to his back.
Breathless with fright, her hands trembling, she repeated:
“My God, my God, what is the matter?”
As she stepped forward slowly, taking small steps, she slipped on something greasy and nearly fell down.
Leaning forward, she saw a red liquid trickling over the red flags and spreading around her feet; quickly she ran towards the door, sure that what she had seen was blood.
Mad with terror, she fled from the place and, throwing aside the lamp so that she might see nothing more, she rushed out of doors in the direction of the village. She lurched along, knocking against the trees, with eyes fixed on the distant lights, screaming at the top of her voice.
Her shrill cries pierced the night like the sinister call of the common owl, and she screamed without ceasing: “The tramp … the tramp … the tramp …”
When she reached the nearest houses, scared men came out and gathered around her, but she was too excited to answer their questions; she had completely lost her head.
Finally they understood that some accident had happened at the curé’s, and made up a party to go to his rescue.
The little pink-coloured house in the middle of the olive orchard was invisible, black in the deep, silent night. Ever since the one light from the illuminated window had gone out like a closed eye, the house had been drowned in shadow, lost in the darkness, undiscoverable to those not familiar with the countryside.
Lights were soon moving about over the ground, through the trees, in the direction of the house, throwing long, yellow rays on the burnt grass, and on the distorted trunks of the olives that looked like unreal monsters, like serpents of hell all twisted and misshapen. The beams projected in the distance suddenly showed up something whitish and vague in the darkness, then the low, square wall of the little house turned pink in the lantern-light. The lanterns were carried by the peasants, who accompanied two gendarmes with revolvers, the village constable, the mayor of the village, and Marguerite supported by some of the men, as she was in a state of collapse.
They hesitated for a minute in front of the still open, nightmarish doorway, but the inspector seized a lantern and entered, followed by the others.
The servant had not lied. The blood, now congealed, spread over the flags like a carpet. It had reached along as far as the vagabond, staining a leg and a hand.
Father and son were asleep. One, with cut throat, slept the everlasting sleep, the other slept the sleep of the drunkard. The two policemen threw themselves upon the latter and had handcuffed him before he awoke. He rubbed his eyes, stupefied, besotted with wine; when he saw the priest’s corpse he looked terrified, having no idea what had happened.
“Why ever did he not run away?” said the Mayor.
“He was too drunk,” replied the inspector.
They all agreed with him: it never occurred to anyone that Abbé Vilbois might have caused his own death.