Yvette
I
As they left the Café Riche, Jean de Servigny said to Léon Saval:
“We’ll walk, if you don’t mind walking. It’s too fine to take a cab.”
“It will suit me perfectly,” answered his friend.
“It’s barely eleven,” continued Jean. “We shall be there long before midnight, so let us go slowly.”
A restless crowd swarmed on the boulevard, the crowd which on summer nights is always to be seen there, contented and merry, walking, drinking, and talking, streaming past like a river. Here and there a café flung a brilliant splash of light on to the group which sat outside, drinking at round little tables loaded with bottles and glasses, and obstructing the hurrying crowd of passersby. And in the road the cabs, with their red, blue, and green eyes, passed swiftly across the harsh glare of the lighted front, and for an instant revealed the silhouette of the thin, trotting horse, the profile of the driver on the box, and the dark, square body of the vehicle. The Urbaine cabs gleamed as the light caught their yellow panels.
The two friends walked slowly along, smoking their cigars. They were in evening dress, their overcoats on their arms, flowers in their button holes and their hats a little on one side, with the careless tilt affected by men who have dined well and find the breeze warm.
Ever since their schooldays the two had been close friends, profoundly and loyally devoted to each other.
Jean de Servigny, small, slim, slightly bald, and frail, very elegant, with a curled moustache, bright eyes, and thin lips, was one of those night-birds who seem to have been born and bred on the boulevards; inexhaustible, though he wore a perpetual air of fatigue, vigorous despite his pallor—one of those slender Parisians to whom gymnastics, fencing, the cold plunge, and the Turkish bath have given an artificial nervous strength. He was as well known for his conviviality as for his wit, his wealth, and his love affairs, and for that geniality, popularity, and fashionable gallantry which are the hallmark of a certain type of man.
In other ways too he was a true Parisian, quick-witted, sceptical, changeable, impulsive, energetic yet irresolute, capable of anything and of nothing, an egoist on principle and a philanthropist on impulse. He kept his expenditure within his income, and amused himself without ruining his health. Cold and passionate by turns, he was continually letting himself go and pulling himself up, a prey to conflicting impulses, and yielding to all of them, following his instinct like any hardened pleasure-seeker whose weathercock logic bids him follow every wind and profit from any train of events, without taking the trouble to set a single one of them in motion.
His companion, Léon Saval, rich also, was one of those superb giants who compel women to turn round and stare after them in the street. He had the air of a statue come to life, of a racial type: he was like one of those models which are sent to exhibitions. Too handsome, too tall, too broad, too strong, all his faults were those of excess. He had broken innumerable hearts.
As they reached the Vaudeville, he inquired:
“Have you let this lady know that you’re bringing me?”
Servigny laughed.
“Let the Marquise Obardi know! Do you let a bus-driver know in advance that you’re going to get on to his bus at the corner of the boulevard?”
“Well, then, exactly who is she?” asked Saval, slightly perplexed.
“A parvenue,” replied his friend, “a colossal fraud, a charming jade, sprung from Lord knows where, who appeared one day, Lord knows how, in the world of adventurers, in which she is well able to make herself prominent. Anyhow, what does it matter? They say her real name, her maiden-name—for she has remained a maiden in every sense but the true one—is Octavie Bardin, whence Obardi, retaining the first letter of the Christian name and dropping the last letter of the surname. She’s an attractive woman, too, and with your physique you’re certain to become her lover. You can’t introduce Hercules to Messalina without something coming of it. I ought to add, by the way, that though admission to the place is as free as to a shop, you are not obliged to buy what is on sale. Love and cards are the stock-in-trade, but no one will force you to purchase either. The way out is as accessible as the way in.
“It is three years now since she took a house in the Quartier de l’Étoile, a rather shady district, and opened it to all the scum of the Continent, which comes to Paris to display its most diverse, dangerous, and vicious accomplishments.
“I went to the house. How? I don’t remember. I went, as we all go, because there’s gambling, because the women are approachable and the men scoundrels. I like this crowd of decorated buccaneers, all foreign, all noble, all titled, all, except the spies, unknown to their ambassadors. They all talk of their honour on the slightest provocation, trot out their ancestors on no provocation at all, and present you with their life-histories on any provocation. They are braggarts, liars, thieves, as dangerous as their cards, as false as their names, brave because they must be, like footpads who cannot rob their victims without risking their necks. In a word, the aristocracy of the galleys.
“I adore them. They’re interesting to study, interesting to meet, amusing to listen to, often witty, never commonplace like the dregs of French officialdom. Their wives too are always pretty, with a little flavour of foreign rascality, and the mystery of their past lives, half of which were probably spent in a penitentiary. Most often they have glorious eyes and wonderful hair, the real professional physique, a grace which intoxicates, a seductive charm that drives men mad, a vicious but wholly irresistible fascination! They’re the real old highway robbers, female birds of prey. And I adore them too.
“The Marquise Obardi is a perfect type of these elegant jades. A little overripe, but still beautiful, seductive, and feline, she’s vicious to the marrow. There’s plenty of fun in her house—gambling, dancing, supper … all the distractions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, in fact.”
“Have you been, or are you, her lover?” asked Léon Saval.
Servigny answered:
“I haven’t been, am not, and never shall be. It’s the daughter I go there for.”
“Oh, there’s a daughter, then, is there?”
“There is indeed! She’s a marvel. At present she’s the principal attraction. A tall, glorious creature, just the right age, eighteen, as fair as her mother is dark, always merry, always ready for fun, always laughing at the top of her voice, and dancing like a thing possessed. Who’s to have her? Who has had her? No one knows. There are ten of us waiting and hoping.
“A girl like that in the hands of a woman like the Marquise is a fortune. And they don’t show their hands, the rogues. No one can make it out. Perhaps they’re waiting for a catch, a better one than I am. Well, I can assure you that if the chance comes my way I’ll take it.
“This girl, Yvette, absolutely nonplusses me. She’s a mystery. If she isn’t the most finished monster of perverse ingenuity that I’ve ever seen, she’s certainly the most extraordinary scrap of innocent girlhood to be found anywhere. She lives there among that disgraceful crew with easy and triumphant serenity, exquisitely wicked or exquisitely simple.
“She’s an extraordinary girl to be the daughter of an adventuress, sprung up in that hotbed, like a beautiful plant nourished on manure, or she may be the daughter of some man of high rank, a great artist or a great nobleman, a prince or a king who found himself one night in her mother’s bed. No one can understand just what she is, or what she thinks about. But you will see her.”
Saval shouted with laughter.
“You’re in love with her,” he said.
“No, I am one of the competitors, which is not the same thing. By the way, I’ll introduce you to my most serious rivals. But I have a real chance. I have a good start, and she regards me with favour.”
“You’re in love,” repeated Saval.
“No, I’m not. She disturbs me, allures me and makes me uneasy, at once attracts me and frightens me. I distrust her as I would a trap, yet I long for her with the longing of a thirsty man for a cool drink. I feel her charm, and draw near it as nervously as if I were in the same room with a man suspected of being a clever thief. In her presence I feel an almost absurd inclination to believe in the possibility of her innocence, and a very reasonable distrust of her equally possible cunning. I feel that I am in contact with an abnormal being, a creature outside the laws of nature, delicious or detestable, I don’t know.”
For the third time Saval declared:
“You’re in love, I tell you. You speak of her with the fervour of a poet and the lyricism of a troubadour. Come now, have it out with yourself, search your heart and admit it.”
“Well, it may be so, after all. At least she’s always in my mind. Yes, perhaps I am in love. I think of her too much. I think of her when I’m falling asleep and when I wake up; that’s fairly serious. Her image haunts me, pursues me, is with me the whole time, in front of me, round me, in me. Is it love, this physical obsession? Her face is so sharply graven in my mind that I see it the moment I shut my eyes. I don’t deny that my pulses race whenever I see her. I love her, then, but in an odd fashion. I long for her passionately, yet the idea of making her my wife would seem to me a monstrous absurd folly. I am also a little afraid of her, like a bird swooped upon by a hawk. And I’m jealous of her too, jealous of all that is hidden from me in her incomprehensible heart. I’m always asking myself: ‘Is she a delightful little guttersnipe or a thoroughly bad lot?’ She says things that would make a trooper blush, but so do parrots. Sometimes she’s so brazenly indecent that I’m inclined to believe in her absolute purity, and sometimes her artlessness is so much too good to be true that I wonder if she ever was chaste. She provokes me and excites me like a harlot, and guards herself at the same time as though she were a virgin. She appears to love me, and laughs at me; in public she almost proclaims herself my mistress, and when we’re alone together she treats me as though I were her brother or her footman.
“Sometimes I imagine that she has as many lovers as her mother. Sometimes I think that she knows nothing about life, absolutely nothing.
“And she has a passion for reading novels. At present, while waiting for a more amusing position, I am her bookseller. She calls me her librarian.
“Every week the Librairie Nouvelle sends her, from me, everything that has appeared; I believe she reads through the whole lot.
“It must make a strange salad in her head.
“This literary taste may account for some of her queer ways. When you see life through a maze of fifteen thousand novels, you must get a queer impression of things and see them from an odd angle.
“As for me, I wait. It is certainly true that I have never felt towards any woman as I feel towards her.
“It’s equally certain that I shall never marry her.
“If she has had lovers, I shall make one more. If she has not, I shall be the first to take my seat in the train.
“It’s all very simple. She can’t possibly marry, ever. Who would marry the daughter of the Marquise Obardi, Octavie Bardin? Clearly no one, for any number of reasons.
“Where could she find a husband? In society? Never; the mother’s house is a public resort, and the daughter attracts the clients. One can’t marry into a family like that. In the middle classes, then? Even less. Besides, the Marquise has a good head on her shoulders; she’d never give Yvette to anyone but a man of rank, and she’ll never find him.
“In the lower classes, perhaps? Still less possible. There’s no way out of it, then. The girl belongs neither to society nor to the middle class, nor to the lower classes, nor would marriage jockey her into any one of them. She belongs, by her parentage, her birth, her upbringing, heredity, manners, habits, to the world of gilded prostitution.
“She can’t escape unless she becomes a nun, which is very unlikely, seeing that her manners and tastes are already what they are. So she has only one possible profession—love. That’s where she’ll go, if she has not already gone. She can’t escape her destiny. From being a young girl, she’ll become just a—‘woman.’ And I should very much like to be the man who brings about the transformation.
“I am waiting. There are any number of lovers. You’ll come across a Frenchman, Monsieur de Beloigne, a Russian who calls himself Prince Kravalow, and an Italian, Chevalier Valréali. These have all definitely entered themselves for the race, and are already training. There are also a number of camp-followers of less account.
“The Marquise is on the lookout. But I fancy she has her eye on me. She knows I’m very rich and she knows less about the others.
“Her house is the most extraordinary place of the kind that I have ever seen. You meet some very decent fellows there; we’re going ourselves and we shall not be the only ones. As for the women, she has come across, or rather picked out, the choicest fruit on the professional stall. Lord knows where she found them. And she was magnificently inspired to make a point of taking those who had children of their own, daughters for choice. The result is that a greenhorn might think the house was full of honest women!”
They had reached the Avenue of the Champs Élysées. A faint breeze whispered among the leaves, and was now and again wafted against their faces, like the soft breath of a giant fan swinging somewhere in the sky. Mute shadows drifted under the trees, others were visible as dark blots on the benches. And all these shadows spoke in very low tones, as though confiding important or shameful secrets.
“You cannot imagine,” went on Servigny, “what a collection of fancy titles you come across in this rabbit-warren. By the way, I hope you know I’m going to introduce you as Count Saval. Saval by itself would not be at all popular, I assure you.”
“No, damn it, certainly not!” cried his friend. “I’m hanged if anyone is going to think me fool enough to scrape up a comic-opera title even for ‘one night only,’ and for that crowd. With your leave, we’ll cut that out.”
Servigny laughed.
“You old idiot! Why, I’ve been christened the Duc de Servigny. I don’t know how or why it was done. I have just always been the Duc de Servigny; I never made trouble about it. It’s no discomfort. Why, without it I should be utterly looked down on!”
But Saval was not to be persuaded.
“You’re a nobleman, you can carry it off. As for me, I shall remain, for better or worse, the only commoner in the place. That will be my mark of distinctive superiority.”
But Servigny was obstinate.
“I tell you it can’t be done, absolutely cannot be done. It would be positively indecent. You would be like a rag-and-bone man at an assemblage of emperors. Leave it to me; I’ll introduce you as the Viceroy of Upper Mississippi, and no one will be surprised. If you’re going to go in for titles, you might as well do it with an air.”
“No; once more, I tell you I won’t have it.”
“Very well, then. I was a fool really to try persuading you, for I defy you to get in without someone decorating you with a title; it’s like those shops a lady can’t pass without being given a bunch of violets at the doorstep.”
They turned to the right down the Rue de Berri, climbed to the first floor of a fine modern mansion, and left their coats and sticks in the hands of four flunkeys in knee-breeches. The air was heavy with the warm festive odour of flowers, scent, and women; and a ceaseless murmur of voices, loud and confused, came from the crowded rooms beyond.
A tall, upright, solemn, potbellied man, in some sort master of the ceremonies, his face framed in white whiskers, approached the newcomers and, making a short, stiff bow, asked:
“What name, please?”
“Monsieur Saval,” replied Servigny.
Whereupon the man flung open the door and in a loud voice announced to the crowd of guests:
“Monsieur le Duc de Servigny. Monsieur le Baron Saval.”
The first room was full of women. The eye was filled at once by a vast vision of bare bosoms lifting from billows of white lace.
The lady of the house stood talking to three friends; she turned and came forward with stately steps, grace in her bearing and a smile upon her lips.
Her low, narrow forehead was entirely hidden by masses of black, gleaming hair, thick and fleecy, encroaching even on her temples. She was tall, a little too massive, a little too fat, a little overripe, but very handsome, with a warm, heady, and powerful beauty. Her crown of hair, with the large black eyes beneath it, provoked entrancing dreams and made her subtly desirable. Her nose was rather thin, her mouth large and infinitely alluring, made for speech and conquest.
But her liveliest charm lay in her voice. It sprang from her mouth like water from a spring, so easily, so lightly, so well pitched, so clear, that listening to it was sheer physical joy. It thrilled the ear to hear the smooth words pour forth with the sparkling grace of a brook bubbling from the ground, and fascinated the eye to watch the lovely, too-red lips part to give them passage.
She held out her hand to Servigny, who kissed it, and, dropping the fan that hung from a thin chain of wrought gold, she gave her other hand to Saval, saying:
“You are welcome, Baron. My house is always open to any friend of the Duc’s.”
Then she fixed her brilliant eyes on the giant to whom she was being introduced. On her upper lip was a faint smudge of black down, the merest shadow of a moustache, more plainly visible when she spoke. Her scent was delicious, strong and intoxicating, some American or Indian perfume.
But other guests were arriving, marquises, counts, or princes. She turned to Servigny and said, with the graciousness of a mother:
“You will find my daughter in the other room. Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen. The house is yours.”
She left them in order to greet the new arrivals, giving Saval that fugitive smiling glance with which women let men know that they have found favour.
Servigny took his friend’s arm.
“I’ll be your pilot,” he said. “Here, where we are at present, are the women; this is the temple of the Flesh, fresh or otherwise. Bargains as good as new, or better; very superior articles at greatly reduced rates. On the left is the gambling. That is the temple of Money. You know all about that.
“At the far end, dancing; that is the temple of Innocence. There are displayed the offspring, if we may believe it, of the ladies in here. Even lawful unions would be smiled on! There is the future, the hope … of our nights. And there, too, are the strangest exhibits in this museum of diseased morals, the young girls whose souls are double-jointed, like the limbs of little clowns who had acrobats for parents. Let us go and see them.”
He bowed to right and left, a debonair figure, scattering pretty speeches and running his rapid, expert glance over every pair of bare shoulders whose possessor he recognised.
At the far end of the second room an orchestra was playing a waltz; they stopped at the door and watched. Some fifteen couples were dancing, the men gravely, their partners with fixed smiles on their lips. Like their mothers, they showed a great deal of bare skin; since the bodices of some were supported only by a narrow ribbon round the upper part of the arm, there were occasional glimpses of a dark shadow under the armpits.
Suddenly a tall girl started up and crossed the room, pushing the dancers aside, her absurdly long train gathered in her left hand. She ran with the short quick steps affected by women in a crowd, and cried out:
“Ah, there’s Muscade. How are you, Muscade!”
Her face was glowing with life, and radiant with happiness. She had the white, golden-gleaming skin which goes with auburn hair. Her forehead was loaded with the sheaf of flaming, gleaming tresses that burdened her still slender neck.
She seemed made for motion as her mother was for speech, so natural, gracious, and simple were her movements. A sense of spiritual delight and physical contentment sprang from the mere sight of her as she walked, moved, bent her head or raised her arm.
“Ah, Muscade,” she repeated. “How are you, Muscade?”
Servigny shook her hand vigorously, as though she were a man, and said:
“This is my friend, Baron Saval, Mam’zelle Yvette.”
She greeted the newcomer, then stared at him.
“How do you do? Are you always as tall as this?”
“Oh, no, Mam’zelle,” answered Servigny, in the mocking tone he used to conceal his uneasiness in her presence. “He has put on his largest size today to please your mother, who likes quantity.”
“Oh, very well, then,” replied the girl in a seriocomic voice. “But when you come for my sake, please be a little smaller; I like the happy medium. Muscade here is about my size,” and she offered him her little hand.
“Are you going to dance, Muscade?” she asked. “Let’s dance this waltz.”
Servigny made no answer, but with a sudden swift movement put his arm round her waist, and away they went like a whirlwind.
They danced faster than any, turning and twirling with wild abandon, so tightly clasped that they looked like one. Their bodies held upright and their legs almost motionless, it was as though they were spun round by an invisible machine hidden under their feet. They seemed unwearying. One by one the other couples dropped out till they were left alone, waltzing on and on. They looked as though they no longer knew where they were or what they were doing, as though they were far away from the ballroom, in ecstasy. The band played steadily on, their eyes fixed on this bewitched pair; everyone was watching, and there was a burst of applause when at last they stopped.
She was rather flushed; her eyes were no longer frank, but strangely troubled, burning yet timid, unnaturally blue, with pupils unnaturally black.
Servigny was drunk with giddiness, and leaned against a door to recover his balance.
“You have a poor head, Muscade,” she said. “You don’t stand it as well as I do.”
He smiled his nervous smile and looked at her with hungry eyes, a savage lust in his eyes and the curve of his lips.
She continued to stand in front of the young man, her throat heaving as she regained her breath.
“Sometimes,” she continued, “you look just like a cat about to make a spring. Give me your arm, and let us go and find your friend.”
Without speaking he offered her his arm, and they crossed the large room.
Saval was alone no longer; the Marquise Obardi had joined him, and was talking of trivial things, bewitching him with her maddening voice. Gazing intently at him, she seemed to utter words very different from those on her lips, words that came from the secret places of her heart. At the sight of Servigny she smiled and, turning to him, said:
“Have you heard, my dear Duc, that I’ve just taken a villa at Bougival for a couple of months? Of course you’ll come and see me; you’ll bring your friend, won’t you? I’m going down there on Monday, so will you both come and dine there next Saturday, and stay over the weekend?”
Servigny turned sharply to Yvette. She was smiling a serene, tranquil smile, and with an air of bland assurance said:
“Of course Muscade will come to dinner on Saturday; there’s no need to ask him. We shall have all kinds of fun in the country.”
He fancied that he saw a vague promise in her smile, and an unwonted decision in her voice.
The Marquise thereupon raised her great black eyes to Saval’s face, and said:
“And you also, Baron?”
There was nothing equivocal about her smile.
He bowed.
“I shall be only too pleased.”
“We’ll scandalise the neighbourhood—won’t we, Muscade?—and drive my admirers wild with rage,” murmured Yvette, glancing, with a malice that was either candid or assured, towards the group of men who watched them from the other side of the room.
“To your heart’s content, Mam’zelle,” replied Servigny; by way of emphasising the intimate nature of his friendship with her, he never called her “mademoiselle.”
“Why does Mademoiselle Yvette always call my friend Servigny ‘Muscade’?” asked Saval.
The girl assumed an air of innocence.
“He’s like the little pea that the conjurers call ‘Muscade.’ You think you have your finger on it, but you never have.”
“Quaint children, aren’t they?” the Marquise said carelessly, obviously thinking of far other things, and not for an instant lowering her eyes from Saval’s face.
“I’m not quaint, I’m frank,” said Yvette angrily. “I like Muscade, and he’s always leaving me; it’s so annoying.”
Servigny made her a low bow.
“I’ll never leave you again, Mam’zelle, day or night.”
She made a gesture of alarm.
“Oh, no, that would never do! In the daytime, by all means, but at night you’d be in the way.”
“Why?” he asked imprudently.
With calm audacity she replied:
“Because you couldn’t possibly look so nice with your clothes off.”
“What a dreadful thing to say!” exclaimed the Marquise, without appearing in the least excited. “You can’t possibly be so innocent as all that.”
“I entirely agree with you,” added Servigny in a jesting tone.
Yvette looked rather hurt, and said haughtily:
“You have just been guilty of blatant vulgarity; you have permitted yourself far too much of that sort of thing lately.”
She turned her back on him, and shouted:
“Chevalier, come and defend me; I have just been insulted.”
A thin, dark man came slowly towards them.
“Which is the culprit?” he asked, forcing a smile.
She nodded towards Servigny.
“That’s the man; but all the same I like him better than all of you put together; he’s not so boring.”
The Chevalier Valréali bowed.
“We do what we can. Perhaps we are not so brilliant, but we are at least as devoted.”
A tall, stout man with grey whiskers and a deep voice was just leaving.
“Your servant, Mademoiselle Yvette,” he said as he passed.
“Ah, it’s Monsieur de Belvigne,” she exclaimed, and turning to Saval, she introduced him.
“Another candidate for my favour, tall, fat, rich, and stupid. That’s how I like them. He’s a real Field-marshal—one of those who hold the door open at restaurants. But you’re taller than he is. Now what am I going to christen you? I know! I shall call you Rhodes Junior, after the colossus who must have been your father. But you two must have really interesting things to discuss, far above our heads, so good night to you.”
She ran across to the orchestra, and asked them to play a quadrille.
Madame Obardi’s attention seemed to be wandering.
“You’re always teasing her,” she said softly. “You’re spoiling the child’s disposition and teaching her a number of bad habits.”
“Then you haven’t finished her education?” he replied.
She seemed not to understand, and continued to smile benevolently.
But observing the approach of a solemn gentleman whose breast was covered with orders, she ran up to him:
“Ah, Prince, how delightful!”
Servigny took Saval’s arm once more and led him away, saying:
“There’s my last serious rival, Prince Kravalow. Isn’t she a glorious creature?”
“They’re both glorious,” replied Saval. “The mother’s quite good enough for me.”
Servigny bowed.
“She’s yours for the asking, my dear.”
The dancers elbowed them as they took their places for the quadrille, couple by couple, in two lines facing one another.
“Now let’s go and watch the Greeks for a bit,” said Servigny.
They entered the gambling-room.
Round each table a circle of men stood watching. There was very little conversation; sometimes a little chink of gold, thrown down on the cloth or hastily mixed up, mingled its faint metallic murmur with the murmur of the players, as though the voice of gold were making itself heard amid the human voices.
The men were decorated with various orders and strange ribbons; and their diverse features all wore the same severe expression. They were more easily distinguished by their beards.
The stiff American with his horseshoe beard, the haughty Englishman with a hairy fan spread over his chest, the Spaniard with a black fleece reaching right up to his eyes, the Roman with the immense moustache bequeathed to Italy by Victor Emmanuel, the Austrian with his whiskers and clean-shaven chin, a Russian general whose lip was armed with two spears of twisted hair, Frenchmen with gay moustaches—they displayed the imaginative genius of every barber in the world.
“Aren’t you going to play?” asked Servigny.
“No; what about you?”
“I never play here. Would you like to go now? We’ll come back one day when it’s quieter. There are too many people here today; there’s nothing to be done.”
“Yes, let us go.”
They disappeared through a doorway which led into the hall.
As soon as they were out in the street, Servigny asked:
“Well, what do you think of it all?”
“It’s certainly interesting. But I like the women better than the men.”
“Good Lord, yes! Those women are the best hunting in the country. Don’t you agree with me that love exhales from them like the perfumes from a barber’s shop? These are positively the only houses where one can really get one’s money’s worth. And what expert lovers they are! What artists! Have you ever eaten cakes made by a baker? They look so good, and they have no flavour at all. Well, the love of an ordinary woman always reminds me of baker’s pastry, whereas the love you get from women like the Marquise Obardi—that really is love! Oh, they can make cakes all right, can these confectioners. You have to pay them twopence halfpenny for what you would get anywhere else for a penny, that’s the only thing.”
“Who is the man running the place at present?” asked Saval.
Servigny shrugged his shoulders to express utter ignorance.
“I have no idea,” he said. “The last I knew certainly was an English peer, but he left three months ago. At the moment she must be living on the community, on the gambling and the gamblers, very likely, for she has her whims. But it’s an understood thing, isn’t it, that we are dining with her at Bougival on Saturday? There’s more freedom in the country, and I shall end by finding out what notions Yvette has in her head!”
“I ask for nothing better,” replied Saval. “I’m not doing anything that day.”
As they returned down the Champs Élysées, under the embattled stars, they passed a couple lying on a bench, and Servigny murmured:
“How ridiculous, yet how utterly indispensable, is this business of love! A commonplace, and an ecstasy, always the same and always different! And the clown who is paying that girl a franc is only seeking the very thing I buy for ten thousand from some Obardi who is perhaps no younger or more fascinating than that drab! What folly!” He was silent for some minutes, then said:
“All the same, it wouldn’t be a poor thing to be Yvette’s first lover. For that I’d give … I’d give …”
He did not make up his mind what he would give. And Saval bade him good night at the corner of the Rue Royale.
II
The table had been laid on the veranda that overlooked the river. Villa Printemps, the house that the Marquise Obardi had taken, stood halfway up the hillside, at the very point where just below the garden wall the Seine made a turn towards Marly. Opposite the house the island of Croissy formed a background of tall trees, a mass of leafage. A long reach of the broad river was clearly visible as far as the floating café, La Grenouillère, half hidden in the branches.
Night was coming down, calm and still, after a flaming riverside sunset; one of those tranquil evenings that bring with them a vague sense of happiness. Not a breath or air stirred the branches, no gust of wind disturbed the smooth translucent surface of the Seine. The air was warm, but not too hot; it was good to be alive. The grateful coolness of the riverbanks rose to the quiet sky.
The sun was disappearing behind the trees, wheeling towards other lands. The serene calm of the sleeping earth soothed their senses; under the vast quiet dome of the sky they felt the effortless surge of the universal life.
The scene enchanted them when they came out of the drawing room and sat down at the dinner-table. A tender gaiety filled their hearts; they all felt it very good to be dining out there in the country with that broad river and glorious sunset for scenery, and breathing that sweet pure air.
The Marquise had taken Saval’s arm, Yvette Servigny’s.
These four made up the little party.
The two women were not in the least like their Parisian selves. Yvette was the more altered of the two; she spoke very little, and seemed tired and grave.
Saval hardly recognised her, and asked:
“What’s the matter with you, Mademoiselle? I find you very changed since last week. You have become quite a reasonable being.”
“It’s the effect of the country,” she answered. “I am not the same there; I feel quite strange. And besides, I never am the same two days together. Today I behave like a lunatic, tomorrow I’ll be like a funeral oration; I change like the weather, I don’t know why. I’m capable of absolutely anything—at the right time. There are days when I could kill people; not animals—I could never kill animals—but people, certainly; and then there are days when I cry for just nothing. A hundred different ideas rush through my head. It depends, too, on my feeling when I get up in the morning. Every morning when I wake up I know just what I shall be like all day. Perhaps our dreams decide that sort of thing. Partly it depends on the book I have just been reading.”
She was dressed in white flannel; the soft delicate folds of material covered her from head to foot. The bodice was loose, with big pleats, and suggested, without too rigidly defining, the firm sweeping contour of her already well-formed bosom. Her slender neck rose from fold upon fold of frothy lace, drooping languidly, its warm gleaming flesh even whiter than her dress and weighed down with its heavy burden of golden hair.
For a long minute Servigny gazed at her, then said:
“You are adorable tonight, Mam’zelle—I wish I could always see you like that.”
“Don’t propose to me, Muscade,” she said, with a touch of her wonted archness. “On a day like this I should take you at your word, and that might cost you dear.”
The Marquise looked happy, very happy. She was dressed severely in black; the fine folds of the gown set off the superb, massive lines of her figure. There was a touch of red in the bodice, a spray of red carnations fell from her waist and was caught up at her side, a red rose was fastened in her dark hair. There was a flame in her tonight, in her whole being, in the simple dress with the bloodred blossoms, in the glance that lingered on her neighbour, in her slow voice, in her rare movements.
Saval too was grave and preoccupied. From time to time, with a gesture familiar to him, he stroked his brown Vandyke beard, and seemed sunk in thought.
For some moments no one spoke.
“There is sometimes a saving grace in silence,” said Servigny at last, as the trout was being handed. “Neighbours are often closer to one another when silent than when speaking; isn’t that so, Marquise?”
She turned slightly towards him and replied:
“Yes, it’s true. It is so sweet for both of us to think of the same delightful thing.”
She turned her burning gaze on Saval; for some moments they remained looking into one another’s eyes. There was a slight, an almost imperceptible movement under the table.
“Mam’zelle Yvette,” continued Servigny, “you’ll make me think you’re in love if you continue to behave so beautifully. Now with whom can you be in love? Let’s think it out together. I leave the vulgar herd of sighing swains on one side, and go straight for the principals. How about Prince Kravalow?”
At this name Yvette was roused.
“My poor dear Muscade, what are you thinking about? The Prince looks like a Russian in the waxworks who would win medals at a hairdressing competition.”
“Very well. The Prince is out of it. Perhaps you have chosen the Vicomte Pierre de Belvigne?”
This time she broke into a fit of laughter and asked:
“Can you see me hanging round Raisiné’s neck”—she called him Raisiné, Malvoisie, or Argenteuil according to the day of the week, for she nicknamed everyone—“and whispering in his ear: ‘My dear little Pierre,’ or ‘My divine Pedro, my adored Pietri, my darling Pierrot, give your dear fat poodlehead to your darling little wifie because she wants to kiss it’?”
“Away with Number Two, then,” said Servigny. “We are left with the Chevalier Valréali, whom the Marquise seems to favour.”
Yvette was as much amused as before.
“What, Old Lachrymose? Why, he’s a professional mourner at the Madeleine; he follows all the high-class funerals. Whenever he looks at me I feel as though I were already dead.”
“That’s three. Then you’ve fallen hopelessly in love with Baron Saval, here present.”
“With Rhodes Junior? No, he’s too strong. It would feel like being in love with the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile.”
“Well, then, Mam’zelle, it is plain that you’re in love with me, for I’m the only one of your worshippers that we haven’t already dealt with. I had kept myself to the end, out of modesty and prudence. It only remains for me to thank you.”
“You, Muscade!” she replied with charming gaiety. “Oh, no, I like you very much … but I don’t love you … Wait, I don’t want to discourage you. I don’t love you yet. … You have a chance … perhaps … Persevere, Muscade, be devoted, ardent, obedient, take plenty of trouble and all possible precautions, obey my lightest whims, be prepared to do anything I may choose … and we’ll see … later.”
“But, Mam’zelle, I’d rather do all this for you after than before, if you don’t mind.”
“After what … Muscade?” she asked him with the ingenuous air of a soubrette.
“Why, deuce take it, after you’ve shown me that you love me.”
“Well, behave as though I did, and believe it if you want to.”
“But, I must say …”
“Be quiet, Muscade. That’s enough about it for this time.”
He made her a military salute and held his tongue.
The sun had gone down behind the island, but the sky still glowed like a brazier, and the quiet water of the river was as though changed to blood. The sunset spilled a burning light over houses, people, everything; the scarlet rose in the Marquise’s hair was like a drop of crimson fallen upon her head from the clouds.
Yvette was looking the other way; her mother laid her hand on Saval’s, as though by accident. But the young girl turned, and the Marquise quickly snatched away her hand and fumbled at the folds of her bodice.
Servigny, who was watching them, said:
“If you like, Mam’zelle, we’ll go for a walk on the island after dinner.”
She was delighted with the idea.
“Oh, yes; that will be lovely; we’ll go by ourselves, won’t we, Muscade?”
“Yes, all by ourselves, Mam’zelle.”
Once more they were silent.
The calm of the wide landscape, the restful slumber of eventide weighed on their hearts, their bodies, their voices. There are rare, quiet hours wherein speech is almost impossible. The servants made no noise. The flaming sky burnt low; slowly night folded the earth in shadow.
“Do you propose to stay here long?” asked Saval.
“Yes,” replied the Marquise, dwelling upon each word, “for just as long as I’m happy here.”
As it was now too dark to see, lamps were brought. They flung across the table a strange pale light in the hollow darkness. A rain of little flies began falling upon the cloth. They were tiny midges, burnt as they flew over the glass chimneys of the lamps; their wings and legs singed, they powdered the table-linen, the plates, and the glasses with a grey, creeping dust. The diners swallowed them in their wine, ate them in the sauces, watched them crawling over the bread. Their faces and hands were perpetually tickled by a flying swarm of innumerable tiny insects.
The wine had constantly to be thrown away, the plates covered; they took infinite precautions to protect the food they were eating. Yvette was amused at the game; Servigny carefully sheltered whatever she was raising to her lips, guarded the wineglass and held his napkin spread out over her head like a roof. But it was too much for the fastidious nerves of the Marquise, and the meal was hastily brought to an end.
“Now let’s go to the island,” said Yvette, who had not forgotten Servigny’s suggestion.
“Don’t stay long, will you?” advised her mother languidly. “We’ll come with you as far as the ferry.”
They went off along the towpath, still two and two, the young girl in front with her friend. They could hear the Marquise and Saval behind them talking very fast in very low voices. All round them was black, with a thick, inky blackness. But the sky, swarming with seeds of fire, seemed to spill them out on the river, for the dark water was richly patined with stars.
By this time the frogs were croaking; all along the banks their rolling, monotonous notes creaked out.
The soft voices of innumerable nightingales rose in the still air.
Yvette remarked abruptly:
“Hallo! They are no longer following us. Where are they?”
And she called: “Mother!”
There was no answer. “They can’t be far away,” continued the young girl. “I heard them a moment ago.”
“They must have gone back,” murmured Servigny. “Perhaps your mother was cold.” He led her on.
A light shone in front of them; it was the inn of Martinet, a fisherman who also ran a tavern. At their call a man came out of the house, and they boarded a large boat moored in the grasses on the bank. The ferryman took up his oars, and the heavy boat advanced, waking the stars slumbering on the water and rousing them to a frenzied dancing that died slowly down in their wake. They touched the other bank and stepped off under the tall trees. The coolness of the moist earth floated up under the high thick branches that seemed to bear as many nightingales as leaves. A distant piano began to play a popular waltz.
Servigny had taken Yvette’s arm; very softly he slipped his hand behind her waist and pressed it gently.
“What are you thinking of?” he asked.
“I? … Nothing, I’m so happy.”
“Then you don’t care for me?”
“Yes, I do, Muscade. I care for you, I care for you a great deal; only don’t talk about it now. It’s too beautiful here to listen to your nonsense.”
He clasped her to him, though she strove, with little struggles, to free herself; through the flannel, so soft and fleecy to the touch, he could feel the warmth of her body.
“Yvette,” he stammered.
“Yes; what is it?”
“It’s … I who care for you.”
“You … don’t mean that, Muscade.”
“Yes, I do; I’ve cared for you for a very long time.”
She was still struggling to get away, striving to free her arm caught between their two bodies. They walked with difficulty, hampered by this link and by her struggles, zigzagging like a couple of drunkards.
He did not know what to say to her now, well aware that it is impossible to use to a young girl the words one would use to a grown woman; he was worried, wondering what he could do, wondering if she consented or did not understand, at his wit’s end for words that would be at once tender, discreet, and unmistakable.
Every second he repeated:
“Yvette! Speak to me, Yvette!”
Suddenly he pressed an audacious kiss on her cheek. She made a little movement of withdrawal, and said in a vexed tone:
“Oh! How absurd you are. Will you leave me alone?”
Her voice revealed nothing of her thoughts and wishes; he saw that she was not too angry, and he stooped his lips to the nape of her neck, on the first few downy golden hairs, the adorable spot he had coveted so long.
Then she struggled with all her might to get free. But he held her firmly, and placing his other hand on her shoulder, forced her head round towards him, and took from her mouth a long, maddening kiss. She slipped between his arms with a quick twist of her whole body, stooped swiftly, and having thus dexterously escaped from his embrace, vanished in the darkness with a sharp rustling of petticoats like the whirring noise of a pheasant rising.
At first he remained motionless, stunned by her quickness and by her disappearance; then, hearing no further sound, he called in a low voice:
“Yvette!”
There was no answer; he began to walk on, ransacking the darkness with his eyes, searching in the bushes for the white patch that must be made by her dress. All was dark. He called again more loudly:
“Mam’zelle Yvette!”
The nightingales were silent.
He hurried on, vaguely uneasy, calling ever louder and louder:
“Mam’zelle Yvette! Mam’zelle Yvette!”
Nothing! He stopped, listened. The whole island was silent; there was barely a rustle in the leaves overhead. The frogs alone kept up their sonorous croaking on the banks.
He wandered from copse to copse, descending first to the steep wooded slope of the swift main stream, then returning to the bare flat bank of the backwater. He went right up until he was opposite Bougival, then came back to the café La Grenouillère, hunting through all the thickets, constantly crying:
“Mam’zelle Yvette, where are you? Answer! It is only a joke. Answer me, answer me! Don’t make me hunt like this.”
A distant clock began to strike. He counted the strokes; it was midnight. For two hours he had been running round the island. He thought that she had probably gone home, and, very uneasy, went back, going round by the bridge.
A servant, asleep in an armchair, was waiting in the hall. Servigny woke him and asked:
“Is it long since Mademoiselle Yvette came in? I left her out in the country, as I had to pay a call.”
“Oh, yes, your Grace,” the fellow replied, “Mademoiselle came in before ten.”
He walked up to his room and went to bed. But he lay with his eyes open, unable to sleep. That snatched kiss had disturbed her. What did she want? he wondered. What did she think? What did she know? How pretty she was, and how she had maddened him! His desire, dulled by the life he had led, by all the women he had known, was reawakened by this strange child, so fresh, provoking, and inexplicable.
He heard one o’clock strike, then two. He realised that he would get no sleep that night. He was hot and wet with sweat; he felt in his temples the quick thudding of his heart. He got up to open the window.
A cool breeze came in, and he drew long deep breaths of it. The night was utterly dark, silent, and still. But suddenly in the darkness of the garden he caught sight of a speck of light, like a little piece of glowing coal. “Ah, a cigar,” he thought. “It can’t be anyone but Saval. Léon,’ he called softly.
“Is that you, Jean?” a voice answered.
“Yes. Wait, I’m coming down.”
He dressed, went out, and joined his friend, who was smoking astride an iron chair.
“What are you doing at this time of night?”
“Having a rest,” replied Saval, and laughed.
Servigny shook his head.
“I congratulate you, my dear chap. As for me, I’ve run my head into a wall.”
“You are telling me … ?”
“I am telling you … that Yvette is not like her mother.”
“What happened? Tell me all about it.”
Servigny recounted his unsuccessful efforts, then continued:
“Yes, the child really worries me. Do you realise that I haven’t been able to get to sleep? What a queer thing a girl is. This one looks as simple as possible, and yet she’s a complete mystery. One can understand at once a woman who has lived and loved, who knows what life is like. But with a young girl, on the other hand, one can’t be sure of anything at all. I’m really beginning to think she’s playing the fool with me.”
Saval rocked gently on his chair.
“Be careful, my dear chap,” he said very slowly; “she’ll get you to marry her. Remember the illustrious examples in history. That was how Mademoiselle de Montijo became empress, and she was at least of decent family. Don’t play the Napoleon.”
“Have no fears about that,” said Servigny. “I’m not a fool, nor an emperor. One has to be one or the other to lose one’s head so completely. But, I say, are you sleepy?”
“Not a bit.”
“Come for a walk along the riverside, then.”
“Very well.”
They opened the gate and started off down the river towards Marly.
It was the cool hour just before dawn, the hour of deepest sleep, deepest rest, utter quiet. Even the faint noises of the night were silent now. The nightingales sang no longer, the frogs had finished their croaking; some unknown animal, a bird perhaps, alone broke the stillness, making a feeble sawing noise, monotonous and regular, like the working of a machine. Servigny, who had at times a touch of the poet and of the philosopher too, said abruptly:
“Look here. This girl absolutely maddens me. In arithmetic, one and one make two. In love, one and one ought to make one, but they make two all the same. Do you know the feeling? The savage need of absorbing a woman into oneself, or of being absorbed into her? I don’t mean the mere physical desire to embrace her, but the mental and spiritual torment to be at one with another human being, to open one’s whole soul to her, one’s whole heart, and to penetrate to the uttermost depths of her mind. And never, never do you really know her or discover all the fluctuations of her will, her desires, and her thoughts. Never can you make even the slightest guess at the whole of the secret, the whole mystery of the spirit come so close to you, a spirit hidden behind two eyes as clear as water, as transparent as though there were no secret behind them. A spirit speaks to you through a beloved mouth, a mouth that seems yours because you desire it so passionately; one by one this spirit sends you its thoughts in the guise of words, and yet it remains farther from you than the stars are from one another, farther out of reach than the stars. Strange, isn’t it!”
“I do not demand so much,” replied Saval. “I do not bother to look behind the eyes. I don’t care much for the inside; it’s the outside I care for.”
“Whatever you say, Yvette’s a queer creature,” murmured Servigny. “I wonder how she’ll treat me in the morning.”
As they reached the weir at Marly, they saw that the sky was paling. Cocks began to crow in the farmyards; the sound reached them slightly muffled by thick walls. A bird cried in a park on the left, continually repeating a simple and ridiculous little cadenza.
“Time to go back,” said Saval, and they turned round.
When Servigny reached his room, the horizon gleamed rosily through the still open window. He pulled down the Venetian blinds and drew the heavy curtains across, got into bed, and at last fell asleep. And all the time he dreamt of Yvette.
A curious sound awoke him. He sat up and listened, but did not hear it again. Then suddenly there came against his shutters a rattling like hail. He jumped out of bed and ran to the window; throwing it open, he saw Yvette standing on the garden-path, throwing great handfuls of gravel in his face.
She was dressed in pink, and wore a broad-brimmed straw hat surmounted with a military plume; she was laughing with malicious mischief.
“Well, Muscade, still asleep? What can you have been doing last night to wake up so late? Did you have any adventures, my poor Muscade?”
“Coming, coming, Mam’zelle! Just a moment, while I stick my nose into the water-jug, and I’ll be down.”
“Hurry up,” she cried; “it’s ten o’clock. And I’ve got a scheme to talk over with you, a plot we are going to carry out. Breakfast at eleven, you know.”
He found her seated on a bench with a book on her knees, a novel. She took his arm with friendly familiarity, as frankly and gaily as though nothing had happened the night before, and leading him to the far end of the garden, said:
“This is my plan. We’re going to disobey mamma, and you are going to take me presently to the Grenouillère. I want to see it. Mamma says that decent women can’t go there, but I don’t care whether I can or I can’t. You’ll take me, Muscade, won’t you? We’ll have such sport with the people on the river.”
The fragrance of her was delightful, but he could not discover what vague, faint scent it was that hung round her. It was not one of her mother’s heavy perfumes, but a delicate fragrance in which he thought he recognised a faint whiff of iris powder and perhaps a touch of verbena.
Whence came this elusive scent—from her dress, her hair, or her skin? He was wondering about this when, as she spoke with her face very close to his, he felt her fresh breath full in his face, and found it quite as delightful. He fancied that the fleeting fragrance he had failed to recognise was the figment of his own bewitched senses, nothing but a delusive emanation from her youth and alluring grace.
“You will, won’t you, Muscade?” she said. “It will be so hot after breakfast that mother won’t want to go out. She’s very lazy when it’s hot. We’ll leave her with your friend, and you shall be my escort. We’ll pretend we are going up to the woods. You don’t know how I shall enjoy seeing the Grenouillère.”
They reached the gate facing the Seine. A flood of sunlight fell on the quiet, gleaming river. A light heat-mist was lifting, the steam of evaporated water, leaving a little glittering vapour on the surface of the stream. From time to time a boat went by, a light skiff or a heavy barge, and distant whistles could be heard, the short notes of the whistles on the Sunday trains that flooded the country with Parisians, and the long warning notes of the steamboats passing the weir at Marly.
But a small bell rang for breakfast, and they went in.
The meal was eaten in silence. A heavy July noon pressed on the earth and oppressed the dwelling thereon. The heat was almost tangible, paralysing both mind and body. The sluggish words would not leave their lips; every movement was an effort, as though the air had acquired power of resistance, and was more difficult to thrust through.
Yvette alone, though silent, was animated, and possessed by impatience. As soon as dessert was finished she said:
“Supposing we went for a walk in the woods. It would be perfectly delightful under the trees.”
“Are you mad?” murmured the Marquise, who looked utterly exhausted. “How can one go out in weather like this?”
“Very well,” replied the young girl slyly, “we’ll leave you here with the Baron to keep you company. Muscade and I will scramble up the hill and sit down and read on the grass.”
She turned to Servigny, saying: “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“At your service, Mam’zelle,” he replied.
She ran off to fetch her hat. The Marquise shrugged her shoulders and sighed: “Really, she’s quite mad.” Indolently she held out her beautiful white hand in a gesture of profound and seductive lassitude; the Baron pressed a lingering kiss upon it.
Yvette and Servigny departed. At first they followed the river, then they crossed the bridge and went on to the island, and sat down under the willows on the bank of the main stream, for it was still too early to go to La Grenouillère.
The young girl at once took a book from her pocket and, laughing, said:
“Muscade, you’re going to read to me.” And she held out the volume for him to take. He made a deprecatory gesture. “I, Mam’zelle? But I can’t read.”
“Come, now, no excuses, no arguments,” she replied severely. “You’re a nice lover, you are. ‘Everything for nothing’—that’s your creed, isn’t it?”
He took the book and opened it, and was surprised to find that it was a treatise on entomology, a history of ants by an English author. He remained silent, thinking that she was making fun of him.
“Go on, read,” she said.
“Is this a bet,” he asked, “or just a joke?”
“Neither. I saw the book in a shop; they told me it was the best book about ants, and I thought it would be nice to hear about the lives of the little creatures and watch them running about in the grass at the same time. So read away.”
She lay down face downwards at full length, her elbows resting on the ground and her head between her hands, her eyes fixed on the grass.
“ ‘Without doubt,’ he read, ‘the anthropoid apes are of all animals those which approach most closely to man in their anatomical structure; but if we consider the habits of ants, their organisation into societies, their vast communities, the houses and roads which they construct, their custom of domesticating animals and even at times of having slaves, we shall be forced to admit that they have the right to claim the place next to man on the ladder of intelligence.’ ”
He continued in a monotonous voice, stopping from time to time to ask: “Isn’t that enough?”
She signed “no” with a shake of her head, and, having picked up a wandering ant on the point of a blade of grass she had plucked, she amused herself by making it run from one end of the stem to the other, turning it upside-down as soon as the insect reached either end. She listened in silence and with concentrated attention to all the surprising details of the life of these frail creatures, their subterranean establishments, the way in which they bring up, keep, and feed little grubs in order to drink the secret liquor they secrete, just as we keep cows in our byres, their custom of domesticating little blind insects which clean their dwellings, and of going to war in order to bring back slaves to serve the victors, which the slaves do with such solicitude that the latter even lose the habit of feeding themselves.
And little by little, as though a maternal tenderness had awakened in her head for this creature at once so tiny and so intelligent, Yvette let it climb about her finger, watching it with loving eyes, longing to kiss it. And as Servigny was reading how they live in a community, how they play together in a friendly rivalry of strength and skill, the young girl, in her enthusiasm, tried to kiss the insect, which escaped from her finger and began to run over her face. She shrieked as violently as though a deadly peril threatened her, and with wild gestures she slapped at her cheek to get rid of the creature. Servigny, roaring with laughter, caught it near her hair and, at the spot where he had caught it, pressed a long kiss, from which Yvette did not recoil.
She got up, declaring: “I like that better than a novel. Now let’s go to La Grenouillère.”
They reached a part of the island which was laid out like a park, shaded with huge trees. Couples wandered under the lofty foliage beside the Seine, over which the boats were gliding. There were girls with young men, working girls with their sweethearts, who were walking in shirtsleeves, coats on their arms and tall hats on the back of their heads, looking weary and dissipated; citizens with their families, the wives in their Sunday best, the children running round their parents like a brood of chickens. A continuous distant buzz of human voices, a dull rumbling clamour, announced the nearness of the establishment beloved of boating parties. Suddenly it came into view, an enormous roofed barge moored to the bank, filled by a crowd of men and women who sat drinking at tables or stood up, shouting, singing, laughing, dancing, capering to the noise of a jingling piano, out of tune and as vibrant as a tin can. Tall, red-haired girls, displaying before and behind them the swelling, provocative curves of breasts and hips, walked up and down with eager, inviting glances, all three parts drunk, talking obscenities. Others were dancing wildly in front of young men who were half naked, dressed only in rowing-shorts and zephyrs, and wearing coloured jockey-caps on their heads. There was a pervading odour of sweat and face powder, the combined exhalations of perfumeries and armpits. Those who were drinking at the tables were swallowing white and red and yellow and green liquids, screaming and yelling for no reason, yielding to a violent need to make a din, an animal instinct to fill ears and brain with noise. From time to time a swimmer dived from the roof, splashing those sitting near, who yelled at him like savages.
On the river a fleet of boats passed and repassed; long narrow skiffs went by, urged on by the powerful strokes of oarsmen whose bare arms showed rolls of muscle under the sunburnt skin. The women in the boats, dressed in blue or red flannel, holding open umbrellas also blue or red over their heads, wore brilliant splashes of colour under the burning sun; they lolled on their seat in the stern and seemed to glide along the water, motionless or drowsy. Heavier boats moved slowly past, loaded with people. A lighthearted student, bent on making himself conspicuous, rowed with a windmill stroke, bumping into all the boats, whose occupants swore at him. He eventually disappeared crestfallen, after nearly drowning two swimmers, followed by the jeers of the crowd jammed together on the floating café.
Yvette, radiant, passed through the middle of this noisy, struggling crowd on Servigny’s arm. She seemed quite happy to be jostled by all and sundry, and stared at the girls with calm and friendly eyes.
“Look at that one, Muscade, what lovely hair she’s got! They do seem to be enjoying themselves.”
The pianist, an oarsman dressed in red, whose hat was very like a colossal straw parasol, began a waltz. Yvette promptly seized her companion by the waist and carried him off with the fury she always put into her dancing. They went on so long and with such frenzy that the whole crowd watched them. Those who were sitting drinking stood upon their tables and beat time with their feet, others smashed glasses. The pianist seemed to go mad; he banged at the ivory keys with galloping hands, gesticulating wildly with his whole body, swaying his head and its enormous covering with frantic movements.
Abruptly he stopped, slid down, and lay full length on the ground, buried under his hat, as though he were dead of exhaustion. There was a burst of laughter in the café, and everyone applauded. Four friends rushed up as though there had been an accident, and picking up their comrade, bore him off by all four limbs, placing on his stomach the roof under which he sheltered his head. Another jester followed, intoning the De Profundis, and a procession formed up behind the mock corpse. It went round all the paths in the island, gathering up drinkers, strollers, indeed everyone it met.
Yvette ran along enraptured, laughing heartily and talking to everyone, wild with the din and the bustle. Young men pushed against her and stared at her excitedly with eyes whose burning glances seemed to strip her naked. Servigny began to be afraid that the adventure might end unfortunately. The procession went on its way, getting faster and faster, for the four bearers had begun to race, followed by the yelling crowd. But suddenly they turned towards the bank, stopped dead at the edge, for an instant swung their comrade to and fro, and then, all letting go of him at once, they heaved him into the water. A great shout of merriment burst from every mouth, while the bewildered pianist splashed about, swearing, coughing, and spitting out the water; stuck fast in the mud, he struggled to climb up the bank. His hat, which was floating down the stream, was brought back by a boat.
Yvette danced with joy and clapped her hands, saying:
“Oh, Muscade, what fun, what fun!”
Servigny, now serious, watched her, a little embarrassed and a little dismayed to see her so much at ease in this vulgar mob. He felt a faint disgust born of the instinct that an aristocrat rarely loses, even in moments of utter abandon, the instinct that protects him from unpardonable familiarities and contacts that would be too degrading. “No one will credit you with too much breeding, my child,” he said to himself, astounded. He had an impulse to speak to her aloud as familiarly as he always did in his thoughts, with as little ceremony as he would have used on meeting any woman who was common property. He no longer saw her as any different from the red-haired creatures who brushed against them, bawling obscene words in their harsh voices. Coarse, brief, and expressive, these words were the current speech of the crowd; they seemed to flit overhead, born there in the mob like flies in the dunghill over which they hover. No one seemed shocked or surprised; Yvette did not seem to notice them at all.
“Muscade, I want to bathe,” she said. “Let’s go out into deep water.”
“At your service, ma’am,” he replied.
They went to the bathing-cabin to get costumes. She was ready first and waited for him on the bank, smiling at all who looked at her. Then they went off side by side in the warm water. She swam with a luxurious abandon, caressed by the stream, quivering with a sensual pleasure; at every stroke she raised herself as though she were ready to leap out of the river. He found difficulty in keeping up with her; he was out of breath and angry at his inferiority. But she slowed down and then turned quickly and floated, her arms crossed, her eyes staring towards the blue sky. He gazed at the soft supple line of her body as she lay there on the surface of the river, at the rounded form and small firm tips of the shapely breasts revealed by her thin clinging garment, the curving sweetness of her belly, the half-submerged thighs, the bare knees gleaming through the water, and the small foot thrust out. He saw every line of her, as though she were deliberately displaying herself to tempt him, offering herself to him or trying to make a fool of him again. He began to desire her with a passionate ardour, every nerve on edge. Abruptly she turned round and looked at him.
“What a nice head you have,” she said with a laugh.
He was hurt, irritated by her teasing, filled with the savage fury of the derided lover. He yielded to a vague desire to punish her, to avenge himself; he wanted to hurt her.
“You’d like that sort of life, would you?” he said.
“What sort?” she asked, with her most innocent air.
“Come now, no more nonsense. You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“No, honestly, I don’t.”
“We’ve had enough of this comedy. Will you or won’t you?”
“I don’t understand you in the least.”
“You’re not so stupid as all that. Besides, I told you last night.”
“What? I’ve forgotten.”
“That I love you.”
“You!”
“Yes, I!”
“What a lie!”
“I swear it’s true.”
“Prove it, then.”
“I ask for nothing better.”
“Well, do, then.”
“You didn’t say that last night.”
“You didn’t propose anything.”
“Oh, this is absurd!”
“Besides, I am not the one to be asked.”
“That’s very kind of you! Who is, then?”
“Mamma, of course.”
He gave way to a fit of laughter.
“Your mother? No, really, that’s too much!”
She had suddenly become very serious, and, looking into his eyes, said:
“Listen, Muscade, if you really love me enough to marry me, speak to mamma first, and I’ll give you my answer afterwards.”
At that he lost his temper altogether, thinking that she was still playing the fool with him.
“What do you take me for, Mam’zelle? An idiot like the rest of your admirers?”
She continued to gaze at him with calm, clear eyes. After a moment’s hesitation she said:
“I still don’t understand.”
“Now look here, Yvette,” he said brusquely, with a touch of rudeness and ill nature in his voice. “Let’s have done with this ridiculous comedy, which has already gone on too long. You keep on playing the innocent maiden, and, believe me, the part doesn’t suit you at all. You know perfectly well that there can be no question of marriage between us—but only of love. I told you I loved you—it’s quite true—I repeat, I do love you. Now don’t pretend not to understand, and don’t treat me as though I were a fool.”
They were upright in the water, face to face, supporting themselves by little movements of the hands. For some seconds more she continued motionless, as though she could not make up her mind to understand his words, then suddenly she blushed to the roots of her hair. The blood rushed in a swift tide from her neck to her ears, which turned almost purple, and without a word she fled landwards, swimming with all her strength, with hurried, powerful strokes. He could not overtake her, and the pursuit left him breathless. He saw her leave the water, pick up her wrap, and enter her cabin, without turning her head.
He took a long time to dress, very puzzled what to do, planning what to say to her, and wondering whether to apologise or persevere.
When he was ready, she had gone, alone. He returned slowly, worried and anxious. The Marquise, on Saval’s arm, was strolling along the circular path round the lawn. At sight of Servigny she spoke with the careless air she had assumed on the previous evening:
“Didn’t I tell you not to go out in such heat? Now Yvette has sunstroke; she’s gone to lie down. She was as scarlet as a poppy, poor child, and has a frightful headache. You must have been walking full in the sun, and up to some mischief or other, heaven knows what. You have no more sense than she has.”
The young girl did not come down to dinner. When she was asked if she would like something brought up to her room, she replied through the closed door that she was not hungry—she had locked herself in and wished to be left alone. The two young men left by the ten o’clock train, promising to come again the following Thursday, and the Marquise sat down by the open window and, musing, listened to the far-off sound of dance-music jerked out at La Grenouillère, vibrating in the profoundly solemn silence of night.
Inured and hardened to love by love, as a man is to riding or rowing, she nevertheless had sudden moments of tenderness which attacked her like a disease. These passions seized roughly upon her, swept through her whole being, driving her mad, exhausting her, or depressing her according to their nature, lofty, violent, dramatic, or sentimental.
She was one of those women who were created to love and to be loved. From a very humble beginning she had climbed high through love, of which she had made a profession almost without being aware of it: acting by instinct, by inborn skill, she accepted money as she accepted kisses, naturally, without distinguishing between them, employing her amazing intuition in an unreasoning and utterly simple fashion, as animals, made cunning by the struggle for life, employ theirs. She had had many lovers for whom she felt no tenderness, yet at whose embraces she had not felt disgust. She endured all caresses with calm indifference, just as a traveller eats anything, because he must live. But from time to time her heart or her flesh caught fire, and she fell into a passion which lasted weeks or months, according to the physical and moral qualities of her lover. These were the delicious moments of her life. She loved with her whole soul, her whole body, with ecstatic abandon. She threw herself into love like a suicide into a river, and let herself be carried away, ready to die if necessary, intoxicated, maddened, infinitely happy. Each time she thought she had never before felt anything like it, and she would have been entirely amazed if she had been reminded of the many different men of whom she had dreamed passionately all night long, gazing at the stars.
Saval had fascinated her, captured her body and soul. She dreamed of him now, soothed by his image and her remembrance of him, in the calm exaltation of a joy fulfilled, of a happiness present and certain.
A noise behind her made her turn round. Yvette had just come in, still in the same dress she had worn all day, but pale now, and with the burning eyes that are the mark of great weariness. She leaned on the ledge of the open window opposite her mother.
“I’ve something to tell you,” she said.
The Marquise, surprised, looked at her. Her love for her daughter was selfish; she was proud of her beauty, as one is proud of wealth; she was herself still too beautiful to be jealous, too careless to make the plans she was commonly supposed to entertain, yet too cunning to be unconscious of her daughter’s value.
“Yes, child,” she replied, “I’m listening; what is it?”
Yvette gave her a burning look, as though to read the depths of her soul, as though to detect every emotion which her words would rouse.
“This is it. Something extraordinary happened just now.”
“What?”
“Monsieur de Servigny told me he loved me.”
The Marquise waited, uneasy. But as Yvette said nothing more, she asked:
“How did he tell you? Explain!”
The young girl sat down by her mother’s feet in a familiar coaxing attitude and, pressing her hand, said:
“He asked me to marry him.”
Madame Obardi made a sudden gesture of amazement, and cried:
“Servigny? You must be mad!”
Yvette’s eyes had never left her mother’s face, watching sharply for her thoughts and her surprise.
“Why must I be mad?” she asked gravely. “Why should Monsieur de Servigny never marry me?”
“You must be wrong,” stammered the Marquise, embarrassed; “it can’t be true. You can’t have heard properly—or you misunderstood him. Monsieur de Servigny is too rich to marry you, and too … too … Parisian to marry at all.”
Yvette slowly rose to her feet.
“But if he loves me as he says he does?” she added.
Her mother replied somewhat impatiently:
“I thought you were old enough and knew enough of the world not to have such ideas in your head. Servigny is a man of the world and an egoist; he will only marry a woman of his own rank and wealth. If he asked you to marry him … it means he wants … he wants …”
The Marquise, unable to voice her suspicions, was silent for a moment, then added:
“Now leave me alone, and go to bed.”
And the young girl, as though she now knew all she wanted, replied obediently:
“Yes, mother.”
She kissed her mother’s forehead and departed with a calm step. Just as she was going out of the door, the Marquise called her back:
“And your sunstroke?” she asked.
“I never had one. It was this affair which had upset me.”
“We’ll have another talk about it,” added the Marquise. “But, above all, don’t be alone with him again after this occurrence for some time. And you may be quite sure that he won’t marry you, do you understand, and that he only wants to … to compromise you.”
This was the best she could do by way of expressing her thoughts. And Yvette returned to her room.
Madame Obardi began to reflect.
Having lived for years in an amorous and opulent tranquillity, she had carefully guarded her mind from every thought that might preoccupy, trouble, or sadden her. She had always refused to ask herself what would become of Yvette; there was always time enough to think of that when difficulties arose. She knew, with her courtesan’s instinct, that her daughter could not marry a rich and highborn man save by an extremely improbable piece of good fortune, one of those surprises of love which set adventuresses upon thrones. She did not really contemplate this possibility, too much preoccupied to form plans by which she herself would not be directly affected.
Yvette would doubtless follow in her mother’s footsteps. She would become a light o’ love; why not? But the Marquise had never had the courage to ask herself when, or how, this would come about. And now here was her daughter suddenly, without any preparation, asking her one of those questions which cannot be answered, and forcing her to take up a definite position in an affair so difficult, so delicate, so dangerous in every sense, and which so profoundly troubled her conscience, the conscience any mother must display when her daughter is involved in an affair such as this.
She had too much natural wit, a wit which might nod but was never quite asleep, to be deceived for one moment in Servigny’s intentions, for she knew men, by personal experience, especially men of that tribe. And so, at the first words uttered by Yvette, she had cried out, almost involuntarily:
“Servigny marry you? You must be mad!”
What had led him to use the old, old trick—he, the shrewd rake, the jaded man about town? What would he do now? And the child, how was she to be more explicitly warned or even forbidden? She was capable of any folly. Who would imagine that a great girl like that could be so innocent, so ignorant, and so unwary?
And the Marquise, thoroughly perplexed and already exhausted by her mental efforts, was utterly at a loss, finding the situation really awkward.
Weary of the whole business, she thought:
“Oh, well, I’ll keep a close watch on them and act according to events. If necessary, I’ll even talk to Servigny; he’s sensitive, and can take a hint.”
She did not ask herself what she should say to him, nor what he would reply, nor what sort of an agreement could be made between them, but, happy at being relieved of one anxiety without having had to make any decision, she began again to dream of her adored Saval. Her glance, wandering in the night, turned to the right towards the misty radiance that hovered over Paris; with both hands she threw kisses towards the great city, swift unnumbered kisses that flew into the darkness one after another; and very softly, as though she were still speaking to him, she murmured:
“I love you! I love you!”
III
Nor could Yvette sleep. Like her mother, she sat at the open window, resting her elbows on the sill, and tears, her first bitter tears, filled her eyes.
Till now she had lived and grown up in the heedless and serene self-confidence of happy youth. Why should she have analysed, wondered, reflected? Why should she not have been like all young girls of her age? Why should doubt, fear, painful suspicions have troubled her? Because she seemed to talk about every subject, because she had taken the tone, the manner, the bold speech of those around her, she had seemed to know all about everything. But she knew hardly more than a girl brought up in a convent; her risky phrases came from her memory, from the faculty women possess of imitation and assimilation, not from a mind already sophisticated and debauched.
She talked of love in the same way that an artist’s or musician’s son talks of painting and music at ten or twelve years of age. She knew, or rather suspected, the sort of mystery hidden behind this word—too many jests had been whispered in her presence for her innocence to remain completely unenlightened—but how was she to tell from this that every household was not like the one she lived in? Her mother’s hand was kissed with apparent respect; all their friends were titled; all were rich, or appeared to be; all spoke familiarly of princes of the blood royal. Two king’s sons had actually come several times, in the evening, to the Marquise’s house. How was she to know?
And, besides, she was by nature innocent. She did not probe into things, she had not her mother’s intuitive judgment of other people. She lived tranquilly, too full of the joy of life to worry about circumstances which might have roused suspicions in people of more quiet, more thoughtful, more secluded ways, who were less impulsive and less radiantly joyous. And now, in a single instant, by a few words whose brutality she had felt without understanding, Servigny had roused in her a sudden uneasiness, an uneasiness at first unreasoning, and now growing into a torturing fear.
She had gone home, had fled from him like a wounded animal; deeply wounded, indeed, by the words she repeated to herself again and again, trying to penetrate their farthest meaning, trying to guess their whole implication: “You know perfectly well that there can be no question of marriage between us—but of love!”
What had he meant? And why the harshness? There was something, then, some shameful secret, of which she was in ignorance? Doubtless she was the only one in ignorance of it. What was it? She was terrified, crushed, as at the discovery of a hidden infamy, the treachery of a friend, one of those calamities of the heart which strike at one’s very reason.
She had thought, wondered, pored over it, wept, consumed with fears and suspicions. Then her young and buoyant nature calmed her, and she began to imagine an adventure, to build up an unusual and dramatic situation drawn from her remembrance of all the fanciful romances she had read. She recalled exciting changes of fortune, gloomy and heartrending plots, and mingled them with her own story, to fling a romantic glory round the half-seen mystery which surrounded her.
She was no longer miserable, she was wholly wrapped up in her dreams. She lifted mysterious veils, imagined improbable complications, a thou sand curious and terrible ideas, attractive through their very strangeness. Was she, by any chance, the natural daughter of a prince? Had her unfortunate mother been reduced and deserted, created a marquise by a king, King Victor Emmanuel perhaps, and had she even been forced to flee from the wrath of her family?
Or was she not more probably a child abandoned by her parents, very noble and famous parents, as the fruit of a guilty love, and found by the marquise, who had adopted her and brought her up? A hundred other notions raced through her head; she accepted or rejected them at the dictates of her fancy. She grew profoundly sorry for herself, at once very happy and very sad; above all, she was delighted at becoming the heroine of a romance with emotions to reveal, a part to act, a dignity and nobility to be upheld. And she thought of the part she would have to play in each plot she imagined. She saw it vaguely, as if she were a character in a novel by Scribe or George Sand. It would be compounded of equal parts of devotion, pride, self-sacrifice, greatness of soul, tenderness, and fine words. Her volatile little heart almost revelled in her new position.
She had continued till nightfall to ponder over her future course of action, wondering how to set to work to drag the truth from the Marquise.
And at the coming of night, so suitable to a tragic situation, she had thought of a trick, a quite simple yet subtle trick, for getting what she wanted; it was to tell her mother very abruptly that Servigny had asked her to marry him. At this news Madame Obardi, in her surprise, would surely let fall a word, an exclamation, that would illumine her daughter’s mind.
So Yvette had promptly put her plan into execution. She expected a burst of astonishment, protests of affection, disclosures, accompanied by tears and every sign of emotion.
And lo and behold! her mother had not apparently been either surprised or heartbroken, merely annoyed; from the worried and peevish tone of her reply the young girl, in whose mind every latent power of feminine cunning, wit, and knowledge were suddenly aroused, realised that it was no good insisting, that the mystery was quite other and more painful than she had imagined, and that she must discover it for herself. So she had returned to her room with a sad heart, her spirit distressed, depressed now in the apprehension of a real misfortune, without knowing how or why she was suffering such an emotion. She rested her elbows on the windowsill and wept.
She cried for a long time, now with no idle dreams: she made no attempt at further discovery. Little by little she was overcome with weariness, and closed her eyes. She dozed, for a few minutes, in the unrefreshing slumber of a person too exhausted to undress and get into bed; her sleep was long and fitful, roughly broken whenever her head slipped from between her hands.
She did not go to bed until the earliest gleam of daylight, when the chill of dawn drove her from the window.
During the next day and the day after, she kept an air of melancholy and reserve. A ceaseless and urgent travail of thought was moving within her; she was learning to watch, to guess, to reason. A gleam, still vague, seemed to throw a new light upon the men and events passing around her; distrust invaded her soul, distrust of everyone that she had believed in, distrust of her mother. During those two days she conjectured every conceivable supposition. She envisaged every possibility, making the most extravagant resolutions, in the impulsiveness of her volatile and unrestrained nature. On the Wednesday she fixed on a plan, a whole scheme of conduct and an elaborate plan of espionage. On the Thursday morning she rose with the determination to be more cunning than the most experienced detective, to be armed against all the world.
She even decided to take as her motto the two words “Myself alone,” and for more than an hour she wondered how they could with best effect be engraved round her monogram and stamped on her notepaper.
Saval and Servigny arrived at ten o’clock. The young girl held out her hand with reserve, but without embarrassment, and said in a familiar, though serious, tone:
“Good morning, Muscade. How are you?”
“Pretty well, thank you, Mam’zelle. And you?”
He watched her narrowly. “What game is she playing now?” he said to himself.
The Marquise having taken Saval’s arm, he took Yvette’s, and they began to walk round the lawn, disappearing and reappearing behind the clumps of trees.
Yvette walked with a thoughtful air, her eyes on the gravel path, and seemed scarcely to hear her companion’s remarks, to which she made no reply. Suddenly she asked:
“Are you really my friend, Muscade?”
“Of course, Mam’zelle.”
“But really, really and truly?”
“Absolutely your friend, Mam’zelle, body and soul.”
“Enough not to tell a lie for once, just for once?”
“Enough not even to tell one for twice, if necessary.”
“Enough to tell me the whole truth, even if it’s unpleasant?”
“Yes, Mam’zelle.”
“Well, what do you really think, really, really think, of Prince Kravalow?”
“Oh, Lord!”
“There you are, already getting ready to tell a fib.”
“No, I’m searching for the words, the right words. Well, dash it, the Prince is a Russian—a real Russian, who speaks Russian, was born in Russia, and perhaps had a passport to get into France. There’s nothing false about him except his name and his title.”
She looked into his eyes.
“You mean he’s a … a …”
He hesitated; then, making up his mind, said:
“An adventurer, Mam’zelle.”
“Thank you. And the Chevalier Valréali is no better, is he?”
“It’s as you say.”
“And Monsieur de Belvigne?”
“Ah, he’s rather different. He’s a gentleman, provincial of course; he’s honourable … up to a point … but he’s singed his wings through flying too near the candle.”
“And you?”
Without hesitation he replied:
“I? Oh, I’m what’s generally called a gay dog, a bachelor of good family who once had brains and frittered them away on making puns; who had health, and ruined it by playing the fool; moderate wealth, and wasted it doing nothing. All I have left is a certain experience of life, a pretty complete freedom from prejudice, a vast contempt for men, women included, a profound sense of the uselessness of my actions, and a wide tolerance of scoundrels in general. I still have momentary flashes of honesty, as you see, and I’m even capable of affection, as you could see if you would. With these qualities and defects I place myself at your orders, Mam’zelle, body and soul, for you to dispose of at your pleasure. There!”
She did not laugh; she listened attentively, carefully scrutinising his words and intentions.
“What do you think of the Comtesse de Lammy?” she continued.
“You must allow me not to give you my opinions on women,” he said gaily.
“Not on any?”
“No, not on any.”
“Then that means you must have a very low opinion of them, of all of them. Now think, aren’t there any exceptions?”
He laughed with the insolent air he almost always wore, and the brutal audacity that was his strength, his armour against life.
“Present company always excepted, of course,” he said.
She flushed slightly, but coolly asked: “Well, what do you think of me?”
“You want to know? Very well, then. I think you’re a person of excellent sense, of considerable experience, or, if you prefer it, of great common sense; that you know very well how to mask your battery, amuse yourself at others’ expense, hide your purpose, pull the strings and wait, without impatience, for the result.”
“Is that all?” she asked.
“That’s all,” he replied.
“I’ll make you alter your opinion, Muscade,” she said very gravely. Then she went over to her mother, who was walking with bent head and tiny steps, with the languid gait one falls into when murmuring of things sweet and intimate. As she walked she drew designs, letters perhaps, with the tip of her sunshade, and talked to Saval without looking at him, talked long and slowly, resting on his arm, held close against his side. Yvette looked sharply at her, and a suspicion, so vague that she could not put it into words, as if it were a physical sensation only half realised, flitted across her mind as the shadow of a windblown cloud flits across the earth.
The bell rang for lunch.
It was silent, almost gloomy.
There was storm in the air, as the saying goes. Vast motionless clouds lay in wait on the horizon, silent and heavy, but loaded with tempest.
When they had taken their coffee on the veranda, the Marquise asked:
“Well, darling, are you going for a walk today with your friend Servigny? This is really the weather to enjoy the coolness of the woods.”
Yvette threw her a rapid glance, and swiftly looked away again.
“No, mother, I’m not going out today.”
The Marquise seemed disappointed.
“Do go for a little walk, child,” she persisted. “It’s so good for you.”
“No, mother,” said Yvette sharply, “I’m going to stay in the house, and you know quite well why, because I told you the other night.”
Madame Obardi had quite forgotten, consumed with her need to be alone with Saval. She blushed, fidgeted, and, distracted by her own desire, uncertain how to secure a free hour or two, stammered:
“Of course; I never thought of it. You’re quite right; I don’t know where my wits are wandering.”
Yvette took up a piece of embroidery which she called the “public welfare,” busying herself with it five or six times a year, on days of utter boredom, and seated herself on a low chair beside her mother. The young men sat in deck-chairs and smoked their cigars.
The hours went by in idle conversation that flagged continually. The Marquise threw impatient glances at Saval, seeking for an excuse, any way of getting rid of her daughter. Realising at last that she would not succeed, and not knowing what plan to adopt, she said to Servigny:
“You know, my dear Duc, that you’re both going to stay the night here. Tomorrow we are going to lunch at the restaurant Fournaise, at Chaton.”
He understood, smiled, and said with a bow:
“I am at your service, Marquise.”
Slowly the day wore on, slowly and uncomfortably, under the menace of the storm. Gradually the hour of dinner approached. The lowering sky was heavy with dull, sluggish clouds. They could not feel the least movement in the air.
The evening meal was eaten in silence. A sense of embarrassment and restraint, a sort of vague fear, silenced the two men and the two women.
When the table had been cleared, they remained on the veranda, speaking only at long intervals. Night was falling, a stifling night. Suddenly the horizon was torn by a great jagged flame that lit with its dazzling and pallid glare the four faces sunk in the shadows. Followed a distant noise, dull and faint, like the noise made by a cart crossing a bridge; the heat of the atmosphere increased, the air grew still more oppressive, the evening shadows more profound.
Yvette rose.
“I’m going to bed,” she said. “The storm makes me feel ill.”
She bent her forehead for the Marquise to kiss, offered her hand to the two young men, and departed.
As her room was directly above the veranda, the leaves of a large chestnut-tree planted in front of the door were soon gleaming with a green light. Servigny fixed his eyes on this pale gleam in the foliage, thinking now and then that he saw a shadow pass across it. But suddenly the light went out. Madame Obardi sighed.
“My daughter is in bed,” she said.
Servigny rose.
“I will follow your daughter’s example, Marquise, if you will allow me.”
He kissed her hand and disappeared in his turn.
She remained alone with Saval, in the darkness. At once she was in his arms, clasping him, embracing him. Then, though he tried to prevent it, she knelt down in front of him, murmuring: “I want to look at you in the lightning-flashes.”
But Yvette, her candle blown out, had come out on to her balcony, gliding barefooted like a shadow, and was listening, tortured by a painful and confused suspicion. She could not see, being exactly over their heads on the roof of the veranda. She heard nothing but a murmur of voices, and her heart beat so violently that the thudding of it filled her ears. A window shut overhead. So Servigny had just gone up to bed. Her mother was alone with the other.
A second flash split the sky, and for a second the whole familiar landscape was revealed in a vivid and sinister glare. She saw the great river, the colour of molten lead, like a river in some fantastic dream-country. At the same instant a voice below her said: “I love you.” She heard no more; strange shudder passed over her, her spirit was drowned in a fearful sea of trouble.
Silence, pressing, infinite, a silence that seemed the eternal silence of the grave, brooded over the world. She could not breathe, her lungs choked by some unknown and horrible weight. Another flash kindled the heavens and for an instant lit up the horizon, another followed on its heels, then another and another.
The voice she had already heard repeated more loudly: “Oh! How I love you! How I love you!” And Yvette knew the voice well; it was her mother’s.
A large drop of warm water fell upon her forehead, and a slight, almost imperceptible quiver ran through the leaves, the shiver of the coming rain.
Then a tumult came hurrying from far off, a confused tumult like the noise of the wind in trees; it was the heavy shower pouring in a torrent upon the earth, the river, and the trees. In a few moments the water was streaming all round her, covering her, splashing her, soaking her like a bath. She did not move, thinking only of what was happening on the veranda. She heard them rise and go up to their rooms. Doors slammed inside the house. And obeying an irresistible longing for certitude, a maddening, torturing desire, the young girl ran down the stairs, softly opened the outer door, ran across the lawn under the furious downpour of rain, and hid in a clump of bushes to watch the windows.
One alone, her mother’s, showed a light. And suddenly two shadows appeared on the luminous square, two shadows side by side. Then they drew closer and made only one; another flash of lightning flung a swift and dazzling jet of light upon the house-front, and she saw them embracing, their arms about one another’s necks.
At that she was stunned; without thinking, without knowing what she did, she cried out with all her strength, in a piercing voice: “Mother!” as one cries to warn another creature of deadly peril.
Her desperate cry was lost in the clatter of the rain, but the engrossed pair started uneasily apart. One of the shadows disappeared, while the other tried to distinguish something in the darkness of the garden.
Fearing to be taken unawares and found by her mother, Yvette ran to the house, hurried upstairs, leaving a trail of water dripping from step to step, and locked herself in her room, determined to open to no one. Without taking off the soaking clothes which clung to her body, she fell upon her knees with clasped hands, imploring in her distress some superhuman protection, the mysterious help of heaven, that unknown aid we pray for in our hours of weeping and despair. Every instant the great flashes threw their livid light into the room, and she saw herself fitfully reflected in her wardrobe-mirror, with her wet hair streaming down her back, so strange a figure that she could not recognise herself.
She remained in this strait for a long time, so long that the storm passed without her noticing its departure. The rain ceased to fall, light flowed into the sky, though it was still dark with clouds, and a warm, fragrant, delicious freshness, the freshness of wet leaves and grass, drifted in at the open window. Yvette rose from her knees, took off her cold sodden clothes, without thinking at all of what she did, and got into bed. She fixed her eyes on the growing daylight, then wept again, then tried to think.
Her mother! With a lover! The shame of it! But she had read so many books in which women, even mothers, abandoned themselves in like fashion, only to rise once more to honour in the last few pages, that she was not utterly dumbfounded to find herself involved in a drama like all the dramas in the stories she read. The violence of her first misery, her first cruel bewilderment, was already slightly lessened by her confused recollections of similar situations. Her thoughts had roamed among so many tragic adventures, gracefully woven into their stories by the authors of romances, that gradually her horrible discovery began to seem the natural continuation of a novelette begun the night before.
“I will save my mother,” she said to herself.
Almost calmed by this heroic resolution, she felt herself strong, great, ready upon the instant for sacrifice and combat. She thought over the means she must employ. Only one seemed good to her, and accorded with her romantic nature. And she rehearsed, like an actress before the performance, the interview she would have with her mother.
The sun had risen and the servants were up and about. The maid came with her chocolate. Yvette had the tray set down on the table, and said:
“Tell my mother that I’m not well, that I shall stay in bed till the gentlemen leave; tell her I did not sleep last night and that I wish not to be disturbed, because I must try to sleep.”
The astonished maid caught sight of the soaked dress, thrown like a rag on the carpet.
“Mademoiselle has been out, then?” she said.
“Yes, I went for a walk in the rain to clear my head.”
The servant picked up the petticoats, stockings, and muddy shoes, and went out carrying them gingerly on her arm with an expression of disgust; they were dripping like the clothes of a drowned women.
Yvette waited, knowing well that her mother would come.
The Marquise entered, having leapt out of bed at the first words of the maid, for she had endured a vague uneasiness ever since that cry of “Mother!” pierced the darkness.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
Yvette looked at her and faltered.
“I’ve … I’ve …”
Then, overcome by violent and sudden emotion, she began to sob.
The astonished Marquise asked again:
“What’s the matter with you?”
Then, forgetting all her schemes and the phrases so carefully prepared, the young girl hid her face in her hands and sobbed:
“Oh, mother! Oh, mother!”
Madame Obardi remained standing by the bed, too excited to understand fully, but guessing with that subtle instinct wherein her strength lay, almost everything there was to know.
Yvette, choked with sobs, could not speak, and her mother, exasperated at last and feeling the approach of a formidable revelation, asked sharply:
“Come, what’s the matter with you? Tell me.”
With difficulty Yvette stammered:
“Oh! Last night … I saw … your window.”
“Well, what then?” asked the Marquise, very pale.
Her daughter repeated, still sobbing:
“Oh, mother! Oh, mother!”
Madame Obardi, whose fear and embarrassment were changing to anger, shrugged her shoulders and turned to go.
“I really think you must be mad. When it’s all over, let me know.”
But suddenly the young girl parted her hands and disclosed her tear-stained face.
“No. … Listen. … I must speak to you. … Listen. Promise me … we’ll both go away, far away, into the country, and we’ll live like peasants and no one will know what’s become of us. Will you, mother? Please, please, I beg you, mother, I implore you!”
The Marquise, abashed, remained in the middle of the room. She had the hot blood of the people in her veins. Then shame, the shame of a mother, mingled with her vague sensation of fear and the exasperation of a passionate woman whose love is menaced. She shivered, equally ready to implore forgiveness or to fly into a rage.
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
“I saw you, mother,” continued Yvette, “last night. … You must never again … Oh, if you knew … we’ll both go away. … I’ll love you so much that you’ll forget. …
“Listen, my child,” said Madame Obardi in a trembling voice, “there are some things you don’t yet understand. Well, never forget … never forget … that I forbid you … ever to speak to me … of … of … of those matters.”
But the young girl caught desperately at her role of saviour and went on:
“No, mother, I’m no longer a child, and I have the right to know. I know all sorts of disreputable people, adventurers, come to our house, and that that’s why we are not respected; and I know more than that. Well, it mustn’t be, I won’t endure it. We’ll go away; you can sell your jewels; we’ll work if necessary, and we’ll live like honest women somewhere far away. And if I manage to get married, so much the better.”
Her mother looked at her out of angry black eyes, and answered:
“You’re mad. Be good enough to get up and come out to lunch with the rest of us.”
“No, mother. There’s someone here, you know whom, whom I won’t see again. He must go out of this house, or I will. You must choose between us.”
She was sitting up in bed, and raised her voice, speaking like a character on the stage; at last she had entered upon the drama so long dreamed of, and her grief was almost forgotten in absorption in her mission.
“You must be mad,” repeated the astonished Marquise again, finding nothing else to say.
“No, mother,” the young girl added, with dramatic verve, “that man will leave this house or I shall go; I shall not weaken.”
“And where will you go? … What will you do?”
“I don’t know; it doesn’t matter much … I want us to be honest women.”
The repetition of that phrase “honest women” aroused in the Marquise the fury of a drab.
“Silence!” she shouted. “I won’t be spoken to like that. I’m as good as any other woman, do you hear? I’m a harlot, it’s true, and I’m proud of it; I’m worth a dozen of your honest women.”
Yvette, overwhelmed, looked at her and stammered:
“Oh, mother!”
But the Marquise became frenzied with excitement.
“Yes, I am a harlot. What then? If I weren’t a harlot, you’d be a kitchen-maid today, as I was once, and you’d work for twenty sous a day, and you’d wash the dishes, and your mistress would send you out on errands to the butcher’s, d’you hear, and kick you out if you were idle; whereas here you are, idling all day long, just because I am a harlot. There! When you’re only a poor servant-girl with fifty francs of savings, you must get away from it somehow if you don’t want to rot in the workhouse; and there’s only one way for women, only one way, d’you hear, when you’re a servant! We can’t make fortunes on the stock exchange or at high finance. We’ve nothing but our bodies, nothing but our bodies.”
She beat her breast like a penitent at confession, and advanced towards the bed, flushed and excited:
“So much the worse for a pretty girl; she must live on her looks or grind along in poverty all her life long … all her life. … There’s no alternative.”
Then, returning hastily to her old idea: “And your honest women, do they go without? It’s they who are sluts, because they’re not forced. They’ve money to live on and amuse themselves with; they have their lovers out of pure wantonness. It’s they who are sluts!”
She stood beside Yvette’s bed; Yvette, utterly overcome, wanted to scream for help and run away; she was crying noisily, like a beaten child.
The Marquise was silent, and looked at her daughter; seeing the girl’s utter despair, she was herself overcome by sorrow, remorse, tenderness, and pity; and falling upon the bed with outstretched arms, she too began to sob, murmuring:
“My poor darling, my poor darling, if you only knew how you hurt me.”
And for a long time they both wept.
Then the Marquise, whose grief never lasted very long, rose gently, and said very softly:
“Well, darling, that’s how it is; it can’t be helped. It can’t be altered now. Life must be taken as it comes.”
But Yvette continued to cry; the shock had been too severe and too unexpected for her to be able to reflect upon it calmly and recover herself.
“Come, get up, and come down to breakfast, so that nothing will be noticed,” said her mother.
The young girl shook her head, unable to speak; at last she said very slowly, her voice choked with sobs:
“No, mother, you know what I said; I won’t change my mind. I will not leave my room till they have gone. I won’t see any of those people again, never, never. If they come back, I … I … you won’t see me again.”
The Marquise had dried her eyes and, worn out with her emotion, murmured:
“Come now, think it over, be sensible about it.” Then again, after a minute’s silence: “Yes, you had better rest this morning. I’ll come and see you in the afternoon.”
She kissed her daughter on the forehead and went away to get dressed, quite calm again.
As soon as her mother had disappeared, Yvette ran to the door and bolted it, so as to be alone, quite alone; then she began to reflect.
About eleven o’clock the maid knocked at the door and asked:
“Madame la Marquise wishes to know if you want anything, Mademoiselle, and what will you have for lunch?”
“I’m not hungry,” replied Yvette; “I only want to be left alone.”
She stayed in bed as though she were really ill. About three o’clock there was another knock.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“It’s I, darling,” answered her mother’s voice; “I’ve come to see how you are.”
She hesitated. What should she do? She opened the door and got back into bed. The Marquise came close, speaking softly as though to an invalid.
“Well, are you feeling better? Won’t you eat an egg?”
“No, thank you, nothing.”
Madame Obardi had sat down beside the bed. Neither spoke for some time; then, at last, as her daughter remained immobile, her hands resting inertly on the sheets, the Marquise added:
“Aren’t you going to get up?”
“Yes, presently,” answered Yvette. “I’ve thought a great deal, mother,” she continued slowly and seriously, “and this … this is my decision. The past is the past; let us say no more about it. But the future will be different … or else … or else I know what I shall have to do. And now let us have done with this subject.”
The Marquise, who had thought that the explanation was all over, felt somewhat irritated. She had had more than enough. This great goose of a girl ought to have understood long ago. But she made no answer, only repeating:
“Are you going to get up?”
“Yes, I’m ready now.”
The mother acted as maid to her daughter, bringing her her stockings, her corset, and her petticoats. Then she kissed her.
“Shall we go for a walk before dinner?”
“Yes, mamma.”
And they walked along the bank of the river, talking almost entirely of the most trivial affairs.
IV
Next morning Yvette went off alone to sit in the place where Servigny had read over the history of the ants.
“I will not leave it,” she said to herself, “until I have come to a decision.”
The river ran at her feet, the swift water of the main stream; it was full of eddies and great bubbles which swirled silently past her.
She had already envisaged every aspect of the situation and every means of escape from it. What was she to do if her mother failed to hold scrupulously to the condition she had laid down, if she did not give up her life, her friends, everything, to take refuge with her in some distant region?
She might go alone … away. But whither? How? What could she live on? By working? At what? Whom should she ask for work? And the melancholy and humble life of the working girl, of the daughters of the common folk, seemed to be a little shameful, and unworthy of her. She thought of becoming a governess, like the young ladies in novels, and of being loved and married by the son of the house. But for that role she should have been of noble descent, so that when an irate parent reproached her for stealing his son’s heart, she could have answered proudly:
“My name is Yvette Obardi.”
She could not. And besides, it was a rather commonplace, threadbare method.
A convent was scarcely any better. Besides, she felt no call towards a religious life, having nothing but an intermittent and fleeting piety. No one—since she was the thing she was—could save her by marrying her, she could not take help from a man, there was no possible way out and no certain resource at all.
She wanted something violent, something really great, really brave, something that would be held up for all to see: and she decided to die.
She came to this resolution quite suddenly, quite calmly, as though it were a question of a journey, without reflecting, without seeing what death means, without realising that it is an end without a new beginning, a departure without a return, an eternal farewell to earth, to life.
She was attracted immediately by this desperate decision, with all the impulsiveness of a young and ardent spirit. And she pondered over the means she should employ. They all appeared to be painful and dangerous to carry out, and to demand, too, a violence which was repulsive to her.
She soon gave up the idea of dagger or pistol, which might only wound, maim, or disfigure her, and which required a steady and practised hand—rejected hanging as vulgar, a pauper’s sort of suicide, ridiculous and ugly—and drowning because she could swim. Poison was all that remained, but which poison? Almost all would hurt her or make her sick. She did not want to suffer, or to be sick. Then she thought of chloroform, having read in a newspaper of a young woman who suffocated herself by this means.
At once she felt something like pleasure in her resolve, a secret self-praise, a prick of vainglory. They should see the manner of woman she was!
She returned to Bougival and went to the chemist’s, where she asked for a little chloroform for an aching tooth. The man, who knew her, gave her a very small phial of the drug. Then she walked over to Croissy, where she procured another little phial of poison. She got a third at Chaton, and a fourth at Rueil, and returned home late for lunch. As she was very hungry after her walk, she ate a hearty meal, with the sharp enjoyment of a hungry athlete.
Her mother, glad to see her excellent appetite, felt now quite confident, and said to her as they rose from the table:
“All our friends are coming to spend Sunday here. I’ve invited the prince, the chevalier, and Monsieur de Belvigne.”
Yvette turned slightly pale, but made no answer. She left the house almost at once, went to the railway station, and took a ticket to Paris.
Throughout the afternoon she went from chemist to chemist, buying a few drops of chloroform from each.
She returned in the evening, her pockets full of little bottles. Next day she continued her campaign, and happening to go into a druggist’s, she was able to buy half a pint all at once. She did not go out on Saturday—it was stuffy and overcast; she spent the whole of it on the veranda, lying in a long cane chair. She thought about nothing, filled with a placid resolution.
The next day, wishing to look her best, she put on a blue frock which became her marvellous well. And as she viewed herself in the mirror she thought suddenly: “Tomorrow I shall be dead.” A strange shiver ran through her body. “Dead! I shall not speak, I shall not think, no one will see me any more. And I shall never see all this again.” She scrutinised her face carefully, as though she had never seen it before, examining, above all, the eyes, discovering a thousand aspects of herself, a secret character in her face that she did not know, astonished to see herself, as though she were face to face with a stranger, a new friend.
“It is I,” she said to herself, “it is I, in that glass. How strange it is to see oneself. We should never recognise ourselves, if we had no mirrors. Everyone else would know what we looked like, but we should have no idea of it.”
She took the thick plaits of her hair and laid them across her breast, gazing at her own gestures, her poses and movements.
“How pretty I am!” she thought. “Tomorrow I shall be dead, there, lying on my bed.”
She looked at her bed, and imagined that she saw herself lying on it, white as the sheets.
Dead! In a week that face, those eyes, those cheeks, would be nothing but black rottenness, shut up in a box underground.
A frightful spasm of anguish constricted her heart.
The clear sunlight flooded the landscape, and the sweet morning air came in at the window.
She sat down and thought. Dead—it was as though the world was disappearing for her sake; and yet it was not like that, for nothing in the world would change, not even her room. Yes, her room would stay just the same, with the same bed, the same chairs, the same dressing-table, but she would be gone forever, and no one would be sorry, except perhaps her mother.
People would say: “How pretty she was, little Yvette!” and that was all. And when she looked at her hand resting on the arm of her chair, she thought again of the rottenness, the black and evil-smelling corruption that her flesh would become. And again a long shudder of horror ran through her whole body, and she could not understand how she could disappear without the whole world coming to an end, so strong was her feeling that she herself was part of everything, of the country, of the air, of the sun, of life.
A burst of laughter came from the garden, a clamour of voices, shouts, the noisy merriment of a country-house party just beginning, and she recognised the sonorous voice of Monsieur de Belvigne, singing:
“Je suis sous ta fenêtre,
Ah! daigne enfin paraître.”
She rose without thinking and went to look out. Everyone clapped. They were all there, all five of them, with two other gentlemen she did not know.
She drew back swiftly, torn by the thought that these men had come to enjoy themselves in her mother’s house, in the house of a courtesan.
The bell rang for lunch.
“I will show them how to die,” she told herself.
She walked downstairs with a firm step, with something of the resolution of a Christian martyr entering the arena where the lions awaited her.
She shook hands with them, smiling pleasantly but a little haughtily. Servigny asked her:
“Are you less grumpy today, Mam’zelle?”
“Today,” she replied in a strange, grave voice, “I am for the wildest pleasures. I’m in my Paris mood. Take care.” Then, turning to Monsieur de Belvigne: “You shall be my pet today, my little Malvoisie. After lunch I’m taking you all to the fair at Marly.”
Marly fair was indeed in full swing. The two newcomers were presented to her, the Comte Tamine and the Marquis de Boiquetot.
During the meal she hardly spoke, bending every effort of will to her resolve to make merry all that afternoon, so that none might guess, so that there should be all the more surprise; they would say: “Who would have thought it? She seemed so gay, so happy! One can never tell what is going on in their heads!”
She forced herself not to think of the evening, the hour she had chosen, when they would all be on the veranda.
She drank as much wine as she could get down, to sharpen her courage, and took two small glasses of brandy; when she left the table she was flushed and a little giddy; she felt herself warmed in body and spirit, her courage high, ready for adventure.
“Off we go!” she cried.
She took Monsieur de Belvigne’s arm, and arranged the order of the rest.
“Come along, you shall be my regiment. Servigny, I appoint you sergeant; you must march on the right, outside the ranks. You must make the Foreign Legion march in front, our two aliens, the prince and the chevalier, and behind them the two recruits who have joined the colours today. Quick march!”
They went off, Servigny playing an imaginary bugle, and the two new arrivals pretending to play the drum. Monsieur de Belvigne, somewhat embarrassed, said to Yvette:
“Do be a little reasonable, Mademoiselle Yvette. You’ll get yourself talked about.”
“It’s you I’m compromising, Raisiné,” she replied. “As for myself, I don’t care a rap. It will be all the same tomorrow. So much the worse for you; you shouldn’t go about with girls like me.”
They went through Bougival, to the amazement of the people in the streets. Everyone turned round and stared; the local inhabitants came to their doors; the travellers on the little railway which runs from Rueil to Marly yelled at them; the men standing on the platforms shouted:
“To the river! … To the river! …”
Yvette marched with a military step, holding Servigny by the arm, as if she were leading a prisoner. She was far from laughter; she wore an air of pale gravity, a sort of sinister immobility. Servigny interrupted his bugle solo in order to shout orders. The prince and the chevalier were enjoying themselves hugely, judging it all vastly diverting and very witty. The two recruits steadily played the drum.
On their arrival at the fairground they caused quite a sensation. The girls clapped, all the young folk giggled; a fat man arm in arm with his wife said to her enviously:
“They’re enjoying life, they are.”
Yvette caught sight of a merry-go-round, and made De Belvigne mount a wooden horse on her right, while the rest of the squad clambered on to horses behind them. When their turn was over she refused to get off, making her escort remain upon the back of her childish steed for five turns running. The delighted crowd flung witticisms at them. Monsieur de Belvigne was very white when he got off, and felt sick.
Then she began careering through the stalls. She made each of the men get weighed before the eyes of a large crowd. She made them buy absurd toys, which they had to carry in their arms. The prince and the chevalier very soon had more than enough of the jest; Servigny and the two drummers alone kept up their spirits.
At last they reached the far end, and she looked at her followers with a curious expression, a glint of malice and perversity in her eyes. A strange fancy came into her head; she made them all stand in a row on the right bank overlooking the river, and said:
“Let him who loves me most throw himself into the water.”
No one jumped. A crowd had formed behind them; women in white aprons gaped at them, and two soldiers in red breeches laughed stupidly.
“Then not one of you is ready to throw himself into the water at my request?” she repeated.
“So much the worse, damn it,” murmured Servigny, and leapt, upright, into the river.
His fall flung drops of water right up to Yvette’s feet. A murmur of surprise and amusement ran through the crowd. Then the young girl bent down, picked up a little piece of wood, and threw it into the river, crying: “Fetch it.”
The young man began to swim, and seizing the floating stick in his mouth, like a dog, he brought it to land, clambered up the bank, dropped on one knee, and offered it to her.
“Good dog,” she said, taking it, and patting his head.
“How can they do it?” cried a stout lady, vastly indignant.
“Nice goings-on,” said another.
“Damned if I’d take a ducking for any wench,” said a man.
She took Belvigne’s arm again, with the cutting remark: “You’re a noodle; you don’t know what you’ve missed.”
As they went home she threw resentful glances at the passersby.
“How stupid they all look,” she observed; then, raising her eyes to her companion’s face, added: “And you too, for the matter of that.”
Monsieur de Belvigne bowed. Turning round, she saw that the prince and the chevalier had disappeared. Servigny, wretched and soaked to the skin, was no longer playing the bugle, but walked with a melancholy air beside the two tired young men, who were not playing the drum now.
She began to laugh dryly.
“You seem to have had enough. That’s what you call fun, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve come here for. I’ve given you your money’s worth.”
She walked on without another word, and suddenly De Belvigne saw that she was crying.
“What’s the matter?” he asked in alarm.
“Leave me alone,” she murmured. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
But he insisted foolishly: “Now, now, Mademoiselle, what is the matter with you? Has anybody hurt you?”
“Be quiet,” she said irritably.
Abruptly, unable to withstand the terrible sorrow flooding her heart, she broke into such a violent fit of sobbing that she could not walk any further. She covered her face with her hands, and gasped for breath, choking, strangled, stifled by the violence of her despair.
Belvigne stood helplessly beside her, repeating:
“I don’t understand at all.”
But Servigny rushed towards her. “Come along home, Mam’zelle, or they’ll see you crying in the street. Why do you do these silly things, if they make you so unhappy?”
He led her forward, holding her arm. But as soon as they reached the gate of the villa she ran across the garden and up to her room, and locked herself in.
She did not reappear until dinnertime; she was pale and very grave. All the rest were gay enough, however. Servigny had bought a suit of workman’s clothes in the neighbourhood, corduroy trousers, a flowered shirt, a jersey, and a smock, and was talking like a peasant.
Yvette was in a fever for the ending of the meal, feeling her courage ebbing. As soon as coffee was over she went again to her room. She heard laughing voices under her window. The chevalier was telling jokes, foreign witticisms and puns, crude and not very savoury. She listened in despair. Servigny, slightly drunk, was imitating a tipsy workman, and was addressing the Marquise as “Mrs. Obardi.” Suddenly he said to Saval: “Hullo, Mr. Obardi.” Everyone laughed.
Then Yvette made up her mind. First she took a sheet of her notepaper and wrote:
“Bougival, Sunday, 9 p.m.
“I die so that I may not become a kept woman.
Then a postscript:
“Goodbye, mother dear. Forgive me.”
She sealed up the envelope, and addressed it to Madame la Marquise Obardi.
Then she moved her armchair up to the window, set a little table within reach of her hand, and placed upon it the large bottle of chloroform, with a handful of cotton wool beside it.
An immense rose-tree in full bloom, planted near the veranda and reaching right up to her window, filled the night with little gusts of faint, sweet fragrance; for some moments she sat breathing in the perfumed air. The crescent moon swung in the dark sky, its left side gnawed away, and veiled now and again with small clouds.
“I’m going to die,” thought Yvette. “I’m going to die!” Her heart, swollen with sobs, bursting with grief, choked her. She longed to cry for mercy, to be reprieved, to be loved.
Servigny’s voice came up to her; he was telling a shady story, constantly interrupted by bursts of laughter. The Marquise seemed more amused than any of them; she repeated gaily: “No one can tell a story like that as well as he can.”
Yvette took the bottle, uncorked it, and poured a little of the liquid on to the cotton wool. It had a queer, pungent, sweet smell, and as she lifted the pad of cotton wool to her lips, she swallowed the strong, irritating flavour of it, and it made her cough.
Then, closing her mouth, she began to breathe it in. She took long draughts of the deadly vapour, shutting her eyes, and compelling herself to deaden every impulse of her mind, so that she would no longer think nor realise what she was doing.
At first she felt as though her heart were swelling and growing, as though her spirit, just now heavy and burdened with sorrow, were growing light, as light as if the weight oppressing it had been raised, lessened, removed.
A lively and pleasant sensation filled her whole body, penetrating to the tips of her fingers and toes, entering into her flesh, a hazy drunkenness, a happy delirium.
She saw that the cotton wool was dry, and was surprised that she was not yet dead. Her senses were sharpened, intensified and more alert. She heard every word uttered on the veranda. Prince Kravalow was relating how he had killed an Austrian general in a duel.
Far away, in the heart of the country, she heard the noises of the night; the intermittent barking of a dog, the short croak of toads, the faint shiver of the leaves.
She took up the bottle, soaked the little piece of cotton wool, and began again to breathe it in. For some moments she felt nothing; then the languid, delightful, secure contentment that she had felt at first took hold of her once more.
Twice she poured out more chloroform, greedy now of the physical and mental sensation, the drowsy languor in which her senses were drowning. She felt as though she no longer had bones or flesh or arms or legs. All had been gently taken from her, and she had felt nothing. The chloroform had drained away her body, leaving nothing but her brain, wider, freer, more lively, more alert than she had ever felt it before.
She remembered a thousand things she had forgotten, little details of her childhood, trifles which gave her pleasure. Her mind, suddenly endowed with an agility hitherto unknown to it, leapt from one strange idea to another, ran through a thousand adventures, wandered at random in the past, and rambled through hopes of the future. This rapid, careless process of thought filled her with a sensual delight; she enjoyed a divine happiness in her dreams.
She still heard the voices, but could no longer distinguish the words, which seemed to her to take on another sense. She sank down and down, wandering in a strange and shifting fairyland.
She was on a large boat which glided beside a very pleasant country filled with flowers. She saw people on the banks, and these people were talking very loudly, and then she found herself on land again, without wondering how she got there, and Servigny, dressed like a prince, came to take her to a bullfight. The streets were full of people talking, and she listened to their conversations, which did not in the least surprise her, but were as though she had always known them; for through her dreamy intoxication she still heard her mother’s friends laughing and chatting on the veranda.
Then all grew dim.
Then she awoke, deliciously sleepy, and had some difficulty in recalling herself to consciousness.
So she was not dead yet.
But she felt so rested, and in such comfort and in such peace of mind, that she was in no hurry to finish the affair. She would have liked this glorious languor to last forever.
She breathed slowly, and looked at the moon facing her above the trees. Something in her soul was changed. Her thoughts were no longer those of a short while ago. The chloroform, soothing her body and mind, had assuaged her grief, and put to sleep her will to die.
Why not live? Why should she not be loved? Why should she not live happily? Everything now seemed possible, easy, sure. Everything in life was sweet, was good and charming. But because she wished to go on dreaming forever, she poured more of this dream-water on to the cotton wool, and again began to breathe it in, occasionally removing the poison from her nostrils, so that she would not take too much, so that she would not die.
She looked at the moon, and saw a face in it, a woman’s face. She began once more to roam about the country, adrift in the hazy visions of an opium dream. The face hung in the centre of the sky; then it began to sing; in a well-known voice it sang the “Alleluia d’Amour.” It was the Marquise, who had just gone indoors to play the piano.
Yvette had wings now. She was flying through the night, a beautiful clear night, over woods and rivers. She flew with vast delight, opening and beating her wings, wafted by the wind as by a caressing touch. She whirled through the air, which kissed her skin, and glided along so fast, so fast, that she had no time to see anything below her, and she found herself sitting beside a pond, with a line in her hand—she was fishing.
Something tugged at the line; she pulled it in and brought up the magnificent pearl necklace she had once desired. She was not in the least astonished at the catch, and looked at Servigny, who had appeared beside her, though she did not know how, and was fishing too; he was just landing a wooden roundabout horse.
Then once again she felt that she was waking, and heard them calling to her from below.
Her mother had said: “Blow out the candle.”
Then Servigny’s voice, clear and humorous: “Mam’zelle Yvette, blow out your candle.”
They all took up the cry in chorus.
“Mam’zelle Yvette, blow out your candle.”
Again she poured chloroform on to the cotton wool, but, as she did not want to die, she kept it at some distance from her face, so that she could breathe the fresh air while filling her room with the asphyxiating odour of the narcotic, for she knew that someone would come upstairs. So she arranged herself in a charming attitude of abandonment, a mimicking of the abandon of death, and waited.
“I’m a little uneasy,” said the Marquise. “The foolish child has gone to sleep leaving the candle alight on the table. I’ll send Clémence up to blow it out and to shut her balcony window, which she has left wide open.”
In a few moments the maid knocked at the door and called:
“Mademoiselle, mademoiselle!”
After an interval of silence she began again: “Mademoiselle, Madame la Marquise says please will you blow out your candle and shut the window.”
Again she waited, then knocked more loudly and called:
“Mademoiselle, mademoiselle!”
As Yvette did not answer, the servant departed and told the Marquise:
“Mademoiselle has certainly gone to sleep; her door is bolted and I can’t wake her.”
“But surely she won’t go on sleeping like that?” murmured Madame Obardi.
On Servigny’s advice they all assembled under the young girl’s window and shouted in chorus:
“Hip-Hip-Hurrah—Mam’zelle Yvette!”
The cry rang out in the still night, piercing the clear moonlit air, and died away in the sleeping countryside; they heard it fade away like the noise of a train that has gone by.
As Yvette did not reply, the Marquise said:
“I hope nothing’s the matter with her; I’m beginning to be alarmed.”
Then Servigny snatched the red roses and the still unopened buds from the big rose-tree that grew up the wall, and began to hurl them through the window into her room. At the first which struck her, Yvette started and nearly cried out. Some fell on her dress, some in her hair, others flew over her head and landed on the bed, covering it with a rain of flowers.
Once more the Marquise cried in a choking voice:
“Come, Yvette, answer!”
“Really, it’s not normal,” declared Servigny. “I’ll climb up by the balcony.”
But the chevalier was indignant.
“Pardon me, pardon me, but that’s too much of a favour, I protest; it’s too good a way—and too good a time—for making a rendezvous!”
And all the others, thinking that the young girl was playing a trick on them, cried out:
“We protest. It’s a put-up affair. He shan’t go up, he shan’t go up.”
But the Marquise repeated in her agitation:
“Someone must go and see.”
“She favours the duke; we are betrayed,” declared the prince, with a dramatic gesture.
“Let’s toss for the honour,” suggested the chevalier, and took a gold hundred-franc piece from his pocket.
He began with the prince. “Tails,” he called. It was heads. The prince in his turn threw the coin, saying to Saval:
“Call, please.”
“Heads,” called Saval.
It was tails.
The prince proceeded to put the same question to all the others. All lost. Servigny, who alone remained facing him, drawled insolently:
“Damn it, he’s cheating!”
The Russian placed his hand on his heart and offered the gold coin to his rival, saying:
“Spin it yourself, my dear duke.”
Servigny took it and tossed it, calling: “Heads!”
It was tails. He bowed, and pointed to the pillar of the balcony.
“Up you go, prince,” he said.
But the prince was looking about him with a troubled air.
“What are you looking for?” asked the chevalier.
“I … I should like a … a ladder.”
There was a general roar of laughter, and Saval came forward, saying: “We’ll help you.”
He lifted the man in his Herculean arms, with the advice: “Hold on to the balcony.”
The prince promptly caught hold of it and, Saval letting go, he remained suspended, waving his legs. Servigny caught hold of the wildly struggling limbs that were groping for a foothold, and tugged at them with all his strength; the hands loosed their grip and the prince fell like a log on to the stomach of Monsieur de Belvigne, who was hurrying forward to help support him.
“Whose turn now?” asked Servigny, but no one offered.
“Come on, Belvigne, a little courage.”
“No, thank you, my boy. I’d sooner keep my bones whole.”
“Well, you, then, chevalier? You should be used to scaling fortresses.”
“I leave it to you, my dear duke.”
“Well … well … I don’t know that I’m so keen on it as all that.” And Servigny walked round the pillar with a scrutinising eye. Then he leapt, caught hold of the balcony, hauled himself up like a gymnast on the horizontal bar, and clambered over the rail.
All the spectators applauded, with uplifted faces. But he reappeared directly, crying: “Come at once! Quickly! Yvette’s unconscious!”
The Marquise screamed loudly and dashed up the stairs.
The young girl, her eyes closed, lay like one dead. Her mother rushed wildly into the room and threw herself upon her.
“What is it? Tell me, what is it?” she asked.
Servigny picked up the bottle of chloroform which had fallen on the floor. “She’s suffocated herself,” he said. He set his ear to her heart, then added: “But she’s not dead; we’ll soon bring her round. Have you any ammonia here?”
“Any what … any what … sir?” said the distracted maid.
“Any sal volatile?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fetch it at once, and leave the door open, to make a draught.”
The Marquise had fallen upon her knees and was sobbing. “Yvette! Yvette! My child, my little girl, my child, listen, answer me, Yvette! My child! Oh! my God, my God, what is the matter with her?”
The frightened men wandered aimlessly about the room, bringing water, towels, glasses, and vinegar.
Someone said: “She ought to be undressed.”
The Marquise, who was almost out of her wits, tried to undress her daughter, but she no longer knew what she was doing. Her trembling hands fumbled uselessly at the clothing, and she moaned: “I … I … I can’t, I can’t.”
The maid had returned with a medicine bottle; Servigny uncorked it and poured out half of its contents on to a handkerchief. He thrust it under Yvette’s nose, and she began to choke.
“Good; she’s breathing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
He bathed her temples, her cheeks, and her neck with the strong-smelling liquid. Then he signed to the maid to unlace the young girl, and when nothing but a petticoat was left over her chemise, he took her in his arms and carried her to the bed; he was shaken, his senses maddened by the fragrance of her half-naked body, by the touch of her flesh, and the softness of the half-seen breasts on which he pressed his lips.
When she was in bed he rose to his feet, very pale.
“She’s coming to,” he said; “it’s nothing,” for he had heard that her breathing was continuous and regular. But seeing the men’s eyes fixed upon Yvette stretched across the bed, a spasm of jealous fury seized him. He went up to them, saying:
“Gentlemen, there are too many of us in this room. Be good enough to leave Monsieur Saval and myself alone with the Marquise.”
His voice was sharp and authoritative. The other men left at once.
Madame Obardi had seized her lover in her arms and, with her face raised to his, was crying:
“Save her! … Oh, save her!”
But Servigny, who had turned round, saw a letter on the table. With a swift movement he picked it up and read the address. He guessed the whole affair at once and thought: “Perhaps the Marquise had better not know about this.” And tearing open the envelope, he read at a glance the two lines which it contained:
I die so that I may not become a kept woman.
“Deuce take it,” he said to himself. “This needs thinking over”; and he hid the letter in his pocket. He returned to the bedside, and at once the thought came to him that the young girl had regained consciousness, but dared not show it, out of shame, humiliation, and a dread of being questioned.
The Marquise had fallen on her knees and was weeping, her head resting on the foot of the bed. Suddenly she exclaimed:
“A doctor! We must have a doctor!”
But Servigny, who had been whispering to Saval, said to her:
“No, it’s all right now. Just go out for a minute and I promise you that she’ll be ready to kiss you when you come back.”
The baron took Madame Obardi’s arm and led her away. Servigny sat down beside the bed and took Yvette’s hand.
“Listen to me, Mam’zelle,” he said.
She did not answer. She felt so happy, so comfortable, so cosy and warm that she would have liked never to move or speak again, but to live on in this state. A sense of infinite well-being possessed her, like no sensation she had ever known. The warm night air drifted into the room in a gentle, caressing breeze, and from time to time its faint breath blew sweetly across her face. It was a caress, the wind’s kiss, the soft refreshing breath of a fan made of all the leaves in the wood, all the shadows of the night, all the mists of the river, and all the flowers, for the roses strewn upon the floor and the bed, and the rose-tree that clung to the balcony, mingled their languid fragrance with the healthy tang of the night breeze.
She drank in the good air, her eyes closed, her senses still half adrift in the intoxication of the drug; she no longer felt a wish to die, but a strong, imperious desire to live, to be happy, no matter how, to be loved, yes, loved.
“Mam’zelle Yvette, listen to me,” repeated Servigny.
She decided to open her eyes. Seeing her thus revived, he went on:
“Come now, what’s all this foolishness?”
“I was so unhappy, Muscade,” she murmured.
He gave her hand a benevolent squeeze.
“Well, this has been a deuce of a lot of use to you, now, hasn’t it? Now promise me not to try again.”
She did not answer, but made a little movement of her head, and emphasised it with a smile that he felt rather than saw.
He took from his pocket the letter he had found on the table.
“Am I to show this to your mother?” he asked.
“No,” she signed with a movement of her head.
He did not know what more to say, for there seemed no way out of the situation.
“My dear little girl,” he murmured, “we must all accept our share of things, however sad. I understand your grief, and I promise …”
“You’re so kind …” she stammered.
They were silent. He looked at her. There was tenderness and surrender in her glance, and suddenly she raised her arms, as if she wished to draw him to her. He bent over her, feeling that she was calling him, and their lips met.
For a long time they stayed thus with closed eyes. But he, realising that he was on the point of losing control, raised his head and stood up. She was smiling at him now with real tenderness, and, gripping his shoulders with both hands, she tried to hold him back.
“I’m going to fetch your mother,” he said.
“One more second,” she murmured. “I’m so happy.”
Then, after a brief interval of silence, she said very softly, so softly that he hardly heard her:
“You will love me very much, won’t you?”
He knelt down by the bedside and kissed her wrist, which she held out to him.
“I adore you.”
But there were footsteps at the door. He sprang up and cried in his ordinary voice, with its faint note of irony:
“You can come in. It’s all over now.”
The Marquise flung herself upon her daughter with open arms, and embraced her frantically, covering her face with tears. Servigny, his heart full of joy and his body on fire with love, stepped out on to the balcony to breathe deeply of the cool night air, humming:
“Souvent femme varie;
Bien fol est qui s’y fie.”20