Rose looked at him:
“What are you thinking about?”
“Again!” said M. Hervart to himself. “Oh, that eternal feminine question! As if any one ever answered it! Here’s my answer....”
Looking at the clouds, he pronounced:
“I think it’s going to rain.”
“Oh, no!” said Rose, “I don’t think so. The wind is ‘suet’....”
Conscious of having uttered a provincialism, she made haste to add:
“As the country people say.”
“What does it mean?”
“South-east.”
M. Hervart was little interested in dialectal forms; rather spitefully and with the true Parisian’s fatuous vanity, he replied:
“What an ugly word! You ought to say South-east. You’re a regular peasant woman.”
“Laugh away,” said Rose. “I don’t mind, now. We’re all country-people; my father comes from these parts, so does my mother. I wasn’t born here, but I belong to the place. I belong to it as the trees do, as the grass and all the animals. Yes, I am a peasant woman.”
She raised her head proudly.
“I come from here too,” said M. Hervart.
“Yes, and you don’t care for it any longer.”
“I do, because it produced you and because you love it.”
Delighted at the discovery of this insipidity, M. Hervart darted, hat in hand, in pursuit of a butterfly; he missed it.
“They’re not so easy to catch as kisses,” said Rose with a touch of irony.
M. Hervart was startled.
“Is she merely sensual?” he wondered.
But Rose was incapable of dividing her nature into categories. She felt her character as a perfect unity. Her remark had been just a conversational remark, for she was not lacking in wit.
Meanwhile, this mystery plunged M. Hervart into a prolonged meditation. He constructed the most perverse theories about the precocity of girls.
But he was soon ashamed of these mental wanderings.
“Women are complex; not more so, of course, than men, but in a different way which men can’t understand. They don’t understand themselves, and what’s more, they don’t care about understanding. They feel, and that suffices to steer them very satisfactorily through life, as well as to solve problems which leave men utterly helpless. One must act towards them as they do themselves. It’s only through the feelings that one can get into contact with them. There is but one way of understanding women, and that is to love them.... Why shouldn’t I say that aloud? It would amuse her, and perhaps she might find something pretty to say in reply.”
But, without being exactly shy, M. Hervart was nervous about hearing the sound of his own voice. That was why he generally gave vent only to the curtest phrases. Rose had taken his hand once more. This mute language seemed to appeal to her, and M. Hervart was content to put up with it, though he found this exchange of manual confidences a little childish.
“But nothing,” he went on to himself, “nothing is childish in love....”
This word, which he did not pronounce, even to himself, but which he seemed to see, as though his own hand had written it on a sheet of paper this word filled him with terror. He burst out into secret protestations:
“But there’s no question of love. She doesn’t love me. I don’t love her. It’s a mere game. This child has made me a child like herself....”
He wanted to stop thinking, but the process went on of its own accord.
“A dangerous game.... I oughtn’t to have kissed her eyes. Her forehead, that’s a different matter; it’s fatherly.... And then letting her lean on my shoulder, like that! What’s to be done?”
He had to admit that he had been the guilty party. Almost unconsciously, prompted by his mere male instinct, he had, since his arrival a fortnight before, and while still to all appearance, he continued to treat her as a child, been silently courting her. He was always looking at her, smiling to her, even though his words might be serious. Feeling herself the object of an unceasing attention, Rose had concluded that he wanted to capture her, and she had allowed herself to be caught. M. Hervart considered himself too expert in feminine psychology to admit the possibility of a young girl’s having deliberately taken the first step. He felt like an absent-minded sportsman who, forgetting that he has fired, wakes up to find a partridge in his game-bag.
“An agreeable surprise,” he reflected. “Almost too agreeable.”
CHAPTER II
IT HAD ALREADY grown hot. They sat down in the shade, on a tree trunk. Large harmless ants crawled hither and thither on the bark, but M. Hervart seemed to have lost his interest in entomology. Idly, they looked at the busy little creatures, crossing and recrossing one another’s paths.
“Do they know what they’re doing? And do I know what I’m doing? Some sensation guides them. What about me? They run here and there, because they think they’ve seen or smelt some prey. And I? Oh, I should like to run away from my prey. I reason, I deliberate.... Yes, I deliberate, or at least I try.”
He looked up at the girl.
Rose was engaged in pulling foxglove buds off their stems and making them pop in the palm of her hand. Her face was serious. M. Hervart could look at her without distracting her from her dreams.
She made a pretty picture, as she sat there, gentle and, at the same time, wild. Her features, while they still preserved a trace of childishness, were growing marked and definite. She was a woman. How red her mouth was, how voluptuous! M. Hervart caught himself reflecting that that mouth would give most excellent kisses. What a fruit to bite, firm-fleshed and succulent! Rose heaved a sigh, and it was as though a wave had lifted her white dress; all her young bosom had seemed to expand. M. Hervart had a vision of roseate whiteness, soft and living; he desired it as a child desires the peach he sees on the wall hidden under its long leaves. He took the pleasure in this desire that he had sometimes taken in standing before Titian’s Portrait of a Young Lady. The obstacle was as insurmountable: Rose, so far as he was concerned, was an illusion.
“But that makes no difference,” he said to himself, “I have desired her, which isn’t chaste of me. If I had been in love with her, I should not have had that kind of vision. Therefore I am not in love with her. Fortunately!”
Rose was thinking of nothing. She was just letting herself be looked at. Having been examined, she smiled gently, a smile that was faintly tinged with shyness. Flying suddenly to the opposite extreme, she burst out laughing and, holding on with both hands to the knotted trunk, leaned backwards. Her hat fell off her hair came undone. She sat up again, looking wilder than ever. M. Hervart thought that she was going to run away, like Galatea; but there was no willow tree.
“I don’t care,” she said as M. Hervart handed her the hat; “my hair will have to stay down. It’s all right like that. Pins don’t hold on my head.”
“Pins,” said M. Hervart, “pins rarely do hold on women’s heads.”
She smiled without answering and certainly without understanding. She was smiling a great deal this morning, M. Hervart thought.
“But her smile is so sweet that I should never get tired of it. Come now, I’ll tell her that....”
“I love your smile. It’s so sweet that I should never get tired of it.”
“As sweet as that? That’s because it’s so new. I don’t smile much generally.”
It was enough to move any man to the depths of his being. M. Hervart murmured spontaneously:
“I love you, Rose.”
Frankly, and without showing any surprise, she answered:
“So do I, my dear.”
At the same time she shook her skirt on which a number of ants were crawling.
“This sort doesn’t bite,” she said. “They’re nice....”
“Like you.” (What a compliment! How insipid! What a fool I’m making of myself!)
“There’s one on your sleeve,” said Rose. She brushed it off.
“Now say thank
you,” and she presented her cheek, on which M. Hervart printed the most fraternal of kisses.
“It’s incomprehensible,” he thought. “However, I don’t think she’s in love. If she were, she would run away. It is only after the decisive act that love becomes familiar....”
“If we want to go to Cherbourg,” said Rose, “we must have lunch early.”
They moved away; soon they were out of the wood and had entered the hardly less unkempt garden. It was sunny there, and they crossed it quickly. She walked ahead. M. Hervart picked a rose as he went along and presented it to her. Rose took it and picked another, which she gave to M. Hervart, saying:
“This one’s me.”
M. Hervart had to begin pondering again. He was feeling happy, but understood less and less.
“She behaves as though she were in love with me.... She also behaves as though she weren’t. At one moment one would think that I was everything to her. A little later she treats me like a mere friend of the family..... And it’s she who leads me on.... I have never seen that with flirts.... Where can she have learnt it? Women are like the noblemen in Molière’s time: they know everything without having been taught anything at all.”
M. Hervart weighed down in mind, but light of heart, went up to his room, so as to be able to meditate more at ease. First of all he smarted himself up with some care. He plucked from his beard a hair, which, if not quite silver, was certainly very pale gold. He scented his waistcoat and slipped on his finger an elaborately chased ring.
“It may come in useful when conversation begins to flag.”
He was about to begin his meditations, when somebody knocked at the door. Luncheon was ready.
M. Des Boys, despite the disturbance of his plans seemed pleased. A drive, he declared would do him good. He needed an outing; besides he had a right to one.
“I have just finished the ninth panel of my of my life of Sainte Clotilde. It is her entry too the convent of Saint Martin at Tours.”
M. Hervart manifested an interest in this composition, which he had admired the previous evening before it had been given the final touches. He hoped to see it soon in its proper frame, with the other panels in Robinvast church.
“There are going to be twelve in all,” said M. Des Boys.
“People will come and see them as they do the Life of St. Bruno that used to be at the Chartreux and is now in the Louvre.”
“So I hope.”
“But they won’t come quite so much.”
“Yes, Robinvast is rather far. But then who goes to the Louvre? A few artists, a few aimless foreign sightseers. Nobody in France takes an interest in art.”
“Nobody in the world does,” said M. Hervart, “except those who live by it.”
“What about those who die of it?” asked Rose.
Mme. Des Boys looked at her daughter with some surprise:
“I have never heard that painting was a dangerous industry.”
“When one believes in it, it is,” said M. Hervart.
“What, not dangerous?” said M. Des Boys “What about white lead?”
“One must believe,” said Rose, looking at M. Hervart.
“This just shows,” M. Des Boys went on, “what the public’s point of view in this matter is. My wife’s marvellously absurd remark exactly represents their feelings.”
There followed a series of pointless anecdotes on Mme. Des Boys’ habitual absence of mind. M. Hervart very nearly forgot to laugh: he was thinking of what Rose had just said.
“Rose,” said M. Des Boys, “ask Hervart if we weren’t believers when we went around the Louvre. We were in a fever of enthusiasm. Hervart is my pupil; I formed his taste for beauty. Unluckily I left Paris and he has turned out badly. I remain faithful, in spite of everything.”
“But” said M. Hervart, “faithfulness only begins at the moment of discovering one’s real vocation.”
Rose seemed to have given these words a meaning which M. Hervart had not consciously intended they should have. Two eyes, full of an infinite tenderness, rested on his like a caress.
“It’s as though I had made a declaration,” he thought. “I must be mad. But how can one avoid phrases which people go and take as premeditated allusions?”
However, he found the game amusing. It was possible in this way to speak in public and to give utterance to one’s real feelings under cover of the commonplaces of conversation. Rose had given him the example; he had followed her without thinking, but this docility was a serious symptom.
“I am lost. Here I am in process of falling in love.”
But like those drunkards who, feeling the moment of intoxication at hand, desire to control themselves, but must still obey their cravings because they have been so far weakened by the very sensation that now awakens them to a consciousness of their state, M. Hervart, while deciding that he ought to struggle, yielded.
He drank off a whole glass of wine and said:
“It is easy to make a mistake at one’s first entry into life, and to go on making it long after. I am still very fond of art, but I was never meant to do more than pay her visits. We are friends, not a married couple. I have built my house on other foundations; it may be worth much or little, but I live in it faithfully. One can only stick to what one loves. To keep a treasure, you must have found it first.”
He had spoken with passion.
“What eloquence!” said M. Des Boys.
All of a sudden, Rose began to laugh, a laugh so happy, so full of gratitude, that M. Hervart could make no mistake about its meaning.
“You’re being laughed at, my poor friend,” M. Des Boys went on.
At this mistake, Rose’s laughter redoubled. It became gay, childish, uncontrollable.
“This is something,” said Mme. Des Boys, “which will console you, I hope. But what a little demon my daughter is!”
Out of pity for her mother, Rose made an effort to restrain herself. She succeeded after two or three renewed spasms and said, addressing herself to M. Hervart:
“What do you think of the little demon? Are you afraid?”
“More than you think.”
“So am I; I’m afraid of myself.”
“That’s a sensible remark,” said Mme. Des Boys. “Come now, behave.”
The home-made cake being approved of, she began giving the recipe. A meal rarely passed without Mme. Des Boys’ revealing some culinary mystery.
The carriage drove past the windows, and lunch ended almost without further conversation. Rose had become dreamy. M. Hervart’s conclusion was:
“Our affair has made the most terrifying progress in these few seconds.”
CHAPTER III
HE WENT ON with his meditations in the little wagonette which carried them to Couville station. Rose was sitting opposite; their feet, naturally, came into contact.
M. Des Boys, who owned several farms, stopped to examine the state of the crops. In some of the fields the corn had been beaten down. He got up on the box beside the driver to ask him whether it was the same throughout the whole district. He was very disquieted.
M. Hervart stretched out his legs, so that he held the girl’s knees between his own. She smiled. M. Hervart, a little oppressed by his emotions, dared not speak. He took her hand and kissed it.
All of a sudden, Rose exclaimed: “We have forgotten the microscope!”
“So we have! our pretext. What will become of us?”
“But do we need a pretext, now?”
M. Hervart renewed the pressure of his prisoning knees. That was his first answer.
“We’re conspirators, Rose,” he then said. “It’s serious.”
“I hope so.”
“We have been conspirators for a long time.”
“Since this morning, yes.”
She blushed a little.
“From that moment,” M. Hervart went on, “when you said, ‘One must believe.’”
“I said what I thought.”
“It’s what I think too.�
�
“In this way,” he said to himself, “I say what I ought to say without going too far. ‘Oh, if only I dared!”
Meanwhile, he was disturbed by the thought of the microscope.
“I shall buy one,” he said, “and leave it with you. It will be of use to me when I come again.”
“Stop,” said Rose; her voice was low, but its tone was violent. “When you talk of coming again, you’re talking of going away.”
M. Hervart had nothing to answer. He got out of the difficulty by renewing the pressure of his legs.
They reached the little lonely station. The train came in, and a quarter of an hour later they were in Cherbourg.
M. Des Boys at once announced his intention of going to see the museum. He wanted to look at a few masterpieces, he said, so that he might once more compare his own art with that of the great men. M. Hervart protested. For him, a holiday consisted in getting away from museums. Furthermore, he regarded this particular collection, with its list of great names, as being in large part apocryphal.
“If the catalogue of the Louvre is false, as it is, what must the catalogue of the Cherbourg museum be like?” he asked.
M. Des Boys shrugged his shoulders:
“You have lost my esteem.”
And he affirmed the perfect authenticity of the Van Dycks, Van Eycks, Chardins, Poussins, Murillos, Jordaenses, Ribeiras, Fra Angelicos, Cranachs, Pourbuses and Leonardos which adorned the town hall.
“There’s no Raphael,” said M. Hervart, “and there ought to be a Velasquez and a Titian and a Correggio.”
M. Des Boys replied sarcastically:
“There’s a Natural History museum.”
And with a wave of the hand, he disappeared round the corner of a street.
One would think everything in this dreary maritime city had been arranged to disguise the fact that the sea is there. The houses turn their backs on it, and a desert of stones and dust and wind lies between the shores and the town. To discover that Cherbourg is really a seaport, one must climb to the top of the Roule rock. M. Hervart had a desire to scale this pinnacle.
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 323