Costals did not telephone. The express letter had made him furious. The mere sight of Andrée's handwriting exasperated him. 'She means nothing to me. I owe her nothing. I've put myself out for her dozens of times. I take her out to dinner and then on top of that I give up two and a half hours of my life to her - yes, two and a half hours! I rack my brains trying to find a way out of the ridiculous position she has put me in without hurting her feelings. And now she comes back at me with express letters, tearful letters. So I'm expected to see her three hours running every other day! Well, this time, no.' At noon, he sent her a telegram saying he had to leave for Besançon to see a sick uncle, and would write to her on his return.
Andrée sat and waited in her room on the sixth floor of her squalid hotel (she had asked the prices of six hotels before deciding on this one), with its draughty windows, its stinking bedside table, the drawer in which she had found some old bits of soiled cotton-wool. Sitting on the only chair beside a meagre wood fire, her overcoat round her shoulders, she thought she could never have experienced such an agony of distress. Oh, God! if only she knew what was in his mind! She guessed that she must have irritated him by writing, but it would have been impossible for her not to write. Her mind swung back and forth like a pair of maladjusted scales. One moment she thought of them Walking, walking like lost souls along those lugubrious avenues in the frightful cold, and his every word seemed like a knife twisted in a wound. The next moment she was at the other extreme, exaggerating and inventing as she went along: 'Those minutes will have been the only happy minutes of my life. Even when he teased me, he was so kind, so tender and serious, perhaps unwittingly. He was unhappy about not having any children, he wanted to confide in me, seemed to be looking for sympathy. How touching he was when he talked about his mother! Has he ever spoken to another woman about his mother?' Just as she imagined that Costals had been confiding in her, when he had merely been thinking aloud, no more and no less than when he prostituted himself to fifty thousand readers, in the same way she genuinely believed that, because she had held his hand for rather a long time when they shook hands on meeting, it was he who had held hers. She could still hear the clatter of 'his German officer's footsteps' on the asphalt; she could still see him listening to her with 'the imperceptible smile of the gods' on his lips. The idea that he had contemplated marrying her - even in a moment of aberration - seemed to her less probable than the day before, and yet: 'I know I'm unworthy of such luck; I realize all that divides us, if only from the social point of view; I'm neither crazy nor romantic. So there must have been something for this eventuality, which I had never, never dreamed of, to have suddenly seemed plausible.' She even reached the point of wanting passionately to walk with him again one evening through those gloomy avenues, to walk and walk until she had to beg for mercy; and what had seemed to her 'frightful' and 'lugubrious' a moment before was what she now pinned all her hopes on.
At half past eleven she went down to the reception to wait for the telephone call, her eyes glued to her wrist-watch. Nothing happened. At one o'clock she returned to her room, incapable of lunching, and went on waiting. She was in Paris for only a month, and yet she was waiting for the time to go by! At two o'clock she received Costals' message, and sensed that he was lying. She went round to the avenue Henri- Martin, and inquired of the concierge: 'Is M. Costals in Paris?' 'Yes, Mademoiselle.' But upstairs the servant told her: 'M. Costals is in Besançon.'
Next morning she went back to the avenue Henri-Martin. She had no doubt that he was there, but could not bear not to know. She needed a verdict one way or the other, however unpleasant, to rest upon a certainty, or die upon it.
'Is M. Costals back?'
'No, Mademoiselle. We don't know when he'll be back.'
She went away and wandered around, unable to bring herself to leave the neighbourhood, looking everywhere for Costals, wallowing in the bitter thought that he and she were both in Paris and the days were flowing by in an emptiness no different from Saint-Léonard. And soon she would have to return to Saint-Léonard, return without a ray of hope to a hell of loneliness and despair. Her peregrinations (no question about it, she was born to tramp the streets!) were aimed not so much at meeting Costals as at providing her with a sort of opiate: sitting idly in her hotel room she might have had a fit of hysterics. She went into a church, the name of which she did not know, and spent an hour there, half frozen, repeating to herself: 'Oh, no, God cannot make one suffer more than a man can.' She wrote this sentence on a piece of paper she found in her bag, bought a cheap envelope, slipped it inside it and took it round to Costals' concierge.
She paced up and down outside the house for an hour, just as, when she happened to be in Paris and Costals was away, she used to pass underneath his windows nearly every night to see if they were lit up. She went pale when she saw a man whom she took for him. She caught sight of herself in a shop window, and was horrified by her ugliness: 'My God, what have you done to me? Who is this stranger?' (she had not thought of God when she was in the church). She met a woman selling violets and bought a bunch - 'I shall be more generous than he' - and going back to Costals' house, laid them on the floor of the landing against the door of his flat. Out in the street again she realized, too late, that her gesture would only do her harm, that the servant would find the flowers and make fun of her. She thought of going up to take them back, but it would be the fifth time the concierge had seen her in two days.... She dared not.
At nightfall, frozen stiff, she made her way to the underground. But oh! the temptation to take a taxi. She would have done so for a short trip. But her hotel was so far that it would cost her at least twelve francs. It was typical of her, this habit of stopping short amid the storms of her emotional life to tot up money. In the underground, people stared at her: people wear their sadness as they do a garment. She felt full of compassion, all kindness, weakness and abandon; she offered her seat (an unconscious reflex action, for she could see nothing) to an old man who was standing. She changed trains in a state of utter bewilderment, horrified by the labyrinthine passages, the rush for the automatic gates which shut in your face, those automatic gates that corral people like animals, as though they were a herd of pigs being sorted out by machines in an American factory. And she thought she was going to faint when she finally got off, what with her utter exhaustion, the nervous tension, her sleepless night, and no lunch. It seemed to her that only the strength of her heartbeats sustained her. Her eyelids were aching. All her anguish and distress seemed to be concentrated in this pain in her eyeballs. She went into a bar and ordered a coffee, despite her fear of being taken for a whore. There was a crowd of workmen at the counter. She had to stand behind them, stretching her arm between two men to reach her glass. But she felt that, without the coffee, she could not have stood up a moment longer. Suddenly one of the workmen smiled at her, and his smile eased her pain. But it only lasted a moment; outside, the pain welled up again.
Back at the hotel, she noticed that a forty-franc bottle of scent had been stolen from her room. During the last few days this scent had been her only consolation: she had sniffed it when she was feeling particularly tormented. She also learned from the waiter that she was being charged three francs a day more for her room than other guests had to pay for it (because of her smart appearance, of course!). She attracted blow after blow, like a wounded hen being pecked by the whole poultry-yard.
She would cheerfully have spent hundreds of francs in a single day if she had been happy. When she was unhappy, the thought of money spent - or wasted - gnawed at her, and there were moments when she told herself that she must leave Paris simply in order to stop the leakage.
She wept.... Tears of uncertainty - it was too stupid. After all, it would be time enough to shed them when it all came to an end. She began to think that he was putting her to the test, teasing her rather cruelly, in order to dazzle her the more with joy for all the suffering he had inflicted on her. She applied to him the remark made about M. de
Chavigny in Musset's Un Caprice: 'He is mischievous, but he is not bad.' In the end she drew some consolation from her suffering, telling herself that it was a decisive test, that she now knew better than ever how much she loved this man, and what the quality of her love was, since she could put up with his behaviour in this way. For all her horrible doubts about him, she had never felt a moment's anger or resentment. She loved him just as much, but simply did not understand. She also told herself: 'Anything that happens to me now will be paradise after all this.' In spite of the grinding neuralgia which had not left her for two days and upon which all the pills in the world had failed to make an impression, she settled down to write him a long letter, scribbling, scribbling away across the calm paper. But the ceiling light was too high and too dim, and she had to give up.
Next morning, at a quarter to eight, Costals heard a ring at the door of his flat. His servant did not come down until eight o'clock, and anyhow had a key. Costals went from the bathroom into the hall with the lather still on his cheeks.
'What is it?' he asked through the door.
'It's me.'
'Who's "me"?'
'Andrée.'
'Andrée? Andrée who?'
He knew only too well. But he wanted to punish her. Ringing at his door at a quarter to eight! And that note: 'God cannot make one suffer more than a man can'! And those flowers on his doorstep, as though it were a tombstone! Enough to cover him with ridicule in the eyes of all the tenants! He had thrown them in the dustbin at once, after crushing them in his rage.
'Andrée Hacquebaut.'
'I can't let you in. I got back last night. But I haven't shaved.'
'What difference does that make? Let me in, please.' 'You must say "for the love of God".'
'For the love of God!'
'I'd be delighted to let you in. Only I'm stark naked.'
'You refuse to see me?'
'At this moment, yes.'
'Is that your last word?'
'Please don't insist.'
'All right. I shall take the eight fifty-six train to Saint- Léonard. You'll have nothing more to fear from me.'
'No, no. I'll telephone you at noon.'
'Yes, just like the other day! Good-bye!'
He heard her footsteps receding. After a while he half-opened the door. He wondered whether he might not find her still there, crouching on the stairs. There was no one. But in front of the door were the fresh imprints of her wet shoes, going in every direction, as though a hunted beast had trampled there.
At eleven o'clock he heaved a sigh and telephoned the hotel. He was told that she had paid her bill and left.
At first he was profoundly relieved. Then he felt remorse. She was to have spent a month in Paris, and it was going to be such a treat for her! As a novelist he was too accustomed to putting himself in other people's skins not to realize how much she must have suffered, and he was moved by it. He wrote to her:
Dear Mademoiselle,
Your sudden departure has left me puzzled. I cannot for a moment believe that it was due to my not receiving you at half past seven in the morning. Once, my mother refused to let me into her room. Being a sensitive child, I was upset and wondered in what way I could have incurred her displeasure. When she came home that evening, she called me in, kissed me, treated me exactly as usual, but refused to explain why her door had been closed to me that morning. Years later she confessed to me: she had run out of face-powder, and did not want me to see her without any powder on. And I was fourteen! When she was about to die, she gave orders that I was not to be allowed into her room after she was dead until they had bandaged her chin ... Well, I'm her son. You accuse me of not being vain enough: and yet, in certain respects, I'm terribly punctilious. This morning, for example, even if you had been in flames on the landing as a result of some heater exploding or God knows what, I probably wouldn't have gone to your help because I hadn't shaved. The fact that I was naked had nothing to do with it, mind you. No doubt you know how men are made: you must have seen statues. And besides, I was dressed.
Your absurd departure has deprived me of the pleasure of taking you to the Monet exhibition, as I had planned. I was so looking forward to it.
Cordially yours.
How very like him Andrée found this letter! Kindliness, jokes, and even a touch of impropriety, which she smiled at without being disturbed by it. And again the allusions to his mother, which she found so moving . . . But she did not regret having returned to Saint-Léonard. She had a feeling that, had she stayed in Paris, he would have continued to make her suffer. Whereas this friendly letter mysteriously - yes, really unaccountably - dissolved her pain. Full, as always, of Costals' books, she remembered a saying in one of them: 'Absence brings people closer.' Why did he understand everything so well in his books and pretend not to understand in life?
One morning, some days after this scene, Costals was in Cannes. The sea could be seen from the villa, still grey after the riotous winter storms. The novelist was reading Malebranche - La Recherche de la Vérité.
From the next room came the sound of a clear young voice singing to itself. Costals raised his head. When he heard his son singing in the house, he felt as though the house were flying through the air. Sometimes both father and son would sing, each on a different floor. He listened for a while, then could not resist any longer and made his way to the child's room.
As soon as he opened the door the voice stopped. The boy pretended to be asleep. Costals was familiar with this trick. As with all boys of his age (he would be fourteen in three months' time), Philippe's jokes and gags, though they did not last long, and were buried forever from one day to the next, were persistent while they did last. Even if he had not heard him singing, Costals would have known that his son was not asleep: his face was dry, and he always perspired in his sleep.
'Open your eyes, donkey, or I'll drop my cigarette ash on your face.'
Costals sat down on the bed ... and jumped up again. He turned back the sheet and found a foil. Philippe had discovered fencing a fortnight before and, still in the first flush of this discovery, took his foil to bed with him - as Cardinal de Maillé, newly promoted to the Sacred College, slept with his red hat, according to Saint-Simon.
Sitting down again, Costals took his son's hands, never quite clean, with their long, delicate fingers (Les jeunes garçons aux mains larges et limpides, he had written one day when he had a penchant for alexandrines), and kissed them. The boy had a tanned face and straight black hair. On the front of his pyjamas the stains of breakfast chocolate were proudly displayed. He was still pretending to be asleep. One could see at once that if he had no wings it was because he had wished it so (but what about the cloven hoof?). Scattered on the floor around the bed, like gobs of spittle around an Arab, was a large quantity of small change (Philippe insisted on having his pocket money in this form so that he could jingle it in his pocket - 'But why?' - 'To show off, of course!'), a comb (broken), a mirror (broken), a fountain-pen (broken), a wallet, an empty scent bottle - all the things which boys' pockets are eternally stuffed with, and which slip out whenever they lie down. There was also a padlock, for Philippe did not want his rabbits to be killed, and every time the cook brought their food. Master Philippe had to be fetched to open and shut the hutch himself.
Suddenly Philippe seized his father's head, pulled it down, and kissed it. Then he squeezed it violently between his arms, no longer the caressing child but a child who fancies himself as a wrestling champion. There followed a great deal of horseplay, which he liked best of all, being very sensitive to touch. Whenever Costals warned him that he was going to break something, or that he was ruining the pillow, he replied: That's a detail' - it was the catch-phrase of the moment. Finally Philippe pinned down his father's shoulders with his knees (the sheet, by this time, was all over the place), and in that position bent forward and nibbled his nose.
'You've hurt me, you idiot!'
'Cry-baby! Sissy, sissy!' (and he made faces at him).
Eventually the excitement died down. Philippe got back under the sheet and buried himself in Cri-Cri [A boys' magazine of the 1920's (Translator's note).] Costals, stretched out on top of the bed, returned to his Malebranche.
Costals had had this bastard son at the age of twenty-one. The chosen intermediary was a woman who in law was an adulteress so that there could be no question of her having any rights whatever over the child. At the age of six Philippe had been entrusted to the care of an old friend of Costals, Mlle du Peyron de Larchant, a spinster of about fifty, who had all the advantages of maternal love for the brat without any of its grave drawbacks. Although she also loved Costals like a son, she had never been in love with him, and this guaranteed the stability and probity of her affection. Costals had arranged things in this way because it seemed to him disgraceful that anyone but he should have any rights over his son. He was, moreover, convinced of the pernicious influence mothers generally have on children, a view shared by a large number of educationists and moralists, who dare not admit it openly for fear of offending time-honoured conventions, which are always exquisitely chivalrous.
Philippe lived partly in Marseilles, partly in Cannes. Costals spent ten days or so with him every month, being convinced from experience that a highly-strung man cannot love a person with whom he cohabits, or even merely sees every day. The arrangement had worked extremely satisfactorily for fourteen years. Which proves nothing.
The Girls Page 9