Indiana (Oxford World's Classics)

by George Sand

  The pen fell from Raymon’s hands. He was horribly tired, he was falling asleep. Nevertheless he read over the letter to assure himself that his ideas had not been influenced by his sleepiness. But he found it impossible to understand what he meant, so much was his mind affected by the exhaustion of his physical strength. He rang for his servant, ordered him to set off for Lagny before daybreak, and slept the deep, precious sleep whose soothing delights are known only to people who are satisfied with themselves. Madame Delmare did not go to bed. She was not conscious of fatigue. She spent the night writing, and when she received Raymon’s letter she replied to it without delay:

  ‘Thank you, Raymon, thank you! You give me strength and life. Now I can face everything bravely, endure everything, for you love me and the hardest tests don’t frighten you. Yes, we’ll see each other again, we’ll face everything. Ralph can do as he likes with our secret. I’m not worrying about anything any more, since you love me. I’m no longer even afraid of my husband.

  ‘You want to know the state of our affairs? . . . I forgot to tell you about them yesterday though they have taken quite an important turn as regards my financial situation. We are ruined. There is talk of selling Lagny; there is even a suggestion that we might go and live in the colonies . . . But what does all that matter? I can’t bring myself to bother about that. I know definitely we’ll never be parted. You have sworn that to me, Raymon. I count on your promise; count on my courage. Nothing will frighten me, nothing will deter me. My place is designated at your side, and death alone will be able to tear me from it.’

  ‘What extravagant feminine emotionalism!’ said Raymon, crumpling the letter. ‘Romantic plans, dangerous enterprises, appeal to their weak imaginations just as bitter food stimulates sick people’s appetites. I’ve succeeded, I’ve regained my power, and as for those imprudent follies she threatens me with, we’ll see! That’s just like those false, frivolous creatures, always ready to undertake the impossible and turning generosity into a show of virtue requiring scandal. To see that letter, who would believe that she rations her kisses and is stingy with her caresses?’

  The same day, he went to Lagny. Ralph was not there. The Colonel received Raymon in a friendly manner and spoke to him in confidence. He took him into the grounds so as to be able to speak more freely, and there he told him that he was completely ruined and that the factory would be up for sale the next day. Raymon offered his help, but Delmare declined it.

  ‘No, my friend,’ he said, ‘I’ve suffered too much from the thought that I owed my lot to Ralph’s kindness; I have been anxious to pay my debt to him. The sale of this property will put me in a position to pay all my debts at once. It’s true I’ll have nothing left. But I have courage, vigour, and business experience; the future is before us. I’ve built up my little fortune once, I can do it again. I must do so for my wife; she is young and I don’t want to leave her in poverty. She still owns a modest dwelling in Bourbon Island. I want to take refuge there and start in business again. In a few years’ time, in ten years at most, I hope we’ll meet again.’

  Raymon pressed the Colonel’s hand, smiling inwardly at seeing his confidence in the future, at hearing him speak of ten years as if it were one day, when his bald head and enfeebled body indicated failing health and a spent life. Nevertheless, he pretended to share his hopes.

  ‘I’m delighted to see that you don’t let yourself be discouraged by these reversals of fortune,’ he said. ‘In that, I recognize your manly heart, your fearless character. But does Madame Delmare show the same courage? Don’t you fear some resistance to your plans for leaving the country?’

  ‘I’m sorry about it,’ the Colonel replied, ‘but women are made to obey and not to give advice. I haven’t yet definitely told Indiana of my decision. Apart from you, my friend, I don’t see that she has much to regret here. And yet, if it’s only from a spirit of contradiction, I foresee tears, nervous attacks . . . The devil take women! Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I count on you, my dear Raymon, to make my wife listen to reason. She trusts you. Use your influence to stop her crying. I loathe tears.’

  Raymon promised to return the next day to tell Madame Delmare her husband’s decision.

  ‘You’re doing me a real service,’ said the Colonel. ‘I’ll take Ralph to the farm so that you’ll be free to talk to her.

  ‘Well, what luck!’ thought Raymon, as he departed.

  XIX

  M. DELMARE’S plans were quite in accord with what Raymon wanted. He foresaw that this love-affair, which, as far as he was concerned, was nearing its end, would soon lead to his being pestered and harassed. He was quite pleased to see events turning out in such a way as to preserve him from the irksome, inevitable consequences of a played-out affair. All that remained for him now was to take advantage of the last moments of Madame Delmare’s emotional excitement and then to leave to his benevolent fate the care of ridding him of her tears and reproaches.

  So he went to Lagny the next day with the intention of bringing the unhappy woman’s enthusiasm to its climax.

  ‘Do you know, Indiana, the task your husband has laid on me with regard to you?’ he said when he arrived. ‘A strange commission, to be sure! I have to beg you to go to Bourbon Island, to plead with you to leave me, to tear out my heart and my life. Do you think he’s made a good choice of advocate?’

  Madame Delmare’s melancholy gravity imposed a kind of respect on Raymon’s wiles.

  ‘Why do you come and talk to me about all this?’ she asked. ‘Are you afraid that I’ll let myself be persuaded? Do you fear that I’ll obey? Be reassured, Raymon, I’ve made up my mind. I’ve spent two nights considering the matter from all angles. I know what I’m laying myself open to. I know what I must face, what I must sacrifice, what I must despise. I am ready to cross this stormy patch of my fate. Will you not be my support and my guide?’

  Raymon was tempted to be afraid of her calmness and to take her crazy threats literally. But then he entrenched himself in his opinion that Indiana did not love him and that she was now applying to her situation the exaggerated feelings she had acquired from books. He made strenuous efforts to be passionately eloquent, to improvise dramatically, so as to remain at his romantic mistress’s level, and he succeeded in prolonging her error. But for a calm, impartial spectator, this love scene would have been the fiction of the theatre in conflict with reality. Raymon’s exaggerated feelings, his poetic ideas, would have seemed a cold, cruel parody of the genuine feelings that Indiana expressed so simply: the one was cerebral, the other spoke from the heart.

  Raymon, who, nevertheless, was a little afraid that she would fulfil her promises if he did not skilfully undermine the resistance plan she had formed, persuaded her to feign submission or indifference until the moment when she could declare open rebellion. He said she must not announce her intention before leaving Lagny, so as to avoid scandal in front of the servants and Ralph’s dangerous intervention in the matter.

  But Ralph did not leave his unfortunate friends. In vain he offered all his fortune, his house at Belleville, his income from England, and the sale of his colonial plantations. The Colonel was inflexible. His friendship for Ralph had diminished. He did not want to be in debt to him any more. Ralph, gifted with Raymon’s skill and wit, might perhaps have been able to persuade him. But when he had clearly set out his ideas and declared his feelings, the poor baronet thought he had said all there was to say and he never expected a refusal to be retracted. He left Bellerive and followed M. and Madame Delmare to Paris, where they awaited their departure for Bourbon Island.

  The house at Lagny was put up for sale with the factory and outbuildings. For Madame Delmare it was a sad, gloomy winter. To be sure, Raymon was in Paris and saw her every day; he was attentive and affectionate but he would stay barely an hour with her. You know that society was Raymon’s element, his life; he needed the noise, the activity, the crowd, in order to breathe, to gain full mastery of his wit, his ease of manner, all his superiority. In
a small, intimate group he could make himself agreeable, but at a society gathering he would become brilliant again; then, no longer the member of a particular coterie, the friend of this one or that one, he would be the man of superior intellect who belongs to everybody and for whom society is a natural element.

  And then Raymon had principles; we have already told you that. When he saw the Colonel show him so much trust and friendship, look on him as a model of honour and sincerity, and appoint him as a mediator between his wife and himself, he resolved to justify the trust, to deserve the friendship, to reconcile M. and Madame Delmare and to rebuff any preference on the part of the wife which might have disturbed the peace of the husband. He became once again a moral, virtuous, reasonable person. You will see for how long.

  Indiana, who did not understand this conversion, suffered acutely at seeing herself neglected. She still had the happiness, however, of not admitting to herself the complete ruin of her hopes. She was easy to deceive; she asked for nothing more; her real life was so bitter and dreary. Her husband was becoming almost impossible. In public he made a show of the courage and indifference of a man of spirit; in the privacy of his own home he was no better than an irritable, obstinate, ridiculous child. Indiana was the victim of his troubles and, we must admit, it was largely her own fault. If she had raised her voice, if she had complained affectionately but forcibly, Delmare, who was merely rough, would have blushed to be thought of as unkind. Nothing was easier than to soften his heart and dominate his mind, if one was willing to descend to his level and enter into the range of ideas that were within the grasp of his mind. But Indiana’s submission was stiff and haughty. She always obeyed in silence. But it was the silence and the submission of a slave who has made a virtue of hatred and a merit of misfortune. Her resignation was like the dignity of a king who accepts fetters and a dungeon rather than abdicate and renounce an empty title. A commonplace woman would have dominated that unrefined man. She would have spoken in his way but would have reserved the right to think differently. She would have pretended to respect his prejudices but, in private, she would have trampled them underfoot. She would have been affectionate but she would have deceived him. Indiana saw many women who behaved in this way, but she felt so much above them that she would have blushed to imitate them. As she was virtuous and chaste, she thought she was not obliged to flatter her master in her words so long as she respected him in her deeds. She wanted none of his affection because she could not respond to it. She would have considered herself much more guilty in making a show of love for her husband whom she did not love, than in granting it to the lover who inspired love in her. Deception, that was the crime in her eyes, and twenty times a day she felt ready to declare that she loved Raymon; only the fear of losing Raymon held her back. Her cold obedience irritated the Colonel much more than a skilful rebellion would have done. If his pride would have suffered from not being the absolute master in his house, he suffered much more from being so in a hateful or ridiculous way. He would have liked to convince, but he merely commanded; to reign, but he merely governed. Sometimes, in his own home, he gave a badly explained order or thoughtlessly issued orders harmful to his own interests. Madame Delmare had them carried out without scrutiny or question, with the indifference of a horse that draws the plough in one direction or another.

  When he saw the consequence of his ill-comprehended ideas, of his misunderstood wishes, Delmare would fly into a rage, but when, calmly and coldly, she proved to him that she had only strictly obeyed his orders, he was reduced to turning his anger against himself. To such a man, with his petty amour propre but violent sensations, it caused cruel pain and was a biting insult.

  He would then have killed his wife if he had been in Smyrna or Cairo. And yet, in the depths of his heart he loved the weak woman who lived under his sway and kept the secret of her ill usage with a religious prudence. He loved her or he pitied her, I don’t know which. He would have liked her to love him, for he was proud of her superior breeding. He would have been elevated in his own eyes if she had deigned to stoop so far as to come to terms with his ideas and principles. When he went into her room in the morning, intending to pick a quarrel with her, sometimes he would find her asleep and he would not dare to wake her up. He would gaze at her in silence; he would be alarmed at the delicacy of her constitution, at the pallor of her cheeks, at the air of calm melancholy, of resigned unhappiness, expressed in her still, silent face. In her features he would find a thousand subjects for reproach, remorse, anger, and fear. He would blush at feeling the influence that so frail a creature had exercised over his destiny, over him, a man of iron, used to commanding others, to seeing heavily armed squadrons, fiery horses, and men of war march at a word from him.

  So a woman who was still a child had made him unhappy! She forced him to look within himself, to examine his decisions, to modify many of them, to retract several, and all that without deigning to say ‘You are wrong; please do it this way.’ She had never pleaded with him; she had never deigned to show she was his equal or to admit she was his partner. This woman, whom he could have crushed in his hand if he had so wished, there she lay, a puny creature, perhaps dreaming of another under his eyes, and defying him even in her sleep. He was tempted to strangle her, to drag her by her hair, to trample her underfoot, to force her to cry for mercy, to beg for his pardon. But she was so pretty, so fair and dainty, that he would take pity on her, like a child who is moved to compassion when looking at the bird he was intending to kill. And that man of steel would weep like a woman and leave the room so that she would not have the triumph of seeing him weep. To tell the truth, I do not know which of them was more unhappy, he or she. She was cruel out of virtue as he was kind out of weakness; she had too much patience, he did not have enough; she had the failings of her virtues but he had the virtues of his failings.

  Around these two ill-assorted beings jostled a crowd of friends who tried to bring them closer together, some for lack of anything else to do, others from self-importance, others still from ill-advised affection. Some took the wife’s side, others took the husband’s. These people quarrelled with each other about M. and Madame Delmare, but the two did not quarrel at all; for with Indiana’s systematic submission, whatever he did, the Colonel could never manage to start a quarrel. And then people who knew nothing about the matter came along and wanted to make themselves necessary. They advised submission to Madame Delmare, not seeing that she was already too submissive; others advised the husband to be inflexible and not to let his authority go to the distaff side. These latter, thick-headed people, who feel so insignificant that they are always afraid of being trodden on and always support each other, constitute a species you will find everywhere; they always get under other people’s feet and make a lot of noise so as to be noticed.

  M. and Madame Delmare had in particular got to know people at Melun and Fontainebleau. In Paris the couple resumed acquaintance with them and they were the keenest to pursue the scandal which was brewing around the Colonel and his wife. The mentality of small towns is the most spiteful in the world, as you no doubt know. There, worthwhile people are always misunderstood and superior minds are born public enemies. If a fool or a boor has to be defended, you will see them come running up. If you have a quarrel with someone, they come to watch as if at a play; they make bets; they crowd round you right up to the soles of your shoes, so eager are they to see and hear. They cover the loser with mud and curses; the one who is always in the wrong is the weaker one. If you are up in arms against prejudice, pettiness, and vice, you are insulting them personally; you attack them in what they hold most dear; you are a dangerous traitor. You will be summoned before the courts to make reparation by people whose names you do not know, but you will be convicted of having referred to them in your dishonest allusions. What more can I say? If you meet one of these people, take care not to step on his shadow, even at sunset when a man’s shadow stretches for thirty feet. All that territory belongs to the small town inhabitant;
you have no right to set foot in it. If you breathe the air he breathes, you wrong him, you ruin his health; if you drink at his fountain, you dry it up; if you increase trade in his region, you increase the price of the commodities he has to buy; if you offer him snuff, you poison it; if you praise his wife’s domestic virtues, you are being coldly ironic, for in your heart you despise her ignorance; if you have the bad luck to think of a compliment to pay him in his house, he will not appreciate it and he will go about everywhere saying that you have insulted him. Take your household gods and convey them to the heart of the woods or far into the desolate moors. Only there, and at best, the smalltown inhabitant will leave you in peace.