The Hippogriff

by Henri de Montherlant

  She remained for a long time on her knees. 'Did you ask the god of the Christians to persuade me to marry you?' he asked on the way out.

  'I simply said: "My God, make me happy",' she replied, quite unselfconsciously.

  'So you have faith?'

  'No, but I have something … ' Costals had expected an answer of this sort, and it was in order to receive it that he had asked his second question: so that she might flounder a little more.

  The torture of having eternally to reckon with another person whom one does not love! When one does love someone, it is pleasant to have to reckon with them; of the time they make one waste one simply tells oneself: 'After all, a certain amount of relaxation is always necessary.' Before the war, Costals had had a German sheep-dog, and often this dog, seeing him go out, would accompany him without being asked, and then make it blatantly obvious that Costals was expected to devote his time to playing with it. For two hundred yards Costals would make it chase after stones, or else, pretending that the dog was a lion, and roaring on its behalf, he would tame it. After which, since he had come out to read, if not to work, he had had enough. 'You damned monkey, this is the very last time I throw your stone for you.' Faced with the dog's imploring eyes and its irresistible sadness, this 'last time' was repeated over and over again. And Costals' walk was ruined. Fortunately, Hesiod's words can be applied to gods, beasts, children, savages and Costals (this recital is a key, though it may not appear to be one): 'The mind of Zeus passes easily from one thought to another.' Thus it would happen that the dog, its whim changing, and suddenly no longer 'loving' Costals, would abandon the game and go back home alone. And Costals, delivered from the demon of charity, could open his book again.... Walking beside Solange, he remembered these little scenes. 'Although nobody would suspect it, no doubt it gives her pleasure to go out with me. There's no accounting for tastes.' But if, changing her mind with canine suddenness, in other words no longer 'loving' him, she were to return by herself to the car, leaving him alone if only for ten minutes, what a sigh of relief he would have given!

  On the way back she was even more silent and morose. And her silence continued in Genoa while they lunched in a restaurant - surrounded, as it happened, by five or six other couples none of whom unclenched their teeth except to eat. 'We are the Eternal Couple, who spend their lives sulking at one another. And if one wants to plumb the depths of human abasement, one must never seek them in the individual, however abject he may be, but always in the couple.' However, towards the end of the meal she tried to start a conversation, but this time it was he who did not answer. He was on the point of ordering his dessert in advance, paying the bill, and going back to the hotel alone, leaving her in the lurch. But they left together, he lashing his calves with his tail (it being understood that, ever since the 'challenge to the sun', he regarded himself, more or less, as some lion-headed Kronos). No doubt he had now earned the right to be alone for a few hours, but he would still have to see her again towards the end of the day. The prospect of meeting her again seemed an ordeal, and the thought of the girl's idleness - which rubbed off on him - a torture.

  As soon as they arrived at the hotel, the storm broke.

  'And now I insist that you tell me precisely why you were sulking this morning.'

  'But I wasn't sulking! On the contrary, it's you who never really let yourself go when you're with me.

  'I know you too well to let myself go with you. I only let myself go with people I don't know, and when it's dangerous to do so.'

  'You trust people you don't know, but not me?'

  'I don't trust anyone.'

  'Don't you trust me?'

  'I trust what you are now. I should be lying if I said I trusted what you may become.'

  She shrugged her shoulders convulsively.

  'You always think I'm sulking when I don't talk. Have you forgotten Miss Silence? I always feel much better when I'm not obliged to answer ... What I want is to be understood without having to explain myself ... But after all, doesn't everyone, more or less.... When you went out with your mother, didn't she remain silent some of the time?'

  'Please don't bring my mother into it. I never had the slightest difficulty with my mother. I was always happy with her, and she was always happy with me. So you weren't sulking this morning? You didn't say more than twenty words in three hours, and you weren't sulking?'

  'No. I was thinking about the future ... I was so happy to be with you.... '

  'Well, anyone who had seen you would have sworn you were having a fit of sulks. If you look as though you're sulking when you're happy, it's rather serious. Because I've got better things to do than spend the whole day asking myself: "Did she get out of bed the wrong side? What's the matter with her? Is it my fault? How? Or is she simply feeling happy?" To have to hang on everything that goes through a woman's head! Let's say it's a misunderstanding on my part. Let's admit I'm impatient, irascible, impossible; nevertheless it's a fact that there are dozens of men and women with whom I never quarrel. And with you I have a quarrel after a week of living together. If it had happened after five years of marriage! No, believe me, a situation in which by loving each other we can't help hurting each other is not a healthy one. For I love you, and yet I feel capable of hurting you, although it is my misfortune not to have the courage to take the plunge and be frankly cruel to you.'

  'If you're unhappy because you can't be nasty to me, then go ahead, get it out of your system.'

  Agitated and distraught, she paced up and down the sun- speckled room like a wild beast prowling through the sun- speckled jungle, lashing her calves with her tail. Yes, it was true, there was something wild about her, this girl who normally lived with all her lights dimmed. Her expression was hard, her eyes had darkened and grown strangely bloodshot, as had her cheek-bones, which were now slightly blotchy; and her nose gleamed in the middle of her powdered face. Costals realized the extent to which she had become a woman, the extent to which he had made her a woman with all his manipulations. Ah! she had been well worked over. From her very first day here, even when she had been so tender in her caresses, he had noticed that she had lost her school-girl's voice, that voice from another planet, her lunar voice of old. Her face, her expression, had become sharper. And the energy with which she stuck the hairpins into her hair and combed her thick tresses was fraught with menace for that peace of mind so dear to the man of thought. Before, she had been a little artichoke. Now she was a woman. A bad business. Like the sea, which the timorous traveller goes out to examine at seven o'clock in the morning and finds calm, but which at ten, when he goes on board, has turned rough. Her hard woman's face. He was afraid of her. Afraid of what she was about to become. Afraid of what she might be capable of doing to him, if he were mad enough to shut himself up in the cage with her. And as there was always a dormant ferocity in him only waiting for a chance to show itself, it was fear that awoke it (the mechanism is always the same, with wild animals as with men: fear engenders the ferocity by means of which one may eliminate what makes one afraid, and ferocity engenders fear - fear of reprisals). And she, pacing up and down, glowing with beauty and life in her emotion, had the air of a caged panther; while he, seated, drawn in on himself, bent forward (so that his back suggested a bristling spine), his eyes narrowed, his mouth cruel, tense with cowardly malevolence, irresistibly recalled a hyena.

  She went on:

  'If you feel that this experiment has proved that you can't live with me, you have only to bring it to an end. I can simply go away. I didn't impose myself on you. It was you who sent for me....'

  'I've been waiting for you to say that for a long time. I sent for you, yes. And why did I send for you? Because I felt you were unhappy. I had no need of you; on the contrary, you were bound to get in my way. I brought you here out of charity. The demon of charity, which is always disorganizing my life ... '

  Mlle Dandillot collapsed into an armchair and began to sob. Costals flung back his head, like a boxer who has just floor
ed his opponent. 'Well, there it is at last! At last she knows what crying is. [Solange never cries, has never cried. 'You can't cry when someone's looking at you, or you can't cry at all?' the doctor asks her. 'I can't cry at all.' Cf. Pity for Women, p 190 (Author's note).]

  'It's always the same. I struggle against charity, then I give in. But charity is a double-edged weapon, it turns back not only on me, but on the person to whom I've dispensed it - for charity always misses its target; that's axiomatic. Then I suffer, that's to say I turn nasty, for with me suffering is never passive and inert, it at once becomes aggressive. Most of the cruel things I've done have been the after-effects of charity. With women. With men. That woman I showed you in my studio at Port-Royal ... And lots of others ... Always charity or pity at the bottom of it. Charity upset things. Cruelty restored them to normal. In fact I don't know why I say "charity"; it's much broader than that; it's good itself that's at issue. The "good" should mean living life to the full, without bothering about others. Your warmth should rekindle them, set them in motion. Alas! it doesn't work out like that. This frightful temptation to do good. Try as I may, I succumb to it the whole time. It's a vice. And doing good knocks me out. You know, the way rockets shoot up and then reach the summit of their marvellous ascent and fall back again, or rather vanish, cease to exist. Sometimes, too, they fall into the crowd, and people are wounded. And there would have been neither that fall to earth, nor that sinister dying away, nor those wounded, if there had been no marvellous ascent. Or again, think of a wild cat, its eyes popping out of its head, making a mad rush to the top of a tree. But once there, it can't get down, it miaows, and one has to climb up and get it. I too, when I've done good, or simply when I've done what the mob would call "my duty", when I've rushed to the top of the tree, I too am caught and start to cry. Such sadness.... As after the carnal act. Only, after the act, it's physiological, it's over quickly; and besides, it's exceptional, at least in my case; in fact one's extremely happy; in any case it's not in the least important, and those who use it as an argument against sex are fools. Whereas the depression I get after doing good happens every time, and it lasts, and there are reasons for it, or at least so I suppose. Perhaps the knowledge that it was useless: apparently useful, but useless in fact, and that I've been duped. Or the feeling that, where others would be happily aware of having done good, I feel only remorse, and the realization that one's so different ... Why should I feel pleasure in being so different from others, on occasions when that difference implies no superiority over them?'

  'You said ... that day in the kitchen: "I enjoy evil... but ... I ... I think I enjoy . . . good even more",' Solanage hiccoughed through her tears.

  He began to laugh.

  'I told you that because it was the opposite of the truth, to tease God (metaphorically speaking, since I don't believe in God).'

  A silence.

  'I've had a fairly adventurous life. Out of two hundred battles fought, let's say I've lost a hundred. Out of this hundred, I lost fifty out of cowardice; I broke off and fled under full sail. But it wasn't only cowardice. I have too much contempt for the world's opinion not to enjoy running away. Someone once made a very witty remark about me: "He's only capable of making up his mind when it's a question of beating it." The other fifty battles were lost because of a momentary hesitation. One moment's hesitation, and my opponent got the upper hand. Well, in those fifty battles, my hesitation was always the result of charity. I was overcome with pity, and although in a position to strike the final blow, I didn't. Result: it was I who received the blow.'

  'Have I struck you many blows?'

  'Yes, many, without realizing it.'

  Solange sobbed into her hands, her body shaking convulsively. Then with one hand she began rumpling her dress, and one of the seams split open. Ought he to shut up? Pity again! Besides, he was enjoying his anger against her, especially because today (as we have seen) Solange was not looking her best. Achilles in the Iliad says that anger is 'sweet as honey'. And anyone who has never felt himself quivering from head to foot with anger or hatred cannot be called a man: there is no merit in being kind if one lacks the power to be cruel. Moreover, he had never relented towards someone who was crying, simply because they were crying. Not even his son. He had a horror of tears. When his son was small, he had made him promise never to cry. (And sometimes Brunet would hide his face in Mlle du Peyron's skirts and say: 'Hide me, because I'm going to cry, and I don't want papa to see me.') One day, when he was thirteen, his father having given him a fifty- franc note to buy some ink for his fountain-pen and told him to bring back the change, Brunet had come home looking crest-fallen. 'It was the boy at the stationer's, not the boss. He cheated me out of fifteen francs. There's fifteen francs missing from the change. He said he'd given them to me. Oh, if only there'd been a policeman about!' Costals had never caught his son out in any dishonesty. But the disappearance of the fifteen francs struck him as suspicious. 'It's annoying, because I don't know which of you is lying, you or the stationer's boy.' Ten seconds went by, during which Costals made a few commonplace remarks about how irritating it was to lose fifteen francs, and at the end of those ten seconds his son's face turned scarlet, his mouth swelled up, and he looked like a frog: he was crying. 'Why are you crying?' 'Because you said it was me who took the money.' Whereupon he believed that Philippe was telling the truth, but did not embrace him or console him in any way. He let him go on crying, still saying nothing but vague and banal remarks.

  It was not until the boy's tears had dried that he said: 'You know, I believe what you say.' And another ten seconds later, the child resumed his frog's grimace and started to cry again. 'You've got nothing to cry about any more. Why are you crying?' He did not answer, but heaved a great sigh and moved nearer his father (they were both sitting on a sofa) and put his cheek against his. And Costals, though convinced of Brunet's double grief, at being robbed and then suspected, and having witnessed his extreme sensitivity, since it was the assurance of having been believed that had made his tears flow a second time, Costals, his face in contact with that of his son (which was as fresh and cool as the body of a trout), had still resisted the temptation to embrace and fondle him. He had simply touched his hand, and then they had talked about something else. All this because he wanted to train people to understand that their tears would never persuade him to relent. (In fact Brunet's tears had not been entirely in vain, since it was through them that he had proved his innocence. But that is another matter.)

  Costals went on:

  'I began to pity you the day I realized that I didn't love you enough. That is to say from the very beginning. Ah, if only I loved you! If only I had been able to take you out of the hell of charity and bring you into the paradise of love! Everything would have been so marvellously simple. I know what it is to love: you would have been my wife three months ago. But I don't love you. I mean I don't love you deeply. And there's an abyss between loving deeply and loving otherwise than deeply. To love otherwise than deeply is not to love at all. My life is elsewhere. My life is where you are not. You were a mistake.

  Mlle Dandillot leapt up, quivering, with the force of a billiard ball quivering at the edge of the pocket, and rushed to the door. He caught her, took her by the arms, forced her to sit down again, and knelt on one knee in front of her. He soothed her, letting her cry against his breast while he kissed her eyelids sadly. Sadly, because he knew that soothing her did not alter in any way the situation he had just described; and once more he was revolted by the caresses and cajoleries by which one tries to disguise some irremediable ill, he fought down the clichés that passed through his head: 'Cruel only to be kind,' etc., he fought down the vulgar impulse of lovers, whereby a 'scene' can only end up in bed. He did not speak, he had the honesty not to say anything to her: what could he have said that would have consoled her? He would have had to retract his last remarks and that he could never have done, even if she had begged him to. 'The desire for sincerity, that sort of turbid passio
n which justifies every crime.' [Jean Cassou (Author's note).] She stopped crying at last, and kissed his face, the palm of his hand, even his hairy fore-arm. These last two gestures, which she had never indulged in before, seemed very extraordinary to Costals, and little to his taste. Her mouth in those hairs, especially. Obviously women must be very different from the rest of the world, to take pleasure in touching a 'mature' man. (Perhaps, after all, they were merely following the instinct of their sex. But still, a man after the age of eighteen was not exactly appetizing.)

  And then, always these gestures, when it was words that were required. However, the words came:

  'I who try to do everything I can to make you happy. But you know yourself that I've always remained a little girl. I've never left the shadow of my parents, I've never had any friends. How do you expect me to be anything but awkward in my relations with people, especially with a man like you? I've got to get used to you. It's all a question of adapting oneself. You say it's more serious that we should have these clashes before marriage than five years after. It would be much more serious then. A day will come when habit ... '

  'But I don't want life ever to become a habit with me.'

  'Still, at the moment we're living in rather abnormal circumstances. You feel you have to look after me all the time; if we were living a normal life we'd only see each other for a few hours a day. If it was up to me, you could have the greatest freedom even now. Do you think I haven't learnt how to keep myself busy and amuse myself, over the past fifteen years?'

  He went on fondling her. He stroked her forehead to smooth away her frown. 'Have I got wrinkles?' she asked. He teased her a little: 'Didn't I warn you in writing that I reserved the right to make you unhappy one day out of fifteen?' Pointing to the little stains made by her tears as they fell on her sleeve, he asked her if ordinary stain-removers were effective against tear-stains - unless she would prefer to leave them there as a souvenir, and her costume thereafter be christened, in the language of the fashion houses, 'Fountains of Italy' or 'The first time I cried'.