He walked in his sleep that night.
‘You see, Désiré, he’s too sensitive.’
And the next day, he was hunting around on the road, to which the sunlight had restored its familiar appearance, for the pale blue tubes of the rockets and the twisted wires which still smelled of gunpowder, when he caught sight of his father, in his shirt-sleeves, busy assembling the kite in the Piedboeufs’ meadow.
That same day, in a bigger meadow, two miles from Nevers, thousands of people were gathering together who had come by road from all points of the horizon, in carts, by motor-car and on foot. Fences had been put up and canvas stretched across stakes in the ground to prevent those who had not paid from seeing into the enclosure. In spite of that, there were more people outside the meadow than there were inside the barriers, families were picnicking on the grass, horses were grazing, and hawkers in white jackets were selling lemonade, liquorice water and scones.
It was hot. There were some youths perched on the fences with their legs dangling, and others were defending the top of a grassy mound or the branches of a walnut-tree as fiercely as you would defend your seat in a theatre.
For the first time in this part of France, some aeroplanes were going to give a flying display. The biplanes with their canvas wings and fragile fuselages were there, at the edge of the ground, surrounded by a few men who were fussing around and looking inquiringly at the sky where two little white clouds were hanging.
Nevers station had never been as empty as it was that morning when the train from Paris came in and the coaches moved slowly by; Félicien Miette was almost alone on the sunny platform where he had been pacing up and down for half an hour. Tense and nervous, he gazed fixedly at the few doors which opened and at the travellers picking up their suitcases and looking for the way out.
Suddenly he turned round. Isabelle was there, smiling at him, very much herself, although he had not seen her getting out of her third-class compartment.
He felt unreasonably furious at not having seen her sooner, among the thinly scattered silhouettes, furious at having given a start, at having failed to understand straight away why she was alone, at having shown it, at behaving in such an unnatural, nervous way in front of her, when after all he was expecting her, and last of all at seeing her just as she was bound to be, dressed in the usual way, calm and simple, with a gleam of affectionate mockery in her eyes.
He did not even think of kissing her.
‘What’s the matter, my love?’
He looked past her, worried, puzzled, and to put an end to his anguish she explained:
‘My father had an attack last night. He wanted to send you a telegram. I insisted on coming, and Mother sighed:
‘ “When they’ve got to that point, Joseph!”’
He asked in a flat voice:
‘You haven’t any luggage?’
‘What for, seeing that I’m going back tonight?’
He was going to relax. He relaxed. But he was upset, and for a moment he nearly started crying for no particular reason.
‘Come along.’
Already, while she was looking for her ticket in her bag, he kissed her, and she could feel him trembling; outside, he put his arm round her waist, as he used to do in Paris, when, in the evening, they walked along the deserted embankments.
They had been apart for only a month. For a month he had written her up to three letters a day, page after page covered with closely written lines, and yet it was taking him some time to get to know her again, and he walked along in silence, looking at the ground.
He knew that with her first glance she had taken everything in, his hair which he had allowed to grow longer, something which made him look thinner—he had in fact lost weight—the loosely tied cravat and the wide-brimmed hat. His fingers linked with Isabelle’s fingers, and their two bodies leaning towards one another formed a single shadow on the pavement.
She asked gently:
‘Are you happy?’
Roger Mamelin’s mother had asked the same question, the previous evening, during the firework display, and the boy had made no answer. Félicien Miette, for his part, just increased the pressure of his fingers. He had been so afraid, just now, unreasonably afraid, that she would have changed, that she would have stopped loving him, and the funny thing was that he had been even more afraid when he had not seen her parents who were supposed to be coming with her.
‘Poor Papa! I do believe that he won’t be easy in his mind until we’re married.’
Then, as at last it occurred to her to look around her, in the shade of the Avenue de la République lined with striped awnings, she asked:
‘Is it far?’
He hesitated and frowned, and his features became sharper, as they always did when he fell a prey to his evil thoughts.
‘No. Five minutes’ walk. Do you love me, Isabelle?’
‘Already?’
How often had he asked her that question, sometimes when they had been apart for scarcely an hour?
‘Answer me!’
‘And what if I said no?’
She could not even allow herself that innocent jest without his growing as tense as a bowstring.
‘Get along with you, you big silly!’
‘You haven’t any regrets?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure you haven’t any regrets, any regrets at all, that you never will have any?’
‘I’m quite sure.’
‘All the same …’
She could feel that he was turning bitter, and knew that a sudden, sharp, painful violence, springing from the very depths of his being, would follow on that bitterness; and as they walked along, holding each other round the waist, with people turning round to look at them, she murmured:
‘Be quiet.’
He could not understand why anybody should love him. There were moments when he refused to believe that it was possible, when he hated Isabelle for deceiving him and looked at her with wild eyes.
‘Tell me about your paper,’ she said.
‘Not now.’
It was about them that he always had to talk, without ever exhausting the subject, the subject of him and her, the subject of their love. How many times had he tried to elucidate the same mystery?
‘The first evening, after the Conservatoire, in that back-street, when I fell on you like a madman…’
‘Well?’
‘You weren’t in love with me!’
He stated it as a fact. She in her turn declared:
‘Yes, I was!’
‘It’s impossible. You couldn’t have been in love with me, yet you let me take you in my arms. If it had been any other man…’
‘No!’
‘When I told you all that I’d done…’
‘Be quiet.’
‘You see!’
‘No, my poor love …’
He was ashamed of the past and he would go on cheating, just as he was cheating in taking her to that house whose key he kept turning over and over in his pocket.
‘It’s here that you live?’
A town dwelling which looked like a country dwelling, a white house with green shutters and boundary-stones at both corners, where they found silence, cool shadows, the intimate smell of a household, children’s toys in the hall and fishing tackle behind the door. It was next to a stone bridge and a stream whose limpid water flowed over the flattened grass before losing itself in the Nièvre. The greengrocer in the shop on the other side of the road watched them go in and said something about them to her customer.
‘Come along.’
The steps of the polished staircase creaked under their feet. The window of the room with the mahogany bed was open, but Félicien Miette, heedless of everything, had already taken Isabelle in his arms, and fiercely, spitefully, he crushed his lips against hers as if he wanted to suffocate her.
She gently disengaged herself and got her breath back, looking over his shoulder at the sunny rectangle of the window.
‘There’s somebody watching us.’
He felt cross with her for having noticed the patch made by an old woman’s face behind the window-panes opposite.
‘Close the shutters, at least!’
He obeyed her irritably, then looked at her, in the room which was now striped with light and shade.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘You don’t know? You don’t want anything?’
‘Yes, I do.’
It was not so much her flesh that he wanted, or sensual pleasure, as to feel that she was his, more so all the time, so much his that nothing and nobody could ever make them two distinct individuals again. He clasped her to him like somebody attempting the impossible, and when he finally lay still in the ravaged bed he felt sad, she knew that, she knew him so well, she who lay looking with tender astonishment at his thin body, the body of an unfinished man.
It was he who, in a suspicious mood, broke the silence.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘About us. You still haven’t told me anything.’
And if he did tell her everything, absolutely everything, she would be frightened, or indignant, or disgusted; she would get dressed with abrupt gestures and go off for ever, without a word or a look.
All the same, he wanted to talk. Often he was tortured by the urge to confess everything to her, perhaps even to tell her more than there was, to exaggerate. She thought that she knew him because he had told her about his hideous youth and the deed he had committed to put an end to it all.
She knew nothing. The truth about the five hundred francs, for instance? Every time he thought about it his forehead broke out in an unhealthy sweat. Sometimes, at night, he tossed about in his bed without being able to banish that memory. He recalled the place, at the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, just behind the eternal mass of Notre-Dame, where he had announced one evening:
‘I’ve received the money-order.’
They had walked along in silence, both too nervous to be pleased.
‘When shall we go to see her?’
‘Tomorrow if you like. Listen, Isabelle …’
What was the use of recalling what they had decided? What else could they have done, in the circumstances?
He had waited on the horrible old woman’s landing. It had been raining and the whole house had smelled of onions. A bat’s-wing gas-burner had been sputtering on the floor below. Tenants had passed him on the landing, and Miette had turned his face towards the wall, like a man surprised in a place of ill repute. When Isabelle had come out of the flat, in which he had caught sight of some armchairs upholstered in crimson velvet, she had been pale and unsteady on her legs. They had gone home keeping close to the walls, and Félicien, in the stationer’s shop, had been unable to look Monsieur Brois in the face any more.
For Léopold had not sent the money. It was Monsieur Brois who had lent it. Miette had gone to see him at his home in the suburbs, where he lived by himself in a little house built of grey stone. He had told him everything, in a violent, tragic speech, and since then, every day, Isabelle had walked past Monsieur Brois.
‘What’s the matter, my love? What’s bothering you?’
He flew into a temper with himself, with the whole world which was doing its best to curb his impatience.
‘You think this room’s mine, don’t you? Well, it isn’t. With what I earn on the Gazette du Centre, I can scarcely afford a sordid room in the most sinister hotel in the town.’
He was lying, cheating all the time. He could not help it. With what he earned, he could have taken a fairly decent room, and indeed he had found one in a widowed lady’s house, but his cross-grained character could not put up with neatness and tranquillity, and it was on purpose that he had chosen the disreputable hotel to which, every evening, the local prostitutes brought their casual customers.
‘Don’t you understand? It’s because your parents were supposed to be coming that I borrowed this room from Chapelle, an absolute fool, the assistant editor of the Gazette. We are in his house. He has taken his wife and children to the flying display. At this very moment, they are picnicking somewhere on the grass.’
She looked at the untidy bed; he guessed what she was thinking and felt ashamed. On his return, his friend would know what purpose the key he had lent had served, and his wife would stop short in horror at the sight of the crumpled sheets.
Isabelle, who was slowly getting dressed again, made no reproach.
‘And even if he knows, what of it?’ Miette asked in a truculent voice.
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘You know. You’re ashamed of being my mistress. You’re afraid that people will know.’
‘No.’
There was a difference which he pretended not to see between knowing and being suddenly confronted with the crude revelation of that ravaged bed.
‘You know, Isabelle, you’re like all the rest. Whereas I …’
He put his head in his hands. He was suffering.
‘I’m all alone! I’ve always been alone! I’ll go on being alone all my life! Nobody tries to understand and yet if you only knew …’
She was about to say ‘I know’ when he bridled angrily.
‘You yourself, you don’t believe me when I tell you that I’ll get to the top, that one day I’ll hold them all in the hollow of my hand, like that, look!’
And clenching his fist until the knuckles showed white, he hit the wall in a convulsive gesture so that the bricks echoed with the noise.
‘I assure you, my love, that I’ve got confidence in you.’
‘If you really had confidence in me, if you really felt what I feel, you wouldn’t start worrying whether a mediocre idiot who’s lent me his bedroom and his fat fool of a wife know or don’t know that we sleep together…’
‘Forgive me … No, Félicien, don’t cry!’
The tears were inevitable. Crying helped him to relax; she stroked his hair and talked softly to him.
‘You’ll see, my love, everything will work out all right. Everything is practically settled already, seeing that my father …’
He sneered:
‘Your father!’
‘You’ve got to admit that he has been more understanding than we could reasonably expect.’
‘Because he was afraid of a scandal. He imagined …’
‘He imagined the truth.’
He did not like seeing that shady part of their past resurrected, and later on he was determined to erase it completely from their memory. Dark streets, the winter, rain, figures gliding along in the slimy shadows, and that disreputable hotel in the Rue Coquillière where he had not hesitated, one evening, to push Isabelle in front of him, past that huge woman who had been soliciting the passers-by from the next doorway.
He had had to have her at all costs. He had had her, icy, docile.
‘I wonder how you can love me. No, it isn’t possible.’
Who could understand that it wasn’t his fault, that some strange force was driving him on, forcing him to go forward in spite of everything?
‘Don’t you see, it’s because I love you, I love you more than everything else in the world, because I’ve only you, nothing but you.’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
He had fallen on his knees, that evening, in that sordid bedroom, and begged her forgiveness. He had cried there too, out of fury, and he had beaten on the wall with his clenched fists.
‘I’d like life to be beautiful, everything to be beautiful, our love …’
Had Monsieur Vétu already followed them in the darkness of the streets? They had never known. One evening, when Isabelle had pushed open the door of the shop, she had been surprised by the light. Her father had been there, with his hat on, very pale, standing with his back to the shelves filled with green files.
He had looked at his daughter, then turned his eyes away and sniffed before saying:
‘Go up to your room.’
Miette, calmer now, his eyel
ids rather red, was tying his cravat in front of the mirror and Isabelle murmured with a smile:
‘It suits you!’
The long curly hair, the black suit, the loosely tied cravat and the sombrero gave added emphasis to the tense and fervent side of his character. Monsieur Boquélus, for his part, the editor of the Gazette du Centre, when he had seen his young reporter dressed like that for the first time, had shaken his head; then, with a deliberate candour more insulting than a reprimand, he had said:
‘I see that you’re an artist.’
Félicien preferred not to think about that any more. He asked:
‘You’re sure? You like it?’
She seized the opportunity to make the bed and, if he noticed, he took care not to say anything.
‘Come along. Now you’re going to tell me all about your paper.’
Outside they found the street again, the greengrocer dimly visible behind her shop-window, the hot sun and the stone bridge, and Miette’s arm returned automatically to its place round Isabelle’s waist.
‘At the moment, all they pay me is a hundred francs a month, plus a commission on any advertisements I bring in.’
He was watching her unobtrusively, as if she were going to give herself away.
‘It may be some time before they give me a rise, a year or more.’
She knew perfectly well what he was thinking. She had seen his ingenuous trap. She could read his thoughts without having to look at him and she was not irritated by what she discovered that was childish or deceitful.
He waited, as if he had just asked a leading question, and to avoid exasperating him any more, to avoid a fresh scene, she said, gazing at their shadows in front of them:
‘We’ll get married when you want to, my love.’
To begin with, Monsieur Vétu had declared:
‘When he gets a job, we’ll see.’
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