Kitabı oku: «Germinie Lacerteux», sayfa 11
XXXII
Disorders of the nervous system frequently result in disarranging the natural sequence of human joys and sorrows, in destroying their proportion and equilibrium, and in carrying them to the greatest possible excess. It seems that, under the influence of this disease of sensitiveness, the sharpened, refined, spiritualized sensations exceed their natural measure and limits, reach a point beyond themselves, and, as it were, make the enjoyment and suffering of the individual infinite. So the infrequent joys that Germinie still knew were insane joys, from which she emerged drunk, and with the physical symptoms of drunkenness. – "Why, my girl," mademoiselle sometimes could not forbear saying, "anyone would think you were tipsy." – "Mademoiselle makes you pay dear for a little amusement once in a while!" Germinie would reply. And when she relapsed into her sorrowful, disappointed, restless condition, her desolation was more intense, more frantic and delirious than her gayety.
The moment had arrived when the terrible truth, which she had suspected before, at last became clear to her. She saw that she had failed to lay hold of Jupillon by the devotion her love had manifested, by stripping herself of all she possessed, by all the pecuniary sacrifices which involved her life in the toils and embarrassment of a debt it was impossible for her to pay. She felt that he gave her his love grudgingly, a love to which he imparted all the humiliation of an act of charity. When she told him that she was again enceinte, the man whom she was about to make a father once more said to her: "Well, women like you are amusing creatures! always full or just empty!" She conceived the ideas, the suspicions that come to genuine love when it is betrayed, the presentiments of the heart that tell women they are no longer in undisputed possession of their lovers, and that there is another because there is likely to be another.
She complained no more, she wept no more, she indulged no more in recrimination. She abandoned the struggle with this man, armed with indifference, who, with the cold-blooded sarcasm of the vulgar cad, was so expert in insulting her passion, her unreasoning impulses, her wild outbursts of affection. And so, in agonizing resignation, she set herself the task of waiting – for what? She did not know: perhaps until he would have no more of her.
Heart-broken and silent, she kept watch upon Jupillon; she followed him about and never lost sight of him; she tried to make him speak by interjecting remarks in his fits of distraction. She hovered about him, but she saw nothing wrong, she could lay hold of nothing, detect nothing; and yet she was convinced that there was something and that what she feared was true; she felt a woman's presence in the air.
One morning, as she went down the street rather earlier than usual, she spied him a few yards before her on the sidewalk. He was dressed up, and constantly looked himself over as he walked along. From time to time he raised his trouser leg a little to see the polish on his boots. She followed him. He went straight on without looking back. She was not far behind him when he reached Place Bréda. There was a woman walking on the square beside the cabstand. Germinie could see nothing of her but her back. Jupillon went up to her and she turned: it was his cousin. They began to walk side by side, up and down the square; then they started through Rue Bréda toward Rue de Navarin. There the girl took Jupillon's arm; she did not lean on it at first, but little by little, as they proceeded, she leaned toward him, with the movement of a branch when it is bent, and drew closer and closer. They walked slowly, so slowly that at times Germinie was obliged to stop in order to keep at a safe distance from them. They ascended Rue des Martyrs, passed through Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, and went down Rue Montholon. Jupillon was talking earnestly; the cousin said nothing, but listened to Jupillon, and walked on with the absent-minded air of a woman smelling of a bouquet, now and then darting a little vague glance on one side or the other – the glance of a frightened child.
When they reached Rue Lamartine, opposite the Passage des Deux-Sœurs, they turned. Germinie had barely time to throw herself in at a hall door. They passed without seeing her. The little one was very serious and walked slowly. Jupillon was talking into her ear. They stopped for a moment; Jupillon gesticulated earnestly; the girl stared fixedly at the pavement. Germinie thought they were about to part; but they resumed their walk together and made four or five turns, passing back and forth by the end of the passage. At last they turned in; Germinie darted from her hiding-place and rushed after them. From the gateway of the passage she saw the skirt of a dress disappear through the door of a small furnished lodging-house, beside a wine shop. She ran to the door, looked into the hall and could see nothing. Thereupon all her blood rushed to her head, with one thought, a single thought that her lips kept repeating like an idiot: "Vitriol! vitriol! vitriol!" And as her thoughts were instantly transformed into the act of which she thought, and her delirium transported her abruptly to the crime she contemplated, she said to herself that she would go up the stairs with the bottle well hidden under her shawl; she would knock at the door very loud and continuously. He would come at last and would open the door a crack. She would say nothing to him, not her name even. She would go in without heeding him. She was strong enough to kill him! and she would go to the bed, to her! She would take her by the arm and say: "Yes it's me – this is for your life!" And over her face, her throat, her skin, over everything about her that was youthful and attractive and that invited love, Germinie watched the vitriol sear and seam and burn and hiss, transforming her into a horrible object that filled Germinie's heart to overflowing with joy! The bottle was empty, and she laughed! And, in her frightful dream, her body also dreaming, her feet began to move. She walked unconsciously down the passage, into the street and to a grocer's shop. Ten minutes she stood motionless at the counter, with eyes that did not see, the vacant, wandering eyes of one who has murder in his heart.
"Well, well, what do you want?" said the grocer's wife testily, almost frightened by the bearing of this woman who did not stir.
"What do I want?" said Germinie. She was so filled, so possessed with the thought of what she wanted that she believed she had asked for vitriol. "What do I want?" – She passed her hand across her forehead. – "Ah! I don't know now."
And she left the shop, stumbling as she went.
XXXIII
In the torment of the life she was leading, in which she suffered the horrors of death and of unsatisfied passion, Germinie, seeking to deaden her ghastly thoughts, had remembered the glass she had taken from Adèle's hand one morning, which gave her a whole day of oblivion. From that day she had taken to drink. She had begun with the little morning draughts to which the maids of kept women are addicted. She had drunk with this one and with that one. She had drunk with men who came to breakfast at the creamery; she had drunk with Adèle, who drank like a man and who took a base delight in seeing this virtuous woman's maid descend as low as herself.
At first she had needed excitement, company, the clinking of glasses, the encouragement of speech, the inspiration of the challenge, in order to arouse the desire to drink; but she had soon reached the point where she drank alone. Then it was that she began to carry home a half-filled glass under her apron and hide it in a corner of the kitchen; that she had taken to drinking those mixtures of white wine and brandy, of which she would take draught upon draught until she had found that for which she thirsted – sleep. For what she craved was not the fevered brain, the happy confusion, the living folly, the delirious, waking dream of drunkenness; what she needed, what she sought was the negative joy of sleep, Lethean, dreamless sleep, a leaden sleep falling upon her like the blow of the sledge upon the ox's head: and she found it in those compounds which struck her down and stretched her out face downward on the waxed cover of the kitchen table.
To sleep that overpowering sleep, to wallow, by day, in that midnight darkness, had come to mean to her a truce, deliverance from an existence that she had not the courage to continue or to end. An overwhelming longing for oblivion was all she felt when she awoke. The hours of her life that she passed in possession of her faculties, contemplating herself, examining her conscience, looking on at her own shame, seemed to her so execrable! She preferred to kill them. There was nothing in the world but sleep to make her forget everything – the congested sleep of intoxication, which lulls its victim with the arms of Death.
In that glass, from which she forced herself to drink, and which she emptied in a sort of frenzy, her sufferings, her sorrows, all her horrible present would be drowned and disappear. In a half hour, her mind would have ceased to think, her life would have ceased to exist; nothing of her surroundings would have any being for her, there would be no more time even, so far as she was concerned. "I drink away my troubles!" she said to a woman who told her that she would wreck her health by drinking. And as, in the periods of reaction that followed her debauches, there came to her a more painful feeling of her own shame, a greater sense of desolation and a fiercer detestation of her mistakes and her sins, she sought stronger decoctions of alcohol, more fiery brandy, and even drank pure absinthe, in order to produce a more deathly lethargy, and to make her more utterly oblivious to everything.
She ended by attaining in this way whole half days of unconsciousness, from which she emerged only half awake, with benumbed intelligence, blunted perceptions, hands that did things by force of habit, the motions of a somnambulist, a body and a mind in which thought, will, memory seemed still to retain the drowsiness and vagueness of the confused waking hours of the morning.
XXXIV
Half an hour after the horrible meeting when – her mind having dabbled in crime as if with her fingers – she had determined to disfigure her rival with vitriol and had believed that she had done so, Germinie returned to Rue de Laval with a bottle of brandy procured at the grocer's.
For two weeks she had been mistress of the apartment, free to indulge her brutish appetite. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who as a general rule hardly stirred from her chair, had gone, strangely enough, to pass six weeks with an old friend in the country; and she decided not to take Germinie with her for fear of setting a bad example to the other servants, and arousing their jealousy of a maid who was accustomed to very light duties and was treated on a different footing from themselves.
Germinie went into mademoiselle's bedroom and took no more time than was necessary to throw her shawl and hat on the floor before she began to drink, with the neck of the bottle between her teeth, pouring down the liquid hurriedly until everything in the room was whirling around her, and she remembered nothing of the day. Thereupon, staggering, feeling that she was about to fall, she tried to throw herself on her mistress's bed to sleep; but her dizziness threw her against the night table. From that she fell to the floor and lay without moving; she simply snored. But the blow was so violent that during the night she had a miscarriage, followed by one of those hemorrhages in which the life often ebbs away. She tried to rise and go out on the landing to call; she tried to stand up: she could not. She felt that she was gliding on to death, entering its portals and descending with gentle moderation. At last, summoning all her strength for a final effort, she dragged herself as far as the hall door; but it was impossible for her to lift her head to the keyhole, impossible to cry out. And she would have died where she lay had not Adèle, as she was passing in the morning, heard a groan, and, in her alarm, fetched a locksmith to open the door, and afterward a midwife to attend to the dying woman.
When mademoiselle returned a month later, she found Germinie up and about, but so weak that she was constantly obliged to sit down, and so pale that she seemed to have no blood left in her body. They told her that she had had a hemorrhage of which she nearly died: mademoiselle suspected nothing.
XXXV
Germinie welcomed mademoiselle's return with melting caresses, wet with tears. Her affectionate manner was like a sick child's; she had the same clinging gentleness, the imploring expression, the melancholy of timid, frightened suffering. She sought excuses for touching her mistress with her white blue-veined hands. She approached her with a sort of trembling and fervent humility. Very often, as she sat facing her upon a stool, and looked up at her with eyes like a dog's, she would rise and go and kiss some part of her dress, then resume her seat, and in a moment begin again.
There was heart-rending entreaty in these caresses, these kisses of Germinie's. Death, whose footsteps she had heard approaching her as if it were a living person; the hours of utter prostration, when, as she lay in her bed, alone with herself, she had reviewed her whole past life; the consciousness of the shame of all she had concealed from Mademoiselle de Varandeuil; the fear of a judgment of God, rising from the depths of her former religious ideas; all the reproaches, all the apprehensions that whisper in the ear of a dying agony had aroused a horrible dread in her conscience; and remorse, – the remorse that she had never been able to put down, – was now alive and crying aloud in her enfeebled, broken body, as yet but partially restored to life, as yet scarcely firm in the persuasion that it was alive.
Germinie's was not one of those fortunate natures that do wrong and leave the memory of it behind them, and never feel a twinge of regret. She had not, like Adèle, one of those vulgar material organizations, which never allow themselves to be affected by any but animal impulses. She was not blessed with one of those consciences which escape suffering by virtue of mere brutishness, or of that dense stupidity in which a woman vegetates, sinning because she knows no better. In her case, an unhealthy sensitiveness, a sort of cerebral excitement, a disposition on the part of the brain to be always on the alert, to work itself into a frenzy of bitterness, anxiety and discontent with itself, a moral sense that stood erect, as it were, after every one of her backslidings, all the characteristics of a sensitive mind, predestined to misfortune, united to torture her, and to renew day after day, more openly and more cruelly in her despair, the agony due to acts that would hardly have caused such long-continued suffering in many women in her station.
Germinie yielded to the impulse of passion; but as soon as she had yielded to it she despised herself. Even in the excitement of pleasure she could not entirely forget and lose herself. The image of mademoiselle always arose before her, with her stern, motherly face. Germinie did not become immodest in the same degree that she abandoned herself to her passions and sank lower and lower in vice. The degrading depths to which she descended did not fortify her against her disgust and horror of herself. Habit did not harden her. Her defiled conscience rejected its defilement, struggled fiercely in its shame, rent itself in its repentance and did not for one second permit itself the full enjoyment of vice, was never completely stunned by its fall.
And so when mademoiselle, forgetting that she was a servant, leaned over to her with the brusque familiarity of tone and gesture that went straight to her heart, Germinie, confused and overcome with blushing timidity, was speechless and seemed bereft of sense under the horrible torture caused by the consciousness of her own unworthiness. She would fly from the room, she would invent some pretext to escape from that affection which she so shamefully betrayed, and which, when it touched her, stirred her remorse to shuddering activity.
XXXVI
The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandoned life, this life of shame and misery, was that it did not become known. Germinie allowed no trace of anything to appear outside; she allowed nothing to rise to her lips, nothing to be seen in her face, nothing to be noticed in her manner, and the accursed background of her existence remained hidden from her mistress.
It had, indeed, sometimes occurred to mademoiselle in a vague way that her maid had some secret, something that she was concealing from her, something that was obscure in her life. She had had moments of doubt, of suspicion, an instinctive feeling of uneasiness, confused glimpses of something wrong, a faint scent that eluded her and vanished in the gloom. She had thought at times that she had stumbled upon sealed, unresponsive recesses in the girl's heart, upon a mystery, upon some unlighted passage of her life. Again, at times it had seemed to her that her maid's eyes did not say what her mouth said. Involuntarily, she had remembered a phrase that Germinie often repeated: "A sin hidden, a sin half forgiven." But the thing that filled her thoughts above all else was amazement that Germinie, despite the increase in her wages and the little gifts that she gave her almost every day, never purchased anything for her toilet, had no new dresses or linen. Where did her money go? She had almost admitted having withdrawn her eighteen hundred francs from the savings bank. Mademoiselle ruminated over it, then said to herself that that was the whole of her maid's mystery; it was about money, she was short of funds, doubtless on account of some obligations she had entered into long ago for her family, and perhaps she had been sending more money to "her canaille of a brother-in-law." She was so kind-hearted and had so little system! She had so little idea of the value of a hundred-sou piece! That was all there was to it: mademoiselle was sure of it; and as she knew the girl's obstinate nature and had no hope of inducing her to change her mind, she said nothing to her. If this explanation did not fully satisfy mademoiselle, she attributed what there was strange and mysterious in her maid's behavior to her somewhat secretive nature, which retained something of the characteristic distrust of the peasant, who is jealous of her own petty affairs and takes delight in burying a corner of her life away down in her heart, as the villager hoards his sous in a woolen stocking. Or else she persuaded herself that it was her ill health, her state of continual suffering that was responsible for her whims and her habit of dissimulation. And her mind, in its interested search for motives, stopped at that point, with the indolence and a little of the selfishness of old people's minds, who, having an instinctive dread of final results and of the real characters of their acquaintances, prefer not to be too inquisitive or to know too much. Who knows? Perhaps all this mystery was nothing but a paltry matter, unworthy to disturb or to interest her, some petty woman's quarrel. She went to sleep thereupon, reassured, and ceased to cudgel her brains.
In truth, how could mademoiselle have guessed Germinie's degradation and the horror of her secret! In her most poignant suffering, in her wildest intoxication, the unhappy creature retained the incredible strength necessary to suppress and keep back everything. From her passionate, overcharged nature, which found relief so naturally in expansion, never a word escaped or a syllable that cast a ray of light upon her secret. Mortification, contempt, disappointment, self-sacrifice, the death of her child, the treachery of her lover, the dying agony of her love, all remained voiceless within her, as if she stifled their cries by pressing her hands upon her heart. Her rare attacks of weakness, when she seemed to be struggling with pains that strangled her, the fierce, feverish caresses lavished upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, the sudden paroxysms, as if she were trying to give birth to something, always ended without words and found relief in tears.
Even illness, with its resulting weakness and enervation, forced nothing from her. It could make no impression on that heroic resolution to keep silent to the end. Hysterical attacks extorted shrieks from her and nothing but shrieks. When she was a girl she dreamed aloud; she forced her dreams to cease speaking, she closed the lips of her sleep. As mademoiselle might have discovered from her breath that she had been drinking, she ate shallots and garlic, and concealed the fumes of liquor with their offensive odors. She even trained her intoxication, her drunken torpor to awake at her mistress's footstep, and remain awake in her presence.
Thus she led, as it were, two lives. She was like two women, and by dint of energy, adroitness and feminine diplomacy, with a self-assurance that never failed her even in the mental confusion caused by drink, she succeeded in separating those two existences, in living them both without mingling them, in never allowing the two women that lived in her to be confounded with each other, in continuing to be, with Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, the virtuous, respectable girl she had been, in emerging from her orgies without carrying away the taste of them, in displaying, when she left her lover, a sort of old-maidish modesty, shocked by the scandalous courses of other maids. She never uttered a word or bore herself in a way to arouse a suspicion of her clandestine life; nothing about her conveyed a hint as to the way her nights were passed. When she placed her foot upon the door-mat outside Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's apartments, when she approached her, when she stood before her, she adopted the tone and the attitude, even to a certain way of holding the dress, which relieve a woman from so much as a suspicion of having aught to do with men. She talked freely upon all subjects, as if she had nothing to blush for. She spoke with bitterness of the misdoings and shame of others, as if she were herself beyond reproach. She joked with her mistress about love, in a jovial, unembarrassed, indifferent tone; to hear her you would have thought she was talking of an old acquaintance of whom she had lost sight. And in the eyes of all those who saw her only as Mademoiselle de Varandeuil did and at her home, there was a certain atmosphere of chastity about her thirty-five years, the odor of stern, unimpeachable virtue, peculiar to middle-aged maid-servants and plain women.
And yet all this falsehood in the matter of appearances was not hypocrisy in Germinie. It did not arise from downright duplicity, from corrupt striving for effect: it was her affection for mademoiselle that made her what she was with her. She was determined at any price to save her the grief of seeing her as she was, of going to the bottom of her character. She deceived her solely in order to retain her affection, – with a sort of respect; and a feeling of veneration, almost of piety, stole into the ghastly comedy she was playing, like the feeling a girl has who lies to her mother in order not to rend her heart.
