Kitabı oku: «Germinie Lacerteux», sayfa 16

LVI

Passion is subject to the most insensate reactions, the most inexplicable revivals. The accursed love that Germinie believed to have been killed by all the wounds and blows Jupillon had inflicted upon it came to life once more. She was dismayed to find it in her heart when she returned home. The mere sight of the man, his proximity for those few moments, the sound of his voice, the act of breathing the air that he breathed, were enough to turn her heart back to him and relegate her to the past.

Notwithstanding all that had happened, she had never been able to tear Jupillon's image altogether from her heart: its roots were still imbedded there. He was her first love. She belonged to him against her own will by all the weaknesses of memory, by all the cowardice of habit. Between them there were all the bonds of torture that hold a woman fast forever, – sacrifice, suffering, degradation. He owned her, body and soul, because he had outraged her conscience, trampled upon her illusions, made her life a martyrdom. She belonged to him, belonged to him forever, as to the author of all her sorrows.

And that shock, that scene which should have caused her to think with horror of ever meeting him again, rekindled in her the frenzied desire to meet him again. Her passion seized her again in its full force. The thought of Jupillon filled her mind so completely that it purified her. She abruptly called a halt in the vagabondage of her passions: she determined to belong thenceforth to no one, as that was the only method by which she could still belong to him.

She began to spy upon him, to make a study of his usual hours for going out, the streets he passed through, the places that he visited. She followed him to Batignolles, to his new quarters, walked behind him, content to put her foot where he had put his, to be guided by his steps, to see him now and then, to notice a gesture that he made, to snatch one of his glances. That was all: she dared not speak to him; she kept at some distance behind, like a lost dog, happy not to be driven away with kicks.

For weeks and weeks she made herself thus the man's shadow, a humble, timid shadow that shrank back and moved away a few steps when it thought it was in danger of being seen; then drew nearer again with faltering steps, and, at an impatient movement from the man, stopped once more, as if asking pardon.

Sometimes she waited at the door of a house which he entered, caught him up again when he came out and escorted him home, always at a distance, without speaking to him, with the air of a beggar begging for crumbs and thankful for what she was allowed to pick up. Then she would listen at the shutters of the ground-floor apartment in which he lived, to ascertain if he was alone, if there was anybody there.

When he had a woman on his arm, although she suffered keenly, she was the more persistent in following him. She went where they went to the end. She entered the public gardens and ballrooms behind them. She walked within sound of their laughter and their words, tore her heart to tatters looking at them and listening to them, and stood at their backs with every jealous instinct of her nature bleeding.

LVII

It was November. For three or four days Germinie had not fallen in with Jupillon. She went to hover about his lodgings, watching for him. When she reached the street on which he lived, she saw a broad beam of light struggling out through the closed shutters. She approached and heard bursts of laughter, the clinking of glasses, women's voices, then a song and one voice, that of the woman whom she hated with all the hatred of her heart, whom she would have liked to see lying dead before her, and whose death she had so often sought to discover in the coffee-grounds, – the cousin!

She glued her ear to the shutter, breathing in what they said, absorbed in the torture of listening to them, pasturing her famished heart upon suffering. It was a cold, rainy winter's night. She did not feel the cold or rain. All her senses were engaged in listening. The voice she detested seemed at times to grow faint and die away beneath kisses, and the notes it sang died in her throat as if stifled by lips placed upon the song. The hours passed. Germinie was still at her post. She did not think of going away. She waited, with no knowledge of what she was waiting for. It seemed to her that she must remain there always, until the end. The rain fell faster. The water from a broken gutter overhead beat down upon her shoulders. Great drops glided down her neck. An icy shiver ran up and down her back. The water dripped from her dress to the ground. She did not notice it. She was conscious of no pain in any of her limbs except the pain that flowed from her heart.

Well on toward morning there was a movement in the house, and footsteps approached the door. Germinie ran and hid in a recess in the wall some steps away, and from there saw a woman come out, escorted by a young man. As she watched them walk away, she felt something soft and warm on her hands that frightened her at first; it was a dog licking her, a great dog that she had held in her lap many an evening, when he was a puppy, in the crémière's back shop.

"Come here, Molosse!" Jupillon shouted impatiently twice or thrice in the darkness.

The dog barked, ran back, returned and gamboled about her, and at last entered the house. The door closed. The voices and singing lured Germinie back to her former position against the shutter, and there she remained, drenched by the rain, allowing herself to be drenched, as she listened and listened, till morning, till daybreak, till the hour when the masons on their way to work, with their dinner loaf under their arms, began to laugh at her as they passed.

LVIII

Two or three days after that night in the rain, Germinie's features were distorted with pain, her skin was like marble and her eyes blazing. She said nothing, made no complaints, but went about her work as usual.

"Here! girl, look at me a moment," said mademoiselle, and she led her abruptly to the window. "What does all this mean? this look of a dead woman risen from the grave? Come, tell me honestly, are you sick? My God! how hot your hands are!"

She grasped her wrist, and in a moment threw it down.

"What a silly slut! you're in a burning fever! And you keep it to yourself!"

"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie stammered. "I think it's nothing but a bad cold. I went to sleep the other evening with my kitchen window open."

"Oh! you're a good one!" retorted mademoiselle; "you might be dying and you'd never as much as say: 'Ouf!' Wait."

She put on her spectacles, and hastily moving her arm-chair to a small table by the fireplace, she wrote a few lines in her bold hand.

"Here," said she, folding the note, "you will do me the favor to give this to your friend Adèle and have her send the concierge with it. And now to bed you go!"

But Germinie refused to go to bed. It was not worth while. She would not tire herself. She would sit down all day. Besides, the worst of her sickness was over; she was getting better already. And then it always killed her to stay in bed.

The doctor, summoned by mademoiselle's note, came in the evening. He examined Germinie, and ordered the application of croton oil. The trouble in the chest was of such a nature that he could say nothing about it until he had observed the effect of his remedies.

He returned a few days later, sent Germinie to bed and sounded her chest for a long while.

"It's a most extraordinary thing," he said to mademoiselle, when he went downstairs; "she has had pleurisy upon her and hasn't kept her bed for a moment! Is she made of iron, in Heaven's name? Oh! the energy of some women! How old is she?"

"Forty-one."

"Forty-one! Oh! it's not possible. Are you sure? She looks fully fifty."

"Ah! as to that, she looks as old as you please. What can you expect? Never in good health, – always sick, disappointment, sorrow, – and a disposition that can't help tormenting itself."

"Forty-one years old! it's amazing!" the physician repeated.

After a moment's reflection, he continued:

"So far as you know, is there any hereditary lung trouble in her family? Has she had any relatives who have died young?"

"She lost a sister by pleurisy; but she was older. She was forty-eight, I think."

The doctor had become very grave. "However, the lung is getting freer," he said, in an encouraging tone. "But it is absolutely necessary that she should have rest. And send her to me once a week. Let her come and see me. And let her take a pleasant day for it, – a bright, sunny day."

LIX

Mademoiselle talked and prayed and implored and scolded to no purpose: she could not induce Germinie to lay aside her work for a few days. Germinie would not even listen to the suggestion that she should have an assistant to do the heavier work. She declared that it was useless, impossible; that she could never endure the thought of another woman approaching her, waiting upon her, attending to her wants; that it would give her a fever simply to think of such a thing as she lay in bed; that she was not dead yet; and she begged that she might be allowed to go on as usual, so long as she could put one foot before the other. She said it in such an affectionate tone, her eyes were so beseeching, her feeble voice was so humble and so passionate in making the request, that mademoiselle had not the courage to force her to accept an assistant. She simply called her a "blockhead," who believed, like all country-people, that a few days in bed means death.

Keeping on her feet, with an apparent improvement due to the physician's energetic treatment, Germinie continued to make mademoiselle's bed, accepting her assistance to turn the mattresses. She also continued to prepare her food, and that was an especially distasteful task to her.

When she was preparing mademoiselle's breakfast and dinner, she felt as if she should die in her kitchen, one of the wretched little kitchens common in great cities, which are the cause of so much pulmonary trouble in women. The embers that she kindled, and from which a thread of suffocating smoke slowly arose, began to stir her stomach to revolt; soon the charcoal that she bought from the charcoal dealer next door, strong Paris charcoal, full of half-charred wood, enveloped her in its stifling odor. The dirty, smoking funnel, the low chimney-piece poured back into her lungs the corroding heat of the waist-high oven. She suffocated, she felt the fiery heat of all her blood surge upward to her face and cause red blotches to appear on her forehead. Her head whirled. In the half-asphyxiated condition of laundresses who pass back and forth through the vapor of their charcoal stoves, she would rush to the window and draw a few breaths of the icy outside air.

She had other motives for suffering on her feet, for keeping constantly about her work despite her increasing weakness, than the repugnance of country-people to take to their beds, or her fierce, jealous determination that no one but herself should attend to mademoiselle's needs: she had a constant terror of denunciation, which might accompany the installation of a new servant. It was absolutely necessary that she should be there, to keep watch on mademoiselle and prevent anyone from coming near her. It was necessary, too, that she should show herself, that the quarter should see her, and that she should not appear to her creditors with the aspect of a dead woman. She must make a pretence of being strong, she must assume a cheerful, lively demeanor, she must impart confidence to the whole street with the doctor's studied words, with a hopeful air, and with the promise not to die. She must appear at her best in order to reassure her debtors and to prevent apprehensions on the subject of money from ascending the stairs and applying to mademoiselle.

She acted up to her part in this horrible, but necessary, comedy. She was absolutely heroic in the way she made her whole body lie, – in drawing up her enfeebled form to its full height as she passed the shops, whose proprietors' eyes were upon her; in quickening her trailing footsteps; in rubbing her cheeks with a rough towel before going out in order to bring back the color of blood to them; in covering the pallor of her disease and her death-mask with rouge.

Despite the terrible cough that racked her sleepless nights, despite her stomach's loathing for food, she passed the whole winter conquering and overcoming her own weakness and struggling with the ups and downs of her disease.

At every visit that he made, the doctor told mademoiselle that he was unable to find that any of her maid's vital organs were seriously diseased. The lungs were a little ulcerated near the top; but people recovered from that. "But her body seems worn out, thoroughly worn out," he said again and again, in a sad tone, with an almost embarrassed manner that impressed mademoiselle. And he always had something to say, at the end of his visit, about a change of air – about the country.

LX

When August arrived, the doctor had nothing but that to advise or prescribe – the country. Notwithstanding the repugnance of elderly people to move, to change their abode and the habits and regular hours of their life; despite her domestic nature and the sort of pang that she felt at being torn from her hearthstone, mademoiselle decided to take Germinie into the country. She wrote to the chick's daughter, who lived, with a brood of children, on a small estate in a village of Brie, and who had been, for many years, begging her to pay her a long visit. She requested her hospitality for a month or six weeks for herself and her sick maid.

They set out. Germinie was delighted. On their arrival she felt decidedly better. For some days her disease seemed to be diverted by the change. But the weather that summer was very uncertain, with much rain, sudden changes, and high winds. Germinie had a chill, and mademoiselle soon heard again, overhead, just above the room in which she slept, the frightful cough that had been so painful and hard to bear at Paris. There were hurried paroxysms of coughing that seemed almost to strangle her; spasms that would break off for a moment, then begin again; and the pauses caused the ear and the heart to experience a nervous, anxious anticipation of what was certain to come next, and always did come, – racking and tearing, dying away again, but still vibrating in the ear, even when it had ceased: never silent, never willing to have done.

And yet Germinie rose from those horrible nights with an energy and activity that amazed mademoiselle and at times reassured her. She was out of bed as early as anybody in the house. One morning, at five o'clock, she went with the man-servant in a char-à-banc to a mill-pond three leagues away, for fish; at another time she dragged herself to the saint's day ball, with the maids from the house, and did not return until they did, at daybreak. She worked all the time; assisted the servants. She was always sitting on the edge of a chair, in a corner of the kitchen, doing something with her fingers. Mademoiselle was obliged to force her to go out, to drive her into the garden to sit. Then Germinie would sit on the green bench, with her umbrella over her head, and the sun in her skirts and on her feet. Hardly moving, she would forget herself utterly as she inhaled the light and air and warmth, passionately and with a sort of feverish joy. Her distended lips would part to admit the fresh, clear air. Her eyes burned, but did not move; and in the light shadow of the silk umbrella her gaunt, wasted, haggard face stared vacantly into space like an amorous death's head.

Weary as she was at night, no persuasion could induce her to retire before her mistress. She insisted upon being at hand to undress her. Seated by her side, she would rise from time to time to wait upon her as best she could, assist her to take off a petticoat, then sit down again, collect her strength for a moment, rise again, and insist upon doing something for her. Mademoiselle had to force her to sit down and order her to keep quiet. And all the time that the evening toilet lasted she had always upon her lips the same tiresome chatter about the servants of the house.

"Why, mademoiselle, you haven't an idea of the eyes they make at each other when they think no one sees them – the cook and the man – I mean. They keep quiet when I am by; but the other day I surprised them in the bakery. They were kissing, fancy! Luckily madame here don't suspect it."

"Ah! there you are again with your tale-bearing! Why, good God!" mademoiselle would exclaim, "what difference does it make to you whether they coo or don't coo? They're kind to you, aren't they? That's all that's necessary."

"Oh! very kind, mademoiselle; as far as that's concerned I haven't a word to say. Marie got up in the night last night to give me some water – and as for him, when there's any dessert left, it's always for me. Oh! he's very polite to me – in fact, Marie don't like it very well that he thinks so much about me. You understand, mademoiselle – "

"Come, come! go to bed with all your nonsense!" said her mistress sharply, sad, and annoyed as well, to find such a keen interest in others' love-affairs in one so ill.

LXI

When they returned from the country, the doctor, after examining Germinie, said to Mademoiselle: "It has been very rapid, very rapid. The left lung is entirely gone. The right has begun to be affected at the top, and I fear that there is more or less difficulty all through it. She's a dead woman. She may live six weeks, two months at most."

"Great Heaven!" said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, "everyone I have ever loved will go before me! Tell me, must I wait until everybody has gone?"

"Have you thought of placing her in some institution?" said the doctor, after a moment's silence. "You can't keep her here. It's too great a burden, too great a grief for you to have her with you," he added, at a gesture from mademoiselle.

"No, monsieur, no, I haven't thought of it. Oh! yes, I am likely to send her away. Why you must have seen, monsieur: that girl isn't a maid, she isn't a servant in my eyes; she's like the family I never had! What would you have me say to her: 'Be off with you now!' Ah! I never suffered so much before on account of not being rich and having a wretched four-sou apartment like this. I, mention such a thing to her! why, it's impossible! And where could she go? To the Maison Dubois? Oh! yes, to the Dubois! She went there once to see the maid I had before, who died there. You might as well kill her! The hospital, then? No, not there; I don't choose to have her die in that place!"

"Good God, mademoiselle, she'll be a hundred times better off there than here. I would get her admitted at Lariboisière, during the term of service of a doctor who is a friend of mine. I would recommend her to an intern, who is under great obligations to me. She would have a very excellent Sister to nurse her in the hall to which I would have her sent. If necessary, she could have a private room. But I am sure she would prefer to be in a common room. It's the essential thing to do, you see, mademoiselle. She can't stay in that chamber up there. You know what these horrible servants' quarters are. Indeed, it's my opinion that the health authorities ought to compel the landlords to show common humanity in that direction; it's an outrage! The cold weather is coming; there's no fireplace; with the window and the roof it will be like an ice-house. You see she still keeps about. She has a marvelous stock of courage, prodigious nervous vitality. But, in spite of everything, the bed will claim her in a few days, – she won't get up again. Come, listen to reason, mademoiselle. Let me speak to her, will you?"

"No, not yet. I must get used to the idea. And then, when I see her around me I imagine she isn't going to die so quickly as all that. There's time enough. Later, we'll see about it, – yes, later."

"Excuse me, mademoiselle, if I venture to say to you that you are quite capable of making yourself sick nursing her."

"I? Oh! as for me!" And Mademoiselle de Varandeuil made a gesture indicating that her life was of no consequence.