Kitabı oku: «In Search Of Lost Time. Volumes 1 to 7», sayfa 43

At that moment, as if in order that against the sea there might multiply in freedom, in the variety of its forms, all the rich decorative whole which was the lovely unfolding of the train of maidens, at once golden and rosy, baked by sun and wind, Albertine’s friends, with their shapely limbs, their supple figures, but so different one from another, came into sight in a cluster that expanded as it approached, advancing towards us, but keeping closer to the sea, along a parallel line. I asked Albertine’s permission to walk for a little way with her. Unfortunately, all she did was to wave her hand to them in greeting. “But your friends will be disappointed if you don’t go with them,” I hinted, hoping that we might all walk together. A young man with regular features, carrying a bag of golf-clubs, sauntered up to us. It was the baccarat-player, whose fast ways so enraged the chief magistrate’s wife. In a frigid, impassive tone, which he evidently regarded as an indication of the highest refinement, he bade Albertine good day. “Been playing golf, Octave?” she asked. “How did the game go? Were you in form?” “Oh, it’s too sickening; I can’t play for nuts,” he replied. “Was Andrée playing?” “Yes, she went round in seventy-seven.” “Why, that’s a record!” “I went round in eighty-two yesterday.” He was the son of an immensely rich manufacturer who was to take an important part in the organisation of the coming World’s Fair. I was struck by the extreme degree to which, in this young man and in the other by no means numerous male friends of the band of girls, the knowledge of everything that pertained to clothes and how to wear them, cigars, English drinks, horses, a knowledge which he possessed in its minutest details with a haughty infallibility that approached the reticent modesty of the true expert, had been developed in complete isolation, unaccompanied by the least trace of any intellectual culture. He had no hesitation as to the right time and place for dinner-jacket or pyjamas, but neither had he any suspicion of the circumstances in which one might or might not employ this or that word, or even of the simplest rules of grammar. This disparity between the two forms of culture must have existed also in his father, the President of the Syndicate that ‘ran’ Balbec, for, in an open letter to the electors which he had recently had posted on all the walls, he announced: “I desired to see the Mayor, to speak to him of the matter; he would not listen to my righteous plaint.” Octave, at the Casino, took prizes in all the dancing competitions, for bostons, tangos and what-not, an accomplishment that would entitle him, if he chose, to make a fine marriage in that seaside society where it is not figuratively but in sober earnest that the young women ‘marry their dancing-partners.’ He lighted a cigar with a “D’you mind?” to Albertine, as one who asks permission to finish, while going on talking, an urgent piece of work. For he was one of those people who can never be ‘doing nothing,’ although there was nothing, for that matter, that he could ever be said to do. And as complete inactivity has the same effect on us, in the end, as prolonged overwork, and on the character as much as on the life of body and muscles, the unimpaired nullity of intellect that was enshrined behind Octave’s meditative brow had ended by giving him, despite his air of unruffled calm, ineffectual longings to think which kept him awake at night, for all the world like an overwrought philosopher.

Supposing that if I knew their male friends I should have more opportunities of seeing the girls, I had been on the point of asking for an introduction to Octave. I told Albertine this, as soon as he had left us, still muttering, “I couldn’t play for nuts!” I thought I would thus put into her head the idea of doing it next time. “But I can’t,” she cried, “introduce you to a tame cat like that. This place simply swarms with them. But what on earth would they have to say to you? That one plays golf quite well, and that’s all there is to it. I know what I’m talking about; you’d find he wasn’t at all your sort.” “Your friends will be cross with you if you desert them like this,” I repeated, hoping that she would then suggest my joining the party. “Oh, no, they don’t want me.” We ran into Bloch, who directed at me a subtle, insinuating smile, and, embarrassed by the presence of Albertine, whom he did not know, or, rather, knew ‘without knowing’ her, bent his head with a stiff, almost irritated jerk. “What’s he called, that Ostrogoth?” Albertine asked. “I can’t think why he should bow to me; he doesn’t know me. And I didn’t bow to him, either.” I had no time to explain to her, for, bearing straight down upon us, “Excuse me,” he began, “for interrupting you, but I must tell you that I am going to Don-cières to-morrow. I cannot put it off any longer without discourtesy; indeed, I ask myself, what must de Saint-Loup-en-Bray think of me. I just came to let you know that I shall take the two o’clock train. At your service.” But I thought now only of seeing Albertine again, and of trying to get to know her friends, and Doncières, since they were not going there, and my going would bring me back too late to see them still on the beach, seemed to me to be situated at the other end of the world. I told Bloch that it was impossible. “Oh, very well, I shall go alone. In the fatuous words of Master Arouet, I shall say to Saint-Loup, to beguile his clericalism:

 
‘My duty stands alone, by his in no way bound;
Though he should choose to fail, yet faithful I’ll be found.’”
 

“I admit he’s not a bad looking boy,” was Albertine’s comment, “but he makes me feel quite sick.” I had never thought that Bloch might be ‘not a bad looking boy’; and yet, when one came to think of it, so he was. With his rather prominent brow, very aquiline nose, and his air of extreme cleverness and of being convinced of his cleverness, he had a pleasing face. But he could not succeed in pleasing Albertine. This was perhaps due, to some extent, to her own disadvantages, the harshness, the want of feeling of the little band, its rudeness towards everything that was not itself. And later on, when I introduced them, Albertine’s antipathy for him grew no less. Bloch belonged to a section of society in which, between the free and easy customs of the ‘smart set’ and the regard for good manners which a man is supposed to shew who ‘does not soil his hands,’ a sort of special compromise has been reached which differs from the manners of the world and is nevertheless a peculiarly unpleasant form of worldliness. When he was introduced to anyone he would bow with a sceptical smile, and at the same time with an exaggerated show of respect, and, if it was to a man, would say: “Pleased to meet you, sir,” in a voice which ridiculed the words that it was uttering, though with a consciousness of belonging to some one who was no fool. Having sacrificed this first moment to a custom which he at once followed and derided (just as on the first of January he would greet you with a ‘Many happy!’) he would adopt an air of infinite cunning, and would ‘proffer subtle words’ which were often true enough but ‘got on’ Albertine’s nerves. When I told her on this first day that his name was Bloch, she exclaimed: “I would have betted anything he was a Jew-boy. Trust them to put their foot in it!” Moreover, Bloch was destined to give Albertine other grounds for annoyance later on. Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way. He would find some precious qualification for every statement, and would sweep from particular to general. It vexed Albertine, who was never too well pleased at other people’s shewing an interest in what she was doing, that when she had sprained her ankle and was keeping quiet, Bloch said of her: “She is outstretched on her chair, but in her ubiquity has not ceased to frequent simultaneously vague golf-courses and dubious tennis-courts.” He was simply being ‘literary,’ of course, but this, in view of the difficulties which Albertine felt that it might create for her with friends whose invitations she had declined on the plea that she was unable to move, was quite enough to disgust her with the face, the sound of the voice, of the young man who could say such things about her. We parted, Albertine and I, after promising to take a walk together later. I had talked to her without being any more conscious of where my words were falling, of what became of them, than if I were dropping pebbles into a bottomless pit. That our words are, as a general rule, filled, by the person to whom we address them, with a meaning which that person derives from her own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which the daily round of life is perpetually demonstrating. But if we find ourselves as well in the company of a person whose education (as Albertine’s was to me) is inconceivable, her tastes, her reading, her principles unknown, we cannot tell whether our words have aroused in her anything that resembles their meaning, any more than in an animal, although there are things that even an animal may be made to understand. So that to attempt any closer friendship with Albertine seemed to me like placing myself in contact with the unknown, if not the impossible, an occupation as arduous as breaking a horse, as reposeful as keeping bees or growing roses.

I had thought, a few hours before, that Albertine would acknowledge my bow but would not speak to me. We had now parted, after planning to make some excursion soon together. I vowed that when I next met Albertine I would treat her with greater boldness, and I had sketched out in advance a draft of all that I would say to her, and even (being now quite convinced that she was not strait-laced) of all the favours that I would demand of her. But the mind is subject to external influences, as plants are, and cells and chemical elements, and the medium in which its immersion alters it is a change of circumstances, or new surroundings. Grown different by the mere fact of her presence, when I found myself once again in Albertine’s company, what I said to her was not at all what I had meant to say. Remembering her flushed temple, I asked myself whether she might not appreciate more keenly a polite attention which she knew to be disinterested. Besides, I was embarrassed by certain things in her look, in her smile. They might equally well signify a laxity of morals and the rather silly merriment of a girl who though full of spirits was at heart thoroughly respectable. A single expression, on a face as in speech, is susceptible of divers interpretations, and I stood hesitating like a schoolboy faced by the difficulties of a piece of Greek prose.

On this occasion we met almost immediately the tall one, Andrée, the one who had jumped over the old banker, and Albertine was obliged to introduce me. Her friend had a pair of eyes of extraordinary brightness, like, in a dark house, a glimpse through an open door of a room into which the sun is shining with a greenish reflexion from the glittering sea.

A party of five were passing, men whom I had come to know very well by sight during my stay at Balbec. I had often wondered who they could be. “They’re nothing very wonderful,” said Albertine with a sneering laugh. “The little old one with dyed hair and yellow gloves has a fine touch; he knows how to draw all right, he’s the Balbec dentist; he’s a good sort. The fat one is the Mayor, not the tiny little fat one, you must have seen him before, he’s the dancing master; he’s rather a beast, you know; he can’t stand us, because we make such a row at the Casino; we smash his chairs, and want to have the carpet up when we dance; that’s why he never gives us prizes, though we’re the only girls there who can dance a bit. The dentist is a dear, I would have said how d’ye do to him, just to make the dancing master swear, but I couldn’t because they’ve got M. de Sainte-Croix with them; he’s on the General Council; he comes of a very good family, but he’s joined the Republicans, to make more money. No nice people ever speak to him now. He knows my uncle, because they’re both in the Government, but the rest of my family always cut him. The thin one in the waterproof is the bandmaster. You know him, of course. You don’t? Oh, he plays divinely. You haven’t been to Cavalleria Rusticana? I thought it too lovely! He’s giving a concert this evening, but we can’t go because it’s to be in the town hall. In the Casino it wouldn’t matter, but in the town hall, where they’ve taken down the crucifix. Andrée’s mother would have a fit if we went there. You’re going to say that my aunt’s husband is in the Government. But what difference does that make? My aunt is my aunt. That’s not why I’m fond of her. The only thing she has ever wanted has been to get rid of me. No, the person who has really been a mother to me, and all the more credit to her because she’s no relation at all, is a friend of mine whom I love just as much as if she was my mother. I will let you see her ‘photo.’” We were joined for a moment by the golf champion and baccarat plunger, Octave. I thought that I had discovered a bond between us, for I learned in the course of conversation that he was some sort of relative, and even more a friend of the Verdurins. But he spoke contemptuously of the famous Wednesdays, adding that M. Verdurin had never even heard of a dinner-jacket, which made it a horrid bore when one ran into him in a music-hall, where one would very much rather not be greeted with “Well, you young rascal,” by an old fellow in a frock coat and black tie, for all the world like a village lawyer. Octave left us, and soon it was Andrée’s turn, when we came to her villa, into which she vanished without having uttered a single word to me during the whole of our walk. I regretted her departure, all the more in that, while I was complaining to Albertine how chilling her friend had been with me, and was comparing in my mind this difficulty which Albertine seemed to find in making me know her friends with the hostility that Elstir, when he might have granted my desire, seemed to have encountered on that first afternoon, two girls came by to whom I lifted my hat, the young Ambresacs, whom Albertine greeted also.

I felt that, in Albertine’s eyes, my position would be improved by this meeting. They were the daughters of a kinswoman of Mme. de Villeparisis, who was also a friend of Mme. de Luxembourg. M. and Mme. d’Ambresac, who had a small villa at Balbec and were immensely rich, led the simplest of lives there, and always went about dressed he in an unvarying frock coat, she in a dark gown. Both of them used to make sweeping bows to my grandmother, which never led to anything further. The daughters, who were very pretty, were dressed more fashionably, but in a fashion suited rather to Paris than to the seaside. With their long skirts and large hats, they had the look of belonging to a different race from Albertine. She, I discovered, knew all about them.

“Oh, so you know the little d’Ambresacs, do you? Dear me, you have some swagger friends. After all, they’re very simple souls,” she went on as though this might account for it. “They’re very nice, but so well brought up that they aren’t allowed near the Casino, for fear of us—we’ve such a bad tone. They attract you, do they? Well, it all depends on what you like. They’re just little white rabbits, really. There may be something in that, of course. If little white rabbits are what appeals to you, they may supply a long-felt want. It seems, there must be some attraction, because one of them has got engaged already to the Marquis de Saint-Loup. Which is a cruel blow to the younger one, who is madly in love with that young man. I’m sure, the way they speak to you with their lips shut is quite enough for me. And then they dress in the most absurd way. Fancy going to play golf in silk frocks! At their age, they dress more showily than grown-up women who really know about clothes. Look at Mme. Elstir; there’s a well dressed woman if you like.” I answered that she had struck me as being dressed with the utmost simplicity. Albertine laughed. “She does put on the simplest things, I admit, but she dresses wonderfully, and to get what you call simplicity costs her a fortune.” Mme. Elstir’s gowns passed unnoticed by any one who had not a sober and unerring taste in matters of attire. This was lacking in me. Elstir possessed it in a supreme degree, or so Albertine told me. I had not suspected this, nor that the beautiful but quite simple objects which littered his studio were treasures long desired by him which he had followed from sale room to sale room, knowing all their history, until he had made enough money to be able to acquire them. But as to this Albertine, being as ignorant as myself, could not enlighten me. Whereas when it came to clothes, prompted by a coquettish instinct, and perhaps by the regretful longing of a penniless girl who is able to appreciate with greater disinterestedness, more delicacy of feeling, in other, richer people the things that she will never be able to afford for herself, she expressed herself admirably on the refinement of Elstir’s taste, so hard to satisfy that all women appeared to him badly dressed, while, attaching infinite importance to right proportions and shades of colour, he would order to be made for his wife, at fabulous prices, the sunshades, hats and cloaks which he had learned from Albertine to regard as charming, and which a person wanting in taste would no more have noticed than myself. Apart from this, Albertine, who had done a little painting, though without, she confessed, having any ‘gift’ for it, felt a boundless admiration for Elstir, and, thanks to his precept and example, shewed a judgment of pictures which was in marked contrast to her enthusiasm for Cavalleria Rusticana. The truth was, though as yet it was hardly apparent, that she was highly intelligent, and that in the things that she said the stupidity was not her own but that of her environment and age. Elstir’s had been a good but only a partial influence. All the branches of her intelligence had not reached the same stage of development. The taste for pictures had almost caught up the taste for clothes and all forms of smartness, but had not been followed by the taste for music, which was still a long way behind.

Albertine might know all about the Ambresacs; but as he who can achieve great things is not necessarily capable of small, I did not find her, after I had bowed to those young ladies, any better disposed to make me known to her friends. “It’s too good of you to attach any importance to them. You shouldn’t take any notice of them; they don’t count. What on earth can a lot of kids like them mean to a man like you? Now Andrée, I must say, is remarkably clever. She is a good girl, that, though she is perfectly fantastic at times, but the others are really dreadfully stupid.” When I had left Albertine, I felt suddenly a keen regret that Saint-Loup should have concealed his engagement from me and that he should be doing anything so improper as to choose a wife before breaking with his mistress. And then, shortly afterwards, I met Andrée, and as she went on talking to me for some time I seized the opportunity to tell her that I would very much like to see her again next day, but she replied that this was impossible, because her mother was not at all well, and she would have to stay beside her. The next day but one, when I was at Elstir’s, he told me how greatly Andrée had been attracted by me; on my protesting: “But it was I who was attracted by her from the start; I asked her to meet me again yesterday, but she could not.” “Yes, I know; she told me all about that,” was his reply, “she was very sorry, but she had promised to go to a picnic, somewhere miles from here. They were to drive over in a break, and it was too late for her to get out of it.” Albeit this falsehood (Andrée knowing me so slightly) was of no real importance, I ought not to have continued to seek the company of a person who was capable of uttering it. For what people have once done they will do again indefinitely, and if you go every year to see a friend who, the first time, was not able to meet you at the appointed place, or was in bed with a chill, you will find him in bed with another chill which he has just caught, you will miss him again at another meeting-place at which he has failed to appear, for a single and unalterable reason in place of which he supposes himself to have various reasons, drawn from the circumstances. One morning, not long after Andree’s telling me that she would be obliged to stay beside her mother, I was taking a short stroll with Albertine, whom I had found on the beach tossing up and catching again on a cord an oddly shaped implement which gave her a look of Giotto’s ‘Idolatry’; it was called, for that matter, ‘Diabolo,’ and is so fallen into disuse now that, when they come upon the picture of a girl playing with one, the critics of future generations will solemnly discuss, as it might be over one of the allegorical figures in the Arena, what it is that she is holding. A moment later their friend with the penurious and harsh appearance, the same one who on that first day had sneered so malevolently: “I do feel sorry for him, poor old man,” when, she saw the old gentleman’s head brushed by the flying feet of Andrée, came up to Albertine with “Good morning,‘m I disturbing you?” She had taken off her hat, for comfort, and her hair, like a strange and fascinating-plant, lay over her brow, displaying all the delicate tracery of its foliation. Albertine, perhaps because she resented seeing the other bare-headed, made-no reply, preserved a frigid silence in spite of which the girl stayed with us, kept apart from myself by Albertine, who arranged at one moment to be-alone with her, at another to walk with me leaving her to follow. I was obliged, to secure an introduction, to ask for it in the girl’s hearing. Then, as Albertine was uttering my name, on the face and in the blue eyes of this girl, whose expression I had thought so cruel when I heard her say: “Poor old man, I do feel so sorry for him,” I saw gather and gleam a cordial, friendly smile, and she held out her hand. Her hair was golden, and not her hair only; for if her cheeks were pink and her eyes blue it was like the still roseate morning sky which sparkles everywhere with dazzling points of gold.

At once kindled by her flame, I said to myself that this was a child who when in love grew shy, that it was for my sake, from love for me that she had remained with us, despite Albertine’s rebuffs, and that she must have rejoiced in the opportunity to confess to me at last, by that smiling, friendly gaze, that she would be as kind to me as she was terrible to other people. Doubtless she had noticed me on the beach, when I still knew nothing of her, and had been thinking of me ever since; perhaps it had been to win my admiration that she mocked at the old gentleman, and because she had not succeeded in getting to know me that on the following days she appeared so morose. From the hotel I had often seen her, in the evenings, walking by herself on the beach. Probably in the hope of meeting me. And now, hindered as much by Albertine’s presence as she would have been by that of the whole band, she had evidently attached herself to us, braving the increasing coldness of her friend’s attitude, only in the hope of outstaying her, of being left alone with me, when she might make an appointment with me for some time when she would find an excuse to slip away without either her family’s or her friends’ knowing that she had gone, and would meet me in some safe place before church or after golf. It was all the more difficult to see her because Andrée had quarrelled with her and now detested her. “I have put up far too long with her terrible dishonesty,” she explained to me, “her baseness; I can’t tell you all the vile insults she has heaped on me. I have stood it all because of the others. But her latest effort was really too much!” And she told me of some foolish thing that this girl had done, which might indeed have injurious consequences to Andrée herself.

But those private words promised me by Gisèle’s confiding eyes for the moment when Albertine should have left us by ourselves, were destined never to be spoken, because after Albertine, stubbornly planted between us, had answered with increasing curtness, and finally had ceased to respond at all to her friend’s remarks, Gisèle at length abandoned the attempt and turned back. I found fault with Albertine for having been so disagreeable. “It will teach her to be more careful how she behaves. She’s not a bad kid, but she’d talk the head off a donkey. She’s no business, either, to go poking her nose into everything. Why should she fasten herself on to us without being asked? In another minute, I’d have told her to go to blazes. Besides I can’t stand her going about with her hair like that; it’s such bad form.” I gazed at Albertine’s cheeks as she spoke, and asked myself what might be the perfume, the taste of them: this time they were not cool, but glowed with a uniform pink, violet-tinted, creamy, like certain roses whose petals have a waxy gloss. I felt a passionate longing for them such as one feels sometimes for a particular flower. “I hadn’t noticed it,” was all that I said. “You stared at her hard enough; anyone would have said you wanted to paint her portrait,” she scolded, not at all softened by the fact that it was at herself that I was now staring so fixedly. “I don’t believe you would care for her, all the same. She’s not in the least a flirt. You like little girls who flirt with you, I know. Anyhow, she won’t have another chance of fastening on to us and being sent about her business; she’s going off to-day to Paris.” “Are the rest of your friends going too?” “No; only she and ‘Miss,’ because she’s got an exam, coming; she’s got to stay at home and swot for it, poor kid. It’s not much fun for her, I don’t mind telling you. Of course, you may be set a good subject, you never know. But it’s a tremendous risk. One girl I know was asked: Describe an accident that you have witnessed. That was a piece of luck. But I know another girl who got: State which you would rather have as a friend, Alceste or Philinte. I’m sure I should have dried up altogether! Apart from everything else, it’s not a question to set to girls. Girls go about with other girls; they’re not supposed to have gentlemen friends.” (This announcement, which shewed that I had but little chance of being admitted to the companionship of the band, froze my blood.) “But in any case, supposing it was set to boys, what on earth would you expect them to say to a question like that? Several parents wrote to the Gaulois, to complain of the difficult questions that were being set. The joke of it is that in a collection of prize-winning essays they gave two which treated the question in absolutely opposite ways. You see, it all depends on which examiner you get. One would like you to say that Philinte was a flatterer and a scoundrel, the other that you couldn’t help admiring Alceste, but that he was too cantankerous, and that as a friend you ought to choose Philinte. How can you expect a lot of unfortunate candidates to know what to say when the professors themselves can’t make up their minds. But that’s nothing. They get more difficult every year. Gisèle will want all her wits about her if she’s to get through.” I returned to the hotel. My grandmother was not there. I waited for her for some time; when at last she appeared, I begged her to allow me, in quite unexpected circumstances, to make an expedition which might keep me away for a couple of days. I had luncheon with her, ordered a carriage and drove to the station. Gisèle would shew no surprise at seeing me there. After we had changed at Doncières, in the Paris train, there would be a carriage with a corridor, along which, while the governess dozed, I should be able to lead Gisèle into dark corners, and make an appointment to meet her on my return to Paris, which I would then try to put forward to the earliest possible date. I would travel with her as far as Caen or Evreux, whichever she preferred, and would take the next train back to Balbec. And yet, what would she have thought of me had she known that I had hesitated for a long time between her and her friends, that quite as much as with her I had contemplated falling in love with Albertine, with the bright-eyed girl, with Rosemonde. I felt a pang of remorse now that a bond of mutual affection was going to unite me with Gisèle. I could, moreover, truthfully have assured her that Albertine no longer interested me. I had seen her that morning as she swerved aside, almost turning her back on me, to speak to Gisèle. On her head, which was bent sullenly over her bosom, the hair that grew at the back, different from and darker even than the rest, shone as though she had just been bathing. “Like a dying duck in a thunderstorm!” I thought to myself, this view of her hair having let into Albertine’s body a soul entirely different from that implied hitherto by her glowing complexion and mysterious gaze. That shining cataract of hair at the back of her head had been for a moment or two all that I was able to see of her, and continued to be all that I saw in retrospect. Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen. While the coachman whipped on his horse I sat there listening to the words of gratitude and affection which Gisèle was murmuring in my ear, born, all of them, of her friendly smile and outstretched hand, the fact being that in those periods of my life in which I was not actually, but desired to be in love, I carried in my mind not only an ideal form of beauty once seen, which I recognised at a glance in every passing stranger who kept far enough from me for her confused features to resist any attempt at identification, but also the moral phantom—ever ready to be incarnate—of the woman who was going to fall in love with me, to take up her cues in the amorous comedy which I had had written out in my mind from my earliest boyhood, and in which every nice girl seemed to me to be equally desirous of playing, provided that she had also some of the physical qualifications required. In this play, whoever the new star might be whom I invited to create or to revive the leading part, the plot, the incidents, the lines themselves preserved an unalterable form.