Kitabı oku: «A LOVE CRIME», sayfa 2

CHAPTER II

It was half-past eleven o'clock when Armand de Querne left the house in

the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. The wind had swept away all the clouds, and

the sky was filled with stars. "What a beautiful night!" said Armand to

himself; "I shall walk home." It was a long way, for he lived in the Rue

Lincoln, in the upper part of the Champs-Élysées. Here, on the second

floor of a wing projecting upon a garden, he had rooms which he had once

amused himself with furnishing in quaint and exquisite fashion with all

kinds of old-fashioned trifles. But how long had he ceased to spend the

evening in this "home?"

He was following the pavement of the Rue St.-Lazare, which, after quite

a narrow and slender beginning, suddenly, like a river swelled by

tributaries, widens after the Place de la Trinité, when it receives,

one after the other, the flood of passengers and vehicles drifting

through the Rue de Chateaudun, the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and the

Rue de Londres. Cabs were plying, omnibuses were changing horses, the

crowd was surging. Sometimes a girl came out from the corner of a

doorway, and with obscene speech accosted the young man, who put her

away gently with his hand.

Was it the contrast between the intimacy of the little drawing-room and

the swarming infamy of the pavement? Armand felt deeply melancholy. He

could not help seeing Alfred's face again in thought, with Helen's close

beside it. Yet, was he jealous? No. Pictures of childhood came back to

him as they had done just before, but with increased precision, showing

him Chazel dressed in the uniform of the "Vanabosteans"--a small jacket

similar to that of the Barbistes. They always went side by side in the

ranks. Poor Chazel! he was not rich. The head of the establishment had

taken him as a foundationer, with a view, to making a show-pupil of

him--a machine for winning prizes in competitions. How many times had

Armand paid for him at the little wicket, when the porter sold to the

pupils sweetmeats, fragments of iced chestnuts, cakes, and Parisian

creams--tablets of chocolate having a thick and oversweet liquid inside!

They had gone through all their classes together from the fourth up, and

had together passed through the evil days of the Commune, when, on

returning both of them from the country, after the siege, they found

themselves blockaded in Paris. Alfred had afterwards entered the École

Polytechnique. And when he came on Wednesdays and Sundays to visit his

old schoolfellow, who had already crossed the Seine and begun to lead

the life of a rich and idle young man, how ludicrous he was in his

military dress, embarrassed by his sword, not knowing how to set his hat

upon his head, and invariably scarred with clumsy razor-cuts!

While Alfred was at the School of Bridges, Armand was travelling. He had

gone round the world in the society of an amateur artist. On his return

he found that his friend was no longer at Paris. The letters passing

between them became rare. Could they have told why? Armand perhaps

might. There was only one point left in common between Alfred's life and

his own. Alfred had married Mademoiselle de Vaivre. They had made a trip

to Paris, and Armand well remembered how he had been deliciously

surprised by Helen's distinguished demeanour, when he had expected to

find her awkward, pretentious, and a fright. But at this period he was

taken up with another woman, little Aline, a mistress of his for whom he

had cherished the only genuine passion of which he was capable--painful

jealousy blended with delirium of the senses.

Later on, some one had spoken to him of Helen Chazel, and told him ugly

stories about her. And who was it that had done so? Another

school-fellow--big Lucien Rieume, who had been educated at the Vanaboste

establishment like Alfred and himself--during one of these

_tête-à-tête_ luncheons when an opening of the heart usually

accompanies that of the oysters between two college companions; and

Lucien--cordial, indiscreet, intolerable--had talked a great deal,

pouring out pell-mell whatever he knew concerning former friends. Armand

could again hear him chuckle, leaning forward somewhat with kindled eye

and humid lip:

"Poor Chazel, he hadn't a head worth a fig! It seems that his wife is

tricking him. I heard the gentleman's name: Marades, Tarades--just wait

a moment--yes, De Varades, an artillery officer. It was the talk of

Bourges. He was never out of the house."

It was an unfortunate trait in Armand's character that he was unable to

withstand the tempting of mistrust. When evil was asserted to him, he

preserved an indelible impression of it. He did not altogether believe

in it, and yet he believed in it sufficiently for a suspicion, and a

busy suspicion, to be planted within him. When the Chazels had come to

settle in Paris, ten months previously, and Armand had begun to interest

himself in Helen, the scruples of an old friendship might perhaps have

been stronger than his freak of curiosity if big Rieume's words had not

risen before his recollection.

"Really," he had said to himself, "it would be too foolish,"--a criminal

phrase which serves men for the justification of many a dastardly

action. Helen had not been slow in displaying towards him a kind of

passion which he had attributed to the natural exaltation of a

provincial. "I am the first Parisian who has paid her attentions," he

had said again to himself, and as she possessed charming gracefulness of

gesture, so sweet an expression of countenance and such an air of

complete refinement and nobility about her entire personality, he had

taken a pleasure in completing her education in elegance, thinking to

himself that she would be a delightful mistress.

But for many days she had refused really to become his mistress, and her

resistance had made him obstinate. He had become bent upon overcoming

her, recollecting the officer and telling himself that the officer had

not been the only one. A few skilful conversations with Alfred had

taught him that at one time Varades had really been a constant guest at

the house; was he not the same year's student at the École

Polytechnique as Alfred himself? Armand had lost his doubts, and in

Helen's refusals to be his, he had seen nothing but coquetry. Now, in

this respect like all men who hold the strange ethics of seducers,

Querne considered coquetry in a women a justification for the worst

behaviour. At last the long siege was about to issue in the coveted

result. Madame Chazel had granted him an appointment for the following

day. Twenty-four hours more and he would have a new mistress, as

desirable and as pretty as those whose memory was the most flattering to

the pride of his recollection. Why then did he, instead of being happy,

feel so deeply melancholy. Was it remorse for the treason to his friend?

His friend? Was Alfred really his friend? Yes, that was understood

between themselves, as well as in the eyes of others. But a friend is a

man who knows you and whom you know, to whom you show your heart and who

shows you his. Would he ever bring the tale of one of his hopes, his

joys, his sadnesses, to the calculating machine that bore the name of

Chazel? Had the latter ever confided a secret to him? So much the

better, too, for the ideas of this worthy schoolboy who seemed to look

upon life as the prolongation of a college task, must be silly enough.

It was their college life that continued to link them together, and the

recollections of their childhood. Their childhood? Turning down the Rue

Royale and arriving at the Champs Élysées, Armand suddenly recalled

the ranks of Vanaboste's school, on Thursdays, as they walked three and

three under the superintendence of a poor wretch of an usher who strove

to hide himself among the groups of people, so as to seem a passer-by

like the rest and not a watch-dog charged with the duty of looking after

a flock of schoolboys.

And what a flock it was! The majority had pale complexions, hollow eyes,

an enervated exhaustion of the whole being that spoke of secret

excesses. How much ignominy and baseness was there in that community,

the eldest in which were nineteen years of age and the youngest eight!

Within the walls of their prison, as within the walls of the great

Lycée to which they repaired twice a day, nothing was thought of but

the infamous amours existing between the elder boys and their juniors.

Of these unnatural loves, some were partly sensual, and had for their

theatre all the deserted corners in the house, from the dormitories to

the infirmary. And of the French youth confined within similar colleges,

how many were participators in this lewdness, while the rest defiled

their imaginations, although they repelled it! Among these college boys

there were also elevated and chaste connexions. The perusal of a certain

eclogue of Virgil's, a dialogue of Plato's, and a few of Shakespeare's

sonnets had excited the more literary of them, and Alfred Chazel, being

then in the third class, had one day received a piece of poetry written

by a sixth-form boy, beginning with the following astonishing line,

which had made them laugh like mad creatures:

"Alfred, my pale Alfred, my love, my sweet."

"Ah! what a horrible, horrible, place!" thought the young man, as he

recalled this blending of turpitude and puerility.

Alfred and he had belonged to the small number of those who had remained

untouched by the infection. But to him at least, all the advantage due

to this disgust was that it had led him when quite young to the pursuit

of women, and his initiation into natural pleasure had been effected in

the most degraded prostitution.

"And these are the youthful recollections that I should respect," said

Armand to himself. "What duty do I owe him because we were galley slaves

together?"

No, a hundred times no, it was not on Alfred's account that he felt so

melancholy as he hastened his steps and, this time with semi-brutality,

repulsed the love-beggars who accosted him with their unvarying phrases.

Ah! he knew this unconquerable melancholy only too well. Only too often

had it visited him, gnawing him in the diseased portion of his heart,

from the time that the income of thirty thousand francs coming to him at

his majority had permitted him to live according to his fancy; and this

fancy had immediately taken the direction of sentimental experiences.

Such melancholy, sharp and severe, he had experienced, even when quite a

youth, every time that he had found himself on the eve of a first

love-meeting with a new mistress, even though she had been the most

coveted. It was like an anguish-stricken apprehension--a dull, dim agony

of soul.

At first he had attributed this strange phenomenon alternately to

physical timidity, to remorse at his own unworthiness of the feelings

that he might inspire, and to hankerings after purity. Now he knew the

true explanation of these momentary sorrows, these keener crises of the

great sorrow which formed the gloomy background of his life. It was,

alas! the more present and palpable certainty of his impotence to love.

At this very moment he was asking himself:

"Am I really in love with Helen?"

He gathered and heaped together the whole of his inmost sensibility,

like a physician seeking with his fingers for the painful spot of a

diseased limb. But the spot of love, which it would have given him such

sweet pain to meet with, Armand could not discover.

"No," he answered himself with terrible sadness, yet courageously--for,

with all his failings, he had energy enough to venture upon

self-knowledge--"no, I am not in love with Helen. I desire her because

she is beautiful; I have paid my addresses to her because I feel bored;

I have grown obstinate about it because she denied me. Pride,

sensuality, and romantic twaddle--that's the top and bottom of the whole

affair. Then what is the good of it? What is the good? Why renew such an

intrigue as that with Madame de Rugle?"

And all the amours into which his depraved liking for seduction--the

fatal vice of his youth--had impelled him, came back into his memory,

with the monotony of their pleasures, the bitterness of their ruptures,

the sickening void of their duration. What was the good of this one or

of that? What was the good a year or two ago of amusing himself by

winning the love of Juliet, governess to the children of a house at

which he was received? What was the good of that comedy played to little

Maud, the pretty Englishwoman whom he had met at a watering-place?

"I dreamed of being a man of gallantry--a Don Juan. It looks as though

fate punishes us for the evil dreams of our youth by bringing them to

pass. I have had intrigues that might flatter my foolish vanity--and

what wretchedness!"

Among all the women whose faces and kisses he distinguished in his

thought, there was not one who had made him happy, even for a single

day, and--strange anomaly of a distempered heart--there was not one who

had not in some sort made him suffer. Through what moral disorder did it

come to pass that he was devoted to this continual inward calamity--to

the endurance of all the tortures of love: the jealousy of the present,

the intolerable loathing for the past, the bitter vision of the

treacheries of the future, and never, never, aught but physical

intoxication, without that ecstacy of soul which, notwithstanding,

existed, for he had seen with envy the heavenly expression due to it on

the countenances of a few of his mistresses?

One especially came before him--one whose conquest had not been effected

for the flattering of his fatuity, for she was but a girl was Aline, who

had died of consumption in the autumn of 1880. He could again see her

with her hollow eyes, her delicate cheek, and the blending of native

purity and corruption that was in her. He could see her nursing a little

sister whom she had taken to be with her, a child four years of age.

What affecting kindliness in vice, and what innocence in infamy! Yes,

Aline loved him, although she had three or four other lovers at the same

time as himself. His chief pleasure used to consist in taking this

pretty, ruined creature into the country to enjoy the childish outbreaks

of rusticity that prompted her to pick flowers, to listen to the birds,

to lean upon his arm, as though she had never exercised her hideous

profession.

What a mysterious thing is memory! He was on the eve of his first

assignation with Helen, and here he was growing tender over poor Aline,

evoking her as she was when he had so often sought her in her rooms in

the Rue de Moscow; as she was at certain moments when he had loved or

nearly loved her--on a summer evening, for instance, when she was seated

in the stern of a boat rowed on the Seine by four oarsmen of their

acquaintance. Yes, she was seated in a bright dress, looking at him over

the heads of the youths as they alternately stooped and rose. A

stillness was falling upon the river. A fine of orange was trailing

along the margin of the sky. What unspeakable emotion had bathed his

soul as he was sensible of the passing hour, the quivering water, the

living creature, and the dying light!

He ascended his staircase with these thoughts. Why this fatal

incompleteness in all his passions? Why was he incapable of attaining to

that absolute of tenderness which he conceived, of which he had

glimpses, towards which he sprang at every new intrigue? And

then--nothing! And yet how many chances had been combined for him; and

while his servant was relieving him of his overcoat, and he was passing

into the drawing-room, in which he often read at night before going to

bed, he mentally enumerated these chances: a fortune which enabled him

to pursue his fancies without much need of calculation; a genuine and

ancient title; ability to maintain a position in society that pleased

him; a robustness of health that could not recall a week of sickness; a

taste for intellectual things just sufficient to occupy his attention

without annoyance, for, absolutely free from personal ambition, he had

never ceased to be interested as an amateur by the attractions of

literature and art.

Added to all this, he had an appointment for the following day with a

charming woman whom he desired, and the fire of sense had not been

slackened within him by the excesses of his life. Why, then, was it

inevitable that the perception of an indefinable insufficiency in his

life should make him so melancholy just at this moment? He put on a

lounging jacket, dismissed his servant, and settled himself beside the

fire in his drawing-room. He again evoked Helen with an exactitude of

recollection which made her present to him from her mauve stockings to

that little mark which she had there at the right corner of her mouth.

Well! he did not love her, and he would never love her. If he had hoped

to experience at last, through her, that supreme surprise of the heart

which continually eluded him, he might tell himself that this hope was

abortive like the rest.

Like the rest! He felt a desire to convince himself that it had always

been so with him. He went and opened a box, in which were piled six or

seven note-books of different sizes. Some were made of sheets of school

paper. There were two of Japanese paper. These note-books were journals

of his life taken up repeatedly at unequal periods. In them he came upon

pages scrawled on the desk of the study-room at school, pages blackened

on the sides of boats, in hotel rooms, in this very drawing-room. He

took up these note-books, and began to turn over the leaves, finding in

them a former ego perfectly similar to the present ego in premature

misanthropy, sudden and fleeting ardours of sensuality, murderous

analysis, impotent hankering after unattainable delight, indolent

languor and incapacity ever fully to feel anything, whether real or

ideal.

The whole had combined to make of him a sort of child of the century, of

the year 1883, but without elegy, a Nihilist of gallantry and without

declamation.

The following is one of the pieces which his eyes, now gloomy and dull,

dwelt upon, and which would have broken Helen's heart if, gifted with

the magic faculty of second sight, she had discovered the melancholy

torpor which even the gift of her person, following upon the gift of her

entire soul, was inadequate to disturb.

"PARIS, _May_ 1871.

"Terrible days. Vanaboste comes and tells us yesterday, at one o'clock,

that we must get ready to leave, and that the pupils at Sainte Barbe

have gone already with their head. The Panthéon is full of powder, and

will soon blow up. Since morning the firing had been slowly, slowly

drawing nearer--a strange noise! It was as though some one had shaken

millions of nuts over the town in a gigantic cloth. Alfred and I spent

the morning in the attic watching the flames of the conflagrations

writhing against the sky. He was quite depressed, and I fiercely gay,

with a nervous gaiety that forced me to the utterance of outrageous

paradoxes--but were they paradoxes?--concerning the fine theories of our

professor of philosophy last week. O vision of fate! His last lesson

turned upon progress!

"We are packing up hastily in order to leave, when one of the masters

comes in a state of terror through the little door opening upon the

Rue Tournefort, which he bolts behind him. He tells us that the

federates would not allow anyone to pass their barricades. It was with

great difficulty that he himself has been able to return. We were a long

way from the good-natured National Guardsman who said to us on Monday,

at the doors of the Lycée: Shout "Long live the Commune!" boys, and you

are free." Vanaboste was as white as my paper when he heard this news.

The usher hit on the plan of having mattresses spread over the middle of

the courtyard, so that if the Panthéon blew up we should fall with less

violence. We remained for about two hours in this distress, we pupils

fourteen in number, the two assistant masters, and the head master.

Alfred and I, who, by an odd contradiction, were almost calm, talking

together in a corner.

"In spite of the firing, which was constantly drawing nearer, and the

bullets cracking against the walls, perhaps a hundred paces off, we had

neither of us a perception of reality; the danger appeared to us to be

something distant, dim, almost abstract. And we were talking--of what?

Of our childhood. 'It has been a happy one,' he said to me, 'even here.'

For once I emptied my heart to him, and let him see what I thought of

the scholastic lupanar in which, owing to my guardian's selfishness, I

have been obliged to grow up. After all, I prefer even this bagnio to

his house.

"Through this useless talking the firing can be heard coming nearer. The

Panthéon does not blow up. Suddenly a loud shout comes down from one of

ourselves in the upper story, where, at the risk of receiving a bullet,

he had stationed himself at the window. 'The Chasseurs are at the end of

the street.' That was the most trying moment. My heart beat as though it

would burst, my throat was choking in the expectation of what was going

to happen. Undefined danger had left me calm. Exact, brutal, and present

fact affected me unpleasantly. Some shots are fired quite close, then

furious summonses with the butt-ends of guns shake the gate. The same

usher who had shown his coolness in conceiving the precautionary measure

of the mattresses, rushes forward in time to strike up the levelled guns

of two chasseurs, who, blackened with powder, and with eyes gleaming in

frenzy, would have fired at random into the crowd of us if the other had

not been there. A lieutenant comes up, a little man in yellow boots,

with strap on chin and pistol in fist. Vanaboste speaks to him, and we

are saved.

"All this was yesterday. To-day we are again at our studies, a symbol of

our childish life in the midst of this tumult of action. I turn over the

leaves of an old book of spiritual philosophy with the pleasure of

contempt, and after reading official phrases about God, the immortal

soul, refinement of manners, moral liberty and innate reason, I close my

eyes and see the Square of the Panthéon as it was last night: the dead

lying with naked feet, because their shoes have been stolen; and with

battered skulls, because their deaths have just been made sure, of by