IV
Monsieur Chantal was silent. He was sitting on the billiard table, swinging his feet; his left hand fiddled with a ball and in his right hand he crumpled the woollen rag we called “the chalk rag,” and used for rubbing out the score on the slate. A little flushed, his voice muffled, he was speaking to himself now, lost in his memories, dreaming happily through early scenes and old happenings stirring in his thoughts, as a man dreams when he walks through old gardens where he grew up, and where each tree, each path, each plant, the prickly holly whose plump red berries crumble between his fingers, evoke at every step some little incident of his past life, the little insignificant delicious incidents that are the very heart, the very stuff of life.
I stood facing him, propped against the wall, leaning my hands on my useless billiard cue.
After a moment’s pause he went on: “God, how sweet pretty she was at eighteen—and graceful—and perfect! Oh, what a pretty—pretty—pretty—sweet—gay—and charming girl! She had such eyes … blue eyes … limpid … limpid … clear … I’ve never seen any like them … never.”
Again he was silent. “Why didn’t she marry?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me: he answered the careless word “marry.”
“Why? why? She didn’t want to … didn’t want to. She had a dowry of ninety thousand francs too, and she had several offers … she didn’t want to marry. She seemed sad during those years. It was just at the time I married my cousin, little Charlotte, my wife, to whom I’d been engaged for six years.”
I looked at Monsieur Chantal and thought that I could see into his mind, and that I’d come suddenly upon the humble cruel tragedy of a heart at once honourable, upright, and pure, that I’d seen into the secret unknown depths of a heart that no one had really understood, not even the resigned and silent victims of its dictates.
Pricked by a sudden savage curiosity, I said deliberately:
“Surely you ought to have married her, Monsieur Chantal?”
He started, stared at me, and said:
“Me? Marry whom?”
“Mademoiselle Pearl.”
“But why?”
“Because you loved her more than you loved your cousin.”
He stared at me with strange, wide, bewildered eyes, then stammered:
“I loved her? … I? … how? What are you talking about?”
“It’s obvious, surely? Moreover, it was on her account that you delayed so long before marrying the cousin who waited six years for you.”
The cue fell from his left hand, and he seized the chalk rag in both hands and, covering his face with it, began to sob into its folds. He wept in a despairing and ridiculous fashion, dripping water from eyes and nose and mouth all at once like a squeezed sponge. He coughed, spat, and blew his nose on the chalk rag, dried his eyes, choked, and overflowed again from every opening in his face, making a noise in his throat like a man gargling.
Terrified and ashamed, I wanted to run away, and I did not know what to say, or do, or try to do.
And suddenly Madame Chantal’s voice floated up the staircase: “Have you nearly finished your smoke?”
I opened the door and called: “Yes, ma’am, we’re coming down.”
Then I flung myself on her husband, seized him by the elbows, and said: “Monsieur Chantal, Chantal my friend, listen to me; your wife is calling you, pull yourself together, pull yourself together, we must go downstairs; pull yourself together.”
“Yes … yes …” he babbled. “I’m coming … poor girl … I’m coming … tell her I’m just coming.”
And he began carefully drying his face on the rag that had been used to rub the score off the slate for two or three years; then he emerged, white and red in streaks, his forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin dabbled with chalk, his eyes swollen and still full of tears.
I took his hands and led him towards his bedroom, murmuring: “I beg your pardon, I humbly beg your pardon, Monsieur Chantal, for hurting you like this … but … I didn’t know … you … you see.”
He shook my hand. “Yes … yes … we all have our awkward moments.”
Then he plunged his face in his basin. When he emerged, he was still hardly presentable, but I thought of a little ruse. He was very disturbed when he looked at himself in the glass, so I said “You need only tell her you’ve got a speck of dust in your eye, and you can cry in front of everyone as long as you like.”
He did at last go down, rubbing his eyes with his handkerchief. They were all very concerned; everyone wanted to look for the speck of dust, which no one could find, and they related similar cases when it had become necessary to call in a doctor.
I had betaken myself to Mademoiselle Pearl’s side and I looked at her, tormented by a burning curiosity, a curiosity that became positively painful. She really must have been pretty, with her quiet eyes, so big, so untroubled, so wide that you’d have thought they were never closed as ordinary eyes are. Her dress was a little absurd, a real old maid’s dress, that hid her real charm but could not make her look graceless.
I thought that I could see into her mind as I had just seen into the mind of Monsieur Chantal, that I could see every hidden corner of this simple humble life, spent in the service of others; but I felt a sudden impulse to speak, an aching persistent impulse to question her, to find out if she too had loved, if she had loved him; if like him she had endured the same long bitter secret sorrow, unseen, unknown, unguessed of all, indulged only at night in the solitude and darkness of her room. I looked at her, I saw her heart beating under her high-necked frock, and I wondered if night after night this gentle wide-eyed creature had stifled her moans in the depths of a pillow wet with her tears, sobbing, her body torn with long shudders, lying there in the fevered solitude of a burning bed.
And like a child breaking a plaything to see inside it, I whispered to her: “If you had seen Monsieur Chantal crying just now, you would have been sorry for him.”
She trembled: “What, has he been crying?”
“Yes, he’s been crying.”
“Why?”
She was very agitated. I answered:
“About you.”
“About me?”
“Yes. He told me how he loved you years ago, and what it had cost him to marry his wife instead of you.”
Her pale face seemed to grow a little longer; her wide quiet eyes shut suddenly, so swiftly that they seemed closed never to open again. She slipped from her chair to the floor and sank slowly, softly, across it, like a falling scarf.
“Help, quick, quick, help!” I cried. “Mademoiselle Pearl is ill.”
Madame Chantal and her daughters rushed to help her, and while they were bringing water, a napkin, vinegar, I sought my hat and hurried away.
I walked away with great strides, sick at heart and my mind full of remorse and regret. And at the same time I was almost happy; it seemed to me that I had done a praiseworthy and necessary action.
Was I wrong or right? I asked myself. They had hidden their secret knowledge in their hearts like a bullet in a healed wound. Wouldn’t they be happier now? It was too late for their grief to torture them again, and soon enough for them to recall it with a tender pitying emotion.
And perhaps some evening in the coming spring, stirred by moonlight falling through the branches across the grass under their feet, they will draw close to one another and clasp each other’s hands, remembering all their cruel hidden suffering. And perhaps, too, the brief embrace will wake in their blood a faint thrill of the ecstasy they have never known, and in the hearts of these two dead that for one moment are alive, it will stir the swift divine madness, the wild joy that turns the least trembling of true lovers into a deeper happiness than other men can ever know in all their life.