IITHE ANNIVERSARY
EVEN on the day of their “anniversary” Maurice tried to persuade his companion to decide on their departure. After lunch he led her into the avenue that bounded the Sacred Mountain and widened at intervals into little terraces, with stone balustrades placed so as to give good views over the lake.
The sunlight filled it everywhere, but at the end of October the sun was grateful and not a thing to shun.
Whether from sadness or absent-mindedness, she did not appear disposed to talk. He was the first to speak, breaking the silence that now separated them, instead of bringing them closer to each other.
“This day had to come, Edith. We have been happy here. But we must go. They are waiting for me in Paris. It will be the beginning of a new life.”
He hoped for an answer, some encouragement, and began again with some embarrassment:
“We’ll set up housekeeping for our love. We’ll have a home. I’ll take steps to legalise our situation, and get a divorce for you. You haven’t wanted me to do anything about it hitherto. We’ve broken all our bonds without a backward glance.”
Edith eluded this question of getting domiciled. She had only a confused idea of not leaving Italy, and seemed without a hint of any plan besides.
“How good it is at this hour of day,” she murmured. “Last evening I felt cold.”
He followed her lead patiently.
“Cold? The air is so soft it seems almost summer still.”
“And yet it’s autumn. Look.”
At their feet stretched the high irregular shores of the lake. Opposite them rose the clearly drawn forms of the mountains. Here and there a shrine, a village, or a tower fixed the salient points of the landscape for them. Trees and shrubs in a few days had changed their colours: only the group of pines kept their green intact in the pale gold sea.
They were leaning on the balustrade. As in Savoy, the menacing beauty of things made Edith feel an almost painful ecstasy. With nostrils dilated and nerves taut, vibrating in all her being, she breathed in the autumn’s mortal grace. And he, gazing on that face across which some passion always stirred, that seemed to burn with some inner devouring flame behind the windows of her soul, that face which probably he had never yet seen in utter calm, could not tear his eyes away. Certain delicate lines, the coursing of the blood beneath her healthy skin, the smell of her dark hair, blotted out the beauty of the world for him, or rather gathered all beauty in that little space. He could not help noticing the effect upon her of the year that had slipped by. Her youth recovered, liberty, pleasure, the cities and works of art which they had seen together, had helped her and brightened her. Her heart had been seething with confused desires when they had set out, and her year had purified and completed her at the same time. Never until now had he appreciated so distinctly the work his love had wrought in her. He felt an anguished joy in reflecting that he might lose her.
She was conscious of Maurice’s persistent gaze, and smiled at him, pointing toward the horizon with a comprehensive gesture that seemed to gather it all in at once.
“It’s lovelier even than in those first days.”
He could not help translating his recent thoughts for her.
“You, too, are more beautiful, Edith.”
The unlooked-for compliment took her by surprise.
“Really?”
“Yes, I mean it. Do you see those trees? They are more graceful, as if they had thrown off some useless weight. You can see farther through their branches. In the same way I can see deeper into your eyes.”
“As deep as my heart?”
“Into your heart.”
She smiled, thinking how much a young man has yet to learn of a woman’s heart. And doubting her power no longer, she judged the moment favourable to begin, herself, the explanations that had been so long postponed. Her idea was to cast aside all falsehood, and bind her lover to herself irrevocably by making him accept a complicity that he could not disavow at so late a day. Such an acceptance of a share of guilt with her would be the greatest proof of tenderness that he could give her. She would have given it to him, herself, without hesitating, were the case reversed. But with men, one could never tell till the very end, so strange is their idea of honour.
Herself she had not had a single doubt as to her right to take away the amount of the settlement Mr. Frasne had made her of his own accord. What sort of gift was it that the giver could keep hold of? She thrust aside even her scruples as to the manner in which she had gone about the business. What did the way of it signify to her? Women only half understand any questions of self-interest that bother them.
It had been explained to her that this money belonged to her, and this explanation sufficed her. Even if she had robbed her husband she would have felt no remorse, because she hated him. But in good faith she did not believe she had despoiled him. She had only taken what was strictly due her, and had only to have opened her hands to take more.Shehad given him her youth and beauty. She had paid with her life, and tears. Could she be paid back for her nine years of repugnances overcome, her nine years of accumulated distaste?
Nevertheless, at the moment of revealing all to Maurice, she hesitated. With her most coaxing voice she began:
“Happiness improves one’s looks, then? Since my childhood this has been my first year of happiness. Oh, if you knew my past!”
“I have often asked you, Edith. Tell me about it now. Let me have the story. Neither you nor I must keep any more secrets from each other.”
It was her own version that she told, somewhat adapted, like all autobiographies: a childhood happy and petted, an environment of prosperity and luxury; then the ruin of her father, overtaken by his passion for gambling, a ruin that brought out the worst in him and led rapidly to idleness, then drunkenness and fatal illness: next her retirement to the country with her forlorn and feeble mother, and already the revolt within herself at her monotonous existence, the fever of desire and envy that consumed her girl’s heart. She had inherited her father’s imprudence and generosity, but was reduced to giving music lessons to the children of the surrounding villas and waiting impatiently for the lover that should set her free. Maurice interrupted her recital to murmur:
“It was misery.”
She believed that he pitied her, and she smiled on him, thanking him for his compassion. She was absorbed in her recollections, and did not see the strict attention that he was concentrating on her every word.
“Almost,” she replied.
“And already you were pretty?”
“I don’t think so. I was so thin. A grapevine.”
But she understood herself very well, for she added in a tone of mischief:
“Good for kindling fires.”
Then began the pursuit of her by Mr. Frasne. With his pop-eyes and his set ways, which she could feel underneath his insipid airs, her only sentiment toward him was one of repulsion. She was revolted by it all. He was the first of all her suitors to ask for her hand. He possessed a comfortable fortune, an honourable position in Paris; he could, if he liked, acquire a lawyer’s practice at Grenoble or in some neighbouring village. It was the marriage of convenience in all its horrors. She detested poverty; her mother, who was not accustomed to it, objected to it still more. Old people want to live, and mere love does not move them. All her relations got round the girl.
“And so I sold myself,” she concluded.
He had not interrupted her once. With heart beating, he followed her throughout, like one who skirts the edge of an abyss. When she ended her story with this climax he hurled the words at her which came in an instant to his lips, brutally:
“And your dot?”
“Wait, you’ll see.”
Only a few pedestrians were taking the air in the avenue. Some children were playing in the woods, quite far from them. They were almost alone, but even by the presence of these discreet witnesses she lost her best argument in this crisis that she had so adroitly postponed until to-day—the argument of her kisses. She had understood, she could not fail to have understood, what was agitating her lover: so often had it lain upon her own mind, too. It had for so long a time tormented both of them; and at the expense of much effort, by many lies and refusals to talk about the past—which counts for so little when one is in love—she had succeeded in keeping it until now at a safe distance from their happiness. At the back of her head, however, was the idea that by this very thing she would chain him to her forever.
She was bravely straining her intelligence, like a bow, to drive her arguments far forward; she wanted her explanation to be sincere and loyal as well as decisive; and all the time he was repeating in a strangled voice:
“Your dot? You had no dot?”
He showed a tone of command that he got from his father, and gave his orders sharply:
“Speak. You must tell me now.”
She was surprised, dismayed, staring at him almost in terror. This big young man of twenty-five, so sweet, so adorable, whom she had felt so sure of, lo, how abruptly he became the master. Then she had not yet explored all the corners of this heart that she had thought was hers. Instinctively, to shield their love, she shifted her tactics, and yielded up the least possible portion of the truth.
“My dot, Maurice? It truly belongs to me, my dot.”
“Where did it come from? It was not settled on you, then, by your relatives? Oh, I can guess how it was. It was he, wasn’t it, who settled it on you in your marriage contract? Answer me.”
She tried to hold out against him.
“Yes, it was he who gave it to me. And afterwards? It’s mine now.”
He was more upset than she was, but contained his anger on account of the passersby, going on with his questioning of her, nevertheless.
“No, unfortunately, it isn’t yours. I am familiar with these contracts. It was a settlement made in case of your surviving your husband. That’s what it was. I’m sure of it. Try to remember now, and be careful.”
She stiffened with all her being at these menacing words from these two dear lips, these set red lips. It was not a question any more now for her of making an accomplice of her lover, of getting this supreme gauge of love from him, only of saving that love. Her only weapons were the caresses in her voice, and she knew he would yield to them; and, besides, was it not the truth, what she was telling him?
“Maurice, don’t treat me like this. You deceive yourself. My dot belongs to me. It was mine from the beginning. A friend of my father’s insisted upon it. Do you want proof of it? As long as my mother lived I used the income from it for her. I could dispose of it as I saw fit. You see, you are mistaken. Don’t treat me like this.”
In his mental disarray the former law student of the Frasne offices was summoning up all his ideas of law, trying to reason the thing out.
“It’s always been a gift. A gift from him. And a settlement is revocable in case of divorce.”
“Not mine, I swear to you,” she assured him, hazarding everything on the throw.
“Try to think, Edith. It is so serious. My very life is at stake.”
“Your life?”
“Yes. Or my honour. It’s the same thing. Was it you who took charge of this sum, who handled the revenues?”
“Yes, I.”
She was on the alert now, and guessed swiftly what way she must make her answers, plunging into falsehood greedily.
The settlement of one hundred thousand francs to which Mr. Frasne had consented upon her marriage was her own property in fact, but under the administration and control of her husband. It was not to continue in the event of an action for divorce against her. In any case, she had not the free use of it, she could not arrange, by herself alone, for withdrawing any of it. But what did these quibbles amount to?
Nevertheless, Maurice went on, implacable as a trial judge.
“Where was this money deposited?”
“In the Universal Bank, in funds that I negotiated myself with it. I’ve told you all this already. Let me be, Maurice.”
“Deposited in your name?”
“In my name.”
“Was it there you drew it out before we left Chambéry?”
“Yes, there.”
“You were able to withdraw it from the branch at Chambéry on your endorsement alone?”
“Yes.”
“Then you were married under the arrangement of a separate maintenance account?”
“That was it.”
Several times he had questioned her on this subject, since she had told him, a little while after their flight, of having realised upon her personal fortune, which she represented as having been an inheritance from her family. This fiction of a deposit account, conceived at that time to avoid rousing the young man’s susceptibilities, she was maintaining now energetically the very day on which she had thought to give it up completely.
Her replies, made clearly and rapidly, and conforming to her previous explanations, were plausible, taken as a whole. It was not improbable that some counsellor of the Dannemarie family should have interposed before the signing of the marriage contract, to turn Frasne’s passion to account and exact an absolute and definite settlement on her; it would safeguard the young woman’s future and make her circumstances more dignified and independent. Why did Maurice doubt these statements? Did they not sufficiently destroy his happiness? It was already too much that he had yielded to a sort of entombment, from which he awakened now in anger; too much that by an unworthy compromise he had delayed his return to work until this end of their year of love. But he had not suspected the tainted origin of this fortune of Edith’s, though he deluded himself into thinking that he would restore it completely some day by his own earnings. And, lo, here was the truth now shedding the veil that hid it, crushing his pride and shattering all his self-esteem. This fortune, even if it belonged of right to Edith, came really from the man whose home he had ruined. That he should have turned the least particle of it to his own account was an infamous proceeding that he could not tolerate at any price.
With a sinking sensation, he made a mental calculation of the amount of his indebtedness to her.
“Your money is deposited in the International Bank of Milan, Edith. Do you know how much of it has been used?”
“You have had charge of it.”
“Eight thousand francs, more or less.”
“We have not spent much,” she protested gently. As a matter of fact, this sum, added to what he had had himself, came to a very moderate figure for the expenses of a whole year spent in travel. But at Orta, where they had stayed for six months, living was very cheap, diversions were infrequent and not costly. Edith, after a brief fling of extravagance, had shown herself always easy to please, quite simple and content with few expenditures, finding her love enough.
When and how could he get hold of eight thousand francs? As long as he was unable to reimburse her he should feel crushed, and dishonoured, his life a burden to him. Because he deeply resented his humiliation, Maurice loaded his companion with reproach.
“Very well, then. I am your debtor. I will pay you back, though. After that we’ll see.”
“What a discussion for two lovers,” sighed Edith, at her wits’ end, discouraged, beaten: “on the day of our anniversary!”
She hid her face, and Maurice, more miserable than herself, came up to her and tried to pull away her clenched hands.
“Listen, Edith, I don’t accuse you, not you yourself. We have been living together as if we were married. I have had no thought but for our happiness. I was wrong. I am still quite young.”
She yielded her hands up to him, not afraid to show him her poor swollen eyes.
“Shouldn’t I have accepted everything from you and been grateful for it?”
“And I from you, yes, but from him? Oh, he’s well avenged. If I have destroyed his home he has crushed my honour.”
“Have I been thinking of him, do you suppose?” But he continued gravely and with sad insistence: “We were living so heedlessly. It’s all finished now.”
There was such despair in his voice that she flung herself impulsively into his arms, and cried, “Hush!”
Her whole scheme of life had crumbled under them here on this little terrace; she must get him away from it.
“Maurice, come to our woods with me,” she pleaded. “Come and sit in the shade behind our chapel. We shall be alone there, and less unhappy.”
He made up his mind abruptly that he would listen to her.
“Yes, let’s get away from here,” he said.
The rays of the sun coming through the pines marked bands of clear light on the leaf-strewn ground. On the shadowy path they lay like golden puddles that must be stepped across. Edith led him round the chapel, and searched out a mossy corner a little to one side, making her lover be seated there. She took his face in her hands and covered it with kisses, and he seemed to yield to her caresses a moment, then suddenly thrust her off.
“No, leave me, Edith. Please don’t. When your lips press mine I’ve no more force of will. I am just nothing any more, only a beating heart.”
“I love you,” she moaned.
“That’s just it. I love you.”
He stood up, and half wildly pointed out the lake to her, where it lay glowing through the trees. Already Edith was trembling, and divined the temptation that was upon him.
“But I love you more than ever before,” she coaxed. “You may command me and I’ll obey. I’ll listen.”
“Will you come with me?”
“Where will you take me to, Maurice?”
“Down there,” he said, pointing to the lake.
“Hush!” she cried, and recoiled instinctively.
But as on the Calvary of Lemenc the year before, when she had urged him to come away, he in his turn felt a kind of ecstasy in conquering her will.
“Yes, come. Our year of love is dead already. Come, Edith. Already our love is dead. No one will look for us. The water isn’t cold. We’ll let ourselves slip over the edge of a boat. I have no more honour left. Will you come, Edith?”
She took him in both her arms and cried out in a frightened voice:
“No, no, no! Because I love you. When you love you don’t want to die. You lie, you steal, you kill, but you don’t want to die. Lovers who kill themselves don’t love their love.”
He broke loose from her grasp roughly, heedless whether he wounded her or not.
“Let me go,” he cried. “Don’t touch me again. Don’t hold me back.”
He fled away from her, and she, almost as agile, started in pursuit of him. Some children playing nearby stopped their games to watch the race.
When he was safely out of reach he turned his course and hurried away in the direction of the Tower of Buccione. It was a place he had discovered once in his walks with Edith, behind the ruins of an old fortress castle, a high square tower surrounded by panelled walls now in ruins and overrun by climbing plants. It stood at the far end of the Lake of Orta, on a hill covered with chestnut trees, and commanding a wide view from south to north. You could see as far as Novare, that shining city at the other end of the plain, and Monte Rosa, whose distant summit and glaciers scintillating in the sun looked round on all the other mountain levels. From no part roundabout was there a wider view than from this deserted place. Often when his companion’s fatigue left him with empty hours to fill Maurice would come here to gaze toward home and sense his exile to the full.
He stayed there now a long time, letting his wounds rankle. Why should he now in this hour be feeling only misery from his love, that passion that should have been the crown of all his youth? Was there, then, something besides love, something so considerable that even if it could not destroy love it was strong enough to reduce it to a second place in life and spoil its pleasures? Love was not all of life. It could not even isolate itself, or detach itself from the rest of life. Of itself it was only a disorganised and destructive force. On the other side of those mountains that marked the horizon there his love had certainly wrought disaster. Maurice was sure of that now.
Could he honestly say that only circumstances were to blame? No, his past, when he summoned it back frankly, condemned only him. The evidence showed that he himself had been guilty of lightness and feebleness, culpable in having consented to go away with Edith at all, when he could easily have foreseen that their resources would not hold out; himself to blame for having accepted without proofs the explanations which Edith made him, when it should have been easy for him to see her inconsistencies; responsible for having yielded to the influence of her caresses in the present without binding that present to either past or future; responsible for having yielded to her when she insisted upon a year of forgetfulness from him, a year of happiness, a year of indolence and cowardice.
And it came to him distinctly that if it was a question of his honour, there could be no salvation unless it reached him through his family. Without his family, he knew that he was lost. He could not, perhaps for a long time, make good that money of Edith’s which he had used and was not willing to have lived on; but with his family, if he asked their help, he might be saved. How could they refuse to save him? Were they not all one with him in his shame? But if they were one with him in shame, he had also duties toward them, and had neglected them.
Fortunate in his birth, he had contracted obligations that he had turned his back on; a compact, and he had broken it. If our families owe us help in evil fortune or in peril, by what right do we forget them and pursue our egotistical bents, sowing our own happiness and reaping consequences that do them harm?
Pride kept him from appealing to his father. His mother had been his confidante: he would ask her for the sum he needed for his liberation. That was the pressing thing. Above all things, he must win back his own self-esteem.
Having come to this decision, he returned promptly to the hotel and wrote a letter to Mrs. Roquevillard. He had just finished it and put it in the postbox when Edith came in. He saw her at the end of the garden walk, almost with a feeling of astonishment at beholding her so soon again, so far away from her had his thoughts translated him in a few hours. For a year she had filled all his days, each beating of his heart. Was she so soon dispossessed of her kingdom?
When she saw him she stopped, as if stunned, then ran and threw herself into his arms.
“It’s you—it’s you——” she cried.
“Dear sweetheart——” he murmured, very gently.
“You’re here! I’m so glad——”
She pointed toward the lake with a frightened gesture, to explain to him where she had been.
“I’ve been down there. I went along the beach. Let’s sit down, shan’t we? I can scarcely stand. I was so afraid.”
She could not turn her eyes away from him, and again the old enchantment at the sight of her came over him. The autumn landscape was all around them, tender and voluptuous. Love stood victorious amid the ruins.
Desperately they tasted of their happiness, both knowing that it had been condemned to death.
Thenceforth they talked no more about the past. He was waiting for an answer to his letter, and she dared not question him, only redoubling her charms to keep him pleased. She modified and adapted her fascination. She was no longer provoking and perpetually agitated. The fear of losing her lover made her humble and submissive, kept her quite frail and tender. She sought out the things that he liked to talk about, the books he preferred to read. She divined what music he would have her play to him on the piano. And he, on his part, was more than ever good to her. It was only that both had some feeling of embarrassment in this renewal of peace and affection between them. It was a joyless concord, lacking confidence, and unconvincing.
The second of November was a particularly cruel day for them. Maurice wanted to give himself up more freely to the memories of his family on this day of the Dead, that should have made them more vivid for him, and would have preferred to take his walk alone. Edith, however, begged to go with him, and he consented, though with no pleasure in the prospect. She went off to get ready, and he was to wait for her at the Sacred Mountain.
“Where shall we go to-day?” she asked, when she joined him there.
“To the cemetery. Everybody goes there to-day.”
Before you come to the cemetery at Orta you have to cross an untilled field which once formed part of it, but has been gradually disused. The graves enclosed in it were now unrecognisable and anonymous. Nothing marked them any more—neither name nor cross, not even a mound of earth. In memory of All Saints’ Day some unknown hand had scattered clusters of chrysanthemums here and there on the field, and the waste place was transformed into a kind of temporary garden.
Edith and Maurice stopped a moment in this enclosure. It was bordered by a row of chestnut trees, whose leaves fluttered in the supporting softness of the air. A breath of wind was enough to strip them. With the coming evening a bit of fresh north wind arose, and the golden leaves fell indeed, spinning round and round and piling themselves up at last in the gutter along the main alley-way of the cemetery. One of them in its flight alighted on Edith’s hat. It was a desolate symbol to poise above that warmly tinted face, with its eyes of fire, that fleshly shape so animate with life in its most immobile moments, and it stirred the last depths of emotion in Maurice, overwrought as he was this day.
He said nothing still, and she pointed out the chrysanthemums to him.
“The pretty flowers,” she said.
And to both of them came the reflection that the flowers were strewn above the dead. By an instinctive recoil upon themselves they glanced at the line of trees which half concealed them, and, moving nearer each to the other, embraced among the graves.