Эмиль Золя
Abbe Mouret's Transgression
BOOK II
I
Through calico curtains, carefully drawn across the two large windows, a pale white light like that of breaking day filtered into the room. It was a lofty and spacious room, fitted up with old Louis XV. furniture, the woodwork painted white, the upholstery showing a pattern of red flowers on a leafy ground. On the piers above the doors on either side of the alcove were faded paintings still displaying the rosy flesh of flying Cupids, whose games it was now impossible to follow. The wainscoting with oval panels, the folding doors, the rounded ceiling (once sky-blue and framed with scrolls, medallions, and bows of flesh-coloured ribbons), had all faded to the softest grey. Opposite the windows the large alcove opened beneath banks of clouds which plaster Cupids drew aside, leaning over, and peeping saucily towards the bed. And like the windows, the alcove was curtained with coarsely hemmed calico, whose simplicity seemed strange in this room where lingered a perfume of whilom luxury and voluptuousness.
Seated near a pier table, on which a little kettle bubbled over a spirit-lamp, Albine intently watched the alcove curtains. She was gowned in white, her hair gathered up in an old lace kerchief, her hands drooping wearily, as she kept watch with the serious mien of youthful womanhood. A faint breathing, like that of a slumbering child, could be heard in the deep silence. But she grew restless after a few minutes, and could not restrain herself from stepping lightly towards the alcove and raising one of the curtains. On the edge of the big bed lay Serge, apparently asleep, with his head resting on his bent arm. During his illness his hair had lengthened, and his beard had grown. He looked very white, with sunken eyes and pallid lips.
Moved by the sight Albine was about to let the curtain fall again. But Serge faintly murmured, ‘I am not asleep.’
He lay perfectly still with his head on his arm, without stirring even a finger, as if overwhelmed by delightful weariness. His eyes had slowly opened, and his breath blew lightly on one of his hands, raising the golden down on his fair skin.
‘I heard you,’ he murmured again. ‘You were walking very gently.‘6
His voice enchanted her. She went up to his bed and crouched beside it to bring her face on a level with his own. ‘How are you?’ she asked, and then continued: ‘Oh! you are well now. Do you know, I used to cry the whole way home when I came back from over yonder with bad news of you. They told me you were delirious, and that if your dreadful fever did spare your life, it would destroy your reason. Oh, didn’t I kiss your uncle Pascal when he brought you here to recruit your health!’
Then she tucked in his bed-clothes like a young mother.
‘Those burnt-up rocks over yonder, you see, were no good to you. You need trees, and coolness, and quiet. The doctor hasn’t even told a soul that he was hiding you away here. That’s a secret between himself and those who love you. He thought you were lost. Nobody will ever disturb you, you may be sure of that! Uncle Jeanbernat is smoking his pipe by his lettuce bed. The others will get news of you on the sly. Even the doctor isn’t coming back any more. I am to be your doctor now. You don’t want any more physic, it seems. What you now want is to be loved; do you see?’
He did not seem to hear her, his brain as yet was void. His eyes, although his head remained motionless, wandered inquiringly round the room, and it struck her that he was wondering where he might be.
‘This is my room,’ she said. ‘I have given it to you. Isn’t it a pretty one? I took the finest pieces of furniture out of the lumber attic, and then I made those calico curtains to prevent the daylight from dazzling me. And you’re not putting me out a bit. I shall sleep on the second floor. There are three or four empty rooms there.’
Still he looked anxious.
‘You’re alone?’ he asked.
‘Yes; why do you ask that?’
He made no answer, but muttered wearily: ‘I have been dreaming, I am always dreaming. I hear bells ringing, and they tire me.’
And after a pause he went on: ‘Go and shut the door, bolt it; I want you to be alone, quite alone.’
When she came back, bringing a chair with her, and sat down by his pillow, he looked as gleeful as a child, and kept on saying: ‘Nobody can come in now. I shall not hear those bells any more. When you are talking to me, it rests me.’
‘Would you like something to drink?’ she asked.
He made a sign that he was not thirsty. He looked at Albine’s hands as if so astonished, so delighted to see them, that with a smile she laid one on the edge of his pillow. Then he let his head glide down, and rested his cheek against that small, cool hand, saying, with a light laugh: ‘Ah! it’s as soft as silk. It is just as if it were sending a cool breeze through my hair. Don’t take it away, please.’
Then came another long spell of silence. They gazed on one another with loving kindliness – Albine calmly scanning herself in the convalescent’s eyes, Serge apparently listening to some faint whisper from the small, cool hand.
‘Your hand is so nice,’ he said once more. ‘You can’t fancy what good it does me. It seems to steal inside me, and take away all the pain in my limbs. It’s as if I were being soothed all over, relieved, cured.’
He gently rubbed his cheek against it, with growing animation, as if he were at last coming back to life.
‘You won’t give me anything nasty to drink, will you? You won’t worry me with all sorts of physic? Your hand is quite enough for me. I have come here for you to put it there under my head.’
‘Dear Serge,’ said Albine softly, ‘how you must have suffered.’
‘Suffered! yes, yes; but it’s a long time ago. I slept badly, I had such frightful dreams. If I could, I would tell you all about it.’
He closed his eyes for a moment and strove hard to remember.
‘I can see nothing but darkness,’ he stammered. ‘It is very odd, I have just come back from a long journey. I don’t even know now where I started from. I had fever, I know, a fever that raced through my veins like a wild beast. That was it – now I remember. The whole time I had a nightmare, in which I seemed to be crawling along an endless underground passage; and every now and then I had an attack of intolerable pain, and then the passage would be suddenly walled up. A shower of stones fell from overhead, the side walls closed in, and there I stuck, panting, mad to get on; and then I bored into the obstacle and battered away with feet and fists, and skull, despairing of ever being able to get through the ever increasing mound of rubbish. At other times, I only had to touch it with my finger and it vanished: I could then walk freely along the widened gallery, weary only from the pangs of my attack.’
Albine tried to lay a hand upon his lips.
‘No,’ said he, ‘it doesn’t tire me to talk. I can whisper to you here, you see. I feel as if I were thinking and you could hear me. The queerest point about that underground journey of mine was that I hadn’t the faintest idea of turning back again; I got obstinate, although I had the thought before me that it would take me thousands of years to clear away a single heap of wreckage. It seemed a fated task, which I had to fulfil under pain of the greatest misfortunes. So, with my knees all bruised, and my forehead bumping against the hard rock, I set myself to work with all my might, so that I might get to the end as quickly as possible. The end? What was it?.. Ah! I do not know, I do not know.’
He closed his eyes and pondered dreamily. Then, with a careless pout, he again sank upon Albine’s hand and said laughing: ‘How silly of me! I am a child.’
But the girl, to ascertain if he were wholly hers, questioned him and led him back to the confused recollections he had tried to summon up. He could remember nothing, however; he was truly in a happy state of childhood. He fancied that he had been born the day before.
‘Oh! I am not strong enough yet,’ he said. ‘My furthest recollection is of a bed which burned me all over, my head rolled about on a pillow like a pan of live coals, and my feet wore away with perpetual rubbing against each other. I was very bad, I know. It seemed as if I were having my body changed, as if I were being taken all to pieces, and put together again like some broken machine.’
He laughed at this simile, and continued: ‘I shall be all new again. My illness has given me a fine cleaning. But what was it you were asking me? No, nobody was there. I was suffering all by myself at the bottom of a black hole. Nobody, nobody. And beyond that, nothing – I can see nothing… Let me be your child, will you? You shall teach me to walk. I can see nothing else but you now. I care for nothing but you… I can’t remember, I tell you. I came, you took me, and that is all.’
And restfully, pettingly, he said once more: ‘How warm your hand is now! it is as nice as the sun. Don’t let us talk any more. It makes me hot.’
A quivering silence fell from the blue ceiling of the large room. The spirit lamp had just gone out, and from the kettle came a finer and finer thread of steam. Albine and Serge, their heads side by side upon the pillow, gazed at the large calico curtains drawn across the windows. Serge’s eyes, especially, were attracted to them as to the very source of light, in which he sought to steep himself, as in diluted sunshine fitted to his weakness. He could tell that the sun lay behind that yellower gleam upon one corner of the curtain, and that sufficed to make him feel himself again. Meanwhile a far-off rustle of leaves came upon his listening ear, and against the right-hand window the clean-cut greenish shadow of a lofty bough brought him disturbing thoughts of the forest which he could feel to be near him.
‘Would you like me to open the curtains?’ asked Albine, misunderstanding his steady gaze.
‘No, no,’ he hastily replied.
‘It’s a fine day; you would see the sunlight and the trees.’
‘No, please don’t… I don’t want to see anything outside. That bough there tires me with its waving and its rising, as if it was alive. Leave your hand here, I will go to sleep. All is white now. It’s so nice.’
And then he calmly fell asleep, while Albine watched beside him and breathed upon his face to make his slumber cool.
II
The fine weather broke up on the morrow, and it rained heavily. Serge’s fever returned, and he spent a day of suffering, with his eyes despairingly fixed upon the curtains through which the light now fell dim and ashy grey as in a cellar. He could no longer see a trace of sunshine, and he looked in vain for the shadow that had scared him, the shadow of that lofty bough which had disappeared amid the mist and the pouring rain, and seemed to have carried away with it the whole forest. Towards evening he became slightly delirious and cried out to Albine that the sun was dead, that he could hear all the sky, all the country bewailing the death of the sun. She had to soothe him like a child, promising him the sun, telling him that it would come back again, that she would give it to him. But he also grieved for the plants. The seeds, he said, must be suffering underground, waiting for the return of light; they had nightmares, they also dreamed that they were crawling along an underground passage, hindered by mounds of ruins, struggling madly to reach the sunshine. And he began to weep and sob out in low tones that winter was a disease of the earth, and that he should die with the earth, unless the springtide healed them both.
For three days more the weather was truly frightful. The downpour burst over the trees with the awful clamour of an overflowing river. Gusts of wind rolled by and beat against the windows with the violence of enormous waves. Serge had insisted on Albine closing the shutters. By lamplight he was no longer troubled by the gloom of the pallid curtains, he no longer felt the greyness of the sky glide in through the smallest chinks, and flow up to him like a cloud of dust intent on burying him. However, increasing apathy crept upon him as he lay there with shrunken arms and pallid features; his weakness augmented as the earth grew more ailing. At times, when the clouds were inky black, when the bending trees cracked, and the grass lay limp beneath the downpour like the hair of a drowned woman, he all but ceased to breathe, and seemed to be passing away, shattered by the hurricane. But at the first gleam of light, at the tiniest speck of blue between two clouds, he breathed once more and drank in the soothing calm of the drying leaves, the whitening paths, the fields quaffing their last draught of water. Albine now also longed for the sun; twenty times a day would she go to the window on the landing to scan the sky, delighted at the smallest scrap of white that she espied, but perturbed when she perceived any dusky, copper-tinted, hail-laden masses, and ever dreading lest some sable cloud should kill her dear patient. She talked of sending for Doctor Pascal, but Serge would not have it.
‘To-morrow there will be sunlight on the curtains,’ he said, ‘and then I shall be well again.’
One evening when his condition was most alarming, Albine again gave him her hand to rest his cheek upon. But when she saw that it brought him no relief she wept to find herself powerless. Since he had fallen into the lethargy of winter she had felt too weak to drag him unaided from the nightmare in which he was struggling. She needed the assistance of spring. She herself was fading away, her arms grew cold, her breath scant; she no longer knew how to breathe life into him. For hours together she would roam about the spacious dismal room, and as she passed before the mirror and saw herself darkening in it, she thought she had become hideous.
One morning, however, as she raised his pillows, not daring to try again the broken spell of her hands, she fancied that she once more caught the first day’s smile on Serge’s lips.
‘Open the shutters,’ he said faintly.
She thought him still delirious, for only an hour previously she had seen but a gloomy sky on looking out from the landing.
‘Hush, go to sleep,’ she answered sadly; ‘I have promised to wake you at the very first ray – Sleep on, there’s no sun out yet.’
‘Yes, I can feel it, its light is there… Open the shutters.’
III
And there, indeed, the sunlight was. When Albine had opened the shutters, behind the large curtains, the genial yellow glow once more warmed a patch of the white calico. But that which impelled Serge to sit up in bed was the sight of the shadowy bough, the branch that for him heralded the return of life. All the resuscitated earth, with its wealth of greenery, its waters, and its belts of hills, was in that greenish blur that quivered with the faintest breath of air. It no longer disturbed him; he greedily watched it rocking, and hungered for the fortified powers of the vivifying sap which to him it symbolised. Albine, happy once more, exclaimed, as she supported him in her arms: ‘Ah! my dear Serge, the winter is over. Now we are saved.’
He lay down again, his eyes already brighter, and his voice clearer. ‘To-morrow I shall be very strong,’ he said. ‘You shall draw back the curtains. I want to see everything.’
But on the morrow he was seized with childish fear. He would not hear of the windows being opened wide. ‘By-and-by,’ he muttered, ‘later on.’ He was fearful, he dreaded the first beam of light that would flash upon his eyes. Evening came on, and still he had been unable to make up his mind to look upon the sun. He remained thus all day long, his face turned towards the curtains, watching on their transparent tissue the pallor of morn, the glow of noon, the violet tint of twilight, all the hues, all the emotions of the sky. There were pictured even the quiverings of the warm air at the light stroke of a bird’s wing, even the delight of earth’s odours throbbing in a sunbeam. Behind that veil, behind that softened phantasm of the mighty life without, he could hear the rise of spring. He even felt stifled at times when in spite of the curtains’ barrier the rush of the earth’s new blood came upon him too strongly.
The following morning he was still asleep when Albine, to hasten his recovery, cried out to him:
‘Serge! Serge! here’s the sun!’
She swiftly drew back the curtains and threw the windows wide open. He raised himself and knelt upon his bed, oppressed, swooning, his hands tightly pressed against his breast to keep his heart from breaking. Before him stretched the broad sky, all blue, a boundless blue; and in it he washed away his sufferings, surrendering himself to it, and drinking from it sweetness and purity and youth. The bough whose shadow he had noted jutted across the window and alone set against the azure sea its vigorous growth of green; but even this was too much for his sickly fastidiousness; it seemed to him that the very swallows flying past besmeared the purity of the azure. He was being born anew. He raised little involuntary cries, as he felt himself flooded with light, assailed by waves of warm air, while a whirling, whelming torrent of life flowed within him. As last with outstretched hands he sank back upon his pillow in a swoon of joy.
What a happy, delicious day that was! The sun came in from the right, far away from the alcove. Throughout the morning Serge watched it creeping onward. He could see it coming towards him, yellow as gold, perching here and there on the old furniture, frolicking in corners, at times gliding along the ground like a strip of ribbon. It was a slow deliberate march, the approach of a fond mistress stretching her golden limbs, drawing nigh to the alcove with rhythmic motion, with voluptuous lingering, which roused intense desire. At length, towards two o’clock, the sheet of sunlight left the last armchair, climbed along the coverlet, and spread over the bed like loosened locks of hair. To its glowing fondling Serge surrendered his wasted hands: with his eyes half-closed, he could feel fiery kisses thrilling each of his fingers; he lay in a bath of light, in the embrace of a glowing orb. And when Albine leaned over smiling, ‘Let me be,’ he stammered, his eyes now shut; ‘don’t hold me so tightly. How do you manage to hold me like this in your arms?’
But the sun crept down the bed again and slowly retreated to the left; and as Serge watched it bend once more and settle on chair after chair, he bitterly regretted that he had not kept it to his breast. Albine still sat upon the side of the bed, and the pair of them, an arm round each other’s neck, watched the slow paling of the sky. At times a mighty thrill seemed to make it blanch. Serge’s languid eyes now wandered over it more freely and detected in it exquisite tints of which he had never dreamed. It was not all blue, but rosy blue, lilac blue, tawny blue, living flesh, vast and spotless nudity heaving like a woman’s bosom in the breeze. At every glance into space he found a fresh surprise – unknown nooks, coy smiles, bewitching rounded outlines, gauzy veils which were cast over the mighty, glorious forms of goddesses in the depths of peeping paradises. And with his limbs lightened by suffering he winged his way amid that shimmering silk, that stainless down of azure. The sun sank lower and lower, the blue melted into purest gold, the sky’s living flesh gleamed fairer still, and then was slowly steeped in all the hues of gloom. Not a cloud – nought but gradual disappearance, a disrobing which left behind it but a gleam of modesty on the horizon. And at last the broad sky slumbered.
‘Oh, the dear baby!’ exclaimed Albine, as she looked at Serge, who had fallen asleep upon her neck at the same time as the heavens.
She laid him down in bed and shut the windows. Next morning, however, they were opened at break of day. Serge could no longer live without the sunlight. His strength was growing, he was becoming accustomed to the gusts of air which sent the alcove curtains flying. Even the azure, the everlasting azure, began to pall upon him. He grew weary of being white and swanlike, of ever swimming on heaven’s limpid lake. He came to wish for a pack of black clouds, some crumbling of the skies, that would break upon the monotony of all that purity. And as his health returned, he hungered for keener sensations. He now spent hours in gazing at the verdant bough: he would have liked to see it grow, expand, and throw out its branches to his very bed. It no longer satisfied him, but only roused desires, speaking to him as it did of all the trees whose deep-sounding call he could hear although their crests were hidden from his sight. An endless whispering of leaves, a chattering as of running water, a fluttering as of wings, all blended in one mighty, long-drawn, quivering voice, resounded in his ears.
‘When you are able to get up,’ said Albine, ‘you shall sit at the window. You will see the lovely garden!’
He closed his eyes and murmured gently:
‘Oh! I can see it, I hear it; I know where the trees are, where the water runs, where the violets grow.’
And then he added: ‘But I can’t see it clearly, I see it without any light. I must be very strong before I shall be able to get as far as the window.’
At times when Albine thought him asleep, she would vanish for hours. And on coming in again, she would find him burning with impatience, his eyes gleaming with curiosity.
‘Where have you been?’ he would call to her, taking hold of her arms, and feeling her skirts, her bodice, and her cheeks. ‘You smell of all sorts of nice things. Ah! you have been walking on the grass?’
At this she would laugh and show him her shoes wet with dew.
‘You have been in the garden! you have been in the garden!’ he then exclaimed delightedly. ‘I knew it. When you came in you seemed like a large flower. You have brought the whole garden in your skirt.’
He would keep her by him, inhaling her like a nosegay. Sometimes she came back with briars, leaves, or bits of wood entangled in her clothes. These he would remove and hide under his pillow like relics. One day she brought him a bunch of roses. At the sight of them he was so affected that he wept. He kissed them and went to sleep with them in his arms. But when they faded, he felt so keenly grieved that he forbade Albine to gather any more. He preferred her, said he, for she was as fresh and as balmy; and she never faded, her hands, her hair, her cheeks were always fragrant. At last he himself would send her into the garden, telling her not to come back before an hour.
‘In that way,’ he said, ‘I shall get sunlight, fresh air, and roses till to-morrow.’
Often, when he saw her coming in out of breath, he would cross-examine her. Which path had she taken? Had she wandered among the trees, or had she gone round the meadow side? Had she seen any nests? Had she sat down behind a bush of sweetbriar, or under an oak, or in the shade of a clump of poplars? But when she answered him and tried to describe the garden to him, he would put his hand to her lips.
‘No, no,’ he said gently. ‘It is wrong of me. I don’t want to know. I would rather see it myself.’
Then he would relapse into his favourite dream of all the greenery which he could feel only a step away. For several days he lived on that dream alone. At first, he said, he had perceived the garden much more distinctly. As he gained strength, the surging blood that warmed his veins seemed to blur his dreamy imaginings. His uncertainties multiplied. He could no longer tell whether the trees were on the right, whether the water flowed at the bottom of the garden, or whether some great rocks were not piled below his windows. He talked softly of all this to himself. On the slightest indication he would rear wondrous plans, which the song of a bird, the creaking of a bough, the scent of a flower, would suddenly make him modify, impelling him to plant a thicket of lilac in one spot, and in another to place flower-beds where formerly there had been a lawn. Every hour he designed some new garden, much to the amusement of Albine, who, whenever she surprised him at it, would exclaim with a burst of laughter: ‘That’s not it, I assure you. You can’t have any idea of it. It’s more beautiful than all the beautiful things you ever saw. So don’t go racking your head about it. The garden’s mine, and I will give it to you. Be easy, it won’t run away.’
Serge, who had already been so afraid of the light, felt considerable trepidation when he found himself strong enough to go and rest his elbows on the window-sill. Every evening he once more repeated, ‘To-morrow,’ and ‘To-morrow.’ He would turn away in his bed with a shudder when Albine came in, and would cry out that she smelt of hawthorn, that she had scratched her hands in burrowing a hole through a hedge to bring him all its odour. One morning, however, she suddenly took him up in her arms, and almost carrying him to the window, held him there and forced him to look out and see.
‘What a coward you are!’ she exclaimed with her fine ringing laugh.
And waving one hand all round the landscape, she repeated with an air of triumph, full of tender promise: ‘The Paradou! The Paradou!’
Serge looked out upon it, speechless.
