CHAPTER VIII
FRIEND AND MISTRESS
Olivier du Prat thought he knew himself. It was a pretension he had often justified. He was really, as he had said to Hautefeuille, a child of the declining century in his tastes, in his passion, almost mania, for self-analysis, in his thirst for emotions, in his powerlessness to remain faithful to any one of his sensations, in his useless lucidity, as regarded himself, and in his indulgence of the morbid, unsatisfied, unquiet longings of his nature. He felt his case was irremediable, the gloomy sign that characterizes the tragically disturbed age we live in, and one of the infallible marks of decadence in a race. Healthy life does not entirely rest upon a freedom from wounds. For the body as for the soul, for a nation as for an individual, vigorous life is indicated by the power to heal those that are made. Olivier was entirely without this capacity. Even the most distant troubles of his childhood became so real as to be agonizing when he thought of them after all the years that had passed. In recalling their walk among the mountains of Auvergne, as he had done the night before to Pierre, he had simply been thinking aloud as he always thought to himself. His imagination was incessantly occupied in turning and returning with an unhealthy activity of mental retrospection, to the hours, the minutes, that had forever vanished. In his mind he reanimated, revived, the past and lived it over again. And by this self-abandonment to a past sensitiveness he continually destroyed all present sensitiveness. He never allowed the wounds that had once been made to heal over, and his oldest injury was always ready to bleed afresh.
This unfortunate singularity of his nature would, under any circumstances, have made a meeting with Madame de Carlsberg very painful, even though the dearest friend of his youth had not been concerned in it. And he would never have heard that his friend loved without being deeply moved. He knew he was so tender-hearted, so defenceless, so vulnerable! Here, again, he was the victim of a retrospective sensitiveness. Friendship carried to the extreme point that his feeling for Hautefeuille occupied is a sentiment of the eighteenth rather than of the thirty-second year. In the first flush of youth, when the soul is all innocence, freshness, and purity, these fervent companionships, these enthusiasms of voluntary fraternity, these passionate, susceptible, absolute friendships, often appear to quickly fade away. Later in life self-interest and experience individualize one and isolation is unavoidable. Complete communion of soul with soul becomes possible only by the sorcery of love, and friendship ceases to suffice. It is relegated to the background with those family affections that once also occupied a unique place in the child and in the youth. Certain men there are, however, and Olivier was one of the number, upon whom the impression made by friendships about their eighteenth year has been too deep, too ineffaceable, and, above all, too delicate, to be ever forgotten, and even to be ever equalled. It remains an incomparable sentiment. These men, like Olivier, may pass through burning passions, suffer all the feverish shocks of love, be bruised in the most daring intrigues, but the true romance of their sensitive natures is not to be found in these passions. It is to be found in those hours of life when, in thought, they project themselves into the future with an ideal companion, with a brother that they have chosen, in whose society they realize for an instant La Fontaine's sublime fable, the complete union of mind, tastes, hopes:—
"And one possess'd nothing that the other did not share."
In the case of Olivier and Pierre this ideal comradeship had been sacredly cemented. Not only had they been brothers in their dreams, they had been brothers in arms. They were nineteen years of age in 1870. At the first news of the immense national shipwreck both had enlisted. Both had gone through the entire war. The first snowfall of the winter that saw the terrible campaign found them bivouacking upon the banks of the Loire. It was as though this friendship of the two students, now become soldiers in the same battalion, had been heroically baptized. And they had learned to esteem as much as they loved each other as they simply, bravely, obscurely risked their lives side by side. These souvenirs of their youth had remained intact and living in both, but particularly in Olivier. For him they were the only recollections unmixed with bitterness, unsullied by remorse. Before these memories his life had been full of sadness, completely orphaned as he had been early in life and turned over to the guardianship of a horribly selfish uncle. Sensual and jealous, suspicious and despotic as he was, he had only known the bitterness and the pains of love apart from his souvenirs of Pierre. Nothing more is necessary to explain to what a degree this illogical and passionate, this troubled and disillusioned being was moved by the mere idea that a woman had come between his friend and him—and what a woman, if she were Madame de Carlsberg, so hated, despised, condemned by him formerly!
Olivier's imagination could only attach itself to two precise facts during the night that followed the arousing of his first suspicions,—a night that was given up to the consideration, one by one, of the possibilities of a love-affair between Ely and Hautefeuille. These were the character of his friend and that of his former mistress. The character of his friend made him fear for him; the character of his former mistress made him fear for her. Upon this latter point also his feelings were very complex. He was convinced that Ely de Carlsberg had had a lover before him, and the idea had tortured him. He was convinced that she had had a lover at the same time with him, and he had left her on account of this idea. He was mistaken, but he was sincere, and had only yielded to proofs of coquetry that appeared sufficiently damaging to convince his jealous nature. This double conviction had left in him a scornful resentment against Ely; had left that inexpiable bitterness which compels us to continually vilify in our mind an image that we despairingly realize can never become entirely indifferent to us. He would have considered a liaison with such a creature a frightful misfortune for any man. What, then, were his feelings when he saw that she had made herself beloved by his friend or that she might make herself beloved?—Having such a prejudiced, violent contempt for this sort of woman, Olivier divined what was really the truth, although it had remained so for so short a time. Ely had been angered by his departure. She had felt the same resentment with him that he had felt with her. Chance had brought her face to face with his dearest friend, with Pierre Hautefeuille, of whom he had so often spoken in exalted terms. She must have decided upon revenge, upon a vengeance that resembled her—criminal, refined, and so profoundly, so cruelly, intelligent!—In this way Du Prat reasoned. And, although his reasoning was only hypothetical, he felt, as he fed his mind with such thoughts, a suffering mingled with a sort of unhealthy and irresistible satisfaction that would have terrified him had he considered it calmly. To suppose that Madame de Carlsberg had avenged herself upon him with such calculation was to suppose that she had not forgotten him. The windings in the human heart are so strange! In spite of the fact that he had insulted his former mistress all the time they had been together, that he had left her first, without a farewell, that he had married after due reflection, and had resolved to keep his vows honorably—in spite of all this, the idea that she still remembered him secretly stirred him strangely. It must be remembered that he was just passing through one of the most dangerous moments of conjugal existence. Every moral crisis is complicated with a multitude of contradictory elements in souls such as his,—souls without fixed principles, that are turned aside at every moment by the influence of their faintest impression. Marriages contracted through sheer lassitude, such as the one he admitted having contracted, bring down their own punishment upon the abominable egoism that prompts them. They have to pay a penalty worse than the most redoubtable catastrophe. They are followed immediately by profound, incurable weariness. The man, thirty years of age, who, thinking he is disgusted forever with sensual passions, and who, mistaking this disgust for wisdom, settles down, as the saying is, quickly finds that those very passions that sickened him are as necessary to him as morphine is to the morphine maniac who has been deprived of his Pravaz syringe, as necessary as alcohol is to the inebriate put upon a régime of pure water. He suffers from a species of nostalgia, of longing for those unhealthy emotions whose fruitlessness he has himself recognized and condemned. If a brutal but very exact comparison can be borrowed from modern pathology, he becomes a favorable medium for the cultivation of all the morbid germs floating in his atmosphere. And at the very moment when everything seems to point to the pacific arrangement of their destiny, some revolution takes place, as it was doing in Olivier,—a revolution so rapid, so terrible, that the witness and victims of these sudden wild outbursts are left almost more disconcerted than despairing.
He had therefore passed the night meditating upon all the details, significant and unimportant, that he had observed in the afternoon and evening, from the moment he had remarked the unexpected intimacy of Pierre with Corancez until the instant he had entered his friend's chamber hoping for an explanation, and had found it empty.
Toward five o'clock he fell asleep, slumbering brokenly and heavily as one does in a railway train in the morning. He dreamed upon the lines of thought that had kept him awake, as was to be expected. But it heightened his uneasiness by an appearance of presentiment. He thought he was again in the little salon of the palace at Rome, where Ely de Carlsberg used to receive him. Suddenly his wife arrived, leading Pierre Hautefeuille by the hand. Pierre stopped, as though smitten with terror, and tried to scream. Suddenly paralysis struck him down, turning his leg rigid, forcing out his left eye, drawing down the corner of his mouth, whence not a sound issued! The suffering caused by this nightmare was so intense that Olivier felt its influence even after he was awake.
He felt so ill that he could not even wait to see his wife before going out. He scribbled a line telling her that he was suffering from a slight headache, and that he had gone out to try and seek relief. He added that he had not liked to disturb her so early in the morning, and that he would be back about nine o'clock. He told her, however, that she was not to await his return should he happen to be late.
He felt that he must steady his nerves by means of a long walk so as to be prepared to cope with the events of the day, which he was convinced would be decisive. Prolonged walks were his invariable remedy in his nervous crises, and he might have been successful this time if, after having walked straight before him for some time, he had not come, about ten o'clock, to the corner of the Rue d'Antibes, the most animated and interesting part of Cannes.
At this hour the long corridor-like street was one mass of sharply outlined shadow, swept and freshened by one of those brisk breezes that impart a touch of crispness to the burning air of morning in Provence. The carriage wheels seemed to roll more rapidly, the horses' hoofs seemed to ring more resonantly upon the white roadway.
Young people were passing to and fro, English for the most part, attending with characteristic thoroughness to their after-breakfast constitutional or their before-lunch exercise. They walked along, overtaking or meeting young girls with whom they chatted gayly, having doubtless arranged the meeting upon the preceding evening. Others were hastening to the station to catch the train for Nice or Monte Carlo. Their manner, bearing, and costume bore that indescribable imprint of a frivolous life of amusement. Olivier was all the more deeply impressed by this from the mere fact that he had formerly been a leader in such an aimless mode of life.
Mornings such as this recurred to his mind. He remembered his life in Rome just two years before. Yes, the sky was of the same shade of blue, the same fresh breeze softened the sun's burning rays in the streets. Carriages rolled along there with the same busy hurry, people walked about wearing the same unconcerned look of amused idleness. And he, Olivier, was one of those promenaders.
He remembered just such a morning when he had gone to meet Ely at some appointed place. He had bought some flowers in the Piazza di Spagna to brighten the room where he was to meet her.
Moved by that mechanical parody of will which remembrance sometimes calls into action, he entered a florist's in this Rue d'Antibes, which had recalled to him the Roman Corso for a moment. Roses, pinks, narcissus, anemones, mimosa, and violets were piled up in heaps on the counter. Everywhere was displayed the glorious prodigality of the soil which, from Hyères to San Remo, is nothing but a vast garden nestling upon the shores of the sea. The shop was filled with a sweet penetrating odor which resembled the perfumes that enveloped them in their hours of love long ago.
The young man carelessly selected a cluster of pinks. He came out again holding them in his hand. And the thought flashed into his mind: "I have no one to whom I can offer them!" As a contrast to this thought the image of his friend and Madame de Carlsberg recurred to him. The thought provoked another sentiment in addition to those of which he had been the prey for some sixteen hours. He felt the most instinctive, the most unreasoning jealousy. He shrugged his shoulders and was just upon the point of flinging the pinks into the road when he thought, in a rush of the ironical self-analysis with which he often found relief for his weary heart:—
"It is your own doing, Georges Dandin," he thought. "I will offer the bouquet to my wife. It will give me an excuse for having gone out without saying good morning."
Berthe was seated before her desk, writing a letter in her long, characterless hand, upon a travelling pad, when he entered the salon of their little apartment at the hotel, to carry out his project of marital gallantry,—something very novel for him. Around the blotter a score of tiny knick-knacks were arranged—a travelling clock, portraits in leather frames, an address book, a note pad—all ready as though she had inhabited the room for several weeks, instead of several hours. She was dressed in a tailor-made costume which she had put on with the idea that her husband would certainly return to show her around Cannes. Then, as he was late, she began to reply to overdue correspondence with an apparent calmness that completely deceived Olivier.
She did not let him see the slightest sign of vexation or reproach when he came in. Her rigid features remained just as cold and fixed as before. The two young people had begun this life of distant politeness in the early weeks of their married life. Of all forms of conjugal existence, this form is the most contrary to nature and the most exceptional in the beginning. The fact that a marriage has been a failure must be an accepted one before it is possible to realize that politeness is the sole remedy for incompatibility of temper. It, at any rate, reduces the difficulties of daily intercourse which is as intolerable when love is lacking as it is sweet and necessary in a happy marriage.
But even in the most inharmonious households this very politeness often conceals in one of the two persons displaying it all the violence of passion, kept in check because misunderstood. Was this the case with Madame du Prat, with this child of twenty-two, with this woman so completely mistress of herself that she seemed to be naturally indifferent? Did she suffer because of her husband without showing it? The future would show. For the moment she was a woman of the world travelling, tranquil in aspect, who held up her forehead for the kiss of her lord and master, without a complaint, without a shade of surprise, even when he began:—
"I am sorry I let the luncheon hour go by. I hope you did not wait for me. I have brought you these flowers in the hope that you will excuse me."
"They are very beautiful," replied Berthe, burying her face in the bouquet and inhaling its subtle perfume.
The brilliant reds of the large flowers, so warm and rich in hue, seemed to accentuate all the coldness of her blond beauty. Her blue eyes had something metal lie in their depth, something steely, as though they had never felt the softening influence of a tear. And yet, from the manner in which she revelled in the musky, pungent odor of the flowers offered her by her husband, it was easy to detect an almost emotional nervousness. But there was no trace of this in the tone with which she asked:—
"Have you been out without eating?—That is very foolish.—Has your headache disappeared?—You must have slept badly last night, for I heard you walking about."
"Yes; I had a little attack of insomnia," replied Olivier, "but it is nothing. The open air on such a beautiful morning has put me all right again.—Have you seen Hautefeuille?" he added.
"No," she replied dryly. "Where could I see him? I have not been out."
"And he has not asked after me?"
"Not that I know of."
"He is perhaps also unwell," continued Olivier. "If you don't mind, I will go and ask after him."
He left the salon before he had finished speaking. The young woman remained with her forehead resting upon her hand in the same attitude. Her cheeks were burning, and although she was not weeping, her heart was swollen with grief, and her breathing was agitated and hurried. She became another woman with Olivier absent. Apart from him she could abandon herself completely to the strange sentiment that her husband inspired in her. She felt a sort of wounded and unrequited affection for him. Her feelings could not seek relief either in reproaches or in caresses. They were, therefore, in a constant state of mute irritation. Under such moral conditions Olivier's visibly partial affection for Pierre could not be very sympathetic to the young woman, particularly since their return to Cannes, which had delayed their return just at the moment she was longing to see her family again.
But there was another reason that caused her to detest this friendship. Like all young women who marry into a different circle from their own, she was mortally anxious about her husband's past. Olivier, in one of those half-confidences that even the most self-contained men fall into in the moment of candor following marriage, had allowed her to see that he had suffered a particularly cruel disillusion in the latter part of his bachelor life. Another half-confidence had enabled her to learn that this incident had taken place at Rome, and that the cause of it was a foreigner of noble birth.
Olivier had completely forgotten these two imprudent phrases, but Berthe treasured them in the recesses of her memory. She had even not been content to brood over the avowals; she had put them side by side, and had completed them by that species of mental mosaic work in which women excel, seizing a detail here, another there, in the most insignificant conversation to add them to the story upon which they are at work. They make deductions in this way that the most scientific observers, the most wily detectives, cannot equal.
Olivier had not the least suspicion of this work going, on in Berthe's mind. Still less did he suspect that she had discovered the first name of this unknown mistress, a name whose very singularity had helped to betray it. It happened in this way: When they were married he had destroyed a number of letters, thrown a lot of faded flowers into the fire with many a portrait. Then—it is the common story of those mental autos da fé—his hand had trembled in taking up some of these relics, relics of a troubled, unhappy youth, of his youth. And this had made him treasure a portrait of Madame de Carlsberg, in profile, so beautiful, so clear cut, so marvellously like the profile of some antique medallion that he could not bear to burn it. He slipped the portrait into an envelope, and, some one happening to call upon him at this moment, he placed the envelope in a large portfolio in which he carried his papers. Then he forgot all about it. He had never thought about the portrait until he was in Egypt. Again he decided to burn it, and again he could not bear to destroy it.
In the cosmopolitan society into which his diplomatic functions called him it is a frequent thing for women to give their photographs bearing their signatures to their friends, sometimes even to mere acquaintances. Ely's name written at the foot of the photograph, therefore, signified nothing. Berthe would never find the portrait, or if she did all that he would need to do would be to speak of her as an acquaintance. He, therefore, returned the photograph to its hiding-place in the portfolio, and one day the improbable happened in the simplest way in the world. They were staying at Luxor. He happened to be away from the hotel for a short time. Berthe, who during the entire journey kept the accounts of their expenses with a natural and cultivated exactitude, was looking for a bill that her husband had paid, and, without thinking, opened the portfolio. There she found the photograph. But the second half of Olivier's reasoning was faulty. She never thought of questioning him upon the subject. The presence of the portrait among Olivier's papers, the regal and singular beauty of the woman's face, the strangely foreign name, the elegant toilet, the place where the photograph had been taken,—Rome,—all told the young wife that this was the mysterious rival who had taken up such a large place in her husband's past.
She thought about it continually. But she could not speak to Olivier without his thinking that she had spied upon him, that she had deliberately searched among his papers. And besides, what was there to ask him about? She divined all that she did not actually know. So she kept silent, her heart seared with this torturing and fatal curiosity.
Her knowledge was sufficient to make her think, when her husband went out the day before with the most intimate friend of his youth: "They are going to talk about her!" For who could be in Olivier's confidence if not Pierre Hautefeuille? Was any other reason necessary to explain her antipathy? She had noticed Olivier's agitation upon his return from the walk with his friend. And she had said to herself: "They have talked about her." In the night she had heard her husband walking restlessly about in his room, and she had thought: "He is thinking about her." And this was the reason why she remained, now that the door was again closed, alone, her brow resting upon her hand, motionless, with her heart beating as though it would burst, and hating with an intense hatred the friend who knew what she ignored. By dint of concentrated reflection, she had divined a part of the truth. It would have been better for her, better for Olivier, better for all, had she only known it all!
Olivier's heart was also beating rapidly when, after having knocked at Pierre's door, he heard the words, "Come in," spoken by the voice he knew so well and whose sound he had so longed to hear the night before upon this very staircase. Pierre was not yet out of bed, though it was eleven o'clock. He excused himself merrily.
"You see what Southern habits I have fallen into. I shall soon be like one of the Kornows who stays here. Corancez called the other day and found him in bed at five o'clock in the afternoon. 'You know,' said Kornow, 'we are not early risers in Russia.'"
"You do well to take care of yourself," said Olivier, "seeing that you have been so ill."
He had spoken with some embarrassment and a little at random. How he wished his friend would tell him of his nocturnal promenade in reply! But no, a little crimson flush colored Pierre's cheek, and that was all. But it was sufficient to remove all doubt from Olivier's mind as to the reason of his midnight absence. His mind suddenly made a choice between the two alternatives imagined when he had found the room empty. The evidence was overpowering. Pierre had a mistress and he had gone to meet her. He saw the countenance, still so youthful, reposing upon the pillow and bearing the traces of a voluptuous lassitude imprinted upon it. The eyes were sunken, his face had that pallor that follows the excesses of a too exquisite passion, as though the blood were momentarily fatigued, and his lips were curved in a smile that was both languid and yet contented.
While chatting upon one thing and another, Olivier noted all these overwhelming indications. He suffered, almost physically, as he remarked them, and â pang of agonizing pain shot through his heart, a pain that almost wrung a cry from him, at the idea that the caresses which had. left Pierre weary, and still intoxicated, had been lavished upon him by Ely.
With the passionate anxiety of a trembling friendship, of an awakening jealousy, of a longing that refuses to be calmed, of a curiosity that will not slumber, he continued his implacable and silent reasoning. Yes, Pierre had a mistress. And this mistress was a society woman, and not free. The proof of this was the hour fixed for their meeting, in the precautions taken, and, above all, in the strange pride in his beloved secret that the lover had in the depths of his eyes. To meet her he must have had to go through a thicket in some garden. Upon his return, Pierre had flung his soft hat that he had worn during his promenade upon the drawers. Little twigs of shrubbery still remained on the brim, and a faint green line bore witness to a passage through foliage pushed on one side with the head. The young man had placed his jewellery near the hat, and lying in close proximity to the watch and keys and purse, was the ring that Olivier had already noticed, the two serpents interlaced, with emerald heads. Du Prat rose from his chair under the pretext of walking about the room, in reality to take up the ring. It fascinated him with an unhealthy, irresistible attraction. As he passed before the commode, he took up the ring, mechanically and without ceasing to talk, and turned it about in his hand for a second with an indifferent air. He noticed an inscription engraved in tiny letters upon its inner surface. Ora e sempre, "Now and forever." It was a phrase that Prince Fregoso had used in speaking about Greek art, and, as a souvenir of their voyage to Genoa, Ely had had the idea of having the words engraved upon the love talisman she gave to Pierre upon their return. Olivier could not possibly divine the hidden meaning of this tender allusion to hours of ecstatic happiness. He laid down the ring again without any comment. But if any doubt had remained in his mind as to what was causing him such secret anxiety, it would have disappeared before his immediate relief. He found nothing in the ring to suggest, as he had expected, a present from Madame de Carlsberg. On the contrary, the words, in Italian, again suggested the idea that Pierre's mistress might just as easily be Madame Bonnacorsi as the Baroness Ely. He thought, "I am the horse galloping after its shadow once more." And, looking at his friend, who had again crimsoned under Olivier's brief scrutiny, he asked:—
"Is the Italian colony here very large?"
"I know the Marchesa Bonnacorsi and her brother, Navagero.—And I must admit the latter is a sort of Englishman much more English than all the Englishmen in Cannes!"
Hautefeuille reddened still more as he spoke of the Venetian. He guessed what association of ideas had suggested Olivier's question so quickly after having toyed with the ring and after having undoubtedly read the inscription. His friend thought the souvenir was the gift of some Italian. And who could this be if not the Marchesa Andryana? Any one else would have hailed with satisfaction the error that turned his friend's watchful perspicacity in a wrong direction. Hautefeuille, however, was too sensitive not to be pained by a mistake that compromised an irreproachable woman, to whose marriage he had even been a witness.
His embarrassment, his crimson cheeks, a slight hesitation in his voice, were only so many signs to Olivier that he was upon the right path. He felt remorse at having yielded to an almost instinctive impulse. He was afraid he had wounded his friend and he wished to ask his pardon. But to ask pardon for an indiscretion is sometimes only to be more indiscreet. All that he could do, all that he did, was to make up a little for the impression his sarcasm upon the day before must have made upon Hautefeuille if he was in love with the Venetian. Navagero's Anglomania served him as a pretext to caricature in a few words a snob of the same order whom he had met in Rome and he then said, in conclusion:—
"I was in a vile temper yesterday, and I must have appeared somewhat prudish in my fit of sepia.—I have often been amused by the motley society one meets in watering-places, and I have felt all the charm of the women from other countries!—I was younger then.—I remember even having been fond of Monte Carlo!—I am curious to see it again. Suppose we dine there to-day? It would amuse Berthe, and I don't think it would bore me."
He spoke truly. In such mental crises, purely imaginary, the first moments of relief are accompanied by a strange feeling of light-heartedness, which shows itself in an almost infantile gayety, often as unreasoning as the motives from which it springs. During the rest of the time until the train started for Nice Olivier astonished his wife and friend by the change in his temper and conversation, a change that was inexplicable for them. The Ora e sempre of the ring and its sentimentality; all his recollections of the simplicity, of the naïveté of Italians in love; the opulent beauty that Pierre had suggested in comparing Madame Bonnacorsi to a Veronese,—all gave him the idea that his friend was the lover of an indulgent and willing mistress, one who was both voluptuous and gentle. It pleased him to think of this happy passion. He felt as much satisfaction in contemplating it as he had suffered at the thought of the other possibility. And he believed in all good faith that his anxiety of the night before and of the morning had been solely prompted by his solicitude about Hautefeuille, and that his present content grew out of his reassured friendship.
A very simple incident shattered all this edifice of voluntary and involuntary illusions. At Golfe Juan Station, as Hautefeuille was leaning a little out of the window, a voice hailed him. Olivier recognized the indestructible accent of Corancez. The door opened and gave admittance to a lady, no other than the ex-Marchesa Bonnacorsi, escorted by the Southerner. When she saw that Pierre was not alone, Andryana could not help blushing to the roots of her beautiful blond hair, while Corancez, equal to every circumstance, always triumphant, beaming, smiling, performed the necessary introduction. The conjugal seducer had thought of everything, a