The battle continued the next day, and the days following, beneath the eyes of an amused gallery; for the people in the hotel had seen how things stood; twenty pairs of idle eyes were watching, bets were made. The two rivals were too much preoccupied with their own game to give a thought to that of the others.
The truth was that, for them, it was a game no longer. Sylvie, as well as Annette, was seriously involved. A demon troubled them, goading their senses. Tullio, proud of his victory, had no trouble adding fuel to the flame. He was really handsome, he did not lack wit, he burned with the desires that he had fired: he was worth conquering. None knew it better than he.
Every evening the two hostile sisters met in their rooms. They hated each other; yet they pretended not to know it. Bed neighbors at night, their position would have become untenable had they admitted the fact to themselves; it would have come to a public rupture, a thing they wished to avoid. They so arranged it that they came and went at different times, talked no longer, pretended not to see each other; or, as that was practically impossible, they would coldly say, "Good-morning," and "Good-evening," as though nothing were the matter. The most straightforward, sensible thing would have been to come to an understanding. But they did not wish to. They could not. When passion is unleashed in a woman there is no longer any question of straightforwardness, still less of common sense.
In Annette passion had become a poison. A kiss that Tullio, profiting by his strength, had violently imprinted upon the mouth of the proud girl, one evening at a turn in the path, had unchained in her a sensual torrent. Humiliated and enraged, she fought against it. But she was the less capable of resistance because it was the first time the flood had invaded her. Misfortune of too well defended hearts! When passion enters, the chastest is the most abandoned. . . .
One night, in one of those fits of feverish insomnia that were consuming her, Annette slipped into sleep while thinking she was still awake. She saw herself lying on her bed, with open eyes; but she could not budge, her limbs were bound. She knew that Sylvie, at her side, was pretending to sleep, and that Tullio was going to come. She could already hear the floor creak in the corridor, and the shuffle of cautious steps advancing. She saw Sylvie raise herself from the pillow, swing her legs from under the sheets, get up, and slip towards the door that half opened. Annette wanted to get up too, but she could not. As though she had heard her, Sylvie turned around, came back to the bed, looked at her, leaned over to see her better. She was not at all, not at all, like Sylvie: she did not resemble her, and yet it was Sylvie; she laughed wickedly, uncovering her teeth; she had long black hair, straight and stiff, that fell over her face when she leaned down, and brushed Annette's mouth and eyes. Annette felt on her tongue the taste of a rough mane and its hot odor. The face of her rival came closer, closer. Sylvie opened the bed, and got into it. Annette felt a hard knee pressing against her hip. She was suffocating. Sylvie had a knife; the chill blade grazed Annette's throat, and she struggled, screamed. . . . She found herself in the quiet of her room, sitting up in bed, the sheets in confusion. Sylvie was sleeping peaceably. Annette, quelling the beating of her heart, listened to her sister's reassuring breathing; and still she trembled from hate and horror. . . .
She hated. . . . But whom? . . . And who was it that she loved? She appraised Tullio, she did not respect him, she mistrusted him, she had no confidence in him whatsoever. And yet for this man whom she had known only two weeks, who was nothing to her, she was ready to hate her sister, the person she had loved best of all, whom she still loved. . . . (No! . . . Yes! . . . whom she still loved. . . .) To this man she had sacrificed, offhand, all the rest of her life. . . . But how . . . how could that be possible! . . .
She was aghast; but she could only admit the omnipotence of her madness. At certain moments a flash of good sense, an ironical start, a returning wave of her old affection for Sylvie would lift her head above the stream. But a jealous glance, the sight of Tullio whispering with Sylvie, was enough to plunge her back again. . . .
It was obvious that she was losing ground. It was precisely for that reason that her passion was maddened. She was clumsy. Annette did not know how to hide her wounded dignity. Tullio, kindly prince, had consented not to choose between them; he deigned to toss his handkerchief to both. Sylvie picked it up in a trice; she did not stand on ceremony; later she would make Tullio dance to her liking. She was not bothered when she saw this Don Juan snatching a few kisses from Annette in the arbor. And even if it had displeased her, she saw no reason why she had to show it. One could dissimulate. . . . But Annette was incapable of it. She would countenance no division of favors, and she allowed herself to show only too plainly the repulsion which Tullio's equivocal play aroused in her.
Tullio was beginning to cool towards her. This serious passion embarrassed him, bored him. A little seriousness in love is all right. But not too much; that makes it a burden, and not a pleasure. He thought of passion as a prima donna who, after singing her great cavatina, returns with extended arms to salute the public. But Annette's passion did not seem to know that the public existed. She played only for herself. She played badly. . . .
She was too sincere, too truly in love to remove the traces of her suffering, of her torments, and those ordinary blemishes that a more attentive woman effaces or mitigates more than once a day. She did not appear at all to advantage. She became even homely, in the measure that she felt herself beaten.
The triumphant Sylvie, sure of her victory, watched the disabled Annette with ironical satisfaction, spiced with a grain of malice, and, at bottom, a little pity. . . .
"Well, have you had enough? Is that what you wanted? You're certainly a sight! . . . A poor beaten dog. . . ."
And she wanted to run and hug her. But when she approached, Annette displayed so much animosity that Sylvie turned her back in vexation, grumbling:
"You don't want me to, my girl? . . . Have it your own way! Look after yourself! I'm all right! . . . Everyone for himself, and that for the others! After all, if the fool is suffering, it's her own fault! Why is she always so ridiculously serious?"
(That was what they were all thinking.)
Annette ended by withdrawing from the combat. Sylvie and Tullio were getting up a program of tableaux, in which Sylvie could show off all her charms, and a few more besides. . . . (She was a little Parisian magician who, with a shred of material, could transform herself into a series of "doubles," all much prettier than the original, but which, by completing that original, made it appear more charming than them all, since it gave birth to them all.) . . . To try to fight her on this ground would have been disastrous for Annette. She knew it only too well: she was beaten in advance; what would she have been afterwards? She asked to be left out of the entertainment, giving her health as an excuse: her ill appearance was excuse enough. And Tullio did not insist. Scarcely had she refused when she suffered the more at having retired fully armed from the battle. Even when hope is dead, a struggle engenders fresh hope. Now she had to leave Tullio and Sylvie alone together for a part of the day. In order to embarrass them she obliged herself to attend all the rehearsals. She didn't embarrass them much. On the contrary she stimulated them, especially that brazen girl, who insisted on rehearsing ten times a scene that showed the abduction of a fainting odalisque by a Byronian corsair with eyes of sombre fire, gnashing teeth,—fatal, feline, ready to leap like a jaguar. Tullio played the rôle as though he were going to put the whole Palace Hotel to fire and sword. As for Sylvie, she might have given points to the twenty thousand houris who hold the Prophet's beard in Paradise.
The evening of the performance arrived. Annette, hidden away in the last row of the hall, happily forgotten in the midst of the enthusiasm, could not stay until the end. She left in torture. Her head was afire; her mouth was bitter; she was chewing the cud of her suffering. Love scorned was gnawing at her vitals.
She went into the fields that surrounded the hotel; but she could not go far away, she kept circling around that lighted hall. The sun had set, darkness was falling. With an animal instinct she smelled out the door by which the two would certainly make their exit; a little side door that enabled the actors, without coming through the hall, to regain the dressing rooms in another wing of the building. They actually did come out, and before they had gone far they lingered in the shadow of the field to talk. Hidden behind a clump of trees, Annette could hear Sylvie laughing, laughing . . .
"No, no, not to-night!"
And Tullio was insisting: "Why not?"
"First of all, I want to sleep."
"There's plenty of time to sleep!"
"No, no, never enough! . . ."
"Well then, to-morrow night."
"It's the same for the other nights. And then I'm not alone at night; I'm spied on."
"Then it will never be?"
And that little rascal of a Sylvie replied, twisting with laughter:
"But I'm not afraid of the daylight! Are you afraid of it? . . ."
Annette could listen no longer. A storm of disgust, fury, and unhappiness swept her away, running, into the night, into the fields. Perhaps they heard the noise of her mad flight and the crackling of branches, like that which follows on the heels of a fleeing animal. But she no longer cared whether she was heard or not. Nothing mattered any more. She was fleeing, fleeing. . . . Whither? She did not know. She never knew. . . . She ran through the night, moaning. She did not see ahead of her. She ran on for five minutes, twenty minutes, an hour? She never knew how long. . . . Until her foot struck a root, and she fell full length, her head against a tree trunk. . . . And then she screamed, she howled, with her mouth against the ground, like a wounded beast.
Around her, the night. A sky without moon or stars, black. A mute earth, untroubled by a breath or by the cries of insects. Only the sound of a trickle of water over the pebbles, dripping at the foot of the slim fir against which Annette had struck her forehead. And from the depths of the gorge that cut the high, abrupt plateau, there rose the fierce rumbling of a mountain stream. Its plaint mingled with the plaint of the wounded woman. They seemed the eternal lamento of the earth. . . .
So long as she cried, she did not think. Her body, shaken by convulsive sobs, was ridding itself of the burden of evil that had crushed it down for days. The mind was silent. Then the body, exhausted, ceased to moan. Mental misery rose to the surface. And Annette again became conscious of her forsakenness. She was alone and betrayed. The circle of her thoughts could stretch no further. She had not the strength to reassemble their dispersed company. She had not even the strength to get up. Stretched out, she abandoned herself to the earth. . . . Oh! if only the earth wished to take her! . . . The rumbling of the mountain stream was speaking, thinking for her.
It was bathing her wound. After a period (long, no doubt) of prostrate suffering, Annette slowly raised her stricken body. The bruise on her forehead pained her sharply enough, and preoccupation with this hurt eased her mind. She dipped her scratched hands in the rivulet, she pressed them against her wounded, burning forehead. And so she remained seated, her eyes and forehead sunk in her wet palms, feeling the penetration of that icy purity. . . . And her grief became a distant thing. . . . She observed its moaning as might a stranger; and she no longer understood the meaning of those transports. She was thinking:
"Why? . . . What's the good? . . . Is it worth the pain? . . ."
And in the night the torrent answered:
"Folly, folly, folly . . . all is vain . . . all is nothing . . ."
And Annette smiled a bitter smile of pity.
"What was it that I wanted? . . . I don't even know, any more. . . . Where is it, that great happiness? Take it who will. . . . I shall not dispute it. . . ."
And then suddenly there returned to her in waves pictures of that happiness that she had desired, hot gusts of those desires by which her body was, and for a long time would be, possessed, even while her reason denied them. In the path traced by their bitter goad, they trailed after them a musty smell of jealous rages. . . . She suffered their attack in silence, bent over as beneath the wing of a passing wind. Then, raising her head, she said aloud:
"I have been wrong. . . . It is Sylvie he loves. . . . That is as it should be. She is better made for love. She is much prettier. I know it, and I love her. I love her because she is so. So I should be happy in her happiness. I am an egotist. . . . Only why, why has she lied to me? All the rest, but not that! Why has she deceived me? Why didn't she tell me frankly that she loved him? Why has she treated me like an enemy? Oh! And then all those things about her that I would rather not see, that are not very nice, not very good, not very beautiful! . . . But she is not to blame. How could she know? What a life she must have led from childhood! And have I the right to reproach her? . . . Were the feelings that I had any nicer? . . . That I had? That I have! . . . I know perfectly well that they are still there. . . ."
She sighed, worn out. Then she said:
"Come, this must end! I am the elder. And the greater folly is mine! . . . Let Sylvie be happy!"
But after having said, "Come," she still remained for a while without stirring. She hearkened to the silence and dreamed, sucking the knuckles of her bruised fingers. And then she sighed, stood up without a word, and began to walk.