_ Sophia lay awake one night in the room lately quitted by Carlier.
That silent negation of individuality had come and gone, and left
scarcely any record of himself either in his room or in the
memories of those who had surrounded his existence in the house.
Sophia had decided to descend from the sixth floor, partly because
the temptation of a large room, after months in a cubicle, was
rather strong; but more because of late she had been obliged to
barricade the door of the cubicle with a chest of drawers, owing
to the propensities of a new tenant of the sixth floor. It was
useless to complain to the concierge; the sole effective argument
was the chest of drawers, and even that was frailer than Sophia
could have wished. Hence, finally, her retreat.
She heard the front-door of the flat open; then it was shut with
nervous violence. The resonance of its closing would have
certainly wakened less accomplished sleepers than M. Niepce and
his friend, whose snores continued with undisturbed regularity.
After a pause of shuffling, a match was struck, and feet crept
across the corridor with the most exaggerated precautions against
noise. There followed the unintentional bang of another door. It
was decidedly the entry of a man without the slightest natural
aptitude for furtive irruptions. The clock in M. Niepce's room,
which the grocer had persuaded to exact time-keeping, chimed three
with its delicate ting.
For several days past Chirac had been mysteriously engaged very
late at the bureaux of the Debats. No one knew the nature of his
employment; he said nothing, except to inform Sophia that he would
continue to come home about three o'clock until further notice.
She had insisted on leaving in his room the materials and
apparatus for a light meal. Naturally he had protested, with the
irrational obstinacy of a physically weak man who sticks to it
that he can defy the laws of nature. But he had protested in vain.
His general conduct since Christmas Day had frightened Sophia, in
spite of her tendency to stifle facile alarms at their birth. He
had eaten scarcely anything at all, and he went about with the
face of a man dying of a broken heart. The change in him was
indeed tragic. And instead of improving, he grew worse. "Have I
done this?" Sophia asked herself. "It is impossible that I should
have done this! It is absurd and ridiculous that he should behave
so!" Her thoughts were employed alternately in sympathizing with
him and in despising him, in blaming herself and in blaming him.
When they spoke, they spoke awkwardly, as though one or both of
them had committed a shameful crime, which could not even be
mentioned. The atmosphere of the flat was tainted by the horror.
And Sophia could not offer him a bowl of soup without wondering
how he would look at her or avoid looking, and without carefully
arranging in advance her own gestures and speech. Existence was a
nightmare of self-consciousness.
"At last they have unmasked their batteries!" he had exclaimed
with painful gaiety two days after Christmas, when the besiegers
had recommenced their cannonade. He tried to imitate the strange,
general joy of the city, which had been roused from apathy by the
recurrence of a familiar noise; but the effort was a deplorable
failure. And Sophia condemned not merely the failure of Chirac's
imitation, but the thing imitated. "Childish!" she thought. Yet,
despise the feebleness of Chirac's behaviour as she might, she was
deeply impressed, genuinely astonished, by the gravity and
persistence of the symptoms. "He must have been getting himself
into a state about me for a long time," she thought. "Surely he
could not have gone mad like this all in a day or two! But I never
noticed anything. No; honestly I never noticed anything!" And just
as her behaviour in the restaurant had shaken Chirac's confidence
in his knowledge of the other sex, so now the singular behaviour
of Chirac shook hers. She was taken aback. She was frightened,
though she pretended not to be frightened.
She had lived over and over again the scene in the restaurant. She
asked herself over and over again if really she had not beforehand
expected him to make love to her in the restaurant. She could not
decide exactly when she had begun to expect a declaration; but
probably a long time before the meal was finished. She had
foreseen it, and might have stopped it. But she had not chosen to
stop it. Curiosity concerning not merely him, but also herself,
had tempted her tacitly to encourage him. She asked herself over
and over again why she had repulsed him. It struck her as curious
that she had repulsed him. Was it because she was a married woman?
Was it because she had moral scruples? Was it at bottom because
she did not care for him? Was it because she could not care for
anybody? Was it because his fervid manner of love-making offended
her English phlegm? And did she feel pleased or displeased by his
forbearance in not renewing the assault? She could not answer. She
did not know.
But all the time she knew that she wanted love. Only, she
conceived a different kind of love: placid, regular, somewhat
stern, somewhat above the plane of whims, moods, caresses, and all
mere fleshly contacts. Not that she considered that she despised
these things (though she did)! What she wanted was a love that was
too proud, too independent, to exhibit frankly either its joy or
its pain. She hated a display of sentiment. And even in the most
intimate abandonments she would have made reserves, and would have
expected reserves, trusting to a lover's powers of divination, and
to her own! The foundation of her character was a haughty moral
independence, and this quality was what she most admired in
others.
Chirac's inability to draw from his own pride strength to sustain
himself against the blow of her refusal gradually killed in her
the sexual desire which he had aroused, and which during a few
days flickered up under the stimulus of fancy and of regret.
Sophia saw with increasing clearness that her unreasoning instinct
had been right in saying him nay. And when, in spite of this,
regrets still visited her, she would comfort herself in thinking:
"I cannot be bothered with all that sort of thing. It is not worth
while. What does it lead to? Is not life complicated enough
without that? No, no! I will stay as I am. At any rate I know what
I am in for, as things are!" And she would reflect upon her
hopeful financial situation, and the approaching prospect of a
constantly sufficient income. And a little thrill of impatience
against the interminable and gigantic foolishness of the siege
would take her.
But her self-consciousness in presence of Chirac did not abate.
As she lay in bed she awaited accustomed sounds which should have
connoted Chirac's definite retirement for the night. Her ear,
however, caught no sound whatever from his room. Then she imagined
that there was a smell of burning in the flat. She sat up, and
sniffed anxiously, of a sudden wideawake and apprehensive. And
then she was sure that the smell of burning was not in her
imagination. The bedroom was in perfect darkness. Feverishly she
searched with her right hand for the matches on the night-table,
and knocked candlestick and matches to the floor. She seized her
dressing-gown, which was spread over the bed, and put it on,
aiming for the door. Her feet were bare. She discovered the door.
In the passage she could discern nothing at first, and then she
made out a thin line of light, which indicated the bottom of
Chirac's door. The smell of burning was strong and unmistakable.
She went towards the faint light, fumbled for the door-handle with
her palm, and opened. It did not occur to her to call out and ask
what was the matter.
The house was not on fire; but it might have been. She had left on
the table at the foot of Chirac's bed a small cooking-lamp, and a
saucepan of bouillon. All that Chirac had to do was to ignite the
lamp and put the saucepan on it. He had ignited the lamp, having
previously raised the double wicks, and had then dropped into the
chair by the table just as he was, and sunk forward and gone to
sleep with his head lying sideways on the table. He had not put
the saucepan on the lamp; he had not lowered the wicks, and the
flames, capped with thick black smoke, were waving slowly to and
fro within a few inches of his loose hair. His hat had rolled
along the floor; he was wearing his great overcoat and one woollen
glove; the other glove had lodged on his slanting knee. A candle
was also burning.
Sophia hastened forward, as it were surreptitiously, and with a
forward-reaching movement turned down the wicks of the lamp; black
specks were falling on the table; happily the saucepan was
covered, or the bouillon would have been ruined.
Chirac made a heart-rending spectacle, and Sophia was aware of
deep and painful emotion in seeing him thus. He must have been
utterly exhausted and broken by loss of sleep. He was a man
incapable of regular hours, incapable of treating his body with
decency. Though going to bed at three o'clock, he had continued to
rise at his usual hour. He looked like one dead; but more sad,
more wistful. Outside in the street a fog reigned, and his thin
draggled beard was jewelled with the moisture of it. His attitude
had the unconsidered and violent prostration of an overspent dog.
The beaten animal in him was expressed in every detail of that
posture. It showed even in his white, drawn eyelids, and in the
falling of a finger. All his face was very sad. It appealed for
mercy as the undefended face of sleep always appeals; it was so
helpless, so exposed, so simple. It recalled Sophia to a sense of
the inner mysteries of life, reminding her somehow that humanity
walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses. She did not
physically shudder; but her soul shuddered.
She mechanically placed the saucepan on the lamp, and the noise
awakened Chirac. He groaned. At first he did not perceive her.
When he saw that some one was looking down at him, he did not
immediately realize who this some one was. He rubbed his eyes with
his fists, exactly like a baby, and sat up, and the chair cracked.
"What then?" he demanded. "Oh, madame, I ask pardon. What?"
"You have nearly destroyed the house," she said. "I smelt fire,
and I came in. I was just in time. There is no danger now. But
please be careful." She made as if to move towards the door.
"But what did I do?" he asked, his eyelids wavering.
She explained.
He rose from his chair unsteadily. She told him to sit down again,
and he obeyed as though in a dream.
"I can go now," she said.
"Wait one moment," he murmured. "I ask pardon. I should not know
how to thank you. You are truly too good. Will you wait one
moment?"
His tone was one of supplication. He gazed at her, a little
dazzled by the light and by her. The lamp and the candle
illuminated the lower part of her face, theatrically, and showed
the texture of her blue flannel peignoir; the pattern of a part of
the lace collar was silhouetted in shadow on her cheek. Her face
was flushed, and her hair hung down unconfined. Evidently he could
not recover from his excusable astonishment at the apparition of
such a figure in his room.
"What is it--now?" she said. The faint, quizzical emphasis which
she put on the 'now' indicated the essential of her thought. The
sight of him touched her and filled her with a womanly sympathy.
But that sympathy was only the envelope of her disdain of him. She
could not admire weakness. She could but pity it with a pity in
which scorn was mingled. Her instinct was to treat him as a child.
He had failed in human dignity. And it seemed to her as if she had
not previously been quite certain whether she could not love him,
but that now she was quite certain. She was close to him. She saw
the wounds of a soul that could not hide its wounds, and she
resented the sight. She was hard. She would not make allowances.
And she revelled in her hardness. Contempt--a good-natured,
kindly, forgiving contempt--that was the kernel of the sympathy
which exteriorly warmed her! Contempt for the lack of self-control
which had resulted in this swift degeneration of a man into a
tortured victim! Contempt for the lack of perspective which
magnified a mere mushroom passion till it filled the whole field
of life! Contempt for this feminine slavery to sentiment! She felt
that she might have been able to give herself to Chirac as one
gives a toy to an infant. But of loving him ...! No! She was
conscious of an immeasurable superiority to him, for she was
conscious of the freedom of a strong mind.
"I wanted to tell you," said he, "I am going away."
"Where?" she asked.
"Out of Paris."
"Out of Paris? How?"
"By balloon! My journal ...! It is an affair of great importance.
You understand. I offered myself. What would you?"
"It is dangerous," she observed, waiting to see if he would put on
the silly air of one who does not understand fear.
"Oh!" the poor fellow muttered with a fatuous intonation and
snapping of the fingers. "That is all the same to me. Yes, it is
dangerous. Yes, it is dangerous!" he repeated. "But what would
you ...? For me ...!"
She wished that she had not mentioned danger. It hurt her to watch
him incurring her ironic disdain.
"It will be the night after to-morrow," he said. "In the courtyard
of the Gare du Nord. I want you to come and see me go. I
particularly want you to come and see me go. I have asked Carlier
to escort you."
He might have been saying, "I am offering myself to martyrdom, and
you must assist at the spectacle."
She despised him yet more.
"Oh! Be tranquil," he said. "I shall not worry you. Never shall I
speak to you again of my love. I know you. I know it would be
useless. But I hope you will come and wish me bon voyage."
"Of course, if you really wish it," she replied with cheerful
coolness.
He seized her hand and kissed it.
Once it had pleased her when he kissed her hand. But now she did
not like it. It seemed hysterical and foolish to her. She felt her
feet to be stone-cold on the floor.
"I'll leave you now," she said. "Please eat your soup."
She escaped, hoping he would not espy her feet. _