“And how did he take it?”
“Not well, of course. However, he understood the necessity and trusted my judgment. But then, he is equipped with some knowledge of our circumstances and does not, like you, make evaluations from the basis of abysmal ignorance. I do hope that doesn’t sound harsh or critical. Listen here, Montjean. Let’s you and I make a pact. Let’s do what we can to make tomorrow a fine and amusing day for Katya and Papa. I shall do my part. I shall participate in the press and sweat of a rural festival, a smile of delight frozen to my face. I shall force cold food into my mouth while sitting on dirt. Greater love hath no man for his sister. Ah… and here comes the woman in question bearing in her basket, I fear, all kinds of nasty comestibles for alfresco gorging… lots of juicy things designed to drip onto clothing.” He rose. “May we expect you sometime midmorning?”
He joined Katya in the middle of the square, and they left towards Etcheverria, after she waved to me and mouthed, “Until tomorrow.”
I sat for a time, looking across the square dazzling with sunlight. I could not quite articulate the ambivalence of my feelings, because to do so required confessing to a petty resentment of Katya’s ability to face our forthcoming separation with so much more equanimity than I. To be sure, there was an element of courage in her attitude, of dealing gracefully with the inevitable. But where does strength leave off and callousness begin? What is the boundary between courage and indifference? And what of my own behavior? Had I not chatted urbanely with Paul, joking about picnics, when Katya’s happiness was at stake? Are we not all victims of social training, of “good form,” which requires us to face the greatest calamity with a certain grace and style? We would rather be destroyed than embarrassed.
And I thought of the forthcoming war that had been the talk of the cafй the past night. Would the young men called to arms laugh and joke and exchange hearty platitudes in imitation of popular fiction, while they waited to be mutilated by the stupidity and arrogance of aged politicians? Could the youth of France be so gullible?
Eight months later, in the trenches of the Marne, I would have the answers. Yes. Yes, young men would indeed joke and exchange stiff platitudes on the last nights of their lives. Good form… being a man… playing the game.
Upon his return that evening, I sought out Doctor Gros to tell him I would want the morrow free for a little trip.
“Hm-m. Yes, of course,” he said, his mood uncharacteristically pensive and umber.
“Your adventure didn’t live up to expectations?” I asked.
“No, of course not, my boy. Yet, even in my case, where the whole business has become so… clinical, there is the irritating presence of Hope. No matter how much one ballasts his adventures with heavy cynicism, there is always that damned glimmer of expectation that must be doused out by reality, again, and again, and again.”
“You don’t sound all that refreshed by your escapade.”
“Oh, it was a good enough bout of its kind. Vigorous. Reasonably inventive. I don’t expect these affairs to refresh me, exactly. More of an emotional purgative. An assurance that, in missing everything the romantic poets coo over, I have missed nothing of value. So! You’re going to join the Trevilles in a little dйjeuner sur l’herbe, eh? Then off to participate in the revels of a rural fкte. Do you think that is wise?”
“Wise?” I laughed. “That’s a strange thing to say. What’s troubling you?”
He scrubbed his meaty face with his palm and sighed deeply. “Sit down and let me play the avuncular sage for a few minutes.”
“Sir, if you intend to say anything that—”
“Sit down.” There was a firmness in his voice that impelled me to obey. As he fumbled about in his desk drawer for one of the black Russian cigarettes he occasionally smoked, I had the feeling he was playing for time to consider how to present something awkward to me. “Ah, here we are. Oh, my, these cigarettes are as dried out as an old nun’s hym—heart.” He tossed the box back into the drawer. “All right, let me say this as simply as possible, because I cannot think of a delicate way to approach the matter. Yesterday evening I attended a little party with my companion—very gay affair, very hollow, much laughter but little mirth—and in the course of trivial chat with a man vacationing from Paris I mentioned that my practice was in Salies. The fellow’s face lit up with that special ecstasy of the gossip with a choice morsel to share, and he asked if Salies were not the village the Trevilles had moved to—’fled to’ was his actual expression. I had no interest in his scandalmongering, but it occurred to me that, in my role as your mentor and colleague—don’t bother to give voice to the sarcasm in your face. At all events, I heard him out. Ugly little affair. To say it bluntly out, it appears that your young lady’s father shot and killed a young man in Paris—a promising lad of excellent family who—”
“—What?” I rose. “I don’t believe… What are you saying?”
“Now, now. It was all a wretched accident, of course. After a long inquiry, upon the details of which the smut-hunting journalists battened, Treville was cleared of any intention of wrongdoing. It appears that the young victim had been an occasional visitor to the home. It was common gossip that the lad was paying court to the young Treville girl. Presumably the boy had—or thought he had—an arrangement to meet the young lady rather late one night. He was creeping about the grounds, possibly seeking informal entry into the house—” Doctor Gros raised a hand. “Don’t bother to object. I am making no judgments concerning Mlle Treville’s character. I am simply recounting the tale as told to me. Well… the rest is simple enough. Monsieur Treville, believing the young man to be a prowler or burglar, shot him dead. The judicial investigators found no reason to doubt his version of the event, but of course parlor gossip fabricated its own narrative. Outraged father… in flagrante delicto… that sort of thing. The more generously disposed of their friends suggested that an elopement had been intercepted. The fellow telling me the story dismissed this possibility with a yellow leer. Well, that’s about it. As soon as the legal stew subsided, the Trevilles left, fleeing as far from Paris as they could. And one can’t get much farther from Paris than Salies, either geographically or culturally. I hope you understand that I am telling you all this only because I believe you ought to know.”
In my distress I had drifted to the window of his study, where I stared out into the dark garden. So overcome was I by what I heard, so great was the struggle to comprehend and accept it, that it was several moments before I could mutter, “Yes, yes. I understand that.”
“And you’re not offended by my interference?”
I shook my head. “No… no. Why do you doubt Monsieur Treville’s version of what happened?”
“What makes you assume I do?”
“You began all this by asking if I thought it wise to join the Trevilles in their trip to Alos.”
Doctor Gros was silent for a moment. “Yes. So I did,” he said heavily, letting it go at that.
I turned away. “God! How terrible that must have been for them! The journalists… the whispering. No wonder they choose to live off by themselves, secluded from society. Think of how the rumors and gossip must have lacerated them! Poor Katya! This explains so much of their distant, retiring behavior.”
“Perhaps… perhaps. But it doesn’t quite explain… everything. For instance, it doesn’t explain why they have suddenly decided to flee from Salies. None of our young men have been reported missing, to my knowledge. And even you, although your wits have been battered by love, appear to be in reasonably good health.”
“It’s not a thing to joke about!”
“No, of course not. Terrible taste. Do forgive me.”
“It’s possible that they are fleeing from what happened in Paris. If you learned about it by accident in St. Jean, it’s not beyond imagination that ugly rumors have pursued them even here.”
“Yes, that’s possible. And I pity anyone scarred by the acid of provincial gossip. Gossip gives our women an opportunity to dabble in delicious sin without having to repent, sin they will never experience at first hand, protected from temptation as they are by lack of courage, lack of imagination, and lack of opportunity—which deficiencies they view as proofs of their moral rectitude.” He was silent for a moment; then he spoke haltingly. “Is this… how to put this delicately?… is this your first love, Montjean?”
I did not respond.
“Allow me to assume from your silence that it is. You’re having rather a nasty go of it, and I am sorry. One’s first love is supposed to be all tinted mist and perfume… save for the final recriminations, of course. You’ve had bad luck, son. The tawdriness is not supposed to emerge until one’s later loves.”
I could not conceive of “later loves.” I was sure that my capacity to love was as narrow as it was deep, and that Katya was my love, not one of my loves. As time was to demonstrate, such was the case.
“Well then!” Doctor Gros said, boldly changing the timbre, uncomfortable in this unaccustomed role of the compassionate man. “I suppose I should congratulate you on saving the Hastoy boy’s arm yesterday. I’ve already heard about your noble feat from several sources. However—lest you grow vain—let me assure you that the reason everyone is impressed is that they doubted you were capable.”
“I see.” I forced a watery smile. “You don’t mind if I take tomorrow off and spend it with the Trevilles, do you?”
“My dear boy,” Doctor Gros said, his voice trembling with sincerity as he patted me on the shoulder, “my dear boy. I want you always to view yourself as uniquely dispensable.”
Like so many others, I was spoiled by the magnificent weather of that summer, coming to accept day after day of perfect beauty as the right and normal way of things, forgetting that, as Monsieur Treville had said, cold and darkness are the constants in the vast stretches of the universe, light and warmth existing only in the vicinity of minute star-specks. In a similar way, loneliness and resignation are constants in the life of a man, youth and love being passing moments whose very preciousness lies in their mutability. There would be nothing wrong with clinging to the comfortable fiction that these pleasant ephemera were the eternal conditions of life, were it not that, when they pass, as inevitably they must, we are left to spend the bulk of our days in bitterness, feeling somehow cheated by fate. We end with being plagued by the tortures of envy and hope which deny us the modest, but enduring, pleasures of calm and resignation.
These are, of course, the reflections of age, and they come only after one has accepted his personal mortality. But I was young that summer, and immortal, and there were no leavening traces of calm and resignation in my mood as I walked the two and a half kilometers to Etcheverria. The sunlight poured down upon the countryside like a golden liquid through air refreshed by breezes bearing the scent of grass and flowers. Overhead, puffy fair-weather clouds churned sedately along on their way to the mountains, and birds cried out their joy in the hedgerows. I was filled with a sense of my youth and strength, and with a desire to embrace life—to struggle with it if need be—to fashion fate in the image of my desires.
Oh, I had passed a hard enough night before falling into a fragile sleep, feeling an irrational and ignoble jealousy towards that poor young man who was killed in Paris. I could not picture the bungling, absent-minded scholar that was Monsieur Treville actually leveling a pistol and shooting someone. It was unthinkable… horrible.
But by the time I had risen, shaved particularly closely, and begun the pleasant early-morning walk to Etcheverria, I found that I was experiencing more relief and hope than I had in days. The ominous shadow surrounding the Trevilles was no longer a mystery; it was a palpable thing that could be confronted and fought. I was determined to speak with Paul at the first opportunity, seek to convince him that running away from gossip and insinuations would not, in the long run, solve anything. Eventually the rumors would find them again; ultimately they would have to make a stand and face their tormentors; time purchased with fruitless efforts to escape was not worth the cost in peace, stability, and comfort.
When I arrived at Etcheverria, my persuasive arguments were rehearsed and marshaled, but I found myself instantly swept up in the preparations for the picnic and fкte. In the same breath as her greeting, Katya asked me if I would mind carrying a basket out to the stable where Paul was harnessing up the trap… then I might come back and help her select the wine… oh, and go over the list with her to see if anything had been forgotten… maybe, on second thought, I should help Paul, who wasn’t the most competent hand in the world with horses… there would be dancing at the fкte, wouldn’t there?… oh, of course there would be dancing… things might seem in a bit of turmoil, but really everything was in readiness, save for last-minute matters, of course… Father was most excited at the prospect of observing the fкte at first hand and chatting with the old-timers… would these shoes do for dancing?… oh, how would you know… come to think of it, where is Father?…
During the cataract of greeting words, she accepted the pebble I had found along the road and dropped it into her reticule, then she absent-mindedly brushed my cheek with a kiss of thanks.
It was the comfortable offhandedness of the kiss that pleased me most.
I found Paul in the stable, grumbling and swearing as he struggled awkwardly to harness the trap while favoring his hurt shoulder and attempting to avoid any contact between the animal and his white linen suit. I laughed and offered to take over the job.
“Be my guest, old fellow. I have no false pride about my ability to perform the tasks of a stableboy. After all, one wouldn’t ask a stableboy to entertain three ancient gentlewomen at a garden party while exchanging wit with half a dozen dense old patricians and, at the same time, keeping a gaggle of adolescent girls giggling and blushing with the odd wink or shrug. That’s the kind of thing I was trained to accomplish. To each his metier. I’ll help Katya with the wine. More down my alley.” He gave the horse one last look of disgust. “Do you know why I dislike horses?”
“No. Why?”
“It’s their antisocial impulse to defecate constantly. Horsey sorts will babble on about the noble beasts until your eyelids are leaden, but they never seem to mention this little flaw in their character. Someday I shall own a motorcar.” He started to leave, but stopped at the stable door. “But then, with my luck, the damned motorcar will probably be forever dropping iron filings out of its back end.”
“Do go help Katya with the wine.”
By the time I brought the trap around to the front of the house, everything was in readiness. But Monsieur Treville was nowhere to be found. After calling up and down stairs for him and out in the garden, Katya discovered him in his study, sitting at his desk scribbling notes, still wearing the broad-brimmed panama he had chosen for the outing. He explained to us that he had just stepped into his study to fetch something—he couldn’t recall just what—and his eye had fallen on a little phrase in one of the open books on his desk, so naturally he read it over; then a corresponding reference occurred to him that demanded checking for accuracy; and the next thing he knew an hour had passed, and everyone in the South of France was running about bellowing his name. Most disconcerting.