Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“I should like to know him,” he said to himself naively; “I should ask him for advice and lessons. I should beg him to reveal his secret to me.”
He would spend hours dreaming on this theme: to be loved like that. In these matters the most intelligent easily become childish. The ego is a wall that limits the view, rising higher in proportion as the man is greater. There is, however, a certain degree of greatness from which, when a man reaches it, he can always look over the top of the wall of his egoism; but that is very rare. Leonor was not a rare character; he was simply a man a little above the ordinary, capable of originality and of learning from experience, clever at his profession, apt at forming general ideas, sometimes refined and sometimes gross, a peasant rather than a man of the world, a solitary, cold of aspect, full of contradictions, ironic or ingenuous by fits, tormented by sexual images and sentimental ideas.
He was not one of those in whom a budding love, even a love of the head, abolishes the senses. The more he dreamed about Rose, the more disquietingly tense grew his nerves. His desire did not turn towards her; he caught himself one evening spying on the wife of the Barnavast keeper, who was showing her legs as she bent over the well. It made him feel rather ashamed, for this big Norman peasant woman, so young and fresh, could boast, he imagined, of nothing more than a peasant’s cleanliness — wholly exterior, and he would only, could only tolerate woman in the state of the nymph fresh risen from the bath, like the companions of Diana.
Besides, he noticed that Lanfranc was making up to this good creature and doing it in all seriousness. Sure of giving him satisfaction by taking himself off for a few days, he drove to Valognes and took the Paris train.
Leonor, without making pretensions to conquests, would have liked to have certain kinds of adventures. He wanted to find one of those women whom some careless husband, whether through avarice or poverty, deprives of the joy of fashionable elegance or who, adorned by a lover’s prodigalities, dreams of giving for nothing the present which they none the less very gladly sell. He had experienced these equivocal good graces in the days when he lived in Paris. He had even succeeded, during the space of eighteen months, in enchanting a very agreeable little actress who fitted marvellously into the second category, and he remembered how he had taken in a very pretty and very poor young middle-class woman who had surrendered herself to him because he had given himself out to be a rich nobleman. At the moment his mistress was Mme. de la Mesangerie, a local beauty; but he had never really possessed her as he desired.
What Grand Turk ever ruled over such a harem? Paris, the cafés, the concert halls, the theatres, the stations, the big shops, the gardens, the Park! The women belong to whoever takes them; none belongs to herself. None leaves her home in freedom and is sure of not returning a slave. Leonor had no illusions with regard to the results of his sensual quest He knew very well that he would captivate none but willing slaves, slaves by profession, slaves by birth. But the hunt, if the game came and offered itself graciously to the hunter, would still have its attraction — that of choice; the fun would be to put one’s hand on the fattest partridge.
“No,” he said to himself, as he walked down the Avenue de l’Opera, “this child from Robinvast shall not obsess me thus hour by hour. Any woman, provided she is acceptable to my senses, will deliver me from this silly vision. Is there such a thing as love without carnal desire? It would be contrary to physiological truth. If I love Rose, it means that I desire her.... If I desire her, it means that I have physical needs. Once these needs are satisfied, I shall feel no desire for any woman and I shall stop thinking of this silly girl. Hervart can do what he likes with her; I shan’t mind; and, after all, will the satisfaction which he derives from her be so different from that which some unknown woman will lavish so generously on me? A little coyness, does that add a spice? The sensation of a victory, a favour is better. Shall I obtain a favour? Alas, no. But by paying for it one can have the most perfect imitations. Ah! why am not I at Barnavast, gauging cubes of masonry, with glimpses of Placide Gerard’s podgy thighs? Now I know just what will happen.... Does one ever know? It’s only eleven in the morning and I’ve got a week before me.”
Still pursuing his stroll and his reflections, he entered the Louvre stores. Here, provincials and foreigners were parading their requirements and their astonishments. One heard all the possible ways of pronouncing French badly. It was an exhibition of provincial dialects. He jumped on moving platforms and staircases, passed down long files of stoves and lamps, went down again, traversed an ocean of crockery, went upstairs, found leather goods, whips and carriage lanterns, tumbled into lifts, was caught once more in a labyrinth of endless drapery, and after having wandered for some time among white leather belts garters and umbrellas, he found himself face to face with Mme de la Mesangerie, who blushed.
“Is it a stroke of luck?” he wondered.
Perhaps it was, for she said to him very quickly:
“I’m alone. My husband has just gone back. I was going to wire to you.”
Then in a lower voice:
“Well here you are! I don’t ask how it happened. Shall we profit by the opportunity?”
“It seems to me that I was looking for you without knowing.”
“I have two days,” she said, “at least two days.”
They left the shop, making their plans, which were very simple.
“Let’s go,” she said, “and shut ourselves up at Fontainebleau for a couple of days.”
“No, at Compiègne. It’s more of a desert.”
She wanted to start on the spot. Her provincial prudery seemed suddenly to have flown away. She was no longer the calm mistress who had never yielded except to the most passionate entreaties. The proud-hearted woman was turning into the lover, full of tenderness, a little reckless.
As he packed his bag, Leonor felt very happy, though still very much surprised. He decided, however, that he would ask no equivocal questions. The woman he was looking for, and whom he would not have found, had just fallen into his arms. What was more, he knew this woman, he was in love with her, though without passion; he had derived from her furtive but delicious pleasures. She inspired him, in a word, with the liveliest curiosity: he trembled at the thought that he was now to see her in all her natural beauty.
“Is she as beautiful as she is elegant? Suppose I were to find a farm-girl under the dress of the great lady.”
Less than an hour after their meeting they were together in the refreshment room of the Gare du Nord. They had time to eat a hasty luncheon, then the train carried them off.
“I’m quite mad,” she said, kissing Leonor’s hands. “What an adventure! It’s I who have thrown myself at your head.”
“I have thrown myself so often at your knees!”
“Very well, let it be understood that I am yielding to an old entreaty — and to my own desire, my darling boy, for I love you. Haven’t I done what you would have liked often enough? But do you think I didn’t want to as much as you? A woman has so little freedom, especially in a country place. How many women are there who would dare do what I have done, even that little? Getting lost when we were out shooting — that was all right for once. How frightened I was when you got into my railway carriage, against orders, one evening at Condé.... Many’s the afternoon I’ve spent dreaming of you, you wicked boy.... There, you make me quite shameless. I’m glad.”
And she took Leonor’s head between her hands, kissing it all over, at haphazard. Leonor had often seen her kissing her little boy or her dog like that.
Hortense was thirty. She owed her name to certain Bonapartist sentiments which, in her family, had survived by a few years the events of 1870. Certain elegant habits of thought and manners had also been preserved. Her father, M. d’Urville had been one of the actors of Octave Feuillet’s comedies, in this same Compiègne where they were now arriving. At the age when girls begin to forget that there are such things as dolls, she had read the complete works of this shy passionate writer
; her mother did not forbid her to look at the Vie Parisienne, in which her happy frivolity had never seen anything that might be dangerous for a well-bred girl. And so, when she married, Hortense knew that though marriage may be a garden surrounded by a wall, there are ladders to climb over this wall; the only things she thought of in her husband were rank, fortune and the conventions. Her first lover had been a young officer, with whom, as with Leonor, she had lost her way hunting; only with him it had been a stag-hunt. Leonor had participated only at an ordinary shoot, M. de la Mesangerie, in view of the present hard times, having broken up his pack of hounds. That affair had been of the most fugitive character. Afterward she had received the advances of M. de la Cloche, a once celebrated member of the Chamber of Deputies; but M. de la Cloche voted the wrong way, and under the cloak of political reasons M. de la Mesangerie closed his doors to him, in spite of his wife, who concealed a real though momentary despair. Finally M. Leonor Varin came to stay at La Mesangerie to superintend certain repairs to the fine Louis XIII house. In this chilly young man, so cold and yet so romantic as well as sensual, Hortense had found a more durable love, which greatly increased her happiness. Under a very skilfully calculated reserve, she adored Leonor, who had, on his side, always shown himself obedient, respectful, adroit and tender. She realised that the furtive pleasures which she was able to give him without compromising herself did not altogether satisfy her lover. She too, in whom the avid sensuality of the woman of thirty had begun to wake, desired pleasures of a less rapid and more complicated nature. Leonor’s kisses and the words he whispered had little by little filled her imagination with images which she wanted to see in real life. How often she had thought of running away! Two days in Paris! And now her husband had given her these two days himself.
When she said, “I’m glad” she was confessing to the existence of a happiness in which it still seemed impossible wholly to believe. She pressed herself close to Leonor.
“Is it true? Are we really both of us here, alone and free?”
In a whisper she added, her bosom heaving with precipitate waves, “I shall be yours, absolutely yours, at last.”
“All mine, all?” asked Leonor, touching her mouth with his own.
“I belong to you.”
She had the wisdom to withdraw, and looking out of the window she asked:
“Where are we?”
“We are coming near our happiness,” said Leonor.
They crossed the Oise, calm and gentle; then came the first houses of Compiègne and in a moment the station. They felt a strange emotion.
She did not wish to go to the Bell Hotel. A cab took them quickly to the Stag. Leonor was paying it off, but Hortense, wiser than her lover, kept it to do a round in the forest. She was pitiless and laughed, but with passion in her laughter; she changed her clothes and came down again.
They passed, without seeing it, before that elegant casket of stone which is the town hall. Following the fringe of the Great Park they reached the Tremble hills, where oaks and chestnut trees emerge, like the sails of ships, above the green ocean of bracken. They got down from the carriage with the intention of losing themselves for a moment in this bitter-smelling sea. The woman’s white dress and fair hair left a luminous track as she advanced, for she was flying, like a laughing nymph before the hoarse laughter of the faun.
“It was about time,” she said when the carriage picked them up to take them on to the Beaux-Monts.
“Time? what do you mean?”
“Yes,” she went on, “I was too entranced.... We’ll come back. Would you like to? We’ll come back every year.... One needs a lot of virtue to resist the persuasions of the forest.”
“Virtue,” said Leonor, “consists in being able to defer one’s pleasure or one’s happiness.... I should like to see you in this scented sea, a nymph, a dryad, a siren....”
“Do you want to?... You’re driving me crazy.”
The climb up the slope of the Beaux-Monts calmed their nerves. The carriage, which had come round by the circular road, was waiting for them at the top. They stood for a little while looking at the mist-grey distances.
They drove back by the Soissons road; they looked at nothing now and, since it had grown cool, they drew closer together and sat with clasped hands.
Leonor was thinking of the curious chances that had transported him, in a day or two, from Barnavast into the forest of Compiègne and had changed his profession from architecture to love. In spite of the fact that it seemed absurd and almost indelicate, he began, sitting in this carriage with his mistress’s hand in his, to think of his walk with Rose.
“Rose is the cause of it all. It is she who brought me here, not you, poor darling, who sit dreaming at my side. It is she who made me hungry for the kisses I reserve for you?? kisses that any other woman might have received in your place.... Yes, squeeze my hand, you may do it, for I really think I love you. I love you more than chance, I love you more than the woman I was looking for, because you are the woman I found. Besides, the perfume of your soul will make sweet your own pleasure without thinking at all of mine. In love, egotism is a homage; it is also a sign of confidence.”
The moment came. Silence fell with the night. She strove to hide her shyness under an impudent smile.
“Must I be a statue to please you? Am I a statue?”
“Your beauty would enchant me,” he said, “even if it were not you. Statue, are you made of marble?”
“You know I’m not.”
She called to mind, though the moment seemed most inapposite, her husband’s pudicity, his discreet entries into the conjugal chamber, the timidity of his caresses, the decency of his words, and the sudden savagery after his almost brotherly conversation. M. de la Mesangerie had explained to her that the final formality was necessary for the procreation of children. “God,” he added, “has so ordered it, and we must bless his divine providence.” He seemed to regret the obligation of going so far and, whether through natural or acquired foolishness, or whether through hypocrisy, he encouraged his wife to believe that sensual pleasures were contemptible. “They are,” he even said, “a means and not an end.” Following these principles, he had deprived her of them as soon as her first child seemed imminent. M. de la Mesangerie was very pious and prided himself on the possession of a most enlightened and methodical religion.
“That’s the way,” she said to herself, as she looped up her hair, “to train up a wife for adultery.”
Under the pretext of sticking a pin into her hair, she stood admiring herself in front of the glass, and at the same time, at the risk of offending her lover, who shouldn’t have doubted the fact, she said, “You’re the only person who has seen me like this, you and I....”
When Leonor went to sleep she knelt beside his adored body and pious words came to her lips: she had found the living god at last.
They had two days. They decided to finish the last hours at Paris and they returned to shut themselves up in a hotel in the Rue de Rivoli. Hortense was indefatigable.
“What shall we do to recapture this?” she asked.
The idea of taking a little house at Carentan seemed to them a good one. Mme. de la Mesangerie would always have the pretext of going to see her mother at Carquebut; her husband accompanied her there only once a year.
“Yes,” said Leonor; “there’s the time between two trains, one hour; then one misses one train. That makes two hours. Plenty of things can be done in two hours.”
“Lovers learn the art of using every moment.”
To Hortense it seemed as though she had begun a new life, her real life. She began consulting time-tables, fitting in her connections. Then she tossed the booklet aside, saying:
“Bah! It would be much simpler to get divorced.”
“Your husband’s virtue stands in the way, my dear.”
She did not insist. Nevertheless, at this moment, she would have abandoned everything — family, children, house, fortune, honour — to follow Leonor and become the w
ife of a little architect with a still uncertain future. And then she would be the niece of Lanfranc, whose mother used to sell cakes to the children in the Place Notre-Dame at Saint-Lô! She had bought them from her when she was ten. Her aristocratic instinct revolted, but she looked at Leonor and reflected that the demigods were born of the peasant girls of Attica. She pursued her idea.
“Your mother must have been very beautiful.”
“Who told you so? It’s quite true.”
She wished to go to the station alone, refused to be seen off.
“When shall I see you? You’re not going to stay on in Paris?”
“No.”
Leonor kept his word. He saw Hortense starting for the station, with red eyes, and an hour later he left in his turn.
CHAPTER XII
SATIATED, LANGUID WITH that fatigue which is a blessing to the body and a joy for the lightened brain, Hortense was thinking. She was not sorry to be returning home. The journey — what better pretext could there be for the headaches which demand darkness and silence, or long morning hours in bed, for siestas?
“I must sleep off my love, as drunkards say that one must sleep off one’s wine. But what a horrid comparison! I shall dream deliciously. My lover, I have only to shut my eyes to see you, happy in my happiness, and to feel your dear caresses. Tell me, are you pleased with me? What must I do to be still more your mistress? Yes, I ought not to have gone away; I ought to have stayed with you, at your orders, forgetting everything that is not you. You should have run and overtaken me, kept me, locked me up! But listen, I shall go and see you every week. Oh! how gladly I shall tell lies! How pleasant it will be for me to look M. de la Mesangerie in the face while he reads around my eyes only the innocent fatigue of a long journey!”