Bernard Desqueyroux had inherited from his father a house at Argelouse, next to that belonging to the Larroques: he was never seen there until the shooting season began, and he did not sleep there until the month of October, when he went pigeon-shooting in the neighbourhood. In the winter this sedate young gentleman studied law in Paris; and in the summer he did not spend much time with his family. He could not endure Victor de la Trave, his mother’s second husband, who had not had a penny when she married him, and whose extravagance was the scandal of Saint Clair; and his half-sister Anne seemed too young to deserve any attention from him. Nor did he think much more about Thérèse. Every one regarded their marriage as inevitable because it seemed such a pity not to combine the two estates, and he very sensibly shared the common opinion on this point. But he left nothing to chance, and took a pride in the management of his life. “If a man is unhappy he has only himself to blame,” this slightly corpulent youth was wont to observe. Until his marriage he divided his time equally between work and pleasure; and although he by no means neglected food, drink, and sport, he worked “like a galley slave,” so his mother said. A husband, he thought, ought to be better informed than his wife: and Thérèse’s intelligence was already famous. She was doubtless clever, but Bernard knew the kind of arguments to influence a woman: moreover, as his mother pointed out, it was not a bad thing to “have a leg in both camps,” and old Larroque might be useful to him.
At twenty-six years of age Bernard Desqueyroux, after a few visits to Italy, Spain, and Holland, which he had carefully “got up” beforehand, would marry the richest and the cleverest girl in the neighbourhood, though not perhaps the prettiest: (“Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you can’t resist her charm!”)
Thérèse smiled at the caricature of Bernard that she drew in her mind: she reflected that he was, in point of fact, better than most of the young men she could have married. The women of those moorlands by the sea are much superior to the men, who see no one but each other after they have left school and hardly ever lose their boorishness. Their hearts are in their country, and in spirit they never leave it. They are never really happy anywhere else: they would feel that they were being utterly false to it if they gave up their country clothes, the local dialect, and the rustic habits of their home. Under Bernard’s thick skin there was certainly a sort of goodness of heart. When he was at the point of death the tenants said there wouldn’t be another gentleman left when he had gone. Yes, he was certainly kind, just, and fundamentally honest. He never talked of what he did not know; he accepted his own limitations. In his younger days he had not been bad-looking, this unlicked Hyppolytus, though he was far less interested in girls than in the hares he coursed on the moors.
Yet it was not Bernard that Thérèse, with half-closed eyes and leaning her head against the carriage windows, pictured to herself bicycling along the road from Saint Clair to Argelouse, about nine o’clock, before the heat of the day had reached its height; not her cold-blooded suitor, but his little sister Anne, her face all afire in the sunshine;—the grasshoppers were already calling from pine to pine, and the murmurous hum of the moorland, like the roar of a furnace, began to rise up to the sky; and myriads of flies hovered above the tall heather.
“You’d better put your cloak on to come into the drawing-room,” she used to say, “it’s like an ice-house”: and Aunt Clara added: “I’ll give you something to drink, dear, when you aren’t quite so hot.” Anne shouted futile words of greeting to the deaf old lady: and Thérèse said: “Don’t make yourself hoarse, darling, she understands everything from the way you move your lips.” But Anne insisted on articulating every word, distorting her young lips in the process, and the Aunt made all sorts of meaningless replies, until the friends had to run away so as to be able to laugh unobserved.
In the far corner of the darkened carriage Thérèse looked back upon those innocent days,—innocent, but gladdened by a fleeting happiness, half understood: and she could not know that this transient gleam was all the happiness ever to be hers. Nothing warned her that her fate was laid in a darkened drawing-room, encompassed by the pitiless summer, on a red-plush sofa by the side of Anne, who sat poring over a photograph album on her knees. Why was she so happy? She and Anne had hardly a single taste in common. Anne hated reading, and did nothing but sew, chatter, and giggle. She had not an idea in her head, while Thérèse devoured with equal voracity the novels of Paul de Kock, the Causeries du Lundi, the History of the Consulate, indeed all that miscellaneous literature that lies about in cupboards in a house in the country. Sometimes Anne got up to see whether the heat had passed: but as the light burst through the half-open shutters, like a splash of molten metal, it seemed to burn the matting on the floor and they had to shut everything up once more and crouch indoors. Even at sunset, when only the feet of the pines glowed in the level rays, and a last persistent grasshopper could still be heard deep down among the herbage, the heat still hovered stagnant under the oak trees. The two friends lay stretched upon the grass at the edge of the field, as they might have sat down on the shore of a lake. Stormy clouds called up fleeting pictures as they passed; but before Thérèse could make out the winged lady that Anne saw in the sky, it had changed, she said, into some strange elongated beast.
In September they could go out after the midday meal and explore that land of thirst: there was not a drop of water to be seen at Argelouse. They had to walk far into the sandy country before they reached the sources of the little river called La Hure, where they bubble up among the alder trees in a low-lying meadow. The girls’ bare feet were benumbed by the icy water, but they soon grew burning hot again, before they were even dry. Like the darkened drawing-room at home, one of the huts used in October by the pigeon-shooters, gave them shelter. They had nothing to say, not one word: they sat in virgin contemplation while time fled by, and no more thought of moving than a sportsman who signals for silence when the birds are coming over. They felt as though the slightest gesture would have put to flight their chaste ingenuous happiness. Anne was the first to break the spell,—it was growing dark and she wanted to go out shooting larks: Thérèse, though she detested the sport, followed her, for she could not bear to lose a minute of her company. Anne went into the entrance hall and took down her .24 which had no recoil. Her friend watched her standing in the field of rye apparently aiming at the sun. Thérèse stopped her ears: a sudden wild cry broke the blue stillness, and the huntress picked up the wounded bird, squeezed it carefully, and, as she was actually brushing the warm feathers against her lips, choked it.
“You will come to-morrow, won’t you?”
“Oh, no, I mustn’t come every day.”
Anne did not want to see her every day: this was perfectly sensible and Thérèse could say nothing; indeed, it would not have occurred to her to object. Anne said she would rather not come back. No, there was nothing to prevent her, but why should they see each other every day? They would end, she said, by hating the sight of each other. “You’re quite right,” Thérèse replied, “don’t make an obligation of it. Come back when you feel like it,—when you have nothing better to do,” and the girl jumped on her bicycle, and disappeared down the darkening road, ringing her bell.