It was strange that Thérèse only remembered the days that followed the departure of Anne and of the La Traves as of a period of torpor. At Argelouse, where it had been agreed that she should find the best means of working on Azévédo and making him give the girl up, she thought of nothing but rest and sleep. Bernard had agreed not to live in his own house, but in Thérèse’s, which was much more comfortable and where Aunt Clara spared them all the worries of housekeeping. What did other people matter to Thérèse? Let them arrange their own affairs. She refused to emerge from her stupor until the child was born. Bernard annoyed her every morning by reminding her of her promise to see Jean Azévédo. But Thérèse snubbed him: she began to be less able to endure his company. It may be that her pregnancy, as Bernard believed, had something to do with her ill-humour. He himself was just undergoing the first attacks of an obsession so common in the men of his race, though it rarely shows itself before the thirtieth year: the fear of death, that seemed at first so astonishing in a young man of his solid physique. But what could one say when he protested: “You don’t know what I feel like.” Men like him, mighty eaters, sprung from a lazy and overfed race, have only the appearance of strength. A pine tree planted in a manured field shoots up quickly: but very soon the heart of the tree grows rotten, and it must be cut down in the height of its strength. “It’s nerves”: people would say to Bernard: but he himself felt the flaw in the metal. Besides, though it was almost inconceivable, he hardly ate, he was no longer hungry. “Why don’t you see a doctor?” He shrugged his shoulders with affected indifference: as a matter of fact, uncertainty seemed to him less terrible than a possible verdict of death. In the night Thérèse was sometimes awakened with a start by his gasps for breath: Bernard’s hand sought hers and he laid it against his left chest so that she could feel the intermittent beating of his heart. She lit the candle, got up, and poured some valerian into a glass of water. How lucky it was, she thought, that this mixture was harmless! Why wasn’t it mortal? Nothing really soothes, and brings sleep, unless it does so for all eternity. Why was this querulous creature so frightened of what would bring him relief once and for all? He went to sleep before she did. How could she lie and wait for sleep beside this great carcass whose snorings sometimes turned to choking agony? Thank God, he no longer came near her,—he thought love-making the most dangerous of all activities for his heart. The cocks of dawn brought the farms to life. The Angelus of Saint Clair tinkled in the east wind; Thérèse’s eyes at last closed. Then the man’s body began to stir once more: he dressed himself quickly, like a peasant (he scarcely put his head into cold water). He crept like a dog down to the kitchen, sniffing after the scraps in the larder: breakfasted on the remains of a bird, or a wedge of cold spiced meat, or even on a bunch of grapes and a crust of bread rubbed with garlic: his only decent meal in the day. He threw some bits to Flambeau and Diane whose jaws were chattering. The mist had the smell of Autumn. It was the hour when Bernard was no longer in pain, when he felt his all-powerful youth once more within him. The pigeons would soon be coming over: it was time to see about the decoy-birds, and take their eyes out. At eleven o’clock he found Thérèse still in bed.
“Well: and the Azévédo boy? You know my mother is waiting for news at Biarritz, at the Poste Restante.”
“And your heart?”
“Don’t talk about my heart. You’ve only got to start talking about it and I begin to feel it again. That shows it’s nervous: don’t you think so?”
She never gave him the answer he wanted.
“You never know: you alone can say what you feel like. There’s no reason because your father died of angina pectoris ... especially at your age.... Evidently the heart is the weak point of the Desqueyroux family. How absurd you are, Bernard, with your fear of death! Don’t you ever feel as I do, profoundly convinced of your own uselessness? No? Don’t you think that the life of people like us is already terribly like death?”
He shrugged his shoulders: her paradoxes were really too tiresome. It is easy enough to be witty, he said: you have only to say exactly the opposite to what is sensible. But she was wrong to waste her efforts on him: she had better save herself for her interview with young Azévédo. “You know he is going to leave Vilméja about the middle of October?”
At Villandraut, the station before Saint Clair, Thérèse thought: “How shall I persuade Bernard that I was never in love with that young man? He will certainly believe I adored him. Like every one who knows nothing about love, he imagines that a crime like mine could only be a crime of passion.”
Bernard would have to understand that at that time she was far from hating him, although she often found him a nuisance: but she did not suppose that any other man could help her. Bernard, all things considered, was not so bad. She hated the descriptions in novels of marvellous creatures that no one ever meets in real life. The only outstanding personality she thought she had ever known was her father. She tried to persuade herself that this obstinate, suspicious old radical was something of a figure. He was a man of many interests: manufacturer, landed proprietor (besides a saw-mill at B——, he handled his own resin and that of his numerous relatives in a factory at Saint Clair)—but, above all, a politician, whose brusque manner had done him harm but made him much respected at the Prefecture. And how he did despise women! He even despised Thérèse, when every one was praising her intelligence. And now since the tragedy: “They’re all hysterics when they aren’t fools,” he used to say to his lawyer. And this old anticlerical had his ideas of decency. Though he would often hum a refrain from Béranger, he could not endure certain subjects being mentioned in his presence,—indeed, he blushed like a schoolboy. Bernard had heard from Monsieur de la Trave that Monsieur Larroque had been a virgin when he married: “and since he has been a widower I have always understood there was never any talk of a mistress. He’s a character, your father!”