She opened her mouth, seemed about to speak, but said nothing. He would not give way, lest a word or a gesture of hers might compromise a success so quick and so unexpected. She asked how Marie was. He said she was very well, and that she was leaving to-morrow for Beaulieu with Anne and Madame de la Trave. He was going to spend a few weeks there himself; two months at the most. He opened the door and stood aside for Thérèse to pass.
In the dark dawn she heard Balion harnessing the horses; then Bernard’s voice, the trampling of hooves, and the rattle of the departing carriage. And then the rain,—on the roofs, on the clouded window-panes, on the desolate fields, on fifty miles of moor and marsh, on the shifting sanddunes by the sea shore, and on the sea.
Thérèse lit a cigarette from the one she had just finished. About four o’clock she put on a mackintosh and went out into the rain. But the darkness frightened her and she came back to her room. The fire was out, and as she was shivering, she went to bed. About seven o’clock Balionte brought her up an egg, fried, on a slice of ham, but she would not eat it; the taste of fat had begun to make her feel sick! Never anything but potted meat or ham. Balionte said that she had nothing better to give her: Monsieur Bernard had forbidden her to have game. She complained that Thérèse made her go up and down stairs for nothing (she had something the matter with her heart and her legs were swollen). The work was really too much for her; she only did it for Monsieur Bernard’s sake.
Thérèse was feverish that night, and in her abnormally clear imagination she evolved a complete existence in Paris: she saw once more the restaurant in the Bois where she had been; this time she was not with Bernard, but with Jean Azévédo and some young women. She put down her tortoiseshell cigarette case on the table, and talked frankly and freely, to the faint accompaniment of an orchestra. She could see the circle of admiring faces, listening eagerly but without astonishment. One woman said: “That is so like me.... I have felt that, too.” A literary man took her aside, and said: “You ought to write down everything that comes into your head; we will publish it in our review and call it ‘The Diary of a Woman of To-day.’”
A young man who was desperately in love with her, took her home in his car. They were driving back along the Avenue du Bois; she felt no emotion whatever, but she took a certain pleasure in the agonised young body close beside her. “No, not this evening,” she said to him. “I’m dining with a friend this evening.” “What about to-morrow evening?” “I can’t to-morrow either.” “Are your evenings never free?” “Hardly ever ... I might almost say never.”
There was one being in her life who made the rest of the world seem insignificant; some one unknown to any one in her circle; very humble and obscure; but Thérèse’s whole existence revolved round this sun whom she alone could see, and whose warmth reached no other flesh but hers. The murmur of Paris was like the wind in the pines. This body that lay so close to hers, light as it was, prevented her breathing; but she would sooner stifle than send him away. (And Thérèse made the gesture of an embrace—she clasped her left shoulder with her right hand and drove the nails of her left hand into her right shoulder.)
She got up, crossed the room barefooted, and opened the window; the night outside was not cold; but she could hardly bring herself to imagine that a day must come when it would rain no more. If she had had any money she would have escaped to Paris, gone straight to Jean Azévédo and confided in him; he would know how to get her work. If she could only be a woman alone in Paris, earning her living and dependent on no one...! Oh to be without a family! She would choose her own people as she pleased,—the tie should not be one of blood, but of the mind, and even of the flesh as well; she would discover her true relations, however few and scattered they might be.... She went to sleep at last, with the window open. The cold damp dawn awoke her; her teeth chattered, and she could not bring herself to get up and shut the window,—she could not even put out her arms and draw up the bedclothes.
That day she did not get up or even do her hair. She swallowed a few mouthfuls of potted meat and drank some coffee so as to be able to smoke,—tobacco on an empty stomach did not agree with her. She tried to recapture her imaginings of the night; and, indeed, at Argelouse the day was almost as quiet and as dark as the night. In these days, the shortest in the year, time disappears under the pall of rain, and one hour melts into the next; dusk passes into dusk in unalterable silence. But Thérèse had no desire for sleep, and her dreams became more and more vivid; she searched her past methodically for forgotten faces, lips that she had loved from afar, vague forms that casual encounters, or the chances of the night, had brought into contact with her young body. She moulded an image of happiness, invented an imaginary joy, and used all the fragments of her experience to build up an impossible love.
“She never gets up now, and she leaves her potted meat and her bread,” said Balionte to Balion some time after this: “but she finishes the bottle fast enough. She’d drink as much as you’d let her have, she would. And then she burns the sheets with her cigarettes. She’ll end by setting the house on fire. She smokes so much that her fingers and nails are all yellow, just as if she’d dipped them in arnica. It’s a shame, so it is!—those sheets were woven at home.... She won’t get clean ones very often, I can tell you.”