“Are you afraid of setting fire to the pavement?” Bernard laughed constrainedly. He was annoyed with himself for having accompanied Thérèse to Paris. As it was so soon after Anne’s marriage he had, of course, done so out of deference to public opinion,—but mainly because his wife had wished it. He told himself she had a positive flair for false situations: so long as she remained in his life, he was always in danger of being manœuvred into doing foolish things of this kind; the wretched woman still had some sort of influence even on a solid and self-respecting person like himself. At the very moment of parting, he could not resist a feeling of sadness, which he would never have admitted: nothing could have been more foreign to his character than an emotion of this kind, inspired by any one; but inspired by Thérèse,—it was inconceivable. He was so impatient to be rid of all disturbing influences! He would not breathe freely until he was in the train going South. The car would meet him that evening at Langon: and on the Villandraut road, almost immediately outside the station, the pines began. He watched Thérèse’s profile, and her eyes that sometimes fixed upon a face in the crowd and followed it until it disappeared; and he said abruptly:
“Thérèse ... I wanted to ask you....”
He turned his eyes away,—he had never been able to withstand her look, and went on hurriedly: “I should like to know ... was it because you hated me ... because you couldn’t bear the sight of me?...”
He listened to his own words with amazement and annoyance. Thérèse smiled, then looked at him fixedly and gravely. At last! Bernard had asked a question, the very question that would have been the first to come into Thérèse’s mind had she been in his place. That confession, so carefully prepared, in the victoria along the Nizan road, and then in the little local train to Saint Clair, that patient meditation in the darkness, her efforts to reach the mainspring of her act,—all that exhausting cross-examination of her conscience, was perhaps on the point of bearing fruit. She had, unconsciously, disturbed Bernard’s peace of mind. She had confused him: and now he was questioning her like some one who is in doubt, and cannot see clearly. He was less self-assured, and therefore more sympathetic. Thérèse gazed at this unknown creature with a kind, almost maternal expression. However, she replied in a bantering tone:
“Didn’t you know it was to get your pines? Yes, I wanted to be in sole possession of your pines.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“If I ever did believe that, I don’t believe it any more. Why did you do it? You might as well tell me now.”
Her eyes stared into vacancy: on that pavement, on the bank of that stream of mud and huddled human bodies, before taking the plunge and joining in the struggle, or allowing herself to sink beneath the surface, she saw a gleam like the light of breaking dawn: she envisaged a return to the sad and desolate country,—a whole life passed in meditation and striving after perfection, in the silence of Argelouse ... the adventure of the soul, the quest for God.... A Moorish vendor of carpets and glass necklaces thought she was smiling at him, and came up to her: and she said in the same bantering tone:
“I was going to answer: ‘I don’t know why I did it’; but now I believe I do know. Perhaps it was to see a look of uneasiness, curiosity, in those eyes of yours: the expression I have noticed in them for the last moment or two:—just to upset your self-satisfaction, in fact!”
“I suppose you can’t be serious even now,” he grumbled, in a tone which reminded Thérèse of her honeymoon. “Do tell me: why did you?”