“You will feel very lonely: though I am away, there is still my empty place: it would have been better for you if I had died.”
He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and in a tone of something like joviality, begged her not to worry herself about him:
“Every generation of the Desqueyroux family has had its old bachelor, and I was meant for one of them. I have all the necessary qualities—you’d be the last to deny that, wouldn’t you? I am only sorry that we had a daughter, because the family name will die out. It is true that even if we had stayed together, we should not have wanted another child,—so all is really for the best. Don’t get up: stay where you are.” He hailed a taxi, and came back to remind Thérèse that he had paid for the drinks.
She stared for a long time at the dregs of port at the bottom of Bernard’s glass; and then once more began to watch the passers-by. A few seemed to be walking up and down waiting for someone. One woman turned back twice, and smiled at Thérèse: she looked like a work girl, or she was disguised as one. It was the hour when the girls came out of the dressmakers’ shops. It did not occur to Thérèse to move: she was perfectly content and not in the least depressed. She decided not to go and see Jean Azévédo that afternoon,—and heaved a sigh of relief: she did not want to see him. More talk—more formulæ and phrases! She knew Jean Azévédo; but those whose company she wanted, she did not know: she was merely certain that they would not insist on conversation. Thérèse was no longer afraid of solitude. She was content to remain silent and still: and just as, if her body had been lying stretched out upon a heath in her own country, ants and crows would have gathered round it, so here she felt herself the centre of some dark activity that eddied about her.
She felt hungry, got up, and saw her youthful figure reflected in a tailor’s shop window: her tightly fitting travelling-dress suited her admirably: but her face, with its high cheek-bones and peaked nose, still bore the dreadful traces of those days at Argelouse. “I don’t look old,” she thought. She lunched (as so often in her dreams) in the Rue Royale. Why should she go back to the hotel since she didn’t want to? A warm feeling of satisfaction stole over her, thanks to that half-bottle of Pouilly. She called for cigarettes. A young man, sitting at the next table, handed her his lighter, and she smiled. To think that hardly an hour ago she wanted to plunge, in Bernard’s company, into the dark Villandraut road, between the rows of menacing pines! She cared no more for one country than another, pines or poplars, plain or ocean. Nothing interested her except living creatures, beings of blood and flesh. “It is not the stone-built city that I love, nor lectures nor museums, but the living forest that stirs within it, racked by passions more furious than any storm. The lamentations of the pines of Argelouse, at night, were so strangely moving because they seemed so nearly human.”
Thérèse had drunk a little and smoked a great deal; and she smiled to herself like a woman who at last is happy. She made up her cheeks and her lips with great care: and then went out into the street,—to seek what she might find.
THE END
Transcriber’s Note:
Words may have inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Obsolete and alternative spellings were left unchanged. Four misspelled words were corrected.