She was free: what more could she want? It would be perfectly simple to put herself right with Bernard. She would make a clean breast of the whole thing, omitting nothing. She would have to tell the whole story, without concealment, and tell it that very evening. This resolution made her feel positively cheerful. Before she got to Argelouse, she would have time to ‘prepare her confession,’ as her pious little friend Anne de la Trave used to say every Saturday of their happy holidays together. Indeed, her innocent little sister Anne played no mean part in this tragedy. These simple creatures do not know in what strange happenings they are involved by day and night, and what poisoned growths spring up under their childish footsteps.
The girl was quite right when she had said, as she so often did to Thérèse, then a sceptical, and mocking schoolgirl: “You can’t think how relieved you feel when you have confessed and been forgiven,—when you can begin all over again with a clean slate.” Indeed, the moment Thérèse had made up her mind to tell the whole story she did feel a sort of delicious relief. She would tell Bernard everything: she would say....
Yes, but what should she say? How should she begin? Could any words express that confused succession of desires, resolves, and impulses?
“How do people behave,” she thought, “when they acknowledge their crimes? I don’t acknowledge mine: I didn’t want to commit it. I don’t know what I did want. I never knew the meaning of that dreadful force within me, and yet outside me: and I was myself horrified at all the destruction it left behind.”
A smoky oil lamp lit up the plaster walls of the Nizan station and a carriage outside it: and all about them gathered the encompassing darkness. A train standing in the station whistled and hooted dismally. Gardère took Thérèse’s bag and again stared at her greedily. His wife must have told him to watch carefully how she was looking and behaving. For the benefit of Monsieur Larroque’s coachman Thérèse instinctively assumed that smile that made people say: “Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you cannot resist her charm.” She asked him to take her ticket, because she did not like to cross the waiting-room, where two farmers’ wives were sitting with baskets on their knees swaying to the rhythm of their knitting-needles.
When he brought back the ticket she told him to keep the change. He touched his cap, and then, gathering up the reins, he turned to have a last, long look at his master’s daughter.
The train was not yet made up. In the old days, at the beginning of the long vacation, or on the way back to school, Thérèse Larroque and Anne de la Trave enjoyed this stop at Nizan station. They used to eat ham and eggs at the local inn and walk with their arms round each other’s waists down that road that looked so dark this evening: but in those vanished years Thérèse always saw it white under the moonlight. And how they used to laugh at their elongated shadows as they melted into each other! They talked, of course, about their mistresses and their school-friends, one standing up for her convent and the other for her school. “Anne!” Thérèse uttered the name aloud in the darkness. She must begin by telling Bernard about Anne. Her Bernard was one of the most precise of men: he classified all emotions, kept them rigidly apart, and ignored the complicated network of sensations that unites them. How could he follow her into those shadowy places where she had lived and suffered? Yet she must try to make him: the only thing to do, when she went into the room later on, would be to sit on the edge of the bed and take him, step by step, through the whole story until he should stop her and say: “Now I understand; get up; I forgive you.”
She felt her way through the station-master’s garden where she could smell the chrysanthemums without seeing them. The first class compartment was empty, and in any case the lamp was much too dim to reveal her face. She could not read: but Thérèse must have found any novel insipid in comparison with the terrible story of her life. She might die of shame, despair, remorse, or exhaustion,—but of boredom, never.
She sat back in her corner and closed her eyes. It was incredible that a woman of her intelligence should not be able to make the tragedy intelligible. When her confession was over, Bernard would of course raise her to her feet and say: “Go in peace, Thérèse: be of good comfort: deeds that are over and done shall never part us now, we will wait for death together in this house at Argelouse. I am thirsty: go down into the kitchen and make me a glass of orangeade: I shall drink it at a draught; no matter what it looks like, nor even if it tastes like my morning chocolate of those days! Do you remember how sick I used to be, darling; and how kindly you held my head, as you stared at that dreadful greenish liquid? You were never frightened when I fainted. And yet how pale you were that night when I noticed that my legs had gone dead and stiff! I was shivering, do you remember? And that old fool Doctor Pédemay who was so astonished because my temperature was so low and my pulse so feverish....”
“No,” Thérèse thought to herself, “he won’t have understood. I shall have to begin at the very beginning.”