“I shall just read one page.”
“One page, indeed! I hate your wordy, doleful Balzac. I confiscate the book.” And he stretched out his hand for it. Andrea drew it towards him, thinking, naturally enough, that all was lost. Lucia closed her eyes as if she were dying. Nothing happened. Alberto did not insist on having the book. After all, what did he care for Eugénie Grandet, so that his wife chattered on instead of reading? Andrea drew a long breath, and took his note back, no longer caring to give it to her; his anxiety had been ineffable. Lucia, with her marvellous faculty of passing from one impression to another, soon recovered her spirits. The note episode was over and done for; they were very merry at dinner. Curiously enough, a bright flush suffused Lucia’s cheeks, ending in a red line like a scratch, towards her chin. She felt the heat and fanned herself, joking with her husband and Caterina. She had never been so animated before; now and then her mouth twitched nervously, but that might have passed for a smile. Andrea drank deep, in absence of mind. Lucia leant towards him, smiling; she spoke very close to his ear, showing her teeth, almost as if she were offering her clove-scented lips to him. Then Andrea, what with the heat of the dining-room, its heavy atmosphere, laden with the odours of viands, preserved fruits, and the strong vinegar used in the preparation of the game, the warm rays reflected from the crystal on to the tablecloth, and Lucia’s flushed face—the lace tie showing her white throat—so near to his, Andrea was seized with a mad longing to kiss her; one kiss, only one, on the lips. Every now and then he drew nearer to her, hoping that the others would think him drunk; anything might be forgiven to a drunken man. He drew nearer to her to kiss her, tortured by his desire. He shrank back in dismay, before his wife’s pale, calm face, and the bony, birdlike profile of Alberto. Suddenly Lucia saw what was passing in his mind, and turned as pale as wax. She saw that he was looking at her lips, and hid them with her hand. But that made no difference; he could see them, bright, moist, bleeding, with the savour of fresh blood, that had gone to his head in the English Garden. He would taste them for an infinitesimal fraction of time. And with fixed gaze and a scowl that wrinkled his eyebrows, his clenched fist on the tablecloth, he turned this resolution over in his mind, while the others continued to talk of Naples and the approaching winter festivities. They partook of coffee in the drawing-room. He tried to lead Lucia behind the piano, so that he might give her that kiss; which was absurd, because the piano was too low. The candles were lighted, Caterina took her seat at the piano, and played her usual pieces; easy ones, executed with a certain taste; some of Schubert’s reveries, the Prelude to the fourth act of the Traviata, and Beethoven’s March of the Ruins of Athens. Lucia was lying with her head far back in the American armchair, and her little feet hidden under the folds of her train, dreaming. Alberto, sitting opposite to her, was turning over the leaves of the Franco-Prussian war album, and discovering that Moltke was not in the least like Crispi, and that all Prussians have a certain family likeness. Andrea took several turns in the room, joining Caterina at the piano sometimes asking her to change her piece, or to alter her time. But he was haunted by Lucia’s lips; he saw them everywhere, like an open pomegranate flower, a brightness of coral; he could see their curves and fluctuations; he followed, caught them, they disappeared. For a moment he would be free: then in a mirror, in a bronze candelabrum, in a wooden jardinière, he would fancy they appeared to him, at first pale, then glowing, as if they grew more living. Never to get to them! He went out on the balcony and exposed his burning head to the air, hoping that the evening dew would calm his delirium. Caterina begged Lucia to play, but she refused, alleging that she had no strength, she felt exhausted. Alberto drowsed. The two friends conversed in whispers for a long time, bending over the black and white keys, while Andrea watched from the window: now Lucia’s lips played him the horrible trick of approaching Caterina’s cheek. Oh! if Caterina would but move away from the piano; but no, there she sat, glued to her place, listening to what Lucia was murmuring.
Thus slowly passed the dreary hours, bringing no change to the aspect of that room. At midnight they all wished each other good-night; Andrea worn out with a nervous tremor, she hardly able to drag herself along. Their good-night was spoken in the broken accents of those who have lost all hope. And, alone in the darkness, he lived over again the torment of that day in which he longed for a look and had not had it, for a word and had been unable to say or hear it, for a note that he had neither been able to read nor to deliver, for a kiss that he had not given; his strength exhausted in that day of misery that had been lost for love. Yes, it must be, it would be thus for evermore. Death was surely preferable.
III.
Andrea, that overgrown child of nature, whose primitive elasticity of temperament enabled him to pass with ease from fury to tenderness, revolted against sorrow and rebelled against anguish. Why would they not let him love Lucia? Who dared to place themselves between him and the woman of his love? When Caterina was in the way, he could have screamed and stamped his foot, and sobbed like a child deprived of its toy; his inward convulsions were like the terrible nervous attacks of those obstinate infants who die in a fit of unsatisfied caprice. Lucia saw his eyes swollen with tears, and his face redden with the effort of repressing them; it made her turn pale with emotion. When the unfortunate Alberto was the obstacle, with his meagre little person, his hoarse voice, and his little fits of coughing, Andrea could hardly resist the impulse which prompted him to take him round the body and throw him down; to walk over him and crush him underfoot. When Lucia saw the breath of madness pass over Andrea’s face, she rushed forward at the first sign of it, to prevent a catastrophe. Then he took up his hat and went out on foot, round the fields, under the broiling sun, with hurried step, clenched teeth, and quivering nerves, bowing mechanically to the people he met, even smiling at them without seeing them. He returned home limp, bathed in perspiration, and fatigued; he slept, the good sleep of old times, for two hours, with clenched fists and head sunk in the pillows. On awaking, he had an instant of supreme felicity, a well-being derived from the rest he had enjoyed, the restored balance of his powers. But suddenly the worm began again to gnaw, and, like a whining child that awakes too early, he thought: “Oh, God! how unhappy I am! Why did I awake if I am to be so unhappy?”
He was in truth a very child in love, a child of no reasoning faculty, incapable of unhealthy sophistry or sensual melancholy. He loved Lucia, and desired her; that was his aim, clear, precise, and well-defined. He looked his own will in the face, straight as a sword-cut that finds its way to the heart. He knew that he did wrong, he knew that he was guilty of treachery; he looked his sin in the face without any mitigating sentimentalism. Not his were the terrors, the languors of an erring conscience, nor the mystifications of a depraved mind. He did wrong, not because he was impelled by faith or wrath divine, but because his imagination was wrought upon, and because he loved. He did not try to justify himself by the discovery of any imaginary defect in Caterina, nor wrongs nor shortcomings which would have made it excusable to bestow his love elsewhere. His conscience could not have endured the pretexts that might serve to lessen the consciousness of wrong-doing in a viler soul. They sinned and betrayed, because they loved elsewhere; that was all. Love is no fatality; love is itself, stronger than aught besides. So he suffered in not being free to love in the light of day, with the loyalty of a brave heart that has the courage of its errors. He could not understand obstacles; they were a physical irritation to him, as a cart across his path would have been. He would have liked to have pushed them aside, or ridden over them; he lamented the injustice of his fate, in that he could not surmount them. Sometimes, when they were all sitting together in the drawing-room, he felt tempted to take Lucia in his arms and carry her away. That was his right, the blind right of violence, suited to his temperament. Did she understand it? When he came too near to her, she shrank away with a slight gesture of repulsion. In proportion as his passion increased in intensity, so did the obstacles become more and more insurmountable. That consumptive creature never left his wife for a moment; drowsing, yawning, reading scraps by fits and starts, sucking tar lozenges, spitting in his handkerchief, grumbling, feeling his own pulse a hundred times a day, complaining of suffocation and cold sweats. Caterina, it is true, went to and fro on household avocations, and sometimes retired to write letters; but when her husband was at home she did her best to get her business done so that she could sit down to sew in the drawing-room. Alberto saw and inspected everything; and with the maudlin curiosity of a sick and indolent person, wanted to touch all that he saw. Caterina was more discreet, less curious, and of silent habit, yet she too saw everything. Impossible to speak to Lucia alone for a minute. Two or three times they had attempted this, almost oblivious of the others’ presence; but having stopped in time, had found each other mute, pale from weariness, their faces drawn by suppressed yawns. Caterina and Alberto had nothing to say to each other. After five minutes they subsided into an inevitable silence. Alberto considered Caterina an excellent woman, a notable housekeeper, but rather stupid, and in every way inferior to his wife. Caterina judged no man, but all that Alberto inspired her with was quiet, unemotional compassion. There was no spiritual sympathy between them, rather a physical repulsion. The impression produced by Caterina on Alberto was the negative one of absence of sex: she was neither beautiful nor ugly in his sight, nor a woman at all. In Caterina the instinct of health which recoils from disease, made him repellent to her. Then came the gloomy hours in which Lucia, in dumb despair, would betake herself to the sofa, where she would lie as rigid as the dead, her feet hidden under her skirts, her train hanging on the ground, with wreathed arms, and hands crossed behind her head, closed eyes and deathly pallor. She scarcely answered except in curt, harsh monosyllables, passing hours in the same attitude, without opening her eyes. Alberto wasted his breath in questioning her, she never made him any reply. Caterina, who since their school-days was accustomed to these acute attacks of melancholy, signed to him to be silent, to wait for the fit to pass over: and they kept silence until the gloom fell upon them all. Andrea started to his feet and prepared to go out, without so much as looking towards the sofa. Caterina was troubled at his manner of absenting himself, for she knew that her husband could not abide these extraordinary scenes. She ran after him to the top of the stairs, calling him back, whispering to him.
“Have patience, Andrea,” she said.
“But what is the matter with her?”
“I don’t know; she has strange ideas that unsettle her brain. She says they are visions, and the doctor calls them hallucinations. She sees things that we do not see.”
“What a singular creature!”