Annette trembled at the thought of beginning another day like the last. Her strength was not equal to it. But the day that followed did not have the terrifying violence of the previous hours. Human suffering, when it reaches its zenith, must descend again. One dies or becomes used to it.
Sylvie had recovered her self-possession. She was livid, with hard lines about her nostrils and lips which later, as they grew fainter, left scars behind. But she was calm, active, busy, with her workers, cutting and sewing her mourning clothes. She gave orders, oversaw things, worked; and her hands, like her expression, were sure and precise. She fitted Annette's dress. Annette was afraid to utter a word that would recall the funeral. But Sylvie spoke of it coldly. She would not leave the details to anyone else. She decided everything. She preserved her unnatural calm to the very end of the ceremony, but with a cold and concentrated rage she had set herself against any religious service. She could not forgive! . . . Till then she had been vaguely sceptical, indifferent, not hostile; and while she laughed at it a little, she had been moved without confessing it on the day when she had seen her beautiful little girl dressed in white for her first communion. . . . Exactly! She had been tricked. . . . That dastardly God! She could never forgive him.
Annette was expecting that the inhuman constraint which Sylvie had imposed upon herself would be paid for by a fresh crisis when they returned to the house. But she was not allowed to stay with her sister. Sylvie harshly forbade it. Annette's presence was intolerable to her. . . . Annette had her son!
On the following day the anxious husband came to tell Annette that Sylvie had not gone to bed. She had not wept, she had not groaned, she was eating her heart out in silence. She had relentlessly resumed her work in the shop, a mechanical duty that was more imperative than life. No one would have perceived her state of mind except for certain accidents, errors that had never happened before. She cut a gown wrongly and afterwards destroyed it without a word, and she hurt her fingers with her scissors. They induced her to go to bed at night, but she remained sitting upright without sleeping, and she did not reply when they spoke to her. And every morning, before appearing in the workroom, she made a visit to the cemetery.
This went on for fifteen days. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, she disappeared. Customers came in and waited. At supper-time she had not returned. Ten, eleven o'clock passed. Her husband feared that something desperate had happened. Towards one o'clock she came in, and that night she slept. No one could find out anything from her. But the next evening she vanished again, and on the two following days she did the same thing. She talked now; she seemed to have relaxed. But she did not say where she had gone. The workers gossiped. Her good husband shrugged his shoulders with pity and said to Annette, "If she is deceiving me I can't be angry with her. She has suffered too much. . . . And besides, if it can only save her from her obsession, well, all right!"
Annette succeeded in catching Sylvie as she was going out, and she tactfully made her understand the anxiety, the suspicion, the pain, which her wanderings caused. Sylvie, who did not want to be stopped at first, seemed to be indifferent to what people might think, but she was touched by her husband's kindness; and, as if she felt a sudden need of unbosoming herself, she led Annette into her room and shut the door. She sat down close beside her and in a low, mysterious voice, with shining eyes, confessed that she went every evening to a circle of initiates who gathered about a table in order to talk with her little girl. Annette listened, horrified, without daring to betray her feelings, while Sylvie, in a soft voice, recounted the child's replies. There was no longer any need to urge her to talk; she delighted in the joy of repeating to herself out loud the puerile words into which she had transfused all the blood of her heart. Annette could not destroy an illusion that gave her sister life. Leopold was ready to encourage her: for his sound common sense this was as good as any other religion. Annette asked the advice of the doctor, who told her to let the sorrow wear itself out.
Sylvie was radiant now. Annette asked herself if she would not have preferred a noble despair to this preposterous joy that profaned death. In the workroom Sylvie no longer concealed her relations with the world beyond the grave; the workers made her describe the séances; it gave them all the shivering pleasure of a popular novel. When Annette came in, she heard them mingling their lively reflexions with the account of the last conversation Sylvie had had with Odette; one apprentice was laughing at it behind the material she was folding up; and Sylvie, so lately an expert in the handling of irony, saw nothing as she babbled away, absorbed in her phantasmagory.
She did not stop there. One evening, without saying anything to Annette, she took Marc with her. She had come to feel once more an exalted affection for him. The moment she saw him her face lighted up. Annette, not finding Marc in the house, guessed what had happened. But she took care not to make him tell her about it when he came in, very late, depressed and unnerved. The child cried in his dreams. Annette lifted him up, calmed him, stroked his head with her tender hands.
In the morning she severely demanded an explanation from Sylvie. Her son was involved, and she spoke directly to the point. This time she did not conceal her disgust and aversion for these dangerous follies, and she angrily forbade her sister to mix the little boy up in them. Sylvie, who, at other times, would have replied in the same tone, bowed her head with an equivocal smile, avoiding Annette's furious look; she did not feel instinctively sure enough of her revelations to expose them to her sister's passionate criticism. She would discuss nothing, she promised nothing; she had a sly, wheedling manner, like that of a scolded cat that still means to do just what it chooses.
She did not venture, however, to carry Marc off again. But she did confide to him what she had heard in her séances; and it was very difficult to prevent their meetings, which Marc distrustfully kept as secret as his aunt. Sylvie told Marc that Odette spoke of him. It was this that bound her to the young boy: Odette had bequeathed him to her. She transmitted messages between the two children. Marc did not really believe in all this; the critical sense of his grandfather defended him against these absurdities, but his imagination was stirred. He listened, interested, repelled. Even while he lent himself to this unwholesome game, he condemned Sylvie severely; and he extended his condemnation to women in general. But this atmosphere of the grave was poisonous for a boy of his age. The horrible buffoonery of life and death gave him a precocious, haunting obsession. He felt surrounded by an odor of decayed flesh. He had moments of suffocation; and, as his mind was not yet strong enough to defend him, his feverish, preadolescent vitality reacted by taking refuge in his troubled instincts, which roved about like animals in the night. A redoubtable flock they were! It seems as if, by a sort of embryogenesis, the psychic organism passes in its evolution through the whole series of animal forms—has to pass through the most bestial stages before it reaches the point where they can be sublimated by intelligence and human will. Fortunately, this return to our savage origins is brief; it is a procession of spectres, and the best thing is to stand aside and let them pass as quickly as possible, doing nothing to arouse their shadowy consciousness. But this hour is not without its dangers, and the most loving watchfulness cannot protect the child from them. For this little Macbeth is the only one who sees the spectres. For the others, those who are closest to him, Banquo's seat remains empty; they perceive the fresh voice, the pure features of the child, but they do not see the formidable shadows that pass in the depths of its limpid eyes. The curious spectator himself hardly sees them. How can he recognize them, since they issue from a world in which he was not born, these instincts of possession, violence and even crime? There is no perverse thought that he does not touch, that he does not taste with the tip of his tongue. Neither of the two women who petted Marc dreamed what a little monster it was they held so close to them.