THE SON

Mme. Marot had been born and had grown up in Lausanne, in a strict, honest, and industrious family. She did not marry early, but when she did, hers was a love match. In the March of 1876, among the passengers of the old French steamer Auvergne, sailing from Marseilles to Italy, was a newly married couple. The days were calm, cool; the sea, all silvery mirrors, lost itself in the misty spring distances; the newly-married couple scarcely ever left the deck. And all admired them, all beheld their happiness with amiable smiles: he showed his happiness in an alert, keen glance, in the necessity for motion, in an animated amiability to all those around him; she, by that joyous interest, with which she assimilated every trifle.... This newly married pair was the Marots.

He was some ten years her senior; he was short in height, swarthy of face, with curly hair; his hand was thin, and his voice sonorous. But in her one sensed an admixture of some blood other than that of the Latins. She seemed just the least trifle too tall, although her waist was splendid; though her hair was dark, her eyes were a grayish blue. They travelled through Naples, Palermo and Tunis to the Algerian town of Constantine, where Monsieur Marot had obtained a rather prominent appointment. And life in Constantine those fourteen years which had passed since that happy spring, had given them everything with which people are usually content: a competance, domestic harmony, healthy and handsome children.

During these fourteen years the Marots had changed very much in appearance: his face had become as black as an Arab’s, he had grown gray and dried up from work, from travelling, from tobacco, and from the sun,—many took him for a native of Algeria; nor would any one have recognized her as the woman who had been a passenger upon the steamer Auvergne: then, even in the shoes she put outside the door at night, there had been the enchantment of youth; now she too had glints of silver in her hair, her skin had grown finer and more aureate, her hands had become thinner, and in her care of them, in the dressing of her hair, in her linen, in her apparel, she already betrayed a certain superfluous nicety. Their relations had changed as well, of course, although none would have said that it was for the worse. And each one led an individual existence: his time was taken up with work,—he still remained as passionate, and, at the same time, as sober a man as he had been before; she had to take care of him, of the children—two very pretty girls, of whom the elder was by now almost a young lady,—and everybody unanimously declared that there was not in all Constantine a better housekeeper, a better mother, or a more charming person to chat with in a drawing room, than Mme. Marot.

Their house stood on a quiet and clean street. From the second story, out of the front rooms, always in semi-darkness on account of the closed Venetian blinds, could be seen Constantine, famed all over the world for its picturesqueness: this ancient Arabian stronghold, which had become a French city, lies upon sloping crags. The windows of the living rooms, shady and cool, looked out upon the garden,—there, in a perpetual blaze and glare, dozed age-old eucalypti, sycamores, palms, behind their enclosures of high walls. The master of the house frequently absented himself on matters connected with his work. As for the mistress, she led that confined existence to which, in the colonies, the wives of all Europeans are condemned. On Sundays she invariably attended church. On week days she rarely went out and restricted herself to a small, choice circle. She read, busied herself with embroidery, chatted with the children or took part in their lessons; sometimes, putting the dark-eyed Marie, her younger daughter, on her knees, and playing on the pianoforte with one hand, she would sing old-fashioned French songs, to make the long African day seem shorter, while the hot wind entered in a flood from the garden through the wide-open windows.... Constantine, under the pitiless blaze of the sun and with all its shutters closed, seemed at these hours a dead city: only the roller-birds called out behind the walls of the gardens, and plaintively, with the nostalgia of colonial lands, sounded the trumpets of the buglers on the knolls beyond the city, where at times the cannons made the earth shake with a dull rumble, and one saw the white helmets of the soldiers twinkling.

The days in Constantine passed monotonously, but no one ever remarked that Mme. Marot was oppressed by this. In her character, exquisite and chaste, never appeared any heightened sensitiveness, nor any surplus nervousness. Her health could not be called robust, but it never caused any alarm to Monsieur Marot. Only one incident had struck him: once, in Tunis, an Arab magician had put her so rapidly into a profound sleep, that she had great difficulty in coming back to herself. But this had been still at the time of their journey from France; since that time she had not experienced any such sharp declines of will power, any such unwholesome susceptibility. And Monsieur Marot was happy, tranquil, and convinced that her soul was undisturbed and like an open book to him. And so it really was, even during the last—the fourteenth—year of his domestic life.... But now there appeared in Constantine a certain Emile du Buys.

Emile du Buys, son of Mme. Bonnet, an old and close friend of the Marots, was only nineteen years of age. Mme. Bonnet, the widow of an engineer, had also a daughter, Eliza, besides Emile, who was born of the first marriage. He had grown up in Paris and was already reading law; but, above all, he was taken up with the composition of verses which were comprehensible to him alone, and had attached himself to a non-existent school of poetry, “The Seekers.” In the May of 1889 Eliza was preparing for the altar, but took sick and died a few days after. Emile, who had never up to now been in Constantine, had come for the funeral. It is easy to understand how touched Mme. Marot was by this death,—this death of a girl who was already trying on the bridal veil; everyone also knows how under such circumstances intimacy is established even between people who have scarce come to know one another. In addition, Emile was in reality only a boy to Mme. Marot. Shortly after the funeral, Mme. Bonnet went to France, to her relatives. Emile remained in Constantine, at the suburban county house of his late stepfather,—at the Villa Hassim, as it was called in the town,—and began to visit the Marots almost daily. No matter what sort of a chap he may have been, or whatever he may have pretended to be, he was, never the less, very young, very sensitive, and had need of people with whom he might seek shelter for a time. “And isn’t it strange,” said some, “Mme. Marot has become unrecognizable! How animated she has become; how she has improved in looks!”

However, these allusions were unfounded. At first all it amounted to was that her existence became a trifle gayer, and that her girls became more playful and coquettish, for Emile, every minute forgetting his grief and that virus with which, as he thought, the fin de siècle had envenomed him, fussed for hours at a time with them, altogether as their equal. Of course he was, after all, a man, a Parisian, and not altogether of an ordinary nature; he had participated in that life which Parisian writers lead, so inaccessible to common mortals; frequently, with a certain somnambulistic expressiveness, he would read strange but sonorous verses; and, perhaps, it was precisely thanks to him that the step of Mme. Marot became lighter and quicker, her house apparel just the least trifle smarter, and the nuances of her voice kindlier and more mocking; there may have been, after all, a drop of purely feminine joy in her soul over the fact that here was a man whom it was possible to lord it over somewhat, with whom it was possible to speak with a half jesting sententiousness, with that freedom which was so naturally permitted by the difference in their years. And also over the fact that here was one who was so devoted to her entire household,—where, however, the first person for him (this, of course was revealed very quickly) was still none other than she. But then, how commonplace all this is! Yet for the most part he was merely pitiful to her.

He, who sincerely deemed himself a poet born, wanted to resemble a poet in appearance as well; he wore his hair long, and tossed back; he dressed with an artistic sobriety; he had fine brown hair, which went well with his pale face, just as his black clothes did; but this pallor was too anæmic, with a yellow tinge; his eyes glittered constantly, but, because of his enervated face, they seemed feverish; and his chest was so thin and flat, his legs were so thin, his hands so bony, that one became somewhat ill at ease when he would grow immoderately lively and would run through the street or garden, bending somewhat forward, as though he were sliding, in order to hide his defect,—he had one leg shorter than the other. In society he was disagreeable, supercilious; he tried to be enigmatic, negligent; or, at times, exquisitely impertinent, audacious, at others disdainfully absent-minded and independent in all things; but only too frequently he did not sustain his rôles to the end,—he would forget his part and begin speaking with a certain naïve candour and impulsiveness. And, of course, he could not manage to hide his feelings for long, to dissemble as an unbeliever in love and happiness on this earth: the entire house soon knew of his being in love. He had already begun to bore the master of the house with his visits; he began to bring, every day, bouquets of the rarest flowers from his villa, to sit at the Marots’ from morn till night, to recite verses more and more incomprehensible,—the children heard him, more than once, adjuring some one to die with him; while at nights he took to disappearing in the native quarters, in those dives where the Arabs, wrapped up in their dirty white bournouses, avidly watch stomach dances and drink the most pungent of liquors.... To put it briefly, not even a month and a half had gone before his inamoration had passed into God only knows what.

His nerves ceased entirely to serve him. Once he sat through almost an entire day in silence; then got up, took his hat, and went out,—and half an hour later was brought in from the street in a dreadful condition: he was writhing in hysterics; he was sobbing so vehemently that he frightened both the children and the domestics. But Mme. Marot, it seemed, did not attach any special significance even to this transport. She herself was restoring him back to consciousness, herself hastily untying his cravat and persuading him to be a man, and she only smiled when he, without any restraint whatsoever before her husband, caught at her hands, covering them with kisses and vowing his disinterested devotion. Still, it was necessary to put an end to all this. And so when Emile, whom the children had soon missed, again made his appearance several days after the fit, already calmed, even though he resembled a man who had gone through a severe illness, Mme. Marot gently told him all that is usually said in such cases.

“My friend, you are really like a son to me,” she had said to him, uttering for the first time this word, “son,” and really feeling almost a maternal tenderness toward him. “Do not, then, put me in a ridiculous and painful position.”

“But I swear to you that you are mistaken!” he exclaimed, with earnest vehemence. “I am only devoted to you; I only want to see you, and no more!”

And he suddenly fell down on his knees,—they were in the garden on a calm, sultry, dusky evening,—impulsively seized her by the hips, on the verge of fainting from passion.... And gazing upon his hair, upon his white, slender neck, she, with anguish and rapture, reflected:

“Ah,—yes, yes, I could have had a son almost the same as he!”

Still, from that time until his very departure for France, he committed no more insane actions. Essentially this was bad; it may have signified that his passion had become deeper. But outwardly everything had changed for the better,—only one other time he could not restrain himself. After dinner one Sunday, in the presence of several strangers, he said to her, without at all reflecting that this might attract attention:

“I most earnestly entreat you to grant me one minute....”

She got up and went with him into the empty, half-dark parlour. He walked up to the window, through which the evening light penetrated from outside in narrow longitudinal streaks, and, looking her straight in the face, said:

“To-day is the anniversary of my father’s death. I love you!”

She turned to go away. Frightened, he hastened to add as she was going away:

“Forgive me,—this is the first time and the last!”

And truly, she heard no new admissions from him. “I was enchanted by her confusion,” he wrote in his diary that evening, in his choice and grandiloquent style; “I vowed to violate her peace no more: for am I not beatified even as it is?” He continued going into the town,—he only slept at the Villa Hassim; and his behaviour varied, but he always observed a greater or lesser degree of seemliness. At times he was, as formerly, inappropriately playful, naïve, romping with the children in the garden; most frequently of all, however, he sat near her and “drank in her presence,” read newspapers and novels to her, and “was happy because she listened to him.” “The children did not interfere with us,” he wrote of these days, “their voices, laughter, bustle, their very beings, seemed to serve as the finest of conductors for our emotions; thanks to them these emotions were still more enchanting; we held the commonest of every day conversations, but something else could be heard in them,—our happiness; yes,—yes; she, too was happy, I affirm this. She liked to hear me declaim; of evenings, from the balcony, we contemplated Constantine lying at our feet in the blue radiance of the moon....” Finally, in August, Mme. Marot insisted upon his going away, returning to his studies,—and won; and en route he entered in his diary: “I am going away! Going away, empoisoned by the bitter delight of parting! She has bestowed upon me, in parting, a bit of velvet ribbon that she had worn about her neck as a girl. When the last minute came, she gave me her blessing, and I saw a humid sparkle in her eyes when she said: ‘Farewell, dear son of mine!...’”

Whether he was right in his conjecture that Mme. Marot also was happy in August, is not known. But that his departure proved painful to her is beyond a doubt. This word “son,” which had stirred her even previously, now took on such a sound for her that she could not hear it in peace. Even formerly, upon meeting friends on her way to church, who would jestingly say to her: “What should you pray about, Mme. Marot; you are without sin and happy as it is!” she had, more than once, replied with a sad smile: “I complain to God because he has deprived me of a son....” Now the thought of a son, of that happiness which he would have ceaselessly given her by his mere existence in this world, never left her. And once, shortly after the departure of Emile, she had said to her husband:

“Now I have comprehended everything! I now know surely, that every mother ought to have a son; that every woman who has no son, if she will but ponder upon herself, will check up her entire life, will see that she is unhappy. You are a man, you cannot feel this, but it is so.... Oh, how tenderly and passionately one can love a son!”

She was very kind to her husband that fall. Occasionally, when she would be left alone with him, she would shyly say to him:

“Hector, listen.... I am ashamed now to ask you about it,—but still.... Do you ever recall the March of ’seventy-six? ... Ah, if only you and I had a son!”

“All this confused me very much,” Monsieur Marot would say subsequently,—“it confused me all the more because she began to grow very thin. She was growing weaker, was becoming more and more silent and gentle in manner. She went less and less often to her friends,—she avoided going to the city unless it were unavoidable.... I do not doubt that some dreadful and incomprehensible ailment was taking possession of her soul and body!” While the bonne added that, whenever Mme. Marot went out of the house that fall, she always put on a thick white veil,—something she had never done before; that, returning home, she would immediately raise her veil in front of a mirror and would intently scrutinize her tired face. It is superfluous to explain that which went on in her soul at this time. But did she want to see Emile, did he write to her, and did she reply to him? He presented two dispatches at court, purporting to be addressed to him, in answer to his letters. One was dated the tenth of November: “You are driving me mad. Calm yourself. Let me have immediate news of yourself.” The other, the twenty-third of December: “No, no, do not come, I implore you. Think of me, love me, as a mother.” But the certainty of these dispatches having been sent by her could not be proven, of course. One thing only is certain,—that from September until January Mme. Marot led a distressed, troubled, painful existence.

The late autumn of that year in Constantine was cold and rainy. Then, as is always the case in Algeria, a ravishing spring came on. And an animation,—that beatific, exquisite headiness which is experienced at the time of the blossoming of spring by people who have already left their youth behind them,—again began to return to Mme. Marot. She again began to go out; rode out a great deal with her children, went with them to the garden of the deserted Villa Hassim; she contemplated an excursion to Algiers,—to show her children Blidah, near which, in the mountains, there is a wooded ravine, a spot beloved of monkeys.... And so things went right up to the seventeenth of January in the year of 1890. On the seventeenth of January, she awoke from some unusually joyous and tender emotion, which, so it had seemed to her, had stirred her all night long. In the large room where she slept alone during the absence of her husband, who had gone away for a long time on matters connected with his post, it was almost dark because of the Venetian blinds and the window curtains. Still, by that blueish pallor which penetrated from behind them, one could gather that it was still early. And, in confirmation, the little clock on the night-table pointed to six. With an enjoyable sense of the morning freshness entering from the garden, she rolled up in a light blanket and turned to the wall.... “Why do I feel so fine?” she thought, dozing off. And, like dim, beautiful visions, pictures of Italy, of Sicily, began to appear before her, pictures of that distant spring when she was sailing in a cabin whose windows looked out on deck, upon the chill silvery shimmer of the sea; a cabin with portieres of red silk, shrivelled and faded by time, and with a high threshold glittering with brass that had been worn down by many years of cleaning.... Then she saw the limitless bays of the sea; lagoons; lowlands; a great Arabian town, all white, with flat roofs, and with undulating mistily blue knolls and foot-hills beyond it. This was Tunis, in which she had been but once, on that very same spring when she had been in Naples, and in Palermo.... But here a wave of cold seemed to go through her,—and, with a shiver, she opened her eyes. It was already going on nine o’clock; one could hear the voices of the children, the voice of their bonne. She arose, threw on a peignoir, and, stepping out on the balcony, descended into the garden and sat down on a rocker, standing in the sand near a round table underneath a mimosa in blossom, spreading its golden canopy overhead, its fragrance heavy in the sun. The maid brought her coffee. She again began to think of Tunis, and recalled that strange experience she had gone through, that sweet fear and that beatific abnegation of her will which was like that of pre-mortal moments,—an experience she had undergone in that pale blue city in the warm, rosy dusk, half-reclining in a rocker on the roof of a house, vaguely seeing the dark face of the Arab hypnotist and magician who was squatting on his heels before her, lulling her to sleep with his barely audible, monotonous sing-song, and the slow movements of his thin hands. And suddenly, even as she was thinking thus and mechanically gazing with eyes wide-open upon a bright silvery spark with which a teaspoon in a glass of water was aflame, she suddenly lost conscience. And when she came to with a start, Emile was standing over her. All that took place subsequent to this unexpected meeting is known from the words of Emile himself,—from his story, from his answers to interrogations. “Yes, I dropped into Constantine as though from heaven!” he had said. “I had come because I had comprehended that the powers of heaven itself could not stop me. On the morning of the seventeenth of January, straight from the station, without any word of warning, I appeared at the house of Monsieur Marot and ran into the garden. I was dumbfounded by that which met my eyes; but I had scarce made a step when she came to. She, it seemed, was also amazed, both by the unexpectedness of my appearance, and that which she had just been through; but she did not even emit an exclamation. Having looked at me, like a person just awakened from a deep sleep, she got up from her seat, putting her hair in order.

“‘That’s the very presentiment I had,’ she said, somehow without any expression. ‘You did not obey me!’

“And with an accustomed gesture, having buttoned the peignoir at her breast, she took my head in both her hands and kissed me twice on the forehead.

“I lost my head from rapture and passion, but she gently put me aside and said:

“‘Let us go; I am not dressed,—I shall return at once, go to the children....’

“‘But, for God’s sake, what was the matter with you?’ I asked, ascending after her to the balcony.

“‘Oh, a mere nothing—a slight trance. I had gazed too long at a glittering tea-spoon,’ she was answering, getting control of herself, and beginning to speak with more animation. ‘But what have you done, what have you done!’

“I did not find the children anywhere; the house was empty and quiet; I sat down in the parlour. Suddenly I heard her begin singing in a distant room in a strong, sonorous voice, but I did not then comprehend all the horror of that sound, because I was all atremble with a nervous ague. I had not slept all night; I had counted the minutes as the train had sped me toward Constantine; I jumped into the first fiacre I had met upon running out of the depot; I did not expect to reach the height of the city.... I knew, I, too, had a premonition, that my arrival would be fatal for us; but still I could not expect that which I had seen in the garden, this mystical meeting, and such a sharp change in her attitude toward me! After ten minutes, she came out with her hair dressed, in a light-gray dress of an iris tint.

“‘Ah,’ said she, as I was kissing her hand, ‘but I had forgotten that to-day is Sunday, and that the children are in church; but then, I have over-slept.... The children will go to the pine grove after church,—were you ever there?’

“And, without waiting for my answer, she rang, ordered some coffee to be served to me, and, sitting down, began to look at me intently, and, without listening, began to question me as to how I had lived, what I had been doing. She started to speak about herself, of the fact that after two or three months, which had been very bad for her, during which she had aged dreadfully,—these words were uttered with sort of incomprehensible smile,—she was feeling well, as young as never before.... I replied, I listened, but did not understand a great deal; both of us said anything but that which we wanted to say; my hands grew chill from the nearness of that other fearful, inevitable hour. I do not deny that I was struck as if by lightning when she had said ‘I have aged....’ I suddenly saw that she was right: in the thinness of her hands, and of the faded, even though really rejuvenated face, in the slenderness of certain outlines of the body, I caught certain signs of that which compels our hearts to contract so painfully, and even somehow awkwardly,—yet all the more passionately,—at the sight of an aging woman. ‘Ah, yes, how rapidly and sharply she had changed!’ I reflected. But she was beautiful, never the less. I was growing intoxicated as I gazed upon her. I had grown accustomed to dreaming of her without end; I had not forgotten that moment, when on the evening of the eleventh of July, I had first embraced her knees. Her hands, too, were slightly trembling, when she was putting her coiffure in order, smiling, and gazing at me; and suddenly—you will understand all the catastrophic force of this moment!—suddenly, this smile was distorted, somehow; and, with difficulty, but firmly, she uttered:

“‘Still, you ought to go home, to rest up from the journey; your appearance is dreadful; you have such suffering, fearful eyes and such burning lips, that I no longer have the strength to see them.... Do you wish me to?—I shall go there in your company....’

“And, without letting me answer, she got up and went away to get her hat and cloak....

“We arrived quickly at the Villa Hassim. I lingered near the entrance, in order to pluck some flowers. She did not wait for me, opening the door herself. I had no servants; there was only the caretaker,—he did not see us. When I stepped into the ante-room, hot and half dark because of the closed Venetian blinds, and offered her the flowers, she kissed them, then embracing me with one hand, she kissed me. From emotion her lips were hot, but her voice was clear.

“‘But listen ... how shall we ... have you anything with you?’ she asked.

“I did not at first understand her,—so had this first kiss, this first familiar ‘you’ overwhelmed me,—and I mumbled:

“‘What do you want to say?’

“She took a step back.

“‘What!’ she said in astonishment, almost sternly. ‘Can you possibly have thought that I ... that we can live after this? Have you anything with you that we may die?’

“I recovered my wits and hastened to show her a revolver loaded with five bullets, with which I never parted.

“She rapidly went on, from room to room. The semi-darkness was everywhere. Hearing only the rustle of her silken skirts, I followed after her, with that confusion of all the senses with which a naked man goes on a sultry day into the sea. Finally we arrived at the end of our journey; she threw off her cloak and began to untie the ribbons of her hat. Her hands were still trembling, and once more I remarked through the dusk something pitiful and tired in her face....

“But she died without wavering. During the last moments she became transformed. Kissing me, and leaning back in order to see my face, she told me, in a whisper, a few words so tender and touching that I have not the strength to repeat them.

“I wanted to go to pluck some more flowers, in order to strew our funeral couch with them. She did not let me, she was hurried, she was saying: ‘No, no, it is not necessary ... there are plenty of flowers ... here are your flowers’—and she kept on repeating:

“‘And so, I charge you, by all that you hold sacred, that you kill me!’

“‘Yes, and then myself,’ said I, not for a second doubting my resolution.

“‘Oh, I believe you, I believe you!’ she answered, by now as if in a trance....

“A minute before her death she said, very quietly, but simply: ‘My God, this is a deed without a name!’

“And again:

“‘Where are the flowers you gave me? Kiss me—for the last time.’

“She herself put the muzzle of the revolver up to her temple. I wanted to shoot, but she stopped me:

“‘No, that isn’t right,—let me show you the right way. Here, so, my child.... And afterward make the sign of the cross over me, and lay the flowers upon my breast....’

“When I fired, she moved her lips slightly. I fired once more....

“She lay there, calm; in her extinguished gaze there was some bitter beatitude. Her hair was spread out; a tortoise shell comb was thrown upon the floor. Swaying, I got up, to put an end to myself. But, despite the Venetian blinds, it was light in the room; and in this light, and amid this quiet which had suddenly arisen all about me, I distinctly saw her face, already grown pallid.... And here a sudden madness possessed me,—I dashed to the window, throwing apart, flinging open the shutters, and began to shout, and to shoot into the air.... The rest you know....”

In the spring, five years ago, travelling over Algeria, the writer of these lines visited Constantine. He often recalls now those evenings, rainy and chill, but spring evenings never the less, which he passed by the fireplace in the reading room of a certain old and homelike French hotel. Upon the heavy, elaborate étagères there lay tattered illustrated journals—in them one could find some faded portraits of Mme. Marot, at different ages,—among them, one taken in Lausanne, when she was a girl.... Her story is told here again, through a strong desire of telling it in my own way.

1916.