The Givreuse Enigma Page 8

  10 a.m. had just chimed on the Church of Saint Saturnin when Madame de Givreuse arrived at Mademoiselle Faubert’s house. The visitor betrayed her agitation more evidently than Pierre; her face had the hardness that emotion gives to authoritarian features. She felt a trifle resentful toward Valentine; she did not understand why the young woman had left so mysteriously, but her rancor was founded in offended affection. Perhaps she was also vaguely jealous of Mademoiselle Faubert. She held the instructress in esteem, but had never showed her any real cordiality.

  “Excuse me, Madame,” said Madeleine. “It wasn’t possible to leave Mademoiselle de Varsennes alone.”

  “I understand that perfectly,” the visitor replied, coldly. “We’ve been very anxious!”

  Madeleine thought she could perceive a reproach in her tone. “I was about to send a telegram when Monsieur de Givreuse arrived.”

  The Comtesse made a vague gesture, and then said, angrily: “Why has she done this? It’s so contrary to her nature.”

  “Circumstances can be stronger than character.”

  “What circumstances?” exclaimed Madame de Givreuse, indignantly. “What could have happened to Valentine, in my house? I assume that no one has shown her any lack of respect?”

  “Oh, that’s impossible, Madame. Mademoiselle de Varsennes has received nothing but evidence of affection from yourself and everyone else.”

  “What, then? She’s not mad…”

  “Merely very troubled.”

  “For which she has her reasons?”

  “Undoubtedly, Madame.”

  “Could she not have confided them to me? Does she not know that I love her as I would my own daughter?”

  “She knows that. She loves you like a mother.”

  “Well then?”

  Madame de Givreuse was generous, devoted and tyrannical; she was not overblessed with insight. She rightly deduced, however, that it was a matter of some sentimental crisis, and she had expected for a long time that Pierre and Valentine would fall in love. She wanted that.

  “Alas,” Madeleine replied, “the people who love us the most are sometimes those to whom we cannot make certain confidences.”

  Madame de Givreuse shrugged her shoulders. “Let’s be clear, Mademoiselle. Has Pierre said something to Valentine—not offensive, he’s incapable of that—but which has frightened her?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “So she’s obeying an entirely private sentiment—is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Do you know what that sentiment is?”

  Madeleine did not reply.

  “Come on,” the Comtesse continued. “I need to know. My ardent desire is that Valentine should be happy. I certainly have a right to know why she has run away from us.”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t really know herself. She’s so scrupulous!”

  “I know what you mean—it concerns Pierre. But in what sense? Is she afraid of love? Is she afraid of being loved?”

  “Both, undoubtedly.”

  “I don’t see that that’s any reason to run away from us.”

  “If she wants to escape any influence, however…to be free…”

  “How are we constraining her?”

  “Oh, Madame, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the influence exercised by affection itself…the scruples that a young woman might have. How do we know whether Valentine isn’t fearful of upsetting you?”

  Madame Givreuse smiled, almost softly. “Upsetting me? I only want her to be happy. If she and Pierre were in love, I would be delighted. If she doesn’t love Pierre, I certainly wouldn’t hold it against her. She’s as free as the wind on the sea!”

  “She surely has no doubt of it…”

  “In sum,” the Comtesse went on, “has any event caused Valentine to act thus?”

  “Only internal events, I might put it thus…”

  “She wants to think things over! That’s good. It won’t prevent me from seeing her, I assume?”

  Madame de Givreuse had raised her voice. The interior door opened and Valentine showed herself, her face tearful. She went silently to kneel before the Comtesse. Her long hair was in semi-disarray; fatigue, emotion and insomnia had swollen her eyelids and her young eyes seemed all the more charming for it. Mollified, Madame de Givreuse drew the young woman to her bosom.

  VI.

  Philippe’s new life was melancholy, but not as much as he had feared. Strength rose up within him from the depths of his being and made him apply himself to his task. He worked hard organizing the workshop that had been entrusted to him. He had a natural technological bent; he was developing a latent talent, and his imagination revealed its ingenuity.

  Savarre had fabricated documents that provided the young man with safeguards. He was now named Philippe Frémeuse; his birthplace had been established as New Orleans in the United States. Philippe’s papers were authentic; they had passed into Savarre’s hands from a shipwreck victim who had died in his sanatorium, whose only son had perished at sea. The father had not had time to register his son’s death, and they had no other family. This deception was indispensable and inevitable. No administrative authority could accept the duplicate personality of Pierre de Givreuse, nor admit that a man could exist without official papers establishing his identity. In the meantime, this legal fiction did no injury to any individual or collective. The neurologist intended to perfect it subsequently by adopting Philippe. At the Town Hall of Ennuyères, to which the Château de Givreuse was dependent, no suspicion was raised. Philippe Frémeuse was officially admitted to membership of the community.

  All of this, without confirming it, prepared the ground for a renunciation. The destiny of the Givreuses was separated. The one who remained at the château acquired a privilege that the subtle form of circumstances would render definitive. The other suffered thereby, but without bitterness; indeed, a primitive delight was mingled with his trial by ordeal. Philippe struggled desperately to transform his love in memory, and that struggle tended to establish a difference, if not of temperament, at least of character, between himself and Pierre. It multiplied his activity.

  To the factory that Rougeterre and his associates had set up near Carolles, it was Philippe who brought the greatest vigilance and tried hardest to perfect the machines. He had succeeded in improving an engine; that small victory over matter helped him adapt himself to his fate. Thus, while Pierre abandoned himself to delightful but passive emotions—taking up, as it were, the life of the species—Philippe accentuated personal life, developing original elements therein. In the particular state of plasticity in which they still found themselves, which offered analogies with childhood and early adolescence, that differentiation had a certain operative breadth.

  It happened that the spirit of invention, the will and aptitude for struggle, made progress in Philippe. It was a kind of recompense for his sacrifice; it encouraged him and filled him with confidence in the future. His work became a passion; he strove doggedly to produce faultless machines, sturdy and flexible engines that refused to break down. He became an aviator himself, so bold and so skillful that he soon desired to become a military pilot—but he concluded that he would render greater service as a manufacturer than he could at the front. Tempted nevertheless by the perilous life, he departed in an airplane on several occasions for the East, where he took part in the trials of the Rougeterre apparatus and departed surreptitiously to hurl bombs of his own invention down upon German railway stations, trains and ammunition depots. These exploits satisfied his need for adventure and his hatred of tedium.

  One evening, as he returned from one of these expeditions, a projectile struck his engine. The twilight was fading away and night was falling very blackly, overcast by heavy cloud. There was not a star in the sky. Electric searchlight beams rose up from the ground, rotating about the sky. The engine was still functioning, but Philippe knew that it could not last much longer. Guns were thundering, and a few German aircraft were prowling
in the shadows.

  Is this my final hour? Philippe wondered.

  He loved life. On that black Earth, lost in the darkness, years of strength and courage had been promised to him. He thought about the other one, his mother and Valentine, with immense affection; he also experienced a strange regret at dying without having discovered the secret of his duplication…

  Suddenly, he found himself in a fog—or, rather in a cloud. The searchlights no longer reached him. For ten minutes more the engine functioned; then it stopped. It was necessary to descend at hazard. Philippe made his machine describe a long spiral, and without quite knowing how, found himself in a large, almost bare clearing in the middle of a forest.

  Everything was peaceful. The distant artillery-fire was scarcely audible. He waited for a few moments, revolver in hand; then, by the bright light of his lantern, he set about examining the engine. The damage was actually slight, but badly located. He rapidly improvised a repair, and was getting ready to take off again when he heard a voice. A human being had just emerged, scarcely clad in a vague chemise and a ragged skirt. She was still a child; her eyes shone like those of a lynx. He directed the light at a swarthy face beneath a shock of hair that hung down to slim shoulders.

  “You’re French!” she said “I know you are!”

  “I’m French.”

  She looked at him imploringly. “I’ve been living in these woods for nearly a year,” she went on. “None of them has ever found me.”

  A great pity, tinged with admiration, filled Philippe’s heart. “What about your parents?” he asked, softly.

  “I have no parents,” she sighed. “I’m a foundling.”

  “Poor child!”

  He became more interested in her. This adventure had mysterious affinities with his own. The child’s origins were lost in the darkness of being, just as his own were lost in the darkness of force. “Wouldn’t you be afraid to come with me?” he asked.

  “Oh, don’t leave me here alone!” she exclaimed, her eyes shining.

  He installed her in the apparatus then, wrapping her up in a blanket. Then, having checked everything, he took his place in his turn and started the engine.

  “Above all, don’t move!”

  The apparatus moved forward and took off. It cleared the tree-tops. The child showed hardly any astonishment, and soon became accustomed to it. The darkness was profound. A mist was settling over the forests, the hills and the plain; the airplane became invisible.

  A few hours later, Philippe landed, far beyond the enemy lines.

  Philippe placed the little girl with an instructress. He went to see her every day when he was not on his travels.

  She was fearful, abrupt and wild at first; she moved like a captive beast; she could not break the habit of being on her guard and fleeing at the slightest suspect sound. He liked her oread’s face, her wide sparkling eyes and her supple forest-dweller’s figure. The child demonstrated an unbridled and jealous affection for him. The night when he had lifted her up into the sky inevitably remained the most magical night of her life. He also became attached to her. He was delighted to have found her in the unknown, among innumerable enemies. The connection that linked him to her became ever stronger, and gave him more courage.

  One day, he found her in the instructress’s garden. The equinox was already approaching. A stormy wind was blowing from the sea. Storm-birds were circling, squawking stridently; soaring birds7 with trenchant wings quit the heights and made long feverish swoops over the cliffs. He walked beneath the apple-trees with little Jeanne; spiders like little crabs were spinning their webs there. Her movements were furtive and rhythmic.

  What will become of her? he wondered, anxiously. What path will she follow through incomprehensible life? He wanted her to be happy. Obscure emotions rose up in him, but he preferred them to be obscure, for fear of all the possibilities that might so easily become impossible. Eventually, he asked: “Are you happy, Jeanne?”

  She turned her clear dark eyes toward him and replied in a low voice: “I’m happy when you’re here.”

  He shivered; he foresaw the child’s future, the mistreatment of the adolescent. “That won’t always be the case,” he murmured.

  There was indignation and fear on the swarthy face; the eyes became quite black, so dilated were the pupils. Then she laughed hoarsely. “Only until I’m dead!”

  “Dead!” He felt the force and depth of the intonation; there was no doubting it. At the fatal hour, the love that was born within this child, like pollen in a flower, would be irrevocable. It would be a jealous love.

  They walked together for a while, side by side. The wind blew the sea-mist away; a black nimbus formed and deepened, bordered by phosphorescence. A vision developed its confused vicissitudes. Philippe glimpsed the twists and turns of a destiny in which there was no more loss or sacrifice, in which pure days would emerge, one after another, like stray buttercups in the mountains.

  Warm raindrops fell upon the apple-trees; something intense and delicious welled up from the autumnal grass—but a rhythmic image suddenly stood out against the cliffs and pain began to beat again in Philippe’s breast. Once again, he saw the open window overlooking the landscape of Old France, while lines echoed implacably in his memory:

  The branch is gilded by the Sun

  And bows down to shelter

  The buds that are about to blossom

  And the bird that is about to sing…

  He took the little girl’s arm, and led her back to the house.

  Part Three

  I.

  Pierre suffered more than Philippe. The strangest remorse accompanied him even into the depths of sleep, often waking him up with a sudden shock. Then, in the shadows, he was subject to an unconscious nightmare, which filled him with horror and disgust. While Philippe steeped himself in active life, Pierre curled up within a dream. He prowled through the immense château like Hamlet, wandering in the sinister cellars where prisoners had suffered hunger, torture and cold.

  Madame de Givreuse’s affairs gave him scant employment; she put such activity into them that the young man’s involvement was virtually unnecessary. He took refuge in the old library, where strange books solicited his curiosity, or wandered beneath the cliffs, living with the wild sea-birds and enigmatic animals, which emerged from the depths of the strand as if from the depths of the ages.

  Like the knell of doom, one single thought resounded in his head. He wanted, incessantly, to call Philippe back. Whenever they met up, though, Philippe opposed that call and insisted that the ordeal was necessary. These disputes revealed the first differences born of their separation; there was more precision in Philippe, more fever and subtlety in Pierre; they began to anticipate the progressive dissolution of their unity.

  Valentine had not returned to the château; she visited Madame de Givreuse once a week. Pierre became furtive during these meetings; he spoke rarely. The young people hardly dared look at one another. After Valentine’s departure he fell into a black depression, without knowing whether it was regret or the sense of his own impotence. He spent hours analyzing his state of mind, but the more he analyzed it the more indecipherable it seemed; he got lost within himself as if in a virgin forest.

  One day, he went out of the château and headed for the heath. He came within sight of Dr. Savarre’s sanatorium, a part of which was now given over to wounded soldiers. It was one of those days when the atmosphere is saturated with all the adventure of life. A muted storm that could not burst rendered the air delicious and hardly breathable, supersaturated with pollen. There were brief palpitations, the beginnings of a breeze, as abortive as the thunderclaps within the clouds.

  Pierre stopped beside the high wall that had hidden and sheltered so much misery. The silence was punctuated by the rustle of the bracken and broom, reminiscent of the distant rippling of skirts. He saw a female form sliding along the wall with hectic and uncoordinated movements—surely a madwoman.

  She caught sight of Pierre.
She stopped, stepped back, tensed. She had wild and fearful eyes, exceedingly pale in color. Suddenly coming to a decision, she launched herself toward Pierre and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Silence!” she whispered. “Don’t make a sound! The giant frogs are coming…the sea is full of them…they’re worse than crocodiles! Oh!”

  A bright gleam seemed to spring from her dilated pupils. Her mouth was partly open; it was the same as Valentine’s mouth: scarlet, with glints of mother-of-pearl.

  “Is it you?” she said. “Do you still love me? The hour has come, my love…it’s sounding down there…the black-and-red hour…the tide’s rising…the giant frogs will flood the cliffs…all the way to the stars. Listen! Oh, how they growl…they’ve put the sailors to flight, you know…in the torrid sands. Clutch me to your heart…save me…”

  Two warders had just appeared around the corner of the wall. They were coming forward, heavily but rapidly. The madwoman uttered a loud scream. “There they are! Quickly! Anda! They’re going to devour us!” Her grip became convulsive; her charming mouth quivered, a continuous groan rising from her throat.

  Abruptly, she ran away. Then, seeing that the warders were about to recapture her, Pierre shut his eyes, gripped by an abominable sadness. When he opened them again, the warders had hold of the fugitive.

  She did not scream again; she followed them, mute and somber—but when she passed close to Pierre again, she cried in a heart-rending voice: “Why have you abandoned me?”

  He fled across the heath. He saw that white face, those excessively clear eyes, and especially that mouth—so fine and sparkling—without any respite. Inexpressible presentiments ran through him like electric currents. He took massive strides.

  Dusk was falling when he saw that he was in a town; it was Avranches. The Church of Saint Saturnin loomed up into the haze. A bell had just finished chiming; a bright star was twinkling. He went into the church. Women were kneeling therein, and also a few men. He studied them in the wan yellow candlelight. He was bizarrely surprised not to see Valentine and Mademoiselle Faubert. For a few minutes he hoped that they might come; then he left, disheartened.