Chapter III: Part 3

One evening Noémi found Doctor Pieuchon and the priest talking in the hall, and she asked bitterly of them the reasons for their silence: why hadn't they told her of Jean's daily visits at the bedside of the consumptive? The doctor bowed his head, pleading ignorance of Jean's condition. He was a man of unbounded kindness himself; why should he have been surprised at devotion like his own in another, and devotion to his own son? The priest defended himself more vigorously: Jean had insisted upon silence, and the rôle of spiritual director necessitated scrupulous discretion. "But it was you, Father, who were determined upon that fatal journey to Paris." "Was it I alone, Noémi?" She leaned against the wall, digging with one of her fingers at a little hole in the marbled plaster. Jean's coughing sounded through the bedroom door, and Cadette's dragging footsteps could be heard in the kitchen. The priest spoke again: "I prayed for guidance, Noémi; we must praise the ways of God." He put on his coat and departed, his mind full of conflicting emotions; in hours of sleeplessness he wept over Jean Péloueyre. To no purpose did he repeat to himself that Jean had made his will in favour of Noémi, and that it was M. Jêrome's intention, after his son's death, to give the house and as much as possible of his property to his daughter-in-law--providing she did not re-marry. The priest, though perhaps too apt to interfere in the lives of others, was a conscientious man, and he questioned himself searchingly. He had never thought that the marriage could be anything but happy--and, _sub specie aeterni_, could anyone help wondering at the success of it? What profit was there for him in the affair? He was a good shepherd whose one concern was the welfare of his flock. Whenever he indulged in self-judgement he invariably absolved himself, but his absolution was never final. The dread of losing the power to discriminate between justice and injustice was ever with him, and hesitation preceded all his actions. As his humility increased, he pontificated less; he no longer let fall the train of his cassock, and he gave up wearing the three-cornered hat that distinguished him from his brother priests. He gradually freed himself from all his pettiness, and was quite indifferent when the news came that, though he was not a senior priest, the bishop had granted him the right to wear a hooded cloak over his surplice. How could he have cared for these trifles, he, a keeper of souls? The only thing for him to do now was to extricate himself from this drama. Had he been the humble instrument of God, or had a poor country priest been trying to take his Creator's place?

Meanwhile, every evening, the young doctor drove away in his gig over the frozen roads. The moonlight flooded through the interlacing branches of the pines and their dark round tops hovered in the sky like an immovable flock of huge birds. On several occasions the shadowy form of a wild boar crossed the road a few hundred paces ahead of the house. The line of pines widened suddenly and skirted a meadow hidden by low-hanging mist; then the road sank between two high banks and one felt the icy breath of a stream. Wrapped in his goat-skin coat, and enveloped in a thick cloud of mist and tobacco smoke, the young man did not know that the stars were shining above the tree-tops. He was thinking of his kitchen fire at which he would soon be drying himself, and the soup that he would pour some wine into; and when his thoughts wandered from food and warmth they clung about the figure of Noémi, so close to his hand every day, but scarcely ever touched by him. "Still," the sportsman said to himself, "I haven't missed her; she's winged." He knew instinctively when the feminine quarry had been run down and was imploring mercy; it was as though Noémi had cried out. Many women had been his, and they were the wives of men, not of poor broken things like Jean Péloueyre. Caught and more defenceless than any of these, would Noémi prove after all the only one not to give in? Naturally, during her husband's illness, common decency was keeping her straight, but, before that, what had prevented him from entirely fascinating his prey? What stronger influence had kept her just out of his reach? Another love, perhaps? He did not believe she was very devout; he imagined he knew that sort when he saw it, for he had already measured his strength with the priest's over the conquest of a sheep from the fold. Pious women enjoyed the game, allowed themselves to be kissed, fluttered close to the flame, even singed their wings; but at the last moment they slipped through one's fingers, back to the confessional as though drawn by an invisible wire. He laid his plans for the day of Jean Péloueyre's death, saying to himself, "I'll get her," and he laughed, for he had the patience of the sportsmen of _Les Landes_ who lie in wait for their prey.

About that time, the pious people of the town who went to church in the middle of the day, and believed themselves to be alone there, were startled by the sound of sighing that came from the choir. The priest spent almost all his spare moments there before his Judge. In no other place could he find peace; not the peace that is afforded by the stillness of country churches, thick with shadows, like caves under the sea, but the peace that the world cannot give. He understood that the wretched little Jean, who had scarcely been able to polish the crystals of the chandeliers before high festivals or to gather moss for the ladies to make into garlands, that poor hunter of magpies, was a vastly different person from the man who was now offering his life for the salvation of others. The priest was overwhelmed in the presence of Him who possessed the power to make slaves equal unto Himself.

XV

FORTUNATELY for Jean, the summer was a mild one; in September frequent storms turned the leaves red. Cadette's grandson brought in the first mushrooms, smelling of forest loam, and diverted him with ortolans taken at dawn, which he would fatten in the dark and serve to Monsieur Jean soaked in old armagnac. Flights of wood-pigeons foretold an early winter, and soon the decoys would be prepared.

Jean had always loved the autumn; he felt a secret affinity with the fields of harvested millet, with the tawny heather-lands known only to solitary ring-doves, to sheep, and to the wind. The scent that came in through the window, opened at dawn to make his breathing easier, reminded him of those melancholy October afternoons when he used to come slowly back from his shooting. He was not allowed to wait peacefully for his release. Noémi did not understand that silence is due to the dying, and just as in the early days she had been unable to conceal her disgust, she could not now spare him the sight of her remorse. Her thirst for his forgiveness was insatiable, and as she bent over his hands, wet with her tears, he whispered: "I am the one who chose you, Noémi. I was the one who should have considered you ..."; but his words were in vain. She shook her head; Jean was dying for her sake; this thought banished everything else from her mind. Oh, the bigness, the nobility of him! How she would love him if he were to recover! She would pay back a hundredfold any affection that he might show her now. How was she to know that the moment when Jean became convalescent must mark the beginning of a fresh desire to be rid of him, and that he had to be at the point of death before she could love him? Young, ignorant and sensual, she could not possibly know her own mind, but her desires were sincere and she had communicated them to God. She kept clumsily insisting that Jean should set her free from remorse and he soon lost heart; his one idea now was to avoid being left alone with her. This would have been difficult to manage, a host of imagined ills having rivetted M. Jêrome to his bed, but for the frequent visits of the young doctor. Jean wondered at such extraordinary attention from a stranger, and, though unable to converse with him, enjoyed his presence.

One afternoon late in September he roused himself after a long period of inertia and saw that Noémi was sitting in a chair by the window asleep, with her head resting on her shoulder. He listened for a moment to her regular breathing, and then closed his eyes. The door-latch clicked, the doctor came in softly, but Jean, too weak to utter a single word of greeting, pretended to be asleep. There was a squeak of hunting boots, and then the room was still. The silence excited Jean's curiosity and he opened his eyes again; the doctor was standing near his sleeping wife, he was leaning ever so slightly towards her, and his big hand trembled.... Then Jean shut his eyes and heard Noémi's low voice: "Oh, do forgive me, doctor; I didn't hear you come in. I must have been asleep. Our patient is having a bad day to-day; the weather is so oppressive. Look at the leaves; they're not moving." He answered that there was a breath from the South-West; then Noémi went on: "It comes from Spain; there'll be a storm...." The man's pale face and his burning eyes were the portents of the storm that was imminent, and they were as clear to Noémi as any thunder-cloud. She got up and walked across the room in order to put Jean's bed between her body and those devouring eyes. The doctor stuttered: "You should take great care of yourself, if only for his sake." "Oh, I can withstand anything. I'm strong; I eat and sleep like an animal.... I envy people who can die of grief." They sat at opposite sides of the room, and Jean, apparently asleep, sang to himself without moving his lips, pausing at the cesura: _Mon Péloueyre touche à son heure dernière_....

Autumn with its veils of mist and its scent of tears folded him in her arms, and he was able to breathe more easily and eat a little. But during these days his mental agony was at its height. Lingering on the borderland between life and death, without distrusting Noémi he could not help wondering how, when he had gone, she would defend herself against this young man's irresistible beauty. Two persons predestined to love each other are not kept apart by the wretched ghost of a dead man. But there was no trace of these tormenting thoughts upon Jean's face and he smiled as he shook hands with the doctor. Ah, that he might live to conquer in the battle for Noémi's love! What obscure madness had produced his desire for death? Even without Noémi, even without any wife, he would have the caresses that were worth more to him than any others, those of the wind at dawn. Pouring with perspiration and sickened by the smell of the sick room, he looked with envious eyes at Cadette's grandson who had brought him the first woodcock of the season. What joy those mornings had been: dull grey pine-tops high in the blue sky, like the meek who will be exalted to glory; the strip of green grass and alders and mist in the heart of the forest that marked the wandering course of a stream whose clear waters flowed over a bed of brown sand. These pines beloved by Jean Péloueyre were the vanguard of a great army that stretched between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic, overlooking Sauternes and the hot valley where the sun warms every stem of every cluster of grapes.

With the passing of the years Jean would have become less and less a prey to emotions, and his ugliness, like all ugliness and all beauty, would have lost itself in old age. At least, he would have had the long days of hunting and gathering mushrooms. In bottles of Yquem are imprisoned the burning summers of long ago, and the sunsets of yesteryear redden the Gruau-Larose; one sits reading before the kitchen fire when the heather lands are bathed in rain and mist.... "It's not necessary for you to come to-morrow," Noémi said to the doctor, and he replied: "Oh, yes, I had better come." Was it possible that she did not understand? Had he never declared himself? Would death carry him off before he knew the result of this contest at his bedside? It was as though someone who thought the unhappy boy was leaving the world without enough suffering had hastened to bind him with the earthly ties that require the severest exertion to break. However, these fell from him one by one before his last day; peace settled upon him, and he had the same grateful smile for everyone. He no longer repeated lines of poetry, but words like these: "It is I. Fear not."

They had to keep the windows of Jean's dismal room closed on account of the late winter rains; but why did they trouble themselves about Jean's suffering, when suffering was a joy to him? The only signs of the life about him that penetrated his consciousness were the crowing of cocks, the jolting of farm carts, the church bells, and the endless patter of rain upon the tiles; and at night he heard the savage screams of birds of prey and the cries of their victims. The dim light of his last dawn came in at the windows. Cadette lit the fire, and the room was filled with resinous fumes. Through many hot summers this scent of burning pine had blown from the parched heather lands upon his face. The d'Artiailhs thought he could still hear, but no longer could see. M. Jêrome, in his soiled dressing gown, stood near the door weeping, and Cadette knelt with her grandson at the foot of the bed. The voice of the priest seemed with propitiatory phrases to be pushing open an invisible door: "Depart from this world, Christian soul, in the name of God the Father Almighty, Who created you in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, Who suffered for you; in the Name of the Holy Ghost Who came down upon you; in the name of Angels and of Archangels; in the name of Thrones and of Dominions; in the name of Principalities and of Powers...."

Noémi gazed at him earnestly and she said softly to herself: "He was beautiful."

The people in the town mistook the bell that tolled while he was dying for the morning Angelus.

XVI

M. JEROME went to bed. The mirrors in which Jean had so often seen his wretched face were covered with dustsheets. His body had been dressed as though for high mass, and Cadette had even put a soft felt hat upon his head and a prayer book in his hands. The kitchen was all bustle and confusion for there would be forty people in the dining-room, and a group of farmers standing round the hearse groaned uncontrollably, like the mourners of ancient days. It was the first time that the priest had officiated at a funeral of such magnificence. Each guest was given a pair of gloves and a sou wrapped in paper. It rained during the service, but afterwards the sun broke through the clouds and shone until the funeral procession had left the cemetery. Jean Péloueyre awaited the resurrection of the dead, his body lying uncorrupted in the dry embalming sand. Noémi Péloueyre shrouded herself in crêpe for three years and her deep mourning enabled her to be almost literally invisible. She only went out to go to mass, and always before crossing the square made certain that no one was in sight. Even through the heat of summer she wore a high black collar edged with white, and in order to protect herself against the comments of the severe she refused to wear dresses made of a too silky material.

About this time a report of the young doctor's conversion went the rounds. He went to mass, and was seen in the church on week-days as well. When the priest was approached on the subject of this event which must have been such a satisfactory one to him, a smile played about his thin-lipped mouth, but he said nothing.

He seemed to have lost his influence and his power of persuasion, for he was unable to find out from M. Jêrome whether he had taken out of his will the clause which obliged Noémi not to re-marry. He failed, too, when he expressed his disapproval of the mourning and insisted that they should relax the strictness with which it was being carried out. M. Jêrome was proud of belonging to a family whose widows never went out of mourning, and the d'Artiailhs were most anxious for Noémi to continue wearing it. And this was why, in the early winter mornings, the young doctor was no more able to see the widow in her shadowy retreat than she to see her husband through the flagstone that sealed his grave, upon which she knelt every day. At times, however, he caught glimpses of her face, youthfully radiant in spite of her secluded life and of her fasts before Communion. The day after the Anniversary Mass, when it became known in the town that Noémi would stay in mourning, the doctor's Christian resolutions broke down. He neglected his patients as well as his religious duties, and Doctor Pieuchon was told that his young colleague had taken to drink, that he even kept a bottle at his bedside for nocturnal consumption. M. Jêrome's health was excellent, so his daughter-in-law had a good deal of leisure; she occupied herself with the estate, but the timber cutting required little supervision. Her religion was a cut-and-dried, mechanical affair, took up a very small part of her time and was not strengthened by reading. She was scarcely capable of meditation, so her faith rested almost entirely upon formula. In a country flowing with resin there is scarcely any poverty; and only a few moments are necessary once a week to collect the bleating flock of the Children of the Virgin about a harmonium. The only thing left for Noémi to do was to interest herself mildly, as did most of the women of _Les Landes_, in cooking. After the third year of her mourning she began to put on flesh, and Doctor Pieuchon had to prescribe an hour's walk every day.

One warm afternoon in the early spring she went as far as the farm called Tartehume and sank down exhausted on the bank that ran along the side of the road. Bees hummed in the broom; horseflies stung her ankles. Noémi's heart was beating rapidly and she could think of nothing but the dusty road that led back to the house; there were two miles of blazing sun, for the trees that bordered the road had recently been cut down. She felt that she would be forever hemmed in by these endless pines with their sticky red gashes, and in these dreary stretches of sand and burnt heather. In her slow uncultivated mind there was a confused echo of the conflict that had tortured Jean Péloueyre in the days of his bachelorhood. The aridity of her country and the solitude of her life parched her soul with mortal thirst and forced the wretched girl to raise her eyes and stretch out her hands towards the Living Water which is perpetual refreshment.

Noémi dried the perspiration from her hands with a black-bordered handkerchief. She looked at her dusty shoes and at a tuft of young ferns whose fronds were opening out like fingers. Then she raised her eyes slowly and the smell of rye bread came drifting across to her like the very breath of the farm. Suddenly she stood up, trembling. A gig that she easily recognized was standing in front of the farmhouse. How often through half-opened shutters she had gazed at its polished axle-caps, more thrilling to her than the stars in the heavens! Noémi shook the sand from the folds of her dress; the wheels of a farm cart creaked; a jay cried. A swarm of horseflies enveloped her as she stood watching the farmhouse door. Her mouth was open, her breath came quickly, and she waited and waited--a meek submissive animal. Then the door swung half-way back, and she tried to see into the dim hall where he was standing. A familiar voice was prescribing in peasant dialect enormous doses of tincture of iodine. He appeared; and every button on his hunting jacket gleamed in the sunlight, as the farmer accompanied him to the gate and held his horse, remarking that this was the season for forest fires; everything was dry; there was no green undergrowth and no rain to ease the situation. The young man picked up the reins.

Noémi drew back; her impulsive movement towards him was checked by a hidden force. She plunged into a thicket of tall heather bushes, scratching her hands on the brambles, and listened for a moment as the gig rattled away down the road. No doubt she was thinking, as she hid from him, of the town's disapproval of all lapses from respectable widowhood; and then there was the clause in M. Jêrome's will, which would always prevent her parents from giving their consent to what Madame d'Artiailh called a crazy match. Noémi would have instinctively swept aside such obstacles as these, had not her instinct been stifled by something still more powerful. Her trifling personality was condemned to greatness; her slavery had become authority. This commonplace girl could not help transcending herself; no road was open to her save that of renunciation, and in this moment she knew that her fidelity to the dead was a humble glory from which her destiny forbade her to escape.

So Noémi ran on through the scorched heather, till at last breathless, exhausted, and her shoes full of sand, she faltered and grasped a stunted oak whose withered leaves rustled in the hot wind--a stunted blackened tree that reminded her of Jean Péloueyre.

_La Motte_, _Vémars_, July;

_Johannet_, _Saint-Symphorien_, September 1921.