“She knows that joy ... what about me, why shouldn’t I know it too?”
The photograph lay on the table: she caught the glitter of a pin beside
it.
“I did that. I actually did that.” ... In the jolting train, now
moving faster down a gradient, Thérèse said slowly to herself: “It is
two years ago since, in that hotel bedroom, I picked up the pin and
ran it through the boy’s photograph in the region of the heart,--not
violently, but coolly, as if I was doing something quite ordinary;--and
then I threw the photograph down the lavatory; and pulled the plug.”
When Bernard came back he had remarked how serious she looked, like
some one who has been thinking something over, and decided what to
do. But she ought not to smoke so much, he said: she was poisoning
herself. Thérèse said that too much importance should not be attached
to a young girl’s fancies. She promised to bring her to a right view
of things. Bernard wanted Thérèse to reassure him,--full of the joy
of feeling the return tickets in his pockets; and more especially
gratified that his family had already asked for his wife’s help. He
announced that, cost what it might, for the last luncheon on their trip
they would go to some restaurant in the Bois. In the taxi he talked
about his plans for the shooting season; he was in a hurry to try the
dog that Balion was breaking in for him. His mother wrote that since
the mare had been fired she did not limp any more.
* * * * *
There were not yet many people in the restaurant, where the innumerable
waiters made them nervous. Thérèse still remembered the smell--a blend
of geraniums and vinegar. Bernard had never tasted Hock (“Good Lord,
they don’t give it away: still, Christmas only comes once a year!”).
Bernard’s broad shoulders prevented Thérèse seeing much of the room.
Behind the great plate-glass windows, motor-cars slid up and stopped,
more silently than in a film. She watched what she knew to be the
temporal muscles moving behind Bernard’s ears. After the first few
glasses he got flushed: for some weeks now this handsome cavalier from
the country had had no means of working off his daily ration of food
and drink. She did not hate him but how she longed to be alone to think
about her pain and find exactly where it lay. She simply wished he was
somewhere else, so that she might no longer have to force herself to
eat and smile, compose her face, and veil the fire that must be blazing
in her eyes: so that her mind might dwell freely on her mysterious
despair.... Some one has escaped from the desert island where you
thought to have her with you till the end; she crosses the abyss that
divides you from the world and is gone;--to another planet, ... and
yet: No.... Who has ever been able to do that? Anne was always one of
those who were content with life as it came: it was a changeling whose
sleeping head Thérèse had watched lying on her lap, in their solitary
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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