Short Fiction, Ivan Bunin [reading women .TXT] 📗

from that time until he left for France he behaved reasonably. This essentially was a bad sign, for it might mean that his passion had become deeper. But outwardly everything had changed for the better⁠—only once did he break down. It was on a Sunday after dinner at which several strangers were present, and he, careless of whether they noticed it, said to her:

“I beg you to spare me a minute.”

She got up and followed him into the empty, half-dark drawing-room. He went to the window through which the evening light fell in broad shafts, and, looking straight into her face, said:

“Today is the day on which my father died. I love you!”

She turned and was about to leave him. Frightened, he hastily called after her:

“Forgive me, it is for the first and last time!”

Indeed, she heard no further confessions from him. “I was fascinated by her agitation,” he noted that night in his diary in his elegant and pompous style; “I swore never again to disturb her peace of mind: am I not blessed enough without that?” He continued to come to town⁠—he only slept at the villa Hashim⁠—and he behaved erratically, but always more or less properly. At times he was, as before, unnaturally playful and naive, running about with the children in the garden; but more often he sat with her and “sipped of her presence,” read newspapers and novels to her, and “was happy in her listening to him.” “The children were not in the way,” he wrote of those days, “their voices, laughter, comings and goings, their very beings acted like the subtlest conductors for our feelings; thanks to them, the charm of those feelings was intensified; we talked about the most everyday matters, but something else sounded through what we said: our happiness; yes, yes, she, too, was happy⁠—I maintain that! She loved me to read poetry; in the evenings from the balcony we looked down upon Constantine, lying at our feet in the bluish moonlight.⁠ ⁠…” At last, in August Madame Maraud insisted that he should go away, return to his work; and during his journey he wrote: “I’m going away! I am going away, poisoned by the bitter sweet of parting! She gave me a remembrance, a velvet ribbon which she wore round her neck as a young girl. At the last moment she blessed me, and I saw tears shine in her eyes, when she said: ‘Goodbye, my dear son.’ ”

Was he right in thinking that Madam Maraud was also happy in August? No one knows. But that his leaving was painful to her⁠—there is no doubt of that. That word “son,” which had often troubled her before, now had a sound for her which she could not bear to hear. Formerly when friends met her on the way to church, and said to her jokingly: “What have you to pray for, Madame Maraud? You are already without sin and without troubles!” she more than once answered with a sad smile: “I complain to God that he has not given me a son.” Now the thought of a son never left her, the thought of the happiness that he would constantly give her by his mere existence in the world. And once, soon after Emile’s departure, she said to her husband:

“Now I understand it all. I now believe firmly that every mother ought to have a son, that every mother who has no son, if she look into her own heart and examine her whole life, will realize that she is unhappy. You are a man and cannot feel that, but it is so.⁠ ⁠… Oh how tenderly, passionately a woman can love a son!”

She was very affectionate to her husband during that autumn. It would happen sometimes that, sitting alone with him, she would suddenly say bashfully:

“Listen, Hector.⁠ ⁠… I am ashamed to mention it again to you, but still⁠ ⁠… do you ever think of March, ’76? Ah, if we had had a son!”

“All this troubled me a good deal,” M. Maraud said later, “and it troubled me the more because she began to get thin and out of health. She grew feeble, became more and more silent and gentle. She went out to our friends more and more rarely, she avoided going to town unless compelled.⁠ ⁠… I have no doubt that some terrible, incomprehensible disease had been gradually getting hold of her, body and soul!” And the governess added that that autumn, Madame Maraud, if she went out, invariably put on a thick white veil, which she had never done before, and that, on coming home, she would immediately take it off in front of the glass and would carefully examine her tired face. It is unnecessary to explain what had been going on in her soul during that period. But did she desire to see Emile? Did he write to her and did she answer him? He produced before the court two telegrams which he alleged she sent him in reply to letters of his. One was dated November 10: “You are driving me mad. Be calm. Send me a message immediately.” The other of December 23: “No, no, don’t come, I implore you. Think of me, love me as a mother.” But, of course, the truth that the telegrams had been sent by her could not be proved. Only this is certain, that from September to January the life which Madame Maraud lived was miserable, agitated, morbid.

The late autumn of that year in Constantine was cold and rainy. Then, as is always the case in Algeria, there suddenly came a delightful spring. And a liveliness began again to return to Madame Maraud, that happy, subtle intoxication which people who have already lived through their youth feel at the blossoming of spring. She began to go out again; she drove out a good deal with the children and used to take them to the deserted garden of the villa Hashim; she intended to go to Algiers, and to show the children Blida