Pity for Women Read online

  He slid on to his knees on the tiled floor, trembling all over with the effort of resisting the pleasure he would have liked to give her by asking her to marry him. As she was half-sitting on the edge of the sink with one foot dangling, he kissed the hem of her skirt, then removed her grey suede shoe, and taking her foot in his hands, pressed it to his lips at the spot where the stocking had a small darn. Often, he had kissed her face on the places where her features were a little defective, thinking that, while in her perfection she belonged to all men, in her imperfections she belonged to him alone. Now he kissed the darn in her stocking because it introduced an unexpected hint of poverty into his idea of her, a faint possibility that the apparent affluence in which she lived might not be altogether genuine; and the thought that he would one day wrong her seemed to him more odious than ever. And the knowledge, underlying all his other feelings, that she was a little unwell today, added new warmth to these feelings and brought them to the boil, as the flame nearby had brought the water to the boil.

  'You,' he said at last, 'you, so quiet and good, as though to appease the Fates. It's strange, I wish you well. What a mysterious thing it is to really wish someone well! What is essential is that you should always be happy. Once you are out of my hands, of course, because as long as we're together ... I so much want to keep the damage I shall do you to a minimum ... Don't love me! Don't love me!' he exclaimed vehemently. 'It's the only chance you have of not being unhappy because of me. Ah, yes, there's another: you must realize that I'm mad. I'm not only mad, but I'm mad as well.' (He felt her toes moving beneath his lips; at the same time, in spite of the intoxication of the moment, it struck him that her foot was rather thin, and he would have preferred it to be a bit sturdier.) 'Marguerite de Rosebourg,' he said, raising his head, 'I ask your pardon for the future. It is the divine part of my soul (though I don't believe in God, I have no reason not to believe in him), it is the divine part of my soul that asks your pardon in advance for whatever harm I may do you; and I ask you this while mentally kissing the glittering Star of the Holy Ghost which I, too, wear invisibly on my heart. Remember this well, Rosebourg: I shall do you harm, but the harm I do you will give me no pleasure ... Am I boring you?' he asked, seeing the grey cat giving a jaw-splitting yawn. And, because of this ludicrous association of ideas, his laughing self was reawakened and took over once again. Throughout this entire speech, it was as though he had been swept now right, now left by opposing gusts of wind.

  He straightened up, and then, standing in front of him, she rested her forearms against his chest, either from some immemorial girlish instinct, or because she had seen it done in films. She had not raised him up when he was kneeling. She had not wept when he wept; the time had not yet come when he would know how to make her cry. With a confidence that nothing, then, could have shaken, she had listened to him as one listens to a child babbling in a dream. She said: 'I know you will never do anything to hurt me.' He was disturbed to think that she knew him so little, and said to himself: 'What can I do against such trustfulness?' Meanwhile the sky had cleared, she had opened the window (canaries were chirping in a cage which had just been put out), and their long embrace was visible to the outside world. He thought of this, but did not close the window, as if something new had occurred which gave them a right to embrace publicly. Thus they remained, merged with each other like the sky and the sea on certain days when the horizon is no longer visible in a great, smooth, even splendour. Then they parted, well pleased with each other.

  That night, after the five hours they had spent talking with passionate truthfulness and sincerity, and with no caresses (he despised the very thought of them) - all of which was new in their relationship - Costals was unable to sleep. The esteem he felt for her kept him awake. This esteem had created in his body a tension of a wholly virile kind which he had not experienced during their chaste hours in the kitchen and which was not, even now, accompanied by the faintest lustful image.

  'The Précieuses,' he thought, 'used to distinguish "tenderness based on esteem". [Le Tendre sur estime - from la carte du Tendre in Mlle de Scudéry's novel Clélie (Translator's note).] This is a case of tension based on esteem.' Till then he had never suspected that a feeling of a purely moral order could have such an effect, and he was greatly astonished.

  He was perfectly aware that he had treated Solange that day as though he were engaged to her, and that it was impossible for her not to have noticed it. For the first time he envisaged the possibility of being weak enough some day to bestride the nuptial Hippogriff with her if she should ever decide to confess to such a desire. He knew for certain that it would be the purest folly. He knew that marriage - of which he had always said, in the words of Don Quixote: 'It is impossible that I should ever conceive of being married, not even to the Phoenix' - would wreck his future: as a writer, because of the obligations, the nervous wear and tear, the need for money, the time-wasting it would involve; and as a man, because his independence was for Costals a necessity as absolute as the air which kept him alive. The Hippogriff, once straddled, could only lead him to Hades. But the idea of marrying Solange was an abyss that had suddenly opened before him and might suck, him down.

  Supposing the marriage did take place, it was inevitable that a day would come when he would have to get divorced, both to save his work and to save his soul. But if Solange had done him no wrong (and he was sure she would not have), and if she refused to divorce him, how could he regain his freedom? All night long this prospect weighed him down like an incubus. At last he realized that the only solution would be to murder her. Not to murder her openly, and be condemned, for that would place him in a situation where he would be unable to continue his work and pursue his love-life. But to murder her in such a way that he would not be detected. For instance, by toppling her over the rails of a ship. Or by taking her out to sea in a dinghy. He had already thought it all out in other circumstances.

  Of course, killing her would be a hideous crime. But what if there were no other way of recovering his manhood? 'Am I then a monster? No, I'm just like everyone else. Sometimes better than others, sometimes worse. I'm like seven people out of ten. And if seven people out of ten are "monsters", there can be no such thing as a monster. It may seem strange that, on one and the same day, I should not only love this girl enough to consider marrying her, but that I should also contemplate murdering her - not for any jealous motive, but simply because she would be in my way. But many other things in men's souls are equally strange. Of course, since it's the idea of marriage, and it alone, that is responsible for fathering this homicide plan, the simplest thing would be not to marry her. Alas, it isn't as simple as that. It's like an abyss sucking me down.'

  He had thought that the night would dissipate these musings like evil phantoms. And, indeed, when he awoke, the possibility of marriage had lost a great deal of its substance. Not enough, however, to prevent him from taking an immediate precautionary measure, painful though it was.

  He was due that day or the next to send to a monthly review a long story about a man who poisons someone for fear that he will 'talk'. All the emotions through which the man passes before committing the deed, and the technique employed, were minutely described over some sixty pages. It was a piece of documentary evidence which, should Costals ever fall under suspicion, would tell fearfully against him. 'A man capable of thinking up a murder with such hallucinatory precision cannot be far from committing it; he has already almost committed it in spirit.' He could just hear counsel for the prosecution! Regretfully Costals wrote to the editor of the review to say that he was unable to deliver the promised story.

  At the same time he wrote to Andrée, for he felt sorry for her because he was happy.

  to Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard

  Pierre Costals

  Paris

  21 June 1927

  Dear Mademoiselle,

  A small cousin of mine, [Costals' bastard son.] sweet and open-hearted if something of a ra
scal (thanks to his father who's quite impossible), was out on an excursion one day when he suddenly decided to telephone his father. 'Hullo, is that you, papa?' 'Yes, what's the matter?' 'Nothing, except that I'm happy and enjoying myself, and I just wanted to let you know.'

  Yesterday I was happy. Happy in a kitchen. And, my goodwill having been awakened as a result of this happiness, I wanted to 'let you know', and also to ask how you were. Tell me briefly (not more than two pages). I have an idea you've been writing to me lately, but I confess I don't remember what you said in your letters; I must only have read the opening sentences. I won't ask whether you're happy, as I know it isn't your fate to be happy. But still, how's it going?

  So long. You can't imagine how benign I feel at the moment. 'Opportunity not to be missed.'

  C.

  I had never seen the inside of a kitchen before. It's an astonishing place; all sorts of possibilities. And to think that it was there all the time!

  If this novel conformed to the rules of the genre as laid down in France, the scene in the kitchen between Costals and Solange would have been placed at the end. Everybody would have been delighted: the pundits because, in a novel constructed in the French manner, that is to say a logically constructed novel, the culminating scene must come at the end, and the moralists because this scene seems to foreshadow a union between the principal characters. And thus the novel, by ending on a vista of blue sky, would have been edifying from beginning to end, for French novels, like Christian souls, always preserve the possibility of redeeming themselves in extremis.

  But life, which knows nothing of living, foolishly presumes to ignore the conventions of the French novel. In the story we are here relating, as it really happened, that scene in the kitchen, in which Costals and his sweetheart discovered together some estimable areas of their souls, was indeed a summit, but with all the drawbacks of summits. For, the summit having been reached, one must perforce descend. That scene had no aftermath.

  When they next met, Solange was taciturn, almost morose. Perhaps she had her reasons. Perhaps she had none. Perhaps, even, she was no different from her usual self, but they had climbed too high. A multitude of small signs made him doubt whether she loved him deeply. Her face did not light up at the sight of him.... A fortnight had elapsed, and she still hadn't had the snap-shots she had taken of him developed ... Whereas so many women overwhelmed him with solicitude, there was never anything of the kind from her.... Once she said to him: 'Neither you nor I are infatuated with each other. That's a sign of the solidity of our attachment.' The 'neither you' was an echo of what he himself had said to her about his not being in love with her. But the 'nor I' seemed a bit chilly.

  He thought: 'She's like a shaded lamp. The light is there all right, but it lacks radiance.' And indeed, as soon as they were apart from each other, it was as if Solange's personality, after all rather frail, was, as it were, swallowed up by that of Costals. When he was with her, he believed in her integrity. When she was absent, all that was tortuous in his nature began to ferment again. Distrustful as a prince and always prone to believe that others wished him as much harm as he felt capable of doing them, he had unwittingly substituted his own turbulent spirit for that of the girl, and soon found himself confronted by a detached, blurred image of Solange, which was no more than a projection of himself. He had re-created her in his own image.

  He had once asked her: 'What did you think of the way I made love to you that first evening in the Bois?' She had answered that she had been extremely surprised, though not shocked, and that the sensation had been disagreeable. He was inclined to exaggerate her physical coldness, and comparing the poor quality of her responsiveness to that of, say, Guiguite or certain others, he sighed; for sexual enjoyment, he could only give her five out of twenty. And he consoled himself with theories, all deriving from that tedious habit he had of drawing a sharp dividing line between the sexes: 'Men only love with the heart when they have first desired with the senses. With women it's the opposite: first they love with the heart, and from thence flows desire. Ugly men are loved, ugly women are not. A woman in love doesn't mind if her lover hasn't shaved for two days, whereas no man would kiss a bearded woman.'

  At other times, this coldness in Solange did not displease him. It provided him with an excuse, opening the door through which he too would one day escape to undertake the divine conquest of some new little partner. Had she remained the Solange of 'Kitchen Sunday', he might eventually have married her. But if she were the first to show signs of wanting to break it off, then he would break it off himself with total indifference. The only person he ever missed was his son, and in any case nobody is irreplaceable. Hence one of the most significant traits in his character was that he was almost devoid of jealousy, which he characterized as a 'shopgirl's sentiment'. Whether the girl fell madly in love with him, or whether she threw him over, made no difference to him at all. He would adapt himself to either contingency with the same promptness and the same contentment: more passionate as she became more passionate, more forgetful if she chose to forget him. Such was the amplitude of his inner keyboard, and his mastery over it, that he could draw from it at will whatever he wanted.

  Nevertheless, prepared as he was to believe that their liaison was on the wane, he decided that it would be unfair to her to postpone the regularization of their position any longer. The state of demi-vierge could not forever satisfy a soul with a thirst for the absolute. The time had come to bring Mlle Dandillot into a more clearly defined category.

  With this end in view, they were at his flat one evening, in the room which he called 'the tomb of the unknown woman', when suddenly....

  Who's that ringing at my door

  Said the fair young la-a-ady

  Yes, who, well after half past nine? ... The servant was out. He saw her start up suddenly from the bed, her eyes wide open, and tried to calm her down. An electric sign outside threw splashes of red on to her arms and shoulders, while the glow from the lights of the city, shining in bands through the slats of the shutters, streaked her face with light and darkness as if she were behind the bars of a prison (this figurative prison was her love for him, little though he realized it). The doorbell rang again, and then a third time, with insistence. She slipped out of bed and hurried to the bathroom.

  He followed her, and found her getting dressed. He begged her not to. But she was shaken. A minute went by, while she sat, half-dressed, on a chair. And suddenly the bell rang again, and fists began to pound on the door of the flat.

  This time Costals was worried. Solange was now fully dressed. There was no one there but a respectably attired young damsel, whose parents must be aware that she often visited him. But he did not think of this: he was simply a frightened man who has heard fists pounding on a door behind which he is in bed with a girl.

  Meanwhile the banging had stopped. He tiptoed into the hall, to make sure no one was waiting behind the door. There, on the floor, lay a visiting card. Andrée!

  'Your letter touched me so much that I felt we must talk things over and get our bearings at the earliest opportunity; so I caught the first train. I know you're at home, because the windows of one of your rooms are lit up. But never mind ... Please write to me express at the address below, tomorrow if possible.'

  So this woman wasn't content with pestering him from a distance. She had to ring his bell at half past nine at night, and bang on his door like a drayman, and watch his windows like a spy. She, whom he did not love, had to disturb him in what he did love.

  He told Solange that it was only 'some imbecile of a friend', but when he asked her if she wanted to call it a day, and she pleaded her shattered nerves, he said to her:

  'Don't apologize. You'd hear bells ringing and fists banging the whole time ... Even I, after nine years of peace, I can't hear a knock on the door without being reminded of machine-guns. Let's finish the evening in the Bois. Tomorrow I'll pick you up at a quarter to four in front of your house, and we'll go to my country place.
'

  This was what he called a garden studio which he owned, off the boulevard du Port-Royal, where they sometimes went.

  Then he wrote an express letter to Andrée, the Angel of Treachery reading over his shoulder.

  Dear Andrée (it was the first time in five years he had called her by her Christian name):

  I am so looking forward to seeing you again! If I could have guessed that it was you just now, I would of course have opened up, even though I was in night attire; but so lonely! Come tomorrow, 25th June, at four-thirty, to 96, boulevard du Port-Royal, and ring three times. It's a little 'folly' I've had there for some years. We shall be undisturbed.

  Yours,

  C.

  p.s. In writing to you I am behaving treacherously to another woman. Sweet treachery.

  They went out. The stars were dancing about like motes in a sunbeam. He stopped the taxi at a post-office, and handed the express letter to Solange.

  'You post it, just to please me. You may read the address. You see it's to a woman....'

  She gave him an anxious, questioning look.

  'It's a woman I'm punishing.'

  'What are you punishing her for?'

  'For not loving her.'

  Back in his flat, he wrote in his notebook: 'Here on my balcony, at a quarter to twelve, I savour to the full the exquisite tang of treachery. It is such a pleasurable state that I wonder how one can ever relinquish it without some grave reason. Above the town, the sky glows like heated iron. An emerald breeze gently fans my face.'

  Next day, at four, Costals and Solange arrived at his Port-Royal studio. Situated at the end of a small garden, this studio was like every other studio, and so not worth describing (the bachelor apartment in all its horror). There was, however, one thing peculiar to it: a number of show-cards, which Costals had had made following an American fashion then becoming fairly widespread in France, were lying about on the furniture. One of them bore this inscription: