“But it suited you very well,” said Maxime.
Armande blushed and he blushed himself, thinking that perhaps he had hurt her feelings. “She would take it the wrong way, naturally. She’s impossible, impossible! Pretty, those flecks of white soap in her black hair. I’d never noticed that the skin at the edge of her forehead, just under the hair, is slightly blue.”
“I was at the end of the garden, in the washhouse,” said Armande. “It’s laundry day today, so . . . Léonie and Maria didn’t even hear the bell.”
“I shan’t keep you from your work, I only looked in for a couple of minutes. As I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”
He had followed her to the top of the steps, and Maxime waited for her to indicate which of the wicker chairs he should sit in. But she said: “From four to seven the sun just beats down on you here,” and she ushered him into the drawing room, where they sat down opposite each other. Maxime seated himself in one of the armchairs tapestried with La Fontaine’s fables—his was “The Cat, the Weasel, and the Little Rabbit”—and stared at the rest of the furniture. The baby-grand piano, the Revolution clock, the plants in pots, he gazed at them all with hostile reverence.
“It’s nice in here, isn’t it?” said Armande. “I keep the blinds down because it faces south. Jeanne wasn’t able to come?”
“Goodness, is she frightened of me?” He was on the point of feeling flattered. But he looked at Armande and saw her sitting stiffly upright on “The Fox and the Stork,” one elbow on the hard arm of the chair, the other on her lap, with her hands clasped together. In the dusk of the lowered blinds, her cheeks and her neck took on the color of very pale terra-cotta, and she was looking straight at him with the steady gaze of a well-brought-up girl who knows she must not blink or look sidelong, or pretend to be shy so as to show off the length of her lashes. “What the hell am I doing here?” thought Maxime furiously. “This is where I’ve got to, where we’ve both got to, after ten, fifteen years of what’s called childhood friendship. This girl is made of wood. Or else she’s choked with pride. You won’t catch me again in the Fauconnier drawing room.” Nevertheless, he replied to Armande’s questions, he talked to her about his “practice” and the “inevitable difficulties” of this postwar period.
Nor did he fail to remark: “But you know better than anyone what these various difficulties are. Look at you, loaded with responsibilities, and all alone in the world!”
Armande’s immobility was shattered by an unexpected movement; she unclasped her fingers and clutched the arms of her chair with both hands as if she were afraid of slipping off it.
“Oh, I’m used to it. You know my mother brought me up in a rather special way. At my age, one’s no longer a child.”
The sentence, begun with assurance, broke off on a childish note that belied the last words. She mastered herself and said, in a different voice: “Won’t you have a glass of port? Or would you prefer orangeade?”
Maxime saw there was a loaded tray within easy reach of her hand and frowned.
“You’re expecting guests? Then I’ll be off!”
He had stood up; she remained seated and laid her hand on Maxime’s arm.
“I never invite anyone on washing day. I assure you I don’t. As you’d told me you were going away again tomorrow, I thought you might possibly . . .”
She broke off, with a little grimace that displeased Maxime. “Ah, no! She’s not to ruin that mouth for me! That outline of the lips, so clear-cut, so full; those corners of the mouth that are so . . . so . . . What’s the matter with her today? You’d think she’d just buried the devil for good and all!”
He realized he was staring at her with unpardonable severity and forced himself to be gay.
“So you’re heavily occupied in domestic chores? What a lovely laundress you make! And all those children at your clinic, do you manage to keep them in order?”
He was laughing only with his lips. He knew very well that, when he was with Armande, love made him gloomy, jealous, self-conscious, unable to break down an obstacle between the two of them that perhaps did not exist. Armande took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and commanded her whole face to be nothing but the calm regular countenance of a beautiful brunette. But three shadowy dimples, two at the corners of the mouth, one in the chin, appeared when she smiled and quivered at every hint of emotion.
“I’ve got twenty-eight children over at the clinic, did you know that?”
“Twenty-eight children? Don’t you think that’s a lot for a young unmarried girl?”
“I’m not frightened of children,” said Armande seriously.
“Children. She loves children. She’d be magnificent, pregnant. Tall as she is, she would broaden at the hips without looking squat, like short women who are carrying babies. She’d take up an enormous amount of space in the garden, in bed, in my arms. At last she’d have trusting eyes, the lovely, dark-ringed eyes of a pregnant woman. But for that to happen, Mademoiselle has got to tolerate someone coming close to her, and a little closer than offering her a ball at arm’s length on a tennis racket. She doesn’t look as if the idea had ever occurred to her, that girl doesn’t! In any case, I’m giving up all thought of it!”
He stood up, resolutely.
“This time, Armande, it’s serious.”
“What is?” she said, very low.
“Why, the fact that it’s five o’clock, that I’ve two or three urgent things to do, a big parcel of medical supplies to get ready. My little village is right out of everything in the way of serums and pills.”
“I know,” said Armande at once.
“You know?”
“Oh, I just accidentally heard them say so, at your brother-in-law’s.”
He had leaned toward her a little; she drew away with such a fierce movement that she knocked her elbow against a monumental lamp-stand.
“Have you hurt yourself?” said Maxime coldly.
“No,” she said, equally coldly. “Not in the least.”
She passed in front of him to open the front door, with its wrought-iron lacework. It resisted her efforts.
“The woodwork’s warped. I keep telling Charost to fix it.”
“Haven’t I always known it to stick like that? Don’t destroy my childhood memories!”
Pursing her lips tight, she shook the door with a stubborn violence that made its panes rattle. There was a loud crash of glass and metal behind her, and turning around, she saw Maxime staggering among the splintered cups and chromium hoops of the chandelier that had just fallen from the ceiling. Then his knees went limp and he fell over on his side. Prone on the floor, he made an attempt to raise his hand to his ear, could not finish the gesture, and lay perfectly still. Armande, with her back against the front door she had not had time to open, stared at the man lying at her feet on his bed of broken glass. She said in a strangled, incredulous voice: “No!” The sight of a trickle of blood running down behind Maxime’s left ear and stopping for a moment on the collar of the blue shirt, which it soaked, restored Armande’s power of speech and movement. She squatted down, straightened up swiftly, opened the door that was half obstructed by the injured body, and screamed shrill summonses out into the garden.
“Maria! Léonie! Maria! Maria!”
The screams reached Maxime in the place where he reposed, unconscious. Along with the screams, he began to hear the buzzing of hives of bees and the clanging of hammers, and he half opened his eyes. But unconsciousness promptly swallowed him up again and he fell back among the swarms of bees and the hammering to some place where pain, in its turn, tracked him down. “The top of my head hurts. It hurts behind my ear and on my shoulder.”
Once again, the loud screams disturbed him. “Léonie! Maria!” He came to, very unwillingly, opened his eyes, and received a sunbeam full in his face. The sunbeam appeared to be red; then it was cut off by a double moving shadow. All at once, he realized that Armande’s two legs were passing to and fro across the light; he recognized Armand
e’s feet, the white linen shoes trimmed with black leather. The feet were moving about in all directions on the carpet quite close to his head, sometimes open in a V and staggering, sometimes close together, and crushing bits of broken glass. He felt an urge to untie one of the white shoelaces for a joke, but at that very moment, he was shot through with agonizing pain, and without knowing it, he moaned.
“My darling, my darling,” said a shaking voice.
“Her darling? What darling?” he asked himself. He raised his cheek, which was lying heavily on fragments of pale blue glass and the butt ends of electric light bulbs. The blood spread out in a pool and his cheek was sticky with it. At the pathetic sight of the precious red spilled all about him, he woke up completely and understood all. He took advantage of the fact that the two feet had turned their heels to him and were running toward the terrace to feel his aching head and bruised shoulder and to discover that the source of the blood was behind his ear. “Good, a big cut. Nothing broken. I might have had my ear sliced off. It’s a good thing to have hair like mine. Lord, how my head does ache!”
“Maria! Léonie!”
The black-and-white shoes returned; two knees sheathed in silk went down on the splintered glass. “She’ll cut herself!” He made a slight movement to raise himself, then decided instead to lie low and keep quiet, only turning his head over so as to show Armande where his wound was.
“Oh heavens, he’s bleeding,” said Armande’s voice. “Maria! Léonie!”
There was no reply.
“Oh, the bitches,” the same voice said violently.
Sheer astonishment made Maxime give a start.
“Speak to me, Maxime! Maxime, can you hear me? My darling, my darling . . .”
Sabots were heard running in the garden, then climbing the steps.
“Ah, there you are, Charost! Yes, the chandelier fell down. A person could die in this place without anyone’s hearing! Where are those two wretched girls?”
“In the paddock, Mademoiselle, spreading out the sheets. Ah, the poor unfortunate young man! He had a hundred years of life ahead of him!”
“I’m quite sure he still has! Run around to Dr. Pommier, tell him . . . If he’s not in, Dr. Tuloup. If he’s not in, the chemist, yes, the ginger-haired one, Madame Jeanne’s husband. Charost, go and get the towels from my bathroom, the little hand towel from the cloakroom, you can see I can’t leave him. And the brown box in the cupboard! Hurry up, will you! Get someone to tell those two idiots to leave their washing, don’t go yourself, send someone!”
The sabots clattered away.
“My darling, my darling,” said the low, sweet voice.
“It really was me, the darling,” Maxime told himself. Two hot hands feverishly massaged one of his, interrogating it. “There, there, my pulse is excellent! Don’t get in a state! How beautiful she must be at this moment . . .” He groaned on purpose and slid the thread of a glance at Armande between his eyelids. She was ugly, with huge, terrified eyes and her mouth gaping stupidly. He closed his lids again, enraptured.
The hands pressed a wet towel over his wound, pushed away the hair. “That’s not right, my pet, that’s not right. Isn’t there any iodine in the place, then? She’ll make me bleed unnecessarily, but what the hell does that matter as long as she keeps busy on me?” The ferruginous smell of iodine rose in his nostrils, he was aware of the wholesome burning pain, and relaxed, content. “Well done! But when it comes to putting on an efficient bandage, my girl, I’m streets ahead of you. That one won’t ever hold. You ought to have shaved off a bit of my hair.” He heard the girl clucking her tongue against her teeth, “tst tst”; then she became despairing.
“Oh, I’m too stupid! A bloody fool, in fact!”
He very nearly laughed but turned it into a vague, pitiful mumbling.
“Maxime, Maxime!” she implored.
She untied his tie, opened his shirt, and, trying to find his heart, brushed the masculine nipple that swelled with pride. For a moment, the two of them were equally and completely motionless. As the hand withdrew, after receiving its reassuring answer from the heart, it slowly went over the same ground on its way back. “Oh, to take that hand that’s stroking me in this startled way, to get up, to hug that grand, beautiful girl I love, to turn her into a wounded, moaning creature, and then to comfort her, to nurse her in my arms. It’s so long I’ve waited for that. But suppose she defends herself?” He decided to go on with his ruse, stirred feebly, opened his arms, and fell back into pretended unconsciousness.
“Ah!” cried Armande, “he’s fainted! Why don’t those imbeciles come!”
She leaped to her feet and ran off to fetch a fiber cushion, which she tried to insert between Maxime’s head and the splinters of glass. In doing so, the makeshift bandage came off. Maxime could hear Armande stamping her feet, walking away, and slapping her thighs with a forceful plebeian despair. She returned to him, sat down right in the litter of broken glass and the pool of bloodstained water, and half lay down against the wounded man. With exquisite pleasure he could feel she had lost her head and was crying. He squeezed his eyelids together so as not to look at her. But he could not shut out the smell of black hair and hot skin, the sandalwood smell that healthy brunettes exude. She raised one of his eyelids with her finger and he rolled up his eyeball as if in ecstasy or a swoon. With her sleeve, she wiped his forehead and his mouth; furtively, she opened his lips and bent over him to look at the white teeth with the gap between the front ones. “Another minute of this sort of thing and . . . and I shall devour her!” She bent a little lower, put her mouth against Maxime’s, then drew back at once, frightened at the sound of hurried footsteps and breathless voices. But her whole body remained close to him, tamed and alert, and there was still time for her to whisper the hackneyed words girls new to love stammer out before the man has taught them others or they invent more beautiful, more secret ones: “Darling . . . My beloved boy. My very own Maxime.”
When the rescue party arrived, she was still sitting on the ground in her soaked skirt and her tom stockings. Maxime was able to wake up, to complete his deception by a few, incoherent words, to smile in a bewildered way at Armande, and to protest at all the fuss going on around him. The Grand Central Pharmacy had provided its stretcher and its pharmacist, who constructed a turban of bandages on Maxime’s head. Then the stretcher and its escort set forth like a procession incensed by a choir of voices.
“Open the other half of the door. Watch out, it won’t go through. I tell you it will go through if you bear a bit to the right. There . . . just a bare millimeter to spare. You’ve got eight steps to go down.”
At the top of the terrace, Armande remained alone, useless, and as if forgotten. But at the bottom of the steps, Maxime summoned her with a gesture and a look: “Come . . . I know you now. I’ve got you. Come, we’ll finish that timid little kiss you began. Stay with me. Acknowledge me . . .” She walked down the steps and gave him her hand. Then she adapted her step to that of the stretcher-bearers and walked meekly beside him, all stained and disheveled, as if she had come straight from the hands of love.
[Translated by Antonia White]
The Rendezvous
A grasshopper jumped out of the beans and flew past with a metallic whir, interposing its fine canvas wings, its long dry thighs, and its horse’s head between the orange pickers and the sun. It terrified Rose by brushing against her hair.
“Ee,” Rose screamed.
“What’s the matter? Oh, goodness!” said Odette, drawing back. “What on earth’s that creature? Must be a scorpion, at least. Why, it’s as big as a swallow. Bernard! I’m asking you what this monster is!”
But Bernard was looking at two frightened blue eyes, at hair that was too curly to be strictly fashionable, at a small hand outstretched to ward off the danger.
He shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he had no idea. The two girls, one dark, the other fair, were recklessly squandering the ripe, juicy fruit whose rind split easily under th
eir nails. They tore them open savagely, sucked the best and easiest ones dry in two mouthfuls, and flung away the reddish skin of the Moroccan oranges whose sharp flavor does not cloy.
“I hope Cyril will be jealous,” said Odette. “What on earth can he be doing at this hour? Asleep, of course. He’s a dormouse. I’ve married a dormouse!”
Bernard stopped munching the green beans.
“Do you know what a dormouse looks like?”
“No,” said Odette, always ready to give battle. “But I know that eating raw beans makes your breath smell horrid.”
He spat out his bean so hastily that Odette burst into her malicious, insinuating laugh. That laugh made Rose blush.
“If I called out to Cyril from here, d’you think he’d hear?”
“Not a hope,” said Bernard. “The hotel is . . . yes, about five hundred yards away.”
Nevertheless Odette, who was never convinced by anyone’s opinion, put her hands up to her mouth like a megaphone and shrieked: “Cyril! Cy-ri-i-il!”
She had a piercing shrill voice which must have carried far out to sea and Bernard winced with exasperation.
Being tyro travelers, they had let the best hours of the morning go by and the eleven o’clock sun was scorching their shoulders. But the April wind, before it reached the young barley, the orange grove, the well-kept kitchen gardens, the neglected park, and Tangiers itself, close by but invisible, had blown across a cool waste of salt water, pale and milky as a Breton sea.
“I believe,” declared Odette, “Cyril’s having a quiet cocktail on the hotel terrace.”
“You forget there aren’t any cocktails yet at the Mirador. The stuff’s on the way.”