In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (67 page)

A young man with regular features, carrying a bag of golf-clubs, sauntered up to us. It was the baccarat-player whose fast ways so enraged the senior judge’s wife. In a frigid, impassive tone, which he evidently regarded as an indication of the highest distinction, he bade Albertine good day. “Been playing golf, Octave?” she asked. “How did it go? Were you in form?” “Oh, it’s too sickening; I’m a wash-out,” he replied. “Was Andrée playing?” “Yes, she went round in seventy-seven.” “Why, that’s a record!” “I went round in eighty-two yesterday.” He was the son of an immensely rich manufacturer who was to take an important part in the organisation of the coming World’s Fair. I was struck by the extreme degree to which, in this young man and the other very rare male friends of the band of girls, the knowledge of everything that pertained to clothes and how to wear them, cigars, English drinks, horses—a knowledge which he displayed down to its minutest details with a haughty infallibility that approached the reticent modesty of the true expert—had been developed in complete isolation, unaccompanied by the least trace of any intellectual culture. He had no hesitation as to the right time and place for dinner-jacket or pyjamas, but had no notion of the circumstances in which one might or might not employ this or that word, or even of the simplest rules of grammar. This disparity between the two forms of culture must have existed also in his father, the President of the Householders’ Association of Balbec, for, in an open letter to the electors which he had recently had posted on all the walls, he announced: “I desired to see the Mayor, to chat to him about it, but he would not listen to my just grievances.” Octave, at the Casino, took prizes in all the dancing competitions, for the boston, the tango, and what-not, an accomplishment that would enable him, if he chose, to make a fine marriage in that seaside society where it is not figuratively but literally that the girls are “wedded” to their “dancing partners.” He lit a cigar with a “D’you mind?” to Albertine, as one who asks permission to finish an urgent piece of work while going on talking. For he was one of those people who can never be “doing nothing,” although there was nothing, in fact, that he could ever be said to do. And since complete inactivity in the end has the same effect as prolonged overwork, in the mental sphere as much as in the life of the body and the muscles, the steadfast intellectual nullity that reigned behind Octave’s meditative brow had ended by giving him, despite his air of unruffled calm, an ineffectual itch to think which kept him awake at night, for all the world like an overwrought philosopher.

Thinking that if I knew their male friends I should have more opportunities of seeing the girls, I had been on the point of asking for an introduction to Octave. I told Albertine this, as soon as he had left us, still muttering “I’m a wash-out,” thinking to put into her head the idea of doing it next time.

“Come, come,” she exclaimed, “I can’t introduce you to a gigolo! This place simply swarms with them. But what on earth would they have to say to you? This one plays golf quite well, and that’s all there is to him. I know what I’m talking about; you’d find he wasn’t at all your sort.”

“Your friends will be cross with you if you desert them like this,” I repeated, hoping that she would then suggest my joining the party.

“Oh, no, they don’t need me.”

We passed Bloch, who directed at me a subtle, insinuating smile, and, embarrassed by the presence of Albertine, whom he did not know, or, rather, knew “without knowing” her, lowered his head towards his neck in a stiff, ungainly motion. “Who’s that weird customer?” Albertine asked. “I can’t think why he should bow to me since he doesn’t know me. So I didn’t respond.”

I had no time to explain to her, for, bearing straight down upon us, “Excuse me,” he began, “for interrupting you, but I must tell you that I’m going to Doncières tomorrow. I cannot put it off any longer without discourtesy; indeed, I wonder what de Saint-Loup-en-Bray must think of me. I just came to let you know that I shall take the two o’clock train. At your service.”

But I thought now only of seeing Albertine again, and of trying to get to know her friends, and Doncières, since they were not going there, and my going would bring me back too late to see them still on the beach, seemed to me to be situated at the other end of the world. I told Bloch that it was impossible.

“Oh, very well, I shall go alone. In the fatuous alexandrines of Master Arouet, I shall say to Saint-Loup, to beguile his clericalism:

My duty stands alone, by his in no way bound;
Though he should choose to fail, yet faithful I’ll be found.”

“I admit he’s not a bad-looking boy,” said Albertine, “but he makes me feel quite sick.”

I had never thought that Bloch might be “not a bad-looking boy”; and yet in fact he was. With his rather prominent forehead, his very aquiline nose, and his air of being extremely clever and of being convinced of his cleverness, he had a pleasing face. But he could not succeed in pleasing Albertine. This was perhaps to some extent due to the bad side of her, to the hardness, the insensitivity of the little band, its rudeness towards everything that was not itself. And later on, when I introduced them, Albertine’s antipathy for him did not diminish. Bloch belonged to a social group in which, between scoffing at high society and at the same time showing the due regard for polite manners which a man is supposed to show who “does not soil his hands,” a sort of special compromise has been reached which differs from the manners of the fashionable world but is none the less a peculiarly odious form of worldliness. When he was introduced to anyone he would bow with a sceptical smile, and at the same time with an exaggerated show of respect, and, if it was to a man, would say: “Pleased to meet you, sir,” in a voice which ridiculed the words that it was uttering, though with a consciousness of belonging to someone who was not a boor. Having sacrificed this first moment to a custom which he at once followed and derided (just as on the first of January he would say: “The compliments of the season to you!”), he would adopt an air of infinite cunning, and would “proffer subtle words” which were often true enough but “got on” Albertine’s nerves. When I told her on this first day that his name was Bloch, she exclaimed: “I would have betted anything he was a Yid. Typical of their creepy ways!” In fact, Bloch was destined to give Albertine other grounds for annoyance later on. Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way. He would find some precious qualifier for every statement, and would sweep from the particular to the general. It irritated Albertine, who was never too well pleased at other people’s paying attention to what she was doing, that when she had sprained her ankle and was lying low, Bloch said of her: “She is outstretched on her couch, but in her ubiquity has not ceased to frequent simultaneously vague golf-courses and dubious tennis-courts.” He was simply being “literary,” of course, but in view of the difficulties which Albertine felt that it might create for her with friends whose invitations she had declined on the plea that she was unable to move, it was quite enough to make her take a profound dislike to the face and the sound of the voice of the young man who said these things.

We parted, Albertine and I, after promising each other to go out together one day. I had talked to her without being any more conscious of where my words were falling, of what became of them, than if I were dropping pebbles into a bottomless pit. That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life. But if in addition we find ourselves in the company of a person whose education (as Albertine’s was to me) is inconceivable, her taste, her reading, her principles unknown to us, we cannot tell whether our words have aroused in her anything that resembles their meaning, any more than in an animal to which we had to make ourselves understood. So that trying to make friends with Albertine seemed to me like entering into contact with the unknown, if not the impossible, an occupation as arduous as breaking in a horse, as restful as keeping bees or growing roses.

I had thought, a few hours before, that Albertine would acknowledge my greeting only from a distance. We had now left one another after planning to make an excursion soon together. I vowed that when I next met Albertine I would treat her with greater boldness, and I had sketched out in advance a plan of all that I would say to her, and even (being now quite convinced that she was not strait-laced) of all the favours that I would demand of her. But the mind is subject to external influences, as plants are, and cells and chemical elements, and the medium which alters it if we immerse it therein is a change of circumstances, or new surroundings. Changed by the mere fact of her presence, when I found myself once again in Albertine’s company, I said to her quite different things from what I had planned. Then, remembering her flushed temple, I asked myself whether she might not appreciate more keenly a polite attention which she knew to be disinterested. Finally, I was embarrassed by some of her looks and her smiles. They might equally well signify a laxity of morals and the rather silly merriment of a high-spirited girl who was at heart thoroughly respectable. A single expression, of face or speech, being susceptible of sundry interpretations, I wavered like a schoolboy faced by the difficulties of a piece of Greek prose.

On this occasion we met almost immediately the tall one, Andrée, the one who had jumped over the old banker, and Albertine was obliged to introduce me. Her friend had extraordinarily bright eyes, like a glimpse, through an open door in a dark house, of a room into which the sun is shining with a greenish reflexion from the glittering sea.

A group of five men passed by whom I had come to know very well by sight during my stay at Balbec. I had often wondered who they were. “They’re nothing very wonderful,” said Albertine with a contemptuous snigger. “The little old one with dyed hair and yellow gloves—isn’t he a weird-looking specimen, quite an eyeful, what?—that’s the Balbec dentist. He’s a good sort. The fat one is the Mayor, not the tiny little fat one, you must have seen him before, he’s the dancing master, and he’s pretty awful too—he can’t stand us, because we make such a row at the Casino and smash his chairs and want to have the carpet up when we dance, which is why he never gives us prizes, though we’re the only ones who know how to dance. The dentist is a nice man—I would have said how d’ye do to him, just to make the dancing master mad, but I couldn’t because they’ve got M. de Sainte-Croix with them—he’s a county councillor, and he comes of a very good family, but he’s joined the Republicans, for money, so no decent people ever speak to him now. He knows my uncle, because they’re both in the Government, but the rest of my family always cut him. The thin one in the waterproof is the conductor of the orchestra. What, you don’t know him! Oh, he plays divinely. You haven’t been to
Cavalleria Rusticana
? Ah, I think it’s marvellous! He’s giving a concert this evening, but we can’t go because it’s to be in the town hall. In the Casino it wouldn’t matter, but in the town hall, where they’ve taken down the crucifix, Andrée’s mother would have a fit if we went there. You’re going to say that my aunt’s husband is in the Government. But what difference does that make? My aunt is my aunt, but that’s no reason why I should like her. The only thing she’s ever wanted to do is get rid of me. No, the person who has really been a mother to me, and all the more credit to her because she’s no relation at all, is a friend of mine whom I love just as much as if she was my mother. I’ll show you her photo.”

We were joined for a moment by the golf champion and baccarat player, Octave. I thought I had discovered a bond between us, for I learned in the course of our conversation that he was some sort of relative of the Verdurins, who were quite fond of him. But he spoke contemptuously of the famous Wednesdays, adding that M. Verdurin had never even heard of dress-clothes, which made it a horrid bore when one ran into him in certain “music-halls” where one would very much rather not be greeted with “Well, you young rascal” by an old fellow in a jacket and black tie, like a village notary.

Octave left us, and soon it was Andrée’s turn, when we came to her villa, into which she vanished without having uttered a single word to me during the whole of our walk. I regretted her departure all the more because, while I was complaining to Albertine how cold her friend had been towards me, and was comparing in my mind this difficulty which Albertine seemed to find in bringing me into contact with her friends with the hostility that Elstir, in attempting to fulfil my wish, seemed to have encountered on that first afternoon, two girls came by to whom I lifted my hat, the misses d’Ambresac, whom Albertine greeted also.

I felt that my position in relation to Albertine would be improved by this meeting. They were the daughters of a kinswoman of Mme de Villeparisis, who was also a friend of Mme de Luxembourg. M. and Mme d’Ambresac, who had a small villa at Balbec and were immensely rich, led the simplest of lives, and always went about in the same clothes, he in the same jacket, she in a dark dress. Both of them used to make sweeping bows to my grandmother, which never led to anything further. The daughters, who were very pretty, were dressed more elegantly, but it was an elegance more suited to Paris than to the seaside. With their long skirts and large hats, they seemed to belong to a different race from Albertine. She, I discovered, knew all about them.

“Oh, so you know the little d’Ambresacs, do you? Well, well, you do have some grand friends. But they’re very simple really,” she went on as though the two things were mutually exclusive. “They’re very nice, but so well brought up that they aren’t allowed near the Casino, mainly because of us, because we’re too badly behaved. You find them attractive, do you? Well, it all depends on what you like. They’re real goody-goodies. Perhaps there’s a certain charm in that. If you like goody-goodies, they’re all that you could wish for. There must be some attraction, because one of them has got engaged already to the Marquis de Saint-Loup. Which was a cruel blow to the younger one, who was madly in love with that young man. As far as I’m concerned, the way they purse their lips when they talk is enough to madden me. And then they dress in the most absurd way. Fancy going to play golf in silk frocks! At their age, they dress more pretentiously than grown-up women who really know about clothes. Look at Mme Elstir. There’s a well-dressed woman if you like.” I answered that she had struck me as being dressed with the utmost simplicity. Albertine laughed.