In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (36 page)

In spite of the fact that Bloch’s family had never suspected the reason why their uncle never lunched at home, and had accepted it from the first as the idiosyncrasy of an elderly bachelor, attributable perhaps to the demands of a liaison with some actress, everything that concerned M. Nissim Bernard was taboo to the manager of the Balbec hotel. And it was for this reason that, without even referring to the uncle, he had finally not ventured to find fault with the niece, albeit recommending her to be a little more circumspect. Mlle Bloch and her friend, who for some days had imagined themselves to have been excluded from the Casino and the Grand Hotel, seeing that all was well, were delighted to show those respectable family men who held aloof from them that they might with impunity take the utmost liberties. No doubt they did not go so far as to repeat the public exhibition which had revolted everybody. But gradually they returned to their old ways. And one evening as I came out of the Casino, which was half in darkness, with Albertine and Bloch whom we had met there, they came by, linked together, kissing each other incessantly, and, as they passed us, crowed and chortled and uttered indecent cries. Bloch lowered his eyes so as to seem not to have recognised his sister, and I was tortured by the thought that this private and horrifying language was addressed perhaps to Albertine.

Another incident focused my preoccupations even more in the direction of Gomorrah. I had noticed on the beach a handsome young woman, slender and pale, whose eyes, round their centre, scattered rays so geometrically luminous that one was reminded, on meeting her gaze, of some constellation. I thought how much more beautiful she was than Albertine, and how much wiser it would be to give up the other. But the face of this beautiful young woman had been scoured by the invisible plane of a thoroughly depraved life, of the constant acceptance of vulgar expedients, so much so that her eyes, though nobler than the rest of her face, could radiate nothing but appetites and desires. On the following day, this young woman being seated a long way away from us in the Casino, I saw that she never ceased to fasten upon Albertine the alternating and revolving beam of her gaze. It was as though she were making signals to her with a lamp. It pained me that Albertine should see that she was being so closely observed, and I was afraid that these incessantly rekindled glances might be the agreed signal for an amorous assignation next day. For all I knew, this assignation might not be the first. The young woman with the flashing eyes might have come another year to Balbec. It was perhaps because Albertine had already yielded to her desires, or to those of a friend, that this woman allowed herself to address to her those flashing signals. If so, they were doing more than demand something for the present; they invoked a justification for it in pleasant hours in the past.

This assignation, in that case, must be not the first, but the sequel to adventures shared in past years. And indeed her glance did not say: “Will you?” As soon as the young woman had caught sight of Albertine, she had turned her head and beamed upon her glances charged with recollection, as though she were afraid and amazed that my beloved did not remember. Albertine, who could see her plainly, remained phlegmatically motionless, with the result that the other, with the same sort of discretion as a man who sees his old mistress with a new lover, ceased to look at her and paid no more attention to her than if she had not existed.

But a day or two later, I received proof of this young woman’s tendencies, and also of the probability of her having known Albertine in the past. Often, in the hall of the Casino, when two girls were smitten with mutual desire, a sort of luminous phenomenon occurred, as it were a phosphorescent trail flashing from one to the other. It may be noted, incidentally, that it is by the aid of such materialisations, impalpable though they be, by these astral signs that set a whole section of the atmosphere ablaze, that Gomorrah, dispersed, tends in every town, in every village, to reunite its separated members, to rebuild the biblical city while everywhere the same efforts are being made, if only in view of an intermittent reconstruction, by the nostalgic, the hypocritical, sometimes the courageous exiles of Sodom.

Once I saw the unknown woman whom Albertine had appeared not to recognise, just at the moment when Bloch’s cousin was passing by. The young woman’s eyes flashed, but it was quite evident that she did not know the Jewish girl. She beheld her for the first time, felt a desire, scarcely any doubt, but by no means the same certainty as in the case of Albertine, Albertine upon whose friendship she must so far have counted that, in the face of her coldness, she had felt the surprise of a foreigner familiar with Paris but not a resident, who, having returned to spend a few weeks there, finds the site of the little theatre where he was in the habit of spending pleasant evenings occupied now by a bank.

Bloch’s cousin went and sat down at a table where she turned the pages of a magazine. Presently the young woman came and sat down beside her with an abstracted air. But under the table one could presently see their feet wriggling, then their legs and hands intertwined. Words followed, a conversation began, and the young woman’s guileless husband, who had been looking everywhere for her, was astonished to find her making plans for that very evening with a girl whom he did not know. His wife introduced Bloch’s cousin to him as a childhood friend, under an inaudible name, for she had forgotten to ask her what her name was. But the husband’s presence made their intimacy advance a stage further, for they addressed each other as
tu
, having known each other at their convent, an incident at which they laughed heartily later on, as well as at the hoodwinked husband, with a gaiety which afforded them an excuse for further caresses.

As for Albertine, I cannot say that anywhere, whether at the Casino or on the beach, her behaviour with any girl was unduly free. I found in it indeed an excess of coldness and indifference which seemed to be more than good breeding, to be a ruse planned to avert suspicion. When questioned by some girl, she had a quick, icy, prim way of replying in a very loud voice: “Yes, I shall be at the tennis-court about five. I shall go for a bathe tomorrow morning about eight,” and of at once turning away from the person to whom she had said this—all of which had a horrible appearance of being meant to put one off the scent, and either to make an assignation, or rather, the assignation having already been made in a whisper, to utter these perfectly harmless words aloud so as not to attract undue attention. And when later on I saw her mount her bicycle and scorch away into the distance, I could not help thinking that she was on her way to join the girl to whom she had barely spoken.

However, when some handsome young woman stepped out of a motor-car at the end of the beach, Albertine could not help turning round. And she would at once explain: “I was looking at the new flag they’ve put up over the bathing place. They might have spent a bit more on it! The old one was pretty moth-eaten, but I really think this one is mouldier still.”

On one occasion Albertine was not content with cold indifference, and this made me all the more wretched. She knew that I was concerned about the possibility of her meeting a friend of her aunt, who had a “bad name” and came now and again to spend a few days with Mme Bontemps. Albertine had pleased me by telling me that she would not speak to her again. And when this woman came to Incarville Albertine would say: “By the way, you know she’s here. Have they told you?” as though to show me that she was not seeing her in secret. One day, when she told me this, she added: “Yes, I ran into her on the beach, and knocked against her as I passed, on purpose, to be rude to her.” When Albertine told me this, there came back to my mind a remark made by Mme Bontemps, to which I had never given a second thought, when she had said to Mme Swann in my presence how brazen her niece Albertine was, as though that were a merit, and how Albertine reminded the wife of some official or other that her father had been a kitchen-boy. But a thing said by the woman we love does not long retain its purity; it cankers, it putrefies. An evening or two later, I thought again of Albertine’s remark, and it was no longer the ill-breeding of which she boasted—and which could only make me smile—that it seemed to me to signify; it was something else, to wit that Albertine, perhaps even without any precise object, to tease this woman’s senses, or wantonly to remind her of former propositions, accepted perhaps in the past, had swiftly brushed against her, had thought that I had perhaps heard of this as it had been done in public, and had wished to forestall an unfavourable interpretation.

However, the jealousy that was caused me by the women whom Albertine perhaps loved was abruptly to cease.

Albertine and I were waiting at the Balbec station of the little local railway. We had driven there in the hotel omnibus, because it was raining. Not far away from us was M. Nissim Bernard, who had a black eye. He had recently forsaken the chorister from
Athalie
for the waiter at a much frequented farmhouse in the neighbourhood, known as the “Cherry Orchard.” This rubicund youth, with his blunt features, appeared for all the world to have a tomato instead of a head. A tomato exactly similar served as head to his twin brother. To the detached observer, the charm of these perfect resemblances between twins is that nature, as if momentarily industrialised, seems to be turning out identical products. Unfortunately M. Nissim Bernard looked at it from another point of view, and this resemblance was only external. Tomato No. 2 showed a frenzied zeal in catering exclusively to the pleasures of ladies; Tomato No. I was not averse to complying with the tastes of certain gentlemen. Now on every occasion when, stirred, as though by a reflex, by the memory of pleasant hours spent with Tomato No. I, M. Bernard presented himself at the Cherry Orchard, being short-sighted (not that one had to be short-sighted to mistake them), the old Jewish gentleman, unwittingly playing Amphitryon, would accost the twin brother with: “Will you meet me somewhere this evening?” He at once received a thorough “hiding.” It might even be repeated in the course of a single meal, when he continued with the second brother a conversation he had begun with the first. In the end this treatment, by association of ideas, so put him off tomatoes, even of the edible variety, that whenever he heard a newcomer order that vegetable at a neighbouring table in the Grand Hotel, he would murmur to him: “You must excuse me, Monsieur, for addressing you without an introduction. But I heard you order tomatoes. They are bad today. I tell you in your own interest, for it makes no difference to me, I never touch them myself.” The stranger would thank this philanthropic and disinterested neighbour effusively, call back the waiter, and pretend to have changed his mind: “No, on second thoughts, definitely no tomatoes.” Aimé, who had seen it all before, would laugh to himself, and think: “He’s an old rascal, that Monsieur Bernard, he’s gone and made another of them change his order.” M. Bernard, as he waited for the already overdue train, showed no eagerness to speak to Albertine and myself, because of his black eye. We were even less eager to speak to him. It would however have been almost inevitable if, at that moment, a bicycle had not come swooping towards us; the lift-boy sprang from its saddle, out of breath. Mme Verdurin had telephoned shortly after we left the hotel, to know whether I would dine with her two days later; we shall presently see why. Then, having given me the message in detail, the lift-boy left us, explaining, as one of those democratic “employees” who affect independence with regard to the gentry and restore the principle of authority among themselves, “I must be off, because of my chiefs.”

Albertine’s friends had gone away for some time. I was anxious to provide her with distractions. Even supposing that she might have found some happiness in spending the afternoons with no company but my own, at Balbec, I knew that such happiness is never complete and that Albertine, being still at the age (which some people never outgrow) when one has not yet discovered that this imperfection resides in the person who experiences the happiness and not in the person who gives it, might have been tempted to trace the cause of her disappointment back to me. I preferred that she should impute it to circumstances which, arranged by myself, would not give us an opportunity of being alone together, while at the same time preventing her from remaining in the Casino and on the beach without me. And so I had asked her that day to come with me to Doncières, where I was going to meet Saint-Loup. With the same object of keeping her occupied, I advised her to take up painting, in which she had had lessons in the past. While working she would not ask herself whether she was happy or unhappy. I would gladly have taken her also to dine now and again with the Verdurins and the Cambremers, who certainly would have been delighted to see any friend introduced by myself, but I must first make certain that Mme Putbus was not yet at La Raspelière. It was only by going there in person that I could make sure of this, and, as I knew beforehand that on the next day but one Albertine would be going on a visit with her aunt, I had seized this opportunity to send Mme Verdurin a telegram asking her whether I could visit her on Wednesday. If Mme Putbus was there, I would contrive to see her maid, ascertain whether there was any danger of her coming to Balbec, and if so find out when, so as to take Albertine out of reach on that day. The little local railway, making a loop which did not exist at the time when I had taken it with my grandmother, now extended to Doncières-la-Goupil, a big station at which important trains stopped, among them the express by which I had come down to visit Saint-Loup from Paris and thence returned. And, because of the bad weather, the omnibus from the Grand Hotel took Albertine and myself to the station of Balbec-Plage.

The little train had not yet arrived, but one could see the lazy, sluggish plume of smoke which it had left in its wake and which now, reduced to its own power of locomotion as a not very mobile cloud, was slowly mounting the green slope of the cliff of Criquetot. Finally the little train, which it had preceded by taking a vertical course, arrived in its turn, at a leisurely crawl. The passengers who were waiting to board it stepped back to make way for it, but without hurrying, knowing that they were dealing with a good-natured, almost human stroller, who, guided like the bicycle of a beginner by the obliging signals of the station-master, under the capable supervision of the engine-driver, was in no danger of running over anybody, and would come to a halt at the proper place.