Marie Claire Part 8

As soon as she had gone I dragged Sister Marie-Aimee off to the old bench. She stopped a moment, and before sitting down she said, "It is as though things were waiting for us." She sat down. She leaned against the linden tree, and I kneeled down in the gra.s.s at her feet.

There were no more rays in her eyes. It was as though the colours in them had all been mixed up together. Her dear little face had grown smaller, and seemed to have gone further back into her cap. Her stomacher had not the beautiful curve on her chest that it used to have, and her hands were so thin that the blue veins in them showed up quite clearly. She hardly glanced at the window of her room, but looked out on the linden trees and round the courtyard, and as she caught sight of the Mother Superior's house, these words fell from her like a sigh, "We must forgive others if we wish to be forgiven." Then she looked at me again, and said, "Your eyes are sad." She pa.s.sed the palms of her hands over my eyes, as if she wanted to wipe out something which displeased her, and, keeping them there so that my eyes remained shut, "How we suffer,"' she said. Then she took her hands away and clasped mine, and, with her eyes on my face, she said, as though she were praying, "My sweet daughter, listen to me. Never become a poor religious." She heaved a long sigh of regret, and said, "Our dress of black and white tells others that we are creatures of strength and of brightness. At our bidding all tears are dried, and all who suffer come to us for consolation, but n.o.body thinks of our own suffering. We are like women without faces." Then she spoke of the future. She said, "I am going where the missionaries go. I shall live there in a house full of terror. Before my eyes will pa.s.s unceasingly everything that is hideous, everything that is ugly, everything that is bad." I listened to her deep voice. There was a note of pa.s.sion in it. It was as though she were taking on to her own shoulders all the suffering of the world. Her fingers loosed mine. She pa.s.sed them over my cheeks, and in a gentle voice, and sweet, she said, "The purity of your face will always remain graven on my mind." Then she looked out, away and past me, and added, "G.o.d has given us remembrance, and it is not in anybody's power to take that away from us." She got up from the bench.

I went with her across the yard, and when Ox Eye had closed the heavy gate behind her, I stood and listened to the echo of its closing.

That evening Sister Desiree-des-Anges came into the room later than usual. She had been taking part in special prayer for Sister Marie-Aimee, who was going away to nurse the lepers.

Winter came again. Sister Desiree-des-Anges had soon guessed my love of reading, and she brought me all the books in the sisters' library, one after the other. Most of the books were childish books, and I read quickly, turning over several pages at a time. I preferred stories of travel, and I used to read at night by the night-light. Sister Desiree-des-Anges used to scold me when she woke up; but as soon as she went to sleep I took up the book again. Little by little we became great friends. The white curtain was no longer drawn between our beds at night time. All sense of constraint had disappeared between us, and all our thoughts were in common. She was cheerful and bright always.

The one thing that annoyed her in her life was her nun's costume. She found it heavy and uncomfortable, and she used to say that it hurt her.

"When I dress," she said, "I always feel as though I were putting myself into a house where it is always night." She was always glad to get out of her dress in the evening, and loved walking about the room in her night-dress. She used to say, making that funny little face, "I am beginning to get used to it, but at first that cap crushed my cheeks and the dress weighed my shoulders down."

When the spring came she began to cough. She had a little dry cough which used to make itself heard from time to time, and her long slim body seemed to become more fragile than ever. She was as bright and cheerful as before, but she complained that her dress became heavier and heavier.

One night in May she tossed about and dreamed aloud. I had been reading all night, and noticed all of a sudden that daylight was coming. I blew out the night-light and tried to sleep a little. I was just dropping off when Sister Desiree-des-Anges said, "Open the window, he is coming to-day." I looked to see whether she was asleep, and saw that she was sitting up in bed. She had drawn back her blanket, and was untying the strings of her night-cap. She took it off and threw it to the foot of the bed. Then she shook her head, her short hair rolled into curls on her forehead, and I recognized Desiree Joly at once. I was a little bit frightened, and got up. She said again, "Open the window and let him in." I opened the window wide, and when I turned round Sister Desiree-des-Anges was holding out her clasped hands towards the sun, and in a voice which had suddenly grown weaker, she said, "I have taken off my dress. I could not stand it any longer."

She lay down quietly, and her face became quite still. I held my breath for a long time to listen to hers. Then I breathed hard, as though I could give her my breath, but when I looked at her more closely I saw that she had breathed her last. Her eyes were wide open, and seemed to be looking at a sunbeam which was coming towards her like a long arrow. Swallows flew past the window and flew back again, chirruping like little girls, and my ears were filled with sounds which I had never heard before. I looked up to the windows of the dormitories, hoping that somebody would hear what I had to say, but I saw nothing but the face of the big clock which seemed to be looking down into the room over the linden trees.

It was five o'clock. I pulled the blanket up over Sister Desiree-des-Anges and went out and rang the bell. I rang for a long time. The notes went far, far away. They went right away to where Sister Desiree-des-Anges had gone. I went on ringing because it seemed to me that the bells were telling the world that Sister Desiree-des-Anges was dead. I went on ringing too, because I hoped that she would pop her beautiful face out of the window and say, "That'll do, that'll do, Marie Claire."

Melanie pulled the rope out of my hands. The bell, which was up, fell back all wrong, and gave a sort of groan. "You have been ringing for a quarter of an hour or more," Melanie said. I answered, "Sister Desiree-des-Anges is dead." Veronique went into the room after us.

She noticed that the white curtain was not drawn between the two beds, and said that she thought it was disgraceful for a religious to let her hair be seen. Melanie pa.s.sed her finger over a tear which was rolling down each of her cheeks. Her head was more on one side than ever, and she whispered quite low, "She is even prettier than she was before."

The sunshine bathed the bed, and covered the dead woman from head to foot.

I remained with her all day. Some of the sisters came to see her. One of them covered her face with a napkin, but as soon as she had gone, I uncovered it again. Melanie came and spent the night by the bedside with me. When she had closed the window she lit the big lamp, "so that Sister Desiree-des-Anges should not be in the dark," she said.

A week afterwards Ox Eye came to the kitchen. She told me to get ready to go the same day. In the hollow of her hand she held two gold pieces, which she put side by side on the corner of the oven, and, touching one after the other with her finger, she said, "Our Mother Superior sends you forty francs." I did not want to go away without saying good-bye to Colette and to Ismerie, whom I had often seen at the other side of the lawn; but Melanie a.s.sured me that they didn't care for me any more. Colette could not understand why I was not married yet, and Ismerie could not forgive me for being so fond of Sister Marie-Aimee.

Melanie went to the gate with me. As we pa.s.sed the old bench, I saw that one of its legs was broken, and that one end of it had fallen into the gra.s.s. At the gate I found a woman waiting. Her eyes were hard.

She said, "I am your sister." I didn't recognize her. It was twelve years since I had seen her. Directly we got outside she caught hold of my arm, and in a voice as hard as her eyes, she asked me how much money I had. I showed her the two gold pieces which I had just received.

Then she said, "You will do better to remain in the town, where you will find it easier to get something to do." As we walked on she told me she was married to a gardener in the neighbourhood, and that she didn't intend to give herself any particular trouble over me. We got to the railway station. She took me on to the platform because she wanted me to help her carry some parcels. She said "good-bye" when her train went off, and I remained there and watched it go. Almost immediately another train stopped. The railway men ran up and down the platform calling to the pa.s.sengers for Paris to cross over. In that one moment I saw Paris with its great houses like palaces, with roofs so high that they were lost in the clouds. A young man b.u.mped into me.

He stopped and said, "Are you going to Paris, mademoiselle?" I scarcely hesitated, and said, "Yes; but I have no ticket." He held out his hand. "Give me the money," he said, "and I will go and get it for you." I gave him one of my two gold coins, and he ran off. I put the ticket and the change in copper which he had brought me into my pocket, went across the line with him, and climbed into the train.

The young man stood at the carriage door for a minute, and went off, turning back once as he went. His eyes were full of gentleness, like those of Henri Deslois.

The train whistled once, as though to warn me, and as it moved off it whistled a second time, a long whistle like a scream.

THE END

AFTERWORD

And now may I tell you what I know about Marguerite Audoux, the author of the book you have just read? I know very little more of her than you do, for you have read the book, and Marguerite Audoux is Marie Claire. If Marie Claire in English does not please you, the fault is mine. I have tried hard to translate into English the uneducated, unspoilt purity of language, the purity of thought which are the characteristics of the French; but the task was no easy one, much as I loved it in the doing.

Marguerite Audoux herself is a plump and placid little woman, of about thirty-five. She lives in a sixth-floor garret in the Rue Leopold Robert, in Paris. From her window she has a view of roof-tops and the Montparna.s.se cemetery. When she learned of the success of her book, with which she had lived for six years, she cried. "I felt dreadfully frightened at first," she said, "I felt very uneasy. I felt as though I had become known too quickly, as though I were a criminal of note.

Now my one wish is to work again." She reads a good deal. Her favourite authors are Chateaubriand and Maeterlinck. In Maeterlinck she loves the mystery. "We never know people properly," she says.

"They are just as difficult to understand as things that happen are.

We never know whose fault it is when good or bad things happen, and we don't really know whether we ought to be angry or to be sorry with people who do harm. Wicked people are like a thunderstorm, don't you think? And a lazy woman is like a hot room. Both are unhealthy, but they cannot help it."

Marguerite Audoux does not say these things to be clever. She says them quite simply, and they express her natural way of thought, which is simplicity and purity itself.

She wrote her book when and how she could, on sc.r.a.ps of cheap paper, and she does not know herself, now, whether she hoped to have it published when she wrote it. She did hope for publication when she had finished it, but that was because she was hungry.

I met a friend just outside Marguerite Audoux's house after my first visit to her. "Tiens," he said, "tu viens de la mansarde de Genie l'ouvriere." And the clever little pun was true. Marguerite Audoux is a genius, and she does not understand what people mean when they ask her "how" she "writes." She opens her weak eyes very wide at the question, laughs as a child laughs when it doesn't understand, and says, "But I don't know. The thoughts come, and I write them down. I only wish that I could spell them better."

When the committee of the Vie Heureuse was voting on her book before awarding her the 200 pound prize for the best book of the year, somebody suggested the possibility that she had had help with it.

Madame Severine was sent to fetch the ma.n.u.script. It was pa.s.sed round, examined, and no more doubt was possible.

I hope you will find the pleasure in reading Marie Claire that I found in translating it. I should like to say quite earnestly--and perhaps a little shamefacedly, because we hate saying these things out loud--that when I had read it I felt awed. The book had worked upon me. Do you remember the impression made on you by moonlight upon the snow in the country? You must be quite alone to feel it. The purity of it all makes you wish that you were a cleaner man or woman, and, till you rub shoulders with people again, you mean to try hard to be cleaner and better. Marie Claire made me feel just exactly like that.

JOHN N. RAPHAEL.