Swann's Way
standing in front of me, and only a few feet away from me, in that room
in which her father had entertained mine, and which she had now made
into a little sitting-room for herself. The window was partly open; the
lamp was lighted; I could watch her every movement without her being
able to see me; but, had I gone away, I must have made a rustling sound
among the bushes, she would have heard me, and might have thought that I
had been hiding there in order to spy upon her.
She was in deep mourning, for her father had but lately died. We had
not gone to see her; my mother had not cared to go, on account of that
virtue which alone in her fixed any bounds to her benevolence--namely,
modesty; but she pitied the girl from the depths of her heart. My
mother had not forgotten the sad end of M. Vinteuil's life, his complete
absorption, first in having to play both mother and nursery-maid to his
daughter, and, later, in the suffering which she had caused him; she
could see the tortured expression which was never absent from the old
man's face in those terrible last years; she knew that he had definitely
abandoned the task of transcribing in fair copies the whole of his later
work, the poor little pieces, we imagined, of an old music-master, a
retired village organist, which, we assumed, were of little or no value
in themselves, though we did not despise them, because they were of such
great value to him and had been the chief motive of his life before he
sacrificed them to his daughter; pieces which, being mostly not even
written down, but recorded only in his memory, while the rest were
scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain
unknown for ever; my mother thought, also, of that other and still more
cruel renunciation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of seeing
the girl happily settled, with an honest and respectable future; when
she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come
upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and
shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness,
which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having
virtually killed her father. "Poor M. Vinteuil," my mother would say,
"he lived for his daughter, and now he has died for her, without getting
his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form? It can only
come to him from her."
At the far end of Mlle. Vinteuil's sitting-room, on the mantelpiece,
stood a small photograph of her father which she went briskly to fetch,
just as the sound of carriage wheels was heard from the road outside,
then flung herself down on a sofa and drew close beside her a little
table on which she placed the photograph, just as, long ago, M. Vinteuil
had 'placed' beside him the piece of music which he would have liked
to play over to my parents. And then her friend came in. Mlle. Vinteuil
greeted her without rising, clasping her hands behind her head, and
drew her body to one side of the sofa, as though to 'make room.' But no
sooner had she done this than she appeared to feel that she was perhaps
suggesting a particular position to her friend, with an emphasis which
might well be regarded as importunate. She thought that her friend would
prefer, no doubt, to sit down at some distance from her, upon a chair;
she felt that she had been indiscreet; her sensitive heart took fright;
stretching herself out again over the whole of the sofa, she closed her
eyes and began to yawn, so as to indicate that it was a desire to sleep,
and that alone, which had made her lie down there. Despite the rude
and hectoring familiarity with which she treated her companion I could
recognise in her the obsequious and reticent advances, the abrupt
scruples and restraints which had characterised her father. Presently
she rose and came to the window, where she pretended to be trying to
close the shutters and not succeeding.
"Leave them open," said her friend. "I am hot."
"But it's too dreadful! People will see us," Mlle. Vinteuil answered.
And then she guessed, probably, that her friend would think that she had
uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other
words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from
prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak. And so, although
I could not see her face clearly enough, I am sure that the expression
must have appeared on it which my grandmother had once found so
delightful, when she hastily went on: "When I say 'see us' I mean, of
course, see us reading. It's so dreadful to think that in every trivial
little thing you do some one may be overlooking you."
With the instinctive generosity of her nature, a courtesy beyond her
control, she refrained from uttering the studied words which, she had
felt, were indispensable for the full realisation of her desire. And
perpetually, in the depths of her being, a shy and suppliant maiden
would kneel before that other element, the old campaigner, battered but
triumphant, would intercede with him and oblige him to retire.
"Oh, yes, it is so extremely likely that people are looking at us at
this time of night in this densely populated district!" said her friend,
with bitter irony. "And what if they are?" she went on, feeling bound
to annotate with a malicious yet affectionate wink these words which
she was repeating, out of good nature, like a lesson prepared beforehand
which, she knew, it would please Mlle. Vinteuil to hear. "And what if
they are? All the better that they should see us."
Mlle. Vinteuil shuddered and rose to her feet. In her sensitive
and scrupulous heart she was ignorant what words ought to flow,
spontaneously, from her lips, so as to produce the scene for which her
eager senses clamoured. She reached out as far as she could across the
limitations of her true character to find the language appropriate to
a vicious young woman such as she longed to be thought, but the
words which, she imagined, such a young woman might have uttered with
sincerity sounded unreal in her own mouth. And what little she allowed
herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained
timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech; while
she kept on interrupting herself with: "You're sure you aren't cold? You
aren't too hot? You don't want to sit and read by yourself?...
"Your ladyship's thoughts seem to be rather 'warm' this evening," she
concluded, doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used, on
some earlier occasion, by her friend.
In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the
sting of her friend's sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and
ran away; and then they began to chase one another about the room,
scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like
wings, clucking and crowing like a pair of amorous fowls. At last Mlle.
Vinteuil fell down exhausted upon the sofa, where she was screened from
me by the stooping body of her friend. But the latter now had her back
turned to the little table on which the old music-master's portrait had
been arranged. Mlle. Vinteuil realised that her friend would not see
it unless her attention were drawn to it, and so exclaimed, as if she
herself had just noticed it for the first time: "Oh! there's my father's
picture looking at us; I can't think who can have put it there; I'm sure
I've told them twenty times, that is not the proper place for it."
I remembered the words that M. Vinteuil had used to my parents in
apologising for an obtrusive sheet of music. This photograph was, of
course, in common use in their ritual observances, was subjected to
daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently
a liturgical response: "Let him stay there. He can't trouble us any
longer. D'you think he'd start whining, d'you think he'd pack you out
of the house if he could see you now, with the window open, the ugly old
monkey?"
To which Mlle. Vinteuil replied, "Oh, please!"--a gentle reproach
which testified to the genuine goodness of her nature, not that it
was prompted by any resentment at hearing her father spoken of in this
fashion (for that was evidently a feeling which she had trained herself,
by a long course of sophistries, to keep in close subjection at such
moments), but rather because it was the bridle which, so as to avoid all
appearance of egotism, she herself used to curb the gratification which
her friend was attempting to procure for her. It may well have been,
too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these
blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her
frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form
of that criminal attitude towards life which she was endeavouring to
adopt. But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with
affection by a woman who had just shewn herself so implacable towards
the defenceless dead; she sprang on to the knees of her friend and held
out a chaste brow to be kissed; precisely as a daughter would have done
to her mother, feeling with exquisite joy that they would thus, between
them, inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty, in robbing M.
Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred
rights of fatherhood. Her friend took the girl's head in her hands and
placed a kiss on her brow with a docility prompted by the real affection
she had for Mlle. Vinteuil, as well as by the desire to bring what
distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan.
"Do you know what I should like to do to that old horror?" she said,
taking up the photograph. She murmured in Mlle. Vinteuil's ear something
that I could not distinguish.
"Oh! You would never dare."
"Not dare to spit on it? On that?" shouted the friend with deliberate
brutality.
I heard no more, for Mlle. Vinteuil, who now seemed weary, awkward,
preoccupied, sincere, and rather sad, came back to the window and drew
the shutters close; but I knew now what was the reward that M. Vinteuil,
in return for all the suffering that he had endured in his lifetime, on
account of his daughter, had received from her after his death.
And yet I have since reflected that if M. Vinteuil had been able to be
present at this scene, he might still, and in spite of everything, have
continued to believe in his daughter's soundness of heart, and that he
might even, in so doing, have been not altogether wrong. It was true
that in all Mlle. Vinteuil's actions the appearance of evil was so
strong and so consistent that it would have been hard to find it
exhibited in such completeness save in what is nowadays called a
'sadist'; it is behind the footlights of a Paris theatre, and not under
the homely lamp of an actual country house, that one expects to see a
girl leading her friend on to spit upon the portrait of a father who has
lived and died for nothing and no one but herself; and when we find in
real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it is generally the 'sadic'
instinct that is responsible for it. It is possible that, without being
in the least inclined towards 'sadism,' a girl might have shewn the
same outrageous cruelty as Mlle. Vinteuil in desecrating the memory and
defying the wishes of her dead father, but she would not have given them
deliberate expression in an act so crude in its symbolism, so lacking
in subtlety; the criminal element in her behaviour would have been less
evident to other people, and even to herself, since she would not have
admitted to herself that she was doing wrong. But, appearances apart, in
Mlle. Vinteuil's soul, at least in the earlier stages, the evil element
was probably not unmixed. A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil,