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The terrace on which we sat, overlooking the dank, neglected garden, was dappled with sunlight through branches of the trees. And when the slight breezes sketched patterns of shadow over Katya’s high-necked dress of white lawn trimmed with lace at the cuffs and throat, the light striking her bodice reflected up under her firm round chin and seemed to set her face aglow. I watched, absorbed, as she served the pale tisane with gestures as graceful as they were sure and nonchalant. That ease of habit, I assumed, was a matter of breeding, just as was her brother’s indolent superiority. I was again struck by the similarities, and blessed differences, between them.
“You live here alone… you and your brother?” I asked.
“There is a village woman who comes.”
“But not, presumably, a gardener.” I gestured towards the congested overgrowth before us.
She laughed. “That’s not fair. I have toiled long hours in an effort to create an artless, even wild effect. And you don’t seem to be impressed by it.”
“Oh, but I am impressed. You have achieved an effect that I might term… uniquely unstudied.”
“Thank you,” she said, bowing her head in modest acceptance of the praise.
“And your parents?” I asked. “Where are they?”
“My mother died in childbirth… our birth.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re not really, of course. How could you be? But I appreciate your conventional expression of sympathy.”
“And your father?”
She looked out over the garden and sipped her tisane. Then she replaced the cup in its saucer and said airily, “Oh, Father’s hale enough.”
“He lives here with you?”
“We live with him, actually.”
I was somewhat surprised. If there was a father living here, how did it come to pass that Katya was dispatched on a bicycle to fetch a doctor, all the way to Salies?
She smiled. “Well, to tell the truth, Father does not know about Paul’s little accident yet. The quotidian problems of life are quite beyond Father’s capacity to cope. No, let me say that more correctly. It’s not his capacity to cope that is in question, it’s his interest in coping. He devotes most of each day to his ‘studies.’ “ She accented the word comically in what I took to be an imitation of her father’s voice.
“Studies of what kind?”
“Goodness only knows. He pores over thick tomes and works at reducing them to scratchings in thin little notebooks, and every now and then he says ‘Hm-m-m’ or ‘Ah!’ or ‘I wonder?’ “ She laughed lightly. “I’m really not doing him justice. He’s a dear old thing with a passion for medieval village life and customs that absorbs his time and mind, leaving him with only the most vague interest in the here and now. I sometimes think Father believes us to be living in an era that is posthistoric and rather insignificant.”
“Is that where it comes from? Your interest in books and learning? Not many women concern themselves with such things as anatomy and Dr. Freud.”
“I’ve never cared much what other women do. Another cup?”
“Please.”
As she leaned forward to pour, she said quietly, as though it had been on her mind all along, “You don’t like my brother, do you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Oh, there was a certain tension in the air when I returned with tea.”
“Yes. I suppose there was.”
“And? What do you think of him?”
“Shall I be frank?”
“That means you intend to say something unpleasant, doesn’t it?”
“I could not be both pleasant and honest.”
“My word!” she said with mock astonishment. “Now, that is frank.”
“I don’t mean to be offensive—”
“But?”
“But… well, don’t you find him a little supercilious and arrogant?”
“He’s just playful.”
“Perhaps. May I ask you, is your name really Treville?”
She looked up in surprise. “What an odd question!”
I began to explain that it wasn’t odd at all, considering her brother’s reaction to being called Monsieur Treville, but she interrupted me with, “Oh, I see. He lead you to believe Treville wasn’t our name.”
“He did in fact.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Isn’t that just like him.”
“I don’t know. But I assume it is.”
“Just a bit of his playfulness. He enjoys having people on… keeping them off balance. You must forgive him.”
“Must I?”
“I was rather hoping you two might hit it off. He knows no one here.”
“I’m afraid the possibility of our hitting it off is rather distant.”
“Too bad. The poor fellow has a quick, intelligent mind and nothing to exercise it on in this forgotten corner of the world. He’s bored to distraction.”
“Why doesn’t he go elsewhere?”
“He is not free to.”
The tone in which she said this prohibited me from pursuing the reasons he was not free, so I asked instead, “Why doesn’t he occupy himself with reading and study, as you do?”
“Other people’s ideas bore him. Shall we walk in the garden?”
So blatant was this change of subject that I had to smile. “Won’t we need a native boy to cut a trail for us?”
She laughed as she walked ahead of me. “No, there’s a well-worn path through the jungle. I spend much of the day at the bottom of the garden. There’s a summerhouse—well, what’s left of a summerhouse—where I enjoy hiding away with a book. Now, it is true that if you stray off the path we may have to muster a search party to find you, but you’re safe enough if you stay close to me.”
“I can imagine nothing less safe than staying close to you, Mlle Treville, and nothing more desirable.”
She frowned. “That is unworthy of you, Dr. Montjean. Men don’t seem to realize that automatic, boyish gallantry can be a terrible bore. A woman must either pretend that she did not hear it, or she must respond to it. And often, she’d rather do neither.”
I felt my ears redden. “I am sorry. You are quite right, of course. May I make a confession to you?”
“I don’t know. Will the confession be a burden? Will I be obligated to keep your secrets? Or to pretend at compassion?”
“No, it’s an altogether trivial confession.”
“Oh, then by all means confess to me. I’m quite comfortable with the altogether trivial.”
“It’s actually more an explanation than a confession. That ‘automatic, boyish gallantry’ you quite rightly objected to is a result of a terrible habit I’ve fallen into. When I’m alone and daydreaming, I practice at confecting clever lines of dialogue. But when I inflict them on people in real life, somehow the cleverness dissolves in my mouth, and only a stilted artificiality is left. I didn’t mean to be forward. I confess, however, to being maladroit. Can you forgive me?”
She turned to me and searched my eyes with hers. “What is your given name, Dr. Montjean?”
“Jean-Marc.”
“Jean-Marc Montjean. Sounds like a character in a nineteenth-century novel. No wonder you’re stricken with romanticism.”
I shrugged. “Didn’t I hear your brother call you Katya?”
“Yes.”
“Katya? Russian diminutive for Catherine? But you’re not Russian, are you?”
“No. And my name isn’t Catherine. With brutal disregard for the delicate feelings of a young woman, and with no ear for poetry at all, my father baptized me Hortense. As soon as I realized that one could do such things, I changed my name to Katya.”
“Changed your name? By legal process?”
“No. By simple force of will. I merely refused to respond to the name Hortense, and I did nothing I was bade unless I was called Katya.”
“And you accuse me of being a romantic?”
“It wasn’t an accusation. It was simply a description.”
“What a strong-minded child you must have been to force everyone to call you by a new name.”
“ ‘Little brat’ might be closer to the mark.” She turned and continued down the narrow path.
As the overgrowth pressed in on us, the acrid smell of damp weeds rose from the cold earth and I felt a sudden ripple of chill over my skin. “Well, well. The ghost must be nearby,” I said, seeking to pass off my discomfort with a joke.
She stopped and turned to me, her expression quite serious. “Ghost? I’ve never thought of it as a ghost.”
“Well… what haunts this place then, if not a ghost?”
“A spirit. I’m sure she’d rather be called a spirit than a ghost.”
“It’s a woman then, the gho—spirit?”
“Yes. A girl, actually. Ghost indeed! What a grim idea!”
“Perhaps, but there’s something inevitably grim about ghosts. Being grim is their mйtier.”
“That may be true of ghosts, but it is not true of spirits, which are an altogether higher order of beings. And that’s all I want to hear about the matter. Well, we have arrived. What do you think of my private library?”
I surveyed the ruin of what had once been a charming little summerhouse. “Ah… Oh, it’s… magnificent. Magnificent! Perhaps a touch of paint would not be inappropriate. And I don’t think the replacement of some of the broken lattice slats would harm the effect overmuch. But I do like that quaint touch of rot around the foundation. And that nonchalant sag of the beams! It’s an architectural wonder, your library, standing as it does in defiance of the laws of gravity.”
“It’s a light-hearted little building, and therefore doesn’t have to obey the laws of gravity. Why do you pull such a face?”
“What a wretched pun!”
“You don’t care for puns?”
“Not overly, as I told you before.”
“You never told me you were a sworn enemy of the noble pun.”
“Yes I did—ah, no. It was your brother I told. Is this addiction to puns a family trait—a genetic flaw?”
“We are willing to allow words to function irreverently, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s not what I meant, but it will do.” I looked about. “You can’t see the house from here.”
“What’s more to the point, you can’t be seen from the house,” she said, smiling at me.
After a second of wondering if I could interpret this as an invitation to some kind of intimacy, I took her hand and held it in both of mine. She did not resist, but her hand was limp and there was no return of my affectionate pressure. She simply searched my eyes with a little frown of—not annoyance, really—of doubtful inquiry.
“Mlle Treville…” I said, with nothing further to add.
“Yes?”
“You are… very beautiful.”
She laughed at me. “That’s not really true, you know. I believe I am a handsome woman. Healthy. Pleasant to look at. But I am not beautiful, and it’s foolish of you to say so.”
I suffered in silent confusion. I wanted to explain that my gesture of affection implied no disrespect. It was simply that she seemed so free and fresh, so… modern, I guess… that I felt she would understand my frank— Ah! I couldn’t find the words to explain myself.
“Does it please you to hold my hand?” she asked with a tone of mild interest.
“Ah… yes. Of course.”
“Very well, then.” She stood quite patiently, her hand unresisting but mute in mine, until growing feelings of awkwardness caused me to release it with a last pressure of farewell.
I feared that my boldness had ruined our former effortless amicability, so I searched for anything to say. “Ah… your father, I take it, is unwell?”
I was surprised at the effect of this random observation. Her expression clouded and she stepped back from me. “Why on earth do you say such a thing?”
I stammered, “Well… you said your family was here for reasons of health. You are obviously… healthy.” I sought to make a little joke. “And, apart from his compulsion for leaping from moving bicycles, your brother seems fairly normal. So I naturally assumed that it was your father who was ill.” I shrugged.
“Oh. I see.” Her expression cleared and she smiled. Then, to my surprise, she slipped her hand into the crook of my arm and led me back up the path towards the house. “I’m afraid my bicycle is going to be a bit of a problem,” she said, with what I would soon come to recognize as a characteristic habit of shifting from topic to topic with a glissando of non sequiturs that made internal sense to her but to no one else.
“Problem of what sort?”
“Of a minor sort, I suppose. I don’t really feel like returning to Salies just now. I wonder if you would mind collecting my machine from the square and keeping it for me until tomorrow?”
“I should be delighted. But how will you get into town tomorrow?”
She shrugged. “I’ll walk of course. It’s only a short ways.”
“Ah yes. Exactly two and six-tenths kilometers, as I recall.”
A look of delighted wonder animated her eyes. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if it really were? I’ve never actually measured it, you know. I have noticed that people are impressed by exact measurements, so I provide them out of my imagination. But wouldn’t it be amazing if one of them were accidentally correct?”
I dared a slight pressure on her hand by flexing my arm. “You are a strange and exceptional person. Do you know that? May one say that much without being guilty of boring you with automatic, boyish gallantry?”
“One may.”
We passed around the terrace to the sulky, where the patient old mare stood stoically, occasionally fluttering a shoulder muscle to discomfit the flies.
“Until tomorrow then?” she said.
I smiled at her and nodded. “Until tomorrow.” And she returned to the house.
As I approached the trap I noticed a pebble of particularly interesting veining beside the wheel, and I automatically picked it up, following a senseless habit from boyhood, a habit that used to annoy the aunt I lived with after the death of my parents. She would throw away scores of pebbles whenever she came across them in her cleaning. The loss never disturbed me, as I was not interested in collecting stones, only in picking them up. And the reason I picked them up was one that made excellent sense to me, though I knew better than to expect anyone else to understand: If I didn’t pick them up… who would?
The sulky had not gone thirty meters down the rutted lane when I heard Katya’s voice calling after me. I reined in and turned to see her running towards me, one hand holding her skirt aside, and my doctor’s bag in the other. I had climbed down to meet her by the time she arrived, flushed and a bit out of breath. “What must you think of the doctor who forgets the tools of his trade?” I asked.
She laughed. “Our Dr. Freud would say you did it on purpose.”
“And he would be right, Mlle Treville. And I’m afraid I have left more behind here than my kit.”
She shook her head sadly and smiled as one might smile at a persistent, mischievous child not totally lacking in redeeming charm. Then, on an impulse, she rose to her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek lightly.
I searched for words, but before I could speak she touched the place on my cheek with her fingertips, as though to seal it, and said, “Hush.” Her lucid grey eyes searched mine for a moment. “May I tell you something? You are the first man outside my family that I have ever kissed. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“Yes… remarkable. I…” But I could find no words. “Here,” I said, pressing something into her hand.
“What’s this?”
“A gift. A pebble.”
“A pebble?” She looked at the little stone in her palm; then she smiled up at me. “I believe this is the first time anyone has ever given me a pebble. In fact, I’m almost sure it is.” She searched my eyes with that amused curiosity of hers. “Thank you, Jean-Marc Montjean.” And she turned and walked back up the lane.
The return to Salies was filled with a young man’s daydreams of the most common and delicious sort. I had never met anyone remotely like Katya (to myself, I already used her first name). I was fascinated by the disturbing blend of quixotism and blunt frankness in her conversation, by her intelligence and freshness of thought, by an absence of conventionality that was not, as it is in so many modern young women, a desperate effort to be original at any cost.
An hour later, still in a gentle swim of delight, I was pushing Katya’s bicycle across the village square towards my boardinghouse.
“Here! What’s this?” Doctor Gros called from the shadows of his favorite cafй beneath the arcade that enclosed the square. “Come over here this instant, young man!”
I propped the bicycle against an arcade column and joined him, my sense of well-being so strengthened by thoughts of Katya that I felt benevolent even to Doctor Gros and his vulgar buffoonery.
“Sit down, Montjean, and prepare to face the music! Let’s examine these macabre events in sequence; see if we can find a pattern here. Primo, an attractive young woman arrives on a bicycle. Beta, she leaves town in the company of a young doctor of singularly modest accomplishments whose practice of holding forth in a high moral tone makes him automatically suspect. Third, the doctor is seen skulking back into the village with the bicycle, but without the young lady. Clearly, there is dirty work afoot here. Come take a little apйro with me, Montjean, while we squeeze the ugly truth out of this mystery.”
He was in a jovial mood, and I was pleased to sit with him for a time, sipping a glass while the light drained from the eastern sky and the western horizon grew purple.
“How did you know about the young lady?” I asked.
He tapped the side of his veiny, bulbous nose and winked with burlesque iniquity. “I was an unwitting contributor to her tragic fate, my boy. The yellow journalists who swarm all over nasty cases like this will record that it was I, Hippolyte Gros, physician of note and fellow of many unappreciated qualities, who suggested that she consult you, not twenty-four hours before she met her ghastly end. My dear boy, if I had had the slightest hint that you lusted so for a bicycle, I should have contributed anything short of money. You have gone too far this time, Montjean! The judges in their square bonnets will agree with me that you’ve gone too far this time.”
I chuckled as the waiter brought me a pastis. “So it was you who suggested she consult me?”
“Just so. She came to the clinic, describing the accident to her brother as a trivial matter that anyone at all could handle. Naturally, the phrase ‘anyone at all’ brought you to mind. I was myself occupied with a patient whose confidence I have been cultivating for some time, and anyway the girl was too young for my taste. Give me married women of a certain age every time. They are so discreet… and grateful. So? Tell me all! Did she plead to retain her bicycle? Were you deaf to her pitiful cries? Blind with passion to be astride her machine?”
“No.” I laughed.
“Blind with lust, then?”
“No.”
“You must have been blind with something. Being blind is a characteristic of your generation. Ah! Blind drunk, I’ll wager. I’ve always mistrusted your addiction to strong waters, Montjean. Particularly as it is accompanied by an equally strong reticence to offer rounds. Very well, I see that you intend to be churlishly secretive about your conquest; so let us settle between ourselves the minor problems of the planet. The newspapers are full of talk of war. Germany is glowering, France is snarling, Britain is vacillating, and Bosnia—where in hell is Bosnia anyway? One of those half-mythical nations down at the lower right of the map, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ve never trusted that lot. If they had honorable intentions they wouldn’t hide and cower down there. The whole business is as angry and gnarled as the probate of a peasant will. Clarify it for me, Montjean. Focus your fine, Parisian-trained mind on the matter and tell me for once and all: Are we to have war or not? Have I time to order supper before the bombardment begins?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“There you go again, being so cocksure of things. Overconfidence is an ugly characteristic of your generation—that and being blind. And refusing to offer rounds. Well, if you don’t know, I do! There will be no war! You have my word on it.” He drew a sigh and made a comic face. “But then, I must tell you that I am the fellow who assured everyone that the Prussians were only bluffing back in ‘70.”
“Dr. Gros, may I ask you something seriously?”
“You certainly have a gift for taking the brio out of a conversation. But, very well. Fire away.”
“What do you know of the Trevilles?”
“Ah-ha! Just as I thought! Curiosity. The Eighth Deadly Sin and notorious felinocide. It’s worse than lust. God only knows how many sordid affairs have been generated by sexual curiosity. There’s strong aphrodisiac in the question: I wonder how she’d be in bed? Nothing, of course, to the saltpeter of finding out. You ask what I know about the Trevilles? I know what the village knows. Nothing and everything. The Trevilles have been most unresponsive to the oblique questioning of the maids, merchants, and tradesmen they have dealt with during their year among us. Therefore, rustic logic feels free to confect—nay, obliged to confect a suitable biography in which to set the few thin facts known. There is a general feeling among the old women of Salies that it is their duty to create and promulgate fabrications and rumors replete with lurid details as a way to protect the Trevilles from the excessive imaginations of the gossips. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Fine. I shall share with you the subtle mйlange of fact and fancy that passes for truth hereabouts. In imitation of Genesis, I shall begin ‘in the beginning’—a dangerously close relative of ‘once upon a time,’ as every conscientious theologian knows. Well, the Trevilles came here from Paris a year ago. Three of them. A father and two children who, as I suppose even you have observed, are twins—a thing vaguely suspect in itself. They took a lease on the decrepit mansion called Etcheverria at terms that so delighted its owner that he rushed into town and bought drinks all around—an excess of generosity he has regretted ever since, and doubtless confessed as a sin of profligacy. Ever since their arrival, the Trevilles have lived as virtual recluses—a thing for which the village gossips cannot forgive them. May I offer you another little glass? No? It’s not charitable to flaunt your abstemiousness in this way, you know. One of those careless cruelties of Youth. The father is rumored to be something of a scholar, with all of the stigma appropriately attached to that nefarious craft. The son is accounted a wastrel, a snob, and—as he has not been caught climbing out of a peasant girl’s window—there are hints that he may be a bit of a pйdй. After all, he comes from Paris, and we all know what that means. But it is the daughter—dare I call her your young lady?—who has attracted most of the old crones’ attention. She has been seen walking alone in the fields from time to time. Walking alone.” Doctor Gros pumped his thick eyebrows up and down to underline the salacious implications of that. “Furthermore, it is said that she rides a bicycle. A bicycle, no less! Stare hard enough at that fact and you’ll find double—nay triple!—entendre. Also, she constantly wears white dresses, and we all know what that means. As she has never been observed doing anything in the least compromising, the gossips reason that she must do these things in secret. All in all, I’m afraid I must tell you that the Trevilles are the scandal of the community. Our local pride is bruised by their having chosen this corner of France in which to hide from whatever their sins and indiscretions may be. It’s as much as saying that we’re a Godforsaken, out-of-the-way backwater! And the fact that this is an accurate description of our community adds to the sting of it. There it is, Montjean. In a capsule, this is what is known and rumored about the Trevilles. And in addition there is the matter of the mother—whom no one has met and who is therefore rumored to be a dwarf, a Protestant, and left-handed. But I have a feeling this description is based on rather sketchy evidence.”
“The mother is dead,” I said.
“A dwarf, Protestant, left-handed, and dead? My, my. There is food for gossip. She’s a handsome one, your young lady. I congratulate you. A bit healthy for my own taste. Men of our profession must always be alert to the possibility that healthy people are doing it on purpose to ruin us.”
“So there’s nothing really known about them at all.”
“Nothing at all, as I have just said at some length.” The cafй waiter having delivered yet another Berger, Gros measured into his glass just enough water to cloud the drink without weakening it, then he stared at me for a moment before asking, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well what? What the devil are we talking about? Have you and your young lady…?” He made a palm-up gesture cutting across his chest.
“I barely know her!”
“Shame on you! Engaging in such intimacies with a girl you barely know. There’s the youth of today for you! No sense of decorum. You do realize, I hope, that you’ve contracted the disease.”
“What disease?”
“Love, man! I spotted the symptoms as you crossed the square pushing that silly bicycle. The vague, purposeless smile, the eye gone dim with inward-directed vision, the—”
“Oh, really!”
“Smitten, by God! Ah well, it happens to the best of us. In proof of which, I confess that I was once infected by love in my youth. But alas,” he drew a fluttering sigh, “it developed that she was a shallow thing attracted only by my physical beauty and ignorant of the depths of sensitivity beneath.”
“I’d really rather not discuss—”
“You have been good enough to share with me your conviction that mine is a quackish branch of medicine. As I recall, you were appalled that the nation of Pasteur could also be the nation of medicinal spas and curative waters. Well, for my part, I am appalled that the culture capable of producing de Sade could also produce the billet-doux and the tender assignation. Love resides in the loin, my boy, not in the heart.”
“I should warn you that I take offense at this turn of talk.”
“Oh, my, my! Forgive me! Misericorde!”
“There is something further I would like to know.”
“Oh, really? I would have taken it from your attitude that you knew everything—everything worth knowing, that is.”
“Can you tell me anything about the house, Etcheverria?”
“Only that it’s a terribly damp old place that might have been designed by a member of our profession specializing in lung disorders.”
“You have never heard anything about its being haunted?”
“Haunted? No. But I would be delighted to add that bit of information to the mass of rumor surrounding the Trevilles, if you wish.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Ah! Here come the municipal thieves, eager for their nightly shearing.” Indeed, the lawyer, Maоtre Lanne, and the village banker were approaching across the square. Each evening they joined Doctor Gros in games of bezique at which he inevitably won, not without muttered accusations of cheating. “I perform a useful service for these worthies, you know. I disemburden them of worldly wealth, making it possible for them to pass through the eye of a needle, as it were.”
“I’ll be going.”
“As you please. May I look forward to the pleasure of your company at the clinic tomorrow? Or have you decided to abandon medicine in favor of bicycle theft and girl molesting?”
“I’ll be there in the morning. But… I may want to take off a bit of time in the afternoon.”
“Ah-h-h, I see.” His voice was moist with conspiracy.
“Mlle Treville will be coming into town,” I explained needlessly.
“Ah-h-h, I see.”
“No, you don’t see!” I felt at one time both anger at his implication of wrongdoing and a childish sense of pleasure at being teased about her… as though she were mine to be teased about. “She has to fetch her bicycle,” I clarified.
“Ah-h-h, I see. Yes, of course. Her bicycle. To be sure.”
“I offered to bring it out to her, but she… I don’t know why I am bothering to explain all this to you.”
“Confession is good for the spirit, Montjean. It empties the soul, making space for more sin.”
I rose as the village worthies arrived and excused myself for having to run along without the privilege of their conversation.
After scribbling sketches and impressions in my journal and finding myself several times frozen in midsentence, staring through the page and smiling at nothing, I blew out my lamp and lay back against the bolster. The details of the room slowly emerged through the blackness as my eyes accustomed themselves to the moonglow that softly illuminated the curtain. All that night I drifted in and out of a sleep lightly brushed with images and imaginings that were not quite dreams.
Incredible though it later seemed, I woke the next morning without a trace of Katya in my mind, without the slightest sense of anticipation, beyond a general feeling of good will and buoyancy. It was not until I had made my toilet and was crossing the square to the cafй where I took morning brioches and coffee that the thought that she was coming into town for her bicycle slipped casually into my mind, then leapt, as it were, from thin script to bold italics in an instant, and a smile brightened my face. It did not occur to me to use the word love in assessing my feelings. Katya had, to be sure, been either in my thoughts or just beyond the rim of them since I left her the day before, and I could recall with tactile memory the brush of her soft warm lips on my cheek. But love? No, I didn’t think of love. I was, however, ashamed to have forgotten all about her arrival for almost half an hour that morning. The lapse made me feel inconstant… unfaithful, almost.
The day crawled by, the passage of time marked only by my trivial duties and tasks, and I began to fear that she would not come after all. The deterioration of the weather increased my apprehension as single dazzling clouds, like torn meringues, sailed lazily overhead and began to pile up on the horizon, thickening to a dark pewter. Would she decide not to dare the walk into Salies? What if she arrived, then a great storm broke, making it impossible for her to return home? We would have to seek shelter somewhere. Under the arcades of the square? No. Beneath a fine old tree? No. The gazebo hidden away at the end of the river park?
… perhaps… my room?
No! No. What nonsense! What an animal you are!
The gazebo then. Yes. The heavy drops would drum on the zinc roof, making conversation impossible. Alone and screened from the world by a silver curtain of rain, we would sit in silence… sharing the silence… holding hands… not needing conversation… no, better yet, our relationship beyond conversation…
“Would it be unreasonable of me to ask when you’re going to finish that prescription, Montjean?” Doctor Gros startled me by asking. “Or is there something beyond that window that has a prior claim on your attention?”
I muttered some apology or another and plied my pestle with unnecessary vigor.
Midafternoon the wind changed, the clouds were herded away to the west, and the sunlight returned—quite inconsiderately, it seemed to me.
The day wore on and the slanting rays of the sun had plunged the arcades on the west side of the square into deep shadow when, for the thousandth time, my attention strayed from my pharmaceutical drudgery and I looked out my window in worried anticipation. She was just passing out of the dense shadow, and her white dress seemed to burst into brightness as she walked with her exuberant stride towards the clinic, hatless, but carrying a closed parasol. My heart twisted with pleasure.
As I approached her on the square, still tugging on my linen jacket, a silly smile took possession of my face and would not release it, although I was sure every eye in the village followed my slightest gesture. She smiled too, but hers was charming where mine was inane.
There was a cafй frequented by the lady patients, as it offered a thin pallid liquid that claimed to be English tea (then quite fashionable) served with small cakes which, as they were dry and tasteless, were assumed to be quintessentially British. I suggested that we take some refreshment there, after her long walk.
“Exactly four thousand two hundred thirty-three paces, from my door to this spot,” she specified.
“Exactly?” I asked in a tone of bantering admonishment.
She shrugged. “For all I know, it might be. Frankly, I wouldn’t care to sit among the ladies and nibble at biscuits. May I have a citron pressй somewhere were we can sit in the sun?”
“Of course. In fact my mood is so expansive that I might even offer you two citrons pressйs.”
I am sure it was not just my imagination that the pairs of ladies strolling the square or sitting at the “English” cafй glanced rather often in the direction of our table, then looked away with studied indifference as they exchanged brief comments. And I felt there was a tone of insinuation, if not downright collaboration, in the excessive graciousness with which our waiter served us. But my annoyance at these intruders evaporated in the pleasure I took in our conversation, which might have appeared to an eavesdropping stranger to be banal and commonplace, but which seemed to me to be filled with significant things unsaid, meaningful gestures withheld, touching intimacies unexpressed. I asked after her brother, her father, and her ghost, all of whom, it appeared, were thriving—although that may not be the mot juste in the case of a ghost. Every moment after the first quarter hour I dreaded that she would say it was time for her to return home. But she seemed perfectly content to sit, sipping her citron pressй, while drawing me out with questions about the deprivations of my youth, my struggle for an education, my medical and literary aspirations. I spoke almost without pause for the better part of an hour, coming to the conclusion, in my youthful egoism, that she was a delightful and entertaining conversationalist.
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone so concerned with the future as you. My father lives in the distant past, and my brother and I have always lived from moment to moment, or at most from day to day. We never talk about the future. I suppose I have always thought of the future as a great heap of tomorrows each waiting its turn to become today.”
“How then do you make plans?”
“Plans? We don’t. That is… we don’t plan in the sense that we seek to achieve things, or become something. We do, of course, try our best to avoid embarrassments… difficulties.”
“Difficulties of what kind?”
She looked at me over the rim of her glass. “Oh, of all kinds.”
“Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with your brother.”
“I was not aware there was anything wrong with Paul.”
“Maybe if he had met a few difficulties along the way, he wouldn’t be so bored with life, so superior in his attitudes.”
“Aren’t you being a bit of a snob?”
“Me? A snob?”
“Not everyone has had a life of struggle to exercise him and make him strong. Not everyone is free to make a career, to anticipate a future.” Her smile was tinged with a sadness that drew my tenderest feelings towards her. Then, with a faint shift in the corners of her eyes, the smile became a look of serious examination as she searched the features of my face one by one in a way that quite discomfited me. “Dr. Montjean, are you aware that you are handsome?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Most handsome men know it only too well, and their confident posturing is a nuisance. But you don’t seem to be aware of your beauty. It’s an attractive ignorance.”
I shook my head, nonplussed. “Young women shouldn’t call young men beautiful.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Well… it isn’t done.”
“I don’t care about what’s done and not done.”
“Nevertheless… and furthermore it’s embarrassing.”
“Is it? Yes, I suppose it is. Well, I’m afraid we may have a more serious kind of embarrassment coming our way.” With a lift of her chin she indicated the sky, and I looked up to discover that while I had been absorbed in our chat, a shift of wind had brought the pewter-bellied clouds back over the village. Puffs of cool wind began to eddy up little dust swirls on the cobbled square.
“It looks as though we shall have to wait the rain out,” I said, the image of the gazebo coming to mind.
“Oh, but I can’t! Father doesn’t know I’ve come into the village. He would be distressed not to find me home, when he emerges from his ‘work’ for his tea.”
“But… surely you can’t ride your bicycle back in the rain!”
“I don’t see that I have any choice. I’ll make a race of it and, who knows, perhaps I can beat the rain back.”
“I can’t allow it.”
She looked at me with comic surprise. “You can’t allow it?”
“I didn’t mean that exactly.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Listen. Tell you what. I’ll get the clinic’s sulky and tie your machine on behind. And we’ll race the rain together.”
“But… even if we won, surely you would get drenched on the way back.”
“I don’t mind. In fact, I’d rather enjoy it.”
She looked at me quizzically. “You know, I believe you would. Very well. Let’s race the rain.”
When I asked Doctor Gros if I could use the sulky, he turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Aiding and abetting, the judges will call it! Accomplice before the fact! My career will be in ruins. My reputation will be… well, my career anyway will be damaged. I don’t suppose it’s any use to appeal to your sense of honor, but you might at least—Montjean!” he called after me. “You could have the decency to hear me out, you know!”
Katya and I came within three minutes of winning our race against the weather, but from the point of view of our appearance when we arrived at the courtyard of Etcheverria, we might as well have lost by half an hour. We were soaked to the skin, as her white silk parasol was comically ineffective.
Just as we turned up the poplar lane, the sky broke open and a brash of warm plump rain burst upon us. By the time I reined in at the courtyard, the leather of the rig was glistening with water, the mare was steaming, and Katya and I looked as though we had just been pulled from a river.
Laughing at each other’s appearance, we entered the central hall, wiping the rain from our faces. My linen jacket hung grey and limp from my shoulders, and my trousers were heavy from waist to knee. For her part, Katya seemed delighted with the adventure, though her dress was sodden and wisps of hair were plastered to her temples and forehead. I suppose we were rather noisy in our excitement, for Paul Treville snatched open the door to the salon and glared at us in fury.
“Katya! For the love of God! Father is working!”
Our delight collapsed in an instant, and I stepped forward. “It’s all my fault, Monsieur Tre—”
“I had assumed as much, Doctor. Katya, what could you have been thinking of?”
“Really, Paul…” Her voice trailed off, and her whole demeanor seemed to shrink into a most uncharacteristic humility.
“We’ll discuss it later,” the brother said. Then he turned and stared through me stonily. “When the good doctor has seen fit to deny us his company.”
“Before I go, Monsieur Treville, I must tell you that I resent your tone, not only on my own behalf, but on that of Katya.”
“What right have you to resent anything I do or say? And by what right do you address my sister by her given name?”
I turned to Katya to make my farewells and was struck by her uncertain, deflated attitude. But it was her slight movement away from me as I began to speak that stung me and left me with nothing to say. I turned back to her brother. “You are quite right, of course, to say that I shouldn’t address Mlle Treville by her first name. It was the lapse of the moment. But I assure you, sir, that—”
“You need assure me, Doctor, of nothing… save for your intention to depart immediately.”
With my whole being, I yearned to hit him in the face. But I resisted for Katya’s sake. Gathering together what dignity my drenched condition and pounding pulse permitted, I bowed curtly and went to the door.
“Just a moment, Doctor!” It is impossible to describe the sudden change in Paul Treville’s tone of voice from that of the haughty, outraged aristocrat to one of concerned fatigue. “Just a moment, if you please.” He closed his eyes and drew a long breath. “Do forgive me. I have been ungracious. Katya, could you look to that new girl in the kitchen? Father will want his supper soon, and she has the appearance of one who would open an egg with a battering ram.”
Without a word to me, without even looking at me, Katya left the hall, her head down and her shoulders rounded.
“And Katya?” Paul arrested her at the entrance to the housekeeping quarters, where she stopped without turning around. He smiled sadly. “Do warm yourself at the fire, and dry your hair. You look frightful.” She nodded and departed. He looked after her for a moment and sighed; then he turned to me. “Would you join me in the salon, Dr. Montjean? I’ve a fire going, and you look as though you could do with a little drying out yourself.
“Brandy?” he asked, following me into the salon.
“Thank you, no,” I said stiffly, uncomfortable and confused by his sudden change of attitude, and even more disturbed by Katya’s humble, almost servile, reaction to his burst of anger. The fire in the marble hearth was inviting, but I did not approach it, still too angry with him to accept any hospitality at his hands.
“Please sit down,” he said as he poured out two large brandies, not having heard, or choosing to ignore, my refusal. With only his left hand free, his empty right sleeve pinned against his bound shoulder, he carried the brandy glasses rather precariously between his fingers. I accepted the glass, not wishing to appear petty, and when he took a chair beside the fire, there was nothing for me to do but join him, my chill skin absorbing the welcome warmth, whether I wanted it or not.
“I take it your sister failed to tell you that she was coming into Salies to collect her bicycle,” I said with some distant dignity.
“You take it correctly. But then, she is not in the habit of accounting to me for her actions. But for more than an hour I have been searching everywhere for her. Consideration for others is not one of Katya’s attributes.”
“You live here alone… you and your brother?” I asked.
“There is a village woman who comes.”
“But not, presumably, a gardener.” I gestured towards the congested overgrowth before us.
She laughed. “That’s not fair. I have toiled long hours in an effort to create an artless, even wild effect. And you don’t seem to be impressed by it.”
“Oh, but I am impressed. You have achieved an effect that I might term… uniquely unstudied.”
“Thank you,” she said, bowing her head in modest acceptance of the praise.
“And your parents?” I asked. “Where are they?”
“My mother died in childbirth… our birth.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re not really, of course. How could you be? But I appreciate your conventional expression of sympathy.”
“And your father?”
She looked out over the garden and sipped her tisane. Then she replaced the cup in its saucer and said airily, “Oh, Father’s hale enough.”
“He lives here with you?”
“We live with him, actually.”
I was somewhat surprised. If there was a father living here, how did it come to pass that Katya was dispatched on a bicycle to fetch a doctor, all the way to Salies?
She smiled. “Well, to tell the truth, Father does not know about Paul’s little accident yet. The quotidian problems of life are quite beyond Father’s capacity to cope. No, let me say that more correctly. It’s not his capacity to cope that is in question, it’s his interest in coping. He devotes most of each day to his ‘studies.’ “ She accented the word comically in what I took to be an imitation of her father’s voice.
“Studies of what kind?”
“Goodness only knows. He pores over thick tomes and works at reducing them to scratchings in thin little notebooks, and every now and then he says ‘Hm-m-m’ or ‘Ah!’ or ‘I wonder?’ “ She laughed lightly. “I’m really not doing him justice. He’s a dear old thing with a passion for medieval village life and customs that absorbs his time and mind, leaving him with only the most vague interest in the here and now. I sometimes think Father believes us to be living in an era that is posthistoric and rather insignificant.”
“Is that where it comes from? Your interest in books and learning? Not many women concern themselves with such things as anatomy and Dr. Freud.”
“I’ve never cared much what other women do. Another cup?”
“Please.”
As she leaned forward to pour, she said quietly, as though it had been on her mind all along, “You don’t like my brother, do you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Oh, there was a certain tension in the air when I returned with tea.”
“Yes. I suppose there was.”
“And? What do you think of him?”
“Shall I be frank?”
“That means you intend to say something unpleasant, doesn’t it?”
“I could not be both pleasant and honest.”
“My word!” she said with mock astonishment. “Now, that is frank.”
“I don’t mean to be offensive—”
“But?”
“But… well, don’t you find him a little supercilious and arrogant?”
“He’s just playful.”
“Perhaps. May I ask you, is your name really Treville?”
She looked up in surprise. “What an odd question!”
I began to explain that it wasn’t odd at all, considering her brother’s reaction to being called Monsieur Treville, but she interrupted me with, “Oh, I see. He lead you to believe Treville wasn’t our name.”
“He did in fact.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Isn’t that just like him.”
“I don’t know. But I assume it is.”
“Just a bit of his playfulness. He enjoys having people on… keeping them off balance. You must forgive him.”
“Must I?”
“I was rather hoping you two might hit it off. He knows no one here.”
“I’m afraid the possibility of our hitting it off is rather distant.”
“Too bad. The poor fellow has a quick, intelligent mind and nothing to exercise it on in this forgotten corner of the world. He’s bored to distraction.”
“Why doesn’t he go elsewhere?”
“He is not free to.”
The tone in which she said this prohibited me from pursuing the reasons he was not free, so I asked instead, “Why doesn’t he occupy himself with reading and study, as you do?”
“Other people’s ideas bore him. Shall we walk in the garden?”
So blatant was this change of subject that I had to smile. “Won’t we need a native boy to cut a trail for us?”
She laughed as she walked ahead of me. “No, there’s a well-worn path through the jungle. I spend much of the day at the bottom of the garden. There’s a summerhouse—well, what’s left of a summerhouse—where I enjoy hiding away with a book. Now, it is true that if you stray off the path we may have to muster a search party to find you, but you’re safe enough if you stay close to me.”
“I can imagine nothing less safe than staying close to you, Mlle Treville, and nothing more desirable.”
She frowned. “That is unworthy of you, Dr. Montjean. Men don’t seem to realize that automatic, boyish gallantry can be a terrible bore. A woman must either pretend that she did not hear it, or she must respond to it. And often, she’d rather do neither.”
I felt my ears redden. “I am sorry. You are quite right, of course. May I make a confession to you?”
“I don’t know. Will the confession be a burden? Will I be obligated to keep your secrets? Or to pretend at compassion?”
“No, it’s an altogether trivial confession.”
“Oh, then by all means confess to me. I’m quite comfortable with the altogether trivial.”
“It’s actually more an explanation than a confession. That ‘automatic, boyish gallantry’ you quite rightly objected to is a result of a terrible habit I’ve fallen into. When I’m alone and daydreaming, I practice at confecting clever lines of dialogue. But when I inflict them on people in real life, somehow the cleverness dissolves in my mouth, and only a stilted artificiality is left. I didn’t mean to be forward. I confess, however, to being maladroit. Can you forgive me?”
She turned to me and searched my eyes with hers. “What is your given name, Dr. Montjean?”
“Jean-Marc.”
“Jean-Marc Montjean. Sounds like a character in a nineteenth-century novel. No wonder you’re stricken with romanticism.”
I shrugged. “Didn’t I hear your brother call you Katya?”
“Yes.”
“Katya? Russian diminutive for Catherine? But you’re not Russian, are you?”
“No. And my name isn’t Catherine. With brutal disregard for the delicate feelings of a young woman, and with no ear for poetry at all, my father baptized me Hortense. As soon as I realized that one could do such things, I changed my name to Katya.”
“Changed your name? By legal process?”
“No. By simple force of will. I merely refused to respond to the name Hortense, and I did nothing I was bade unless I was called Katya.”
“And you accuse me of being a romantic?”
“It wasn’t an accusation. It was simply a description.”
“What a strong-minded child you must have been to force everyone to call you by a new name.”
“ ‘Little brat’ might be closer to the mark.” She turned and continued down the narrow path.
As the overgrowth pressed in on us, the acrid smell of damp weeds rose from the cold earth and I felt a sudden ripple of chill over my skin. “Well, well. The ghost must be nearby,” I said, seeking to pass off my discomfort with a joke.
She stopped and turned to me, her expression quite serious. “Ghost? I’ve never thought of it as a ghost.”
“Well… what haunts this place then, if not a ghost?”
“A spirit. I’m sure she’d rather be called a spirit than a ghost.”
“It’s a woman then, the gho—spirit?”
“Yes. A girl, actually. Ghost indeed! What a grim idea!”
“Perhaps, but there’s something inevitably grim about ghosts. Being grim is their mйtier.”
“That may be true of ghosts, but it is not true of spirits, which are an altogether higher order of beings. And that’s all I want to hear about the matter. Well, we have arrived. What do you think of my private library?”
I surveyed the ruin of what had once been a charming little summerhouse. “Ah… Oh, it’s… magnificent. Magnificent! Perhaps a touch of paint would not be inappropriate. And I don’t think the replacement of some of the broken lattice slats would harm the effect overmuch. But I do like that quaint touch of rot around the foundation. And that nonchalant sag of the beams! It’s an architectural wonder, your library, standing as it does in defiance of the laws of gravity.”
“It’s a light-hearted little building, and therefore doesn’t have to obey the laws of gravity. Why do you pull such a face?”
“What a wretched pun!”
“You don’t care for puns?”
“Not overly, as I told you before.”
“You never told me you were a sworn enemy of the noble pun.”
“Yes I did—ah, no. It was your brother I told. Is this addiction to puns a family trait—a genetic flaw?”
“We are willing to allow words to function irreverently, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s not what I meant, but it will do.” I looked about. “You can’t see the house from here.”
“What’s more to the point, you can’t be seen from the house,” she said, smiling at me.
After a second of wondering if I could interpret this as an invitation to some kind of intimacy, I took her hand and held it in both of mine. She did not resist, but her hand was limp and there was no return of my affectionate pressure. She simply searched my eyes with a little frown of—not annoyance, really—of doubtful inquiry.
“Mlle Treville…” I said, with nothing further to add.
“Yes?”
“You are… very beautiful.”
She laughed at me. “That’s not really true, you know. I believe I am a handsome woman. Healthy. Pleasant to look at. But I am not beautiful, and it’s foolish of you to say so.”
I suffered in silent confusion. I wanted to explain that my gesture of affection implied no disrespect. It was simply that she seemed so free and fresh, so… modern, I guess… that I felt she would understand my frank— Ah! I couldn’t find the words to explain myself.
“Does it please you to hold my hand?” she asked with a tone of mild interest.
“Ah… yes. Of course.”
“Very well, then.” She stood quite patiently, her hand unresisting but mute in mine, until growing feelings of awkwardness caused me to release it with a last pressure of farewell.
I feared that my boldness had ruined our former effortless amicability, so I searched for anything to say. “Ah… your father, I take it, is unwell?”
I was surprised at the effect of this random observation. Her expression clouded and she stepped back from me. “Why on earth do you say such a thing?”
I stammered, “Well… you said your family was here for reasons of health. You are obviously… healthy.” I sought to make a little joke. “And, apart from his compulsion for leaping from moving bicycles, your brother seems fairly normal. So I naturally assumed that it was your father who was ill.” I shrugged.
“Oh. I see.” Her expression cleared and she smiled. Then, to my surprise, she slipped her hand into the crook of my arm and led me back up the path towards the house. “I’m afraid my bicycle is going to be a bit of a problem,” she said, with what I would soon come to recognize as a characteristic habit of shifting from topic to topic with a glissando of non sequiturs that made internal sense to her but to no one else.
“Problem of what sort?”
“Of a minor sort, I suppose. I don’t really feel like returning to Salies just now. I wonder if you would mind collecting my machine from the square and keeping it for me until tomorrow?”
“I should be delighted. But how will you get into town tomorrow?”
She shrugged. “I’ll walk of course. It’s only a short ways.”
“Ah yes. Exactly two and six-tenths kilometers, as I recall.”
A look of delighted wonder animated her eyes. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if it really were? I’ve never actually measured it, you know. I have noticed that people are impressed by exact measurements, so I provide them out of my imagination. But wouldn’t it be amazing if one of them were accidentally correct?”
I dared a slight pressure on her hand by flexing my arm. “You are a strange and exceptional person. Do you know that? May one say that much without being guilty of boring you with automatic, boyish gallantry?”
“One may.”
We passed around the terrace to the sulky, where the patient old mare stood stoically, occasionally fluttering a shoulder muscle to discomfit the flies.
“Until tomorrow then?” she said.
I smiled at her and nodded. “Until tomorrow.” And she returned to the house.
As I approached the trap I noticed a pebble of particularly interesting veining beside the wheel, and I automatically picked it up, following a senseless habit from boyhood, a habit that used to annoy the aunt I lived with after the death of my parents. She would throw away scores of pebbles whenever she came across them in her cleaning. The loss never disturbed me, as I was not interested in collecting stones, only in picking them up. And the reason I picked them up was one that made excellent sense to me, though I knew better than to expect anyone else to understand: If I didn’t pick them up… who would?
The sulky had not gone thirty meters down the rutted lane when I heard Katya’s voice calling after me. I reined in and turned to see her running towards me, one hand holding her skirt aside, and my doctor’s bag in the other. I had climbed down to meet her by the time she arrived, flushed and a bit out of breath. “What must you think of the doctor who forgets the tools of his trade?” I asked.
She laughed. “Our Dr. Freud would say you did it on purpose.”
“And he would be right, Mlle Treville. And I’m afraid I have left more behind here than my kit.”
She shook her head sadly and smiled as one might smile at a persistent, mischievous child not totally lacking in redeeming charm. Then, on an impulse, she rose to her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek lightly.
I searched for words, but before I could speak she touched the place on my cheek with her fingertips, as though to seal it, and said, “Hush.” Her lucid grey eyes searched mine for a moment. “May I tell you something? You are the first man outside my family that I have ever kissed. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“Yes… remarkable. I…” But I could find no words. “Here,” I said, pressing something into her hand.
“What’s this?”
“A gift. A pebble.”
“A pebble?” She looked at the little stone in her palm; then she smiled up at me. “I believe this is the first time anyone has ever given me a pebble. In fact, I’m almost sure it is.” She searched my eyes with that amused curiosity of hers. “Thank you, Jean-Marc Montjean.” And she turned and walked back up the lane.
* * *
The return to Salies was filled with a young man’s daydreams of the most common and delicious sort. I had never met anyone remotely like Katya (to myself, I already used her first name). I was fascinated by the disturbing blend of quixotism and blunt frankness in her conversation, by her intelligence and freshness of thought, by an absence of conventionality that was not, as it is in so many modern young women, a desperate effort to be original at any cost.
An hour later, still in a gentle swim of delight, I was pushing Katya’s bicycle across the village square towards my boardinghouse.
“Here! What’s this?” Doctor Gros called from the shadows of his favorite cafй beneath the arcade that enclosed the square. “Come over here this instant, young man!”
I propped the bicycle against an arcade column and joined him, my sense of well-being so strengthened by thoughts of Katya that I felt benevolent even to Doctor Gros and his vulgar buffoonery.
“Sit down, Montjean, and prepare to face the music! Let’s examine these macabre events in sequence; see if we can find a pattern here. Primo, an attractive young woman arrives on a bicycle. Beta, she leaves town in the company of a young doctor of singularly modest accomplishments whose practice of holding forth in a high moral tone makes him automatically suspect. Third, the doctor is seen skulking back into the village with the bicycle, but without the young lady. Clearly, there is dirty work afoot here. Come take a little apйro with me, Montjean, while we squeeze the ugly truth out of this mystery.”
He was in a jovial mood, and I was pleased to sit with him for a time, sipping a glass while the light drained from the eastern sky and the western horizon grew purple.
“How did you know about the young lady?” I asked.
He tapped the side of his veiny, bulbous nose and winked with burlesque iniquity. “I was an unwitting contributor to her tragic fate, my boy. The yellow journalists who swarm all over nasty cases like this will record that it was I, Hippolyte Gros, physician of note and fellow of many unappreciated qualities, who suggested that she consult you, not twenty-four hours before she met her ghastly end. My dear boy, if I had had the slightest hint that you lusted so for a bicycle, I should have contributed anything short of money. You have gone too far this time, Montjean! The judges in their square bonnets will agree with me that you’ve gone too far this time.”
I chuckled as the waiter brought me a pastis. “So it was you who suggested she consult me?”
“Just so. She came to the clinic, describing the accident to her brother as a trivial matter that anyone at all could handle. Naturally, the phrase ‘anyone at all’ brought you to mind. I was myself occupied with a patient whose confidence I have been cultivating for some time, and anyway the girl was too young for my taste. Give me married women of a certain age every time. They are so discreet… and grateful. So? Tell me all! Did she plead to retain her bicycle? Were you deaf to her pitiful cries? Blind with passion to be astride her machine?”
“No.” I laughed.
“Blind with lust, then?”
“No.”
“You must have been blind with something. Being blind is a characteristic of your generation. Ah! Blind drunk, I’ll wager. I’ve always mistrusted your addiction to strong waters, Montjean. Particularly as it is accompanied by an equally strong reticence to offer rounds. Very well, I see that you intend to be churlishly secretive about your conquest; so let us settle between ourselves the minor problems of the planet. The newspapers are full of talk of war. Germany is glowering, France is snarling, Britain is vacillating, and Bosnia—where in hell is Bosnia anyway? One of those half-mythical nations down at the lower right of the map, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ve never trusted that lot. If they had honorable intentions they wouldn’t hide and cower down there. The whole business is as angry and gnarled as the probate of a peasant will. Clarify it for me, Montjean. Focus your fine, Parisian-trained mind on the matter and tell me for once and all: Are we to have war or not? Have I time to order supper before the bombardment begins?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“There you go again, being so cocksure of things. Overconfidence is an ugly characteristic of your generation—that and being blind. And refusing to offer rounds. Well, if you don’t know, I do! There will be no war! You have my word on it.” He drew a sigh and made a comic face. “But then, I must tell you that I am the fellow who assured everyone that the Prussians were only bluffing back in ‘70.”
“Dr. Gros, may I ask you something seriously?”
“You certainly have a gift for taking the brio out of a conversation. But, very well. Fire away.”
“What do you know of the Trevilles?”
“Ah-ha! Just as I thought! Curiosity. The Eighth Deadly Sin and notorious felinocide. It’s worse than lust. God only knows how many sordid affairs have been generated by sexual curiosity. There’s strong aphrodisiac in the question: I wonder how she’d be in bed? Nothing, of course, to the saltpeter of finding out. You ask what I know about the Trevilles? I know what the village knows. Nothing and everything. The Trevilles have been most unresponsive to the oblique questioning of the maids, merchants, and tradesmen they have dealt with during their year among us. Therefore, rustic logic feels free to confect—nay, obliged to confect a suitable biography in which to set the few thin facts known. There is a general feeling among the old women of Salies that it is their duty to create and promulgate fabrications and rumors replete with lurid details as a way to protect the Trevilles from the excessive imaginations of the gossips. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Fine. I shall share with you the subtle mйlange of fact and fancy that passes for truth hereabouts. In imitation of Genesis, I shall begin ‘in the beginning’—a dangerously close relative of ‘once upon a time,’ as every conscientious theologian knows. Well, the Trevilles came here from Paris a year ago. Three of them. A father and two children who, as I suppose even you have observed, are twins—a thing vaguely suspect in itself. They took a lease on the decrepit mansion called Etcheverria at terms that so delighted its owner that he rushed into town and bought drinks all around—an excess of generosity he has regretted ever since, and doubtless confessed as a sin of profligacy. Ever since their arrival, the Trevilles have lived as virtual recluses—a thing for which the village gossips cannot forgive them. May I offer you another little glass? No? It’s not charitable to flaunt your abstemiousness in this way, you know. One of those careless cruelties of Youth. The father is rumored to be something of a scholar, with all of the stigma appropriately attached to that nefarious craft. The son is accounted a wastrel, a snob, and—as he has not been caught climbing out of a peasant girl’s window—there are hints that he may be a bit of a pйdй. After all, he comes from Paris, and we all know what that means. But it is the daughter—dare I call her your young lady?—who has attracted most of the old crones’ attention. She has been seen walking alone in the fields from time to time. Walking alone.” Doctor Gros pumped his thick eyebrows up and down to underline the salacious implications of that. “Furthermore, it is said that she rides a bicycle. A bicycle, no less! Stare hard enough at that fact and you’ll find double—nay triple!—entendre. Also, she constantly wears white dresses, and we all know what that means. As she has never been observed doing anything in the least compromising, the gossips reason that she must do these things in secret. All in all, I’m afraid I must tell you that the Trevilles are the scandal of the community. Our local pride is bruised by their having chosen this corner of France in which to hide from whatever their sins and indiscretions may be. It’s as much as saying that we’re a Godforsaken, out-of-the-way backwater! And the fact that this is an accurate description of our community adds to the sting of it. There it is, Montjean. In a capsule, this is what is known and rumored about the Trevilles. And in addition there is the matter of the mother—whom no one has met and who is therefore rumored to be a dwarf, a Protestant, and left-handed. But I have a feeling this description is based on rather sketchy evidence.”
“The mother is dead,” I said.
“A dwarf, Protestant, left-handed, and dead? My, my. There is food for gossip. She’s a handsome one, your young lady. I congratulate you. A bit healthy for my own taste. Men of our profession must always be alert to the possibility that healthy people are doing it on purpose to ruin us.”
“So there’s nothing really known about them at all.”
“Nothing at all, as I have just said at some length.” The cafй waiter having delivered yet another Berger, Gros measured into his glass just enough water to cloud the drink without weakening it, then he stared at me for a moment before asking, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well what? What the devil are we talking about? Have you and your young lady…?” He made a palm-up gesture cutting across his chest.
“I barely know her!”
“Shame on you! Engaging in such intimacies with a girl you barely know. There’s the youth of today for you! No sense of decorum. You do realize, I hope, that you’ve contracted the disease.”
“What disease?”
“Love, man! I spotted the symptoms as you crossed the square pushing that silly bicycle. The vague, purposeless smile, the eye gone dim with inward-directed vision, the—”
“Oh, really!”
“Smitten, by God! Ah well, it happens to the best of us. In proof of which, I confess that I was once infected by love in my youth. But alas,” he drew a fluttering sigh, “it developed that she was a shallow thing attracted only by my physical beauty and ignorant of the depths of sensitivity beneath.”
“I’d really rather not discuss—”
“You have been good enough to share with me your conviction that mine is a quackish branch of medicine. As I recall, you were appalled that the nation of Pasteur could also be the nation of medicinal spas and curative waters. Well, for my part, I am appalled that the culture capable of producing de Sade could also produce the billet-doux and the tender assignation. Love resides in the loin, my boy, not in the heart.”
“I should warn you that I take offense at this turn of talk.”
“Oh, my, my! Forgive me! Misericorde!”
“There is something further I would like to know.”
“Oh, really? I would have taken it from your attitude that you knew everything—everything worth knowing, that is.”
“Can you tell me anything about the house, Etcheverria?”
“Only that it’s a terribly damp old place that might have been designed by a member of our profession specializing in lung disorders.”
“You have never heard anything about its being haunted?”
“Haunted? No. But I would be delighted to add that bit of information to the mass of rumor surrounding the Trevilles, if you wish.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Ah! Here come the municipal thieves, eager for their nightly shearing.” Indeed, the lawyer, Maоtre Lanne, and the village banker were approaching across the square. Each evening they joined Doctor Gros in games of bezique at which he inevitably won, not without muttered accusations of cheating. “I perform a useful service for these worthies, you know. I disemburden them of worldly wealth, making it possible for them to pass through the eye of a needle, as it were.”
“I’ll be going.”
“As you please. May I look forward to the pleasure of your company at the clinic tomorrow? Or have you decided to abandon medicine in favor of bicycle theft and girl molesting?”
“I’ll be there in the morning. But… I may want to take off a bit of time in the afternoon.”
“Ah-h-h, I see.” His voice was moist with conspiracy.
“Mlle Treville will be coming into town,” I explained needlessly.
“Ah-h-h, I see.”
“No, you don’t see!” I felt at one time both anger at his implication of wrongdoing and a childish sense of pleasure at being teased about her… as though she were mine to be teased about. “She has to fetch her bicycle,” I clarified.
“Ah-h-h, I see. Yes, of course. Her bicycle. To be sure.”
“I offered to bring it out to her, but she… I don’t know why I am bothering to explain all this to you.”
“Confession is good for the spirit, Montjean. It empties the soul, making space for more sin.”
I rose as the village worthies arrived and excused myself for having to run along without the privilege of their conversation.
After scribbling sketches and impressions in my journal and finding myself several times frozen in midsentence, staring through the page and smiling at nothing, I blew out my lamp and lay back against the bolster. The details of the room slowly emerged through the blackness as my eyes accustomed themselves to the moonglow that softly illuminated the curtain. All that night I drifted in and out of a sleep lightly brushed with images and imaginings that were not quite dreams.
* * *
Incredible though it later seemed, I woke the next morning without a trace of Katya in my mind, without the slightest sense of anticipation, beyond a general feeling of good will and buoyancy. It was not until I had made my toilet and was crossing the square to the cafй where I took morning brioches and coffee that the thought that she was coming into town for her bicycle slipped casually into my mind, then leapt, as it were, from thin script to bold italics in an instant, and a smile brightened my face. It did not occur to me to use the word love in assessing my feelings. Katya had, to be sure, been either in my thoughts or just beyond the rim of them since I left her the day before, and I could recall with tactile memory the brush of her soft warm lips on my cheek. But love? No, I didn’t think of love. I was, however, ashamed to have forgotten all about her arrival for almost half an hour that morning. The lapse made me feel inconstant… unfaithful, almost.
The day crawled by, the passage of time marked only by my trivial duties and tasks, and I began to fear that she would not come after all. The deterioration of the weather increased my apprehension as single dazzling clouds, like torn meringues, sailed lazily overhead and began to pile up on the horizon, thickening to a dark pewter. Would she decide not to dare the walk into Salies? What if she arrived, then a great storm broke, making it impossible for her to return home? We would have to seek shelter somewhere. Under the arcades of the square? No. Beneath a fine old tree? No. The gazebo hidden away at the end of the river park?
… perhaps… my room?
No! No. What nonsense! What an animal you are!
The gazebo then. Yes. The heavy drops would drum on the zinc roof, making conversation impossible. Alone and screened from the world by a silver curtain of rain, we would sit in silence… sharing the silence… holding hands… not needing conversation… no, better yet, our relationship beyond conversation…
“Would it be unreasonable of me to ask when you’re going to finish that prescription, Montjean?” Doctor Gros startled me by asking. “Or is there something beyond that window that has a prior claim on your attention?”
I muttered some apology or another and plied my pestle with unnecessary vigor.
Midafternoon the wind changed, the clouds were herded away to the west, and the sunlight returned—quite inconsiderately, it seemed to me.
The day wore on and the slanting rays of the sun had plunged the arcades on the west side of the square into deep shadow when, for the thousandth time, my attention strayed from my pharmaceutical drudgery and I looked out my window in worried anticipation. She was just passing out of the dense shadow, and her white dress seemed to burst into brightness as she walked with her exuberant stride towards the clinic, hatless, but carrying a closed parasol. My heart twisted with pleasure.
* * *
As I approached her on the square, still tugging on my linen jacket, a silly smile took possession of my face and would not release it, although I was sure every eye in the village followed my slightest gesture. She smiled too, but hers was charming where mine was inane.
There was a cafй frequented by the lady patients, as it offered a thin pallid liquid that claimed to be English tea (then quite fashionable) served with small cakes which, as they were dry and tasteless, were assumed to be quintessentially British. I suggested that we take some refreshment there, after her long walk.
“Exactly four thousand two hundred thirty-three paces, from my door to this spot,” she specified.
“Exactly?” I asked in a tone of bantering admonishment.
She shrugged. “For all I know, it might be. Frankly, I wouldn’t care to sit among the ladies and nibble at biscuits. May I have a citron pressй somewhere were we can sit in the sun?”
“Of course. In fact my mood is so expansive that I might even offer you two citrons pressйs.”
I am sure it was not just my imagination that the pairs of ladies strolling the square or sitting at the “English” cafй glanced rather often in the direction of our table, then looked away with studied indifference as they exchanged brief comments. And I felt there was a tone of insinuation, if not downright collaboration, in the excessive graciousness with which our waiter served us. But my annoyance at these intruders evaporated in the pleasure I took in our conversation, which might have appeared to an eavesdropping stranger to be banal and commonplace, but which seemed to me to be filled with significant things unsaid, meaningful gestures withheld, touching intimacies unexpressed. I asked after her brother, her father, and her ghost, all of whom, it appeared, were thriving—although that may not be the mot juste in the case of a ghost. Every moment after the first quarter hour I dreaded that she would say it was time for her to return home. But she seemed perfectly content to sit, sipping her citron pressй, while drawing me out with questions about the deprivations of my youth, my struggle for an education, my medical and literary aspirations. I spoke almost without pause for the better part of an hour, coming to the conclusion, in my youthful egoism, that she was a delightful and entertaining conversationalist.
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone so concerned with the future as you. My father lives in the distant past, and my brother and I have always lived from moment to moment, or at most from day to day. We never talk about the future. I suppose I have always thought of the future as a great heap of tomorrows each waiting its turn to become today.”
“How then do you make plans?”
“Plans? We don’t. That is… we don’t plan in the sense that we seek to achieve things, or become something. We do, of course, try our best to avoid embarrassments… difficulties.”
“Difficulties of what kind?”
She looked at me over the rim of her glass. “Oh, of all kinds.”
“Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with your brother.”
“I was not aware there was anything wrong with Paul.”
“Maybe if he had met a few difficulties along the way, he wouldn’t be so bored with life, so superior in his attitudes.”
“Aren’t you being a bit of a snob?”
“Me? A snob?”
“Not everyone has had a life of struggle to exercise him and make him strong. Not everyone is free to make a career, to anticipate a future.” Her smile was tinged with a sadness that drew my tenderest feelings towards her. Then, with a faint shift in the corners of her eyes, the smile became a look of serious examination as she searched the features of my face one by one in a way that quite discomfited me. “Dr. Montjean, are you aware that you are handsome?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Most handsome men know it only too well, and their confident posturing is a nuisance. But you don’t seem to be aware of your beauty. It’s an attractive ignorance.”
I shook my head, nonplussed. “Young women shouldn’t call young men beautiful.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Well… it isn’t done.”
“I don’t care about what’s done and not done.”
“Nevertheless… and furthermore it’s embarrassing.”
“Is it? Yes, I suppose it is. Well, I’m afraid we may have a more serious kind of embarrassment coming our way.” With a lift of her chin she indicated the sky, and I looked up to discover that while I had been absorbed in our chat, a shift of wind had brought the pewter-bellied clouds back over the village. Puffs of cool wind began to eddy up little dust swirls on the cobbled square.
“It looks as though we shall have to wait the rain out,” I said, the image of the gazebo coming to mind.
“Oh, but I can’t! Father doesn’t know I’ve come into the village. He would be distressed not to find me home, when he emerges from his ‘work’ for his tea.”
“But… surely you can’t ride your bicycle back in the rain!”
“I don’t see that I have any choice. I’ll make a race of it and, who knows, perhaps I can beat the rain back.”
“I can’t allow it.”
She looked at me with comic surprise. “You can’t allow it?”
“I didn’t mean that exactly.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Listen. Tell you what. I’ll get the clinic’s sulky and tie your machine on behind. And we’ll race the rain together.”
“But… even if we won, surely you would get drenched on the way back.”
“I don’t mind. In fact, I’d rather enjoy it.”
She looked at me quizzically. “You know, I believe you would. Very well. Let’s race the rain.”
* * *
When I asked Doctor Gros if I could use the sulky, he turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Aiding and abetting, the judges will call it! Accomplice before the fact! My career will be in ruins. My reputation will be… well, my career anyway will be damaged. I don’t suppose it’s any use to appeal to your sense of honor, but you might at least—Montjean!” he called after me. “You could have the decency to hear me out, you know!”
* * *
Katya and I came within three minutes of winning our race against the weather, but from the point of view of our appearance when we arrived at the courtyard of Etcheverria, we might as well have lost by half an hour. We were soaked to the skin, as her white silk parasol was comically ineffective.
Just as we turned up the poplar lane, the sky broke open and a brash of warm plump rain burst upon us. By the time I reined in at the courtyard, the leather of the rig was glistening with water, the mare was steaming, and Katya and I looked as though we had just been pulled from a river.
Laughing at each other’s appearance, we entered the central hall, wiping the rain from our faces. My linen jacket hung grey and limp from my shoulders, and my trousers were heavy from waist to knee. For her part, Katya seemed delighted with the adventure, though her dress was sodden and wisps of hair were plastered to her temples and forehead. I suppose we were rather noisy in our excitement, for Paul Treville snatched open the door to the salon and glared at us in fury.
“Katya! For the love of God! Father is working!”
Our delight collapsed in an instant, and I stepped forward. “It’s all my fault, Monsieur Tre—”
“I had assumed as much, Doctor. Katya, what could you have been thinking of?”
“Really, Paul…” Her voice trailed off, and her whole demeanor seemed to shrink into a most uncharacteristic humility.
“We’ll discuss it later,” the brother said. Then he turned and stared through me stonily. “When the good doctor has seen fit to deny us his company.”
“Before I go, Monsieur Treville, I must tell you that I resent your tone, not only on my own behalf, but on that of Katya.”
“What right have you to resent anything I do or say? And by what right do you address my sister by her given name?”
I turned to Katya to make my farewells and was struck by her uncertain, deflated attitude. But it was her slight movement away from me as I began to speak that stung me and left me with nothing to say. I turned back to her brother. “You are quite right, of course, to say that I shouldn’t address Mlle Treville by her first name. It was the lapse of the moment. But I assure you, sir, that—”
“You need assure me, Doctor, of nothing… save for your intention to depart immediately.”
With my whole being, I yearned to hit him in the face. But I resisted for Katya’s sake. Gathering together what dignity my drenched condition and pounding pulse permitted, I bowed curtly and went to the door.
“Just a moment, Doctor!” It is impossible to describe the sudden change in Paul Treville’s tone of voice from that of the haughty, outraged aristocrat to one of concerned fatigue. “Just a moment, if you please.” He closed his eyes and drew a long breath. “Do forgive me. I have been ungracious. Katya, could you look to that new girl in the kitchen? Father will want his supper soon, and she has the appearance of one who would open an egg with a battering ram.”
Without a word to me, without even looking at me, Katya left the hall, her head down and her shoulders rounded.
“And Katya?” Paul arrested her at the entrance to the housekeeping quarters, where she stopped without turning around. He smiled sadly. “Do warm yourself at the fire, and dry your hair. You look frightful.” She nodded and departed. He looked after her for a moment and sighed; then he turned to me. “Would you join me in the salon, Dr. Montjean? I’ve a fire going, and you look as though you could do with a little drying out yourself.
“Brandy?” he asked, following me into the salon.
“Thank you, no,” I said stiffly, uncomfortable and confused by his sudden change of attitude, and even more disturbed by Katya’s humble, almost servile, reaction to his burst of anger. The fire in the marble hearth was inviting, but I did not approach it, still too angry with him to accept any hospitality at his hands.
“Please sit down,” he said as he poured out two large brandies, not having heard, or choosing to ignore, my refusal. With only his left hand free, his empty right sleeve pinned against his bound shoulder, he carried the brandy glasses rather precariously between his fingers. I accepted the glass, not wishing to appear petty, and when he took a chair beside the fire, there was nothing for me to do but join him, my chill skin absorbing the welcome warmth, whether I wanted it or not.
“I take it your sister failed to tell you that she was coming into Salies to collect her bicycle,” I said with some distant dignity.
“You take it correctly. But then, she is not in the habit of accounting to me for her actions. But for more than an hour I have been searching everywhere for her. Consideration for others is not one of Katya’s attributes.”