I asked, laughing, “What! all that?”
“Everything that you can imagine,” was his answer.
He introduced me to her. She was very pleasant, on easy terms with me, as was natural, and begged me to look upon their house as my own. But I felt that he, Blérot, did not belong to me any longer. Our intimacy was cut off definitely, and we hardly found a word to say to each other.
I soon took my leave, and shortly afterwards went to the East, returning by way of Russia, Germany, Sweden, and Holland, after an absence of eighteen months from Paris.
The morning after my arrival, as I was walking along the boulevards to feel the air of Paris once more, I saw a pale man with sunken cheeks coming toward me, who was as much like Blérot as it was possible for an emaciated tubercular man to resemble a strong, ruddy, rather stout man. I looked at him in surprise, and asked myself: “Can it possibly be he?” But he saw me, uttered a cry, and came toward me with outstretched arms. I opened mine and we embraced in the middle of the boulevard.
After we had gone up and down once or twice from the Rue Drouot to the Vaudeville Theatre, just as we were taking leave of each other—for he already seemed quite done up with walking, I said to him:
“You don’t look at all well. Are you ill?”
“I do feel rather out of sorts,” was all he said. He looked like a man who was going to die, and I felt a flood of affection for my dear old friend, the only real one that I had ever had. I squeezed his hands.
“What is the matter with you? Are you in pain?”
“A little tired; but it is nothing.”
“What does your doctor say?”
“He calls it anaemia, and has ordered me to eat no white meat and to take tincture of iron.”
A suspicion flashed across me.
“Are you happy?” I asked him.
“Yes, very happy; my wife is charming, and I love her more than ever.”
But I noticed that he grew rather red and seemed embarrassed, as if he was afraid of any further questions, so I took him by the arm and pushed him into a café, which was nearly empty at that time of day. I forced him to sit down, and looking him straight in the face, I said:
“Look here, old fellow, just tell me the exact truth.”
“I have nothing to tell you,” he stammered.
“That is not true,” I replied, firmly. “You are ill, mentally perhaps, and you dare not reveal your secret to anyone. Something or other is doing you harm, and I mean you to tell me what it is. Come, I am waiting for you to begin.”
Again he got very red, stammered, and turning his head away, he said:
“It is very idiotic—but I—I am done for!”
As he did not go on, I said:
“Just tell me what it is.”
“Well, I have got a wife who is killing me, that is all,” he said abruptly, almost desperately as if he had uttered a torturing thought, as yet unrealised.
I did not understand at first. “Does she make you unhappy? She makes you suffer, night and day? How? What is it?”
“No,” he replied in a low voice, as if he were confessing some crime; “I love her too much, that is all.”
I was thunderstruck at this unexpected avowal, and then I felt inclined to laugh, but at length I managed to reply:
“But surely, at least so it seems to me, you might manage to—to love her a little less.”
He had got very pale again, but finally he made up his mind to speak to me openly, as he used to do formerly.
“No,” he said, “that is impossible; and I am dying from it, I know; it is killing me, and I am really frightened. Some days, like today, I feel inclined to leave her, to go away altogether, to start for the other end of the world, so as to live for a long time; and then, when the evening comes, I return home in spite of myself, but slowly, and feeling uncomfortable. I go upstairs hesitatingly and ring, and when I go in I see her there sitting in her armchair, and she says, ‘How late you are,’ I kiss her, and we sit down to dinner. During the meal I think: ‘I will go directly it is over, and take the train for somewhere, no matter where’; but when we get back to the drawing room I am so tired that I have not the courage to get up out of my chair, and so I remain, and then—and then—I succumb again.”
I could not help smiling again. He saw it, and said: “You may laugh, but I assure you it is very horrible.”
“Why don’t you tell your wife?” I asked him. “Unless she be a regular monster she would understand.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It is all very well for you to talk. I don’t tell her because I know her nature. Have you ever heard it said of certain women, ‘She has just married a third time?’ Well, and that makes you laugh as you did just now, and yet it is true. What is to be done? It is neither her fault nor mine. She is so, because nature has made her so; I assure you, my dear old friend, she has the temperament of a Messalina. She does not know it, but I do; so much the worse for me. She is charming, gentle, tender, and thinks that our conjugal intercourse, which is wearing me out and killing me, is natural and quite moderate. She seems like an ignorant schoolgirl, and she really is ignorant, poor child.
“Every day I form energetic resolutions, for you must understand that I am dying. But one look of her eyes, one of those looks in which I can read the ardent desire of her lips, is enough for me,
