“I shouldn’t have dared say so. I assure you that after a little practice one gets extraordinarily clever at it; it’s a kind of divination—intuition, if you prefer. However, one sometimes goes off on a wrong track; the important thing is not to persist in it. Do you know how all our conversations begin? Boris starts by telling me what he has dreamt the night before.”
“How do you know he doesn’t invent?”
“And even if he did invent! … All the inventions of a diseased imagination reveal something.”
She was silent for a moment or two, and then: “ ‘Invention,’ ‘diseased imagination’ … no, no, that’s not it. Words betray one’s meaning. Boris dreams aloud in my presence. Every morning he consents to remain during one hour in that state of semi-somnolence in which the images which present themselves to us escape from the control of our reason. They no longer group and associate themselves according to ordinary logic, but according to unforeseen affinities; above all, they answer to a mysterious inward compulsion—which is the very thing I want to discover; and the ramblings of this child are far more instructive than the most intelligent analysis of the most conscious of minds could be. Many things escape the reason, and a person who should attempt to understand life by merely using his reason would be like a man trying to take hold of a flame with the tongs. Nothing remains but a bit of charred wood, which immediately stops flaming.”
She was again silent and began to turn over the pages of my book.
“How very little you penetrate into the human soul!” she cried; then she laughed and added abruptly:
“Oh, I don’t mean you in particular; when I say you, I mean novelists in general. Most of your characters seem to be built on piles; they have neither foundations nor subsoil. I really think there’s more truth to be found in the poets; everything which is created by the intelligence alone is false. But now I am talking of what isn’t my business. … Do you know what puzzles me in Boris? I believe him to be exceedingly pure.”
“Why should that puzzle you?”
“Because I don’t know where to look for the source of the evil. Nine times out of ten a derangement like his has its origin in some sort of ugly secret.”
“Such a one exists in every one of us, perhaps,” said I, “but it doesn’t make us all ill, thank Heaven!”
At that Mme. Sophroniska rose; she had just seen Bronja pass by the window.
“Look!” said she, pointing her out to me; “there is Boris’s real doctor. She is looking for me; I must leave you; but I shall see you again, shan’t I?”
For that matter, I understand what Sophroniska reproaches the novel for not giving her; but in this case, certain reasons of art escape her—higher reasons, which make me think that a good novelist will never be made out of a good naturalist.
I have introduced Laura to Mme. Sophroniska. They seem to take to each other, and I am glad of it. I have fewer scruples about keeping to myself when I know they are chatting together. I am sorry that Bernard has no companion of his own age; but at any rate the preparation for his examination keeps him occupied for several hours a day. I have been able to start work again on my novel.
III
Edouard Explains His Theory of the Novel
Notwithstanding first appearances, and though each of them did his best, Uncle Edouard and Bernard were only getting on together fairly well. Laura was not feeling satisfied, either. How should she be? Circumstances had forced her to assume a part for which she was not fitted; her respectability made her feel uncomfortable in it. Like those loving and docile creatures who make the most devoted wives, she had need of the proprieties to lean on, and felt herself without strength now that she was without the frame of her proper surroundings. Her situation as regards Edouard seemed to her more and more false every day. What she suffered from most and what she found unendurable, if she let her mind dwell on it, was the thought that she was living at the expense of this protector—or rather that she was giving him nothing in exchange—or more exactly, that Edouard asked nothing of her in exchange, while she herself felt ready to give him everything. “Benefits,” says Tacitus, through the mouth of Montaigne, “are only agreeable as long as one can repay them”; no doubt this is only true of noble souls, but without question Laura was one of these. She, who would have liked to give, was on the contrary continually receiving, and this irritated her against Edouard. Moreover when she went over the past in her mind, it seemed to her that Edouard had deluded her by awakening a love in her which she still felt strong within her and then by evading this love and leaving it without an object. Was not that the secret motive of her errors—of her marriage with Douviers, to which she had resigned herself, to which Edouard had led her—and then of her yielding so soon after to the solicitations of the springtime? For she must needs admit it to herself, in Vincent’s arms it was still Edouard that she sought. And as she could not understand her lover’s coldness, she accused herself of being responsible for it, and imagined that she might have vanquished him, had she had more beauty or more boldness; and as she could not succeed in hating him, it was herself she upbraided and depreciated, denying herself all value, and refusing to allow herself any reason for existing or the possession of any virtue.
Let us add further that this camping-out style of life, necessitated by the arrangement of the rooms, though it might seem amusing to her companions, hurt her delicacy in
