AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, MRS. TANERAN ANNOUNCED HER departure with such insistence that it seemed almost inappropriate. Mrs. Pecresse wasn’t expecting it and immediately envisioned the catastrophe that was about to descend upon her family. Once Maud was gone, what would happen to her son? Not only did Maud avoid him, but since the suicide of his girlfriend, John was looked upon in The Pardal as a dishonest young man to whom people would hesitate to give their daughter in marriage.
In the mind of the Pecresse woman, it was because of his love for Maud that John had given up his mistress. She didn’t know that Jacques, in turn, had abandoned and mistreated the young woman. Mrs. Pecresse continued to cling to the first part of the story, believing in her son’s guilt. Happily for the Tanerans, she went about moping with disappointment and made no effort to find out the truth.
Mrs. Pecresse knew about her son’s weakness, like her own, for stubbornly insisting on getting what he wanted. Thus, since that tragic night, she feared the worst—for example, that John would leave her. The disdain her son had shown her in the last little while was as terrible for the Pecresse woman as the thought of her own death. Wasn’t the only way of fixing things up to keep Maud at Uderan? Even if Miss Grant turned out to be a young woman whose reputation was no longer intact, even if she had become of late the object of public scandal, she certainly remained desirable, and John did not stop wanting her even more than before.
However, during the dinner, the Pecresse woman did not show her concern in the least. She did her best to appear friendly and to cause the faults she found in the Tanerans to be forgotten. Completely focused on her own designs, she didn’t stop to ask herself whether her plans compromised the very existence of the Taneran family, which already appeared so disunited. But even if she had realized, she would not have hesitated to move ahead, because her behavior was completely dictated by her passions.
That night, Maud Grant left very early for Uderan. She headed straight for the loquat hedge, where weeks earlier she had turned away John Pecresse. There, she stopped a moment to catch her breath. It was light outside, even though the moon hadn’t yet risen. On her right, in the Dior valley, the mist was gathering with the weightlessness of foam. On the other side of the path, the Uderan plateau stretched out as far as the eye could see, bare and motionless.
What a despicable Sunday! From the morning onward something had been hovering over them—their final determination to leave Uderan. Concluding such a day couldn’t have been any different. After that, how light they had felt in returning to the Pecresses’!
As soon as she was alone, however, Maud felt as awake as if she had been sleeping all day. All of a sudden, Sunday was far behind her, and she inhaled the perfume of her regained solitude, which blended with the pungent fragrance of the night. “What an awful day! How they disgust me,” she repeated to herself. “They would disgust anyone…”
But she was already mulling over her words without feeling their reality. Indeed, she was getting closer to George, whom she was dying to see. The young man was supposed to be waiting for her at Uderan, under the linden trees. He would be coming on foot, no doubt, and would be smoking while waiting for her. Under the trees she would be able to discern him only by the light of his cigarette. He would be nervous and ill-disposed, but she was glad, because he concealed his real self less and less with her. She set out again quickly, fearing he might leave before she got back to Uderan.
There was no one under the linden trees, and no noise, except that of the wind in the pine trees, rough and monotonous, like the sound of the sea on the beach pebbles. No matter how much she searched, there was no one.
She went into her room, not knowing what to do, and finally sat down near the pedestal table. “He should come, all the same, at this time…” From the top of the road she would hear him. Even before hearing him, she would discern the sound of his steps, she thought.
Almost immediately, her impatience knew no bounds. Would he come on foot or on horseback? The sound of galloping seemed to come from everywhere at once, tiring her mind and throwing her off center. The man was coming from every direction, from all the roads filled with night, and she didn’t know where to place her hope. How tormenting was this multiple approach, which closed in on her as if she were in the middle of a circle that grew ever tighter and menacing!
Didn’t he usually come earlier? My God, what did this mean? In thinking about their encounter the night before, she thought he must be suffering from the strictness he so naïvely imposed upon himself. “If you don’t mind,” he had said, “I won’t keep coming as often; it’s difficult, given the conditions in which we’re seeing each other… I think it would be more fitting on my part to speak to your mother…”
She had laughed at the obstacles that he himself created, observing with satisfaction how much the temptation to go further tortured him more and more each day.
Even though she was breathing deeply, the air she took in got lost in her body as if through a leak at the bottom of her lungs, making her suffocate. She looked intensely through the barred window, scrutinizing the path through the linden trees, where gusts of wind were stirring up the leaves. “He’s having fun making me wait. I know him…”
She spoke out loud, no longer able to overcome her impatience. The sound of her voice surprised her, and it seemed as if everything around her sent it back in successive echoes. “He’s having fun; he’s having fun making me wait; I know him; he’s having fun…”
There were a hundred ways to understand it. He was having fun. He was having fun, no doubt a bit brutally, like the children of the region who pluck fish from under the rocks, barefoot in the torrents (maybe he was in the greenhouse, watching her). Perhaps he was also playing the odious game of the man who heightens his pleasure through an exasperating wait.
At this thought, her impatience became frenzied. Her attraction to George had grown as he had made himself scarcer these last few days. She got up, turned off the light, and went out.
The moon had now risen, and Maud’s hunched-up shadow danced beside her like a little animal, happy to follow her. On the plateau, the wind was barely blowing, and the smell of hay floated over the pasturelands of the Dior. There was still nobody on the roads.
Maud walked very quickly. Her freedom intoxicated her, all the more so because it was only an apparent freedom. Her own folly amused her. How surprised he would be to see her! She was going to trap him, and he couldn’t escape back to his own place, the way he fled Uderan every night.
She turned off toward the village. Only a few windows were still lit up, the blinds closed; the labored breathing coming from a few houses was evidence of the torpidity of this summer night. Maud moved away from the inhabited areas and went by an abandoned building—the home of a man who had hanged himself. The tragic event had taken place shortly after they had moved into Uderan; she remembered it well. Fear seized her, as it always did in going past the house, but a force stronger than fear compelled her to go on.
When she reached the lane lined with cypress trees she stopped. The house was lit up; she was no longer in danger of missing George. She felt a bit of shame in coming here. Her heart was beating so wildly she could hardly stand the pounding in her temples and throughout her whole body.
For a moment, the image of her mother sleeping in the large guest room at the Pecresses’ passed before her eyes. Maud feared the moment she was in and also loathed the idea that she was hiding herself.
Tomorrow—what would tomorrow be like if her mother learned something? Standing still, she tried to bring back the image of her mother in a fit of rage, terrible and ugly. But her attempt to scare herself was in vain. Her mother was still sleeping with the humble and tired face of a vanquished woman, and Maud could not picture her in the heat of anger or an emotional outbreak. “She’ll never know I came; how would she know? That’s the only thing that counts…”