“Why not? It’s a little whimsical, but it’s alive. Your own bedroom is pretty, but it looks like a Decorative Arts exhibition.”
“And yours looks like a dustbin.”
“Thank you… Listen,” he said, more conciliatory, “I didn’t come to discuss spring-cleaning, but to take you to see Madame Osiris… the clairvoyant.”
He began to laugh:
“Her salon is full of women cooks, but I’ve been promised favourable treatment. She will tell us whether it’s a boy or a girl…”
He paused. Hedwige had turned her back on him and was looking out of the window so as not to see this irritating, grimacing, fanatical man.
“What’s the matter, Hedwige? Won’t you come with me? Come now, pull yourself together! Whoever loves me follows me.”
Hedwige turned round, her teeth gritted:
“I won’t follow you.”
“So you don’t love me?”
“Not at this moment, certainly.”
“Because of… because of my disorderliness?… Because of the clairvoyant? Don’t be stubborn now, come.”
He felt that he had chosen the wrong moment, that he had been wrong to insist, that by calling on Hedwige unexpectedly he had put her nerves on edge and was making himself odious, but he could not stop himself; upsetting Hedwige, hurting her and almost horrifying her were a good thing; they satisfied a spitefulness that was becoming exacerbated within him.
“Go to the clairvoyant on your own,” said Hedwige, “don’t look into the crystal ball, you won’t see happiness there; you can read the tea leaves: your future is darkness.”
All of a sudden she began to cry, her head buried in her scarf, with little choked sobs.
“I’m frightened, something’s going to happen. You burn the candle at both ends. Life can’t go on like this, you’ll wear yourself out, you’ll go mad! And I’ll become a nervous wreck! There’s a curse upon you. Mother can sense it too.”
Pierre stopped her severely:
“Your family support me fully, I know. That’s not the question. What matters to me is to know whether you’re tired of me, whether you refuse to follow me towards greatness. Hurrying is my own particular greatness…”
He looked at his wrist automatically.
“There we go, now my watch has stopped! This flawless chronometer is quite impossible!”
He took it off and handed it to Hedwige.
“Have it repaired for me right away. I can’t live without a watch.”
Hedwige took the gold strap with its square dial and looked at it with loathing.
“My engagement present,” she said.
With a violent gesture, she hurled it out of the window. Pierre stared at her in astonishment for a moment, then he leapt up onto the window casement which he closed, fearful no doubt for his black, nickel-plated perpetual-motion pendulum.
“My beautiful chronometer!” he said sorrowfully, standing in the midst of his clutter.
Hedwige looked at him with disapproval, but, having calmed down, she then said nothing.
Pierre was lost in thought; a long silence ensued. She looked at him, secretly anxious; Pierre’s silences always culminated in some dreaded new initiative. She could feel the baby moving, she closed her eyes and relished the symphony that was playing inside her; flooded with happiness, she had completely forgotten Pierre’s presence; all at once she felt him by her feet, leaning against her knees.
“Listen to me, Hedwige,” he said in a low voice, “this child…”
“This child?”
She braced herself.
“I can’t go on like this,” he continued. “It’s making me ill. Yes, I know what you’re going to say; don’t make fun of me; you’re the one who’s not well, but I swear to you that I am just as much and even, from a certain point of view, more so… I’ve thought a great deal… Just now, you were furious, but now you’re calmer… and I know that you love me; don’t you want to help me and release me from this torment?”
“I don’t understand,” said Hedwige.
“I have an idea… I’ve found something that can solve everything.”
“But what, solve what?”
“Very well… what I mean… is that you can equally well give birth at seven months as at nine.”
Hedwige drew away from him; she stared at him, speechless, her face pale.
“Yes. The child will thrive wonderfully. Keeping it two months more than necessary is absurd when one can do otherwise… Don’t look at me like that… what I’m suggesting to you is, if not normal, totally reasonable at least… Hedwige, don’t make that face… You haven’t understood me,” he concluded more slowly.
Hedwige pushed him away and stood up.
“You’re the one who hasn’t understood, unfortunately, how inhuman what you’re suggesting is! Waiting for this baby is my supreme delight, it’s what I live for! And I’m not even waiting for it; this little creature exists, just as alive as if he or she were already living with us. I could never be happier than I am bearing him snugly inside me; everything I feel, any discomfort I experience, is sweet to me. Can’t you see that I’m desperate for it to last and for the child to be perfect, and you, with your cruelty, want to take it away from me! If you were a human being instead of a locomotive, I would try to make you understand how I feel, but what’s the point?”
“I beseech you, Hedwige… Please agree… It would be wonderful if you were to agree…”
She rose to her feet, firmly balanced on her large, heavy belly, and looked him straight in the eyes, no longer with anger, but with hatred.
“You’re a lunatic.”
“I have the address of a doctor who is willing.”
“Shut up.”
“Hedwige, darling…”
“Get out! Get out! I don’t want to see you again.”
Hedwige had become so distant, so fearsome, so Boisrosé that Pierre left, slowly for once.
CHAPTER XXII
THE “YEAR 1000 EXHIBITION”, brought from Paris to Chicago, was due to open in a fortnight’s time under the auspices of the Field Museum.
Pierre set off for America like a cannon shot.
He took with him some precious pieces that he hoped to sell in the United States once the exhibition was over, European booty that exacerbated the stripping bare of the Old World without embellishing the New. But antique dealers care little about such concerns: they practise their profession with the same insensitivity as the castrator who deprives the young thoroughbred of its illustrious offspring.
Pierre spent the four-day sea crossing stretched out on deck, in a state of total inertia, watching the horizon rising and falling, because for men like him there can be no half-measure: they must either be moving about at breakneck speed or else lethargic, like all those who can only find their equilibrium in movement, in aeroplanes, or in racing dinghies that depend on their own forward motion and sail on supported by something harder than a keel, by the sea that solidifies speed.
Pierre had forbidden himself to think of Hedwige: we know how little these prohibitions mean. It only required her image, kept strictly at a distance, to take advantage of a thousandth of a second’s lack of concentration and creep into his visual range; and Pierre would relive Hedwige’s departure for Saint-Germain, that frenzied haste when, in a flash, her suitcases were packed, filled and spirited away with a speed that Pierre himself could not have matched. He had watched all this without lifting a finger to detain his wife, almost comforted by the notion that he would not see her any more. The separation would not be long, six weeks at the most, which, by affording him a change of surroundings and keeping him busy with work, would bring him, without his noticing, to the delivery date so eagerly awaited. Thanks to this journey, Hedwige would live, Pierre would live. He admitted to himself honestly that he exhausted her more than any great sorrow could, more than any long illness. When she cried out “You’re killing me!” she was not speaking figuratively; she felt that she was in danger of dying, and the child with her. Each day he crucified them a little more.