“Go back into your room, Madame! Get away from the window at once!”
The policeman’s wife had not at first understood, and had remained staring in considerable bewilderment at this shame-ravaged countenance emerging so suddenly from the house opposite.
“Will you go back into your room!” screamed Ferdinand. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Madame— you ought to be ashamed!”
Still unable to gather what he was talking about, and being most curious to know, she had leaned out a little farther, bringing her bosom entirely over the window-ledge and causing a certain undulation within the corset. Ferdinand nearly had a seizure. Dreadful consequences ensued. The policeman came within an ace of being dismissed the service; he had to move and was never promoted sergeant. As for the two boys, in addition to going without dessert for six months and being made to copy out the funeral oration to Henrietta Maria of England fifteen times, they suffered the further humiliation of being escorted to and from school every day by the servant. They never again set eyes on the pink corset, and consoled themselves by spending an extra five minutes in the privy on Sunday mornings.
Ferdinand himself could not enter the privy without being instantly assailed by the consciousness of sin that seemed to pervade it. Could he have done so, he would have confiscated his sons’ genitals and only lent them back to them, for perhaps five minutes a month, when they were married and set up in life. But his suspicions were not confined to Frederic and Antoine. They were directed no less at Lucienne and his wife, and with no less justification.
Lucienne had settled the matter in her mind. For her there existed beneath the lowering heavens one small, locked place where without any twinge of remorse she might allow her thoughts to dwell upon the burly form of the policeman. Her conscience did not accompany her into this retreat, and what went on there was no business of her confessor or of the Demoiselles Hermeline; nor did the least reference to it ever appear in her book of Conscience Scrutiny. When she thought about the matter at other times her only real regret was that the policeman should be a person of inferior social status. She had tried to substitute the Colonel of Hussars and other more suitable figures, but being unable to evoke their images at the appropriate time and place had been obliged to abandon the attempt. Only the policeman would do. It must be said, however, that she indulged in no great imaginative debauches. Her ignorance of physical facts was such as reflected the utmost credit upon the moral tone and high standard of conduct prevailing in the establishment of the Demoiselles Hermeline. The policeman’s role was merely that of a witness, unaccountably sympathetic, of sins so instinctive and of such innocence that they warranted no flicker of the flames of Hell, and scarcely even a hint of Purgatory. The real danger lay in this process of detachment, since it might be foreseen that a time would come when sins more searching and more real would be consigned to the same limbo of forgetfulness.
But there was no hope that Mme. Haudouin would ever forget the policeman. Her husband’s embraces gave her no pleasure. In the early days of their marriage she had been deluded by Ferdinand, whose initial access of enthusiasm was due largely to his astonishment at the loss of his virginity. The haste induced by his excessive modesty had left her invariably unsatisfied; but this was something which she hoped time and experience would cure. No doubt she was in any case a little disappointed. Among the girls at the Demoiselles Hermeline’s establishment it was the generally held belief that love was something to be consummated on elegant sofas in rooms of the boudoir kind. Moreover her parents, town-dwellers for two generations, were addicted to a slightly coarse freedom of speech and behaviour, indulging in pats and cuddles and murmured asides which led Helene to suppose that love-making, even conjugal, was something that did not take place except when the way had been prepared.
From the outset she had to give up all thought of sofas and any other embellishment which might foster the illusion of a decorative caprice arising out of an elegant tete a tete. Such flights were not for Ferdinand, who considered that the place for love-making was in bed and at the time when it was reasonable to be in bed. And before getting into bed he made use of the chamber-pot. This was the only occasion when he could expose himself without discomfort in the presence of his wife, being encouraged and confirmed in the state of mind by all the generations of Haudouins who had acted likewise. It was a straightforward act, without mystery, and the sound of splashing water to which he was accustomed from his earliest childhood greeted his ears like a song of bourgeois tranquillity. Helene, however, did not easily grow accustomed to it. He might, she considered, have taken his precautions a little easier (as a cavalry officer would have done!). But all this was relatively unimportant. What seriously mattered was that Ferdinand made no attempt to repair the clumsiness due in the first place to his inexperience. His groping and unaided fumblings sometimes hurt and never satisfied her. He took his hasty pleasure for himself alone, disregarding her murmured protests and angrily rebuffing her attempts to assist, since to him the thought of her active connivance was outrageous. The act of the flesh was to him a shameful commerce transacted in unmentionable physical regions where the hand, the instrument of consciousness, must play no part.
So by degrees Mme. Haudouin had reverted to the habits of her girlhood, associating with them the image of the policeman, whose robust form and amiable, bovine countenance were in soothing contrast to those of her husband. The entry of Lieutenant Galais into her life made no difference. Helene could not allow herself to picture him in a role reserved for the flesh alone, and her love for him continued on a high, romantic plane. Despite her husband's political affiliations, she continued to be extremely devout and attended Communion several times a year. She confessed with the utmost particularity, sometimes to an elderly priest who, scarcely listening, sent her away with words of reassurance, and sometimes to a younger one who studied her case minutely, seeking to find a remedy. Once, when she was spending a few days at Honore’s house, she confessed to the cure of Claquebue. He exhorted her to resignation, and in words of great tact gave her to understand that no course could be more truly wise or Christian than her evocation of the policeman. He refused to see in it any sin of intention, or even so much as an evil thought, but considered it rather the reverse side of a wifely modesty that was wholly admirable.
Ten
Honore read aloud:
“My dear parents — I am coming out of hospital the day after to-morrow. I put my shoulder out on the pay-office stairs fetching the adjutant’s gloves. I’m all right now, but I couldn’t be in the fourteenth July parade which was a bit of a pity but I’m all right no%v. I didn’t write to tell you in case you were worried. The gloves had been left in the captain’s room and so now I have been given five days’ leave and I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you next Wednesday. I’m not going on manoeuvres and perhaps they’ll shift me to another company and I’ll be sorry about that because our sergeant has been very nice to me. It was a bit of luck getting some leave and I’ll tell you about it. Well, I hope I’ll find you all all right and being that my shoulder is all right I will be able to help a bit with the harvest.