THE SECRET (_continued_)

Then the journal began again.

He had noted memories of a stay they had both made somewhere in the country: I do not know where. But, strange to say, from this moment, perhaps from a feeling of secret modesty, the journal had been kept in such a broken, irregular manner, scribbled down so hurriedly, that I have been obliged to go over it again myself and rewrite all this part of his story.

* * * * *

_June 14._ When he awoke early in the morning in the bedroom of the inn, the sun lit up the black curtain’s red design. Farm labourers were drinking their morning coffee in the inn parlour and talking in loud voices. They were put out, in a rude and kindly way, about one of their employers. Doubtless Meaulnes had been hearing this restful noise for a long time in his sleep, for he took no notice at first. The curtain covered with grapes reddened by the sun, the morning voices rising to the silent bedroom, all this mingled with the one impression of waking up in the country at the beginning of delightful summer holidays.

He got up, knocked lightly on the door into the next room without obtaining a reply and opened it a little, noiselessly. Then he saw Valentine and understood where his feeling of peace and happiness came from. She was asleep, quite still and silent: you could not hear her breathe: she slept as a bird might sleep. For a long time he watched this child’s face with the shut eyes, this child’s face that was so peaceful you could not wish it to waken or ever be troubled.

She made no other movement to show she was no longer asleep than to open her eyes and look at him.

* * * * *

As soon as he was dressed, Meaulnes came back to the girl.

‘We are late,’ she said.

And she immediately became like a housewife in her home.

She tidied the rooms, brushed the clothes which Meaulnes had worn the day before and, when she came to the trousers, was quite upset. The bottoms of the legs were covered with thick mud. She hesitated, and then, with careful precaution before brushing them, began to scrape off the first coat of mud with a knife.

‘That’s what little boys do at Sainte-Agathe,’ Meaulnes said, ‘when they have taken a toss in the mud.’

‘Oh! Mother taught me that,’ Valentine said.

* * * * *

... And such was exactly the helpmate that the sportsman and peasant which Admiral Meaulnes was might have wished for previous to his mysterious adventure.

* * * * *

_June 15._ At the dinner at the farm where they were invited, much to their annoyance (thanks to friends who introduced them as husband and wife), she behaved as shyly as a young bride.

Candles had been lighted in two stands, and one was put at each end of the white linen-covered table, as at a quiet country wedding. Faces in that dim light, when people looked down, were hidden in shadow.

On the right of Patrice (the farmer’s son) sat Valentine, then Meaulnes, who remained gloomy and silent to the end of dinner, though he was the one they generally addressed. Ever since he had resolved, in order to check gossip, to pass Valentine off for his wife in this deserted village, regret and remorse tore at him. And while Patrice was playing the host like a proper squire, Meaulnes kept thinking: ‘By rights, I should be presiding at my own wedding feast this evening, in a low dining-room like this, a lovely room I know well.’

Valentine, close to him, timidly refused everything that was offered her. You would have said she was a peasant girl. At each fresh offer she looked at her friend and seemed to want to hide against him. Patrice had been vainly insisting for a long time that she should empty her glass, until at last Meaulnes leaned towards her and said gently: ‘You must drink, dear little Valentine.’

Then she meekly drank. And Patrice smilingly congratulated the young man on having such an obedient wife.

But both of them, Valentine and Meaulnes, remained silent and thoughtful. For one thing, they were tired; their feet were soaked in the mud of their walk and felt frozen on the newly washed kitchen flagstones. And then the young man was forced from time to time to say: ‘My wife, Valentine, my wife....’

And every time he heavily pronounced the word, before these unknown peasants in this dark room, he felt that he was doing a wrong.

* * * * *

_June 17._ The afternoon of this last day began badly.

Patrice and his wife went for a walk with them. Little by little the two couples became separated, among the rough slopes covered with heather. Meaulnes and Valentine sat down in a little copse amongst some junipers.

The wind brought drops of rain: the weather was lowering. The evening, it seemed, had a bitter taste, the taste of such gloom as love itself could not dispel.

They stopped there, for a long time, in their hiding-place, crouched under branches, talking little. Then the weather lifted. It became fine. They believed, now, that all would be well.

And they began to speak of love. Valentine talked and talked....

‘This,’ she said, ‘is what the man I was engaged to promised me, like the child he was: we should immediately have a home like a thatched cottage hidden away in the country. It was all ready, he said. We were to arrive as though returning from a long journey on the evening of our wedding day, about the time that night comes. And along the roads and in the courtyard, and hidden in bushes, unknown children would have a fête to welcome us, shouting, “Long life to the bride!” What nonsense, isn’t it?’

Meaulnes listened, speechless and anxious. There came back to him the echo of sounds once heard before. And in the voice of the girl as she told this story, there seemed the tone of vague regret.

But she feared that she had hurt him. She turned towards him with warmth and kindness: ‘All I have I want to give to you,’ she said, ‘something which has been more precious to me than anything ... and you shall burn it!’

Then, looking straight at him, anxiously, she produced a small packet of letters from her pocket and handed them to him, letters from the man to whom she had been engaged.

Ah! instantly he recognised the fine handwriting. Why had it not occurred to him sooner! It was the handwriting of Frantz, the bohemian, which he had once seen on the despairing note left in the bedroom at the manor....

Now they were walking along a narrow lane, between daisies and grasses lit by the slanting rays of the sun at five in the afternoon. Meaulnes was so stupefied that he could not yet grasp the extent of the disaster which all this meant for him. He read because she asked him to read. Childish, sentimental, pathetic words and phrases.... Such as, in the last letter:

‘_... Ah! you have lost that little heart, unforgivable little Valentine. What’s going to happen to us? At any rate I am not superstitious...._’

Meaulnes read, half blinded by regret and anger, his face motionless but pale, and he shuddered. Valentine, uneasy to see him like this, looked to find what page he was at and what so bothered him.

‘Oh! that’s a jewel,’ she explained quickly--‘a jewel he gave me and made me swear to keep always. That was one of his mad ideas.’

But she managed only to exasperate Meaulnes.

‘Mad!’ he said, putting the letters in his pocket. ‘Why repeat that word? Why not have wanted to believe in him? I knew him; he was the most wonderful fellow in the world!’

‘You knew him!’ she cried at the pitch of excitement. ‘You knew Frantz de Galais?’

‘He was my best friend; he was my brother-in-arms, and now I’ve taken the girl he was engaged to from him!--Ah!’ he went on, in fury, ‘what mischief you’ve done us, you who would believe in nothing! You’re the cause of it all. It’s you who’ve mucked it all, mucked it all....’

She wanted to speak to him, wanted to take his hand, but he repulsed her brutally.

‘Go away! Let me be!’

‘All right,’ she said, her face hot, stammering and half crying, ‘if that’s it, I shall indeed go.--Make my way back to Bourges with my sister. And if you don’t come and find me--you know, don’t you, that father’s too poor to keep me--well, I shall go right back to Paris. I shall tramp the streets as I’ve done once already; and I shall become a bad girl for certain, I know I shall, as I’ve no job any more....’

And she went off to find her belongings to catch the train, while Meaulnes, not even looking at her go off, kept walking on anywhere.

* * * * *

The journal broke off again.

Rough drafts of letters followed once more, the letters of a man undecided and at his wit’s end. Back at the Ferté-d’Angillon Meaulnes wrote to Valentine, apparently to reaffirm his resolve never to see her again and to give her the precise reasons for it, but in reality, perhaps, so that she could reply. In one of these letters he asked her what, in his first distress, he had not even dreamed of asking her: Did she know where the manor was, the manor that had been so searched for?... In another, he begged her to make it up with Frantz de Galais. He would set himself to find him again.... All the letters of which I saw the rough drafts could not have been sent. But he must have written two or three times without receiving any reply. It must have been a time of fierce and miserable struggle for him, in complete isolation. As the hope of ever seeing Yvonne de Galais again had vanished, he must have felt his great resolution weaken little by little. And from the pages which I shall presently give--the last in the journal--I imagine that he must have hired a bicycle one fine morning at the beginning of the holidays and gone to Bourges to visit the cathedral.

He started out early by the lovely road through the woods, inventing, as he went along, any number of reasons for appearing before the girl he had thrown over, without loss of dignity and without asking her to make it up.

The last four pages which I have been able to put together give the narrative of this journey and of this last mistake....