THE SECRET (_concluded_)

_August 25._ After a long search he found the house of Valentine Blondeau on the other side of Bourges, at the far end of the new suburbs. A woman on the doorstep--Valentine’s mother--seemed to be waiting for him. She was a good housewife in appearance, heavy, shabby, but still good-looking. She watched him come with curiosity and when he asked, ‘Are the Misses Blondeau at home?’ she explained gently and kindly that they had gone to Paris on August 15. ‘They forbade me to say where they were going,’ she added, ‘but their letters will be forwarded from their old address.’

As he pushed his bicycle back along the little garden, he thought: ‘She’s gone.... All is over as I wanted.... I’ve driven her to this. “I shall become a bad girl for certain,” she said. And I’ve pushed her into it! I’ve ruined the girl Frantz was engaged to!’

And he kept saying to himself in a low voice like a madman, ‘So much the better! So much the better!’ knowing quite well that it was really ‘So much the worse!’ and that under the eyes of that woman, before reaching the gate, he was going to stumble and fall on his knees.

He never thought of luncheon, but stopped at a café in which he wrote a long letter to Valentine, only to cry aloud, only to get rid of the despairing cry which choked him. His letter kept repeating endlessly: ‘You could!... You could!... You could stoop to this!... You could ruin yourself like this!’

Officers were drinking near him. One of them was noisily telling a story about a woman which could be heard in snatches: ‘I said to her ... you ought to know me ... I play with your husband every evening!’ The others laughed and turning round spat behind the benches. Meaulnes, pale and dusty, watched them as a beggar might. He imagined them holding Valentine on their knees.

* * * * *

For a long time he rode round the cathedral on his bicycle muttering, ‘As a matter of fact, I really came to see the cathedral.’ You could see it rise on the deserted square, enormous and indifferent, at the end of every street. These streets were narrow and filthy as the alleys that surround village churches. Here and there hung a red lantern, sign of a house of ill fame.... Meaulnes felt his utter misery in this unclean, vicious quarter, nestling, as in old times, under the buttressed walls of the cathedral. There came over him a peasant’s fear, a loathing for this church of the town, where vices are sculptured on the cornices, which is built among evil places and has no remedy for the purest sorrows of love.

Two girls passed, street walkers, their arms round one another’s waists, and looked at him boldly. From disgust or for fun, to avenge his love or to destroy it, Meaulnes followed them slowly on his bicycle, and one of them, a wretched girl whose thin yellow hair was held up at the back in a false chignon, gave him a rendezvous for six o’clock in the Garden of the Archbishop’s Palace--the very garden in which Frantz in one of his letters had arranged to meet poor Valentine.

He did not say no, realising that he would have left the town far behind by that time. And she stopped a long while at her low window over the sloping street, making vague signs to him.

* * * * *

He hurried to regain the road.

Before leaving, he could not resist the mournful wish to pass for the last time before Valentine’s house. He gazed at it and was able to gather food for sorrow. It was one of the last houses in the suburb and the street became a road from that place.... In front a sort of empty plot made something like a little square. No one was at any of the windows, no one in the yard or anywhere. Only a dirty powdered girl passed along the wall, dragging two little boys in rags.

There had Valentine passed her childhood, there she had begun to look at the world with her confident, wise eyes. She had worked, stitching, behind those windows. And Frantz had gone by to see her, to smile at her, along this very street. But now nothing remained, nothing.... The sad afternoon dragged on and Meaulnes knew only that somewhere, this very day, the melancholy place she would never come to again was passing before the mind’s eye of Valentine, now ruined.

* * * * *

The long ride ahead of him must have remained the last succour against his woe, his last enforced distraction before being plunged into its depths.

He went away. By the side of the road, and amongst the trees at the edge of the water along the valley, delicious farmhouses showed their pointed gables with green trellises. Down there, no doubt, on the lawns, girls were pensively talking of love. You could imagine souls down there, beautiful souls....

But for Meaulnes at that moment there existed but one love, that unsatisfying love which had just been buffeted so cruelly, and the girl among all girls whom he ought to have protected and kept safe was precisely the girl whom he had just sent to her ruin.

* * * * *

A few hurried lines of the journal informed me that he had planned to find Valentine again, at all costs, before it was too late. A date, in the corner of one page, led me to believe that this was the long journey for which Madame Meaulnes was making preparations when I came to the Ferté-d’Angillon to upset everything. Meaulnes was noting down his memories and projects in the deserted ‘Town Hall’ one fine morning at the end of August--when I had pushed open the door and brought him the great news which he had ceased to expect. He had been caught, checked by his old adventure, without daring to do anything or confess anything. Then remorse began and regret and grief, sometimes stifled, sometimes emerging in triumph, until his wedding day on which the cry of the bohemian in the fir wood reminded him dramatically of his young manhood’s first oath.

* * * * *

He had hastily scribbled in this same composition test book a few words, at dawn, before going away (with her permission--but for ever) from Yvonne de Galais, his wife since the previous day:

‘I am going. I must follow the tracks of the two bohemians who came yesterday to the fir wood and have gone on bicycles toward the east. I shall not come near Yvonne de Galais again until I can bring back with me and install in “Frantz’s house,” Frantz and Valentine married.’

* * * * *

‘This manuscript, which I began as a secret journal and which has become my confession, is to be the property, if I do not come back, of my friend François Seurel.’

* * * * *

He must have hastily slipped the exercise-book under the others, relocked his old small schoolboy trunk and disappeared.