Abbe Mouret's Transgression: Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Every day in this wise she made him sit at the window during the cool
hours of morning. He would now attempt to take a few steps, leaning the
while on the furniture. A rosy tint appeared upon his cheeks, and his
hands began to lose their waxy transparency. But, while he thus regained
health, his senses remained in a state of stupor which reduced him to
the vegetative life of some poor creature born only the day before.
Indeed, he was nothing but a plant; his sole perception was that of the
air which floated round him. He lacked the blood necessary for the
efforts of life, and remained, as it were, clinging to the soil,
imbibing all the sap he could. It was like a slow hatching in the warm
egg of springtide. Albine, remembering certain remarks of Doctor
Pascal, felt terrified at seeing him remain in this state, 'innocent,'
dull-witted like a little boy. She had heard it said that certain
maladies left insanity behind them. And she spent hours in gazing at him
and trying her utmost, as mothers do, to make him smile. But as yet he
had not laughed. When she passed her hand across his eyes, he never saw,
he never followed the shadow. Even when she spoke to him, he barely
turned his head in the direction whence the sound came. She had but one
consolation: he thrived splendidly, he was quite a handsome child.

For another whole week she lavished the tenderest care on him. She
patiently waited for him to grow. And as she marked various symptoms of
awakening perception, her fears subsided and she began to think that
time might make a man of him. When she touched him now he started
slightly. Another time, one night, he broke into a feeble laugh. On the
morrow, when she had seated him at the window, she went down into the
garden, and ran about in it, calling to him the while. She vanished
under the trees, flitted across the sunny patches, and came back
breathless and clapping her hands. At first his wavering eyes failed to
perceive her. But as she started off again, perpetually playing at
hide-and-seek, reappearing behind every other bush, he was at last able
to follow the white gleam of her skirt; and when she suddenly came
forward and stood with upraised face below his window, he stretched out
his arms and seemed anxious to go down to her. But she came upstairs
again, and embraced him proudly: 'Ah! you saw me, you saw me!' she
cried. 'You would like to come into the garden with me, would you
not?---- If you only knew how wretched you have made me these last few
days, with your stupid ways, never seeing me or hearing me!'

He listened to her, but apparently with some slight sensation of pain
that made him bend his neck in a shrinking way.

'You are better now, however,' she went on. 'Well enough to come down
whenever you like---- Why don't you say anything? Have you lost your
tongue? Oh, what a baby! Why, I shall have to teach him how to talk!'

And thereupon she really did amuse herself by telling him the names of
the things he touched. He could only stammer, reiterating the syllables,
and failing to utter a single word plainly. However, she began to walk
him about the room, holding him up and leading him from the bed to the
window--quite a long journey. Two or three times he almost fell on the
way, at which she laughed. One day he fairly sat down on the floor, and
she had all the trouble in the world to get him up on his feet again.
Then she made him undertake the round of the room, letting him rest by
the way on the sofa and the chairs--a tour round a little world which
took up a good hour. At last he was able to venture on a few steps
alone. She would stand before him with outstretched hands, and move
backwards, calling him, so that he should cross the room in search of
her supporting arms. If he sulked and refused to walk, she would take
the comb from her hair and hold it out to him like a toy. Then he would
come to her and sit still in a corner for hours, playing with her comb,
and gently scratching his hands with its teeth.

At last one morning she found him up. He had already succeeded in
opening one of the shutters, and was attempting to walk about without
leaning on the furniture.

'Good gracious, we are active this morning!' she exclaimed gleefully.
'Why, he will be jumping out of the window to-morrow if he has his own
way---- So you are quite strong now, eh?'

Serge's answer was a childish laugh. His limbs were regaining the
strength of adolescence, but more perceptive sensations remained
unroused. He spent whole afternoons in gazing out on the Paradou,
pouting like a child that sees nought but whiteness and hears but the
vibration of sounds. He still retained the ignorance of urchinhood--his
sense of touch as yet so innocent that he failed to tell Albine's gown
from the covers of the old armchairs. His eyes still stared wonderingly;
his movements still displayed the wavering hesitation of limbs which
scarce knew how to reach their goal; his state was one of incipient,
purely instinctive existence into which entered no knowledge of
surroundings. The man was not yet born within him.

'That's right, you'll act the silly, will you?' muttered Albine. 'We'll
see.'

She took off her comb, and held it out to him.

'Will you have my comb?' she said. 'Come and fetch it.'

When she had got him out of the room, by retreating before him all the
way, she put her arm round his waist and helped him down each stair,
amusing him while she put her comb back, even tickling his neck with a
lock of her hair, so that he remained unaware that he was going
downstairs. But when he was in the hall, he became frightened at the
darkness of the passage.

'Just look!' she cried, throwing the door wide open.

It was like a sudden dawn, a curtain of shadow snatched aside, revealing
the joyousness of early day. The park spread out before them verdantly
limpid, freshly cool and deep as a spring. Serge, entranced, lingered
upon the threshold, with a hesitating desire to feel that luminous lake
with his foot.

'One would think you were afraid of wetting yourself,' said Albine.
'Don't be frightened, the ground is safe enough.'

He had ventured to take one step, and was astonished at encountering the
soft resistance of the gravel. The first touch of the soil gave him a
shock; life seemed to rebound within him and to set him for a moment
erect, with expanding frame, while he drew long breaths.

'Come now, be brave,' insisted Albine. 'You know you promised me to
take five steps. We'll go as far as the mulberry tree there under the
window---- There you can rest.'

It took him a quarter of an hour to make those five steps. After each
effort he stopped as if he had been obliged to tear up roots that held
him to the ground.

The girl, pushing him along, said with a laugh: 'You look just like a
walking tree.'

Having placed him with his back leaning against the mulberry tree, in
the rain of sunlight falling from its boughs, she bounded off and left
him, calling out to him that he must not stir. Serge, standing there
with drooping hands, slowly turned his head towards the park.
Terrestrial childhood met his gaze. The pale greenery was steeped in the
very milk of youth, flooded with golden brightness. The trees were still
in infancy, the flowers were as tender-fleshed as babes, the streams
were blue with the artless blue of lovely infantile eyes. Beneath every
leaf was some token of a delightful awakening.

Serge had fixed his eyes upon a yellow breach which a wide path made in
front of him amidst a dense mass of foliage. At the very end, eastward,
some meadows, steeped in gold, looked like the luminous field upon which
the sun would descend, and he waited for the morn to take that path and
flow towards him. He could feel it coming in a warm breeze, so faint at
first that it barely brushed across his skin, but rising little by
little, and growing ever brisker till he was thrilled all over. He could
also taste it coming with a more and more pronounced savour, bringing
the healthful acridity of the open air, holding to his lips a feast of
sugary aromatics, sour fruits, and milky shoots. Further, he could smell
it coming with the perfumes which it culled upon its way--the scent of
earth, the scent of the shady woods, the scent of the warm plants, the
scent of living animals, a whole posy of scents, powerful enough to
bring on dizziness. He could likewise hear it coming with the rapid
flight of a bird skimming over the grass, waking the whole garden from
silence, giving voice to all it touched, and filling his ears with the
music of things and beings. Finally, he could see it coming from the end
of the path, from the meadows steeped in gold--yes, he could see that
rosy air, so bright that it lighted the way it took with a gleaming
smile, no bigger in the distance than a spot of daylight, but in a few
swift bounds transformed into the very splendour of the sun. And the
morn flowed up and beat against the mulberry tree against which Serge
was leaning. And he himself resuscitated amidst the childhood of the
morn.

'Serge! Serge!' cried Albine, lost to sight behind the high shrubs of
the flower garden. 'Don't be afraid, I am here.'

But Serge no longer felt frightened. He was being born anew in the
sunshine, in that pure bath of light which streamed upon him. He was
being born anew at five-and-twenty, his senses hurriedly unclosing,
enraptured with the mighty sky, the joyful earth, the prodigy of
loveliness spread out around him. This garden, which he knew not only
the day before, now afforded him boundless delight. Everything filled
him with ecstasy, even the blades of grass, the pebbles in the paths,
the invisible puffs of air that flitted over his cheeks. His whole body
entered into possession of this stretch of nature; he embraced it with
his limbs, he drank it in with his lips, he inhaled it with his
nostrils, he carried it in his ears and hid it in the depths of his
eyes. It was his own. The roses of the flower garden, the lofty boughs
of the forest, the resounding rocks of the waterfall, the meadows which
the sun planted with blades of light, were his. Then he closed his eyes
and slowly reopened them that he might enjoy the dazzle of a second
wakening.

'The birds have eaten all the strawberries,' said Albine disconsolately,
as she ran up to him. 'See, I have only been able to find these two!'

But she stopped short a few steps away, heart-struck and gazing at Serge
with rapturous astonishment. 'How handsome you are!' she cried.

She drew a little nearer; then stood there, absorbed in her
contemplation, and murmuring: 'I had never, never seen you before.'

He had certainly grown taller. Clothed in a loose garment, he stood
erect, still somewhat slender, with finely moulded limbs, square chest,
and rounded shoulders. His head, slightly thrown back, was poised upon a
flexible and snowy neck, rimmed with brown behind. Health and strength
and power were on his face. He did not smile, his expression was that of
repose, with grave and tender mouth, firm cheeks, large nose, and grey,
clear, commanding eyes. The long locks that thickly covered his head
fell upon his shoulders in jetty curls; while a slender growth of hair,
through which gleamed his white skin, curled upon his upper lip and
chin.

'Oh! how handsome, how handsome you are!' lingeringly repeated Albine,
crouching at his feet and gazing up at him with loving eyes. 'But why
are you sulking with me? Why don't you speak to me?'

Still he stood there and made no answer. His eyes were far away; he
never even saw that child at his feet. He spoke to himself in the
sunlight, and said: 'How good the light is!'

That utterance sounded like a vibration of the sunlight itself. It fell
amid the silence in the faintest of whispers like a musical sigh, a
quiver of warmth and of life. For several days Albine had never heard
his voice, and now, like himself, it had altered. It seemed to her to
course through the park more sweetly than the melody of birds, more
imperiously than the wind that bends the boughs. It reigned, it ruled.
The whole garden heard it, though it had been but a faint and passing
breath, and the whole garden was thrilled with the joyousness it
brought.

'Speak to me,' implored Albine. 'You have never spoken to me like that.
When you were upstairs in your room, when you were not dumb, you talked
the silly prattle of a child. How is it I no longer know your voice?
Just now I thought it had come down from the trees, that it reached me
from every part of the garden, that it was one of those deep sighs that
used to worry me at night before you came. Listen, everything is keeping
silence to hear you speak again.'

But still he failed to recognise her presence. Tenderer grew her tones.
'No, don't speak if it tires you. Sit down beside me, and we will remain
here on the grass till the sun wanes. And look, I have found two
strawberries. Such trouble I had too! The birds eat up everything. One's
for you, both if you like; or we can halve them, and taste each of them.
You'll thank me, and then I shall hear you.'

But he would not sit down, he refused the strawberries, which Albine
pettishly threw away. She did not open her lips again. She would rather
have seen him ill, as in those earlier days when she had given him her
hand for a pillow, and had felt him coming back to life beneath the
cooling breath she blew upon his face. She cursed the returning health
which now made him stand in the light like a young unheeding god. Would
he be ever thus then, with never a glance for her? Would he never be
further healed, and at last see her and love her? And she dreamed of
once again being his healer, of accomplishing by the sole power of her
little hands the cure of the second childhood in which he remained. She
could clearly see that there was no spark in the depths of his grey
eyes, that his was but a pallid beauty like that of the statues which
had fallen among the nettles of the flower-garden. She rose and clasped
him, breathing on his neck to rouse him. But that morning Serge never
even felt the breath that lifted his silky beard. The sun got low, it
was time to go indoors. On reaching his room, Albine burst into tears.

From that morning forward the invalid took a short walk in the garden
every day. He went past the mulberry tree, as far as the edge of the
terrace, where a wide flight of broken steps descended to the flowery
parterre. He grew accustomed to the open air, each bath of sunlight
brought him fresh vigour. A young chestnut tree, which had sprung from
some fallen nut between two stones of the balustrade, burst the resin of
its buds, and unfolded its leafy fans with far less vigour than he
progressed. One day, indeed, he even attempted to descend the steps, but
in this his strength failed him, and he sat down among the dane-wort
which had grown up between the cracks in the stone flags. Below, to the
left, he could see a small wood of roses. It was thither that he dreamt
of going.

'Wait a little longer,' said Albine. 'The scent of the roses is too
strong for you yet. I have never been able to sit long under the
rose-trees without feeling exhausted, light-headed, with a longing to
cry. Don't be afraid, I will some day lead you to the rose-trees, and I
shall surely weep among them, for you make me very sad.'

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