Calvary. Octave Mirbeau
revived her worn-out energy, awakened her conscience to new duties, to new sacred responsibilities which now devolved upon her. What ardent nights, what feverish days she spent bent over the cradle where lay something born of her own flesh and soul, and palpitating! … Ah! yes! … I belonged to her, to her only; it was not at all of this conjugal submission that I was born; I was not the fatal consequence of the original sin as other children of men are; no! she had always carried me in her womb, and like Christ I was conceived in a long cry for love. All her troubles, her terrors, her past sufferings she understood now; it was because a great mystery of creation was being enacted in her being.
She had great difficulty in bringing me up, and if I outlived all that had threatened me one might say it was accomplished by a miracle of love. More than twenty times my mother snatched me from the clutches of death. … And then what a joy and what a recompense it was to her to see the little wrinkled body fill itself with the sap of health, the rumpled face take on the color of shiny pink, the little eyes open gaily into a smile, the lips, greedy and searching, move and gluttonously pump the life-giving liquid from her nourishing breast! My mother now tasted a few moments of complete and wholesome happiness. A desire to act, to be good and useful, to occupy her hands, heart and spirit, to live at last took hold of her, and even in the most commonplace duties of her household she found a new, a passionate interest which was doubled by a feeling of profound peace. Her gayety came back to her, a natural and gentle gayety without violent outbursts. She made plans, pictured the future to herself with confidence, and many a time she was astonished to discover that she no longer thought of her past—that evil dream which vanished.
I grew. "One can see him getting bigger every day," the nurse used to say. And with rapturous emotions my mother watched the hidden labor of nature which polished the rough places of flesh, giving it more pliant form, more definite features, better regulated movements and poured into the dimness of the brain just emerged from nothingness the primitive glimmer of instinct. Oh, how everything seemed to her now clothed in bright and entrancing colors! It was music of welcome itself, the benediction of love, and even the trees, formerly so full of dread and menace, were stretching out their branches above like so many protecting arms. One was led to hope that the mother had saved the woman. Alas! That hope was of short duration.
One day she noticed in me a certain predisposition to nervous fits, to a diseased contraction of muscles, and she became alarmed. When I was about one year old I had convulsions which came short of finishing me. The fits were so violent that my mouth, even long after the attack was over, remained twisted into an ugly grimace as if paralyzed. My mother would not admit that at periods of rapid growth the majority of children were subject to such fits. She saw in that something which she thought was characteristic of her and her ancestors, she saw in that the first symptoms of a hereditary illness, of a terrible disease which she thought was going to continue in her son. She battled hard, however, against these thoughts which came in hives; she used every bit of energy and vigor she could command to dissipate them, taking refuge in me as if in an inviolable asylum for protection against phantoms and evil spirits. She held me pressed against her bosom, covering me with kisses and saying:
"My little Jean, it is not true, is it? You will live and be happy, won't you? … Answer me! … Alas! You can't talk, my poor little angel. … Oh, don't cry, never cry, Jean, my Jean, my dear little Jean! … "
But question as she might, feel as she might my heart beating against her own, my awkward hands gripping her breasts, my legs dangling from under the loosed swaddling cloth—her confidence was gone, doubts gained the upper hand. An incident which was related to me time and again with a sort of religious terror served to bring consternation into my mother's soul.
One day she was taking a bath. In the hall of the bathroom laid out with black and white square slabs, Marie, bent over me, was watching my first uncertain steps. Suddenly, fixing my gaze on a black square, I appeared to be very much frightened. I uttered a cry and, trembling all over as if I had seen something terrible, I hid my head in my nurse's apron.
"What's the matter?" my mother anxiously asked.
"I don't know," answered old Marie. It seemed as though Master Jean had been frightened by a paving block.
She brought me to the spot where my countenance so suddenly changed its expression. But at the sight of the paving slab, I cried out again. My whole body shuddered.
"There must be something!" cried my mother. "Marie, quick, quick, my underwear! … My God!—What did he see?"
Having come out of the bathroom, she did not want to wait to be wiped, and scarcely covered by her peignoir she stooped over the stone and examined it.
"That's strange," she murmured. "And yet he saw something … but what? … There isn't anything. … "
She took me in her arms, swayed me. I smiled now, uttering inarticulate sounds and playing with the ribbons of her peignoir. She put me down on the floor. Moving with short, unsteady steps, both arms outstretched, I purred like a kitten. None of the blocks before which I stopped frightened me in the least. Arrived at the fatal block, my face again assumed the expression of horror, and frightened and crying I returned quickly to my mother.
"I tell you there must be something!" she cried. "Call Felix. Let him come with tools … a hammer, quick, quick! Tell Monsieur also!"
"It seems strange all the same," assented Marie who, with gaping mouth and eyes wide open, was looking at the mysterious slab. "He must be a sorcerer then!"
Felix lifted one stone, examined it carefully, dug into the mortar below.
"Dig up another one!" my mother commanded. "And that one also … another one … all of them … dig them all up! I want to find out. … And Monsieur is not coming!"
In the excitement of her gestures, forgetting that there was a man around, she uncovered herself and revealed her nude body. Kneeling on the blocks, Felix continued digging them up. He took each one out with his brawny hands and shook his head.
"If Madame wants me to tell her. … For the rest, Monsieur is way out in the park, busy sharpening the pick-axe. … And besides, there is nothing to it … the stone blocks are like stone blocks, seemingly of the pavement. That's all! … Madame may be sure. … Only it might be that that was only in Master Jean's imagination. … Madame knows that children are like grown-up folks and that they see things! But as to these slabs, they are just slabs, neither more nor less."
My mother became pale, haggard.
"Shut up!" she ordered, "and get out of here, all of you!"
And without waiting for the execution of her order she carried me out of the room. Her cries, interrupted by the slamming of the door, resounded on the stairway and in the hall.
She never thought, however, poor dear creature that she was, of giving to the bathroom incident a natural explanation. One could have demonstrated to her that what had frightened me so badly might have been a moving reflection of a towel upon the humid surface of the floor, or perhaps the shadow of a leaf projected from outside across the window, which of course she would not have admitted as likely to have taken place. Her spirit, fed on dreams, tormented by lurid exaggerations and instinctively drawn to the mysterious and the fantastic, accepted with dangerous credulity the vaguest explanation and yielded to the most troubling suggestions. She imagined that her caresses, her kisses, her lulling me to sleep communicated to me the germs of her disease, that the nervous fits which almost caused my death, the hallucinations which shone in my eyes with the sombre radiance of madness, were to her a divine warning, and as soon as she conceived that, the last hope died in her heart.
Marie found her mistress half naked, stretched out on the bed.
"My God! My God!" she moaned, "that's the end of it. … My poor little Jean! … You, too, they will take away from me! … Oh, God, have pity on him! … Could that be possible! … So little, so weak! … "
And while Marie was putting back her clothes which slipped to the ground, trying to quiet her:
"My good Marie," she stammered, "listen to me. Promise me, yes promise