The Age of Reason (46 page)

‘Well, I... I wanted to see the effect it would produce on a fellow like you,’ said Daniel, clearing his throat. ‘Also, now that there’s someone who knows, I... I shall perhaps succeed in believing it.’

He had turned a little green, and spoke with difficulty, but he was still smiling. Mathieu could not endure that smile, and turned away his head.

Daniel grinned.

‘Does it surprise you? Does it upset your conception of inverts?’

Mathieu raised his head abruptly. ‘Don’t throw your weight about,’ he said. ‘It’s distressing. There’s no need to do that for my benefit. You are disgusted with yourself, I suppose, but not more so than I am with myself, there’s nothing much to choose between us. Besides,’ he said, after a moment’s reflection, ‘that’s why you tell me all this. It must be much easier to confess to a derelict like me: and you get the advantage of the confession just the same.’

‘You’re a sly little devil,’ said Daniel in a coarse voice that Mathieu had never heard him use before.

They were silent. Daniel was staring straight into vacancy with an expression of fixed bewilderment, as old men do. Mathieu felt an agonizing stab of remorse.

‘If it’s like that, why are you marrying Marcelle?’

‘That has nothing to do with it.’

‘I... I can’t let you marry her,’ said Mathieu.

Daniel stiffened, and dark red blotches appeared on his drowned-corpse countenance.

‘
Can’T
you indeed?’ he demanded haughtily. ‘And how are you going to stop me?’

Mathieu got up without answering. The telephone was on his desk. He picked up the receiver and dialled Marcelle’s number. Daniel eyed him ironically. There was a long silence.

‘Hullo?’ came Marcelle’s voice.

Mathieu gave a start.

‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘It’s Mathieu... I... look here, we were behaving idiotically just now. I want... Hullo! Marcelle! Are you there? Marcelle!’ he said savagely. ‘Hullo!’

No answer. He lost his head and shouted into the instrument: ‘Marcelle, I want to marry you.’

There was a brief silence, then a yapping sound at the end of the line, and a concluding click. Mathieu gripped the receiver for a moment, then gently replaced it. Daniel eyed him without uttering a word, his expression was in no sense triumphant. Mathieu took a drink of rum, and sat down in the armchair.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said.

Daniel smiled. ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said, by way of consolation. ‘Homosexuals have always made excellent husbands — that’s well known.’

‘Daniel! If you are marrying her as a sort of gesture, you will ruin her life.’

‘You ought to be the last person to tell me so,’ said Daniel. ‘Besides, I’m not marrying her as a sort of gesture. The, fact is, what she wants above all is the baby.’

‘Does she... Does she know?’

‘No.’

‘Why are you marrying her?’

‘Because I’m fond of her.’

The tone was not convincing. They refilled their glasses, and Mathieu said doggedly: ‘I don’t want her to be unhappy.’

‘I swear she won’t be.’

‘Does she believe you’re in love with her?’

‘I don’t think so. She suggested I should come and live in her place, but that wouldn’t suit me at all. I shall bring her to my flat. It is agreed that any emotional relation shall come gradually.’ And he added with laborious irony: ‘I mean to fulfil all my marital duties.’

‘But...’ Mathieu blushed violently. ‘Do you like women too?’

Daniel emitted an odd sniff, and said: ‘Not much.’

‘I see.’

Mathieu bent his head, and tears of shame came into his eyes. He said: ‘I’m even more disgusted with myself because I know you’re going to marry her.’

Daniel drank. ‘Yes,’ he said with a nonchalant, absent-minded air. ‘I suppose you must be feeling pretty rotten.’

Mathieu did not answer. He was looking at the floor between his feet. ‘He’s a homosexual, and she’s going to marry him.’

He unclasped his hands and scraped his heel against the floor: he felt like a hunted quarry. Suddenly the silence grew burdensome, he said to himself: ‘Daniel is looking at me,’ and he hurriedly raised his head. Daniel was indeed looking at him, and with so venomous an expression that Mathieu’s heart contracted.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked.

‘You know,’ said Daniel. ‘There is someone who
knows
!’

‘You wouldn’t be sorry to put a bullet through me?’

Daniel did not answer. Mathieu was suddenly scorched by an unendurable idea. ‘Daniel,’ he said, ‘you are marrying her to make a martyr of yourself.’

‘What then?’ said Daniel, in a toneless voice. ‘That’s nobody’s concern but mine.’

Mathieu laid his head in his hands. ‘My God!’ he said.

Daniel added rapidly: ‘It’s of no importance.
For her
, it’s of no importance.’

‘Do you hate her?’

‘No.’

And Mathieu reflected sadly: ‘No, it’s me he hates.’

Daniel had resumed his smile. ‘Shall we finish the bottle?’

‘By all means,’ said Mathieu.

They drank, and Mathieu became aware that he wanted to smoke. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it.

‘Look here, what you are is none of my business. Even now that you’ve told me about it But there is one thing I should like to ask you: why are you ashamed?’

Daniel laughed dryly. ‘I was waiting for that, my dear fellow. I am ashamed of being a homosexual
because
I am a homosexual. I know what you’re going to say: If I were in your place, I wouldn’t stand any nonsense. I would claim my place in the sun, it’s a taste like any other, etc. etc. — But that is all entirely off the mark. You say that kind of thing precisely because you are not a homosexual. All inverts are ashamed of being so, it’s part of their make-up.’

‘But wouldn’t it be better... to accept the fact?’ asked Mathieu timidly.

This seemed to annoy Daniel. ‘You can say that to me, when you have accepted the fact that you’re a swine,’ he answered harshly. ‘No. Homosexuals who boast of it or proclaim it, or merely acquiesce... are dead men. Their very sense of shame has killed them. I don’t want to die that sort of death.’

But his tense mood seemed to have relaxed, and he looked at Mathieu without hatred.

‘I have accepted myself only too thoroughly,’ he continued quietly. ‘I know myself inside out.’

There was nothing more to say. Mathieu lit another cigarette. There was a drain of rum left in his glass and he drank it off. Daniel filled him with horror. He thought: ‘In two years, in four years... shall I be like that?’ And he was suddenly seized with the desire to talk to Marcelle about it: it was to her alone that he could talk about his life, his fears, his hopes. But he remembered that he would never see her again, and his desire, not yet actual nor defined, slowly dissolved into a kind of anguish. He was alone.

Daniel seemed to be reflecting: his eyes were set, and from time to time his lips parted. He uttered a faint sigh, and something in his face seemed to give way. He passed a hand over his forehead: he looked astonished.

‘Today, all the same, I did surprise myself,’ he said in an undertone.

He smiled a strange, almost childlike smile, which looked out of place on his sallow face, on which a hasty shave had left blue blotches. ‘It’s true,’ thought Mathieu: ‘he went right through with it, this time.’ Suddenly an idea came to him, which made his heart turn over. ‘He is free,’ he thought. And the horror with which Daniel inspired him was suddenly combined with envy.

‘You must be in a strange state,’ he said.

‘Yes; in a very strange state,’ said Daniel.

He was still smiling genially, and he said: ‘Give me a cigarette.’

‘Are you smoking now?’ asked Mathieu.

‘One. This evening.’

‘I wish I were in your place,’ said Mathieu abruptly.

‘In my place —’ said Daniel, without much surprise.

‘Yes.’

Daniel shrugged his shoulders. ‘In this affair,’ he said, ‘you’ve been a winner all round.’

Mathieu laughed dryly; and Daniel explained: ‘You are free.’

‘No,’ said Mathieu, shaking his head. ‘It isn’t by giving up a woman that a man is free.’

Daniel eyed Mathieu with curiosity. ‘You looked as if you believed it, this morning.’

‘I don’t know. It wasn’t clear. Nothing is clear. The truth is that I gave up Marcelle for nothing.’

He gazed at the window curtains which were faintly stirring in the night breeze. He was tired.

‘For nothing,’ he repeated. ‘In all this affair I have been a sort of embodied refusal, a negation. Marcelle is no longer in my life, but there’s all the rest.’

‘What do you mean?’

Mathieu pointed to his desk, with a vague embracing gesture. ‘All that — all the rest.’

He was intrigued by Daniel. ‘Is that what freedom is?’ he thought. ‘He has
acted
: and now he can’t go back: it must seem strange to him to feel behind him an unknown act, which he has already almost ceased to understand, and which will turn his life upside down. All I do, I do for nothing. It might be said that I am robbed of the consequences of my acts: everything happens as though I could always play my strokes again. I don’t know what I would give to do something irrevocable.’

And he said aloud: ‘Two evenings ago, I met a fellow who had wanted to join the Spanish militia.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, and then he became deflated. He’s down and out now.’

‘Why do you tell me that?’

‘I don’t know. It just came into my head.’

‘Do you want to go to Spain?’

‘Yes: but not enough.’

They were silent. After a moment or two, Daniel threw away his cigarette and said: ‘I should like to be six months older.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Mathieu. ‘In six months I shall be the same as I am now.’

‘Minus the remorse,’ said Daniel.

He got up. ‘Come and have a drink at Clarisse’s.’

‘No,’ said Mathieu. ‘I don’t want to get drunk this evening. I don’t quite know what I should do if I were to get drunk.’

‘Nothing very sensational,’ said Daniel. ‘So you won’t come?’

‘No. Won’t you stay a little longer?’

‘I must drink,’ said Daniel.

‘Good-bye. I... shall see you soon?’ asked Mathieu.

Daniel seemed embarrassed.

‘I feel it will be difficult. Marcelle certainly told me that she didn’t want to alter anything in my life, but I doubt if she would care for me to see you again.’

‘Indeed? All right,’ said Mathieu dryly. ‘In that case, good luck.’

Daniel smiled at him without replying, and Mathieu added brusquely: ‘You hate me.’

Daniel went up to him, and laid a hand on his shoulder with an awkward, diffident little gesture: ‘No, not at this moment.’

‘But tomorrow...’

Daniel bent his head and did not answer.

‘Good-bye,’ said Mathieu.

‘Good-bye.’

Daniel went out; Mathieu walked up to the window and drew the curtains. It was a lovely night, a lovely blue night: the wind had swept the clouds away, the stars were visible above the roofs. He laid his elbows on the balcony, and yawned. In the street below a man was walking quietly along: he stopped at the corner of the Rue Huyghens and the Rue Froidevaux, raised his head and looked at the sky: it was Daniel. The sound of music came in gusts from the Avenue du Maine, the white shaft of a headlight slid across the sky, lingered above a chimney, and plunged down behind the roofs. It was a sky for a village fête, sparkling with ribbons and rosettes, redolent of holidays and dancing in the open air. Mathieu watched Daniel disappear, and thought: ‘I remain alone.’ Alone but no freer than before. He had said to himself last evening: ‘If only Marcelle did not exist.’ But in so saying he deceived himself. ‘No one has interfered with my freedom; my life has drained it dry.’ He shut the window and went back into the room. The scent of Ivich still hovered in the air. He inhaled the scent, and reviewed that day of tumult. ‘A lot of fuss for nothing,’ he thought. For nothing: this life had been given him for nothing, he was nothing and yet he would not change: he was as he was made. He took off his shoes and sat motionless on the arm of the easy-chair: he could still feel at the back of his throat the amber, sugared pungency of rum. He yawned: he had finished the day, and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense, stoicism — all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life. He took off his jacket, and began to undo his necktie. He yawned again as he repeated to himself: ‘It’s true, it’s absolutely true: I have attained the age of reason.’

The End