The Catalans: A Novel
Read The Catalans: A Novel Online
Authors: Patrick O'Brian
PATRICK O’BRIAN
The
Catalans
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK • LONDON
FOR MARY, WITH LOVE
Contents
A
T CARCASSONNE
the carriage emptied, and until Narbonne Dr. Roig had the compartment to himself. He was glad of it, for although his companions had been agreeable men and women he was feeling too stupid and bleary at this time of day—the hour of dawn, after a long night’s run—far too stupid to talk.
They wished him a good journey, he bade them farewell; and when the train pulled out he sank luxuriously into the corner seat: it was the first time since he had climbed into the train that he had been able to sit easy, spread out, uncramped, and he promised himself a quiet doze for an hour at least. On his right the great dark bulk of the Cité soared up, its fantastic battlements sharp against the pale sky: it revolved slowly, a half-turn, and slid away into the corner of the window as the train gathered speed. He leaned forward, straining his eyes to catch the last glimpse as it vanished, and then, easing himself back into his corner, cushioned against the rhythmic swing of the train, he closed his eyes.
In the corridor, a man, overburdened with parcels, a string-fastened suitcase and a basket with a duck peering from it, battled his way slowly down the train on some laborious errand: with every swing of the carriage he lurched against the outer window or an inner door, and as he banged against the doctor’s compartment he cried “Mare de Deu de Deu de Deu de Deu. Boun Deu, Senyor.” At the sound of the Catalan Dr. Roig opened his eyes: it was his mother tongue, and although he had not used it for so many years, still he dreamed in Catalan. The sound of it brought the end of his journey clearly into the immediate present; a long journey, from the confines of Prabang, weeks of traveling, half across the world: but now suddenly the end was in sight, so near that he could touch it. He looked up at his baggage in the rack, straightened himself in his seat and felt the inner pocket where his tickets lay.
He knew very well that he still had some hours of traveling—he had made this part of the journey so often as a young man that each stage from Carcassonne toward the south was sharp and distinct in his memory—but the thought of sleep had flown out of his mind, and he continued to sit upright as the train hurried down through the growing day.
He looked forward to his homecoming, of course: he had been thinking of it with increasing pleasure for the last six months. But it would be a formidable reunion after all these years, with the whole family gathered; and still it was very early in the morning to think of the welcome at the station, the embracing, the cries of enthusiasm, the feast, without a slight tinge of melancholy. How much more agreeable it would be if he could slowly materialize at Saint-Féliu without any fuss; if by some happy dislocation of time he could already have been there for a month.
And besides the new cousins whom he certainly would not recognize, the cousins by marriage and the men and women whom he had last seen as children, there would be the births, marriages, and deaths to applaud and to deplore: and there would be this sad business of Xavier’s folly to be gone into. This was the affair that most agitated the family: it had begun at least a year ago, and the storm that it had raised in Saint-Féliu had sent ripples as far as his quiet laboratory on the shores of the Luong river. He would hear it all over again, from many sources: and even those who had from the first kept him so well informed, Aunt Margot, Aunt Marinette, cousin Côme and the others, even those would certainly repeat all that they had said in their letters, would repeat it all within a very few hours of his arrival. It was inevitable; but still he would be glad to hear the latest developments, and he was willing to pay that price to hear them. A great deal could have happened during his voyage, for if Aunt Margot were right (and she was a shrewd old woman; he had a high opinion of her judgment) the whole affair was fast reaching a climax at the time he left Prabang.
There was her last letter, double-crossed in a thin, angular pattern of violet ink, most angular where it was most emphatic, and in some places illegible because of the writer’s anger: it was still in his pocket, and from time to time during his voyage he had tried to decipher it.
He looked at it again, unfolding the crackling pages to the place where indignation had spread a series of hard uprights, underscored with a force that had nearly torn the paper: he hoped to surprise the meaning unawares, to catch it this time without effort. “. . . and Xavier has . . . the wretched girl . . . influence . .
.
at once
. . . children . . .” Children? No. Perhaps it was “comfort”; though that made little difference: the whole paragraph remained obscure whatever the reading. It was frustrating to be on the edge of comprehension: but it did not matter essentially, the solution of the difficulty was at hand; and in any case, even if he could never know what the passage meant, the main lines of the affair were clear in his mind. Xavier, a middle-aged widower, the chief man of the family, the mayor and one of the most substantial inhabitants of Saint-Féliu dels Aspres, had formed a liaison with a girl young enough to be his daughter, and it appeared that there was a real danger of his marrying her.
The liaison in itself was bad enough, so public in the little town, so much on his own doorstep: the liaison was bad enough, and the early letters that had sped across the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and hastened across Asia to carry him the news, had been alarmed, uneasy. As cousin Côme had said, there was every opportunity for a man to have what women friends he liked in Perpignan—a separate establishment, even. It could so easily be done tactfully, and so long as the accepted gestures toward morality were made, very few people would blame him at all, even if it were quite widely known.
But in one’s own village . . . It showed a cynical contempt for public opinion that could be very wounding to a man’s reputation; and the family was deeply concerned with Xavier’s reputation. The publicity, the local sniggering had certainly hurt them, but it was the fear for Xavier’s reputation that had first sent the letters hurrying over the sea. Of course they were concerned with his good name: it was part of the general property; without it, they would all be lessened, and very much lessened; they had every right to be concerned with it. Furthermore, Xavier could never have been what he was, firmly based, solid, well connected, influential, without them, and for this reason, if for no other, he owed them consideration.
But this cause for agitation and unhappiness faded to insignificance when the far greater danger appeared: the letters redoubled in number and they grew shriller and more shrill in tone as it became more and more obvious that Xavier had lost his wits to the extent of contemplating marriage with the girl. For now it was not merely the question of property in reputation that was at stake (such reputation as Xavier could possibly retain, once it was known that he had really thought of such a crack-brained transgression): no; now the issue was that of real, tangible property, the family property, funds, land, houses. This was a common stock. It was true that it was not held communally, but it was certainly considered as a family possession: everything must be kept inside the family limits, and it was intolerable to think that Xavier, marrying, might dispose of his share like an imbecile. The letters followed hot one upon the other, and Dr. Roig, although he was so far removed in time and space and spirit, whistled gently over them, pulling his chin with that gesture that was habitual in him when he wished to express doubt, thoughtfulness, and the appreciation of a difficult situation.
He was far removed from the family. His interests had lain for so many years in another country that he could not be touched by the same immediacy, nor, even if he had been there in Saint-Féliu, would he ever have been infected by the same indignation: but still, no physical removal and no spiritual removal that he could conceive would ever take him so far away that he would remain indifferent to this fundamental danger to the family’s property.
They had pressed him to come home earlier than the date he had fixed, and for a time he had been half inclined to agree: if he had thought his influence as great as Aunt Margot so flatteringly described it—“Xavier will certainly listen to
you
. He has always had a great respect for you and for your opinion”—he might have done so. But thinking of Xavier and of their cool, superficial relationship, Dr. Roig had neither written to his cousin nor hurried his departure. A letter, indeed, on so intimate a subject, would have been impossible, especially the tirade that Aunt Margot had outlined for him: “You should say,
My dear Cousin Xavier—your conduct is unworthy of you and of our family. I blush for you, and my heart bleeds for little Dédé, whom you propose to disinherit, for the memory of Georgette, and for all our poor unjustly wounded family
.” It went on to cover two sheets of note paper. He did not suppose that Aunt Margot ever really thought that he would use this outline, although she had couched it in the shabby rhetoric that she evidently felt appropriate to a man in the act of delivering a high moral rebuke. Her own style was direct, trenchant, without literary adornment; and sometimes, when he recalled the phrases she had chosen for him, he wondered uneasily whether he had ever done anything to justify her choice; whether, unknown to himself, he had shown a tendency toward righteous pomp. He hoped not. No; it was merely a release for Aunt Margot: somebody ought to thunder at Xavier in the consecrated frock-coat and shirt-front phrases, and as she dared not do it herself she had launched her bolt in an oblique direction, with a very slight hope that it might perhaps rebound and strike the intended victim. For that matter, he doubted whether Xavier had received one tenth part of the harangues that had come to him—to Alain Roig—in the form of verbatim reports, “pieces of their mind.”
He smiled, too, at the old lady’s heart bleeding for little Dédé. This was Xavier’s son, whom he had met but recently in Haiphong, where the young man was reluctantly performing his military service. An unlikable fellow, spineless and selfish, cold; he did not think it at all probable that Aunt Margot, a clear-sighted, unsentimental woman, liked him in the least, or deceived herself into believing that she did. And as for Georgette, Xavier’s wife, she had been dead these fifteen years and more. Dr. Roig could not recall any precise impression of her now: the pale, thin little personality had faded without leaving any strong trace. He remembered, with an effort, her slight, anemic form and her rather pathetic dependence on Xavier: she was not the kind of woman Aunt Margot would have liked; and now that he thought about it he brought up a distinct image of Aunt Margot speaking impatiently to her—a controlled impatience with a fund of irritation behind. It was something very simple, the preservation of greengages in brandy, some trifling household operation with which Georgette could not succeed: nothing in itself, but symptomatic.
The train was running slower; its rhythm changed. The revolution of his mind slowed with that of the wheels, slower and slower, trying to keep the same rhythm, but then it was no longer possible, and he looked briskly out of the window. Here were the sidings of Narbonne, here the platform, and his face was gliding before a sea of other faces, the same height as his, and removed from his by a pane of glass and four feet of air.