Pierre and Jean - Guy de Maupassant (top ten ebook reader .txt) 📗

get off without seeing her, without pressing on her cheek the false kiss which it made his heart sick to think of. But she replied:

“No. Wait a moment. I will let you in. Wait till I get into bed again.”

He heard her bare feet on the floor and the sound of the bolt drawn back. Then she called out:

“Come in.”

He went in. She was sitting up in bed, while, by her side, Roland, with a silk handkerchief by way of nightcap and his face to the wall, still lay sleeping. Nothing ever woke him but a shaking hard enough to pull his arm off. On the days when he went fishing it was Joséphine, rung up by Papagris at the hour fixed, who roused her master from his stubborn slumbers.

Pierre, as he went towards his mother, looked at her with a sudden sense of never having seen her before. She held up her face, he kissed each cheek, and then sat down in a low chair.

“It was last evening that you decided on this excursion?” she asked.

“Yes, last evening.”

“Will you return to dinner?”

“I do not know. At any rate do not wait for me.”

He looked at her with stupefied curiosity. This woman was his mother! All those features, seen daily from childhood, from the time when his eye could first distinguish things, that smile, that voice⁠—so well known, so familiar⁠—abruptly struck him as new, different from what they had always been to him hitherto. He understood now that, loving her, he had never looked at her. All the same it was very really she, and he knew every little detail of her face; still, it was the first time he clearly identified them all. His anxious attention, scrutinizing her face which he loved, recalled a difference, a physiognomy he had never before discerned.

He rose to go; then, suddenly yielding to the invincible longing to know which had been gnawing at him since yesterday, he said:

“By the way, I fancy I remember that you used to have, in Paris, a little portrait of Maréchal, in the drawing-room.”

She hesitated for a second or two, or at least he fancied she hesitated; then she said:

“To be sure.”

“What has become of the portrait?”

She might have replied more readily:

“That portrait⁠—stay; I don’t exactly know⁠—perhaps it is in my desk.”

“It would be kind of you to find it.”

“Yes, I will look for it. What do you want it for?”

“Oh, it is not for myself. I thought it would be a natural thing to give it to Jean, and that he would be pleased to have it.”

“Yes, you are right; that is a good idea. I will look for it, as soon as I am up.”

And he went out.

It was a blue day without a breath of wind. The folks in the streets seemed in good spirits, the merchants going to business, the clerks going to their office, the girls going to their shop. Some sang as they went, exhilarated by the bright weather.

The passengers were already going on board the Trouville boat; Pierre took a seat aft on a wooden bench.

He asked himself:

“Now was she uneasy at my asking for the portrait or only surprised? Has she mislaid it, or has she hidden it? Does she know where it is, or does she not? If she had hidden it⁠—why?”

And his mind, still following up the same line of thought from one deduction to another, came to this conclusion:

That portrait⁠—of a friend, of a lover, had remained in the drawing-room in a conspicuous place, till one day when the wife and mother perceived, first of all and before anyone else, that it bore a likeness to her son. Without doubt she had for a long time been on the watch for this resemblance; then, having detected it, having noticed its beginnings, and understanding that anyone might, any day, observe it too, she had one evening removed the perilous little picture and had hidden it, not daring to destroy it.

Pierre recollected quite clearly now that it was long, long before they left Paris that the miniature had vanished. It had disappeared, he thought, about the time that Jean’s beard was beginning to grow, which had made him suddenly and wonderfully like the fair young man who smiled from the picture-frame.

The motion of the boat as it put off disturbed and dissipated his meditations. He stood up and looked at the sea. The little steamer, once outside the piers, turned to the left, and puffing and snorting and quivering, made for a distant point visible through the morning haze. The red sail of a heavy fishing-bark, lying motionless on the level waters, looked like a large rock standing up out of the sea. And the Seine, rolling down from Rouen, seemed a wide inlet dividing two neighbouring lands. They reached the harbour of Trouville in less than an hour, and as it was the time of day when the world was bathing, Pierre went to the shore.

From a distance it looked like a garden full of gaudy flowers. All along the stretch of yellow sand, from the pier as far as the Roches Noires, sunshades of every hue, hats of every shape, dresses of every colour, in groups outside the bathing huts, in long rows by the margin of the waves, or scattered here and there, really looked like immense bouquets on a vast meadow. And the Babel of sounds⁠—voices near and far ringing thin in the light atmosphere, shouts and cries of children being bathed, clear laughter of women⁠—all made a pleasant, continuous din, mingling with the unheeding breeze, and breathed with the air itself.

Pierre walked among all this throng, more lost, more remote from them, more isolated, more drowned in his torturing thoughts, than if he had been flung overboard from the deck of a ship a hundred miles from shore. He passed by them and heard a few sentences without listening; and he saw, without looking, how the men spoke to the women, and the women