The book starts with Annette Georges choosing between two fates: suicide and running away with a disreputable stranger. She is rescued by a kind woman who looks after her until she can go to live with her maiden aunts in a village in the English countryside. There she meets and makes friends with various people and, almost coincidentally, the facts of her past come back to play a crucial part in the story.
By : Mary Cholmondeley (1859 - 1925)
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"Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne
M'a rendu fou!"
Victor Hugo.
Annette leaned against the low parapet and looked steadfastly at the water, so steadfastly that all the brilliant, newly-washed, tree-besprinkled city of Paris, lying spread before her, cleft by the wide river with its many bridges, was invisible to her. She saw nothing but the Seine, so tranquil yesterday, and to-day chafing beneath its bridges and licking ominously round their great stone supports—because there had been rain the day before.
The Seine was the only angry, sinister element in the suave September sunshine, and perhaps that was why Annette's eyes had been first drawn to it. She also was angry, with the deep, still anger which invades once or twice in a lifetime placid, gentle-tempered people.
Her dark eyes under their long curled lashes looked down over the stone bastion of the Pont Neuf at a yellow eddy just below her. They were beautiful eyes, limpid, deep, with a certain tranquil mystery in them. But there was no mystery in them at this moment. They were fixed, dilated, desperate.
Annette was twenty-one, but she looked much younger, owing to a certain slowness of development, an immaturity of mind and body. She reminded one not of an opening flower, but of a big, loose-limbed colt, ungainly still, but every line promising symmetry and grace to come. She was not quite beautiful yet, but that clearly was also still to come, when life should have had time to erase a certain ruminative stolidity from her fine, still countenance. One felt that in her schoolroom days she must have been often tartly desired not to "moon." She gave the impression of not having wholly emerged from the chrysalis, and her bewildered face, the face of a dreamer, wore a strained expression, as if some cruel hand had mockingly rent asunder the veils behind which her life had been moving and growing so far, and had thrust her, cold and shuddering, with unready wings, into a world for which she was not fully equipped.
And Annette, pale gentle Annette, standing on the threshold of life, unconsciously clutching an umbrella and a little handbag, was actually thinking of throwing herself into the water!
Not here, of course, but lower down, perhaps near St. Germains. No, not St. Germains,—there were too many people there,—but Melun, where the Seine was fringed thick with reeds and rushes, where in the dusk a determined woman might wade out from the bank till the current took her.
The remembrance of a certain expedition to Melun rose suddenly before her. In a kind of anguish she saw again its little red and white houses, sprinkled on the slope of its low hill, and the river below winding between its willows and poplars, amid meadows of buttercups, scattered with great posies of maythorn. She and he had sat together under one of the may trees, and Mariette, poor Mariette, with Antoine at her feet, had sat under another close at hand. And Mariette had sung in her thin, reedy voice the song with its ever-recurring refrain—
"Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne
Me rendra fou, oui, me rendra fou."
Annette shuddered and then was still.
It must have been a very deep wound, inflicted with a jagged instrument, which had brought her to this pass, which had lit this stony defiance in her soft eyes. For though it was evident that she had rebelled against life, it was equally evident that she was not of the egotistic temperament of those who rebel or cavil, or are discontented. She looked equable, feminine, the kind of woman who would take life easily, bend to it naturally,
"As the grass grows on the weirs";
who might, indeed, become a tigress in defence of her young, but then what woman would not?
But it is not only in defence of its babes of flesh and blood that the protective fierceness of woman can be aroused. There are spiritual children, ideals, illusions, romantic beliefs in others, the cold-blooded murder of which arouses the tigress in some women. Perhaps it had been so with Annette. For the instinct to rend and tear was upon her, and it had turned savagely against herself.
Strange how in youth our first crushing defeat in the experiment of living brings with it the temptation of suicide! Did we then imagine, in spite of all we saw going on round us, that life was to be easy for us, painless for us, joyful for us, so that the moment the iron enters our soul we are so affronted that we say, "If this is life, we will have none of it"?
Several passers-by had cast a backward glance at Annette. Presently some one stopped, with a little joyous exclamation. She was obliged to raise her eyes and return his greeting.
She knew him, the eccentric, rich young Englishman who rode his own horses under a French name which no one believed was his own. He often came to her father's cabaret in the Rue du Bac.
"Good morning, mademoiselle."
"Good morning, M. Le Geyt."
He came and leaned on the parapet beside her.
"Are you not riding to-day?"
"Riding to-day! Ride on the Flat! Is it likely? Besides, I had a fall yesterday schooling. My neck is stiff."
He did not add that he had all but broken it. Indeed, it was probable that he had already forgotten the fact.
He looked hard at her with his dancing, irresponsible blue eyes. He had the good looks which he shared with some of his horses, of extreme high breeding. He was even handsome in a way, with a thin, reckless, trivial face, and a slender, wiry figure. He looked as light as a leaf, and as if he were being blown through life by any chance wind, the wind of his own vagaries.
His manner had just the shade of admiring familiarity which to some men seems admissible to the pretty daughter of a disreputable old innkeeper.
He peered down at the river, and then at the houses crowding along its yellow quays, mysterious behind their paint as a Frenchwoman behind her pomade and powder.
Then he looked back at her with mock solemnity.
"I see nothing," he said.
"What did you expect to see?"
"Something that had the honour of engaging your attention completely."
"I was looking at the water."
"Just so. But why?"
She paused a moment, and then said, without any change of voice—
"I was thinking of throwing myself in."
Their eyes met—his, foolhardy, inquisitive, not unkindly; hers, sombre, sinister, darkened.
The recklessness in both of them rushed out and joined hands.
He laughed lightly.
"No, no," he said, "sweet Annette—lovely Annette. The Seine is not for you. So you have quarrelled with Falconhurst already. He has managed very badly. Or did you find out that he was going to be married? I knew it, but I did not say. Never mind. If he is, it doesn't matter. And if he isn't, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters."
"You are right. Nothing matters," said Annette. Her face, always pale, had become livid.
His became suddenly alert, flushed, as hers paled. He sighted a possible adventure. Excitement blazed up in his light eyes.
"One tear," he said, "yes,—you may shed one tear. But the Seine! No. The Seine is made up of all the tears which women have shed for men—men of no account, worthless wretches like Falconhurst and me. You must not add to that great flood. Leave off looking at the water, Annette. It is not safe for you to look at it. Look at me instead. And listen to what I am saying. You are not listening."
"Yes, I am."
"I'm going down to Fontainebleau for a bit. The doctor says I must get out of Paris and keep quiet, or I shan't be able to ride at Auteuil. I don't believe a word he says, croaking old woman! But—hang it all, I'm bound to ride Sam Slick at Auteuil. Kirby can look after the string while I'm at Fontainebleau. I'm going there this afternoon. Come with me. I am not much, but I am better than the Seine. My kisses will not choke the life out of you, as the Seine's will. We will spend a week together, and talk matters over, and sit in the sun, and at the end of it we shall both laugh—how we shall laugh—when you remember this." And he pointed to the swirling water.
A thought slid through Annette's mind like a snake through grass.
"He will hear of it. He is sure to hear of it. That will hurt him worse than if I were drowned."
"I don't care what I do," she said, meeting his eyes without flinching. It was he who for a moment winced when he saw the smouldering flame in them.
He laughed again, the old light, inconsequent laugh which came to him so easily, with which he met good and bad fortune alike.
"When you are as old as I am," he said not unkindly, "you will do as I am doing now, take the good the gods provide you, and trouble your mind about nothing else. For there's nothing in the world or out of it that is worth troubling about. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing."
"Nothing," echoed Annette hoarsely.
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