Blérot had been my friend since childhood; we had no secrets from each other, and were united heart and soul by a brotherly intimacy and a boundless confidence in each other. He used to tell me his most intimate thoughts, even the smallest pangs of conscience that are very often kept hidden from our own selves. I did the same for him. I had been the confident of all his love affairs, as he had been with mine. When he told me that he was going to get married I was hurt, as though by an act of treason. I felt that it must interfere with that cordial and absolute affection which had united us. His wife would come between us. The intimacy of the marriage-bed establishes a kind of complicity, a mysterious alliance between two persons, even when they have ceased to love each other. Man and wife are like two discreet partners who will not let anyone else into their secrets. But that close bond which the conjugal kiss fastens is broken quickly on the day on which the woman takes a lover.
I remember Blérot's wedding as if it were but yesterday. I would not be present at the signing of the marriage contract, as I have no particular liking for such ceremonies. I only went to the civil wedding and to the church.
His wife, whom I had never seen before, was a tall, slight girl, with pale hair, pale cheeks, pale hands, and eyes to match. She walked with a slightly undulating motion, as if she were on board a ship, and seemed to advance with a succession of long, graceful courtesies.
Blérot seemed very much in love with her. He looked at her constantly, and I felt a shiver of an immoderate desire for her pass through his frame.
I went to see him a few days later, and he said to me:
"You do not know how happy I am; I am madly in love with her; but then she is—she is—" He did not finish his sentence, but he put the tips of his fingers to his lips with a gesture which signified "divine! delicious! perfect!" and a good deal more besides.
I asked, laughing, "What! all that?"
"Everything that you can imagine," was his answer.
He introduced me to her. She was very pleasant, on easy terms with me, as was natural, and begged me to look upon their house as my own. But I felt that he, Blérot, did not belong to me any longer. Our intimacy was cut off definitely, and we hardly found a word to say to each other.
I soon took my leave, and shortly afterwards went to the East, returning by way of Russia, Germany, Sweden, and Holland, after an absence of eighteen months from Paris.
The morning after my arrival, as I was walking along the boulevards to feel the air of Paris once more, I saw a pale man with sunken cheeks coming toward me, who was as much like Blérot as it was possible for an emaciated tubercular man to resemble a strong, ruddy, rather stout man. I looked at him in surprise, and asked myself: "Can it possibly be he?" But he saw me, uttered a cry, and came toward me with outstretched arms. I opened mine and we embraced in the middle of the boulevard.
After we had gone up and down once or twice from the Rue Drouot to the Vaudeville Theatre, just as we were taking leave of each other,—for he already seemed quite done up with walking,—I said to him:
"You don't look at all well. Are you ill?"
"I do feel rather out of sorts," was all he said.
He looked like a man who was going to die, and I felt a flood of affection for my dear old friend, the only real one that I had ever had. I squeezed his hands.
"What is the matter with you? Are you in pain?"
"A little tired; but it is nothing."
"What does your doctor say?"
"He calls it an?mia, and has ordered me to eat no white meat and to take tincture of iron."
A suspicion flashed across me.
"Are you happy?" I asked him.
"Yes, very happy; my wife is charming, and I love her more than ever."
But I noticed that he grew rather red and seemed embarrassed, as if he was afraid of any further questions, so I took him by the arm and pushed him into a café, which was nearly empty at that time of day. I forced him to sit down, and looking him straight in the face, I said:
"Look here, old fellow, just tell me the exact truth."
"I have nothing to tell you," he stammered.
"That is not true," I replied, firmly. "You are ill, mentally perhaps, and you dare not reveal your secret to anyone. Something or other is doing you harm, and I mean you to tell me what it is. Come, I am waiting for you to begin."
Again he got very red, stammered, and turning his head away, he said:
"It is very idiotic—but I—I am done for!"
As he did not go on, I said:
"Just tell me what it is."
"Well, I have got a wife who is killing me, that is all," he said abruptly, almost desperately as if he had uttered a torturing thought, as yet unrealised.
I did not understand at first. "Does she make you unhappy? She makes you suffer, night and day? How? What is it?"
"No," he replied in a low voice, as if he were confessing some crime; "I love her too much, that is all."
I was thunderstruck at this unexpected avowal, and then I felt inclined to laugh, but at length I managed to reply:
"But surely, at least so it seems to me, you might manage to—to love her a little less."
He had got very pale again, but finally he made up his mind to speak to me openly, as he used to do formerly.
"No," he said, "that is impossible; and I am dying from it, I know; it is killing me, and I am really frightened. Some days, like to-day, I feel inclined to leave her, to go away altogether, to start for the other end of the world, so as to live for a long time; and then, when the evening comes, I return home in spite of myself, but slowly, and feeling uncomfortable. I go upstairs hesitatingly and ring, and when I go in I see her there sitting in her arm-chair, and she says, 'How late you are,' I kiss her, and we sit down to dinner. During the meal I think: 'I will go directly it is over, and take the train for somewhere, no matter where'; but when we get back to the drawing-room I am so tired that I have not the courage to get up out of my chair, and so I remain, and then—and then—I succumb again."
I could not help smiling again. He saw it, and said: "You may laugh, but I assure you it is very horrible."
"Why don't you tell your wife?" I asked him. "Unless she be a regular monster she would understand."
He shrugged his shoulders. "It is all very well for you t............