Swanns Way | Page 6

study the barometer, for he took
an interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as
not to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard,
not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my
grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in
torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker
armchairs, so that they should not get soaked--you would see my
grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing
back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to
imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At
last one can breathe!" and would run up and down the soaking
paths--too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of
any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been
asking all morning if the weather were going to improve--with her keen,
jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul
by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of
my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety
(for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt
from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a
depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled
her with fresh despair.
When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there
was one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that

was if (at one of those points when the revolutions of her course
brought her, moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where
the liqueurs were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to
her: "Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!"
For, simply to tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into
my father's family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used
to make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few
drops. My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her
husband not to taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and
swallow his few drops all the same, and she would go out again sad and
discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that
her gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of
herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a
smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no
trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to
spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved
without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses. The
torments inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my
grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in her weakness conquered before
she began, but still making the futile endeavour to wean my grandfather
from his liqueur-glass--all these were things of the sort to which, in
later years, one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to
take the tormentor's side with a. happy determination which deludes
one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; but in those days
they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt.
And yet, as soon as I heard her "Bathilde! Come in and stop your
husband from drinking brandy!" in my cowardice I became at once a
man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with
suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them; I ran up to the top of
the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and
beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root, and was scented also by a
wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the
outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened
window. Intended for a more special and a baser use, this room, from
which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of
Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless
because it was the only room whose door Ï was allowed to lock,

whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude;
reading or dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire. Alas! I little
knew that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the
consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my
grandmother's mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband,
during those endless perambulations, afternoon and evening, in which
we used to see