Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [104]
Mlle Vinteuil shuddered and rose to her feet. Her sensitive and scrupulous heart was ignorant of the words that ought to flow spontaneously from her lips to match the scene for which her eager senses clamoured. She reached out as far as she could across the limitations of her true nature to find the language appropriate to the vicious young woman she longed to be thought, but the words which she imagined such a young woman might have uttered with sincerity sounded false on her own lips. And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her impulse towards audacity and was interlarded with: “You’re sure you aren’t cold? You aren’t too hot? You don’t want to sit and read by yourself?…
“Her ladyship’s thoughts seem to be rather lubricious this evening,” she concluded, doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used by her friend on some earlier occasion.
In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend’s sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and broke away; and then they began to chase one another about the room, scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like wings, clucking and squealing like a pair of amorous fowls. At last Mlle Vinteuil collapsed on to the sofa, with her friend lying on top of her. The latter now had her back turned to the little table on which the old music-master’s portrait had been arranged. Mlle Vinteuil realised that her friend would not see it unless her attention were drawn to it, and so exclaimed, as if she herself had just noticed it for the first time: “Oh! there’s my father’s picture looking at us; I can’t think who can have put it there; I’m sure I’ve told them a dozen times that it isn’t the proper place for it.”
I remembered the words that M. Vinteuil had used to my parents in apologising for an obtrusive sheet of music. This photograph was evidently in regular use for ritual profanations, for the friend replied in words which were clearly a liturgical response: “Let him stay there. He can’t bother us any longer. D’you think he’d start whining, and wanting to put your overcoat on for you, if he saw you now with the window open, the ugly old monkey?”
To which Mlle Vinteuil replied in words of gentle reproach—“Come, come!”—which testified to the goodness of her nature, not that they were prompted by any resentment at hearing her father spoken of in this fashion (for that was evidently a feeling which she had trained herself, by a long course of sophistries, to keep in close subjection at such moments), but rather because they were a sort of curb which, in order not to appear selfish, she herself applied to the gratification which her friend was attempting to procure for her. It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form of the wickedness she was striving to emulate. But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with tenderness by a woman who had shown herself so implacable towards the defenceless dead, and, springing on to her friend’s lap she held out a chaste brow to be kissed precisely as a daughter would have done, with the exquisite sensation that they would thus, between them, inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty by robbing M. Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred rights of fatherhood. Her friend took Mlle Vinteuil’s head between her hands and placed a kiss on her brow with a docility prompted by the real affection she had for her, as well as by the desire to bring what distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan.
“Do you know what I should like to do to this old horror?” she said, taking up the photograph. And she murmured in Mlle Vinteuil