Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [173]
A fresh turn was given to the screw when Swann recalled a sudden expression which he had intercepted, a few days earlier, and for the first time, in Odette’s eyes. It was after dinner at the Verdurins’. Whether it was because Forcheville, aware that Saniette, his brother-in-law, was not in favour with them, had decided to make a butt of him and to shine at his expense, or because he had been annoyed by some awkward remark which Saniette had made to him, although it had passed unnoticed by the rest of the party who knew nothing of whatever offensive allusion it might quite unintentionally have concealed, or possibly because he had been for some time looking for an opportunity of securing the expulsion from the house of a fellow-guest who knew rather too much about him, and whom he knew to be so sensitive that he himself could not help feeling embarrassed at times merely by his presence in the room, Forcheville replied to Saniette’s tactless utterance with such a volley of abuse, going out of his way to insult him, emboldened, the louder he shouted, by the fear, the pain, the entreaties of his victim, that the poor creature, after asking Mme Verdurin whether he should stay and receiving no answer, had left the house in stammering confusion, and with tears in his eyes. Odette had watched this scene impassively, but when the door had closed behind Saniette, she had forced the normal expression of her face down, so to speak, by several pegs, in order to bring herself on to the same level of baseness as Forcheville, her eyes had sparkled with a malicious smile of congratulation upon his audacity, of ironical pity for the poor wretch who had been its victim, she had darted at him a look of complicity in the crime which so clearly implied: “That’s finished him off, or I’m very much mistaken. Did you see how pathetic he looked? He was actually crying,” that Forcheville, when his eyes met hers, sobering instantaneously from the anger, or simulated anger, with which he was still flushed, smiled as he explained: “He need only have made himself pleasant and he’d have been here still; a good dressing-down does a man no harm, at any age.”
One day when Swann had gone out early in the afternoon to pay a call, and had failed to find the person he wished to see, it occurred to him to go to see Odette instead, at an hour when, although he never called on her then as a rule, he knew that she was always at home resting or writing letters until tea-time, and would enjoy seeing her for a moment without disturbing her. The porter told him that he believed Odette to be in; Swann rang the bell, thought he heard the sound of footsteps, but no one came to the door. Anxious and irritated, he went round to the other little street at the back of her house and stood beneath her bedroom window: the curtains were drawn and he could see nothing; he knocked loudly upon the pane, and called out; no one opened. He could see that the neighbours were staring at him. He turned away, thinking that after all he had perhaps been mistaken in believing that he heard footsteps; but he remained so preoccupied with the suspicion that he could not think of anything else. After waiting for an hour, he returned. He found her at home; she told him that she had been in the house when he rang, but had been asleep; the bell had awakened her, she had guessed that it must be Swann, and had run to meet him, but he had already gone. She had, of course, heard him knocking at the window. Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when caught off guard, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude. It was true that when Odette had just done something she did not wish to disclose, she would take pains to bury