In spite of myself, I hold out my arms, with hands joined, the better to conjure up all I desire.
Hamond is still listening, as if I hadn’t finished speaking:
“And then, child, after that?”
“What do you mean, ‘after that?’ ” I ask vehemently . . . “After that?
That’s all!
I ask for nothing more.”
“How fortunate!” he mutters to himself . . . “I meant, after that will you live with Maxime?
Will you give up touring?
You . . . won’t work in vaudeville any more?”
His very natural question is enough to stop me in my tracks, and I look at my old friend with suspicion, so nervous that I’m almost intimidated:
“Why shouldn’t I?” I ask feebly.
He shrugs his shoulders:
“Come now, Renee, think things out a bit!
Thanks to Maxime, you’ll be able to live in comfort, even in luxury, and . . . as we’re all hoping, you’ll be able to pick up once more that clever pen of yours which has been rusting . . . Then, maybe a child . . . What a pretty little fellow he’d be!”
Thoughtless Hamond!
Did he succumb to his instinct as a former genre artist?
That little tableau of my future life, between a faithful lover and a beautiful child, has the most inexplicable and disastrous effect on me . . . But he continues, the wretch!
He persists, without noticing that a hateful merriment is dancing in my eyes, which avoid his, and that all he’s now getting out of me is a bored “yes,” “no doubt,” or “I don’t know,” the responses of a schoolgirl who finds the lesson too long . . .
*** A beautiful child . . . a faithful husband . . . after all, that was nothing to laugh about!
I’m still searching for the reason why I was so naughtily jolly . . . A beautiful child . . . I confess I never thought about it.
I didn’t have the time when I was married and occupied by love first and jealousy later—in short, when I was completely taken up by Taillandy, who, for his part, didn’t care about cumbersome, expensive progeny . . .
Now I’m past thirty-three and I’ve never contemplated the possibility of being a mother.
Am I a monster? . . .
A beautiful child . . . gray eyes, a slender muzzle, the air of a fox cub, like its mother; big hands and broad shoulders, like Maxime . . . Well, no! No matter how I try, I can’t see or love the child I might have had, or maybe still will have . . .
“What do you think about it, tell me, Big Ninny, darling?”
He has arrived, very quietly, already so present in my heart that, with him standing by, I continue my self-examination . . .
“What do you think about the child we could have?
It’s Hamond who wants one, just imagine!”
My friend opens his mouth like a Pierrot, a round, stupefied mouth; he opens his eyes very wide and exclaims:
“Great!
Hurray for Hamond!
He’ll have his kid! . . .
And right away, Renee, if you’re willing!”
I defend myself, because he’s jostling me in the worst and best way, biting me a little, kissing me a lot, with that starving expression which frightens me just enough . . .
“A child!” he cries. “A little one of our own!
I hadn’t thought about it, Renee!
How intelligent Hamond is!
That’s a brilliant idea!”
“You think so, darling?
Selfish brute that you are!
You don’t give a damn if I lose my figure, get ugly, and suffer, do you?”
Still laughing, he plunks me down on the couch, at the end of his outstretched arms:
“Lose your figure?
Get ugly?
You’re the one who’s a silly goose, Madame!
You’ll be magnificent, the little one, too, and we’ll have a wonderful time!”
Suddenly he stops laughing and knits his fierce eyebrows over those gentle eyes:
“Besides, then a least you would no longer be able to leave me and tramp the highways alone, would you? You’d be caught!”
Caught . . . I go limp and play idly with the fingers that pin me down. But going limp is also the weaker party’s ruse . . . Caught . . . Yes, that’s what he said, carried away by selfish ness . . . I had judged him correctly when I laughingly called him a monogamous bourgeois, a sit-by-the-fire patriarch.
Could I, then, live out my days peacefully, cowering in his mighty shadow?