She sways. My hand goes out to her. I take her, support, and enfold her. Fainting, she clings to me, and for one moment I carry—gently, heavily—all the young woman's weight. The neck of her dress is undone, and falls like foliage from her throat, and I just saw the real curve of her bosom, nakedly and distractedly throbbing.
Her body is agitated. She hides her face in her hands and then turns it to mine. It chanced that our faces met, and my lips gathered the wonderful savor of her tears!
* * * * * *
The room fills with lamentation; there is a continuous sound of deep sighing. It is overrun by neighbors become friends, to whom no one pays attention.
And now, in this sacred homelet, where death still bleeds, I cannot prevent a heavy heart-beat in me towards the girl who is prostrated like the rest, but who reigns there, in spite of me—of herself—of everything. I feel myself agitated by an obscure and huge rapture—the birth of my flesh and my vitals among these shadows. Beside this poor creature who was so blended with me, and who is falling, falling, through a hell of eternity, I am uplifted by a sort of hope.
I want to fix my attention on the fixity of the bed. I put my hand over my eyes to shut out all thought save of the dead woman, defenseless already, reclining on that earth into which she will sink. But my looks, impelled by superhuman curiosity, escape between my fingers to this other woman, half revealed to me in the tumult of sorrow, and my eyes cannot come out of her.
Madame Piot has changed the candles and attached a band to support the dead woman's chin. Framed in this napkin, which is knotted over the skull in her woolly gray hair, the face looks like a hook-nosed mask of green bronze, with a vitrified line of eyes; the knees make two sharp summits under the sheet; one's eyes run along the thin rods of the shins and the feet lift the linen like two in-driven nails.
Slowly Marie prepares to go. She has closed the neck of her dress and hidden herself in her cloak. She comes up to me, sore-hearted, and with her tears for a moment quenched she smiles at me without speaking. I half rise, my hands tremble towards her smile as if to touch it, above the past and the dust of my second mother.
Towards the end of the night, when the dead fire is scattering chilliness, the women go away one by one. One hour, two hours, I remain alone. I pace the room in one direction and another, then I look, and shiver. My aunt is no more. There is only left of her something indistinct, struck down, of subterranean color, and her place is desolate. Now, close to her, I am alone! Alone—magnified by my affliction, master of my future, disturbed and numbed by the newness of the things now beginning. At last the window grows pale, the ceiling turns gray, and the candle-flames wink in the first traces of light.
I shiver without end. In the depth of my dawn, in the heart of this room where I have always been, I recall the image of a woman who filled it—a woman standing at the chimney-corner, where a gladsome fire flames, and she is garbed in reflected purple, her corsage scarlet, her face golden, as she holds to the glow those hands transparent and beautiful as flames. In the darkness, from my vigil, I look at her.
* * * * * *
The two nights which followed were spent in mournful motionlessness at the back of that room where the trembling host of lights seemed to give animation to dead things. During the two days various activities brought me distraction, at first distressing, then depressing.
The last night I opened my aunt's jewel box. It was called "the little box." It was on the dressing table, at the bottom of piled-up litter. I found some topaz ear-rings of a bygone period, a gold cross, equally outdistanced, small and slender—a little girl's, or a young girl's; and then, wrapped in tissue paper, like a relic, a portrait of myself when a child. Last, a written page, torn from one of my old school copy-books, which she had not been able to throw wholly away. Transparent at the folds, the worn sheet was fragile as lace, and gave the illusion of being equally precious. That was all the treasure my aunt had collected. That jewel box held the poverty of her life and the wealth of her heart.
* * * * * *
It poured with rain on the day of the funeral. All the morning groups of people succeeded each other in the big cavern of our room, a going and coming of sighs. My aunt was laid in her coffin towards two o'clock, and it was carried then into the passage, where visitors' feet had brought dirt and puddles. A belated wreath was awaited, and then the umbrellas opened, and under their black undulation the procession moved off.
When we came out of the church it was not far off four o'clock. The rain had not stopped and little rivers dashed down from either side of the procession's sluggish flow along the street. There were many flowers, so that the hearse made a blot of relief, beautiful enough. There were many people, too, and I turned round several times. Always I saw old Eudo, in his black cowl, hopping along in the mud, hunchbacked as a crow. Marie was walking among some women in the second half of the file, whose frail and streaming roof the hearse drew along irregularly with jerks and halts. Her gait was jaded; she was thinking only of our sorrow! All things darkened again to my eyes in the ugliness of the evening.
The cemetery is full of mud under the muslin of fallen rain, and the footfalls make a sticky sound in it. There are a few trees, naked and paralyzed. The sky is marshy and sprinkled with crows.
The coffin, with its shapeless human form, is lowered from the hearse and disappears in the fresh earth.
They march past. Marie and her father take their places beside me. I say thanks to every one in the same tone; they are all like each other, with their gestures of impotence, their dejected faces, the words they get ready and pour out as they pass before me, and their dark costume. No one has come from the castle, but in spite of that there are many people and they all converge upon me. I pluck up courage.
Monsieur Lucien Gozlan comes forward, calls me "my dear sir," and brings me the condolences of his uncles, while the rest watch us.
Joseph Bonéas says "my dear friend" to me, and that affects me deeply. Monsieur Pocard says, "If I had been advised in time I would have said a few words. It is regrettable——"
Others follow; then nothing more is to be seen in the rain, the wind and the gloom but backs.
"It's finished. Let's go."
Marie lifts to me her sorrow-laved face. She is sweet; she is affectionate; she is unhappy; but she does not love me.
We go away in disorder, along by the trees whose skeletons the winter has blackened.
When we arrive in our quarter, twilight has invaded the streets. We hear gusts of talk about the Pocard scheme. Ah, how fiercely people live and seek success!
Little Antoinette, cautiously feeling her way by a big wall, hears us pass. She stops and would look if she could. We espy her figure in that twilight of which she is beginning to make a part, though fine and faint as a pistil.
"Poor little angel!" says a woman, as she goes by.
Marie and her father are the only ones left near me when we pass Rampaille's tavern. Some men who were at the funeral are sitting at tables there, black-clad.
We reach my home; Marie offers me her hand, and we hesitate. "Come in."
She enters. We look at the dead room; the floor is wet, and the wind blows through as if we were out of doors. Both of us are crying, and she says, "I will come to-morrow and tidy up. Till then——"
We take each other's hand in confused hesitation.
* * * * * *
A little later there is a scraping at the door, then a timid knock, and a long figure appears.
It is Véron who presents himself with an awkward air. His tall and badly jointed body swings like a hanging signboard. He is an original and sentimental soul, but no one has ever troubled to find out what he is. He begins, "My young friend—hum, hum—" (he repeats this formless sound every two or three words, like a sort of clock with a sonorous tick)—"One may be wanting money, you know, for something—hum, hum; you need money, perhaps—hum, hum; all this expense—and I'd said to myself 'I'll take him some——'"
He scrutinizes me as he repeats, "Hum, hum." I shake his hand with tears in my eyes. I do not need money, but I know I shall never forget that action; so good, so supernatural.
And when he has swung himself out, abashed by my refusal, embarrassed by the unusual size of his legs and his heart, I sit down in a corner, seized with shivering. Then I obliterate myself in another corner, equally forlorn. It seems as if Marie has gone away with all I have. I am in mourning and I am all alone, because of her.
The seat leans against the gray wall, at the spot where a rose tree hangs over it, and the lane begins to slope to the river. I asked Marie to come, and I am waiting for her in the evening.
When I asked her—in sudden decision after so many days of hesitation—to meet me here this evening, she was silent, astonished. But she did not refuse; she did not answer. Some people came and she went away. I am waiting for her, after that prayer.
Slowly I stroll to the river bank. When I return some one is on the seat, enthroned in the shadow. The face is indistinct, but in the apparel of mourning I can see the neck-opening, like a faint pale heart, and the misty expansion of the skirt. Stooping, I hear her low voice, "I've come, you see." And, "Marie!" I say.
I sit down beside her, and we remain silent. She is there—wholly. Through her black veils I can make out the whiteness of her face and neck and hands—all her beauty, like light enclosed.
For me she had only been a charming picture, a passer-by, one apart, living her own life. Now she has listened to me; she has come at my call; she has brought herself here.
* * * * * *
The day has been scorching. Towards the end of the afternoon storm-rain burst over the world and then ceased. One can still hear belated drops falling from the branches which overhang the wall. The air is charged with odors of earth and leaves and flowers, and wreaths of wind go heavily by.
She is the first to speak; she speaks of one thing and another.
I do not know what she is saying; I draw nearer to see her lips; I answer her, "I am always thinking of you."
Hearing these words, she is silent. Her silence grows greater and greater in the shadows. I have drawn still nearer; so near that I feel on my cheek the wing-beat of her breath; so near that her silence caresses me.
Then, to keep myself in countenance, or to smoke, I have struck a match, but I make no use of the gleam at my finger-tips. It shows me Marie, quivering a little; it gilds her pale face. A smile arises on her face; I have seen her full of that smile.
My eyes grow dim and my hands tremble. I wish she would speak.
"Tell me——" Her down-bent neck unfolds, and she lifts her head to speak. At that moment, by the light of the flame that I hold, whose great revealing kindness I am guarding, our eyes fall on an inscription scratched in the wall—a heart—and inside it two initials, H-S. Ah, that design was made by me one evening. Little Helen was lolling there then, and I thought I adored her. For a moment I am overpowered by this apparition of a mistake, bygone and forgotten. Marie does not know; but seeing those initials, and divining a presence between us, she dare not speak.
As the match is on the point of going out I throw it down. The little flame's last flicker has lighted up for me the edge of the poor black serge skirt, so worn that it shines a little, even in the evening, and has shown me the girl's shoe. There is a hole in the heel of the stocking, and we have both seen it. In quick shame, Marie draws her foot under her skirt; and I—I tremble still more that my eyes have touched a little of her maiden flesh, a fragment of her real innocence.
Gently she stands up in the grayness, and puts an end to this first fate-changing meeting.
We return. The obscurity is outstretched all around and against us. Together and alone we go into the following chambers of the night. My eyes follow the sway of her body in her dress against the vaguely luminous background of the wall. Amid the night her dress is night also; she is there—wholly! There is a singing in my ears; an anthem fills the world.
In the street, where there are no more wayfarers, she walks on the edge of the causeway. So that my face may be on a level with hers, I walk beside her in the gutter, and the cold water enters my boots.
And that evening, inflated by mad longing, I am so triumphantly confident that I do not even remember to shake her hand. By her door I said to her, "To-morrow," and she answered, "Yes."
On one of the days which followed, finding myself free in the afternoon, I made my way to the great populous building of flats where she lives. I ascended two dark flights of steps, closely encaged, and followed a long elbowed corridor. Here it is. I knock and enter. Complete silence greets me. There is no one, and acute disappointment runs through me.
I take some hesitant steps in the tiny vestibule, which is lighted by the glass door to the kitchen, wherein I hear the drip of water. I see a room whose curtains invest it with broidered light. There is a bed in it, with a cover of sky-blue satinette shining like the blue of a chromo. It is Marie's room! Her gray silk hat, rose-trimmed, hangs from a nail on the flowery paper. She has not worn it since my aunt's death; and alongside hang black dresses. I enter this bright blue sanctuary, inhabited only by a cold and snow-like light, and orderly and chaste as a picture.
My hand goes out like a thief's. I touch, I stroke these dresses, which are wont to touch Marie. I turn again to the blue-veiled bed. On a whatnot there are books, and their titles invite me; for where her thoughts dwell, the things which occupy her mind—but I leave them. I would rather go near her bed. With a movement at once mad, frightened and trembling, I lift the quilts that clothe it and my gaze enters it, and my knees lean trembling on the edge of this great lifeless thing, which, alone among dead things, is one of soft and supple flesh.
* * * * * *
My customary life continues and my work is always the same. I make notes, by the way, of Crillon's honest trivialities; of Brisbille's untimely outbursts; of the rumors anent the Pocard scheme, and the progress of the Association of Avengers, a society to promote national awakening, founded by Monsieur Joseph Bonéas. The same complex and monotonous existence bears me along as it does everybody. But since that tragic night when my sorrow was transformed into joy at the lyke-wake in the old room, in truth the world is no longer what it was. People and things appear to me shadowy and distant when I go out into the current of the crowds; when I am dressing in my room and decide that I look well in black; when I sit up late at my table in the sunshine of hope. Now and again the memory of my aunt comes bodily back to me. Sometimes I hear people pronounce the name of Marie. My body starts when it hears them say "Marie," who know not what they say. And there are moments when our separation throbs so warmly that I do not know whether she is here or absent.
* * * * * *
During this walk that we have just had together the summer and the sweetness of living have weighed more than ever on my shoulders. Her huge home, which is such a swarming hive at certain times, is now immensely empty in the labyrinth of its dark stairs and the landings, whence issue the narrow closed streets of its corridors, and where in the corners taps drip upon drain-stones. Our immense—our naked solitude pervades us. An exquisite emotion takes hold of me while we are slowly climbing the steep and methodical way. There is something human in the stairway; in the inevitable shapes of its spiral and its steps cut out of the quick, in the rhythmic repetition of its steps. A round skylight pierces the sloping roof up there, and it is the only light for this part of the people's house, this poor internal city. The darkness which runs down the walls of the well, whence we are striving to emerge step by step, conceals our laborious climb towards that gap of daylight. Shadowed and secret as we are, it seems to me that we are mounting to heaven.
Oppressed by a common languor, we at last sat down side by side on a step. There is no sound in the building under the one round window bending over us. We lean on each other because of the stair's narrowness. Her warmth enters into me; I feel myself agitated by that obscure light which radiates from her. I share with her the heat of her body and her thought itself. The darkness deepens round us. Hardly can I see the crouching girl there, warm and hollowed like a nest.
I call her by her name, very quietly, and it is as though I made a loud avowal! She turns, and it seems that this is the first time I have seen her naked face. "Kiss me," she says; and without speaking we stammer, and murmur, and laugh.
* * * * * *
Together we are looking at a little square piece of paper. I found it on the seat which the rose-tree overhangs on the edge of the downward lane. Carefully folded, it had a forgotten look, and it was waiting there, detained for a moment by its timorous weight. A few lines of careful writing cover it. We read it:
"I do not know how speaks the pious heart; nothing I know; th' enraptured martyr I. Only I know the tears that brimming start, your beauty blended with your smile to espy."
Then, having read it, we read it again, moved by a mysterious influence. And we finger the chance-captured paper, without knowing what it is, without understanding very well what it says.
* * * * * *
When I asked her to go with me to the cemetery that Sunday, she agreed, as she does to all I ask her. I watched her arms brush the roses as she came in through the gardens. We walked in silence; more and more we are losing the habit of talking to each other. We looked at the latticed and flower-decked square where our aunt sleeps—the garden which is only as big as a woman. Returning from the cemetery by way of the fields, the sun already low, we join hands, seized with triumphant delight.
She is wearing a dress of black delaine, and the skirt, the sleeves and the collar wave in the breeze. Sometimes she turns her radiant face to me and it seems to grow still brighter when she looks at me. Slightly stooping, she walks, though among the grass and flowers whose tints and grace shine in reflection on her forehead and cheeks, she is a giantess. A butterfly precedes us on our path and alights under our eyes, but when we come up it takes wing again, and comes down a little farther and begins all over again; and we smile at the butterfly that thinks of us.
Inlaid with gold by the slanting sun we lead each other, hand in hand, as far as the statue of Flora, which once upon a time a lord of the manor raised on the fringe of the wood. Against the abiding background of distant heights the goddess stands, half-naked, in the beautiful ripe light. Her fair hips are draped with a veil of still whiter stone, like a linen garment. Before the old moss-mellowed pedestal I pressed Marie desperately to my heart. Then, in the sacred solitude of the wood, I put my hands upon her, and so that she might be like the goddess I unfastened her black bodice, lowered the ribbon shoulder-straps of her chemise, and laid bare her wide and rounded bosom.
She yielded to the adoration with lowered head, and her eyes magnificently troubled, red-flushing with blood and sunshine.
I put my lips on hers. Until that day, whenever I kissed her, her lips submitted. This time she gave me back my long caress, and even her eyes closed upon it. Then she stands there with her hands crossed on her glorious throat, her red, wet lips ajar. She stands there, apart, yet united to me, and her heart on her lips.
She has covered her bosom again. The breeze is suddenly gusty. The apple trees in the orchards are shaken and scatter bird-like jetsam in space; and in that bright green paddock yonder the rows of out-hung linen dance in the sunshine. The sky darkens; the wind rises and prevails. It was that very day of the gale. It assaults our two bodies on the flank of the hill; it comes out of infinity and sets roaring the tawny forest foliage. We can see its agitation behind the black grille of the trunks. It makes us dizzy to watch the swift displacement of the gray-veiled sky, and from cloud to cloud a bird seems hurled, like a stone. We go down towards the bottom of the valley, clinging to the slope, an offering to the deepest breath of heaven, driven forward yet holding each other back.
So, gorged with the gale and deafened by the universal concert of space that goes through our ears, we find sanctuary on the river bank. The water flows between trees whose highest foliage is intermingled. By a dark footpath, soft and damp, under the ogive of the branches, we follow this crystal-paved cloister of green shadow. We come on a flat-bottomed boat, used by the anglers. I make Marie enter it, and it yields and groans under her weight. By the strokes of two old oars we descend the current.
It seems to our hearts and our inventing eyes that the banks take flight on either side—it is the scenery of bushes and trees which retreats.We—we abide! But the boat grounds among tall reeds. Marie is half reclining and does not speak. I draw myself towards her on my knees, and the boat quivers as I do. Her face in silence calls me; she calls me wholly. With her prostrate body, surrendered and disordered, she calls me.
I possess her—she is mine! In sublime docility she yields to my violent caress. Now she is mine—mine forever! Henceforth let what may befall; let the years go by and the winters follow the summers, she is mine, and my life is granted me! Proudly I think of the great and famous lovers whom we resemble. I perceive that there is no recognized law which can stand against the might of love. And under the transient wing of the foliage, amid the continuous recessional of heaven and earth, we repeat "never"; we repeat "always"; and we proclaim it to eternity.
* * * * * *
The leaves are falling; the year draws near to its end; the wedding is arranged to take place about Christmas.
That decision was mine; Marie said "yes," as usual, and her father, absorbed all the day in figures, would emerge from them at night, like a shipwrecked man, seeing darkly, passive, except on rare occasions when he had fits of mad obstinacy, and no one knew why.
In the early morning sometimes, when I was climbing Chestnut Hill on my way to work, Marie would appear before me at a corner, in the pale and blushing dawn. We would walk on together, bathed in those fresh fires, and would watch the town at our feet rising again from its ashes. Or, on my way back, she would suddenly be there, and we would walk side by side towards her home. We loved each other too much to be able to talk. A very few words we exchanged just to entwine our voices, and in speaking of other people we smiled at each other.
One day, about that time, Monsieur the Marquis of Monthyon had the kindly thought of asking us both to an evening party at the castle, with several leading people of our quarter. When all the guests were gathered in a huge gallery, adorned with busts which sat in state between high curtains of red damask, the Marquis took it into his head to cut off the electricity. In a lordly way he liked heavy practical jokes—I was just smiling at Marie, who was standing near me in the middle of the crowded gallery, when suddenly it was dark. I put out my arms and drew her to me. She responded with a spirit she had not shown before, our lips met more passionately than ever, and our single body swayed among the invisible, ejaculating throng that elbowed and jostled us. The light flashed again. We had loosed our hold. Ah, it was not Marie whom I had clasped! The woman fled with a stifled exclamation of shame and indignation towards him who she believed had embraced her, and who had seen nothing. Confused, and as though still blind, I rejoined Marie, but I was myself again with difficulty. In spite of all, that kiss which had suddenly brought me in naked contact with a complete stranger remained to me an extraordinary and infernal delight. Afterwards, I thought I recognized the woman by her blue dress, half seen at the same time as the gleam of her neck after that brief and dazzling incident. But there were three of them somewhat alike. I never knew which of those unknown women concealed within her flesh the half of the thrill that I could not shake off all the evening.
* * * * * *
There was a large gathering at the wedding. The Marquis and Marchioness of Monthyon appeared at the sacristy. Brisbille, by good luck, stayed away. Good sectarian that he was, he only acknowledged civil marriages. I was a little shamefaced to see march past, taking their share of the fine and tranquil smile distributed by Marie, some women who had formerly been my mistresses—Madame Lacaille, nervous, subtle, mystical; big Victorine and her good-natured rotundity, who had welcomed me any time and anywhere; and Madeleine Chaine; and slender Antonia above all, with the Italian woman's ardent and theatrical face, ebony-framed, and wearing a hat of Parisian splendor. For Antonia is very elegant since she married Véron. I could not help wincing when I saw that lanky woman, who had clung to me in venturesome rooms, now assiduous around us in her ceremonious attire. But how far off and obliterated all that was!
We rearranged the house. We did not alter the general arrangement, nor the places of the heavy furniture—that would have been too great a change. But we cast out all the dusty old stuff, the fossilized and worthless knick-knacks that Mame had accumulated. The photographs on the walls, which were dying of jaundice and debility, and which no longer stood for anybody, because of the greatness of time, we cleared out of their imitation tortoiseshell and buried in the depths of drawers.
I bought some furniture, and as we sniffed the odor of varnish which hung about for a long time in the lower room, we said, "This is the real thing." And, indeed, our home was pretty much like the middle-class establishments of our quarter and everywhere. Is it not the only really proud moment here on earth, when we can say, "I, too!"
Years went by. There was nothing remarkable in our life. When I came home in the evening, Marie, who often had not been out and had kept on her dressing-gown and plaits, used to say, "There's been nothing to speak of to-day."
The aeroplanes were appearing at that time. We talked about them, and saw photographs of them in the papers. One Sunday we saw one from our window. We had heard the chopped-up noise of its engine expanding over the sky; and down below, the townsfolk on their doorsteps, raised their heads towards the ceiling of their streets. Rattling space was marked with a dot. We kept our eyes on it and saw the great flat and noisy insect grow bigger and bigger, silhouetting the black of its angles and partitioned lines against the airy wadding of the clouds. When its headlong flight had passed, when it had dwindled in our eyes and ears amid the new world of sounds, which it drew in its train, Marie sighed dreamily.
"I would like," she said, "to go up in an aeroplane, into the wind—into the sky!"
One spring we talked a lot about a trip we would take some day. Some railway posters had been stuck on the walls of the old tin works, that the Pocard scheme was going to transfigure. We looked at them the day they were freshly brilliant in their wet varnish and their smell of paste. We preferred the bill about Corsica, which showed seaside landscapes, harbors with picturesque people in the foreground and a purple mountain behind, all among garlands. And later, even when stiffened and torn and cracking in the wind, that poster attracted us.
One evening, in the kitchen, when we had just come in—there are memories which mysteriously outlive the rest—and Marie was lighting the fire, with her hat on and her hands wiped out in the twilight by the grime of the coal, she said, "We'll make that trip later!"
Sometimes it happened that we went out, she and I, during the week. I looked about me and shared my thoughts with her. Never very talkative, she would listen to me. Coming out of the Place de l'Eglise, which used to affect us so much not long ago, we often used to meet Jean and Genevieve Trompson, near the sunken post where an old jam pot lies on the ground. Everybody used to say of these two, "They'll separate, you'll see; that's what comes of loving each other too much; it was madness, I always said so." And hearing these things, unfortunately true, Marie would murmur, with a sort of obstinate gentleness, "Love is sacred."
Returning, not far from the anachronistic and clandestine Eudo's lair, we used to hear the coughing parrot. That old bird, worn threadbare, and of a faded green hue, never ceased to imitate the fits of coughing which two years before had torn Adolphe Piot's lungs, who died in the midst of his family under such sad circumstances. Those days we would return with our ears full of the obstinate clamor of that recording bird, which had set itself fiercely to immortalize the noise that passed for a moment through the world, and toss the echoes of an ancient calamity, of which everybody had ceased to think.
Almost the only people about us are Marthe, my little sister-in-law, who is six years old, and resembles her sister like a surprising miniature; my father-in-law, who is gradually annihilating himself; and Crillon. This last lives always contented in the same shop while time goes by, like his father and his grandfather, and the cobbler of the fable, his eternal ancestor. Under his square cap, on the edge of his glazed niche, he soliloquizes, while he smokes the short and juicy pipe which joins him in talking and spitting—indeed, he seems to be answering it. A lonely toiler, his lot is increasingly hard, and almost worthless. He often comes in to us to do little jobs—mend a table leg, re-seat a chair, replace a tile. Then he says, "There's summat I must tell you——"
So he retails the gossip of the district, for it is against his conscience, as he frankly avows, to conceal what he knows. And Heaven knows, there is gossip enough in our quarter!—a complete network, above and below, of quarrels, intrigues and deceptions, woven around man, woman and the public in general. One says, "Itcan'tbe true!" and then thinks about something else.
And Crillon, in face of all this perversity, all this wrong-doing, smiles! I like to see that happy smile of innocence on the lowly worker's face. He is better than I, and he even understands life better, with his unfailing good sense.
I say to him, "But are there not any bad customs and vices?Alcoholism, for instance?"
"Yes," says Crillon, "as long as you don't exarrergate it. I don't like exarrergations, and I find as much of it among the pestimists as among the opticions. Drink, you say! It's chiefly that folks haven't enough charitableness, mind you. They blame all these poor devils that drink and they think themselves clever! And they're envious, too; if they wasn't that, tell me, would they stand there in stony peterified silence before the underhand goings-on of bigger folks? That's what it is, at bottom of us. Let me tell you now. I'll say nothing against Termite, though he's a poacher, and for the castle folks that's worse than all, but if yon bandit of a Brisbille weren't the anarchist he is and frightening everybody, I'd excuse him his dirty nose and even not taking it out of a pint pot all the week through. It isn't a crime, isn't only being a good boozer. We've got to look ahead and have a broad spirit, as Monsieur Joseph says. Tolerantness! We all want it, eh?"
"You're a good sort," I say.
"I'm a man, like everybody," proudly replies Crillon. "It's not that I hold by accustomary ideas; I'm not an antiquitary, but I don't like to single-arise myself. If I'm a botcher in life, it's cos I'm the same as others—no less," he says, straightening up. And standing still more erect, he adds, "Norno more, neither!"
When we are not chatting we read aloud. There is a very fine library at the factory, selected by Madame Valentine Gozlan from works of an educational or moral kind, for the use of the staff. Marie, whose imagination goes further afield than mine, and who has not my anxieties, directs the reading. She opens a book and reads aloud while I take my ease, looking at the pastel portrait which hangs just opposite the window. On the glass which entombs the picture I see the gently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains, and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with broken streaks and all kinds of wave marks.
"Ah, these adventures!" Marie sometimes sighs, at the end of a chapter; "these things that never happen!"
"Thank Heaven," I cry.
"Alas," she replies.
Even when people live together they differ more than they think!
At other times Marie reads to herself, quite silently. I surprise her absorbed in this occupation. It even happens that she applies herself thus to poetry. In her set and stooping face her eyes come and go over the abbreviated lines of the verses. From time to time she raises them and looks up at the sky, and—vastly further than the visible sky—at all that escapes from the little cage of words.
And sometimes we are lightly touched with boredom.
* * * * * *
One evening Marie informed me that the canary was dead, and she began to cry, as she showed me the open cage and the bird which lay at the bottom, with its feet curled up, as rumpled and stark as the little yellow plaything of a doll. I sympathized with her sorrow; but her tears were endless, and I found her emotion disproportionate.
"Come now," I said, "after all, a bird's only a bird, a mere point that moved a little in a corner of the room. What then? What about the thousands of birds that die, and the people that die, and the poor?" But she shook her head, insisted on grieving, tried to prove to me that it was momentous and that she was right.
For a moment I stood bewildered by this want of understanding; this difference between her way of feeling and mine. It was a disagreeable revelation of the unknown. One might often, in regard to small matters, make a multitude of reflections if one wished; but one does not wish.
* * * * * *
My position at the factory and in our quarter is becoming gradually stronger. By reason of a regular gratuity which I received, we are at last able to put money aside each month, like everybody.
"I say!" cried Crillon, pulling me outside with him, as I was coming in one evening; "I must let you know that you've been spoken of spontanially for the Town Council at the next renewment. They're making a big effort, you know. Monsieur the Marquis is going to stand for the legislative elections—but we've walked into the other quarter," said Crillon, stopping dead. "Come back, come back."
We turned right-about-face.
"This patriotic society of Monsieur Joseph," Crillon went on, "has done a lot of harm to the anarchists. We've all got to let 'em feel our elbows, that's necessential. You've got a foot in the factory, eh? You see the workmen; have a crack of talk with 'em. You ingreasiate yourself with 'em, so's some of 'em'll vote for you. Forthem'sthe danger."
"It's true that I am very sympathetic to them," I murmured, impressed by this prospect.
Crillon came to a stand in front of the Public Baths. "It's the seventeenth to-day," he explained; "the day of the month when I takes a bath. Oh, yes! I know thatyougo every Thursday; but I'm not of that mind. You're young, of course, and p'raps you have good reason! But you take my tip, and hobnob with the working man. We must bestir ourselves and impell ourselves, what the devil! As for me, I've finished my political efforts for peace and order. It'syourturn!"
He is right. Looking at the ageing man, I note that his framework is slightly bowed; that his ill-shaven cheeks are humpbacked with little ends of hair turning into white crystals. In his lowly sphere he has done his duty. I reflect upon the mite-like efforts of the unimportant people; of the mountains of tasks performed by anonymity. They are necessary, these hosts of people so closely resembling each other; for cities are built upon the poor brotherhood of paving-stones.
He is right, as always. I, who am still young; I, who am on a higher level than his; I must play a part, and subdue the desire one has to let things go on as they may.
A sudden movement of will appears in my life, which otherwise proceeds as usual.
I approached the workpeople with all possible sympathy. The toiler's lot, moreover, raises interesting problems, which one should seek to understand. So I inform myself in the matter of those around me.
"You want to see the greasers' work? Here I am," said Marcassin, surnamed Pétrolus. "I'm the lamp-man. Before that I was a greaser. Is that any better? Can't say. It's here that that goes on, look—there. My place you'll find at night by letting your nose guide you."
The truth is that the corner of the factory to which he leads me has an aggressive smell. The shapeless walls of this sort of grotto are adorned with shelves full of leaking lamps—lamps dirty as beasts. In a bucket there are old wicks and other departed things. At the foot of a wooden cupboard which looks like iron are lamp glasses in paper shirts; and farther away, groups of oil-drums. All is dilapidated and ruinous; all is dark in this angle of the great building where light is elaborated. The specter of a huge window stands yonder. The panes only half appear; so encrusted are they they might be covered with yellow paper. The great stones—the rocks—of the walls are upholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom of a stewpan, and nests of dust hang from them. Black puddles gleam on the floor, with beds of slime from the scraping of the lamps.
There he lives and moves, in his armored tunic encrusted with filth as dark as coffee-grounds. In his poor claw he grips the chief implement of his work—a black rag. His grimy hands shine with paraffin, and the oil, sunk and blackened in his nails, gives them a look of wick ends. All day long he cleans lamps, and repairs, and unscrews, and fills, and wipes them. The dirt and the darkness of this population of appliances he attracts to himself, and he works like a nigger.
"For it's got to be well done," he says, "and even when you're fagged out, you must keep on rubbing hard."
"There's six hundred and sixty-three, monsieur" (he says "monsieur" as soon as he embarks on technical explanations), "counting the smart ones in the fine offices, and the lanterns in the wood-yard, and the night watchmen. You'll say to me, 'Why don't they have electricity that lights itself?' It's 'cos that costs money and they get paraffin for next to nothing, it seems, through a big firm 'at they're in with up yonder. As for me, I'm always on my legs, from the morning when I'm tired through sleeping badly, from after dinner when you feel sick with eating, up to the evening, when you're sick of everything."
The bell has rung, and we go away in company. He has pulled off his blue trousers and tunic and thrown them into a corner—two objects which have grown heavy and rusty, like tools. But the dirty shell of his toil did upholster him a little, and he emerges from it gaunter, and horribly squeezed within the littleness of a torturing jacket. His bony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottom in long and mournful shoes, with hillocks, and resembling crocodiles; and their soles, being soaked in paraffin, leave oily footprints, rainbow-hued, in the plastic mud.
Perhaps it is because of this dismal companion towards whom I turn my head, and whom I see trotting slowly and painfully at my side in the rumbling grayness of the evening exodus, that I have a sudden and tragic vision of the people, as in a flash's passing. (I do sometimes get glimpses of the things of life momentarily.) The dark doorway to my vision seems torn asunder. Between these two phantoms in front the sable swarm outspreads. The multitude encumbers the plain that bristles with dark chimneys and cranes, with ladders of iron planted black and vertical in nakedness—a plain vaguely scribbled with geometrical lines, rails and cinder paths—a plain utilized yet barren. In some places about the approaches to the factory cartloads of clinker and cinders have been dumped, and some of it continues to burn like pyres, throwing off dark flames and darker curtains. Higher, the hazy clouds vomited by the tall chimneys come together in broad mountains whose foundations brush the ground and cover the land with a stormy sky. In the depths of these clouds humanity is let loose. The immense expanse of men moves and shouts and rolls in the same course all through the suburb. An inexhaustible echo of cries surrounds us; it is like hell in eruption and begirt by bronze horizons.
At that moment I am afraid of the multitude. It brings something limitless into being, something which surpasses and threatens us; and it seems to me that he who is not with it will one day be trodden underfoot.
My head goes down in thought. I walk close to Marcassin, who gives me the impression of an escaping animal, hopping through the darkness—whether because of his name,[1] or his stench, I do not know. The evening is darkening; the wind is tearing leaves away; it thickens with rain and begins to nip.
[Footnote 1:Marcassin—a young wild boar.—Tr.]
My miserable companion's voice comes to me in shreds. He is trying to explain to me the law of unremitting toil. An echo of his murmur reaches my face.
"And that's what one hasn't the least idea of. Because what's nearest to us, often, one doesn't see it."
"Yes, that's true," I say, rather weary of his monotonous complaining.
I try a few words of consolation, knowing that he was recently married."After all, no one comes bothering you in your own little corner.There's always that. And then, after all, you're going home—your wifeis waiting for you. You're lucky——"
"I've no time; or rather, I've no strength. At nights, when I come home I'm too tired—I'm too tired, you understand, to be happy, you see. Every morning I think I shall be, and I'm hoping up till noon; but at night I'm too knocked out, what with walking and rubbing for eleven hours; and on Sundays I'm done in altogether with the week. There's even times that I don't even wash myself when I come in. I just stay with my hands mucky; and on Sundays when I'm cleaned up, it's a nasty one when they say to me, 'You're looking well.'"
And while I am listening to the tragicomical recital which he retails, like a soliloquy, without expecting replies from me—luckily, for I should not know how to answer—I can, in fact, recall those holidays when the face of Pétrolus is embellished by the visible marks of water.
"Apart from that," he goes on, withdrawing his chin into the gray string of his over-large collar; "apart from that, Charlotte, she's very good. She looks after me, and tidies the house, and it's her that lightsourlamp; and she hides the books carefully away from me so's I can't grease 'em, and my fingers make prints on 'em like criminals. She's good, but it doesn't turn out well, same as I've told you, and when one's unhappy everything's favorable to being unhappy."
He is silent for a while, and then adds by way of conclusion to all he has said, and to all that one can say, "Myfather, he caved in at fifty. And I shall cave in at fifty, p'raps before."
With his thumb he points through the twilight at that sort of indelible darkness which makes the multitude, "Them others, it's not the same with them. There's those that want to change everything and keep going on that notion. There's those that drink and want to drink, and keep going that way."
I hardly listen to him while he explains to me the grievances of the different groups of workmen, "The molders, monsieur, them, it's a matter of the gangs——"
Just now, while looking at the population of the factory, I was almost afraid; it seemed to me that these toilers were different sorts of beings from the detached and impecunious people who live around me. When I look at this one I say to myself, "They are the same; they are all alike."
In the distance, and together, they strike fear, and their combination is a menace; but near by they are only the same as this one. One must not look at them in the distance.
Pétrolus gets excited; he makes gestures; he punches in and punches out again with his fist, the hat which is stuck askew on his conical head, over the ears that are pointed like artichoke leaves. He is in front of me, and each of his soles is pierced by a valve which draws in water from the saturated ground.
"The unions, monsieur——" he cries to me in the wind, "why, it's dangerous to point at them. You haven't the right to think any more—that's what they call liberty. If you're inthem, you've got to be agin the parsons—(I'm willing, but what's that got to do with labor?)—and there's something more serious," the lamp-man adds, in a suddenly changed voice, "you've got to be agin the army,—thearmy!"
And now the poor slave of the lamp seems to take a resolution. He stops and devotionally rolling his Don Quixote eyes in his gloomy, emaciated face, he says, "I'malways thinking about something. What? you'll say. Well, here it is. I belong to the League of Patriots."
As they brighten still more, his eyes are like two live embers in the darkness, "Déroulède!" he cries; "that's the man—he'smyGod!"
Pétrolus raises his voice and gesticulates; he makes great movements in the night at the vision of his idol, to whom his leanness and his long elastic arms give him some resemblance. "He's for war; he's for Alsace-Lorraine, that's what he's for; and above all, he's for nothing else. Ah, that's all there is to it! The Boches have got to disappear off the earth, else it'll be us. Ah, when they talk politics tome, I ask 'em, 'Are you for Déroulède, yes or no?' That's enough! I got my schooling any old how, and I know next to nothing but I reckon it's grand, only to think like that, and in the Reserves I'm adjutant[1]—almost an officer, monsieur, just a lamp-man as I am!"
[Footnote 1: A non-com., approximately equivalent to regimental sergeant-major.—Tr.]
He tells me, almost in shouts and signs, because of the wind across the open, that his worship dates from a function at which Paul Déroulède had spoken to him. "He spoke to everybody, an' then he spoke to me, as close to me as you and me; but it washim! I wanted an idea, and he gave it to me!"
"Very good," I say to him; "very good. You are a patriot, that's excellent."
I feel that the greatness of this creed surpasses the selfish demands of labor—although I have never had the time to think much about these things—and it strikes me as touching and noble.
A last fiery spasm gets hold of Pétrolus as he espies afar Eudo's pointed house, and he cries that on the great day of revenge there will be some accounts to settle; and then the fervor of this ideal-bearer cools and fades, and is spent along the length of the roads. He is now no more than a poor black bantam which cannot possibly take wing. His face mournfully awakes to the evening. He shuffles along, bows his long and feeble spine, and his spirit and his strength exhausted, he approaches the porch of his house, where Madame Marcassin awaits him.
The workmen manifest mistrust and even dislike towards me. Why? I don't know; but my good intentions have gradually got weary.
One after another, sundry women have occupied my life. Antonia Véron was first. Her marriage and mine, their hindrance and restriction, threw us back upon each other as of yore. We found ourselves alone one day in my house—where nothing ever used to happen, and she offered me her lips, irresistibly. The appeal of her sensuality was answered by mine, then, and often later. But the pleasure constantly restored, which impelled me towards her, always ended in dismal enlightenments. She remained a capricious and baffling egotist, and when I came away from her house across the dark suburb among a host of beings vanishing, like myself, I only brought away the memory of her nervous and irritating laugh, and that new wrinkle which clung to her mouth like an implement.
Then younger desires destroyed the old, and gallant adventures begot one another. It is all over with this one and that one whom I adored. When I see them again, I wonder that I can say, at one and the same time, of a being who has not changed, "How I loved her!" and, "How I have ceased to love her!"
All the while performing as a duty my daily task, all the while taking suitable precautions so that Marie may not know and may not suffer, I am looking for the happiness which lives. And truly, when I have a sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal to everything!
This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears it. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared. When they say in my presence of some young woman that, "she is not happy," a thrill of joy tears through me.
On Sundays, among the crowds, I have often felt my heart tighten with distress as I watch the unknown women. Reverie has often held me all day because of one who has gone by and disappeared, leaving me a clear vision of her curtained room, and of herself, vibrating like a harp. She, perhaps, was the one I should have always loved; she whom I seek gropingly, desperately, from each to the next. Ah, what a delightful thing to see and to think of a distant woman always is, whoever she may be!
There are moments when I suffer, and am to be pitied. Assuredly, if one could read me really, no one would pity me. And yet all men are like me. If they are gifted with acceptable physique they dream of headlong adventures, they attempt them, and our heart never stands still. But no one acknowledges that, no one, ever.
Then, there were the women who turned me a cold shoulder; and among them all Madame Pierron, a beautiful and genteel woman of twenty-five years, with her black fillets and her marble profile, who still retained the obvious awkwardness and vacant eye of young married women. Tranquil, staid and silent, she came and went and lived, totally blind to my looks of admiration.
This perfect unconcern aggravated my passion. I remember my pangs one morning in June, when I saw some feminine linen spread upon the green hedge within her garden. The delicate white things marshaled there were waiting, stirred by the leaves and the breeze; so that Spring lent them frail shape and sweetness—and life. I remember, too, a gaunt house, scorching in the sun, and a window which flashed and then shut! The window stayed shut, like a slab. All the world was silent; and that splendid living being was walled up there. And last, I have recollection of an evening when, in the bluish and dark green and chalky landscape of the town and its rounded gardens, I saw that window lighted up. A narrow glimmer of rose and gold was enframed there, and I could distinguish, leaning on the sill that overhung the town, in the heart of that resplendence, a feminine form which stirred before my eyes in inaccessible forbearance. Long did I watch with shaking knees that window dawning upon space, as the shepherd watches the rising of Venus. That evening, when I had come in and was alone for a moment—Marie was busy below in the kitchen—alone in our unattractive room, I retired to the starry window, beset by immense thoughts. These spaces, these separations, these incalculable durations—they all reduce us to dust, they all have a sort of fearful splendor from which we seek defense in our hiding.
* * * * * *
I have not retained a definite recollection of a period of jealousy from which I suffered for a year. From certain facts, certain profound changes of mood in Marie, it seemed to me that there was some one between her and me. But beyond vague symptoms and these terrible reflections on her, I never knew anything. The truth, everywhere around me, was only a phantom of truth. I experienced acute internal wounds of humiliation and shame, of rebellion! I struggled feebly, as well as I could, against a mystery too great for me, and then my suspicions wore themselves out. I fled from the nightmare, and by a strong effort I forgot it. Perhaps my imputations had no basis; but it is curious how one ends in only believing what one wants to believe.
* * * * * *
Something which had been plotting a long while among the Socialist extremists suddenly produced a stoppage of work at the factory, and this was followed by demonstrations which rolled through the terrified town. Everywhere the shutters went up. The business people blotted out their shops, and the town looked like a tragic Sunday.
"It's a revolution!" said Marie to me, turning pale, as Benoît cried to us from the step of our porch the news that the workmen were marching. "How does it come about that you knew nothing at the factory?"
An hour later we learned that a delegation composed of the most dangerous ringleaders was preceding the army of demonstrators, commissioned to extort outrageous advantages, with threats, from Messrs. Gozlan.
Our quarter had a loose and dejected look. People went furtively, seeking news, and doors half opened regretfully. Here and there groups formed and lamented in undertones the public authority's lack of foresight, the insufficient measures for preserving order.
Rumors were peddled about on the progress of the demonstration.
"They're crossing the river."
"They're at the Calvary cross-roads."
"It's a march against the castle!"
I went into Fontan's. He was not there, and some men were talking in the twilight of the closed shutters.
"The Baroness is in a dreadful way. She's seen a dark mass in the distance. Some young men of the aristocracy have armed themselves and are guarding her. She says it's another Jacquerie[1] rising!"
[Footnote 1: A terrible insurrection of the French peasantry in 1358.—Tr.]
"Ah, my God! What a mess!" said Crillon.
"It's the beginning of the end!" asserted old Daddy Ponce, shaking his grayish-yellow forehead, all plaited with wrinkles.
Time went by—still no news. What are they doing yonder? What shall we hear next?
At last, towards three o'clock Postaire is framed in the doorway, sweating and exultant. "It's over! It's all right, my lad!" he gasps; "I can vouch for it that they all arrived together at the Gozlans' villa. Messrs. Gozlan were there. The delegates, I can vouch for it that they started shouting and threatening, my lad! 'Never mind that!' says one of the Messrs. Gozlan, 'let's have a drink first; I'll vouch for it we'll talk better after!' There was a table and champagne, I'll vouch for it. They gave 'em it to drink, and then some more and then some more. I'll vouch for it they sent themselves something down, my lad, into their waistcoats. I can vouch for it that the bottles of champagne came like magic out of the ground. Fontan kept always bringing them as though he was coining them. Got to admit it was an extra-double-special guaranteed champagne, that you want to go cautious with. So then, after three-quarters of an hour, nearly all the deputation were drunk. They spun round, tongue-tied, and embraced each other,—I can vouch for it. There were some that stuck it, but they didn't count, my lad! The others didn't even know what they'd come for. And the bosses; they'd had a fright, and they didn't half wriggle and roar with laughing—I'll vouch for it, my lad! An' then, to-morrow, if they want to start again, there'll be troops here!"
Joyful astonishment—the strike had been drowned in wine! And we repeated to each other, "To-morrow there'll be the military!"
"Ah!" gaped Crillon, rolling wonder-struck eyes, "That's clever! Good; that's clever, that is! Good, old chap——"
He laughed a heavy, vengeful laugh, and repeated his familiar refrain full-throated: "The sovereign people that can't stand on its own legs!"
By the side of a few faint-hearted citizens who had already, since the morning, modified their political opinions, a great figure rises before my eyes—Fontan. I remember that night, already long ago, when a chance glimpse through the vent-hole of his cellar showed me shiploads of bottles of champagne heaped together, and pointed like shells. For some future day he foresaw to-day's victory. He is really clever, he sees clearly and he sees far. He has rescued law and order by a sort of genius.
The constraint which has weighed all day on our gestures and words explodes in delight. Noisily we cast off that demeanor of conspirators which has bent our shoulders since morning. The windows that were closed during the weighty hours of the insurrection are opened wide; the houses breathe again.
"We're saved from that gang!" people say, when they approach each other.
This feeling of deliverance pervades the most lowly. On the step of the little blood-red restaurant I spy Monsieur Mielvaque, hopping for joy. He is shivering, too, in his thin gray coat, cracked with wrinkles, that looks like wrapping paper; and one would say that his dwindled face had at long last caught the hue of the folios he desperately copies among his long days and his short nights, to pick up some sprigs of extra pay. There he stands, not daring to enter the restaurant (for a reason he knows too well); but how delighted he is with the day's triumph for society! And Mademoiselle Constantine, the dressmaker, incurably poor and worn away by her sewing-machine, is overjoyed. She opens wide the eyes which seem eternally full of tears, and in the grayish abiding half-mourning of imperfect cleanliness, in pallid excitement, she claps her hands.
Marie and I can hear the furious desperate hammering of Brisbille in his forge, and we begin to laugh as we have not laughed for a long time.
At night, before going to sleep, I recall my former democratic fancies. Thank God, I have escaped from a great peril! I can see it clearly by the terror which the workmen's menace spread in decent circles, and by the universal joy which greeted their recoil! My deepest tendencies take hold of me again for good, and everything settles down as before.
* * * * * *
Much time has gone by. It is ten years now since I was married, and in that lapse of time there is hardly a happening that I remember, unless it be the disillusion of the death of Marie's rich godmother, who left us nothing. There was the failure of the Pocard scheme, which was only a swindle and ruined many small people. Politics pervaded the scandal, while certain people hurried with their money to Monsieur Boulaque, whose scheme was much more safe and substantial. There was also my father-in-law's illness and his death, which was a great shock to Marie, and put us into black clothes.
I have not changed. Mariehassomewhat. She has got stouter; her eyelids look tired and red, and she buries herself in silences. We are no longer quite in accord in details of our life. She who once always said "Yes," is now primarily disposed to say "No." If I insist she defends her opinion, obstinately, sourly; and sometimes dishonestly. For example, in the matter of pulling down the partition downstairs, if people had heard our high voices they would have thought there was a quarrel. Following some of our discussions, she keeps her face contracted and spiteful, or assumes the martyr's air, and sometimes there are moments of hatred between us.
Often she says, while talking of something else, "Ah, if we had had a child, all would have been different!"
I am becoming personally negligent, through a sort of idleness, against which I have not sufficient grounds for reaction. When we are by ourselves, at meal times, my hands are sometimes questionable. From day to day, and from month to month, I defer going to the dentist and postpone the attention required. I am allowing my molars to get jagged.
Marie never shows any jealousy, nor even suspicion about my personal adventures. Her trust is almost excessive! She is not very far-seeing, or else I am nothing very much to her, and I have a grudge against her for this indifference.
And now I see around me women who are too young to love me. That most positive of obstacles, the age difference, begins to separate me from the amorous. And yet I am not surfeited with love, and I yearn towards youth! Marthe, my little sister-in-law, said to me one day, "Now that you're old——" That a child of fifteen years, so freshly dawned and really new, can bring herself to pass this artless judgment on a man of thirty-five—that is fate's first warning, the first sad day which tells us at midsummer that winter will come.
One evening, as I entered the room, I indistinctly saw Marie, sitting and musing by the window. As I came in she got up—it was Marthe! The light from the sky, pale as a dawn, had blenched the young girl's golden hair and turned the trace of a smile on her cheek into something like a wrinkle. Cruelly, the play of the light showed her face faded and her neck flabby; and because she had been yawning, even her eyes were watery, and for some seconds the lids were sunk and reddened.
The resemblance of the two sisters tortured me. This little Marthe, with her luxurious and appetizing color, her warm pink cheeks and moist lips; this plump adolescent whose short skirt shows her curving calves, is an affecting picture of what Marie was. It is a sort of terrible revelation. In truth Marthe resembles, more than the Marie of to-day does, the Marie whom I formerly loved; the Marie who came out of the unknown, whom I saw one evening sitting on the rose-tree seat, shining, silent—in the presence of love.
It required a great effort on my part not to try, weakly and vainly, to approach Marthe—the impossible dream, the dream of dreams! She has a little love affair with a youngster hardly molted into adolescence, and rather absurd, whom one catches sight of now and again as he slips away from her side; and that day when she sang so much in spite of herself, it was because a little rival was ill. I am as much a stranger to her girlish growing triumph and to her thoughts as if I were her enemy! One morning when she was capering and laughing, flower-crowned, at the doorstep, she looked to me like a being from another world.
* * * * * *
One winter's day, when Marie had gone out and I was arranging my papers, I found a letter I had written not long before, but had not posted, and I threw the useless document on the fire. When Marie came back in the evening, she settled herself in front of the fire to dry herself, and to revive it for the room's twilight; and the letter, which had been only in part consumed, took fire again. And suddenly there gleamed in the night a shred of paper with a shred of my writing—"I love you as much as you love me!"
And it was so clear, the inscription that flamed in the darkness, that it was not worth while even to attempt an explanation.
We could not speak, nor even look at each other! In the fatal communion of thought which seized us just then, we turned aside from each other, even shadow-veiled as we were. We fled from the truth! In these great happenings we become strangers to each other for the reason that we never knew each other profoundly. We are vaguely separated on earth from everybody else, but we are mightily distant from our nearest.
* * * * * *
After all these things, my former life resumed its indifferent course. Certainly I am not so unhappy as they who have the bleeding wound of a bereavement or remorse, but I am not so delighted with life as I once hoped to be. Ah, men's love and women's beauty are too short-lived in this world; and yet, is it not only thereby that we and they exist? It might be said that love, so pure a thing, the only one worth while in life, is a crime, since it is always punished sooner or later. I do not understand. We are a pitiful lot; and everywhere about us—in our movements, within our walls, and from hour to hour, there is a stifling mediocrity. Fate's face is gray.
Notwithstanding, my personal position has established itself and progressively improved. I am getting three hundred and sixty francs a month, and besides, I have a share in the profits of the litigation office—about fifty francs a month. It is a year and a half since I was stagnating in the little glass office, to which Monsieur Mielvaque has been promoted, succeeding me. Nowadays they say to me, "You're lucky!" They envy me—who once envied so many people. It astonishes me at first, then I get used to it.
I have restored my political plans, but this time I have a rational and normal policy in view. I am nominated to succeed Crillon in the Town Council. There, no doubt, I shall arrive sooner or later. I continue to become a personality by the force of circumstances, without my noticing it, and without any real interest in me on the part of those around me.
Quite a piece of my life has now gone by. When sometimes I think of that, I am surprised at the length of the time elapsed; at the number of the days and the years that are dead. It has come quickly, and without much change in myself on the other hand; and I turn away from that vision, at once real and supernatural. And yet, in spite of myself, my future appears before my eyes—and its end. My future will resemble my past; it does so already. I can dimly see all my life, from one end to the other, all that I am, all that I shall have been.