Chapter III: Part ONE: I (3)

Just once, taken by surprise, she gave way before their assault. It was one afternoon, shortly before the movers were to come. Her aunt was at church and Marc was at Sylvie's. Annette, alone in the Boulogne house, where everything spoke of their approaching departure, was kneeling on a half-rolled rug, folding up a tapestry that had been taken down. Occupied with her task, while her active hands came and went, her head was busy calculating about the new arrangements. But she still had room for dreams; for her eye, floating for an instant far from the present vision, fastened in its mistiness upon a design in the tapestry which her hands were rolling up: it recognized this design. A motif of pale flowers, almost worn away; butterflies' wings, detached petals? It mattered little; but Annette's eyes as a child had fallen there, and on this canvas they had embroidered the tapestry of the days that had fled. And this tapestry had suddenly emerged from the night. Annette's hands ceased to wander; her mind, for one moment more, persisted in repeating the figures of which it had lost the thread, then was still. And Annette, letting herself slip down upon the floor, with her forehead on the roll of the rug and her face in her hands, lay there with her knees drawn up, abandoned herself to the wind and the flood, set sail. . . . She did not voyage towards any particular country. . . . Such a mass of memories--lived? dreamed?--how distinguish between them? Dizzy symphony of a moment of silence! It contained much more than the substance of a life. In active thought, the consciousness, when it believes it takes possession of our inner world, only seizes the crest of the wave at the moment when the sun-ray gilds it. Reverie alone perceives the moving abyss and its torrential rhythm, those innumerable drops, scudding along on the wind of the ages, seeds of thought of the beings from whom we spring and who will spring from us, that formidable chorus of hopes and regrets whose trembling hands stretch out towards the past or the future. Indefinable harmony that forms the tissue of an illuminated second, and that sometimes a shock is enough to awaken. A bouquet of pale flowers had just evoked it in Annette.

When she pulled herself together, after a long silence, she rose hastily, and with hands that were suddenly awkward, hasty, trembling, she finished folding up the tapestry without looking at it. She did not quite finish it, she threw it into a box, incompletely rolled, and fled from the room. . . . No, she did not want to stay with these thoughts! It was better to escape from them. Later she would have time enough to regret the past, when she would herself belong to the past . . . later, in the twilight of her life. For the moment, she was too full of the future, she must see it through. Her dreams lay ahead of her. "I don't want to know what is behind me; I must not turn around."

She walked down the street, hastening her steps, tense, looking neither to right nor left . . . the years, the years, the life that was coming . . . that of her child, her own, the new life, the Annette of to-morrow.

X

She had this vision in her eyes on the evening when she established herself in Sylvie's house. Sylvie, as soon as her shop was closed, hastened to climb up to her sister's apartment to distract her from the regrets she supposed the latter must be feeling. She found her walking back and forth in her narrow room, not at all tired after the exhausting day, trying to make her too diminutive cupboards hold her clothes and her linen. Unsuccessful in this, perched on a stool, with her arms full of sheets, looking at the filled shelves, she was meditating another plan, whistling like a boy a Wagnerian fanfare that she absent-mindedly travestied, giving it a burlesque turn. Sylvie looked at her and said, "Annette, I admire you." (She did not mean quite as much as this.)

"Why?" asked Annette.

"If I were in your place, how I should rage!"

Annette began to laugh. Absorbed in her work, she made a sign to her sister to be silent.

"I think I've got it," she said.

She buried her head and her arms in the cupboard, arranging, disarranging, rummaging.

"I said so," she remarked, "and I have."

(She was addressing a cupboard that was full, arranged, conquered.)

She descended, victorious, from the stool.

"Rage, Sylvie?" she said. (She was holding her by the chin.) "When you were a child you played at building houses with dominoes. When the house fell, did you get angry?"

"I banged the dominoes on the floor," said Sylvie.

"And I said, Biff! I'll build another."

"You'll have to admit that you shook the table!"

"Well, I wouldn't swear I didn't," said Annette.

Sylvie called her an anarchist.

"What!" said Annette. "Isn't that just what you are?"

Sylvie was not. She could laugh at order and authority when she wanted to do so, but she felt the need of order and authority. Even if it was only to apply them to other people. For her, as for others, there was no pleasure in revolting unless it was against some authority. And as for order, Sylvie was well supplied with it. She did not cavil at the established order except in so far as it was not her own. She did not reproach it for being established. An order should be established. Since she too was established, as an employer, directing her own business, she was all for a stable order. Annette made this discovery with surprise. Nor was this the only discovery she made. You do not know another human being unless you see him in that everyday activity which brings his energies to a head and reveals his natural movements and gestures. Annette had never seen Sylvie except during her idle times, her times of relaxation. Who can judge of a cat stretched out on a soft cushion? You must see it on the warpath with its back arched and the green fire in its eyes.

Annette was now seeing Sylvie in her own field, the portion of earth she had cleared for herself in the Parisian jungle. The little business woman had taken her trade seriously, and she was second to no one in the art of managing her affairs. Annette could observe her at leisure and close by; for, during the first weeks that followed her moving, she took her meals with Sylvie; it had been agreed that they should keep house together until the settling was entirely finished. Annette, to keep her own end up, tried to make herself useful, sharing in some of the tasks of the workshop. Thus she saw Sylvie at all hours of the day, now with the customers, now with the workers, now alone for a private talk, and she observed in her sister traits she had not known, or which had become accentuated in the last two or three years.

The coaxing Sylvie, under her charming smile, no longer concealed from the penetrating eyes of Annette a rather cold nature which, amid all its entanglements, knew where it was going. She had a small personnel of working-girls whom she managed with superlative skill. With her keen observation and her winning ways, she had chosen and drawn to herself hearts that had no other attachments. Such, for instance, was her chief assistant, Olympe, who was much older than she, more expert in the craft, an excellent worker, but entirely without ideas, and unable to take care of herself. She had come from the country and was lost in Paris, victimized and laughed at by men, women, her employers and her fellow-workers. She was intelligent enough to see this, but she did not have the strength to resist it, and she had been looking for some one who, without taking advantage of her, would make use of her work and free her from the responsibility of managing herself. It had needed no effort on Sylvie's part to bring her into line. Sylvie was merely obliged to take care that there should be a good understanding among the rival devotions that she had aroused in her personnel, making skilful use of their antagonisms in order to stimulate their zeal and, like a wise government, uniting competitors in the patriotism of the common work. The pride of the little establishment and the desire to distinguish themselves in the eyes of the young mistress delivered them over to her cunning domination, which often made them work till they were exhausted. She set the example, and no one complained. Her affectionate taunts, the droll mockery at which they would burst out laughing, would reinvigorate the weary team and make them hold out to the end. Proud of their employer, they loved her jealously; while she, who stimulated their enthusiasm, remained indifferent to them herself. In the evening, after they had left, she talked about them to her sister in a tone of cold detachment that shocked Annette. For the rest, she was ready to do them a good turn in case of need, and she never left them in the lurch if she found them ill or in difficulties. But whether they were ill or not, if she did not see them she forgot them. She had no time to think of the absent. She had no time to love very long. A perpetual activity occupied all her moments: the care of her person, housekeeping, meals, business, trying on dresses, gossip, love affairs, amusements. And everything--even to the (never very long) periods of silence, when, between the bustle of the day and her sleep at night, she found herself alone face to face with herself--everything about her was precise. Not a cranny for dreams. When she observed herself, it was with the clear and curious eye that watches others and looks upon oneself as a passer-by. A minimum of inner life: everything projected into acts and words. The need that Annette felt for moral confession found no consideration here. Annette was embarrassed in this perpetual midday. No shadow. Or, if it existed--and it exists in every soul--the door was closed tight upon it. Sylvie was not interested in what might be behind the door. Her only concern was to administer her little domain punctiliously, enjoying everything, her work and her pleasures, but everything at its own time so that nothing should be lost; consequently, she was without passions or any great excesses, for this activity, this perpetual going from one thing to another, not only did not lend itself to anything of the kind, but even destroyed its possibility in advance. No danger that her lovers would make her lose her head.

The truth was that she did not love anything very much. She loved whole-heartedly only one soul, Annette. And how strange this was! Why in the world did she love this big girl who had nothing, or virtually nothing, in common with her?

Ah, that "virtually nothing" was a great deal; who knows but that it was the most important thing of all?--the tie of blood. This does not always count for much between people of the same family. But when it does count, what a mysterious strength it has! It is a voice that whispers to us, "That other person is a part of me. Moulded in another shape, the substance is the same. I recognize myself in a different form and possessed by an alien soul."

And one wants to capture oneself in this usurper double attraction, a triple attraction: the attraction of resemblance, the attraction of opposition, of the war of conquest, which is not the least of the three.

What forces there were binding Annette and Sylvie together! Pride, independence, orderliness, will, the life of the senses! Of these two spirits, the one turned inward, the other outward--the two hemispheres of the soul. They were constituted of almost the same elements, but each, for deep, obscure reasons that sprang from the essence of their personality, repressed one half, wished only to see one half, that which emerged or that which was submerged. The uniting of the two sisters in a common life disturbed the habitual consciousness that each had of herself. Their mutual affection was tinged with hostility. And the warmer the affection was, the keener was the hidden hostility, for they realized how hopelessly unlike they were. Annette was more expert in reading her buried thoughts, and she was also more sincere: she was able to judge them and repress them. The time had passed when she had wished to absorb Sylvie in her imperious love. But Sylvie still had a secret desire to dominate her elder sister, and she was not displeased that circumstances had given her an opportunity to affirm her superiority. It was a sort of revenge for the inequalities of their lot during the girlhood of the two sisters. This unconfessed feeling, together with her real affection, gave her a sense of satisfaction which she concealed as she saw Annette working under her direction in the shop. She would have liked to have her on her pay roll. She put her in charge of receiving her customers and making charcoal designs for embroidered trimmings; she tried to persuade her that she could look forward to some important position and even to being her partner later on in the business.

Annette, who saw what Sylvie was driving at, had no intention of tying herself down. She let the offer drop, and when Sylvie pressed her she replied that she was not fitted for this work. Upon this Sylvie asked her ironically for what work she was fitted. This was a tender point with her. When one has never had to work for a living and necessity drives one to do so, it is painful not to know what work one is fitted for, not even to know whether, in spite of one's education, one is fitted for any work. But she had to face the question. Annette did not want to remain dependent on Sylvie. Of course Sylvie would never have shown that she felt this dependence: she enjoyed helping her sister. But if she was happy in spending for Annette, she knew what she was spending; her right hand was never unaware of what her left hand gave. Annette was still less unaware of it. She could not endure the thought that Sylvie, as she made up her accounts, mentally wrote her down as her debtor. . . . The devil take all money! Should it be considered between two hearts that love each other? Annette and Sylvie did not consider it in their hearts. But it was a consideration in their life. People do not live by love alone. They live by money too.

XI

This was a truth which Annette had ignored a little too much. She was to lose no time in learning it.

She started out in search of a position, saying nothing about it to Sylvie. Her first idea was to go to see the principal of the school for young girls where she had studied. As an intelligent student who was rich and the daughter of an influential father, she had been a favorite of Mme. Abraham, and she felt certain of her sympathy. This remarkable woman--one of the first to organize the teaching of women in France--had rare qualities of energy and judgment that were complemented--or mitigated, according to the case--by a very cold political sense which many men might have envied. She was disinterested personally, but she was far from being so where her school was concerned. She was a freethinker, and, although she did not parade the fact, she was not without a certain contemptuous anti-clericalism that could do her no harm with her clientele, the daughters of the radical bourgeoisie and young Jewesses. But in place of the dogmas she rejected she had established a civic morality which, although it lacked basis and certitude, was no less strict and commanding. (It was even more so, for the more arbitrary a rule is the more rigid it becomes.) Annette, thanks to her position in society, was intimate with the principal and had her confidence. It amused her to tease the latter about her famous official morality, and Mme. Abraham, who was sceptical by nature, found no difficulty in smiling at the whims of this saucy young thing. She smiled at them, yes, indeed, when they talked together behind her closed door. But as soon as the door was open and Mme. Abraham was reinstated in her title and her official rank, she was as firm as iron in her belief in the Tables of the laic Law, the product of the highly reasonable morality of a few republican pedagogues. It was enough to say that, if her naked conscience was indifferent to conventional morality, her clothed conscience--her usual conscience--severely blamed Annette's behavior. For she knew about it; the adventure had gone the rounds of society.

But she did not yet know of her ruin. And when Annette called, she took care not to reveal her thoughts: her first business was to find out the reasons for this call and whether the school might reap any advantage from it. She therefore gave her a pleasant though rather reserved greeting. But scarcely had she learned that Annette had come to ask a favor than she remembered the scandal and her smile froze. One can easily accept money from a person of whom one doesn't approve, but one cannot decently give it to such a person. It was easy for Mme. Abraham to find compelling reasons for averting a candidacy that was so impolitic. There was no position in the school; and, when Annette asked for a recommendation to other institutions, Mme. Abraham did not even take the trouble to make vague promises. She was very diplomatic when she was negotiating with anyone who was on top of the wheel of fortune, but she instantly ceased to be so when the wheel had flung them down. A serious mistake in diplomacy! For sometimes those who are down to-day are on top to-morrow, and good diplomacy looks out for the future. Mme. Abraham considered nothing but the present. At present Annette was drowning; it was a pity, but Mme. Abraham was not in the habit of fishing out those who were in the water. She did not disguise her coldness, and, when Annette failed to abandon her tone of calm self-possession and henceforth misplaced equality, Mme. Abraham, in order to bring her back to a more exact sense of her distance, declared that she could not conscientiously recommend her. Annette, who was burning with indignation, was on the point of expressing it. A flash of anger passed over her, but it was extinguished in contempt. She was seized by one of those rather diabolical whims of her younger days, an itching desire to mock. She rose, saying, "Well, think of me if you establish a course in the new morality."

Mme. Abraham looked at her, taken aback; the impertinence was all too evident. She replied dryly, "The old one is good enough for us."

"But it might not be a bad thing to enlarge it a little."

"What would you like to add to it?"

"Nothing very much," said Annette, calmly. "Freedom and humanity."

Mme. Abraham, hurt, said: "The right to love, no doubt?"

"No," said Annette, "the right to have a child."

As she went out she shrugged her shoulders at her useless bravado. . . . Stupid! . . . What was the use of making an enemy? . . . She laughed just the same as she thought of the vexed expression of her antagonist. A woman cannot resist the pleasure of slighting another. Bah! The Abraham woman would remain her enemy only until Annette had reconquered her position. And she would reconquer it!

Annette visited other institutions, but there were no positions. There were none for women. The Latin democracies are only made for men; they sometimes put feminism on their programmes, but they distrust it; they are in no hurry to furnish arms to what still remains, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the enslaved rival, a rival that will not long so remain, thanks to the tenacity of the Nordic woman. Pressure will have to be brought by the public opinion of the rest of the world to oblige them to offer a crabbed welcome to the woman who works and wishes to exercise her rights.

Annette might have been admitted, however, to two or three positions if her susceptibility had not caused her to lose them. They would have been ready to shut their eyes to her irregular situation if she herself had been willing to give them some specious explanation--that she was a widow or divorced by her own choice. But when she was questioned her absurd pride drove her to tell the facts as they were. After two or three rebuffs, she approached no more institutions, not even the University, although in the latter she had left sympathetic friends behind her and would have found minds large enough to help her without censuring her. But she was afraid of being wounded. She was still inexperienced in the country of the poor. The hands of her pride had not had time to become callous.

She looked about for a chance to give private lessons. She did not wish to seek them among the friends of her own class; she preferred to conceal her steps. She turned to those clandestine employment--those exploitative--agencies that still exist in Paris. She was not skilful enough to appear well from their point of view. She had too much disdain. They resented her fastidiousness. Instead of accepting whatever offered, like so many unhappy souls who are fortified with very few recommendations, who will teach anything that is asked of them at famine prices and work from dawn till dark, she presumed to pick and choose.

At last, through the mediation of Sylvie's customers, she found a few foreigners. She gave lessons in conversation to some Americans who treated her kindly and occasionally invited her to drive in their carriages, though they offered her an absurd remuneration, never even thinking that they ought to have paid her more. They did not hesitate to give a hundred francs for a pair of shoes, while for an hour of French they would pay a franc. (It was not impossible in those days to find people who would give lessons for fifty centimes!) Annette, who did not have the right to be exacting as yet, refused to accept this shameful treatment. But after having sought far and wide, she could find nothing better. The well-to-do bourgeoisie who, under the eye of public opinion, are willing to spend whatever is demanded for the education of their children when the teaching is public, sordidly exploit instructors in their own households. There no one sees you. You are dealing with people who are too humble to resist: for one who refuses there are ten who beg you to accept them!

Isolated, without experience, Annette was in a poor position to protect herself. But she had the practical instinct of the Rivières and she had her pride, and they would not accept the humiliating wages to which others yielded. She was not of the whining sort who complain and give in. She did not complain and she did not give in. And in the face of all expectation this attitude was successful. The human species is cowardly; Annette had a calm, rather haughty way of saying no that cut short all bargaining; people did not dare to treat her as they would have treated others, and she obtained conditions that were rather more favorable. Not greatly so. She had to go through many weary hours to earn what she spent every day. Her pupils were scattered in remote quarters, and this was before the time of the autobusses and the metro in Paris. When she came home in the evening, her feet ached and her shoes were worn out. But she was robust, and it gave her a sense of satisfaction to experience the life of toil for one's daily bread. To earn her bread was a new adventure for Annette. When she was successful in one of those little duels of the will with her exploiters, she was as well pleased with her day as a gambler who, in the pleasure of what he has won, forgets the insignificance of the stake. She learned to see men better. It was not always a pleasant sight. But everything is worth learning. She came into contact with the obscure world of toil. But her contacts were inadequate and without depth. If wealth isolates, poverty isolates no less. Every one is caught fast in his difficulties and his effort, and he sees in others not so much brothers in misery as rivals whose fortune is made at the expense of his own.

Annette divined this feeling in the women with whom she found herself thrown, and she understood it; for she was a privileged being among them. If she worked in order not to be a charge upon her sister, her sister was none the less there; she was safe from the danger of destitution. She did not know that feverish uncertainty about to-morrow. She had her child to enjoy; no one was trying to take him away from her. How compare her lot with that of this woman whose story she had learned--a teacher who had been dismissed because she, like Annette, had had the hardihood to be a mother. It was true that she had been tolerated at first on condition that she kept her maternity secret. Exiled in a post of disgrace, in the depths of the country, she had had to separate from the child of her own flesh. But she could not keep herself from running to him when he was ill. The secret was out, and the virtuous countryside made ferocious sport of her. The authorities of the university of course upheld the popular decree and threw into the street the two rebels against the code. And it was with them that Annette was disputing their meagre livelihood. She took care not to apply for the position which the other woman was seeking. But she was chosen. Just because she sought positions less eagerly, because she had less need of them. People have little respect for those who are hungry. And then the poor souls whom she supplanted treated her as an intruder who was robbing them. They knew they were unjust; but it is comforting to be unjust when you are a victim of injustice. Annette became familiar with that greatest of all wars--the war of the workers, not against nature or circumstances, nor against the rich for taking their bread away from them--the war of the workers against the workers who are snatching the bread from each other, the crumbs that have fallen from the table of the rich or from that sordid Crœsus, the State. That is the misery of miseries, most felt by women, and especially those of to-day. For they are still incapable of organization. They remain in the state of primitive warfare, the individual against the individual; instead of pooling their difficulties, they multiply them.

Annette hardened herself, and although her heart bled her eyes were aflame with joy. She strode on, sustained in her ungrateful work by its novelty, the energy she had to spend--and the thought of her child, which illumined the whole day.

XII

Marc spent the day in Sylvie's workshop. Aunt Victorine had flickered out shortly after they were settled. She had not been able to survive the ruin of the old home, the loss of the old furniture, the habits of a peaceful half-century. Since Annette was out of the house till evening, Sylvie took charge of the child. He was the darling of the workshop, petted by the customers and the workers, rummaging about on all fours, sitting under a table, collecting hooks and eyes and scraps of chiffon, winding skeins of silk, rolling balls, stuffing himself with sweets and smothered with kisses. He was a little boy of three or four, with golden auburn hair like Annette's, and he had been rather pale ever since his illness. Life for him was a perpetual spectacle. Sylvie could remember her own first experiences when, sitting under her mother's counter, she had listened to the customers. But the great personages, from the tops of their stilts, have too utterly different a field of vision to know what catches the eyes of a child. And its rosy ears. . . . There was quite enough to keep them busy in the workshop! Every tongue was loosened, laughing, bold, brazen. Prudery was no weakness of Sylvie and her flock. Plenty of laughing, plenty of gossip, makes the needle fly. No one thought of the child. Was it possible that he understood? He did not understand (in all probability), but he grasped things, he let nothing escape him. The child collected everything, touched everything, tasted everything. Woe to whatever lay in his way! Sprawling under a chair, he put in his mouth whatever fell from above, scraps of biscuit, buttons, fruit-stones; and he also put words there. Without knowing what they meant. Exactly, in order to find out! And he munched away and sang.

"Little pig!"

An apprentice would snatch from his fingers a ribbon he was sucking, or perhaps experimentally burying in his nose. But no one took from him the words he had swallowed. He was doing nothing with them for the present; there was nothing he could do with them. But they were not lost.

Routed out from under the furniture and the petticoats, where he was absorbed in curious studies of the fidgeting feet and the imprisoned toes curled up in their shoes, dragged back to the conventions, to his normal position in the world of grown-ups, he would remain motionless, soberly seated on a low stool between Sylvie's legs. Or, since his aunt rarely kept still, between some other pair of knees. He would lean his cheek against the warm cloth and watch, with his nose in the air and his head thrown back, those bending faces with their puckered eyes, their quick, shining, moving pupils, those mouths, biting the thread; he saw the saliva and the lower lips--they seemed to be the upper ones--gnawed by the teeth, the undersides of the nostrils, covered with little red streaks and trembling as the words came, and the fingers that flew with their needles. Suddenly a hand would tickle his chin: there was a thimble at the end of it that gave him a cold feeling in his neck. Here, as ever, nothing was lost on him; these warm and cold contacts, this downy glow, these lights that reddened and these shadows that turned to amber the bits of living flesh, yes, and this feminine odor. . . . He was certainly not aware of it himself, but that multiple consciousness, that many-faceted consciousness which is spread about the whole periphery of a child, registered everything that passed over its little printer's-roller. . . . These women never suspected that their images, complete from head to foot, were being imprinted on this little sensitive plate. But he saw them only fragmentarily: pieces were missing, as in a puzzle in which the parts are mixed up. From this resulted his strange, fleeting preferences, as lively as they were varied, which seemed capricious but were really due to his deep-seated predisposition. A clever person might have said what it was in each of these women that attracted him. He was like a regular household pet: it was the gentleness of the hands rather than the whole person that he liked. And it was the totality of these sweetnesses, the home, the workshop. He was frankly an egoist. (And rightfully: the little builder has to assemble his ego first of all.) A sincere egoist, even in his blandishments. For he was blandishing: he wanted to please and he enjoyed giving pleasure, but only to those whom he had chosen.

From the very beginning his great favorite had been Sylvie. The instinct of the domestic animal in him had at once perceived that she was the god of the household, the master who dispensed food and kisses and was responsible for the tone of the day, and whom it was a good thing to propitiate. But it was better still to be propitiated by her. And the child had observed that this privilege had been accorded to him. It never occurred to him that it might not be deserved. Thus he received without surprise but with satisfaction the agreeable and flattering homage that was rendered to him by the sovereign of the workshop. Sylvie spoiled him, adored him, went into ecstasies over his gestures, his steps, his words, his intelligence, his beauty, his mouth, his eyes, his nose; she held him up to the admiration of her customers and preened herself on his account as if he had been her own chick.

To tell the truth, she also called him, "Little blackguard! Silly little fool!" And sometimes she tweaked his nose, slapped him, gave him a spanking. But from her he did not take this as an offence; although he protested loudly, he did not even find it too disagreeable. May not any one be struck by the hand of the queen? From any one else, from one of the girls in the workroom, heavens above, he would never have permitted it! Even without her sceptre, Sylvie had a charm for him. In his feminine puzzle, made up of this group and that, she had provided him with the greatest number of parts; he loved to press against her dress, with his head against her stomach, to listen to her voice (he could hear her laughing all through her body), or clamber up her hips till he had reached the summit; and then, with his two arms knotted about her neck, he would rub his nose, his lips and his eyes against her soft cheek, close to her ears, among the little blonde curls that had such a nice smell. What the eye is for the mind of grown-ups, the sense of touch is for that of children. It is the talisman that permits one to see over the wall and weave within oneself the dream of things one believes one sees, the illusion of life. The child spun his web. And without knowing what these blonde curls were, or what this cheek was, this voice, this laugh, this Sylvie or this "I," he thought, "This is mine."

XIII

Annette would come home in the evening. She would be famished. All day she had walked in a waterless desert, a world without love. All day she had walked with her eyes turned towards the spring which, in the evening, she would find again. She heard it rippling; in anticipation she would dip her lips in it; a passer-by in the street might have taken as intended for him the smile which this beautiful woman who was hastening along addressed to the image of her child. As she approached Sylvie's house, her steps quickened like those of a horse that scents the oats; and when at last she entered, laughing with greedy love, no matter how tired she was she went upstairs at a run. The door opened; she dashed in and threw herself on the child; she caught him up in her hands, squeezed him, devoured him furiously, his eye, his nose, under his nose, wherever she happened to alight, whatever part she could reach, and her mad joy expressed itself noisily. As for him, as he played about or amused himself soberly, comfortably settled on the padded sofa, drawing lines with a piece of chalk or mixing up threads of various colors, he was none too pleased by this invasion. This great rough woman who came in without any warning, seized him, pulled him about, shouted in his ear, stifled him with kisses . . . he didn't like it at all! To be disposed of without his permission made him indignant. He wouldn't allow it. He was cross and he struggled; but this only made her shake him, fondle him, laugh and cry all the more furiously. . . . Everything about her displeased him: this lack of consideration, this noise, this violence. . . . He quite understood that she ought to love him, admire him and even kiss him. But she should have had better manners! Where had she come from? Sylvie and her girls were more ladylike. When they played with him, even when they laughed or exclaimed, they didn't make such a racket and seize you and hug you in this brutal way. He was astonished that Sylvie, who knew so well how to give her subjects a dressing down, should never give this ill-bred person a lesson in deportment, that she did not protect him from such familiarities. On the contrary, Sylvia assumed with Annette a tone of affectionate equality which she did not have for any one else, and she said to Marc, "Come, be good! Kiss your mother!"

His mother! Of course, he knew it. But that was no excuse. Yes, she too was a domestic power. He was still too close to the warmth of the breast not to have kept on his epicurean mouth the sugary taste of milk, not to have kept in his birdlike body the golden shadow of the wing that sheltered him. Even more recent were the nights of illness when the invisible enemy had seized the throat of the fledgling and the head of the great protectress had bent over him. Of course, of course! But now he no longer needed this. If he preserved these memories and a hundred others that were stored away in his granary, he had no use for them at present. Later, perhaps, he would see. . . . Every moment now brought him a new gift; he had enough to do to gather them all in. A child is ungrateful by nature. _Mens momentanea_. Do you imagine he has time to remember what was good yesterday? What is good for him is what is good to-day. To-day Annette had made the great mistake of allowing herself to be eclipsed by others who were more agreeable and even more serviceable in Marc's eyes. Instead of going off, heaven knew where, and making her unseemly appearances in the evening, why didn't she stay here like Sylvia and the others, busy all day with Marc and paying court to him? It was her loss. So he barely condescended to accept Annette's effusions, responding to the rain of silly, loving questions with a bored and distant Yes, No, Good Morning, Good Evening; and then, flying from the downpour and wiping his cheek, he would return to his play or to Sylvie's knees.

Annette could not help seeing that Marc preferred Sylvie to herself. Sylvie saw it even more clearly. They laughed about it together, and both pretended not to attach a shadow of importance to it. But deep in their hearts Sylvie was flattered and Annette was jealous. They took good care not to confess this to each other. Like a good girl, Sylvie forced the ungracious child to kiss Annette. Annette found little joy in these forced embraces; Sylvie found more. She did not tell herself that she was stealing from the garden of the poor, and that later she would royally return some of the fruit. But what one keeps to oneself in order not to load oneself with troublesome scruples, one only tastes the better with one's closed mouth. And although she had no unkind feeling, Sylvie found more pleasure in making the child fondle her and in displaying her power over him in Annette's presence. Annette, pretending to joke, would say, in a careless tone, "Out of sight, out of mind." But her heart did not take it as a joke. There was no joke about it. Annette had no humor save that of the intellect. Her love was as foolish as that of a dumb creature. It was painful to be a woman among women and to be obliged to hide one's feelings. People would only laugh at you if you showed your poor famished heart. Annette, when she was with other people, acted as if her love were an old story; she talked about her day, the people she had seen, what she had learned, said and done--in short, everything that was indifferent to her. (Oh, how indifferent!)

But at night, by herself, in her apartment, alone with her child, she could give free rein to the torment she felt. To her joy, too, her torrential passion. No need to take precautions any longer. There was no one from whom to hide herself. She had her son entirely at her mercy. She abused her power a little; she wearied him with her wild affection. Since here, away from Sylvie, he no longer had the upper hand, the little politician did not show his annoyance: till morning came he would have to humor this extravagant mother. He used strategy; he pretended to fall asleep. He did not have to pretend very much; sleep came quickly after his full days. All the same, it had not quite come when, like a lamb in his mother's arms, with his eyes closed, Marc would seem to be overwhelmed by it. Annette, interrupting her prattle, was obliged to carry him to bed; and the little comedian, in the half-sleep down which he let himself slip, step by step, down which he slid on the banisters to the foot, laughed in his sleeve as he watched through his eyelashes the credulous Mamma who was mutely adoring him. He had a sense of his superiority, he was grateful to her for it; and sometimes in a transport he would even throw his little arms about her neck as she knelt beside him. By a surprise like that Annette was repaid for her troubles. But the stingy child did not repeat it often, and Annette had to fall asleep hungry. It was not before she had turned over in bed many times to listen to the child's breathing as her thoughts revolved feverishly. He had not kissed her nicely, and she said to herself, "He doesn't love me."

Her heart would shrink. But she would at once correct herself. "What nonsense I'm inventing!" The idea had to be repressed at once. How could one live with it? No, it wasn't true. . . . The good little creature she was accusing! She hastily sought among her memories for the best she had, for the pretty tricks of the child, for his lovable ways. At the images she called up she would have liked to snatch him out of his bed and kiss him. . . . But hush! She mustn't wake him up. That delicious little breath. . . . My treasure! . . . How good it will all be later!

For as the present was decidedly meagre, Annette made up for it by inventing a future of motherly intimacy with her son that conformed with her desires. She needed an idol to absorb the energies of her nature. For some time now they had been troubling her again.

XIV

It was no longer a restless melancholy, that neurasthenic depression which had preceded her child's illness and which the illness had dissipated--those days of a life that was at a standstill, in which she felt emptied of energy and interest: the becalmed sea before the flow of the tide.

This was the return of the oceanic flood. It announced itself by a roaring of the waves, a nocturnal resurgence. For a time maternity had satisfied the passionate elements of her nature. The material fatigue of a working life had set up a dam against them. But, gathering in the shadow, they beat against the rock. The soul, which as it grows climbs up the spiral of life, found itself returning to a state bordering on that from which it had passed, four or five years before, between the burning summer of the hotel in the Grisons and the spring of love with Roger Brissot. Bordering on it, but not the same. One returns on the spiral above the past; one does not descend to it again. Annette's nature had ripened. There was no longer in her agitation any of the blind ingenuousness of the young girl. She was a woman; her desires were keen and definite. She knew whither they led. And if she did not wish to know, it was precisely because she did know. Her will had matured no less than her flesh. Everything about her had become richer, and everything had assumed an accent of passion.

The reappearance of these familiar demons, these dreaded demons, was like a midday when a storm is gathering. A heavy silence, a silence big with the tempest to come. It followed the careless joys and the careless sorrows of the young morning. The shadows slipped unceasingly over Annette's face. She had become tense. When she was in company or off her guard, when she was not distracted by the child's presence, she would fall into a dumb silence, with a line between her brows. When she became aware of this, she would slip noiselessly away. Any one who had been disturbed about her would have found her in her room, setting it in order, making her bed, turning the mattress, polishing the furniture or the floor, using more movements than were necessary, but not succeeding in stifling the spirit that resounded within her. She would stop in the midst of something she was doing, upright on a chair, a bit of chiffon in her hand, or leaning on the window-sill. Then she would forget everything, not only the past but the present as well, the dead and the living, even her child. She saw without seeing, she heard without hearing, she thought without thinking. A flame that burned in empty space. A sail in the wind of the open sea. She felt the great breath that passed through her limbs, and the ship vibrated with all its masts. And then from the boundless void emerged the face of the things that surrounded her. From the court of the house over which Annette was leaning mounted the familiar sounds; she recognized the voice of the child talking and singing. But her reverie was not interrupted; it took another course. It was the song of a bird on a summer afternoon. O sunny heart, what an amount of life you still have to give! Take the world into your open arms! Too much plunder! . . . Her consciousness relaxed its grip; she fell back into the incandescent gulf where there was no longer any song, any child's voice, any Annette . . . nothing but a powerful vibration of sunlight. . . .

Annette awakened, leaning on her elbow on the window-sill.

But at night the tormenting dreams that had disappeared since Marc's birth took up their abode in her. They came in groups of three or four, ceaselessly succeeding one another. Annette rolled from one to another, layer after layer of them. She would get up in the morning fatigued, feverish; she had lived ten nights in one. And she did not want to recall what she had dreamed.

Those who saw Annette frequently had observed her anxious brow and her absorbed eyes; they did not understand this sudden change, but they were not disturbed by it; they attributed it to external causes, material difficulties. For Annette these periods of anxiety were a season of deep renewal. She could not do justice to them, for they brought with them the weight of gestation, which was more agonizing than that of maternity. It was a maternity indeed, that of the buried soul. The human being is wrapped up like a seed in the depths of matter, in the amalgam of humus and human loam where the generations have left their debris. The labor of a great life consists in disengaging it. For this childbirth a whole lifetime is necessary, and often the midwife is death.

Annette had the secret anguish of the unknown being who was to emerge from her some day and rend her. Overcome by fits of shame, she would shut herself up in a tumultuous retreat, face to face with the immanent Being; and their relations were hostile. The air was charged with electricity; its gusts rose and fell in the immobility. She realized her danger. In vain had her consciousness left in the shadow the thing that disturbed her. "In the shadow" meant in herself, in her own home. And to feel her home peopled from top to bottom with beings whom she did not know was far from reassuring.

"All that. . . . I am all that. . . . But what does it want of me? . . . What do I myself desire?"

In reply, she said to herself, "You have nothing more to desire. You possess."

Her stiffened will turned all the violence of her love upon the child. These continual recurrences of maternal passion were not very fortunate. Abnormal, excessive, unhealthy--(for this passion sprang from an impossible attempt to turn into a path that was not theirs alien and insistent instincts)--they could only end in disappointment. She repelled the child. Marc would not submit to being monopolized in this way. He no longer concealed his ill-will from his mother. He thought her a bore and he told her so in cross little monologues which happily Annette did not hear, but which Sylvie overheard one day. She scolded him for it, bursting out laughing at the same time. Marc, in a corner by the door, was talking to the wall, saying, as he made little impatient gestures, "That woman makes me tired!"

XV

People are always writing the history of the events of a life. They imagine they see the life itself in them, but in reality these events are only its outer covering. The life itself is within. The events act upon it only in so far as it has chosen them; one might be tempted to say it has produced them, and in many cases this is the exact truth. Twenty events take place each month under our eyes; they do not count for us because we have nothing to do with them. But when one of them touches us, it is a safe wager that we have gone halfway to meet it; and if the shock loosens a spring in us, it is because the spring is wound up and awaiting the shock.

Towards the end of 1904, Annette's moral tension gave way, and the transformations it brought about in her seemed to coincide with certain changes which, at the same moment, took place in her.

Sylvie married. She was twenty-six years old; she had had enough of the joys of liberty; she decided that the moment had come to enjoy those of a home. She took her time making her choice. The stuff of which a lover is made does not need to be lasting; it only needs to be pleasing. But a good husband must be made of sound, durable material. Of course it was important for Sylvie that he should be attractive too. But there are ways and ways of being attractive. In choosing a husband one doesn't have to lose one's head. Sylvie consulted her common sense and even her social sense. Her business was going well. Her establishment, _Sylvie: Robes et manteaux_, had acquired, along with a select clientele of the fairly well-to-do bourgeoisie, a justified reputation for elegance and style at moderate prices. She had reached a point in her business where she could go no further alone. To advance she would be obliged to associate other forces with her own and add to her seamstress's workshop a tailor's shop that would enable her to enlarge the circle of her operations.

Without taking any one into her confidence she looked about for some one who would fall in with her plans. She made her choice soberly; and once it was made she decided to marry. Love would come later. It should have its proper place: Sylvie would not marry a man whom she could not love. But love must await its turn. Business came first.