Chapter V: Book II: Being (2)

With remarkable dexterity the women undid the swaddling-clothes, turning, tucking up, unwrapping. The blonde swelled out her bosom as she stuck it full of pins; the ogress held her pins between her teeth. A suffocating odor of warm wool, sour milk, perspiration, and stale flesh arose amid the cries.

The line began to move. One after the other they went up tendering their children like poor plucked bruised flowers, with the idolatrous, skulking faith of believers approaching God.

From my bench, my heart frightfully wrung, I saw each showing me what I might make of my child ... a baby with its neck seamed with a reddish crack ... a baby with tiny, tiny limbs beneath an abdomen swelling like a bagpipe ... a baby whose ribs striped its body like a zebra's hide ... a baby with a back all covered with boils....

"He has green movements." "He has a swollen stomach." "He has ringworm." "He coughs." And the same slack answers to the doctor's questions: "I don't know.--I don't know.--I don't know."

The man cast his sovereign glance over the printed form held out to him, handled the little body, remained impassive while pronouncing his rapid decision, and took up the next case.

Among the lethargic flock who went away with bowed heads, some, to rally their spirits, mumbled the flesh of their babies with fierce kisses as if to take revenge and show that this man after all had done them harm....

* * * * *

I got up, dragging my double weight.

So this is the maternal infatuation which is so sanctified and revered. "I don't know.--I don't know.--I don't know." And I presumptuously was going to commit the same folly, I, who knew no better than they, who had not learned the unknown love awaiting me....

Why doesn't that man, the doctor, who _knows_, arise and snatch away these lives contaminated by the fond ignorance of the mothers, and proclaim that the instinct is fallible, fatal, even criminal?

* * * * *

Most of the women met me again under the porte-cochere, because I walked with difficulty. The one with the drowned-corpse face gave me a friendly little nod.

"You will see," her nod said, "it will soon be your turn...."

Yes, I know.... To be a mother.... In return for the gift of life, to have the right of death over one's child. And to use that right.

XIII

A rending, moments repeated incessantly, torture indescribable, pain embedded in the body, battle, cruel cries....

I remember everything and every second. I remember the seconds when I gnawed at my bedclothes, when I howled like a wild beast. I remember all of them and others. I remember that none of them was ever the last, how the hours added themselves to the seconds in an excruciating, inhuman succession of throes in which my whole being set furiously upon itself, how I no longer had the strength to suffer.

I twisted my head from side to side like a dying animal in entreaty; I stifled it in the pillows; it was wet with perspiration; I felt a new convulsion begin and break like a wave. And when an infernal force tore me with a pang greater than all the others, I heard vaguely a cry that was no longer mine, a film passed over my pupils, I sank into an abyss sunlit and sultry. It was over ... it was over ... I fell asleep.

* * * * *

Did I remain in that state of lethargy and inertia for long? When I opened my eyes the whiteness and blankness of the walls of my room seemed to be released by a spring. About me was a startling silence peopled with sibilant whispers. I saw women stooping, then disappearing with their arms full of linen.

* * * * *

My baby! My baby!

His father, exultant, held him out to me. I became fully conscious. But goodness, how ugly he was! The shrivelled face of an old woman, the profile of a vulture, a forehead covered with plushy mucosities, cheeks smeared as with the yolk of an egg, hands on the outside exactly like a bird's and on the inside creased and red. And real nails!

At the fontanelle the pulse beneath the skin throbbed terrifyingly, and the fuzz on his skull was skimpier than pin-feathers on a fledgling.

I took him in my arms, stiff and long in his swaddling-clothes. His eyes opened half way and showed a glassy violet with milky gleams.

Our child? We both in turn dropped timid solemn kisses on his downy cheeks made of a sweet smell, and I dared not say anything.

* * * * *

Well?... The call of the blood, the rejoicing of the flesh, the issue of love, the instinct, the lurid mother-instinct at last?

No!

XIV

I should like to hold these things fast, for always.

I see them now as they really are, just as I see my son in his present form. But it is not enough to say: "I see them." I have carefully preserved all my pictures of him; I want to keep intact the memory of the heart he gave me.

This is not difficult to tell. Other feelings are too bound up with self for description. You'd have to explain a person's whole nature to understand them. Love is indefinable, grief is indefinable, but a mother's heart can open up like a book. It is uniform and simple, free from all alloy, and its very infiniteness is like finiteness.

My little boy is near me, awkwardly assaying his first steps in the garden. Without raising my eyes from my work I watch him and I thank him.

It is he. Although he changes from day to day, I know his ways by heart: the big curl in which the sunlight lies coiled, the almost imperceptible arch of his eyebrows, mere shades of lines, the red pollen blown on the petals of his cheeks, his profile of curves, his neck of mother-of-pearl, the spreading fan of his fingers, his unique form which is unique only to me.

I must rack my brain in order to force into my memory that once he lay hidden in my warm womb and I carried him as though he were one of my organs, as though he were a secret, that I carried him as one carries a joy or a pain. I no longer remember this.

I am in a hurry for him to grow up and be able to listen; I should like to talk to him. I have found words for the others, though they awoke in me only an uncertain love and set my heart in chaos. He has given me an intelligible emotion, and to him I have said nothing.

I love him as I love no one, because he is the sole human being for whom I am _responsible_. My love is responsibility first and foremost. If he bends over, I suppress a cry; if the sun shines too strong on him, I shield him with my body; if he makes a new gesture, a slight disquiet flits through me. In whatever concerns him danger seems to lurk. He is a lively, approachable child, people like him, and when they come up and speak to him, I smile a pleasant, natural smile, though his life and his death keep up an incessant sport within me and incessantly it devolves upon me to secure his life. It is a tragic stake, a terribly cruel problem; it is the entire basis of mother-love.

* * * * *

He has run as far as the ivy thicket, thirty yards from my chair. I tremble so that I have to get up and leave my work. Every now and then he comes tottering to present me with a shaving of wood fished up from the sand he plays in, a big earth-coated pebble, treasure-troves of all sorts. "Look, mother." His attention flatters me.

If I were to disappear without leaving anything?... Without leaving a will? Or suppose that from beyond the tomb I were to say: "Before you took your first steps your life was all arranged. In order that you should be happy I kept you from having dignity or a sense of justice. No need for you to undergo the bitter struggle that presses upon a man, the primordial cares of existence, honesty--honor, in short. Are you not my child? If I have taken trouble and pains it was to deprive human beings all for your sake. You will be exempted from earning your bread and pursuing an occupation. You will depend upon the labor of others, you will be under the delusion that you are distinguished from those upon whom you depend. That is the end to which my efforts will have served." But this is wrong, unwholesome, dishonorable.

* * * * *

When he is grown up into a tall young man whom people take notice of, shall I have the courage to look him in the face and say:

"You are not everything to me: you never have been my whole passion. I have cherished you on my knees, I have served you, I have idolized you. I have never deceived myself. I knew perfectly that in loving a child one gives without ever receiving. I have reserved the highest place for others. It is not to you that I have dedicated the essential thing in my life, its supreme reason, if a supreme reason can be found.

"Therefore you have the right to leave me. You must be finer, you must repudiate me. I bow before what you are. I free you from the duty in which children are cooped up, and I assume the duty myself. Whatever I may have done, never let my course of life be an example to you; there is no example; you, nothing but you, is what will count.

"You will have so much to do, everything I have failed to do. Go, keep your face set forward, never turn back. What were you born for if not to depart from me? To be sure, you are flesh of my flesh, but a part of my flesh that is unlike me, a contrary current that has emanated from me.... You say no to everything I am.

"Does it hurt me to see you disappear? Am I alarmed? Do I suffer? That does not concern you. _I was forewarned_. On the day you were born I was told that the tearing-away process would last as long as I last. We leave each other each minute. Your head mounts upward towards the heavens, mine draws closer to the earth.

"It is right and proper that this should be so. Without you, you know, my existence would be justified. It was not merely to bring you into the world that I was born. The thing is that your existence should be justified.... No, do not delay. Life is nothing but a departure and every time one halts one commits treason.

"I shall have to come to understand many things, thanks to you. I have always tried to be clear and know myself, but when I went to the bottom of things, I mean to the bottom of myself, there always remained _another_ soul, a rebellious soul which refused to reveal its mystery, and I have doubted whether it is humanly possible to learn the truth of it.

"I was not mistaken. The real, unknown part of myself, my unreachable soul, is in your eyes. You will see through what I have got no knowledge of. If you beheld how I look at you! You are like the travellers who come from afar, from the lands of fable concealed under lovely names of gold. You resemble those travellers. Your eyes will see beyond the horizon in which I go astray. I tell you that of the two of us the one who ought to kneel, listen, and learn is not you.

"My little baby, I shall owe to you the sole love that is sorrowful and perfect, the love that neither barters nor expects reward. Since I have given everything, you will owe me nothing."

* * * * *

Shall I have the courage to say this to him? It will be hard perhaps, but already I find that it is a veritable grace from heaven to have twenty years in which to attain to such courage.

* * * * *

Here he is coming back, running this time and brandishing in his plump hand a twig he has broken off all by himself. He drops plump on his knees as on two round balls, all hampered in his clumsy race to me. His chubby cheeks are stained with crimson. He throws himself on me. "Mother," he lisps, the little flatterer....

The mournful moment of a kiss, the exasperating moment of an abortive embrace, the fleeting moment of contact--he is gone.

XV

The test has been made.

We have lived side by side in the heart of the country, we have done the humble things of daily life together, have shared its immediate exigencies, have enjoyed the wild spirit of long walks together, the redolent silence of the little wood, all the freedom written on the face of the earth and carried by the waters. After this we shall feel that the looks we exchange are sisterly, and I have the improbable hope of some day being able to say: "I have found a woman friend."

Her very name seems wonderful. Eva....

I met her in the office where I work. What a lovely vision the first day! You so rarely find strength blended with sweetness in a woman that her bearing seemed a little supernatural. It was merely self-assurance, however, and the majesty of perfect health that gave her her superb manner of treading the waves. You noticed her tallness and fearless vitality, and did not try to question her eyes for the secret being in her. This was fully expressed by her quick gestures, the smile of her frank lips, the fearless carriage of her head, the straightforward look of her beautiful brown eyes.

A sort of reserve established a connection between us at first.

I noticed her diligence, her desire to do well, and a something like heroism, which made her rush into the forefront of life and carry away a little more than her share of the burden.

Our silent understanding lasted for some time. Perhaps without our knowledge the intuition brooding in women brought us closer than words could have done. One evening in speaking of her home and saying how happily she looked forward to meeting her husband, she used a phrase so tender, warm and chaste that I caught a glimpse of the woman in her. Her face, always behind a mask of energy, turned gentle and serious as if veiled by serenity. I imagined a couple in her image, for it is the woman who makes or unmakes the couple. She must have achieved a deep marriage.... The weather was fine and bright, and we left for home together.

I think I shall always remember her pure voice, which revealed the restlessness of living like a burning bush hidden behind strength and youth.... I kept wishing we'd never reach the corner where we had to separate.

But there it was already. The red of the sky threw its glow on her face and spread an impalpable halo of dusty rays behind her. "Till to-morrow," she said. I almost ran off, my heart swelling with gratitude. I remember my eyes smarted.

That was several months ago. When we decided to spend our vacation together, I felt beforehand that we were going to be friends.

We made the rash experiment of bringing two couples, two poor couples, under the same poor roof. We did it and we were gay and happy in the doing. It makes you believe in miracles.

I do believe in miracles. It is not a miracle that this beautiful woman with the tanned cheeks walking beside me is the strongest attraction in the landscape because of the tall stem of her body, the dancing refrain of her steps, and the brilliance of her complexion. Other women have passed over the ageless earth who were as alive, as charming, as stirring. The miracle is that her brow is clear, her manner clean-cut, her gaze straight and sure and keen with intelligence; that she goes lovingly toward a love which she has built with her own hands; that she is free and strives to be sincere in her freedom. Our mothers knew not. The woman in us owes them nothing but our faults.

If you look at this woman carrying her will on her shoulders, leading her will on towards the realization of her inner idea, towards the simple desire to be brave, to love, to be truthful; if you see her passing in nature, if you see how she moves, how she takes into her being the keen sea-air and how aware she is of everything, the great eucalyptus, its gray-green leaves tossing in the wind, the ochre-colored slope checkered with vines, the sleepy languor of the lovely coast-line robed in blue, you can tell at a glance that our humanity is strangely new.

When she returns to her and her husband's orderly, flower-decked room, what a life she will stir up; what creative power, what inspiration, what harmony she will contribute to their relation.

* * * * *

Will she and I succeed in producing that supreme masterpiece known as friendship? Friendship between two women used to seem almost impossible to me. I have always seen women leagued against man. They meet only to connive, and when they meet, humanity divides into two camps with the woman's camp almost wholly devoted to the concoction of plots and lies. Two women together? Two enemies confronting each other. If they cease from their rivalry, it is in order to set traps for male weakness.

* * * * *

She turns round. "Quick, we ought to be back already." Her smile is so confiding and my heart so happy, she is so radiant, so wholesome and her presence is so forceful that some day, I say to myself, the name of friendship will have to be the same as of love.

XVI

An arbor at the water's edge. Cool green leaves. Flowers. Boughs striped with sunshine. Close by, the peacefulness of a sleepy stream.

We had decided to celebrate our second wedding anniversary here. We rose early in the morning, set out arm in arm, keeping step, and came to this springtime nook as if to a rendezvous arranged by spring itself.

The setting for our lunch was all it should be--the midday sun blazing down upon the surrounding country, the table garlanded with flowers, the scenery framed in the arch of the arbor.

Two years....

The afternoon passed tranquilly.

He was seated close beside me. I saw his profile against the bank and the misty line where the horizon was falling asleep. His wandering gaze was caught by everything and rested on nothing. He seemed to be summing up each breath of nature, each line, each feature, and he had eyes only--this being a day apart from other days--for the broad effects of the great stretch of landscape.

A halt. We count on our fingers, we hold a mental roll-call before turning back.... Presently, when we start on our homeward walk, the great amphitheatre of vapors, the slope fringed with trees, the belt of mist will each one by one be making their quivering signs.

* * * * *

Two years. What has my love become, my hope, the spirit without end which dwelt within me?... We are two, that is all.

The same current of the spirit--if not the same spirit--drives its waves through us. The same flame--if not the same heart--mounts within us. The same love of truth--if not the same truth--throws the light of day between us. And nothing but silence is needed for us to be close and united.

We love each other better than ever; we no longer talk to each other.

Had anyone said to me the first day of our marriage: "You will want to explain everything to him, what you are, what you see, what you wish; you will want to find out from him what he is, what he sees, what he wishes; you will also want to find out what in both of you is reconcilable and perhaps, above all, what is irreconcilable: this is his concern or interest, this is your concern or interest," I should have nodded my head. "Yes, exactly."

But if I had also been told: "A day will come when you will have nothing more to learn of each other, nothing more to tell each other; without mutual explanations you will understand everything," I should have denied the possibility. I should have cried out that a whole century wouldn't be enough to bring two human beings into harmony, because human beings change from second to second. I should have said it was blasphemy.

But the day did come.

There is a region of soft azure outlines where words have been extinguished. _He_ exists and I exist.

It is a little green arbor where nothing, in short, binds us together, neither the flaming leafage, nor the smell of invisible murmuring water, nor the languishing hour; neither the nights past and gone, nor the days to come, nor the little child asleep at home in his cradle. If anything binds us together, it is the freedom that each of us has found, nothing else.

* * * * *

One must never say "This is love," for love is the heaven that the heart has in prospect, and the whole of space is yet to be traversed.... It is an immense feeling which speaks and impels you and is made up of certainty and clearness.

I am sure of him.

He might see a weapon of crime in my hands--or at least some symbolic weapon, something he holds a crime--without a shrug of his shoulders. Remembering that my tenderness is unfailing, he would say to me "all right," then he would come to me to find out why what I was doing was right.

And he is sure of me. He could leave us, his hearth, his love, his child, without so much as a glance back. I should merely say: "He had to go, he must submit to our love, and go his own way. That is how we love each other."

A moment at the foot of a hill, a great moment, so welcoming, so stable, and so peaceful that it is like an open doorway before which you must commune with yourself before entering. Two years gone by. Before me the rest of my life.

* * * * *

I have also had my doubts and fears. In the beginning I said to myself: "Will life allow such a love? What will become of this ardor and determination? And he, will he allow me to love him as my heart dictates?"

We have gone through daily cares together, poverty, weariness, all the formidable common things. We got many laughs and more strength out of them. In the evening his step would sound on the dark landing; I would run to the door to meet his smile; he would kiss me; the hours would fly.... That is the way two years unrolled their seasons and brought forth their fruits, and we became strict with each other because perfection revealed her face to us from afar.

So, without a word said, by minutes added to minutes, by the divine simplicity to which one approaches, you reach the promised land and the very heart of love.

I say what I see. Life does allow all the ardor, all the sublimity of two human beings to flourish; and in their relation to each other she grants even the impossible. I say what he and I are.

* * * * *

With one accord we rise, we know it is time. Our child is waiting for us, our house, our to-morrows, a thousand impatient desires, and all the things you don't think of in advance.

We follow the line of the bank. Where to? I do not know, but I know it is sweet, very sweet, and his arm is linked in mine.

Ahead of us are two banks set with houses and edged with reeds sharp-edged and long as swords.

It gives you a sort of dizziness to follow the banks straight ahead without removing your eyes. These two lines, separated forever and mingled forever by the current, are fascinating.

A marvel. Is it not a marvel? An arch. Rising from the ground on either side, its loving, solid curve clasps both banks and brings them together in an embrace. Nevertheless they are like two convicts. Yet at one point they become a single bank; they touch, they merge. Then they go on, their bed widening out. In spite of appearances they are still closely united in order to sustain the deepening river which will place its mouth on the mouth of the ocean.

* * * * *

Yes ... one more look....

Above the slope leaning down to lull itself in bliss, the sky has just enshrined a light cloud the color of periwinkles, and the arch resounds like an Hallelujah in stone.

Come.

XVII

He entered.

I cannot say how I reacted to the first steps he took into my life. I have only a confused impression left. The man who entered was not one to whom I could be indifferent. He was an aspect of my own being which was taking form and moving outside myself without recognizing me.

He approached shyly enough. My heart rose ... he approached ... I felt vaguely that a large event involving me was taking place in far-off regions, and the shadow of his body spread an immense new something before my eyes.

I thought him very gentle. I noticed the metallic clearness of his restless gaze, and that his figure suggested a great tree which dominates the other trees and lowers its branches so as not to be alone.

What was he going to do among these people, what attitude would he, the single sane person in the entire gathering, assume? How was he going to behave in this brilliant drawing-room filled with twittering women, dazzling lights, bare shoulders, ripples of laughter, and heavy perfumes?

I had tried hard to cut a figure but soon had to confess myself beaten. The women spoke a language not like the rest of the world's. Their vocabulary was limited to "masterpiece," "infamous," "divine," "diabolical," "delicious," "intriguing." In their presence an average, disgracefully normal, tame creature like myself without vices or virtues, had to keep mum.

The old gentleman advancing screened my escape from the group in which I had been trapped, and I managed to retreat to a safe corner, from which I saw the women fasten on him with a buzz of talk, a whole gamut of rosy bosoms and a great display of fireworks.... Further off the hostess was keeping a watchful eye to see that no one of the women distinguished herself too much. The elderly laughing gentleman must have been some one of importance....

The tobacco-laden air was gradually getting to be unbreathable. The noise pounded incessantly. I sat riveted to my chair without daring to move, as though a nightmare were upon me, the sort in which a terrible load oppresses your chest, though you remain conscious. "I am dying, I am dying." The load weighs more heavily. "No, I am dreaming, I am going to wake myself up." But you are impotent; you can't shake the load off and you can't come out of the nightmare.

* * * * *

It was just as I was exerting every muscle and scrap of courage to escape from the oppressive spectacle--I had devised a polite pretext--when he entered.

The hostess went to meet him with her wide smile, her hand uplifted, and the phrase of greeting she had repeated at least twenty times since I had been in the room.

She steered him my way, threw out a rising syllable, a descending syllable, like two balls between our two faces, and then propelled him over to the group while I listened to the muffled echo of his name bury itself in my heart.

I forgot the smoke, the noise, my eagerness to leave. Even the weight lifted from my chest in the very way a nightmare suddenly takes wing and yields to a dream of clear, bright meanderings.

They did not pay much attention to him. The loud dame who presided over the group captured all eyes. She was plump and short; as she talked she flapped her arms like fins, and every now and then let out from her chest as from a great case a vibrant laugh, which sent undulations over her salmon-colored bosom. When she herself had done laughing, she would cast her eyes about in quest of approval as though levying tribute from the faces. But when she encountered the newcomer, she had to stop because his frank gaze pronounced disapproval and denial.

How I wanted to thank him!

The company had been too much for me; it became too much for him. Soon I saw him cast about for a retreat.... For a second his eyes glided over me, I alarmed him as he had alarmed me. Then he slunk away, with the same crushed, crestfallen manner that I must have had.

He walked off ... the curtain of palms ... he disappeared.

By fits and starts the nightmare returned, clutching me with clammy tentacles. The noise fell in slabs, the weight on my chest suffocated me. Through a mist phantoms glided by, exchanging absurd bows, disjointed gestures, and disconnected remarks. A woman in a spangled gown with hair like flaxen wood-shavings turned and showed a chalky face. Others followed her, branded with painted red smiles. They were all hurrying. Refreshments were being served under the rotunda. The subdued clash of silver against glass sounded along with the clatter of china, little exclamations, and the shuffling of feet.

I am dreaming. Impossible that a gathering of human beings should be such an outrage on life, such a parody of it. When living persons come together and have attired themselves beautifully, it is for the interchange of what is best in them, not for the spilling of gall and the raising of a hubbub. I must be dreaming.

Little groups were coming back; women's laughter cut the curdled air like sharp lashes.

* * * * *

Again I made a painful effort and rose. With the looks of the women riddling me and paralyzed by the men's attention, I crossed the room driven by a force that operated for me. I found myself beside him.

* * * * *

He raised his eyes slowly. Did he smile? I no longer know. But he looked--as I must have looked--as though he were gazing into light.

XVIII

I have a new friend.

A friend.... When I see him, it is like a revision of all I am, a kind of unusual sincerity that urges me on, amplifies me, and carries me toward him.

When he is away, I have the impression of having discovered a treasure within myself from which I draw in deep draughts....

And also of hymns striking up beneath my tread.

XIX

"Why? Yes, tell me why you squeezed my hand so hard?"

I lean towards him, my head touches his chest. He is enraptured, overwhelmed, and as smiling as the night when it is about to pass.

He did not answer.

A silky wind blows down from a sheltering eminence and carves his face and makes me cling to him. Are we on the borders of the true silence, the ultimate silence in which human beings find themselves face to face? "You! You!"

A terraced garden. If this were another evening, I should be discovering in detail how beautiful the garden is. Each walk opens up a paradise, cool and secret as a spring, and the pebbles shine like glowworms. Borders of irises with violet fragrance dissolving among their stems, a profusion of spreading boughs, and near our bench a thicket from which at intervals darts the straight streak of a gray-bird's flight. Below us in the distant semi-circle across the fading daylight the sparkling apparition of a group of houses lighting up.

The sight of all this beauty fills me with such a glow--almost hurts me--because I feel _he_ is looking at me.... He says: "Your shining curly hair, your broad, clear forehead, your mouth, your eyes." Mentioned in his quivering passionate voice my hair, my forehead, my mouth, my eyes are so new that I close my eyes so as to see them ... And I did not know....

The garden has changed. Pale ochre reflections. Little shivers damp and creeping. Heavy black pockets on the parasol tops of the trees. The mournful andante of a swaying cypress. As though it were the first time, my beloved, that we were alone and had only found each other this evening under the narrow sky.

The shadows spread haphazard piling up in ridges, drawing after them dim white trails. Unknown thoughts escape from everywhere. They are too swift for me. The breeze carries them away. His face at my right, blurred except for the prominent features, is silvered over and turned into a medallion....

Am I quite sure that he is still close to me? I tighten my hand in his. The true, regular pulse at his wrist assures me all is well and down here everything is fair and _true_. The garden and the leaves, the multiplying lights of the town, the gloaming are all real.

The air is stirring and freshening up. Let us walk. Straight ahead of us as far as the last terrace with its ornamental balustrade; then we will follow the Broad Walk at the entrance of the garden.

He takes my arm gently. I do not dare to lean on it, though the weight of his presence bears me to the ground. I feel I am alone in upholding his life. Who will tell him, who will ever tell him the whole drama that this means? Will he ever know how I see him, how he lives for me? Other people and he himself see his huge figure, always a little bowed as if he never dared to be altogether tall, the steel of his eyes, and the slope of his forehead, which every shadow exaggerates, and his gaze bemired in clouds. They may see his simplicity and transparent kindliness; but at this they stop.

I am caught in what is inexpressible in him. I assume all the questions a man may put to himself without being able to solve them, all the vague poignant evils. And when he appears, I feel that a word has been fashioned to express everything, but not a single word to express his face. It is too outside of everything, too mysterious, perhaps too like my own.

We are at the Broad Walk, a solemn pile in which the trees go two by two, close together, erect--a cathedral. A chilly silence lays a sheet on your shoulders, the nave boldly thrusts its black pillars upwards, and the branches topping the vault wed in the sky.

In spite of yourself you say something in a very low voice. "Up there, that red glow as through a stained-glass window."

"Tell me you love me ... tell me ... tell me you love me...."

He has said _me_, he has said _you_, as if it were possible to stand this shock on your breast without turning pale. He sees I am sinking and passes his irresistible arm about my body. The future tears itself to pieces at the bottom of my life. At the end of the Broad Walk the last golden ray goes down in a black mass. I do not know how to say these things, but I raise my head like a slow remonstrance and I hold my gaze up to him. Have I said everything?

Let us return. I can go no further. He takes my hand and presses it with the warm strength of his fingers. It is limp and inert, the palm lifeless and cold.

What have I done to deserve this diaphanous gloaming, this prolonged rhapsody rising about us? I have loved once already, and that counts I know. But if I had not had this great passion to love another man, if I did not still have it, would my heart be so clairvoyant? Would the new evening be as mild as it is? But if in spite of my deepened heart, I am not yet all-embracing and big enough?

We have gone the full length of the Broad Walk and back. Have we really gone so far? Behind us the view retreats into the opaque distance, and the whole pile, as mournful as a church abandoned by God, fades away slowly beneath a pall of silence. Our walk is almost at an end. We still have to cross a deserted spot, where thin bushes hold up their charred arms to support the slanting line of the gold and black rays.

* * * * *

Does he see this high dizzy instant passing close within our reach? I might snatch it perhaps but for these mad throbbings, this veil over my eyes, the dryness of my lips. Only the fragments of the instant reach me, but even they are beautiful enough to dazzle me.

He stops and faces me and his gaze fixes on my throat. Doubtless he too is catching the fragments....

What are you to do when you are a mere humble human being and have no power to retain the superhuman moments?

May my longing for truth at least flame out. My love of truth is my finest quality, my one merit. May it shake me as the wind shakes a tree, and may my hands, if they dare, rend these garments which hide me from his eye. Garments are a lie, and the moment is naked....

He has understood. He trembles so visibly that I feel my breasts quiver like twin flowers and my whole being stir. He draws me to him and holds without daring to embrace me, small, panting, fainting away....

* * * * *

The pile has been swallowed up, the Broad Walk has turned black, the beautiful moment has fled through my fault; we have only a few steps farther to go. If I have nothing to give him, may he at least share with me the one idea I still retain.

This idea is the strange knowledge I have of my body, but of a body no longer mine, so lucid has it become, full of resonances, coursing blood, warmth and appeal ... a body of mysterious flesh and tense limbs, as bright as a torch, as sensitive as a soul ... a body I want to give him--my body and my arms.

XX

"No, don't get up, stay where you are; it is I.

"You told me you were not going to work this evening, so I came. I want to talk to you.

"I am going to sit beside you, if you don't mind, on the cushion on the floor under the window, where I like to sit when it is as light as it is now.

"I hesitate, not because it's hard to say. On the contrary, it's too simple, and things too simple are beyond words to express.

"I really have nothing to tell you. You understood. You know. But it is right for me to come and right that the confession I want to make should revert to our love, for it has to do with our love.

"How you look at me.... Your eyes probe to the depths.... Yes. That is it.... You do see, don't you? I love him.

"Perhaps the confession, which is so long, so long in beginning and has weighed so heavily, is already finished?... No. Since my eyes are overflowing, I have not yet made it. Well, listen, I have no idea any more of what I am going to tell you, but don't interrupt, let me say everything....

"Oh, I wanted to speak in orderly sequence, and I promised myself I should not be moved but would talk to you quite simply. When I came in, I felt I was growing and rising. I heard my own words stirring like live things.... But they are trivial; they hurt me so I wish I could find others.

"To think that here at this window we have so often talked of love, not of our love, but of all love. You remember? You used to say--I think it was you: 'What is beautiful is not the face you love so dearly, it is the need to love it dearly. What matters is not the delirium in which two people lose themselves, but the truth they discover.' And when you and I evoked those two rays of light which are one, love and truth, our words were so vast that we had to stop talking.

"This evening--do you know why?--instead of telling their splendid secret my words are mere splinters ripping my throat.... Yet when we used to talk here, I did not know love was so beautiful; we did not say it was.

"You certainly saw the change in me, and you guessed. The morning when you stopped in front of me and restrained the exclamation in your breast, I was sure you knew. Perhaps it was very apparent. I came and went in a radiance; the house grew chilly, everything in the house was conscious of it and unnatural. Evenings I worked later and later, as if I were afraid of falling asleep, and when we discussed things, it was I who explained, I who knew. You must have seen, too, how often I buried myself in silence, content in it sometimes, then tortured.

"You observed me. There was no reason for speaking one day rather than another?

"A reason has arisen.

"It was yesterday evening. Walking beside him I suddenly realized that in him, in us, in me, there was a sort of attraction; I responded to it--with all the strong, fine need of truth you gave me. It is this need of truth which brings me to you this evening.

"Take it, take it before giving it back to me. Don't let us ask whether it is more painful for you who receive it than for me who bestow it. Let us forget that man retains the proud authority of the male in his flesh and says "possess" as of a thing. Don't let us ask whether the union between man and woman is sublime to this degree. Let ours take that stand. One always has the time to suffer in, but there is only one time in which to love in truth.

"See, maybe it is at this very moment when my voice is worn threadbare and in spite of yourself you push my head away and hold yourself up as if you were about to fall, that we draw closer together than ever before.

"You are watching the night as it comes creeping ... you see, don't you? There is no question, not for a moment, of parting, nor of my loving you less. Because our hearts are turned towards each other to-day. A miracle is taking place. It will not be undone.

"Listen to me. Listen to me as if you could understand. Let me spread at your feet the infinity I hold.... Since he came, if you only knew, I love you more. Not only do I feel your smile and your whole presence around me like a thousand arms and with even more than one heart, but I feel surer of myself, nobler, and--admit it--more beautiful.... To love you is to think perfection, nobility, light, and to stretch my hands out to them. It is nothing else.

"To go to him is to continue myself; it is not to lessen you.

"But.... Is it the dusk or the reflection of the tree? Your cheeks are ashen, your eyes are quite wet, and in spite of everything, in spite of everything I am hurting you.... At the moment that you love like a God, you suffer like a man....

"It is because our understanding is a high one that your grief is deep and my confession necessary.

"If you knew, if you knew....

"You see, I still tremble before stopping just as I hesitated before sitting down, because once my confession is made we shall both feel that it is closed forever.

"Does one ever know whether one has not omitted the essential word, the life word, the one that means everything and has not been said? I no longer know. It is as if I still had it within me....

"Let me stay where I am, near you, for a long time. You will let my head rest on your knees, the night will succeed better than I in revealing the heart unseen.

"Perhaps he has come already.... Tell me ... do you hear him?"

XXI

How happy I was!... I listened without stirring to the deep throbbing of his life. I came to know him better through the regular pulsing of his neck, the twisting of his arms and the warmth that passed between us than through our past meetings. All the warm invisible things that work in the depths of a human being, the changing fate, the mystery circulating in the blood, were talking into my ears.

Here we were alongside each other, breathing in unison--can you have enough of such happiness? I entrusted my entire being to him; it was a pure, holy fulfilment.

* * * * *

There's no use trying to sum matters up differently. It may be that at death you find the higher expression, the illumination so sought for, but the living have no other way of saying the truth to each other than through the flesh.

* * * * *

You understand, don't you, that you have to rest from living? No longer to have this gaping heart, this pitiless, relentless love, but simply to lie stretched out close against him, so that the whole universe comes rushing to you, the mystery reveals itself, and life finds consolation.... Does God ever bestow greater charity?

* * * * *

I have just given him my life, my body, my very depths, and he is gone to sleep.

Then, a human being never knows what another human being gives him?

Physical love joins nothing, leaves nothing. Nevertheless, it seems to bring everything, and it does bring everything at the red moment of embrace.

The joy at which I grasped has departed; my lips are dry, my arms empty.

Yet a little while ago I thought I was going to live like God. And to have had the hope of living like God for a single instant is in itself beautiful enough.

XXII

"You really want to know what I am thinking of? And why I look so obstinate with my eyebrows projecting like a black roof over my eyes?

"I was working out an idea, the sort of idea that seems silly when you try to express it, but is really quite reasonable and logical....

"Why do you insist upon my telling you? I assure you it's so simple that you, a man, won't understand.

"Well then. I was thinking of your wife.... No, don't interrupt ... the woman who shares your name, your home, your meals, the money you earn, your cares; the woman who lives beside you--here's the one wrong--in utter ignorance of your love for me.

"I was imagining--this is where the vagary commences--a meeting between the two of us, not a meeting of constrained smiles, not the confrontation of two human beings, with elements of the dramatic and the divine. Do try to follow me. Put together the details I am going to give you one by one the way they are in reality. Give the extraordinary interview the ordinary setting of humble, banal, tame everydayness. I told you it was a silly notion.

* * * * *

"I go to visit her. The interview takes place amid her familiar accustomed things, which assist and protect her. She sits beside the window--her little sewing-table, her work-basket, a dozen scattered articles. She sews without thinking of much, in the broad daylight so dazzlingly brilliant that you can't see the swing of the pendulum. Her head is bent, the sunlight grazes her neck. You feel her spirit is with her needle and thread, that is, crystallized in calm. Her tranquillized body submits in advance to the impending visit. She has only to lift her eyes to know the limits set to her being, the very boundary-line of everything she awaits.

* * * * *

"I enter. I go to her. My steps erect a hedge of sound around me. To make myself seen I raise my voice.... How make myself heard? I do not know.... Since truth is triumphant, the announcement of my presence may be triumphant also. It may write 'I love him' all over me before we shake hands or even give each other the first look.

"She knows. She knows everything. I feel bathed in a vast thankfulness. Just imagine: when people talk of you, she is the only one in the world who knows down to the very roots of her being the full content of their words. It is as if I were speaking to God.

"Well, I begin. Laughing, crying I impart what cannot be imparted. I hurry. The words flowing from my lips warm me with their generous wine, and I hear love pouring forth.

"I see myself, almost on my knees, scarcely perceiving her. Is it to her that I address myself? I speak merely in order to remove a barrier obstructing the light and to say the truth.

"In the breathless words that I pour out at her feet it is not a question perhaps of either her or myself. Why should it be? I never considered that I was doing her a wrong. If she reads my face, she will see things as they are. Have I turned anything away from her, have I diminished her portion, have I deprived her of anything? I have simply given you everything.

"Don't say she might repulse me and would be right if she did, because that, after all, would be the human way to act. Human to you means everything that deceives itself and denies the essential grace, everything that falls and dies in the mud of the road. Are you quite sure that a woman when she loves does not feel that sort of humanity die?

* * * * *

"You look at me dubiously. Of course you cannot know. You men tolerate an understanding between two women when it exists for the sake of cherishing the dust-covered memory of a man. A tomb reassures you. You will never allow life as a pretext. According to you we have no right to a sisterhood until it is too late.

* * * * *

"In my unfailing and fatal sincerity I say your wife might understand. Truth striking the ear is bound to impress. And that I should be alive as I am alive at this moment, with the eloquence and magic that spring from real presences, is also bound to impress. Look at me. Need I say a single word? Isn't a great love with eyes uplifted convincing?

"When you tell me sometimes that I am beautiful, it is like a gift. She would see me bearing this gift, and if she perceived her forty years moaning and fading at my approach, she would understand that age in a woman is an offense love cannot forgive.

* * * * *

"Your eyes are searching space. You are wondering where such a conversation would lead her and me. Don't bother. It would merely lead me to the side of truth and her to its summit. I imagined that was enough and one could stop there.

"I imagined that after I had spoken, she would rise and stand without taking a single step, upright and solemn, her work at her feet, she would feel the morals of the world collapse, its false hells, its hardness and harshness, its monstrous delusions, everything that sheathed her in a coat of mail and incited her to self-defense.... Feeling her heart set at liberty, she would think of you, but of you with your body sloughed; of your real self hidden where neither she nor I can penetrate.

"Then she would draw nearer--would she know to what? It is a deep-seated law in us to try desperately to approach something. She would rediscover the dazzling moments when her twenty years of age gave her the power to bid the submissive universe do everything for your good. It would be a similar instant that I would place like a sheaf of wheat in her open arms. Don't you see?