Chapter VII: Book III: Becoming (1)

I

I had been counting the days until I could call the day I was yearning for by its name, a name new to me every morning. To have said good-bye for two months, to have lived apart so long and almost without news, and now finally to be able to caress the ardent moment which gives each back to the other, if only for a short space; to caress it as you hold your hands up to the fire. By a great effort I succeeded in remaining calm.

I had put my house in order, filled my vases with flowers, and made myself beautiful. My velvet gown dulled the light, so that by contrast I seemed to have a halo round my bared neck.

The hour drew near. The clock struck. But, no, the clock must be fast.... The next moments stabbed the silence, dragging on leaden feet. I went to the window. On turning back into the room, I was delighted to discover a few things to do. The little round corner table was standing tipped, there were too many leaves in the bouquet ... and this wisp of hair straggling down my cheek. No, he was not coming. Waiting is a death died over and over again.

At last....

To think I could have breathed till now! You! He moved toward me rather timidly, almost as if he were a stranger. It occurred to me that he was not familiar with my home. A panic seized me: he might not like it.

But in one bound I was close to him, my head on his shoulder and his arms around me. I forgot everything. "I am so happy, so happy." We found ourselves in my little room, where the flowers piercing the twilight opened wide their mock hearts....

But how he had changed; his face had grown thinner.... Why that overcast brow, that look of depression, that manner of not being at home?... What was the matter with him?... What was the matter with him?

Though there had been no time for conversation, and we had merely exchanged awkward, random questions, I felt suddenly that our hearts had ceased to beat in unison.

He should speak. I must know! Nothing is worse than not knowing....

"I'll tell you," he began, resting his head on his hands. He had suffered too much by our separation; he had realized this forcibly again just now when he entered my home where everything dispossessed him; he could no longer live without me, so far away; he needed me all the time, every minute. Oh, he knew there was something irrational in his entreaty, but all he had was plain common sense. "Listen to me," he said, "there's an instinct, an instinct stronger ... but you don't understand ... there ... I've told you everything ... that's all."

He began again. His expostulations breathed an awful storm; while an icy clearness and a terrible calm rose in me. Fear crept into me down to the very marrow of my bones. What could I say to a man who suddenly talked another language? All I had was the words we used to....

"Answer me, I beg of you, answer me, even if it is no, but answer me...."

Did I have to begin all over again--give everything and explain everything all over again? Until then I had been carried along on the sustaining bosom of a powerful stream. Now a torrent furiously discharged its troubled waters and infernal foam into the even flow, and I had to fight my way back up against the current in a desperate life-and-death struggle.

So it seems that the bonds of flesh make mock of you; instead of uniting, they detach, leaving each of you to wrestle and paralyze the other's limbs like entangling undergrowth.

And does it seem that the bonds of the spirit are not strong enough because they always lack some link or word or look?

If it were not that I had found complete harmony with another human being, I should have doubted whether a man and a woman could ever love, that is, ever understand each other.

The thought inspired me with supreme strength. A hot wave kissed my mouth and ears; I pushed him away.

His wife. She was the first consideration. Remembering her gentleness, I spoke of her gently.

To be with me he could give up twenty years of his life in common, twenty years of attentions and indulgences, twenty deeply rooted years. She was a frail loving woman who had once been beautiful; she was nearly forty, which in a woman is to have no age.... Wouldn't my presence, consequently, result in hurting another woman?... And would I do such a thing, I who brought so much warmth of feeling and enthusiasm to what was beautiful, right, and high-spirited?

"In loving you I wanted everything about you to be brighter, easier and more perfect; and just when I rapturously believed I had succeeded, you come and brusquely ask me to remove the light from another being. That's what you are really asking me to do.

"More. The man in whose name I built my house--don't be afraid it's his suffering I dread; I love him enough to rise above pity. But I thought I told you that he is necessary to my effulgence; you understand, necessary.... Remember, he is the one to whom I told the truth, in whose presence I could live while at the same time holding your presence, who has suffered through me without loving me the less, and prefers my happiness to his own heart's happiness. That's the sort of man he is. That sort of man exists. And you would deprive me of him!

"But if, to get me away from him, you were to offer something superior, a more perfect means of elevating me and teaching me to _know_, I should go unafraid, perhaps without hesitating. Love is the thing that elevates life.... But you, what do you offer? Feeling, instinct. Instinct is not a reason...."

I had risen while speaking. My cheeks and forehead were burning. His face, plunged in the snowy curtain, was quite changed. Was it the look in his eyes or the folds around his mouth?

"Then you don't love me?..." He repeated this like a child taken with the words, and dropped his head in his hands.

That the light fell about me in gray veils may have been only a fleeting phenomenon. It cannot be that love will desert you suddenly.

The rest of his stay was of no avail, and when awkwardness fell between us, he rose, pressed his hands down on my shoulders, and gave me a long, sombre stare. Then he left. I heard the door close slowly.

Then he doesn't understand? But the love I feel for him is a true love. It is not that unstable impulse which passion carries off in a puff of wind. My love, like my life, craves all the victories I have gained, all the people who are dear to me. And my eyes take in whatever they can of sky and color.... Nothing forbids me to breathe. Why am I forbidden to love whatever I love?

My love, you will conquer, you will make yourself understood. You are not this man who is leaving, nor the other man, nor anyone; you are a heart of flesh exposed ... a restless heart without limit, a heart forever beating and forever aimless. Do not let a single one who has ever been with you fade and drop away. If love cannot conquer, what else is there to resort to?

And I ran out to overtake him.

II

Only a few months since the first day of the war, yet I cannot recall one thing about it.

What I know is, that until the end it will remain the outstanding day of my life, the day of days. No matter what happens later, we who have lived through it have drunk at one draught the dregs of all the centuries, we have borne all the thunder of the heavens on our shoulders. Those who ask "Why exactly us" do not know that misfortune is always waiting to extort its tax.

I do not speak of the older people, those of the _other_ generation, of the other age: they have not been touched.

But we, we on that day!

After all, I can recall several words and impressions, but they are no more illuminating than the way my folks used to describe the day I was born. "You looked like a little red monkey, you didn't cry much, your grandmother was the first to kiss you, it was a dreadfully hot evening."

And I can also recall Mr. Barret's gray stony face, his huge, petrified figure, when he entered the office where we were talking and regaining a little hope. "It's here!" he discharged from the doorway. None of us gave any sign of understanding. "It's posted on the bulletin boards!" he shouted, and advanced into the room like a weapon about to descend.

As a field of wheat catches fire stalk by stalk until the whole is in a blaze, so we caught fire in our stupor, each spiked to the ground by his own flame.

Fire! Fire! Moments of scarlet, strangled breathing, souls cowering in bosoms, horror, too much horror already, wide-open eyes staring into space....

I remember I had to lean against the wall, and other trifling incidents, but my impotent dismay, my realization of all the folly let loose upon the world no more come back to me than the taste of the first gulp of life at birth.

I must have kept a clear brain and steady legs, because I ran straight home.... What street, what hell, where was I?... I had no eyes for the street nor ears for the humming in my head, nor consciousness even of the daze that was driving me on.

We met in front of the house whose quiet walls still enclosed our happiness. We passed under the porte-cochere heavily, passively, like beasts driven to slaughter, and the staircase was an ascent to Calvary. I do not think we exchanged a single word. When the door closed upon us we embraced without kissing, and my cheek against his shoulder was wet with tears that were not of my shedding.

It had occurred to me that he might leave for the war, but like every other thought this one too was promptly chilled and crushed. Nor can I say that it was the idea of his going that made me suffer the most. I was stupefied beyond the power to suffer. I was just as ready to burst out laughing or tear off my arms. I let myself be touched, handled, and moved like a stone thrown into space. But contact with him restored me a little, a very little, to the realization of what I was going to lose.

The days succeeding were spat from a volcano; nothing remains of them but ashes. You learned new words; a whole language born of the moment slipped from your tongue; countries became persons with distinct individualities, gestures and features. You actually fed on what appeared in the newspapers, picking up items like grains of manna. Men alone counted--men, men. Life was in their hands, life and the fate of the world. So and so many killed--abstractions with which the world juggled in figures. Death, a human divinity after all, settled down familiarly. Nothing was like anything that had gone before.

People began to talk of glory....

A day came: his departure.

I got his things ready as I always did before a trip, from a list, with my usual mania for taking along too many things. After filling his bag with all the necessaries, I stowed a tiny bottle of my perfume in it, a cigarette-case, his last birthday gift, some dried flowers, and our baby's photograph. I childishly pictured his exclamation of delighted surprise when he would remove his shirts and the picture would fall out.

Before he left the house, hardly recognizable in his uniform, he kissed his son savagely and pressed him long and hard, bending low to hide his tears.... On the way he spoke mostly of the child--commonplaces to deaden his pain. "Don't let him be too much of a bother. You must be strict with him, you know." I saw he was entrusting his share in his survival to me, and it was better to avoid reference to a parting that marched on to death.

Regiments were springing up on all sides, troops of men with innocent eyes and faces shining with pride; sons, brothers, lovers, changed into statues of men, in a confusion of brass bands, cheers, red and gold, clashing of arms, and tramping of feet.

If only this were hell in its completeness! But he was not there. He had left six days before without my being able to say good-bye to him.

There was the last kiss, the fixed, tangible second when you part for good and the yard of space between you actually counts. You were two bodies clasped, then you became only one body, two arms ... a soul locked in a leaden coffin.

There were the wretched minutes when you summon all your illusions to your assistance. "Nothing can possibly happen to him ... of course not to _him_...."

I returned, dragging my misery like a chain. I was one of the vast herd which fretted the surface of the earth like a canker, moulded and moved by a deadly maniac hand.... Never before has there been such a herd.

Being a woman, I felt withdrawn from the herd, exactly as I had felt on the first day of the war that humanity was cut in two--men and women.

I was impotent, curdled, set aside. Like the other women I passed by the young men with orders to die and only a few days to live, though their bearing was of men who had long to live. I passed by the other women, useless flesh of the earth, faint-hearted flesh for grieving....

I went.... In another sense it was the herd that passed by, that she-thing, in countless numbers, dancing bacchantes with hideous hyena-laughter and robes smelling of red blood and heavy wine, compliant....

You no longer saw yourself, because you had been swallowed up in a living craw.

* * * * *

Where were you, my sisters from everywhere, women of Europe, you, Trude and Clara and Mania? What were you doing? Were you weeping?

You saw, didn't you, that bloody sky with forked black signs, that summer swooning away, that day?... Why was not your voice heard in denunciation of the universal slaughter?

Why was not my own voice heard, when there were outcries in my throat, tears in my flesh?

III

I am becoming horribly accustomed to going about the empty apartment alone. I find I no longer think of the scowling walls, the dumb silence, the dim windows. They wrap me in a vague acquiescence. Habit is exerting its awful power.

I seem to be gliding down a slope where there is no one at the bottom to warn me that there may be a precipice ahead or tell me whither this strange existence leads.

My days are regulated according to the rules I myself have made to apply only to myself; I go, I come, I turn the key in the lock; I loiter; then I rush at my work. Sometimes the mirror casts a sudden image which runs away busily at my approach. My shadow and the creaking under my tread are all I have for company.

Yet this is not the first time I have lived alone. There once was a room with a flowered quilt, a moth-eaten carpet and a rickety door which opened like the lid of a devil-in-the-bandbox on the mahogany wig and scarlet smile of Mme. Noel. But everything was so different! I brought nothing to that virgin space except the desire to fill it; my body knew nothing; my inner being cried out for too many things to be able to hold any of them, and had I dared, I would have stretched my arms out through the window to embrace the air of life....

My solitude now is like rotten fruit; it scorches my entrails like a fiery drink. It is a strange solitude.

Two men peopled my life and fertilized and vivified it. But wasn't that very long ago and somewhere else? Come, try to remember....

I do not know; they are neither dead nor alive. To be sure they are hungry and thirsty and get bored as living people do, but they are locked up in the earth's carcass like the real dead; and it may be that at this very moment when I am imagining them warm and active, they are already stiff and cold. To be absolutely truthful, to go down to the bottom of things, there is scarcely anything in common between the two men who went to war and me who stayed behind.

Sometimes when I am alone, I lean over, way over, to touch the very bottom of things so as to feel the pain of it.

Yes, letters pass between us. When I read their letters I try to imagine their surroundings and the crass details of their life; the fir-trees of the Argonne, the name of a regiment which I know by heart like a prayer, frost-bitten feet, the incessant thunder, and the arrival of the postman which draws us a little closer together. Then there is Carency--the place makes no difference--the light cavalry.... Attack, formation, the first rank mowed down, the second, the third; he alone standing upright in the front of the fourth rank, a struggle lasting a century, the confused subsidence, and my portrait snug under his blue jacket. And that night last week when he was nearly dying of thirst and crawled out over the open field, groping for something to drink. A miracle, a pool! He fills his mess cup and empties it at one draught. He spits out thick threads, they hang from his mouth--bits of brains.... A pool of human blood from which he has quenched his thirst.

I receive a letter nearly every morning. The envelope burns in my fingers: the written lines make a pretense of talking and telling you things, as if I were not standing in front of him as you stand in front of a window-pane which you frost with your breath so that you can't see what's on the other side.

I write to them before I go to bed. Nothing important ever turns up, so I make a lot of the little everyday affairs--what happens at the office or at lunch in the restaurant where the people discuss and wrangle and the smells turn you sick. I tell them how forlorn the house looks, and how well the child is getting along in the country, that I do some work after dinner to make a little more money. Besides, there's always some anecdote to relate.... Twelve strokes cutting into the metallic night.... Sometimes when I fold my letter I have a sense of having written about somebody else.

Nevertheless, the thought of them is an obsession; it is a red point about which I develop and revolve and add to myself.

And sometimes, too, when I shut my eyes, bizarre notions swoop down on me, a horrid swarm of bats. "How many women are there to-night," I wonder, "who are tossing about in the thin warmth of their beds, distracted creatures, tormented, empty-armed, who, however, are the bigger for all this, easy in their minds and free already in their bitter freedom?"

Yes there are many women to-night without husbands or lovers who wonder as they lie in bed; then they sit up and lean on their elbows ... they don't _know_ yet or suspect anything ... but they don't sleep, they can't sleep; it's too absurd to think that a woman can live all alone, sleep alone, even breathe. And then it might be that the closest union is a prison after all.

At last I fall asleep, and in the morning, in the bald, shivering twilight, I go back to my doings of the day before, somewhat cowardly doings. Dull habit, which greases the machinery of life, leads me blindly along the streets to the office.

Was it only two months ago that with despair in my heart I passed this corner where the chestnut-stand sends up its whistling steam? His letter in my bosom had told of the night attack and of his possible death; a brief, heart-rending farewell. Is he in less danger this morning, is he less cold, less hungry? I just passed the same corner worried for fear I might be late. The whole way I had been thinking of my dress and winter hat.

That's how you get used to the martyrdom of others.

Even if it is the flesh of your flesh that undergoes the martyrdom, even if it is the man of your love--ah, don't say no--you get _used_ to it. In suffering one person cannot take the place of another, and pain cannot be shared. The first day, because grief turns your head, you think you are sharing the other person's pain, but the other days, all the other days?

Why not have the courage to look crude reality crudely in the face? There are no people who are inseparable, there are no couples who are inseparable.

He is in the trenches, the men are in the trenches, engulfed in misery, exposed to danger, plagued by vermin, and I am here alive and untouched, grazing this large wall patched with three-colored placards. "Women ... your noble role ... noble work ... honor...."

Honor? What honor? I work. Isn't that natural? He is suffering, he is going to die. Didn't I see my own dormant energies wake up? And if he has given all, have I not taken all?

Five minutes to nine! I hurry, raising my coat collar in a shiver and clasping my hands inside my soft muff.

At the end of the street a dusty gust driving a handful of people along like dead leaves, women with billowing skirts, a tramping, whistling gang of blue-lipped street boys, and old Noel with his breath frozen on his beard.

* * * * *

_They_ have left. Even if they return, they have left. That's the whole thing. There will have been a space of time when they were wiped off the face of the earth, and life went forward without them, was lived without them, and women actually _continued_ without them....

IV

The typical young lover, well built, good-looking enough but without charm; his youthfulness armed with a timid pretentiousness. I had always avoided talking to him, but this evening he got hold of a foolish excuse for walking home with me. I tried hard to speak of something else and quickly switched the conversation on to another track when it took a certain turn, while he, a hundred times more proficient than I, certainly more obstinate, dragged the subject back to where he wanted it to be.

The eternal comedy of man. The same words--who will tell them that they always use the same words?--to reach the same goal. He made awkward, crafty attempts, watching me out of the corner of his eye, and when he saw I was escaping, he declared himself, throwing up his dice and staking his very heart. His voice was rusty, his nose pointed downward, his ears were fiery.

Until then he had seemed fatuous, almost ridiculous in his little perfidy. Now he was ennobled, like a saint, pure, supplicating. His whole body took on grandeur. How he trembled, the poor boy!

When my answer was given--a woman who doesn't love has a lot of ease and gentleness at her command--"Forgive me," he said, "I have offended you."

I watched him as he walked away, his back bent, humiliated, I suppose, but bathed all the same in the hope that rises from the words you dare to utter.

Forgive him! As if any woman ever harbored bitter feelings against the man who gave her the great gift, as if a single one of us ever remained untouched, as if a mysterious yet positive connection did not establish itself the moment love was declared.

I remember all the men who ever loved me. Each thinks he has discovered you, and offers you your secret. Each does in fact discover you, and also kisses you a little.

I shall remember this young man, too; I shall remember the strip of mackerel sky showing above the street crossing; I shall remember the stammering mouth whose youth demanded its satisfaction from mine, the mouth that touched mine in thought.

V

I have had the sensation of death.

Not in the instant of dying; that is still a part of life; but in the instant after death.

I had gone to the end of the pier, where the water lashes incessantly and regularly, and seated myself facing the open sea. To right and left the green shore curved and the fir-trees ran down toward the sea to hold in the pale sandy strip edged with foam. Over my head the procession of clouds.

Sunday morning. The voice of the chimes from the old church, buried in the heart of the island, was music sent by the air and tinted blue by the waters. At each stroke you expected to see space divided in two.

The sea was smooth and sleek with dark, wide, winding oily tracks, which looked like roadways traced by the sure finger of God.

Looking down at my feet I saw a sparkling play of meshes of rainbow light. The iris fragments dented the surface, formed into chains, made a covering of diamond facets, and drew downward full rainbows resting on myriads of arches. It was an incessant disappearance and reappearance.

It was fascinating to watch. The only thing that distracted me was a swarm of miniature fish darting under the pier more lightly than insects. For a moment they showed dove-colored, then orange; then they melted away. You tried to fasten your eyes upon one of the cells of water, just one. You had it, but no, it was another one.

The sun was so hot you couldn't lift your head. A broad sunbeam falling perpendicularly on the hard surface of the sea cut it in a blinding fissure, which attached the foot of the pier to the horizon.

Caught between the heat pouring down from the heavens and the freshness rising from the water, my body lost its sense of weight, form, equilibrium, and even of breathing. Every bit of feeling was gone from my legs, my neck was burning. My soul and eyes existed for nothing except the stable yet ever-changing mosaic which laughed a thousand laughs at the face of the sky.

There was nothing but light. Substance, eyes, body, memories, all seemed to be losing themselves and making a plunge into light.

There really was one moment in which I ceased to be. My existence underwent a momentary eclipse. I was no longer some one obstinately facing a realm of infinity in order to measure its limits, a very small creature who wanted to add herself to nature. I was the immense, permeating idea of the ocean, the sun and the sky.

It was between the singing ether and the silvery water that I seemed to foresee my nothingness, because when consciousness left me and I ceased to be, the sparkling eyes of the sea formed again, the blue oily tracks unfurled themselves, the glittering fissure sucked in the same line, the blue deep followed its unchanging course. Everything kept on behind me.

VI

Nothing but women....

Not a single pretty one. Two, four, ten, a hundred ... there must be two hundred.... Not a single pretty one....

To be sure, the weak unsteady light discolors their faces and throws drab blotches around their features, but that alone does not account for the general stamp of dullness which makes them seem like a flock of widows. The two men sitting apart on the crosswise bench like well-behaved children who have just been punished, have a sorry air, not at all the air of having done it on purpose.

I am impatient. A woman addressing other women.... What is she going to tell us? Will the audience brighten up?

I am standing with my back to the platform facing the door to keep watch for Eva for whom I am reserving a seat beside my own.... Alas, something for a merciless eye to feed upon! I can hardly bear to look at that uncultivated field of dingy heads. But there is nothing better to turn to--moldy walls picked at and peeling, smeary stains on a colorless floor. Your ears are pierced by a rising babel.

Eva at last.... I draw a breath of relief and feel, as I always do, like saying "Thank you" to her. Great floodgates open, my poise is restored--a living proof.... Why this blitheness? Because of her smile, her radiance, her frankness, the glory she carries about with her from the clear image of her child and husband? I do not know. She exists, that's all. When I think of her, I have a complete sense of happiness and confidence.... Perhaps this is friendship.

She has a little trouble making her way through the hall. Her head, set in velvet, rises above the field of heads like a taller, brighter stalk; the precious gems of her eyes show in full. She sees me, her face brightens.... "Thank you," I say, very low just to myself. After all there will be one fine face in the room.

We had scarcely shaken hands and seated ourselves when silence fell, broken here and there by coughing.

The speech.

The woman making the speech is also ugly. Yet what resources in that ample body. Under the armor of her corset, there are fine, noble lines, I am sure. Under her sausage sleeves there are the arms of a mother, even perhaps of a woman in love; the huge pancake on the nape of her neck shows she has long shining hair silky to the touch; and what tenderness in the depth of her eyes which dart glances in our direction. If she dared, what sweetness....

She came to speak to us from a platform for the purpose of conveying her idea and a little of her soul, unaware that a valiant soul is a visible soul. The only means we have of showing our souls, sharing them and giving them freedom, are the ordinary means--our actions, the bare flesh of our lips, the sincere tears of our eyes, our bodies which encase our souls, our smiles which beautify our souls, and our voices.

This woman's soul is a strained voice, but how marvellous. The rows in the audience remain stationary, each head staying fixed in the position it held at the first word she uttered.

The women's horrid cares, their marketing, their husbands, their children, their dishwashing, their difficulty in making ends meet, all the everyday trifles that weigh on women and enslave them, are driven far away. The pale blonde with faded eyes beside Eva probably made the same O of her mouth when she spelled out her letters as a child. The old woman nodding "Yes, yes"--the two plumes in her bonnet respond "Yes, yes"--has forgotten her stupid drudgery.

They are all stamped with a sort of pathetic imprint; love is their element, their strength, their medium. They listen with love and understand through love. Love gives them this serious, fixed attentiveness.

The woman with the burning insignia of her stove on her fiery cheeks has lost all traces of worry except for the scolding expression of the mother whom you imagine with a horde of children jumping round her like little rabbits. And the thin girl with the dusky gaze--we've all seen her kneeling in the shadow of a confessional mumbling her sins with her mouth glued to a wooden grating from the other side of which comes the warm breath of a man without a face--what ardor she, too, is capable of!

Instead of the voice of the speaker on the platform it is the women's outcries that I hear.

These women have been imprisoned by themselves, hampered by their own lives, and what lives! what a miserable heap of desires and troubles in the face of the immense thing which gathers all beings together and makes them resemble one another, the thing unanimous and intangible that I hardly see. I don't even know its name. Before it I am like a blind man who has never seen the sun, but suddenly feels it shining on his forehead and exclaims: "There is light!" It is this _thing_ that has made all these women come here to-night and bestow their childish presence, their somewhat uncouth attention, their tragic lips which would kiss everything. Do they feel the great current rising from them which seeks to be caught and held fast, a current altogether new in the human atmosphere?... Not yet. Not yet.

How subdued Eva looks; her gaze seems clipped short; she's frowning. Her expression makes me uncomfortable.

Hands flutter like white leaves; a bow from the platform; the meeting is over.

The auditors stretch themselves a little, then rise to the accompaniment of clattering benches, gossamer sighs, and the sound of two hundred bodies moving and coming back to themselves. A faint cackling, then a full chorus of barnyard noises mounting and spreading.

I plant myself up against the wall to let them pass and see who will cast thorny glances at my hat, dress and shoes.

"Come on," cries Eva. Her forehead is drawn in hard lines. "Come on."

Outside, the night blowing upon the parting groups of women gives their scattered voices resonance.

Eva takes my arm ... but no, I feel like being by myself. I repel her bluntly, as you throw aside a branch you have broken. She instinctively draws her cloak around her.

"What an absurd evening! Those women!" she says.

She is right, I am sure. Every one of the women, it was easy to see, was ugly and petty, but together, multiplied and magnified, their individualities wiped out, they revealed I cannot say what unformed hope, what substance, what richness.... If only I could explain this to Eva!

"Hurry, hurry, here comes my street-car! Good night!"

The buzzing of an electric bell, an intense disk of light, another buzzing, and the little illuminated house stops. With a flutter of her skirts and a wave of her hand, Eva disappears.

Has she really gone? Goodness, what is she carrying away with her?...

In the nebulous depth of the long avenue I can still distinguish a vanishing star gliding along its mechanical path.

I had said: "Here is my friend, my companion, my sister." On this evening, tender as dawn, she has left behind in me a great emotion which she does not understand.

VII

"A lady," the fat concierge told me. "Been here twice. Well, a sort of lady, a ... you understand. Her cheeks--her skirt--you can see her legs up to here.... Believe me or don't believe me, but she's twin pea to your Marie. If she comes back, what shall I tell her? I won't let that sort into my house! Eh? Kick her out?"

"Oh but, M. Etienne, I am at home to-day. Let her come up."

I closed my door blushing.

Through the banisters I recognized her. Actually Marie!

"Come in...."

She went in ahead of me to the dining-room--"my dining-room," she used to call it--and seated herself deliberately. Genuine timidity hides itself behind a mask of absurd audacity.

"Marie ... Marie ... is it possible?"

She was wearing a large red straw hat turned up at one side and weighted down on the other side by a nodding mass of huge black plumes, two tall elastic antennae, the sort worn by horses drawing hearses. Under the chalky enamel you couldn't see her freckles, but her eyes, her lovely eyes of purest aquamarine, with glints of indigo from her blackened lashes, still retained their dewy look of astonishment.

Here was Marie. At last I was going to know why she was so mute and why she ran away one evening without taking along her bundle of clothes or her prayer-book. I was going to find out how a poor little servant girl rebelling against kindness could become a poor little swaggering over-dressed prostitute.

"I have come for my things."

"They are still here, Marie; I'll go and get them."

But I couldn't budge. This phenomenon coming so close to me was appalling. I looked at her. She had the soft, awkward charm of a little astonished beast. Seated there in my presence she made an ingenuous, piteous sight, like a ladybird you're afraid of crushing, or a wilful timid lamb withdrawing from your caress.

I noticed all sorts of minutiae--that she carried a cloth hand-bag, an exact copy of a bag of mine, and tied her shoe-latchets the very same way I did mine; was very neat, her shoes polished, her hands clean, her neck fairly waxed with soap. Her gaze, once aimless and imprisoned, harpooned the things in my room and withdrew freighted with discoveries.... And she gave me acid, persistent looks like the looks one woman gives another. "Has she aged?" her looks questioned, "has she changed, is she prettier?" Her eyes roved around the room. "Ah, that little etagere was not there in my time, nor that engraving.... Who's doing her work? The place looks well kept." She parted the collar of her jacket at the opening to show off her imitation brooch. The child had become feminized, she seemed older than ever.

"Why, Marie? Why?"

I couldn't restrain myself any longer. She leaned her elbow on the table. When she raised her eyes, they were underlined with red and two slow tears cut little pathways down the powder on her cheeks. I jumped up and took her hands.

"I didn't like--I didn't know what to do with myself. It wasn't my fault. No one cared about me...."

The great answer to the riddle. They all have this devouring need. What they ask of love and look for in love is "someone to care about them."

"And then my hair, my Breton dress ... everybody stared at me. 'Aren't you ashamed?' I used to think."

Another need--to be like other people, to be just as good as anyone else--why not?--to have a bag like madam and hats like the hats you see on the street....

"That's all," she added.

It was all. When women sell themselves, it is not poverty necessarily that drives them to it. You don't know the hell of jealousy that burns in all of us. There are some women who make themselves beautiful less for the sake of pleasing men than for annoying other women.

"You must be unhappy."

"Yes, ma'am."

Is a poor little thing like Marie sensual? Women are rarely sensual. If they are, they have not been so from the start; they have become so.

Her Breton accent came back. "Madam," she said in her singsong of four years ago and in the same servile tone. Now she felt like relieving herself and telling me everything. There was one man who really didn't disgust her, but he was at the front, and if only he could come back! In the meantime she practiced economies and perhaps they could fix up a home and perhaps he would marry her. But if he did not come back, then--

I had been to blame, I alone. I had been satisfied to deplore her grim silence and do nothing. But I ought to have humiliated myself so as to earn her smile. I ought by talking to her to have driven out of her heart the longing to equal and surpass which prevents us all from being human sisters. I should have....

We are all to blame for the prostitutes, we are the ones at whom the stones should be cast. Nearly all of them are little Maries with the craving for just one man, the peaceful healthy desire for a secure hearth, but we tolerate poverty, and we don't know how to talk to each other.

She put her package under her arm. I did not know what to do. I went up to her, humble of heart, and rather awkwardly kissed her cheek streaked by tears and sullied by paint.

She started, shaken by a revulsion. The liquid blue of her eyes turned sharp and aggressive, her lips narrowed; she held her little bag close like booty. Then she departed, leaving the door open for the smoky darkness of the landing to creep into my rooms. She had the untamable, sullen expression of a hunted beast.

VIII

Twenty days passed without news.

When I woke up, the early sunlight had a reassuring effect, the morning chattered familiarly, my terror of the night before took wings like a fancy. Hope swelled within me.

The postman's ring, sharp, strident, unbearable, reopened the wound. I rushed to the door. Nothing. A circular, an ordinary letter which I didn't have the will to open.

* * * * *

It was exactly twenty-two days. I forced myself to sit down at the table, but my courage was completely gone, and the alarms of the night which haunted the room gripped me by the throat. Well, there would be something to-morrow. It was impossible....

Anxiety, from the moment it began, made me neglect myself--no prinking, no housework, dust powdering my furniture. The most I did was to turn back my bedclothes. What did all these things matter? I wanted to sleep, sleep....

Coming back from work I slipped into my flannel dressing gown and slippers and let down my hair. I did not even take the time to warm up my dinner prepared beforehand in the morning. The plate was on the table, an orange, a piece of bread.... I'd eat.

I couldn't. The mouthfuls choked me. I couldn't do one thing. I was overwhelmed, almost paralyzed, by an unconquerable weakness. I threw myself in my armchair. I would put the room in order the next day. I would work twice as hard, but not to-night....

Sleep....

Torpor gained complete possession of me. The darkness gathered, and when the last streak of twilight came through the window fluttering on my eyelids, a little hope returned.

After all, twenty-two days was not so terrible. Many people had had to wait longer. Hadn't I had to wait sixteen days once? Letters get lost on the way.

I visualized a scene--a hospital ward, a row of beds, white coverings, nurses. How was it I had not thought of it before? Wounded!... A slight wound which kept him from writing.... I welcomed the certainty. It was so comforting that I tried to hold on to it by jumping right up and shaking off anxiety and being happy. Anxiety is an insult to love.

I groped for the lamp, turned on the light, and laid some reading matter on the table. The disorder was dismal but--to-morrow was another day. I sat down to read.

The lines leapt at my eyes. You'd have thought them an army of ants running over the page, running, yet always remaining at the same place. Should I try to work? Should I try to make up a package for him? That would be two packages this week, but two are not a whole lot.

My heart gave a great leap. The door-bell rang. Who could it be at this hour? My very life went round in a whirlwind, I flew to the door.

Some one in black shrinking in the dark doorway in the humble attitude of a sister of charity requesting alms for the poor. My aunt Finot!

I murmured a few little hypocrisies and put up my hair. I was fuming inwardly, although actually a little relieved at the prospect of a visit, which even if tedious would mean a human presence, a tangible certainty. I was so upset I came near saying "Tante Finot" and giving away the nickname by which she had been called in the family for twenty years.

"Come in, aunt...."

She stepped in ahead of me, hunching up her body. The disorder struck me ... my home was usually so neat ... and my dressing gown ... my run-down slippers--

"An awkward hour for a visit, I know," said Aunt Finot, sitting down. "Are you feeling quite well, dear?"

"Dear" in that mouth with lips like two tight-drawn catguts! It stabbed like a dagger.... She sat perched on the edge of the chair twisting the straps of her hand-bag. The lamplight threw dusky shadows on her skeleton frame and turned her eyes into the sharp-gleaming eyes of an executioner. My God!

"Has anything happened," I asked, "anything dreadful?"

"You see, dear ... don't get excited ... listen...."

"Dead!"

An abyss yawned at my feet, something flashed and grazed my eyelids. I...

My aunt rose slowly. I saw her hands on the table knotted like a tangle of cords.

"Don't get excited. Your family received bad news, I don't know from what source. I asked them if it was official. They were all half crazy--afraid to come and tell you.... I always felt an affection for you, you know...."

"Yes, yes, I understand; he's dead."

There she still stood, her knotted hands on the table, a grin widening her flat features. There she still stood.

"Aunt, please leave me alone, please do."

Perhaps she went on talking a little, perhaps she leaned over to kiss me, perhaps I heard words falling from her lips like pellets of lead: "country--trial--sacrifice." The door closed upon my slaughtered love.

I know I tried to stand up--it was like trying to lift a tombstone--and drag myself to the window to lean my forehead on the pane; but something pulled at me from deep within, something cold and incomprehensible, like a slimy slug, like a deep gash in living flesh. And a strange dizziness, not entirely physical, threw me back into the armchair.

The walls of this black hissing pit into which I fell were the walls of my dining-room, the very same walls papered in a scallop design, and I saw a cloud of tiny coal-black butterflies, mere specks, whirl without end from the blackened lamp-chimney.

My being turned into something enormous and gaping, which fed constantly upon a great wound. I was so overwhelmed with a senseless horror that at moments during the night his death seemed quite normal and natural. But when I withdrew my hand from under my head a multitude of serpents wriggled about within me, and I felt suffocated again and began to tumble through emptiness, while little pointed teeth bit my blood and left behind a penetrating icy poison.

It has ever been the same, Lord God. Suffering is too monotonous.... When a bit of sense and ordinary life returned and cried in my ears: "It is over. Never more," I felt that suffering is too monotonous; and when a clamor of revolt sounded in my being: "They have killed him!" I felt that suffering is too monotonous.

And when the dawn came tapping at the window and creeping toward the table, drab and livid, when I rose from my bruised knees, and when the humming and buzzing began in the indifferent house, I still felt that suffering is too monotonous.

IX

Your beloved is dead.

News that comes from the depths of the ages or the depths of the flesh; you can't tell.

One day--there--a clap of thunder. It bursts from your flesh and tries to enter your flesh again. It beats at the portals of your heart, besieges your ears, howls round your entrails, but there is no place for it, no part of your body wants it, your soul retreats to shelter, your heart drips black blood, your mind goes round and round. News, News! Your beloved is dead!

No need for the thunder to break. I knew it was brewing in me.

When we used to come back from work and I kissed him with this very mouth and embraced him with these very arms, pressing him so hard that he laughed sometimes, it was premonition of the News that kept my lips sealed to his cheek so long, and turned my arms into iron clutches, and gave me warning when I woke up, and frightened me in the dark.

We used to talk about it and try to imagine what separation by death would be like. "If I die, if you die." We wanted to provide against it, we had accepted it.

My beloved, the knowledge of misfortune is not the misfortune itself; the knowledge of death is not death itself. When we were together we never imagined I should suffer so much. When people are together, they can't imagine what it is to be alone.

It is like childbirth over again, I assure you: I remember your face when I shrieked in travail. I am more torn now, and you are not here to hold my hands.

Why do they all say suffering is necessary and ennobling? I can testify that suffering doesn't do any good.

I used to be a gay, active woman, who went about with chest expanded, a body full of pleasure, lips like kisses, and cheeks alive with color. I used to get up at five o'clock in the morning and stay up until late at night. After the day's work in the evening I'd say "to-morrow" as if anticipating the loveliest day in the world. I had poverty, laughter, an appetite, I had a perfect union with another, and I maintain that this counts. I led a life according to my own will; I had a bright child. I had all this, I _was_ all this, this was my lot....

To-day I am a woman whose eyes are swollen and corroded with salt tears, whose features are sharpened, whose shoulders stoop, whose black dress bags on her reduced figure, whose eyes are turned inward, whose house is untidy and whose evenings drop into darkness without the lamplight. My little one has to call me.... I love him without a smile, and as for myself, I hate myself.

I used to try to be kind and make it pleasant for people in my home. I am like a thistle withered on its stem, I am like a fruit cut open and thrown out on the street. I am useless and bitter--I am bad.

When people come to me, I feel the pricking of their thorns, and I wallow in gall. They are all enveloped in an awful respect for death. It revolts me.

My family comes to visit me, each one of them chockful of advice and dropping honied words.... Yet I was more worthwhile when I was happy. Why didn't they incline themselves when there was still time? They seem to send up a cry of relief. "At last! You're suffering! At last a person can approach you!" They console me and lull me; they are crows quarreling over the remains of a charnel-house.

But when they have the effrontery to extol his virtues, it is too much; my grief springs to the attack. The idea! They hated him while he lived! Keep quiet, don't insult him! I wish to be alone with the knowledge that he is dead.

But I don't utter a word; grief has lips of stone; I keep my secret locked within me while seeming to listen to them. I sit in front of the fire, my hair loose, my forehead drawn, watching the flames blaze and the embers fall. After all, their presence, their footsteps pawing the silence, mean only a little additional pain. Time passes, and they're sure to go eventually.

Has the door closed on them? I don't know. I can hardly move.

I am alone with you, my knees clasped in my hands, while the castle in the fire slowly crumbles on its gray dust.

Some mourners at least have the consolation of mourning real dead--real dead whom they have seen stiffen into death, whose last words they have received, whose last agonies they have tried to soothe, for whom they have done everything they could.

But you, beloved, are you dead? I don't even know. "Fallen on the field of honor?" What does that mean? Was it in the evening or the morning? Were you alone? Did you cry out? Did you suffer terribly? Did you open your eyes once more? Perhaps you couldn't, perhaps you called and called for me? Perhaps you thought I should have come? Ah yes, I should have been there; it is my fault. I have always cured you, you know I have. I simply had to hold your head in my hands and your pain was eased.

But I didn't die--I didn't die at the moment of your death, that moment too frightful to speak of. I didn't die when life was drowned in your mouth. We knew the whole truth concerning each other, yet when you were dying I may have been smiling.