(From _The Dial_)
The old lady was often to be seen walking on the beaches overlooked
by the hotels. She had been tall, but was now stooped, and always
advanced slowly, and with the help of a cane. In spite of the expensive
soberness of her dress, of fine stuffs not quite in the fashion,
yet much discussed by the maids in her hotel who expected generous
remuneration for their services to her, the old lady had not that aloof
confidence in herself and her position which is the usual endowment of
wealth. She smiled too frequently into the faces of those who looked at
her, and her excessive benevolence was like a subtle self-apology.
Her thoughts could not be read, and that was fortunate. When she
awakened in the morning in a stately bed, from which, against an
opposite wall of her large room, she saw an _armoire_ flanked with
mirrors give back her image, she always, when possible, avoided
the contemplation of this reflection; or, compelled to confront a
revelation which caused her pain, remarked inwardly, “Can it be I?” and
tried vainly to recall another almost-obliterated impression of her
own features. Queer that, remembering so distinctly the most minute
incidents of a past that had been filled with dramatic interest, able
to visualize with exactitude the appearances of each of her friends,
today dead or separated from her by years and oceans, she had so much
difficulty in piecing together from fragments retained from the lost
years, even the vaguest representation of her own countenance as it had
been caught in looking-glasses long ago. People who had been dear to
her, and even the people she had once disliked, had not aged, nor had
they died, in that they existed continually in her thoughts in every
moment of the time. Only her own personality, in its once-youthful
aspect, had disappeared in the nothingness of a feeble present. She
sighed, and said to herself, “Well, I never was pretty.” Yet without
being pretty she had commanded affection and even very strong feeling.
It frightened her a little that she had become some one whom she did
not know, some one whom she could not look at with clear eyes.
For all the sadness which pervaded her meditations, she did not,
with truth, call herself unhappy. She slept badly, dreaming often of
her married daughter whom she had not seen for many months, and of a
dead son; but always, after noting the thinning of the darkness by a
dawn yet scarcely visible and feeling, upon her dry cheeks and in her
scanty hair, the still wind which rushed in a tide of freshness from
the suddenly audible sea, she would turn upon her side, and, as if
some sentinel duty of the night had been accomplished, find that she
could rest easily. Then, from this hour into the morning, she would
sleep like a child and awaken when the sun was shining rosily upon
the gilt-flowered bedroom walls, while the lace curtains between the
window hangings of brown-and-cream brocade seemed to expand as with an
ecstatic delicacy, and, in the gilded foliage of the dark plane tree
beyond them, birds sang.
Her maid, entering the chamber, and bringing the morning coffee in an
immaculate service, received a cheery “_Bon jour_,” but, offering to
assist the old lady at her toilet, was invariably sent away with a
refusal couched in the same terms. “Not yet, Françoise. The time for
that has not yet come.” And the old lady dressed herself. She waited
for something miraculous to occur. Every morning approached her with
an adventure which, finally, in the heat of noontime, had not revealed
itself.
She felt that Françoise was a “good girl,” who should be treated
generously, and the maid, stout, handsome, and slyly officious, with
the characteristics of a peasant initiate in the ways of the rich,
adopted in her manner toward her prosperous mistress, the attitude
of a mother. The old lady was not deceived as to the motives which
prompted this consideration, yet, in the passiveness of temperament
engendered by old age, did not condemn. “Well, poor girl. I must try
and do something for her. I’ll leave her something in my will.” And the
old lady felt drawn to the girl by the very exposure of self-interest
which, it seemed, should have been repelling. To know that some one
depended on you, if only for money, made you feel that your presence in
the world was yet of importance. Generous pity relieved the heart of
the old lady from the oppression of exhausted but persistent emotions
which had no outlet. There was no one to whom the old lady could
express herself.
Yes, she was lonely, though had she been asked if, in this loneliness,
she wished to depart to an oblivion in which loneliness is not felt,
she would have said, “No,” sincerely and emphatically. Trifles which
had once been of no account to her, objects and incidents which, in her
youth, had failed to interest her, now compelled her whole attention
and were infinitely precious. She loved her careful walks through the
French town. She loved the hardy appearance of the cabbages planted
in small gardens behind low fences covered with creepers. A neglected
bush of marigolds, jutting ruddy-coloured blossoms beyond a wall,
excited in her a tenderness for growing things. She watched the dark
swallows in their bat-flights above a puddle in the road, and their
shrill bleats, coming vaguely to her deaf ears, made her think of
them innocently as lambs. Strong sunlight, stagnant upon the plaster
façade of a dwelling, enchanted her. When, with a final exertion of
her ever-waning strength, she climbed slowly, among heaps of refuse,
to the summit of a crooked street which terminated on a hillside, and
could gaze below her, between ancient roofs which interceded in the
view, at the countryside--the still avalanches of the mountains, the
small villages crushed under the red roofs that surmounted the houses,
the acres of vines, tremblingly outspread in the soaring light of
morning and resembling still lakes of green silk--the immense silence
which lay beyond the town in which she was visiting seemed to her to
enwrap her benevolently, and the whole world, dissension and struggle
obliterated, was a friendly place.
It was only at noontime, in the heat of the day, when, after taking
her luncheon in the table d’hôte downstairs and, with nodding head,
listening for half an hour to some Spanish singers who, on a terrace
ornamented with palms and young trees in pots and covered over by a
pergola on which roses twined, were entertaining the guests of the
hotel, she rested in her bedroom, that she felt depressed. The sunshine
filled the street below her window, but the stillness it made, as
the heat arrested the play of children and hushed their voices, and
footsteps became so occasional that they echoed on the cobbles as
footsteps echo in the night--this stillness was terrible and oppressive.
She lowered the Venetian blinds upon her balconies, and, in a
semi-glow, in which the unchanging aspect of objects in her room became
pronounced, she lay on her bed again, her eyes closed, and tried to
sleep. Sleep was impossible. Her cheeks, pale and withered and covered
by a scarcely-perceptible down of white, were hot and parched. With
no relief from the violence of the light, that, even through drawn
curtains could be discerned in the stolid brilliance of a stucco
building opposite the hotel, she moistened her lips, several times
adjusted the pillow beneath her head, and, without being conscious of
the sounds she uttered, moaned slightly.
Her health was bad. At any moment she might have a recurrence of
the heart trouble from which she suffered, a malady from which she
would, at last, most certainly die. But it was not of death that she
thought. Indeed she refused to think of death. It pleased her better
to imagine that she would live a long time--a long, long, long time.
And when, in her promenades, her steps turned inadvertently toward
the cemetery, with its crumbling mausoleums making little intimate
avenues for the dead below the black-green lines of conical cypress
trees, she experienced, in her first glimpse of the tombs, decorated as
for a perpetual holiday with wreaths of colored beads, black, violet,
pale-blue, and white, and with bouquets of artificial flowers, a sudden
shock of fright, of amazement--of some emotion which she did not
attempt to describe--and turned back.
Why was she traveling like this, going all over Europe, from one hotel
to another, rarely encountering an acquaintance and certainly not
amusing herself in the ways habitual with tourists? In her young days
she had been too much occupied with personal affairs to give much of
her energy to travel. There was a great deal of the world that she had
never seen. Now that her daughter was married, absorbed by interests in
which the old lady had but slight part, and her son was dead, she, the
old lady, had uninterrupted opportunity to see odd corners of the globe
that had always intrigued her--even the names of the towns she visited
were those that had, years ago, seemed to her remarkable. Besides she
had a terror, continual if not dwelt upon, of being unwanted, and so,
rather than remain as a tolerated outsider in her daughter’s home, she
had preferred the company of strangers who were not obliged to show her
any attentions that were not quite spontaneous.
On the terrace of the hotel, under the pergola covered with roses
and with foliage which had turned blue and artificial in the glow of
the electric lamps, the old lady sat in the evenings, watching those
who came and went from the dancing in the saloon, while she tried to
make herself unobtrusive. If a young couple, approaching her, ignored
her, and it could be seen that they were covertly making love to one
another, the old lady moved further away into the shadows and out of
hearing. There she was able, when lifting her gaze, to discern the
stars which, at one instant, appeared to her quite brilliant, while
the next minute she saw only darkness, and could hear, distant under
the rotating melody of a waltz played by an orchestra, a rushing sound
in her ears which might be the sea and might only be the beating of
her own heart. She always preferred to think the sound was the sea,
and then she would rise and walk about, still clinging to the shadows
and, because she was forgotten, feeling her own person as the person of
another whom she also desired to forget.
No, the day was happier than the night. She loved children. In her
black dress and bonnet, she often walked, with her stick, along the
beaches. There she encountered children. She recalled the delights of
her own childhood and longed to be able, in some manner, to indicate to
the children, in some way which would convince them, that she had been
a child, and that childhood was not foreign to her, as they supposed.
And she was humiliated by something grotesque in this longing, as if
she had convicted herself of a jealousy of youth.
The children paid no heed to her, and, screaming as they ran, they
brushed past her blowing skirts, brushed past her and ran down to the
sea. Feeling a pain which was so ignoble that she refused to recognize
it, she thought, “They are so young. They don’t understand.” And she
prayed to be able always to love children as she did now, and to wish
for them, with her whole being, saturate with gratitude for a happy
past, a continuance of their light-heartedness.
After such an experience, returning to the hotel, she wrote letters,
to keep herself from growing “stale,” as she smilingly called it,
letters to her daughter, letters to old acquaintances--some of them had
almost ceased to take account of her existence--and the reward for this
insistent attention to those who were far away, perhaps forever, was
an interest in the coming of the postman, so keen that it embarrassed
her. Often the mails brought her nothing at all, or there came a
letter from some old friend who, burdened with age, expressed herself
entirely in the utterance of complaints. “Poor Jane, poor Sally, poor
Louisa,” the old lady would say, and try to evade the fact that she had
anticipated a letter of a different kind, a letter containing something
stimulating, something of especial interest, or something complimentary
to herself. It seemed to her that her own troubles would have been
quite bearable if only her dear old friends could find, as she did,
the philosophical compensations of maturity. Occasionally, in her
travels, she encountered a woman like herself, old, isolate, seeking,
in new sights and scenes, a substitute for the personal drama which was
finished. “Poor woman,” the old lady would say of the other old woman,
then, suddenly, realizing that the one she pitied was like herself, and
alarmed by the sense of an intolerable identity, she would conjure up
cheerful thoughts and, from that time forward, gently avoid the new
acquaintance, and this without any intention of being cruel, but simply
to preserve something necessary to her.
“We must all live our own lives. We old people have no right to prey
upon our children,” she often said. And it was this conviction which
made her, secretly, a little afraid of her grandchildren of whom her
daughter sent her photographs--the daughter who, with the dead son, had
been for many years the one absorption of the old lady’s life. When
she meditated upon the joys of maternity and the intimate relations
of a family, the old lady became confused. In some manner, in spite
of her devotion, her attitude toward her children had been an error,
but an error which she would never be able to localize within her or
describe to herself accurately. She only felt that such error, or its
equivalent, must be common to all the world, and, in apologizing so
constantly for herself, she apologized for others, too, and found that
any emotion which was not pity had become incomprehensible to her. The
most frightening thing of all was that pity itself required a defence,
and her very desire to confess for herself and admit for others
inadequacy, without condemning it, was the basis of her real apartness
from her former life. She wanted to state all this intelligibly, but
she had never been able to do so. Her thoughts became lost again in the
past, when her eyes filled with tears and the grief she had felt at her
husband’s death came back to her--not the grief she had experienced
at the time, to which her health had succumbed while her reason was
threatened, but another despair which was without any quality of
protest and which she vainly attempted to unify with the emotions of
twenty years before. She even tried to grieve more, but without success.
It was her present incapacity for strong passion which drove her, in
her phantomlike existence, to dependence on routine, and the concrete
regularity of meal hours had become as important to her as any critical
event. In the vast dining saloon with its glass front overlooking
the water, she was punctual at one o’clock and at half-past seven,
and, though her appetite was variable, she was always one of the last
to leave the table. What nice young people those two in the corner
were, the ones who were newly married, and what an excellent mamma
was the stout woman of thirty with the little daughter. The old lady
usually had some pleasant remark for the waiter who, good-humored and
polite, was ready to serve her immediately upon her entrance into
the room, though he was somewhat perfunctory and reserved his most
refined solicitude for persons who, not poorer than she was, were more
difficult to please. She liked hot coffee that burned her withered
lips, and Michael was careful to bring coffee steaming and perfumed,
and she drank it on the terrace. Yet she bored him. There was nothing
beyond her guessed-at fortune to supply material for scandals or invite
interest.
She did not resent living alone, but she was often conscious of her
lonely appearance and of what it might suggest to others. She wished,
on that account, to exhibit an occupation. When she went to the writing
room or sat on the beach, she carried a book with her, turned over the
pages carefully, and appreciated, perhaps, a paragraph of what she
read, but many of the lines she perused might have been inscribed in
some strange language as remote as a language of the Orient. Refusing
to confront this incapacity to receive, mentally, the new impression,
the secret of the universe was, to her, as if buried inscrutably in her
own soul, and to be divulged--if ever--in a reconstructed understanding
of what had happened to her, an understanding which included even the
most trivial incidents of former days. To have lived, loved, borne
children, and grown old was to have known everything. Why could she
find no words to make this meaning of intimate things intelligible to
her fellow men? Because she could not speak and make herself heard,
it was often as though, in living so fully, she had never lived. Her
heart beat in a troubled way. Her hands, on the leaves of her book,
trembled, and she resisted being sorry for herself. She tried to take
comfort in a religion in which her faith was no longer orthodox, and
ended, finally, with this great pity for the world which did not
ask to be pitied and despised pity--pity which was--she sometimes
doubtfully conjectured it--the reflection of her own weakness. Then
the only recourse from these vague and half-comprehended thoughts
was to consider a change to a new scene, a journey which would tax
her strength, in which, in speaking to Françoise, the old lady would
ridicule weakness and make light of it. Or she would rise from her
deck-chair and walk in the sunshine along the beach.
The blue waters, angry and violent in the wind that flapped her skirts,
suggested to her a darkness of night in which green fields are visible.
The poetry of the comparison pleased her, as the image appeared
unpremeditatedly from her mind, and was like a memory of youth. As
she watched that steady onward movement of waters upon the land, she
experienced what was to her, in this day, a rare moment, a moment of
positive happiness.
Beyond the pier, where she walked, leaning on her stick, the
sea surrounded the dripping rocks of a headland. The rocks were
bronze-colored and porous, like gutted and petrified combs of honey,
left there by bees of a giant size. Above them, in jagged curtains of
white foam, in the glow of the sun, the surf towered. For an instant
the suspended curtain hung twinkling in the light, to descend, with
the transcience of dew and the indolence of a floating veil, upon the
agitation of waves which had conveyed it. The surface of glass which
was the ocean, voluminous and rocking, like the sun-inflamed canopy
of a glass tent, washed up and down magnificently, somnolently, as a
cradle gently rocked, and the enormous tents of water, built up one
after another, were covered all over with globules of sunshine, round
and crystal, trembling like the drops that fall hesitatingly from metal
which, made over-warm, has begun to cool again.
Once more the foam concentrated in seething currents, rushing together
with subterranean hisses. The foam concentrated, lifted, and made a
glittering edifice of snow, harsh, exquisite, and momentary, like the
Gothic traceries of frost. The tower of marble, of a lacy substance, of
the purity of linen left long to bleach, but with the adamant glitter
of diamonds, sank easily, waned in prismatic reflections, and was no
more than a pale breath, breathed on the distance of the intense sky
and evaporating like mist. Little water-spouts, such as pour from the
gargoyle-mouths of old fountains, ran steadily downward from crevices
in the stones. The tide rattled among the boulders. The sea had
subsided, only to come forward as before, but with a more implacable
ease. A glass tube, transparent on the length of the shore, showed, in
a bottle-blue wall, ribbon-tangles of reddish seaweed, designed in the
clear substance with the design of objects caught in amber. The swell,
with its mounting undulations, resolved in long blades of crystal,
run high in the air in a concave symmetry in which sank massive and
transparent shadows that were the reflections of the waves themselves,
carving the beaches.
The old lady’s bonnet-strings whipped out under her chin, her wide
black dress was full like a banner and beat her legs, yet, though she
steadied herself against the onslaught of winds, felt salt vapors upon
her face, and was obliged to squint and lower her wrinkled lids against
the glare, she saw everything vividly. The foam, curdling the sands,
sticky amber and smooth as mirrors, was a flat scallop, like a ruffle
of soapsuds, and the scallops ran down coruscations and runnels that
were the imprints of wavy hair, faintly golden. A cold smell of rotted
fish and kelp came to the old lady on the same breeze that wafted to
her the screams of the children, of the little boys in their striped
bathing costumes who were wading in the shallows. And little girls in
white, little girls, barefoot, with sand-buckets and shovels, their
short skirts tilted behind their flying legs, were heard shrieking
happily as they swooped, like a flock of small gulls, straight down
to the water’s edge. More obscurely, as from a more vast distance,
the old lady heard the voices of the grown-up bathers, who, swimming
far out into the breakers, were carried, with heads bobbing, to an
immense height, lifted, by the indifferent sapphire waters, as upon the
flashing shoulders of armored giants.
Then she turned toward the sultry horizon, where the brilliance of the
day succumbed to the overshadowing of clouds, and to something less
visible--perhaps an emanation from the light itself--which was like
unseen smoke. Beyond the cobalt welter of sun and waves, incessantly
flaked as with white flowers, a boat balanced quietly under one sail,
stood, upon the emptiness, like a swan upon a still lake, its head
under its wing.
The old lady was fatigued by this unforeseen intensity of visual
appreciation. She had come to the end of the pier, and, turning
reluctantly, began to retrace her footsteps to the hotel. On the shore
she noted the rosy and dusked loftiness of the retreating mountains,
their peaks somber under the fogs of a summer rainstorm, while on the
rusted slopes the deep green of the trees suggested a relief of velvet
on an old brocade, the crushed foliage of the pines and cork oaks
hinting at the tactile qualities of variegated mosses. The fashionable
hotels along the waterfront, built in stucco and somewhat in the
Spanish style, ancient houses in the town with walls of plaster or
rubble, all showed in a violent radiance of sinking sun in which the
pallor of white surfaces and the redness of far-off roofs received a
remote emphasis on objects which seemed the minute dwellings of dolls.
And the old lady was suddenly overcome by an emotion which she
afterwards preferred to forget. What she felt, as she turned from her
promenade, the sea-wind stinging her flaccid cheeks, was an immanence
of death, which came to her from nowhere out of nothing--from the cries
of the children, from the boat, the breeze, from the vast water that
flowed after her. Yes, most of all from the sea, the sea flashing in
the sunshine, the great sea, monotonous, voracious, untouched, and
merciless. “I shall die,” she thought, “but _they_ will die, too.” In
“they” she included the people in the village, the bathers in the surf,
and the ladies in their organdie frocks and flowered hats, with the
gentlemen in flannels, gentlemen dressed so precisely, if carelessly,
in imitations of the English style--the old lady, as she approached the
termination of her walk, could now see them all. And the quiet gale
that swept past her from some space infinitely distant, beyond even
the clouds of the coming rainstorm, was the breath of a holocaust.
“_They_” were all dead, all the people who covered the security of the
land, people the old lady loved and had loved, indeed people who were
dead already. That the sea was, had been, and always would be--long,
long after these, the young, the happy, the oblivious, had ceased to
live--this sea, of which she herself was afraid, so that she had never
undertaken an ocean voyage without a tremor, the sea comforted her with
an immense and terrible comfort, so that, for an instant, her spirit
flamed coldly and intensely. All was light, sunshine, happiness, and
moving waters, and all was death, forever and ever death--though she
scarcely called it so exactly, or by that name.
Then her eyes grew dim. The peculiar accuracy with which, the moment
before, she had viewed and absorbed the details of her surroundings,
faded in her habitual hesitance and vagueness. She began to think of
saving her strength, of getting back to the hotel in time for her tea
when she would eat some nice little _brioches_, of buying Françoise a
new dress. Entering the hotel lobby at just quarter to five o’clock,
weak and at peace as after some exhausting victory, she gave to her
heart the shadowy acknowledgment of its new strength, and, in spite of
her cheerful resolutions, was conscious of a faint, austere bitterness.