EVENING AND DAWN
Just at the moment when I was settling down to audit the Sesmaisons'
account--I remember that detail--there came an unusual sound of steps
and voices, and before I could even turn round I heard a voice through
the glass door say, "Monsieur Paulin's aunt is very ill."
The sentence stuns me. I am standing, and some one is standing
opposite me. A draught shuts the door with a bang.
Both of us set off. It is Benoît who has come to fetch me. We hurry.
I breathe heavily. Crossing the busy factory, we meet acquaintances
who smile at me, not knowing the turn of affairs.
The night is cold and nasty, with a keen wind. The sky drips with
rain. We jump over puddles as we walk. I stare fixedly at Benoît's
square shoulders in front of me, and the dancing tails of his coat as
the wind hustles them along the nocturnal way.
Passing through the suburban quarter, the wind comes so hard between
the infrequent houses that the bushes on either side shiver and press
towards us, and seem to unfurl. Ah, we are not made for the greater
happenings!
* * * * * *
I meet first in the room the resounding glare of a wood fire and an
almost repelling heat. The odors of camphor and ether catch my throat.
People that I know are standing round the bed. They turn to me and
speak all together.
I bend down to look at Mame. She is inlaid upon the whiteness of the
bed, which is motionless as marble. Her face is sunk in the cavity of
the pillow. Her eyes are half closed and do not move; her skin has
darkened. Each breath hums in her throat, and beyond that slight
stirring of larynx and lips her little frail body moves no more than a
doll's. She has not got her cap on and her gray hair is unraveled on
her head like flocks of dust.
Several voices at once explain to me that it is "double congestion, and
her heart as well." She was attacked by a dizziness, by prolonged and
terrible shivering. She wandered, mentioned me, then suddenly
collapsed. The doctor has no hope but is coming back. The Reverend
Father Piot was here at five.
Silence hovers. A woman puts a log in the fire, in the center of the
dazzling cluster of snarling flames, whose light throws the room into
total agitation.
* * * * * *
For a long time I look upon that face, where ugliness and goodness are
mingled in such a heartrending way. My eyes seek those already almost
shut, whose light is hardening. Something of darkness, an internal
shadow which is of herself, overspreads and disfigures her. One may
see now how outworn she was, how miraculously she still held on.
This tortured and condemned woman is all that has looked after me for
twenty years. For twenty years she took my hand before she took my
arm. She always prevented me from understanding that I was an orphan.
Delicate and small as I was for so long, she was taller and stronger
and better than I! And at this moment, which shows me the past again
in one glance, I remember that she beautified the affairs of my
childhood like an old magician; and my head goes lower as I think of
her untiring admiration for me. How she did love me! And she must
love me still, confusedly, if some glimmering light yet lasts in the
depths of her. What will become of me--all alone?
She was so sensitive, and so restless! A hundred details of her
vivacity come to life again in my eyes. Stupidly, I contemplate the
poker, the tongs, the big spoon--all the things she used to flourish as
she chattered. There they are--fallen, paralyzed, mute!
As in a dream I go back to the times when she talked and shouted, to
days of youth, to days of spring and of springtime dresses; and all the
while my gaze, piercing that gay and airy vision, settles on the dark
stain of the hand that lies there like the shadow of a hand, on the
sheet.
My eyes are jumbling things together. I see our garden in the first
fine days of the year; our garden--it is behind that wall--so narrow is
it that the reflected sunshine from our two windows dapples the whole
of it; so small that it only holds some pot-encaged plants, except for
the three currant bushes which have always been there. In the scarves
of the sun rays a bird--a robin--is hopping on the twigs like a rag
jewel. All dusty in the sunshine our red hound, Mirliton, is warming
himself. So gaunt is he you feel sure he must be a fast runner.
Certainly he runs after glimpsed rabbits on Sundays in the country, but
he never caught any. He never caught anything but fleas. When I lag
behind because of my littleness my aunt turns round, on the edge of the
footpath, and holds out her arms, and I run to her, and she stoops as I
come and calls me by my name.
* * * * * *
"Simon! Simon!"
A woman is here. I wrench myself from the dream which had come into
the room and taken solidity before me. I stand up; it is my cousin
Marie.
She offers me her hands among the candles which flutter by the bed. In
their poor starlight her face appears haggard and wet. My aunt loved
her. Her lips are trembling on her rows of sparkling teeth; the whole
breadth of her bosom heaves quickly.
I have sunk again into the armchair. Memories flow again, while the
sick woman's breathing is longer drawn, and her stillness becomes more
and more inexorable. Things she used to say return to my lips. Then
my eyes are raised, and look for Marie, and turn upon her.
* * * * * *
She has leaned against the wall, and remains so--overcome. She invests
the corner where she stands with something like profane and sumptuous
beauty. Her changeful chestnut hair, like bronze and gold, forms moist
and disordered scrolls on her forehead and her innocent cheeks. Her
neck, especially, her white neck, appears to me. The atmosphere is so
choking, so visibly heavy, that it enshrouds us as if the room were on
fire, and she has loosened the neck of her dress, and her throat is
lighted up by the flaming logs. I smile weakly at her. My eyes wander
over the fullness of her hips and her outspread shoulders, and fasten,
in that downfallen room, on her throat, white as dawn.
* * * * * *
The doctor has been again. He stood some time in silence by the bed;
and as he looked our hearts froze. He said it would be over to-night,
and put the phial in his hand back in his pocket. Then, regretting
that he could not stay, he disappeared.
And we stayed on beside the dying woman--so fragile that we dare not
touch her, nor even try to speak to her.
Madame Piot settles down in a chair; she crosses her arms, lowers her
head, and the time goes by.
At long intervals people take shape in the darkness by the door; people
who come in on tiptoe whisper to us and go away.
The moribund moves her hands and feet and contorts her face. A
gurgling comes from her throat, which we can hardly see in the cavity
that is like a nest of shadow under her chin. She has blenched, and
the skin that is drawn over the bones of her face like a shroud grows
whiter every moment.
Intent upon her breathing, we throng about her. We offer her our
hands--so near and so far--and do not know what to do.
I am watching Marie. She has sunk onto the little stool, and her
young, full-blooming body overflows it. Holding her handkerchief in
her teeth, she has come to arrange the pillow, and leaning over the
bed, she puts one knee on a chair. The movement reveals her leg for a
moment, curved like a beautiful Greek vase, while the skin seems to
shine through the black transparency of the stocking, like clouded
gold. Ah! I lean forward towards her with a stifled, incipient appeal
above this bed, which is changing into a tomb. The border of the
tragic dress has fallen again, but I cannot remove my eyes from that
profound obscurity. I look at Marie, and look at her again; and though
I knew her, it seems to me that I wholly discover her.
"I can't hear anything now," says a woman.
"Yes I can----"
"No, no!" the other repeats.
Then I see Crillon's huge back bending over. My aunt's mouth opens
gently and remains open. The eyelids fall back almost completely upon
the stiffened gleam of the eyes, which squint in the gray and bony
mask. I see Crillon's big hand hover over the little mummified face,
lowering the eyelids and keeping them closed.
Marie utters a cry when this movement tells her that our aunt has just
died.
She sways. My hand goes out to her. I take her, support, and enfold
her. Fainting, she clings to me, and for one moment I carry--gently,
heavily--all the young woman's weight. The neck of her dress is
undone, and falls like foliage from her throat, and I just saw the real
curve of her bosom, nakedly and distractedly throbbing.
Her body is agitated. She hides her face in her hands and then turns
it to mine. It chanced that our faces met, and my lips gathered the
wonderful savor of her tears!
* * * * * *
The room fills with lamentation; there is a continuous sound of deep
sighing. It is overrun by neighbors become friends, to whom no one
pays attention.
And now, in this sacred homelet, where death still bleeds, I cannot
prevent a heavy heart-beat in me towards the girl who is prostrated
like the rest, but who reigns there, in spite of me--of herself--of
everything. I feel myself agitated by an obscure and huge rapture--the
birth of my flesh and my vitals among these shadows. Beside this poor
creature who was so blended with me, and who is falling, falling,
through a hell of eternity, I am uplifted by a sort of hope.
I want to fix my attention on the fixity of the bed. I put my hand
over my eyes to shut out all thought save of the dead woman,
defenseless already, reclining on that earth into which she will sink.
But my looks, impelled by superhuman curiosity, escape between my
fingers to this other woman, half revealed to me in the tumult of
sorrow, and my eyes cannot come out of her.
Madame Piot has changed the candles and attached a band to support the
dead woman's chin. Framed in this napkin, which is knotted over the
skull in her woolly gray hair, the face looks like a hook-nosed mask of
green bronze, with a vitrified line of eyes; the knees make two sharp
summits under the sheet; one's eyes run along the thin rods of the
shins and the feet lift the linen like two in-driven nails.
Slowly Marie prepares to go. She has closed the neck of her dress and
hidden herself in her cloak. She comes up to me, sore-hearted, and
with her tears for a moment quenched she smiles at me without speaking.
I half rise, my hands tremble towards her smile as if to touch it,
above the past and the dust of my second mother.
Towards the end of the night, when the dead fire is scattering
chilliness, the women go away one by one. One hour, two hours, I
remain alone. I pace the room in one direction and another, then I
look, and shiver. My aunt is no more. There is only left of her
something indistinct, struck down, of subterranean color, and her place
is desolate. Now, close to her, I am alone! Alone--magnified by my
affliction, master of my future, disturbed and numbed by the newness of
the things now beginning. At last the window grows pale, the ceiling
turns gray, and the candle-flames wink in the first traces of light.
I shiver without end. In the depth of my dawn, in the heart of this
room where I have always been, I recall the image of a woman who filled
it--a woman standing at the chimney-corner, where a gladsome fire
flames, and she is garbed in reflected purple, her corsage scarlet, her
face golden, as she holds to the glow those hands transparent and
beautiful as flames. In the darkness, from my vigil, I look at her.
* * * * * *
The two nights which followed were spent in mournful motionlessness at
the back of that room where the trembling host of lights seemed to give
animation to dead things. During the two days various activities
brought me distraction, at first distressing, then depressing.
The last night I opened my aunt's jewel box. It was called "the little
box." It was on the dressing table, at the bottom of piled-up litter.
I found some topaz ear-rings of a bygone period, a gold cross, equally
outdistanced, small and slender--a little girl's, or a young girl's;
and then, wrapped in tissue paper, like a relic, a portrait of myself
when a child. Last, a written page, torn from one of my old school
copy-books, which she had not been able to throw wholly away.
Transparent at the folds, the worn sheet was fragile as lace, and gave
the illusion of being equally precious. That was all the treasure my
aunt had collected. That jewel box held the poverty of her life and
the wealth of her heart.
* * * * * *
It poured with rain on the day of the funeral. All the morning groups
of people succeeded each other in the big cavern of our room, a going
and coming of sighs. My aunt was laid in her coffin towards two
o'clock, and it was carried then into the passage, where visitors' feet
had brought dirt and puddles. A belated wreath was awaited, and then
the umbrellas opened, and under their black undulation the procession
moved off.
When we came out of the church it was not far off four o'clock. The
rain had not stopped and little rivers dashed down from either side of
the procession's sluggish flow along the street. There were many
flowers, so that the hearse made a blot of relief, beautiful enough.
There were many people, too, and I turned round several times. Always
I saw old Eudo, in his black cowl, hopping along in the mud,
hunchbacked as a crow. Marie was walking among some women in the
second half of the file, whose frail and streaming roof the hearse drew
along irregularly with jerks and halts. Her gait was jaded; she was
thinking only of our sorrow! All things darkened again to my eyes in
the ugliness of the evening.
The cemetery is full of mud under the muslin of fallen rain, and the
footfalls make a sticky sound in it. There are a few trees, naked and
paralyzed. The sky is marshy and sprinkled with crows.
The coffin, with its shapeless human form, is lowered from the hearse
and disappears in the fresh earth.
They march past. Marie and her father take their places beside me. I
say thanks to every one in the same tone; they are all like each other,
with their gestures of impotence, their dejected faces, the words they
get ready and pour out as they pass before me, and their dark costume.
No one has come from the castle, but in spite of that there are many
people and they all converge upon me. I pluck up courage.
Monsieur Lucien Gozlan comes forward, calls me "my dear sir," and
brings me the condolences of his uncles, while the rest watch us.
Joseph Bonéas says "my dear friend" to me, and that affects me deeply.
Monsieur Pocard says, "If I had been advised in time I would have said
a few words. It is regrettable----"
Others follow; then nothing more is to be seen in the rain, the wind
and the gloom but backs.
"It's finished. Let's go."
Marie lifts to me her sorrow-laved face. She is sweet; she is
affectionate; she is unhappy; but she does not love me.
We go away in disorder, along by the trees whose skeletons the winter
has blackened.
When we arrive in our quarter, twilight has invaded the streets. We
hear gusts of talk about the Pocard scheme. Ah, how fiercely people
live and seek success!
Little Antoinette, cautiously feeling her way by a big wall, hears us
pass. She stops and would look if she could. We espy her figure in
that twilight of which she is beginning to make a part, though fine and
faint as a pistil.
"Poor little angel!" says a woman, as she goes by.
Marie and her father are the only ones left near me when we pass
Rampaille's tavern. Some men who were at the funeral are sitting at
tables there, black-clad.
We reach my home; Marie offers me her hand, and we hesitate. "Come
in."
She enters. We look at the dead room; the floor is wet, and the wind
blows through as if we were out of doors. Both of us are crying, and
she says, "I will come to-morrow and tidy up. Till then----"
We take each other's hand in confused hesitation.
* * * * * *
A little later there is a scraping at the door, then a timid knock, and
a long figure appears.
It is Véron who presents himself with an awkward air. His tall and
badly jointed body swings like a hanging signboard. He is an original
and sentimental soul, but no one has ever troubled to find out what he
is. He begins, "My young friend--hum, hum--" (he repeats this formless
sound every two or three words, like a sort of clock with a sonorous
tick)--"One may be wanting money, you know, for something--hum, hum;
you need money, perhaps--hum, hum; all this expense--and I'd said to
myself 'I'll take him some----'"
He scrutinizes me as he repeats, "Hum, hum." I shake his hand with
tears in my eyes. I do not need money, but I know I shall never forget
that action; so good, so supernatural.
And when he has swung himself out, abashed by my refusal, embarrassed
by the unusual size of his legs and his heart, I sit down in a corner,
seized with shivering. Then I obliterate myself in another corner,
equally forlorn. It seems as if Marie has gone away with all I have.
I am in mourning and I am all alone, because of her.