GHOSTS
We have gone out together and aimlessly; we walk straight forward.
It is an autumnal day--gray lace of clouds and wind. Some dried leaves
lie on the ground and others go whirling. We are in August, but it is
an autumn day all the same. Days do not allow themselves to be set in
strict order, like men.
Our steps take us in the direction of the waterfall and the mill. We
have seldom been there again since our engagement days. Marie is
covered in a big gray cloak; her hat is black silk with a little square
of color embroidered in front. She looks tired, and her eyes are red.
When she walks in front of me I see the twisted mass of her beautiful
fair hair.
Instinctively we both looked for the inscriptions we cut, once upon a
time, on trees and on stones, in foolish delight. We sought them like
scattered treasure, on the strange cheeks of the old willows, near the
tendrils of the fall, on the birches that stand like candles in front
of the violet thicket, and on the old fir which so often sheltered us
with its dark wings. Many inscriptions have disappeared. Some are
worn away because things do; some are covered by a host of other
inscriptions or they are distorted and ugly. Nearly all have passed on
as if they had been passers-by.
Marie is tired. She often sits down, with her big cloak and her
sensible air; and as she sits she seems like a statue of nature, of
space, and the wind.
We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of the
river--slowly, as if we were climbing--towards the stone seat of the
wall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet it
sooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it is
the seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has withered
away and become a crown of thorns.
There are dead leaves on the stone slab. They come from the chestnuts
yonder. They fell on the ground and yet they have flown away as far as
the seat.
On this seat--where she came to me for the first time, which was once
so important to us that it seemed as if the background of things all
about us had been created by us--we sit down to-day, after we have
vainly sought in nature the traces of our transit.
The landscape is peaceful, simple, empty; it fills us with a great
quivering. Marie is so sad and so simple that you can see her thought.
I have leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. I have contemplated the
gravel at my feet; and suddenly I start, for I understand that my eyes
were looking for the marks of our footsteps, in spite of the stone, in
spite of the sand.
After the solemnity of a long silence, Marie's face takes on a look of
defeat, and suddenly she begins to cry. The tears which fill her--for
one always weeps in full, drop on to her knees. And through her sobs
there fall from her wet lips words almost shapeless, but desperate and
fierce, as a burst of forced laughter.
"It's all over!" she cries.
* * * * * *
I have put my arm round her waist, and I am shaken by the sorrow which
agitates her chest and throat, and sometimes shakes her rudely, the
sorrow which does not belong to me, which belongs to no one, and is
like a divinity.
She becomes composed. I take her hand. In a weak voice she calls some
memories up--this and that--and "one morning----" She applies herself
to it and counts them. I speak, too, gently. We question each other.
"Do you remember?"--"Oh, yes." And when some more precise and intimate
detail prompts the question we only reply, "A little." Our separation
and the great happenings past which the world has whirled have made the
past recoil and shaped a deep ditch. Nothing has changed; but when we
look we see.
Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening,
I said, "We loved each other," and she answered, "I remember."
I call her by her name, in a low voice, so as to draw her out of the
dumbness into which she is falling.
She listens to me, and then says, placidly, despairingly,
"'_Marie_,'--you used to say it like that. I can't realize that I had
the same name."
A few moments later, as we talked of something else, she said to me at
last, "Ah, that day we had dreams of travel, about our plans--_you were
there_, sitting by my side."
In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since we
have lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here. Her glances
come to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that we
are; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything.
And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth to
answer "no" when it is "yes." In this moment by my side Marie is like
me.
The immense mourning of human hearts appears to us. We dare not name
it yet; but we dare not let it not appear in all that we say.
* * * * * *
Then we see a woman, climbing the footpath and coming nearer to us. It
is Marthe, grown up, full-blown. She says a few words to us and then
goes away, smiling. She smiles, she who plays a part in our drama.
The likeness which formerly haunted me now haunts Marie, too--both of
us, side by side, and without saying it, harbored the same thought, to
see that child growing up and showing what Marie was.
Marie confesses all, all at once, "I was only my youth and my beauty,
like all women. And _there_ go my youth and beauty--Marthe! Then,
I----?" In anguish she goes on, "I'm not old yet, since I'm only
thirty-five, but I've aged very quickly; I've some white hairs that you
can see, close to; I'm wrinkled and my eyes have sunk. I'm here, in
life, to live, to occupy my time; but I'm nothing more than I am! Of
course, I'm still alive, but the future comes to an end before life
does. Ah, it's really only youth that has a place in life. All young
faces are alike and go from one to the other without ever being
deceived. They wipe out and destroy all the rest, and they make the
others see themselves as they are, so that they become useless."
She is right! When the young woman stands up she takes, in fact, the
other's place in the ideal and in the human heart, and makes of the
other a returning ghost. It is true. I knew it. Ah, I did not know
it was so true! It is too obvious. I cannot deny it. Again a cry of
assent rises to my lips and prevents me from saying, "No."
I cannot turn away from Marthe's advent, nor as I look at her, from
recognizing Marie. I know she has had several little love-affairs.
Just now she is alone. She is alone, but she will soon be
leaning--yes, phantom or reality, man is not far from her. It is
dazzling. Most certainly, I no longer think as I used to do that it is
a sort of duty to satisfy the selfish promptings one has, and I have
now got an inward veneration for right-doing; but all the same, if that
being came to me, I know well that I should become, before all, and in
spite of all, an immense cry of delight.
Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman only
lives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she's
no longer anything."
She repeats, "You see--I'm nothing any more."
Ah, she is at the bottom of her abyss! She is at the extremity of a
woman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought is
higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all
that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer
anything." And _I_--I am only he who is present with her just now, and
no help whatever is left her to look for from any one.
I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and
simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with
her presence--but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I
can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief.
"Ah!" she cries, "if we came to life again!"
But she, too, has tried to cling to illusion. I see by the track of
her tears, and because I am looking at her--that she has powdered her
face to-day and put rouge on her lips, perhaps even on her cheeks, as
she did in bygone days, laughing, to set herself off, in spite of me.
This woman who tries to keep a good likeness of herself through passing
time, to be fixed upon herself, who paints herself, she is, to that
extent like what Rembrandt the profound and Titian the bold and
exquisite did--make enduring, and save! But this time, a few tears
have washed away the fragile, mortal effort.
She tries also to delude herself with words, and to discover something
in them which would transform her. She asserts, as she did the other
morning, "There must be illusion. No, we must not see things as they
are." But I see clearly that such words do not exist.
Once, when she was looking at me distressfully, she murmured,
"_You_--you've no more illusion at all. I pity you!"
At that moment, within the space of a flash, she was thinking of me
only, and she pities me! She has found something in her grief to give
me.
She is silent. She is seeking the supreme complaint; she is trying to
find what there is which is more torturing and more simple; and she
stammers--"The truth."
The truth is that the love of mankind is a single season among so many
others. The truth is that we have within us something much more mortal
than we are, and that it is this, all the same, which is all-important.
Therefore we survive very much longer than we live. There are things
we think we know and which yet are secrets. Do we really know what we
believe? We believe in miracles. We make great efforts to struggle,
to go mad. We should like to let all our good deserts be seen. We
fancy that we are exceptions and that something supernatural is going
to come along. But the quiet peace of the truth fixes us. The
impossible becomes again the impossible. We are as silent as silence
itself.
We stayed lonely on the seat until evening. Our hands and faces shone
like gleams of storm in the entombment of the calm and the mist.
We go back home. We wait and then have dinner. We live these few
hours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as
never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a real
drama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; our
movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it is
empty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each
other, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitation
of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but
close by--so close--are phantoms!
Then bedtime comes. She is sleeping in the little bedroom opposite
mine across the landing, less fine than mine and smaller, hung with an
old and faded paper, where the patterned flowers are only an irregular
relief, with traces here and there of powder, of colored dust and
ashes.
We are going to separate on the landing. To-day is not the first time
like that! but to-day we are feeling this great rending which is not
one. She has begun to undress. She has taken off her blouse. I see
her neck and her breasts, a little less firm than before, through her
chemise; and half tumbling on to the nape of her neck, the fair hair
which once magnificently flamed on her like a fire of straw.
She only says, "It's better to be a man than a woman."
Then she replies to my silence, "You see, we don't know what to say,
now."
In the angle of the narrow doorway she spoke with a kind of immensity.
She goes into her room and disappears. Before I went to the war we
slept in the same bed. We used to lie down side by side, so as to be
annihilated in unconsciousness, or to go and dream somewhere else.
(Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas.
For man and wife--to sleep, to die.) But since I came back we separate
ourselves with a wall. This sincerity that I have brought back in my
eyes and mind has changed the semblances round about me into reality,
more than I imagine. Marie is hiding from me her faded but disregarded
body. Her modesty has begun again; yes, she has ended by beginning
again.
She has shut her door. She is undressing, alone in her room, slowly,
and as if uselessly. There is only the light of her little lamp to
caress her loosened hair, in which the others cannot yet see the white
ones, the frosty hairs that she alone touches.
Her door is shut, decisive, banal, dreary.
Among some papers on my table I see the poem again which we once found
out of doors, the bit of paper escaped from the mysterious hands which
wrote on it, and come to the stone seat. It ended by whispering, "Only
I know the tears that brimming rise, your beauty blended with your
smile to espy."
In the days of yore it had made us smile with delight. To-night there
are real tears in my eyes. What is it? I dimly see that there is
something more than what we have seen, than what we have said, than
what we have felt to-day. One day, perhaps, she and I will exchange
better and richer sayings; and so, in that day, all the sadness will be
of some service.