what you said the other day. People always think that women aren’t
capable of reflection, but you know, it depends upon the woman....
That thing you said the other day about the products of cross breeding
... and that it isn’t by crossing that one gets satisfactory results
so much as by selection.... Have I remembered your lesson, eh? Well,
this morning I think you have bred a monster--a perfectly ridiculous
creature--you’ll never rear it! A cross between a bacchante and the
Holy Ghost! Haven’t you now?... You’re disgusted with yourself for
having chucked Laura. I can tell it from the lines on your forehead. If
you want to go back to her, say so at once and leave me; I shall have
been mistaken in you and I shan’t mind in the least. But if you mean
to stay with me, then get rid of that funereal countenance. You remind
me of certain English people--the more emancipated their opinions,
the more they cling to their morality; so that there are no severer
Puritans than their free-thinkers.... You think I’m heartless? You’re
wrong. I understand perfectly that you are sorry for Laura. But then,
what are you doing here?”
Then, as Vincent turned his head away:
“Look here! You must go to the bath-room now and try and wash your
regrets off in the shower-bath. I shall ring for breakfast, eh? And
when you come back, I’ll explain something that you don’t seem to
understand.”
He had got up. She sprang after him.
“Don’t dress just yet. In the cupboard on the right hand side of the
bath, you’ll find a collection of burnouses and haiks and pyjamas. Take
anything you like.”
Vincent appeared twenty minutes later dressed in a pistachio coloured
silk jellabah.
“Oh, wait a minute--wait! Let me arrange you!” cried Lilian in
delight. She pulled out of an oriental chest two wide purple scarves;
wound the darker of the two as a sash round Vincent’s waist, and the
other as a turban round his head.
“My thoughts are always the same colour as my clothes,” she said. (She
had put on crimson and silver lamé pyjamas.) “I remember once, when I
was quite a little girl at San Francisco, I was put into black because
a sister of my mother’s had died--an old aunt whom I had never seen.
I cried the whole day long. I was terribly, terribly sad; I thought
that I was very unhappy and that I was grieving deeply for my aunt’s
death--all because I was in black. Nowadays, if men are more serious
than women, it’s because their clothes are darker. I’ll wager that your
thoughts are quite different from what they were a little while ago.
Sit down there on the bed; and when you’ve drunk a glass of vodka and
a cup of tea and eaten two or three sandwiches, I’ll tell you a story.
Say when I’m to begin....”
She settled down on the rug beside the bed, crouching between Vincent’s
legs like an Egyptian statue, with her chin resting on her knees. When
she had eaten and drunk, she began:
“I was on the _Bourgogne_, you know, on the day of the wreck. I
was seventeen, so now you know how old I am. I was a very good swimmer,
and to show you that I’m not hard-hearted, I’ll tell you that if my
first thought was to save myself, my second was to save someone else.
I’m not quite sure even whether it wasn’t my first. Or rather, I don’t
think I thought of anything; but nothing disgusts me so much in such
moments as the people who only think of themselves--oh, yes--the women
who scream. There was a first boatload, chiefly of women and children,
and some of them yelled to such an extent that it was enough to make
anyone lose his head. The boat was so badly handled that instead of
dropping down on to the sea straight, it dived nose foremost and
everyone in it was flung out before it even had time to fill with
water. The whole scene took place by the light of torches and lanterns
and search-lights. You can’t imagine how ghastly it was. The waves were
very big and everything that was not in the light was lost in darkness
on the other side of the hill of water.
“I have never lived more intensely; but I was as incapable of
reflection as a Newfoundland dog, I suppose, when he jumps into the
water. I can’t even understand now what happened; I only know that I
had noticed a little girl in the boat--a darling thing of about five
or six; and when I saw the boat overturn, I immediately made up my
mind that it was her I would save. She was with her mother, but the
poor woman was a bad swimmer; and as usual in such cases, her skirts
hampered her. As for me, I expect I undressed mechanically; I was
called to take my place in the second boatload. I must have got in; and
then I no doubt jumped straight into the sea out of the boat; all I
can remember is swimming about for a long time with the child clinging
to my neck. It was terrified and clutched me so tight that I couldn’t
breathe. Luckily the people in the boat saw us and either waited for
us or rowed towards us. But that’s not why I’m telling you this story.
The recollection which remains most vividly with me and which nothing
will ever efface from my mind and my heart is this.--There were about
forty or so of us in the boat, all crowded together, for a number of
swimmers had been picked up at the last gasp like me. The water was
almost on a level with the edge of the boat. I was in the stern and I
was holding the little girl I had just saved tightly pressed against
me to warm her--and to prevent her from seeing what I couldn’t help
seeing myself--two sailors, one armed with a hatchet and the other with
a kitchen chopper. And what do you think they were doing?... They were
hacking off the fingers and hands of the swimmers who were trying to
get into our boat. One of these two sailors (the other was a Negro)
turned to me, as I sat there, my teeth chattering with cold and fright
and horror, and said, ‘If another single one gets in we shall be bloody
well done for. The boat’s full.’ And he added that it was a thing that
had to be done in all shipwrecks, but that naturally one didn’t mention
it.
“I think I fainted then; at any rate, I can’t remember anything more,
just as one remains deaf for a long time after a noise that has been
too tremendous.
“And when I came to myself on board the X., which picked us up, I
realized that I was no longer the same, that I never could again be
the same sentimental young girl I had been before; I realized that a
part of myself had gone down with the _Bourgogne_; that henceforth
there would be a whole heap of delicate feelings whose fingers and
hands I should hack away to prevent them from climbing into my heart
and wrecking it.”
She looked at Vincent out of the corner of her eye and, with a backward
twist of her body, went on: “It’s a habit one must get into.”
Then, as her hair, which she had pinned up loosely, was coming down and
falling over her shoulders, she rose, went up to a mirror and began to
re-arrange it, talking as she did so:
“When I left America a little later, I felt as if I were the golden
fleece starting off in search of a conqueror. I may sometimes have
been foolish ... I may sometimes have made mistakes--perhaps I am
making one now in talking to you like this--but you, on your side,
don’t imagine that because I have given myself to you, you have won me.
Make certain of this--I abominate mediocrity and I can love no one who
isn’t a conqueror. If you want me, it must be to help you to victory;
if it’s only to be pitied and consoled and made much of ... no, my
dear boy--I’d better say so at once--_I’m_ not the person you
need--it’s Laura.”
She said all this without turning round and while she was continuing to
arrange her rebellious locks, but Vincent caught her eye in the glass.
“May I give you my answer this evening?” he said, getting up and taking
off his oriental garments to get into his day clothes. “I must go home
quickly now so as to catch my brother Olivier before he goes out. I’ve
got something to say to him.”
He said it by way of apology, to give colour to his departure; but
when he went up to Lilian, she turned round to him smiling, and so
lovely that he hesitated.
“Unless I leave a line for him to get at lunch time,” he added.
“Do you see a great deal of him?”
“Hardly anything. No, it’s an invitation for this afternoon, which I’ve
got to pass on to him.”
“From Robert?... _Oh! I see!_[2]...” she said, smiling oddly.
“That’s a person, too, I must talk to you about.... All right! Go at
once. But come back at six o’clock, because at seven his car is coming
to take us out to dinner in the Bois.”
Vincent walks home, meditating as he goes; he realizes that from the
satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were
sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: In English in the original.]
VIII
EDOUARD AND LAURA
_Il faut choisir d’aimer les femmes ou de les connaître; il n’y a
pas de milieu._
CHAMFORT.
EDOUARD, as he sits in the Paris express, is reading Passavant’s new
book, _The Horizontal Bar_, which he has just bought at the Dieppe
railway station. No doubt he will find the book waiting for him when
he gets to Paris, but Edouard is impatient. People are talking of
it everywhere. Not one of his own books has ever had the honour of
figuring on station book-stalls. He has been told, it is true, that it
would be an easy matter to arrange, but he doesn’t care to. He repeats
to himself that he hasn’t the slightest desire to see his books in
railway stations--but it is the sight of Passavant’s book that makes
him feel the need of repeating it. Everything that Passavant does, and
everything that other people do round about him, rubs Edouard up the
wrong way: the newspaper articles, for instance, in which his book is
praised up to the skies. It’s as if it were a wager; in every one of
the three papers that he buys on landing, there is a eulogy of _The
Horizontal Bar_. In the fourth there is a letter from Passavant,
complaining of an article which had recently appeared in the same paper
and which had been a trifle less flattering than the others. Passavant
writes defending and explaining his book. This letter irritates Edouard
even more than the articles. Passavant pretends to enlighten public
opinion--in reality he cleverly directs it. None of Edouard’s books
has ever given rise to such a crop of articles; but, for that matter,
Edouard has never made the slightest attempt to attract the favour of
the critics. If they turn him the cold shoulder, it is a matter of
indifference to him. But as he reads the articles on his rival’s book,
he feels the need of assuring himself again that it is a matter of
indifference.
Not that he detests Passavant. He has met him occasionally and has
thought him charming. Passavant, moreover, has always been particularly
amiable to him. But he dislikes Passavant’s books. He thinks Passavant
not so much an artist as a juggler. Enough of Passavant!
Edouard takes Laura’s letter out of his coat pocket--the letter he was
reading on the boat; he reads it again:
“Dear friend,
The last time I saw you--(do you remember?--it was in St. James’s
Park, on the 2nd of April, the day before I left for the South?) you
made me promise to write to you if ever I was in any difficulty. I am
keeping my promise. To whom can I appeal but you? I cannot ask for
help from those to whom I should most like to turn; it is just from
them that I must hide my trouble. Dear friend, I am in very great
trouble. Some day perhaps, I will tell you the story of my life after
I parted from Felix. He took me out to Pau and then he had to return
to Cambridge for his lectures. What came over me, when I was left out
there all by myself--the spring--my convalescence--my solitude?...
Dare I confess to you what it is impossible to tell Felix? The time
has come when I ought to go back to him--but oh! I am no longer
worthy to. The letters which I have been writing to him for some time
past have been lying letters, and the ones he writes to me speak of
nothing but his joy at hearing that I am better. I wish to heaven I
had remained ill! I wish to heaven I had died out there!... My friend,
the fact must be faced: I am expecting a child and it is not his.
I left Felix more than three months ago; there’s no possibility of
blinding _him_ at any rate. I dare not go back to him. I cannot.
I will not. He is too good. He would forgive me, no doubt, and I don’t
deserve--I don’t want his forgiveness. I daren’t go back to my parents
either. They think I am still at Pau. My father--if he knew, if he
understood--is capable of cursing me. He would turn me away. And how
could I face his virtue, his horror of evil, of lying, of everything
that is impure? I am afraid too of grieving my mother and my sister.
As for ... but I will not accuse him; when he was in a position
to help me, he promised to do so. Unfortunately, however, in order
to be better able to help me, he took to gambling. He has lost the
money which should have served to keep me until after my confinement.
He has lost it all. I had thought at first of going away with him
somewhere--anywhere; of living with him at any rate for a short time,
for I didn’t mean to hamper him--to be a burden to him; I should have
ended by finding some way of earning my living, but I can’t just yet.
I can see that he is unhappy at having to abandon me and that it is
the only thing that he can do. I don’t blame him--but all the same he
is abandoning me. I am here in Paris without any money. I am living on
credit in a little hotel, but it can’t go on much longer. I don’t know
what is to become of me. To think that ways so sweet should lead only
to such depths as these! I am writing to the address in London which
you gave me. But when will this letter reach you? And I who longed so
to have a child! I do nothing but cry all day long. Advise me. You are
the only hope I have left. Help me if you can, and if you can’t....
Oh! in other days I should have had more courage, but now it is not I
alone who will die. If you don’t come--if you write that you can do
nothing for me, I shall have no word or thought of reproach for you.
In bidding you good-bye, I shall try and not regret life too much, but
I think that you never quite understood that the friendship you gave
me is still the best thing in my life--never quite understood that
what I called my friendship for you went by another name in my heart.
LAURA DOUVIERS
P. S. Before putting this letter in the post I shall make another
attempt. This evening I shall go and see him one last time more.
If you get this therefore it will mean that really.... Good-bye,
good-bye! I don’t know what I am writing.
Edouard had received this letter on the morning of the day he had left
England. That is to say he had decided to leave as soon as he received
it. In any case he had not intended to stay much longer. I don’t mean
to insinuate that he would have been incapable of returning to Paris
specially to help Laura; I merely say that he is glad to return. He has
been kept terribly short of pleasure lately in England; and the first
thing he means to do when he gets to Paris is to go to a house of
ill-fame; and as he doesn’t wish to take his private papers with him,
he reaches his portmanteau down from the rack and opens it, so as to
slip in Laura’s letter.
The place for this letter is not among coats and shirts; he pulls out
from beneath the clothes a cloth-bound MS. book, half filled with his
writing; turns to the very beginning of the book, looks up certain
pages which were written last year and re-reads them; it is between
these that Laura’s letter will find its proper place.
EDOUARD’S JOURNAL
_Oct. 18th._--Laura does not seem to suspect her power; but I, who
can unravel the secrets of my own heart, know well enough that up till
now I have never written a line that has not been indirectly inspired
by her. I feel her still a child beside me, and all the skill of my
discourse is due only to my constant desire to instruct, to convince,
to captivate her. I see nothing--I hear nothing without asking myself
what she would think of it. I forsake my own emotion to feel only
hers. And I think that if she were not there to give definition to
my personality, it would vanish in the excessive vagueness of its
contours. It is only round her that I concentrate and define myself.
By what illusion have I hitherto believed that I was fashioning her
to my likeness, when, on the contrary, I was bending myself to hers?
And I never noticed it! Or rather--the influence of love, by a curious
action of give and take, made us both reciprocally alter our natures.
Involuntarily--unconsciously--each one of a pair of lovers fashions
himself to meet the other’s requirements--endeavours by a continual
effort to resemble that idol of himself which he beholds in the other’s
heart.... Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity.
This was the way in which she deluded me. Her thought everywhere
companioned mine. I admired her taste, her curiosity, her culture, and
did not realize that it was her love for me which made her take so
passionate an interest in everything that I cared for. For she never
discovered anything herself. Each one of her admirations--I see it
now--was merely a couch on which she could lay her thought alongside
of mine; there was nothing in all this that responded to any profound
need of her nature. “It was only for you that I adorned and decked
myself,” she will say. Yes! But I could have wished that it had been
only for _her_ and that she had yielded in doing so to an intimate
and personal necessity. But of all these things that she has added to
herself for my sake, nothing will remain--not even a regret--not even a
sense of something missing. A day comes when the true self, which time
has slowly stripped of all its borrowed raiment, reappears, and then,
if it was of these ornaments that the other was enamoured, he finds
that he is pressing to his heart nothing but an empty dress--nothing
but a memory--nothing but grief and despair.
Ah! with what virtues, with what perfections I had adorned her!
How vexing this question of sincerity is! _Sincerity!_ When I
say the word I think only of her. If it is myself that I consider, I
cease to understand its meaning. I am never anything but what I think
myself--and this varies so incessantly, that often, if I were not
there to make them acquainted, my morning’s self would not recognize
my evening’s. Nothing could be more different from me than myself. It
is only sometimes when I am alone that the substratum emerges and that
I attain a certain fundamental continuity; but at such times I feel
that my life is slowing down, stopping, and that I am on the very verge
of ceasing to exist. My heart beats only out of sympathy; I live only
through others--by procuration, so to speak, and by espousals; and I
never feel myself living so intensely as when I escape from myself to
become no matter who.
This anti-egoistical force of decentralization is so great in me,
that it disintegrates my sense of property--and, as a consequence, of
responsibility. Such a being is not of the kind that one can marry. How
can I make Laura understand this?
_Oct. 26th._--The only existence that anything (including myself)
has for me, is poetical--I restore this word its full signification.
It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but that I
merely imagine I exist. The thing that I have the greatest difficulty
in believing in, is my own reality. I am constantly getting outside
myself, and as I watch myself act I cannot understand how a person who
acts is the same as the person who is watching him act, and who wonders
in astonishment and doubt how he can be actor and watcher at the same
moment.
Psychological analysis lost all interest for me from the moment that I
became aware that men feel what they imagine they feel. From that to
thinking that they imagine they feel what they feel was a very short
step...! I see it clearly in the case of my love for Laura: between
loving her and imagining I love her--between imagining I love her less
and loving her less--what God could tell the difference? In the domain
of feeling, what is real is indistinguishable from what is imaginary.
And if it is sufficient to imagine one loves, in order to love, so
it is sufficient to say to oneself that when one loves one imagines
one loves, in order to love a little less and even in order to detach
oneself a little from one’s love, or at any rate to detach some of the
crystals from one’s love. But if one is able to say such a thing to
oneself, must one not already love a little less?
It is by such reasoning as this, that X. in my book tries to detach
himself from Z.--and, still more, tries to detach her from himself.
_Oct. 28th._--People are always talking of the sudden
crystallization of love. Its slow _decrystallization_, which I
never hear talked of, is a psychological phenomenon which interests
me far more. I consider that it can be observed, after a longer or
shorter period, in all love marriages. There will be no reason to fear
this, indeed, in Laura’s case (and so much the better) if she marries
Felix Douviers, as reason, and her family, and I myself advise her to
do. Douviers is a thoroughly estimable professor, with many excellent
points, and very capable in his own line (I hear that he is greatly
appreciated by his pupils). In process of time and in the wear of daily
life, Laura is sure to discover in him all the more virtues for having
had fewer illusions to begin with; when she praises him, indeed, she
seems to me really not to give him his due. Douviers is worth more than
she thinks.
What an admirable subject for a novel--the progressive and reciprocal
decrystallization of a husband and wife after fifteen or twenty years
of married life. So long as he loves and desires to be loved, the lover
cannot show himself as he really is, and moreover he does not see the
beloved--but instead, an idol whom he decks out, a divinity whom he
creates.
So I have warned Laura to be on her guard against both herself and me.
I have tried to persuade her that our love could not bring either of us
any lasting happiness. I hope I have more or less convinced her.
Edouard shrugs his shoulders, slips the letter in between the leaves
of his journal, shuts it up and replaces it in his suit-case. He then
takes a hundred-franc note out of his pocket-book and puts that too
in his suit-case. This sum will be more than sufficient to last him
till he can fetch his suit-case from the cloak-room, where he means to
deposit it on his arrival. The tiresome thing is that it has got no
key--or at any rate he has not got its key. He always loses the keys of
his suit-cases. Pooh! The cloak-room attendants are too busy during the
daytime and never alone. He will fetch it out at about four o’clock and
then go to comfort and help Laura; he will try and persuade her to come
out to dinner with him.
Edouard dozes; insensibly his thoughts take another direction. He
wonders whether he would have guessed merely by reading Laura’s
letter, that her hair was black. He says to himself that novelists,
by a too exact description of their characters, hinder the reader’s
imagination rather than help it, and that they ought to allow each
individual to picture their personages to himself according to his own
fancy. He thinks of the novel which he is planning and which is to
be like nothing else he has ever written. He is not sure that _The
Counterfeiters_ is a good title. He was wrong to have announced it
beforehand. An absurd custom this of publishing the titles of books
in advance, in order to whet the reader’s appetite! It whets nobody’s
appetite and it ties one. He is not sure either that the subject is a
very good one. He is continually thinking of it and has been thinking
of it for a long time past; but he has not yet written a line of it.
On the other hand, he puts down his notes and reflections in a little
note-book. He takes this note-book out of his suit-case and a fountain
pen out of his pocket. He writes:
I should like to strip the novel of every element that does not
specifically belong to the novel. Just as photography in the past
freed painting from its concern for a certain sort of accuracy, so
the phonograph will eventually no doubt rid the novel of the kind
of dialogue which is drawn from the life and which realists take so
much pride in. Outward events, accidents, traumatisms, belong to the
cinema. The novel should leave them to it. Even the description of the
characters does not seem to me properly to belong to the _genre_.
No; this does not seem to me the business of the _pure_ novel
(and in art, as in everything else, purity is the only thing I care
about). No more than it is the business of the drama. And don’t let it
be argued that the dramatist does not describe his characters because
the spectator is intended to see them transposed alive on the stage;
for how often on the stage an actor irritates and baffles us because
he is so unlike the person our own imagination had figured better
without him. The novelist does not as a rule rely sufficiently on the
reader’s imagination.
What is the station that has just flashed past? Asnières. He puts
the note-book back in his suit-case. But, decidedly, the thought of
Passavant vexes him. He takes the note-book out again and adds: