away your time with comparing and feeling and looking, look here at what
will become of her! First her mouth will be transformed--her eyes, too,
of course, but there the change won’t be permanent all at once; her eyes
will go back and forward a long while and kindle and be quenched, but
the mouth will retain inflexibly all that is strong enough to force in a
wrinkle, to bend a line. The lips will come to shut harder when they are
not opened by laughter. Here everything will be constricted together:
the weariness of desire, the suffocation of kisses; hate which congeals
into loathing, shame that is stifled; and then certitude will encompass
them, the certitude that it must be so, that that is the whole.
“The cheek”--he almost touched it as it shone soft and pale in the
light--“the cheek gets more sharply modeled, more set in contour, sinks
in a little here, as when a flower petal withers. The forehead,--it will
stay the same, only a line straight across as if an invisible knife had
cut into the brain and divided the thoughts; barred in some to pine away
up here, and driven the others to wrestle in nakedness and confinement.
The hair,--it will grow darker with age and disfiguring attention, it
will droop here and lie like a weight. The eyebrows,--you see there is a
bend between them, they sink here, which gives a suggestion of nervous
sensibility, of vibrating thoughts; but this will become no longer
noticeable when she opens her eyes, nothing will be noticeable then but
their depth of weariness, their infinity of freezing chill.
“Imagine the color of the whole harder, more vivid; weigh down all that
is heavy, make sharp all that is light and delicate, harden all that is
strong, banish joy with a cuff and blushes with a sneer, and there you
have her, that is what will become of her. Pretty, eh! prettier than now
because she’ll be even more effective to draw, eh?”
He stood silent a while and looked at her, his shadow trembling. Then he
went on:
“That’s what she’ll come to be, and that, too, is all that such as we
have the right to think of. But what she _might_ be, ah! what she might
be. If someone could take her as she lies there and dreams, take her and
carry her far away and lift her on high in his arms. We keep on talking
about art here, about what we intend and what the time is dreaming of.
If there is anyone that has the same dreams that she has and the
strength to will them, if there is anyone who’s a man, she is his. And
what might not become of them both!”
He looked about him at us others who sat bending forward, gazing with
hypnotized looks at the white gleaming countenance of the girl. At his
last words we started half up; it was as if we waited that some one
should come, that some one should grip us by the hair and hurl us
forward, should lift us to where space was bright around us. Something
should come to birth in us, sharp as a steel blade, unbending,
unsullied, the blue sword of our will and life should be created among
us, true life with warm soil and the sun that impels to growth. In the
heat of the room we felt it already glowing in us by anticipation,
cheeks and foreheads were red, a warm current of blood set in, there
were white sparks in the eyes, and a shiver trembled along the spine.
Thereupon the girl awoke, as if roused by the clamor of all these
thoughts as they beat their wings and struck together. First her eyes
stared in fright, and then she laughed.
We all sunk back again.
“I didn’t know where I was,” she said.
“Oh, you weren’t afraid of us, were you?” inquired Jacques. “You saw
that there was no one dangerous here.”
“Oh, no, I surely wasn’t afraid.” She laughed more merrily still. “No,
there’s no one dangerous here. But I must have been asleep a long while.
I must go now.”
We all offered to go with her, but she looked straight at us.
“Why?” she asked, “is the outside door locked?”
“No, not yet. But the street, the dark, the snow!”
“Oh, only that! But I went out alone. No, no, nobody needs to go along
with me. I know my way.”
Nobody thought of opposing her, her voice was so remarkably firm; almost
scornful, we thought.
We lighted her to the door and saw her small feet step quickly on the
yellow lamplight, which grew paler along the tile floor and was broken
by the light on the stairway.
When she was half out of sight we called for the last time, “You’ll come
again, won’t you?”
She turned her head. From under the ugly old hat her eyes looked out at
us, deep and sombre.
“No,” she said, “I shan’t come again. Why should I?”
She was gone, and we all rushed forward to the window, opened it and
leaned out, stretching ourselves over the sill. She had not got down
yet. Before us lay the black bulks of the houses, defiantly heavy and
motionless to our gaze. Here and there was a faint yellow gleam from a
street lamp; one could see some large, loose flakes glide through it.
The air was gray, swarmingly alive with darkness and a little farther
out across the roofs the church tower stood with its shining dials
against the black horizon.
Then she came out of the house door; we could hear her steps resound up
to where we were through the chilly air. We followed the little black,
indistinct figure out to the corner, where the lamplight took hold of it
and threw it out into tawny, pale relief. With that she was gone,
vanished into the blackness, into the snow and night and threatening
uncertainty from which she had come.
We fastened the window and sat down. In order to do something we tried
to discuss, as we were used to, about art and its future. We talked
about symbolism and syntheticism, but it all seemed less worth while now
than before, and from time to time a speaker would stop in the midst of
his period in order to examine a line in the half-finished portrait of
Cecilia, and then give it up in despair.
And there was no warmth in the discussion, only dry and ill-tempered
sallies that cut now at one man’s, now at another’s hobby and caused
them to bolt off into the inane, where comprehension ceases. Soon we
were all silent.