HE WOULD HAVE BEEN FORTY NOW
When you have seen your child born, have watched his first steps in life,
have noted him smile and weep, have heard him call you papa as he
stretches out his little arms to you, you think that you have become
acquainted with all the joys of paternity, and, as though satiated with
these daily joys that are under your hand, you already begin to picture
those of the morrow. You rush ahead, and explore the future; you are
impatient, and gulp down present happiness in long draughts, instead of
tasting it drop by drop. But Baby's illness suffices to restore you to
reason.
To realize the strength of the ties that bind you to him, it is necessary
to have feared to see them broken; to know that a river is deep, you must
have been on the point of drowning in it.
Recall the morning when, on drawing aside the curtain of his bed, you saw
on the pillow his little face, pale and thin. His sunken eyes,
surrounded by a bluish circle, were half closed. You met his glance,
which seemed to come through a veil; he saw you, without smiling at you.
You said, "Good morning," and he did not answer. His face only expressed
dejection and weakness, it was no longer that of your child. He gave a
kind of sigh, and his heavy eyelids drooped. You took his hands,
elongated, transparent, and with colorless nails; they were warm and
moist. You kissed them, those poor little hands, but there was no
responsive thrill to the contact of your lips. Then you turned round,
and saw your wife weeping behind you. It was at that moment when you
felt yourself shudder from head to foot, and that the idea of a possible
woe seized on you, never more to leave you. Every moment you kept going
back to the bed and raising the curtains again, hoping perhaps that you
had not seen aright, or that a miracle had taken place; but you withdrew
quickly, with a lump in your throat. And yet you strove to smile, to
make him smile himself; you sought to arouse in him the wish for
something, but in vain; he remained motionless, exhausted, not even
turning round, indifferent to all you said, to everything, even yourself.
And what is all that is needed to strike down this little creature, to
reduce him to this pitch? Only a few hours. What, is that all that is
needed to put an end to him? Five minutes. Perhaps.
You know that life hangs on a thread in this frail body, so little fitted
to suffer. You feel that life is only a breath, and say to yourself:
"Suppose this one is his last." A little while back he was complaining.
Already he does so no longer. It seems as though someone is clasping
him, bearing him away, tearing him from your arms. Then you draw near
him, and clasp him to you almost involuntarily, as though to give him
back some of your own life. His bed is damp with fever sweats, his lips
are losing their color. The nostrils of his little nose, grown sharp and
dry, rise and fall. His mouth remains wide open. It is that little rosy
mouth which used to laugh so joyfully, those are the two lips that used
to press themselves to yours, and . . . all the joys, the bursts of
laughter, the follies, the endless chatter, all the bygone happiness,
flock to your recollection at the sound of that gasping, breathing, while
big hot tears fall slowly from your eyes. Poor wee man. Your hand seeks
his little legs, and you dare not touch his chest, which you have kissed
so often, for fear of encountering that ghastly leanness which you
foresee, but the contact of which would make you break out in sobs.
And then, at a certain moment, while the sunlight was flooding the room,
you heard a deeper moan, resembling a cry. You darted forward; his face
was contracted, and he looked toward you with eyes that no longer saw.
And then all was calm, silent and motionless, while his hollow cheeks
became yellow and transparent as the amber of his necklaces.
The recollection of that moment lasts for a lifetime in the hearts of
those who have loved; and even in old age, when time has softened your
grief, when other joys and other sorrows have filled your days, his dying
bed still appears to you when sitting of an evening beside the fire. You
see amid the sparkling flames the room of the lost child, the table with
the drinks, the bottles, the arsenal of illness, the little garments,
carefully folded, that waited for him so long, his toys abandoned in a
corner. You even see the marks of his little fingers on the wall paper,
and the zigzags he made with his pencil on the door; you see the corner
scribbled over with lines and dates, in which he was measured every
month, you see him playing, running, rushing up in a perspiration to
throw himself into your arms, and, at the same time, you also see him
fixing his glazing eyes on you, or motionless and cold under a white
sheet, wet with holy water.
Does not this recollection recur to you sometimes, Grandma, and do not
you still shed a big tear as you say to yourself: "He would have been
forty now?" Do we not know, dear old lady, whose heart still bleeds,
that at the bottom of your wardrobe, behind your jewels, beside packets
of yellow letters, the handwriting of which we will not guess at, there
is a little museum of sacred relics--the last shoes in which he played
about on the gravel the day he complained of being cold, the remains of
some broken toys, a dried sprig of box, a little cap, his last, in a
triple wrapper, and a thousand trifles that are a world to you, poor
woman, that are the fragments of your broken heart?
The ties that unite children to parents are unloosed. Those which unite
parents to children are broken. In one case, it is the past that is
wiped out; in the other, the future that is rent away.