Their hours of sweetness dragged, drooped, and withered like flowers
without water. The sky was still blue for them, but there was no longer
the light morning breeze. All was still: Nature was silent. They were
alone, as they had desired.--And their hearts sank.
An indefinable feeling of emptiness, a vague weariness not without a
certain charm, came over them. They knew not what it was, and they were
darkly uneasy. They became morbidly sensitive. Their nerves, strained in
the close watching of the silence, trembled like leaves at the least
unexpected clash of life. Jacqueline was often in tears without any
cause for weeping, and although she tried hard to convince herself of
it, it was not only love that made them flow. After the ardent and
tormented years that had preceded her marriage the sudden stoppage of
her efforts as she attained--attained and passed--her end,--the sudden
futility of any new course of action--and perhaps of all that she had
done in the past,--flung her into a state of confusion, which she could
not understand, so that it appalled and crushed her. She would not allow
that it was so: she attributed it to her nerves, and pretended to laugh
it off: but her laughter was no less uneasy than her tears. She tried
bravely to take up her work again: but as soon as she began she could
not understand how she could ever have taken any interest in such stupid
things, and she flung them aside in disgust. She made an effort to pick
up the threads of her social life once more: but with no better success:
she had committed herself, and she had lost the trick of dealing with
the commonplace people and their commonplace remarks that are inevitable
in life: she thought them grotesque; and she flung back into her
isolation with her husband, and tried hard to persuade herself, as a
result of these unhappy experiences, that there was nothing good in the
world save love. And for a time she seemed really to be more in love
than ever. Olivier, being less passionate and having a greater store of
tenderness, was less susceptible to these apprehensions: only every now
and then he would feel a qualm of uneasiness. Besides, his love was
preserved in some measure by the constraint of his daily occupation, his
work, which was distasteful to him. But as he was highly strung and
sensitive, and everything that happened in the heart of the woman he
loved affected him also, Jacqueline's secret uneasiness infected him.
One fine afternoon they went for a walk together in the country. They
had looked forward to the walk eagerly and happily. All the world was
bright and gay about them. But as soon as they set out gloom and heavy
sadness descended upon them: they felt chilled to the heart. They could
find nothing to say to each other. However, they forced themselves to
speak, but every word they said rang hollowly, and made them feel the
emptiness of their lives at that moment. They finished their walk
mechanically, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. They returned home sick
at heart. It was twilight: their rooms were cold, black, and empty. They
did not light up at once, to avoid seeing each other. Jacqueline went
into her room, and, instead of taking off her hat and cloak, she sat in
silence by the window. Olivier sat, too, in the next room with his arms
resting on the table. The door was open between the two rooms; they were
so near that they could have heard each other's breathing. And in the
semi-darkness they both wept, in silence, bitterly. They held their
hands over their mouths, so that they should make no sound. At last, in
agony, Olivier said:
"Jacqueline...."
Jacqueline gulped down her sobs, and said:
"What is it?"
"Aren't you coming?"
"Yes, I'm coming."
She took off her hat and cloak, and went and bathed her eyes. He lit the
lamp. In a few minutes she came into the room. They did not look at each
other. Each knew that the other had been weeping. And they could not
console each other, for they knew not why it was.
Then came a time when they could no longer conceal their unhappiness.
And as they would not admit the true cause of it, they cast about for
another, and had no difficulty in finding it. They set it down to the
dullness of provincial life and their surroundings. They found comfort
in that. M. Langeais was informed of their plight by his daughter, and
was not greatly surprised to hear that she was beginning to weary of
heroism. He made use of his political friends, and obtained a post in
Paris for his son-in-law.
When the good news reached them, Jacqueline jumped for joy and regained
all her old happiness. Now that they were going to leave it, they found
that they were quite fond of the dull country: they had sown so many
memories of love in it! They occupied their last days in going over the
traces of their love. There was a tender melancholy in their pilgrimage.
Those calm stretches of country had seen them happy. An inward voice
murmured:
"You know what you are leaving behind you. Do you know what lies before
you?"
Jacqueline wept the day before they left. Olivier asked her why. She
would not say. They took a sheet of paper, and as they always did when
they were fearful of the sound of words, wrote:
"My dear, dear Olivier...."
"My dear, dear Jacqueline...."
"I am sorry to be going away."
"Going away from what?"
"From the place where we have been lovers."
"Going where?"
"To a place where we shall be older."
"To a place where we shall be together."
"But never so loving."
"Always more loving."
"Who can tell?"
"I know."
"I will be."
Then they drew two circles at the bottom of the paper for kisses. And
then she dried her tears, laughed, and dressed him up as a favorite of
Henri III by putting her toque on his head and her white cape with its
collar turned up like a ruff round his shoulders.
In Paris they resumed all their old friendships, but they did not find
their friends just as they had left them. When he heard of Olivier's
arrival, Christophe rushed to him delightedly. Olivier was equally
rejoiced to see him. But as soon as they met they felt an unaccountable
constraint between them. They both tried to break through it, but in
vain. Olivier was very affectionate, but there was a change in him, and
Christophe felt it. A friend who marries may do what he will: he cannot
be the friend of the old days. The woman's soul is, and must be, merged
in the man's. Christophe could detect the woman in everything that
Olivier said and did, in the imperceptible light of his expression, in
the unfamiliar turn of his lips, in the new inflections of his voice and
the trend of his ideas. Olivier was oblivious of it: but he was amazed
to find Christophe so different from the man he had left. He did not go
so far as to think that it was Christophe who had changed: he recognized
that the change was in himself, and ascribed it to normal evolution, the
inevitable result of the passing years; and he was surprised not to find
the same progress in Christophe: he thought reproachfully that he had
remained stationary in his ideas, which had once been so dear to him,
though now they seemed naïve and out of date. The truth was that they
did not sort well with the stranger soul which, unknown to himself, had
taken up its abode in him. He was most clearly conscious of it when
Jacqueline was present when they were talking: and then between
Olivier's eyes and Christophe there was a veil of irony. However, they
tried to conceal what they felt. Christophe went often to see them, and
Jacqueline innocently let fly at him her barbed and poisoned shafts. He
suffered her. But when he returned home he would feel sad and sorry.
Their first months in Paris were fairly happy for Jacqueline, and
consequently for Olivier. At first she was busy with their new house:
they had found a nice little flat looking on to a garden in an old
street at Passy. Choosing furniture and wallpapers kept her time full
for a few weeks. Jacqueline flung herself into it energetically, and
almost passionately and exaggeratedly: it was as though her eternal
happiness depended on the color of her hangings or the shape of an old
chest. Then she resumed intercourse with her father and mother and her
friends. As she had entirely forgotten them during her year of love, it
was as though she had made their acquaintance for the first time: just
as part of her soul was merged in Olivier's, so part of Olivier's soul was
merged in hers, and she saw her old friends with new eyes. They
seemed to her to have gained much. Olivier did not lose by it at first.
They were a set-off to each other. The moral reserve and the poetic
light and shade of her husband made Jacqueline find more pleasure in
those worldly people who only think of enjoying themselves, and of being
brilliant and charming: and the seductive but dangerous failings of
their world, which she knew so much better because she belonged to it,
made her appreciate the security of her lover's affection. She amused
herself with these comparisons, and loved to linger over them, the
better to justify her choice.--She lingered over them to such an extent
that sometimes she could not tell why she had made that choice. Happily,
such moments never lasted long. She would be sorry for them, and was
never so tender with Olivier as when they were past. Thereupon she would
begin again. By the time it had become a habit with her it had ceased to
amuse her: and the comparison became more aggressive: instead of
complementing each other, the two opposing worlds declared war on each
other. She began to wonder why Olivier lacked the qualities, if not some
of the failings, which she now admired in her Parisian friends. She did
not tell him so: but Olivier often felt his wife looking at him without
any indulgence in her eyes, and it hurt him and made him uneasy.
However, he had not lost the ascendancy over Jacqueline which love had
given him: and they would have gone on quite happily living their life
of tender and hard-working intimacy for long enough had it not been for
circumstances which altered their material condition and destroyed its
delicate balance.
_Quivi trovammo Pluto il gran némico...._
A sister of Madame Langeais died. She was the widow of a rich
manufacturer, and had no children. Her whole estate passed to the
Langeais. Jacqueline's fortune was more than doubled by it. When she
came in for her legacy, Olivier remembered what Christophe had said
about money, and remarked:
"We were quite well off without it: perhaps it will be a bad thing for
us."
Jacqueline laughed at him:
"Silly!" she said. "As though money could ever do any harm! We won't
make any change in our way of living just yet."
Their life remained the same to all appearances: so much the same that
after a certain time Jacqueline began to complain that they were not
well enough off: proof positive that there was a change somewhere. And,
in fact, although their income had been doubled or tripled, they spent
the whole of it without knowing how they did it. They began to wonder
how they had managed to live before. The money flew, and was swallowed
up by a thousand new expenses, which seemed at once to be habitual and
indispensable. Jacqueline had begun to patronize the great dressmakers:
she had dismissed the family sempstress who came by the day, a woman she
had known since she was a child. The days of the little fourpenny hats
made out of nothing, though they were quite pretty all the same, were
gone,--gone the days of the frocks which were not impeccably smart,
though they had much of her own grace, and were, indeed, a part of
herself! The sweet intimate charm which shone upon all about her grew
fainter every day. The poetry of her nature was lost. She was becoming
commonplace.
They changed their flat. The rooms which they had furnished with so much
trouble and pleasure seemed narrow and ugly. Instead of the cozy little
rooms, all radiant with her spirit, with a friendly tree waving its
delicate foliage against the windows, they took an enormous,
comfortable, well-arranged flat which they did not, could not, love,
where they were bored to death. Instead of their old friendly
belongings, they obtained furniture and hangings which were strangers to
them. There was no place left for memories. The first years of their
married life were swept away from their thoughts.... It is a great
misfortune for two people living together to have the ties which bind
them to their past love broken! The image of their love is a safeguard
against the disappointment and hostility which inevitably succeed the
first years of tenderness.... The power to spend largely had brought
Jacqueline, both in Paris and abroad--(for now that they were rich they
often traveled)--into touch with a class of rich and useless people,
whose society gave her a sort of contempt for the rest of mankind, all
those who had work to do. With her marvelous power of adaptation, she
very quickly caught the color of these sterile and rotten men and women.
She could not fight against it. At once she became refractory and
irritable, regarding the idea that it was possible--and right--to be
happy in her domestic duties and the _auréa mediocritus_ as mere
"vulgar manners." She had lost even the capacity to understand the
bygone days when she had so generously given herself in love.
Olivier was not strong enough to fight against it. He, too, had changed.
He had given up his work, and had no fixed and compulsory occupation. He
wrote, and the balance of his life was adjusted by it. Till then he had
suffered because he could not give his whole life to art. Now that he
could do so he felt utterly lost in the cloudy world. Art which is not also
a profession, and supported by a healthy practical life, art which
knows not the necessity of earning the daily bread, loses the best part
of its force and its reality. It is only the flower of luxury. It is
not--(what in the greatest, the only great, artists it is)--the sacred
fruit of human suffering.--Olivier felt a disinclination to work, a
desire to ask: "What is the good of it?" There was nothing to make him
write: he would let his pen run on, he dawdled about, he had lost his
bearings. He had lost touch with his own class of men and women
patiently plowing the hard furrow of their lives. He had fallen into a
different world, where he was ill at ease, though on the whole he did
not find it unpleasant. Weak, amiable, and curious, he fell complacently
to observing that world which was entirely lacking in consistency,
though it was not without charm; and he did not see that little by
little he was becoming contaminated by it: it was undermining his faith.
No doubt the transformation was not so rapid in him as it was in
Jacqueline.--Women have the terrible privilege of being able suddenly to
undergo a complete change. The way in which they suddenly die and then
as suddenly come to life again is appalling to those who love them. And
yet it is perfectly natural for a human being who is full of life
without the curb of the will not to be to-morrow what it is to-day. A
woman is like running water. The man who loves her must follow the
stream or divert it into the channel of his own life. In both cases
there must be change. But it is a dangerous experience, and no man
really knows love until he has gone through it. And its harmony is so
delicate during the first years of married life that often the very
smallest change in either husband or wife is enough to destroy their
whole relationship. How much more perilous, then, is a sudden change of
fortune or of circumstance! They must needs be very strong--or very
indifferent to each other--to withstand it.
Jacqueline and Olivier were neither indifferent nor strong. They began
to see each other in a new light: and the face of the beloved became
strange to them. When first they made the sad discovery, they hid it
from each other in loving pity: for they still loved each other. Olivier
took refuge in his work, and by applying himself to it regularly, though
with even less conviction than before, won through to tranquillity.
Jacqueline had nothing. She did nothing. She would stay in bed for
hours, or dawdle over her toilette, sitting idly, half dressed,
motionless, lost in thought: and gradually a dumb misery crept over her
like an icy mist. She could not break away from the fixed idea of
love.... Love! Of things human the most Divine when it is the gift of
self, a passionate and blind sacrifice. But when it is no more than the
pursuit of happiness, it is the most senseless and the most elusive....
It was impossible for her to conceive any other aim in life. In moments
of benevolence she had tried to take an interest in the sorrows of other
people: but she could not do it. The sufferings of others filled her
with an ungovernable feeling of repulsion: her nerves were not strong
enough to bear them. To appease her conscience she had occasionally done
something which looked like philanthropy: but the result had been tame
and disappointing.
"You see," she would say to Christophe, "when one tries to do good one
does harm. It is much better not to try. I'm not cut out for it."
Christophe would look at her: and he would think of a girl he had met, a
selfish, immoral little grisette, absolutely incapable of real
affection, though, as soon as she saw anybody suffering, she was filled
with motherly pity for him, even though she had not cared a rap for him
before, even though he were a stranger to her. She was not abashed by
the most horrible tasks, and she would even take a strange pleasure in
doing those which demanded the greatest self-denial. She never stopped
to think about it: she seemed to find in it a use for her obscure,
hereditary, and eternally unexpressed idealism: her soul was atrophied
as far as the rest of her life was concerned, but at such rare moments
it breathed again: it gave her a sense of well-being and inward joy to
be able to allay suffering: and her joy was then almost misplaced.--The
goodness of that woman, who was selfish, the selfishness of Jacqueline,
who was good in spite of it, were neither vice nor virtue, but in both
cases only a matter of health. But the first was in the better case.
Jacqueline was crushed by the mere idea of suffering. She would have
preferred death to physical illness. She would have preferred death to
the loss of either of her sources of joy: her beauty or her youth. That
she should not have all the happiness to which she thought herself
entitled,--(for she believed in happiness, it was a matter of faith with
her, wholeheartedly and absurdly, a religious belief),--and that others
should have more happiness than herself, would have seemed to her the
most horrible injustice. Happiness was not only a religion to her; it
was a virtue. To be unhappy seemed to her to be an infirmity. Her whole
life gradually came to revolve round that principle. Her real character
had broken through the veils of idealism in which in girlish bashful
modesty she had enshrouded herself. In her reaction against the idealism
of the past she began to see things in a hard, crude light. Things were
only true for her in proportion as they coincided with the opinion of
the world and the smoothness of life. She had reached her mother's state
of mind: she went to church, and practised religion punctiliously and
indifferently. She never stopped to ask herself whether there was any
real truth in it: she had other more positive mental difficulties: and
she would think of the mystical revolt of her childhood with pitying
irony.--And yet her new positivism was no more real than her old
idealism. She forced it. She was neither angel nor brute. She was just a
poor bored woman.
She was bored, bored, bored: and her boredom was all the greater in that
she could not excuse herself on the score of not being loved, or by
saying that she could not endure Olivier. Her life seemed to be stunted,
walled up, with no future prospect: she longed for a new happiness that
should be perpetually renewed; her longing was utterly childish, for it
never took into account her indifferent capacity for happiness. She was
like so many women living idle lives with idle husbands, who have every
reason to be happy, and yet never cease torturing themselves. There are
many such couples, who are rich and blessed with health and lovely
children, and clever and capable of feeling fine things, and possessed
of the power to keep themselves employed and to do good, and to enrich
their own lives and the lives of others. And they spend their time in
moaning and groaning that they do not love each other, that they love
some one else, or that they do not love somebody else--perpetually taken
up with themselves, and their sentimental or sensual relations, and
their pretended right to happiness, their conflicting egoism, and
arguing, arguing, arguing, playing with their sham grand passion, their
sham great suffering, and in the end believing in it, and--suffering....
If only some one would say to them:
"You are not in the least interesting. It is indecent to be so sorry for
yourselves when you have so many good reasons for being happy!"
If only some one would take away their money, their health, all the
marvelous gifts of which they are so unworthy! If only some one would
once more lay the yoke of poverty and real suffering on these slaves who
are incapable of being free and are driven mad by their liberty! If they
had to earn their bread in the sweat of their brows, they would be glad
enough to eat it. And if they were to come face to face with grim
suffering, they would never dare to play with the sham....
But, when all is said and done, they do suffer. They are ill. How, then,
are they not to be pitied?--Poor Jacqueline was quite innocent, as
innocent in drifting apart from Olivier as Olivier was in not holding
her. She was what Nature had made her. She did not know that marriage is
a challenge to Nature, and that, when one has thrown down the gauntlet
to Nature, it is only to be expected that she will arise and begin
valiantly to wage the combat which one has provoked. She saw that she
had been mistaken, and she was exasperated with herself; and her
disillusion turned to hostility towards the thing she had loved,
Olivier's faith, which had also been her own. An intelligent woman has,
much more than a man, moments of an intuitive perception of things
eternal: but it is more difficult for her to maintain her grip on them.
Once a man has come by the idea of the eternal, he feeds it with his
life-blood. A woman uses it to feed her own life: she absorbs it, and
does not create it. She must always be throwing fresh fuel into her
heart and mind: she cannot be self-sufficing. And if she cannot believe
and love, she must destroy--except she possess the supreme virtue of
serenity.