1
Next day, Rose was with me early in the morning:
"I could not sleep," she said. "I wanted to speak to you without tears
or blushes. If I have done wrong, I have atoned for it; and it is done
with. All that remained of it was a sad memory; and, now that I have
considered it with you, even that is gone."
I look at her. Her appearance pleases me. Her step is firm, her cheeks
are pale, her eyes burning; she is living more ardently than usual. She
continues, with animation:
"You said to me once that people who believe in another life seem to
sweep their sins and their remorse up to the doors of eternity. For us,
you said, who have not that illusion, everything is different: we do not
put off paying the bill for our sins. We can recognise their
consequences; and that is our expiation." And you added, proudly, "It is
cowardly to look to another for it, even if that other were God!"
We are walking in the orchard. The long grass is bending under the
weight of the dew, which has decked it with a thousand glittering
jewels. As we pass by a tree laden with apples, Rose pulls a branch to
her and, without plucking the fruit, bites into it. I watch the lips
part and the white teeth meet and disappear in the juicy pulp. For a
second, the soft red mouth rounds over the fruit, which seems to match
its beauty and to be questioning Rose about her pitiful love-affairs.
"Then, Rose dear, you were not really happy for a moment with your
lover?"
"No."
"But he was young, I suppose, and more or less good-looking?"
She thinks for a moment and then bends her head.
"You remember it, Rose?"
The girl appears astonished and answers, hesitatingly:
"It is five years ago, I don't remember now...."
I was surprised in my turn and looked at her. What! She didn't remember!
She had forgotten that! Her lips had not retained the impress of the
first kiss!
My eyes closed and from the background of my life a bygone moment rose,
one of those memories that linger in the hearts of women with such
fidelity and vividness that they lack not a scent, a sound, a line, a
word, a look, a gesture!
I was twelve years old and he fifteen. It was at the seaside. Our
parents were talking a few steps away, but night was falling and a
fisherman's hut hid us from their eyes. He bent over to me and our lips
met in a simple kiss, simple as a flower with petals still unopened, for
we were both of us innocent....
I can still see the colour and the shape of the drifting clouds. I can
smell the mingled breath of the sea and of his boyish mouth. I can
remember how I felt as a frightened, trembling and enraptured little
girl.... A sailor was singing some way off; and the gulls that circled
between sea and sky seemed to be keeping the last rays of daylight upon
their white wings.
Why, I know that boy's mouth by heart and shall always know it! We often
kissed again, without even dreaming that, at this game as at all games,
there might be room for progress!... And then ... and then ... that's
all I remember of him.... The next is another memory, at another place
and another age.... And then another again....
2
Would one not think that, in the more or less happy lives of us women,
in our more or less easily traversed roads, the sensations of love are
so many illuminated floral arches that mark the different stages of our
accomplishment? We go up to them, we pass through them with hopes,
smiles or sighs. But, whatever they may be, we come out of them fairer
and better. What should we be without that, without love? The love which
is rebuked, which we are supposed to hide and blush for! The love that
entreats both our strength and our weakness, our patience and our
fervour, our passion and our reason! The love that sets in motion our
highest faculties and our lowest instincts, that makes each of us know
her own power and her own poverty by the part which she allows it to
play in her life!
In that moment, I saw and lived my joys in the kisses of childhood and
girlhood. I travelled my road again; and the arches of light seemed
higher to me and they followed hard on one another, becoming ever more
radiant and decked with gayer flowers, until this very hour when the
desired happiness has been found, established and kept fast....
3
My thoughts return to Rose, who has sat down under a tree; and I stretch
myself beside her.
A herd of cows suddenly enters the orchard. White and brown, they plunge
among the apple-trees; driven by a child, who is taking them down to the
long grass, they amble heavily along in meek-eyed resignation. A smell
of cow-shed at once reaches our nostrils; and, in the silence, we hear a
noise of busy munching....
"Darling, you, who have always lived in the midst of nature, should have
sounder and more accurate ideas on love than those of other women, while
mine are a little warped by my over-cultivated nerves and feelings. If,
for instance, you had said to me, yesterday, 'I gave myself because it
was natural,' you would have dominated my poor reason from the pinnacle
of an essential truth."
Without quite understanding what I say, Rose smiles in answer to my
smile and we remain silent; our eyes gaze without seeing and our idle
hands trail in the wet grass. We hear, without listening, the hoarse,
fat, cooing-voluptuous voices of the doves: in the cool air of the
morning, among the leaves, the flowers and the branches, it is an
undercurrent of joy rising and falling, suspended for a moment and then
beginning again, in unwearying repetition.
Rose murmurs:
"Why are you always saying that I cannot make progress without love? It
makes me unhappy when you say that. I should have liked to have nothing
in the world but your affection. You kissed me so tenderly last night,
over the hedge."
"It is not the same thing, Rose darling. Certainly, there is nothing
more harmonious and purer than the kiss that joins the lips of two
friends like ourselves. But it is not the same thing as the kiss of
love, for the value of that lies not only in what it is, but in what it
promises; and it is a delight that sometimes echoes through our whole
lives.... You will have to love before you understand."
The girl folded her arms around my waist as though to bind herself to
me:
"But how would you have me love any one but yourself?" she asked. "Have
you not given me happiness? When I am with you, I seem to be living in a
fairy-tale."
Despite the pleasure which her words gave me, I made an effort to combat
them.
The character of a woman who tries to be just is full of these little
contradictions. In proportion as her heart is satisfied, she finds her
intellect becoming clearer and stronger; and what calls for her judgment
rarely leaves her heart unmoved. If Rose had not protested, I should
still have spoken, from a sense of duty, but my words would have been
without warmth or conviction. Now it seemed to me that her charming
compliment gave added force to what I was about to utter in the interest
of another's happiness.
She leant her face against my breast and my fingers played with her
sunny hair, her unbound hair, which was now waving joyously, crowning
her with a shimmer of amber and gold.
"No," I replied, "you must fall in love in order to develop and expand.
Our women's lives are like summer days: wisdom tells us to follow their
evolution. After the morning's waiting, we want the noon-day splendour
and rapture. As you never had that rapture, you have not yet known love:
and, at your age, is not that an absurd and miserable ignorance? Is it
not right to wish for love and even to force its coming? Those who go on
waiting for it in meek resignation appear to me so guilty!... Life has
always seemed to me to be divided into two parts: the search for love;
and love. As long as we are not in love, let us continue the search for
it; let us seek stubbornly, madly, cruelly, if need be; let us be
untiring and unrelenting. There are no obstacles for the woman with a
resolute will. Let each of us follow that quest in her own manner,
according to her strength, her means and her courage, through every
danger and every pain. When we have at last found love, or rather our
love, let us go towards it without fear, without false modesty; and, if
we are loved, let us not wait to be entreated for what we can offer
generously. Let us never be pilfered of that which it is our privilege
to give!"
A tendril drops from the creeper above us and caresses our faces....
How delightful life is at this moment! The air is filled with rejoicing,
with the murmur of an infinite happiness! A tremulous haze hovers over
the fields, the insatiate doves reiterate their glad refrain. Around us,
here and there, a slender blade of grass shakes beneath the light weight
of a butterfly. But is not everything lovely in the eyes of a woman who
is talking of love? It is as though happiness were the harbinger of her
glance, flying ahead and settling upon things.
Rose, all attention and curiosity, now questioned me:
"But you, what did you do?"
"In my case," I said, "when I knew that he loved me too, I went to his
country to find him. I can still see us walking in a meadow all bright
with flowers. On the horizon, the blue sky met the sea; and, behind us,
the red roofs, the church-steeples and the tiny white houses of a Dutch
village slowly vanished from sight. He gave me his arm; and it was a joy
to me to let him feel the gladness in my heart by the motion of my hip,
on which he leant slightly. Then he said, 'You walk like a queen for
whom her subjects wait.' And I knew from his words that he was still
waiting for me, though I was by his side, and they suddenly told me
what a blissful kingdom I had to offer him!"
"Did you seek long before that day came?"
"No, once I was free, I found happiness after a few months of trouble
and difficulty; but you see, dear, I would have gone to the other end of
the world to meet my love! I had no need to journey so far; and this
makes me inclined to think that, in our search, we need to be attentive
even more than active!"
Roseline murmured, pensively:
"The men say that a certain amount of preliminary experience in love is
indispensable ... to them."
My whole soul revolted. Releasing myself from the girl's embrace, I
sprang to my feet and faced her:
"But, Rose, isn't it the same with us? And is it right to expect that a
woman should rivet her whole existence to the first smile, to the first
look, the first word that moves her? Sensible people tell us that
marriage is a lottery! By what aberration of the intellect do they come
to admit that a being's whole life should be voluntarily subjected to
chance? Not one of us would consent to such a degradation, if women in
general were not absolutely ignorant! And that is why many, too
clear-sighted to submit to a ridiculous law and lacking the courage to
infringe it, die without having known the flavour and the goodness of
life. Oh, what injustice! Is youth not short enough as it is? Is the
circle in which our poor intelligence moves not sufficiently limited?
And is it necessary, in addition, to chain us to phantom principles,
which falsify nature, disfigure goodness and vilify the miracle of the
kiss and the innocence of the flesh?"
I was standing against a tree, a few steps away from Rose; and my hand
plucked nervously at the leaves within my reach. The blue sky seemed
hypocritical to my eyes, the beauty of the flowers crafty and mocking. I
continued, in a tone of conviction:
"It is right that woman should make her own experiments, it is right
that she should know men to judge which of them harmonises with her....
It is by constantly encountering alien souls that she will form an idea
of what her twin soul should be. Yes, I know that a natural law rejects
this morality; and that is why I do not think the woman should give
herself until she is quite certain of her choice. It is true that her
experiments will be incomplete; the senses will have played but a small
part in them, or none at all; but must we not accommodate ourselves to
the inevitable? In any case, that woman will indeed be enlightened who,
regardless of public opinion, lives freely in the man's company,
studying him, observing him and sometimes even loving him!"
Rose listened to me without a word or a movement; only, every now and
then, her long, dark lashes, tipped with gold, would flicker for a
moment and then droop discreetly on her cool, fresh cheeks. But the
thought of her own frailty suggested an objection; and she asked:
"Don't you think that what you propose is difficult for the woman?"
"Oh, yes, difficult and, to many of us, impossible! Through a want of
pride, through love or pity, they resign themselves to an act of which
their reason does not approve and they wake up unhappy, sometimes for
ever.... It is difficult, for the woman who resists appears to the man a
sort of monster, abominable and detestable. Ah, there must be no
desertion before possession! Because we have given him our lips, we must
make him a present of our lives! Because we have consented to certain
pleasures, we must, so that he may enjoy a greater, sacrifice our future
to him!... In fact, he goes farther and says that woman, when she
indulges in those experiments, is following the dictates of a loathsome
and mean self-interest. Self-interest, when this conduct entails endless
dangers and bitterness! Self-interest, when it demands of us, before
all, an absolute contempt of a world to which nearly all are slaves,
when it exposes us to insults and suffering and increases the number of
our enemies and multiplies the obstacles in our path!... No, that woman
is not selfish who, in all good faith, plunges boldly into the adventure
at the risk of ruining herself, comes near to a man, thinking that she
has found what she is seeking and hoping that love may result. She feels
the promptings of her senses and does not resist her heart, but her
reason is awake! She will not give herself unless everything that she
learns confirms her expectations; she will give herself if she really
believes that the happiness of both depends upon it; and the combat that
is waged enables her to judge clearly of the quality of their love. She
is judge and combatant in one. She lets herself be carried along so that
she may have fuller knowledge; and it is not without pain, it is not
without love that, at the eleventh hour, she will, if need be, refuse
herself."
Rose here interrupted me:
"If she loves, if she suffers, why does she refuse herself?"
"There are a thousand degrees in love; and a woman of feeling always
suffers when she inflicts suffering."
I examined my mind for a moment and, as though it were uttering its
thoughts backwards, I continued, slowly:
"It is sometimes our duty to inflict suffering. The man's instinct is
always more or less blinded by desire; he always, either craftily or
brutally, proposes. It is for us to dispose. We are all-powerful. Peace
or discord springs from our will. He is not as well fitted to choose as
we are, because he has not the same reasons for wishing to see
comradeship follow upon passion, to see rapture give way to security. If
we are one day to be the mother of the child, are we not first of all
the mother of love? Are we not at the same time the cradle and the
tabernacle of that god? In any happy couple, is love not cast in the
woman's image much more than in the man's? The man has a thousand
things that attract and retain him elsewhere; his temperament is more
prodigal and less considerate than ours. It is in the woman that love
dwells; her sensitive nature leads her to a higher knowledge in the art
of loving; and the infinite details of her tenderness can make her seem
perfect in her lover's eyes when they do not render her exclusive...."
Struck by this last word, Rose exclaimed:
"What! According to you, love should not be exclusive!" And, lowering
her voice, she asked, "Are you not faithful?"
"We do not even think of being faithful as long as we love. We should
blush to offer love the cold homage of fidelity: it is a word devoid of
meaning in the presence of a genuine love. In love fidelity is like a
chain disappearing under the flowers. If it is one day seen, that means
that the flowers are faded."
I kneel beside her and, taking her in my arms, kiss her fondly. Through
the exquisite silence of the day, the church-bell rings out the
_Angelus_ in notes of gold. The garden is flooded with sunshine; and the
marigolds, the phlox, the jasmines, the scabious and the mallows push
their heads above their white railing. Each eager heart turns towards
the light.
"You see, my Roseline: just as the great sun shines in his glory and
governs the realm of flowers, so love must be king in the lives of us
women! He reigns and is independent of any but himself. Only," I added,
laughing, "though we accept him as king, we must not make a tyrant of
him. Poor love! I wonder what wretched transformation he must have
undergone through the ages for us to have managed to invest him with the
most selfish of human sentiments, the sense of property! So far from
that, we ought mutually to respect the life that goes with ours and
never seek to restrain it."
There is a pause; and Rose, with her face pressed to my cheek, almost
whispers:
"You are not jealous?"
I felt myself flushing and would have liked not to answer. But, alas,
would she not by degrees have discovered all the pettiness that is
ill-concealed under my thin veneer of self-control and determination? I
tried to reveal it all in one sentence:
"Know this, Rose, that it is in myself and in myself alone that I study
the women that I would not be!"
4
I watch my great girl while she talks. This rustic beauty, in her cotton
bodice, her blue print skirt and her wooden shoes, no longer shouts. She
expresses herself better and does not gesticulate so violently. She is
quieter in her movements and her shyness is not unattractive. Rays of
light filter through the branches and cast shifting patches of light on
her face and figure. I always love to observe the details of her beauty,
but to-day my heart contracts for a moment as my eyes follow the curve
of her chin, which is charming, but devoid of all firmness, and her
whole profile, which is beautiful, but lacking in decision....
Will Rose be one of those who accomplish themselves by means of love,
who exalt themselves by exalting it, who master and improve themselves
the better to control it?
Love is the great test by which our values are reckoned and weighed. The
fond vagaries of the body have taught the proud soul its limits; and
reason has wilted under a kiss like a flower under the scorching sun.
Every woman has known the exquisite luxury of forgetting herself, of
losing herself so utterly that no other thing at the moment appears to
her worth living for. She has heard the voice of the charmer exhorting
her to abandon pride, ambition, her own personality, to become, in
short, no more than an atom of happiness under a dark and splendid sky
which each moment of felicity seems to adorn with a new star.
Where the weak woman goes under, her stronger sister is never lost. The
lower she may have fallen, the higher she raises herself. She returns
from each of her strayings more fit for life. She is more resisting, for
she has known how to sway and bend without breaking; more indulgent,
because she has seen herself encompassed with weakness and beset with
longings. She knows how frail is the spring that regulates her strength,
but also how necessary that strength is to her happiness. She has come
to understand what real love means, that the union of man and woman
approaches the nearer to perfection the less the two wills are fused.
She has understood, above all, that, to contain, glorify and keep love,
we need all the energy of our respective personalities and all the
benefit of our dissimilarity!
Rose was silent.
I lay on the grass, with my arms outstretched and my eyes fixed on the
sky; and the breeze sent my hair playing over my lips. For a long while
afterwards, my thoughts continued to wander amid the fairest things in
the world.