I went for several days without seeing anything. Those days were
frightfully warm. At first the sky was grey and rainy. Now September
was flaming to a close. Friday! Why, I had been in that house a week
already.
One sultry morning I sat in my room and sank into dreamy musings and
thought of a fairy tale.
The edge of a forest. In the undergrowth on the dark emerald carpet,
circles of sunlight. Below, a hill rising from the plain, and above
the thick yellow and dark-green foliage, a bit of wall and a turret as
in a tapestry. A page advanced dressed like a bird. A buzzing. It
was the sound of the royal chase in the distance. Unusually pleasant
things were going to happen.
. . . . .
The next afternoon was also hot and sunny. I remembered similar
afternoons, years before and the present seemed to be that past, as if
the glowing heat had effaced time and had stifled all other days
beneath its brooding wings.
The room next to mine was almost dark. They had closed the shutters.
Through the double curtains made out of some thin material I saw the
window streaked with shining bars, like the grating in front of a fire.
In the torrid silence of the house, in the large slumber it enclosed,
bursts of laughter mounted and broke, voices died away, as they had the
day before and as they always would.
From out of these remoter sounds emerged the distinct sound of
footsteps, coming nearer and nearer. I propped myself up against the
wall and looked. The door of the Room opened, as if pushed in by the
flood of light that streamed through it, and two tiny shadows appeared,
engulfed in the brightness.
They acted as though they were being pursued. They hesitated on the
threshold, the doorway making a frame around those little creatures.
And then they entered.
The door closed. The Room was now alive. I scrutinised the newcomers.
I saw them indistinctly through the dark red and green spots dancing in
front of my eyes, which had been dazzled by the flood of light. A
little boy and a little girl, twelve or thirteen years old.
They sat down on the sofa, and looked at each other in silence. Their
faces were almost alike.
. . . . .
The boy murmured:
"You see, Hélène, there is no one here."
And a hand pointed to the uncovered bed, and to the empty table and
empty clothes-racks--the careful denudation of unoccupied rooms.
Then the same hand began to tremble like a leaf. I heard the beating
of my heart. The voices whispered:
"We are alone. They did not see us."
"This is about the first time we've ever been alone together."
"Yet we have always known each other."
A little laugh.
They seemed to need solitude, the first step to a mystery toward which
they were travelling together. They had fled from the others. They
had created for themselves the forbidden solitude. But you could
clearly tell that now that they had found solitude, they did not know
what else to look for.
. . . . .
Then I heard one of them stammer and say sadly, with almost a sob:
"We love each other dearly."
Then a tender phrase rose breathlessly, groping for words, timidly,
like a bird just learning to fly:
"I'd like to love you more."
To see them thus bent toward each other, in the warm shadow, which
bathed them and veiled the childishness of their features, you would
have thought them two lovers meeting.
Two lovers! That was their dream, though they did not yet know what
love meant.
One of them had said "the first time." It was the time that they felt
they were alone, although these two cousins had been living close
together.
No doubt it was the first time that the two had sought to leave
friendship and childhood behind them. It was the first time that
desire had come to surprise and trouble two hearts, which until now had
slept.
. . . . .
Suddenly they stood up, and the slender ray of sunlight, which passed
over them and fell at their feet, revealed their figures, lighted up
their faces and hair, so that their presence brightened the room.
Were they going away? No, they sat down again. Everything fell back
into shadow, into mystery, into truth.
In beholding them, I felt a confused mingling of my past and the past
of the world. Where were they? Everywhere, since they existed. They
were on the banks of the Nile, the Ganges, or the Cydnus, on the banks
of the eternal river of the ages. They were Daphnis and Chloë, under a
myrtle bush, in the Greek sunshine, the shimmer of leaves on their
faces, and their faces mirroring each other. Their vague little
conversation hummed like the wings of a bee, near the freshness of
fountains and the heat that consumed the meadows, while in the distance
a chariot went by, laden with sheaves.
The new world opened. The panting truth was there. It confused them.
They feared the brusque intrusion of some divinity. They were happy
and unhappy. They nestled as close together as they could. They
brought to each other as much as they could. But they did not suspect
what it was that they were bringing. They were too small, too young.
They had not lived long enough. Each was to self a stifling secret.
Like all human beings, like me, like us, they wished for what they did
not have. They were beggars. But they asked /themselves/ for charity.
They asked for help from their /own/ persons.
The boy, a man already, impoverished already by his feminine companion,
turned, drawn towards her, and held out his awkward arms, without
daring to look at her.
The girl, a woman already, leaned her face on the back of the sofa, her
eyes shining. Her cheeks were plump and rosy, tinted and warmed by her
heart. The skin of her neck, taut and satiny, quivered. Half-blown
and waiting, a little voluptuous because voluptuousness already
emanated from her, she was like a rose inhaling sunlight.
And I--I could not tear my eyes from them.
. . . . .
After a long silence, he murmured:
"Shall we stop calling each other by our first names?"
"Why?"
He seemed absorbed in thought.
"So as to begin over again," he said at last.
"Shall we, Miss Janvier?" he asked again.
She gave a visible start at the touch of this new manner of address, at
the word "Miss," as if it were a kind of embrace.
"Why, Mr. Lecoq," she ventured hesitatingly, "it is as though something
had covered us, and we were removing--"
Now, he became bolder.
"Shall we kiss each other on our mouths?"
She was oppressed, and could not quite smile.
"Yes," she said.
They caught hold of each other's arms and shoulders and held out their
lips, as if their mouths were birds.
"Jean!" "Hélène!" came softly.
It was the first thing they had found out. To embrace the embracer, is
it not the tiniest caress and the least sort of a bond? And yet it is
so sternly prohibited.
Again they seemed to me to be without age.
They were like all lovers, while they held hands, their faces joined,
trembling and blind, in the shadow of a kiss.
. . . . .
They broke off, and disengaged themselves from their embrace, whose
meaning they had not yet learned.
They talked with their innocent lips. About what? About the past,
which was so near and so short.
They were leaving their paradise of childhood and ignorance. They
spoke of a house and a garden where they had both lived.
The house absorbed them. It was surrounded by a garden wall, so that
from the road all you could see was the tip of the eaves, and you
couldn't tell what was going on inside of it.
They prattled:
"The rooms, when we were little and they were so big--"
"It was easier to walk there than anywhere else."
To hear the children talk, you would have thought there was something
benevolent and invisible, something like the good God of the past,
behind those walls. She hummed an air she had heard there, and said
that music was easier to remember than people. They dropped back into
the past easily and naturally. They wrapped themselves up in their
memories as though they were cold.
"The other day, just before we left, I took a candle and walked alone
through the rooms, which scarcely woke up to watch me pass."
In the garden, so prim and well kept, they thought only of the flowers,
and little else. They saw the pool, the shady walk, and the cherry
tree, which, in winter when the lawn was white, they made believe had
too many blossoms--snow blossoms.
The day before they had still been in the garden, like brother and
sister. Now life seemed to have grown serious all at once, and they no
longer knew how to play. I saw that they wanted to kill the past.
When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill
it.
She sat up straight.
"I don't want to remember any more," she said.
And he:
"I don't want us to be like each other any more. I don't want us to be
brother and sister any more."
Gradually their eyes opened.
"To touch nothing but each other's hands," he muttered, trembling.
"Brother--sister--that's nothing."
It had come--the hour of beautiful, troubled decisions, of forbidden
fruits. They had not belonged to each other before. The hour had come
when they sought to be all in all to each other.
They were a little self-conscious, a little ashamed of themselves
already. A few days before, in the evening, it had given them profound
pleasure to disobey their parents and go out of the garden although
they had been forbidden to leave it.
"Grandmother came to the top of the steps and called to us to come in."
"But we were gone. We had slipped through the hole in the hedge where
a bird always sang. There was no wind, and scarcely any light. Even
the trees didn't stir. The dust on the ground was dead. The shadows
stole round us so softly that we almost spoke to them. We were
frightened to see night coming on. Everything had lost its colour.
But the night was clear, and the flowers, the road, even the wheat were
silver. And it was then that my mouth came closest to your mouth."
"The night," she said, her soul carried aloft on a wave of beauty, "the
night caresses the caresses."
"I took your hand, and I knew that you would live life whole. When I
used to say 'Hélène,' I did not know what I was saying. Now, when I
shall say 'she,' it will be everything."
Once more their lips joined. Their mouths and their eyes were those of
Adam and Eve. I recalled the ancestral lesson from which sacred
history and human history flow as from a fountain. They wandered in
the penetrating light of paradise without knowledge. They were as if
they did not exist. When--through triumphant curiosity, though
forbidden by God himself--they learned the secret, the sky was darkened.
The certainty of a future of sorrow had fallen upon them. Angels
pursued them like vultures. They grovelled on the ground from day to
day, but they had created love, they had replaced divine riches by the
poverty of belonging to each other.
The two little children had taken their parts in the eternal drama. By
talking to each other as they did they had restored to their first
names their full significance.
"I should like to love you more. I should like to love you harder.
How could I?"
. . . . .
They said no more, as though there were no more words for them. They
were completely absorbed in themselves, and their hands trembled.
Then they rose, and as they did so, the door opened. There stood the
old stooping grandmother. She came out of the grey, out of the realm
of phantoms, out of the past. She was looking for them as if they had
gone astray. She called them in a low voice. She put into her tone a
great gentleness, almost sadness, strangely harmonising with the
children's presence.
"You are here, children?" she said, with a kind little laugh. "What
are you doing here? Come, they are looking for you."
She was old and faded, but she was angelic, with her gown fastened up
to her neck. Beside these two, who were preparing for the large life,
she was, thenceforth, like a child, inactive, useless.
They rushed into her arms, and pressed their foreheads against her
saintly mouth. They seemed to be saying good-by to her forever.
. . . . .
She went out. And a moment afterwards they followed her, hastily, as
they had come, united now by an invisible and sublime bond. On the
threshold, they looked at each other once more.
And now that the room was empty like a deserted sanctuary, I thought of
their glance, their first glance of love, which I had seen.
No one before me had ever seen a first glance of love. I was beside
them, but, far away. I understood and read it without being part of
the infatuation myself, without being lost in the sensation. That is
why I saw that glance. They did not know when it began, they did not
know that it was the first. Afterwards they would forget. The urgent
flowering of their hearts would destroy those preludes. We can no more
know our first glance of love than our last. I shall remember it when
they will have forgotten it.
I do not recall my own first glance of love, my own first gift of love.
Yet it happened. Those divine simplicities are erased from my heart.
Good God, then what do I retain that is of value? The little boy that
I was is dead forever, before my eyes. I survived him, but
forgetfulness tormented me, then overcame me, the sad process of living
ruined me, and I scarcely know what he knew. I remember things at
random only, but the most beautiful, the sweetest memories are gone.
Well, this tender canticle that I overheard, full of infinity and
overflowing with fresh laughter, this precious song, I take and hold
and cherish. It pulses in my heart. I have stolen, but I have
preserved truth.