For a day, the Room remained vacant. Twice I had high hopes, then
disillusionment.
Waiting had become a habit, an occupation. I put off appointments,
delayed my walks, gained time at the risk of losing my position. I
arranged my life as for a new love. I left my room only to go down to
dinner, where nothing interested me any more.
The second day, I noticed that the Room was ready to receive a new
occupant. It was waiting. I had a thousand dreams of who the guest
would be, while the Room kept its secret, like some one thinking.
Twilight came, then evening, which magnified the room but did not
change it. I was already in despair, when the door opened in the
darkness, and I saw on the threshold the shadow of a man.
. . . . .
He was scarcely to be distinguished in the evening light.
Dark clothing, milky white cuffs from which his grey tapering hands
hung down; a collar a little whiter than the rest. In his round
greyish face I could see the dusky hollows of his eyes and mouth, under
the chin a cavity of shadow. The yellow of his forehead shone
unclearly. His cheekbone made an obscure bar in the dusk. You would
have called him a skeleton. What was this being whose physiognomy was
so monstrously simple?
He came nearer, and his face kindled, assumed life. I saw that he was
handsome.
He had a charming serious face, fringed with a fine black beard, a high
forehead and sparkling eyes. A haughty grace guided and refined his
movements.
He came forward a step or two, then returned to the door, which was
still open. The shadow of the door trembled, a silhouette appeared and
took shape. A little black-gloved hand grasped the knob, and a woman
stole into the room, with a questioning face.
She must have been a few steps behind him in the street. They had not
wished to enter the room together, in which they both sought refuge to
escape pursuit.
She closed the door, and leaned her whole weight against it, to close
it still tighter. Slowly she turned her head to him, paralysed for a
moment, it seemed to me, with fear that it was not he. They stared
into each other's faces. A cry burst from them, passionate,
restrained, almost mute, echoing from one to the other. It seemed to
open up their wound.
"You!"
"You!"
She almost fainted. She dropped on his breast as though swept by a
storm. She had just strength enough to fall into his arms. I saw the
man's two large pale hands, opened but slightly crooked, resting on the
woman's back. A sort of desperate palpitation seized them, as if an
immense angel were in the Room, struggling and making vain efforts to
escape. And it seemed to me that the Room was too small for this
couple, although it was full of the evening.
"They didn't see us!"
It was the same phrase which had come the other day from the two
children.
He said, "Come!" leading her over to the sofa, near the window, and
they seated themselves on the red velvet. I saw their arms joined
together as though by a cord. They remained there, engrossed,
gathering about them all the shadow of the world, reviving, beginning
to live again in their element of night and solitude.
What an entry, what an entry! What an irruption of anathema!
I had thought, when this form of sin presented itself before me, when
the woman appeared at the door, plainly driven toward him, that I
should witness bliss in its plenitude, a savage and animal joy, as
momentous as nature. On the contrary, I found that this meeting was
like a heart-rending farewell.
"Then we shall always be afraid?"
She seemed just a little more tranquil, and said this with an anxious
glance at him, as if really expecting a reply.
She shuddered, huddled in the shadows, feverishly stroking and pressing
the man's hand, sitting upright, stiffly. I saw her throat rising and
falling like the sea. They stayed there, touching one another; but a
lingering terror mingled with their caresses.
"Always afraid--always afraid, always. Far from the street, far from
the sun, far from everything. I who had so much wanted full daylight
and sunlight!" she said, looking at the sky.
They were afraid. Fear moulded them, burrowed into their hearts.
Their eyes, their hearts were afraid. Above all, their love was
afraid.
A mournful smile glided across the man's face. He looked at his friend
and murmured:
"You are thinking of /him."/
She was sitting with her cheeks in her hands and her elbows on her
knees and her face thrust forward. She did not reply.
She /was/ thinking of him. Doubled up, small as a child, she gazed
intently into the distance, at the man who was not there. She bowed to
this image like a suppliant, and felt a divine reflection from it
falling upon her--from the man who was not there, who was being
deceived, from the offended man, the wounded man, from the master, from
him who was everywhere except where they were, who occupied the immense
outside, and whose name made them bow their heads, the man to whom they
were a prey.
Night fell, as if shame and terror were in its shadows, over this man
and woman, who had come to hide their embraces in this room, as in a
tomb where dwells the Beyond.
. . . . .
He said to her:
"I love you!"
I distinctly heard those grand words.
I love you! I shuddered to the depths of my being on hearing the
profound words which came from those two human beings. I love you!
The words which offer body and soul, the great open cry of the creature
and the creation. I love you! I beheld love face to face.
Then it seemed to me that sincerity vanished in the hasty incoherent
things he next said while clasping her to him. It was as though he had
a set speech to make and was in a hurry to get through with it.
"You and I were born for each other. There is a kinship in our souls
which must triumph. It was no more possible to prevent us from meeting
and belonging to each other than to prevent our lips from uniting when
they came together. What do moral conventions or social barriers
matter to us? Our love is made of infinity and eternity."
"Yes," she said, lulled by his voice.
But I knew he was lying or was letting his words run away with him.
Love had become an idol, a thing. He was blaspheming, he was invoking
infinity and eternity in vain, paying lip service to it by daily prayer
that had become perfunctory.
They let the banality drop. The woman remained pensive for a while,
then she shook her head and she--/she/ pronounced the word of excuse, of
glorification; more than that, the word of truth:
"I was so unhappy!"
. . . . .
"How long ago it was!" she began.
It was her work of art, her poem and her prayer, to repeat this story,
low and precipitately, as if she were in the confessional. You felt
that she came to it quite naturally, without transition, so completely
did it possess her whenever they were alone.
She was simply dressed. She had removed her black gloves and her coat
and hat. She wore a dark skirt and a red waist upon which a thin gold
chain was hanging.
She was a woman of thirty, perhaps, with regular features and smooth
silken hair. It seemed to me that I knew her, but could not place her.
She began to speak of herself quite loudly, and tell of her past which
had been so hard.
"What a life I led! What monotony, what emptiness! The little town,
our house, the drawing-room with the furniture always arranged just so,
their places never changed, like tombstones. One day I tried to put
the table that stood in the centre in another place. I could not do
it."
Her face paled, grew more luminous.
He listened to her. A smile of patience and resignation, which soon
was like a pained expression of weariness, crept across his handsome
face. Yes, he was really handsome, though a little disconcerting, with
his large eyes, which women must have adored, his drooping moustache,
his tender, distant air. He seemed to be one of those gentle people
who think too much and do evil. You would have said that he was above
everything and capable of everything. Listening to her with a certain
remoteness, but stirred by desire for her, he had the air of waiting.
And suddenly the veil fell from my eyes, and reality lay stripped
before me. I saw that between these two people there was an immense
difference, like an infinite discord, sublime to behold because of its
depths, but so painful that it bruised my heart.
/He/ was moved only by his longing for her; /she,/ by her need of
escaping from her ordinary life. Their desires were not the same.
They seemed united, but they dwelt far apart.
They did not talk the same language. When they spoke of the same
things, they scarcely understood each other, and to my eyes, from the
very first, their union appeared to be broken more than if they had
never known each other.
But he did not say what was really in his mind. You felt it in the
sound of his voice, the very charm of his intonation, his lyrical
choice of words. He thought to please her, and he lied. He was
evidently her superior, but she dominated him by a kind of inspired
sincerity. While he was master of his words, she offered her whole
self in her words.
She described her former life.
"From the windows in my room and the dining-room, I could look out on
the square. The fountain in the centre, with its shadow at its base.
I watched the day go round there, on that little, white, round place,
like a sundial.
"The postman crossed it regularly, without thinking. At the arsenal
gate stood a soldier doing nothing. Nobody else ever came there. When
noon rang like a knell, still no one. What I remember best of all was
the way noon rang like a knell--the middle of the day, absolute ennui.
"Nothing ever happened to me, nothing ever would happen to me. There
was nothing for me. The future no longer existed for me. If my days
were to go on like that, nothing would separate me from my death--
nothing! Not a thing! To be bored is to die! My life was dead, and
yet I had to live. It was suicide. Others killed themselves with
poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours."
"Amy!" said the man.
"Then, by dint of seeing the days born in the morning and miscarrying
in the evening, I became afraid to die, and this fear was my first
passion.
"Often, in the middle of a visit I was paying, or in the night, or when
I came home after a walk, the length of the convent wall, I shuddered
with hope because of this passion.
"But who would free me from it? Who would save me from this invisible
shipwreck, which I perceived only from time to time? Around me was a
sort of conspiracy, composed of envy, meanness and indifference.
Whatever I saw, whatever I heard, tended to throw me back into the
narrow road, that stupid narrow road along which I was going.
"Madame Martet, the one friend with whom I was a little bit intimate,
you know, only two years older than I am, told me that I must be
content with what I had. I replied, 'Then, that is the end of
everything, if I must be content with what I have. Do you really
believe what you say?' She said she did. Oh, the horrid woman!
"But it was not enough to be afraid. I had to hate my ennui. How did
I come to hate it? I do not know.
"I no longer knew myself. I no longer was myself. I had such need of
something else. In fact, I did not know my own name any more.
"One day, I remember (although I am not wicked) I had a happy dream
that my husband was dead, my poor husband who had done nothing to me,
and that I was free, free, as large as the world!
"It could not last. I couldn't go on forever hating monotony so much.
Oh, that emptiness, that monotony! Of all the gloomy things in the
world monotony is the darkest, the gloomiest. In comparison night is
day.
"Religion? It is not with religion that we fill the emptiness of our
days, it is with our own life. It was not with beliefs, with ideas
that I had to struggle, it was with myself.
"Then I found the remedy!"
She almost cried, hoarsely, ecstatically:
"Sin, sin! To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up
monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another
person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as not to die.
"I met you. You wrote verses and books. You were different from the
rest. Your voice vibrated and gave the impression of beauty, and above
all, you were there, in my existence, in front of me! I had only to
hold out my arms. Then I loved you with all my heart, if you can call
it love, my poor little friend!"
She spoke now in a low quick voice, both oppressed and enthusiastic,
and she played with her companion's hand as if it were a child's toy.
"And you, too, you loved me, naturally. And when we slipped into a
hotel one evening, the first time, it seemed to me as if the door
opened of itself, and I was grateful for having rebelled and having
broken my destiny. And then the deceit--from which we suffer sometimes,
but which, after reflection, we no longer detest--the risks, the dangers
that give pleasure to each minute, the complications that add variety
to life, these rooms, these hiding-places, these black prisons, which
have fled from the sunlight I once knew!
"Ah!" she said.
It seemed to me that she sighed as if, now that her aspiration was
realized, she had nothing so beautiful to hope for any more.
. . . . .
She thought a moment, and then said:
"See what we are. I too may have believed at first in a sort of
thunderbolt, a supernatural and fatal attraction, because of your
poetry. But in reality I came to you--I see myself now--with clenched
fists and closed eyes."
She added:
"We deceive ourselves a good deal about love. It is almost never what
they say it is.
"There may be sublime affinities, magnificent attractions. I do not
say such a love may not exist between two human beings. But we are not
these two. We have never thought of anything but ourselves. I know,
of course, that I am in love with you. So are you with me. There is
an attraction for you which does not exist for me, since I do not feel
any pleasure. You see, we are making a bargain. You give me a dream,
I give you joy. But all this is not love."
He shrugged his shoulders, half in doubt, half in protest. He did not
want to say anything. All the same, he murmured feebly:
"Even in the purest of loves we cannot escape from ourselves."
"Oh," she said with a gesture of pious protest, the vehemence of which
surprised me, "that is not the same thing. Don't say that, don't say
that!"
It seemed to me there was a vague regret in her voice and the dream of
a new dream in her eyes.
She dispelled it with a shake of her head.
"How happy I was! I felt rejuvenated, like a new being. I had a sense
of modesty again. I remember that I did not dare to show the tip of my
foot from under my dress. I even had a feeling about my face, my
hands, my very name."
. . . . .
Then the man continued the confession from the point where she had left
off, and spoke of their first meetings. He wished to caress her with
words, to win her over gradually with phrases and with the charm of
memories.
"The first time we were alone--"
She looked at him.
"It was in the street, one evening," he said. "I took your arm. You
leaned more and more upon my shoulder. People swarmed around us, but
we seemed to be quite alone. Everything around us changed into
absolute solitude. It seemed to me that we were both walking on the
waves of the sea."
"Ah!" she said. "How good you were! That first evening your face was
like what it never was afterwards, even in our happiest moments."
"We spoke of one thing and another, and while I held you close to me,
clasped like a bunch of flowers, you told me about people we knew, you
spoke of the sunlight that day and the coolness of the evening. But
really you were telling me that you were mine. I felt your confession
running through everything you said, and even if you did not express
it, you actually gave me a confession of love.
"Ah, how great things are in the beginning! There is never any
pettiness in the beginning.
"Once when we met in the public garden, I took you back at the end of
the afternoon through the suburbs. The road was so peaceful and quiet
that our footsteps seemed to disturb nature. Benumbed by emotion, we
slackened our pace. I leaned over and kissed you."
"There," she said.
She put her finger on his neck.
"Gradually the kiss grew warmer. It crept toward your lips and stopped
there. The first time it went astray, the second time it pretended it
went astray. Soon I felt against my mouth"--he lowered his voice--"your
mouth."
She bowed her head, and I saw her rosy mouth.
"It was all so beautiful in the midst of the watchfulness imprisoning
me," she sighed, ever returning to her mild, pathetic preoccupation.
How she needed the stimulus of remembering her emotions, whether
consciously or not! The recalling of these little dramas and former
perils warmed her movements, renewed her love. That was the reason why
she had had the whole story told her.
And he encouraged her. Their first enthusiasm returned, and now they
tried to evoke the most exciting memories.
"It was sad, the day after you became mine, to see you again at a
reception in your own home--inaccessible, surrounded by other people,
mistress of a regular household, friendly to everybody, a bit timid,
talking commonplaces. You bestowed the beauty of your face on
everybody, myself included. But what was the use?
"You were wearing that cool-looking green dress, and they were teasing
you about it. I did not dare to look at you when you passed me, and I
thought of how happy we had been the day before."
"Ah," she sighed, as the beauty widened before her of all her memories,
her thoughts, of all her soul, "love is not what they say it is. I,
too, was stirred with anguish. How I had to conceal it, dissimulating
every sign of my happiness, locking it hastily away within the coffer
of my heart. At first I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of saying
your name in a dream, and often, fighting against the stealthy invasion
of sleep, I have leaned on my elbow, and remained with wide-open eyes,
watching heroically over my heart.
"I was afraid of being recognised. I was afraid people would see the
purity in which I was bathed. Yes, purity. When in the midst of life
one wakes up from life, and sees a different brilliance in the
daylight, and recreates everything, I call that purity.
. . . . .
"Do you remember the day we lost our way in the cab in Paris--the day he
thought he recognised us from a distance, and jumped into another cab
to follow us?"
She gave a start of ecstasy.
"Oh, yes," she murmured, "that was the great day!"
His voice quivered as if shaken by the throbbing of his heart, and his
heart said:
"Kneeling on the seat, you looked out of the little window in the back
of the cab and cried to me, 'He is nearer! He is further off! He will
catch us. I do not see him any more. He has lost us.' Ah!"
And with one and the same movement their lips joined.
She breathed out like a sigh:
"That was the one time I enjoyed."
"We shall always be afraid," he said.
These words interlaced and changed into kisses. Their whole life
surged into their lips.
Yes, they had to revive their past so as to love each other, they had
constantly to be reassembling the pieces so as to keep their love from
dying through staleness, as if they were undergoing, in darkness and in
dust, in an icy ebbing away, the ruin of old age, the impress of death.
They clasped each other.
They were drowned in the darkness. They fell down, down into the
shadows, into the abyss that they had willed.
He stammered:
"I will love you always."
But she and I both felt that he was lying again. We did not deceive
ourselves. But what matter, what matter?
Her lips on his lips, she murmured like a thorny caress among the
caresses:
"My husband will soon be home."
How little they really were at one! How, actually, there was nothing
but their fear that they had in common, and how they stirred their fear
up desperately. But their tremendous effort to commune somehow was
soon to be over.
They stopped talking. Words had already accomplished the work of
reviving their love. She merely murmured:
"I am yours, I am yours. I give myself to you. No, I do not give
myself to you. How can I give myself when I do not belong to myself?"
"Are you happy?" she asked again.
"I swear you are everything in the world to me."
* * * * * * * * *
Now, she felt, their bliss had already become a mere memory, and she
said almost plaintively:
"May God bless the bit of pleasure one has."
A doleful lament, the first signal of a tremendous fall, a prayer
blasphemous yet divine.
I saw him look at the clock and at the door. He was thinking of
leaving. He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was about to
give him. There was a suggestion of uneasiness, almost disgust, in his
expression.
"No," she said, "you are not going to love me always. You are going to
leave me. But I regret nothing. I never will regret anything.
Afterwards, when I return from--/this/--for good, to the great sorrow
that will never leave me again, I shall say, 'I have had a lover,' and
I shall come out from my nothingness to be happy for a moment."
He did not want to answer. He could not answer any more. He
stammered:
"Why do you doubt me?"
But they turned their eyes toward the window. They were afraid, they
were cold. They looked down at the space between the two houses and
saw a vague remnant of twilight slip away like a ship of glory.
It seemed to me that the window beside them entered the scene. They
gazed at it, dim, immense, blotting out everything around it. After
the brief interval of sinful passion, they were overwhelmed as if,
looking at the stainless azure of the window, they had seen a vision.
Then their eyes met.
"See, we stay here," she said, "looking at each other like two
miserable curs."
They separated. He seated himself on a chair, a sorry figure in the
dusk.
His mouth was open, his face was contracted. His eyes and his jaw were
self-condemnatory. You expected that in a few moments he would become
emaciated, and you would see the eternal skeleton.
And at last both were alike in their setting, made so as much by their
misery as by their human form. The night swallowed them up. I no
longer saw them.
. . . . .
Then, where is God, where is God? Why does He not intervene in this
frightful, regular crisis? Why does He not prevent, by a miracle, that
fearful miracle by which one who is adored suddenly or gradually comes
to be hated? Why does he not preserve man from having to mourn the
loss of all his dreams? Why does he not preserve him from the distress
of that sensuousness which flowers in his flesh and falls back on him
again like spittle?
Perhaps because I am a man like the man in the room, like all other
men, perhaps because what is bestial engrosses my attention now, I am
utterly terrified by the invincible recoil of the flesh.
"It is everything in the world," he had said. "It is nothing," he had
also said, but later. The echo of those two cries lingered in my ears.
Those two cries, not shouted but uttered in a low scarcely audible
voice, who shall declare their grandeur and the distance between them?
Who shall say? Above all, who shall know?
The man who can reply must be placed, as I am, above humanity, he must
be both among and apart from human beings to see the smile turn into
agony, the joy become satiety, and the union dissolve. For when you
take full part in life you do not see this, you know nothing about it.
You pass blindly from one extreme to the other. The man who uttered
the two cries that I still hear, "Everything!" and "Nothing!" had
forgotten the first when he was carried away by the second.
Who shall say? I wish some one would tell. What do words matter or
conventions? Of what use is the time-honoured custom of writers of
genius or mere talent to stop at the threshold of these descriptions,
as if full descriptions were forbidden? The thing ought to be sung in
a poem, in a masterpiece. It ought to be told down to the very bottom,
if the purpose be to show the creative force of our hopes, of our
wishes, which, when they burst into light, transform the world,
overthrow reality.
What richer alms could you bestow on these two lovers, when again love
will die between them? For this scene is not the last in their double
story. They will begin again, like every human being. Once more they
will try together, as much as they can, to seek shelter from life's
defeats, to find ecstasy, to conquer death. Once more they will seek
solace and deliverance. Again they will be seized by a thrill, by the
force of sin, which clings to the flesh like a shred of flesh.
Yet once again, when once again they see that they put infinity into
desire all in vain, they will be punished for the grandeur of their
aspiration.
I do not regret having surprised this simple, terrible secret. Perhaps
my having taken in and retained this sight in all its breadth, my
having learned that the living truth is sadder and more sublime than I
had ever believed, will be my sole glory.