The same background, the same half-light tarnishing them as when I
first saw them together. Amy and her lover were seated beside each
other, not far from me.
They seemed to have been talking for some time already.
She was sitting behind him, on the sofa, concealed by the shadow of the
evening and the shadow of the man. He was bending over, pale and
vaguely outlined, with his hands on his knees.
The night was still cloaked in the grey silken softness of evening.
Soon it would cast off this mantle and appear in all its bare darkness.
It was coming on them like an incurable illness. They seemed to have a
presentiment of it and sought refuge from the fatal shadows in talking
and thinking of other things.
They talked apathetically about this and that. I heard the names of
places and people. They mentioned a railway station, a public walk, a
florist.
All at once she stopped and hid her face in her hands.
He took her wrists, with a sad slowness that showed how much he was
used to these spells, and spoke to her without knowing what to say,
stammering and drawing as close as he could to her.
"Why are you crying? Tell me why you are crying."
She did not answer. Then she took her hands away from her eyes and
looked at him.
"Why? Do I know? Tears are not words."
. . . . .
I watched her cry--drown herself in a flood of tears. It is a great
thing to be in the presence of a rational being who cries. A weak,
broken creature shedding tears makes the same impression as an all-
powerful god to whom one prays. In her weakness and defeat Amy was
above human power.
A kind of superstitious admiration seized me before this woman's face
bathed from an inexhaustible source, this face sincere and truthful.
. . . . .
She stopped crying and lifted her head. Without his questioning her
again she said:
"I am crying because one is alone.
"One cannot get away from one's self. One cannot even confess
anything. One is alone. And then everything passes, everything
changes, everything takes flight, and as soon as everything takes
flight one is alone. There are times when I see this better than at
other times. And then I cannot help crying."
She was getting sadder and sadder, but then she had a little access of
pride, and I saw a smile gently stir her veil of melancholy.
"I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would
not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of
lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all
alone."
Disturbed to see her growing distress, he tried to raise her spirits.
"We cannot say that, we who have reshaped our destiny. You, who have
achieved a great act of will--"
But what he said was borne away like chaff.
"What good was it? Everything is useless. In spite of what I have
tried to do, I am alone. My sin cannot change the face of things.
"It is not by sin that we attain happiness, nor is it by virtue, nor is
it by that kind of divine fire by which one makes great instinctive
decisions and which is neither good nor evil. It is by none of these
things that one reaches happiness. One /never/ reaches happiness."
She paused, and said, as if she felt her fate recoiling upon her:
"Yes, I know I have done wrong, that those who love me most would
detest me if they knew. My mother, if she knew--she who is so
indulgent--would be so unhappy. I know that our love exists with the
reprobation of all that is wise and just and is condemned by my
mother's tears. But what's the use of being ashamed any more? Mother,
if you knew, you would have pity on my happiness."
"You are naughty," he murmured feebly.
She stroked the man's forehead lightly, and said in a tone of
extraordinary assurance:
"You know I don't deserve to be called naughty. You know what I am
saying is above a personal application. You know better than I do that
one is alone. One day when I was speaking about the joy of living and
you were as sad as I am to-day, you looked at me, and said you did not
know what I was thinking, in spite of my explanations. You showed me
that love is only a kind of festival of solitude, and holding me in
your arms, you ended by exclaiming, 'Our love--I am our love,' and I
gave the inevitable answer, alas, 'Our love--I am our love.'"
He wanted to speak, but she checked him.
"Stop! Take me, squeeze my hands, hold me close, give me a long, long
kiss, do with me what you want--just to bring yourself close to me,
close to me! And tell me that you are suffering. Why, don't you feel
/my/ grief?"
He said nothing, and in the twilight shroud that wrapped them round, I
saw his head make the needless gesture of denial. I saw all the misery
emanating from these two, who for once by chance in the shadows did not
know how to lie any more.
It was true that they were there together, and yet there was nothing to
unite them. There was a void between them. Say what you will, do what
you will, revolt, break into a passion, dispute, threaten--in vain.
Isolation will conquer you. I saw there was nothing to unite them,
nothing.
She kept on in the same strain.
He seemed to be used to these sad monologues, uttered in the same tone,
tremendous invocations to the impossible. He did not answer any more.
He held her in his arms, rocked her quietly, and caressed her with
delicate tenderness. He treated her as if she were a sick child he was
nursing, without telling her what was the matter.
But he was disturbed by her contact. Even when prostrate and desolate,
she quivered warm in his arms. He coveted this prey even though
wounded. I saw his eyes fixed on her, while she gave herself up freely
to her sadness. He pressed his body against hers. It was she whom he
wanted. Her words he threw aside. He did not care for them. They did
not caress him. It was she whom he wanted, she!
Separation! They were very much alike in ideas and temperament, and
just then they were helping each other as much as they could. But I
saw clearly--I who was a spectator apart from men and whose gaze soared
above them--that they were strangers, and that in spite of all
appearances they did not see nor hear each other any more. They
conversed as best they could, but neither could yield to the other, and
each tried to conquer the other. And this terrible battle broke my
heart.
. . . . .
She understood his desire. She said plaintively, like a child at
fault:
"I am not feeling well."
Then, in a sudden change of mood, she gave herself up to love, offering
her whole self with her wounded woman's heart.
* * * * * * * * *
They rose and shook off the dream that had cast them to the ground.
He was as dejected as she. I bent over to catch what he was saying.
"If I had only known!" he breathed in a whisper.
Prostrated but more distrustful of each other with a crime between
them, they went slowly over to the grey window, cleansed by a streak of
twilight.
How much they were like themselves on the other evening. It /was/ the
other evening. Never had the impression been borne in upon me so
strongly that actions are vain and pass like phantoms.
The man was seized with a trembling. And, vanquished, despoiled of all
his pride, of all his masculine reserve, he no longer had the strength
to keep back the avowal of shamed regret.
"One can't master one's self," he stammered, hanging his head. "It is
fate."
They caught hold of each other's hands, shuddered slightly, panting,
dispirited, tormented by their hearts.
. . . . .
Fate!
In so speaking they saw further than the flesh. In their remorse and
disgust it was not mere physical disillusionment that so crushed them.
They saw further. They were overcome by an impression of bleak truth,
of aridity, of growing nothingness, at the thought that they had so
many times grasped, rejected, and vainly grasped again their frail
carnal ideal.
They felt that everything was fleeting, that everything wore out, that
everything that was not dead would die, and that even the illusory ties
holding them together would not endure. Their sadness did not bring
them together. On the contrary, they were separated by all the force
of their two sorrows. To suffer together, alas, what disunion!
And the condemnation of love itself came from her, in a cry of agony:
"Oh, our great, our immense love! I feel that little by little I am
recovering from it!"
. . . . .
She threw back her head, and raised her eyes.
"Oh, the first time!" she said.
She went on, while both of them saw that first time when their hands
had found each other.
"I knew that some day all that emotion would die, and, in spite of our
promises, I wanted time to stand still.
"But time did not stand still, and now we scarcely love each other."
He made a gesture as of denial.
"It is not only you, my dear, who are drifting away," she continued.
"I am, too. At first I thought it was only you. But then I understood
my poor heart and realised that in spite of you, I could do nothing
against time."
She went on slowly, now with her eyes turned away, now looking at him.
"Alas, some day, I may say to you, 'I no longer love you.' Alas, alas,
some day I may say to you, 'I have never loved you!'
"This is the wound--time, which passes and changes us. The separation
of human beings that deceive themselves is nothing in comparison. One
can live even so. But the passage of time! To grow old, to think
differently, to die. I am growing old and I am dying, I. It has taken
me a long time to understand it. I am growing old. I /am/ not old,
but I am growing old. I have a few grey hairs already. The first grey
hair, what a blow!
"Oh, this blotting out of the colour of your hair. It gives you the
feeling of being covered with your shroud, of dry bones, and
tombstones."
She rose and cried out into the void:
"Oh, to escape the network of wrinkles!"
. . . . .
She continued:
"I said to myself, 'By slow degrees you will get there. Your skin will
wither. Your eyes, which smile even in repose, will always be
watering. Your breasts will shrink and hang on your skeleton like loose
rags. Your lower jaw will sag from the tiredness of living. You will
be in a constant shiver of cold, and your appearance will be
cadaverous. Your voice will be cracked, and people who now find it
charming to listen to you will be repelled. The dress that hides you
too much now from men's eyes will not sufficiently hide your monstrous
nudity, and people will turn their eyes away and not even dare to think
of you.'"
She choked and put her hands to her mouth, overcome by the truth, as if
she had too much to say. It was magnificent and terrifying.
He caught her in his arms, in dismay. But she was as in a delirium,
transported by a universal grief. You would have thought that this
funereal truth had just come to her like a sudden piece of bad news.
"I love you, but I love the past even more. I long for it, I long for
it, I am consumed with longing for it. The past! I shall cry, I shall
suffer because the past will never come back again.
"But love the past as much as you will, it will never come back. Death
is everywhere, in the ugliness of what has been too long beautiful, in
the tarnishing of what has been clean and pure, in the forgetfulness of
what is long past, in daily habits, which are the forgetfulness of what
is near. We catch only glimpses of life. Death is the one thing we
really have time to see. Death is the only palpable thing. Of what
use is it to be beautiful and chaste? They will walk over our graves
just the same.
"A day is coming when I shall be no more. I am crying because I shall
surely die. There is an invincible nothingness in everything and
everybody. So when one thinks of that, dear, one smiles and forgives.
One does not bear grudges. But goodness won in that way is worse than
anything else."
. . . . .
He bent over and kissed her hands. He enveloped her in a warm,
respectful silence, but, as always, I felt he was master of himself.
"I have always thought of death," she continued in a changed voice.
"One day I confessed to my husband how it haunted me. He launched out
furiously. He told me I was a neurasthenic and that he must look after
me. He made me promise to be like himself and never think of such
things, to be healthy and well-balanced, as he was.
"That was not true. It was he who suffered from the disease of
tranquillity and indifference, a paralysis, a grey malady, and his
blindness was an infirmity, and his peace was that of a dog who lives
for the sake of living, of a beast with a human face.
"What was I to do? Pray? No. That eternal dialogue in which you are
always alone is crushing. Throw yourself into some occupation? Work?
No use. Doesn't work always have to be done over again? Have children
and bring them up? That makes you feel both that you are done and
finished and that you are beginning over again to no purpose. However,
who knows?"
It was the first time that she softened.
"I have not been given the chance to practise the devotion, the
submission, the humiliation of a mother. Perhaps that would have
guided me in life. I was denied a little child."
For a moment, lowering her eyes, letting her hands fall, yielding to
the maternal impulse, she only thought of loving and regretting the
child that had not been vouchsafed to her--without perceiving that if
she considered it her only possible salvation, it was because she did
not have it.
"Charity? They say that it makes us forget everything. Oh, yes, to go
distributing alms on the snowy streets, in a great fur cloak," she
murmured and made a tired gesture, while the lover and I felt the
shiver of the cold rainy evening and of all the winters past and yet to
come.
"All that is diversion, deception. It does not alter the truth a
particle. We shall die, we are going to die."
She stopped crying, dried her eyes and assumed a tone so positive and
calm that it gave the impression that she was leaving the subject.
"I want to ask you a question. Answer me frankly. Have you ever
dared, dear, even in the depths of your heart, to set a date, a date
relatively far off, but exact and absolute, with four figures, and to
say, 'No matter how old I shall live to be, on that day I shall be
dead--while everything else will go on, and little by little my empty
place will be destroyed or filled again?'"
The directness of her question disturbed him. But it seemed to me that
he tried most to avoid giving her a reply that would heighten her
obsession.
And all at once, she remembered something he had once said to her, and
cleverly reminded him of it so as to close his mouth in advance and
torture herself still more.
"Do you remember? One evening, by lamplight. I was looking through a
book. You were watching me. You came to me, you knelt down and put
your arms around my waist, and laid your head in my lap. There were
tears in your eyes. I can still hear you. 'I am thinking,' you said,
'that this moment will never come again. I am thinking that you are
going to change, to die, and go away. I am thinking so truly, so
hotly, how precious these moments are, how precious you are, you who
will never again be just what you are now, and I adore your ineffable
presence as it is now.' You looked at my hand, you found it small and
white, and you said it was an extraordinary treasure, which would
disappear. Then you repeated, 'I adore you,' in a voice which trembled
so, that I have never heard anything truer or more beautiful, for you
were right as a god is right.
"Alas!" he said.
He saw the tears in her eyes. Then he bowed his head. When he lifted
it again, I had a vague intuition that he would know what to answer,
but had not yet formulated how to say it.
"Poor creatures, a brief existence, a few stray thoughts in the depths
of a room--that is what we are," she said, lifting her head and looking
at him, hoping for an impossible contradiction, as a child cries for a
star.
He murmured:
"Who knows what we are?"
. . . . .
She interrupted him with a gesture of infinite weariness.
"I know what you are going to say. You are going to talk to me about
the beauty of suffering. I know your noble ideas. I love them, my
love, your beautiful theories, but I do not believe in them. I would
believe them if they consoled me and effaced death."
With a manifest effort, as uncertain of himself as she was of herself,
feeling his way, he replied:
"They would efface it, perhaps, if you believed in them."
She turned toward him and took one of his hands in both of hers. She
questioned him with inexorable patience, then she slipped to her knees
before him, like a lifeless body, humbled herself in the dust, wrecked
in the depths of despair, and implored him:
"Oh, answer me! I should be so happy if you could answer me. I feel
as though you really could!"
He bent over her, as if on the edge of an abyss of questioning:
"Do you know what we are?" he murmured. "Everything we say, everything
we think, everything we believe, is fictitious. We know nothing.
Nothing is sure or solid."
"You are wrong," she cried. "There /is/ something absolute, our
sorrow, our need, our misery. We can see and touch it. Deny
everything else, but our beggary, who can deny that?"
"You are right," he said, "it is the only absolute thing in the world."
. . . . .
"Then, /we/ are the only absolute thing in the world," he deduced.
He caught at this. He had found a fulcrum. "We--" he said. He had
found the cry against death, he repeated it, and tried again. "We--"
It was sublime to see him beginning to resist.
"It is we who endure forever."
"Endure forever! On the contrary, it is we who pass away."
"We see things pass, but we endure."
She shrugged her shoulders with an air of denial. There almost was
hatred in her voice as she said:
"Yes--no--perhaps. After all, what difference does it make to me? That
does not console me."
"Who knows--maybe we need sadness and shadow, to make joy and light."
"Light would exist without shadow," she insisted.
"No," he said gently.
"That does not console me," she said again.
. . . . .
Then he remembered that he had already thought out all these things.
"Listen," he said, in a voice tremulous and rather solemn as if he were
making a confession. "I once imagined two beings who were at the end
of their life, and were recalling all they had suffered."
"A poem!" she said, discouraged.
"Yes," he said, "one of those which might be so beautiful."
It was remarkable to see how animated he became. For the first time he
appeared sincere--when abandoning the living example of their own
destiny for the fiction of his imagination. In referring to his poem,
he had trembled. You felt he was becoming his genuine self and that he
had faith. She raised her head to listen, moved by her tenacious need
of hearing something, though she had no confidence in it.
"The man and the woman are believers," he began. "They are at the end
of their life, and they are happy to die for the reasons that one is
sad to live. They are a kind of Adam and Eve who dream of the paradise
to which they are going to return. The paradise of purity. Paradise
is light. Life on earth is obscurity. That is the motif of the song I
have sketched, the light that they desire, the shadow that they are."
"Like us," said Amy.
He told of the life of the man and the woman of his poem. Amy listened
to him, and accepted what he was saying. Once she put her hands on her
heart and said, "Poor people!" Then she got a little excited. She
felt he was going too far. She did not wish so much darkness, maybe
because she was tired or because the picture when painted by some one
else seemed exaggerated.
Dream and reality here coincided. The woman of the poem also protested
at this point.
I was carried away by the poet's voice, as he recited, swaying
slightly, in the spell of the harmony of his own dream:
"At the close of a life of pain and suffering the woman still looked
ahead with the curiosity she had when she entered life. Eve ended as
she had begun. All her subtle eager woman's soul climbed toward the
secret as if it were a kind of kiss on the lips of her life. She
wanted to be happy."
Amy was now more interested in her companion's words. The curse of the
lovers in the poem, sister to the curse she felt upon herself, gave her
confidence. But her personality seemed to be shrinking. A few moments
before she had dominated everything. Now she was listening, waiting,
absorbed.
"The lover reproached the woman for contradicting herself in claiming
earthly and celestial happiness at the same time. She answered him
with profundity, that the contradiction lay not in herself, but in the
things she wanted.
"The lover then seized another healing wand and with desperate
eagerness, he explained, he shouted, 'Divine happiness has not the same
form as human happiness. Divine happiness is outside of ourselves.'
"The woman rose, trembling.
"'That is not true! That is not true!' she exclaimed. 'No, my
happiness is not outside of me, seeing it is /my/ happiness. The
universe is God's universe, but I am the god of my own happiness. What
I want,' she added, with perfect simplicity, 'is to be happy, I, just
as I am, and with all my suffering.'"
Amy started. The woman in the poem had put her problem in a clearer
and deeper manner, and Amy was more like that woman than herself.
"'I, with all my suffering,' the man repeated.
"Suffering--important word! It leads us to the heart of reality. Human
suffering is a positive thing, which requires a positive answer, and
sad as it is, the word is beautiful, because of the absolute truth it
contains. 'I, with all my suffering!' It is an error to believe that
we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a
formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of
suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would
remain?
"And the woman said, 'My God, I do not wish for heaven!'"
"Well, then," said Amy, trembling, "it follows that we can be miserable
in paradise."
"Paradise is life," said the poet.
Amy was silent and remained with her head lifted, comprehending at last
that the whole poem was simply a reply to her question and that he had
revived in her soul a loftier and a juster thought.
"Life is exalted to perfection as it ends," the poet went on. "'It is
beautiful to reach the end of one's days,' said the lover. 'It is in
this way that we have lived paradise.'
"There is the truth," the poet concluded. "It does not wipe out death.
It does not diminish space, nor halt time. But it makes us what we are
in essential. Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with
sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream
of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to
blood and earth. 'Just as I am!' Remember that. We are a great
mixture. We are more than we believe. Who knows what we are?"
On the woman's face, which the terror of death had rigidly contracted,
a smile dawned. She asked with childish dignity:
"Why did you not tell me this right away when I asked you?"
"You would not have understood me then. You had run your dream of
distress into a blind alley. I had to take the truth along a different
way so as to present it to you anew."
. . . . .
After that they fell silent. For a fraction of time they had come as
close to each other as human beings can come down here below--because of
their august assent to the lofty truth, to the arduous truth (for it is
hard to understand that happiness is at the same time happy and
unhappy). She believed him, however, she, the rebel, she, the
unbeliever, to whom he had given a true heart to touch.