He was very, very weak and lay absolutely still and silent, chained
fast by the baleful weight of his flesh. Death had already put an end
to even his faintest quiverings.
His wonderful companion sat exactly where his fixed eyes fell on her,
at the foot of the bed. She held her arms resting on the base board of
the bed with her beautiful hands drooping. Her profile sloped downward
slightly, that fine design, that delicate etching of eternal sweetness
upon the gentle background of the evening. Under the dainty arch of
her eyebrows her large eyes swam clear and pure, miniature skies. The
exquisite skin of her cheeks and forehead gleamed faintly, and her
luxuriant hair, which I had seen flowing, gracefully encircled her
brow, where her thoughts dwelt invisible as God.
She was alone with the man who lay there as if already in his grave--she
who had wished to cling to him by a thrill and to be his chaste widow
when he died. He and I saw nothing on earth except her face. And in
truth, there was nothing else to be seen in the deep shadows of the
evening.
A voice came from the bed. I scarcely recognised it.
"I haven't said everything yet that I want to say," said the voice.
Anna bent over the bed as if it were the edge of a coffin to catch the
words that were to issue for the last time, no doubt, from the
motionless and almost formless body.
"Shall I have the time? Shall I?"
It was difficult to catch the whisper, which almost stuck in his
throat. Then his voice accustomed itself to existence again and became
distinct.
"I should like to make a confession to you, Anna. I do not want this
thing to die with me. I am sorry to let this memory be snuffed out. I
am sorry for it. I hope it will never die.
"I loved once before I loved you.
"Yes, I loved the girl. The image I have left of her is a sad, gentle
one. I should like to snatch it from death. I am giving it to you
because you happen to be here."
He gathered himself together to have a clear vision of the woman of
whom he was speaking.
"She was fair-haired and fair-skinned," he said.
"You needn't be jealous, Anna. (People are jealous sometimes even when
they are not in love.) It was a few years after you were born. You
were a little child then, and nobody turned to look at you on the
streets except the mothers.
"We were engaged in the ancestral park of her parents. She had bright
curls tied with ribbons. I pranced on horseback for her. She smiled
for me.
"I was young and strong then, full of hope and full of the beginning of
things. I thought I was going to conquer the world, and even had the
choice of the means to conquer it. Alas, all I did was to cross
hastily over its surface. She was younger than I, a bud so recently,
blown, that one day, I remember, I saw her doll lying on the bench that
we were sitting on. We used to say to each other, 'We shall come back
to this park when we are old, shall we not?' We loved each other--you
understand--I have no time to tell you, but you understand, Anna, that
these few relics of memory that I give you at random are beautiful,
incredibly beautiful.
"She died the very day in spring when the date of our wedding was set.
We were both taken sick with a disease that was epidemic that year in
our country, and she did not have the strength to escape the monster.
That was twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years, Anna, between her
death and mine.
"And now here is the most precious secret, her name."
He whispered it. I did not catch it.
"Say it over again, Anna."
She repeated it, vague syllables which I caught without being able to
unite them into a word.
"I confide the name to you because you are here. If you were not here,
I should tell it to anyone, no matter whom, provided that would save
it."
He added in an even, measured voice, to make it hold out until the end:
"I have something else to confess, a wrong and a misfortune."
"Didn't you confess it to the priest?" she asked in surprise.
"I hardly told him anything," was all he replied.
And he resumed, speaking calmly, with his full voice:
"I wrote poems during our engagement, poems about ourselves. The
manuscript was named after her. We read the poems together, and we
both liked and admired them. 'Beautiful, beautiful!' she would say,
clapping her hands, whenever I showed her a new poem. And when we were
together, the manuscript was always with us--the most beautiful book
that had ever been written, we thought. She did not want the poems to
be published and get away from us. One day in the garden she told me
what she wanted. 'Never! Never!' she said over and over again, like an
obstinate, rebellious child, tossing her dainty head with its dancing
hair."
The man's voice became at once surer and more tremulous, as he filled
in and enlivened certain details in the old story.
"Another time, in the conservatory, when it had been raining
monotonously since morning, she asked, 'Philip'--she used to pronounce
my name just the way you do."
He paused, himself surprised by the primitive simplicity of what he had
just expressed.
"'Do you know,' she asked, 'the story of the English painter Rossetti?'
and she told me the episode, which had so vividly impressed her, how
Rossetti had promised the lady he loved to let her keep forever the
manuscript of the book he had written for her, and if she died, to lay
it beside her in her coffin. She died, and he actually carried out his
promise and buried the manuscript with her. But later, bitten by the
love of glory, he violated his promise and the tomb. 'You will let me
have your book if I die before you, and will not take it back, will
you, Philip?' And I promised laughingly, and she laughed too.
"I recovered from my illness slowly. When I was strong enough, they
told me that she had died. When I was able to go out, they took me to
the tomb, the vast family sepulchre which somewhere hid her new little
coffin.
"There's no use my telling you how miserable I was and how I grieved
for her. Everything reminded me of her. I was full of her, and yet
she was no more! As I recovered from the illness, during which my
memory had faded, each detail brought me a recollection. My grief was
a fearful reawakening of my love. The sight of the manuscript brought
my promise back to me. I put it in a box without reading it again,
although I had forgotten it, things having been blotted out of my mind
during my convalescence. I had the slab removed and the coffin opened,
and a servant put the book in her hands.
"I lived. I worked. I tried to write a book. I wrote dramas and
poems. But nothing satisfied me, and gradually I came to want our book
back.
"I knew it was beautiful and sincere and vibrant with the two hearts
that had given themselves to each other. Then, like a coward, three
years afterward, I tried to re-write it--to show it to the world. Anna,
you must have pity on us all! But I must say it was not only the
desire for glory and praise, as in the case of the English artist,
which impelled me to close my ears to the sweet, gentle voice out of
the past, so strong in its powerlessness, 'You will not take it back
from me, will you, Philip?' It was not only for the sake of showing
off in a book of great beauty. It was also to refresh my memory, for
all our love was in that book.
"I did not succeed in reconstructing the poems. The weakening of my
faculties soon after they were written, the three years afterward
during which I made a devout effort not to revive the poems even in
thought, since they were not to keep on living--all this had actually
wiped the book out of my mind. It was with difficulty that I recalled--
and then only by chance--the mere titles of some of the poems, or a few
of the verses. Of some parts, all I retained was just a confused echo.
I needed the manuscript itself, which was in the tomb.
"One night, I felt myself going there.
"I felt myself going there after periods of hesitation and inward
struggles which it is useless to tell you about because the struggles
themselves were useless. I thought of the other man, of the
Englishman, of my brother in misery and crime as I walked along the
length of the cemetery wall while the wind froze my legs. I kept
saying to myself it was not the same thing, and this insane assurance
was enough to make me keep on.
"I asked myself if I should take a light. With a light it would be
quick. I should see the box at once and should not have to touch
anything else--but then I should see /everything!/ I preferred to grope
in the dark. I had rubbed a handkerchief sprinkled with perfume over
my face, and I shall never forget the deception of this odour. For an
instant, in the stupefaction of my terror, I did not recognise the
first thing I touched--her necklace--I saw it again on her living body.
The box! The corpse gave it to me with a squashing sound. Something
grazed me faintly.
"I had meant to tell you only a few things, Anna. I thought I should
not have time to tell you how everything happened. But it is better
so, better for me that you should know all. Life, which has been so
cruel to me, is kind at this moment when you are listening, you who
will live. And my desire to express what I felt, to revive the past,
which made of me a being accursed during the days I am telling you
about, is a benefit this evening which passes from me to you, and from
you to me."
The young woman was bending toward him attentively. She was motionless
and silent. What could she have said, what could she have done, that
would have been sweeter than her silent attention?
"The rest of the night I read the stolen manuscript. Was it not the
only way to forget her death and think of her life?
"I soon saw that the poems were not what I had thought them to be.
"They game me a growing impression of being confused and much too
lengthy. The book so long adored was no better than what I had done
afterwards. I recalled, step by step, the background, the occasion,
the vanished gesture that had inspired these verses, and in spite of
their resurrection, I found them undeniably commonplace and
extravagant.
"An icy despair gripped me, as I bent my head over these remains of
song. Their sojourn in the tomb seemed to have deformed and crushed
the life out of my verses. They were as miserable as the wasted hand
from which I had taken them. They had been so sweet! 'Beautiful,
beautiful!' the happy little voice had cried so many times while she
clasped her hands in admiration.
"It was because her voice and the poems had been vibrating with life
and because the ardour and delirium of our love had adorned my rhymes
with all their charms, that they seemed so beautiful. But all that was
past, and in reality our love was no more.
"It was oblivion that I read at the same time as I read my book. Yes,
death had been contagious. My verses had remained there too long,
sleeping down below there in awful peace--in the sepulchre into which I
should never have dared to enter if love had still been alive. She was
indeed dead.
"I thought of what a useless and sacrilegious thing I had done and how
useless and sacrilegious everything is that we promise and swear to
here below.
"She was indeed dead. How I cried that night. It was my true night of
mourning. When you have just lost a beloved there is a wretched
moment, after the brutal shock, when you begin to understand that all
is over, and blank despair surrounds you and looms like a giant. That
night was a moment of such despair when I was under the sway of my
crime and the disenchantment of my poems, greater than the crime,
greater than everything.
"I saw her again. How pretty she was, with her bright, lively ways,
her animated charm, her rippling laugh, the endless number of questions
she was always asking. I saw her again in the sunlight on the bright
lawn. She was wearing a dress of old rose satin, and she bent over and
smoothed the soft folds of her skirt and looked at her little feet.
(Near us was the whiteness of a statue.) I remembered how once I had
for fun tried to find a single flaw in her complexion. Not a spot on
forehead, cheek, chin--anywhere. Her skin was as smooth as if it had
been polished. I felt as though that exquisite delicate face were
something ever in flight that had paused for an instant for my sake,
and I stammered, almost with tears in my voice, 'It is too much! It is
too much!' Everybody looked on her as a princess. In the streets of
the town the shopkeepers were glad to see her pass by. Did she not
have a queenly air as she sat half-reclining on the great carved stone
bench in the park, that great stone bench which was now a kind of empty
tomb?
"For a moment in the midst of time I knew how much I had loved her, she
who had been alive and who was dead, who had been the sun and who was
now a kind of obscure spring under the earth.
"And I also mourned the human heart. That night I understood the
extremes of what I had felt. Then the inevitable forgetfulness came,
the time came when it did not sadden me to remember that I had mourned.
. . . . .
"That is the confession I wanted to make to you, Anna. I wanted this
story of love, which is a quarter of a century old, never to end. It
was so real and thrilling, it was such a big thing, that I told it to
you in all simplicity, to you who will survive. After that I came to
love you and I do love you. I offer to you as to a sovereign the image
of the little creature who will always be seventeen."
He sighed. What he said proved to me once more the inadequacy of
religion to comfort the human heart.
"Now I adore you and you alone--I who adored her, I whom she adored.
How can there possibly be a paradise where one would find happiness
again?"
His voice rose, his inert arms trembled. He came out of his profound
immobility for a moment.
"Ah, /you/ are the one, /you/ are the one--/you/ alone."
And a great cry of impotence broke from him.
"Anna, Anna, if you and I had been really married, if we had lived
together as man and wife, if we had had children, if you had been
beside me as you are this evening, but really beside me!"
He fell back. He had cried out so loud that even if there had been no
breach in the wall, I should have heard him in my room. He voiced his
whole dream, he threw it out passionately. This sincerity, which was
indifferent to everything, had a definite significance which bruised my
heart.
"Forgive me. Forgive me. It is almost blasphemy. I could not help
it."
He stopped. You felt his will-power making his face calm, his soul
compelling him to silence, but his eyes seemed to mourn.
He repeated in a lower voice, as if to himself, "You! You!"
He fell asleep with "You" on his lips.
. . . . .
He died that night. I saw him die. By a strange chance he was alone
at the last moment.
There was no death rattle, no death agony, properly speaking. He did
not claw the bedclothes with his fingers, nor speak, nor cry. No last
sigh, no last flash.
He had asked Anna for a drink. As there was no more water in the room
and the nurse happened to be away at that moment, she had gone out to
get some quickly. She did not even shut the door.
The lamplight filled the room. I watched the man's face and felt, by
some sign, that the great silence at that moment was drowning him.
Then instinctively I cried out to him. I could not help crying out so
that he should not be alone.
"I see you!"
My strange voice, disused from speaking, penetrated into the room.
But he died at the very instant that I gave him my madman's alms. His
head dropped back stiffly, his eyeballs rolled. Anna came in again.
She must have caught the sound of my outcry vaguely, for she hesitated.
She saw him. A fearful cry burst from her with all the force of her
healthy body, a true widow's cry. She dropped on her knees at the
bedside.
The nurse came in right after her and raised her arms. Silence
reigned, that flashing up of incredible misery into which you sink
completely in the presence of the dead, no matter who you are or where
you are. The woman on her knees and the woman standing up watched the
man who was stretched there, inert as if he had never lived. They were
both almost dead.
Then Anna wept like a child. She rose. The nurse went to tell the
others. Instinctively, Anna, who was wearing a light waist, picked up
a black shawl that the nurse had left on a chair and put it around her.
. . . . .
The room, so recently desolate, now filled with life.
They lit candles everywhere, and the stars, visible through the window,
disappeared.
They knelt down, and cried and prayed to him. The dead man held
command. "He" was always on their lips. Servants were there whom I
had not yet seen but whom he knew well. These people around him all
seemed to be lying, as though it was they who were suffering, they who
were dying, and he were alive.
"He must have suffered a great deal when he died," said the doctor, in
a low voice to the nurse, at a moment when he was quite near me.
"But he was so weak, the poor man!"
"Weakness does not prevent suffering except in the eyes of others,"
said the doctor.
. . . . .
The next morning the drab light of the early day fell upon the faces
and the melancholy funeral lights. The coming of the day, keen and
cold, had a depressing effect upon the atmosphere of the room, making
it heavier, thicker.
A voice in a low apologetic tone for a moment interrupted the silence
that had lasted for hours.
"You mustn't open the window. It isn't good for the dead body."
"It is cold," some one muttered.
Two hands went up and drew a fur piece close. Some one rose, and then
sat down again. Some one else turned his head. There was a sigh.
It was as if they had taken advantage of these few words to come out of
the calm in which they had been concealed. Then they glanced once more
at the man on the bier--motionless, inexorably motionless.
I must have fallen asleep when all at once I heard the church bells
ringing in the grey sky.
After that harassing night there was a relaxation from rigid attention
to the stillness of death, and an inexplicable sweetness in the ringing
of the bells carried me back forcibly to my childhood. I thought of
the countryside where I used to hear the bells ringing, of my native
land, where everything was peaceful and good, and the snow meant
Christmas, and the sun was a cool disk that one could and should look
at.
The tolling of the bells was over. The echo quietly died away, and
then the echo of the echo. Another bell struck, sounding the hour.
Eight o'clock, eight sonorous detached strokes, beating with terrible
regularity, with invincible calm, simple, simple. I counted them, and
when they had ceased to pulsate in the air, I could not help counting
them over again. It was time that was passing--formless time, and the
human effort that defined it and regularized it and made of it a work
as of destiny.