I went out on the street like an exile, I who am an everyday man, who
resemble everybody else so much, too much. I went through the streets
and crossed the squares with my eyes fixed upon things without seeing
them. I was walking, but I seemed to be falling from dream to dream,
from desire to desire. A door ajar, an open window gave me a pang. A
woman passing by grazed against me, a woman who told me nothing of what
she might have told me. I dreamed of her tragedy and of mine. She
entered a house, she disappeared, she was dead.
I stood still, a prey to a thousand thoughts, stifled in the robe of
the evening. From a closed window on the ground floor floated a strain
of music. I caught the beauty of a sonata as I would catch distinct
human words, and for a moment I listened to what the piano was
confiding to the people inside.
Then I sat down on a bench. On the opposite side of the avenue lit by
the setting sun two men also seated themselves on a bench. I saw them
clearly. They seemed overwhelmed by the same destiny, and a mutual
sympathy seemed to unite them. You could tell they liked each other.
One was speaking, the other was listening.
I read a secret tragedy. As boys they had been immensely fond of each
other. They had always been of the same mind and shared their ideas.
One of them got married, and it was the married one who was now
speaking. He seemed to be feeding their common sorrow.
The bachelor had been in the habit of visiting his home, always keeping
his proper distance, though perhaps vaguely loving the young wife.
However, he respected her peace and her happiness. The married man was
telling him that his wife had ceased to love him, while he still adored
her with his whole being. She had lost interest in him, and turned
away from him. She did not laugh and did not smile except when there
were other people present. He spoke of this grief, this wound to his
love, to his right. His right! He had unconsciously believed that he
had a right over her, and he lived in this belief. Then he found out
that he had no right.
Here the friend thought of certain things she had said to him, of a
smile she had given him. Although he was good and modest and still
perfectly pure, a warm, irresistible hope insinuated itself into his
heart. Listening to the story of despair that his friend confided to
him, he raised his face bit by bit and gave the woman a smile. And
nothing could keep that evening, now falling grey upon those two men,
from being at once an end and a beginning.
A couple, a man and a woman--poor human beings almost always go in
pairs--approached, and passed. I saw the empty space between them. In
life's tragedy, separation is the only thing one sees. They had been
happy, and they were no longer happy. They were almost old already.
He did not care for her, although they were growing old together. What
were they saying? In a moment of open-heartedness, trusting to the
peacefulness reigning between them at that time, he owned up to an old
transgression, to a betrayal scrupulously and religiously hidden until
then. Alas, his words brought back an irreparable agony. The past,
which had gently lain dead, rose to life again for suffering. Their
former happiness was destroyed. The days gone by, which they had
believed happy, were made sad; and that is the woe in everything.
This couple was effaced by another, a young one, whose conversation I
also imagined. They were beginning, they were going to love. Their
hearts were so shy in finding each other. "Do you want me to go on
that trip?" "Shall I do this and that?" She answered, "No." An
intense feeling of modesty gave this first avowal of love so humbly
solicited the form of a disavowal. But yet they were already thinking
of the full flower of their love.
Other couples passed by, and still others. This one now--he talking,
she saying nothing. It was difficult for him to master himself. He
begged her to tell him what she was thinking of. She answered. He
listened. Then, as if she had said nothing, he begged her again, still
harder, to tell him. There he was, uncertain, oscillating between
night and day. All he needed was for her to say one word, if he only
believed it. You saw him, in the immense city, clinging to that one
being. The next instant I was separated from these two lovers who
watched and persecuted each other.
Turn where you will, everywhere, the man and the woman ever confronting
each other, the man who loves a hundred times, the woman who has the
power to love so much and to forget so much. I went on my way again.
I came and went in the midst of the naked truth. I am not a man of
peculiar and exceptional traits. I recognise myself in everybody. I
have the same desires, the same longings as the ordinary human being.
Like everybody else I am a copy of the truth spelled out in the Room,
which is, "I am alone and I want what I have not and what I shall never
have." It is by this need that people live, and by this need that
people die.
But now I was tired of having desired too much. I suddenly felt old.
I should never recover from the wound in my breast. The dream of peace
that I had had a moment before attracted and tempted me only because it
was far away. Had I realised it, I should simply have dreamed another
dream.
. . . . .
Now I looked for a word. The people who live my truth, what do they
say when they speak of themselves? Does the echo of what I am thinking
issue from their mouths, or error, or falsehood?
Night fell. I looked for a word like mine, a word to lean upon, a word
to sustain me. And it seemed to me that I was going along groping my
way as if expecting some one to come from round the corner and tell me
everything.
I did not return to my room. I did not want to leave the crowds that
evening. I looked for a place that was alive.
I went into a large restaurant so as to hear voices around me. There
were only a few vacant places, and I found a seat in a corner near a
table at which three people were dining. I gave my order, and while my
eyes mechanically followed the white-gloved hand pouring soup into my
plate from a silver cup, I listened to the general hubbub.
All I could catch was what my three neighbours were saying. They were
talking of people in the place whom they knew, then of various friends.
Their persiflage and the consistent irony of their remarks surprised
me.
Nothing they said was worth the while, and the evening promised to be
useless like the rest.
A few minutes later, the head waiter, while serving me with filets of
sole, nodded his head and winked his eye in the direction of one of the
guests.
"M. Villiers, the famous writer," he whispered proudly.
I recognised M. Villiers. He resembled his portraits and bore his
young glory gracefully. I envied that man his ability to write and say
what he thought. I studied his profile and admired its worldly
distinction. It was a fine modern profile, the straightness of it
broken by the silken point of his well-kept moustache, by the perfect
curve of his shoulder, and by the butterfly's wing of his white
necktie.
I lifted my glass to my lips when suddenly I stopped and felt all my
blood rush to my heart.
This is what I heard:
"What's the theme of the novel you're working on?"
"Truth," replied Pierre Villiers.
"What?" exclaimed his friend.
"A succession of human beings caught just as they are."
"What subject?" somebody asked.
People turned and listened to him. Two young diners not far away
stopped talking and put on an idling air, evidently with their ears
pricked. In a sumptuous purple alcove, a man in evening clothes, with
sunken eyes and drawn features, was smoking a fat cigar, his whole life
concentrated in the fragrant glow of his tobacco. His companion, her
bare elbow on the table, enveloped in perfume and sparkling with
jewels, and overloaded with the heavy artificiality of luxury, turned
her simple moon-like face toward the speaker.
"This is the subject," said Pierre Villiers. "It gives me scope to
amuse and tell the truth at the same time. A man pierces a hole in the
wall of a boarding-house room, and watches what is going on in the next
room."
. . . . .
I must have looked at the speakers just then with a rather sorry
expression of bewilderment. Then I quickly lowered my head like a
child afraid to be seen.
They had spoken for /me,/ and I sensed a strange secret service
intrigue around me. Then, in an instant this impression, which had got
the better of my common sense, gave way. Evidently a pure coincidence.
Still I was left with the vague apprehension that they were going to
notice that I /knew,/ and were going to recognise me.
One of the novelist's friends begged him to tell more of his story. He
consented.
He was going to tell it in my presence!
. . . . .
With admirable art in the use of words, gestures, and mimicry, and with
a lively elegance and a contagious laugh, he described a series of
brilliant, surprising scenes. Under cover of his scheme, which brought
all the scenes out into peculiar relief and gave them a special
intensity, he retailed a lot of amusing oddities, described comical
persons and things, heaped up picturesque and piquant details, coined
typical and witty proper names, and invented complicated and ingenious
situations. He succeeded in producing irresistible effects, and the
whole was in the latest style.
They said, "Ah!" and "Oh!" and opened their eyes wide.
"Bravo! A sure success! A corking funny idea!"
"All the characters who pass before the eyes of the man spying upon
them are amusing, even the man who kills himself. Nothing forgotten.
The whole of humanity is there."
But I had not recognized a single thing in the entire show.
A stupor and a sort of shame overwhelmed me as I heard that man trying
to extract the utmost entertainment possible from the dark happenings
that had been torturing me for a month.
I thought of that great voice, now silenced, which had said so clearly
and forcefully that the writers of to-day imitate the caricaturists.
I, who had penetrated into the heart of humanity and returned again,
found nothing human in this jiggling caricature! It was so superficial
that it was a lie.
He said in front of me--of me the awful witness:
"It is man stripped of all outward appearances that I want people to
see. Others are fiction, I am the truth."
"It has a philosophical bearing, too."
"Perhaps. But that wasn't my object. Thank God, I am a writer, and
not a thinker."
And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent--the truth,
that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my
eyes, and whose taste was in my mouth.
Was I so utterly forsaken? Would no one speak the word I was in search
of?
. . . . .
The Room was flooded with moonlight. In that magnificent setting there
was an obscure white couple, two silent human beings with marble faces.
The fire was out. The clock had finished its work and had stopped, and
was listening with its heart.
The man's face dominated. The woman was at his feet. They did
nothing. An air of tenderness hovered over them. They looked like
monuments gazing at the moon.
He spoke. I recognised his voice. It lit up his face for me, which
had been shrouded from my sight before. It was /he,/ the nameless
lover and poet whom I had seen twice before.
He was telling Amy that on his way that evening he had met a poor
woman, with her baby in her arms.
She walked, jostled and borne along by the crowd returning home from
work, and finally was tossed aside up against a post under a porch, and
stopped as though nailed there.
"I went up to her," he said, "and saw she was smiling.
. . . . .
"What was she smiling at? At life, on account of her child. Under the
refuge where she was cowering, facing the setting sun, she was thinking
of the growth of her child in the days to come. However terrible they
might be, they would be around him, for him, in him. They would be the
same thing as her breath, her walk, her look.
"So profound was the smile of this creator who bore her burden and who
raised her head and gazed into the sun, without even looking down at
the child or listening to its babbling.
"I worked this woman and child up into a poem."
He remained motionless for a moment, then said gently without pausing,
in that voice from the Beyond which we assume when we recite, obeying
what we say and no longer mastering it:
"The woman from the depths of her rags, a waif, a martyr--smiled. She
must have a divine heart to be so tired and yet smile. She loved the
sky, the light, which the unformed little being would love some day.
She loved the chilly dawn, the sultry noontime, the dreamy evening.
The child would grow up, a saviour, to give life to everything again.
Starting at the dark bottom he would ascend the ladder and begin life
over again, life, the only paradise there is, the bouquet of nature.
He would make beauty beautiful. He would make eternity over again with
his voice and his song. And clasping the new-born infant close, she
looked at all the sunlight she had given the world. Her arms quivered
like wings. She dreamed in words of fondling. She fascinated all the
passersby that looked at her. And the setting sun bathed her neck and
head in a rosy reflection. She was like a great rose that opens its
heart to the whole world."
The poet seemed to be searching for something, to be seeing things, and
believing infinitely. He was in another world where everything we see
is true and everything we say is unforgettable.
Amy was still on her knees with eyes upraised to his. She was all
attention, filled with it like a precious vase.
"But her smile," he went on, "was not only in wonder about the future.
There was also something tragic in it, which pierced my heart. I
understood it perfectly. She adored life, but she detested men and was
afraid of them, always on account of the child. She already disputed
over him with the living, although he himself was as yet scarcely among
the living. She defied them with her smile. She seemed to say to
them, 'He will live in spite of you, he will use you, he will subdue
you either to dominate you or to be loved by you. He is already
braving you with his tiny breath, this little one that I am holding in
my maternal grasp.' She was terrible. At first, I had seen her as an
angel of goodness. Now, although she had not changed, she was like an
angel of mercilessness and vengeance. I saw a sort of hatred for those
who would trouble him distort her face, resplendent with superhuman
maternity. Her cruel heart was full of one heart only. It foresaw sin
and shame. It hated men and settled accounts with them like a
destroying angel. She was the mother with fearful nails, standing
erect, and laughing with a torn mouth."
Amy gazed at her lover in the moonlight. It seemed to me that her
looks and his words mingled.
"I come back as I always do to the greatness of mankind's curse, and I
repeat it with the monotony of those who are always right--oh, without
God, without a harbour, without enough rags to cover us, all we have,
standing erect on the land of the dead, is the rebellion of our smile,
the rebellion of being gay when darkness envelops us. We are divinely
alone, the heavens have fallen on our heads."
The heavens have fallen on our heads! What a tremendous idea! It is
the loftiest cry that life hurls. That was the cry of deliverance for
which I had been groping until then. I had had a foreboding it would
come, because a thing of glory like a poet's song always gives
something to us poor living shadows, and human thought always reveals
the world. But I needed to have it said explicitly so as to bring
human misery and human grandeur together. I needed it as a key to the
vault of the heavens.
These heavens, that is to say, the azure that our eyes enshrine,
purity, plenitude--and the infinite number of suppliants, the sky of
truth and religion. All this is within us, and has fallen upon our
heads. And God Himself, who is all these kinds of heavens in one, has
fallen on our heads like thunder, and His infinity is ours.
We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its
toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong
we may go in the dark, whatever our efforts in the dark and the useless
work of our hearts working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left
to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we
ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion. It is this sentiment
that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in
spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to
holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to
occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to
speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.
. . . . .
"I have such respect for the actual truth that there are moments when I
do not dare to call things by their name," the poet ended.
"Yes," said Amy, very softly, and nothing else. She had been listening
intently. Everything seemed to be carried away in a sort of gentle
whirlwind.
"Amy," he whispered.
She did not stir. She had fallen asleep with her head on her lover's
knees. He looked at her and smiled. An expression of pity and
benevolence flitted across his face. His hands stretched out part way
toward the sleeping woman with the gentleness of strength. I saw the
glorious pride of condescension and charity in this man whom a woman
prostrate before him deified.