BOOK III

_BECOMING_

I

I had been counting the days until I could call the day I was yearning

for by its name, a name new to me every morning. To have said good-bye

for two months, to have lived apart so long and almost without news, and

now finally to be able to caress the ardent moment which gives each back

to the other, if only for a short space; to caress it as you hold your

hands up to the fire. By a great effort I succeeded in remaining calm.

I had put my house in order, filled my vases with flowers, and made

myself beautiful. My velvet gown dulled the light, so that by contrast I

seemed to have a halo round my bared neck.

The hour drew near. The clock struck. But, no, the clock must be

fast.... The next moments stabbed the silence, dragging on leaden feet.

I went to the window. On turning back into the room, I was delighted to

discover a few things to do. The little round corner table was standing

tipped, there were too many leaves in the bouquet ... and this wisp of

hair straggling down my cheek. No, he was not coming. Waiting is a death

died over and over again.

At last....

To think I could have breathed till now! You! He moved toward me rather

timidly, almost as if he were a stranger. It occurred to me that he was

not familiar with my home. A panic seized me: he might not like it.

But in one bound I was close to him, my head on his shoulder and his

arms around me. I forgot everything. "I am so happy, so happy." We found

ourselves in my little room, where the flowers piercing the twilight

opened wide their mock hearts....

But how he had changed; his face had grown thinner.... Why that overcast

brow, that look of depression, that manner of not being at home?... What

was the matter with him?... What was the matter with him?

Though there had been no time for conversation, and we had merely

exchanged awkward, random questions, I felt suddenly that our hearts had

ceased to beat in unison.

He should speak. I must know! Nothing is worse than not knowing....

"I'll tell you," he began, resting his head on his hands. He had

suffered too much by our separation; he had realized this forcibly again

just now when he entered my home where everything dispossessed him; he

could no longer live without me, so far away; he needed me all the time,

every minute. Oh, he knew there was something irrational in his

entreaty, but all he had was plain common sense. "Listen to me," he

said, "there's an instinct, an instinct stronger ... but you don't

understand ... there ... I've told you everything ... that's all."

He began again. His expostulations breathed an awful storm; while an icy

clearness and a terrible calm rose in me. Fear crept into me down to the

very marrow of my bones. What could I say to a man who suddenly talked

another language? All I had was the words we used to....

"Answer me, I beg of you, answer me, even if it is no, but answer

me...."

Did I have to begin all over again--give everything and explain

everything all over again? Until then I had been carried along on the

sustaining bosom of a powerful stream. Now a torrent furiously

discharged its troubled waters and infernal foam into the even flow, and

I had to fight my way back up against the current in a desperate

life-and-death struggle.

So it seems that the bonds of flesh make mock of you; instead of

uniting, they detach, leaving each of you to wrestle and paralyze the

other's limbs like entangling undergrowth.

And does it seem that the bonds of the spirit are not strong enough

because they always lack some link or word or look?

If it were not that I had found complete harmony with another human

being, I should have doubted whether a man and a woman could ever love,

that is, ever understand each other.

The thought inspired me with supreme strength. A hot wave kissed my

mouth and ears; I pushed him away.

His wife. She was the first consideration. Remembering her gentleness, I

spoke of her gently.

To be with me he could give up twenty years of his life in common,

twenty years of attentions and indulgences, twenty deeply rooted years.

She was a frail loving woman who had once been beautiful; she was nearly

forty, which in a woman is to have no age.... Wouldn't my presence,

consequently, result in hurting another woman?... And would I do such a

thing, I who brought so much warmth of feeling and enthusiasm to what

was beautiful, right, and high-spirited?

"In loving you I wanted everything about you to be brighter, easier and

more perfect; and just when I rapturously believed I had succeeded, you

come and brusquely ask me to remove the light from another being. That's

what you are really asking me to do.

"More. The man in whose name I built my house--don't be afraid it's his

suffering I dread; I love him enough to rise above pity. But I thought I

told you that he is necessary to my effulgence; you understand,

necessary.... Remember, he is the one to whom I told the truth, in whose

presence I could live while at the same time holding your presence, who

has suffered through me without loving me the less, and prefers my

happiness to his own heart's happiness. That's the sort of man he is.

That sort of man exists. And you would deprive me of him!

"But if, to get me away from him, you were to offer something superior,

a more perfect means of elevating me and teaching me to _know_, I should

go unafraid, perhaps without hesitating. Love is the thing that

elevates life.... But you, what do you offer? Feeling, instinct.

Instinct is not a reason...."

I had risen while speaking. My cheeks and forehead were burning. His

face, plunged in the snowy curtain, was quite changed. Was it the look

in his eyes or the folds around his mouth?

"Then you don't love me?..." He repeated this like a child taken with

the words, and dropped his head in his hands.

That the light fell about me in gray veils may have been only a fleeting

phenomenon. It cannot be that love will desert you suddenly.

The rest of his stay was of no avail, and when awkwardness fell between

us, he rose, pressed his hands down on my shoulders, and gave me a long,

sombre stare. Then he left. I heard the door close slowly.

Then he doesn't understand? But the love I feel for him is a true love.

It is not that unstable impulse which passion carries off in a puff of

wind. My love, like my life, craves all the victories I have gained, all

the people who are dear to me. And my eyes take in whatever they can of

sky and color.... Nothing forbids me to breathe. Why am I forbidden to

love whatever I love?

My love, you will conquer, you will make yourself understood. You are

not this man who is leaving, nor the other man, nor anyone; you are a

heart of flesh exposed ... a restless heart without limit, a heart

forever beating and forever aimless. Do not let a single one who has

ever been with you fade and drop away. If love cannot conquer, what

else is there to resort to?

And I ran out to overtake him.

II

Only a few months since the first day of the war, yet I cannot recall

one thing about it.

What I know is, that until the end it will remain the outstanding day of

my life, the day of days. No matter what happens later, we who have

lived through it have drunk at one draught the dregs of all the

centuries, we have borne all the thunder of the heavens on our

shoulders. Those who ask "Why exactly us" do not know that misfortune is

always waiting to extort its tax.

I do not speak of the older people, those of the _other_ generation, of

the other age: they have not been touched.

But we, we on that day!

After all, I can recall several words and impressions, but they are no

more illuminating than the way my folks used to describe the day I was

born. "You looked like a little red monkey, you didn't cry much, your

grandmother was the first to kiss you, it was a dreadfully hot evening."

And I can also recall Mr. Barret's gray stony face, his huge, petrified

figure, when he entered the office where we were talking and regaining a

little hope. "It's here!" he discharged from the doorway. None of us

gave any sign of understanding. "It's posted on the bulletin boards!" he

shouted, and advanced into the room like a weapon about to descend.

As a field of wheat catches fire stalk by stalk until the whole is in a

blaze, so we caught fire in our stupor, each spiked to the ground by his

own flame.

Fire! Fire! Moments of scarlet, strangled breathing, souls cowering in

bosoms, horror, too much horror already, wide-open eyes staring into

space....

I remember I had to lean against the wall, and other trifling incidents,

but my impotent dismay, my realization of all the folly let loose upon

the world no more come back to me than the taste of the first gulp of

life at birth.

I must have kept a clear brain and steady legs, because I ran straight

home.... What street, what hell, where was I?... I had no eyes for the

street nor ears for the humming in my head, nor consciousness even of

the daze that was driving me on.

We met in front of the house whose quiet walls still enclosed our

happiness. We passed under the porte-cochere heavily, passively, like

beasts driven to slaughter, and the staircase was an ascent to Calvary.

I do not think we exchanged a single word. When the door closed upon us

we embraced without kissing, and my cheek against his shoulder was wet

with tears that were not of my shedding.

It had occurred to me that he might leave for the war, but like every

other thought this one too was promptly chilled and crushed. Nor can I

say that it was the idea of his going that made me suffer the most. I

was stupefied beyond the power to suffer. I was just as ready to burst

out laughing or tear off my arms. I let myself be touched, handled, and

moved like a stone thrown into space. But contact with him restored me a

little, a very little, to the realization of what I was going to lose.

The days succeeding were spat from a volcano; nothing remains of them

but ashes. You learned new words; a whole language born of the moment

slipped from your tongue; countries became persons with distinct

individualities, gestures and features. You actually fed on what

appeared in the newspapers, picking up items like grains of manna. Men

alone counted--men, men. Life was in their hands, life and the fate of

the world. So and so many killed--abstractions with which the world

juggled in figures. Death, a human divinity after all, settled down

familiarly. Nothing was like anything that had gone before.

People began to talk of glory....

A day came: his departure.

I got his things ready as I always did before a trip, from a list, with

my usual mania for taking along too many things. After filling his bag

with all the necessaries, I stowed a tiny bottle of my perfume in it, a

cigarette-case, his last birthday gift, some dried flowers, and our

baby's photograph. I childishly pictured his exclamation of delighted

surprise when he would remove his shirts and the picture would fall out.

Before he left the house, hardly recognizable in his uniform, he kissed

his son savagely and pressed him long and hard, bending low to hide his

tears.... On the way he spoke mostly of the child--commonplaces to

deaden his pain. "Don't let him be too much of a bother. You must be

strict with him, you know." I saw he was entrusting his share in his

survival to me, and it was better to avoid reference to a parting that

marched on to death.

Regiments were springing up on all sides, troops of men with innocent

eyes and faces shining with pride; sons, brothers, lovers, changed into

statues of men, in a confusion of brass bands, cheers, red and gold,

clashing of arms, and tramping of feet.

If only this were hell in its completeness! But he was not there. He had

left six days before without my being able to say good-bye to him.

There was the last kiss, the fixed, tangible second when you part for

good and the yard of space between you actually counts. You were two

bodies clasped, then you became only one body, two arms ... a soul

locked in a leaden coffin.

There were the wretched minutes when you summon all your illusions to

your assistance. "Nothing can possibly happen to him ... of course not

to _him_...."

I returned, dragging my misery like a chain. I was one of the vast herd

which fretted the surface of the earth like a canker, moulded and moved

by a deadly maniac hand.... Never before has there been such a herd.

Being a woman, I felt withdrawn from the herd, exactly as I had felt on

the first day of the war that humanity was cut in two--men and women.

I was impotent, curdled, set aside. Like the other women I passed by the

young men with orders to die and only a few days to live, though their

bearing was of men who had long to live. I passed by the other women,

useless flesh of the earth, faint-hearted flesh for grieving....

I went.... In another sense it was the herd that passed by, that

she-thing, in countless numbers, dancing bacchantes with hideous

hyena-laughter and robes smelling of red blood and heavy wine,

compliant....

You no longer saw yourself, because you had been swallowed up in a

living craw.

* * * * *

Where were you, my sisters from everywhere, women of Europe, you, Trude

and Clara and Mania? What were you doing? Were you weeping?

You saw, didn't you, that bloody sky with forked black signs, that

summer swooning away, that day?... Why was not your voice heard in

denunciation of the universal slaughter?

Why was not my own voice heard, when there were outcries in my throat,

tears in my flesh?

III

I am becoming horribly accustomed to going about the empty apartment

alone. I find I no longer think of the scowling walls, the dumb silence,

the dim windows. They wrap me in a vague acquiescence. Habit is exerting

its awful power.

I seem to be gliding down a slope where there is no one at the bottom to

warn me that there may be a precipice ahead or tell me whither this

strange existence leads.

My days are regulated according to the rules I myself have made to apply

only to myself; I go, I come, I turn the key in the lock; I loiter; then

I rush at my work. Sometimes the mirror casts a sudden image which runs

away busily at my approach. My shadow and the creaking under my tread

are all I have for company.

Yet this is not the first time I have lived alone. There once was a room

with a flowered quilt, a moth-eaten carpet and a rickety door which

opened like the lid of a devil-in-the-bandbox on the mahogany wig and

scarlet smile of Mme. Noel. But everything was so different! I brought

nothing to that virgin space except the desire to fill it; my body knew

nothing; my inner being cried out for too many things to be able to hold

any of them, and had I dared, I would have stretched my arms out through

the window to embrace the air of life....

My solitude now is like rotten fruit; it scorches my entrails like a

fiery drink. It is a strange solitude.

Two men peopled my life and fertilized and vivified it. But wasn't that

very long ago and somewhere else? Come, try to remember....

I do not know; they are neither dead nor alive. To be sure they are

hungry and thirsty and get bored as living people do, but they are

locked up in the earth's carcass like the real dead; and it may be that

at this very moment when I am imagining them warm and active, they are

already stiff and cold. To be absolutely truthful, to go down to the

bottom of things, there is scarcely anything in common between the two

men who went to war and me who stayed behind.

Sometimes when I am alone, I lean over, way over, to touch the very

bottom of things so as to feel the pain of it.

Yes, letters pass between us. When I read their letters I try to imagine

their surroundings and the crass details of their life; the fir-trees of

the Argonne, the name of a regiment which I know by heart like a prayer,

frost-bitten feet, the incessant thunder, and the arrival of the postman

which draws us a little closer together. Then there is Carency--the

place makes no difference--the light cavalry.... Attack, formation, the

first rank mowed down, the second, the third; he alone standing upright

in the front of the fourth rank, a struggle lasting a century, the

confused subsidence, and my portrait snug under his blue jacket. And

that night last week when he was nearly dying of thirst and crawled out

over the open field, groping for something to drink. A miracle, a pool!

He fills his mess cup and empties it at one draught. He spits out thick

threads, they hang from his mouth--bits of brains.... A pool of human

blood from which he has quenched his thirst.

I receive a letter nearly every morning. The envelope burns in my

fingers: the written lines make a pretense of talking and telling you

things, as if I were not standing in front of him as you stand in front

of a window-pane which you frost with your breath so that you can't see

what's on the other side.

I write to them before I go to bed. Nothing important ever turns up, so

I make a lot of the little everyday affairs--what happens at the office

or at lunch in the restaurant where the people discuss and wrangle and

the smells turn you sick. I tell them how forlorn the house looks, and

how well the child is getting along in the country, that I do some work

after dinner to make a little more money. Besides, there's always some

anecdote to relate.... Twelve strokes cutting into the metallic

night.... Sometimes when I fold my letter I have a sense of having

written about somebody else.

Nevertheless, the thought of them is an obsession; it is a red point

about which I develop and revolve and add to myself.

And sometimes, too, when I shut my eyes, bizarre notions swoop down on

me, a horrid swarm of bats. "How many women are there to-night," I

wonder, "who are tossing about in the thin warmth of their beds,

distracted creatures, tormented, empty-armed, who, however, are the

bigger for all this, easy in their minds and free already in their

bitter freedom?"

Yes there are many women to-night without husbands or lovers who wonder

as they lie in bed; then they sit up and lean on their elbows ... they

don't _know_ yet or suspect anything ... but they don't sleep, they

can't sleep; it's too absurd to think that a woman can live all alone,

sleep alone, even breathe. And then it might be that the closest union

is a prison after all.

At last I fall asleep, and in the morning, in the bald, shivering

twilight, I go back to my doings of the day before, somewhat cowardly

doings. Dull habit, which greases the machinery of life, leads me

blindly along the streets to the office.

Was it only two months ago that with despair in my heart I passed this

corner where the chestnut-stand sends up its whistling steam? His letter

in my bosom had told of the night attack and of his possible death; a

brief, heart-rending farewell. Is he in less danger this morning, is he

less cold, less hungry? I just passed the same corner worried for fear I

might be late. The whole way I had been thinking of my dress and winter

hat.

That's how you get used to the martyrdom of others.

Even if it is the flesh of your flesh that undergoes the martyrdom, even

if it is the man of your love--ah, don't say no--you get _used_ to it.

In suffering one person cannot take the place of another, and pain

cannot be shared. The first day, because grief turns your head, you

think you are sharing the other person's pain, but the other days, all

the other days?

Why not have the courage to look crude reality crudely in the face?

There are no people who are inseparable, there are no couples who are

inseparable.

He is in the trenches, the men are in the trenches, engulfed in misery,

exposed to danger, plagued by vermin, and I am here alive and untouched,

grazing this large wall patched with three-colored placards. "Women ...

your noble role ... noble work ... honor...."

Honor? What honor? I work. Isn't that natural? He is suffering, he is

going to die. Didn't I see my own dormant energies wake up? And if he

has given all, have I not taken all?

Five minutes to nine! I hurry, raising my coat collar in a shiver and

clasping my hands inside my soft muff.

At the end of the street a dusty gust driving a handful of people along

like dead leaves, women with billowing skirts, a tramping, whistling

gang of blue-lipped street boys, and old Noel with his breath frozen on

his beard.

* * * * *

_They_ have left. Even if they return, they have left. That's the whole

thing. There will have been a space of time when they were wiped off

the face of the earth, and life went forward without them, was lived

without them, and women actually _continued_ without them....

IV

The typical young lover, well built, good-looking enough but without

charm; his youthfulness armed with a timid pretentiousness. I had always

avoided talking to him, but this evening he got hold of a foolish excuse

for walking home with me. I tried hard to speak of something else and

quickly switched the conversation on to another track when it took a

certain turn, while he, a hundred times more proficient than I,

certainly more obstinate, dragged the subject back to where he wanted it

to be.

The eternal comedy of man. The same words--who will tell them that they

always use the same words?--to reach the same goal. He made awkward,

crafty attempts, watching me out of the corner of his eye, and when he

saw I was escaping, he declared himself, throwing up his dice and

staking his very heart. His voice was rusty, his nose pointed downward,

his ears were fiery.

Until then he had seemed fatuous, almost ridiculous in his little

perfidy. Now he was ennobled, like a saint, pure, supplicating. His

whole body took on grandeur. How he trembled, the poor boy!

When my answer was given--a woman who doesn't love has a lot of ease

and gentleness at her command--"Forgive me," he said, "I have offended

you."

I watched him as he walked away, his back bent, humiliated, I suppose,

but bathed all the same in the hope that rises from the words you dare

to utter.

Forgive him! As if any woman ever harbored bitter feelings against the

man who gave her the great gift, as if a single one of us ever remained

untouched, as if a mysterious yet positive connection did not establish

itself the moment love was declared.

I remember all the men who ever loved me. Each thinks he has discovered

you, and offers you your secret. Each does in fact discover you, and

also kisses you a little.

I shall remember this young man, too; I shall remember the strip of

mackerel sky showing above the street crossing; I shall remember the

stammering mouth whose youth demanded its satisfaction from mine, the

mouth that touched mine in thought.

V

I have had the sensation of death.

Not in the instant of dying; that is still a part of life; but in the

instant after death.

I had gone to the end of the pier, where the water lashes incessantly

and regularly, and seated myself facing the open sea. To right and left

the green shore curved and the fir-trees ran down toward the sea to

hold in the pale sandy strip edged with foam. Over my head the

procession of clouds.

Sunday morning. The voice of the chimes from the old church, buried in

the heart of the island, was music sent by the air and tinted blue by

the waters. At each stroke you expected to see space divided in two.

The sea was smooth and sleek with dark, wide, winding oily tracks, which

looked like roadways traced by the sure finger of God.

Looking down at my feet I saw a sparkling play of meshes of rainbow

light. The iris fragments dented the surface, formed into chains, made a

covering of diamond facets, and drew downward full rainbows resting on

myriads of arches. It was an incessant disappearance and reappearance.

It was fascinating to watch. The only thing that distracted me was a

swarm of miniature fish darting under the pier more lightly than

insects. For a moment they showed dove-colored, then orange; then they

melted away. You tried to fasten your eyes upon one of the cells of

water, just one. You had it, but no, it was another one.

The sun was so hot you couldn't lift your head. A broad sunbeam falling

perpendicularly on the hard surface of the sea cut it in a blinding

fissure, which attached the foot of the pier to the horizon.

Caught between the heat pouring down from the heavens and the freshness

rising from the water, my body lost its sense of weight, form,

equilibrium, and even of breathing. Every bit of feeling was gone from

my legs, my neck was burning. My soul and eyes existed for nothing

except the stable yet ever-changing mosaic which laughed a thousand

laughs at the face of the sky.

There was nothing but light. Substance, eyes, body, memories, all seemed

to be losing themselves and making a plunge into light.

There really was one moment in which I ceased to be. My existence

underwent a momentary eclipse. I was no longer some one obstinately

facing a realm of infinity in order to measure its limits, a very small

creature who wanted to add herself to nature. I was the immense,

permeating idea of the ocean, the sun and the sky.

It was between the singing ether and the silvery water that I seemed to

foresee my nothingness, because when consciousness left me and I ceased

to be, the sparkling eyes of the sea formed again, the blue oily tracks

unfurled themselves, the glittering fissure sucked in the same line, the

blue deep followed its unchanging course. Everything kept on behind me.

VI

Nothing but women....

Not a single pretty one. Two, four, ten, a hundred ... there must be two

hundred.... Not a single pretty one....

To be sure, the weak unsteady light discolors their faces and throws

drab blotches around their features, but that alone does not account for

the general stamp of dullness which makes them seem like a flock of

widows. The two men sitting apart on the crosswise bench like

well-behaved children who have just been punished, have a sorry air, not

at all the air of having done it on purpose.

I am impatient. A woman addressing other women.... What is she going to

tell us? Will the audience brighten up?

I am standing with my back to the platform facing the door to keep watch

for Eva for whom I am reserving a seat beside my own.... Alas, something

for a merciless eye to feed upon! I can hardly bear to look at that

uncultivated field of dingy heads. But there is nothing better to turn

to--moldy walls picked at and peeling, smeary stains on a colorless

floor. Your ears are pierced by a rising babel.

Eva at last.... I draw a breath of relief and feel, as I always do, like

saying "Thank you" to her. Great floodgates open, my poise is

restored--a living proof.... Why this blitheness? Because of her smile,

her radiance, her frankness, the glory she carries about with her from

the clear image of her child and husband? I do not know. She exists,

that's all. When I think of her, I have a complete sense of happiness

and confidence.... Perhaps this is friendship.

She has a little trouble making her way through the hall. Her head, set

in velvet, rises above the field of heads like a taller, brighter

stalk; the precious gems of her eyes show in full. She sees me, her face

brightens.... "Thank you," I say, very low just to myself. After all

there will be one fine face in the room.

We had scarcely shaken hands and seated ourselves when silence fell,

broken here and there by coughing.

The speech.

The woman making the speech is also ugly. Yet what resources in that

ample body. Under the armor of her corset, there are fine, noble lines,

I am sure. Under her sausage sleeves there are the arms of a mother,

even perhaps of a woman in love; the huge pancake on the nape of her

neck shows she has long shining hair silky to the touch; and what

tenderness in the depth of her eyes which dart glances in our direction.

If she dared, what sweetness....

She came to speak to us from a platform for the purpose of conveying her

idea and a little of her soul, unaware that a valiant soul is a visible

soul. The only means we have of showing our souls, sharing them and

giving them freedom, are the ordinary means--our actions, the bare flesh

of our lips, the sincere tears of our eyes, our bodies which encase our

souls, our smiles which beautify our souls, and our voices.

This woman's soul is a strained voice, but how marvellous. The rows in

the audience remain stationary, each head staying fixed in the position

it held at the first word she uttered.

The women's horrid cares, their marketing, their husbands, their

children, their dishwashing, their difficulty in making ends meet, all

the everyday trifles that weigh on women and enslave them, are driven

far away. The pale blonde with faded eyes beside Eva probably made the

same O of her mouth when she spelled out her letters as a child. The old

woman nodding "Yes, yes"--the two plumes in her bonnet respond "Yes,

yes"--has forgotten her stupid drudgery.

They are all stamped with a sort of pathetic imprint; love is their

element, their strength, their medium. They listen with love and

understand through love. Love gives them this serious, fixed

attentiveness.

The woman with the burning insignia of her stove on her fiery cheeks has

lost all traces of worry except for the scolding expression of the

mother whom you imagine with a horde of children jumping round her like

little rabbits. And the thin girl with the dusky gaze--we've all seen

her kneeling in the shadow of a confessional mumbling her sins with her

mouth glued to a wooden grating from the other side of which comes the

warm breath of a man without a face--what ardor she, too, is capable of!

Instead of the voice of the speaker on the platform it is the women's

outcries that I hear.

These women have been imprisoned by themselves, hampered by their own

lives, and what lives! what a miserable heap of desires and troubles in

the face of the immense thing which gathers all beings together and

makes them resemble one another, the thing unanimous and intangible that

I hardly see. I don't even know its name. Before it I am like a blind

man who has never seen the sun, but suddenly feels it shining on his

forehead and exclaims: "There is light!" It is this _thing_ that has

made all these women come here to-night and bestow their childish

presence, their somewhat uncouth attention, their tragic lips which

would kiss everything. Do they feel the great current rising from them

which seeks to be caught and held fast, a current altogether new in the

human atmosphere?... Not yet. Not yet.

How subdued Eva looks; her gaze seems clipped short; she's frowning. Her

expression makes me uncomfortable.

Hands flutter like white leaves; a bow from the platform; the meeting is

over.

The auditors stretch themselves a little, then rise to the accompaniment

of clattering benches, gossamer sighs, and the sound of two hundred

bodies moving and coming back to themselves. A faint cackling, then a

full chorus of barnyard noises mounting and spreading.

I plant myself up against the wall to let them pass and see who will

cast thorny glances at my hat, dress and shoes.

"Come on," cries Eva. Her forehead is drawn in hard lines. "Come on."

Outside, the night blowing upon the parting groups of women gives their

scattered voices resonance.

Eva takes my arm ... but no, I feel like being by myself. I repel her

bluntly, as you throw aside a branch you have broken. She instinctively

draws her cloak around her.

"What an absurd evening! Those women!" she says.

She is right, I am sure. Every one of the women, it was easy to see, was

ugly and petty, but together, multiplied and magnified, their

individualities wiped out, they revealed I cannot say what unformed

hope, what substance, what richness.... If only I could explain this to

Eva!

"Hurry, hurry, here comes my street-car! Good night!"

The buzzing of an electric bell, an intense disk of light, another

buzzing, and the little illuminated house stops. With a flutter of her

skirts and a wave of her hand, Eva disappears.

Has she really gone? Goodness, what is she carrying away with her?...

In the nebulous depth of the long avenue I can still distinguish a

vanishing star gliding along its mechanical path.

I had said: "Here is my friend, my companion, my sister." On this

evening, tender as dawn, she has left behind in me a great emotion which

she does not understand.

VII

"A lady," the fat concierge told me. "Been here twice. Well, a sort of

lady, a ... you understand. Her cheeks--her skirt--you can see her legs

up to here.... Believe me or don't believe me, but she's twin pea to

your Marie. If she comes back, what shall I tell her? I won't let that

sort into my house! Eh? Kick her out?"

"Oh but, M. Etienne, I am at home to-day. Let her come up."

I closed my door blushing.

Through the banisters I recognized her. Actually Marie!

"Come in...."

She went in ahead of me to the dining-room--"my dining-room," she used

to call it--and seated herself deliberately. Genuine timidity hides

itself behind a mask of absurd audacity.

"Marie ... Marie ... is it possible?"

She was wearing a large red straw hat turned up at one side and weighted

down on the other side by a nodding mass of huge black plumes, two tall

elastic antennae, the sort worn by horses drawing hearses. Under the

chalky enamel you couldn't see her freckles, but her eyes, her lovely

eyes of purest aquamarine, with glints of indigo from her blackened

lashes, still retained their dewy look of astonishment.

Here was Marie. At last I was going to know why she was so mute and why

she ran away one evening without taking along her bundle of clothes or

her prayer-book. I was going to find out how a poor little servant girl

rebelling against kindness could become a poor little swaggering

over-dressed prostitute.

"I have come for my things."

"They are still here, Marie; I'll go and get them."

But I couldn't budge. This phenomenon coming so close to me was

appalling. I looked at her. She had the soft, awkward charm of a little

astonished beast. Seated there in my presence she made an ingenuous,

piteous sight, like a ladybird you're afraid of crushing, or a wilful

timid lamb withdrawing from your caress.

I noticed all sorts of minutiae--that she carried a cloth hand-bag, an

exact copy of a bag of mine, and tied her shoe-latchets the very same

way I did mine; was very neat, her shoes polished, her hands clean, her

neck fairly waxed with soap. Her gaze, once aimless and imprisoned,

harpooned the things in my room and withdrew freighted with

discoveries.... And she gave me acid, persistent looks like the looks

one woman gives another. "Has she aged?" her looks questioned, "has she

changed, is she prettier?" Her eyes roved around the room. "Ah, that

little etagere was not there in my time, nor that engraving.... Who's

doing her work? The place looks well kept." She parted the collar of her

jacket at the opening to show off her imitation brooch. The child had

become feminized, she seemed older than ever.

"Why, Marie? Why?"

I couldn't restrain myself any longer. She leaned her elbow on the

table. When she raised her eyes, they were underlined with red and two

slow tears cut little pathways down the powder on her cheeks. I jumped

up and took her hands.

"I didn't like--I didn't know what to do with myself. It wasn't my

fault. No one cared about me...."

The great answer to the riddle. They all have this devouring need. What

they ask of love and look for in love is "someone to care about them."

"And then my hair, my Breton dress ... everybody stared at me. 'Aren't

you ashamed?' I used to think."

Another need--to be like other people, to be just as good as anyone

else--why not?--to have a bag like madam and hats like the hats you see

on the street....

"That's all," she added.

It was all. When women sell themselves, it is not poverty necessarily

that drives them to it. You don't know the hell of jealousy that burns

in all of us. There are some women who make themselves beautiful less

for the sake of pleasing men than for annoying other women.

"You must be unhappy."

"Yes, ma'am."

Is a poor little thing like Marie sensual? Women are rarely sensual. If

they are, they have not been so from the start; they have become so.

Her Breton accent came back. "Madam," she said in her singsong of four

years ago and in the same servile tone. Now she felt like relieving

herself and telling me everything. There was one man who really didn't

disgust her, but he was at the front, and if only he could come back! In

the meantime she practiced economies and perhaps they could fix up a

home and perhaps he would marry her. But if he did not come back,

then--

I had been to blame, I alone. I had been satisfied to deplore her grim

silence and do nothing. But I ought to have humiliated myself so as to

earn her smile. I ought by talking to her to have driven out of her

heart the longing to equal and surpass which prevents us all from being

human sisters. I should have....

We are all to blame for the prostitutes, we are the ones at whom the

stones should be cast. Nearly all of them are little Maries with the

craving for just one man, the peaceful healthy desire for a secure

hearth, but we tolerate poverty, and we don't know how to talk to each

other.

She put her package under her arm. I did not know what to do. I went up

to her, humble of heart, and rather awkwardly kissed her cheek streaked

by tears and sullied by paint.

She started, shaken by a revulsion. The liquid blue of her eyes turned

sharp and aggressive, her lips narrowed; she held her little bag close

like booty. Then she departed, leaving the door open for the smoky

darkness of the landing to creep into my rooms. She had the untamable,

sullen expression of a hunted beast.

VIII

Twenty days passed without news.

When I woke up, the early sunlight had a reassuring effect, the morning

chattered familiarly, my terror of the night before took wings like a

fancy. Hope swelled within me.

The postman's ring, sharp, strident, unbearable, reopened the wound. I

rushed to the door. Nothing. A circular, an ordinary letter which I

didn't have the will to open.

* * * * *

It was exactly twenty-two days. I forced myself to sit down at the

table, but my courage was completely gone, and the alarms of the night

which haunted the room gripped me by the throat. Well, there would be

something to-morrow. It was impossible....

Anxiety, from the moment it began, made me neglect myself--no prinking,

no housework, dust powdering my furniture. The most I did was to turn

back my bedclothes. What did all these things matter? I wanted to sleep,

sleep....

Coming back from work I slipped into my flannel dressing gown and

slippers and let down my hair. I did not even take the time to warm up

my dinner prepared beforehand in the morning. The plate was on the

table, an orange, a piece of bread.... I'd eat.

I couldn't. The mouthfuls choked me. I couldn't do one thing. I was

overwhelmed, almost paralyzed, by an unconquerable weakness. I threw

myself in my armchair. I would put the room in order the next day. I

would work twice as hard, but not to-night....

Sleep....

Torpor gained complete possession of me. The darkness gathered, and when

the last streak of twilight came through the window fluttering on my

eyelids, a little hope returned.

After all, twenty-two days was not so terrible. Many people had had to

wait longer. Hadn't I had to wait sixteen days once? Letters get lost on

the way.

I visualized a scene--a hospital ward, a row of beds, white coverings,

nurses. How was it I had not thought of it before? Wounded!... A slight

wound which kept him from writing.... I welcomed the certainty. It was

so comforting that I tried to hold on to it by jumping right up and

shaking off anxiety and being happy. Anxiety is an insult to love.

I groped for the lamp, turned on the light, and laid some reading matter

on the table. The disorder was dismal but--to-morrow was another day. I

sat down to read.

The lines leapt at my eyes. You'd have thought them an army of ants

running over the page, running, yet always remaining at the same place.

Should I try to work? Should I try to make up a package for him? That

would be two packages this week, but two are not a whole lot.

My heart gave a great leap. The door-bell rang. Who could it be at this

hour? My very life went round in a whirlwind, I flew to the door.

Some one in black shrinking in the dark doorway in the humble attitude

of a sister of charity requesting alms for the poor. My aunt Finot!

I murmured a few little hypocrisies and put up my hair. I was fuming

inwardly, although actually a little relieved at the prospect of a

visit, which even if tedious would mean a human presence, a tangible

certainty. I was so upset I came near saying "Tante Finot" and giving

away the nickname by which she had been called in the family for twenty

years.

"Come in, aunt...."

She stepped in ahead of me, hunching up her body. The disorder struck

me ... my home was usually so neat ... and my dressing gown ... my

run-down slippers--

"An awkward hour for a visit, I know," said Aunt Finot, sitting down.

"Are you feeling quite well, dear?"

"Dear" in that mouth with lips like two tight-drawn catguts! It stabbed

like a dagger.... She sat perched on the edge of the chair twisting the

straps of her hand-bag. The lamplight threw dusky shadows on her

skeleton frame and turned her eyes into the sharp-gleaming eyes of an

executioner. My God!

"Has anything happened," I asked, "anything dreadful?"

"You see, dear ... don't get excited ... listen...."

"Dead!"

An abyss yawned at my feet, something flashed and grazed my eyelids.

I...

My aunt rose slowly. I saw her hands on the table knotted like a tangle

of cords.

"Don't get excited. Your family received bad news, I don't know from

what source. I asked them if it was official. They were all half

crazy--afraid to come and tell you.... I always felt an affection for

you, you know...."

"Yes, yes, I understand; he's dead."

There she still stood, her knotted hands on the table, a grin widening

her flat features. There she still stood.

"Aunt, please leave me alone, please do."

Perhaps she went on talking a little, perhaps she leaned over to kiss

me, perhaps I heard words falling from her lips like pellets of lead:

"country--trial--sacrifice." The door closed upon my slaughtered love.

I know I tried to stand up--it was like trying to lift a tombstone--and

drag myself to the window to lean my forehead on the pane; but something

pulled at me from deep within, something cold and incomprehensible, like

a slimy slug, like a deep gash in living flesh. And a strange dizziness,

not entirely physical, threw me back into the armchair.

The walls of this black hissing pit into which I fell were the walls of

my dining-room, the very same walls papered in a scallop design, and I

saw a cloud of tiny coal-black butterflies, mere specks, whirl without

end from the blackened lamp-chimney.

My being turned into something enormous and gaping, which fed constantly

upon a great wound. I was so overwhelmed with a senseless horror that at

moments during the night his death seemed quite normal and natural. But

when I withdrew my hand from under my head a multitude of serpents

wriggled about within me, and I felt suffocated again and began to

tumble through emptiness, while little pointed teeth bit my blood and

left behind a penetrating icy poison.

It has ever been the same, Lord God. Suffering is too monotonous....

When a bit of sense and ordinary life returned and cried in my ears: "It

is over. Never more," I felt that suffering is too monotonous; and when

a clamor of revolt sounded in my being: "They have killed him!" I felt

that suffering is too monotonous.

And when the dawn came tapping at the window and creeping toward the

table, drab and livid, when I rose from my bruised knees, and when the

humming and buzzing began in the indifferent house, I still felt that

suffering is too monotonous.

IX

Your beloved is dead.

News that comes from the depths of the ages or the depths of the flesh;

you can't tell.

One day--there--a clap of thunder. It bursts from your flesh and tries

to enter your flesh again. It beats at the portals of your heart,

besieges your ears, howls round your entrails, but there is no place for

it, no part of your body wants it, your soul retreats to shelter, your

heart drips black blood, your mind goes round and round. News, News!

Your beloved is dead!

No need for the thunder to break. I knew it was brewing in me.

When we used to come back from work and I kissed him with this very

mouth and embraced him with these very arms, pressing him so hard that

he laughed sometimes, it was premonition of the News that kept my lips

sealed to his cheek so long, and turned my arms into iron clutches, and

gave me warning when I woke up, and frightened me in the dark.

We used to talk about it and try to imagine what separation by death

would be like. "If I die, if you die." We wanted to provide against it,

we had accepted it.

My beloved, the knowledge of misfortune is not the misfortune itself;

the knowledge of death is not death itself. When we were together we

never imagined I should suffer so much. When people are together, they

can't imagine what it is to be alone.

It is like childbirth over again, I assure you: I remember your face

when I shrieked in travail. I am more torn now, and you are not here to

hold my hands.

Why do they all say suffering is necessary and ennobling? I can testify

that suffering doesn't do any good.

I used to be a gay, active woman, who went about with chest expanded, a

body full of pleasure, lips like kisses, and cheeks alive with color. I

used to get up at five o'clock in the morning and stay up until late at

night. After the day's work in the evening I'd say "to-morrow" as if

anticipating the loveliest day in the world. I had poverty, laughter, an

appetite, I had a perfect union with another, and I maintain that this

counts. I led a life according to my own will; I had a bright child. I

had all this, I _was_ all this, this was my lot....

To-day I am a woman whose eyes are swollen and corroded with salt tears,

whose features are sharpened, whose shoulders stoop, whose black dress

bags on her reduced figure, whose eyes are turned inward, whose house is

untidy and whose evenings drop into darkness without the lamplight. My

little one has to call me.... I love him without a smile, and as for

myself, I hate myself.

I used to try to be kind and make it pleasant for people in my home. I

am like a thistle withered on its stem, I am like a fruit cut open and

thrown out on the street. I am useless and bitter--I am bad.

When people come to me, I feel the pricking of their thorns, and I

wallow in gall. They are all enveloped in an awful respect for death. It

revolts me.

My family comes to visit me, each one of them chockful of advice and

dropping honied words.... Yet I was more worthwhile when I was happy.

Why didn't they incline themselves when there was still time? They seem

to send up a cry of relief. "At last! You're suffering! At last a person

can approach you!" They console me and lull me; they are crows

quarreling over the remains of a charnel-house.

But when they have the effrontery to extol his virtues, it is too much;

my grief springs to the attack. The idea! They hated him while he lived!

Keep quiet, don't insult him! I wish to be alone with the knowledge that

he is dead.

But I don't utter a word; grief has lips of stone; I keep my secret

locked within me while seeming to listen to them. I sit in front of the

fire, my hair loose, my forehead drawn, watching the flames blaze and

the embers fall. After all, their presence, their footsteps pawing the

silence, mean only a little additional pain. Time passes, and they're

sure to go eventually.

Has the door closed on them? I don't know. I can hardly move.

I am alone with you, my knees clasped in my hands, while the castle in

the fire slowly crumbles on its gray dust.

Some mourners at least have the consolation of mourning real dead--real

dead whom they have seen stiffen into death, whose last words they have

received, whose last agonies they have tried to soothe, for whom they

have done everything they could.

But you, beloved, are you dead? I don't even know. "Fallen on the field

of honor?" What does that mean? Was it in the evening or the morning?

Were you alone? Did you cry out? Did you suffer terribly? Did you open

your eyes once more? Perhaps you couldn't, perhaps you called and called

for me? Perhaps you thought I should have come? Ah yes, I should have

been there; it is my fault. I have always cured you, you know I have. I

simply had to hold your head in my hands and your pain was eased.

But I didn't die--I didn't die at the moment of your death, that moment

too frightful to speak of. I didn't die when life was drowned in your

mouth. We knew the whole truth concerning each other, yet when you were

dying I may have been smiling.

For fifteen nights, fifteen days, fifteen years my heart has been crying

that you are dead and that it has lost the hope of ever seeing you again

in your clothes exactly as you used to look, with that manner of

yours.... Fifteen days since I have been trying to learn again, begin

all over again, and call everything into question again. Fifteen days of

impotence. I see only what is.

There is earth on your hands, on your eyes, on every part of your body

wherever it may be. Your feet are cold and gray like the feet of a

pauper, your skin is bloated, worms are preying upon you. I don't want

to--I cannot see you as you are. When I think of you I have a false

vision of your living self with your cheeks of the color of life and

your dear natural gestures. How can I help being all bewildered? Nothing

is left. Even the memory of you changes from day to day. I can no longer

recall the right tone of your voice. Your corpse is hidden. It is as if

I were suffering for no reason at all.

Not to know how to suffer, perhaps that is what suffering is.... Not to

divine where you are, is that your death?

The sparkling hearth-fire has scattered and gone out. Fire has devoured

fire. A few embers reddening here and there, a porous heap of fanciful

firebrands.

And now, and now, my beloved, if I no longer see you, I do see the

consuming truth. I see it and here it is: I let you go. I consented.

There's no doubt of it, it was _I_ who killed you....

X

I felt a great need for fresh air and light. What the nature of this

hunger and thirst was I cannot tell.... The sunshine suddenly lighted up

the window-frame. Its golden rays coming through the open casement and

falling obliquely upon the objects in my room filled it with numerous

fires. It was a salute.

To be out of doors, to walk, to feel the sun on my skin!

I had a letter to mail. The thought of it brought me to my feet,

impatient, ready.

Should I take the little one along? But how about a good long walk, the

semblance of distraction?... I decided to go alone.

With my eyes close to the image in the mirror, I powdered my face and

puffed my hair on each side under my hat as I used to do. How the least

prinking helps a woman! Instead of the really ugly pointed little face

smeared with pallor, which, without arousing my shame, had visibly

lengthened these past weeks, there was a face of warm, even whiteness

and of an oval not so pronounced, eyes which, even if dark-rimmed, had

lost their fixity, and a shower of red tendrils like coppery breaths

blown on my forehead.

The early spring was making itself felt. A raw wind was raising the dust

of the streets. Assailed at the first step by the blue, dancing,

swirling air, I walked falteringly, like a prisoner who has just been

released and doesn't know where to turn.

Everything the same. The old bridge still stretching its badly joined

planks from the paved street to the road where the wistaria bloomed. The

patched, mossy roof of the old wash-house a few steps from the mill

still displaying its dog's-eared edges. The same vistas across the green

breaches between the houses.

Every corner of the town held out a memory to me--here a two-year-old

memory, here a distinct vision crouching. I called to the vision and

welcomed it. My life was not dead, and my heart was open and there was

still a man to love me....

I had been unjust in the black moment of despair. My share of love and

light still remained. Did he know I was a widow? Since he had been taken

prisoner six months ago, no news had reached me and I didn't know if he

had received any of my letters.

The broad sunshine expanded my chest and warmed up a vision so tender--a

hope or a memory--that I was stung by a pang of remorse and almost felt

like chasing it away.

I reached the center of the town, where there were more people and

especially more well-to-do people.

Feminine figures, which I recognized, came toward me at a dull gait. I

knew them; I had seen these old ladies at prayers two years before. They

wore the same dresses and the same hats, the sort you don't see anywhere

except in the provinces.... Hypocritical hands as I passed the houses,

lifted the crocheted curtains. I was preceded by mystery and followed by

whisperings.

Every passerby seemed to be blaming me for the dazzling sunlight which

my eyes were embracing; every house scowled, and the whole street, in

spite of the pleasant weather, wore veritable mourning, not mere sadness

and solemnity, but mourning, and the people looked as though they were

in a slow funeral procession, the women strangled in black, upholstered

in crepe, and buried alive in their hoods and veils.

The Cathedral square was resplendent with profane joy. The birds swooped

from one to the other of the great, white-dappled plane-trees, and every

now and then one perched on the statue in the fountain, a clumsy girl

with petticoat of stone and turned-up sleeves, a decent bosom bared, a

sheaf in one arm, and an eternally dried-up urn in the other arm.

Through its high lanceolate windows and the tracery of the two

rose-windows Notre Dame was drinking in light and making mock of its

ancient front.

It was a brilliant day, and the world rejoiced. I tasted the savor of

living. In spite of myself I fell into the nervous, elastic step of old

and drank in the living air like an intoxicating elixir.

An idea took lodgment--he was familiar with this scene, these crabbed

shops, hostile promenaders, and square of bourgeoning; he had walked on

these cobblestones; and at the edge of the town was his little summer

villa. The idea went round and round, very fast; and I was weak; so I

clutched at it for support.

* * * * *

Another veiled woman in black....

That figure tending to heaviness but graceful and in the very mould of

femininity is not unfamiliar. I have seen the woman before. You can

tell from a distance that she wears the mark of the widow, a hood-like

hat faced with white.

She too;...

I am interested in her. In the country you are interested in everybody

you meet.

Who is she, I wonder. She seems to be about forty, but neither her hair

nor her cheeks have lost their freshness. Who....

My heart bursts, alarm comes rushing, misfortune approaches.... She

walks toward me--she is only a few feet away.... If she would only

stop ... it is she ... his wife!

* * * * *

In the time it takes to walk only a few feet you can undergo the acutest

agony. I held my breath and for a second time felt death strike me with

its thunderbolt. I had time to become a widow too.

She advanced terribly: it was death advancing along the sidewalk. I felt

I must detain and implore her. With jaws set I restrained a great

convulsive outcry and flung myself in her way.... My lips gave a sort of

cluck.... She fixed her eyes straight ahead and turned away deliberately

as if from a drunken beggar.

I looked and looked after her....

* * * * *

She departs--forever--her skirt grazing the ground. Her veil carries

away the remnant of my joy, leaving me there stupefied and convulsed,

alone under the sun. She departs....

My God!...

XI

My son is growing up.

He has reddish-brown ringlets, his cheeks are vermilion, the blue of his

eyes radiates seraphic calm. He is probably going to be very handsome.

Often people stop me on the street to tell me how lovely he is, and for

a moment I feel some pride.

He is beginning to show human traits; he talks, he expresses a desire to

touch and possess things, and likes to listen to stories, which used to

make no appeal: "And then, Mamma? Tell me, what next?..." I always begin

by kissing him.

My heart has grown with him. I have just begun to feel that his

existence is rooted in my own existence. What welds me to him are not

only the pains I take for him, or my perpetual anxiety. I am welded to

him by the kisses he already gives me. When he says "Mamma" in his

inimitable way, I am proud and overwhelmed; when he puts his arms round

my neck, it is as if I were usurping a reward too perfect for me.

The terror with which he filled me when he was so little and frail is

disappearing. I have rocked him, watched over him and suckled him; he

has strong legs and a strong body; nevertheless a much greater terror is

growing in me.

The greatest terror of my life. To bring up a child, to hold in your

hands not only what he will be, but what he may be; and to decree

everything, the colors he looks at, the words he hears! To give birth a

second time to a living creature. To be worthy of it....

And to have nothing to help you but a heart wise yet too intellectual,

the heart of an adult.

To have this timid heart, the maternal heart, too prompt and misleading.

Not to have anything else!

XII

I was sitting on the grass beside the rugged, windswept path which

follows the curve of the sea. Instinctively I straightened up out of my

careless attitude into the attitude of a woman in danger.

He is coming closer, he is very near....

He forces himself to assume the indifferent, I don't-know-you air of

some one happening to be passing by, but he shortens his strides, and in

spite of himself his face dilates and beams with the delight of the

hunter striking the trail. A little more, and he'd let out a whistle.

Should I try to escape through the woods by cutting across the railroad

track? Should I?...

"How do you do?"

"How do you do?"

The man is handsome, decidedly handsome, even in the full light, and I

smile at his coming as I smiled a few moments ago when the sun climbed

over the slope.

I had always seen him in the dusk when he returned to his smart white

house held fast in a coil of green. He would stop a moment at the rusty

gate and give me a lingering glance out of his long-lashed eyes.

Yesterday evening when we passed each other on the road, his eyes were

like black enamel, but now in the bare light of the morning they are of

a more crystalline gray than the sea.

A tragic duel of looks ... a thousand questions asked and answered ...

wonderful understanding ... dizziness ... unbearable dizziness.

He stands balancing himself on his feet searching the ground for the

nascent lie. Then he puts a direct, confident question--is this

magnificent weather going to last? I in my turn dissemble and scrutinize

the silent, motionless horizon.

Safe! Hypocrisy between us. He has found a suitable topic and exploits

it cleverly in jerky little phrases, rather sensual, like the kisses you

give a child. He points his three-cornered head at me and tosses back

his thick black mane.

He shuffles his feet. "Answer me," beg the glittering eyes. "Answer

me.... I am asking you a question...."

No, I don't want to answer. A word thrown out now and then with the

fervent assurance one always has under a desirous gaze; also the

defensive attitude men force upon you. I lean over and begin to pluck

the rich grass methodically, producing a fine, fresh scent and the dry,

peaceful sound of a browsing beast. Two bare spots in the velvety slope

and several light blades zigzagging in the wind....

Will he go?

He understands. His chest collapses like a pair of bellows and he draws

his two long legs together ostentatiously.

Why this tricky manoeuvring? Why thoughts unspoken? I am a part of the

tender landscape to him, and I realize he is looking at me tenderly. Why

not dare to make a pure, natural confession?

"Good-bye?"

"Good-bye."

I can't be irritated with this man; I haven't the courage to; the

weather is too lovely.

When you see the jolly morning frolicking on the road in cap-and-bells

and look over where the blue curve of paradise lovingly touches the

brown curve of the earth, all you feel is a warm indulgence.

It is too beautiful. The trees mingle their branches, the rays of

sunshine mingle their warmth, the birds mingle their songs. Down below,

the tide is coming in with the rush of clanking chains submerged by a

host of swift, frisky little waves....

And this man with the knavish eyes is nothing more than a black particle

blown by the wind to the end of this promontory where a few clustered

pines taper into the azure.

It is too beautiful. All you can do is close your eyes.

I close them--to shut out for a while the dazzle of the water in the

indigo basin, the thousand golden bubbles in its centre, the thousand

silver teeth biting at its edge. I don't want to think any more. All I

want to feel are the warm darts which pierce my hands resting on the

grass and the peculiar sense of well-being which takes the place of

everything else....

Have I really slept?... Sweetness, the sweetness of lips kissed by

breezes, a sweetness complete and overwhelming ... a delicious life.

But ... this black gown ... my dead ... I have nothing but my grief,

nothing but my grief. What wrong have I perpetrated that my grief should

forever sing in my ears?

Ah, just to forget.... Everywhere the earth breathing happiness, the

blue, blue rolling waves, the almond trees veiled in faery whiteness,

everywhere the nuptials of joy.

Grief, where are you? Everywhere space terribly alive, with hope in

every color and death just died for the last time.

XIII

It happened as it does in novels. The man suddenly feels the beast of

prey panting within him and yields to it hotly; the woman writhes under

the fiery coercion and gropingly reassumes the ancient ways that have

come down from time immemorial....

Even to the words I used. Where did they come from, the words that cut

him like a lash, whipped up his desire, and then fell on his face like

drops of ice water?

I was ashamed. I straightened my hair and left the room. How was it

nothing warned me that I must be on my guard against the man alongside

of whom I had been working daily? Had I been blind? I tried to extract

something significant from my recollections ... but no....

I am going to leave him soon, and I must speak to him.

His disappointment gives him a humanizing air of meekness. It inclines

me to him. You feel intensely that other doors are open and, if you

wanted to, you could knock and gain admittance.

This grim laconic man, whose ways are confined to the ways of command,

who has been sterilized and handcuffed by the barren power which money

confers, looks at me intently with eyes raised like a child's. Women are

wrong in supposing that a man forsakes them when he renounces his

desire.

I speak to him disconnectedly, but I am leading up to what I want to

say. And he moves his face a little forward and still a little further

forward; it's as though he were drawing closer, step by step, step by

step. And everything external about me is effaced by degrees, my

sunshiny hair, my mouth, my body present but concealed, my entire

femininity. An infallible instinct tells me this. He takes in my voice

alone, and is surprised that my voice talks nothing but sense. But he

is going to know if it will talk sense straight to the end, so he

settles himself more comfortably in his armchair, lets his eyebrows

relax, and loses all thought of himself. His logic is being appealed to.

"Now as to your money ... you know if I married you it would not be for

your love.... Your money?... It doesn't count? You're right, it doesn't

count.... I might not have discovered it at once. I might have said, as

I did the other day, that I don't love you. I might also have thought of

my aversion to the idea of marriage. Don't look like that. Marriage as

it is to-day is immoral and stupid. Don't say my marriage was perfect.

The man I lost was a rare soul. For ordinary people like you and me

marriage brings nothing but misfortune and mediocrity.

"To marry is to lie, to deceive both yourself and the other one; and

when a man and a woman harbor infinite hopes, when they look out upon

perpetually changing horizons, when they have the choice of all the

roads in the world, and the whole of life spreads out before them, it is

absurd to suppose that they can ever subject themselves to each other.

"You marry, you pledge your soul, you promise your flesh. Once

imprisoned, you maim yourself, and should the call of love some day

become too strong, what other alternative than to lie or break the

chains? Deceit or catastrophe; there is no choice. Love does not

reconcile the primitive hatred between man and woman: on the contrary,

it sharpens it; and for two people to venture upon the impossible

enterprise of joining together two opposite destinies the full length of

their courses, requires a spirit that neither you nor I possess, a

spirit greater than nature bestows; it also takes the intellect of a

God. I assure you it does....

"Perhaps you would have waited till the very end to bring out your trump

argument. But I would have rejected your seductive words angrily. They

would not be to the point. The point is, that if I were to become your

wife, my lot would be as I have described it.

"You lean forward, you approve what I say.

"The simple fact is, I couldn't live. There would be no use my trying. I

should not have the strength every day to witness a real death unless I

had the tiredness and the sort of forgiveness that come from hard work.

I simply couldn't eat with appetite, I couldn't sleep in peace.

"And in the morning, if I did not know that this exultation, this unruly

vigor, this swarming of scattered inclinations could not be controlled,

dammed and curbed by laws ... no, I would not dare to begin to live

again....

"In a single day there are too many temptations, in a single body too

many feelings; the inner life, remote and _secondary_, must learn

through humble duty to subdue itself by merely keeping its attention

fastened upon the external life. If we listened to the goodness, the

heaven we all carry round within us, what would become of us? I for my

part would not be capable of resisting long.... I believe you understand

me. You yourself have felt what a help and support your daily routine

is. I never paid much attention to you, you were only one of the many

supernumeraries on the stage of my work, but I respected you because you

made a part of my efforts, and you too took great pains with your work.

"Every time I left you, I felt gentler. Though fatigued I felt free to

think of myself, buoyant, wiser, unloaded, as if my sins had been

forgiven me.... I had paid my debt; I owed nothing.

"I do not know if work in itself is a good deed. God probably never

meant it for us. Not to lie does not mean to discern the truth, and to

work is not to find the truth, but it is to have the right to advance

toward truth and put oneself in a state of grace and health.

"Then remember that you dared to offer me this miserable fate, me who in

doing the same work lived beside you as if under the same roof, who felt

imbued with an austere ardor. But you saw nothing, learned nothing,

understood nothing. You horrified me. What you did yesterday! Good

heavens! You attacked, I defended; we are quits.

"And the money spread out glitteringly to gag me at night....

"You must be just. While you were going through your day's work it never

occurred to you that I had my day's work too, and my strong arms and

the energy and chastity deep-seated in my body.... What was the value,

the slight importance I possess as a person to you? What was my peace to

you?

"Even if you make fun of the exigencies of the soul, do you think it's a

question of the soul alone? And how about one's relation to other

people? You go out of your house on to the street, you see the crowds on

their way to shops, offices and factories. You have to look the

working-people in the face.... Tell me, how do the men and women who

have _nothing to do_ look the workers in the face?

"I see this doesn't touch you. You are withdrawing. To keep you leaning

toward me, I myself and I alone have to be the subject under discussion.

I must be uncovered, laid naked, by what I say...."

I felt a sudden surge of blood to my cheeks and my lips; our looks

crossed like swords.

* * * * *

Here I am with nothing more to do, my arms hanging at my sides, the

sudden weight of my useless words on my shoulders. The man follows my

example and rises.

"I shall go away, very far away. Don't mind. That's the good of being a

woman who works; you're not afraid. You may be at the mercy of

misfortune, which is always lurking, but not at the mercy of human

beings....

"That's all, I'll go now...."

In the silence that cuts in I feel how this man is wishing I'd never

go--wishing it so strongly that for a moment he touches love and a path

is opened along which I could take a step, but only a single step, no

more.

My eyes stare into space. I hear the mournful, eternal good-bye you say

to things--this table at which I worked, the afternoon sunlight laughing

through the window, all the familiar objects, which reel slightly from

the separation now beginning, from the nascence of everything that is to

be....

He presses my hand. And I think of all the men you could convince if you

wanted to take the trouble....

If you had the time....

If life were not a choice.

XIV

Her head is nodding and dropping lower and lower, her fingers are gently

loosening their hold on the square of embroidery: my mother has gone to

sleep.

She comes to see me frequently now, and always arrives panting, loaded

down with luscious fruit or bottles of golden wine "from your father."

When she prolongs her stay after dinner too late to return home that

night, I give my room up to her. You can tell--poor mother--that her

visits are undertaken for duty's sake--pilgrimages on which she never

fares forth without a preliminary struggle: "That child--you can't

leave her all alone--you've got to be sorry for her."

When I opened the door for her this evening, I could see there was

something on her mind. Her face was drawn, and contrary to her wont she

kissed me two or three times. Was there going to be a battle?

Dinner was over, but I still waited.

"Oh, by the way, my dear, this idea of yours--your plan to go away--it

isn't serious, is it? How about your position? Are you really going to

carry things to such extremes? Your obstinacy is very annoying. What

whimsies you used to have when you were a young girl, that faddy notion

about earning your own living ... and marrying against our will--yes,

against our will.... Your poor husband is dead; so you've paid, and your

father and I are willing to let bygones be bygones. If you come and live

with us, you know you'll lead a nice quiet life and have everything you

need. Your room will be kept in order for you, I will help you bring up

the boy, you will be able to go out as much as you want to. We will give

you perfect freedom.... And you mustn't forget you still have a future,

you're young.... Why don't you say something? Am I an enemy? Am I not

considering your good?"

My mother floundered for more arguments. So to avoid idle discussion I

threw my arms around her neck.

She smiled a good full smile, thinking the battle was won and everything

was settled without much difficulty.... Now that she was satisfied, her

best arguments came crowding: she had known from the start that I would

agree with her.

"You haven't only just yourself to consider, you see. When a woman has a

child, she doesn't do any and everything she feels like doing."

Now I had to explain!

"Mamma, dear...."

I was biting my lips and probably wore the same obstinate look I did as

a little girl, because she pushed me away and her eyes flashed.

"And what about us? In what sort of a position do you think it places

us?... Think a little. People will see you suddenly running away as if

we had refused to take you in. What do you think we'll be taken for? And

you, my goodness! How will it look for a young woman to go away all by

herself, on an adventure?"

Her face was purple, her voice came out in a rush, her arms extended

beyond her shadow. She was quite beside herself.

I don't know what made me do it, whether my worn nerves or my terror at

always, no matter what I did, seeing a gulf yawn between us--I burst

into tears.

With her stubborn patience my mother often went to extremes, but she

could not resist the argument of tears. She was taken aback. I had

conquered. She put her arms round me in a large, warm, cradling embrace,

planted short little kisses all over my hair, comforted me in my

distress. "Come, dear, don't cry, don't cry."

I made a tremendous effort to shake off a frightful impression. If I had

had to pay with my life to get rid of it, I would have paid with my

life. But drop by drop the poison filtered into my heart and changed it

into a bitter heart which seemed unlike my own.

With all the appearance of humility in her drooping shoulders and bowed

head, armed with the tricky sweetness of a person accustomed to

yielding, my mother drew our chairs closer together and tried to console

me at any price by talking of something else. She held out her

needlework.

"A tray-cover. I noticed you haven't got one.... Rows of hemstitching

with a square of filet in the centre. Do you like it?"

I dabbed my eyes, forced a smile, and leaned over to watch her draw the

threads. "Wonderful," I said, "marvellously fine, and such tedious

work." I forced myself to fill up the gaps in the conversation.

The evening flagged slowly and gently. The oil in the lamp was giving

out. A drowse gradually laid itself upon the delicate maternal face;

under the scant light beginning to smell of smoke, it looked almost like

a mummy's.

She is asleep now.

* * * * *

My imagination is free; the frightful impression carries me far back to

a time shrouded in dimness which resembles my childhood days.

A mere baby still. At night caressing hands tucked me in bed. I held up

my forehead for the kisses of a fairy....

A little girl who ran and fell and hurt her forehead and palms and flew

with her troubles to the living Providence. "Did you hurt yourself?...

Ah, you're bleeding!" I felt the thrill of the miraculous wound because

she caught me in her arms and pressed my undeserved suffering to her

heart. Then she tended me, oh, so gently. When she finished, I secretly

regretted that the hurt was assuaged and I had no more blood to offer,

red flowing blood, in exchange for the doting tenderness that it brought

raining down upon me.

A long illness. A veritable angel hovering all the time. Clouds in my

room, clouds on my bed, and a constant buzzing in my ears. When the

angel moved, a current of freshness reached me, a magnificent hand

raised the head which weighed like a ball of fire, and the heavenly

voice said in the tone of ordinary mothers: "Drink, darling!"

* * * * *

When my memory brings me up to the moments of effort, the real moments

which count, I find myself an orphan.

No, you were not there, mother, when my inner life developed, nor the

first morning when I saw clearly, nor when my love came. You were never

with me at any time when my good will acted, never, never. It was you

who stayed behind and left me. I went on my way. Should I have stopped

to stay behind with you?

You idolized my littleness, my tears, my naughtinesses. You covered them

all up, I know. But one can't keep on being ill, or naughty, or a little

tot.

You are the mother, you pardon everything. When father scolded us, you

came with a kiss to absolve us in secret, and sometimes, gritting your

teeth and darting the defiance of a she-wolf from your eyes, you'd say:

"I would forgive you all your faults. I would say you are right when you

are wrong."

But see here, mother, this is what I have done: will you forgive me

this:

I have invoked the truth, I have taken pains, I have climbed up, I have

striven, I have had radiant moments, days of flowering, and happiness

was the same age as myself. Mother, have you forgiven me this?

I am not better-hearted than you, but it is the life about me which

demands that one do more, love more. This is what differentiates and

actually divides us.

Everything that sings and invites one out into the good old world, the

"out-of-doors," seems pernicious to you. What you would have wanted was

to stand barring the door with your arms crossed and refuse me the fresh

air. You yourself avaricious but destitute would have liked me to salute

your avarice and praise your destitution. "Will you set yourself up in

judgment over your father and mother?"

Mother, when children grow up, their eyes open.... And if my son sees me

fallen lower than his love, lower than my own love, let him accuse and

condemn me.

No, it will not always be the same thing, as you say, for that depends

neither upon him nor you, but only upon me. You do not know, you do not

know!

With its expiring breath the lamp sends out a blackish, leaping light,

which splashes shadows on the pendulous surroundings.

I had never noticed the puffiness of her lids, nor the sharpness of her

cheekbones, nor the drooping corners of her tender mouth, nor the

flatness and thinness of her hair, which used to be full and flaming as

my own. Never before had I remarked the tragic similarity between the

dead and the sleeping. And I did not know that immutable Truth sometimes

has the ring of a curse and makes you cry, and yet is Truth.

* * * * *

The scissors gliding to the floor awakened her with a start. "What,

still crying?"

She gave the lamp a shake to force a bit of light and said in her

resigned tone, instinctively but unconsciously touching my horrible

thought: "Wipe your eyes, dear ... the dead have to be forgotten...."

XV

The storm raked the streets and stunned the houses.... All night long it

raged; and once the thunder crashed so close by that I jumped out of bed

terror-stricken to make sure the shutters were closed.

The morning dawned sullen, dragging lazy, gray wings on the earth and

taking flight only at the furious onslaught of the wind.

To comb my hair I seated myself close to the window with my face to the

mirror on the wall.

Outside, the downpour and incessant sharp rattle, the blue-lacquered

roofs, the wan drift of the clouds. In front of me, an image which had

my name.

The more eager a woman is to please, the less she sees _herself_ in the

mirror. What she sees is the idea others have of her, a sort of

consciousness of her power, the irrepressible desire to attract.

When I sat down before the glass just now, I must have seen _myself_;

suddenly I felt afraid.

I had raised the tumble of ringlets from my forehead and saw a gleam--my

first white hair. Then I scanned my face closely, pitilessly. At the

outer corners of my eyes a place was preparing for a fine meshwork which

would close up when I laughed.

A mad need fell upon me--to see myself again and again. Around each

corner of my mouth an invisible line had chosen its pathway; the

perfect oval of my face slipped slightly from its frame; under the chin

there was an imperceptible mass which would never yield to any amount of

massage.

I wanted to run away, I wanted to look, I wanted.... I tell you my heart

was leaping from between my ribs, so that you could have taken it in

your hand.

How many years are there left?... Ten years?... Eight years?... Perhaps

only six in which to continue to be the very same woman I am.

A day will come immersed in the other days, similar to the other days,

when this woman will be dead while I shall live.

I try to question space. I turn in every direction. The storm has

increased. The rain is coming down in sheets and rebounding in mist. The

polished pavements are cracked by quivering little ripples. The tempest

drives the people ahead like leaves.

Whence this dread which blows like a typhoon from the future, breathing

on my youth and freezing my blood? Whence these two words which gnaw at

my breast like a canker? Six years....

No, no, it is impossible. I believe in the deluge, in the thunder, in

misfortune, in oblivion. Not in that. Why should this face of mine with

its curves, its marble purity and its color change? Why? I have always

had a fair amount of courage, I have always done what I had to do, but

this renunciation, this hideous acquiescence. I haven't got the courage

for that, no, I haven't.

I am prepared to accept death. If necessary, I will stretch my hands out

to it. Let the one moment of my life which wipes out the other moments

flow into nothingness. Take, strike, I am prepared....

But that "six years, no more," should be written on my face, that people

should see my face and I should hold it up smilingly like a ruthless

gift to those I love, that I should bear the signs upon me of dull

decay, wrinkles, falling hair, withered cheeks, and dimmed eyes.... What

if I refuse?...

I could no longer bear to look into the mirror and see what was going to

be. I held my face to the pane on which a dismal music was drumming.

I have had deep feelings as plentiful and coming as thick and fast as

these drops of rain; some feelings have been vaster than the soul

itself; but the only feeling truly like woman, the only feeling

essentially woman, which weds her soul while wedding her body, is the

immense desire to be beautiful. I have lived through my love of others,

I love my child as though I were still carrying it, yet all the time,

from waking up in the morning until going to bed at night, year in and

year out, from as far back as I can remember, I was cloaked and upheld

by a will to please.

I was not more beautiful than other women, but I wanted to be. In spite

of me and in spite of themselves, the men hovered about me, lavish of

their glances. I moved like a ray of joy, life was a festival redder

than war; I expressed myself without saying a word, all hearts were

ready, they gave me more love than I asked for and almost as much as I

needed.

That was the air I breathed and had to breathe. Is it good, is it bad?

It is an instinct which keeps turning rapidly round and round in you. If

you were to pull it up, it would sprout again.

Then how can it be that some day, though I shall have done nothing to

bring it on, the territory of this indestructible instinct will be

clouded over and made barren forever after? How can it be that I shall

no longer please if I still want to please?

* * * * *

The rain is beating upon the streaked window-pane and glides down

against my cheeks in long transparent tears. Every chink in the room is

an inlet for the wind. Around me there is a wailing as if drawn from a

sad, dreary bowstring.

Is it the woman of the mirror? Is it the woman that I am? You can't tell

which woman is speaking to the other woman....

"So you're of the sort to let yourself be disheartened?

"You thought you had said all the good-byes there are to say in life.

There is one left, even more awful than the others. You have dragged

yourself over mouldering graves, yet when you arose you found something

to keep you alive. But as yet you are unworthy of this last good-bye:

To survive it, you need a grandeur you don't possess, a more solid

strength than the furtive power you're proud of. You believed you were

pure, and you were quite sure you lived in your entirety. Look!..."

How ashamed I am, O God. What a stranger the woman opposite me is....

* * * * *

At the outset I said to the husband I chose: "I shall cherish your

happiness as much as I cherish my love for you; and if ever your

happiness assumes the features of another woman, that woman shall be

dear to me."

When another woman approached, I knitted my brows and formed a secret

vow to blacken her in his eyes.

* * * * *

He loved me as you love your life, as you sing, as you kiss. And I

reproached him for not leaning over close enough and telling me tender

things over and over again every day. I had plighted my troth; in order

not to take it back, I needed actions, words; to keep it, I had to put

his heart to the proof.

* * * * *

When I came to know another love, my instinct could not rise to the

height of my idea. I did not know how to bring the two men together, nor

did I know how to make the woman who loved him receive the truth.

And I allowed useless people, useless existences to come to me. I saw

them fighting around me like quarrelsome, chattering sparrows around a

tree; I saw them pillage and carry away in their beaks the ripe fruit of

my days. To know how to live is to know how to choose. I did not know.

* * * * *

Everywhere shame. Everywhere in the past, the hell of what I have lost.

These hands capable of everything have done almost nothing. I contented

myself with little and believed in humility.

I silenced nearly every appeal within me. I let regard for others govern

and restrain me. I still feel how the imperious look of an unforgettable

passerby once tore me; the rude superior deprecation in that look was

like a cry rising above the night. Several indifferent persons were

about me, my spirit fixed upon them. Perhaps it was the last of my life

which a stranger mercilessly carried off in the depths of his being. I

let him pass.

* * * * *

I believed myself beautiful. Beauty is a promise which no woman has ever

kept. I have seen my features in the glass, but I have not looked for

the mission to which I was appointed. What human being ever perceives

that he wears a distinctive badge?

The wind redoubles in strength and howls in the face of the sky. The

rain-spout near the window is choking, the drops rap-tap-tap on the

pane: "What have you done? What have you done?"

Lord, I am looking myself in the face. While waiting for the light to

appear and the clouds to scatter, for the damp air to shine between the

drops of sunlight, for the good genius who must teach us to grow old,

for the inaccessible perfection for which I was built, I look and look

at myself....

* * * * *

I went to the window to watch the storm and smoothe my hair. Leaning

toward the mirror it was God I found.

God is there, I see Him approaching when I approach and smiling when I

smile, God who carries me and whom I carry, God palpitating with faith,

God who lowers His head....

I believe in myself.

XVI

I cannot sleep.

There's no good-bye to say, it is late, everything is ready, and yet I

am stifling in this empty room, which lives only through my sleeping son

and me.

But he sleeps....

I hardly recognize him when he sleeps, and I have to go close to him. He

fell asleep a moment ago and is lying exactly the way I placed him, with

his arm outstretched. Is there anything tenderer and frailer to behold

than this little rounded face with its fine veins and pearly curves?

Beneath his sleep and the warmth of his cheeks, life is working, and

what a hurry it is in!

I lean down closer, almost touching the fine down of gold on his

forehead, his velvety warmth, his scarcely perceptible breath. As

always, I feel both terrified and transported by this immense

littleness, and consumed by a longing to put my lips to him.... I draw

back: I must not wake him up.

* * * * *

I move away from the crib. The will to question the present which is

passing takes a stronger hold of me this evening than usual.

No, it is not to you I turn, my child.

The best in me, the true, God, and my soul do not concern you.

Perhaps I am too hasty in saying this. Perhaps I have paid too much

attention to the gulf between my generation and the old blind

generation. Probably the gulf between your generation and mine is not so

deep, but when I look carefully I do not find that you are the profound

motive.

Nothing holds out the promise that in the future we can really give each

other a single day. When I look at you, I am astonished that I gave you

life--it is such a miracle to have caused a creature to live. I am at

the verge of the space separating us. I do not find you there. I go my

way, you go your opposite way, and though there be nothing impossible in

the world, our mutual understanding is impossible. I shall never attain

to your height.

You were born to contradict, since you must surpass, the palpitating

question that I am, my acts, their purpose. You, whom I carried in my

womb nine months, will never be anything but a stranger in my wet eyes

and to the kisses of my lips, a stranger who departs with my blood in

his veins.

You have come. But I did not sink into the fatal pit that engulfs

mothers, the inevitable snare. It's so hard to resist the weak little

thing which can't talk. How can you be expected to resist? A woman

eclipses herself for the sake of the child she brings into the world,

and at the first cry, the mother is in danger. It is the mother we

should try to save. There's no need to be afraid that the

mother-instinct will cool off. The earth will cool off sooner!

To have children. Love is born with them, but love is not enough. And to

try with all your might to fulfill your own destiny. And misfortune if

the children fall behind!

Sleep, my little one....

* * * * *

I have opened the window; the night breathes upon my face. In the wide

outdoors, where the darkness is naked and the freshness is blue, the

expanse opens out like a river. Below, the clustered houses--a sombre

vegetation, a confused, winking mass, a starry profundity, vast and

chaotic, with no boundary lines between city and sky.

My eyes look tranquilly upon the black future piled up at my feet. My

eyes are no longer restless, because now I know for all time what the

future holds. I know that soon I shall be tired and go to sleep, and

when I wake up in the white daylight my son will put his arms round my

neck so prettily. I will smile, then the time for parting will come. The

hidden days contain the unknown.... But forever and ever it will be

suffering.

The future is not a question you ask; it is the suffering that awaits

you. Suffering is the answer to every question, and every instant claws

the flesh. If you listen intently, you will hear that the echo of

everything is a sob.

It is suffering. Suffering does not find a vent, it does not bleed in

any cry, it clings to you, and nothing reveals it because it is

omnipresent, so present and so plain that you can't look for or find it.

It is not the tears choking your throat, nor the groan at night, nor the

knell of a parting footstep, nor the mourning which stifles you, nor the

heart in your breast, for that would be too little. When suffering

begins with exuberant sunshine and mornings like a flourish of trumpets,

it is even more terrible because it is further away.... Suffering is

more. It is unlike anything else. It is regular, steady as the breath,

amazing, tolerable, and it is not the last word you say, it is also the

first word; it follows its mortal, monotonous course, and you realize it

has no name: to _live_ is to suffer.

Is it human misery? No, human suffering. Stammering nights, groping

footsteps. Whither and why? No, there's no time to lose, you jump up and

go, go, because you haven't suffered enough yet. Look.

When I leave to-morrow with my suffering in my breast I shall go in

advance of suffering. I shall not hesitate in the doorway. Looking back

into the room I shall not say what I have often said: "You are a bit of

myself, good-bye. Since my eyes will no longer be here to see you, give

them a picture of yourself to take along."

Suffering is self-sufficient. You don't associate things with it, I

shall have my back turned, my body will be impatient to lean forward. I

no longer care for memories.

* * * * *

Not one. Not even the memory of you, my two dead lovers. Other dead are

further on, where I am going, or rather, other suffering. And your

suffering is over because you are dead.

The pictures I have of you rise less and less frequently in my memory.

How I cherished them at first! Some especially.... That little

station-platform where we met ... the transparent morning flew ahead of

your footsteps, the spring was intoxicated, I ran into your outstretched

arms.... And the path where I cried, the sunset sinking away between the

branches, my head grazing your shoulder like a fruit falling from the

tree.... And another.... And another....

It is over. I carry you differently. Some of your ways, which I

acquired, stick to me from habit. My voice often has your inflection,

and when I am animated I feel I have made some of your ideas my own. If

I don't remember you so clearly, it is because I _live_ you and the

legacy you left me rises and falls with my breathing.

In my fierce survival I have preserved only what is of use to me. All

the rest has decomposed; it is nothing to me any more. We should break

away from this burden of the dead. The dead are the living who have

abandoned us, and sooner or later, whether we wish to or not, we forget

them.

* * * * *

I loved my dead dearly, so dearly that it seemed to me my being inclined

towards them the moment they appeared--so dearly that because of them,

who have gone, love has remained.

Love proclaims its law. You must show your love, it cries.

Somewhere in the world to-night there are faces lying dormant for me,

persons to whom I have things to say. I am waiting for them, I stretch

my arms out to them, I know they will come because of my need for

embraces, a desire for caresses, so strong to-night that I jump up with

a start. It is as if half of my body were missing. I see myself deserted

and frightfully widowed, and my mouth quivers with hunger and thirst for

another mouth.

I know a man is on the way. I shall recognize him. I shall have the

somewhat bitter audacity you must have in order to confess yourself the

immense thing you are. I shall stir him, I shall do everything; you can

go the full lengths of the sublime that dwells within you.

As soon as he will rise above the horizon he will realize from my mere

expression that I have long lost the trick of lying.

And when I read the first glance he gives me, when desire bewilders him

a little and forces him back within himself, I shall be happy to be

beautiful. Beneath his eyes my sound healthy self will brace up again,

my inexhaustible twenty-seven years, my rounded limbs, everything which

goes slightly to pieces when love is absent. Here is the offering,

blond, slim, laughing, which I already present to you.... He will

perceive uncomprehendingly that if I am a little more beautiful than

myself, it is because by virtue of loving one comes to resemble the love

one feels.

When he will have looked at me long, I will explain what each of my

features means; I will speak. Because silence is beautiful after the

last words, and it is the woman who has the most to say.

I may have a stronger expression than other women, perhaps a slightly

more taciturn expression, too. My solitude would account for this. Women

are not sufficiently alive to the fact that one should live alone,

depart alone, and return alone, and that there is no one outside one's

self. No one. In going to meet love again, I who have been twice widowed

and have my child to make me feel more isolated, shall find nothing but

another solitude. To be sure, there will be kisses, meetings, a symphony

of voices. Yet in spite of everything to know you're alone, all the

time....

All the time....

If I had reached this secure kingdom through my own power I should be

very proud. But I don't deserve the credit. My dead lovers gave me this

awful superhuman gift. For there comes a moment when you have taken from

some one else everything there was to be taken. Without his noticing he

becomes useless, he must disappear. Who resigns himself to this?

My lovers bestowed upon me the love I was capable of, attentive and

complete, they bestowed upon me the intelligence of my blood, my tears

and my words.... And then they gave me up. They performed this supreme

deed.

And now when enlarged by love I desire love again, I give it its place.

Love is not the essential thing. I have often said: "Life, my life." The

phrase has assumed the shape of my lips because it says the essential

thing. Love, after all is nothing but the most beautiful moment.

I summon all the moments of my life. Even the least thrilling cling just

as deeply by roots of flesh.

Life wishes to become what it never has been: It is ready, it is

empty.... Until to-night human words filled it saying:

"Nothing changes here below; nothing can possibly change: love goes on

from age to age, death was and will be, life is forever the same, and

man is always man." To express this the word "eternal" has been

invented.

I do not know. I came, I, a woman, and like every other creature, I too

began by loving. Life was _not_ the same, I swear it was not the same.

Life had a different taste, I shouldered it differently, and my death,

while resembling other deaths, does not exist by the same idea.

I am; everything is changed.

And even if I had never lived, other women are ready to change the

earth. You can't tell yet what the women of my generation are capable

of. They themselves don't know altogether.

The memory of what they have always been told weighs upon them. Man is a

fierce, greedy lover. With bloodshot eyes like a blind man, he has

fallen upon the feverish couch where lies the vanquished enemy. He has

brought his boiling sap, and between his clasped arms a great

tenderness. When he has risen from the couch, he has been sad, his eyes

have been wasted, his tenderness worn out. And he has said: "This is

woman."

This has lasted long. I do not know if there hasn't been some reason for

it. I simply say I live. I am honest, exact, I have muscles of steel, I

like people to say what is, I am loyal, willing, I earn my living, and I

am inured to suffering. What truth does one fail to recognize when it

shows its face?

I think. I want. I know.

It has taken me a long time to take in the humble things I now know. I

commenced with very little; my youth passed in chaos, I had to suffer

very much. So it is not chance, random truths that I follow. I do not

set limits to them. Even my death will not disprove them. Thus, a few

scattered fragments hover. I snatched and caught them in moments of

alert intelligence, I held them fast with my willing heart, I gripped

them between clenched teeth to keep from losing them.

* * * * *

The wind rises on the right. Is it not the wind that has extinguished

those dots of gold, the houses, without deepening the dark of the town?

I see the wind, it is blowing near. And here, immobile, upright in my

heavy rectitude, I share with the wind the moments which are driving it

on. One by one. I fly with them, one by one.

I go where they are going, even elsewhere, and my death perhaps is far

from reaching its limits. It has been on the way a long time, it will

stop when I am completely tired out, when there will be nothing more for

me to do, when my breath will not be an indispensable breath. Then that

will be all. They say it is hard to die. Does that mean that the world

holds something more tragic than life?

The wind has swollen the whole sky. The sky is ready to drop down from

on high--ah, let the sky fall! The wind pins itself to my face. It has

become so violent that I cross my arms on my breast to brave it. The

infinite future, as though it too were swollen, approaches the houses.

How can I tell what the future holds? No use searching the violet depths

of the horizon or breathing in the whole of the sky. The times to come

are beyond my reach. They give no sign.

There, below, all I see is my own existence. But how I see it! Flashing,

assiduous, full of free spaces, brooding, crimson in my veins, paling

slightly at the horizon, departing in the starless wind, and returning

in haste to my limbs.

The woof of the night has changed color again.

Can it be that what I am is a promise of something that should be?

* * * * *

The wind blows stronger.

No, it is not for nothing that to-night I am drawing a deeper breath

than on all other nights, a breath stronger than my strength, rising up

over my life.

Night passes, as pure as a summoning voice.

Then it must be, Lord, that soon, perhaps at dawn, you must go further

than your journey and, in flashes of your being, reach heights higher

than everything you have said, live to the last drop of your blood, live

more than life?

Here I am.

THE END