Woman Part 10

VII

They point to us, just stopping short of using their index fingers, as an example of a happy couple. They speak enviously of our great good fortune as if we were bound on an adventurous voyage on which you embark only once in your life.

What do their "young couple," their "happy pair" mean? Do people really imagine that you arrive at happiness so quickly and easily, and that to be sent off _together_ into the steep mountain country, life is in itself enough to make you find the fulness of life?

Happy!... When everything tends to estrange you, the opposite natures of man and woman, their conflicting interests, their very physical attraction for each other. Happy! When you realize that two beings, however close they may be, are forever divided. When, no matter how free you are, marriage forces you to restrain and prostrate yourself. When, apart from your joint life, you have your own career to pursue. And when, after the day's work is accomplished, come the night's kisses as if to undo the good of the day's work--behold the body, the blood, the lips of love--and you change from friends into lovers again.

To be sure, there are occasionally moments of blinding delight, and it is sweet to lean on a shoulder and have a second in the duel of life and be with a man who smiles and takes you in his arms.

But to be happy! To feel that your measure is filled, that you are yourself and him.... Man and woman are above all enemies; you feel it at every turn. And yet you tell yourself that at the heart of some inaccessible firmament there does exist a sublime harmony and it _must_ be attained, even if the road to it is superhuman and your strength fails. And this harmony and this road must be taken afresh every day, if ever one approaches them, for a human being changes from day to day.

I am already somewhat stronger and simpler, and somewhat appeased, but still we are not "happy" as yet.

VIII

It is true; she was sincere....

While talking she cast off her enormous furs and fiddled with her rings in the unconscious wish to remove them. Her restless head was set high on a neck encircled by pearls. Minus the litter of ornaments she would have tempted you to hold your hand out to her.

The landscape, swallowed up in long gulps by the window of the railway-coach, had a sombre fascination for her, because it was moving almost as fast as her pain. You saw her shoulders gradually shrink together and slowly draw down the beautiful column of flesh supporting her head. Then you saw them raised helplessly to ask the eternal question, "What shall I do?" And then you saw them in the characteristic gesture of all sufferers--thrown back as if to toss off the pack of unhappiness loaded on her back.

Her story burst and rose in precipitate bubbles. Her voice, at moments, broke. The woman at her side remained perfectly calm, walled up in the dull indifference accompanying the forties. At the jolting of the train she merely shook her head--was she listening?--and turned toward the flying window where her own story was pa.s.sing.

Darkness would soon be falling. So I had an excuse for going to sleep, and as soon as I shut my eyes the young woman took up her tale of woe anew, twice, three times, ten times. The whole of her misery escaped from under a mask of restraint.

"And listen, the other day...."

Did I need to hear what she was going to say?

At the end of one sentence I caught "my little girls." I could see her little daughters--exactly alike, well-behaved, in airy frocks, two heads with long, elastic curls, a twin step in walking--the sort of children who are their parents all over again and invariably provoke the question, "Whom does she look like--her father or her mother?" as if you have to search into a child's origin.

I could see her husband too. Haven't all these women the same way of saying "my husband"? I could see him short, bustling, jovial--really not a bad sort--and with a chubby face, the only kind I could possibly match up with the young woman's insipid face. Though she said nothing of a garden, I imagined a very strait-laced one with rectilinear, timidly-flowering walks, the sort of garden that is not cherished with love. And I also saw the family in their home, a substantial white-stone ornate building. I raised my eyes furtively. I must have got a poor view of her when she came in an hour ago. Now she looked pretty. Her features were regular, her color had heightened, her quivering mouth showed her lips to the fullest, and her distressed hand, pus.h.i.+ng back her hair, disclosed a brow eloquent, smooth and flawless as ivory. Certain women derive their entire beauty from the pathetic. She was one of them.

Her eyes turned from the scenery; I lowered my lids.

"He doesn't understand me any more ... it's all over ... I am nothing to him ... still ... a love match...."

The sc.r.a.ps of her plaint were borne off by the wind, the engine snorted more vigorously, and the last remnants went down with me in the roar of a far-off, formidable lullaby.

I soon awoke. Still bemoaning her lot, with the same phrase, it seemed to me, always at the same point. She went on with such bitter persistence that in the end you couldn't help learning her story by heart. I did at any rate. The two women kept looking at each other--shadowy vis-a-vis--the younger one far from the other, far from us, far from everything, rooted in her life, in her square garden, in her thirty years. It was as if she were talking aloud for the first time.

I listened. Each detail revealed a year, a corner of the house, an important event. I felt a dull rage fermenting in me instead of the timidity and compunction one usually experiences in trespa.s.sing upon another's inmost recesses.

Why? Perhaps because I, a stranger, had not the power to interpose and hold the secret of this trouble so as to remedy it.

Ah, I no longer need to listen nor need to know the man in order to feel that he is right to lose himself in his business and be merely a good father who sees in his wife nothing but the mother of his children and shrugs his shoulders when she heaves with sighs.

The evening air was blowing in cooler through the upper half of the window. We were entering a plain where the green of the meadows was deepening into mauve. Two rows of trees, which had been a profile against the sky when seen from afar, turned into a black curtain suddenly drawn. Here and there houses stood out as though groping in the dark--faces blotted out as soon as arisen--one field swallowed up the next; the ragged line of a hedge came and went; an embankment followed, its slope daubed with brown, unwholesome stains, its top dressed with tufted gra.s.s and straggling bushes, which moved their arms like signals.

The young woman's brows were drawn. She was questioning the obscure flickering stretch of s.p.a.ce. I read the questions in her face: Why does he merely graze her forehead when he comes back in the evening? Why does he keep her out of everything? Why does he never feast on her presence or heed her advice? How did he love her? She had been right a short while before when she had said bitterly: "A little less than a prost.i.tute, a little more than a servant."

The woman was certainly suffering and calling upon a G.o.d who could not answer. At night when the close jealous house is asleep, she undoubtedly falls to her knees in secret and wrings her barren hands and invokes misery, love, grief, as if the sacred words were for the whole world.

Thou, G.o.d whom she implores, Thou knowest well the reason of her trouble, a simple reason, brutal, elementary. Why dost Thou let her hunt for others?

I threw myself back because I both wanted and feared that my face might betray me.

The Midi was beginning, the first olive trees were rounding off the landscape, the night sky was already smiling in the rosy light of dawn.

In our times no woman has the right to live under the shelter of a man's labor. The woman who dares to accept such shelter should abdicate and commit her dignity to the hands that are productive. She should consent to her dethronement and take the condescending love that is fed to the weaker without complaining.

Men begin--the women know it well--by adoring this weakness. "My wife,"

that piece of fragility, those useless days, those little arms which don't know how to do anything, the jewels he brings home, the great astonished eyes, the mincing steps, everything that is touching and contrasts with the struggle of his existence. Then he comes to extract pride from this relation. "It is I who protect, sustain, feed her. It is I...." He mounts a few steps higher and sees her a little lower, incapable, infantile, unequal to battle, unequal to his power. Each day inevitably finds them a little farther apart, and she in approaching him is bound to raise her eyes while he condescends. If his love lasts it takes the very form of contempt, though neither is conscious of it.

Which is just and proper.

A woman supported by her husband has no right to protest. If she is not _earning_ her living, she should have some work to do, should use her arms, her idle strength, her health. Merely bringing children into the world is not enough.

The fat lady starts up from her entrenchment of cus.h.i.+ons. "We are almost there. We must get ready."

Bags pulled open emit the animal odor of leather and give out nickel glints as they are snapped shut again. Then the fire of the rings disappears under the gloves. "We are there!" They are now quite free to stare at me.

What a metamorphosis. She has resumed her former appearance of a lady.

She is scarcely pretty. In the glimmer of the night-lamp she seems sharp-featured and masked by a ghastly pallor, as if the generous sun had abjured her forever.

Each turn of the wheels brings us closer to the town. The young woman drawing herself up rea.s.sumes her manner of a somebody. She is back in her setting, already less unhappy because she is nearer her unhappiness.

She pulls out her watch. Five minutes still. Time enough to lean on one's elbow and think sad thoughts pro tem, which come running like a docile flock.

I put my hand up to my forehead to prevent her searching my eyes for the fountain of compa.s.sion denied her. There is no compa.s.sion for her in me, neither is there in the opal-tinted meadows, nor under the sapphire of the sky. To find compa.s.sion she would have to reconstruct her life from top to bottom. A fate such as hers lies outside the fate of humanity; suffering such as hers is beside and apart from the suffering of humanity. I say her fate has not made her suffer enough yet and the woman does not deserve to live.

A woman who does nothing is fallen in the sight of love.

He and I are going to the country on our holiday. I have been thirsty for its freshness....

The carriage is empty now. You feel the double pulse of the train as it rolls between two slopes spitting out rings of smoke, pursued, you'd think, by its own speed, travelling on, on, on....

IX

We've been here a week.

Strange days, without axis or prop or stay, pa.s.sed as if outside of something, as if you had been asked to step up to a door but not invited inside. Nature is not easy to reach and penetrate.

We had longed to live in this spot conceiving it beforehand as an oasis set in dew. And here it is under our feet with its earth which smells good and its breezes which tinge our cheeks. For all our ardor and a.s.siduity nature preserves her mystery; she is an unresponsive mother insensible to the clamor of her children. When we draw near, she stops talking and either drops a veil or retires completely into seclusion.

"You would like to a.s.say my movements, cull the delicate scent of the gra.s.s blade by blade, meditate like this tree, follow the steps of the peasants who are my only kith and kin, be a wave in s.p.a.ce, unravel the relations of things, and delude yourselves with my warmth. That is what everybody wants. May your wish recoil on you. Do not try to reach me.

Do not turn your heads in my direction. Let the thrills and tremors of your feelings pa.s.s between yourselves. I know you not."