Woman Part 16

He raised his eyes slowly. Did he smile? I no longer know. But he looked--as I must have looked--as though he were gazing into light.

XVIII

I have a new friend.

A friend.... When I see him, it is like a revision of all I am, a kind of unusual sincerity that urges me on, amplifies me, and carries me toward him.

When he is away, I have the impression of having discovered a treasure within myself from which I draw in deep draughts....

And also of hymns striking up beneath my tread.

XIX

"Why? Yes, tell me why you squeezed my hand so hard?"

I lean towards him, my head touches his chest. He is enraptured, overwhelmed, and as smiling as the night when it is about to pa.s.s.

He did not answer.

A silky wind blows down from a sheltering eminence and carves his face and makes me cling to him. Are we on the borders of the true silence, the ultimate silence in which human beings find themselves face to face?

"You! You!"

A terraced garden. If this were another evening, I should be discovering in detail how beautiful the garden is. Each walk opens up a paradise, cool and secret as a spring, and the pebbles s.h.i.+ne like glowworms.

Borders of irises with violet fragrance dissolving among their stems, a profusion of spreading boughs, and near our bench a thicket from which at intervals darts the straight streak of a gray-bird's flight. Below us in the distant semi-circle across the fading daylight the sparkling apparition of a group of houses lighting up.

The sight of all this beauty fills me with such a glow--almost hurts me--because I feel _he_ is looking at me.... He says: "Your s.h.i.+ning curly hair, your broad, clear forehead, your mouth, your eyes."

Mentioned in his quivering pa.s.sionate voice my hair, my forehead, my mouth, my eyes are so new that I close my eyes so as to see them ...

And I did not know....

The garden has changed. Pale ochre reflections. Little s.h.i.+vers damp and creeping. Heavy black pockets on the parasol tops of the trees. The mournful andante of a swaying cypress. As though it were the first time, my beloved, that we were alone and had only found each other this evening under the narrow sky.

The shadows spread haphazard piling up in ridges, drawing after them dim white trails. Unknown thoughts escape from everywhere. They are too swift for me. The breeze carries them away. His face at my right, blurred except for the prominent features, is silvered over and turned into a medallion....

Am I quite sure that he is still close to me? I tighten my hand in his.

The true, regular pulse at his wrist a.s.sures me all is well and down here everything is fair and _true_. The garden and the leaves, the multiplying lights of the town, the gloaming are all real.

The air is stirring and freshening up. Let us walk. Straight ahead of us as far as the last terrace with its ornamental bal.u.s.trade; then we will follow the Broad Walk at the entrance of the garden.

He takes my arm gently. I do not dare to lean on it, though the weight of his presence bears me to the ground. I feel I am alone in upholding his life. Who will tell him, who will ever tell him the whole drama that this means? Will he ever know how I see him, how he lives for me? Other people and he himself see his huge figure, always a little bowed as if he never dared to be altogether tall, the steel of his eyes, and the slope of his forehead, which every shadow exaggerates, and his gaze bemired in clouds. They may see his simplicity and transparent kindliness; but at this they stop.

I am caught in what is inexpressible in him. I a.s.sume all the questions a man may put to himself without being able to solve them, all the vague poignant evils. And when he appears, I feel that a word has been fas.h.i.+oned to express everything, but not a single word to express his face. It is too outside of everything, too mysterious, perhaps too like my own.

We are at the Broad Walk, a solemn pile in which the trees go two by two, close together, erect--a cathedral. A chilly silence lays a sheet on your shoulders, the nave boldly thrusts its black pillars upwards, and the branches topping the vault wed in the sky.

In spite of yourself you say something in a very low voice. "Up there, that red glow as through a stained-gla.s.s window."

"Tell me you love me ... tell me ... tell me you love me...."

He has said _me_, he has said _you_, as if it were possible to stand this shock on your breast without turning pale. He sees I am sinking and pa.s.ses his irresistible arm about my body. The future tears itself to pieces at the bottom of my life. At the end of the Broad Walk the last golden ray goes down in a black ma.s.s. I do not know how to say these things, but I raise my head like a slow remonstrance and I hold my gaze up to him. Have I said everything?

Let us return. I can go no further. He takes my hand and presses it with the warm strength of his fingers. It is limp and inert, the palm lifeless and cold.

What have I done to deserve this diaphanous gloaming, this prolonged rhapsody rising about us? I have loved once already, and that counts I know. But if I had not had this great pa.s.sion to love another man, if I did not still have it, would my heart be so clairvoyant? Would the new evening be as mild as it is? But if in spite of my deepened heart, I am not yet all-embracing and big enough?

We have gone the full length of the Broad Walk and back. Have we really gone so far? Behind us the view retreats into the opaque distance, and the whole pile, as mournful as a church abandoned by G.o.d, fades away slowly beneath a pall of silence. Our walk is almost at an end. We still have to cross a deserted spot, where thin bushes hold up their charred arms to support the slanting line of the gold and black rays.

Does he see this high dizzy instant pa.s.sing close within our reach? I might s.n.a.t.c.h it perhaps but for these mad throbbings, this veil over my eyes, the dryness of my lips. Only the fragments of the instant reach me, but even they are beautiful enough to dazzle me.

He stops and faces me and his gaze fixes on my throat. Doubtless he too is catching the fragments....

What are you to do when you are a mere humble human being and have no power to retain the superhuman moments?

May my longing for truth at least flame out. My love of truth is my finest quality, my one merit. May it shake me as the wind shakes a tree, and may my hands, if they dare, rend these garments which hide me from his eye. Garments are a lie, and the moment is naked....

He has understood. He trembles so visibly that I feel my b.r.e.a.s.t.s quiver like twin flowers and my whole being stir. He draws me to him and holds without daring to embrace me, small, panting, fainting away....

The pile has been swallowed up, the Broad Walk has turned black, the beautiful moment has fled through my fault; we have only a few steps farther to go. If I have nothing to give him, may he at least share with me the one idea I still retain.

This idea is the strange knowledge I have of my body, but of a body no longer mine, so lucid has it become, full of resonances, coursing blood, warmth and appeal ... a body of mysterious flesh and tense limbs, as bright as a torch, as sensitive as a soul ... a body I want to give him--my body and my arms.

XX

"No, don't get up, stay where you are; it is I.

"You told me you were not going to work this evening, so I came. I want to talk to you.

"I am going to sit beside you, if you don't mind, on the cus.h.i.+on on the floor under the window, where I like to sit when it is as light as it is now.

"I hesitate, not because it's hard to say. On the contrary, it's too simple, and things too simple are beyond words to express.

"I really have nothing to tell you. You understood. You know. But it is right for me to come and right that the confession I want to make should revert to our love, for it has to do with our love.

"How you look at me.... Your eyes probe to the depths.... Yes. That is it.... You do see, don't you? I love him.

"Perhaps the confession, which is so long, so long in beginning and has weighed so heavily, is already finished?... No. Since my eyes are overflowing, I have not yet made it. Well, listen, I have no idea any more of what I am going to tell you, but don't interrupt, let me say everything....

"Oh, I wanted to speak in orderly sequence, and I promised myself I should not be moved but would talk to you quite simply. When I came in, I felt I was growing and rising. I heard my own words stirring like live things.... But they are trivial; they hurt me so I wish I could find others.

"To think that here at this window we have so often talked of love, not of our love, but of all love. You remember? You used to say--I think it was you: 'What is beautiful is not the face you love so dearly, it is the need to love it dearly. What matters is not the delirium in which two people lose themselves, but the truth they discover.' And when you and I evoked those two rays of light which are one, love and truth, our words were so vast that we had to stop talking.

"This evening--do you know why?--instead of telling their splendid secret my words are mere splinters ripping my throat.... Yet when we used to talk here, I did not know love was so beautiful; we did not say it was.