Woman Part 19

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 pa.s.sion 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 s.p.a.ce....

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 h.e.l.l, 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 pa.s.sed under the porte-cochere heavily, pa.s.sively, 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.h.i.+rts 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 s.h.i.+ning with pride; sons, brothers, lovers, changed into statues of men, in a confusion of bra.s.s bands, cheers, red and gold, clas.h.i.+ng of arms, and tramping of feet.

If only this were h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sistance. "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.