Woman Part 2

III

It is done....

How shall I bring myself to believe it, how tell myself it is true, that _it_ is done, that it is an accomplished fact? And why is it that an absurd recollection obsesses me instead of the thing that has just taken place? Recollections are not considerate. They thrust themselves upon you w.i.l.l.y-nilly.... It was one day when I was still little and wore my hair in a plait down my back tied with a red ribbon. An idea struck me and set me all a-quiver, to surprise my mother by secretly filling her vase with flowers, the beautiful blue vase with the band of gold, erect on its ma.s.sive pedestal like a slim thing on a throne. I was very careful, I held my breath, my movements were sedulously controlled....

The vase toppled and made a clear, ringing sound. I can still hear it.

My father came in unexpectedly. He stopped--he always was severe--took me by the shoulder, and shook me like a wind-tossed sapling. Then he dragged me to my room and on the threshold gave me a slap which sent me staggering. There was a whistling in my ears. I was drunk, dazed, completely bewildered.... Then he shut the door.

When I came to my senses, I ran to the gla.s.s, I don't know why, for nothing, "just to see." A wine-colored mark streaked with red was spreading over my cheek. I held the back of my hand up and felt the glow even without touching it.

It was burning, but, oddly enough, it did not hurt. I was conscious of not suffering pain, and instantly a sadness filled me, utter and sudden as a bitter flood. I didn't know why I was sad. Even now I only glimpse the reason imperfectly. Children who are simple are also more subtle than we. It was my fate to be defrauded, not to have a definite reason for shedding tears over myself, not to suffer in real earnest from an undeserved punishment, not to be able to cherish the compensation or possess the impregnable asylum, the inexhaustible resource that grief always is. It was when I touched my cheek which did not hurt that I threw myself on my bed crying, alone, yes really alone for the first time. And to-night it is just the same way.

I have run away from home. Here I am cast out on the street in the night. There is a fine blinding sleet; I do not know as yet where I am going to spend the night, but that doesn't hurt any more than the slap on my cheek hurt. Am I unfeeling? I push on straight ahead, the houses follow one another, the streets meet and cross, the separate shadows are only one and the same shadow. I stop now and then arrested by the consciousness of having forgotten to suffer.

I have been walking a good hour.

How penetrating the night is. An hour of utter aloneness, an hour empty and bare. Ah, that it may be so until the end. Let misery come, the unknown, humiliations, but let the truth come also. You perish trying to do without the truth....

That scene.... Can the memory of it be annihilated, so that nothing remains, not even the grotesque memory of a memory?

He blazed with fury, he lashed the air first with one arm then the other; his features swelled with rage and suddenly looked youthful....

Now that I come to think of it, he looked exactly the same as on the day of the blue vase, only this time he did not dare to slap me. That's why he gesticulated so wildly. I listened to him at first with an indifferent air; I was accustomed to his storms--well, the thing would soon blow over. And before my eyes the familiar scene, which the lighting up of the chandelier always placidly ushered in, was being set according to the daily ritual--the smoking tureen, which Leontine, who had entered with her padded tread, was placing on the table (she removed her red hands, finger by finger, and stole her sidewise glance at me), and the transparent play of the gla.s.ses, with iridescent stems giving back the glitter of the silver and the white sheen of the tablecloth.

Although my eyes were occupied in following intently the details of the dinner-table, a heavy travail was going on within me. A legion of slumbering desires, halting impulses, dead aspirations were rousing themselves noiselessly, almost without my consciousness. Thoughts that come in the morning when one's eyes open, "To-day! to-day," hopes dashed to the ground, deceptions, sighs--their tune rose to the surface and changed to a peal which drew me on. Yet I remained on the spot, like a beast with lowered head led by a rope.

I saw his gesture in time.

He was advancing towards me, his fist raised. Did he mean to strike?

What did it matter? I was no longer in a condition to judge. A roll of thunder was s.h.i.+vering my inner trouble into a thousand bits, there was a flash of lightning which unloosened everything, even my tongue. I was speaking, I was speaking at last....

What did I say? Really, almost nothing, because in the frantic swiftness of his anger he broke in upon my first words. "Get out, get out!" He showed me his hand as if he were cursing his hand, too, forever.

The door closing behind me made a very long and very impressive sound.

I was on the landing of the staircase. No sound. The electric light cruelly exaggerated the red spiral of the carpet and touched each copper bar of the banisters with a tiny comet.

Alone.

And suddenly ... what did it all mean? I no longer understood.

That outburst of cries, that tempest, that sort of comedy, my reply ... what ... I went and sat down, tempted equally to laugh and to cry. I wanted to think ... but it was already done, an almost outside force was pus.h.i.+ng me off my hinges. "Escaped!" I was like a prisoner who sees the door left open inadvertently.

I knocked gently, my entire presence of mind returning to me in a rush.

Leontine came with a pseudo-contrite expression and an air of saying "Hus.h.!.+" while beneath her manner was the concentrated delight of an animal lying in wait. "They are at dinner," she whispered while I got my things together, a frock, a blouse, some toilet articles, a little money, some linen, a few books.

I closed the front door on myself, slowly, without faltering, slowly. It was done. It was not difficult.

A faint wind blew from the street below which chilled me.... Ah, you are trembling already, you are drawing back. That fine courage of yours, where is it? Where is your all-powerful will, and your still surer hope?...

It was not out of cowardice that I was trembling; but as I advanced towards my Self, street by street, house by house, through my first ordeal, I got a blunter, deeper knowledge of my Self, and a sudden fear entered my breast.

I am really not a strong person. What had been struggling in me so forcibly was not my own strength; it was simply the reaction from the _others_. A strong person would know at the very first step what mandate to derive from the power animating him; before destroying he would have built up. When a bird finds its cage open and takes flight, it does not hesitate, it has the idea of s.p.a.ce, it spreads its wings, it knows where to fly, and how high.

I know nothing. I am setting out, that's all. Neither before nor behind me is the irresistible urge which is the start of a great career. Nor do I see close by the rising shape of my life. Nor about me is the ringing mirth of faery liberty. Nothing but a little tiredness, a little emptiness in my head, a little emptiness in my heart.... I am not a strong person.

Good-bye, mother, good-bye to your transparent eyes, to your shoulders which will always shrug for the wrong side, good-bye to your tender lying.

You see, I am no longer faint-hearted, because I can walk away from you forever and venture upon a vague future without a glow of eagerness. All I need is something to beckon to me.... There is nothing ahead of me except the quiet artery of a thoroughfare hemmed in by inky houses and the darkness, which melts away at the panes of the street-lamps and makes them dance and quiver below and twinkle like eyes at the top.

Liberty has the taste of fog....

BOARDING-HOUSE

Shall I cross this unfriendly threshold covered with a mangy rug? I should so much like to stop walking and go to sleep. Shall I choose this house which exhales the smell of a cellar, this gloomy shelter, these dingy walls? Shall I....

Come on, fate is everywhere. This is the place I must enter.

IV

I have found work....

A fortnight, a hundred hopes, a fortnight.... The unfriendly atmosphere of stiff faces. "The position is filled." Stairs mounted four steps at a time, then descended gravely, catechisms begun with questions that embarra.s.s and so often ending with questions that make you blush. Then one fine day--by what magic?--the position is not filled, and you answer yes to everything required; the sky is clear, you will start to-morrow.

I have not drained to its dregs the joy there is in working at my nondescript job from morning until evening. To work for your bread, to feel dignified and straight. You cannot talk, to be sure, but at least you do not lie, you are in repose, you let the waves of your being pile up, and every evening you return to a docile home, where the silence is always nigh to flowering....

The boarding-house, however, is not hospitable; you never satisfy your hunger, and my narrow room with its threadbare carpet and mouldy ceiling is like a badly kept cage. But it's Sunday morning and I have undertaken to make it inviting.

A handkerchief twisted about my hair, a white blouse and bare arms....

By persisting and rubbing again, by chasing the dust, by trying a place for the books twenty times over, by pus.h.i.+ng the chairs about, by sc.r.a.ping away the layers of encrusted filth, I am bound to triumph. To judge of the effect, I stop several times and perch on the tattered arm of the red-flowered armchair; the place looks better already. But to it again!

No pictures, no ornaments. I have taken down the sentimental prints hypocritically concealing the scars of the wall-paper. Nothing but the bare room and the high window with its dim panes.

The bed of a doubtful mahogany burrows into the bashful retreat of the alcove. The wardrobe would wabble if it were not secured by a thick rope tied to the rosette on the front. The rosette is typical of a curious character that the room has for all its dinginess. There was an attempt to decorate with a profusion of flowers. Flowers everywhere, spread broadcast over the walls, cutting off the corners of the wash-boards, and trailing their sallow procession in a border around the top of the walls. They are even woven into the stuff on the back of the armchair, they appear almost effaced in the maroon-colored linoleum, and ravelled out and faded in the cretonne curtains.... In this cemetery, the sweet violets blooming on my table have a sensual, almost insolent splendor; their petals look red.

For all its bareness, my room radiates light; the meagre sunlight s.h.i.+nes in through the window and is already transfiguring the place; I feel comfortable in it.

Oftener and oftener I ask myself what is my reason for existence, my true, my sole destiny. Doubtless one must sleep in a room for a long time before encountering the soul that prepares itself there.

I am, I know, like a person who wants to build a big house without having a site or materials, who says nevertheless: "No, not this site, no, not this material." But this is of no importance, I realize. Once you have submitted to the wholesome discipline enjoined by poverty, you receive in return energetic muscles and a patient outlook.

I wait; and no longer having any need to complain or criticize, I wait with a smile. Everything is simpler than one thinks, and everything is easier, and it seems to me that--

Someone is knocking at the door.

"May I come in?"

The landlady, Mme. Noel.