The Choice of Life Part 23

"Perhaps there is some obstacle that separates you? Do you dislike him?"

"No, I know his whole life and I have nothing against him."

"Well, then ...?"

I tried in vain to obtain a definite reply. Her soul was shut, walled in, almost hostile. Was she refusing herself, as she had once given herself, without knowing why? Or else was my vague intuition correct and was a latent energy escaping from that little low, square forehead, white and pure as a camellia, a force of which she herself was unaware and which no doubt would one day reveal to me the final choice of her life?

I made her sit down and, kneeling beside her, questioned her patiently and gently as one asks a sick child to describe the pain which one is anxious to relieve. Silently, gazing vaguely into s.p.a.ce, she let herself rest on my shoulder. The flowers fell from her listless hands.

Some still hung to her dress, with tangled stalks. Red carnations, mimosa, tuberose, narcissus, hyacinths drunk with perfume, guelder-roses and white lilac wept at her feet.

I rose slowly and looked at her, my heart aching for the heedless one who dropped the joys which chance laid in her arms!

PART THE THIRD

CHAPTER I

1

The reason why we judge people better after a lapse of time is that, when we look at them from a distance, there is no confusion of detail.

The main lines of their character stand out, relieved of the thousand little alterations and erasures which the scrupulous hand of truth is constantly making as it pa.s.ses. .h.i.ther and thither, now rubbing out, now redrawing, until at last the impression is no longer a very clear one.

From the day when I separated my life completely from the life of Rose, her character appeared to me distinctly; and at the same time, now that it was free to come down to its own level, it a.s.serted itself in its turn. Until that moment, while I had been careful to put no pressure upon her, I had nevertheless been asking her to choose her tastes and occupations on a plane that was unsuitable for her.

Her moral outlook was good, true and not at all silly, but it was limited; and, in trying to make her see life swiftly and from above, as though in a bird's-eye view, I had made it impossible for her to distinguish anything.

Her fault was that she had not been able to change, mine was that I had had too much faith in her possibilities. My optimism had wound itself around her immobility and fastened to it, even as ivy coils around a stone statue, without communicating to it the smallest portion of its st.u.r.dy and luxuriant little life.

2

And now it is six months since we parted; and I am going to-day to see her for the first time in her new existence.

I look out of the window of the railway-carriage; and my mind calls up memories which glide past with the autumn fields. First comes the departure of Floris, wearied by the incomprehensible att.i.tude of the girl. He went away shortly after our meeting, still philosophical and cheerful, in spite of his disappointment. And the part which he played in my experiment taught me something that guided my efforts into a fresh direction: if Rose's beauty was to him sufficient compensation for her commonplace character, could not I also accept the girl as something out of which to weave romance and beauty? Does not everything lie in the mere fact of consent? Pa.s.sive and silent, would she not become a rare object in my life, a precious stone?

"Woman blossoms into fullest flower by doing nothing," some one has said. "Women who do not work form the beauty of the world."

I took Rose to live with me and for weeks devoted myself exclusively to her appearance and her manners. I sought if possible to perfect the exterior. It was all in vain. This beautiful creature was so totally ignorant of what beauty meant that she was constantly deforming herself; and I at last gave up the struggle.

Sadly I remember the last pulsation of my will. It happened in the silence of my heart; and life went on for a little while longer. Would it not have been hateful to send Rose away, as one dismisses a servant?

And what act, what fault had she committed to deserve such treatment?

When it would have been so sweet to me to give her everything, for no reason at all, how could I find a solid reason for taking everything from her?

So I said nothing to her; we had none of those horrible explanations which set bristling spikes on the barriers--inevitable barriers, alas!--which dissimilarities in taste or character raise between people.

There are certain persons who cannot bear to make any change without a preliminary explanation. They seem to carry a sort of map in their heads: on the far side of the frontier that borders the friendly territory lies the enemy; and it needs but a word, a gesture, a difference of opinion for you to find yourself in exile. Alas, have we not enough with all the limits, demarcations, laws and judgments that are perhaps necessary to the world at large? And must we lay upon ourselves still others in the intimate relations of life?

I had no right to set myself up as a judge and I could not have p.r.o.nounced sentence. I waited. And, my will being no longer in the way, circ.u.mstances gradually led my companion to her true destiny better than I could have done.

She was bored. She was not really made to be a purely decorative object.

In spite of her trailing silk or velvet dresses, twenty times a day I would find her in the larder, with a loaf under her arm and a knife in her hand, contentedly b.u.t.tering thick slices of bread, which she would eat slowly in huge mouthfuls, looking straight before her as she did so.

She was bored; and I was powerless to cure this unfamiliar ill. I looked out some work for her in my busy life. She wrote letters, kept my accounts, hemmed the maids' ap.r.o.ns. Soon she was running the errands.

One day she answered the front-door.

I still remember that moment when she came and told me, in her pretty, gentle way, that there was some one to see me in the drawing-room. I do not know why, but that insignificant incident suddenly revealed the truth to me. I was ashamed of myself and turned away my head so that she should not see me blush. Poor child, she was unconsciously lowering herself more and more daily. She was becoming my property. I was making use of her.

Without saying anything, I at once began to search for something for her. I hesitated between first one thing and then another; but at last chance came to my aid. Country-bred as she was, the girl was losing her colour in the Paris air; she was ordered to leave town. She knew a family at Neufchatel, in Normandy, who were willing to take her as a boarder for a few weeks. She went and did not come back.

3

What did she do there, how did she spend her time? She wrote to me before long that she was quite happy, that she was earning her livelihood without difficulty. There was a little linen-draper's shop, it seemed, kept by an old maid, who, having no relations of her own, had taken Rose to a.s.sist her at first and perhaps to succeed her in time.

I was not at all surprised. For that matter, when we follow the natural evolution of things, their conclusion comes so softly that we hardly notice it. It is the descent which we are approaching: it becomes less steep at every step and, when we reach it, it is only a faint depression in the ground.

4

Strange temperament! The more I think of it, the more it appears to me as an instance of the dangers of virtue, or at least of what we understand by the word. Does it not look as though, in the charts of our characters, the virtues are the ultimate goals which can be reached only by the way of our faults? Each virtue stands like a golden statue in the centre of a cross-roads. We can hardly know every side of it unless we have beheld it from the various paths that lead to it. It s.h.i.+nes in a different manner at the end of each road.

Rose never became conscious of her good qualities, because she possessed them too naturally; and she remained poor in the midst of all the riches which she was unable to discern.

Oh, if only she had been less wise and had had that ardour, that flame which feeds on all that is thrown upon it to extinguish it; if she had had that inordinate prodigality which teaches us by making us commit a thousand acts of folly; if, in short, she had had faults, vices, impulses of curiosity, how different her fate would have been! The equilibrium of a person's character may be compared with that of a pair of scales; and it is safe to say that, by weighing more heavily upon one of these, our defects raise our good qualities to their highest level.

5

But every minute is now bringing me nearer to this life which I am at last to know; and I gaze absent-mindedly at the Bray country, that lovely country red with the gold of autumn. By force of habit, my nerves spell out a few sensations which my thoughts do not put into words. My heart is beating. Now, with no idea or purpose in my mind, I am speeding with a full heart towards the girl who was at least the inspiration of a splendid hope and above all an incentive to action.

CHAPTER II

1

I arrived at Neufchatel at the gracious hour when the sun is paling; and I was at once charmed with the kindly aspect of this little Norman town.

The house-fronts gleaming with fresh paint, the pigeons picking their way across the streets, the gra.s.s growing between the cobble-stones, the flowers outside the windows and doors, a cleanliness that adorns the smallest details: all this is so calm and so empty that our life at once settles there as in a frame that takes with equal ease the happy or the sad picture which we propose to fit into it.

It reminds me of Bruges, whose infinite, patient calm is a clean page on which the visitor's life is printed, happy or distressful at will, since there is nothing to define its character. It also has the silence of the little Flemish towns, with their streets without carriages or wayfarers.

The gardens look as though they were artificial; and in the frame of the open windows we see interiors which are as sharp as pictures.