The Inferno Part 4

They seemed to need solitude, the first step to a mystery toward which they were travelling together. They had fled from the others. They had created for themselves the forbidden solitude. But you could clearly tell that now that they had found solitude, they did not know what else to look for.

Then I heard one of them stammer and say sadly, with almost a sob:

"We love each other dearly."

Then a tender phrase rose breathlessly, groping for words, timidly, like a bird just learning to fly:

"I'd like to love you more."

To see them thus bent toward each other, in the warm shadow, which bathed them and veiled the childishness of their features, you would have thought them two lovers meeting.

Two lovers! That was their dream, though they did not yet know what love meant.

One of them had said "the first time." It was the time that they felt they were alone, although these two cousins had been living close together.

No doubt it was the first time that the two had sought to leave friends.h.i.+p and childhood behind them. It was the first time that desire had come to surprise and trouble two hearts, which until now had slept.

Suddenly they stood up, and the slender ray of sunlight, which pa.s.sed over them and fell at their feet, revealed their figures, lighted up their faces and hair, so that their presence brightened the room.

Were they going away? No, they sat down again. Everything fell back into shadow, into mystery, into truth.

In beholding them, I felt a confused mingling of my past and the past of the world. Where were they? Everywhere, since they existed. They were on the banks of the Nile, the Ganges, or the Cydnus, on the banks of the eternal river of the ages. They were Daphnis and Chloe, under a myrtle bush, in the Greek suns.h.i.+ne, the s.h.i.+mmer of leaves on their faces, and their faces mirroring each other. Their vague little conversation hummed like the wings of a bee, near the freshness of fountains and the heat that consumed the meadows, while in the distance a chariot went by, laden with sheaves.

The new world opened. The panting truth was there. It confused them.

They feared the brusque intrusion of some divinity. They were happy and unhappy. They nestled as close together as they could. They brought to each other as much as they could. But they did not suspect what it was that they were bringing. They were too small, too young.

They had not lived long enough. Each was to self a stifling secret.

Like all human beings, like me, like us, they wished for what they did not have. They were beggars. But they asked /themselves/ for charity.

They asked for help from their /own/ persons.

The boy, a man already, impoverished already by his feminine companion, turned, drawn towards her, and held out his awkward arms, without daring to look at her.

The girl, a woman already, leaned her face on the back of the sofa, her eyes s.h.i.+ning. Her cheeks were plump and rosy, tinted and warmed by her heart. The skin of her neck, taut and satiny, quivered. Half-blown and waiting, a little voluptuous because voluptuousness already emanated from her, she was like a rose inhaling sunlight.

And I--I could not tear my eyes from them.

After a long silence, he murmured:

"Shall we stop calling each other by our first names?"

"Why?"

He seemed absorbed in thought.

"So as to begin over again," he said at last.

"Shall we, Miss Janvier?" he asked again.

She gave a visible start at the touch of this new manner of address, at the word "Miss," as if it were a kind of embrace.

"Why, Mr. Lecoq," she ventured hesitatingly, "it is as though something had covered us, and we were removing--"

Now, he became bolder.

"Shall we kiss each other on our mouths?"

She was oppressed, and could not quite smile.

"Yes," she said.

They caught hold of each other's arms and shoulders and held out their lips, as if their mouths were birds.

"Jean!" "Helene!" came softly.

It was the first thing they had found out. To embrace the embracer, is it not the tiniest caress and the least sort of a bond? And yet it is so sternly prohibited.

Again they seemed to me to be without age.

They were like all lovers, while they held hands, their faces joined, trembling and blind, in the shadow of a kiss.

They broke off, and disengaged themselves from their embrace, whose meaning they had not yet learned.

They talked with their innocent lips. About what? About the past, which was so near and so short.

They were leaving their paradise of childhood and ignorance. They spoke of a house and a garden where they had both lived.

The house absorbed them. It was surrounded by a garden wall, so that from the road all you could see was the tip of the eaves, and you couldn't tell what was going on inside of it.

They prattled:

"The rooms, when we were little and they were so big--"

"It was easier to walk there than anywhere else."

To hear the children talk, you would have thought there was something benevolent and invisible, something like the good G.o.d of the past, behind those walls. She hummed an air she had heard there, and said that music was easier to remember than people. They dropped back into the past easily and naturally. They wrapped themselves up in their memories as though they were cold.

"The other day, just before we left, I took a candle and walked alone through the rooms, which scarcely woke up to watch me pa.s.s."

In the garden, so prim and well kept, they thought only of the flowers, and little else. They saw the pool, the shady walk, and the cherry tree, which, in winter when the lawn was white, they made believe had too many blossoms--snow blossoms.