The Choice of Life Part 13

I have done my utmost to make her come. Lately, I have been sending her urgent and encouraging letters daily. Now, the hour is approaching; and my only feeling is one of anguish.

I have told her twenty times that the talk about responsibility which I hear all around me brings a smile to my lips. I have told her how, by making my conduct depend on hers, I relieved myself of all personal anxiety. And to-day my task appears to me so heavy that I can only laugh at my presumption.

2

It was foolish of me to write to her:

"What are your faults? Teach me to know you. Tell me what you are."

In reality, our faults arise from our circ.u.mstances. Events alone set us the questions to which our actions give a definite answer. Up to the present, Rose has not lived; she has been acc.u.mulating forces that are now about to come into being. What will they be? Whither will they tend?

We can a.s.sume nothing in a life that is but beginning; and is it not just this that encourages us to seek and to help? Each of us has only to look back in order to know that, in the shifting soil of characters, we can fix or establish nothing. I found her acquiescing in a shameful servitude; and yet I have faith in the n.o.bility of her soul. She was untruthful; there was no relation between her wishes and her actions, her thoughts and her words. Nevertheless, I do not doubt her essential honesty.

The atmosphere that surrounds us is so often treacherous to our pliant natures! We women are obliged to lie. So long as we have not found our "love," we look in vain for a little confidence. No one believes us, no one receives the best part of our soul. One would think that, for those who listen to us, our sincerest words are poisoned as they pa.s.s through our fairest smiles. And, when nature has made us beautiful and gifted, people take pleasure in judging us severely, as they might look at the summer days through dark-tinted window-panes.

We are always refused recognition. The first feeling which any work that we perform arouses is one of doubt. Its merit is disputed. And yet we have devoted a part of our youth to it; we have left with it a little of our freshness and our bloom. Very often, it is the ransom of our sorrow.

Our love is written upon it; and it bears the imprint alike of our smiles and of our tears. Do we not know that woman, for all her culture, remains closer than man to her instinct and her "soil?" She is less purely intellectual but more sensitive than man; and, while he can create everything in the silence of his imagination, she has to live and suffer everything that she brings into the world. She conceives and realises with her flesh and with her blood.

A woman said to me, one day:

"If I had to begin life over again, I should not have the courage to avoid a single danger, pain or disappointment. In surmounting them, I have gained a power of resistance which forms the framework of my present and my future. I can see the sparkle of my happiness better when I keep in the shadow of my sad memories; and all that I accomplish, all that I write seems to me to flow from my past tears."

To refuse recognition to a woman's work is to refuse to recognise her soul, her existence and every throb of her heart!...

Man does not know that torture which every true woman suffers when she feels that those who are listening to her do not hear her real words, that those who are looking at her do not see what she is making every effort to show. Even when she is obeying the simplest impulses of her nature, people distrust what she says and what she does; and in some women, good and kind and beautiful, we see repeated the artless miracle of the flowers that exhaust themselves in giving too much fragrance and too much blossom. How fearful and timid this moral isolation makes us!

And how thrice courageous we must be in the hour of realisation! If effort sometimes seems useless to men, what about women, who see themselves ever confronted by a blank wall of scepticism?

A man is valued by the weight of the forces which he stirs up for and against himself. The forces which woman encounters are nearly all hostile.

3

I was close upon sixteen. One day, I heard some one say, speaking of some trifling thing of which I was wrongly suspected:

"She is no longer a child. She's a woman now and she's lying."

That was a cruel speech, the sort of speech that influences a whole life. My eyes were gradually opened to the dreary injustice that casts its shadow over the fairest destinies of women. Nothing around them seems clear and natural. Doubt lies in wait for them, calumny rends them. Now my hour was coming: my skirts, touching the ground for the first time, had suggested the suspicion of deceit and hypocrisy.

It was perhaps this wound, inflicted on the soul of the growing girl, that left the most serious mark on my soul as a woman. Thanks to a strange p.r.i.c.k of conscience, to a singular need to give to others what I did not obtain, I wanted to trust and I did trust! I gave my confidence pa.s.sionately, utterly, rapturously! And this made wells of such deep and impetuous joy spring up in me that I felt no bitterness when I saw my confidence marred as it pa.s.sed through others, even as a clear stream is muddied in following its course.

Still, I wanted more; I sought to concentrate in one person, herself generous and confiding, the happiness which I lacked and whose infinite value I suspected. Ah, what a blessed relief when I found her! I was as one who has never seen his face save in distorting mirrors and who suddenly sees himself as he hoped to be. It seems to me that my happiness dates from that day. Before then, I suffered, I was all astray, an ill wind hovered round me; and, on the sands of other lives, there was never a trace of my footsteps where I believed that I had pa.s.sed. Henceforth, another soul would read mine! Another's eyes would own the candour of my eyes!

It was little more than a child that introduced me to love and kindness.

She was treated with iron severity, she was unhappy; I was alone: she became my daily companion. Alas! too early ripe, too intelligent, she was of those who cannot stay. Is it a presentiment that makes them hurry so, or is it rather their eagerness to live, their over-sharpened senses that wear out their strength?

4

She was not fifteen; but, already matured in body and mind, she attracted immediate attention. Her walk was so superb that I cannot think of her without seeing her come swiftly to me, with that dear smile of hers and with her lovely arms outstretched in greeting. Her limpid eyes obeyed the light, the light of her heart and the light of the sky, whereas her dark hair, always tangled and rebellious, bore witness to the protest of her dauntless spirit. In her company I tasted for the first time the delight of souls that join and blend and unite in mutual trust. In an ecstasy of sincerity, for hours I imagined myself baptising her whole life with my faith. I said to her, over and over again:

"I believe in you.... I believe in you.... Do you understand what that means? It is something greater and better than 'I love you:' it means that one can never be alone again!"

She died a few months later; and for years I was to seek in vain in others' hearts and eyes the pure and limpid faith which reflects everything that bends over it.

One can love people without knowing them fully; one cannot believe in them without mingling one's soul with theirs; and the moral luxury of it is so great that, when we have once known it, if only for a moment, we demand it from all with whom we come in contact.

Roseline, all that I then wished for, that charming bond of tenderness and confidence which should link women together, that difficult and precious happiness which I knew for one hour through that child-soul: that is what I am trying to offer you.

And perhaps you will have something better still, because the a.s.sistance which you receive is deliberate and has stood the test. In the place of that artless faith rushing to meet life, you find a soul that has been steeped in it. Rose, may my faith and my soul be your two mirrors. In one, you will see your forces rise even as we catch the first swell of a cornfield at dawn. In the other, they will appear to you enlarged, multiplied, transformed according to nature's laws, ripened by the dazzling suns of noon, utilised by the intellect, ready at last to nourish you and nourish others.

5

Then I met men, I met other women, without ever attaining the wish of my heart. They came and went. But, at each soul that I lost, I found my own a little more and I remember most gratefully those who were the most cruel. This man was ill and unconscious of his actions; that woman was wicked; that man too frivolous; and another was a liar....

A liar! Even to-day, among those withered attachments which it pleases me to evoke, this last arrests my thoughts. For it was he--O singular contrast!--who, by his lying and duplicity, finished the work begun by the frank confidence of the child.

He was a liar.--Lying came to him so easily and naturally that he himself did not discriminate between what he had done and what he had said, between what he had actually experienced and the life which he pretended to have lived. His was a strange nature, which, in its eagerness to seem, forgot to be, a nature which, no longer distinguishing its frontiers from another's, lost in the end its own domain! A strange example of a strayed consciousness which, knowing no dividing line, attributed the acts of others to itself, spoke from their hearts and led their existences! He walked through life as one walks through a gallery whose walls are panelled with mirrors. He could not take a step without thinking that he was taking a thousand; and his vanity enhanced his least actions to such a degree that he actually believed himself the lover of a woman if he merely kissed her hand. It was thus that he boasted of making innumerable conquests at every hour of the day; and, to hear him talk, always tired and exhausted with love, he was a wreck at twenty, as the price of his inordinate exploits.

Enamoured of his appearance, he saw nothing beyond the blankness of his little soul, or rather he made it the origin and the end of everything.

Poor empty head! Wretched puppet, whose spring was the vanity which every pa.s.ser-by could set in motion at will!

At a time when I myself did not know it, he had cleverly discovered what he must appear to be in order to arouse my enthusiasm, thus offering me the illusion of that faith which I aspire to awaken in you, my Roseline.

Certainly, I owe him much! If an exact copy of a masterpiece can stir us as deeply as the original, the perfect impersonation of a fine intellect and a n.o.ble character can influence us very happily. How grateful I am to him for the trouble which he took to give me a representation of virtues which he did not possess! They were painted on his soul in such relief, a relief which no reality gives, as I was afterwards to learn!

The artificial lilies that decorate the chapel of the church hard by have an a.s.surance that is absent from those which will soon fade over there, on the table. The false boasts an unvarying brilliance, an imposing emphasis which we never find in the true. And, no doubt, the qualities of which he vouchsafed me the sight would never have had such value in my eyes, if his fatuousness had not displayed them to my youthful admiration as one shows an object behind a magnifying-gla.s.s.

And what does it matter to me now that they were false, those gifts with which that soul seemed laden, if for a moment I pictured them as real!

After the error was dispelled, the image which I once thought true remained in me. It had determined my tastes, fixed my opinions, set my mind at rest. Subsequently, I was to try and refashion the perfection of which I had beheld the mirage and, with still greater ardour, I was to pursue in others and conquer at last the reality of the once-known happiness which I thought that I had found in him.

We are none the poorer when a sad truth takes the place of a beautiful dream. Knowledge has already filled the void which the lost illusion leaves behind it....

6

Let us seek then, Rose, let us seek even after we have found! Whether we be denied or heard, let us go on seeking! When we have lovingly performed the little things necessary that a flower may peradventure blossom, if it does not give us what we hoped for, does that prevent us from loving another exactly like it and from tending it with all the greater skill and care?

Our ignorance must be renewed in the presence of each life that touches ours. May the quest suffice to keep our faith eternally young, that wonderful, childlike faith which alone encourages, finds and sets free.

CHAPTER III

1

It was eleven o'clock when I went to meet Rose this morning; but the day was so dark and the fog so dense that the street-lamps were still lit.

It was gloomy and depressing. Wrapped in a long cloak and huddled in a corner of the cab, I shivered with cold and nervousness. I reread her telegram, dispatched from a railway-station before daybreak; and the pathos of those few words went to my heart: