The Choice of Life Part 20

4

When I return to the drawing-room, Blanche calls me with a laugh of delight:

"Oh, look!" she cries. "I've found a book with a portrait of my beloved Elizabeth Browning. Look at that sweet, gentle face, surrounded with ringlets: it's just as I imagined her. I love her all the better now."

They had opened other books written by women and, leaning over the table, were comparing the frontispiece portraits of the authors, interesting or handsome, grave or smiling, young or old. Even so do certain little volumes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries open nearly always with an engraving faded by time and representing charming faces all of the same cla.s.s and often with similar expressions and features: a delicate nose, a bow-shaped, smiling mouth, intelligent eyes with no mysterious depths, dimpled cheeks, a string of pearls round the neck, a loosely-tied kerchief just revealing a swelling bosom, wanton curls dancing against a dark background in a frame of roses upheld by Cupids. And the quiver and the arrows and the flying ribbons and the turtle-doves: all this, joined to the letters, the maxims or the verses, often grave or even sad, sometimes calm and reasonable, sometimes pa.s.sionate, brings before us in a few strokes the harmonious picture of woman's life.

"It is no longer the fashion in these days," murmured Blanche. "And yet is there not an intimate relation between a woman's work and her appearance?"

"That is the reason, no doubt," replied Marcienne, "why it seems, unlike man's, to grow smaller as it pa.s.ses out of the present. We see the immortal pages disappear like the fallen petals of a flower. It's sad, don't you think?"

Struck with the beauty of her closing words, we listened to her in silence. She continued to turn the leaves at random and resumed:

"But, oh, the exquisite art which a woman's work can show when she is not only beautiful, but truly wise, when a lovely hand indites stately verse, when a life holds or breathes nothing but high romance ... and love! For it is love and love alone that makes a woman's brain conceive."

Cecilia, who was gradually losing her shyness, made a gesture to silence us and said, slowly:

"I'll tell you something!"

A general peal of laughter greeted this phrase with which the young Dutchwoman, according to the custom of her country, always ushers in her least words. To make yourself better understood by slow and absent minds, is it not well to give a warning? It is a sort of little spring that goes off first and arouses people's attention. Then the thought is there, ready for utterance. And sometimes, amid the silence, an announcement is made that it will be fine to-morrow, or that it is hot and that a storm is threatening.

But Cecilia is much too clever to cast aside those little mannerisms of her native race which so charmingly accentuate her special type of beauty. So she joined in our laughter with a good grace and, after repeating her warning, observed, in her hesitating language, that, by thus admitting ourselves to be the mere creatures of love, we were justifying the opinion of the men who treat us as "looking-gla.s.ses."

"Looking-gla.s.ses? Men's looking-gla.s.ses? And why not?" I exclaimed. "It is not for us women to decry that looking-gla.s.s side of us. It is serious, more serious than you think, for on the beauty of our reflection often depend our ardour, our courage, our very character and all the energies that create or affect our actions. Besides, whether men or women, we can only reflect one another and we ourselves do not become conscious of our powers until the day of the supreme love, as if, till then, we had only seen ourselves in pocket-mirrors which never reflect more than a morsel of our lives, a movement, a gesture ... and which always distort it!"

Every mouth quivered with laughter. I insisted:

"If women often have so much difficulty in learning to know their own characters, it is because most men are scornful mirrors, occupied with nothing smaller than the universe and never dreaming of reflecting women except in a grudging and imperfect fashion."

"It is true," said Marcienne, thinking of her lover, a man whose domineering temper often made him unjust to her. "Men's lives would be less serenely confident if our amiable and accommodating souls did not afford them a vision incessantly embellished by love ... and always having infinity for a background!"

And, with a satirical smile, she added:

"Let us accept the part of looking-gla.s.ses, but let us place our G.o.ds in a still higher light! They will not complain; and we shall at least have the advantage of seeing beyond them a little s.p.a.ce and brightness."

The conversation then a.s.sumed a more personal character, each of us thinking of the well-beloved: Marcienne, ever mournful and pa.s.sionate; the gentle Blanche, anxious, secretly plighted to an absent lover; and Cecilia, all absorbed in her young happiness with the husband of her choice.

5

Hermione and her cl.u.s.ter of girls had gradually come nearer. She dresses badly, she does her hair with uncompromising severity, but, in spite of it all, Hermione is very beautiful; and her loveliness triumphs over her commonplace clothes, even as her generous heart and the n.o.ble restlessness of her mind keep her on a plane which is loftier than the narrow dogmas of her creed.

During a moment's silence, I hear her answer a question put by Rose:

"Oh, what does it matter if I am wrong, as long as I make others happy!"

And all my friends, like a sheaf of glowing flowers, seemed to be bound together by that word of loving-kindness. Were they not all, these bestowers of joy, living in a world into which neither sin nor error entered, their lives obeying the same eternal principles of love, following the sacred law of nature which fills our hearts with tenderness and our bodies with longing?

6

They were now able to talk together. Their remarks would not be vain, ordinary or frivolous. During the first moments of isolation, each of them had pursued her own thoughts and continued her own life. Each had reached that perfect diapason at which the most antagonistic spirits are in supreme unison. Heedless of different objects or of diverse aims, the same yearning for generosity, the same thirst after graciousness and beauty united their hearts; and their minds, leaping all barriers, came to an understanding of one another in a region beyond opinions. All these young and beautiful creatures, all these forms fashioned for delight exhaled an atmosphere of love. Were they not all alike its votaries?

One alone, in a fiercer glow of enthusiasm and with a doubtless finer sensualism, one alone attempts to offer up her life to a G.o.d! The glorious folly of her! How I love to see her, vainly tormenting her beauty, seeking infinity, aspiring to bear peace across the world. I see her soul like a walled garden in which all the flowers lift themselves higher and higher, struggling to offer themselves to a moment of light.

But, in a day of greater discontent and in an hour of maturity, the illusory fence will fall and the fair life will stand in open s.p.a.ce.

Then, drunk with boundless earth and boundless sky, the woman, restored to nature, will doubtless find herself more attuned to pleasure than were the others and more responsive to joy.

I looked at all those bowed heads, dark or fair, dusky or golden, those lovely forms revealed by their clinging robes, those delicate profiles bent over the portraits and writings of their sisters, far-off friends, vanished, unknown or absent, whose power of love still lives for all men and for all time ... immortal tears, petals dropped from the flower.

Then my glistening eyes turned towards my Roseline. She was there, indifferent, unmoved, perhaps secretly bored.

And my thoughts wept in my heart.

The most beautiful things cannot be given.

CHAPTER X

1

I had been out of town for a time. Returning to Paris a day sooner than I intended, I wished to give Rose the pleasure of an unexpected arrival and I went to see her that same evening. Though it was not more than ten o'clock, the lights were already out in the strictly-managed boarding-house. There was a row of bra.s.s candlesticks on the hall-table.

The man-servant wanted to give me one; but I was impatient, thanked him hurriedly and ran upstairs in the dark.

I could not have told why I was so happy; for, though I should not have been willing to confess it, I had long lost all my illusions about the girl. But she was so beautiful; and her pa.s.sive temperament left so much room for my fancy! I never made any headway; but at the moment it always seemed to me as if I were heard and understood. I used to write on that unresisting life as one writes on the sand; and, the easier I found it to make the impress of my will, the faster was it obliterated.

When I reached the floor on which Rose's bedroom was, I stopped in the dark pa.s.sage. A narrow streak of light showed me that her door was not quite shut. Then, gathering up my skirts to deaden their sound, I felt along the wall and crept softly, on tip-toe, so as to take her by surprise. With infinite precautions, I slowly pushed the door open. I first caught sight of a corner of the empty bed, with its white curtains still closed; then of a candle-end burning on the table and of flowers and a broken vase lying on the ground. What could she be doing?

I was so far from imagining the truth that I do not know how I beheld it without betraying my presence by a movement or a sound. There was a young man in the room.

I saw his face, straight opposite me, near the guttering candle. A man in Rose's bedroom! A friend, no doubt; a lover, perhaps! But why had she never mentioned him to me? I had been away a month; and in not one of her letters had she ever spoken of him. A friend? A lover? Could she have a whole existence of which I knew nothing? Could her quiet life be feigned? But why?

At the risk of revealing my presence, I opened the door still farther; and then I saw her profile bending forward. Thus posed, it stood out against the black marble of the mantel-piece like a cameo. Rose had let down her hair, as she did every evening. Her bodice was unfastened; and the two golden tresses brought forward over her breast meekly followed the curve of her half-exposed bosom. She was not astonished, she was not even excited. She seemed to acquiesce in the man's presence in her room; it was no doubt customary.

And suddenly, amid the thousand details that engaged my attention, a light flashed across me: was not Rose's companion one of the boarders in the house, perhaps that painter of whom she had told me, the one who made a sketch of her head which she brought to me a few days after her arrival in Paris?

His eyes never left her. He watched and followed her every movement, whereas she, in her perfect composure, did not seem even to heed his presence. And that was what struck me: Rose's impa.s.siveness in the face of that anxious and silent prayer. Did she not see? Could she not understand? I almost longed to rush at her and cry:

"But look, open your eyes; that man is entreating you!... If you do not share his emotions, at least be touched by his suffering; if not your lips, give him a glance or a smile!"

Oh, how like her it all is! And how the anxious pleading of the wooer resembles the vain waiting of the friend! But, alas, what in my case is but a disappointment of the heart, a tiresome obstacle to the evolution of an idea, is perhaps in his case a cruel and lasting ordeal!

Suddenly, he falls on his knees before the girl. With his shaking hands, he touches her breast; then he kisses it gently. She does not repel him, but her bored and absent expression discourages any amorous action and withers the kisses at the very moment when they alight upon her flesh.

Then he half-raises himself to gaze at her from head to foot; and with all his ardour he silently asks for the consenting smile and the word that gives permission.