The Choice of Life Part 4

CHAPTER VIII

1

We were lying in the long gra.s.s, looking up at the sky through the branches of the apple-trees and watching the clouds drift past.

The light was fading slowly, the leaves became dim, the birds stopped singing.

"Rose, I do nothing but think of you. Who are you? What will become of you? I should like to antic.i.p.ate everything, so as to save you every pain. Had you been happy and well-cared-for, I would have wished you trouble and grief. But, strengthened as you now are by many trials, you will be able to find in sorrows avoided and only seen in the distance all the good which we usually draw from them by draining them to the dregs."

"I am not afraid, I expect to be unhappy."

"I hope that you will not be unhappy. The change will be quite simple if it is wisely brought about; you will drop out of your present life like a ripe fruit dropping from its stalk."

"How shall I prepare myself?"

"So far, your chief merit has been patience. But now rouse yourself, look around you, judge, find out your good and bad qualities."

Rose interrupted me:

"My good qualities! Have I any?"

"Indeed you have: plenty of common sense, a great power of resistance, shrewdness. By means of these, you have been able to subdue the tyranny of others: can you not escape from that of your failings? Your life has adapted itself to an evil and stupid environment; it must now adapt itself to the environment of your own self."

2

From the neighbouring farms came the plaintive, monotonous cry calling the cattle home. The drowsy sky became one universal grey, while the night dews covered the earth with a faint haze.

"I am surprised that, when you were so unhappy, solitude did not appear to you in the light of a beautiful dream."

Rose's timid and astonished voice echoed my last words:

"A beautiful dream! Then do you like solitude?"

"Oh, Rose, I owe it the greatest, the only joys of my childhood! It was to gain solitude that, later, I set myself to win my independence, knowing that, if I did not meet with the love I wished, I should yet be happier alone than among others."

"But, still, you do not live alone!"

I remained silent for a moment, stirred by that question which filled my mind with the thought of my own happiness; and then I said in a whisper, as though speaking to myself:

"Rose, my present life is the most exquisite form of independence and solitude."

And I went on:

"Ah, Rose, to know how to be alone! That is the finest conquest that a woman can make! You cannot imagine my rapture when I first found myself in a home of my own, surrounded by all the things purchased by my work.

When I came in at the end of the day, my heart used to throb with gladness. No pleasure has ever seemed to equal that blessed harmony which reigned and reigns in my soul or that a.s.sured peace which no one can take from me, because it depends only on my mood."

"Teach me that joy."

"It is only a brighter light of our own consciousness, a more detached and loftier contemplation of what affects us, a truer way of seeing and understanding...."

The girl murmured:

"Shall I ever have it?"

"Later, when you have gone away."

And, in response to her anxious sigh, I went on, confidently:

"And you will go away when you want to go as badly as I did, when your object is not so much to escape unhappiness as to secure happiness; for, when you become what I hope to see you, you will look at things so differently! You will pity those about you, you will not judge them. The irksome duties laid upon you will not be a burden to you. You will understand the beauty of the country for the first time; and the thought of leaving it will reveal its sweetness to you. But, on the other hand, fortunately, new reasons for going will appeal to your conscience: first, your just pride in what you are and what you may become; the sense of your independence; and the vision of a wider and n.o.bler existence. And, in this way, you will go not to escape annoyance or to please me, but as a duty towards yourself."

3

It was the silent hour when nature seems to be awaiting the darkness.

Not a breath, not a sound, while the colours of the day vanish one by one before the life of the evening has yet begun to throb.

I turned to my companion. With a great labourer's knife in her hand, she was solemnly whittling a piece of wood. She answered my enquiring glance:

"It is to fasten to Blossom's horns; she's getting into bad ways...."

And, quickly, fearing lest she had hurt me, she added:

"I was listening, you know!"

4

Standing in the porch, we breathe the scent of the rose-trees laden with roses. It has been raining heavily. Tiny drops drip from leaf to leaf; the flowers, for a moment bowed down, raise their heads; the birds resume their singing; and, in the sunbeams that now appear, slanting and a little treacherous, the pebbles on the path glitter like precious stones.

We had taken shelter, during the storm, inside the house, where we sat eating sweets, laughing and talking without restraint. But now Rose is uneasy; she looks at me and says, abruptly:

"Do you love me?"

"I cannot tell you yet."

She insists, coaxingly:

"Do tell me!"

"Darling, I have become very chary of words like that, for I know what pain we can give if, after our lips have uttered them, they are not borne out by all our later acts. As we grow in understanding, I believe that it becomes more difficult for us to distinguish the exact value of the friendship which we bestow."

"Why?"