Woman Part 12

He smiles without answering, shaken in his flesh, so lucid and so well prepared for his approaching fatherhood that I feel myself a hundred leagues behind. He, at least, knows why he will love his child, why he already loves it.

As for me, my vision is obscured by the disconcerting pictures drawn by the other women. Perhaps also I am under the ancestral pressure exerted by the long line of my foremothers. Why should I be different? What quality would make me better?

The animal heaviness rea.s.serts its rights. My body is an unwieldy sheath overspread with sleepiness, ramified by thick blood, its cells given over to contented, torpid well-being. My very heart is struck with stupor.

To lie at full length, on my bed beneath the weight of my b.r.e.a.s.t.s of rock, no longer to move or think, only to feel at momentary intervals a light stirring, a caress, which gently turns on its self and folds its wings.

XI

I scarcely dare to get up. She knew me in my slenderness of the previous summer, when I took the torrid paths like a goat leaping dangerous mountain tracks. It was from my brisk manner of ready, go! she told me, that she could tell how warm our love was.

We were living in the same inn. The very first day I was struck by the blooming youthfulness of this woman who so skilfully escaped the burden of the forties and constantly trailed a lover, a lover with a vindictive eye and bullish neck and forehead. Perhaps on close inspection you might suspect the fine tracery of wrinkles on her transparent skin.

Nevertheless she shone resplendent as we younger women don't know how to shine.

Black on white, a head surcharged with mystery and night, two jewels, no, two green pools, a mouth that revealed the shape of a kiss better than other mouths, a figure not very tall but with a race and suppleness which lent dignity. Clothes planned to reveal the curves of her body.

Movements kindling I know not what lights. Woman, in short, with all a woman has in her of the venomous and the childlike.

We sat directly opposite each other at table. The charm of her vivid smile, glowing face, and darting movements turned the frugal meal for me into a riotous feast.

One morning as I was starting out on a walk by myself for nowhere in particular she came up to me in an easy spontaneous way, as if there really did exist a sisterhood among women. Part of her loveliness was a deep, maternal voice; in crystal tones she plunged into a surprising eulogy of the relationship between my husband and me. She had noticed us. How perfectly united we must be! "Married? Absurd!" She pouted. But we had such a way of locking arms, and looking and waiting for each other, also such a....

She went on talking and talking. I was rather bewildered.... Was it really _us_ she was describing--sombre with pa.s.sion, eagerly relishing a concord that was pregnant with storms which might break suddenly from a clear sky? Wasn't it more like her own love? I was at a loss how to answer. Still I could not recognize ourselves. She clutched me and laughingly declared I was a little savage, and my being a little savage pleased her.

We came to where the country takes a sudden dip, so that to be visible to the heavens it has to cling to the bronzed trunks of the half-stripped cork-trees. We went on breasting the wind. I knitted my brows. Everything she said breathed, at least to me, another age or another sphere; it all hinged on love, was dedicated to love, and by that very fact created a distance between us. I saw her cramped and confined by the very thing that gave her so much vitality; I saw it was her crucifixion. She was nothing but the instinct for love restricted to the need of man. Nevertheless she attracted me.

We got to know each other better. She astonished me more and more.

Whether she and her lover carried on a squally conversation on the bench in the hall or whether she wandered along the narrow, brambly paths in a sort of ferocious abandon, or whether she came to me and threw her th.o.r.n.y crown at my feet with a radiant gesture, she was Woman as men have described her, as they have wanted her. She was the ancient bearer of a fatal property, the creature who either subdues her opponent or is subdued by him, and knows nothing else; the sorry creature of tears and fascinations....

She never spoke of her life or of herself. We were two women, our lot therefore was the same, she was in love, I was in love. What else need one want?

"Good-bye for the present," she cried as the cart set off down the road at a snail's pace. She stood with her head inclined tenderly sidewise and her floating veil prolonging the farewell.... There was a bend in the road. I thought that was to be my last view of her.

But a little while ago as I was going to lie down, an imperious ring tore the silence. Actually she, her smile, her veil, her dress a tangle of silver.

"What a pretty little nest! How comfortable you must be! Well, well.

Still happy?"

And then--there!--her laugh with a little savagery in it. She notices that I am expecting a baby. "Well, of all things!" She throws her gloves into the air, seats herself, gets up again, and from her hectic restlessness I infer that she feels defrauded. My home is too cozy and my manner too tranquil. Not, of course, that she wants to find me in misfortune, but it's as though I have pa.s.sed over into an enemy's camp.

She has come because she is in trouble. I do my best. I hold her hands in mine and try to trace the ravages of grief on her faun face because she keeps saying: "I'm so miserable." She must be suffering. But I cannot get myself to be moved.

This is her story. Her lover has betrayed her, she is sure of it. In tidying his drawers she found letters from a woman referring to a recent rendezvous. She thought she'd die when she read them.... Still I am unmoved. She warms up to her theme. At breakfast, then and there, a terrible scene; they fly at each other.... Disgust seizes me.... To show my interest and stimulate my pity, I ask some questions. "So you had an explanation and could come to an understanding?" She s.n.a.t.c.hes her hands away and draws back. "Aren't you listening?"

To come to an understanding! That would be too easy. They rushed at each other at the first pretext, each resorting to shifts and dodges and keeping silent as to the real issue, though recognizing the other's grievance. "He beat me."

She closes her beautiful victimized eyes. She has displayed the seven wounds of her heart; and the least she expects is the shelter of my breast and the succor of my arms....

"But it would be so simple to tell each other the truth and try to understand each other...."

She keeps her flexible panther-like body from bounding up. "The truth!

what truth? Do you think love is so simple? He has deceived me. That's the only truth I need to know." She gives herself up to tears, and her clear eyes turn into two bloodshot orbs.

Should I tell her that I am insensible to such despair, and her love is merely a mistake proceeding from books, it really isn't love? Should I tell her that love is logical and simple at bottom, and is less in its transports than in the gentleness it conveys? Should I tell her that men like change more than women and for a man to s.n.a.t.c.h at a pa.s.sing temptation does not mean that he is trying to reach the love he prefers?

Should I?

She antic.i.p.ates me. "I understand, I understand, you are not in love.

Poor little thing, you'll see when you love!" She sends her prophetic look around the orderly room and the, to her, inconceivable quiet. What polite excuse can she find for getting away quickly? She came a long way to meet a real sister in love. We ought to have groaned together over the common enemy who is also the common G.o.d; then she would have departed in her honorable failure aided and reinforced for the eternal contest.

Shall I let her leave like this? I have been able to secure a serenity which she does not surmise; it would be a charity to beg her to try to secure the same serenity. This woman ... I shall say to her: "A beloved is neither a G.o.d nor an enemy, he is a friend you must discover in spite of pa.s.sion. I know it's hard and needs an iron will and devotion, but I swear one succeeds...."

She raises the window-shade. Her face stands out--is it the same?--marred by the light.

The borders of her green eyes show the streaky after-effects of tears, her cheeks are lined, her lips have lost their blood and youthful red, the two tendons of her lovely marble neck twitch, and the cherished body in its holiday attire collapses like a broken toy.

I approach her, holding out in my comradely arms the new spirit that will blossom on the new earth. I am not the only one; other young women would speak as I do. The love by which we live is not like the love the others die of.

But when I come close to her she steps into the full light ... I give up the idea of explaining myself. There is nothing to say. She is twenty years older than we are.

XII

I have the feeling that I am not prepared; it is a sort of embarra.s.sment, an obscure terror, and when I get myself to say so to the other women, they laugh and hush me up. "Don't worry. The knowledge comes of itself. Just being a mother teaches you how to raise a child."

It was by chance that I came to this street. I was walking along. The hospital. A dull flat smell surrounded the sordid building with a leprous haze. The doorway was swallowing up a long line of women from off the gray canyon of the street. I do not know what struck me--I retraced my steps and followed the women in.

We were made to wait in a room heavy with a brew of musty drug smells.

Someone shut the door, and immediately there broke out a fearful hubbub, a concert of human meowings, bawls, pipings. A panic nearly seized me.

With the dull patience of animals penned in together the women formed into groups and filled out blank forms, rocking and bobbing the light fragile bundles they each carried in their arms.

I went up to one of them, leaned over and looked upon the crumpled patch of a little old red face. Then I realized I had come there to occupy myself in my period of expectancy and catch a glimpse of my child in advance.

The woman's face was bloodless, like the face of a drowned corpse, and fanned by long colorless locks limp as seaweed. Seeing the supplication in my eyes she lifted up the thick dirty-gray shawl with the air of a benefactress. "Three months." The first thing they tell of a child is its age.

The little worm very leisurely wrinkled its forehead of peeling satin and stretched itself, opened two rather gla.s.sy eyes encircled by mauve, and let out its guttural wail through a toothless aperture upholstered with flesh. The provident mother had already pulled a rubber pacifier out of her pocket, which transformed the wail into a monotonous greedy gurgle. "Will you be quiet! They're an awful trouble. You'll see," she declared, gauging my heavy figure. "I had bad luck, I had no milk. No use giving him gravy or bread soaked and boiled. He doesn't get any good out of them. If you think you can fatten them on the doctor's fine words, as if the doctors even know what they're talking about!"

"I believe you!" bawled a big blonde. The baby which she had a triumphant way of carrying had hanging cheeks and bottle-blue eyes in b.u.t.ton-hole slits. "Just look at mine. At nine months it ate like us.

What do you say to that, eh?"

A group gathered. "What are you here for then?" asked a huge creature with a gray ogress head, high cheekbones and skin streaked with fine veins. The blonde turned her baby over and showed its chubby flesh covered with a crusty, scabby, red-streaked sheath. "Oh, only this."

The ogress dropped into an empty place on the bench and paraded her darling on her knees. "My daughter's," she explained to the circle around her. "Her third. Maybe you think she hasn't got something to worry about--three babies and working in a factory. Babies--I know a thing or two about babies. I've had eleven." There was a general stir of compa.s.sion followed by protests. "I have two left." She danced the mite on her knee. Her tower of a body swayed back and forth, through her half-open jacket you could divine her dead b.r.e.a.s.t.s. There was something weird and horrible in the dismal accustomedness of her knees.

"The doctors make you fuss such a lot. You give the babies too much, and you don't give 'em enough, and you don't bathe 'em, and you don't weigh 'em. There wasn't such a lot of talk in my time, but they grew up all the same. I said to my daughter, 'Look here, you let me alone, either I know what to do or I don't know what to do.' I used to give mine toast-water, that was all." She tucked up the lank pads of hair clinging to either side of her face. "You boil two or three crusts of bread...."