Woman Part 20

I was impotent, curdled, set aside. Like the other women I pa.s.sed by the young men with orders to die and only a few days to live, though their bearing was of men who had long to live. I pa.s.sed by the other women, useless flesh of the earth, faint-hearted flesh for grieving....

I went.... In another sense it was the herd that pa.s.sed by, that she-thing, in countless numbers, dancing bacchantes with hideous hyena-laughter and robes smelling of red blood and heavy wine, compliant....

You no longer saw yourself, because you had been swallowed up in a living craw.

Where were you, my sisters from everywhere, women of Europe, you, Trude and Clara and Mania? What were you doing? Were you weeping?

You saw, didn't you, that b.l.o.o.d.y sky with forked black signs, that summer swooning away, that day?... Why was not your voice heard in denunciation of the universal slaughter?

Why was not my own voice heard, when there were outcries in my throat, tears in my flesh?

III

I am becoming horribly accustomed to going about the empty apartment alone. I find I no longer think of the scowling walls, the dumb silence, the dim windows. They wrap me in a vague acquiescence. Habit is exerting its awful power.

I seem to be gliding down a slope where there is no one at the bottom to warn me that there may be a precipice ahead or tell me whither this strange existence leads.

My days are regulated according to the rules I myself have made to apply only to myself; I go, I come, I turn the key in the lock; I loiter; then I rush at my work. Sometimes the mirror casts a sudden image which runs away busily at my approach. My shadow and the creaking under my tread are all I have for company.

Yet this is not the first time I have lived alone. There once was a room with a flowered quilt, a moth-eaten carpet and a rickety door which opened like the lid of a devil-in-the-bandbox on the mahogany wig and scarlet smile of Mme. Noel. But everything was so different! I brought nothing to that virgin s.p.a.ce except the desire to fill it; my body knew nothing; my inner being cried out for too many things to be able to hold any of them, and had I dared, I would have stretched my arms out through the window to embrace the air of life....

My solitude now is like rotten fruit; it scorches my entrails like a fiery drink. It is a strange solitude.

Two men peopled my life and fertilized and vivified it. But wasn't that very long ago and somewhere else? Come, try to remember....

I do not know; they are neither dead nor alive. To be sure they are hungry and thirsty and get bored as living people do, but they are locked up in the earth's carca.s.s like the real dead; and it may be that at this very moment when I am imagining them warm and active, they are already stiff and cold. To be absolutely truthful, to go down to the bottom of things, there is scarcely anything in common between the two men who went to war and me who stayed behind.

Sometimes when I am alone, I lean over, way over, to touch the very bottom of things so as to feel the pain of it.

Yes, letters pa.s.s between us. When I read their letters I try to imagine their surroundings and the cra.s.s details of their life; the fir-trees of the Argonne, the name of a regiment which I know by heart like a prayer, frost-bitten feet, the incessant thunder, and the arrival of the postman which draws us a little closer together. Then there is Carency--the place makes no difference--the light cavalry.... Attack, formation, the first rank mowed down, the second, the third; he alone standing upright in the front of the fourth rank, a struggle lasting a century, the confused subsidence, and my portrait snug under his blue jacket. And that night last week when he was nearly dying of thirst and crawled out over the open field, groping for something to drink. A miracle, a pool!

He fills his mess cup and empties it at one draught. He spits out thick threads, they hang from his mouth--bits of brains.... A pool of human blood from which he has quenched his thirst.

I receive a letter nearly every morning. The envelope burns in my fingers: the written lines make a pretense of talking and telling you things, as if I were not standing in front of him as you stand in front of a window-pane which you frost with your breath so that you can't see what's on the other side.

I write to them before I go to bed. Nothing important ever turns up, so I make a lot of the little everyday affairs--what happens at the office or at lunch in the restaurant where the people discuss and wrangle and the smells turn you sick. I tell them how forlorn the house looks, and how well the child is getting along in the country, that I do some work after dinner to make a little more money. Besides, there's always some anecdote to relate.... Twelve strokes cutting into the metallic night.... Sometimes when I fold my letter I have a sense of having written about somebody else.

Nevertheless, the thought of them is an obsession; it is a red point about which I develop and revolve and add to myself.

And sometimes, too, when I shut my eyes, bizarre notions swoop down on me, a horrid swarm of bats. "How many women are there to-night," I wonder, "who are tossing about in the thin warmth of their beds, distracted creatures, tormented, empty-armed, who, however, are the bigger for all this, easy in their minds and free already in their bitter freedom?"

Yes there are many women to-night without husbands or lovers who wonder as they lie in bed; then they sit up and lean on their elbows ... they don't _know_ yet or suspect anything ... but they don't sleep, they can't sleep; it's too absurd to think that a woman can live all alone, sleep alone, even breathe. And then it might be that the closest union is a prison after all.

At last I fall asleep, and in the morning, in the bald, shivering twilight, I go back to my doings of the day before, somewhat cowardly doings. Dull habit, which greases the machinery of life, leads me blindly along the streets to the office.

Was it only two months ago that with despair in my heart I pa.s.sed this corner where the chestnut-stand sends up its whistling steam? His letter in my bosom had told of the night attack and of his possible death; a brief, heart-rending farewell. Is he in less danger this morning, is he less cold, less hungry? I just pa.s.sed the same corner worried for fear I might be late. The whole way I had been thinking of my dress and winter hat.

That's how you get used to the martyrdom of others.

Even if it is the flesh of your flesh that undergoes the martyrdom, even if it is the man of your love--ah, don't say no--you get _used_ to it.

In suffering one person cannot take the place of another, and pain cannot be shared. The first day, because grief turns your head, you think you are sharing the other person's pain, but the other days, all the other days?

Why not have the courage to look crude reality crudely in the face?

There are no people who are inseparable, there are no couples who are inseparable.

He is in the trenches, the men are in the trenches, engulfed in misery, exposed to danger, plagued by vermin, and I am here alive and untouched, grazing this large wall patched with three-colored placards. "Women ...

your n.o.ble role ... n.o.ble work ... honor...."

Honor? What honor? I work. Isn't that natural? He is suffering, he is going to die. Didn't I see my own dormant energies wake up? And if he has given all, have I not taken all?

Five minutes to nine! I hurry, raising my coat collar in a shiver and clasping my hands inside my soft m.u.f.f.

At the end of the street a dusty gust driving a handful of people along like dead leaves, women with billowing skirts, a tramping, whistling gang of blue-lipped street boys, and old Noel with his breath frozen on his beard.

_They_ have left. Even if they return, they have left. That's the whole thing. There will have been a s.p.a.ce of time when they were wiped off the face of the earth, and life went forward without them, was lived without them, and women actually _continued_ without them....

IV

The typical young lover, well built, good-looking enough but without charm; his youthfulness armed with a timid pretentiousness. I had always avoided talking to him, but this evening he got hold of a foolish excuse for walking home with me. I tried hard to speak of something else and quickly switched the conversation on to another track when it took a certain turn, while he, a hundred times more proficient than I, certainly more obstinate, dragged the subject back to where he wanted it to be.

The eternal comedy of man. The same words--who will tell them that they always use the same words?--to reach the same goal. He made awkward, crafty attempts, watching me out of the corner of his eye, and when he saw I was escaping, he declared himself, throwing up his dice and staking his very heart. His voice was rusty, his nose pointed downward, his ears were fiery.

Until then he had seemed fatuous, almost ridiculous in his little perfidy. Now he was enn.o.bled, like a saint, pure, supplicating. His whole body took on grandeur. How he trembled, the poor boy!

When my answer was given--a woman who doesn't love has a lot of ease and gentleness at her command--"Forgive me," he said, "I have offended you."

I watched him as he walked away, his back bent, humiliated, I suppose, but bathed all the same in the hope that rises from the words you dare to utter.

Forgive him! As if any woman ever harbored bitter feelings against the man who gave her the great gift, as if a single one of us ever remained untouched, as if a mysterious yet positive connection did not establish itself the moment love was declared.

I remember all the men who ever loved me. Each thinks he has discovered you, and offers you your secret. Each does in fact discover you, and also kisses you a little.

I shall remember this young man, too; I shall remember the strip of mackerel sky showing above the street crossing; I shall remember the stammering mouth whose youth demanded its satisfaction from mine, the mouth that touched mine in thought.

V

I have had the sensation of death.

Not in the instant of dying; that is still a part of life; but in the instant after death.

I had gone to the end of the pier, where the water lashes incessantly and regularly, and seated myself facing the open sea. To right and left the green sh.o.r.e curved and the fir-trees ran down toward the sea to hold in the pale sandy strip edged with foam. Over my head the procession of clouds.