Woman Part 21

Sunday morning. The voice of the chimes from the old church, buried in the heart of the island, was music sent by the air and tinted blue by the waters. At each stroke you expected to see s.p.a.ce divided in two.

The sea was smooth and sleek with dark, wide, winding oily tracks, which looked like roadways traced by the sure finger of G.o.d.

Looking down at my feet I saw a sparkling play of meshes of rainbow light. The iris fragments dented the surface, formed into chains, made a covering of diamond facets, and drew downward full rainbows resting on myriads of arches. It was an incessant disappearance and reappearance.

It was fascinating to watch. The only thing that distracted me was a swarm of miniature fish darting under the pier more lightly than insects. For a moment they showed dove-colored, then orange; then they melted away. You tried to fasten your eyes upon one of the cells of water, just one. You had it, but no, it was another one.

The sun was so hot you couldn't lift your head. A broad sunbeam falling perpendicularly on the hard surface of the sea cut it in a blinding fissure, which attached the foot of the pier to the horizon.

Caught between the heat pouring down from the heavens and the freshness rising from the water, my body lost its sense of weight, form, equilibrium, and even of breathing. Every bit of feeling was gone from my legs, my neck was burning. My soul and eyes existed for nothing except the stable yet ever-changing mosaic which laughed a thousand laughs at the face of the sky.

There was nothing but light. Substance, eyes, body, memories, all seemed to be losing themselves and making a plunge into light.

There really was one moment in which I ceased to be. My existence underwent a momentary eclipse. I was no longer some one obstinately facing a realm of infinity in order to measure its limits, a very small creature who wanted to add herself to nature. I was the immense, permeating idea of the ocean, the sun and the sky.

It was between the singing ether and the silvery water that I seemed to foresee my nothingness, because when consciousness left me and I ceased to be, the sparkling eyes of the sea formed again, the blue oily tracks unfurled themselves, the glittering fissure sucked in the same line, the blue deep followed its unchanging course. Everything kept on behind me.

VI

Nothing but women....

Not a single pretty one. Two, four, ten, a hundred ... there must be two hundred.... Not a single pretty one....

To be sure, the weak unsteady light discolors their faces and throws drab blotches around their features, but that alone does not account for the general stamp of dullness which makes them seem like a flock of widows. The two men sitting apart on the crosswise bench like well-behaved children who have just been punished, have a sorry air, not at all the air of having done it on purpose.

I am impatient. A woman addressing other women.... What is she going to tell us? Will the audience brighten up?

I am standing with my back to the platform facing the door to keep watch for Eva for whom I am reserving a seat beside my own.... Alas, something for a merciless eye to feed upon! I can hardly bear to look at that uncultivated field of dingy heads. But there is nothing better to turn to--moldy walls picked at and peeling, smeary stains on a colorless floor. Your ears are pierced by a rising babel.

Eva at last.... I draw a breath of relief and feel, as I always do, like saying "Thank you" to her. Great floodgates open, my poise is restored--a living proof.... Why this blitheness? Because of her smile, her radiance, her frankness, the glory she carries about with her from the clear image of her child and husband? I do not know. She exists, that's all. When I think of her, I have a complete sense of happiness and confidence.... Perhaps this is friendship.

She has a little trouble making her way through the hall. Her head, set in velvet, rises above the field of heads like a taller, brighter stalk; the precious gems of her eyes show in full. She sees me, her face brightens.... "Thank you," I say, very low just to myself. After all there will be one fine face in the room.

We had scarcely shaken hands and seated ourselves when silence fell, broken here and there by coughing.

The speech.

The woman making the speech is also ugly. Yet what resources in that ample body. Under the armor of her corset, there are fine, n.o.ble lines, I am sure. Under her sausage sleeves there are the arms of a mother, even perhaps of a woman in love; the huge pancake on the nape of her neck shows she has long shining hair silky to the touch; and what tenderness in the depth of her eyes which dart glances in our direction.

If she dared, what sweetness....

She came to speak to us from a platform for the purpose of conveying her idea and a little of her soul, unaware that a valiant soul is a visible soul. The only means we have of showing our souls, sharing them and giving them freedom, are the ordinary means--our actions, the bare flesh of our lips, the sincere tears of our eyes, our bodies which encase our souls, our smiles which beautify our souls, and our voices.

This woman's soul is a strained voice, but how marvellous. The rows in the audience remain stationary, each head staying fixed in the position it held at the first word she uttered.

The women's horrid cares, their marketing, their husbands, their children, their dishwashing, their difficulty in making ends meet, all the everyday trifles that weigh on women and enslave them, are driven far away. The pale blonde with faded eyes beside Eva probably made the same O of her mouth when she spelled out her letters as a child. The old woman nodding "Yes, yes"--the two plumes in her bonnet respond "Yes, yes"--has forgotten her stupid drudgery.

They are all stamped with a sort of pathetic imprint; love is their element, their strength, their medium. They listen with love and understand through love. Love gives them this serious, fixed attentiveness.

The woman with the burning insignia of her stove on her fiery cheeks has lost all traces of worry except for the scolding expression of the mother whom you imagine with a horde of children jumping round her like little rabbits. And the thin girl with the dusky gaze--we've all seen her kneeling in the shadow of a confessional mumbling her sins with her mouth glued to a wooden grating from the other side of which comes the warm breath of a man without a face--what ardor she, too, is capable of!

Instead of the voice of the speaker on the platform it is the women's outcries that I hear.

These women have been imprisoned by themselves, hampered by their own lives, and what lives! what a miserable heap of desires and troubles in the face of the immense thing which gathers all beings together and makes them resemble one another, the thing unanimous and intangible that I hardly see. I don't even know its name. Before it I am like a blind man who has never seen the sun, but suddenly feels it shining on his forehead and exclaims: "There is light!" It is this _thing_ that has made all these women come here to-night and bestow their childish presence, their somewhat uncouth attention, their tragic lips which would kiss everything. Do they feel the great current rising from them which seeks to be caught and held fast, a current altogether new in the human atmosphere?... Not yet. Not yet.

How subdued Eva looks; her gaze seems clipped short; she's frowning. Her expression makes me uncomfortable.

Hands flutter like white leaves; a bow from the platform; the meeting is over.

The auditors stretch themselves a little, then rise to the accompaniment of clattering benches, gossamer sighs, and the sound of two hundred bodies moving and coming back to themselves. A faint cackling, then a full chorus of barnyard noises mounting and spreading.

I plant myself up against the wall to let them pa.s.s and see who will cast th.o.r.n.y glances at my hat, dress and shoes.

"Come on," cries Eva. Her forehead is drawn in hard lines. "Come on."

Outside, the night blowing upon the parting groups of women gives their scattered voices resonance.

Eva takes my arm ... but no, I feel like being by myself. I repel her bluntly, as you throw aside a branch you have broken. She instinctively draws her cloak around her.

"What an absurd evening! Those women!" she says.

She is right, I am sure. Every one of the women, it was easy to see, was ugly and petty, but together, multiplied and magnified, their individualities wiped out, they revealed I cannot say what unformed hope, what substance, what richness.... If only I could explain this to Eva!

"Hurry, hurry, here comes my street-car! Good night!"

The buzzing of an electric bell, an intense disk of light, another buzzing, and the little illuminated house stops. With a flutter of her skirts and a wave of her hand, Eva disappears.

Has she really gone? Goodness, what is she carrying away with her?...

In the nebulous depth of the long avenue I can still distinguish a vanishing star gliding along its mechanical path.

I had said: "Here is my friend, my companion, my sister." On this evening, tender as dawn, she has left behind in me a great emotion which she does not understand.

VII

"A lady," the fat concierge told me. "Been here twice. Well, a sort of lady, a ... you understand. Her cheeks--her skirt--you can see her legs up to here.... Believe me or don't believe me, but she's twin pea to your Marie. If she comes back, what shall I tell her? I won't let that sort into my house! Eh? Kick her out?"

"Oh but, M. Etienne, I am at home to-day. Let her come up."

I closed my door blushing.

Through the banisters I recognized her. Actually Marie!

"Come in...."

She went in ahead of me to the dining-room--"my dining-room," she used to call it--and seated herself deliberately. Genuine timidity hides itself behind a mask of absurd audacity.

"Marie ... Marie ... is it possible?"