Woman Part 24

Every corner of the town held out a memory to me--here a two-year-old memory, here a distinct vision crouching. I called to the vision and welcomed it. My life was not dead, and my heart was open and there was still a man to love me....

I had been unjust in the black moment of despair. My share of love and light still remained. Did he know I was a widow? Since he had been taken prisoner six months ago, no news had reached me and I didn't know if he had received any of my letters.

The broad sunshine expanded my chest and warmed up a vision so tender--a hope or a memory--that I was stung by a pang of remorse and almost felt like chasing it away.

I reached the center of the town, where there were more people and especially more well-to-do people.

Feminine figures, which I recognized, came toward me at a dull gait. I knew them; I had seen these old ladies at prayers two years before. They wore the same dresses and the same hats, the sort you don't see anywhere except in the provinces.... Hypocritical hands as I pa.s.sed the houses, lifted the crocheted curtains. I was preceded by mystery and followed by whisperings.

Every pa.s.serby seemed to be blaming me for the dazzling sunlight which my eyes were embracing; every house scowled, and the whole street, in spite of the pleasant weather, wore veritable mourning, not mere sadness and solemnity, but mourning, and the people looked as though they were in a slow funeral procession, the women strangled in black, upholstered in crepe, and buried alive in their hoods and veils.

The Cathedral square was resplendent with profane joy. The birds swooped from one to the other of the great, white-dappled plane-trees, and every now and then one perched on the statue in the fountain, a clumsy girl with petticoat of stone and turned-up sleeves, a decent bosom bared, a sheaf in one arm, and an eternally dried-up urn in the other arm.

Through its high lanceolate windows and the tracery of the two rose-windows Notre Dame was drinking in light and making mock of its ancient front.

It was a brilliant day, and the world rejoiced. I tasted the savor of living. In spite of myself I fell into the nervous, elastic step of old and drank in the living air like an intoxicating elixir.

An idea took lodgment--he was familiar with this scene, these crabbed shops, hostile promenaders, and square of bourgeoning; he had walked on these cobblestones; and at the edge of the town was his little summer villa. The idea went round and round, very fast; and I was weak; so I clutched at it for support.

Another veiled woman in black....

That figure tending to heaviness but graceful and in the very mould of femininity is not unfamiliar. I have seen the woman before. You can tell from a distance that she wears the mark of the widow, a hood-like hat faced with white.

She too;...

I am interested in her. In the country you are interested in everybody you meet.

Who is she, I wonder. She seems to be about forty, but neither her hair nor her cheeks have lost their freshness. Who....

My heart bursts, alarm comes rushing, misfortune approaches.... She walks toward me--she is only a few feet away.... If she would only stop ... it is she ... his wife!

In the time it takes to walk only a few feet you can undergo the acutest agony. I held my breath and for a second time felt death strike me with its thunderbolt. I had time to become a widow too.

She advanced terribly: it was death advancing along the sidewalk. I felt I must detain and implore her. With jaws set I restrained a great convulsive outcry and flung myself in her way.... My lips gave a sort of cluck.... She fixed her eyes straight ahead and turned away deliberately as if from a drunken beggar.

I looked and looked after her....

She departs--forever--her skirt grazing the ground. Her veil carries away the remnant of my joy, leaving me there stupefied and convulsed, alone under the sun. She departs....

My G.o.d!...

XI

My son is growing up.

He has reddish-brown ringlets, his cheeks are vermilion, the blue of his eyes radiates seraphic calm. He is probably going to be very handsome.

Often people stop me on the street to tell me how lovely he is, and for a moment I feel some pride.

He is beginning to show human traits; he talks, he expresses a desire to touch and possess things, and likes to listen to stories, which used to make no appeal: "And then, Mamma? Tell me, what next?..." I always begin by kissing him.

My heart has grown with him. I have just begun to feel that his existence is rooted in my own existence. What welds me to him are not only the pains I take for him, or my perpetual anxiety. I am welded to him by the kisses he already gives me. When he says "Mamma" in his inimitable way, I am proud and overwhelmed; when he puts his arms round my neck, it is as if I were usurping a reward too perfect for me.

The terror with which he filled me when he was so little and frail is disappearing. I have rocked him, watched over him and suckled him; he has strong legs and a strong body; nevertheless a much greater terror is growing in me.

The greatest terror of my life. To bring up a child, to hold in your hands not only what he will be, but what he may be; and to decree everything, the colors he looks at, the words he hears! To give birth a second time to a living creature. To be worthy of it....

And to have nothing to help you but a heart wise yet too intellectual, the heart of an adult.

To have this timid heart, the maternal heart, too prompt and misleading.

Not to have anything else!

XII

I was sitting on the gra.s.s beside the rugged, windswept path which follows the curve of the sea. Instinctively I straightened up out of my careless att.i.tude into the att.i.tude of a woman in danger.

He is coming closer, he is very near....

He forces himself to a.s.sume the indifferent, I don't-know-you air of some one happening to be pa.s.sing by, but he shortens his strides, and in spite of himself his face dilates and beams with the delight of the hunter striking the trail. A little more, and he'd let out a whistle.

Should I try to escape through the woods by cutting across the railroad track? Should I?...

"How do you do?"

"How do you do?"

The man is handsome, decidedly handsome, even in the full light, and I smile at his coming as I smiled a few moments ago when the sun climbed over the slope.

I had always seen him in the dusk when he returned to his smart white house held fast in a coil of green. He would stop a moment at the rusty gate and give me a lingering glance out of his long-lashed eyes.

Yesterday evening when we pa.s.sed each other on the road, his eyes were like black enamel, but now in the bare light of the morning they are of a more crystalline gray than the sea.

A tragic duel of looks ... a thousand questions asked and answered ...

wonderful understanding ... dizziness ... unbearable dizziness.

He stands balancing himself on his feet searching the ground for the nascent lie. Then he puts a direct, confident question--is this magnificent weather going to last? I in my turn dissemble and scrutinize the silent, motionless horizon.

Safe! Hypocrisy between us. He has found a suitable topic and exploits it cleverly in jerky little phrases, rather sensual, like the kisses you give a child. He points his three-cornered head at me and tosses back his thick black mane.

He shuffles his feet. "Answer me," beg the glittering eyes. "Answer me.... I am asking you a question...."

No, I don't want to answer. A word thrown out now and then with the fervent a.s.surance one always has under a desirous gaze; also the defensive att.i.tude men force upon you. I lean over and begin to pluck the rich gra.s.s methodically, producing a fine, fresh scent and the dry, peaceful sound of a browsing beast. Two bare spots in the velvety slope and several light blades zigzagging in the wind....