Woman Part 25

Will he go?

He understands. His chest collapses like a pair of bellows and he draws his two long legs together ostentatiously.

Why this tricky manoeuvring? Why thoughts unspoken? I am a part of the tender landscape to him, and I realize he is looking at me tenderly. Why not dare to make a pure, natural confession?

"Good-bye?"

"Good-bye."

I can't be irritated with this man; I haven't the courage to; the weather is too lovely.

When you see the jolly morning frolicking on the road in cap-and-bells and look over where the blue curve of paradise lovingly touches the brown curve of the earth, all you feel is a warm indulgence.

It is too beautiful. The trees mingle their branches, the rays of sunshine mingle their warmth, the birds mingle their songs. Down below, the tide is coming in with the rush of clanking chains submerged by a host of swift, frisky little waves....

And this man with the knavish eyes is nothing more than a black particle blown by the wind to the end of this promontory where a few cl.u.s.tered pines taper into the azure.

It is too beautiful. All you can do is close your eyes.

I close them--to shut out for a while the dazzle of the water in the indigo basin, the thousand golden bubbles in its centre, the thousand silver teeth biting at its edge. I don't want to think any more. All I want to feel are the warm darts which pierce my hands resting on the gra.s.s and the peculiar sense of well-being which takes the place of everything else....

Have I really slept?... Sweetness, the sweetness of lips kissed by breezes, a sweetness complete and overwhelming ... a delicious life.

But ... this black gown ... my dead ... I have nothing but my grief, nothing but my grief. What wrong have I perpetrated that my grief should forever sing in my ears?

Ah, just to forget.... Everywhere the earth breathing happiness, the blue, blue rolling waves, the almond trees veiled in faery whiteness, everywhere the nuptials of joy.

Grief, where are you? Everywhere s.p.a.ce terribly alive, with hope in every color and death just died for the last time.

XIII

It happened as it does in novels. The man suddenly feels the beast of prey panting within him and yields to it hotly; the woman writhes under the fiery coercion and gropingly rea.s.sumes the ancient ways that have come down from time immemorial....

Even to the words I used. Where did they come from, the words that cut him like a lash, whipped up his desire, and then fell on his face like drops of ice water?

I was ashamed. I straightened my hair and left the room. How was it nothing warned me that I must be on my guard against the man alongside of whom I had been working daily? Had I been blind? I tried to extract something significant from my recollections ... but no....

I am going to leave him soon, and I must speak to him.

His disappointment gives him a humanizing air of meekness. It inclines me to him. You feel intensely that other doors are open and, if you wanted to, you could knock and gain admittance.

This grim laconic man, whose ways are confined to the ways of command, who has been sterilized and handcuffed by the barren power which money confers, looks at me intently with eyes raised like a child's. Women are wrong in supposing that a man forsakes them when he renounces his desire.

I speak to him disconnectedly, but I am leading up to what I want to say. And he moves his face a little forward and still a little further forward; it's as though he were drawing closer, step by step, step by step. And everything external about me is effaced by degrees, my sunshiny hair, my mouth, my body present but concealed, my entire femininity. An infallible instinct tells me this. He takes in my voice alone, and is surprised that my voice talks nothing but sense. But he is going to know if it will talk sense straight to the end, so he settles himself more comfortably in his armchair, lets his eyebrows relax, and loses all thought of himself. His logic is being appealed to.

"Now as to your money ... you know if I married you it would not be for your love.... Your money?... It doesn't count? You're right, it doesn't count.... I might not have discovered it at once. I might have said, as I did the other day, that I don't love you. I might also have thought of my aversion to the idea of marriage. Don't look like that. Marriage as it is to-day is immoral and stupid. Don't say my marriage was perfect.

The man I lost was a rare soul. For ordinary people like you and me marriage brings nothing but misfortune and mediocrity.

"To marry is to lie, to deceive both yourself and the other one; and when a man and a woman harbor infinite hopes, when they look out upon perpetually changing horizons, when they have the choice of all the roads in the world, and the whole of life spreads out before them, it is absurd to suppose that they can ever subject themselves to each other.

"You marry, you pledge your soul, you promise your flesh. Once imprisoned, you maim yourself, and should the call of love some day become too strong, what other alternative than to lie or break the chains? Deceit or catastrophe; there is no choice. Love does not reconcile the primitive hatred between man and woman: on the contrary, it sharpens it; and for two people to venture upon the impossible enterprise of joining together two opposite destinies the full length of their courses, requires a spirit that neither you nor I possess, a spirit greater than nature bestows; it also takes the intellect of a G.o.d. I a.s.sure you it does....

"Perhaps you would have waited till the very end to bring out your trump argument. But I would have rejected your seductive words angrily. They would not be to the point. The point is, that if I were to become your wife, my lot would be as I have described it.

"You lean forward, you approve what I say.

"The simple fact is, I couldn't live. There would be no use my trying. I should not have the strength every day to witness a real death unless I had the tiredness and the sort of forgiveness that come from hard work.

I simply couldn't eat with appet.i.te, I couldn't sleep in peace.

"And in the morning, if I did not know that this exultation, this unruly vigor, this swarming of scattered inclinations could not be controlled, dammed and curbed by laws ... no, I would not dare to begin to live again....

"In a single day there are too many temptations, in a single body too many feelings; the inner life, remote and _secondary_, must learn through humble duty to subdue itself by merely keeping its attention fastened upon the external life. If we listened to the goodness, the heaven we all carry round within us, what would become of us? I for my part would not be capable of resisting long.... I believe you understand me. You yourself have felt what a help and support your daily routine is. I never paid much attention to you, you were only one of the many supernumeraries on the stage of my work, but I respected you because you made a part of my efforts, and you too took great pains with your work.

"Every time I left you, I felt gentler. Though fatigued I felt free to think of myself, buoyant, wiser, unloaded, as if my sins had been forgiven me.... I had paid my debt; I owed nothing.

"I do not know if work in itself is a good deed. G.o.d probably never meant it for us. Not to lie does not mean to discern the truth, and to work is not to find the truth, but it is to have the right to advance toward truth and put oneself in a state of grace and health.

"Then remember that you dared to offer me this miserable fate, me who in doing the same work lived beside you as if under the same roof, who felt imbued with an austere ardor. But you saw nothing, learned nothing, understood nothing. You horrified me. What you did yesterday! Good heavens! You attacked, I defended; we are quits.

"And the money spread out glitteringly to gag me at night....

"You must be just. While you were going through your day's work it never occurred to you that I had my day's work too, and my strong arms and the energy and chast.i.ty deep-seated in my body.... What was the value, the slight importance I possess as a person to you? What was my peace to you?

"Even if you make fun of the exigencies of the soul, do you think it's a question of the soul alone? And how about one's relation to other people? You go out of your house on to the street, you see the crowds on their way to shops, offices and factories. You have to look the working-people in the face.... Tell me, how do the men and women who have _nothing to do_ look the workers in the face?

"I see this doesn't touch you. You are withdrawing. To keep you leaning toward me, I myself and I alone have to be the subject under discussion.

I must be uncovered, laid naked, by what I say...."

I felt a sudden surge of blood to my cheeks and my lips; our looks crossed like swords.

Here I am with nothing more to do, my arms hanging at my sides, the sudden weight of my useless words on my shoulders. The man follows my example and rises.

"I shall go away, very far away. Don't mind. That's the good of being a woman who works; you're not afraid. You may be at the mercy of misfortune, which is always lurking, but not at the mercy of human beings....

"That's all, I'll go now...."

In the silence that cuts in I feel how this man is wishing I'd never go--wishing it so strongly that for a moment he touches love and a path is opened along which I could take a step, but only a single step, no more.

My eyes stare into s.p.a.ce. I hear the mournful, eternal good-bye you say to things--this table at which I worked, the afternoon sunlight laughing through the window, all the familiar objects, which reel slightly from the separation now beginning, from the nascence of everything that is to be....

He presses my hand. And I think of all the men you could convince if you wanted to take the trouble....

If you had the time....

If life were not a choice.