The Choice of Life
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3
He listens to my words as I listen to his, with surprised delight. We feel as if we were playing with the same thought, for it flashes from one life to the other without undergoing any alteration.
In point of fact, the human beings whom we see for the first time are not always new to us. True, we have never seen each other before, but our sympathies, our enthusiasms, inasmuch as they are common to both of us, have met more than once; and, now that we are talking, the form of our thoughts also corresponds, for, without intending it, we often look at the most abstract things objectively, because he is a painter and I a woman.
Oh, I know no more exquisite surprises than those chance meetings which suddenly bring you a friend at a turning in life's road! It is like a charming landscape which one has seen in a dream and which one now finds in reality, without even having hoped for it. You speak, laugh, recognise each other and above all you are astonished and go on being astonished, adorably and shamelessly, like children.
What we had to say was all interwoven, as though we were both drawing on the same memories. We were speaking of those friends of a day whom accident sometimes gives us and whom the very briefness of the emotion impresses deeply on our heart. They are there for ever, in a few clear, sharp strokes, like sketches:
"For instance, you go on a matter of business to see somebody whom you don't know. You chafe with annoyance as you cross the threshold. In spite of the material duty which you are performing, you consider that it is so much time wasted. Then, for some unknown reason, the atmosphere seems kindly. You find familiar things in the room where you are waiting: a picture which you might have chosen yourself, books which you know and like, things which look as if your own hand had arranged them. And you forget everything. With your forehead against the pane, you look at the roofs of the houses, at the streets, at all that little scene which is the constant companion of an existence which you do not know and with which you are about to come into touch; and your heart beats very fast, for a sort of foresight tells you that a friend is going to enter the room."
"That's quite true; and sometimes even we have already met him at some house or other; but then his mind displayed itself in a special attitude, inaccessible, motionless, lifeless, like a thing in a glass case. Now, we see him before us, in his own surroundings; and everything is changed. He has a smile which is made of just the same quality of affection as our own, a look instinct with the same sort of experience, a laugh that cheerfully faces like dangers, a mind responding to the same springs. And we talk and are contented and happy; and, when the sun enters at the window or when the fire flickers merrily in the hearth, we can easily picture spending the rest of our life there, in gladness and comfort. Anything that the one says is received by the other with an exclamation of delight. Yes, we have felt and seen things in the same way; and this little fact, natural though it may seem, is so rare that it appears extraordinary!"
With an abrupt movement that must be customary with him, my companion shook his head to fling back his thick hair, which darkened his forehead whenever he leant forward:
"And very often," he said, "you don't see each other again, or at least you don't see each other like that, because time is too swift and because everybody has to go his own road."
The bright shaft of sunlight was still between us. It came now from a higher point of the little window. In the shimmering dust, I conjured up the faces of scarce-seen friends. There were some whose features had become almost obliterated; but beyond them, as one sees an image in a crystal, I clearly perceived the ideas, the life, the soul that had for a moment throbbed on exactly the same level as my own.
I replied, in a very low voice:
"We remain infinitely grateful to people who have given us such minutes as those!"
And then, certain of hearing myself echoed, I cried, delightedly:
"Egoists should always be grateful and responsive, for gratitude is nothing but happiness prolonged by thought...."
"Yes, that is the whole secret of the responsive soul: to have sufficient impetus not to stop the sensation at the place where the joy itself stops."
"To have simply, like the runner, an impetus that carries us beyond the goal...."
4
Thus were our remarks unrolled like the links of one and the same chain; and yet how different were our two existences! His was devoid of all restlessness and agitation; and mine was still in need of it. His intelligence was active, but not at all anxious to appear so. For him, meditation was the great object; and, when I expressed my admiration of a modesty impossible to my own undisciplined pride, he replied, in all simplicity:
"Do not look upon this as modesty. The over-modest are often those whose pride is too great to find room on the surface."
"If I were a man or an older woman than I am," I said, laughingly, "I would choose your destiny; but, for the time being, I feel a genuine need to satisfy my youth and to give it a few of the little pleasures that suit it."
He tried to jest, like most men who disapprove of the trouble which we take to please them by making ourselves prettier or more brilliant; but at heart he was as fond as myself of feminine cajolery and frivolity.
"You are full of pride," I exclaimed, "when you have accomplished some noble action or produced some rare work of art; then why should not women be happy at realising in their persons consummate beauty and grace? It is very probable that, if Plato or Socrates had suddenly been turned into beautiful young creatures, their destiny would have been different from what it was; it is even exceedingly probable that wisdom would have prompted them very often to lay aside their writings and come and contemplate their charms in the admiration of men!"
I quoted the words uttered by a woman who had known and loved admiration in her day:
"If life were longer, I would devote as many hours to my body as I now do to my mind; and I should be right. Unfortunately, I have to make a choice; and my very love of beauty makes me turn to that which does not fade...."
5
We should certainly have gone on talking for hours and without tiring; but suddenly we both together remembered that Rose must be waiting for me at my house and I rose to go.
As I did so, I said:
"I happen not to know your Christian name. What is it?"
"Floris."
Floris! That name, so little known in France but very frequent in Holland, surprised me; and I had some difficulty in not saying:
"Then you are not a Frenchman?"
But all that I said was:
"Floris, you shall have your Rose!"
Chapter XII
1
Going down the stairs, I laughed to myself and said:
"It is really one of love's miracles, that that man should be interested in Rose. And yet, to a philosopher, does not that beautiful girl offer a very unusual sense of security? From the point of view of the life which I had planned for her, she is a failure; but will she not be perfect in the eyes of a lover, of a man who expects nothing from her but an occasion for dreams and pleasure?"
Filled with gladness, I hastened my steps. Although it was the end of winter, it was still freezing; and it was pleasant to hear the sound of my feet on the hard ground. I also noticed the noises of the street: they were sharp and distinct; and in the crisp air things were all black and white, as though etched in dry-point.
For a moment, my dream vanished; then suddenly I became aware of it and I rifled a shop of its flowers and jumped into a cab in order to be with my Roseline the sooner.
2
Rose and Floris! The delicious combination filled my heart to bursting-point. Is it not always some insignificant little accident that sets our impressions overflowing? Like a child, at the last minute, I had felt a wish to know what he was called; and I was delighted to find that it was a name full of grace and colour. Now all my thoughts clustered around those harmonious syllables. Those remarkable eyes, that dark hair with its faint wave, that sensitive heart, that profound intellect, powerful and yet a little tired, like a tree bowed down with fruit: all this went through life under the name of Floris!
Then I saw once more his face, his gentleness, his profound charm; and I never doubted the girl's secret assent. In my fond hope, I went to the length of imagining that she had wished to choose her life for herself, independent of my influence; that she had at last understood that, in order to please me, she must first assert her liberty, without fear of hurting or vexing me. It was an illusion, certainly; but there are times when joy thrusts aside reason in order to burst into full blossom, even as in moments of sorrow our despair often goes beyond reality to drain itself to the last drop in one passionate outpouring.
3
Rose was sitting in the drawing-room, waiting for me. I rushed in like a mad thing, without knowing what I was doing. My laughter, my flowers, my words all came together and fell upon her like a shower of joy. In one breath I told her of my indiscretion of the night before, of those stolen sensations, of my anguish, of my life at a standstill, waiting on theirs, of my delightful talk with Floris, of the sympathy between us and lastly of my conviction that happiness was being offered to her here and now.
Then I noticed that she said nothing; and, begging her pardon for my incoherence, I tried to express in serious words the future that awaited her. But all those glad impressions had dazzled me; I was like some one who comes suddenly from the bright sunshine into a room. Shadows fell and rose before my brain as before eyes that have looked too long at the light; and I could do nothing but kiss her and repeat:
"Believe me, happiness lies there! Seize it, seize it!"
At last she murmured, wearily:
"No, I can't do it."
I questioned her, anxiously:
"Perhaps there is some obstacle that separates you? Do you dislike him?"
"No, I know his whole life and I have nothing against him."
"Well, then …?"
I tried in vain to obtain a definite reply. Her soul was shut, walled in, almost hostile. Was she refusing herself, as she had once given herself, without knowing why? Or else was my vague intuition correct and was a latent energy escaping from that little low, square forehead, white and pure as a camellia, a force of which she herself was unaware and which no doubt would one day reveal to me the final choice of her life?
I made her sit down and, kneeling beside her, questioned her patiently and gently as one asks a sick child to describe the pain which one is anxious to relieve. Silently, gazing vaguely into space, she let herself rest on my shoulder. The flowers fell from her listless hands. Some still hung to her dress, with tangled stalks. Red carnations, mimosa, tuberose, narcissus, hyacinths drunk with perfume, guelder-roses and white lilac wept at her feet.
I rose slowly and looked at her, my heart aching for the heedless one who dropped the joys which chance laid in her arms!
PART THE THIRD
Chapter I
1
The reason why we judge people better after a lapse of time is that, when we look at them from a distance, there is no confusion of detail. The main lines of their character stand out, relieved of the thousand little alterations and erasures which the scrupulous hand of truth is constantly making as it passes hither and thither, now rubbing out, now redrawing, until at last the impression is no longer a very clear one.
From the day when I separated my life completely from the life of Rose, her character appeared to me distinctly; and at the same time, now that it was free to come down to its own level, it asserted itself in its turn. Until that moment, while I had been careful to put no pressure upon her, I had nevertheless been asking her to choose her tastes and occupations on a plane that was unsuitable for her.
Her moral outlook was good, true and not at all silly, but it was limited; and, in trying to make her see life swiftly and from above, as though in a bird's-eye view, I had made it impossible for her to distinguish anything.
Her fault was that she had not been able to change, mine was that I had had too much faith in her possibilities. My optimism had wound itself around her immobility and fastened to it, even as ivy coils around a stone statue, without communicating to it the smallest portion of its sturdy and luxuriant little life.
2
And now it is six months since we parted; and I am going to-day to see her for the first time in her new existence.
I look out of the window of the railway-carriage; and my mind calls up memories which glide past with the autumn fields. First comes the departure of Floris, wearied by the incomprehensible attitude of the girl. He went away shortly after our meeting, still philosophical and cheerful, in spite of his disappointment. And the part which he played in my experiment taught me something that guided my efforts into a fresh direction: if Rose's beauty was to him sufficient compensation for her commonplace character, could not I also accept the girl as something out of which to weave romance and beauty? Does not everything lie in the mere fact of consent? Passive and silent, would she not become a rare object in my life, a precious stone?
"Woman blossoms into fullest flower by doing nothing," some one has said. "Women who do not work form the beauty of the world."
I took Rose to live with me and for weeks devoted myself exclusively to her appearance and her manners. I sought if possible to perfect the exterior. It was all in vain. This beautiful creature was so totally ignorant of what beauty meant that she was constantly deforming herself; and I at last gave up the struggle.
Sadly I remember the last pulsation of my will. It happened in the silence of my heart; and life went on for a little while longer. Would it not have been hateful to send Rose away, as one dismisses a servant? And what act, what fault had she committed to deserve such treatment? When it would have been so sweet to me to give her everything, for no reason at all, how could I find a solid reason for taking everything from her?
So I said nothing to her; we had none of those horrible explanations which set bristling spikes on the barriers—inevitable barriers, alas!—which dissimilarities in taste or character raise between people. There are certain persons who cannot bear to make any change without a preliminary explanation. They seem to carry a sort of map in their heads: on the far side of the frontier that borders the friendly territory lies the enemy; and it needs but a word, a gesture, a difference of opinion for you to find yourself in exile. Alas, have we not enough with all the limits, demarcations, laws and judgments that are perhaps necessary to the world at large? And must we lay upon ourselves still others in the intimate relations of life?
I had no right to set myself up as a judge and I could not have pronounced sentence. I waited. And, my will being no longer in the way, circumstances gradually led my companion to her true destiny better than I could have done.
She was bored. She was not really made to be a purely decorative object. In spite of her trailing silk or velvet dresses, twenty times a day I would find her in the larder, with a loaf under her arm and a knife in her hand, contentedly buttering thick slices of bread, which she would eat slowly in huge mouthfuls, looking straight before her as she did so.
She was bored; and I was powerless to cure this unfamiliar ill. I looked out some work for her in my busy life. She wrote letters, kept my accounts, hemmed the maids' aprons. Soon she was running the errands. One day she answered the front-door.
I still remember that moment when she came and told me, in her pretty, gentle way, that there was some one to see me in the drawing-room. I do not know why, but that insignificant incident suddenly revealed the truth to me. I was ashamed of myself and turned away my head so that she should not see me blush. Poor child, she was unconsciously lowering herself more and more daily. She was becoming my property. I was making use of her.
Without saying anything, I at once began to search for something for her. I hesitated between first one thing and then another; but at last chance came to my aid. Country-bred as she was, the girl was losing her colour in the Paris air; she was ordered to leave town. She knew a family at Neufchâtel, in Normandy, who were willing to take her as a boarder for a few weeks. She went and did not come back.
3
What did she do there, how did she spend her time? She wrote to me before long that she was quite happy, that she was earning her livelihood without difficulty. There was a little linen-draper's shop, it seemed, kept by an old maid, who, having no relations of her own, had taken Rose to assist her at first and perhaps to succeed her in time.
I was not at all surprised. For that matter, when we follow the natural evolution of things, their conclusion comes so softly that we hardly notice it. It is the descent which we are approaching: it becomes less steep at every step and, when we reach it, it is only a faint depression in the ground.
4
Strange temperament! The more I think of it, the more it appears to me as an instance of the dangers of virtue, or at least of what we understand by the word. Does it not look as though, in the charts of our characters, the virtues are the ultimate goals which can be reached only by the way of our faults? Each virtue stands like a golden statue in the centre of a cross-roads. We can hardly know every side of it unless we have beheld it from the various paths that lead to it. It shines in a different manner at the end of each road.
Rose never became conscious of her good qualities, because she possessed them too naturally; and she remained poor in the midst of all the riches which she was unable to discern.
Oh, if only she had been less wise and had had that ardour, that flame which feeds on all that is thrown upon it to extinguish it; if she had had that inordinate prodigality which teaches us by making us commit a thousand acts of folly; if, in short, she had had faults, vices, impulses of curiosity, how different her fate would have been! The equilibrium of a person's character may be compared with that of a pair of scales; and it is safe to say that, by weighing more heavily upon one of these, our defects raise our good qualities to their highest level.
5
But every minute is now bringing me nearer to this life which I am at last to know; and I gaze absent-mindedly at the Bray country, that lovely country red with the gold of autumn. By force of habit, my nerves spell out a few sensations which my thoughts do not put into words. My heart is beating. Now, with no idea or purpose in my mind, I am speeding with a full heart towards the girl who was at least the inspiration of a splendid hope and above all an incentive to action.
Chapter II
1
I arrived at Neufchâtel at the gracious hour when the sun is paling; and I was at once charmed with the kindly aspect of this little Norman town.
The house-fronts gleaming with fresh paint, the pigeons picking their way across the streets, the grass growing between the cobble-stones, the flowers outside the windows and doors, a cleanliness that adorns the smallest details: all this is so calm and so empty that our life at once settles there as in a frame that takes with equal ease the happy or the sad picture which we propose to fit into it.
It reminds me of Bruges, whose infinite, patient calm is a clean page on which the visitor's life is printed, happy or distressful at will, since there is nothing to define its character. It also has the silence of the little Flemish towns, with their streets without carriages or wayfarers. The gardens look as though they were artificial; and in the frame of the open windows we see interiors which are as sharp as pictures.
Leading out of the main street is a mysterious little alley, dark and badly paved. It runs upwards and ends in a clump of trees arching against the blue of the sky. There is no visible gate or doorway. I turn up it. All along a high wall hang old fire-backs, bas-reliefs of cracked, rusty-red iron, once licked by the flames, now washed by the rain.
I loiter to examine the subjects: coats of arms, trophies of weapons, or allegories and half-obliterated love-scenes. It is curious to see these homely relics thus exposed in the street, conjuring up the peaceful soul of families gathered round the hearth. From over the wall, the air reaches me laden with hallowed fragrance. I picture the box-bordered walks on the other side.
Then I climb higher; and, when I come to the trees, I find a charming surprise. The public gardens lie in front of me. In the shade of the public gardens we seem to find the very spirit of a town; it is to the gardens or to the church that our curiosity always turns in the first place. Here is the walk edged with stone benches on which old men and old women sit coughing and gossiping; here mothers bring their work, while their children run about; and in the centre, at the junction of the paths, is the platform where the regimental band plays on Sundays.
The Neufchâtel gardens are in no way elaborate: a number of avenues have been cut out of an ancient wood; and that is all. There are no shrubs; just a patch of dahlias, with a ridiculous little iron railing round them. But its whole charm lies in its picturesque situation up above the town. In between the tall trees with their interlacing boughs, one can see the slopes of the hills, the plains, the meadows, the gleaming roofs and the church with its twin spires piercing the blue of the sky. Then, in the foreground, I see, behind the houses, the little gardens whose breath reached me just now. They are there, divided into small plots of equal size, simple or pretentious, sometimes humble kitchen-gardens, but sometimes also a patchwork adorned with grottoes, arbours and glass bells.
Rose mentioned a garden which brightens her little home. Suppose it were one of these!… A woman appears over there: she is tall and fair-haired. She stoops over a well; I cannot make out her features. She draws herself up again. Oh, no, her figure is clumsy, her hair looks dull and colourless and her clothes vulgar. Rose would never dress like that, in two colours that clash! Rose would never …
I wander into a delicious reverie. How infinitely superior Rose is to all these people whose lives I can picture around me. Two women sit cackling beside me on the bench: they are at once guileless and bad, with their mania for eternally wagging tongues that know no rest. A little farther on, a good housewife is shaking her troublesome child; a stout, overdressed woman of the shop-keeping class is flaunting her finery down one of the walks; a priest passes and, while his lips mumble prayers, his eyes, held in leash by fear, prowl around me; one of his flock curtseys to the ground as she meets him.
A protest rises in my heart at each of the little incidents: is not Rose rid of all that? Rose long ago gave up going to mass and confession. She has lost the hypocritical sense of shame, knows neither envy nor malice and is a stranger to all ostentation.
I often used to reproach her with her extreme humility. How wrong I was! I now think that this humility can achieve the same result as pride itself. One looks too high, the other too low; but both pass by the petty vanities of life and either of them can keep us equally indifferent to those vanities.
2
I rose from my seat with a happy heart. The time had come for me to go in search of her. I would kiss her in all gratitude. Had she not enlarged my will to the extent of making it admit her little existence?