The sound of the horn had ceased for
some time. The street and the houses had quieted
down. Silence. I passed my hand over my
forehead. My fit of emotion was over. So
much the better. I recovered my balance by an
effort of will-power.
I sat down at the table and took some
papers out of my bag that I had to look over and arrange.
Something spurred me on. I wanted
to earn a little money. I could then send some
to my old aunt who had brought me up. She always
waited for me in the low-ceilinged room, where her
sewing-machine, afternoons, whirred, monotonous and
tiresome as a clock, and where, evenings, there was
a lamp beside her which somehow seemed to look like
herself.
Notes-the notes from which
I was to draw up the report that would show my ability
and definitely decide whether I would get a position
in Monsieur Berton’s bank-Monsieur
Berton, who could do everything for me, who had but
to say a word, the god of my material life.
I started to light the lamp.
I scratched a match. It did not catch fire,
the phosphorous end breaking off. I threw it
away and waited a moment, feeling a little tired.
Then I heard a song hummed quite close to my ear.
Some one seemed to be leaning on my
shoulder, singing for me, only for me, in confidence.
Ah, an hallucination! Surely
my brain was sick-my punishment for having
thought too hard.
I stood up, and my hand clutched the
edge of the table. I was oppressed by a feeling
of the supernatural. I sniffed the air, my eyelids
blinking, alert and suspicious.
The singing kept on. I could
not get rid of it. My head was beginning to
go round. The singing came from the room next
to mine. Why was it so pure, so strangely near?
Why did it touch me so? I looked at the wall
between the two rooms, and stifled a cry of surprise.
High up, near the ceiling, above the
door, always kept locked, there was a light.
The song fell from that star.
There was a crack in the partition
at that spot, through which the light of the next
room entered the night of mine.
I climbed up on the bed, and my face
was on a level with the crack. Rotten woodwork,
two loose bricks. The plaster gave way and an
opening appeared as large as my hand, but invisible
from below, because of the moulding.
I looked. I beheld. The
next room presented itself to my sight freely.
It spread out before me, this room
which was not mine. The voice that had been
singing had gone, and in going had left the door open,
and it almost seemed as though the door were still
swinging on its hinges. There was nothing in
the room but a lighted candle, which trembled on the
mantelpiece.
At that distance the table looked
like an island, the bluish and reddish pieces of furniture,
in their vague outline, like the organs of a body
almost alive.
I looked at the wardrobe. Bright,
confused lines going straight up, its feet in darkness.
The ceiling, the reflection of the ceiling in the
glass, and the pale window like a human face against
the sky.
I returned to my room-as
if I had really left it-stunned at first,
my thoughts in a whirl, almost forgetting who I was.
I sat down on my bed, thinking things
over quickly and trembling a little, oppressed by
what was to come.
I dominated, I possessed that room.
My eyes entered it. I was in it. All who
would be there would be there with me without knowing
it. I should see them, I should hear them, I
should be as much in their company as though the door
were open.
A moment later I raised my face to
the hole and looked again.
The candle was out, but some one was
there. It was the maid. No doubt she had
come in to put the room in order. Then she paused.
She was alone. She was quite
near me. But I did not very well see the living
being who was moving about, perhaps because I was dazzled
by seeing it so truly-a dark blue apron,
falling down from her waist like rays of evening,
white wrists, hands darker than her wrists from toil,
a face undecided yet striking, eyes hidden yet shining,
cheeks prominent and clear, a knot on top of her head
gleaming like a crown.
A short time before I had seen the
girl on the staircase bending over cleaning the banisters,
her reddened face close to her large hands. I
had found her repulsive because of those blackened
hands of hers and the dusty chores that she stooped
over. I had also seen her in a hallway walking
ahead of me heavily, her hair hanging loose and her
body giving out an unpleasant odour, so that you felt
it was obnoxious and wrapped in dirty underwear.
And now I looked at her again.
The evening gently dispelled the ugliness, wiped
out the misery and the horror, changed the dust into
shadow, like a curse turned into a blessing.
All that remained of her was colour, a mist, an outline;
not even that; a thrill and the beating of her heart.
Every trace of her had disappeared save her true self.
That was because she was alone.
An extraordinary thing, a dash of the divine in it,
to be actually alone. She was in that perfect
innocence, that purity which is solitude.
I desecrated her solitude with my
eyes, but she did not know it, and so she was
not desecrated.
She went over to the window with brightening
eyes and swinging hands in her apron of the colour
of the nocturnal sky. Her face and the upper
part of her body were illuminated. She seemed
to be in heaven.
She sat down on the sofa, a great
low red shadow in the depths of the room near the
window. She leaned her broom beside her.
Her dust cloth fell to the floor and was lost from
sight.
She took a letter from her pocket
and read it. In the twilight the letter was
the whitest thing in the world. The double sheet
trembled between her fingers, which held it carefully,
like a dove in the air. She put the trembling
letter to her lips, and kissed it. From whom
was the letter? Not from her family. A
servant girl is not likely to have so much filial
devotion as to kiss a letter from her parents.
A lover, her betrothed, yes. Many, perhaps,
knew her lover’s name. I did not, but
I witnessed her love as no other person had.
And that simple gesture of kissing the paper, that
gesture buried in a room, stripped bare by the dark,
had something sublime and awesome in it.
She rose and went closer to the window,
the white letter folded in her grey hand.
The night thickened-and
it seemed to me as if I no longer knew her age, nor
her name, nor the work she happened to be doing down
here, nor anything about her-nothing at
all. She gazed at the pale immensity, which
touched her. Her eyes gleamed. You would
say she was crying, but no, her eyes only shed light.
She would be an angel if reality flourished upon
the earth.
She sighed and walked to the door
slowly. The door closed behind her like something
falling.
She had gone without doing anything
but reading her letter and kissing it.
I returned to my corner lonely, more
terribly alone than before. The simplicity of
this meeting stirred me profoundly. Yet there
had been no one there but a human being, a human being
like myself. Then there is nothing sweeter and
stronger than to approach a human being, whoever that
human being may be.
This woman entered into my intimate
life and took a place in my heart. How?
Why? I did not know. But what importance
she assumed! Not of herself. I did not
know her, and I did not care to know her. She
assumed importance by the sole value of the momentary
revelation of her existence, by the example she gave,
by the wake of her actual presence, by the true sound
of her steps.
It seemed to me as if the supernatural
dream I had had a short while before had been granted,
and that what I called the infinite had come.
What that woman, without knowing it, had given me by
showing me her naked kiss-was it not the
crowning beauty the reflection of which covers you
with glory?
The dinner bell rang.
This summons to everyday reality and
one’s usual occupations changed the course of
my thoughts for the moment. I got ready to go
down to dinner. I put on a gay waistcoat and
a dark coat, and I stuck a pearl in my cravat.
Then I stood still and listened, hoping to hear a
footstep or a voice.
While doing these conventional things,
I continued to be obsessed by the great event that
had happened-this apparition.
I went downstairs and joined the rest
of my fellow-boarders in the brown and gold dining-room.
There was a general stir and bustle and the usual
empty interest before a meal. A number of people
seated themselves with the good manners of polite
society. Smiles, the sound of chairs being drawn
up to the table, words thrown out, conversations started.
Then the concert of plates and dishes began and grew
steadily louder.
My neighbours talked to those beside
them. I heard their murmur, which accentuated
my aloneness. I lifted my eyes. In front
of me a shining row of foreheads, eyes, collars, shirtfronts,
waists, and busy hands above a table of glistening
whiteness. All these things attracted my attention
and distracted it at the same time.
I did not know what these people were
thinking about. I did not know who they were.
They hid themselves from one another. Their
shining fronts made a wall against which I dashed
in vain.
Bracelets, necklaces, rings.
The sparkling of the jewels made me feel far away
from them as do the stars. A young girl looked
at me with vague blue eyes. What could I do
against that kind of sapphire?
They talked, but the noise left each
one to himself, and deafened me, as the light blinded
me.
Nevertheless, at certain moments these
people, because in the course of conversation they
thought of things they had at heart, revealed themselves
as if they were alone. I recognized the revelation
of this truth, and felt myself turning pale on remembering
that other revelation.
Some one spoke of money, and the subject
became general. The assembly was stirred by
an ideal. A dream of grasping and touching shone
through their eyes, just as a little adoration had
come into the eyes of the servant when she found herself
alone.
They recalled military heroes triumphantly,
and some men thought, “Me, too!” and worked
themselves up into a fever, showing what they were
thinking of, in spite of their ridiculously low station
and the slavery of their social position. One
young girl seemed dazzled, looked overwhelmed.
She could not restrain a sigh of ecstasy. She
blushed under the effect of an inscrutable thought.
I saw the surge of blood mount to her face.
I saw her heart beaming.
They discussed the phenomena of occultism
and the Beyond. “Who knows?” some
one said. Then they discussed death. Two
diners, at opposite ends of the table, a man and a
woman who had not spoken to each other and seemed
not to be acquainted, exchanged a glance that I caught.
And seeing that glance leap from their eyes at the
same time, under the shock of the idea of death, I
understood that these two loved each other.
The meal was over. The young
people went into the parlour. A lawyer was telling
some people around him about a murder case that had
been decided that day. The nature of the subject
was such that he expressed himself very cautiously,
as though confiding a secret. A man had injured
and then murdered a little girl and had kept singing
at the top of his voice to prevent the cries of his
little victim from being heard. One by one the
people stopped talking and listened with the air of
really not listening, while those not so close to the
speaker felt like drawing up right next to him.
About this image risen in their midst, this paroxysm
so frightful to our timid instincts, the silence spread
in a circle in their souls like a terrific noise.
Then I heard the laugh of a woman,
of an honest woman, a dry crackling laugh, which she
thought innocent perhaps, but which caressed her whole
being, a burst of laughter, which, made up of formless
instinctive cries, was almost fleshy. She stopped
and turned, silent again. And the speaker, sure
of his effect, continued in a calm voice to hurl upon
these people the story of the monster’s confession.
A young mother, whose daughter was
sitting beside her, half got up, but could not leave.
She sat down again and bent forward to conceal her
daughter. She was eager and yet ashamed to listen.
Another woman was sitting motionless,
with her head leaning forward, but her mouth compressed
as if she were defending herself tragically.
And beneath the worldly mask of her face, I saw a fanatical
martyr’s smile impress itself like handwriting.
And the men! I distinctly heard
one man, the man who was so calm and simple, catch
his breath. Another man, with a characterless
business man’s face, was making a great effort
to talk of this and that to a young girl sitting next
to him, while he watched her with a look of which
he was ashamed and which made him blink. And
everybody condemned the satyr in terms of the greatest
abuse.
And so, for a moment, they had not
lied. They had almost confessed, perhaps unconsciously,
and even without knowing what they had confessed.
They had almost been their real selves. Desire
had leaped into their eyes, and the reflection passed-and
I had seen what happened in the silence, sealed by
their lips.
It is this, it is this thought, this
kind of living spectre, that I wished to study.
I rose, shrugging my shoulders, and hurried out,
impelled by eagerness to see the sincerity of men and
women unveiled before my eyes, beautiful as a masterpiece
in spite of its ugliness. So, back in my room
again, I placed myself against the wall as if to embrace
it and look down into the Room.
There it was at my feet. Even
when empty, it was more alive than the people one
meets and associates with, the people who have the
vastness of numbers to lose themselves in and be forgotten
in, who have voices for lying and faces to hide themselves
behind.