For a day, the Room remained vacant.
Twice I had high hopes, then disillusionment.
Waiting had become a habit, an occupation.
I put off appointments, delayed my walks, gained
time at the risk of losing my position. I arranged
my life as for a new love. I left my room only
to go down to dinner, where nothing interested me
any more.
The second day, I noticed that the
Room was ready to receive a new occupant. It
was waiting. I had a thousand dreams of who the
guest would be, while the Room kept its secret, like
some one thinking.
Twilight came, then evening, which
magnified the room but did not change it. I
was already in despair, when the door opened in the
darkness, and I saw on the threshold the shadow of
a man.
He was scarcely to be distinguished in the evening
light.
Dark clothing, milky white cuffs from
which his grey tapering hands hung down; a collar
a little whiter than the rest. In his round
greyish face I could see the dusky hollows of his eyes
and mouth, under the chin a cavity of shadow.
The yellow of his forehead shone unclearly.
His cheekbone made an obscure bar in the dusk.
You would have called him a skeleton. What
was this being whose physiognomy was so monstrously
simple?
He came nearer, and his face kindled,
assumed life. I saw that he was handsome.
He had a charming serious face, fringed
with a fine black beard, a high forehead and sparkling
eyes. A haughty grace guided and refined his
movements.
He came forward a step or two, then
returned to the door, which was still open.
The shadow of the door trembled, a silhouette appeared
and took shape. A little black-gloved hand grasped
the knob, and a woman stole into the room, with a
questioning face.
She must have been a few steps behind
him in the street. They had not wished to enter
the room together, in which they both sought refuge
to escape pursuit.
She closed the door, and leaned her
whole weight against it, to close it still tighter.
Slowly she turned her head to him, paralysed for a
moment, it seemed to me, with fear that it was not
he. They stared into each other’s faces.
A cry burst from them, passionate, restrained, almost
mute, echoing from one to the other. It seemed
to open up their wound.
“You!”
“You!”
She almost fainted. She dropped
on his breast as though swept by a storm. She
had just strength enough to fall into his arms.
I saw the man’s two large pale hands, opened
but slightly crooked, resting on the woman’s
back. A sort of desperate palpitation seized
them, as if an immense angel were in the Room, struggling
and making vain efforts to escape. And it seemed
to me that the Room was too small for this couple,
although it was full of the evening.
“They didn’t see us!”
It was the same phrase which had come
the other day from the two children.
He said, “Come!” leading
her over to the sofa, near the window, and they seated
themselves on the red velvet. I saw their arms
joined together as though by a cord. They remained
there, engrossed, gathering about them all the shadow
of the world, reviving, beginning to live again in
their element of night and solitude.
What an entry, what an entry!
What an irruption of anathema!
I had thought, when this form of sin
presented itself before me, when the woman appeared
at the door, plainly driven toward him, that I should
witness bliss in its plenitude, a savage and animal
joy, as momentous as nature. On the contrary,
I found that this meeting was like a heart-rending
farewell.
“Then we shall always be afraid?”
She seemed just a little more tranquil,
and said this with an anxious glance at him, as if
really expecting a reply.
She shuddered, huddled in the shadows,
feverishly stroking and pressing the man’s hand,
sitting upright, stiffly. I saw her throat rising
and falling like the sea. They stayed there,
touching one another; but a lingering terror mingled
with their caresses.
“Always afraid-always
afraid, always. Far from the street, far from
the sun, far from everything. I who had so much
wanted full daylight and sunlight!” she said,
looking at the sky.
They were afraid. Fear moulded
them, burrowed into their hearts. Their eyes,
their hearts were afraid. Above all, their love
was afraid.
A mournful smile glided across the
man’s face. He looked at his friend and
murmured:
“You are thinking of him."
She was sitting with her cheeks in
her hands and her elbows on her knees and her face
thrust forward. She did not reply.
She was thinking of him.
Doubled up, small as a child, she gazed intently
into the distance, at the man who was not there.
She bowed to this image like a suppliant, and felt
a divine reflection from it falling upon her-from
the man who was not there, who was being deceived,
from the offended man, the wounded man, from the master,
from him who was everywhere except where they were,
who occupied the immense outside, and whose name made
them bow their heads, the man to whom they were a
prey.
Night fell, as if shame and terror
were in its shadows, over this man and woman, who
had come to hide their embraces in this room, as in
a tomb where dwells the Beyond.
He said to her:
“I love you!”
I distinctly heard those grand words.
I love you! I shuddered to the
depths of my being on hearing the profound words which
came from those two human beings. I love you!
The words which offer body and soul, the great open
cry of the creature and the creation. I love
you! I beheld love face to face.
Then it seemed to me that sincerity
vanished in the hasty incoherent things he next said
while clasping her to him. It was as though he
had a set speech to make and was in a hurry to get
through with it.
“You and I were born for each
other. There is a kinship in our souls which
must triumph. It was no more possible to prevent
us from meeting and belonging to each other than to
prevent our lips from uniting when they came together.
What do moral conventions or social barriers matter
to us? Our love is made of infinity and eternity.”
“Yes,” she said, lulled by his voice.
But I knew he was lying or was letting
his words run away with him. Love had become
an idol, a thing. He was blaspheming, he was
invoking infinity and eternity in vain, paying lip
service to it by daily prayer that had become perfunctory.
They let the banality drop.
The woman remained pensive for a while, then she shook
her head and she-she pronounced the
word of excuse, of glorification; more than that,
the word of truth:
“I was so unhappy!”
“How long ago it was!” she began.
It was her work of art, her poem and
her prayer, to repeat this story, low and precipitately,
as if she were in the confessional. You felt
that she came to it quite naturally, without transition,
so completely did it possess her whenever they were
alone.
She was simply dressed. She
had removed her black gloves and her coat and hat.
She wore a dark skirt and a red waist upon which a
thin gold chain was hanging.
She was a woman of thirty, perhaps,
with regular features and smooth silken hair.
It seemed to me that I knew her, but could not place
her.
She began to speak of herself quite
loudly, and tell of her past which had been so hard.
“What a life I led! What
monotony, what emptiness! The little town, our
house, the drawing-room with the furniture always arranged
just so, their places never changed, like tombstones.
One day I tried to put the table that stood in the
centre in another place. I could not do it.”
Her face paled, grew more luminous.
He listened to her. A smile
of patience and resignation, which soon was like a
pained expression of weariness, crept across his handsome
face. Yes, he was really handsome, though a little
disconcerting, with his large eyes, which women must
have adored, his drooping moustache, his tender, distant
air. He seemed to be one of those gentle people
who think too much and do evil. You would have
said that he was above everything and capable of everything.
Listening to her with a certain remoteness, but stirred
by desire for her, he had the air of waiting.
And suddenly the veil fell from my
eyes, and reality lay stripped before me. I
saw that between these two people there was an immense
difference, like an infinite discord, sublime to behold
because of its depths, but so painful that it bruised
my heart.
He was moved only by his longing
for her; she, by her need of escaping from
her ordinary life. Their desires were not the
same. They seemed united, but they dwelt far
apart.
They did not talk the same language.
When they spoke of the same things, they scarcely
understood each other, and to my eyes, from the very
first, their union appeared to be broken more than
if they had never known each other.
But he did not say what was really
in his mind. You felt it in the sound of his
voice, the very charm of his intonation, his lyrical
choice of words. He thought to please her, and
he lied. He was evidently her superior, but
she dominated him by a kind of inspired sincerity.
While he was master of his words, she offered her
whole self in her words.
She described her former life.
“From the windows in my room
and the dining-room, I could look out on the square.
The fountain in the centre, with its shadow at its
base. I watched the day go round there, on that
little, white, round place, like a sundial.
“The postman crossed it regularly,
without thinking. At the arsenal gate stood
a soldier doing nothing. Nobody else ever came
there. When noon rang like a knell, still no
one. What I remember best of all was the way
noon rang like a knell-the middle of the
day, absolute ennui.
“Nothing ever happened to me,
nothing ever would happen to me. There was nothing
for me. The future no longer existed for me.
If my days were to go on like that, nothing would
separate me from my death- nothing!
Not a thing! To be bored is to die! My
life was dead, and yet I had to live. It was
suicide. Others killed themselves with poison
or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes
and hours.”
“Amy!” said the man.
“Then, by dint of seeing the
days born in the morning and miscarrying in the evening,
I became afraid to die, and this fear was my first
passion.
“Often, in the middle of a visit
I was paying, or in the night, or when I came home
after a walk, the length of the convent wall, I shuddered
with hope because of this passion.
“But who would free me from
it? Who would save me from this invisible shipwreck,
which I perceived only from time to time? Around
me was a sort of conspiracy, composed of envy, meanness
and indifference. Whatever I saw, whatever I
heard, tended to throw me back into the narrow road,
that stupid narrow road along which I was going.
“Madame Martet, the one friend
with whom I was a little bit intimate, you know, only
two years older than I am, told me that I must be
content with what I had. I replied, ’Then,
that is the end of everything, if I must be content
with what I have. Do you really believe what
you say?’ She said she did. Oh, the horrid
woman!
“But it was not enough to be
afraid. I had to hate my ennui. How did
I come to hate it? I do not know.
“I no longer knew myself.
I no longer was myself. I had such need of
something else. In fact, I did not know my own
name any more.
“One day, I remember (although
I am not wicked) I had a happy dream that my husband
was dead, my poor husband who had done nothing to me,
and that I was free, free, as large as the world!
“It could not last. I
couldn’t go on forever hating monotony so much.
Oh, that emptiness, that monotony! Of all the
gloomy things in the world monotony is the darkest,
the gloomiest. In comparison night is day.
“Religion? It is not with
religion that we fill the emptiness of our days, it
is with our own life. It was not with beliefs,
with ideas that I had to struggle, it was with myself.
“Then I found the remedy!”
She almost cried, hoarsely, ecstatically:
“Sin, sin! To rid myself
of boredom by committing a crime, to break up monotony
by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person,
another person. To hate life worse than it hated
me. To sin so as not to die.
“I met you. You wrote
verses and books. You were different from the
rest. Your voice vibrated and gave the impression
of beauty, and above all, you were there, in my existence,
in front of me! I had only to hold out my arms.
Then I loved you with all my heart, if you can call
it love, my poor little friend!”
She spoke now in a low quick voice,
both oppressed and enthusiastic, and she played with
her companion’s hand as if it were a child’s
toy.
“And you, too, you loved me,
naturally. And when we slipped into a hotel
one evening, the first time, it seemed to me as if
the door opened of itself, and I was grateful for
having rebelled and having broken my destiny.
And then the deceit-from which we suffer
sometimes, but which, after reflection, we no longer
detest-the risks, the dangers that give
pleasure to each minute, the complications that add
variety to life, these rooms, these hiding-places,
these black prisons, which have fled from the sunlight
I once knew!
“Ah!” she said.
It seemed to me that she sighed as
if, now that her aspiration was realized, she had
nothing so beautiful to hope for any more.
She thought a moment, and then said:
“See what we are. I too
may have believed at first in a sort of thunderbolt,
a supernatural and fatal attraction, because of your
poetry. But in reality I came to you-I
see myself now-with clenched fists and
closed eyes.”
She added:
“We deceive ourselves a good
deal about love. It is almost never what they
say it is.
“There may be sublime affinities,
magnificent attractions. I do not say such a
love may not exist between two human beings.
But we are not these two. We have never thought
of anything but ourselves. I know, of course,
that I am in love with you. So are you with me.
There is an attraction for you which does not exist
for me, since I do not feel any pleasure. You
see, we are making a bargain. You give me a dream,
I give you joy. But all this is not love.”
He shrugged his shoulders, half in
doubt, half in protest. He did not want to say
anything. All the same, he murmured feebly:
“Even in the purest of loves
we cannot escape from ourselves.”
“Oh,” she said with a
gesture of pious protest, the vehemence of which surprised
me, “that is not the same thing. Don’t
say that, don’t say that!”
It seemed to me there was a vague
regret in her voice and the dream of a new dream in
her eyes.
She dispelled it with a shake of her head.
“How happy I was! I felt
rejuvenated, like a new being. I had a sense
of modesty again. I remember that I did not dare
to show the tip of my foot from under my dress.
I even had a feeling about my face, my hands, my
very name.”
Then the man continued the confession
from the point where she had left off, and spoke of
their first meetings. He wished to caress her
with words, to win her over gradually with phrases
and with the charm of memories.
“The first time we were alone-”
She looked at him.
“It was in the street, one evening,”
he said. “I took your arm. You leaned
more and more upon my shoulder. People swarmed
around us, but we seemed to be quite alone.
Everything around us changed into absolute solitude.
It seemed to me that we were both walking on the
waves of the sea.”
“Ah!” she said.
“How good you were! That first evening
your face was like what it never was afterwards, even
in our happiest moments.”
“We spoke of one thing and another,
and while I held you close to me, clasped like a bunch
of flowers, you told me about people we knew, you
spoke of the sunlight that day and the coolness of
the evening. But really you were telling me
that you were mine. I felt your confession running
through everything you said, and even if you did not
express it, you actually gave me a confession of love.
“Ah, how great things are in
the beginning! There is never any pettiness
in the beginning.
“Once when we met in the public
garden, I took you back at the end of the afternoon
through the suburbs. The road was so peaceful
and quiet that our footsteps seemed to disturb nature.
Benumbed by emotion, we slackened our pace.
I leaned over and kissed you.”
“There,” she said.
She put her finger on his neck.
“Gradually the kiss grew warmer.
It crept toward your lips and stopped there.
The first time it went astray, the second time it
pretended it went astray. Soon I felt against
my mouth”-he lowered his voice-“your
mouth.”
She bowed her head, and I saw her rosy mouth.
“It was all so beautiful in
the midst of the watchfulness imprisoning me,”
she sighed, ever returning to her mild, pathetic preoccupation.
How she needed the stimulus of remembering
her emotions, whether consciously or not! The
recalling of these little dramas and former perils
warmed her movements, renewed her love. That
was the reason why she had had the whole story told
her.
And he encouraged her. Their
first enthusiasm returned, and now they tried to evoke
the most exciting memories.
“It was sad, the day after you
became mine, to see you again at a reception in your
own home-inaccessible, surrounded by other
people, mistress of a regular household, friendly
to everybody, a bit timid, talking commonplaces.
You bestowed the beauty of your face on everybody,
myself included. But what was the use?
“You were wearing that cool-looking
green dress, and they were teasing you about it.
I did not dare to look at you when you passed me,
and I thought of how happy we had been the day before.”
“Ah,” she sighed, as the
beauty widened before her of all her memories, her
thoughts, of all her soul, “love is not what
they say it is. I, too, was stirred with anguish.
How I had to conceal it, dissimulating every sign
of my happiness, locking it hastily away within the
coffer of my heart. At first I was afraid to
go to sleep for fear of saying your name in a dream,
and often, fighting against the stealthy invasion
of sleep, I have leaned on my elbow, and remained with
wide-open eyes, watching heroically over my heart.
“I was afraid of being recognised.
I was afraid people would see the purity in which
I was bathed. Yes, purity. When in the
midst of life one wakes up from life, and sees a different
brilliance in the daylight, and recreates everything,
I call that purity.
“Do you remember the day we
lost our way in the cab in Paris-the day
he thought he recognised us from a distance, and jumped
into another cab to follow us?”
She gave a start of ecstasy.
“Oh, yes,” she murmured, “that was
the great day!”
His voice quivered as if shaken by
the throbbing of his heart, and his heart said:
“Kneeling on the seat, you looked
out of the little window in the back of the cab and
cried to me, ’He is nearer! He is further
off! He will catch us. I do not see him
any more. He has lost us.’ Ah!”
And with one and the same movement their lips joined.
She breathed out like a sigh:
“That was the one time I enjoyed.”
“We shall always be afraid,” he said.
These words interlaced and changed
into kisses. Their whole life surged into their
lips.
Yes, they had to revive their past
so as to love each other, they had constantly to be
reassembling the pieces so as to keep their love from
dying through staleness, as if they were undergoing,
in darkness and in dust, in an icy ebbing away, the
ruin of old age, the impress of death.
They clasped each other.
They were drowned in the darkness.
They fell down, down into the shadows, into the abyss
that they had willed.
He stammered:
“I will love you always.”
But she and I both felt that he was
lying again. We did not deceive ourselves.
But what matter, what matter?
Her lips on his lips, she murmured
like a thorny caress among the caresses:
“My husband will soon be home.”
How little they really were at one!
How, actually, there was nothing but their fear that
they had in common, and how they stirred their fear
up desperately. But their tremendous effort to
commune somehow was soon to be over.
They stopped talking. Words
had already accomplished the work of reviving their
love. She merely murmured:
“I am yours, I am yours.
I give myself to you. No, I do not give myself
to you. How can I give myself when I do not belong
to myself?”
“Are you happy?” she asked again.
“I swear you are everything in the world to
me.”
Now, she felt, their bliss had already
become a mere memory, and she said almost plaintively:
“May God bless the bit of pleasure one has.”
A doleful lament, the first signal
of a tremendous fall, a prayer blasphemous yet divine.
I saw him look at the clock and at
the door. He was thinking of leaving.
He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was
about to give him. There was a suggestion of
uneasiness, almost disgust, in his expression.
“No,” she said, “you
are not going to love me always. You are going
to leave me. But I regret nothing. I never
will regret anything. Afterwards, when I return
from-this-for good, to
the great sorrow that will never leave me again, I
shall say, ‘I have had a lover,’ and I
shall come out from my nothingness to be happy for
a moment.”
He did not want to answer. He
could not answer any more. He stammered:
“Why do you doubt me?”
But they turned their eyes toward
the window. They were afraid, they were cold.
They looked down at the space between the two houses
and saw a vague remnant of twilight slip away like
a ship of glory.
It seemed to me that the window beside
them entered the scene. They gazed at it, dim,
immense, blotting out everything around it. After
the brief interval of sinful passion, they were overwhelmed
as if, looking at the stainless azure of the window,
they had seen a vision. Then their eyes met.
“See, we stay here,” she
said, “looking at each other like two miserable
curs.”
They separated. He seated himself
on a chair, a sorry figure in the dusk.
His mouth was open, his face was contracted.
His eyes and his jaw were self-condemnatory.
You expected that in a few moments he would become
emaciated, and you would see the eternal skeleton.
And at last both were alike in their
setting, made so as much by their misery as by their
human form. The night swallowed them up.
I no longer saw them.
Then, where is God, where is God?
Why does He not intervene in this frightful, regular
crisis? Why does He not prevent, by a miracle,
that fearful miracle by which one who is adored suddenly
or gradually comes to be hated? Why does he
not preserve man from having to mourn the loss of
all his dreams? Why does he not preserve him
from the distress of that sensuousness which flowers
in his flesh and falls back on him again like spittle?
Perhaps because I am a man like the
man in the room, like all other men, perhaps because
what is bestial engrosses my attention now, I am utterly
terrified by the invincible recoil of the flesh.
“It is everything in the world,”
he had said. “It is nothing,” he
had also said, but later. The echo of those
two cries lingered in my ears. Those two cries,
not shouted but uttered in a low scarcely audible
voice, who shall declare their grandeur and the distance
between them?
Who shall say? Above all, who shall know?
The man who can reply must be placed,
as I am, above humanity, he must be both among and
apart from human beings to see the smile turn into
agony, the joy become satiety, and the union dissolve.
For when you take full part in life you do not see
this, you know nothing about it. You pass blindly
from one extreme to the other. The man who uttered
the two cries that I still hear, “Everything!”
and “Nothing!” had forgotten the first
when he was carried away by the second.
Who shall say? I wish some one
would tell. What do words matter or conventions?
Of what use is the time-honoured custom of writers
of genius or mere talent to stop at the threshold
of these descriptions, as if full descriptions were
forbidden? The thing ought to be sung in a poem,
in a masterpiece. It ought to be told down to
the very bottom, if the purpose be to show the creative
force of our hopes, of our wishes, which, when they
burst into light, transform the world, overthrow reality.
What richer alms could you bestow
on these two lovers, when again love will die between
them? For this scene is not the last in their
double story. They will begin again, like every
human being. Once more they will try together,
as much as they can, to seek shelter from life’s
defeats, to find ecstasy, to conquer death. Once
more they will seek solace and deliverance.
Again they will be seized by a thrill, by the force
of sin, which clings to the flesh like a shred of flesh.
Yet once again, when once again they
see that they put infinity into desire all in vain,
they will be punished for the grandeur of their aspiration.
I do not regret having surprised this
simple, terrible secret. Perhaps my having taken
in and retained this sight in all its breadth, my
having learned that the living truth is sadder and
more sublime than I had ever believed, will be my
sole glory.