He was very, very weak and lay absolutely
still and silent, chained fast by the baleful weight
of his flesh. Death had already put an end to
even his faintest quiverings.
His wonderful companion sat exactly
where his fixed eyes fell on her, at the foot of the
bed. She held her arms resting on the base board
of the bed with her beautiful hands drooping.
Her profile sloped downward slightly, that fine design,
that delicate etching of eternal sweetness upon the
gentle background of the evening. Under the dainty
arch of her eyebrows her large eyes swam clear and
pure, miniature skies. The exquisite skin of
her cheeks and forehead gleamed faintly, and her luxuriant
hair, which I had seen flowing, gracefully encircled
her brow, where her thoughts dwelt invisible as God.
She was alone with the man who lay
there as if already in his grave-she who
had wished to cling to him by a thrill and to be his
chaste widow when he died. He and I saw nothing
on earth except her face. And in truth, there
was nothing else to be seen in the deep shadows of
the evening.
A voice came from the bed. I scarcely recognised
it.
“I haven’t said everything yet that I
want to say,” said the voice.
Anna bent over the bed as if it were
the edge of a coffin to catch the words that were
to issue for the last time, no doubt, from the motionless
and almost formless body.
“Shall I have the time? Shall I?”
It was difficult to catch the whisper,
which almost stuck in his throat. Then his voice
accustomed itself to existence again and became distinct.
“I should like to make a confession
to you, Anna. I do not want this thing to die
with me. I am sorry to let this memory be snuffed
out. I am sorry for it. I hope it will
never die.
“I loved once before I loved you.
“Yes, I loved the girl.
The image I have left of her is a sad, gentle one.
I should like to snatch it from death. I am
giving it to you because you happen to be here.”
He gathered himself together to have
a clear vision of the woman of whom he was speaking.
“She was fair-haired and fair-skinned,”
he said.
“You needn’t be jealous,
Anna. (People are jealous sometimes even when they
are not in love.) It was a few years after you were
born. You were a little child then, and nobody
turned to look at you on the streets except the mothers.
“We were engaged in the ancestral
park of her parents. She had bright curls tied
with ribbons. I pranced on horseback for her.
She smiled for me.
“I was young and strong then,
full of hope and full of the beginning of things.
I thought I was going to conquer the world, and even
had the choice of the means to conquer it. Alas,
all I did was to cross hastily over its surface.
She was younger than I, a bud so recently, blown,
that one day, I remember, I saw her doll lying on the
bench that we were sitting on. We used to say
to each other, ’We shall come back to this park
when we are old, shall we not?’ We loved each
other-you understand-I have
no time to tell you, but you understand, Anna, that
these few relics of memory that I give you at random
are beautiful, incredibly beautiful.
“She died the very day in spring
when the date of our wedding was set. We were
both taken sick with a disease that was epidemic that
year in our country, and she did not have the strength
to escape the monster. That was twenty-five years
ago. Twenty-five years, Anna, between her death
and mine.
“And now here is the most precious secret, her
name.”
He whispered it. I did not catch it.
“Say it over again, Anna.”
She repeated it, vague syllables which
I caught without being able to unite them into a word.
“I confide the name to you because
you are here. If you were not here, I should
tell it to anyone, no matter whom, provided that would
save it.”
He added in an even, measured voice,
to make it hold out until the end:
“I have something else to confess,
a wrong and a misfortune.”
“Didn’t you confess it
to the priest?” she asked in surprise.
“I hardly told him anything,” was all
he replied.
And he resumed, speaking calmly, with his full voice:
“I wrote poems during our engagement,
poems about ourselves. The manuscript was named
after her. We read the poems together, and we
both liked and admired them. ‘Beautiful,
beautiful!’ she would say, clapping her hands,
whenever I showed her a new poem. And when we
were together, the manuscript was always with us-the
most beautiful book that had ever been written, we
thought. She did not want the poems to be published
and get away from us. One day in the garden she
told me what she wanted. ‘Never!
Never!’ she said over and over again, like an
obstinate, rebellious child, tossing her dainty head
with its dancing hair.”
The man’s voice became at once
surer and more tremulous, as he filled in and enlivened
certain details in the old story.
“Another time, in the conservatory,
when it had been raining monotonously since morning,
she asked, ’Philip’-she used
to pronounce my name just the way you do.”
He paused, himself surprised by the
primitive simplicity of what he had just expressed.
“‘Do you know,’
she asked, ‘the story of the English painter
Rossetti?’ and she told me the episode, which
had so vividly impressed her, how Rossetti had promised
the lady he loved to let her keep forever the manuscript
of the book he had written for her, and if she died,
to lay it beside her in her coffin. She died,
and he actually carried out his promise and buried
the manuscript with her. But later, bitten by
the love of glory, he violated his promise and the
tomb. ’You will let me have your book
if I die before you, and will not take it back, will
you, Philip?’ And I promised laughingly, and
she laughed too.
“I recovered from my illness
slowly. When I was strong enough, they told
me that she had died. When I was able to go out,
they took me to the tomb, the vast family sepulchre
which somewhere hid her new little coffin.
“There’s no use my telling
you how miserable I was and how I grieved for her.
Everything reminded me of her. I was full of
her, and yet she was no more! As I recovered
from the illness, during which my memory had faded,
each detail brought me a recollection. My grief
was a fearful reawakening of my love. The sight
of the manuscript brought my promise back to me.
I put it in a box without reading it again, although
I had forgotten it, things having been blotted out
of my mind during my convalescence. I had the
slab removed and the coffin opened, and a servant
put the book in her hands.
“I lived. I worked.
I tried to write a book. I wrote dramas and
poems. But nothing satisfied me, and gradually
I came to want our book back.
“I knew it was beautiful and
sincere and vibrant with the two hearts that had given
themselves to each other. Then, like a coward,
three years afterward, I tried to re-write it-to
show it to the world. Anna, you must have pity
on us all! But I must say it was not only the
desire for glory and praise, as in the case of the
English artist, which impelled me to close my ears
to the sweet, gentle voice out of the past, so strong
in its powerlessness, ’You will not take it back
from me, will you, Philip?’ It was not only
for the sake of showing off in a book of great beauty.
It was also to refresh my memory, for all our love
was in that book.
“I did not succeed in reconstructing
the poems. The weakening of my faculties soon
after they were written, the three years afterward
during which I made a devout effort not to revive the
poems even in thought, since they were not to keep
on living-all this had actually wiped the
book out of my mind. It was with difficulty that
I recalled- and then only by chance-the
mere titles of some of the poems, or a few of the
verses. Of some parts, all I retained was just
a confused echo. I needed the manuscript itself,
which was in the tomb.
“One night, I felt myself going there.
“I felt myself going there after
periods of hesitation and inward struggles which it
is useless to tell you about because the struggles
themselves were useless. I thought of the other
man, of the Englishman, of my brother in misery and
crime as I walked along the length of the cemetery
wall while the wind froze my legs. I kept saying
to myself it was not the same thing, and this insane
assurance was enough to make me keep on.
“I asked myself if I should
take a light. With a light it would be quick.
I should see the box at once and should not have to
touch anything else-but then I should see
everything! I preferred to grope in the dark.
I had rubbed a handkerchief sprinkled with perfume
over my face, and I shall never forget the deception
of this odour. For an instant, in the stupefaction
of my terror, I did not recognise the first thing
I touched-her necklace-I saw
it again on her living body. The box! The
corpse gave it to me with a squashing sound.
Something grazed me faintly.
“I had meant to tell you only
a few things, Anna. I thought I should not have
time to tell you how everything happened. But
it is better so, better for me that you should know
all. Life, which has been so cruel to me, is
kind at this moment when you are listening, you who
will live. And my desire to express what I felt,
to revive the past, which made of me a being accursed
during the days I am telling you about, is a benefit
this evening which passes from me to you, and from
you to me.”
The young woman was bending toward
him attentively. She was motionless and silent.
What could she have said, what could she have done,
that would have been sweeter than her silent attention?
“The rest of the night I read
the stolen manuscript. Was it not the only way
to forget her death and think of her life?
“I soon saw that the poems were
not what I had thought them to be.
“They game me a growing impression
of being confused and much too lengthy. The
book so long adored was no better than what I had done
afterwards. I recalled, step by step, the background,
the occasion, the vanished gesture that had inspired
these verses, and in spite of their resurrection,
I found them undeniably commonplace and extravagant.
“An icy despair gripped me,
as I bent my head over these remains of song.
Their sojourn in the tomb seemed to have deformed
and crushed the life out of my verses. They
were as miserable as the wasted hand from which I
had taken them. They had been so sweet!
’Beautiful, beautiful!’ the happy little
voice had cried so many times while she clasped her
hands in admiration.
“It was because her voice and
the poems had been vibrating with life and because
the ardour and delirium of our love had adorned my
rhymes with all their charms, that they seemed so
beautiful. But all that was past, and in reality
our love was no more.
“It was oblivion that I read
at the same time as I read my book. Yes, death
had been contagious. My verses had remained there
too long, sleeping down below there in awful peace-in
the sepulchre into which I should never have dared
to enter if love had still been alive. She was
indeed dead.
“I thought of what a useless
and sacrilegious thing I had done and how useless
and sacrilegious everything is that we promise and
swear to here below.
“She was indeed dead.
How I cried that night. It was my true night
of mourning. When you have just lost a beloved
there is a wretched moment, after the brutal shock,
when you begin to understand that all is over, and
blank despair surrounds you and looms like a giant.
That night was a moment of such despair when I was
under the sway of my crime and the disenchantment
of my poems, greater than the crime, greater than
everything.
“I saw her again. How
pretty she was, with her bright, lively ways, her
animated charm, her rippling laugh, the endless number
of questions she was always asking. I saw her
again in the sunlight on the bright lawn. She
was wearing a dress of old rose satin, and she bent
over and smoothed the soft folds of her skirt and
looked at her little feet. (Near us was the whiteness
of a statue.) I remembered how once I had for fun
tried to find a single flaw in her complexion.
Not a spot on forehead, cheek, chin-anywhere.
Her skin was as smooth as if it had been polished.
I felt as though that exquisite delicate face were
something ever in flight that had paused for an instant
for my sake, and I stammered, almost with tears in
my voice, ’It is too much! It is too much!’
Everybody looked on her as a princess. In the
streets of the town the shopkeepers were glad to see
her pass by. Did she not have a queenly air
as she sat half-reclining on the great carved stone
bench in the park, that great stone bench which was
now a kind of empty tomb?
“For a moment in the midst of
time I knew how much I had loved her, she who had
been alive and who was dead, who had been the sun and
who was now a kind of obscure spring under the earth.
“And I also mourned the human
heart. That night I understood the extremes
of what I had felt. Then the inevitable forgetfulness
came, the time came when it did not sadden me to remember
that I had mourned.
“That is the confession I wanted
to make to you, Anna. I wanted this story of
love, which is a quarter of a century old, never to
end. It was so real and thrilling, it was such
a big thing, that I told it to you in all simplicity,
to you who will survive. After that I came to
love you and I do love you. I offer to you as
to a sovereign the image of the little creature who
will always be seventeen.”
He sighed. What he said proved
to me once more the inadequacy of religion to comfort
the human heart.
“Now I adore you and you alone-I
who adored her, I whom she adored. How can there
possibly be a paradise where one would find happiness
again?”
His voice rose, his inert arms trembled.
He came out of his profound immobility for a moment.
“Ah, you are the one, you are
the one-you alone.”
And a great cry of impotence broke from him.
“Anna, Anna, if you and I had
been really married, if we had lived together as man
and wife, if we had had children, if you had been
beside me as you are this evening, but really beside
me!”
He fell back. He had cried out
so loud that even if there had been no breach in the
wall, I should have heard him in my room. He
voiced his whole dream, he threw it out passionately.
This sincerity, which was indifferent to everything,
had a definite significance which bruised my heart.
“Forgive me. Forgive me.
It is almost blasphemy. I could not help it.”
He stopped. You felt his will-power
making his face calm, his soul compelling him to silence,
but his eyes seemed to mourn.
He repeated in a lower voice, as if
to himself, “You! You!”
He fell asleep with “You” on his lips.
He died that night. I saw him
die. By a strange chance he was alone at the
last moment.
There was no death rattle, no death
agony, properly speaking. He did not claw the
bedclothes with his fingers, nor speak, nor cry.
No last sigh, no last flash.
He had asked Anna for a drink.
As there was no more water in the room and the nurse
happened to be away at that moment, she had gone out
to get some quickly. She did not even shut the
door.
The lamplight filled the room.
I watched the man’s face and felt, by some
sign, that the great silence at that moment was drowning
him.
Then instinctively I cried out to
him. I could not help crying out so that he
should not be alone.
“I see you!”
My strange voice, disused from speaking, penetrated
into the room.
But he died at the very instant that
I gave him my madman’s alms. His head
dropped back stiffly, his eyeballs rolled. Anna
came in again. She must have caught the sound
of my outcry vaguely, for she hesitated.
She saw him. A fearful cry burst
from her with all the force of her healthy body, a
true widow’s cry. She dropped on her knees
at the bedside.
The nurse came in right after her
and raised her arms. Silence reigned, that flashing
up of incredible misery into which you sink completely
in the presence of the dead, no matter who you are
or where you are. The woman on her knees and
the woman standing up watched the man who was stretched
there, inert as if he had never lived. They were
both almost dead.
Then Anna wept like a child.
She rose. The nurse went to tell the others.
Instinctively, Anna, who was wearing a light waist,
picked up a black shawl that the nurse had left on
a chair and put it around her.
The room, so recently desolate, now filled with life.
They lit candles everywhere, and the
stars, visible through the window, disappeared.
They knelt down, and cried and prayed
to him. The dead man held command. “He”
was always on their lips. Servants were there
whom I had not yet seen but whom he knew well.
These people around him all seemed to be lying, as
though it was they who were suffering, they who were
dying, and he were alive.
“He must have suffered a great
deal when he died,” said the doctor, in a low
voice to the nurse, at a moment when he was quite near
me.
“But he was so weak, the poor man!”
“Weakness does not prevent suffering
except in the eyes of others,” said the doctor.
The next morning the drab light of
the early day fell upon the faces and the melancholy
funeral lights. The coming of the day, keen and
cold, had a depressing effect upon the atmosphere of
the room, making it heavier, thicker.
A voice in a low apologetic tone for
a moment interrupted the silence that had lasted for
hours.
“You mustn’t open the
window. It isn’t good for the dead body.”
“It is cold,” some one muttered.
Two hands went up and drew a fur piece
close. Some one rose, and then sat down again.
Some one else turned his head. There was a sigh.
It was as if they had taken advantage
of these few words to come out of the calm in which
they had been concealed. Then they glanced once
more at the man on the bier-motionless,
inexorably motionless.
I must have fallen asleep when all
at once I heard the church bells ringing in the grey
sky.
After that harassing night there was
a relaxation from rigid attention to the stillness
of death, and an inexplicable sweetness in the ringing
of the bells carried me back forcibly to my childhood.
I thought of the countryside where I used to hear
the bells ringing, of my native land, where everything
was peaceful and good, and the snow meant Christmas,
and the sun was a cool disk that one could and should
look at.
The tolling of the bells was over.
The echo quietly died away, and then the echo of
the echo. Another bell struck, sounding the hour.
Eight o’clock, eight sonorous detached strokes,
beating with terrible regularity, with invincible
calm, simple, simple. I counted them, and when
they had ceased to pulsate in the air, I could not
help counting them over again. It was time that
was passing-formless time, and the human
effort that defined it and regularized it and made
of it a work as of destiny.