The Choice of Life Part 8

CHAPTER XI

1

Next day, Rose was with me early in the morning:

"I could not sleep," she said. "I wanted to speak to you without tears or blushes. If I have done wrong, I have atoned for it; and it is done with. All that remained of it was a sad memory; and, now that I have considered it with you, even that is gone."

I look at her. Her appearance pleases me. Her step is firm, her cheeks are pale, her eyes burning; she is living more ardently than usual. She continues, with animation:

"You said to me once that people who believe in another life seem to sweep their sins and their remorse up to the doors of eternity. For us, you said, who have not that illusion, everything is different: we do not put off paying the bill for our sins. We can recognise their consequences; and that is our expiation." And you added, proudly, "It is cowardly to look to another for it, even if that other were G.o.d!"

We are walking in the orchard. The long gra.s.s is bending under the weight of the dew, which has decked it with a thousand glittering jewels. As we pa.s.s by a tree laden with apples, Rose pulls a branch to her and, without plucking the fruit, bites into it. I watch the lips part and the white teeth meet and disappear in the juicy pulp. For a second, the soft red mouth rounds over the fruit, which seems to match its beauty and to be questioning Rose about her pitiful love-affairs.

"Then, Rose dear, you were not really happy for a moment with your lover?"

"No."

"But he was young, I suppose, and more or less good-looking?"

She thinks for a moment and then bends her head.

"You remember it, Rose?"

The girl appears astonished and answers, hesitatingly:

"It is five years ago, I don't remember now...."

I was surprised in my turn and looked at her. What! She didn't remember!

She had forgotten that! Her lips had not retained the impress of the first kiss!

My eyes closed and from the background of my life a bygone moment rose, one of those memories that linger in the hearts of women with such fidelity and vividness that they lack not a scent, a sound, a line, a word, a look, a gesture!

I was twelve years old and he fifteen. It was at the seaside. Our parents were talking a few steps away, but night was falling and a fisherman's hut hid us from their eyes. He bent over to me and our lips met in a simple kiss, simple as a flower with petals still unopened, for we were both of us innocent....

I can still see the colour and the shape of the drifting clouds. I can smell the mingled breath of the sea and of his boyish mouth. I can remember how I felt as a frightened, trembling and enraptured little girl.... A sailor was singing some way off; and the gulls that circled between sea and sky seemed to be keeping the last rays of daylight upon their white wings.

Why, I know that boy's mouth by heart and shall always know it! We often kissed again, without even dreaming that, at this game as at all games, there might be room for progress!... And then ... and then ... that's all I remember of him.... The next is another memory, at another place and another age.... And then another again....

2

Would one not think that, in the more or less happy lives of us women, in our more or less easily traversed roads, the sensations of love are so many illuminated floral arches that mark the different stages of our accomplishment? We go up to them, we pa.s.s through them with hopes, smiles or sighs. But, whatever they may be, we come out of them fairer and better. What should we be without that, without love? The love which is rebuked, which we are supposed to hide and blush for! The love that entreats both our strength and our weakness, our patience and our fervour, our pa.s.sion and our reason! The love that sets in motion our highest faculties and our lowest instincts, that makes each of us know her own power and her own poverty by the part which she allows it to play in her life!

In that moment, I saw and lived my joys in the kisses of childhood and girlhood. I travelled my road again; and the arches of light seemed higher to me and they followed hard on one another, becoming ever more radiant and decked with gayer flowers, until this very hour when the desired happiness has been found, established and kept fast....

3

My thoughts return to Rose, who has sat down under a tree; and I stretch myself beside her.

A herd of cows suddenly enters the orchard. White and brown, they plunge among the apple-trees; driven by a child, who is taking them down to the long gra.s.s, they amble heavily along in meek-eyed resignation. A smell of cow-shed at once reaches our nostrils; and, in the silence, we hear a noise of busy munching....

"Darling, you, who have always lived in the midst of nature, should have sounder and more accurate ideas on love than those of other women, while mine are a little warped by my over-cultivated nerves and feelings. If, for instance, you had said to me, yesterday, 'I gave myself because it was natural,' you would have dominated my poor reason from the pinnacle of an essential truth."

Without quite understanding what I say, Rose smiles in answer to my smile and we remain silent; our eyes gaze without seeing and our idle hands trail in the wet gra.s.s. We hear, without listening, the hoa.r.s.e, fat, cooing-voluptuous voices of the doves: in the cool air of the morning, among the leaves, the flowers and the branches, it is an undercurrent of joy rising and falling, suspended for a moment and then beginning again, in unwearying repet.i.tion.

Rose murmurs:

"Why are you always saying that I cannot make progress without love? It makes me unhappy when you say that. I should have liked to have nothing in the world but your affection. You kissed me so tenderly last night, over the hedge."

"It is not the same thing, Rose darling. Certainly, there is nothing more harmonious and purer than the kiss that joins the lips of two friends like ourselves. But it is not the same thing as the kiss of love, for the value of that lies not only in what it is, but in what it promises; and it is a delight that sometimes echoes through our whole lives.... You will have to love before you understand."

The girl folded her arms around my waist as though to bind herself to me:

"But how would you have me love any one but yourself?" she asked. "Have you not given me happiness? When I am with you, I seem to be living in a fairy-tale."

Despite the pleasure which her words gave me, I made an effort to combat them.

The character of a woman who tries to be just is full of these little contradictions. In proportion as her heart is satisfied, she finds her intellect becoming clearer and stronger; and what calls for her judgment rarely leaves her heart unmoved. If Rose had not protested, I should still have spoken, from a sense of duty, but my words would have been without warmth or conviction. Now it seemed to me that her charming compliment gave added force to what I was about to utter in the interest of another's happiness.

She leant her face against my breast and my fingers played with her sunny hair, her unbound hair, which was now waving joyously, crowning her with a s.h.i.+mmer of amber and gold.

"No," I replied, "you must fall in love in order to develop and expand.

Our women's lives are like summer days: wisdom tells us to follow their evolution. After the morning's waiting, we want the noon-day splendour and rapture. As you never had that rapture, you have not yet known love: and, at your age, is not that an absurd and miserable ignorance? Is it not right to wish for love and even to force its coming? Those who go on waiting for it in meek resignation appear to me so guilty!... Life has always seemed to me to be divided into two parts: the search for love; and love. As long as we are not in love, let us continue the search for it; let us seek stubbornly, madly, cruelly, if need be; let us be untiring and unrelenting. There are no obstacles for the woman with a resolute will. Let each of us follow that quest in her own manner, according to her strength, her means and her courage, through every danger and every pain. When we have at last found love, or rather our love, let us go towards it without fear, without false modesty; and, if we are loved, let us not wait to be entreated for what we can offer generously. Let us never be pilfered of that which it is our privilege to give!"

A tendril drops from the creeper above us and caresses our faces....

How delightful life is at this moment! The air is filled with rejoicing, with the murmur of an infinite happiness! A tremulous haze hovers over the fields, the insatiate doves reiterate their glad refrain. Around us, here and there, a slender blade of gra.s.s shakes beneath the light weight of a b.u.t.terfly. But is not everything lovely in the eyes of a woman who is talking of love? It is as though happiness were the harbinger of her glance, flying ahead and settling upon things.

Rose, all attention and curiosity, now questioned me:

"But you, what did you do?"

"In my case," I said, "when I knew that he loved me too, I went to his country to find him. I can still see us walking in a meadow all bright with flowers. On the horizon, the blue sky met the sea; and, behind us, the red roofs, the church-steeples and the tiny white houses of a Dutch village slowly vanished from sight. He gave me his arm; and it was a joy to me to let him feel the gladness in my heart by the motion of my hip, on which he leant slightly. Then he said, 'You walk like a queen for whom her subjects wait.' And I knew from his words that he was still waiting for me, though I was by his side, and they suddenly told me what a blissful kingdom I had to offer him!"

"Did you seek long before that day came?"

"No, once I was free, I found happiness after a few months of trouble and difficulty; but you see, dear, I would have gone to the other end of the world to meet my love! I had no need to journey so far; and this makes me inclined to think that, in our search, we need to be attentive even more than active!"

Roseline murmured, pensively:

"The men say that a certain amount of preliminary experience in love is indispensable ... to them."

My whole soul revolted. Releasing myself from the girl's embrace, I sprang to my feet and faced her: