Light

The ancient hut of a fisherman is outlined on the grassy slope. Below it, crowding reeds rustle in the current; and where they are more sparse they fashion concentric orbs upon the gleaming, fleeing water. The landscape has something exotic or antique about it. You are no matter where in the world or among the centuries. You are on some corner of the eternal earth, where men and women are drawing near to each other, and cling together while they wrap themselves in mystery.

* * * * * *

Dreamily I ascend again towards the sounds and the swarming of the town. There, the Sunday evening rendezvous,—the prime concern of the men,—is less discreet. Desire displays itself more crudely on the pavements. Voices chatter and laughter dissolves, even through closed doors; there are shouts and songs.

Up there one sees clearly. Faces are discovered by the harsh light of the gas jets and its reflection from plate-glass shop windows. Antonia goes by, surrounded by men, who bend forward and look at her with desire amid their clamor of conversation. She saw me, and a little sound of appeal comes from her across the escort that presses upon her. But I turn aside and let her go by.

When she and her harness of men have disappeared, I smell in their wake the odor of Pétrolus. He is lamp-man at the factory. Yellow, dirty, cadaverous, red-eyed, he smells rancid, and was, perhaps, nurtured on paraffin. He is some one washed away. You do not see him, so much as smell him.

Other women are there. Many a Sunday have I, too, joined in all that love-making.

* * * * * *

Among these beings who chat and take hold of each other, an isolated woman stands like a post, and makes an empty space around her.

It is Louise Verte. She is fearfully ugly, and she was too virtuous formerly, at a time when, so they say, she need not have been. She regrets this, and relates it without shame, in order to be revenged on virtue. She would like to have a lover, but no one wants her, because of her bony face and her scraped appearance; from a sort of eczema. Children make sport of her, knowing her needs; for the disclosures of their elders have left a stain on them. A five-year-old girl points her tiny finger at Louise and twitters, "She wants a man."

In the Place is Véron, going about aimlessly, like a dead leaf—Véron, who revolves, when he may, round Antonia. An ungainly man, whose tiny head leans to the right and wears a colorless smile. He lives on a few rents and does not work. He is good and affectionate, and sometimes he is overcome by attacks of compassion.

Véron and Louise Verte see one another,—and each makes a détour of avoidance. They are afraid of each other.

Here, also, on the margin of passion, is Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, very compassionable, in spite of his intellectual superiority. Between the turned-down brim of his hat and his swollen white kerchief,—thick as a towel,—a mournful yellow face is stuck.

I pity these questing solitaries who are looking for themselves! I feel compassion to see those fruitless shadows hovering there, wavering like ghosts, these poor wayfarers, divided and incomplete.

Where am I? Facing the workmen's flats, whose countless windows stand sharply out in their huge flat background. It is there that Marie Tusson lives, whose father, a clerk at Messrs. Gozlan's, like myself, is manager of the property. I steered to this place instinctively, without confessing it to myself, brushing people and things without mingling with them.

Marie is my cousin, and yet I hardly ever see her. We just say good-day when we meet, and she smiles at me.

I lean against a plane tree and think of Marie. She is tall, fair, strong and amiable, and she goes modestly clad, like a wide-hipped Venus; her beautiful lips shine like her eyes.

To know her so near agitates me among the shadows. If she appeared before me as she did the last time I met her; if, in the middle of the dark, I saw the shining radiance of her face, the swaying of her figure, traced in silken lines, and her little sister's hand in hers,—I should tremble.

But that does not happen. The bluish, cold background only shows me the two second-floor windows pleasantly warmed by lights, of which one is, perhaps, she herself. But they take no sort of shape, and remain in another world.

At last my eyes leave that constellation of windows among the trees, that vertical and silent firmament. Then I make for my home, in this evening which comes at the end of all the days I have lived.

* * * * * *

Little Antoinette,—how comes it that they leave her all alone like this?—is standing in my path and holding a hand out towards me. It is her way that she is begging for. I guide her, ask questions and listen, leaning over her and making little steps. But she is too little, and too lispful, and cannot explain. Carefully I lead the child,—who sees so feebly that already she is blind in the evening, as far as the low door of the dilapidated dwelling where she nests.

In my street, in front of his lantern-shaped house, with its iron-grilled dormer, old Eudo is standing, darkly hooded, and pointed, like the house.

I am a little afraid of him. Assuredly, he has not got a clean conscience. But, however guilty, he is compassionable. I stop and speak to him. He lifts to me out of the night of his hood a face pallid and ruined. I speak about the weather, of approaching spring. Heedless he hears, shapes "yes" with the tip of his lips, and says, "It's twelve years now since my wife died; twelve years that I've been utterly alone; twelve years that I've heard the last words she said to me."

And the poor maniac glides farther away, hooded in his unintelligible mourning; and certainly he does not hear me wish him good-night.

At the back of the cold downstairs room a fire has been lighted. Mame is sitting on the stool beside it, in the glow of the flaming coal, outstretching her hands, clinging to the warmth.

Entering, I see the bowl of her back. Her lean neck has a cracked look and is white as a bone. Musingly, my aunt takes and holds a pair of idle tongs. I take my seat. Mame does not like the silence in which I wrap myself. She lets the tongs fall with a jangling shock, and then begins vivaciously to talk to me about the people of the neighborhood. "There's everything here. No need to go to Paris, nor even so much as abroad. This part; it's a little world cut out on the pattern of the others," she adds, proudly, wagging her worn-out head. "There aren't many of them who've got the wherewithal and they're not of much account. Puppets, if you like, yes. That's according to how one sees it, because at bottom there's no puppets,—there's people that look after themselves, because each of us always deserves to be happy, my lad. And here, the same as everywhere, the two kinds of people that there are—the discontented and the respectable; because, my lad, what's always been always will be."

CHAPTER III

EVENING AND DAWN

Just at the moment when I was settling down to audit the Sesmaisons' account—I remember that detail—there came an unusual sound of steps and voices, and before I could even turn round I heard a voice through the glass door say, "Monsieur Paulin's aunt is very ill."

The sentence stuns me. I am standing, and some one is standing opposite me. A draught shuts the door with a bang.

Both of us set off. It is Benoît who has come to fetch me. We hurry. I breathe heavily. Crossing the busy factory, we meet acquaintances who smile at me, not knowing the turn of affairs.

The night is cold and nasty, with a keen wind. The sky drips with rain. We jump over puddles as we walk. I stare fixedly at Benoît's square shoulders in front of me, and the dancing tails of his coat as the wind hustles them along the nocturnal way.

Passing through the suburban quarter, the wind comes so hard between the infrequent houses that the bushes on either side shiver and press towards us, and seem to unfurl. Ah, we are not made for the greater happenings!

* * * * * *

I meet first in the room the resounding glare of a wood fire and an almost repelling heat. The odors of camphor and ether catch my throat. People that I know are standing round the bed. They turn to me and speak all together.

I bend down to look at Mame. She is inlaid upon the whiteness of the bed, which is motionless as marble. Her face is sunk in the cavity of the pillow. Her eyes are half closed and do not move; her skin has darkened. Each breath hums in her throat, and beyond that slight stirring of larynx and lips her little frail body moves no more than a doll's. She has not got her cap on and her gray hair is unraveled on her head like flocks of dust.

Several voices at once explain to me that it is "double congestion, and her heart as well." She was attacked by a dizziness, by prolonged and terrible shivering. She wandered, mentioned me, then suddenly collapsed. The doctor has no hope but is coming back. The Reverend Father Piot was here at five.

Silence hovers. A woman puts a log in the fire, in the center of the dazzling cluster of snarling flames, whose light throws the room into total agitation.

* * * * * *

For a long time I look upon that face, where ugliness and goodness are mingled in such a heartrending way. My eyes seek those already almost shut, whose light is hardening. Something of darkness, an internal shadow which is of herself, overspreads and disfigures her. One may see now how outworn she was, how miraculously she still held on.

This tortured and condemned woman is all that has looked after me for twenty years. For twenty years she took my hand before she took my arm. She always prevented me from understanding that I was an orphan. Delicate and small as I was for so long, she was taller and stronger and better than I! And at this moment, which shows me the past again in one glance, I remember that she beautified the affairs of my childhood like an old magician; and my head goes lower as I think of her untiring admiration for me. How she did love me! And she must love me still, confusedly, if some glimmering light yet lasts in the depths of her. What will become of me—all alone?

She was so sensitive, and so restless! A hundred details of her vivacity come to life again in my eyes. Stupidly, I contemplate the poker, the tongs, the big spoon—all the things she used to flourish as she chattered. There they are—fallen, paralyzed, mute!

As in a dream I go back to the times when she talked and shouted, to days of youth, to days of spring and of springtime dresses; and all the while my gaze, piercing that gay and airy vision, settles on the dark stain of the hand that lies there like the shadow of a hand, on the sheet.

My eyes are jumbling things together. I see our garden in the first fine days of the year; our garden—it is behind that wall—so narrow is it that the reflected sunshine from our two windows dapples the whole of it; so small that it only holds some pot-encaged plants, except for the three currant bushes which have always been there. In the scarves of the sun rays a bird—a robin—is hopping on the twigs like a rag jewel. All dusty in the sunshine our red hound, Mirliton, is warming himself. So gaunt is he you feel sure he must be a fast runner. Certainly he runs after glimpsed rabbits on Sundays in the country, but he never caught any. He never caught anything but fleas. When I lag behind because of my littleness my aunt turns round, on the edge of the footpath, and holds out her arms, and I run to her, and she stoops as I come and calls me by my name.

* * * * * *

"Simon! Simon!"

A woman is here. I wrench myself from the dream which had come into the room and taken solidity before me. I stand up; it is my cousin Marie.

She offers me her hands among the candles which flutter by the bed. In their poor starlight her face appears haggard and wet. My aunt loved her. Her lips are trembling on her rows of sparkling teeth; the whole breadth of her bosom heaves quickly.

I have sunk again into the armchair. Memories flow again, while the sick woman's breathing is longer drawn, and her stillness becomes more and more inexorable. Things she used to say return to my lips. Then my eyes are raised, and look for Marie, and turn upon her.

* * * * * *

She has leaned against the wall, and remains so—overcome. She invests the corner where she stands with something like profane and sumptuous beauty. Her changeful chestnut hair, like bronze and gold, forms moist and disordered scrolls on her forehead and her innocent cheeks. Her neck, especially, her white neck, appears to me. The atmosphere is so choking, so visibly heavy, that it enshrouds us as if the room were on fire, and she has loosened the neck of her dress, and her throat is lighted up by the flaming logs. I smile weakly at her. My eyes wander over the fullness of her hips and her outspread shoulders, and fasten, in that downfallen room, on her throat, white as dawn.

* * * * * *

The doctor has been again. He stood some time in silence by the bed; and as he looked our hearts froze. He said it would be over to-night, and put the phial in his hand back in his pocket. Then, regretting that he could not stay, he disappeared.

And we stayed on beside the dying woman—so fragile that we dare not touch her, nor even try to speak to her.

Madame Piot settles down in a chair; she crosses her arms, lowers her head, and the time goes by.

At long intervals people take shape in the darkness by the door; people who come in on tiptoe whisper to us and go away.

The moribund moves her hands and feet and contorts her face. A gurgling comes from her throat, which we can hardly see in the cavity that is like a nest of shadow under her chin. She has blenched, and the skin that is drawn over the bones of her face like a shroud grows whiter every moment.

Intent upon her breathing, we throng about her. We offer her our hands—so near and so far—and do not know what to do.

I am watching Marie. She has sunk onto the little stool, and her young, full-blooming body overflows it. Holding her handkerchief in her teeth, she has come to arrange the pillow, and leaning over the bed, she puts one knee on a chair. The movement reveals her leg for a moment, curved like a beautiful Greek vase, while the skin seems to shine through the black transparency of the stocking, like clouded gold. Ah! I lean forward towards her with a stifled, incipient appeal above this bed, which is changing into a tomb. The border of the tragic dress has fallen again, but I cannot remove my eyes from that profound obscurity. I look at Marie, and look at her again; and though I knew her, it seems to me that I wholly discover her.

"I can't hear anything now," says a woman.

"Yes I can–"

"No, no!" the other repeats.

Then I see Crillon's huge back bending over. My aunt's mouth opens gently and remains open. The eyelids fall back almost completely upon the stiffened gleam of the eyes, which squint in the gray and bony mask. I see Crillon's big hand hover over the little mummified face, lowering the eyelids and keeping them closed.

Marie utters a cry when this movement tells her that our aunt has just died.

She sways. My hand goes out to her. I take her, support, and enfold her. Fainting, she clings to me, and for one moment I carry—gently, heavily—all the young woman's weight. The neck of her dress is undone, and falls like foliage from her throat, and I just saw the real curve of her bosom, nakedly and distractedly throbbing.

Her body is agitated. She hides her face in her hands and then turns it to mine. It chanced that our faces met, and my lips gathered the wonderful savor of her tears!

* * * * * *

The room fills with lamentation; there is a continuous sound of deep sighing. It is overrun by neighbors become friends, to whom no one pays attention.

And now, in this sacred homelet, where death still bleeds, I cannot prevent a heavy heart-beat in me towards the girl who is prostrated like the rest, but who reigns there, in spite of me—of herself—of everything. I feel myself agitated by an obscure and huge rapture—the birth of my flesh and my vitals among these shadows. Beside this poor creature who was so blended with me, and who is falling, falling, through a hell of eternity, I am uplifted by a sort of hope.

I want to fix my attention on the fixity of the bed. I put my hand over my eyes to shut out all thought save of the dead woman, defenseless already, reclining on that earth into which she will sink. But my looks, impelled by superhuman curiosity, escape between my fingers to this other woman, half revealed to me in the tumult of sorrow, and my eyes cannot come out of her.

Madame Piot has changed the candles and attached a band to support the dead woman's chin. Framed in this napkin, which is knotted over the skull in her woolly gray hair, the face looks like a hook-nosed mask of green bronze, with a vitrified line of eyes; the knees make two sharp summits under the sheet; one's eyes run along the thin rods of the shins and the feet lift the linen like two in-driven nails.

Slowly Marie prepares to go. She has closed the neck of her dress and hidden herself in her cloak. She comes up to me, sore-hearted, and with her tears for a moment quenched she smiles at me without speaking. I half rise, my hands tremble towards her smile as if to touch it, above the past and the dust of my second mother.

Towards the end of the night, when the dead fire is scattering chilliness, the women go away one by one. One hour, two hours, I remain alone. I pace the room in one direction and another, then I look, and shiver. My aunt is no more. There is only left of her something indistinct, struck down, of subterranean color, and her place is desolate. Now, close to her, I am alone! Alone—magnified by my affliction, master of my future, disturbed and numbed by the newness of the things now beginning. At last the window grows pale, the ceiling turns gray, and the candle-flames wink in the first traces of light.

I shiver without end. In the depth of my dawn, in the heart of this room where I have always been, I recall the image of a woman who filled it—a woman standing at the chimney-corner, where a gladsome fire flames, and she is garbed in reflected purple, her corsage scarlet, her face golden, as she holds to the glow those hands transparent and beautiful as flames. In the darkness, from my vigil, I look at her.

* * * * * *

The two nights which followed were spent in mournful motionlessness at the back of that room where the trembling host of lights seemed to give animation to dead things. During the two days various activities brought me distraction, at first distressing, then depressing.

The last night I opened my aunt's jewel box. It was called "the little box." It was on the dressing table, at the bottom of piled-up litter. I found some topaz ear-rings of a bygone period, a gold cross, equally outdistanced, small and slender—a little girl's, or a young girl's; and then, wrapped in tissue paper, like a relic, a portrait of myself when a child. Last, a written page, torn from one of my old school copy-books, which she had not been able to throw wholly away. Transparent at the folds, the worn sheet was fragile as lace, and gave the illusion of being equally precious. That was all the treasure my aunt had collected. That jewel box held the poverty of her life and the wealth of her heart.

* * * * * *

It poured with rain on the day of the funeral. All the morning groups of people succeeded each other in the big cavern of our room, a going and coming of sighs. My aunt was laid in her coffin towards two o'clock, and it was carried then into the passage, where visitors' feet had brought dirt and puddles. A belated wreath was awaited, and then the umbrellas opened, and under their black undulation the procession moved off.

When we came out of the church it was not far off four o'clock. The rain had not stopped and little rivers dashed down from either side of the procession's sluggish flow along the street. There were many flowers, so that the hearse made a blot of relief, beautiful enough. There were many people, too, and I turned round several times. Always I saw old Eudo, in his black cowl, hopping along in the mud, hunchbacked as a crow. Marie was walking among some women in the second half of the file, whose frail and streaming roof the hearse drew along irregularly with jerks and halts. Her gait was jaded; she was thinking only of our sorrow! All things darkened again to my eyes in the ugliness of the evening.

The cemetery is full of mud under the muslin of fallen rain, and the footfalls make a sticky sound in it. There are a few trees, naked and paralyzed. The sky is marshy and sprinkled with crows.

The coffin, with its shapeless human form, is lowered from the hearse and disappears in the fresh earth.

They march past. Marie and her father take their places beside me. I say thanks to every one in the same tone; they are all like each other, with their gestures of impotence, their dejected faces, the words they get ready and pour out as they pass before me, and their dark costume. No one has come from the castle, but in spite of that there are many people and they all converge upon me. I pluck up courage.

Monsieur Lucien Gozlan comes forward, calls me "my dear sir," and brings me the condolences of his uncles, while the rest watch us.

Joseph Bonéas says "my dear friend" to me, and that affects me deeply. Monsieur Pocard says, "If I had been advised in time I would have said a few words. It is regrettable–"

Others follow; then nothing more is to be seen in the rain, the wind and the gloom but backs.

"It's finished. Let's go."

Marie lifts to me her sorrow-laved face. She is sweet; she is affectionate; she is unhappy; but she does not love me.

We go away in disorder, along by the trees whose skeletons the winter has blackened.

When we arrive in our quarter, twilight has invaded the streets. We hear gusts of talk about the Pocard scheme. Ah, how fiercely people live and seek success!

Little Antoinette, cautiously feeling her way by a big wall, hears us pass. She stops and would look if she could. We espy her figure in that twilight of which she is beginning to make a part, though fine and faint as a pistil.

"Poor little angel!" says a woman, as she goes by.

Marie and her father are the only ones left near me when we pass Rampaille's tavern. Some men who were at the funeral are sitting at tables there, black-clad.

We reach my home; Marie offers me her hand, and we hesitate. "Come in."

She enters. We look at the dead room; the floor is wet, and the wind blows through as if we were out of doors. Both of us are crying, and she says, "I will come to-morrow and tidy up. Till then–"

We take each other's hand in confused hesitation.

* * * * * *

A little later there is a scraping at the door, then a timid knock, and a long figure appears.

It is Véron who presents himself with an awkward air. His tall and badly jointed body swings like a hanging signboard. He is an original and sentimental soul, but no one has ever troubled to find out what he is. He begins, "My young friend—hum, hum—" (he repeats this formless sound every two or three words, like a sort of clock with a sonorous tick)—"One may be wanting money, you know, for something—hum, hum; you need money, perhaps—hum, hum; all this expense—and I'd said to myself 'I'll take him some–'"

He scrutinizes me as he repeats, "Hum, hum." I shake his hand with tears in my eyes. I do not need money, but I know I shall never forget that action; so good, so supernatural.

And when he has swung himself out, abashed by my refusal, embarrassed by the unusual size of his legs and his heart, I sit down in a corner, seized with shivering. Then I obliterate myself in another corner, equally forlorn. It seems as if Marie has gone away with all I have. I am in mourning and I am all alone, because of her.

CHAPTER IV

MARIE

The seat leans against the gray wall, at the spot where a rose tree hangs over it, and the lane begins to slope to the river. I asked Marie to come, and I am waiting for her in the evening.

When I asked her—in sudden decision after so many days of hesitation—to meet me here this evening, she was silent, astonished. But she did not refuse; she did not answer. Some people came and she went away. I am waiting for her, after that prayer.

Slowly I stroll to the river bank. When I return some one is on the seat, enthroned in the shadow. The face is indistinct, but in the apparel of mourning I can see the neck-opening, like a faint pale heart, and the misty expansion of the skirt. Stooping, I hear her low voice, "I've come, you see." And, "Marie!" I say.