Part 24 (1/2)
”If you want to make me cry again I warn you you won't succeed.”
”No, I know. He has been here to-day and the dry season has set in.”
”Yes, he has been here. I a.s.sure you it was perfectly unexpected.
Yesterday he was railing at the world at large, at me who certainly have not made it, at himself and even at his mother. All this rather in parrot language, in the words of tradition and morality as understood by the members of that exclusive club to which he belongs. And yet when I thought that all this, those poor hackneyed words, expressed a sincere pa.s.sion I could have found in my heart to be sorry for him. But he ended by telling me that one couldn't believe a single word I said, or something like that. You were here then, you heard it yourself.”
”And it cut you to the quick,” I said. ”It made you depart from your dignity to the point of weeping on any shoulder that happened to be there. And considering that it was some more parrot talk after all (men have been saying that sort of thing to women from the beginning of the world) this sensibility seems to me childish.”
”What perspicacity,” she observed, with an indulgent, mocking smile, then changed her tone. ”Therefore he wasn't expected to-day when he turned up, whereas you, who were expected, remained subject to the charms of conversation in that studio. It never occurred to you ... did it? No!
What had become of your perspicacity?”
”I tell you I was weary of life,” I said in a pa.s.sion.
She had another faint smile of a fugitive and unrelated kind as if she had been thinking of far-off things, then roused herself to grave animation.
”He came in full of smiling playfulness. How well I know that mood!
Such self-command has its beauty; but it's no great help for a man with such fateful eyes. I could see he was moved in his correct, restrained way, and in his own way, too, he tried to move me with something that would be very simple. He told me that ever since we became friends, we two, he had not an hour of continuous sleep, unless perhaps when coming back dead-tired from outpost duty, and that he longed to get back to it and yet hadn't the courage to tear himself away from here. He was as simple as that. He's a _tres galant homme_ of absolute probity, even with himself. I said to him: The trouble is, Don Juan, that it isn't love but mistrust that keeps you in torment. I might have said jealousy, but I didn't like to use that word. A parrot would have added that I had given him no right to be jealous. But I am no parrot. I recognized the rights of his pa.s.sion which I could very well see. He is jealous. He is not jealous of my past or of the future; but he is jealously mistrustful of me, of what I am, of my very soul. He believes in a soul in the same way Therese does, as something that can be touched with grace or go to perdition; and he doesn't want to be d.a.m.ned with me before his own judgment seat. He is a most n.o.ble and loyal gentleman, but I have my own Basque peasant soul and don't want to think that every time he goes away from my feet-yes, _mon cher_, on this carpet, look for the marks of scorching-that he goes away feeling tempted to brush the dust off his moral sleeve. That! Never!”
With brusque movements she took a cigarette out of the box, held it in her fingers for a moment, then dropped it unconsciously.
”And then, I don't love him,” she uttered slowly as if speaking to herself and at the same time watching the very quality of that thought.
”I never did. At first he fascinated me with his fatal aspect and his cold society smiles. But I have looked into those eyes too often. There are too many disdains in this aristocratic republican without a home.
His fate may be cruel, but it will always be commonplace. While he sat there trying in a worldly tone to explain to me the problems, the scruples, of his suffering honour, I could see right into his heart and I was sorry for him. I was sorry enough for him to feel that if he had suddenly taken me by the throat and strangled me slowly, _avec delices_, I could forgive him while I choked. How correct he was! But bitterness against me peeped out of every second phrase. At last I raised my hand and said to him, 'Enough.' I believe he was shocked by my plebeian abruptness but he was too polite to show it. His conventions will always stand in the way of his nature. I told him that everything that had been said and done during the last seven or eight months was inexplicable unless on the a.s.sumption that he was in love with me,-and yet in everything there was an implication that he couldn't forgive me my very existence. I did ask him whether he didn't think that it was absurd on his part ... ”
”Didn't you say that it was exquisitely absurd?” I asked.
”Exquisitely! ... ” Dona Rita was surprised at my question. ”No. Why should I say that?”
”It would have reconciled him to your abruptness. It's their family expression. It would have come with a familiar sound and would have been less offensive.”
”Offensive,” Dona Rita repeated earnestly. ”I don't think he was offended; he suffered in another way, but I didn't care for that. It was I that had become offended in the end, without spite, you understand, but past bearing. I didn't spare him. I told him plainly that to want a woman formed in mind and body, mistress of herself, free in her choice, independent in her thoughts; to love her apparently for what she is and at the same time to demand from her the candour and the innocence that could be only a shocking pretence; to know her such as life had made her and at the same time to despise her secretly for every touch with which her life had fas.h.i.+oned her-that was neither generous nor high minded; it was positively frantic. He got up and went away to lean against the mantelpiece, there, on his elbow and with his head in his hand. You have no idea of the charm and the distinction of his pose. I couldn't help admiring him: the expression, the grace, the fatal suggestion of his immobility. Oh, yes, I am sensible to aesthetic impressions, I have been educated to believe that there is a soul in them.”
With that enigmatic, under the eyebrows glance fixed on me she laughed her deep contralto laugh without mirth but also without irony, and profoundly moving by the mere purity of the sound.
”I suspect he was never so disgusted and appalled in his life. His self-command is the most admirable worldly thing I have ever seen. What made it beautiful was that one could feel in it a tragic suggestion as in a great work of art.”
She paused with an inscrutable smile that a great painter might have put on the face of some symbolic figure for the speculation and wonder of many generations. I said:
”I always thought that love for you could work great wonders. And now I am certain.”
”Are you trying to be ironic?” she said sadly and very much as a child might have spoken.
”I don't know,” I answered in a tone of the same simplicity. ”I find it very difficult to be generous.”
”I, too,” she said with a sort of funny eagerness. ”I didn't treat him very generously. Only I didn't say much more. I found I didn't care what I said-and it would have been like throwing insults at a beautiful composition. He was well inspired not to move. It has spared him some disagreeable truths and perhaps I would even have said more than the truth. I am not fair. I am no more fair than other people. I would have been harsh. My very admiration was making me more angry. It's ridiculous to say of a man got up in correct tailor clothes, but there was a funereal grace in his att.i.tude so that he might have been reproduced in marble on a monument to some woman in one of those atrocious Campo Santos: the bourgeois conception of an aristocratic mourning lover. When I came to that conclusion I became glad that I was angry or else I would have laughed right out before him.”
”I have heard a woman say once, a woman of the people-do you hear me, Dona Rita?-therefore deserving your attention, that one should never laugh at love.”
”My dear,” she said gently, ”I have been taught to laugh at most things by a man who never laughed himself; but it's true that he never spoke of love to me, love as a subject that is. So perhaps ... But why?”