"You certainly saw the change in me, and you guessed. The morning when you stopped in front of me and restrained the exclamation in your breast, I was sure you knew. Perhaps it was very apparent. I came and went in a radiance; the house grew chilly, everything in the house was conscious of it and unnatural. Evenings I worked later and later, as if I were afraid of falling asleep, and when we discussed things, it was I who explained, I who knew. You must have seen, too, how often I buried myself in silence, content in it sometimes, then tortured.

"You observed me. There was no reason for speaking one day rather than another?

"A reason has arisen.

"It was yesterday evening. Walking beside him I suddenly realized that in him, in us, in me, there was a sort of attraction; I responded to it--with all the strong, fine need of truth you gave me. It is this need of truth which brings me to you this evening.

"Take it, take it before giving it back to me. Don't let us ask whether it is more painful for you who receive it than for me who bestow it. Let us forget that man retains the proud authority of the male in his flesh and says "possess" as of a thing. Don't let us ask whether the union between man and woman is sublime to this degree. Let ours take that stand. One always has the time to suffer in, but there is only one time in which to love in truth.

"See, maybe it is at this very moment when my voice is worn threadbare and in spite of yourself you push my head away and hold yourself up as if you were about to fall, that we draw closer together than ever before.

"You are watching the night as it comes creeping ... you see, don't you?

There is no question, not for a moment, of parting, nor of my loving you less. Because our hearts are turned towards each other to-day. A miracle is taking place. It will not be undone.

"Listen to me. Listen to me as if you could understand. Let me spread at your feet the infinity I hold.... Since he came, if you only knew, I love you more. Not only do I feel your smile and your whole presence around me like a thousand arms and with even more than one heart, but I feel surer of myself, n.o.bler, and--admit it--more beautiful.... To love you is to think perfection, n.o.bility, light, and to stretch my hands out to them. It is nothing else.

"To go to him is to continue myself; it is not to lessen you.

"But.... Is it the dusk or the reflection of the tree? Your cheeks are ashen, your eyes are quite wet, and in spite of everything, in spite of everything I am hurting you.... At the moment that you love like a G.o.d, you suffer like a man....

"It is because our understanding is a high one that your grief is deep and my confession necessary.

"If you knew, if you knew....

"You see, I still tremble before stopping just as I hesitated before sitting down, because once my confession is made we shall both feel that it is closed forever.

"Does one ever know whether one has not omitted the essential word, the life word, the one that means everything and has not been said? I no longer know. It is as if I still had it within me....

"Let me stay where I am, near you, for a long time. You will let my head rest on your knees, the night will succeed better than I in revealing the heart unseen.

"Perhaps he has come already.... Tell me ... do you hear him?"

XXI

How happy I was!... I listened without stirring to the deep throbbing of his life. I came to know him better through the regular pulsing of his neck, the twisting of his arms and the warmth that pa.s.sed between us than through our past meetings. All the warm invisible things that work in the depths of a human being, the changing fate, the mystery circulating in the blood, were talking into my ears.

Here we were alongside each other, breathing in unison--can you have enough of such happiness? I entrusted my entire being to him; it was a pure, holy fulfilment.

There's no use trying to sum matters up differently. It may be that at death you find the higher expression, the illumination so sought for, but the living have no other way of saying the truth to each other than through the flesh.

You understand, don't you, that you have to rest from living? No longer to have this gaping heart, this pitiless, relentless love, but simply to lie stretched out close against him, so that the whole universe comes rushing to you, the mystery reveals itself, and life finds consolation.... Does G.o.d ever bestow greater charity?

I have just given him my life, my body, my very depths, and he is gone to sleep.

Then, a human being never knows what another human being gives him?

Physical love joins nothing, leaves nothing. Nevertheless, it seems to bring everything, and it does bring everything at the red moment of embrace.

The joy at which I grasped has departed; my lips are dry, my arms empty.

Yet a little while ago I thought I was going to live like G.o.d. And to have had the hope of living like G.o.d for a single instant is in itself beautiful enough.

XXII

"You really want to know what I am thinking of? And why I look so obstinate with my eyebrows projecting like a black roof over my eyes?

"I was working out an idea, the sort of idea that seems silly when you try to express it, but is really quite reasonable and logical....

"Why do you insist upon my telling you? I a.s.sure you it's so simple that you, a man, won't understand.

"Well then. I was thinking of your wife.... No, don't interrupt ... the woman who shares your name, your home, your meals, the money you earn, your cares; the woman who lives beside you--here's the one wrong--in utter ignorance of your love for me.

"I was imagining--this is where the vagary commences--a meeting between the two of us, not a meeting of constrained smiles, not the confrontation of two human beings, with elements of the dramatic and the divine. Do try to follow me. Put together the details I am going to give you one by one the way they are in reality. Give the extraordinary interview the ordinary setting of humble, ba.n.a.l, tame everydayness. I told you it was a silly notion.

"I go to visit her. The interview takes place amid her familiar accustomed things, which a.s.sist and protect her. She sits beside the window--her little sewing-table, her work-basket, a dozen scattered articles. She sews without thinking of much, in the broad daylight so dazzlingly brilliant that you can't see the swing of the pendulum. Her head is bent, the sunlight grazes her neck. You feel her spirit is with her needle and thread, that is, crystallized in calm. Her tranquillized body submits in advance to the impending visit. She has only to lift her eyes to know the limits set to her being, the very boundary-line of everything she awaits.

"I enter. I go to her. My steps erect a hedge of sound around me. To make myself seen I raise my voice.... How make myself heard? I do not know.... Since truth is triumphant, the announcement of my presence may be triumphant also. It may write 'I love him' all over me before we shake hands or even give each other the first look.

"She knows. She knows everything. I feel bathed in a vast thankfulness.

Just imagine: when people talk of you, she is the only one in the world who knows down to the very roots of her being the full content of their words. It is as if I were speaking to G.o.d.

"Well, I begin. Laughing, crying I impart what cannot be imparted. I hurry. The words flowing from my lips warm me with their generous wine, and I hear love pouring forth.

"I see myself, almost on my knees, scarcely perceiving her. Is it to her that I address myself? I speak merely in order to remove a barrier obstructing the light and to say the truth.

"In the breathless words that I pour out at her feet it is not a question perhaps of either her or myself. Why should it be? I never considered that I was doing her a wrong. If she reads my face, she will see things as they are. Have I turned anything away from her, have I diminished her portion, have I deprived her of anything? I have simply given you everything.

"Don't say she might repulse me and would be right if she did, because that, after all, would be the human way to act. Human to you means everything that deceives itself and denies the essential grace, everything that falls and dies in the mud of the road. Are you quite sure that a woman when she loves does not feel that sort of humanity die?

"You look at me dubiously. Of course you cannot know. You men tolerate an understanding between two women when it exists for the sake of cherishing the dust-covered memory of a man. A tomb rea.s.sures you. You will never allow life as a pretext. According to you we have no right to a sisterhood until it is too late.

"In my unfailing and fatal sincerity I say your wife might understand.