In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (36 page)

When, that evening, after having accompanied my grandmother to her
destination and spent some hours in her friend's house, I had returned
by myself to the train, at any rate I found nothing to distress me in
the night which followed; this was because I had not to spend it in a
room the somnolence of which would have kept me awake; I was
surrounded by the soothing activity of all those movements of the
train which kept me company, offered to stay and converse with me if I
could not sleep, lulled me with their sounds which I wedded—as I had
often wedded the chime of the Combray bells—now to one rhythm, now to
another (hearing as the whim took me first four level and equivalent
semi–quavers, then one semi–quaver furiously dashing against a
crotchet); they neutralised the centrifugal force of my insomnia by
exercising upon it a contrary pressure which kept me in equilibrium
and on which my immobility and presently my drowsiness felt themselves
to be borne with the same sense of refreshment that I should have had,
had I been resting under the protecting vigilance of powerful forces,
on the breast of nature and of life, had I been able for a moment to
incarnate myself in a fish that sleeps in the sea, driven unheeding by
the currents and the tides, or in an eagle outstretched upon the air,
with no support but the storm.

Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as
are hard–boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon
which boats strain but make no progress. At a certain moment,—when I
was counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind, in the
preceding minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or
not (and when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the
question was to furnish me with an affirmative answer), in the pale
square of the window, over a small black wood I saw some ragged clouds
whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change,
like the colour that dyes the wing which has grown to wear it, or the
sketch upon which the artist's fancy has washed it. But I felt that,
unlike them, this colour was due neither to inertia nor to caprice but
to necessity and life. Presently there gathered behind it reserves of
light. It brightened; the sky turned to a crimson which I strove,
gluing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it
was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the
course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave
place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs
still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent
nacre of night, beneath a firmament still powdered with all its stars,
and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught
sight of it afresh, but red this time, in the opposite window which it
left at a second bend in the line, so that I spent my time running
from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect oh a single
canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet,
ever–changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view of it and a
continuous picture.

The scenery became broken, abrupt, the train stopped at a little
station between two mountains. Far down the gorge, on the edge of a
hurrying Stream, one could see only a solitary watch–house,
deep–planted in the water which ran past on a level with its windows.
If a person can be the product of a soil the peculiar charm of which
one distinguishes in that person, more even than the peasant girl whom
I had so desperately longed to see appear when I wandered by myself
along the Méséglise way, in the woods of Roussainville, such a person
must be the big girl whom I now saw emerge from the house and,
climbing a path lighted by the first slanting rays of the sun, come
towards the station carrying a jar of milk. In her valley from which
its congregated summits hid the rest of the world, she could never see
anyone save in these trains which stopped for a moment only. She
passed down the line of windows, offering coffee and milk to a few
awakened passengers. Purpled with the glow of morning, her face was
rosier than the sky. I felt in her presence that desire to live which
is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of
happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities,
and, substituting for them in our mind a conventional type at which we
arrive by striking a sort of mean amongst the different faces that
have taken our fancy, the pleasures we have known, we are left with
mere abstract images which are lifeless and dull because they are
lacking in precisely that element of novelty, different from anything
we have known, that element which is proper to beauty and to
happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we
suppose to be fair, for we believed that we were taking into account
when we formed it happiness and beauty, whereas in fact we left them
out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom
of either. So it is that a well–read man will at once begin to yawn
with boredom when anyone speaks to him of a new 'good book,' because
he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read
and knows already, whereas a good book is something special, something
incalculable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous
masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of
every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists
not in their sum but beyond it. Once he has become acquainted with
this new work, the well–read man, till then apathetic, feels his
interest awaken in the reality which it depicts. So, alien to the
models of beauty which my fancy was wont to sketch when I was by
myself, this strapping girl gave me at once the sensation of a certain
happiness (the sole form, always different, in which we may learn the
sensation of happiness), of a happiness that would be realised by my
staying and living there by her side. But in this again the temporary
cessation of Habit played a great part. I was giving the milk–girl the
benefit of what was really my own entire being, ready to taste the
keenest joys, which now confronted her. As a rule it is with our
being reduced to a minimum that we live, most of our faculties lie
dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to
be done and has no need of their services. But on this morning of
travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the change of
place and time, had made their presence indispensable. My habits,
which were sedentary and not matutinal, played me false, and all my
faculties came hurrying to take their place, vying with one another in
their zeal, rising, each of them, like waves in a storm, to the same
unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath,
appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination.
I cannot say whether, so as to make me believe that this girl was
unlike the rest of women, the rugged charm of these barren tracts had
been added to her own, but if so she gave it back to them. Life would
have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend
it, hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the
cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known
to her, had my place in her thoughts. She would have initiated me into
the delights of country life and of the first hours of the day. I
signalled to her to give me some of her coffee. I felt that I must be
noticed by her. She did not see me; I called to her. Above her body,
which was of massive build, the complexion of her face was so
burnished and so ruddy that she appeared almost as though I were
looking at her through a lighted window. She had turned and was coming
towards me; I could not take my eyes from her face which grew larger
as she approached, like a sun which it was somehow possible to arrest
in its course and draw towards one, letting itself be seen at close
quarters, blinding the eyes with its blaze of red and gold. She
fastened on me her penetrating stare, but while the porters ran along
the platform shutting doors the train had begun to move. I saw her
leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad
daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn. Whether my exaltation
had been produced by this girl or had on the other hand been
responsible for most of the pleasure that I had found in the sight of
her, in the sense of her presence, in either event she was so closely
associated with it that my desire to see her again was really not so
much a physical as a mental desire, not to allow this state of
enthusiasm to perish utterly, not to be separated for ever from the
person who, although quite unconsciously, had participated in it. It
was not only because this state was a pleasant one. It was principally
because (just as increased tension upon a cord or accelerated
vibration of a nerve produces a different sound or colour) it gave
another tonality to all that I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the
stage of an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe; that
handsome girl whom I still could see, while the train gathered speed,
was like part of a life other than the life that I knew, separated
from it by a clear boundary, in which the sensations that things
produced in me were no longer the same, from which to return now to my
old life would be almost suicide. To procure myself the pleasure of
feeling that I had at least an attachment to this new life, it would
suffice that I should live near enough to the little station to be
able to come to it every morning for a cup of coffee from the girl.
But alas, she must be for ever absent from the other life towards
which I was being borne with ever increasing swiftness, a life to the
prospect of which I resigned myself only by weaving plans that would
enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at the
same station, a project which would have the further advantage of
providing with subject matter the selfish, active, practical,
mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the human
mind; for our mind turns readily aside from the effort which is
required if it is to analyse in itself, in a general and disinterested
manner, a pleasant impression which we have received. And as, on the
other hand, we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind
prefers to imagine it in the future tense, which while it gives us no
clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of
recreating it in our own consciousness and allows us to hope that we
may receive it afresh from without.

Certain names of towns, Vezelay or Chartres, Bourses or Beauvais,
serve to indicate, by abbreviation, the principal church in those
towns. This partial acceptation, in which we are so accustomed to take
the word, comes at length—if the names in question are those of
places that we do not yet know—to fashion for us a mould of the name
as a solid whole, which from that time onwards, whenever we wish it to
convey the idea of the town—of that town which we have never
seen—will impose on it, as on a cast, the same carved outlines, in
the same style of art, will make of the town a sort of vast cathedral.
It was, nevertheless, in a railway–station, above the door of a
refreshment–room, that I read the name—almost Persian in style—of
Balbec. I strode buoyantly through the station and across the avenue
that led past it, I asked my way to the beach so as to see nothing in
the place but its church and the sea; people seemed not to understand
what I meant. Old Balbec, Balbec–en–Terre, at which I had arrived, had
neither beach nor harbour. It was, most certainly, in the sea that the
fishermen had found, according to the legend, the miraculous Christ,
of which a window in the church that stood a few yards from where I
now was recorded the discovery; it was indeed from cliffs battered by
the waves that had been quarried the stone of its nave and towers.
But this sea, which for those reasons I had imagined as flowing up to
die at the foot of the window, was twelve miles away and more, at
Balbec–Plage, and, rising beside its cupola, that steeple, which,
because I had read that it was itself a rugged Norman cliff on which
seeds were blown and sprouted, round which the sea–birds wheeled, I
had always pictured to myself as receiving at its base the last drying
foam of the uplifted waves, stood on a Square from which two lines of
tramway diverged, opposite a Café which bore, written in letters of
gold, the word 'Billiards'; it stood out against a background of
houses with the roofs of which no upstanding mast was blended. And the
church—entering my mind with the Café, with the passing stranger of
whom I had had to ask my way, with the station to which presently I
should have to return—made part of the general whole, seemed an
accident, a by–product of this summer afternoon, in which its mellow
and distended dome against the sky was like a fruit of which the same
light that bathed the chimneys of the houses was ripening the skin,
pink, glowing, melting–soft. But I wished only to consider the eternal
significance of the carvings when I recognised the Apostles, which I
had seen in casts in the Trocadéro museum, and which on either side of
the Virgin, before the deep bay of the porch, were awaiting me as
though to do me reverence. With their benign, blunt, mild faces and
bowed shoulders they seemed to be advancing upon me with an air of
welcome, singing the Alleluia of a fine day. But it was evident that
their expression was unchanging as that on a dead man's face, and
could be modified only by my turning about to look at them in
different aspects. I said to myself: "Here I am: this is the Church
of Balbec. This square, which looks as though it were conscious of its
glory, is the only place in the world that possesses Balbec Church.
All that I have seen so far have been photographs of this church—and
of these famous Apostles, this Virgin of the Porch, mere casts only.
Now it is the church itself, the statue itself; these are they; they,
the unique things—this is something far greater."