The Inferno (4 page)

She gave a visible start at the touch of this new manner of address, at the word "Miss," as if it were a kind of embrace.

"Why, Mr. Lecoq," she ventured hesitatingly, "it is as though something had covered us, and we were removing--"

Now, he became bolder.

"Shall we kiss each other on our mouths?"

She was oppressed, and could not quite smile.

"Yes," she said.

They caught hold of each other's arms and shoulders and held out their lips, as if their mouths were birds.

"Jean!" "Hélène!" came softly.

It was the first thing they had found out. To embrace the embracer, is it not the tiniest caress and the least sort of a bond? And yet it is so sternly prohibited.

Again they seemed to me to be without age.

They were like all lovers, while they held hands, their faces joined, trembling and blind, in the shadow of a kiss.

. . . . .

They broke off, and disengaged themselves from their embrace, whose meaning they had not yet learned.

They talked with their innocent lips. About what? About the past, which was so near and so short.

They were leaving their paradise of childhood and ignorance. They spoke of a house and a garden where they had both lived.

The house absorbed them. It was surrounded by a garden wall, so that from the road all you could see was the tip of the eaves, and you couldn't tell what was going on inside of it.

They prattled:

"The rooms, when we were little and they were so big--"

"It was easier to walk there than anywhere else."

To hear the children talk, you would have thought there was something benevolent and invisible, something like the good God of the past, behind those walls. She hummed an air she had heard there, and said that music was easier to remember than people. They dropped back into the past easily and naturally. They wrapped themselves up in their memories as though they were cold.

"The other day, just before we left, I took a candle and walked alone through the rooms, which scarcely woke up to watch me pass."

In the garden, so prim and well kept, they thought only of the flowers, and little else. They saw the pool, the shady walk, and the cherry tree, which, in winter when the lawn was white, they made believe had too many blossoms--snow blossoms.

The day before they had still been in the garden, like brother and sister. Now life seemed to have grown serious all at once, and they no longer knew how to play. I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.

She sat up straight.

"I don't want to remember any more," she said.

And he:

"I don't want us to be like each other any more. I don't want us to be brother and sister any more."

Gradually their eyes opened.

"To touch nothing but each other's hands," he muttered, trembling.

"Brother--sister--that's nothing."

It had come--the hour of beautiful, troubled decisions, of forbidden fruits. They had not belonged to each other before. The hour had come when they sought to be all in all to each other.

They were a little self-conscious, a little ashamed of themselves already. A few days before, in the evening, it had given them profound pleasure to disobey their parents and go out of the garden although they had been forbidden to leave it.

"Grandmother came to the top of the steps and called to us to come in."

"But we were gone. We had slipped through the hole in the hedge where a bird always sang. There was no wind, and scarcely any light. Even the trees didn't stir. The dust on the ground was dead. The shadows stole round us so softly that we almost spoke to them. We were frightened to see night coming on. Everything had lost its colour. But the night was clear, and the flowers, the road, even the wheat were silver. And it was then that my mouth came closest to your mouth."

"The night," she said, her soul carried aloft on a wave of beauty, "the night caresses the caresses."

"I took your hand, and I knew that you would live life whole. When I used to say 'Hélène,' I did not know what I was saying. Now, when I shall say 'she,' it will be everything."

Once more their lips joined. Their mouths and their eyes were those of Adam and Eve. I recalled the ancestral lesson from which sacred history and human history flow as from a fountain. They wandered in the penetrating light of paradise without knowledge. They were as if they did not exist. When--through triumphant curiosity, though forbidden by God himself--they learned the secret, the sky was darkened. The certainty of a future of sorrow had fallen upon them. Angels pursued them like vultures. They grovelled on the ground from day to day, but they had created love, they had replaced divine riches by the poverty of belonging to each other.

The two little children had taken their parts in the eternal drama. By talking to each other as they did they had restored to their first names their full significance.

"I should like to love you more. I should like to love you harder.
How could I?"

. . . . .

They said no more, as though there were no more words for them. They were completely absorbed in themselves, and their hands trembled.

Then they rose, and as they did so, the door opened. There stood the old stooping grandmother. She came out of the grey, out of the realm of phantoms, out of the past. She was looking for them as if they had gone astray. She called them in a low voice. She put into her tone a great gentleness, almost sadness, strangely harmonising with the children's presence.

"You are here, children?" she said, with a kind little laugh. "What are you doing here? Come, they are looking for you."

She was old and faded, but she was angelic, with her gown fastened up to her neck. Beside these two, who were preparing for the large life, she was, thenceforth, like a child, inactive, useless.

They rushed into her arms, and pressed their foreheads against her saintly mouth. They seemed to be saying good-by to her forever.

. . . . .

She went out. And a moment afterwards they followed her, hastily, as they had come, united now by an invisible and sublime bond. On the threshold, they looked at each other once more.

And now that the room was empty like a deserted sanctuary, I thought of their glance, their first glance of love, which I had seen.

No one before me had ever seen a first glance of love. I was beside them, but, far away. I understood and read it without being part of the infatuation myself, without being lost in the sensation. That is why I saw that glance. They did not know when it began, they did not know that it was the first. Afterwards they would forget. The urgent flowering of their hearts would destroy those preludes. We can no more know our first glance of love than our last. I shall remember it when they will have forgotten it.

I do not recall my own first glance of love, my own first gift of love. Yet it happened. Those divine simplicities are erased from my heart. Good God, then what do I retain that is of value? The little boy that I was is dead forever, before my eyes. I survived him, but forgetfulness tormented me, then overcame me, the sad process of living ruined me, and I scarcely know what he knew. I remember things at random only, but the most beautiful, the sweetest memories are gone.

Well, this tender canticle that I overheard, full of infinity and overflowing with fresh laughter, this precious song, I take and hold and cherish. It pulses in my heart. I have stolen, but I have preserved truth.

For a day, the Room remained vacant. Twice I had high hopes, then
disillusionment.

Waiting had become a habit, an occupation. I put off appointments, delayed my walks, gained time at the risk of losing my position. I arranged my life as for a new love. I left my room only to go down to dinner, where nothing interested me any more.

The second day, I noticed that the Room was ready to receive a new occupant. It was waiting. I had a thousand dreams of who the guest would be, while the Room kept its secret, like some one thinking.

Twilight came, then evening, which magnified the room but did not change it. I was already in despair, when the door opened in the darkness, and I saw on the threshold the shadow of a man.

. . . . .

He was scarcely to be distinguished in the evening light.

Dark clothing, milky white cuffs from which his grey tapering hands hung down; a collar a little whiter than the rest. In his round greyish face I could see the dusky hollows of his eyes and mouth, under the chin a cavity of shadow. The yellow of his forehead shone unclearly. His cheekbone made an obscure bar in the dusk. You would have called him a skeleton. What was this being whose physiognomy was so monstrously simple?

He came nearer, and his face kindled, assumed life. I saw that he was
handsome.

He had a charming serious face, fringed with a fine black beard, a high forehead and sparkling eyes. A haughty grace guided and refined his movements.

He came forward a step or two, then returned to the door, which was still open. The shadow of the door trembled, a silhouette appeared and took shape. A little black-gloved hand grasped the knob, and a woman stole into the room, with a questioning face.

She must have been a few steps behind him in the street. They had not wished to enter the room together, in which they both sought refuge to escape pursuit.

She closed the door, and leaned her whole weight against it, to close it still tighter. Slowly she turned her head to him, paralysed for a moment, it seemed to me, with fear that it was not he. They stared into each other's faces. A cry burst from them, passionate, restrained, almost mute, echoing from one to the other. It seemed to open up their wound.

"You!"

"You!"

She almost fainted. She dropped on his breast as though swept by a storm. She had just strength enough to fall into his arms. I saw the man's two large pale hands, opened but slightly crooked, resting on the woman's back. A sort of desperate palpitation seized them, as if an immense angel were in the Room, struggling and making vain efforts to escape. And it seemed to me that the Room was too small for this couple, although it was full of the evening.

"They didn't see us!"

It was the same phrase which had come the other day from the two
children.

He said, "Come!" leading her over to the sofa, near the window, and they seated themselves on the red velvet. I saw their arms joined together as though by a cord. They remained there, engrossed, gathering about them all the shadow of the world, reviving, beginning to live again in their element of night and solitude.

What an entry, what an entry! What an irruption of anathema!

I had thought, when this form of sin presented itself before me, when the woman appeared at the door, plainly driven toward him, that I should witness bliss in its plenitude, a savage and animal joy, as momentous as nature. On the contrary, I found that this meeting was like a heart-rending farewell.

"Then we shall always be afraid?"

She seemed just a little more tranquil, and said this with an anxious glance at him, as if really expecting a reply.

She shuddered, huddled in the shadows, feverishly stroking and pressing the man's hand, sitting upright, stiffly. I saw her throat rising and falling like the sea. They stayed there, touching one another; but a lingering terror mingled with their caresses.

"Always afraid--always afraid, always. Far from the street, far from the sun, far from everything. I who had so much wanted full daylight and sunlight!" she said, looking at the sky.

They were afraid. Fear moulded them, burrowed into their hearts.
Their eyes, their hearts were afraid. Above all, their love was
afraid.

A mournful smile glided across the man's face. He looked at his friend
and murmured:

"You are thinking of /him."/

She was sitting with her cheeks in her hands and her elbows on her knees and her face thrust forward. She did not reply.

She /was/ thinking of him. Doubled up, small as a child, she gazed intently into the distance, at the man who was not there. She bowed to this image like a suppliant, and felt a divine reflection from it falling upon her--from the man who was not there, who was being deceived, from the offended man, the wounded man, from the master, from him who was everywhere except where they were, who occupied the immense outside, and whose name made them bow their heads, the man to whom they were a prey.

Night fell, as if shame and terror were in its shadows, over this man and woman, who had come to hide their embraces in this room, as in a tomb where dwells the Beyond.

. . . . .

He said to her:

"I love you!"

I distinctly heard those grand words.

I love you! I shuddered to the depths of my being on hearing the profound words which came from those two human beings. I love you! The words which offer body and soul, the great open cry of the creature and the creation. I love you! I beheld love face to face.

Then it seemed to me that sincerity vanished in the hasty incoherent things he next said while clasping her to him. It was as though he had a set speech to make and was in a hurry to get through with it.

"You and I were born for each other. There is a kinship in our souls which must triumph. It was no more possible to prevent us from meeting and belonging to each other than to prevent our lips from uniting when they came together. What do moral conventions or social barriers matter to us? Our love is made of infinity and eternity."

"Yes," she said, lulled by his voice.

But I knew he was lying or was letting his words run away with him. Love had become an idol, a thing. He was blaspheming, he was invoking infinity and eternity in vain, paying lip service to it by daily prayer that had become perfunctory.

They let the banality drop. The woman remained pensive for a while, then she shook her head and she--/she/ pronounced the word of excuse, of glorification; more than that, the word of truth:

"I was so unhappy!"

. . . . .

"How long ago it was!" she began.