"I knew that some day all that emotion would die, and, in spite of our promises, I wanted time to stand still.

"But time did not stand still, and now we scarcely love each other."

He made a gesture as of denial.

"It is not only you, my dear, who are drifting away," she continued.

"I am, too. At first I thought it was only you. But then I understood my poor heart and realised that in spite of you, I could do nothing against time."

She went on slowly, now with her eyes turned away, now looking at him.

"Alas, some day, I may say to you, 'I no longer love you.' Alas, alas, some day I may say to you, 'I have never loved you!'

"This is the wound--time, which pa.s.ses and changes us. The separation of human beings that deceive themselves is nothing in comparison. One can live even so. But the pa.s.sage of time! To grow old, to think differently, to die. I am growing old and I am dying, I. It has taken me a long time to understand it. I am growing old. I /am/ not old, but I am growing old. I have a few grey hairs already. The first grey hair, what a blow!

"Oh, this blotting out of the colour of your hair. It gives you the feeling of being covered with your shroud, of dry bones, and tombstones."

She rose and cried out into the void:

"Oh, to escape the network of wrinkles!"

She continued:

"I said to myself, 'By slow degrees you will get there. Your skin will wither. Your eyes, which smile even in repose, will always be watering. Your b.r.e.a.s.t.s will shrink and hang on your skeleton like loose rags. Your lower jaw will sag from the tiredness of living. You will be in a constant shiver of cold, and your appearance will be cadaverous. Your voice will be cracked, and people who now find it charming to listen to you will be repelled. The dress that hides you too much now from men's eyes will not sufficiently hide your monstrous nudity, and people will turn their eyes away and not even dare to think of you.'"

She choked and put her hands to her mouth, overcome by the truth, as if she had too much to say. It was magnificent and terrifying.

He caught her in his arms, in dismay. But she was as in a delirium, transported by a universal grief. You would have thought that this funereal truth had just come to her like a sudden piece of bad news.

"I love you, but I love the past even more. I long for it, I long for it, I am consumed with longing for it. The past! I shall cry, I shall suffer because the past will never come back again.

"But love the past as much as you will, it will never come back. Death is everywhere, in the ugliness of what has been too long beautiful, in the tarnishing of what has been clean and pure, in the forgetfulness of what is long past, in daily habits, which are the forgetfulness of what is near. We catch only glimpses of life. Death is the one thing we really have time to see. Death is the only palpable thing. Of what use is it to be beautiful and chaste? They will walk over our graves just the same.

"A day is coming when I shall be no more. I am crying because I shall surely die. There is an invincible nothingness in everything and everybody. So when one thinks of that, dear, one smiles and forgives.

One does not bear grudges. But goodness won in that way is worse than anything else."

He bent over and kissed her hands. He enveloped her in a warm, respectful silence, but, as always, I felt he was master of himself.

"I have always thought of death," she continued in a changed voice.

"One day I confessed to my husband how it haunted me. He launched out furiously. He told me I was a neurasthenic and that he must look after me. He made me promise to be like himself and never think of such things, to be healthy and well-balanced, as he was.

"That was not true. It was he who suffered from the disease of tranquillity and indifference, a paralysis, a grey malady, and his blindness was an infirmity, and his peace was that of a dog who lives for the sake of living, of a beast with a human face.

"What was I to do? Pray? No. That eternal dialogue in which you are always alone is crushing. Throw yourself into some occupation? Work?

No use. Doesn't work always have to be done over again? Have children and bring them up? That makes you feel both that you are done and finished and that you are beginning over again to no purpose. However, who knows?"

It was the first time that she softened.

"I have not been given the chance to practise the devotion, the submission, the humiliation of a mother. Perhaps that would have guided me in life. I was denied a little child."

For a moment, lowering her eyes, letting her hands fall, yielding to the maternal impulse, she only thought of loving and regretting the child that had not been vouchsafed to her--without perceiving that if she considered it her only possible salvation, it was because she did not have it.

"Charity? They say that it makes us forget everything. Oh, yes, to go distributing alms on the snowy streets, in a great fur cloak," she murmured and made a tired gesture, while the lover and I felt the shiver of the cold rainy evening and of all the winters past and yet to come.

"All that is diversion, deception. It does not alter the truth a particle. We shall die, we are going to die."

She stopped crying, dried her eyes and a.s.sumed a tone so positive and calm that it gave the impression that she was leaving the subject.

"I want to ask you a question. Answer me frankly. Have you ever dared, dear, even in the depths of your heart, to set a date, a date relatively far off, but exact and absolute, with four figures, and to say, 'No matter how old I shall live to be, on that day I shall be dead--while everything else will go on, and little by little my empty place will be destroyed or filled again?'"

The directness of her question disturbed him. But it seemed to me that he tried most to avoid giving her a reply that would heighten her obsession.

And all at once, she remembered something he had once said to her, and cleverly reminded him of it so as to close his mouth in advance and torture herself still more.

"Do you remember? One evening, by lamplight. I was looking through a book. You were watching me. You came to me, you knelt down and put your arms around my waist, and laid your head in my lap. There were tears in your eyes. I can still hear you. 'I am thinking,' you said, 'that this moment will never come again. I am thinking that you are going to change, to die, and go away. I am thinking so truly, so hotly, how precious these moments are, how precious you are, you who will never again be just what you are now, and I adore your ineffable presence as it is now.' You looked at my hand, you found it small and white, and you said it was an extraordinary treasure, which would disappear. Then you repeated, 'I adore you,' in a voice which trembled so, that I have never heard anything truer or more beautiful, for you were right as a G.o.d is right.

"Alas!" he said.

He saw the tears in her eyes. Then he bowed his head. When he lifted it again, I had a vague intuition that he would know what to answer, but had not yet formulated how to say it.

"Poor creatures, a brief existence, a few stray thoughts in the depths of a room--that is what we are," she said, lifting her head and looking at him, hoping for an impossible contradiction, as a child cries for a star.

He murmured:

"Who knows what we are?"

She interrupted him with a gesture of infinite weariness.

"I know what you are going to say. You are going to talk to me about the beauty of suffering. I know your n.o.ble ideas. I love them, my love, your beautiful theories, but I do not believe in them. I would believe them if they consoled me and effaced death."

With a manifest effort, as uncertain of himself as she was of herself, feeling his way, he replied:

"They would efface it, perhaps, if you believed in them."

She turned toward him and took one of his hands in both of hers. She questioned him with inexorable patience, then she slipped to her knees before him, like a lifeless body, humbled herself in the dust, wrecked in the depths of despair, and implored him:

"Oh, answer me! I should be so happy if you could answer me. I feel as though you really could!"

He bent over her, as if on the edge of an abyss of questioning: "Do you know what we are?" he murmured. "Everything we say, everything we think, everything we believe, is fict.i.tious. We know nothing.

Nothing is sure or solid."

"You are wrong," she cried. "There /is/ something absolute, our sorrow, our need, our misery. We can see and touch it. Deny everything else, but our beggary, who can deny that?"

"You are right," he said, "it is the only absolute thing in the world."