HER days now lay like a beautiful landscape basking in the sun, still as a lake mirroring summer skies and gentle trees. There seemed to be a pause as if thought had given way to dreams, as if something in her had begged and ob-tained a respite. "How life slips by one I" she marvelled. "How it glides by like a river shining brightly in the sun—winds like a gentle road among beautiful trees and meadows, up hills and among valleys, and every step brings one to a new prospect, beautiful, arresting, overwhelming. What a ciu'ious thing it is that life should so gently and unnoticeably glide past one and yet be so full of wonders, so full of wizard charms I" There were now just two or three things that mattered and those she knew, and everything else she had forgotten or cast aside. She knew that the ocean existed. Somewhere beyond Paris it beat and roared and filled the air with salt freshness, and invited the mind to float out upon its vastness. Simple big things like that marked and comprised her girlhood,—she felt the world, in her sympathy with the joys and sufferings of people, felt infinity every time she looked up at a star-dusted sky, felt life each time she entered or glanced over towards Pere Lachaise.
Towards people she bore herself gently— with a peculiar tolerance, which she lost a few years later, with their opinions and even prejudices, a tolerance which kept pace with her own strength of feeling and principle.
And there were now facts which she must learn to overlook, or at least to put from her as far as possible—the whole world had learned to overlook them. One must overlook death and the incompleteness of life and one must overlook the way the world was conducted. One must not make oneself a party to the crimes and the suffering of the world, one could not lock oneself in the chamber of the condemned to suffer execution with them, one could not enter alone the dark and frenzied mind, and live there in its chaos, in the fumes of the poison of its hatred—Life must become too full for her to allow her to do this.
This is what she did not know in her childhood, what she again forgot in her later youth—but now the dreamy, lovely years demanded it at her hands—now she understood how one kept alive in the midst of death. If ever she forgot, and the facts confronted her, she shook herself free of them as one does from some monstrous invention of one's own fancy.
She was learning to be objective. "Listen to the note of that bird-song—it calls you! See the trembling of those young leaves on the birch-tree, the slowly moving clouds in the overcast sky, the black flight of two birds against the gently brightening south—and listen again to the insistent song of the bird singing somewhere at your feet in the tops of those cypresses below."
She got her joy from a walk in the rain, from watching the fir-trees as they stood breathless, hushed in the cloak of snow, and from the gentle smile in the eyes of her grandfather. She found her happiness in a book the publication of which marked an era in her life, in the occasional meeting with a strange face that set her heart beating, in the occasional perception of the achievement of another as she brushed elbows with him in a crowd, or met his eye by chance.
Violette could have spoken long and realistically about her childhood. There were her grandfather and Pere Lachaise and her converse with them, there was the mute appeal of the flowers themselves, to the beauty of which she responded passionately. They had created thoughts in her she otherwise would not have had, and a feeling of luxury, of splendour, not at all in keeping with the humbleness of her surrounding, wiping out completely whatever realisation she might have had of her poverty. Did not flowers bloom on her table, on the shelf above her bed where the few books stood, on the dresser below the blurred mirror? There were the meetings which stood out in her memory, and to which her mind owed much, for she understood that she gained from them a familiarity with thoughts and people that many years could not have given her.
But never at a given time in her girlhood could she sum up the influences and the interests that prevailed in her life at that time. It was a period illusive, evasive. Time went more slowly—the years glided one into the other without anything to mark them.
Now when Violette walked in Pere La-chaise she brought the thoughts and the facts of life into those precincts. It was as if she was sensing the world, was imconsciously studying, looking about her, making up her mind to certain things, gathering up bit by bit a far-reaching story, developing within herself the power to generalise, to dream, to aspire, to struggle. This is what the light in her eyes meant, the alert attitude of her whole person.
SHE walked and smiled to herself for happiness. The sun on the grass, the white clouds in the sky, the brightness, the quiet broken only by the song of birds, made her feel that there was something about merely living sweet and precious and ineffable beyond words. Yet not about merely living—her mind dreamily contradicted her senses—it is only when one Uves out the promise of life, rises to its possibilities, makes come true all that the charm, the tenderness, the gentle loveliness of a spring morning augurs, that one begins to perceive how like a sea life tosses and waves imder its multitudinous experiences, each one terrible and great, even the lightest and happiest, each one, the most terrible and the most sad, capable of being turned into the greatest good, the wildest joy.
Such perceptions, which later would have been condemned by her as coldness to human fate, as a too absolute acceptance of it, in the gaiety of a spring morning, seemed to her natural and inevitable.
She walked on, ever more dreamily, im-der the enchantment of all that loveliness and the corresponding harmony of her thoughts and feelings. The future called her. In fancy she abounded in friends towards whom she was going, who were coming straight towards her—friends who sailed bravely under a flag of revolt.
How different she was from those who said: "Let the world go on as it can—we are content if only we are let alone, if only we can exist!" How passionately she believed that it was possible to reach all people with a message from another time and another order! What was the inner world of the men who had voice and expression, that their words echoed in every heart? What would it be to rise and speak to all, to find herself uttering things that everybody must stop to hear? What words would they have to be to reach the soul of man, to kindle a great flame in people, to speak so that all could hear and understand, oppressed and oppressor alike, victim and tyrant, so that all could as one repudiate conditions that divided people, and establish simple and beautiful relations ?
The world presented itself to her as a family, no one member of which was less interesting and fundamentally less lovable than another. She had visions of crowded streets, of windows of houses behind which lived people in their various spheres, with their thoughts and feelings, beneath which lay an innate desire and aspiration to unite themselves with their kind. Whether they were conscious of it or not, that was what they were living for.
She had an extraordinary effect on those who knew her. She made it possible for them to believe in all the exceptional natures they found in books, to feel near to the great, and intimate with them. A deepened democratic faith became theirs—they saw in her the spirit of mankind, what all could be if the chance had been theirs. For Violette had not made her own chances. She had not been hindered and withered from childhood, the sad visage of life had not borne hatred in its eyes, nor poison in its lips—as it did for the countless millions who are cast naked and defenceless into the streets of the world.
Those who knew her felt that a star was glowing in their heaven, that sunrise and sunset, and the unnumbered wonders of existence were theirs to behold. They learned from her that inspiration was a state of complete surrender of the self which could only be attended by a happiness such as no other experience of the mind could afford. They saw her moving among them, inspired gifted, and it made them tender with one another.
To such a nature what could the world do ? How could life limit and subdue her? It was in harmony with the new school of philosophy—this tendency to live theory, to adopt and be conscious of ideas only when they are lived. She was the embodiment of this philosophy of love and revolution, of idealism, of democracy. She was a forerunner. She was the Future.
PERE LACHAISE lay wrapped in silence. All day long it had drowsed in the summer heat, lulled by nodding cypresses and singing birds, but now neither tree nor bird had a word to say to the marbles that guarded the dead. Eternal time met eternal death, and they lay down together in an imending sleep.
Violette sat in Pere Lachaise. By the last rays of the sun she read a book describing the hfe and death of five men and one woman who had worked to liberate a people. It did not occur to her to doubt their ways nor to question the theory of their revolt. She felt only their passion, their marvellous abandon, their heroism and their love. Tears blinded her eyes, sobs choked her, again and again she closed the book, and remained sitting with sunken head the better to think of their single-mindedness, the better to lose herself in measureless pity for their fate, and in boundless exaltation.
They were hers. She belonged to them. Henceforth, her Ufe must be other than what it would have been if she had not sat reading the unforgettable pages of this chronicle, had not sat weeping for these strangers long dead, and feeling, besides the universal significance of their doom, the unbearable bereavement of her heart. And around her, just outside the gate, people were passing, talking, laughing, or walking their way alone, children were playing, the world ran on as if their blood had never been shed, and the high achievement of their hves never taken place. Around her all were oblivious of the great drama of these few who revolted in the name of the Future and who went to a terrible death for their revolt. How strange they did not know facts so important, so beyond words inspiring.
In her own immediate world they knew— her grandfather and that other, the man she called the friend of all her life. She had known him ever since she was a child when he had entered the shop to buy a wreath to hang on the wall of the Communards. He had come often for a httle while, and when soon afterwards he left Paris, he sent letters to the little girl and the old man. He returned in her young girlhood. Perhaps he contributed the larger part of her formal education. He read her the great German individuaUst, and she understood that the individual and society were distinct from each other, and yet one. He brought her dramas which flooded her Ufe with a new light. She went with him to a meeting on the top floor of an old building, and they presented a red card at the door. There was at once an air of mystery and openness at this gathering, and Violette caught the suggestion of an atmosphere strange to that which prevailed at the meetings to which her grandfather had taken her—something, more free, more abandoned, more extreme.
The girl was not noticed until her application for membership was read. It was immediately opposed because of her youth, and it devolved upon Violette to rise and defend her right. With flushed cheeks and trembling voice, she advanced the argument that thought had no age, that if there were very old men who belonged, and of comse there were, then there could and should be the young. It was a matter of understanding and conviction, and she imder-stood and was convinced, had been ever since she first began to think, now a long while ago.
She was admitted, It was at once a registering of her protest against the ways of the world as she saw them, and the setting out upon her journey to the futme by joining the forces of progress and of change. Now she was no longer a spectator, now her ideas were no longer theories, but a reality which made their demand upon her. She felt the character of that reality, no longer as a theory or a fact too remote for any definite significance, but as something that made her allegiance to it a matter of course, inevitable as her love of life itself. Thus her girlhood began with a glimmering sense of the people, with the passion for agitation stirring within her, with an idea of the possibility of leading a separate and original existence lighted by truth. Some day, she felt, she would look back upon her girlhood from a height and find it had been beautiful.
VIOLETTE could always say in after years that she had known the friendship of a man. In his asceticism he was very different from Violette. "All the beauties of nature and of man are free/' he said, "and whatever I have to buy I can almost always do without—for the price I would have to pay would be my energy and my time, both of which are devoted to other things 1" He had no dealing with the organised world of to-day. He did not even request a living at its hands. He taught languages privately during as few hours a week as was needed to eke out his bare existence, and he made no further compromise with the economic forces that prevail. Behind this austerity Violette found not only ail inspiring breadth of intellect, but a nature capable of great tenderness. He was large, and his face was expressive and handsome. His voice, deep and rich, lent something to whatever he said and arrested her attention always. Strength emanated from his whole personahty.
He had been nineteen and she seven when they met. Yet she had had a romantic feeling about him even at that time, and had looked upon their friendship as something extraordinary, significant. Sometimes she paid him visits. He Uved in a room at the top of a house on a level with the buttresses of Notre Dame—in a room stocked with books and bare of all adornment except that of a faded drawing of Rachel. He had acquired the Rachel in her honour, a Uttle after she came to tell him that she was going to claim Rachel for her elder sister.
She was his pupil. But he knew that he was really hers, that in knowing her, teaching her, reading to her, he was overtaking his own long-fled childhood. All the women in the world bore a resemblance to her in his mind, and where they were different from her it seemed to him they were in some way remiss.
It was through him that she so early began to divine that there was a supreme idealism, a supreme service, that there was something that transcended the personal aspects of art and love, that there was the conscious, pulsating life of the people with which one could be merged and yet remain oneself. Together they attended meetings, discussed, read, and identified themselves and became intertwined with forces that were cosmic, real, compelling, as well as elusive and romantic.
VIOLETTE worked hard. The time would come, she knew, when she would have to he much more tired than she was then, when she would have to accomplish something in comparison to which that was mere child's play. She would not like to have thought otherwise. Everything in her life was still unformed, hidden in mist, she could foresee nothing, and this was a thought of delight to her; as long as this lasted she knew she would be a child, a child of Ufe, always growing, always changing her state for the better.
Every new day found her facing a new task. That was to live, she told herself, to find that what had seemed difficult yesterday was easy to-day, and despite this to find that one's work could never be accomplished or conquered, that it waited for one with the breaking of each new day. This was adventure, romance, intellectual gaiety, and it depressed her to remember how few had the opportimity of knowing what work means— certainly not the poor, who were early taught to toil, but who, no matter how strong the impulse, had no leisure for work, certainly not women who were often in the position of the millions upon millions of poor, limited in time, strength, and opportunity.
She looked upon herself as one of the masses, and boldly realised that when one of the masses becomes an individual, she becomes as great as the race and takes on the stamp of the future.
But how get that control that would place her in a security from which she could not be ejected? How possess herself of such tm-shakable strength? By developing a talent which would be indispensable, by so keeping abreast with the times that she would be carried along by the progress of life, sustained by the social forces with which her individual existence was linked.
She saw this in her gh-lhood, and wondered how people got their grasp of conditions. It was so easy not to work, to contemplate, dream, plan, and not to move towards one's goal. It was so difficult to keep the brain and the nerves tense. Ideas hovered above her head, and did not quite descend within her reach. Something irked and tormented her,—indecision, vagueness, fear, even, seemed to be her lot, the beautiful days coming and going and not fulfilling themselves. There were times when she ran to her grandfather in despair. In her, so much ferment and struggle, so much desire, such revelations and perceptions, and yet often and often she was becalmed in a sea of inertia.
Thus in her strong and vibrant girlhood, the very richness of her nature betrayed her into a feeling of wretchedness and of poverty of the will. Her resolution, once it became conscious, lashed her to such a passion of endeavour that because her years were few, her strength undiscovered, her talents latent, her life's programme not made out, it sometimes seemed to her that she was destined to fall by the roadside, in full view of her goal.
Unless she found a life-work, the world would grind her fine and grind her small, and an end would come of all her dreams.
IT came about somewhere in the middle of her girlhood—it came in one overmastering impulse which transformed the direction of her life—with the urgency of a poet's thought clamouring for expression,—it came to her that she would be an actress!
What was the world but a theatre for the performance of tragic struggles and aspirations, for the enactment of a role that spans the immeasurable space between birth and death? What was youth but at once the most wistful and the gayest of all plays? To stand up before an audience and portray and interpret life, what could be more wonderful! To make the whole personality a medium for the expression of thought and feeling, to wrap herself aroimd the hearts of people, to fire them, to make them laugh and weep, what destiny could be more beautiful ? It was in the exuberance of her girlhood that she conceived the idea of being an actress, and it sprang equally out of her joy in the beauty of human personality, out of her belief in the dreams of liberators and poets that the lives of all could be made beautiful and great. Always she had suffered from a kind of civic sorrow, and had felt that her strength, her youth, her aspiration, her talents were as by nature itself consecrated to the service of the people. She could not know where her existence left off and the existence of others began. And it occurred to her that in being an actress she would satisfy her love of mankind, that it would be one way of engaging in the endless battle with the people, for the people, that it would be one way of belonging to the world and to herself at the same time.
She must be an actress because she was a world-spirit, was dramatic in the sense that life is dramatic.
Under the quiet stars, among the silent tombs, it was decided by her that this should be, that she should hurl herself into the middle of the stream, to make good a promise that seemed given for her at her very birth. Often she lay awake at night, while picture after picture passed before her closed eyes. She saw herself holding a great stage, in a part that was all soul and fire. She saw her audience, and loved it. Her hand waved to it for one frenzied moment.
One need not accept the tragedies of natural law; how then yield to the artificial tragedies of existence? She would show how one must fight these, even if one were all alone in the world to do it; one must combat cruel and barbarous conditions, wanton waste and suffering, insults placed upon yet imborn generations. She would give plays that did not teach patience with the present or tolerance towards the past.
Because life was anguish, she would cling to it. She would hope because despair was on every hand. She would fraternise with all the world from her stage, would inspire people to revolt and to struggle, would show them the ways of love.
To this end she worked, and her mind revolved about the new drama that would burst on the world, unconventional, unrelated to anything that preceded it, because rising not out of the actual but out of an ideal—towards which life was only approaching. Perhaps she would write her own plays, perhaps she would find words for all she had thought and known of age, and love, and work, and of the new world that must replace the old.
She would add the art of poetry to that of acting! To be a poet! Would she not barter all her years for the privilege? To be a poet she would break her heart like all poets, would take her vantage ground on the outskirts of the earth.
Her grandfather called her devotion to the stage and her ecstatic attitude towards her own dramatic ambition religious, but Violette laughed at his inability to part with a word because it had been in good repute throughout the centuries of human history. She was interested in religion solely as it affected other people. It had neither meaning nor content for herself, and she was impatient of those who called reUgious every humane tendency, every fine feeling. Did not reUgion stand for faith in something extra-human and super-human; was it not a code of conduct imposed upon people in the name of something they could not understand? Was it not a crude weapon in the hands of age-old, barbarous law-givers that found its way even to the present ? She explained its dire persistence by the fact that so much else that was barbarous still existed —she went further, and said that the basis of life was as yet barbarism, crude and cruel beyond words, a long night unbroken throughout the ages.
Not out of the tendency to goodness, always latent in people, not out of strength and faith in themselves, and hope of the future, and love of life, but out of fear was religion bom—out of fear of the elements, out of fear of the hand of fate, out of that fear which all feel who are sore beset by conditions over which they can have no control, and most of all out of the fear of death, out of the knowledge of death and its threat against the first and most vital of all instincts, that of love. Love was the strength of man, and religion the weakness of that strength.
Violette asked herself whether in that day which she and her friend foresaw for the future of the world, love, too, would not grow different in nature from the love we feel today in our half-lived, thwarted existences, whether then, love would not meet the truth of death triumphantly, and with a glad heart.
THREE altars existed for her in Pere Lachaise,—the tomb of Abelard and Heloise, the tomb of Rachel, and the monument to death that stood facing the gate.
Abelard and Heloise—they had killed love and abandoned each other, and they lay together under a canopy of stone, side by side, their eyes closed in death, their hands devoutly clasped, married and divided forever. They who had given up their love for the sake of the world, for the sake of what they called religion, how many worlds would they now give up to regain their love, had they the chance ? Violette asked how many lovers there were in the Paris of her day that would do as did these ancient Parisians. In the future of that world for which she lived, love would not thus be slain.
At the tomb of Rachel, she worshipped art, and it seemed to her that of all the destinies that lay buried here, hers was the one she understood best. She had divined a little of the passion for art, even before her studies for the stage began, through reading and frequent visits to the theatre, through roaming on long afternoons in galleries and museums, and through her thoughts on her walks of what it was that lured and enchanted people, of what it was they really loved, of what the goal was towards which they strove. Art always brought to people something they had not known before, but which they recognised. Had Rachel been an actress, she told herself, she would have foimd something to do that would have brought her to the people. Had not her grandfather striven, in that youth of his, towards the people? He had forgotten. The fire had died out, but in her it burned with a steady white heat, threatening to consume her girlhood, her art; stretching tongues of flame even towards her dreams! She would reach the people with her physical presence, with her voice and eyes and hands, with her passion and ideals.
WHEN Violette, as a result of all her studies, received an invitation to read before the Academy, she held it and pictured herself on the stage before those austere judges. She had no fear. In a flash her idea took shape and formed itself into something almost audible. She saw how she must perform her task, the amount of strength she must put forth. Then it was over: the picture vanished, but she knew that when she came to prepare she would remember.
She took counsel with herself in Pere Lachaise. It was a strange chance, and to her excited mind an omen, that she found herself at the tomb of Rachel, and there she read her part. Was she flaunting her life in the eyes of the dead, those eyes that had burned their will and their meaning into the multitude ?
A mist began to fall, followed by a fine rain. Violette leaned against the cypress that stood at the head of Rachel and glanced at the low clouds that hung over the cemetery. The tombs looked black and chill. It was difficult to believe that Paris existed, that just beyond the gate there lived men and women and children. More than ever before Pere Lachaise seemed the place where all the afflictions of the ages were perpetuated, and she bade farewell to Rachel sleeping in her granite home under the summer rain.
When the great night came, and she had recited, words of praise fell on her like tangible things—so little was she able to bear the ovation she received. They broke over her being like waves, imtil she began to believe them and to return the pressure of the hands that pressed hers, to take note of the dear, moved faces of the people who applauded her. She stood on the platform in the midst of a crowd that pressed forward, with something wild and sweet in her eyes, her arms clasping the roses that had been given her. She thrilled with the excitement which only an audience inspires, with the passion to be at one with it, to give love for love. She seemed taken out of her life into something wider, freer. She had suddenly broadened her scope, mounted on inspiration into a new existence.
They walked home from the theatre. Vi-olette's eyes shone in the dark, her hand rested on the arm of her grandfather. Their friend was with them. She tried to tell them what she felt. Then she grew a little sad, a little depressed by a subtle threat that lurked in her good fortune, a feeling that it would not last half long enough, that what had come like a sunrise might go at sunset.
In the middle of the night she slipped from her bed and put her head out of the window. The air struck her shoulders; she was poised as if to fly out of the confines of her room, and the waving trees of Pere La-chaise, black in the faint starlight, signalled to her. Yet it seemed to her that life was an ascending scale of happiness, expanding and stretching beyond her knowledge and conception, with days that were years, years that were eternity.
What was Pere Lachaise saying to her this night? Even should she die in youth, it would not be true that she had lived in vain—forever and ever the fact would remain written in the course of the stars, that she had lived.
IF she made many friendships it was because at that time she was possessed by the innate beauty of people—a democratic passion burned in her. She would gladly have spoken to people on the street, in a car, at a public gathering. It did not matter how far removed their life was from hers. Among her friends were workingmen to whom she would have seemed strange, were it not for her sympathy which made nothing that was important to them distant or inscrutable to her. It took strength to be so fully alive to other people—a vitality which perhaps she lost for a little while later, when she fell in love and again when her art took a firmer hold upon her. But now, she was fortunate, she had time—infinite tune for everything, it would seem.
She saw the world in the light of growth through struggle. The sun was shining, winds laden with perfimie were blowing beauty, and freshness, and budding youth everywhere—a world that lived in a kind of everlasting spring, but which suffered death and destruction, nevertheless, every day, every moment of its existence. So much that was waste; so much that never pierced the weight of the soil towards the air above, so much that was imborn but willed itself to be; so much that having come up went down again in misery and death.
It was the spell of Pere Lachaise, laid upon her so early, from which she would never emerge, and which made intense, and dear, and difficult every aspect of life. Was it this that endowed her with her rarest gift, the power to imagine love, to imderstand its marvellous role, to hunger early for its ineffable sweetness? She attracted people.
It was strange and startling how many different types of men thought her born for them. Violette, in kindly himiour, confided to her grandfather, and laughed. If one was right, then all the others were wrong, and yet each believed himself to know with unmistakable absoluteness.
The thought of love had an extraordinary hold upon her mind at this time. She was modem, inasmuch as she knew that she must develop herself, educate herself, fit herself for some work that would take all her strength. But she was also of the past in her full expectancy of romance, of a personal union with some one whose coming to her would mean the utmost of happiness that the heart could support, the utmost of feeling of one human being for another. She combined all the hopes and the longing of the woman of the past dreaming of her lover, with all the ideals of the modern woman who aspired towards taking a part in the adventures and activities peculiar to the present.
She once went with a girl her own age on an outing, but how foreign she felt to her companions, with their half adult love-making, their open intriguing and flirting! They had picnicked in a wood, then danced, then supped, and taken a Seine boat back to Paris, the girls and the boys arm-in-arm, laughing, openly kissing. She sat and spoke to the youth who was allotted to her with a seriousness which flattered as much as it astonished him, and wondered how she could the sooner get away to herself, to her grandfather, to her friend, to Pere Lachaise. She could not understand a hght kiss. Had she been drawn to any one there, or elsewhere, it would have meant an upheaval in her whole nature, an impression to be carried through life. It was as if the weighty big things with which she had always lived hung their atmosphere about her.
The time came when she asked herself whether she loved her friend. She had always found a home in his presence. Her hand sought his impulsively, naturally; whenever he was in the room, she chose the seat nearest his as if it must be so. She addressed her conversation to him, and her unspoken thoughts. She never separated him from her life, always saw him in the centre of it. She would go on and on because she was young, and he who to her youth seemed mature beyond change at thirty, would help her, rejoice with her, go along with her as far as she went, though for himself remain perhaps the same contemplative spirit with two absorbing passions—that of the revolutionist for his cause, and of his love for her, but making no step towards either, watching and brooding over both, like an elder brother.
Did she love him? Did her content in him, and her admiration for his qualities, her eagerness to be with him, her demand that they spend many hours of each day together, mean that she loved him? She asked herself this question, put to her first by him. For the time came when a conviction flashed on the lonely spirit that Violette was his.
She was then eighteen, developed beyond her years, and though he said to her and to himself that she was too young, that he could not call her out of her life to join him, and so, perhaps, impede her progress, and that she must go on to her goal even though it might lead her away from him, he could not admit that it did not devolve upon him to declare his love as soon as he became aware of it!
His love and hers was a fact which not only they must not belittle or overlook, but about which, henceforth, they must make their imited lives revolve.
They were walking hand in hand in a park. A rainstorm had descended on them. They had been to a meeting, had discussed the speaker, had read for hours together on a bench, and when the rain came, and the lightning, she clung to him, and he kissed her.
She felt helpless, ashamed. She was conscious of insincerity, she had never believed it possible that she would ever tell him what was not true. Yet, in fact, it was true. Sweet and wonderful as his kiss was, she had not wanted it.
With the rain drenching her and him, and tlie lightning rending the air, in silence they made their way towards her home. She would never again have to ask herself whether she loved him. He would never again have to ask her that, question. They knew, this was not love.
By her ungiven kiss, by her sudden fear of him, by the misery in her heart that a dream for him, risen she knew not where or how, was to be dispelled like mist, by her wonder why it could not be for them who were so close—by these she knew that the friend of all her life was not the beloved whom the waiting years would reveal.
He made no effort to win her love. He could not allow himself to bear down upon her with his superior strength, with his greater experience, with the indescribable radiance of his vision of their mutual love. Never again did Violette hear a word of love from him, nor catch that ardent glance from his eyes which before this night had so often broken over her like a sun.
AS she read and worked and broadened, and came more and more in contact with people, she pictured life in other terms than those of Pere Lachaise. It was no longer a simple journey through the world that ends at the Gate, the same for all. Life fulfilled itself by its variations; it was different to every one and the difference was so profound that the imagination could only accept the fact without grasping its extent. No two people in the world ever lived the same life, nor were ever the same,— if they were, love whose task it is to seek to bridge the roaring seas that toss and break between people, would have no miracle to perform.
Every human being was an entity, a creature who belonged to himself always, whose life none but himself could live—if his nature rushed him into the heart of existence where beat the lives of other people, it was only another form of fulfilling his individual impulse, of expressing his separateness. How then think of birth and of love and of death generically ? How can it mean the same to all? How can it be the same?
A long basking in the simlight of girlhood for Violette, during which time she saw the manifold ways in which life transmutes life. So was it possible to live that there could be no death, despite the fact that the gate of Pere Lachaise opened hourly. So was it possible to live that even in dying one came away a conqueror, lying down among the flowers to rest and to dream.
She did not know how this was achieved. Not yet, she told herself, was it possible for her to find the way which led through Pere Lachaise and beyond, to vistas of experience so vibrant, so intimate, so beyond the grasp of the mind significant, that they set all the seeming laws of nature at naught, and at the very last transformed death itself into something different from what it was.
Violette in thinking this had not deserted the realism so early impressed upon her by the teaching of both her grandfather and her friend, and the silent influence of Pere La-chaise. She was not reverting to mysticism. She was allowing her mind to soar past the actual, past the usual, to possibilities suggested to her imagination by both. She was not wandering from the realm of fact. She was dedicated to the discovery and practice of new forms of life, and though as yet she had succeeded partially only, and that subjectively, though much that was around her had already tried to beat her into a given form, nothing, she told herself, would induce her to desist from the primal impulse of her whole nature, to be herself, to find the utter-most of happiness and intensity to enjoy, to live many lives in one, to live so her own heart said: It is welL.
Her materialism told her that no individual is detachable from his environment, but neither is the future unrelated to the present, and for that reason she could hope to reflect distant forces, not yet incorporated in the present, to be a creature of an environment that had not yet come to pass. She was transitional, and she expressed the Future. She heralded its truth. She embodied it, she was its living witness.
So the resolve made in childhood that she would seek happiness extended itself in her girlhood to something deeper. She would so live as to make herself stronger than her environment, stronger than fate, than natural law. She would turn tragedy into joy, she would set at naught death itself. Sunlight and flowers and beauty, wonderful relaxations, romance, but never ease, never indulgent, cloddish ease—she saw herself frankly a pleasure-lover, in at once the most simple and the most serious sense, a person enamoured, whose passion never abated before the forces of reality.
This troubled her friend. He thought it not enough that she knew and felt the great facts, such as the brevity of life, and the suffering and injustice of the world—she should know the bitterness that those suflPer daily who are not, like her, protected by the power to live in themselves—the stabs to the spirit, the tortures, that people constantly suflPer at the hands of others,—did her optimism ever deliver her into the City of the Dreadful Night where the average human being lives.
It was impossible to go about with the elation of a Violette and know life. How reach her with his knowledge? She found it possible to laugh, to sing, to dance, she wrote, she indulged in long conversations, she luxuriated, drank in sunshine, rain, woke early for a glimpse of the sunrise, walked far to see a sunset—she read, again and again, her favourite books and poems, she bridged the gulf of years between her grandfather and herself, and she made of her relation with her friend something stronger and more wonderful than ever friendship was— so much vitahty troubled him, angered him. It was possible only, he thought, when the heart is asleep, when the eyes so wide open to beauty, are shut to the thousand forms of suflPering that beset the world. He imder-took to point them out to her, to suggest them whenever she wandered away into realms of her own, he was impatient with the warmth of a sympathy she expended, as he thought, too equally, too liberally. It was partly the unconsciousness of girlhood, partly its strength and power to recuperate from shock and desolation, power to overlook, to glide past on the drifting years.
Ah, she exclaimed, what mattered it all, since the world was being reconstructed, and she was aware of her part in the general change. I What mattered it if she did not know precisely how people lived, since her feeling for them was right I Of what avail would a robe of sackcloth be to her spirit decked in joy 1 Was he not pleased that she had the gift of feeling that happiness which he would wish aU young girls to have? Did happiness ever harm any one? Could he think it made her cold to their principles, cold to her work?
She dared be happy! In a world of death, in a world of suflPering, she dared be happier than she could express, she dared be grateful for life as for a boon too great to conceive. The beauty, the sunlight, the peace inspired her—the little singing insects, the rustling of the leaves, the birds, the flutter of butterflies, with velvet wings broad spread and at rest in patches of sunlight at her feet. These things spoke to her, challenged her to send on her voice of gladness and of song, far out into the world until it reached even her martyr sisters buried in dust and darkness in the factory, her hero brothers in Arrtic prison..
The waiting years would carry in safety the marvellous burden of her song the mes-sage with which they were freighted.
SHE was beginning to feel a vague restlessness, was thinking whether there was not something she could do in the present, outside her studies. The imcon-scious years of girlhood were towards the close of that era taking on a new character. She hungered for time to pass; she had a way of saying, "When I shall be older, when I shall have been graduated, when I shall have travelled." She was feverish for the time ahead, and yet fearful lest it arrive and she find it had not fulfilled itself. It took so long to do anything at all, to find voice for the thousand messages of the mind to the inner self.
She was beginning to look about her and to rouse herself from her speculations, to put by for a while her thoughts for social restitution, and to think of simpler, nearer things. The artist soared, aspired, worked, and was content; the girl found herself dreaming of distant parts, of new-found friends, of a life somehow different from the one she had always led. And in her mind she already made these journeys away from Paris and Pre Lachaise, from her grandfather whom she loved better than ever, from her friend to whom she was just growing up, perhaps. The whole world stood waiting, and now was the time for their tryst, now when she was young and eager. Perhaps later there would be a post she could not desert; later, to the young girl, was far away when too many unforeseen things might happen.
The world was waiting, and she was yearning to rush to it, to voyage and journey over its areas. Lost as she was in her studies at the Academy, she yet felt that a new light would flood her life could she travel in the countries of which she had read much, and whose daily history was the same, she was certain, as that of the people who lived in her street. There was romance in the fact of difference of language and of climate, of mere physical distance, romance in the study of their tradition and literature, and above all, passionate interest in the quest for the spirit of revolt wherever it might be.
She pictured herself on a village green near a pond. Night was falling, but the crowd of men and women that had left their huts and fields to hear her message, and to tell her of their condition, did not think of leaving. The women held sick and starved babies in their arms, and tried to still them at their shrivelled breasts. And when it was over, and she had been made to enter and partake of their bread and salt, she sat with them as a long-lost sister might, talking intimately and lovingly, and being loved in turn. Something that had burned in her heart many years had there been expressed, and Violette fancied herself returning from this voyage with memories that would last her forever,—memories of people as they live their pitifully short day under the sun and stars, memories of colossal suflPering in narrow existences. Oh, they were waiting, these people she could call out of their homes and their fields—they were waiting, and she was coming.
She pictured her travels otherwise too— among those who had found themselves after having been lost, or among joyous, free spirits who knew why they lived, or, not knowing, were too happy to ask. She pictured herself going far and wide, without haste, at home everywhere, entering into converse with all, making unforgettable friends, expanding in proportion as she conquered space, growing even as her horizon grew.
She pictured travel apart from people— that, too, was possible—mountains whose snows grew red as blood dyed by the evening sun-glow, whose lakes were black and cold, whose valleys smiled, ran with rivulets and glistened with water-falls.
She pictured the sea, which she had never known, heard its voice in her mind, stood wide-eyed on its shore and said that at last she knew what drama wasl The sea could teach her more of tragedy than Pere La-chaise, it laughed where the other dropped silent tears of pity—it laughed and mocked, and yet inspired.
She was on the ocean. White birds, hundreds of miles from the banks, circled close to the water and seemed at times to be pulled below by the waves. They rested a little, floating in the air with wings stiffened. They, too, called to her strongly.