The Choice of Life Part 19

"But just think! Conversation in pairs, when two people are in sympathy--and they are nearly always in sympathy when they are face to face--can be as sincere as lonely meditations."

I felt that she shared my sentiment; but her reasonable nature makes her always steer a middle course, never leaning to either side.

2

The pale winter sun is beginning to wane, but there is still plenty of daylight in the white drawing-room. And I look at my friends, who have formed little groups in harmony with my wishes and their own. When an increased intimacy brings us all closer together, the party will gain by that earlier informality. Each life will have been given its normal pitch and will try at least to keep it. For our souls are such sensitive instruments that they can rarely strike as much as a true third.

Blanche, with the agate eyes and the cloud of chestnut hair, is a picture of autumn in the brown and red of her frock, with its bands of sable. She is listening attentively to Marcienne. The fair Marcienne herself, whom I love for her pa.s.sionate pride, is sitting near the fire-place; and her wonderful profile stands out against the flames. Her mouth is a fierce red; but the figure which shows through the pale-coloured tailor-made dress is full of tender childish curves. The swansdown toque makes her black hair seem blacker still. She is talking seriously and holding out to the flames her fingers covered with rings.

The wide-open door reveals the darker bedroom, in which the lights are already turned on. A young married woman is sitting with her elbows on the table. She is reading a poem in a low voice; and from time to time a few words, spoken more loudly, mingle with the semi-silence of the other rooms. Bending under the lamp-shade, her brown hair is bathed in the light, while her profile is veiled by her hand and the lines of her body are lost in the dark dress which melts into the shadow. Near her, leaning against the white wall, two white figures listen and dream.

I see Rose. She is standing, all emerald and gold, in the middle of the next room. Behind her, a mirror reflects the copper candelabra whose lighted branches surround her with stars. A placidly-smiling Madonna, chaste and cold, dazzling and glorious, she talks to the inseparables, Aurelie and Renee.

Renee, clad in deep mourning, is a delicious little princess of jet, with lint-white hair and flax-blue irises. Her companion, crowned with glowing tresses, knows the splendour of her green eyes and, with a cunning fan-like play of her long eyelids, amuses herself by making them appear and disappear.

My attention is recalled to the visitor by my side, a young Dutchwoman not yet quite at home in France. She is shy in speaking and she does not know my friends. I look at her. Her fair round face is quaintly framed in the smooth coils of her golden hair. Her eyes are a cloudless blue.

Her nose, which is a little heavy and serious, belies the smiling mouth, with its corners that turn up so readily. The very long and very lovely neck makes one follow in thought the hollow of the nape and the slope of the shoulders vanis.h.i.+ng in a snowy cloud of Mechlin lace. On the deliberately antiquated black-silk dress, a gold chain and a miniature set in brilliants give the finis.h.i.+ng touch to a style cla.s.sic in its chast.i.ty. Seated in a grandfather's chair in the embrasure of the window, she reminds one of Mme. de Mortsauf in Balzac's _Lys dans la vallee_.

But she is also the very embodiment of Zealand. You can picture her head covered with a lace cap and her temples adorned with gold corkscrews.

Behind her you conjure up flat horizons, slow-turning wind-mills, little red-and-green houses in which the inmates seem to play at living. How charming she looks in the last rays of light, at once childish and dignified, pa.s.sive and romantic ... and so different from the rest!

But has not each her particular interest, her special grace? When my eyes go from one to another, they tell a rosary of precious beads, each with its own peculiar beauty, neither greater nor less than its fellows!

What a glad and wondrous thing it is to be women, to be delicate, pretty things, infinitely sensitive and infinitely varied, living works of art, matter for kisses, the realised stuff of dreams! When you look at them like that, solely in the decorative sense, you are ready to condemn those who work, who think and who concentrate upon an aim of some sort, for these superfine creatures carry the reason for their existence within themselves, so great is the perfection which they achieve with a gesture, an att.i.tude, a glance. And then you reflect upon what they too often are in the privacy of their lives: narrow and domineering, attached to petty, useless duties, their minds lacking dignity, their souls lacking horizon; and you are sorry that they have not grown, through the sheer consciousness of their beauty, into ways that are kindly and generous.

I let my hand rest lightly on Cecilia's hands; and in the sweetness of the gathering dusk we both dream. Like the scent of flowers, the different natures seem to find a more precise expression as their shapes fade. I explain them to Cecilia, who does not know them.

Aurelie and Renee draw my eyes with their laughter; and I begin with them. They are the careless lovers, idle for the exquisite pleasure of idleness. They live a dream-life, the life of a child that sleeps, dresses itself, goes for a walk, eats sweets and plays with its dolls.

They are good-natured as well as frivolous, lissom of mind as well as of body, indulgent to others and charming in themselves. Love, resting on their young and tender lives, makes them more tender yet, like the light that lingers long and fondly upon a soft-tinted pastel.

Next comes the turn of Marcienne, who, greatly daring, has broken with her family and given up worldly luxury, to work and live freely with the man of her choice.

Beside her is Blanche, still restless and undecided, attracted by love and irritated by her sister Hermione, who pursues a vision of charity and redemption.

Here my friend's fine profile turns to the other groups; and I continue:

"The one whom we call Sister Hermione you can see in the dark bedroom, reading under the light of the lamp, with her face hidden in her hands."

"Is she good-looking?"

"Very, but tries not to seem so. That is why she is always so simply dressed."

Cecilia interrupts me:

"But her dress isn't simple!"

"You are quite right. It is made complex by a thousand superfluous fripperies. Hermione has not been slow to understand that, to counteract perfect beauty, you must read simplicity to mean commonplace triviality."

A flutter of silk, a gleam of a silver-white skirt in the waning light, a whiff of orris-root; and Marcienne glides down to our feet with a lithe, cat-like movement. In a curt, pa.s.sionate tone, she says:

"You are speaking of Hermione. Oh, do try and persuade her sister not to go the same way: is not one enough? Must more loveliness be wasted?"

Sitting on a cus.h.i.+on on the floor, she raises her glowing face, her eyes dark as night, her scarlet mouth, her dazzling pallor.

"I shall do nothing of the sort," I answer with a laugh, "for I rather like Hermione's folly; besides, her reason will soon conquer it! The dangers we run depend on chance; the first roads we take depend on influences. The way in which we bear those dangers and return from those roads: that is where the interest begins!"

"But, tell me," murmurs Cecilia, "what does your Hermione want?"

"Here is her story, in a couple of words," says Marcienne. "She is rich, beautiful and talented; and she belongs to an aristocratic English family. At twenty, she yielded to an impulse and went on the stage; in a few months, she was a really successful actress; then she made the acquaintance of a Hindu high-priest. He came and went; and she followed him. During the last two years, she has been his faithful disciple."

"But what does she preach?"

Marcienne made a vague gesture:

"Buddhist doctrines! She believes that she possesses the true faith and tries to hand it on to others. In the few days which she has spent in Paris, she has already made two converts, those two innocents who are hanging on her words. It would all be charming, you know, if her creed did not enjoin chast.i.ty and if, by holding those views, she did not risk the awful fate of never knowing love!"

Marcienne continued, still addressing herself to my new friend:

"Do you see those pretty creatures in white, standing close to Hermione?

They are two orphans, two girls who fell in love with the same man. I don't know the details of the romance, nor can I say whether it was fancy or pa.s.sion that guided the man's choice. All I know is that he loved one of them and had a child by her. A little while after, he deserted her. Thereupon their unhappy love reunited those two hearts which happy love, as always, had divided. The same devotion and kindness made them both bend over the one cradle. Oh, the adorable pity that prompted Anne's heart on the day when, hearing her baby call her mamma for the first time, she sent for her sister Marie and, holding towards her those little outstretched arms, those eyes in which consciousness was dawning, that little fluttering life seeking a resting-place, she offered the maid, in the exquisite mystery of that first smile, the first name of love! From that time onward, the baby grew up between its two mammas as one treads a sunny path between two flowering banks."

Marcienne had a gift for pretty phrases of this kind, which she would let fall not without a certain affectation. She liked talking and I liked listening to her. I asked her what she thought of Rose. She praised her beauty highly and even said the occasional awkwardness of her movements made it more uncommon:

"For that matter," she added, "if it were not so, I should try to be blind to it. A woman must understand that she lowers herself by belittling her sisters. How immensely we increase man's ascendancy by never praising one another!"

I began to laugh:

"Alas, I would not dare to say that the wisest among us, in extolling our own s.e.x, are not once more seeking the admiration of some man!"

And Marcienne, who has been to such pains to release herself from the worldly surroundings amid which she suffered, goes on speaking long and pa.s.sionately. There is a note of pain in her voice as she says:

"Everything separates us and removes us one from the other, education even more than instinct. If woman only knew how she lessens her power by blindly respecting the petty social laws of which she is nevertheless the sole judge and dictator! Whereas she hands them down meekly, from mother to daughter, with all their wearisome restrictions, and grows indignant if some one bolder ventures to transgress them. And yet it is in this domain, which is hers, that she might extend her power by gradually overthrowing the old idols."

And she also says:

"Almost always, in defending a woman, we have occasion to strike a mortal blow at some ancient prejudice. For my part, I must confess that I take a mischievous delight in bestowing special indulgence on things which often are too severe a test for that indulgence in others; for, rather than be suspected of impugning ever so lightly some worn-out principle, they will wound and wound again the most innocent of their sisters."

3

It is almost dark. I leave my companions in order to call for the lamps and I stop near Rose as I pa.s.s through the next room. Here, all the girls are cl.u.s.tered round Hermione, who is telling them a story of her travels.

Anne and Marie are listening respectfully, while the two inseparables, only half-attentive, are sharing a box of sweets.

Roseline throws her arms round me and, shrugging her shoulders, says:

"All this strikes me as such utter nonsense!"

She is certainly right, with her Normandy common sense; but does she not need just a touch of this same nonsense to bring her faculties into play, her powers into action?