ROMAIN ROLLAND (continued 3)

To disguise his feeling he leaned, with a gruff camaraderie, over the pamphlet she had just laid down.

"What are you reading here?"

He turned the leaves. A scientific review. There was a file of them.

"Yes," said Annette, "I am trying to catch up with things. It's not easy. I have lost ground during these five years; I have to earn my living, giving lessons, and I haven't the time. I am taking advantage of Easter. No more lessons. I'm resting. I am trying to make up for lost time. I am taking double doses, you see. [She pointed to the open reviews that surrounded her.] I should like to swallow them all. But it's too much. I can't manage it; I have to learn everything all over again. Such an immense number of things have happened since I have been out of the running; they allude to works that I don't know. . . . Heavens, how quickly things move! But I shall catch up with them again! I swear I shan't be left behind on the road like a cripple. There are fine things to be seen out there. I want to see them."

Julien drank in her words. Of all she was saying what remained in his mind was this: she was earning her living under difficulties, and she was laughing. She rose in his admiration to a height which the old Annette had never attained. And she dragged him along with her. For this joy, which he did not possess, she brought to him.

They went out together. Julien was proud to find himself in the company of this beautiful woman; he could not get over his surprise that she should have remembered him so well. In the old days she had hardly seemed to notice that he existed. And here she was recalling to him little forgotten events in which he was concerned. She asked about Julien's mother. He was so touched that his embarrassment vanished; haltingly, he began to tell her about himself; he was tongue-tied. Annette listened to him with gentle irony; she would have liked to prompt him. He was still at the beginning and his assurance was coming back when she held out her hand to bid him goodbye. He had just time to ask her if she was going to be at the library again, and he was overjoyed to hear her say, "to-morrow."

Julien went home in utter confusion. He was ashamed of himself, but to-morrow he would make up for it. To-day he only wanted to think of the miracle of this friendship. On her side, Annette, who was submerged in Sylvie's environment, was pleased to have found again a comrade of her intellectual years. Not that he was very enlivening—hardly that—but he was a serious, sympathetic, honest boy. . . . What an icicle!

She had no reason the next day to change her opinion. Julien only thawed out when he was alone at home. The moment he saw Annette again, the ice at once returned. He was filled with consternation. He had prepared many things to say, prepared a conversation as he would have prepared a lecture, but under Annette's eyes nothing remained of it all. There was only a tasteless extract left of the recitation that he had warmed up in himself so many times. Even he was bored as he heard himself reeling it off. He only recovered his equilibrium when they began to discuss science and he himself was not in question. On that ground he was precise and clear and even became quite lively. Annette could have asked nothing more. Eager to learn, she pressed him with questions that interested Julien by their intelligence; she was so quick in imagining, though she often guessed wrong, and at a word she would turn up at the exact point whither he wished to lead her. He liked this attentive face, these eyes that plunged into his to reach his thought more quickly, and then suddenly lighted up. She had understood! The joy of thought shared in common, and this invisible sun and the immense perspective illumined by its light, the joy of travelling together towards discovery by new roads where he was her guide! It was delicious to talk in this way, in the peaceful seclusion of this hall of books, this church of the mind.

Delicious for him, but not for those who were near them. For he talked too loud: he had forgotten that other people existed. Annette smilingly told him that he must be silent and rose to go out. He followed her. But once in the street again, with the table and the books no longer before them, he became the same impotent soul whom Annette had seen the day before. She tried to make him talk of himself, but her labor was lost. And he could not make up his mind to leave her; he wanted to take her back to the door of her house. He was stiff, nervous, abrupt from embarrassment—at moments, unintentionally, even rather impolite. . . . He was a fearful bore! Annette, slightly irritated, thought, "How the devil can I get rid of him?"

Julien perceived the mocking curve in this mouth that said nothing. He stopped suddenly and remarked, in a tone of distress, "O forgive me, I'm boring you. . . . Yes, I know it, I know it! I am such a bore! I don't know how to talk. I am not used to it. I live alone. My mother is good, very good, but I can't tell her about my thoughts. Many of them would upset her; she wouldn't understand them. And I have never known anybody who was interested in them. I don't expect it. You have been good to listen to me so indulgently. I have let myself go on because I wanted to tell you. . . . But it isn't possible. One can't tell things, one should keep them to oneself. It isn't interesting, it isn't manly. Live and be silent. I ask your pardon for having bored you."

Annette was touched. There was real feeling in these words. This mixture of modesty and sad pride struck her; she felt the disappointment and the wounded affection under the shell of coldness. In one of those bursts of emotion which she could not resist, she was seized with a kindly pity for Julien. She said warmly, "No, no, don't regret anything. I thank you. It was quite right of you to talk"—she corrected herself with a touch of mockery that had no sharpness in it this time—"to try to talk. Yes, it isn't easy. You are not used to it. . . . Well, I'm glad you are not used to it. There are plenty of others who are! But there is nothing to prevent me from hoping that I shall make you get used to it. Are you willing? Since you have no one with whom you can talk?"

Julien was too much moved to reply, but his look expressed a gratitude that was still shy. Although it was past the hour when she should have been at home, Annette retraced her steps so that they might still have a few minutes together; and she talked to him with a kind, motherly camaraderie, in a simple, cordial tone that was like a cool hand laid on his aching forehead. Yes, he had been hurt, this big boy; with his moody air he needed to be handled very gently. He was coming back to life now. But she had to go in. . . . Annette suggested seeing him again from time to time. And they confessed that, as for the work they had done in the library, they might have done it just as well in the Luxembourg Gardens, or . . .

"Or . . . why not at my house?"

And Annette, inviting him for some Sunday soon, vanished without waiting for a reply.

Ah, how well he might have talked, now that she was no longer there! He went over the whole scene; he felt how kind Annette was. And since this man, who was so well balanced in his intellectual life, was unable to preserve any measure in the things of the heart, he slipped without transition from the thought that his feeling was destined to remain unreturned to the thought that perhaps . . .

XVIII

Annette had not the least suspicion of what was taking place in Julien. The unengaging appearance of her new companion seemed a guarantee against love, and she thought that in some comic fashion it would also guarantee Julien. She respected him. She pitied him. Pitied, he became sympathetic. It was pleasant to tell herself that she could do him good; and he became more sympathetic to her. But it would never have occurred to her to be on her guard against him, still less against herself.

She had forgotten her invitation when, on the following Sunday, he came to recall it to her; and the joyous surprise with which she greeted him was not assumed. But Julien who, for a week, had been thinking of nothing but this moment, did not see the surprise and saw only the joy. And his own increased. The weather was very bad. Annette had not thought of going out this afternoon. As she was not expecting anybody; she was in négligé, and so was the apartment. The baby had been playing there. It is useless to have, as Annette had, a love of order; children oblige one to give it up, along with so many fine plans that one has formed without considering them. But Julien, referring everything to himself, saw in this disorder no artistic effect, but a sign of some intimacy that Annette wished to accord him. He came in with a beating heart, but with his mind made up to appear this time in an advantageous light; he assumed an air of assurance. It was not becoming to him, and Annette, who was annoyed at being surprised in this confusion, was angry because the intruder was so unceremonious. She at once became cold, and in an instant Julien's pride was broken. So they remained, each as stiff as the other, the one not daring to utter another word, the other waiting with an air of malicious hauteur.

"If you imagine, my dear boy, that I am going to help you to-day!"

And then she saw the ridiculous side of the situation. She saw with the corner of her eye the piteous look of the conqueror, and she laughed out loud. Suddenly relaxed, she resumed the comradely tone. Julien did not understand it at all: disconcerted but relieved, he too became natural again, and at last a friendly conversation sprang up between them.

Annette told him about her working life, and they confessed to one another that they were not made for their occupations. Julien was passionately interested in the science which he taught, but . . .

"They can't follow me! They look at me with their dull eyes blinking with sleep; there are hardly two or three who have a glimmer of understanding; the rest are a heavy mass of boredom. If you sweat blood and water, you can sometimes (not always) stir it for a moment, but it always falls back into the pond. Try to fish it out again! It's work for a well-digger. But it isn't their fault, the unhappy brats. They are just like ourselves; they are victims of the democratic mania according to which all minds absorb equally the same sum of knowledge—before the normal age when they might begin to understand! Then come the examinations, the agricultural matches, when they weigh these products of ours who are crammed with a mixture of lame words and formless notions. Most of these they hastily disgorge immediately afterwards, and they are disgusted with learning for the rest of their lives."

"Now I," said Annette, laughing, "like children very much, yes, even the most unattractive ones. I am not indifferent to any of them. I should like to have them all, I should like to hug them all. But one has to limit oneself. Isn't that so? It's enough to have one. . . ."

(She pointed to the disorderly room, but he did not understand and smiled stupidly.)

"It's a pity! When I see one who pleases me, I would like to steal him. And they all give me pleasure. There is something fresh, an infinite hope, even in the ugliest. . . . But what can I do with them? And what can they do with me? I see so little of them. They are only in my hands for an hour. And then I run to the others. And my little ones also run from hand to hand. What one hand has done the other undoes. Nothing sticks. These little formless souls, these little soulless forms, who dance the Boston and the two-step. We run about. Everyone runs about. This life is a race-course. No one ever stops. People die, they join the dead. Ah, what unhappy souls, never granting themselves a day to collect their thoughts! And they don't grant us one either, we who would so like to have it!"

Julien understood her. He had no need to learn the value of a retreat, the horror of the tumultuous world. And their understanding increased when Annette said that fortunately, in the midst of the flood, there were still a few islets where one could take refuge, the beautiful books of the poets and especially music. The poets had little attraction for Julien; their language was beyond him. He had the strange distrust of it which is common in minds that love thought and often have their own poetry, but do not perceive the deep vibrations of the music of words. The other music, the language of sounds, is more accessible to them. Julien loved it. Unfortunately, he lacked the time and the means to go and hear it.

"I lack them too," said Annette. "But I go just the same."

Julien did not have this vitality. After his working day he stayed quietly at home. He did not know how to amuse himself. He saw a piano in the room.

"Do you play?"

"Ah, it isn't easy!" said Annette, laughing. "He doesn't allow it."

Julien, vaguely troubled, asked in surprise who could prevent her in this way. Annette, with her ear alert, listened to the little steps that were tapping along as they climbed the stairs. She ran and opened the door. "See, there's the monster!"

She brought Marc in. He had returned from his aunt's.

Julien did not yet understand.

"My little boy . . . Marc, will you say good-afternoon?"

Julien was astounded. It had not even occurred to Annette that he would be surprised. She went on gaily, holding Marc, who tried to escape from her, "You see, I haven't lost my time in spite of all."

Julien did not have the wit to reply. His attention was occupied in concealing his confusion. He attempted a rather foolish smile. Marc had succeeded in slipping from his mother's hands, without having said good-afternoon. (He thought this ceremony ridiculous, and he made off, leaving his mother talking, "talking and saying nothing," well knowing that the instant after she would have forgotten it in something else. There was no continuity in women.) Four steps away from Julien, in the folds of a curtain which he twisted in his embrace, Marc looked the stranger up and down with severe eyes; and in his childish way (which was fairly accurate) he had quickly sized up the situation. Decision without appeal: he did not like Julien. The question was settled.

Julien, whose embarrassment was increased by this look from the child, tried to resume the thread of the conversation while following the thread of his own thoughts. But he only succeeded in becoming more confused. He reassured himself, however. Feebly. Annette's confident manner made it impossible for him to suspect that she was unmarried: that was out of the question. But where was the husband? Alive or dead? Annette was not in mourning. No, he was not reassured. What had become of this man? Julien did not dare to ask directly. After many detours, he finally took a chance, imagining he was very clever, and carelessly remarked, "Have you been alone very long?"

"I am not alone," said Annette. And she pointed to her child.

He learned nothing more. But since she thus admitted by implication that she was alone (with the child) and that she took it gaily, it must be because her mourning was far, very far, behind her, and she no longer thought of it. Julien's interested logic ended victoriously, "Monsieur Malbrough is dead."

Farewell to the husband! He was no longer disturbing. Julien threw one more shovelful of earth on him, and then, turning to Marc, gave the child a crooked smile. Marc was becoming sympathetic to him.

But he had not become so to Marc. He was more familiar with the constitution of the atomic bodies than with that of a child's mind. Marc fully realized that this demonstration of good nature was not natural, and the result was that he turned his back, grumbling, "I forbid him to laugh at me."

Annette, amused by Julien's useless efforts to win over the child, thought she ought to make up for Marc's ungracious greeting. She questioned Julien about his solitary life with an interest that wandered a little at first, but soon ceased to do so. Julien, who was always more sure of himself when he was sitting in the half-light of a room, talked about himself this time quite frankly. He was simple; he never, or hardly ever, posed, in spite of his desire to please. In his sincerity he revealed a candour that one seldom meets in Paris in a man of his age. When he touched upon subjects that were dear to him, he had a delicacy that veiled a restrained emotion. In these moments of abandon when, in the kindly silence of the encouraging Annette, his true inner nature seemed to blossom, a gleam of moral beauty lighted up his face. Annette looked at him attentively, and what she felt for him was no longer merely a friendly indifference.

After this they saw each other regularly on Sundays and a little oftener during the week, when they had a free moment. Julien used as a pretext the books which he lent her; it was quite necessary to accompany them with explanations so that Annette should have less difficulty in understanding them. He brought Marc some rather expensive but badly chosen presents for which the little enemy was by no means grateful to him: he thought them childish and beneath his dignity. But nothing could shake Julien's good will, firmly resolved as he was not to see anything that would disturb him. Solitary spirits who distrust the world lose all discernment, all desire to be discerning, the moment they abandon their distrust in favor of some chosen soul: they are liberated. Julien's mind, ingenious in deceiving itself, arranged to its satisfaction the memories it brought back from each of its visits: everything that Annette had said and everything that surrounded her. (Without being conscious of it, he indirectly glorified himself.) Annette's inattentiveness, her wandering replies, even the bored silences which he sometimes caused her, all rendered her more beautiful and more touching to him. And as, each time, he still discovered some new little trait, which did not accord with the portrait he had made, he kept remaking the portrait, he made it over ten times; and although the portrait no longer resembled what it had been at the beginning, Julien never admitted that there had been a change in its essential constancy. He was ready to alter his ideal of love as many times as the beloved object altered.

Annette had become aware of his love for her. She was amused by it at first, then touched, then grateful, a little, a good deal, in spite of everything. ("The least handsome boy in the world can only give what he has. Thank you, my good Julien.") Then she was a little troubled. She told herself frankly that she should not allow him to start down that slope. But it gave the boy so much happiness, and certainly it was not displeasing to her. Annette was susceptible to affection; susceptible also to gentle attentions, the flattery of tenderness. Too much so, perhaps. She confessed it. Love, the admiration she read in his eyes were for her a caress that she could not but wish to have repeated. . . . Yes, she admitted it: perhaps it was not quite right, but it was so natural! She would have to make some little effort to deprive herself of it. She did so, but she had no luck; everything she said to push Julien away from her (did she really say everything?) attracted him all the more. It was a fatality! One has to resign oneself to a fatality. She laughed at herself, while Julien, troubled, wondered if she was not laughing at him.

"Hypocrite, hypocrite! Haven't you any shame?"

She had no shame. Can one resist pleasing a heart that has surrendered itself into one's hands? It brightens one's days. And what harm does it do? What is the danger? As long as one is calm and master of oneself and desires only what is good, the good of the other person!

She did not know that one of the insidious paths through which love finds its way is the fond vanity of believing that one is necessary—that feeling which is so strong in the heart of a true woman: it satisfies her double need of doing good, which she confesses, and of pride, which she does not confess. It is so strong that when she has a well-developed soul she often prefers the man for whom she cares less, but whom she can protect, to the man for whom she cares more, but who can get along without her. Is not this the essence of maternity? Suppose the big boy were to remain the little chick as long as he lived! The woman with a mother's heart, like Annette, finds it easy to attribute to a man whose love appeals to her a charm he does not possess. Her instinct disposes her to observe only his good qualities. Julien had plenty of these. Annette rejoiced to see his timidity vanishing and his real nature, which had been repressed, expanding in the daylight with the soft happiness of the convalescent. She said to herself that hitherto no one had understood this man, not even the mother of whom he was always talking and of whom she was beginning to be jealous. As for poor Julien, he did not know himself. . . . Who would have suspected that under this rough shell there was a tender, delicate soul? . . . (She was exaggerating.) . . . He needed confidence and he had lacked it: confidence in others, confidence in himself. To believe in himself he needed another believer. Well, she believed! She believed in Julien, for Julien's sake, so much that she ended by believing in him also for her own. . . . He blossomed under her eye as a plant in the sunlight. And it is good to be the sun for somebody else. "Open, my heart!" Was it to Julien's heart or her own that she was speaking? Already she had ceased to know. For she too was blossoming as a result of the good she was doing. An abundant nature dies if it cannot nourish others from itself. "To give myself!"

Annette gave too much. She was irresistible. Julien no longer concealed his passion. And Annette—a little late—recognized that she was in danger.

When she saw love rising within her, she threw up a feeble defence; she tried not to take Julien's feelings seriously. But she did not believe herself, and all she did was to make Julien more importunate. He became pathetic.

Then she was seized with fear. She besought him not to love her, to let them remain good friends.

"Why?" he asked. "Why?"

She did not want to say. She had an instinctive fear of love; she remembered what she had suffered through it, and an intuition warned her of what she would have to suffer again. She summoned it and she drove it away from her; she desired it and she fled from it. Julien's entreaties she resisted sincerely, and in the bottom of her heart she prayed that her adversary might conquer her; resistance.

The combat would have dragged on if a certain event had not hastened the issue.

XIX

With her sister's husband Annette was on terms of the frankest friendship. This good soul, for all his slight vulgarity, lacked neither heart nor integrity. Annette respected him, and Leopold treated her with a rather ceremonious consideration. Ever since their first meetings he had gathered that she belonged to a different species from his and Sylvie's; she intimidated him. He was all the more grateful for the kindness she showed him. At the time when he was paying court to Sylvie, she had been his ally; more than once she had come to his aid when he was exposed to the ridicule of his fiancée, who was too sure of her power not to abuse it. Later she had even discreetly interposed in misunderstandings in the household, or when Sylvie yielded to sudden whims, crotchets and deviltries, now and then, escaping from her own vexations by vexing her husband. Leopold, who did not understand such things, would come and tell his troubles to Annette, who undertook to bring Sylvie back to reason. He had even gone so far as to confide to his sister-in-law more than one matter which he had not mentioned to his wife. Sylvie was not unaware of this, and she teased Annette, who took it gaily. Everything was natural and frank among the three. Leopold had never complained of the place held in his home by his wife's sister and the little boy, though they were often rather in the way; he thought, in fact, that Sylvie did not do enough to help Annette, whose courage he admired; and he spoiled the child. Annette, who knew through Sylvie what Leopold thought, was grateful to him.

The period of Sylvie's pregnancy was not, for those about her, especially the husband, a happy time. Frequent discords drove Leopold and his consort apart. Not that Sylvie meant to get along without him. She thought very little about her maternity and was unwilling to make any change in her manner of living. But he did think about it. Those long months of gestation were far from being for her what they had been for Annette, an endless dream of languid happiness that was finished too soon. Sylvie was not made to brood on dreams. She was impatient and had no intention of giving up one of her duties, one of her rights or one of her pleasures: she overtaxed herself. Her health was affected by her nervous state, and her character did not gain by it. When one is tormented, one is glad to torment others. Sylvie, who was uncomfortable, was indignant because her husband was not; and she undertook to make him so. She harassed him with her teasing, malicious, perpetually changing moods. She was even (unexpectedly enough) jealously amorous, though this did not prevent her from abusing him. There were days when he did not know which way to turn.

Annette was at hand to receive his lamentations. He would climb up to her floor, complaining; she would listen to him patiently, and she found a way to make him laugh at his little misfortunes. These meetings, as they went on, established between them a sort of complicity, for they had so many feelings in common. And sometimes, in Sylvie's presence, they would exchange a malicious glance. Perfectly honest, both of them, they took no precautions and abandoned themselves to a familiarity which, if it was innocent, was not entirely harmless. Annette did not dream that there was any risk, and these friendly coquetries amused her. Leopold was captivated by them; he asked for nothing better. He had been attracted for a long time by the radiant force of joy that issued from her. Just at that moment Annette was discovering Julien's love, and it troubled her deliciously. The rest of the world was all a haze. When she had just seen Julien, and Leopold was talking to her, she listened to Leopold and replied to him, but it was to Julien that she was smiling. Leopold had no means of guessing this.

He knew what he wanted. He resisted like a decent fellow. But a decent fellow is a man. He should not play with fire.

One Sunday in May the four of them, Sylvie, Annette, Leopold and little Marc, went for a walk in the direction of Sceaux. After an hour of strolling, Sylvie, who was a little tired, sat down at the foot of a slope and said, "Well, young people, climb it if you want to! You will find us still here."

She remained behind with the child. Annette and Leopold went gaily on. Annette was animated, joyous, the best of company. Leopold, with his jolly talk, eased the moral tension in which Julien's love and his intellectual conversation held her. The path wound between the long wall of a great estate and a rise of ground covered with flowering bushes. Through the holes in the hedges they saw, as they climbed, the sloping orchards with their white and pink tufts.

A fantastic sky, with the busy clouds racing over its delicate blue. The laughing wind, like a young dog, bit them by fits and starts. Annette was walking ahead, picking flowers, singing. Leopold was following her; he watched her bending over, watched her robust frame under the tightly fitting dress, her bare hands, her bare neck, reddened by the lash of the wind, and amid the foaming hair the red shell of her ear, the tip of which looked like a drop of blood. The slope rose again to the right, and the road formed a passage in which the rushing wind streamed down upon them. Annette, without turning, asked her companion a question. He did not reply. She went on, bending over, picking flowers and talking. And as she joked with Leopold, who was silent, it suddenly occurred to her that there was something dangerous in this silence. She let her flowers fall. She straightened herself, but she did not have time to turn when . . . she almost fell. He had clasped her in his arms. She had been brutally seized, and she felt on her neck a panting breath. An eager mouth was kissing her throat, her cheeks. Instantly stiffening, bracing herself, with all her unconscious fighting forces collected, with her chest and her spine she furiously shook the man who had seized her: she broke his hold and found herself face to face with the aggressor. Her eyes flamed with anger, but he did not relax his grip. A rough struggle followed, like that of animals that hate each other. Rough and brief. Annette, whose outraged instincts gave her an added strength, violently repulsed the man, and he tripped and stumbled. He remained there before her, doubly humiliated, panting, scarlet, and they looked at each other with rage in their eyes. Not a word was said. Suddenly Annette clambered up the bank, crept through a hole in the hedge to the other side, and fled. Leopold, who had come to his senses, called after her. She stopped twenty paces away and would not let him approach. They redescended the hill on different sides of the hedge, keeping their distances, on their guard, hostile and ashamed. Leopold, in a changed voice, implored Annette to come back, begged her pardon. Annette turned a deaf ear towards him, but she heard him: the confusion of this voice reached her through the barrier of her bitterness. She slackened her pace.

"Annette!" he besought her. "Annette! Don't run away! I don't want to pursue you. See, I'm staying here, I shan't come near you. I've behaved like a brute. I'm ashamed, ashamed. Call me any names you like, but don't run away. I shall never touch you again, not even with the tip of my finger. I'm disgusted with myself. I ask your pardon on my knees!"

He knelt down awkwardly on the pebbles. He looked utterly wretched. He was ridiculous.

Annette, who was listening to him in cold silence, motionless, with her face turned away, threw him a side-glance without looking at him. She saw this humiliated man. She was touched by his humiliation; her warm heart had the faculty of opening to the emotions of others as if they were her own, and she blushed at Leopold's shame. She made a movement towards him and said, "Get up!"

He rose, and she instinctively recoiled a few steps. "You are still afraid," he said. "You will never forgive me."

"Don't speak of it any more," she answered dryly. "It's ended."

They descended the road again. Annette was dumb and frozen. He had difficulty in keeping silent. He was mortified, and he was trying to justify himself. But he was not very eloquent, the poor man. His style was not exactly noble. "I am a dirty cur!" he repeated angrily.

Annette, still agitated, repressed a smile. Her mind was in a tumult, and she found difficulty in calming it. She felt at the same time the loathsomeness and the absurdity of the scene. She had not forgiven him, and she was ready to pity the man who was accusing himself so pathetically beside her. He continued to flounder. She listened to him with bitterness, compassion, irony. He struggled to explain "this filthy madness that passes through your body." . . . Yes, this madness, she knew it, although it was not the time to tell him so. But he looked so wretched that, in spite of herself, she said to him, "I know. One is mad sometimes. What's done is done."

They continued on their way, without speaking, their hearts heavy, sad and embarrassed. Just as they were arriving at the spot where they had left Sylvie, Annette made a gesture as if she were about to hold out her hand to Leopold. But instead of doing so, she said, "I've forgotten it."

He was relieved, though he was still troubled. Like a schoolboy caught in some misdemeanor, he asked, "You won't say anything about it?"

Annette gave him a little pitying smile.

No, she said nothing. But at the first glance the sharp eye of Sylvie had seen it all. She asked no questions. They spoke of other things. And while all three, to hide their thoughts, made a great parade of chattering all the way home, Sylvie observed the two others.

From that day forward Annette and Leopold were never again alone together. The jealous one was always watching; Annette too was on her guard. In spite of herself she allowed her distrust to be viable. And Leopold, who was hurt, brooded over his unconfessed bitterness.

XX

Annette's eyes were opened. She could no longer remain undistrustful of herself and others. She could no longer pass along, laughing, as she had done before, heedless, because she did not seek them, of the desires she aroused. Society being as it is, customs being as they are, her situation as a single woman, young and free, not only exposed her to pursuit, but legitimized it. No one could believe that she had freed herself, in the boldest fashion, in order to shut herself up afterwards in a widowhood the constancy of which was without an object. She imagined she had changed with maternity, and no doubt maternity was a great flame. But another flame still burned in her. She tried to forget it, because she was afraid of it; and she imagined that no one saw it. But this was not so; in spite of her, the fire of love burned on. And other people, if not she, were in danger of being its victims. Leopold's adventure had shown her this. It was hideous. She was revolted by it. In the disillusioned eyes of one who is not in love, the act of love seems a grotesque or disgusting bestiality. As Annette saw it, Leopold's attempt was both. But Annette did not have a calm conscience. She had fanned these desires. She remembered her thoughtless coquetries, her arts, the provocations she had given him. What had driven her into them? That repressed force, that inner fire which she was obliged to foster or stifle. Stifle it one cannot, one should not! It is the sunlight of life. Without it, everything is plunged in shadow. But at least it should not consume that to which it ought to give life, like the chariot that was given into the hands of Phaëton. Let it follow its regular course through the sky! Marriage then? After having so long avoided it, the perception of the dangers that menaced her led her to tell herself that a marriage of affection and esteem, of calm sympathy, would be a bulwark against the demons of the heart and a protection against pursuit from without. The more she convinced herself (and everything conspired to convince her: her material and moral security, the attraction of a home and the solicitations of her heart), the less resistance she opposed to Julien's supplications. In order to yield to them, she went over all the reasons she had for loving him. But she did not wait for these reasons in order to love him. For already there had begun within her that construction of the mind which creates an exalted vision of the chosen one. Julien had preceded her in this, but as she had a richer and more passionate nature she had soon outdistanced him.

No longer on her guard, surrendering to the ardor of her frank nature, she used none of those artifices with which a cleverer woman masks her defeat when her heart is captured and she allows people to believe that she is still mistress of it. Annette had made a gift of hers. She told Julien. And from that very moment Julien began to be uneasy.

He knew very little about women. They fascinated him and disconcerted him. Rather than know them he preferred to judge them. He idealized some, he condemned others. Towards those who fell into neither of the two categories he remained indifferent. Very young men—and Julien, owing to the slightness of his experience, had remained very young—are always hasty in their judgments. As they are full of themselves and their desires, they seek in others only for what they wish to find. Whether on the moral or the carnal side, naïve persons are like roués in one respect: when they love they are always thinking of themselves and never of the woman. They refuse to see that she exists outside of them. Love is the one test that can teach them. It teaches the few who are capable of learning—but generally to their cost and that of their partners; for when at last they know it is too late. The naïve astonishment, old as the ages, that bewails the irreducible duality which is the bitter fruit of love, that disappointed dream of unity, is the usual result of this initial misunderstanding. For what does "love" mean if it is not "loving someone else"? Without possessing the egoism of Roger Brissot, Julien, through ignorance, had no less difficulty in getting outside of himself; and he had a still more limited view of the feminine universe. He needed to be led prudently by the hand.

Prudent was the one thing Annette was not by nature, and love did not teach her. It gave her the need of a generous confidence. Now that she was sure of loving and being loved, she concealed nothing. Nothing in the man she loved could have repelled her: why should she paint herself up? She was healthy-minded, and she did not blush at being what she was. Whoever loved her should see her as she was! She had clearly seen Julien's naïveté, his lack of understanding, his alarm. She found a tender and malicious pleasure in them. She was glad that she was the first to reveal to him a feminine soul.

One day she went to surprise him in his apartment. His mother opened the door. An old lady, with gray hair tightly drawn across a calm brow that was lighted up by two severe, watchful eyes, she inspected Annette with a distrustful politeness and showed her into a neat, cold little drawing-room with horsehair furniture.

Dull family photographs and pictures from museums added a finishing touch to the freezing atmosphere of the room. Annette waited alone. After a whispered consultation in the adjoining bedroom, Julien dashed in. He was delighted and he was frightened; he did not know what to say. He spoke absent-mindedly. They were sitting in uncomfortable chairs with stiff backs that thwarted every natural movement. Between them was one of those drawing-room tables that you cannot lean upon, tables with sharp edges that hurt your knees. The cold glitter of the carpetless floor and the dead faces under glass, like plants in a herbarium, congealed the words on their lips and made them lower their voices. This drawing-room absolutely froze Annette. Was Julien going to keep her here during the whole of her call? She asked him if he did not want to show her the room where he worked. He could not refuse, he even wanted to do so. But he looked so hesitant that she said, "Would you rather not?"

He protested, explaining that it was not in order, and took her in. It was in much better order than her own rooms had been at the time of Julien's first call, but there was no air of gaiety in Julien's room. It served him both for working and sleeping. Books, a well-known engraving that represented Pasteur, papers on the chairs, a pipe on the table, a student's bed. She noticed overhead a little crucifix with a branch of boxwood. Settled in the badly upholstered arm-chair, she tried to put her host at his ease by gaily recalling to him the memory of their student days. She talked without prudery of what they both knew. But he was distrait, embarrassed by her presence and her freedom of speech; he seemed preoccupied with what was going on in the next room. Annette, embarrassed by contagion, held out bravely and succeeded in making him forget the "what will she think of it?" At last he became quite lively and they had a good laugh. When she got up to go he became awkward again, leading her out. In the corridor they passed the mother's room; the door was ajar; Mme. Dumont, from discretion or in order not to have to speak to the stranger, pretended not to see them. The two women had only exchanged a glance, and they were enemies already. Mme. Dumont, the mother, was shocked by the call of this bold girl with her free and easy ways, her dear voice, her laughter, her animation: she scented danger. And Annette, who, during the visit, had perceived between Julien and herself this invisible presence, had felt angry: passing the room of the old lady who turned her back on her, she spoke and laughed more loudly still. And she jealously thought, "I'm going to take him away from her."

A week later, Julien came in turn, one evening, after dinner. He had had his first discussion with his mother on the subject of Annette; and he meant to assert his will. They were alone. Leopold had taken little Marc to the circus. When Julien left her, a little before eleven o'clock, Annette suggested walking back with him for the pleasure of enjoying together the fresh night air. But when they reached his door, Julien was troubled at the idea of leaving Annette to return alone. She made fun of his fear. None the less, he masted on going back with her again, and she did not protest. She would have him all the longer with her! So they returned by the most roundabout way; and without quite knowing how they got there, they found themselves on a steep bank of the Seine. It was a June night. They sat down on a bench. The poplars rustled above the dark water in which were spread the reddish and yellow lights of the lamps on the bridges. The sky was far away, the stars were feeble, as if the monstrous city had drawn all the life out of them. The darkness was above and the light below. They were silent. Words could no longer express their thoughts, but, without looking at each other, each read the other's mind. Julien's desire set Annette's heart aflame; but his timidity kept him bound and motionless, and he did not dare even to lift his eyes to her. She smiled and watched him, without turning her head, as she kept her eyes upon the red reflexions on the river; he could not make up his mind! Then she leaned towards him and kissed him.

Drunk with love and gratitude, he kissed her in return, while the insidious point of a dull anxiety fastened itself in his brain. A harsh remark of his mother's: "These bold, poverty-stricken girls who are trying to find somebody to marry them. . . ." He had pulled it angrily out not long before, but the tip of the sting had remained under the skin. He was ashamed. Mentally he asked Annette's pardon. He knew that the insulting suspicion was false. He believed in her religiously, but he was troubled. And each new visit troubled him more. Annette's freedom, the freedom of her manners, the freedom of her ideas, the freedom of her opinions on every kind of subject—especially on social morality—her calm lack of prejudices, terrified him. He was as narrow in his way of thinking as in his dress, rather dull in his ideas, inclined to severity. She, on the other hand, was generously indulgent and full of laughter. It did not occur to him that she might be as much of a Puritan as he where she herself was concerned, while with an ironical tolerance she applied to others their own measure. Tolerance and irony disconcerted him. She saw this; and when he expressed himself on some question with an unjust and excessive harshness she did not attempt to oppose his way of thinking; she smiled at this naïve rigidity which did not displease her. Her smile disturbed Julien more than her words. He had the impression that she knew more than he. It was true. But how much more? And just what did she know? What experience had she had?

Like his mother—and some of his mother's spiteful remarks had contributed to make him so—this man of fine but impoverished vitality was vaguely alarmed by the brilliant health, the radiance of this woman. He had the most ardent desire for her, but he was afraid of her. In the walks they took together he felt that he cut a poor figure. Annette's perfect poise in every company added to his embarrassment. And although she would have liked this embarrassment if she had observed it, he was humiliated by it. But she did not observe it. She was utterly absorbed in the song within her. Annette mistakenly thought that no one but herself heard this song; and she did not see Julien's anxious glance when he asked himself, "At whom, at what, is she laughing?"

She seemed so far away!

He did not cease to see—he saw more clearly than ever—her great intellectual force, her moral energy. At the same time she remained for him a dangerous enigma. He was divided between two opposite feelings, an invincible attraction and an obscure mistrust that were like a remnant of the primitive instinct that recalls to the man and the woman of to-day the original enmity of the sexes, for which the carnal union was a form of combat. That suspicious instinct of defence is strongest perhaps in a man like Julien who is at once keenly intelligent and poor in experience. As it is impossible for him to see a woman just as she is, he sees her now too simply, now as full of snares.

Annette contributed to these oscillations of thought by her way of alternately saying everything and saying nothing, of revealing everything and concealing everything, her bursts of passionate expansiveness and her hermetic silences, which sometimes lasted during a good half of their walk. . . . These terrible silences—what man has not suffered from them?—during which the life of the companion who walks at your side goes down into those regions that you will never know! . . . Not that as a usual thing they cover very profound secrets. If you plunged into them you would find that they did not rise above your heel. But whatever the depth may be, the sheet of silence is opaque: the eye cannot penetrate it. And the tormented spirit of the man has plenty of time to conjure up all sorts of alarming mysteries. The idea would never have entered the head of a Julien that he might be the author of them, that if a woman is silent it is often because she knows so well how little the man understands her. Annette's silence, which was ironical and a little weary on some days, tolerated a false interpretation of her feelings on the part of her lover, for she knew that he loved the false and did not love the true.

"If you wish . . . As you wish! . . . Of course. I am not as I am. I am as you see me."

But these silences of acquiescence only lasted for a time. From the moment Annette perceived that there might be danger in frank explanations (since Julien was unable to understand them) and that it would be more prudent to hold her peace, she spoke. To be silent in order to avoid uselessly annoying Julien, yes. But to deceive him, no. And if there was danger in speaking, all the more reason. That was the time when you couldn't avoid speaking any longer. The greater the risk, the greater was the pride that desired to brave it. This test of love made her heart beat. If the test succeeded, she would love Julien all the more. If it did not succeed? . . . It would succeed. Didn't Julien love her? Let come what might!

She played the game loyally. But there are some men who would prefer to have their partners cheat. When Sylvie learned of Julien's love and the plan for the marriage, she scolded Annette: good heavens, she wasn't thinking of telling the whole truth? Of course it was absolutely necessary for him to learn a part of it. When they were married the official records would be sure to enlighten him. But there was always a way of dressing up the truth. Since this boy loved her he would close his eyes. She had only not to open them! To do so would be really too stupid! Later there would be time to tell each other everything. . . . Sylvie spoke honestly out of her experience. She wished her sister's welfare. (She wished her own too; she would not have been displeased to see them out of her house with all possible speed.) From her point of view one didn't owe the truth to everyone, especially to one's fiancé: it was enough to love him! Annette's truth, of course, was innocent, but men are weak. They cannot endure the full truth. It has to be given to them in small doses. . . .

Annette listened to Sylvie calmly and spoke of something else. Useless to reply: it would only make her more obstinate. Sylvie's morality was not hers, and she preferred not to say what she thought of it. Sylvie was Sylvie. She loved her. . . . But what a look she would have given anyone else who had spoken to her so!

"Poor Sylvie! . . . She judges men from those she has known. But my Julien belongs to another species. He loves me as I am. He will love me as I was. I have nothing to conceal from him. I have never done him an injury. If any injury was done I did it to myself alone."

Fully considering the risks, but trusting in Julien's magnanimity, she made up her mind to speak. She brought up the subject of her past life. With a common modesty, they had always avoided this topic. But more than once, Annette had read in Julien's eyes what he burned and trembled to ask, what he wanted both to know and not to know.

She placed her hand tenderly on Julien's hand and said, "My friend, you have always been so adorably discreet with me. I thank you for it. I love you. . . . But I must tell you at last something you don't know about me, something that I have been. You must know me. I am not free from reproach."

He made an apprehensive gesture that protested against what she was going to say, as if he half wished to prevent it. She smiled.

"Don't be afraid! I haven't committed any great crimes. At least I shouldn't call them so. But perhaps I am too indulgent to myself, for the world regards these matters differently. It is for you to judge. I believe in your judgment. I am what you decide I am."

She began to tell her story. More frightened than she wanted to appear, she had prepared in advance what she intended to say. But simple as she imagined it would be to utter this, it was very painful to her. To overcome this constraint she made herself appear more free from emotion than she was. She even revealed at moments a touch of irony, directed at herself, which scarcely corresponded with the anxiety this recital stirred in her: she resorted to it in order to protect herself. . . . Julien did not understand it at all. He saw in this attitude only a shocking light-mindedness and lack of conscience.

She said first that she was not married. Julien had feared this. To tell the truth, he had even been silently sure of it. But he had always hoped that the contrary would turn out to be the case, and that Annette should tell him this, that doubt should no longer be possible, filled him with consternation. Intensely Catholic at heart, under his superficial liberalism, he had not freed himself from the idea of sin. Instantly he thought of his mother: she would never accept it. He foresaw a struggle. He was very much in love. In spite of the grief that Annette's confession caused him, in spite of the real fall her past weakness signified for him, the "error" of her whom he loved, he loved her, he was ready, in order to have her, to fight against his mother's opposition. But someone must help him; Annette must second him. He was weak; to endure the combat, he needed to summon all his strength, not the least element of which was the strength of illusion. He needed to idealize Annette, and if Annette had been clever she would have helped him to do so.

She saw the grief which her words caused. She had expected it; she was sorry for it, but she could not spare him. Since they were to live together, each would have to take his share of the trials and even the errors of the other. But she did not suspect the conflict that was taking place in him; and if she had thought of it, she would have remained confident of the victory of love.

"My poor Julien," she said, "I am giving you pain. Forgive me. It is hard for me too. You believed that I was better than I am. You gave me a higher place, too high, in your mind. . . . I am a woman. I am weak. . . . At least, if I have made a mistake, I have never deceived anyone else. I have always acted in good faith. I have always done that."

"Yes," he said hastily. "I'm sure of it. He deceived you, didn't he?"

"Who?" asked Annette.

"That wretch. . . . Forgive me! . . . That man who left you."

"No, don't accuse him," she said. "I am the guilty one."

She attached to this word "guilty" only the sense of a warm regret for the pain she was causing him, but he seized upon it greedily. In his confusion he longed to hold fast to the idea that Annette was the victim of a seduction and that she had repented. . . . He had an extreme need of this notion of "repenting"; it was for him a kind of compensation for the hurt he had suffered, a balm for the wound it could not heal but could render endurable; it gave him a moral superiority over Annette of which—to be fair to him—he would never have made use. In short, since he had no doubt about Annette's sin, he also had none about the need of repentance. His Christian nature was imbued with both these ideas. The most liberal Christian never frees himself from them.

But Annette had sprung from a race with a different kind of soul. The Rivières might be pure or impure, in the sense that Christian morality attaches to this word; but if they were pure it was not in obedience to an invisible God or his too visible representatives and their Tables of the Law. It was because they loved purity as moral cleanliness, as beauty. And if they were impure they regarded it as an affair between themselves and their own consciences, not the consciences of others. Annette could not admit that she must give an account of herself to others. If she confessed herself to Julien, it was a gift of love that she was making him. In all honesty, she owed him merely an account of her life. But of her inner life she did not owe him any account. She gave it to him of her own free will. She saw now that Julien would have preferred to have her embellish the truth. But she was too proud to profit by a lying excuse of which she felt no need. On the contrary, when she understood what he wanted her to say she took pains to make it clear that she had given herself to her lover.

Julien, who was completely upset, would not listen to her.

"No, no, I don't believe you," he said. "You are too generous. Don't accuse yourself to defend that man who deserves nothing but contempt."

"But I'm not accusing anyone," she said simply.

Her words struck against his consciousness, but he refused to understand.

"You are trying to exonerate him."

"I am not exonerating him. No one's to blame."

Julien struggled. "Annette, I implore you not to talk that way."

"Why?"

"You know very well it's wrong!"

"I know nothing of the kind."

"What? You don't regret anything?"

"I regret making you unhappy. But I didn't know you then, my friend. I was free and alone; I had no obligations except to myself."

"Is that nothing?" he thought. He did not dare to say it.

"But still you regret it?" he said, insistently. "You know very well you made a mistake."

He did not want to accuse her. But he so longed to have her accuse herself.

"Perhaps," she said.

"Perhaps," he took her up, dejectedly.

"I don't know," said Annette.

She saw where Julien wanted to lead her. Perhaps she had made a mistake, if yielding to a transport of sincere love and pity was a mistake. Perhaps, yes. "But if in my heart I can regret a sincere error, I don't need to excuse myself for it. My heart has remained alone with its suffering, communing with it alone in the silence. It must commune now with its regrets. They concern nobody. . . . Regrets? . . . Let's be honest to the end! There are no regrets!" After reflecting, she said, "I don't think I made a mistake."

Perhaps she was exaggerating in reaction against Julien's unconscious pharisaism. (Poor Julien!) But even in the moments when she loved him the most she could not bring herself to utter the word of regret which he was expecting. . . . "I should so much like to say it! But I can't. It isn't true." Regret what? She had acted in accordance not only with her rights but with her happiness. For, costly as the latter had been, she had had it—the child. And she knew (she alone) that this gift of the child, far from dishonoring her, as a stupid public opinion supposed, had purified her, delivered her for a long time from her troubles, brought into her life order and peace. . . . No, for the sake of assuring her future love she would never be base enough to slander her past love. She even felt now a certain gratitude towards this Roger who had only been an agent of her destiny, so inferior to the love and the flame of life he had lighted in her.

Julien felt this jealously. "Ah, you still love that man?" he said.

"No, my friend."

"But you are not angry with him."

"Why should I be angry with him?"

"And you are thinking of him."

"I am thinking of you, Julien."

"But you haven't forgotten him."

"I could not forget anyone who had done me good, even if he ceased to exist. Don't reproach me, you who have done me so much more good!"

Julien was honest enough to respect Annette's frankness, and in his heart he felt her nobility. This for him was an unaccountable spectacle, the unwonted dignity of which revealed to him a new world—the new woman. But another part of his nature was in revolt. His masculine instincts were wounded. His Catholic and bourgeois prejudices were horrified. The idea that he had, that he continued to have, of Annette was poisoned with degrading suspicions. Instead of being surer of a woman who gave up her secret to him with complete loyalty, he was less sure of a woman whose past weakness had been revealed to him. He doubted her fidelity in the future. He thought of that other living man who had possessed her and whose child would be his. He was afraid of being deceived, he was afraid of being ridiculous. He was mortified, and he could not forgive her.

As soon as Annette fully perceived the dangerous struggle that was going on in Julien's mind and saw that the hope she had formed was menaced, she trembled. She was utterly in the grip of the love she had provoked. All her power of loving, all her capacity for happiness, she had centred in this Julien. And in truth she had half deceived herself. But she had only half deceived herself. Julien was not unworthy of her; his qualities were real; they deserved love. Different as they were, they would be able to live together with a little mutual effort to understand and tolerate each other—and a little suffering, no doubt; and was a little suffering too much to pay for a firm affection? Annette would have been good for him; she would have invigorated him; she would have been that great wind of confidence in life that would have swelled his sails and carried him whither he could never have gone without her. And Julien's delicate tenderness, his respect for woman, his moral purity, even that candid religious faith which Annette did not share, would have been wholesome for her; they would have given her passionate nature a basis of security, the peace of home and of a soul of which one is sure.

Ah, the misery of hearts that miss their destiny through a misapprehension which their passion exaggerates, that know it and reproach themselves for it and always will reproach themselves, but will never yield the point that separates them just because they love too much to make a moral concession to which they would disdainfully consent with those to whom they are indifferent!

Annette tormented herself now with the anxieties to which she had given birth in Julien's mind. Was Julien right? . . . She was not infatuated with her own judgment. She tried to understand other ways of judging. Her character was not entirely formed: her moral instinct was strong, but her ideas were not yet established; she reserved the right to revise them. While quite young she had realized how artificial was the morality of those who surrounded her, and she had found nothing upon which to lean, nothing but her reason, which had often deceived her. She was always seeking; she sought for other ways of thinking in which she might breathe freely. And when she encountered a sincere conscience like Julien's she scrutinized it eagerly: would this voice respond to the appeal of her heart? She aspired to believe, this woman in revolt! She was seeking, seeking for her moral homeland. . . . How she would have loved to enter Julien's, to subscribe to its laws, even if they condemned her! But it was not enough to long. She could not do it. What Julien desired simply wasn't human!

"I realize," she said to him tenderly, "that you are judging me as the world judges. I don't reproach you. I admire the rigorous, preservative force of its laws. They have their place in the sum of things and I know that their roots are deep in your family. It is natural for you to obey them. I respect them in you. But, my friend, all the efforts of my will could never make me deny an action, even if it is condemned by everyone, which has given me my child. Dear Julien, how could I deny what is my only consolation, the purest joy perhaps that heaven will grant me in my whole life? Don't try to blight it, but if you love me share my happiness! There is nothing in it that can injure you!"

She knew, even as she spoke, that he did not understand; she only irritated him the more. And she was broken-hearted. But what could she do? Lie to him? It was too dreadful that she had even thought of this humiliating resource. But could she allow the breach to grow wider in this affection that was so dear to her? It was as if this breach had extended to her heart. . . . She was in mortal terror every time she found herself in Julien's presence. What was he going to read to-day in her face?

As for him, he abused her love with all the baseness of a man who is certain that he is loved. He knew that he was hurting her and he went on hurting her. He in turn felt his power, and he began to desire her less now he was sure that she desired him.

She understood it all! She was in despair because she had betrayed her weakness. But she went on. She abandoned herself to a superstitious feeling: if fate intended her to be Julien's wife, she would be, whatever she said; whatever she said, she would lose him if that was her fate.

But secretly she wished to believe that, in exchange for her submission, fate would be favorable to her. Julien would be touched.

"I put myself in your hands. Will you love me the less for that?"

XXI

A strange travail was going on in Julien's mind. He loved her—no, he desired her—as much as always. Who could say which it was? (He did not want to know.) . . . In short, he still wanted her. But he was sure now, not only that his mother would never consent to his marriage, but that he himself would never be able to make up his mind to it. For many reasons: bitterness, wounded vanity, moral disapproval, what might be called a jealous repulsion. But he preferred not to dwell on these reasons. "Yes, we know you, but don't show yourselves." His mind arranged expedients to satisfy at once his hidden reasons and his desires. . . . Annette, in the past, had declared herself a free woman in love. He did not approve of this, no; but, after all, since she was as she was, why should she not be just this with him whom she loved?

He did not put it to her as bluntly as this. He pleaded all the things that made marriage impossible (he brought forth new ones as fast as she refuted them): the insurmountable obstacles, his mother's opposition, the necessity of living with his mother, his financial straits, with Annette accustomed to wealth, to society—poor Annette, reduced for two years to giving private lessons!—the difference in their minds and temperaments. . . . (This last argument came up just at the end, to the dismay and terror of Annette, when she believed she had surmounted the others.) With obstinate unfairness, Julien depreciated himself, the better to mark the difference between them. It was enough to make one laugh and weep. It was pitiable to see him looking for all these poor pretexts for escaping, while she, forgetting her pride, pretended not to understand, wore herself out finding replies, struggled feverishly to keep him from leaving her.

He was not leaving her. He did not refuse to take. He refused to give.

When Annette perceived the object of all these barricades and what he wanted of her, she had a feeling less of revolt than of prostration. She did not have enough strength left to be indignant. To struggle was no longer worth the trouble. That was what he wanted! . . . He! . . . Wretched soul! . . . So he didn't know himself? So he didn't realize how he appeared in her eyes? If he had been loved it was just because of his solid integrity. It wasn't at all, not at all, becoming for him to play the Don Juan, the libertine, the free lover! (For, in spite of her grief, Annette's mind kept its ironical clearness, and it never failed to seize the comic that was mingled with the tragic in life.)

"My friend," she thought, tenderly, pityingly, disgustedly, "I loved you better when you condemned me. Your rather narrow but lofty idea of love gave you the right to do so. But now you no longer have that right. What have I to do with this inferior love you are proposing to me to-day, this love without trust? If trust is lacking there is nothing left between us."

Every love has its essence: where one blossoms, another withers. Carnal love dispenses with respect. The love that is based on respect cannot lower itself to ample enjoyment.

"Why," cried Annette in her heart, which was rising in revolt, "I would rather be the mistress of the first passer-by who pleased me than of you, you whom I love!"

For with him it would be degrading. Everything or nothing!

To Julien's suggestions she thus opposed a firm, affectionate refusal that hurt him. They continued to love one another, while judging each other severely; and neither of them could resign himself to the loss of their happiness. There they were, appealing to each other, desiring each other, even offering themselves—incapable as they were of pronouncing the word that would bring them together—the one through inner weakness, that moral debility which with rare exceptions (if a man can dare to say it) belongs to man, and which he does not recognize, the other through that deep-seated pride which belongs to woman and which she does not confess either: for the two sexes have been so deformed by the moral conventions of a society built upon the victory of man that they have both forgotten their real character. The weaker of the two is not always by nature the one who calls himself so. The woman is richer in the energies of the earth, and if she is caught in the snare that man has thrown over her she remains a captive who has not surrendered.

Julien dimly perceived the justice of Annette's motives, and he did not question their honesty, but he could not do violence to the timidity of his own heart. He followed the opinion of the world, which he respected less than Annette. By himself he would have accepted Annette's past, but he could not accept it under the eye of the world; and he persuaded himself that this was the eye of his own conscience. He did not have the courage to take for a wife this woman whom he desired; and his pusillanimity he called dignity. He was not able to delude himself completely; and he was angry with Annette because he had not been able to delude her either. He ought to have broken with her, but he would not consent to this. And when Annette spoke of leaving him he held her back, hesitated, suffered, caused her suffering. He was no more willing to accept her than to give her up. He played the cruel game of keeping up her hope, which he later killed. He shunned her when she was most loving and was most loving when she resigned herself. Annette went through painful crises of wounded affection. She ate her heart out. Sylvie saw this and finally extorted the truth from her. She had seen Julien and she had made up her mind about him. "He is one of those people," she said, "who never make a decision till they are forced to do so. You can do it; make him consent. He will be grateful to you later."

But Annette had suffered too much from the thought that Julien might reproach her some day (even if he never expressed it) if she married him. When it was no longer possible to ignore the irremediable weakness of his character and the futile hope of a lasting decision from which his troubled spirit would no longer try to draw back, she settled the question in good earnest. She wrote to Julien and told him not to prolong this useless torment any further. She was suffering, he was suffering, and they had to live. She had to work for her child, and he had his own work. She had taken him away from it too long. They had both been using up their strength, and they had none too much of it. Since they could not do each other the good they had hoped for, let them not do each other harm. They must not see each other any more. She thanked him for all that he had been to her.

Julien did not answer. Silence fell between them. But in their hearts, bitterness, regret, wounded passion still fought with one another.

XXII

Their love had not remained a secret from those who were close to them. Leopold had watched it with an annoyance he had not been able to conceal from Sylvie. His painful memory of that far from brilliant adventure of his had left in his mind an involuntary resentment which had not become less active a few months later. Far from it. For he found it possible to pretend to himself that he had forgotten the reason for it. Sylvie, already on the watch, was struck by his strange behavior: she observed him and she found it impossible to doubt that he was jealous. In accordance with the admirable logic of the heart, she was angry with Annette. She took a violent dislike to her. In a measure the state of her health explained these violent reactions. But the unfortunate thing in such cases is that the reverberation is prolonged beyond the condition that has caused them.

In October Sylvie gave birth to a little girl. Joy for everybody. Annette became as passionately attached to the child as if it had been her own. It gave Sylvie no pleasure to see it in her arms, and she no longer tried to conceal the hostility that she had hitherto repressed. Annette, who, for a few weeks, had been listening to unkind words from her sister, which she attributed to the passing illness, was no longer able to doubt Sylvie's estrangement. She said nothing, avoiding any occasion for annoying her. She hoped for a return of the old affection.

Sylvie was on her feet again. The relations between the two sisters remained apparently the same, and an outsider would not have noticed any change. But Annette observed in Sylvie a cold animosity that hurt her. She would have liked to take her hands and ask her, "What's the matter? What have you against me? Tell me, dear!"

But Sylvie's look froze her. She did not dare. She felt intuitively that if Sylvie spoke she would say something irreparable. It was much better to remain silent. Annette felt in her sister a wish to be unjust against which she could do nothing.

One day Sylvie said to Annette that she wanted to have a talk with her. Annette, with her heart beating, wondered, "What is she going to say to me?"

Sylvie said nothing that could offend Annette, not a word of her grievances. She talked to her about getting married.

Annette gently changed the subject. But Sylvie was insistent and suggested a match: a friend of Leopold, a sort of business agent, a journalist in some vague way, with a certain style, the manners of a man of the world, and varied, too varied, resources, who sold automobiles and wrote advertisements, acted as an intermediary between the manufacturers and their customers in clubs and drawing-rooms, and received commissions from both sides. It was a proof that Sylvie had changed greatly in relation to her sister that she could offer her such a choice, and Annette was aware of the lack of affection this deliberate slight indicated. With a gesture she stopped the description of the candidate. Sylvie took it in bad part, asking if Annette found the suggested suitor beneath her pretensions. Annette said that she had no pretensions except to live alone. Sylvie replied that this was easy to say, that it was all very well to want to live alone, but that first one had to have the power to do so.

"But do you think I can't?"

"You? I challenge you to do it!"

"You are unjust. I can earn my living."

"With the help of other people."

In the tone, even more than in the words, there was something intentionally wounding. Annette blushed, but she did not take her up; she did not want to bring about an open quarrel.

During the following weeks, Sylvie's ill-humor was very noticeable. Any pretext served her, the least disagreement in conversation, a detail in dress, Annette's lateness at dinner, the noise little Marc made on the stairs. They never went out together any more. If they had arranged for a walk on Sunday, she set out with Leopold, without saying anything to Annette, using the latter's unpunctuality as an excuse. Or at the last moment she would call off the party they had planned.

Annette saw that her presence was a burden. She spoke timidly of looking for an apartment in some other quarter that would be less remote from her pupils. She hoped they would protest, beg her to remain. They pretended not to have heard her.

She was cowardly; she stayed on. She clung to this affection which she felt was escaping her. It was not only Sylvie whom she did not want to leave. She was attached to little Odette. She endured more than one painful affront without seeming to notice it. She lengthened the intervals between her visits.

Even so, they were too frequent for Sylvie. She certainly had not returned to her normal state. An unwholesome jealousy was working in her. Once when Annette was innocently playing with Odette, without noticing a dry warning that Sylvie had given her to stop, the latter rose, irritated, and snatched the little girl from her arms. "Go away!" she said.

There was such animosity in her eyes that Annette, struck by it, said to her, "But what have I done? Don't look at me that way! I can't bear it. Do you want me to go away? Do you want me not to come back any more?"

"At last you understand," said Sylvie, cruelly.

Annette turned pale. "Sylvie!" she cried.

With a cold rage, Sylvie went on: "You are living at my expense. Very well. That's all right. But that's enough. My husband and my daughter are mine. Hands off!"

Annette, with white lips, repeated, in an agonized tone, "Sylvie, Sylvie!"

Then suddenly a transport seized her too. "You wicked thing!" she cried. "You will never see me again!"

She ran to the door and went out.

Ashamed of her violence, Sylvie pretended to laugh.

"We shall see her again this evening."

SUMMER

PART TWO

XXIII

Annette left Sylvie's apartment intending never to enter it again. She was weeping. She was burning with shame and rage. These two passionate natures could not cease to love each other without almost hating each other.

Impossible for Annette to remain under the same roof with her! If she had had the means she would have moved the next day. Happily for her, she had to yield to practical necessities: to give notice, to look for another apartment. In her first fury she would have preferred to place her furniture in storage and camp out in a hotel. But this was not the moment to squander her money. She had very little laid aside; what she earned was spent as she went along; even when she had no recourse to her sister's aid, the feeling that she could appeal to her in case of need gave her a security that spared her any too keen anxieties over the future. When she came to reckon up what she must have in order to live, she was obliged to recognize, to her mortification, that if she were thrown upon her own resources her actual work would not suffice to support her. Living with her sister and taking some of their meals together lightened her expenses. The child's clothes were given him by Sylvie, and Annette paid only for the material of her own dresses. And this was not to mention the things she borrowed or those which, while they belonged to one, served for two, the small gifts, the Sunday excursions, the little extra pleasures that brightened the daily monotony. And then the credit which her sister enjoyed in the neighborhood gave Annette the benefit of a certain latitude in paying her bills. Now she would have to count upon paying cash for everything. The beginning would be hard. The moving, the deposit, the expenses of settling. And the great question, who was going to look after the child? A contradictory question: for she had to earn money for the child, and in order to earn it she had to leave home, and who would take care of him? Annette had to admit that she would never have surmounted these difficulties if they had come earlier, when Marc was very young. How did other women manage? Annette was sorry for the unhappy souls, and she felt humiliated.

Place the child in a boarding-school? He was old enough to go to school now. But she was unwilling to shut him up in one of those menageries. What she had heard about those old-time institutions (things have been somewhat improved since then), what she instinctively surmised about this physical and moral promiscuity, had led her to regard it as a crime to put one's child into them. She wanted to believe that the boy would be unhappy there. Who could say? Perhaps he would have been very glad to get away from her. But what mother can believe that she is a burden to her child? She was not even willing to leave him at one of these schools for his meals. She told herself that this was because of Marc's delicate health; he needed special food; she had to watch over his diet. But it was extremely fatiguing to come home from lunch when her lessons obliged her sometimes to run to the other end of Paris. Going, coming, always in movement. And the lessons did not bring in enough money. Some urgent expense was always turning up upon which she had not reckoned. The boy was growing very large, and Annette regretted that he was not like those little beans which never grow faster than their shells. She had to clothe him. Nor could she permit herself to neglect her own appearance; her occupation would have prevented this if her pride had not done so. So she had to find new resources. Copying to be done at home, the work of some foreigner or a translation to be revised (an ungrateful task, poorly remunerated); secretarial work, one or two mornings in the week (also poorly remunerated); but all these things, taken together, were enough. To earn money by any means! Annette did many things at once. She made herself hated by the hungry rivals whom she thrust out of her way in her pursuit of bread. But this time the devil could take the hindmost. No more sentimentality! She had no time for it. You cannot go back and pick up those who have fallen. It was true that she sometimes had the vision in passing of some strained face that stared at her with hostile eyes, some evicted competitor whom she would gladly have helped in other days. A pity, but she did not have the time. She had to get there first. She knew now where to find work, and she knew the shortest way to it. Her diplomas, her degree, gave her an assured superiority. And she was not unaware that she had advantages on another side, the personal side, her eyes, her voice, her way of dressing, her skill in handling her clients. Between her and other applicants they rarely hesitated. Those that were sacrificed could not forgive her.

Her new life was established on a healthily rigorous system. No empty room for useless thoughts. From one day to another, every day was as full as a nut, full and hard. After the trepidation of the first weeks, when she did not know whether she could manage to live and keep her child alive, she became used to it, she grew more confident, she even ended by finding pleasure in the difficulties she had overcome. No doubt, in the rare moments when the necessity of acting no longer held her mind tense, when at night she laid her head on her pillow, there were times before she went to sleep when her accounts, the thought of her budget, weighed upon her. . . . If she dropped on the road? . . . If she fell ill? . . . I won't. . . . Peace, I must sleep. . . . Happily, she was tired; sleep did not keep her waiting And when the day returned, there was no longer room for those "ifs" and apprehensions. No more room for that which enervated, enfeebled, broke the soul. Penury and toil put everything in its proper place—that which belonged to the necessary and that which belonged to luxury.

The necessary: daily bread. Luxury: the problems of the heart. . . . Could she have imagined it? These problems seemed to her now of secondary importance. All very well for those who have too much time on their hands! She had neither too much nor too little. Just enough. One thought for each thing she did, and not one to spare. So, full of strength, she felt like a well-trimmed ship that is launched on the waves.

She was in her thirty-third year, and nothing had yet wasted her energies. She perceived that she not only did not need protection but that she was stronger without it. The difficulty of her life invigorated her. And its first benefit was in liberating her from the obsession of Julien, from the nostalgia of love, which, dull or violent, had poisoned all her past years. She realized how satiated she was with sentimental dreams, sweet things, tender things, hypocritical sensuality; merely to think of them was repugnant to her. To be occupied with the rough facts of life, to undergo its wounding contact, to be obliged to be hard herself—that was good, it was vivifying. A whole part of herself, the best part perhaps, certainly the healthiest, was born again.

She no longer dreamed. She no longer tormented herself, even about her child's health. When he was ill she did what had to be done. She did not think about it beforehand. She no longer thought about it, indefinitely, afterwards. She was ready for everything, she was confident. And that was the best medicine. Dining these first years of desperate toil she was not ill a single day, and the child caused her no real anxiety.

Her intellectual life was no less curtailed than her emotional life. She scarcely had time to read any longer. She might have suffered from this, but she did not. Her mind made up the deficiency from its own resources. She had enough to do to sort and arrange her new discoveries. For during these first months she discovered a great deal; she discovered everything. And yet in what respect had things changed? As for work, she had been very familiar with that—or she had thought she was familiar with it. And this city, these people were just the same to-day as yesterday.

Between one day and the next, however, everything had changed. From the moment she had begun to seek her bread she had made the real discovery. It had not been love, not even maternity. She carried these things within her, but her life had expressed only a small portion of herself. Hardly had she passed into the camp of poverty, however, than she discovered the world.

The world varies, according as one considers it from above or from below. Annette was in the street now, between the rows of houses that stretched away on both sides: she saw the asphalt, the mud, the menace of the motor-cars and the flood of passers-by. She saw the sky above (rarely luminous)—when she had the time! The space between vanished: all that had formed the object of her life hitherto, society, conversation, theatres, books, the luxury of pleasure and the intelligence. She knew very well that they were there and she might have enjoyed them, but she had other things to think about. Watching her steps, looking out for herself, hurrying. . . . How all these people ran! . . . From above one saw nothing but the meandering of the river: it seemed calm, and one did not notice the strength of the current. The race, the race for bread. . . .

A thousand times Annette had thought of the state in which she found herself to-day, in the world of toil and poverty. But what she had thought then bore no resemblance to what she thought now that she was taking part in it.

Yesterday she had believed in the democratic axiom of the Rights of Man, and it had seemed to her unjust that the masses should be deprived of them. To-day, the injustice—if there remained any question of just and unjust—was that rights existed for the privileged. There are no rights. Man has no right to anything. Nothing belongs to him. He has to conquer everything anew every day. That is the Law: "Thou shalt earn thy bread in the sweat of thy brow." Rights are the deceitful invention of a fallen combatant, to sanction the spoils of his past victory. Rights are nothing but the strength of yesterday, heaping up its treasures. But the living right, the only one, is work. The conquest of every day. . . . What a sudden vision of the human battlefield! It had no terrors for Annette. The courageous soul accepted this combat as a necessity; and she found it just because she was "in form," young and robust. If she conquered, so much the better! If she was conquered, so much the worse! (She would not be conquered. . . .) She had not given up pity, but she had given up weakness. The first of her duties was "Don't be pusillanimous!"

By the new light of this law of labor, everything became dear to her. The old faiths were put to the test, and a new morality rose on the ruins of the old, cemented on this heroic foundation. The morality of freedom, the morality of strength, not of Pharisaism and debility. And examining under this light the doubts that troubled her, especially that which lay deepest in her heart, "Have I the right to my child?" she answered, "Yes, if I can keep him alive, if I can make a man of him. If I can do this, everything will be all right. If I cannot, everything will be wrong. This is the only morality; everything else is hypocritical."

This inflexible decision redoubled her vigor and her joy in the struggle.

She was meditating in this fashion one day as she was walking about Paris, going from one task to another. The walking excited her mind. Now that her daily activity was methodically regulated, her dreams resumed their rights. But they were waking dreams, clear, precise, dreams that had nothing misty about them. The more limited her time was, the more she made of these slight intervals; like ivy the hours climbed up, covering the walls of the days. Annette brought her enlarged conceptions of the true human morality face to face with the experiences of her day. Work and poverty had opened her eyes. She had a new perception of the untruthfulness of modern life which she had not seen when she was caught in it. The monstrous futility of this life—nine-tenths of this life—particularly for women. . . . Eating, sleeping, procreating. . . . Yes, a tenth part had some use. But the rest? . . . This "civilization"? What people call "thinking"? Is man—vulgus umbrarum—really made for thought? He wants to persuade himself that he is, he puts himself into the attitude for it, and he believes that he holds it, as by consecrated exploits. But he does not think. He does not think over his newspaper, or in his office, before the wheel on which his everyday activities revolve. The wheel turns with him, turns empty. Did they think, those young girls whom Annette had undertaken to teach? What was the meaning of the words they heard, read, uttered? To what did their life reduce itself? A few immense, depressing instincts brooding in their torpor under a mass of playthings. Desire and enjoyment. . . . Thought was also one of their playthings. Who was deceived by it? Themselves. The garment of this civilization, its luxury, its art, its movement and its noise—(that noise! one of its masks, to make itself believe that it was hurrying toward some end! what end? It hurried in order to stupefy itself)—what lay beneath it? Emptiness. People gloried in it. They gloried in their tinsel, in their chatter, in their trinkets. How rare were the men who revealed the shining light of Necessity! To the eternal brute in man the voice of its gods and its sages says nothing or is only one triviality the more. It never escapes from the confines of its desire and boredom. Like man himself, human society is a meretricious structure. Custom holds it together. A touch can lay it in ruins. . . .