Then she composed an apostrophe to the Star. She invoked it to look down upon the children, and see them where they stood with their faces turned upwards to the sky. Her grandfather knew that something unusual was taking place by the scattered pages on the table, the flushed cheeks, the tumbled curls. She left her chair to place herself at the window and look at Pere Lachaise through whose trees many stars now sparkled and shone.
Older people were too harassed, too taken up with the matter of keeping alive, too hard-pressed,—but the children—about them she could weave dreams and hopes, as one wound flowers into a wreath or put rose by rose in a bouquet! Them she could fit into that future which so early had dawned on her horizon.
She sometimes forsook everjrthing and went in search of children, and abandoned herself to their play, telling them stories inspired by her reading and her theatre-going, singing songs, making up dances, inducing each of them to contribute to these performances. But her grandfather noticed that while playing with the children, she was able to get better acquainted with the elders.
The mother of one enjoyed a book and made her promise to come some night to read it before her man. Often Violette sat writing, for one or the other of their neighbours, letters seeking employment, or entrance into a hospital, or admission for some child into a school or institution. Violette was thus forced to become familiar with the needs and the sufferings of the world surrounding her, to take part in its battles, to go out daily in search of some paltry and mean benefit.
This was the school of which her grandfather approved and he let her stay long at her tasks, and sat watching her as she bent over them, and gathered up and treasured the laboured copies with which the table was strewn. It seemed natural to him that Violette should be called upon to do such things. It was right, he thought, that whatever vision of the future transfixed her soul, it should grow out of her reahties.
VI. The Waiting Years
VIOLETTE as a child was conscious of her childhood. There were no old wounds, no half-forgotten joys; there were no eras or epochs, so swiftly did events and conditions follow upon one another, in that period before the sense of time was born! Every day was a finished thing, unrelated to the day before or after.
Whenever she looked back upon it after it was past, it seemed to her that it had been something full of sunlight and warmth, something even gay. There it lay, under a golden haze, in an illimitable distance, and it seemed to her as if from the very first she had been placed at the heart of hfe, had heard voices and seen a thousand hands stretched out to her in welcome, forcing doors for her that she might walk forth towards the free spaces. She would not have exchanged her childhood for any other, since the mass of impressions for which it stood left her only with a sense of its marvels, its scope, its precious accidents, as romantic and exceptional as everything else.that characterised the morning hour of her existence.
A different aspect indeed her childhood bore to her grandfather, who could span the few years of her life as though their beginning were yesterday! To him their two lives, hers just opening, and his drawing to an end, seemed cut off and placed apart from all others. She and he were real. They were real in their isolation, their poverty, in their love for each other, in their thoughts and questions. It was the others who were insubstantial, fantastic, to whom it was not possible to relate oneself.
There had been enough sadness and fear in their lives. He could not forget the time she clamoured for bread and was held tight in his arms instead, and bathed in tears. It was when she was very little, before they had come to sell flowers in the shop in the Rue de Repos, opposite Pere Lachaise, when he was searching for work. In the evening he went to a friend who borrowed something for him from another. Violette's childhood—was it not those hours when he sat waiting in his friend's house till he return with the aid he had gone to seek? Was it not his frantic search with the money in his hand for a place where he could buy food at that late hour? Would he ever forget how he bent over her, gazed at her flushed cheeks, at her little hands and arms tossing above the covers, how he raised her and squeezed the juice of an orange between her lips, fearing to let her sleep longer without breaking her fast? Such was her childhood, and his memory of it not time itself could soften. She could forget, who was young, could look back kindly on the past, not he who was old, and had been old then.
Violette remembered her intense interest in the people that came to the shop, with their grave faces and sad manner and lowered voices, and how she watched them cross the street till they passed beyond the Gate, where they carried their offerings and their tears. She wondered what need called them there, what sorrow drove them, what hope they f omid, what they heard in the silence of that place. It was in her childhood that her heart opened itself to others, that strangers became friends, it was then she discovered that everybody was threatened in the same way, that all knew that sorrow and anguish might arrive to all, must be shared by all. That was what made everybody one, what underlay everybody's love, she thought. There was bom in her then, as she sat at the counter sorting ferns for her grandfather, as she bent over the pails in which the cut roses were kept, that sympathy for her kind which never left her. She thought she could remember through what processes her heart grew gentler and gentler, how her mind followed those she so briefly met, how she suffered their sorrow, loved them for their tenderness, and how the poetry of himaan life spoke to her and inspired her.
Her childhood gave her Pere Lachaise, stretched Pere Lachaise as a garden at her feet, as a street to traverse, as a miraculous room of her house, built of sky and sod and whispering trees, with ages of buried lives to right and to left, of people sleeping forever in the arms of eternal time! Mystery was then her daily bread— mystery of the place in the presence of which she had come to live. She learned everything from Pere Lachaise —her love for her grandfather even, for she fled from the place as from an enemy and clung to him whenever its air seemed filled with a threat against him. She learned her love of life, in this way too, from the early knowledge which she gleaned of death. Life was priceless, an imrestorable gift, because all that lives must die. Feelings profound oceanic, glorious, were hers, as in revenge on Pere Lachaise. So from the ashes of death were created in her the spark and the flame of hfel So the pictures of possible tragedies, the crowd of sad fancies that were the heritage of her childhood ended always in something eloquent of the good of life, in a tiding of happiness. So when there rose in her mind the thought of a mother at whose side a laughing, blue-eyed wonder of a baby stood pleading for a tussle and a game, and Violette saw that baby denied because of some duty of the moment, she thought if the mother met her death that day, how her heart must have remembered at her dying moment, with a regret that seared and burned worse than a fatal bolt, the love she might have given and had withheld. It was from such thoughts as these that there was born in her her passionate devotion to life, her reverence for life's possibilities, her standards for perfection of feeling and the expression of it in deed and word and gesture. Life was brief, was full of hazards! Who could trust it ? Who could forget that the place waited, that it was near, ever- present, ever-beckoning with starry eyes and soothing, peace-promising voice, ever-waiting like a mother the home-returning of her children? Who could forget? Who, remembering, could deal with it lightly?
Yet her grandfather feared her familiarity with death, and he thought her childhood a premature old age, and looked upon the influence of Pere Lachaise upon her life with dread.
The same was true of her school-days. She remembered the happiness of contact with other children, her love of teachers, her idealisation of the classroom, with its chalky atmosphere, its blackboards, its formidable, straight-backed benches. She could not remember learning anything there—and she remembered struggling with sleep in the close air, irking for the bell to ring that would release her, yet to her it had been a happy and important time. He thought only of how little she received in return for what she spent there, how he had sighed as he started her off to school or as he waited outside the shop for the moment when she would turn the corner and run to meet him with her kiss and her account of the day.
To such an extent did they diflFer in their estimate of those years! Perhaps they were both right—perhaps it was not necessary for Violette to live in order to feel. It was perhaps possible for her innately to understand life, to bear it a wild enthusiasm, to have a vital hold upon the forces of existence. It was perhaps possible for her to have a foretaste of death, a vision of the greatness of love, a flash into mysteries, tragedies of being, wonders greater than the heart can support, than the mind bear to contemplate.
She knew with certainty that not with any one on earth would she have exchanged that childhood, no more than she would have wished to be some one diflFerent from herself, to bear a diflFerent name. It was not that her life was perfect—but it was her life, and she loved it. She never doubted her past, and she believed in the years ahead of her. How could she doubt ? Had she not known isolation, tragedy, death, stood with them face to face?
