you. I feel so strange. I can’t understand it. I’m really worried.” And after a long pause, while he looked doubtfully at her: “I can’t get up.”
“You can’t get up?” she asked skeptically. It was a joke, some nonsense of his, of course, a poor joke. “It’s impossible that all of a sudden you can’t get up.”
“Yes,” he said slowly and seemed not to believe it himself. “But I feel as if I had no legs. Anyhow, they are numb.”
“Nonsense,” she cried and jumped up. “You have caught a chill, or they’ve gone to sleep. Wait. I’ll help you.”
But even as she spoke, even as she walked round the bed to him, terror pierced her.… It’s true, it’s true, she realized.
Did she realize it? The old woman at the window shrugged her shoulders. How could she realize the impossible? The fleetest, the happiest, the most vivid creature in the world, not to be able to walk, not even to stand. Impossible to realize that!
But the icy sensation had remained; it was as if she were inhaling more and more of coldness with every breath. Her heart tried to resist, but it, too, was getting cold. Round it an armor of ice closed tightly.
“Edmund!” she called imploringly. “Wake up, get up!”
“I can’t,” he murmured.
He really could not. Just as he sat that morning in bed, so he had sat, day in and day out, year after year, in bed, in a wheeled chair, in a deck chair … sat, entirely healthy, without pain—but could not walk. Life which had started so flamboyantly, swift shining life, the smile of good luck, the blue sky and flowers—all was all gone and done with. Why could it not return? No answer. Oh, God, why not? And, if it had to be, why, then, so suddenly? Why without any warning? He had passed happily into sleep and had miserably awakened, to incredible wretchedness.
Oh, she had not lain down under it; no, she hadn’t given in for a moment. All the twenty years this had lasted she hadn’t given in once. When he had long abandoned every hope, she still dragged him from physician to physician. Reports of a miraculous cure or a newspaper notice were enough to rekindle her optimism. In succession she believed in baths, electrical treatment, mud packs, massage, medicine, miracle-working saints. She wanted to believe in them, and she did believe.
“Don’t bother,” he smiled. “Perhaps it’s just as well as it is.”
“That’s what you’d like,” she cried angrily. “To give in, to bear it patiently. That’s too easy. Humility may be all right for the proud and fortunate who need checking. I hold with the ancients who fought the gods for their happiness.”
“But I am happy,” he said good-humoredly.
She didn’t want that kind of happiness, however. She despised it, it filled her with anger. She had married an attache, an active man on good terms with his fellow men, a future ambassador. On the door she had fixed a plate: “Edmund Pagel, Attache,” and it would stay. She would not have a new one made: “Pagel—Artist.” No, she had not married a color-grinder and a paint-dauber.
He sat and painted. He sat in his wheeled chair and smiled and whistled and painted. Angry impatience filled her. Did he not understand that he was wasting his life on these stupid paintings at which people only smiled?
“Let him alone, Mathilde,” said the relatives. “It’s very good for an invalid. He has occupation and amusement.”
No, she would not let him alone. When she married him there had been no talk of painting; she didn’t know that he had ever held a paintbrush in his hand, even. She hated it all, down to the smell of the oil paints. She was always knocking against the frames, the easel was always in her way; she never resigned herself to it. His pictures she left in boarding houses, at watering-places, in the attics of their flats; his charcoal sketches lay around and were lost.
Occasionally, in the midst of some work or worry, she would glance from the narrow prison of herself at one such picture on the wall as if seeing it for the first time. Then something seemed to want to lightly touch her, as if something asleep were waking.… Stop! Oh please stop! Everything was very bright. A tree, for instance, in the sun, in the air, against a clear summer sky. But the tree seemed to rise up, the wind to blow gently. The tree moved. Was it flying? Yes, the whole earth was flying, the sun, the play of light and air—everything was light, swift, soft. Oh, stop, you relentless, bright world! She came closer to the picture, and the curtain in front of the mysterious stirred. It was linen, smelling of oil paint, earth, firm earth. But the wind was blowing, the tree waved its branches, life was in movement.
Painted by a cripple, created out of nothing by a man who knew and loved movement, it is true, but who was now no more than a cumbersome body that had to be rolled out of bed into a chair. No, do not stop, we’re fleeing, we’re flying.
Yes, something stirred in the dreaming woman about to be illuminated by an intuition that in this picture her husband was living, immortal, brilliant, swifter than ever; but she turned from it. There was nothing left now but canvas and paint, a flat surface colored in accordance with certain rules; nothing of movement, nothing of the man.
More watering-places! Still more physicians! What did the world say? Two or three exhibitions—no one heard anything about them, saw anything of them; and no pictures were ever sold—thank God, there was no need of that. Now and then, on one of their restless journeys through the health resorts of the world, someone would seek them out; some young man, taciturn, awkward, gloomy, or another breaking out into a flood of words, with nervous movements, to announce a new era; such people did not encourage her to regard her husband’s pictures seriously.
“The day is so beautiful; let us go for a drive.”
“The light is good. I should like to paint another hour.”
“I almost forget what it’s like outside. I shall die for lack of air.”
“All right, sit by the window, open it—I’ve been wanting to paint you for a long time.”
That was his way—friendly, serene, never angry, but not to be moved either. She talked, implored, got furious, made it up again, used wiles, asked for forgiveness. He was as a field over which pass wind, storm, sunshine, night frost and rain, accepting everything without seeming to change, yet in the end producing a harvest.
Yes, the harvest came. But before it ripened something else happened, something for which she had fought, scolded, struggled, begged, for twenty years: one day he stood up, made a few steps, faltering at first, and then, with the same somewhat embarrassed, apologetic face of twenty years before, said: “I really think I can.”
The affliction vanished as it had come, just as incomprehensively. All her eagerness, her zeal, had not been able to effect its departure; it had been beyond human influence—it was enough to make one despair.
Meanwhile half a life—the better half—had passed. She was in her early forties, a forty-five-year-old husband at her side. An active life, an eager life without rest, full of plans, full of hopes, had slipped away. Now the hopes were fulfilled and there was nothing more to desire. All her plans, all her cares, had lost their meaning. A whole life had crumbled to dust in the moment Edmund got up and walked.
Incomprehensible heart of woman! “Here is your painting, Edmund. It only wants a few more touches. Won’t you?”
“Painting, yes, painting,” he said absent-mindedly, glanced at it, and went out, where his thoughts had already gone.
No, there was no time now to paint for even half an hour. He had had time, twenty years, to be ill, patiently, without complaint; now he had not a minute to spare. Outside, the whole of life was waiting for him in a whirl of festivities each more splendid than the other, hundreds of people with whom it was glorious to talk, beautiful women, girls who were so bewitchingly young that a thrill went down one’s spine just to look at them …
And wasn’t he himself young, really? He was five-and-twenty; what had happened didn’t count, a mere waiting around. He was young, life was young; pick and taste the fruit. Stop, please stop! Go on.…
Painting? True, it had helped him, it had been an excellent pastime. Now nothing more was needed to pass away the heavy burden of time. Down its torrent raced, sparkling, shining from a thousand eyes, thrilling to a million songs—with him, still with him, forever with him. Sometimes he started up at night, supporting his burning temples in hot hands. He thought he could hear Time rustling by. He ought not to sleep; who dared sleep when Time glides away so quickly? To sleep was time lost. And softly, so as not to wake his wife, he got up, went into the town,
