“What is the matter, Rosa? Are you cross with me?”
She shook her head violently in denial, and turning towards him with her usual suddenness took his arm with both hands:
“Oh! Christophe! …” she said.
He was alarmed. He let his piece of bread fall from his hands.
“What! What is the matter?” he stammered.
She said again:
“Oh! Christophe! … Such an awful thing has happened!”
He thrust away from the table. He stuttered:
“H-here?”
She pointed to the house on the other side of the yard.
He cried:
“Sabine!”
She wept:
“She is dead.”
Christophe saw nothing. He got up: he almost fell: he clung to the table, upset the things on it: he wished to cry out. He suffered fearful agony. He turned sick.
Rosa hastened to his side: she was frightened: she held his head and wept.
As soon as he could speak he said:
“It is not true!”
He knew that it was true. But he wanted to deny it, he wanted to pretend that it could not be. When he saw Rosa’s face wet with tears he could doubt no more and he sobbed aloud.
Rosa raised her head:
“Christophe!” she said.
He hid his face in his hands. She leaned towards him.
“Christophe! … Mamma is coming! …”
Christophe got up.
“No, no,” he said. “She must not see me.”
She took his hand and led him, stumbling and blinded by his tears, to a little woodshed which opened on to the yard. She closed the door. They were in darkness. He sat on a block of wood used for chopping sticks. She sat on the fagots. Sounds from without were deadened and distant. There he could weep without fear of being heard. He let himself go and sobbed furiously. Rosa had never seen him weep: she had even thought that he could not weep: she knew only her own girlish tears and such despair in a man filled her with terror and pity. She was filled with a passionate love for Christophe. It was an absolutely unselfish love: an immense need of sacrifice, a maternal self-denial, a hunger to suffer for him, to take his sorrow upon herself. She put her arm round his shoulders.
“Dear Christophe,” she said, “do not cry!”
Christophe turned from her.
“I wish to die!”
Rosa clasped her hands.
“Don’t say that, Christophe!”
“I wish to die. I cannot … cannot live now. … What is the good of living?”
“Christophe, dear Christophe! You are not alone. You are loved. …”
“What is that to me? I love nothing now. It is nothing to me whether everything else live or die. I love nothing: I loved only her. I loved only her!”
He sobbed louder than ever with his face buried in his hands. Rosa could find nothing to say. The egoism of Christophe’s passion stabbed her to the heart. Now when she thought herself most near to him, she felt more isolated and more miserable than ever. Grief instead of bringing them together thrust them only the more widely apart. She wept bitterly.
After some time, Christophe stopped weeping and asked:
“How? … How? …”
Rosa understood.
“She fell ill of influenza on the evening you left. And she was taken suddenly. …”
He groaned.
“Dear God! … Why did you not write to me?”
She said:
“I did write. I did not know your address: you did not give us any. I went and asked at the theater. Nobody knew it.”
He knew how timid she was, and how much it must have cost her. He asked:
“Did she … did she tell you to do that?”
She shook her head:
“No. But I thought …”
He thanked her with a look. Rosa’s heart melted.
“My poor … poor Christophe!” she said.
She flung her arms round his neck and wept. Christophe felt the worth of such pure tenderness. He had so much need of consolation! He kissed her:
“How kind you are,” he said. “You loved her too?”
She broke away from him, she threw him a passionate look, did not reply, and began to weep again.
That look was a revelation to him. It meant:
“It was not she whom I loved. …”
Christophe saw at last what he had not known—what for months he had not wished to see. He saw that she loved him.
“ ’Ssh,” she said. “They are calling me.” They heard Amalia’s voice.
Rosa asked:
“Do you want to go back to your room?”
He said:
“No. I could not yet: I could not bear to talk to my mother. … Later on. …”
She said:
“Stay here. I will come back soon.”
He stayed in the dark woodshed to which only a thread of light penetrated through a small airhole filled with cobwebs. From the street there came up the cry of a hawker, against the wall a horse in a stable next door was snorting and kicking. The revelation that had just come to Christophe gave him no pleasure; but it held his attention for a moment. It made plain many things that he had not understood. A multitude of little things that he had disregarded occurred to him and were explained. He was surprised to find himself thinking of it; he was ashamed to be turned aside even for a moment from his misery. But that misery was so frightful, so irrepressible that the mistrust of self-preservation, stronger than his will, than his courage, than his love, forced him to turn away from it, seized on this new idea, as the suicide drowning seizes in spite of himself on the first object which can help him, not to save himself, but to keep himself for a moment longer above the water. And it was because he was suffering that he was able to feel what another was suffering—suffering through him. He understood the tears that he had brought to her eyes. He was filled with pity for Rosa. He thought how cruel he had been to her—how cruel he must still be. For he did not love her. What good was it for her to love him? Poor girl! … In vain did he tell himself that she was good (she had
