She took Christophe by surprise one day at the end of October.—They were at dinner. He was talking to Braun about a crime of passion which was the sole topic in the town. In the country two Italian girls, sisters, had fallen in love with the same man. They were both unable to make the sacrifice with a good grace, and so they had drawn lots as to who should yield. But when the lot was cast the girl who had lost showed little inclination to abide by the decision. The other was enraged by such faithlessness. From insult they came to blows, and even to fighting with knives: then, suddenly, the wind changed: they kissed each other, and wept, and vowed that they could not live without each other: and, as they could not submit to sharing the lover, they made up their minds that he should be killed. This they did. One night the two girls invited the lover to their room, and he was congratulating himself upon such twofold favor; and, while one girl clasped him passionately in her arms, the other no less passionately stabbed him in the back. It chanced that his cries were heard. People came and tore him in a pitiable condition from the embraces of his charmers, and they were arrested. They protested that it was no one’s business, and that they alone were interested in the matter, and that, from the moment when they had agreed to rid themselves of their own property, it was no one else’s concern. Their victim was not a little inclined to agree with their line of argument: but the law was unable to follow it. And Braun could not understand it either.
“They are mad,” he said. “They should be shut up in an asylum. Beasts! … I can understand a man killing himself for love. I can even understand a man killing the woman he loves if she deceives him. … I don’t mean that I would excuse his doing so: but I am prepared to admit that there is a remnant of primitive savagery in us: it is barbarous, but it is logical: you kill the person who makes you suffer. But for a woman to kill the man she loves, without bitterness, without hatred, simply because another woman loves him, is nothing but madness. … Can you understand it, Christophe?”
“Peuh!” said Christophe. “I’m quite used to being unable to understand things. Love is madness.”
Anna, who had said nothing, and seemed not to be listening, said in her calm voice:
“There is nothing irrational in it. It is quite natural. When a woman loves, she wants to destroy the man she loves so that no one else may have him.”
Braun looked at his wife aghast, thumped on the table, folded his arms, and said:
“Where on earth did you get that from? … What? So you must put your oar in, must you? What the devil do you know about it?”
Anna blushed a little, and said no more. Braun went on:
“When a woman loves, she wants to destroy, does she? That’s a nice sort of thing to say! To destroy anyone who is dear to you is to destroy yourself.—On the contrary, when one loves, the natural feeling is to do good to the person you love, to cherish him, to defend him, to be kind to him, to be kind to everything and everybody. Love is paradise on earth.”
Anna sat staring into the darkness, and let him talk, and then shook her head, and said coldly:
“A woman is not kind when she loves.”
Christophe did not renew the experiment of hearing Anna sing. He was afraid … of disillusion, or what? He could not tell. Anna was just as fearful. She would never stay in the room when he began to play.
But one evening in November, as he was reading by the fire, he saw Anna sitting with her sewing in her lap, deep in one of her reveries. She was looking blankly in front of her, and Christophe thought he saw in her eyes the strangely burning light of the other evening. He closed his book. She felt his eyes upon her, and picked up her sewing. With her eyelids down she saw everything. He got up and said:
“Come.”
She stared at him, and there was still a little uneasiness in her eyes: she understood, and followed him.
“Where are you going?” asked Braun.
“To the piano,” replied Christophe.
He played. She sang. At once he found her just as she had been on the first occasion. She entered the heroic world of music as a matter of course, as though it were her own. He tested her yet further, and went on to a second song, then to a third, more passionate, which let loose in her the whole gamut of passion, uplifting both herself and him: then, as they reached a very paroxysm, he stopped short and asked her, staring straight into her eyes:
“Tell me, what woman are you?”
Anna replied:
“I do not know.”
He said brutally:
“What is there in you that makes you sing like that?”
She replied:
“Only what you put there to make me sing.”
“Yes? Well, it is not out of place. I’m wondering whether I created it or you. How do you come to think of such things?”
“I don’t know. I think I am no longer myself when I am singing.”
“I think it is only then that you are yourself.”
They said no more. Her cheeks were wet with a slight perspiration. Her bosom heaved, but she spoke no word. She stared at the lighted candles, and mechanically scratched away the
