and pictured herself on the stage before those austere judges. She had no fear. In a flash her idea took shape and formed itself into something almost audible. She saw how she must perform her task, the amount of strength she must put forth. Then it was over: the picture vanished, but she knew that when she came to prepare she would remember.
She took counsel with herself in Pere Lachaise. It was a strange chance, and to her excited mind an omen, that she found herself at the tomb of Rachel, and there she read her part. Was she flaunting her life in the eyes of the dead, those eyes that had burned their will and their meaning into the multitude ?
A mist began to fall, followed by a fine rain. Violette leaned against the cypress that stood at the head of Rachel and glanced at the low clouds that hung over the cemetery. The tombs looked black and chill. It was difficult to believe that Paris existed, that just beyond the gate there lived men and women and children. More than ever before Pere Lachaise seemed the place where all the afflictions of the ages were perpetuated, and she bade farewell to Rachel sleeping in her granite home under the summer rain.
When the great night came, and she had recited, words of praise fell on her like tangible things—so little was she able to bear the ovation she received. They broke over her being like waves, imtil she began to believe them and to return the pressure of the hands that pressed hers, to take note of the dear, moved faces of the people who applauded her. She stood on the platform in the midst of a crowd that pressed forward, with something wild and sweet in her eyes, her arms clasping the roses that had been given her. She thrilled with the excitement which only an audience inspires, with the passion to be at one with it, to give love for love. She seemed taken out of her life into something wider, freer. She had suddenly broadened her scope, mounted on inspiration into a new existence.
They walked home from the theatre. Vi-olette's eyes shone in the dark, her hand rested on the arm of her grandfather. Their friend was with them. She tried to tell them what she felt. Then she grew a little sad, a little depressed by a subtle threat that lurked in her good fortune, a feeling that it would not last half long enough, that what had come like a sunrise might go at sunset.
In the middle of the night she slipped from her bed and put her head out of the window. The air struck her shoulders; she was poised as if to fly out of the confines of her room, and the waving trees of Pere La-chaise, black in the faint starlight, signalled to her. Yet it seemed to her that life was an ascending scale of happiness, expanding and stretching beyond her knowledge and conception, with days that were years, years that were eternity.
What was Pere Lachaise saying to her this night? Even should she die in youth, it would not be true that she had lived in vain—forever and ever the fact would remain written in the course of the stars, that she had lived.
IX. Love and Insight
IF she made many friendships it was because at that time she was possessed by the innate beauty of people—a democratic passion burned in her. She would gladly have spoken to people on the street, in a car, at a public gathering. It did not matter how far removed their life was from hers. Among her friends were workingmen to whom she would have seemed strange, were it not for her sympathy which made nothing that was important to them distant or inscrutable to her. It took strength to be so fully alive to other people—a vitality which perhaps she lost for a little while later, when she fell in love and again when her art took a firmer hold upon her. But now, she was fortunate, she had time—infinite tune for everything, it would seem.
She saw the world in the light of growth through struggle. The sun was shining, winds laden with perfimie were blowing beauty, and freshness, and budding youth everywhere—a world that lived in a kind of everlasting spring, but which suffered death and destruction, nevertheless, every day, every moment of its existence. So much that was waste; so much that never pierced the weight of the soil towards the air above, so much that was imborn but willed itself to be; so much that having come up went down again in misery and death.
It was the spell of Pere Lachaise, laid upon her so early, from which she would never emerge, and which made intense, and dear, and difficult every aspect of life. Was it this that endowed her with her rarest gift, the power to imagine love, to imderstand its marvellous role, to hunger early for its ineffable sweetness? She attracted people.
It was strange and startling how many different types of men thought her born for them. Violette, in kindly himiour, confided to her grandfather, and laughed. If one was right, then all the others were wrong, and yet each believed himself to know with unmistakable absoluteness.
The thought of love had an extraordinary hold upon her mind at this time. She was modem, inasmuch as she knew that she must develop herself, educate herself, fit herself for some work that would take all her strength. But she was also of the past in her full expectancy of romance, of a personal union with some one whose coming to her would mean the utmost of happiness that the heart could support, the utmost of feeling of one human being for another. She combined all the hopes and the longing of the woman of the past dreaming of her lover, with all the ideals of the modern woman who aspired towards taking a part in the adventures and activities peculiar to the present.
She once went with a girl her own age on an outing, but how foreign she felt to her companions, with their half adult love-making, their open intriguing and flirting! They had picnicked in a wood, then danced, then supped, and taken a Seine boat back to Paris, the girls and the boys arm-in-arm, laughing, openly kissing. She sat and spoke to the youth who was allotted to her with a seriousness which flattered as much as it astonished him, and wondered how she could the sooner get away to herself, to her grandfather, to her friend, to Pere Lachaise. She could not understand a hght kiss. Had she been drawn to any one there, or elsewhere, it would have meant an upheaval in her whole nature, an impression to be carried through life. It was as if the weighty big things with which she had always lived hung their atmosphere about her.
The time came when she asked herself whether she loved her friend. She had always found a home in his presence. Her hand sought his impulsively, naturally; whenever he was in the room, she chose the seat nearest his as if it must be so. She addressed her conversation to him, and her unspoken thoughts. She never separated him from her life, always saw him in the centre of it. She would go on and on because she was young, and he who to her youth seemed mature beyond change at thirty, would help her, rejoice with her, go along with her as far as she went, though for himself remain perhaps the same contemplative spirit with two absorbing passions— that of the revolutionist for his cause, and of his love for her, but making no step towards either, watching and brooding over both, like an elder brother.
Did she love him? Did her content in him, and her admiration for his qualities, her eagerness to be with him, her demand that they spend many hours of each day together, mean that she loved him? She asked herself this question, put to her first by him. For the time came when a conviction flashed on the lonely spirit that Violette was his.
She was then eighteen, developed beyond her years, and though he said to her and to himself that she was too young, that he could not call her out of her life to join him, and so, perhaps, impede her progress, and that she must go on to her goal even though it might lead her away from him, he could not admit that it did not devolve upon him to declare his love as soon as he became aware of it!
His love and hers was a fact which not only they must not belittle or overlook, but about which, henceforth, they must make their imited lives revolve.
They were walking hand in hand in a park. A rainstorm had descended on them. They had been to a meeting, had discussed the speaker, had read for hours together on a bench, and when the rain came, and the lightning, she clung to him, and he kissed her.
She felt helpless, ashamed. She was conscious of insincerity, she had never believed it possible that she would ever tell him what was not true. Yet, in fact, it was true. Sweet and wonderful as his kiss was, she had not wanted it.
With the rain drenching her and him, and tlie lightning rending the air, in silence they made their way towards her home. She would never again have to ask herself whether she loved him. He would never again have to ask her that, question. They knew, this was not love.
By her ungiven kiss, by her sudden fear of him, by the misery in her heart that a dream for him, risen she
