knew not where or how, was to be dispelled like mist, by her wonder why it could not be for them who were so close—by these she knew that the friend of all her life was not the beloved whom the waiting years would reveal.
He made no effort to win her love. He could not allow himself to bear down upon her with his superior strength, with his greater experience, with the indescribable radiance of his vision of their mutual love. Never again did Violette hear a word of love from him, nor catch that ardent glance from his eyes which before this night had so often broken over her like a sun.
X. Intensity and Happiness
AS she read and worked and broadened, and came more and more in contact with people, she pictured life in other terms than those of Pere Lachaise. It was no longer a simple journey through the world that ends at the Gate, the same for all. Life fulfilled itself by its variations; it was different to every one and the difference was so profound that the imagination could only accept the fact without grasping its extent. No two people in the world ever lived the same life, nor were ever the same,— if they were, love whose task it is to seek to bridge the roaring seas that toss and break between people, would have no miracle to perform.
Every human being was an entity, a creature who belonged to himself always, whose life none but himself could live—if his nature rushed him into the heart of existence where beat the lives of other people, it was only another form of fulfilling his individual impulse, of expressing his separateness. How then think of birth and of love and of death generically ? How can it mean the same to all? How can it be the same?
A long basking in the simlight of girlhood for Violette, during which time she saw the manifold ways in which life transmutes life. So was it possible to live that there could be no death, despite the fact that the gate of Pere Lachaise opened hourly. So was it possible to live that even in dying one came away a conqueror, lying down among the flowers to rest and to dream.
She did not know how this was achieved. Not yet, she told herself, was it possible for her to find the way which led through Pere Lachaise and beyond, to vistas of experience so vibrant, so intimate, so beyond the grasp of the mind significant, that they set all the seeming laws of nature at naught, and at the very last transformed death itself into something different from what it was.
Violette in thinking this had not deserted the realism so early impressed upon her by the teaching of both her grandfather and her friend, and the silent influence of Pere La-chaise. She was not reverting to mysticism. She was allowing her mind to soar past the actual, past the usual, to possibilities suggested to her imagination by both. She was not wandering from the realm of fact. She was dedicated to the discovery and practice of new forms of life, and though as yet she had succeeded partially only, and that subjectively, though much that was around her had already tried to beat her into a given form, nothing, she told herself, would induce her to desist from the primal impulse of her whole nature, to be herself, to find the utter-most of happiness and intensity to enjoy, to live many lives in one, to live so her own heart said: It is welL.
Her materialism told her that no individual is detachable from his environment, but neither is the future unrelated to the present, and for that reason she could hope to reflect distant forces, not yet incorporated in the present, to be a creature of an environment that had not yet come to pass. She was transitional, and she expressed the Future. She heralded its truth. She embodied it, she was its living witness.
So the resolve made in childhood that she would seek happiness extended itself in her girlhood to something deeper. She would so live as to make herself stronger than her environment, stronger than fate, than natural law. She would turn tragedy into joy, she would set at naught death itself. Sunlight and flowers and beauty, wonderful relaxations, romance, but never ease, never indulgent, cloddish ease—she saw herself frankly a pleasure-lover, in at once the most simple and the most serious sense, a person enamoured, whose passion never abated before the forces of reality.
This troubled her friend. He thought it not enough that she knew and felt the great facts, such as the brevity of life, and the suffering and injustice of the world—she should know the bitterness that those suflPer daily who are not, like her, protected by the power to live in themselves—the stabs to the spirit, the tortures, that people constantly suflPer at the hands of others,—did her optimism ever deliver her into the City of the Dreadful Night where the average human being lives.
It was impossible to go about with the elation of a Violette and know life. How reach her with his knowledge? She found it possible to laugh, to sing, to dance, she wrote, she indulged in long conversations, she luxuriated, drank in sunshine, rain, woke early for a glimpse of the sunrise, walked far to see a sunset—she read, again and again, her favourite books and poems, she bridged the gulf of years between her grandfather and herself, and she made of her relation with her friend something stronger and more wonderful than ever friendship was— so much vitahty troubled him, angered him. It was possible only, he thought, when the heart is asleep, when the eyes so wide open to beauty, are shut to the thousand forms of suflPering that beset the world. He imder-took to point them out to her, to suggest them whenever she wandered away into realms of her own, he was impatient with the warmth of a sympathy she expended, as he thought, too equally, too liberally. It was partly the unconsciousness of girlhood, partly its strength and power to recuperate from shock and desolation, power to overlook, to glide past on the drifting years.
Ah, she exclaimed, what mattered it all, since the world was being reconstructed, and she was aware of her part in the general change. I What mattered it if she did not know precisely how people lived, since her feeling for them was right I Of what avail would a robe of sackcloth be to her spirit decked in joy 1 Was he not pleased that she had the gift of feeling that happiness which he would wish aU young girls to have? Did happiness ever harm any one? Could he think it made her cold to their principles, cold to her work?
She dared be happy! In a world of death, in a world of suflPering, she dared be happier than she could express, she dared be grateful for life as for a boon too great to conceive. The beauty, the sunlight, the peace inspired her—the little singing insects, the rustling of the leaves, the birds, the flutter of butterflies, with velvet wings broad spread and at rest in patches of sunlight at her feet. These things spoke to her, challenged her to send on her voice of gladness and of song, far out into the world until it reached even her martyr sisters buried in dust and darkness in the factory, her hero brothers in Arrtic prison..
The waiting years would carry in safety the marvellous burden of her song the mes-sage with which they were freighted.
XI. Journeys
SHE was beginning to feel a vague restlessness, was thinking whether there was not something she could do in the present, outside her studies. The imcon-scious years of girlhood were towards the close of that era taking on a new character. She hungered for time to pass; she had a way of saying, 'When I shall be older, when I shall have been graduated, when I shall have travelled.' She was feverish for the time ahead, and yet fearful lest it arrive and she find it had not fulfilled itself. It took so long to do anything at all, to find voice for the thousand messages of the mind to the inner self.
She was beginning to look about her and to rouse herself from her speculations, to put by for a while her thoughts for social restitution, and to think of simpler, nearer things. The artist soared, aspired, worked, and was content; the girl found herself dreaming of distant parts, of new-found friends, of a life somehow different from the one she had always led. And in her mind she already made these journeys away from Paris and Pre Lachaise, from her grandfather whom she loved better than ever, from her friend to whom she was just growing up, perhaps. The whole world stood waiting, and now was the time for their tryst, now when she was young and eager. Perhaps later there would be a post she could not desert; later, to the young girl, was far away when too many unforeseen things might happen.
The world was waiting, and she was yearning to rush to it, to voyage and journey over its areas. Lost as she was in her studies at the Academy, she yet felt that a new light would flood her life could she travel in the countries of which she had read much, and whose daily history was the same, she was certain, as that of the
