mine began perhaps when love was bom in her.'
She felt for him almost the intimacy that comes from marriage—he was hers, she understood him, so much so that she was astonished every time she looked at him that he was objective at all. It was a time when she drank deep from the sources of life, when she was at the height of her power, and always there was the feeling that there was more to be felt and had, more to be given. The strange sad thoughts that had often lain like a weight on her heart were dissipated like mist before the sun. She was beginning to understand not only the courage to live but the courage to perpetuate life. There was the dim foreshadowing of vital things. She felt the subterranean sea which tossed beneath life and she wanted to go out into the world, proclaiming, 'Let us free youth! Let us free age.' Her feeling was that life could be lived so much more fully—there was so much more to be had, to be felt, to be explored. She felt the loneliness of the eternal feminine.
The time would come of her grandfather's death,'—the time would come when she would be waiting for the new-born,—the time would come when natural laws and forces would hold her in their grasp. All the more must she love then I It took wisdom and experience, she thought, to understand happiness, not the cheap happiness of contentment and success, but real happiness, the happiness of achievement which often looks like failure. If she had not known sorrow, she thought, she could not have been so ready for happiness, so eager for it as the parched soil for rain, the flower for sunshine.
Neither her grandfather nor her friend could feel that Violette would have joy of her first love. He had been weary unto death—would he not grow mortally ill again and forsake her when she had forgotten how to live without him ? They thought this even when they saw Violette, under the spell of that rarest of all happiness— triumphant first love—going with Gervais for their walk in Pere Lachaise, her white veil fluttering in the wind, a smile playing on her lips; when they heard her call herself a captive of Spring; and when they saw her stretch her arms out wide to the skies above her; when she told them how she had stayed with him at the tomb of Rachel and had asked, 'Do you see me with my love, oh, elder sister?'
But for him love and death had already been; and if all the happiness of life were placed in his hands, they thought, he would not know what to do with it. As some strong natures are prepared for death, so he seemed to them prepared to forego her, for hfe to him was neither a banquet nor a spectacle—it was warfare. What had he to do with love, they asked in anguish of heart.
So the dream went on and people wondered about Violette who now sat with the great and was wooed and courted, and she revelled in her good fortune with a heart half-surprised, half-expectant. Critics wrote extensively about her. Artists and sculptors sought her. 'It must be half divine,' wrote a celebrated man about her, 'to be young, to be beautiful, and to be devoted to a great cause I'' The world adopted the orphan, returned her. love a thousandfold, but her renown did not cross her consciousness. She was taken up entirely with other things. Somewhere she knew a free world existed— if only in the minds of a few. Better than she loved her art she loved a certain ideal of hers concerning the world at large, a dream that had come to her when twining the wire for wreaths—that every one in the world should have a chance for happiness and growth. This thought laid a spell on her which never lifted. It was because of this that she became an actress or fell in love or did any of the things that really expressed her. She could not have cared to live had not this thought of human betterment been present. It was a vision and a prophecy that she carried in her heart, and when she got older, she found that others confirmed her hope and strove to make it true, laying all on its altar gladly, and even going down in darkness to the grave in order to prove it.
IV. Barriers
VIOLETTE and Gervais were walking arm in arm in Pere Lachaise. It was spring. Every blade of grass seemed sentient, every tree proud of its green, the perfimied air hummed of mystic beginnings, of deep stirrings and passions.
Her eyes met the eyes of her lover, and it seemed to her that she was lost in him, that meanings became fathomless, and time and space receded, and she stood held by joy. But he exclaimed, 'I shall never forget your love I' and she had the foreboding of doom that she had often felt in her happiest moments with him.
There was a barrier between him and her.
But love itself creates a barrier, she thought,—love which leads one to contemplate one's love in silence, which makes one unable to impart one's feeling to the other, which makes one live a separate existence just at the point where the divided life is ended forever, love which is the most individual experience of the soul.
Their love was her achievement. She had held out her hands to him, had rushed out to him; at the most terrible moment in his night she had been present; she had chosen him, she had compelled him to choose her—by all the subtle and mighty power of her youth she had drawn him to her heart. To her he was the ineffable soul, the ideal face behind all the faces.
But he had loved before I The deathless memory of another possessed him. He could not repeat his experience of love. Nature's economy would not permit it. Was this the barrier that she felt? Some day she would be brave enough to ask him and he would answer her with his unfailing courage and truth.
Beyond the faces applauding and approving her Violette saw always his face. She knew that he also saw a face—her face—but she was aware that he saw faces behind it. Behind her stood victims, and behind those, others and still others—pinched, pale women, despairing men, ragged and sickly children. They pressed round her on every side, almost effaced her. She thought she saw him reach his arms to the multitude and cry he was coming, and she thought she saw how her own face faded from his sight. The sick man she had made whole was using his strength against her.
She could not misunderstand or overlook anything about him, since only large forces played a part in his life. She could see him away from her, arid of love, sterile of hunger and yearning, barren of need. She could feel that he looked upon her beautiful youth as pure delight, and that because of this he shut his heart to her. In fancy she pleaded with him: 'The cemetery is my background—do you blame me for not having let it swallow me up? Was it not well that I struggled up from the abyss? I am not a breath of spring, a flush of dawn, a feather fallen from the wing of night—I am a human being. I am not a shadow, not a reflex of some beauty of a passing season, not an echo of nature, but a human being.
'You are afraid of my eagerness, afraid of my happiness, but I am only a simple girl, and I too have the strength to siu'-render my happiness. I can lay down everything if the moment arrives. I may not always remain brilliant, I may grow listless, disheartened. You can not bear my youth—try to imagine my age, and see if you cannot love me as I may be when I am older, or when I am old. See if you cannot love me when my heart breaks.
'I am like everybody else. Everybody lives within hailmg distance of Pere Lachaise. All are children, nursed in the lap of age, potentially artists, potentially lovers.
'People have snatched moments from the scaffold for love, have loved when they had but an hour of life to live, an hour of measured death.'
She understood why he was able to resist her inward happiness. She could not have wished him to be different, and yet how unalterably different from him she was in the consecration of her whole life to personal expression, and personal development. In her love of love how different she was from him I When she pictured herself living for him, he for her, their lives a paean sung for each other, an interplay of drama, their eyes meeting across all possible human experiences—how different she was I Was it the difference of man and woman? she asked, or was it the difference of vouth and maturity? She could not wish him to be like herself, nor could she wish herself to change.
It came upon Gervais hke an illness of the body that he must flee Violette, that he must go away and take up the burden where he had laid it down a year ago on the quay. With the end of spring came an end of the dream. It died out suddenly, so without struggle of any kind that for a while Violette did not believe it was gone, did not trust the uneasiness that assailed her, the clamoto'ing hunger that tore through her for something that Gervais had given her and was now withholding from her. She felt a change.
In a certain sense Violette was not strong. She could not have fought for herself. Her mind would see clearly what was to be said and demanded, but so gently had she brought herself up, dwelt so long on the history of himian folk, lingered on the threshold of other people's lives with such sympathy, that, when attacked, she was
