incapable of defence. What mattered it if in her heart she was a stoic? What mattered it if she said that no one but herself could ever put an affront upon her, what mattered it if her pride as an individual forestalled even that possibility of any one invading the precincts of her nature as long as there was lacking in her the power to hurt people when they hurt her, the talent to strike back, to meet hardness with hardness ?
Pere Lachaise had imfitted her for this. Others might be hasty and shortsighted, might act rashly as if they had all eternity with which to make amends; others might forget, but not she I.
'I do not need happiness,' she said. 'It was a fantasy of my youth to imagine that I did. I can live as the millions and millions of people do who have little happiness, or who perhaps have never had any, upon whom no one leans, for whom no one yearns. I can be all alone, although for a long time now I had supposed myself to be two in one, to be mystically united in love with another. I do not need happiness, but something tells me that happiness is possible just the same.'
V. Lost
THE day rose in humid heat and grew more oppressive every hour. Paris lay under a glaring sun, inert, hardly breathing, in cruel suspense for the evening's cool.
Violette awaited Gervais.
'We will not have the strength. It will be impossible,' she reiterated to herself, and she did not try to fight oflF the languor which oppressed her. 'Why could we not go on as before? What has happened?' But in another moment came a poignant sense of desertion, of one-sided love; for the first time in her life it seemed wiser to her to die than to live, and she started up in anguish, frightened, shaken. 'I must not succimib to the first misery,' she told herself.
And it was with this thought that she came into the room where he waited.
'Geivais,' she began, 'Vhere are you go-mg?'
'When I stood on the quay, Violette, I thought I saw the starved of all the world gather about me. They were not a clamorous lot, and I wondered at their silence. I wondered at their empty hands, for I knew that if the fate which has created the soul I possess had also made me a beggar, I should beg with a knife in my hands! Violette, that night I crossed the threshold of my personal existence. For a little while I forgot—through you— Violette.'
Violette was at his side.
'So much I could say to you if I were older, stronger; so much perhaps that would be truer too than it now can be. You come to me with your doctrines and theories, but I come with my whole life, with my thoughts, with my heart. The days in my childhood when I suflFered himger, the isolation, the nights of torture seeking in my own thoughts answers that I knew existed somewhere—is it all as nothing?'
'You are meant for happiness, Violette,' he said.
For a long time they sat silent, their hands in each other's, and then they arose and passed into the inner room to her grandfather.
'Friend,' the old man said, looking long at Gervais, 'you will yearn to come again. But the way is long.'
Gervais turned to Violette, but she could not speak, for her soul seemed to call to him. With blinded eyes he passed through the door.
VI. Night and Dawn
VIOLETTE thought she was in her bed at home looking out upon the stars through the open window facing her, but when she saw the tombs and the rows of nodding trees she remembered. It was Pere Lachaise. She sighed and sank back on the green bank. The night was warm.
She wondered if any girl as alive as she had ever spent the night in Pere Lachaise. Never had Violette been more alive—not even in the spring when she had sat on this spot with Jervais. The smell of the grass on which she lay was sweet to her, the flowers, the far starlight, the little cloud toward the east. It was wonderful to be there in the still beauty of the night and think bravely in the silence, and gather the hopes like flowers and count them as one would count stars, aware only that they were innumerable, that they were brilliant and distant. No, Vio-lette was never quite so happy I If only she could find some way to tell Gervais that it was well with her, but in time he would know. He would hear how she had fulfilled her destiny, and been an artist from beginning to end. Perhaps he would be there some day, sitting in the gloom of the theatre, the face beyond the faces, and he would guess that she saw him and played to him, and be no longer sorry that he had been unable to take her gift of herself, and sit dreaming of fair days, of a promised spring, of starlit nights, and sweetness and passion and converse. Perhaps he would yet come to know how wonderful a thing it was to live—when it would be too late for happiness.
Her heart beat painfully and she raised herself slowly and looked past the trees far into the night. She walked towards the tomb of Rachel lying to the left. She would come like a younger sister to Rachel and speak with her. Violette's feet gleamed on the grass. Dew hung on them like gems, dew glistened in her hair that swept downwards to her waist, dew was on her eyes and cheeks. She stopped and threw her arms out towards the sky, and her face changed as with a sudden memory of pain, and 'Gervais' fell from her lips. Then she went on.
'There is no one here,' she said.
Violette's eyes sought the window of her room across the street. She saw it by the faint glimmer of candle light that burned behind it. Perhaps the candle was at that moment in the hand of her grandfather.
The night grew deeper, darker.
Here in Pere Lachaise, she thought, was surcease without interruption, peace past understanding. Here there was no love which woke and tortured you throughout the night.
The stars hung high above her, the leaves fell like tears on her head, the silence was impenetrable as death. She stood by the tomb of Abelard and Heloise. 'Their sleep is dreamless,' said Violette. 'Her spirit went out hke a candle when Abelard left her for the cold preferment of the church. She was able to let him leave her because he had already left her.' And then she thought, 'What is this love for which we are sick to death and which yet makes us so strong? I have forgotten. What do I want with Gervais? What did I want with his love? I cannot remember.'
Pere Lachaise lay white in the starUght. It took on a deeper silence with the advancing homs. Violette wondered whether the dead grew weary and rose to stretch their arms and to look upon the night. 'It is sad,' she thought, 'that it should be easier to find death than love,' and suddenly her thought deserted Gervais. He no longer stood for love. It was love itself she saw, not the half-tortured, strangled thing he turned it into—love as she felt it before his coming, added to her riper knowledge of it since his leaving. And now, she, a lover of love, lay there bleeding.
Violette went to the farther end of the cemetery, where suddenly she came upon Rachel, who stood and played to all the dead of Pere Lachaise. If ever Violette met Gervais again (and she knew that it could not be), she would tell him how Rachel played in the starlight to herself and all the dead. About her heart cold as ice the words of the actress leaped like flames of joy. Violette remembered her grandfather, and she was overcome by the greatness of his love for her as by the grandeur of Gk)d. She remembered her whole childhood—it flowed like a river at her feet. She went back into rooms of her vanished life, opening door upon door. She remembered Gervais. Mirrored in Rachel's luminous eyes she saw rain and storm and sunshine, and she loved these things for themselves as she did when she was a child. From Rachel's voice, her tears, her laughter, there came to her a vague wonder which soon turned into a feeling, an assertion. She wanted to live. She wanted to wander forth into the mazes of life, secme in her knowledge that she could endure the unendurable.
The dawn crept up from the east. The stars paled. A httle cloud drifted towards her. The breaking day called her. But it seemed to her that Rachel pitied her weari-ness and detained her, prevailing upon her to lie down on the grass beside her and crooning a lullaby over her of such sweetness that she could not help but
