time, for a respite from death. He demanded it as he would demand a right held from God.
Violette shared his fear. He felt it in her kisses, in the way she clung to him, and he held her in his arms and asked himself if it were not wrong to let a childhood dwell under the shadow of age and death. He looked at her with frightened eyes, pressed close to her and implored Life for life.
He had other fears, too. When he saw how love flowed from her towards everybody in the world, how love flowed towards her. so that not one who entered the shop but lingered to speak with her, he began to see in her as in a mirror the vision of other lives. There had been her mother who was about to be married when her lover had come and talked about spent passion, about feelings that age prematurely, about promises that because they are promises are false from their birth. When he had gone away she walked as in a dream to Pere Lachaise, and sat for many hours there, then staggered home. Later she had found a friend, and they had turned to each other and joined their lives.
There was himself. How he had loved, and yet how easily he had lost the love of the woman he worshipped! But he married. The old man, in his chair facing Pere Lachaise, remembered how he had married to humble his heart, to thwart his destiny I He thought of Therese, Violette's aunt, who did not marry, who laid herself down in death at the end of her twenty-five years—Therese, who loved life like a poet and like a poet knew how to surrender it.
And here was Violette. More than later in her girlhood, more than later still when her whole life stood threatened by love, her grandfather was obsessed by a thousand fears for her. Already in the loving and beloved child he saw the possibly tormented soul of a woman.
He could not say when, in Violette's childhood, he had begun to feel that she was exceptional, that she did not belong to herself or to him at all, but to the whole world; that she had something to offer that the world would be glad of and better for having. Perhaps it began in her infancy, when he heard her name the stars with names taken from the flowers; perhaps it was when he overheard the ditties she crooned to herself at night. Perhaps it was when she was most a child and hurt him with all a child's cruelty, when she envied other children and pictured how they lived in a world all crystal and gold, a world, alas! so different from her own! Perhaps it was when he learned how deep was her need for the mother she had never known, and when he saw how sometimes she turned away from Pere La-chaise as from some monstrous thing.
There was the time she discovered poverty. Like a Columbus of the spirit she adventured over the sea of human existence where storms and wrecks abound, where people lie famishing, eaten in and out with want so that the very texture of their spirits shrinks together, becomes grey and deathlike. She discovered it from the children of her street, who were hungry and ragged; from the woman next door, whose breasts, as so often happens with the poor, dried up through lack of food, and who came borrowing sous with which to buy milk for her infant. She discovered poverty as a fact, not only in her own world, but in the world beyond her world, in the world which she would enter and storm when she grew up. She saw the prison walls it built up around people to keep out the daylight. The real martyrdom of poverty was not the suffering of hunger and cold—it was that so much of life was turned to death, so much shut away from the heart's desire, so much kept hidden from the mind. That was where the robbery and the mvu-der of it lay. She saw inequalities of life, so incalculable and infinite that they led to inequalities of death! People died when they might have lived, people went down too soon into their graves, away from the long road which led all aroimd the earth till it came to a vast sea!
That people should be poor and be resigned—that was terrible. That they should range themselves into classes, and not believe that a legacy of joy and power was theirs!
It lay in her power to refuse to be poor— to free herself from everything that had ever limited her. She would not be denied—she would not let life forsake her.
She would rove in the world, she would plunge forward to find what there was worth knowing and being. There were books. She would read. There were people. She would meet them—the best should not afford to overlook her, or to refuse what she had to give. That was the way not to be poor—it was a way of seeking to establish the last democracy in one's life, and she came upon that way in a flash of imaginative wisdom. It was now in her power to try to think whatever she wished to think, to try to be whatever she wished to be. From that moment she was free.
IX. Promise
SUCH was the manner in which the shadows of that childhood lifted, in which Violette became more and more a creature of life. It was a long childhood, for she had the subtlety of a woman at its beginning and the simplicity of a child at the end. Yet it passed like all childhood, in a day, in an hour, in a breath of spring, in the sweep of a wing across the summer sky. Genius sprang out of that early hour, genius that stood not for any one art, but for personality, for richness of spirit, for flashing intuitive intellect, genius that found its first expression in an insistence on freedom and scope, in the extraordinary demand that she made upon life. There was a gaiety in her speech and bearing, as if she had grown old enough to taste the sweetness of her youth. She had a practical ambition, too. She would seat herself at the banquet of happiness with her grandfather. He who had had nothing should sit and behold his life reborn, refashioned. He should have all the happiness and peace he had ever prayed for for her,—she would make his old age brilliant.
There was the same passion in her demand for herself that there was in the progranune that she drew up for the future of the world. She wanted life, more and more life. Whatever life held of good that she would have, and life at bottom, deep down in its very nature, was good—even its sorrows, even its eternal tragedies. Out of the narrowness of her existence, out of her isolation, out of her utter poverty, sprang this brilliant desire for all that was good and large and free, this miraculous faith in the treasures hidden somewhere near at hand.
So the dream came and went in her mind, as she sat in the room the floor of which was strewn with scraps of ferns and tinsel. She looked at her grandfather bent over his work, and wondered if he guessed how beautiful their destiny loomed before her even as they sat chilled, underfed, tired, alone. She wound her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his, and looked into his eyes. It would be like a play—years of sadness, hemmed in by age and death, and then the world would lie before them in splendour, inviting then- feet and then- hearts! How? When? She did not ask, she did not know. It was enough that it was possible.
They approached each other more closely now. Avenues of expression opened up between them, thoughts and ideas flowed easily from one to the other. They spoke together of the movement which extended beyond boundaries of nation and race, a movement that, child though she was, she understood to be historic. She believed that it was possible for her, as well as for everybody, to play a part in bringing about the change.
Violette, cradled by Pere Lachaise, wept over and yearned over so long by her grandfather, could grow into radiant, perfect womanhood, could grow into all that is symbolic of human development, human aspiration and achievement, could become a wonderful expression of the beauty and the power of the human spirit. As far as it was possible for an individual to take part in the drama of social revolution, she would find her role.
In this way it was decided in that little shop that here was to be nurtured a complete personality, here was to be incarnated womanhood, youth, life, art. Love was to sit at the banquet. The world was to be stretched out at their feet for their use and delight. Henceforth, there was but one thing to do—to free the nightingale in her, to transplant her from the desert into the world's garden. To herself and to her grandfather she was destined for the happiness of genius.
Girlhood
I. Growth
HER days now lay like a beautiful landscape basking in the sun, still as a lake mirroring summer skies and
