Part 7

And the beggar raised his sightless face, hearkening to her steps, and he smiled with the tender and poignant smile of the wisdom of old men.

“Gautami!” spake he to her. “I see thee not but I feel thy approach. Gautami, may thy path be blessed!”

And she kissed the knee of the beggar and went on upon her way; and upon her way, in the hot, sun-filled groves, among the satin trees, she did give birth to her child before its time.

And blissfully, having rested with tears of happiness after her sore travail, she returned with the child in her arms into the palace of the prince and gave full rein to her ceaseless ecstasy and tender delight, to an emotion of bodily love for the new-born, to the delectable disquiet of seeing, scenting, touching, and pressing to her bosom this growing being, that with every day became more and more awake to thought and consciousness.

“My soul hath recalled thee!”--these words had not been uttered by the prince to Gautami when he had become as one with her, even though she had been dear to him, even though they had borne her to the palace of the king with music, upon bullocks adorned with ribbands and flowers, having arrayed her as for a bridal, dressing her black hair smoothly, putting rouge on her cheeks, and blackening her eye-lashes with kohl.

And Gautami, having given birth to the child, received submissively the youth’s having grown cold toward her, and removed herself from his sight, that he might not feel troubled and guilty upon meeting her by chance.

And, remaining within the enclosure of the palace, she settled in a simple hut on the banks of the ponds, taking upon herself the duty of feeding the swans that swam in those ponds among the grasses and flowers.

And for a time she was happy, preparing, without herself knowing it, for those great sorrows which were destined to come in ordained replacement of this happiness, and to put her upon the sole true path, into the society of the religious brotherhood of those that go clad in yellow.

Blessed are the meek at heart, who have riven their chain.

In an abode of the highest joy do we dwell, who love nothing in this universe, and like to a bird are we, that beareth nothing with it but its wings.

_1919._

THE SON

Mme. Marot had been born and had grown up in Lausanne, in a strict, honest, and industrious family. She did not marry early, but when she did, hers was a love match. In the March of 1876, among the passengers of the old French steamer _Auvergne_, sailing from Marseilles to Italy, was a newly married couple. The days were calm, cool; the sea, all silvery mirrors, lost itself in the misty spring distances; the newly-married couple scarcely ever left the deck. And all admired them, all beheld their happiness with amiable smiles: he showed his happiness in an alert, keen glance, in the necessity for motion, in an animated amiability to all those around him; she, by that joyous interest, with which she assimilated every trifle.... This newly married pair was the Marots.

He was some ten years her senior; he was short in height, swarthy of face, with curly hair; his hand was thin, and his voice sonorous. But in her one sensed an admixture of some blood other than that of the Latins. She seemed just the least trifle too tall, although her waist was splendid; though her hair was dark, her eyes were a grayish blue. They travelled through Naples, Palermo and Tunis to the Algerian town of Constantine, where Monsieur Marot had obtained a rather prominent appointment. And life in Constantine those fourteen years which had passed since that happy spring, had given them everything with which people are usually content: a competance, domestic harmony, healthy and handsome children.

During these fourteen years the Marots had changed very much in appearance: his face had become as black as an Arab’s, he had grown gray and dried up from work, from travelling, from tobacco, and from the sun,--many took him for a native of Algeria; nor would any one have recognized her as the woman who had been a passenger upon the steamer _Auvergne_: then, even in the shoes she put outside the door at night, there had been the enchantment of youth; now she too had glints of silver in her hair, her skin had grown finer and more aureate, her hands had become thinner, and in her care of them, in the dressing of her hair, in her linen, in her apparel, she already betrayed a certain superfluous nicety. Their relations had changed as well, of course, although none would have said that it was for the worse. And each one led an individual existence: his time was taken up with work,--he still remained as passionate, and, at the same time, as sober a man as he had been before; she had to take care of him, of the children--two very pretty girls, of whom the elder was by now almost a young lady,--and everybody unanimously declared that there was not in all Constantine a better housekeeper, a better mother, or a more charming person to chat with in a drawing room, than Mme. Marot.

Their house stood on a quiet and clean street. From the second story, out of the front rooms, always in semi-darkness on account of the closed Venetian blinds, could be seen Constantine, famed all over the world for its picturesqueness: this ancient Arabian stronghold, which had become a French city, lies upon sloping crags. The windows of the living rooms, shady and cool, looked out upon the garden,--there, in a perpetual blaze and glare, dozed age-old eucalypti, sycamores, palms, behind their enclosures of high walls. The master of the house frequently absented himself on matters connected with his work. As for the mistress, she led that confined existence to which, in the colonies, the wives of all Europeans are condemned. On Sundays she invariably attended church. On week days she rarely went out and restricted herself to a small, choice circle. She read, busied herself with embroidery, chatted with the children or took part in their lessons; sometimes, putting the dark-eyed Marie, her younger daughter, on her knees, and playing on the pianoforte with one hand, she would sing old-fashioned French songs, to make the long African day seem shorter, while the hot wind entered in a flood from the garden through the wide-open windows.... Constantine, under the pitiless blaze of the sun and with all its shutters closed, seemed at these hours a dead city: only the roller-birds called out behind the walls of the gardens, and plaintively, with the nostalgia of colonial lands, sounded the trumpets of the buglers on the knolls beyond the city, where at times the cannons made the earth shake with a dull rumble, and one saw the white helmets of the soldiers twinkling.

The days in Constantine passed monotonously, but no one ever remarked that Mme. Marot was oppressed by this. In her character, exquisite and chaste, never appeared any heightened sensitiveness, nor any surplus nervousness. Her health could not be called robust, but it never caused any alarm to Monsieur Marot. Only one incident had struck him: once, in Tunis, an Arab magician had put her so rapidly into a profound sleep, that she had great difficulty in coming back to herself. But this had been still at the time of their journey from France; since that time she had not experienced any such sharp declines of will power, any such unwholesome susceptibility. And Monsieur Marot was happy, tranquil, and convinced that her soul was undisturbed and like an open book to him. And so it really was, even during the last--the fourteenth--year of his domestic life.... But now there appeared in Constantine a certain Emile du Buys.

Emile du Buys, son of Mme. Bonnet, an old and close friend of the Marots, was only nineteen years of age. Mme. Bonnet, the widow of an engineer, had also a daughter, Eliza, besides Emile, who was born of the first marriage. He had grown up in Paris and was already reading law; but, above all, he was taken up with the composition of verses which were comprehensible to him alone, and had attached himself to a non-existent school of poetry, “The Seekers.” In the May of 1889 Eliza was preparing for the altar, but took sick and died a few days after. Emile, who had never up to now been in Constantine, had come for the funeral. It is easy to understand how touched Mme. Marot was by this death,--this death of a girl who was already trying on the bridal veil; everyone also knows how under such circumstances intimacy is established even between people who have scarce come to know one another. In addition, Emile was in reality only a boy to Mme. Marot. Shortly after the funeral, Mme. Bonnet went to France, to her relatives. Emile remained in Constantine, at the suburban county house of his late stepfather,--at the Villa Hassim, as it was called in the town,--and began to visit the Marots almost daily. No matter what sort of a chap he may have been, or whatever he may have pretended to be, he was, never the less, very young, very sensitive, and had need of people with whom he might seek shelter for a time. “And isn’t it strange,” said some, “Mme. Marot has become unrecognizable! How animated she has become; how she has improved in looks!”

However, these allusions were unfounded. At first all it amounted to was that her existence became a trifle gayer, and that her girls became more playful and coquettish, for Emile, every minute forgetting his grief and that virus with which, as he thought, the _fin de siècle_ had envenomed him, fussed for hours at a time with them, altogether as their equal. Of course he was, after all, a man, a Parisian, and not altogether of an ordinary nature; he had participated in that life which Parisian writers lead, so inaccessible to common mortals; frequently, with a certain somnambulistic expressiveness, he would read strange but sonorous verses; and, perhaps, it was precisely thanks to him that the step of Mme. Marot became lighter and quicker, her house apparel just the least trifle smarter, and the nuances of her voice kindlier and more mocking; there may have been, after all, a drop of purely feminine joy in her soul over the fact that here was a man whom it was possible to lord it over somewhat, with whom it was possible to speak with a half jesting sententiousness, with that freedom which was so naturally permitted by the difference in their years. And also over the fact that here was one who was so devoted to her entire household,--where, however, the first person for him (this, of course was revealed very quickly) was still none other than she. But then, how commonplace all this is! Yet for the most part he was merely pitiful to her.

He, who sincerely deemed himself a poet born, wanted to resemble a poet in appearance as well; he wore his hair long, and tossed back; he dressed with an artistic sobriety; he had fine brown hair, which went well with his pale face, just as his black clothes did; but this pallor was too anæmic, with a yellow tinge; his eyes glittered constantly, but, because of his enervated face, they seemed feverish; and his chest was so thin and flat, his legs were so thin, his hands so bony, that one became somewhat ill at ease when he would grow immoderately lively and would run through the street or garden, bending somewhat forward, as though he were sliding, in order to hide his defect,--he had one leg shorter than the other. In society he was disagreeable, supercilious; he tried to be enigmatic, negligent; or, at times, exquisitely impertinent, audacious, at others disdainfully absent-minded and independent in all things; but only too frequently he did not sustain his rôles to the end,--he would forget his part and begin speaking with a certain naïve candour and impulsiveness. And, of course, he could not manage to hide his feelings for long, to dissemble as an unbeliever in love and happiness on this earth: the entire house soon knew of his being in love. He had already begun to bore the master of the house with his visits; he began to bring, every day, bouquets of the rarest flowers from his villa, to sit at the Marots’ from morn till night, to recite verses more and more incomprehensible,--the children heard him, more than once, adjuring some one to die with him; while at nights he took to disappearing in the native quarters, in those dives where the Arabs, wrapped up in their dirty white _bournouses_, avidly watch stomach dances and drink the most pungent of liquors.... To put it briefly, not even a month and a half had gone before his inamoration had passed into God only knows what.

His nerves ceased entirely to serve him. Once he sat through almost an entire day in silence; then got up, took his hat, and went out,--and half an hour later was brought in from the street in a dreadful condition: he was writhing in hysterics; he was sobbing so vehemently that he frightened both the children and the domestics. But Mme. Marot, it seemed, did not attach any special significance even to this transport. She herself was restoring him back to consciousness, herself hastily untying his cravat and persuading him to be a man, and she only smiled when he, without any restraint whatsoever before her husband, caught at her hands, covering them with kisses and vowing his disinterested devotion. Still, it was necessary to put an end to all this. And so when Emile, whom the children had soon missed, again made his appearance several days after the fit, already calmed, even though he resembled a man who had gone through a severe illness, Mme. Marot gently told him all that is usually said in such cases.

“My friend, you are really like a son to me,” she had said to him, uttering for the first time this word, “son,” and really feeling almost a maternal tenderness toward him. “Do not, then, put me in a ridiculous and painful position.”

“But I swear to you that you are mistaken!” he exclaimed, with earnest vehemence. “I am only devoted to you; I only want to see you, and no more!”

And he suddenly fell down on his knees,--they were in the garden on a calm, sultry, dusky evening,--impulsively seized her by the hips, on the verge of fainting from passion.... And gazing upon his hair, upon his white, slender neck, she, with anguish and rapture, reflected:

“Ah,--yes, yes, I could have had a son almost the same as he!”

Still, from that time until his very departure for France, he committed no more insane actions. Essentially this was bad; it may have signified that his passion had become deeper. But outwardly everything had changed for the better,--only one other time he could not restrain himself. After dinner one Sunday, in the presence of several strangers, he said to her, without at all reflecting that this might attract attention:

“I most earnestly entreat you to grant me one minute....”

She got up and went with him into the empty, half-dark parlour. He walked up to the window, through which the evening light penetrated from outside in narrow longitudinal streaks, and, looking her straight in the face, said:

“To-day is the anniversary of my father’s death. I love you!”

She turned to go away. Frightened, he hastened to add as she was going away:

“Forgive me,--this is the first time and the last!”

And truly, she heard no new admissions from him. “I was enchanted by her confusion,” he wrote in his diary that evening, in his choice and grandiloquent style; “I vowed to violate her peace no more: for am I not beatified even as it is?” He continued going into the town,--he only slept at the Villa Hassim; and his behaviour varied, but he always observed a greater or lesser degree of seemliness. At times he was, as formerly, inappropriately playful, naïve, romping with the children in the garden; most frequently of all, however, he sat near her and “drank in her presence,” read newspapers and novels to her, and “was happy because she listened to him.” “The children did not interfere with us,” he wrote of these days, “their voices, laughter, bustle, their very beings, seemed to serve as the finest of conductors for our emotions; thanks to them these emotions were still more enchanting; we held the commonest of every day conversations, but something else could be heard in them,--our happiness; yes,--yes; she, too was happy, I affirm this. She liked to hear me declaim; of evenings, from the balcony, we contemplated Constantine lying at our feet in the blue radiance of the moon....” Finally, in August, Mme. Marot insisted upon his going away, returning to his studies,--and won; and _en route_ he entered in his diary: “I am going away! Going away, empoisoned by the bitter delight of parting! She has bestowed upon me, in parting, a bit of velvet ribbon that she had worn about her neck as a girl. When the last minute came, she gave me her blessing, and I saw a humid sparkle in her eyes when she said: ‘Farewell, dear son of mine!...’”

Whether he was right in his conjecture that Mme. Marot also was happy in August, is not known. But that his departure proved painful to her is beyond a doubt. This word “son,” which had stirred her even previously, now took on such a sound for her that she could not hear it in peace. Even formerly, upon meeting friends on her way to church, who would jestingly say to her: “What should you pray about, Mme. Marot; you are without sin and happy as it is!” she had, more than once, replied with a sad smile: “I complain to God because he has deprived me of a son....” Now the thought of a son, of that happiness which he would have ceaselessly given her by his mere existence in this world, never left her. And once, shortly after the departure of Emile, she had said to her husband:

“Now I have comprehended everything! I now know surely, that every mother ought to have a son; that every woman who has no son, if she will but ponder upon herself, will check up her entire life, will see that she is unhappy. You are a man, you cannot feel this, but it is so.... Oh, how tenderly and passionately one can love a son!”

She was very kind to her husband that fall. Occasionally, when she would be left alone with him, she would shyly say to him:

“Hector, listen.... I am ashamed now to ask you about it,--but still.... Do you ever recall the March of ’seventy-six? ... Ah, if only you and I had a son!”

“All this confused me very much,” Monsieur Marot would say subsequently,--“it confused me all the more because she began to grow very thin. She was growing weaker, was becoming more and more silent and gentle in manner. She went less and less often to her friends,--she avoided going to the city unless it were unavoidable.... I do not doubt that some dreadful and incomprehensible ailment was taking possession of her soul and body!” While the _bonne_ added that, whenever Mme. Marot went out of the house that fall, she always put on a thick white veil,--something she had never done before; that, returning home, she would immediately raise her veil in front of a mirror and would intently scrutinize her tired face. It is superfluous to explain that which went on in her soul at this time. But did she want to see Emile, did he write to her, and did she reply to him? He presented two dispatches at court, purporting to be addressed to him, in answer to his letters. One was dated the tenth of November: “You are driving me mad. Calm yourself. Let me have immediate news of yourself.” The other, the twenty-third of December: “No, no, do not come, I implore you. Think of me, love me, as a mother.” But the certainty of these dispatches having been sent by her could not be proven, of course. One thing only is certain,--that from September until January Mme. Marot led a distressed, troubled, painful existence.