Pierre and Luce/12
They had come to the day preceding Palm Sunday. Every day they saw each other for hours together; and they did not even try to hide themselves any more. They no longer had any accounts to render the world. By such gossamer threads were they attached to it and so near to breaking!—Two days before, the German grand offensive had been started. The wave advanced along a front of nearly a hundred kilometers. Fast following emotions caused the City to vibrate: the explosion of Courneuve, which had shaken Paris like an earthquake; the incessant air bomb-alarms which broke in on sleep and wore out nerves. And on this morning of Saturday after a troubled night all those who were not able to close an eyelid until very late were roused again by the thunder of the mysterious cannon buried in the far distance, which, beyond the Somme, launched death in trial shots, as if from another planet. In the course of the earlier shots, which were attributed to the coming back of the aerial Gothas, people had taken refuge in a docile way inside their cellars; but a danger that continues becomes in time a habit to which life accommodates itself; and the peril is not far from turning out an attraction even, when the risks run are common to all and are not too great. Besides, the weather was too lovely; it was a pity to bury one's self alive: before noon all the world was out of doors; and the streets and gardens, the terraces of the cafés had a festival air on this radiant and burning afternoon.
It was this afternoon Pierre and Luce had selected to pass, far from the crowd, in the forest of Chaville. For the past ten days they had existed in an uplifted calm. Profound peace at the heart, and nerves on edge. They had a feeling like existing on an islet, about which rushed a frantic current: a vertigo of sight and hearing carried them away. But with eyelids lowered and hands on ears, when the bolt is pushed on the door, suddenly in one's inner deep there comes a silence, a blinding silence, the moveless summer day, when Joy invisible like a hidden bird sings its song, fresh and liquid, like a brook. O Joy! magical singer, warblings of happiness! I know too well it suffices that a slit should open between my lids or that my finger should cease to push a moment against my ear, and the foam and roar of the stream will follow in. Frail dyke! Just to know it so frail exalts the mood of Joy which I know is threatened. Peace and silence itself take on a passionate look! . . .
The woods once reached, they held each other by the hand. The first days of spring are a new wine that rises to the head. The youthful sun intoxicates with the purest juice of its vine. Light still floats over the leafless wood, and athwart the bare branches the blue eye of the sky fascinates the reason and lulls it to sleep. . . . Scarcely did they endeavor to exchange a few words. Their tongues declined to finish a phrase once started. Their legs were weak and they hated to walk. Under the sunshine and the silence of the woods they tottered. The earth drew them. Just to lie down in the path! Just to let themselves be carried along on the rim of the colossal wheel of the worlds. . . .
They scrambled over the bank of the wayside, entered a thicket and, side by side on the old dead leaves through which violets showed their buds, they stretched themselves out. The first songs of the birds and the distant thuds of the guns mingled with the village bells that were proclaiming the festival of the morrow. The luminous air vibrated hope, faith, love, death. Notwithstanding the solitude they spoke in whispers. Their hearts were oppressed: by happiness? or by sorrow? They could not have told. They were submerged in their dream. Lucile, immobile, stretched out, her arms close to her body, her eyes open, absorbed and gazing at the sky, felt rising in her a hidden suffering which since the morning she forced herself to drive away in order not to mar the joy of the holiday. Pierre laid his head on Luce's knees in the hollow of her skirt like a child who goes to sleep with its face close couched against the warmth of the stomach. And Luce without a word caressed with her hands the ears and eyes, the nose and lips of her beloved one. Dear spiritual hands which seemed, as in the tales about fairies, to have little mouths at the finger-tips! And Pierre, a thinking piano, divined the meaning of the little waves that sped under the tips, the emotions that passed through the soul of his darling. He heard her sigh before she had begun to sigh. Luce had raised herself with her body leaning forward and, with breathing oppressed, she moaned in a whisper:
"Pierre, oh, Pierre!"
Pierre looked at her troubled.
"Oh, Pierre! What are we, anyway? . . . What is it they want of us? . . . What do we want? . . . What is this going on within us? These guns, these birds, this war, this love. . . . These hands, body, eyes. . . . Where am I? . . . and what am I?"
Pierre, who did not recognize this expression of bewilderment in her, wanted to take her in his arms. But she repulsed him.
"No! No!"
And hiding her face in her hands she thrust face and hands together into the grass. Pierre was upset and begged of her:
"Luce! . . ."
He thrust his head close to that of Luce.
"Luce," he repeated, "what's the matter with you? Is it against me?"
She raised her head.
"No!"
And he saw tears in her eyes.
"Are you in trouble?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Tell me . . ."
"Ah, I'm ashamed," she said. . . .
"Ashamed? About what?"
"About everything."
She fell silent.
Since the morning she had been haunted by a sorrowful memory, painful and degrading; her mother, crazed by the poison that crept about in the promiscuous conditions of the factories made for luxury and for murder, in those human vats, no longer kept up any restraint upon herself. At home she had indulged in a scene of furious jealousy with her lover, without caring if her daughter heard; and Luce had learned that her mother was with child. For her this was like a blot that extended to herself, whose entire love, whose love for Pierre was polluted thereby. That is why when Pierre had approached her she had repulsed him; she was ashamed of herself and of him. . . . Ashamed of him? Poor Pierre! . . .
He remained there, humiliated, and not daring to budge any more. She was struck with remorse, smiled in the midst of tears and, resting her head on Pierre's knees, said:
"It is my turn!"
Still disquieted, Pierre smoothed her hair as one pets a cat. He murmured:
"Luce, what is all this? Tell me . . ."
"Nothing," she responded. "I've seen sorrowful things."
He had too much respect for her secrets to insist. But Luce went on a few minutes later:
"Ah, there are moments . . . One is ashamed to belong to mankind."
Pierre trembled.
"Yes," said he.
And after a silence, bending over, he said very low:
"Forgive me!"
Luce sprang up impetuously, threw herself on Pierre's neck, repeating:
"Forgive me!"
And their mouths found each other.
The two children felt the need of consoling one another, both of them. Without saying it aloud they were thnking:
"Luckily we are going to die! The most frightful thing would be to become one of those men who are proud of being man—to destroy, to render vile . . ."
Lips touching lips, eyelashes brushing eyelashes, they plunged their gaze one in the other, smiling and with a tender pity. They did not tire of that divine sentiment which is the purest form of love. At last they tore themselves from their contemplation and Luce, with eyes again serene, perceived once more the gentle hue of the sky, the sweetness of the renewing trees and the breath of flowers.
"How lovely it all is!" she exclaimed.
She was thinking:
"Why are things so beautiful? And we so poor, so mediocre, so ugly! (unless it be you, my love, unless it be you!) . . ."
She gazed at Pierre again:
"Pshaw! What are others to me?"
And with the magnificent illogicality of love she burst out laughing, sprang up with a leap, rushed into the wood and cried: "Catch me, catch me!"
They played like two children all the rest of the day. And when they were very tired they returned with slow steps toward the valley filled like a basket with the sheaves of the setting sun. Everything they savored seemed new to them—with one heart for two, with two bodies for one.