In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (38 page)

There is perhaps nothing that gives us so strong an impression of the
reality of the external world as the difference in the positions,
relative to ourselves, of even a quite unimportant person before we
have met him and after. I was the same man who had taken, that
afternoon, the little train from Balbec to the coast, I carried in my
body the same consciousness But on that consciousness, in the place
where, at six o'clock, there had been, with the impossibility of
forming any idea of the manager, the Grand Hotel or its occupants, a
vague and timorous impatience for the moment at which I should reach
my destination, were to be found now the pustules excised from the
face of the cosmopolitan manager (he was, as a matter of fact, a
naturalised Monegasque, although—as he himself put it, for he was
always using expressions which he thought distinguished without
noticing that they were incorrect—'of Rumanian originality'), his
action in ringing for the lift, the lift–boy himself, a whole frieze
of puppet–show characters issuing from that Pandora's box which was
the Grand Hotel, undeniable, irremovable, and, like everything that is
realised, sterilising. But at least this change, which I had done
nothing to bring about, proved to me that something had happened which
was external to myself—however devoid of interest that thing might
be—and I was like a traveller who, having had the sun in his face
when he started, concludes that he has been for so many hours on the
road when he finds the sun behind him. I was half dead with
exhaustion, I was burning with fever; I would gladly have gone to bed,
but I had no night–things. I should have liked at least to lie down
for a little while on the bed, but what good would that have done me,
seeing that I should not have been able to find any rest there for
that mass of sensations which is for each of us his sentient if not
his material body, and that the unfamiliar objects which encircled
that body, forcing it to set its perceptions on the permanent footing
of a vigilant and defensive guard, would have kept my sight, my
hearing, all my senses in a position as cramped and comfortless (even
if I had stretched out my legs) as that of Cardinal La Balue in the
cage in which he could neither stand nor sit. It is our noticing them
that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them
away again and clears a space for us. Space there was none for me in
my bedroom (mine in name only) at Balbec; it was full of things which
did not know me, which flung back at me the distrustful look that I
had cast at them, and, without taking any heed of my existence, shewed
that I was interrupting the course of theirs. The clock—whereas at
home I heard my clock tick only a few seconds in a week, when I was
coming out of some profound meditation—continued without a moment's
interruption to utter, in an unknown tongue, a series of observations
which must have been most uncomplimentary to myself, for the violet
curtains listened to them without replying, but in an attitude such as
people adopt who shrug their shoulders to indicate that the sight of a
third person irritates them. They gave to this room with its lofty
ceiling a semi–historical character which might have made it a
suitable place for the assassination of the Duc de Guise, and
afterwards for parties of tourists personally conducted by one of
Messrs. Thomas Cook and Son's guides, but for me to sleep in—no. I
was tormented by the presence of some little bookcases with glass
fronts which ran along the walls, but especially by a large mirror
with feet which stood across one corner, for I felt that until it had
left the room there would be no possibility of rest for me there. I
kept raising my eyes—which the things in my room in Paris disturbed
no more than did my eyelids themselves, for they were merely
extensions of my organs, an enlargement of myself—towards the
fantastically high ceiling of this belvedere planted upon the summit
of the hotel which my grandmother had chosen for me; and in that
region more intimate than those in which we see and hear, that region
in which we test the quality of odours, almost in the very heart of my
inmost self, the smell of flowering grasses next launched its
offensive against my last feeble line of trenches, where I stood up to
it, not without tiring myself still further, with the futile incessant
defence of an anxious sniffing. Having no world, no room, no body now
that was not menaced by the enemies thronging round me, invaded to the
very bones by fever, I was utterly alone; I longed to die. Then my
grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my ebbing heart there
opened at once an infinity of space.

She was wearing a loose cambric gown which she put on at home whenever
any of us was ill (because she felt more comfortable in it, she used
to say, for she always ascribed to her actions a selfish motive), and
which was, for tending us, for watching by our beds, her servant's
livery, her nurse's uniform, her religious habit. But whereas the
trouble that servants, nurses, religious take, their kindness to us,
the merits that we discover in them and the gratitude that we owe them
all go to increase the impression that we have of being, in their
eyes, some one different, of feeling that we are alone, keeping in our
own hands the control over our thoughts, our will to live, I knew,
when I was with my grandmother, that, however great the misery that
there was in me, it would be received by her with a pity still more
vast; that everything that was mine, my cares, my wishes, would be, in
my grandmother, supported upon a desire to save and prolong my life
stronger than was my own; and my thoughts were continued in her
without having to undergo any deflection, since they passed from my
mind into hers without change of atmosphere or of personality.
And—like a man who tries to fasten his necktie in front of a glass
and forgets that the end which he sees reflected is not on the side to
which he raises his hand, or like a dog that chases along the ground
the dancing shadow of an insect in the air—misled by her appearance
in the body as we are apt to be in this world where we have no direct
perception of people's souls, I threw myself into the arms of my
grandmother and clung with my lips to her face as though I had access
thus to that immense heart which she opened to me. And when I felt my
mouth glued to her cheeks, to her brow, I drew from them something so
beneficial, so nourishing that I lay in her arms as motionless, as
solemn, as calmly gluttonous as a babe at the breast.

At last I let go, and lay and gazed, and could not tire of gazing at
her large face, as clear in its outline as a fine cloud, glowing and
serene, behind which I could discern the radiance of her tender love.
And everything that received, in however slight a degree, any share of
her sensations, everything that could be said to belong in any way to
her was at once so spiritualised, so sanctified, that with
outstretched hands I smoothed her dear hair, still hardly grey, with
as much respect, precaution, comfort as if I had actually been
touching her goodness. She found a similar pleasure in taking any
trouble that saved me one, and in a moment of immobility and rest for
my weary limbs something so delicious that when, having seen that she
wished to help me with my undressing and to take my boots off, I made
as though to stop her and began to undress myself, with an imploring
gaze she arrested my hands as they fumbled with the top buttons of my
coat and boots.

"Oh, do let me!" she begged. "It is such a joy for your Granny. And be
sure you knock on the wall if you want anything in the night. My bed
is just on the other side, and the partition is, quite thin. Just give
a knock now, as soon as you are ready, so that we shall know where we
are."

And, sure enough, that evening I gave three knocks—a signal which,
the week after, when I was ill, I repeated every morning for several
days, because my grandmother wanted me to have some milk early. Then,
when I thought that I could hear her stirring, so that she should not
be kept waiting but might, the moment she had brought me the milk, go
to sleep again, I ventured on three little taps, timidly, faintly, but
for all that distinctly, for if I was afraid of disturbing her,
supposing that I had been mistaken and that she was still asleep, I
should not have wished her either to lie awake listening for a summons
which she had not at once caught and which I should not have the
courage to repeat. And scarcely had I given my taps than I heard
three others, in a different intonation from mine, stamped with a calm
authority, repeated twice over so that there should be no mistake, and
saying to me plainly: "Don't get excited; I heard you; I shall be with
you in a minute!" and shortly afterwards my grandmother appeared. I
explained to her that I had been afraid that she would not hear me, or
might think that it was some one in the room beyond who was lapping;
at which she smiled:

"Mistake my poor chick's knocking for anyone else! Why, Granny
could tell it among a thousand! Do you suppose there's anyone else in
the world who's such a silly–billy, with such feverish little
knuckles, so afraid of waking me up and of not making me understand?
Even if he just gave the least scratch, Granny could tell her mouse's
sound at once, especially such a poor miserable little mouse as mine
is. I could hear it just now, trying to make up its mind, and rustling
the bedclothes, and going through all its tricks."

She pushed open the shutters; where a wing of the hotel jutted out at
right angles to my window, the sun was already installed upon the
roof, like a slater who is up betimes, and starts early and works
quietly so as not to rouse the sleeping town, whose stillness seems to
enhance his activity. She told me what o'clock, what sort of day it
was; that it was not worth while my getting up and coming to the
window, that there was a mist over the sea; if the baker's shop had
opened yet; what the vehicle was that I could hear passing. All that
brief, trivial curtain–raiser, that negligible
introit
of a new day,
performed without any spectator, a little scrap of life which was only
for our two selves, which I should have no hesitation in repeating,
later on, to Françoise or even to strangers, speaking of the fog
'which you could have cut with a knife at six o'clock that morning,
with the ostentation of one who was boasting not of a piece of
knowledge that he had acquired but of a mark of affection shewn to
himself alone; dear morning moment, opened like a symphony by the
rhythmical dialogue of my three taps, to which the thin wall of my
bedroom, steeped in love and joy, grown melodious, immaterial, singing
like the angelic choir, responded with three other taps, eagerly
awaited, repeated once and again, in which it contrived to waft to me
the soul of my grandmother, whole and perfect, and the promise of her
coming, with a swiftness of annunciation and melodic accuracy. But on
this first night after our arrival, when my grandmother had left me, I
began again to feel as I had felt, the day before, in Paris, at the
moment of leaving home. Perhaps this fear that I had—and shared with
so many of my fellow–men—of sleeping in a strange room, perhaps this
fear is only the most humble, obscure, organic, almost unconscious
form of that great and desperate resistance set up by the things that
constitute the better part of our present life towards our mentally
assuming, by accepting it as true, the formula of a future in which
those things are to have no part; a resistance which was at the root
of the horror that I had so often been made to feel by the thought
that my parents must, one day, die, that the stern necessity of life
might oblige me to live remote from Gilberte, or simply to settle
permanently in a place where I should never see any of my old friends;
a resistance which was also at the root of the difficulty that I found
in imagining my own death, or a survival such as Bergotte used to
promise to mankind in his books, a survival in which I should not be
allowed to take with me my memories, my frailties, my character, which
did not easily resign themselves to the idea of ceasing to be, and
desired for me neither annihilation nor an eternity in which they
would have no part.

When Swann had said to me, in Paris one day when I felt particularly
unwell: "You ought to go off to one of those glorious islands in the
Pacific; you'd never come back again if you did." I should have liked
to answer: "But then I shall not see your daughter any more; I shall
be living among people and things she has never seen." And yet my
better judgment whispered: "What difference can that make, since you
are not going to be affected by it? When M. Swann tells you that you
will not come back he means by that that you will not want to come
back, and if you don't want to that is because you will be happier out
there." For my judgment was aware that Habit—Habit which was even now
setting to work to make me like this unfamiliar lodging, to change the
position of the mirror, the shade of the curtains, to stop the
clock—undertakes as well to make dear to us the companions whom at
first we disliked, to give another appearance to their faces, to make
attractive the sound of their voices, to modify the inclinations of
their hearts. It is true that these new friendships for places and
people are based upon forgetfulness of the old; but what my better
judgment was thinking was simply that I could look without
apprehension along the vista of a life in which I should be for ever
separated from people all memory of whom I should lose, and it was by
way of consolation that my mind was offering to my heart a promise of
oblivion which succeeded only in sharpening the edge of its despair.
Not that the heart also is not bound in time, when separation is
complete, to feel the anodyne effect of habit; but until then it will
continue to suffer. And our dread of a future in which we must forego
the sight of faces, the sound of voices that we love, friends from
whom we derive to–day our keenest joys, this dread, far from being
dissipated, is intensified, if to the grief of such a privation we
reflect that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation
an even more cruel grief; not to feel it as a grief at all—to remain
indifferent; for if that should occur, our ego would have changed, it
would then be not merely the attractiveness of our family, pur
mistress, our friends that had ceased to environ us, but our affection
for them; it would have been so completely eradicated from our heart,
in which to–day it is a conspicuous element, that we should be able to
enjoy that life apart from them the very thought of which to–day makes
us recoil in horror; so that it would be in a real sense the death of
ourselves, a death followed, it is true, by resurrection but in a
different ego, the life, the love of which are beyond the reach of
those elements of the existing ego that are doomed to die. It is
they—even the meanest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the
dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom—that grow stubborn and
refuse, in acts of rebellion which we must recognise to be a secret,
partial, tangible and true aspect of our resistance to death, of the
long resistance, desperate and daily renewed, to a fragmentary and
gradual death such as interpolates itself throughout the whole course
of our life, tearing away from us at every moment a shred of
ourselves, dead matter on which new cells will multiply, and grow. And
for a neurotic nature such as mine, one that is to say in which the
intermediaries, the nerves, perform their functions badly—fail to
arrest on its way to the consciousness, allow indeed to penetrate
there, distinct, exhausting, innumerable, agonising, the plaint of
those most humble elements of the personality which are about to
disappear—the anxiety and alarm which I felt as I lay outstretched
beneath that strange and too lofty ceiling were but the protest of an
affection that survived in me for a ceiling that was familiar and low.
Doubtless this affection too would disappear, and another have taken
its place (when death, and then another life, would, in the guise of
Habit, have performed their double task); but until its annihilation,
every night it would suffer afresh, and on this first night
especially, confronted with a future already realised in which there
would no longer be any place for it, it rose in revolt, it tortured me
with the sharp sound of its lamentations whenever my straining eyes,
powerless to turn from what was wounding them, endeavoured to fasten
their gaze upon that inaccessible ceiling.