In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (61 page)

On our way back to Balbec, of those of the fair strangers to whom he
had introduced me I would repeat to myself without a moment's
interruption, and yet almost unconsciously: "What a delightful woman!"
as one chimes in with the refrain of a song. I admit that these words
were prompted rather by the state of my nerves than by any lasting
judgment. It was nevertheless true that if I had had a thousand
francs on me and if there had still been a jeweller's shop open at
that hour, I should have bought the lady a ring. When the successive
hours of our life are thus displayed against too widely dissimilar
backgrounds, we find that we give away too much of ourselves to all
sorts of people who next day will not interest us in the least. But we
feel that we are still responsible for what we said to them overnight,
and that we must honour our promises.

As on these evenings I came back later than usual to the hotel, it was
with joy that I recognised, in a room no longer hostile, the bed on
which, on the day of my arrival, I had supposed that it would always
be impossible for me to find any rest, whereas now my weary limbs
turned to it for support; so that, in turn, thighs, hips, shoulders
burrowed into, trying to adhere at every angle to, the sheets that
covered its mattress, as if my fatigue, like a sculptor, had wished to
take a cast of an entire human body. But I could not go to sleep; I
felt the approach of morning; peace of mind, health of body, were no
longer mine. In my distress it seemed that never should I recapture
them. I should have had to sleep for a long time if I were to overtake
them. But then, had I begun to doze, I must in any event be awakened
in a couple of hours by the symphonic concert on the beach. Suddenly
I was asleep, I had fallen into that deep slumber in which are opened
to us a return to childhood, the recapture of past years, of lost
feelings, the disincarnation, the transmigration of the soul, the
evoking of the dead, the illusions of madness, retrogression towards
the most elementary of the natural kingdoms (for we say that we often
see animals in our dreams, but we forget almost always that we are
ourself then an animal deprived of that reasoning power which projects
upon things the light of certainty; we present on the contrary to the
spectacle of life only a dubious vision, destroyed afresh every moment
by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as
one projection of a magic lantern fades before the next as we change
the slide), all those mysteries which we imagine ourselves not to know
and into which we are in reality initiated almost every night, as we
are into the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection.
Rendered more vagabond by the difficulty of digesting my Rivebelle
dinner, the successive and flickering illumination of shadowy zones of
my past made of me a being whose supreme happiness would have been
that of meeting Legrandin, with whom I had just been talking in my
dream.

And then, even my own life was entirely hidden from me by a new
setting, like the 'drop' lowered right at the front of the stage
before which, while the scene snifters are busy behind, actors appear
in a fresh 'turn.' The turn in which I was now cast for a part was in
the manner of an Oriental fairy–tale; I retained no knowledge of my
past or of myself, on account of the intense proximity of this
interpolated scenery; I was merely a person who received the bastinado
and underwent various punishments for a crime the nature of which I
could not distinguish, though it was actually that of having taken too
much port wine. Suddenly I awoke and discovered that, thanks to a long
sleep, I had not heard a note of the concert. It was already
afternoon; I verified this by my watch after several efforts to sit up
in bed, efforts fruitless at first and interrupted by backward falls
on to my pillow, but those short falls which are a sequel of sleep as
of other forms of intoxication, whether due to wine or to
convalescence; besides, before I had so much as looked at the time, I
was certain that it was past midday. Last night I had been nothing
more than an empty vessel, without weight, and (since I must first
have gone to bed to be able to keep still, and have been asleep to be
able to keep silent) had been unable to refrain from moving about and
talking; I had no longer any stability, any centre of gravity, I was
set in motion and it seemed that I might have continued on my dreary
course until I reached the moon. But if, while I slept, my eyes had
not seen the time, my body had nevertheless contrived to calculate it,
had measured the hours; not on a dial superficially marked and
figured, but by the steadily growing weight of all my replenished
forces which, like, a powerful clockwork, it had allowed, notch by
notch, to descend from my brain into the rest of my body in which
there had risen now to above my knees the unbroken abundance of their
store. If it is true that the sea was once upon a time our native
element, into which we must plunge our cooling blood if we are to
recover our strength, it is the same with the oblivion, the mental
non–existence of sleep; we seem then to absent ourselves for a few
hours from Time, but the forces which we have gathered in that
interval without expending them, measure it by their quantity as
accurately as the pendulum of the clock or the crumbling pyramid of
the sandglass. Nor does one emerge more easily from such sleep than
from a prolonged spell of wakefulness, so strongly does everything
tend to persist; and if it is true that certain narcotics make us
sleep, to have slept for any time is an even stronger narcotic, after
which we have great difficulty in making ourselves wake up. Like a
sailor who sees plainly the harbour in which he can moor his vessel,
still tossed by the waves, I had a quite definite idea of looking at
the time and of getting up, but my body was at every moment cast back
upon the tide of sleep; the landing was difficult, and before I
attained a position in which I could reach my watch and confront with
its time that indicated by the wealth of accumulated material which my
stiffened limbs had at their disposal, I fell back two or three times
more upon my pillow.

At length I could reach and read it: "Two o'clock in the afternoon!" I
rang; but at once I returned to a slumber which, this time, must have
lasted infinitely longer, if I was to judge by the refreshment, the
vision of an immense night overpassed, which I found on awakening. And
yet as my awakening was caused by the entry of Françoise, and as her
entry had been prompted by my ringing the bell, this second sleep
which, it seemed to me, must have been longer than the other, and had
brought me so much comfort and forgetfulness, could not have lasted
for more than half a minute.

My grandmother opened the door of my bedroom; I asked her various
questions about the Legrandin family.

It is not enough to say that I had returned to tranquillity and
health, for it was more than a mere interval of space that had divided
them from me yesterday, I had had all night long to struggle against a
contrary tide, and now I not only found myself again in their
presence, they had once more entered into me. At certain definite and
still somewhat painful points beneath the surface of my empty head
which would one day be broken, letting my ideas escape for all time,
those ideas had once again taken their proper places and resumed that
existence by which hitherto, alas, they had failed to profit.

Once again I had escaped from the impossibility of sleeping, from the
deluge, the shipwreck of my nervous storms. I feared now not at all
the menaces that had loomed over me the evening before, when I was
dismantled of repose. A new life was opening before me; without making
a single movement, for I was still shattered, although quite alert and
well, I savoured my weariness with a light heart; it had isolated and
broken asunder the bones of my legs and arms, which I could feel
assembled before me, ready to cleave together, and which I was to
raise to life merely by singing, like the builder in the fable.

Suddenly I thought of the fair girl with the sad expression whom I had
seen at Rivebelle, where she had looked at me for a moment. Many
others, in the course of the evening, had seemed to me attractive; now
she alone arose from the dark places of my memory. I had felt that she
noticed me, had expected one of the waiters to come to me with a
whispered message from her. Saint–Loup did not know her and fancied
that she was respectable. It would be very difficult to see her, to
see her constantly. But I was prepared to make any sacrifice, I
thought now only of her. Philosophy distinguishes often between free
and necessary acts. Perhaps there is none to the necessity of which we
are more completely subjected than that which, by virtue of an
ascending power held in check during the act itself, makes so
unfailingly (once our mind is at rest) spring up a memory that was
levelled with other memories by the distributed pressure of our
indifference, and rush to the surface, because unknown to us it
contained, more than any of the others, a charm of which we do not
become aware until the following day. And perhaps there is not,
either, any act so free, for it is still unprompted by habit, by that
sort of mental hallucination which, when we are in love, facilitates
the invariable reappearance of the image of one particular person.

This was the day immediately following that on which I had seen file
past me against a background of sea the beautiful procession of young
girls. I put questions about them to a number of the visitors in the
hotel, people who came almost every year to Balbec. They could tell me
nothing. Later on, a photograph shewed me why. Who could ever
recognise now in them, scarcely and yet quite definitely beyond an age
in which one changes so utterly, that amorphous, delicious mass, still
wholly infantine, of little girls who, only a few years back, might
have been seen sitting in a ring on the sand round a tent; a sort of
white and vague constellation in which one would have distinguished a
pair of eyes that sparkled more than the rest, a mischievous face,
flaxen hair, only to lose them again and to confound them almost at
once in the indistinct and milky nebula.

No doubt, in those earlier years that were still so recent, it was
not, as it had been yesterday when they appeared for the first time
before me, one's impression of the group, but the group itself that
had been lacking in clearness. Then those children, mere babies, had
been still at that elementary stage in their formation when
personality has not set its seal on every face. Like those primitive
organisms in which the individual barely exists by itself, consists in
the reef rather than in the coral insects that compose it, they were
still pressed one against another. Sometimes one pushed her neighbour
over, and then a wild laugh, which seemed the sole manifestation of
their personal life, convulsed them all at once, obliterating,
confounding those indefinite, grinning faces in the congealment of a
single cluster, scintillating and tremulous. In an old photograph of
themselves, which they were one day to give me, and which I have kept
ever since, their infantile troop already presents the same number of
participants as, later, their feminine procession; one can see from it
that their presence must, even then, have made on the beach an unusual
mark which forced itself on the attention; but one cannot recognise
them individually in it save by a process of reasoning, leaving a
clear field to all the transformations possible during girlhood, up to
the point at which one reconstructed form would begin to encroach upon
another individuality, which must be identified also, and whose
handsome face, owing to the accessories of a large build and curly
hair, may quite possibly have been, once, that wizened and impish
little grin which the photograph album presents to us; and the
distance traversed in a short interval of time by the physical
characteristics of each of these girls making of them a criterion too
vague to be of any use, whereas what they had in common and, so to
speak, collectively, had at that early date been strongly marked, it
sometimes happened that even their most intimate friends mistook one
for another in this photograph, so much so that the question could in
the last resort be settled only by some detail of costume which one of
them could be certain that she herself, and not any of the others, had
worn. Since those days, so different from the day on which I had just
seen them strolling along the 'front,' so different and yet so close
in time, they still gave way to fits of laughter, as I had observed
that afternoon, but to laughter of a kind that was no longer the
intermittent and almost automatic laughter of childhood, a spasmodic
discharge which, in those days, had continually sent their heads
dipping out of the circle, as the clusters of minnows in the Vivonne
used to scatter and vanish only to gather again a moment later; each
countenance was now mistress of itself, their eyes were fixed on the
goal towards which they were marching; and it had taken, yesterday,
the indecision and tremulousness of my first impression to make me
confuse vaguely (as their childish hilarity and the old photograph had
confused) the spores now individualised and disjoined of the pale
madrepore.

Repeatedly, I dare say, when pretty girls went by, I had promised
myself that I would see them again. As a rule, people do not appear a
second time; moreover our memory, which speedily forgets their
existence, would find it difficult to recall their appearance; our
eyes would not recognise them, perhaps, and in the meantime we have
seen new girls go by, whom we shall not see again either. But at other
times, and this was what was to happen with the pert little band at
Balbec, chance brings them back insistently before our eyes. Chance
seems to us then a good and useful thing, for we discern in it as it
were rudiments of organisation, of an attempt to arrange our life; and
it makes easy to us, inevitable, and sometimes—after interruptions
that have made us hope that we may cease to remember—cruel, the
retention in our minds of images to the possession of which we shall
come in time to believe that we were predestined, and which but for
chance we should from the very first have managed to forget, like so
many others, with so little difficulty.