In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (76 page)

But to a great extent our astonishment springs from the other person's
presenting to us also a face that is the same as before. It would
require so immense an effort to reconstruct everything that has been
imparted to us by things other than ourselves—were it only the taste
of a fruit—that no sooner is the impression received than we begin
imperceptibly to descend the slope of memory and, without noticing
anything, in a very short time, we have come a long way from what we
actually felt. So that every fresh encounter is a sort of
rectification, which brings us back to what we really did see. We have
no longer any recollection of this, to such an extent does what we
call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him. But so
long as we can still see at the moment when the forgotten aspect
appears, we recognise it, we are obliged to correct the straying line;
thus the perpetual and fruitful surprise which made so salutary and
invigorating for me these daily outings with the charming damsels of
the sea shore, consisted fully as much in recognition as in discovery.
When there is added to this the agitation aroused by what these girls
were to me, which was never quite what I had supposed, and meant that
my expectancy of our next meeting resembled not so much my expectancy
the time before as the still throbbing memory of our latest
conversation, it will be realised that each of our excursions made a
violent interruption in the course of my thoughts and moved them clean
out of the direction which, in the solitude of my own room, I had been
able to trace for them at my leisure. That plotted course was
forgotten, had ceased to exist, when I returned home buzzing like a
hive of bees with remarks which had disquieted me when I heard them
and were still echoing in my brain. The other person is destroyed when
we cease to see him; after which his next appearance means a fresh
creation of him, different from that which immediately preceded it, if
not from them all. For the minimum variation that is to be found in
these creations is duality. If we have in mind a strong and searching
glance, a bold manner, it is inevitably, next time, by a half–languid
profile, a sort of dreamy gentleness, overlooked by us in our previous
impression, that we shall be, on meeting him again, astonished, that
is to say almost solely struck. In confronting our memory with the new
reality it is this that will mark the extent of our disappointment or
surprise, will appear to us like the revised version of an earlier
reality warning us that we had not remembered it correctly. In its
turn, the facial aspect neglected the time before, and for that very
reason the most striking this time, the most real, the most
documentary, will become a matter for dreams and memories. It is a
languorous and rounded profile, a gentle, dreamy expression which we
shall now desire to see again. And then, next time, such resolution,
such strength of character as there may be in the piercing eyes, the
pointed nose, the tight lips, will come to correct the discrepancy
between our desire and the object to which it has supposed itself
to correspond. It is understood, of course, that this loyalty to the
first and purely physical impressions which I formed afresh at each
encounter with my friends did not involve only their facial
appearance, since the reader has seen that I was sensible also of
their voices, more disquieting still, perhaps (for not only does a
voice offer the same strange and sensuous surfaces as a face, it
issues from that unknown, inaccessible region the mere thought of
which sets the mind swimming with unattainable kisses), their voices
each like the unique sound of a little instrument into which the
player put all her artistry and which was found only in her
possession. Traced by a casual inflexion, a sudden deep chord in one
of their voices would astonish me when I recognised after having
forgotten it. So much so that the corrections which after every fresh
meeting I was obliged to make so as to ensure absolute accuracy were
as much those of a tuner or singing–master as a draughtsman's.

As for the harmonious cohesion in which had been neutralised for some
time, by the resistance that each brought to bear against the
expansion of the others, the several waves of sentiment set in motion
in me by these girls, it was broken in Albertine's favour one
afternoon when we were playing the game of 'ferret.' It was in a
little wood on the cliff. Stationed between two girls, strangers to
the little band, whom the band had brought in its train because we
wanted that day to have a bigger party than usual, I gazed enviously
at Albertine's neighbour, a young man, saying to myself that if I had
been in his place I could have been touching my friend's hands all
those miraculous moments which might perhaps never recur, and that
this would have been but the first stage in a great advance. Already,
by itself, and even without the consequences which it would probably
have involved, the contact of Albertine's hands would have been
delicious to me. Not that I had never seen prettier hands than hers.
Even in the group of her friends, those of Andrée, slender hands and
much more finely modelled, had as it were a private life of their own,
obedient to the commands of their mistress, but independent, and used
often to strain out before her like a leash of thoroughbred
greyhounds, with lazy pauses, long dreams, sudden stretchings of a
joint, seeing which Elstir had made a number of studies of these
hands. And in one of them, in which you saw Andrée warming her hands
at the fire, they had, with the light behind them, the gilded
transparency of two autumn leaves. But, plumper than these, the hands
of Albertine would yield for a moment, then resist the pressure of the
hand that clasped them, giving a sensation that was quite peculiar to
themselves. The act of pressing Albertine's hand had a sensual
sweetness which was in keeping somehow with the rosy, almost mauve
colouring of her skin. That pressure seemed to allow you to penetrate
into the girl's being, to plumb the depths of her senses, like the
ringing sound of her laughter, indecent as may be the cooing of doves
or certain animal cries. She was the sort of woman with whom shaking
hands affords so much pleasure that one feels grateful to civilisation
for having made of the handclasp a lawful act between young men and
girls when they meet. If the arbitrary code of good manners had
replaced the clasp of hands by some other gesture, I should have
gazed, day after day, at the unattainable hands of Albertine with a
curiosity to know the feel of them as ardent as was my curiosity to
learn the savour of her cheeks. But in the pleasure of holding her
hand unrestrictedly in mine, had I been next to her at 'ferret' I did
not envisage that pleasure alone; what avowals, declarations silenced
hitherto by my bashfulness, I could have conveyed by certain pressures
of hand on hand; on her side, how easy it would have been for her, in
responding by other pressures, to shew me that she accepted; what
complicity, what a vista of happiness stood open! My love would be
able to make more advance in a few minutes spent thus by her side than
it had yet made in all the time that I had known her. Feeling that
they would last but a short time, were rapidly nearing their end,
since presumably we were not going on much longer with this game, and
that once it was over I should be too late, I could not keep in my
place for another moment. I let myself deliberately be caught with
the ring, and, having gone into the middle, when the ring passed I
pretended not to see it but followed its course with my eyes, waiting
for the moment when it should come into the hands of the young man
next to Albertine, who herself, pealing with helpless laughter, and in
the excitement and pleasure of the game, was blushing like a rose.
"Why, we really are in the Fairy Wood!" said Andrée to me, pointing to
the trees that grew all round, with a smile in her eyes which was
meant only for me and seemed to pass over the heads of the other
players, as though we two alone were clever enough to double our
parts, and make, in connexion with the game we were playing, a remark
of a poetic nature. She even carried the delicacy of her fancy so far
as to sing half–unconsciously: "The Ferret of the Wood has passed this
way, Sweet Ladies; he has passed by this way, the Ferret of Fairy
Wood!" like those people who cannot visit Trianon without getting up a
party in Louis XVI costume, or think in effective to have a song sung
to its original setting. I should no doubt have been sorry that I
could see no charm in this piece of mimicry, had I had time to think
of it. But my thoughts were all elsewhere. The players began to shew
surprise at my stupidity in never getting the ring. I was looking at
Albertine, so pretty, so indifferent, so gay, who, though she little
knew it, was to be my neighbour when at last I should catch the ring
in the right hands, thanks to a stratagem which she did not suspect,
and would certainly have resented if she had. In the heat of the game
her long hair had become loosened, and fell in curling locks over her
cheeks on which it served to intensify, by its dry brownness, the
carnation pink. "You have the tresses of Laura Dianti, of Eleanor of
Guyenne, and of her descendant so beloved of Chateaubriand. You ought
always to wear your hair half down like that," I murmured in her ear
as an excuse for drawing close to her. Suddenly the ring passed to her
neighbour. I sprang upon him at once, forced open his hands and seized
it; he was obliged now to take my place inside the circle, while I
took his beside Albertine. A few minutes earlier I had been envying
this young man, when I saw that his hands as they slipped over the
cord were constantly brushing against hers. Now that my turn was
come, too shy to seek, too much moved to enjoy this contact, I no
longer felt anything save the rapid and painful beating of my heart.
At one moment Albertine leaned towards me, with an air of connivance,
her round and rosy face, making a show of having the ring, so as to
deceive the ferret, and keep him from looking in the direction in
which she was just going to pass it. I realised at once that this was
the sole object of Albertine's mysterious, confidential gaze, but I
was a little shocked to see thus kindle in her eyes the image—purely
fictitious, invented to serve the needs of the game—of a secret, an
understanding between her and myself which did not exist, but which
from that moment seemed to me to be possible and would have been
divinely sweet. While I was still being swept aloft by this thought, I
felt a slight pressure of Albertine's hand against mine, and her
caressing finger slip under my finger along the cord, and I saw her,
at the same moment, give me a wink which she tried to make pass
unperceived by the others. At once, a mass of hopes, invisible
hitherto by myself, crystallised within me. "She is taking advantage
of the game to let me feel that she really does love me," I thought to
myself, in an acme of joy, from which no sooner had I reached it than
I fell, on hearing Albertine mutter furiously: "Why can't you take it?
I've been shoving it at you for the last hour." Stunned with grief, I
let go the cord, the ferret saw that ring and swooped down on it, and
I had to go back into the middle, where I stood helpless, in despair,
looking at the unbridled rout which continued to circle round me,
stung by the jeering shouts of all the players, obliged, in reply, to
laugh when I had so little mind for laughter, while Albertine kept on
repeating: "People can't play if they don't pay attention, and spoil
the game for the others. He shan't be asked again when we're going to
play, Andrée; if he is, I don't come." Andrée, with a mind above the
game, still chanting her 'Fairy Wood' which, in a spirit of imitation,
Rosemonde had taken up too, but without conviction, sought to make a
diversion from Albertine's reproaches by saying to me: "We're quite
close to those old Creuniers you wanted so much to see. Look, I'll
take you there by a dear little path, and we'll leave these silly
idiots to go on playing like babies in the nursery." As Andrée was
extremely nice to me, as we went along I said to her everything about
Albertine that seemed calculated to make me attractive to the latter.
Andrée replied that she too was very fond of Albertine, thought her
charming; in spite of which the compliments that I was paying to her
friend did not seem altogether to please her. Suddenly, in the little
sunken path, I stopped short, touched to the heart by an exquisite
memory of my childhood. I had just recognised, by the fretted and
glossy leaves which it thrust out towards me, a hawthorn–bush,
flowerless, alas, now that spring was over. Around me floated the
atmosphere of far–off Months of Mary, of Sunday afternoons, of
beliefs, or errors long ago forgotten. I wanted to stay it in its
passage. I stood still for a moment, and Andrée, with a charming
divination of what was in my mind, left me to converse with the leaves
of the bush. I asked them for news of the flowers, those hawthorn
flowers that were like merry little girls, headstrong, provocative,
pious. "The young ladies have been gone from here for a long time
now," the leaves told me. And perhaps they thought that, for the great
friend of those young ladies that I pretended to be, I seemed to have
singularly little knowledge of their habits. A great friend, but one
who had never been to see them again for all these years, despite his
promises. And yet, as Gilberte had been my first love among girls, so
these had been my first love among flowers. "Yes, I know all that,
they leave about the middle of June," I answered, "but I am so
delighted to see the place where they stayed when they were here.
They came to see me, too, at Combray, in my room; my mother brought
them when I was ill in bed. And we used to meet on Saturday evenings,
too, at the Month of Mary devotions. Can they get to them from here?"
"Oh, of course! Why, they make a special point of having our young
ladies at Saint–Denis du Désert, the church near here." "Then, if I
want to see them now?" "Oh, not before May, next year." "But I can be
sure that they will be here?" "They come regularly every year." "Only
I don't know whether it will be easy to find the place." "Oh, dear,
yes! They are so gay, the young ladies, they stop laughing only to
sing hymns together, so that you can't possibly miss them, you can
tell by the scent from the other end of the path."