The Unknown
We were talking of lucky adventures and each of us had an odd happening to relate, delightful and unexpected encounters, in a railway carriage, in a hotel, abroad, on a seashore. Seashores, said Roger des Annettes, were uncommonly propitious for a love-affair.
Gontran, who had said nothing, was appealed to.
“Paris is still the happiest hunting-ground of all,” said he. “With a woman, as with a book, we appreciate one more highly in a place where we never expected to find one; but the finest specimens are found only in Paris.”
He was silent for some moments, then added:
“God, how adorable they are! Go out into our streets on any spring morning. They look as if they had come up like flowers, the little darlings pattering along beside the houses. What a charming, charming, charming sight! The scent of violets reaches us from the pavement; the bunches of violets that pass us in the slow-moving carts pushed on by the hawkers. The town is alive with spring, and we look at the women. Christ, how tempting they are in their light frocks, thin frocks through which their skin gleams! One strolls along, nose down to the scent and senses on fire; one strolls along and one sniffs them out and waylays them. Such mornings are utterly divine.
“You notice her approaching in the distance, a hundred paces away you can find out and recognise the woman who will be delightful at close range. By a flower in her hat, a movement of her head, the swing of her body, you know her. She comes. You say to yourself: ‘Attention, eyes front!’ and walk past her with your eyes devouring her.
“Is she a slip of a girl running errands for a shop, a young woman coming from church or going to visit her lover? What’s the odds! Her breast shows rounded under her transparent bodice. Oh, if only one might thrust a finger down beneath it—a finger, or one’s lips! Does she look shy or bold, is her head dark or fair? What’s the odds! The swift passage of this woman, as she flits past, sends a thrill down your spine. And how desire haunts us until evening for the woman we have met in such fashion! I’ll swear I’ve treasured the memory of a round twenty, of the dear creatures seen once or ten times like this, and I would have fallen madly in love with them if I had known them more intimately.
“But there you are, the women we cherish most fiercely are the ones we never know. Have you noticed it? It’s very odd. Every now and then one catches a glimpse of women the mere sight of whom rouses in us the wildest desire. But one never more than glimpses them. For my part, when I think of all the adorable creatures whom I have jostled in the streets of Paris, I could hang myself for rage. Where are they? Who are they? Where could I find them again, see them again? There is a proverb which says that we are always rubbing elbows with happiness, and I’ll take my oath that I’ve more than once walked past the woman who could have snared me like a linnet with the allure of her fragrant body.”
Roger des Annettes had been listening with a smile, and answered:
“I know all that as well as you. Listen what happened to me, yes, to me. About five years ago I met for the first time, on the Pont de la Concorde, a tall and rather sturdy young woman who made on me an impression … oh, an altogether amazing impression! She was a brunette, a plump brunette, with gleaming hair growing low on her forehead and eyebrows that bracketed both eyes, under their high arch that stretched from temple to temple. The shadow of a moustache on her lip set one dreaming … dreaming … as the sight of a bunch of flowers on a table stirs dreams of a beloved wood. She had a shapely figure, firm rounded breasts held proudly like a challenge, offering themselves as a temptation. Her eyes were like inkstains on the gleaming white of her skin. This girl’s eyes were not eyes, but shadowed caverns, deep open caverns in her head, through which one saw right into her, entered into her. What a veiled empty gaze, untroubled by thought and utterly as lovely!
“I imagined her to be a Jewess. I followed her. More than one man turned to look after her. She walked with a slightly swaggering gait, a little graceless but very disturbing. She took a cab in the Place de la Concorde. And I stood there like a stuck pig, beside the Obelisk; I stood transfixed by the fiercest passion of longing that had ever assailed me in my life.
“I remembered her for at least three weeks, then I forgot her.
“Six months later I saw her again in the Rue de la Paix, and at sight of her my heart leaped as if I had caught sight of some mistress whom I had loved to distraction. I halted the better to watch her approach. As she passed me, almost touching me, I seemed to be standing in the mouth of a furnace. Then, as she drew away, I felt as if a cool wind were blowing across my face. I did not follow her. I was afraid of committing some folly, afraid of myself.
“Again and again I saw her in my dreams. You know what such obsessions are.
“It was a year before I found her again; then, one evening at sunset, about the month of May, I recognised her in a woman who was walking in front of me up the Champs-Élysées.
“The Arc de l’Étoile lifted its sombre outline against the flaming curtain of the sky. A golden dust, a mist of rosy light hung in the air, it was one of those glorious evenings which are the immortal glory of Paris.
“I followed her, wild with the longing to speak to her, to kneel at her feet, to tell her of the emotion which was choking me.
“Twice I walked past her in order to turn and meet her again. Twice, as I passed her, I experienced again that sensation of fiery heat which had come over me in the Rue de la Paix.
“She looked at me. Then I saw her enter a house in the Rue de Presbourg. I waited two hours in a doorway. She did not come out. At last I decided to question the concierge. He did not appear to understand me. ‘She must have been a caller,’ he said.
“And it was eight months before I saw her again.
“Then one January morning, during a spell of Arctic cold, I was on my way down the Boulevard Malesherbes and running to warm myself, when at the corner of a street I collided so violently with a woman that she dropped a small parcel.
“I began apologies. It was she!
“For a moment I stood still, stunned by the suddenness of the shock; then, giving her back the parcel she had been carrying in her hand, I said abruptly:
“ ‘I am distressed and overjoyed, madame, to have rushed into you like this. Will you believe me that for more than two years I have noticed you, admired you, longed cruelly to make your acquaintance, and I could not manage to find out who you were nor where you lived? Pardon words like these, ascribe them to my passionate desire to be numbered among those who have the right to speak to you. Such a feeling could not wrong you, could it? You do not know me. I am Baron Roger des Annettes. Make your own inquiries: you will be told that I am a man you can admit to your house. If you refuse my request now, you will make me the most miserable wretch alive. I implore you, be kind, give me, allow me the chance to visit you.’
“She regarded me intently, out of her strange lustreless eyes, and answered smiling:
“ ‘Give me your address. I will come to your house.’
“I was so utterly dumbfounded that I must have shown it. But I am never long in recovering from such shocks and I hastened to give her a card, which she slipped into her pocket with a swift gesture, with a hand evidently used to manipulating clandestine letters.
“Becoming bold, I stammered:
“ ‘When shall I see you?’
“She hesitated, as if she had to make a complicated calculation, no doubt trying to recollect just what she had to do with each hour of her time; then she murmured:
“ ‘Sunday morning, is that right for you?’
“ ‘I am quite sure that it is all right.’
“Then she went away, after she had searched my face, judged me, summed me up, dissected me with that heavy insensible stare that seemed to leave something on one’s skin, a kind of viscous fluid, as if her glance flung out on to human beings one of those dense liquids which devilfish use to cloud the water and lull their prey to sleep.
“All the time until Sunday, I gave myself up to the most desperate cudgelling of my wits, in the effort to make up my mind what she was and ascertain the correct attitude to adopt to her.
“Ought I to give her money? How much?
“I decided to buy a piece of jewellery, an uncommonly charming piece of jewellery too, and I placed it, in its case, on the mantelshelf.
“I waited for her, after a restless night.
“She arrived about ten o’clock, quite calm, quite placid, and gave me her hand as if we were old friends. I offered her a seat, I relieved her of her hat, her veil, her furs, her muff. Then, slightly embarrassed, I began to press her somewhat more hardily, for I had no time to lose.
“She asked for nothing better, and we had not exchanged twenty words before I began to undress her. She herself continued this ticklish business that I never succeed in finishing: I prick myself on pins, I twist strings into inextricable knots instead of undoing them; I mismanage and confuse everything, I delay it all and I lose my head.
“Do you know any moment in life, my dear, more marvellous than the moments when you are watching—standing just far enough away and using just enough discretion to avoid startling that ostrich modesty all women affect—a woman who is stripping herself for you of all the rustling garments that fall round her feet, one after another?
“And what is prettier, too, than the gestures with which they put off those adorable garments that slip to the ground, empty and stretched indolently out as if they had just been struck dead? How glorious and intoxicating is the revelation of her flesh, her naked arms and breasts after her bodice is off, and how disturbing the lines of her body glimpsed under the last veil of all!
“But all at once I saw an amazing thing, a black stain between her shoulders; for she had turned her back to me: a wide stain standing vividly out, black as night. I had promised, moreover, not to look at her.
“What was it? I had not the least doubt what it was, however, and the memory of that clearly visible moustache, the eyebrows joined above the eyes, of that mop of hair which covered her head like a helmet, ought to have prepared me for this shock.
“I was none the less dumbfounded and my mind was thronged suddenly with swift thoughts and strange remembered things. I imagined that I was looking at one of those enchantresses from the Thousand and One Nights, one of those fatal and faithless creatures who exist only to drag mortal men into unknown abysses. I thought of Solomon making the Queen of Sheba walk over a mirror to assure himself that she had not a cloven hoof.
“And … and when it came to the point of singing her my song of love, I discovered that I had no voice left, not even a trickle of sound, my dear. Or let’s say I had a voice like a eunuch, which at first astonished and at last thoroughly displeased her, for she remarked, clothing herself with all dispatch:
“ ‘There was not much point in putting me to this trouble, was there?’
“I wanted her to accept the ring bought for her, but she said deliberately and very stiffly: ‘What do you take me for, Monsieur?’ so that I crimsoned to the ears under this accumulation of humiliations. And she departed without adding another word.
“And that is all there is to my adventure. But the worst of it is that, now, I am in love with her, and madly in love.
“I cannot see a woman without thinking of her. All others repel me, disgust me, in so far as they do not resemble her. I cannot press a kiss on another cheek without seeing her cheek beside the one that I am caressing, and without suffering agonies from the unappeased desire which torments me.
“She is present at all my rendezvous, at all the caresses that she spoils for me and renders hateful to me. She is always there, clothed or naked, my real mistress; she is there, pressed close to the other woman, standing or lying down, visible and unattainable. And I believe now that she was in very truth a woman under a spell, bearing between her shoulders a mysterious talisman.
“Who is she? Even now I do not know. I have met her twice again. I bowed to her. She made not the slightest return to my greeting, she pretended not to know me at all. Who is she? An Asiatic perhaps? Most likely an Eastern Jewess. Yes, a Jewess. I am convinced she is a Jewess. But why? Yes, why indeed? I do not know.”