IV

She stood at her dressing table, where two narrow candles burned before the mirror. She had just arranged her rich brown hair, and before she finished her toilet she touched her face with a powder puff to subdue the color. He sat behind her in a corner of the sofa, but their glances met in the mirror and were fixed on each other in a long smile. The trembling of the candle flames and the distance, which the mirror lengthened, made this smile dark and mysterious. And far within the dusky depth behind the glass danced a green spark from the emerald on her finger.

“Shall you be ready soon?” he asked. “It’s half-past seven. I’m afraid we shall miss the ghost.”

It was Hamlet they were to see.

She turned and stroked his cheek with the powder puff, so that he became as white as a Pierrot.

“Silly Pierrette,” he said, wiping off the powder with her handkerchief, “don’t you see I’m pale enough as it is?”

She leaned down, pressed his head to her breast, and kissed his hair.

“I am so happy,” she whispered, “because it is my bridal day today, and because I am going to the theater with you to sit in a little nook where no one can see us.”

He caressed her hand softly. He felt a secret stab in the heart when he heard her speak so, for he knew almost to a certainty that if there had been any chance of it she would much rather have sat with him in a place where all could see them. But he did not believe that she had been thinking of this just now. Never during the past year had she let fall an allusion to marriage, and she knew only too well how impossible it was. But he on his part could never cease to feel it as a secret disgrace that it was not in his power to give her the happiness which belonged to a secure and respected social position where she would not need to conceal anything from the world. He felt thus not because there remained in a corner of his soul any idea of a duty to be performed or of any transgression that ought to be atoned for, but because he was infinitely fond of her and could have wished to make life bright for her eyes and smooth for her little foot, which had such stony paths to go that it was not surprising if at last it had trodden a bit awry.

He dismissed these thoughts, however; he did not mean to attempt the impossible; he was no strong man who could take her in his arms and break a way for them both. And she had made her own choice. She had known strong men too, the kind of men of whom women commonly say, “He’s a real man”; if she had wished she might have given her love to one of them, and he would not have despised it. But her deepest instinct had held her back with forebodings of shame and unhappiness. For, strangely enough, it was precisely the strong men who rarely acted as he could have wished to do had he been able; they were strong just because in the crisis, when there was really something at stake, their feelings always formed an alliance with their profit, and they usually knew where best to employ their strength. No, he and she had nothing else to do, lonely and chilled as they were, than gratefully and without any yearning for the impossible to warm themselves at the happiness which had fallen into their hands, blessing the day when they were driven together by the voice of their blood, which told them that they suited each other and could bring each other joy. Secretly, however, he often liked to dwell on the remote vision that some day many years hence he might be able to give her a home. The thought that by then she would be already an old woman did not frighten him. He had the feeling that, no matter how fast time flew, even if she had gray hair and wrinkles around her eyes, her young white body could never become old⁠—it would still remain young and warm as now; and no matter how the years passed and winter after winter snowed under his youth and stung his soul and his thoughts with needles of ice, his heart would always be warm as now to the beating of hers, and that always when the two met there would spring up a spark of the sacred fire which warms all the world.

While he was thinking all this, his eyes were following every motion of her slender white arms before the mirror. Again his smile sought hers, she nodded to him with a glimmer of secret happiness in her color underneath the powder, and deep within the dusk he saw his own face, the features sharpened to a mask-like quality by the candlelight, nodding in answer like a Chinese doll.

“There’s no hurry,” she said. “In any case we can’t creep into our little corner before a good bit of the first act is over; otherwise we might meet acquaintances in the lobby.”

“That’s true, you are right,” he answered.

He had thought of that himself too.

“One must have one’s wits about one in such a position as ours,” she nodded. “It’s a different thing from sitting with one’s nose down over a book. But isn’t it almost like magic, when one thinks about it, that we’ve actually been left in peace a whole year and that nobody knows anything? I even think people speak less badly about me now than they used to. Everybody has got so friendly toward me: the manager, the clerks, and the girls in the office. But perhaps that’s because I’ve become prettier⁠—haven’t I? They certainly see I’m happy, and that makes them kindly disposed, so that they are cheerful and nice to me without suspecting why. If they knew!⁠—”

Martin didn’t like to hear her talk of their happiness. It was a different thing to read it in her eyes and her color and to feel it in her kisses; he believed in it then, and no text could be more precious to interpret than that. But when he heard her talk about it he felt on his breast a weight of bitterness and oppression at the thought of how little he had really given her and how full of faults and deficiencies her poor happiness was. He knew that the short minutes she spent with him took on such vivid color just because she had to pay for them with long days and nights of fear, fear lest she should suddenly lose what she had dared so much to win, fear that all of a sudden everything might end some day, her golden happiness turn to withered leaves, and she herself be left more poor and lonely than ever before. This fear never really left her, he knew.

Once, it had not been so long ago, they had arranged to meet at his house. The time was approaching, he was awaiting her, there was a ring at the door, and he hurried to open it. But it was not she; it was one of his friends who had come to sit and talk a while. He could not say he was engaged or that he was expecting a visit, or the friend would have met her on the stairs and taken in the whole thing. He said instead that he was just going on an important errand, put on his hat and coat, and they went out together. They had not gone far beyond the gate before he saw her coming along the street. She cast a frightened and uncertain glance at him and he raised his hat to her as he passed, politely and a little distantly, as he had to do so as not to betray her. He turned off into a side street to get rid of his friend and after a couple of minutes came back circuitously to his gate. She was walking in front of it in the rain and mud. He pressed her hand softly and they went up. But when she was inside the door he saw she was trembling with sobs.

There was no need of explanations; she had already understood the situation, but his curt and chilly greeting as he passed, while he was talking with a strange man, had been enough to rouse the secret fear in her blood; she had to give it vent, she had to weep, and she wept long and silently in his arms.

Ah! their poor happiness; it had given them much but it could not bear the bright and arid illumination of words; it could not endure being spoken of. All his tenderness could not give her the calm which accompanies a life that can be shown to the multitude and approved by them, nor could it in solitude prevent her from sometimes feeling ashamed and conscience-stricken. For because life had shown her two different aspects, between which she could not see any connection, she had not one conscience but two. One told her she had acted rightly and that the time would come some day when no one would be able to understand any more why people had formerly concealed the love between man and woman in shame and filth and called it sin. But the other conscience said nothing about the future; it rose from the depths of the past, speaking with the accents of her dead mother and with voices from her home in the woods and from her childhood, when she knew nothing of the world or of herself, when everything was simple and one only needed to be good to have things go nicely.

On evenings when he had just left and she sat alone in her rented room with strange stupid furniture, amid which the bureau with the Empire mirror and the green stone top was the only thing that was hers and the only object to remind her of her childhood home, the old conscience would rise up and whisper many vulgar things into her ear. It whispered that both the women who married men repugnant to them so as to be provided for and the poor girls who sold their bodies from necessity were better than she was, for they had at least a reason for their conduct but she had none. It did not help that she thought of her great love and defended her course with that; the old conscience was prepared for such an argument and whispered in reply that it was not he who had kindled the fire in her blood; her own desire had blown upon the flame; the evil was in herself, and she was an abandoned creature who ought to be whipped with rods in the town hall, as people used to treat women of loose morals. Still worse things this conscience hit upon, whispering that he whom she loved would soon tire of her, nay, that he had already tired and despised her in his heart because she was always so willing to sin and had never denied him anything.

He knew all this, for she always let him share her troubles. He in turn always felt the same wonder and surprise at this philosophy: namely, that the same desire which in a man was so natural and simple and as easy to admit as hunger or thirst, should be for a woman a burning shame which must be quenched or concealed; this philosophy, which he never could comprehend emotionally, though he followed it in his reflections all the way to its source in the dusk of ancient times, when woman was still man’s property and when the sensual side of her nature was permitted, even praised, as far as it expressed her submission to the will of her master, but was considered criminal and shameful if it came from her own will. This philosophy was still so firmly rooted in woman that modest ladies often felt a secret shame in loving their husbands and longing for their embraces. He even recalled how he had once heard a woman of the streets divide her kind into the decent and the sluts, meaning by the decent those who only thought of giving themselves for money. As a matter of fact this division was more just and profound than she herself imagined. It had its origin in the policy of women inherited through millenniums from one generation to another, as necessity had dictated it from the beginning. Necessity bade a woman not to lower by generous prodigality the price of the commodity which was the only means of power for the weaker sex, the one thing which could save it from being wholly trampled down by the stronger. If the poor streetwalker had known her Bible better, she might in support of her classification have cited the savage anathemas of the prophet Ezekiel against the lascivious Ahala, who was not as other harlots, “whom a man must needs purchase with money.”

He realized all this quite well; life was too stingy to allow women to be lavish, and he condemned none of them, not even the modest. But he loved his generous mistress and consoled her as well as he might on the days when the warning voices within her had frightened and filled her with remorse. That was not hard for him to do, because when he was with her she felt no fear. But he knew also that there were days, nay, weeks, when she went about in consuming anxiety for fear she might have a child in spite of everything. He did not conceal from himself that this was the weak point in all secret love. He saw clearly how uneven the game must always be when one approached this point, how all the risk and danger lay on the side of the woman, and again he was secretly ashamed that it was not in his power to share with her the bitter as he shared the sweet. The risk of having a child was hers to begin with, and if this was avoided she had still the lack and emptiness of not being able to allow herself the happiness of motherhood. It cut him to the heart when he once saw her at twilight take a strange child from the street in her arms and kiss it. But motherhood for her would have implied continual misery, as the world was now.

Neither of them had, however, been pampered by life; they had taught themselves not to covet any complete and unblemished happiness, and love had helped them to take all this as it had to be and ought to be taken.

She was ready now; she put out the candles in front of the mirror and waited a couple of minutes in the dark while he went ahead of her on the street, so that no one might meet them together on the stairway. On the street they sometimes ventured to walk together after it was dark, especially if the weather was misty or if there was rain or snow. On this particular evening the snow was falling so thick and white that nobody could have recognized them. People passed them in the white night like phantoms without name or distinction. Close together, nameless themselves and somewhat like the silhouettes which children cut out in pairs from folded paper, they made their way through the snow. She held his arm pressed to her bosom and both were silent.