II.
He was soon on Boulevard Strassbourg, a mere drop of spray in the human tide. People were coming and going, chatting and laughing, the zest of life everywhere. He, too, now felt the zest of life. He was no longer feeling that the marrow of his life had dried up. There was spring in his heart, the sap of renewed life was flowing through his veins; no, he was not dying. He was humming to himself a few verses of an old song of his, which had been set to music by an admirer.
Yes, sadness was creeping into his heart and enveloping his whole being, but it was not the sadness that possessed him earlier in the day. It was the sadness of longing, of woeful longing, the sadness of music in a minor key, which thrilled him even as it kept tugging at his heartstrings. Suddenly, oblivious of the people that were passing, he paused, and, clenching his fists with joy vibrating through the whole being, his face beaming with a strange light, he uttered, almost loud enough to be heard by passersby, “I am myself again—love has returned!”
And love had returned. He was his old self again. Youth had come back. His features had almost changed. There came a new softness in his eyes, languor in his face, the dreaminess of his student days. He had not been in love since Miriam had gone back to marry the drover’s son. He had known friendship but not love.
He was not trying to argue himself out of his sudden passion for the girl in the shoe shop; he was only explaining himself to himself. What did it matter so long as love had again entered his heart, so long as he was restless with the yearnings and longings of his student days, so long as he felt the ache of blossoming youth! Indeed, what else mattered!
He went to his room and wrote a poem. He had not been in the mood for writing verse since his arrival in Paris, but now melody flowed from his soul. He could think of nothing, of nobody, but Marguerite. And he lost himself in reverie about her sweetly pouting lips, her well-formed nose, her glistening white teeth, the faint dimples in her cheeks. There was child-like beauty and sweetness in her face and speech, and it was that child-like quality in her that had captivated his imagination and passion.
He was too impetuous to lay plans. He could not lay siege to his citadel. He would either win it by storm or go down to defeat in the assault.
The next day he was again at the shoe shop without even the subtle subterfuge of the lover. He offered no excuses, invented no pretences to account for his call. He sat down and gazed at her rapturously and called her Marguerite, and repeated the name again and again, lisping it, murmuring it, echoing it as if it were a melodious term.
Marguerite at first laughed and told him he was foolish but by and by new tints came into the pink of her cheeks and she smiled confusedly—with the confusion of a child who does not know why it is confused—and there came a shimmering heat in the lustrous pupils of her eyes. Her heart beat tumultuously when he looked at her, and his words seemed so caressing. Sometimes he gazed at her as if he did not see her at all and then he would say, “How beautiful your voice sounds!” and when he caught hold of an edge of her apron he fondled it as if he had passed his hand over her bare skin.
One day he took hold of her fingers and kissed the tips of every one of them. She never forgot that day. She thought she ought not to let him kiss her fingers but she liked the sensation and yielded.
And when a few days later she found herself in his arms she feigned no resistance. She craved the touch of his lips and of his tender embraces and the endearing names he called her and had no objections to being his Marguerite.