1
It was eleven o'clock when I went to meet Rose this morning; but the day was so dark and the fog so dense that the street-lamps were still lit.
It was gloomy and depressing. Wrapped in a long cloak and huddled in a corner of the cab, I shivered with cold and nervousness. I reread her telegram, dispatched from a railway-station before daybreak; and the pathos of those few words went to my heart:
"Am starting. Ran away yesterday.
"Your Baby."
Yesterday? Then she had spent the night at an inn? Why?
Alas, in such circumstances, do not we women usually behave like that, blindly and illogically? We prepare everything, we look out the trains and choose the most favourable time for flight; we announce the minute of our arrival to those expecting us; everything is ready, everything is decided.... Then the appointed day arrives. The hour strikes, the hour passes and we do not stir. We have been kept by some meaningless trifle which is magnified in our excitement and acquires an importance which it never had before: a word, a look from those whom we are going to desert. We forgive them when we are on the point of leaving them for ever. We invest them with a little of our own gentleness and kindness. Even as the colour of things blurs and fades when our eyes are dim with tears, so the hardest people do not appear so to the anxious heart of a woman. And pity gains the upper hand, time slips by and we put off to the morrow and, on the morrow, we put off again....
Then, one day, we depart all at once, for no definite reason, depart empty-handed, with an impassive face and without looking round. We perform the most energetic action almost without knowing it, for even our will shirks the too-heavy task. It dreads the preparations, it would like to be able to tell us feebly that nothing is done, that nothing is decided, that we can still go back to the past; and this is enough to hurry our steps towards the future. We go, we walk on and on, we walk till we are tired. Then does it not seem as if each minute shifted the problem of our destiny a little more? And in a few hours would it not need more courage to return than to continue our road?
But it is nearly always so, by little unforeseen acts, by fear as much as by weakness, that we perform the inaugural act of our enfranchisement. We flee bewildered, like poor beasts that have broken loose; and the first movements of our liberty echo in our hearts with a melancholy sound of dangling chains.