3
He was gone and she was alone, waiting for the children. She neglected to ring for the lamp to be lighted; and the twilight of the late afternoon darkened into the room. She sat motionless, looking out before her at the leafless trees.
“Why should I not be happy?” she thought. “He is happy with me; he is himself with me only; he cannot be so among other people. Why then can I not be happy?”
She felt pain; her soul suffered and it seemed to her as if her soul were suffering for the first time, perhaps because now, for the first time, her soul had not been itself but another. It seemed to her as if another woman and not she had spoken to him, to Quaerts, just now. An exalted woman, a woman of illusions; the woman, in fact, whom he saw in her and not the woman that she was, a humble woman, a woman of love. Ah, she had had to restrain herself not to ask him:
“Why do you speak to me like that? Why do you raise up your beautiful thoughts to me? Why do you not rather let them drip down upon me? For see, I do not stand so high as you think; and see, I am at your feet and my eyes seek you above me.”
Ought she to have told him that he was deceiving himself? Ought she to have asked him:
“Why do I lower myself when I mix with other people? What do you see in me after all? Behold, I am only a woman, a woman of weakness and dreams; and I have come to love you, I don’t know why.”
Ought she to have opened his eyes and said to him:
“Look upon your own soul in a mirror; look upon yourself and see how you are a god walking the earth, a god who knows everything because he feels it, who feels everything because he knows it....”
Everything?... No, not everything; for he deceived himself, this god, and thought to find an equal in her, who was but his creature.
Ought she to have declared all this, at the cost of her modesty and his happiness? For his happiness—she felt perfectly assured—lay in seeing her in the way in which he saw her.
“With me he is happy!” she thought. “And sympathy is sealed between us.... It was not friendship, nor did he speak of love; he called it simply sympathy.... With me he feels only his real self and not that other ... the brute that is within him!... The brute!...”
Then there came drifting over her a gloom as of gathering clouds; and she shuddered at something that suddenly rolled through her: a broad stream of blackness, as though its waters were filled with mud, which bubbled up in troubled rings, growing larger and larger. And she took fear before this stream and tried not to see it; but it swallowed up all her landscapes—so bright before, with their luminous horizons—now with a sky of ink smeared above, like a foul night.
“How loftily he thinks, how noble his thoughts are!” Cecile still forced herself to imagine, in spite of it all....
But the magic was gone: her admiration of his lofty thoughts tumbled away into an abyss; then suddenly, by a lightning flash through the night of that inky sky, she saw clearly that this loftiness of thought was a supreme sorrow to her in him.
It was quite dark in the room. Cecile, afraid of the lightning which revealed her to herself, had thrown herself back upon the cushions of the couch. She hid her face in her hands, pressing her eyes, as though she wished, after this moment of self-revelation, to be blind for ever.
But demoniacally it raged through her, a hurricane of hell, a storm of passion, which blew out of the darkness of the landscape, lashing the tossed waves of the stream towards the inky sky.