On the Borderland

by F. Britten Austin

She climbed an uncarpeted, dreary staircase and hesitated for a moment outside a door inscribed “le citoyen réprésentant du peuple Desnouettes.” She knocked timidly, opened, and entered.

Across a large bare room a young man was seated, writing, at a table. A broad tri-coloured sash barred his blue, wide-collared coat and white waistcoat. He had divested himself of the cocked hat with three absurdly large plumes of blue, white, and red which lay upon the table and the long hair of his uncovered head reached almost to his shoulders. He looked up, as if startled, at his visitor, looked up with a young face whose intellectual keenness, whose vivid, passionate eyes above the long nose and almost ascetic mouth were strangely, disconcertingly reminiscent of—of——

“Jim!” gasped the young woman in the chair, feeling herself in that curious state of split identity where the unaffected, remote Ego registers without controlling the adventures of a dream.

“Shh!” he murmured in his turn, bewildered to find himself as it were looking at his own personality and, though as at the other side of a partition in his soul, experiencing the feelings of the man at whom he gazed. An echo of a surprise, of a mysterious surprise that disturbed him to the depths—of something that had come, startlingly new and powerful though not yet fully manifest, into his life—reverberated in the recesses of his being as he contemplated the girl. And then a counter-impulse flooded him, the impulse that made him set his mouth, rejecting with an assertion of his own personality wedded to some vague ideal, the vulgar influence of a human emotion. He felt as though the girl approached him, as she moved toward that young man who regarded her with a stern frigidity.

“Citoyenne?” he was surprised to find himself murmuring the coldly polite query, as though repeating it after that insultingly superior young man.

He heard the gasp of the young woman at his side as of someone infinitely remote from him. His real being was in that large bare room where the superb young republican scrutinized the young girl with a cold glance that put her out of countenance. Yet how beautiful she was as she blushed up to her eyes, youthful modesty in confusion! He felt something flush warm within his breast, a vague emotion that dissipated the assurance underneath his sternly maintained aspect. Before she had spoken, an alarm to the threatened supremacy of his cold reason rang through the depths of him. He reacted with a severity that he obscurely felt to be excessive, reiterated almost with menace “Citoyenne?” Was the word really uttered from his lips? He did not know.

She came close, poured out her trouble in a flood of nervous, anguished speech that he comprehended perfectly without being able to arrest a single definite word in his memory—it was as though that part of him which understood was something deep down, lying beyond the necessity for spoken language. Of course! he comprehended with a kind of awakening memory—that old émigré who had stolen back disguised, in defiance of the laws, whom he had arrested for plotting against the safety of that Republic One and Indivisible of which he was the incorruptible servant, whose name he had but just put on the fatal list of the next batch for the guillotine! He chilled, mercilessly; wondered for a moment at his own inexorability, and then, as his identification with the scene completed itself, understood it.

For a crime against himself, against another individual, he might have had compassion. The conspirator against that fanaticized ideal of his soul, the young Republic fighting in rags for its life, for the ultimate freedom of all humanity, was guilty of the unforgiveable sin. He steeled himself, in a pride of approximation to that Brutus, to those other sternly incorruptible Roman republicans with whom his imagination was filled. No human tears, no human despair however poignant, should move him from his path of duty. He felt his teeth set hard over the absurd feebleness in his breast as his eyes rested, coldly he hoped, upon that beautiful girl who stood, strangely disturbing in her closeness, and stretched out her arms to him in agonized appeal. As if telepathically, his soul was filled with her passionate, eloquent entreaty—he had to fight down the tears which threatened his eyes in sympathy with those which suffused the beautiful orbs which looked into his, in despair of softening them.

And she—the woman in the chair, remote spheres away, trembled at a trouble in her soul, at an awakening of something else in her—something that was wrong, unpardonably at variance with every standard of her life, as she looked into those stern but fascinating eyes in the ascetic face and pleaded her cause. She despised herself for the blush she felt creep over her. Her father’s life—her father’s life!—what else dared she think of? This superb young man was an enemy, an implacable enemy, the incarnation of all the crimes wreaked upon her class! Yet her dignity imposed upon her, and she dared not practice that false coquetry upon him that, in a sublime abnegation of her own pride, she had promised herself to use as a supreme resource. She could only plead, plead passionately, in utter sincerity, the best in her appealing to the best in him—and she scorned herself for admitting that there was that best to evoke.

A devil stirred in him, subtly malicious, tempting him with an intellectual bait that was the disguise of passions of whose reality he was but vaguely cognizant. These proud aristos! The bitterness of a youth of humiliations surged up in him, avid for vengeance. He encouraged it as a protection against himself. He would show them—these oppressors of the people, these enemies of the republic—who sent their womenfolk to corrupt the virtuous representatives of the nation! Two could play at that game! He smiled in the thought of the insult he prepared.