How penetrating the night is. An hour of utter aloneness, an hour empty and bare. Ah, that it may be so until the end. Let misery come, the unknown, humiliations, but let the truth come also. You perish trying to do without the truth....
That scene.... Can the memory of it be annihilated, so that nothing remains, not even the grotesque memory of a memory?
He blazed with fury, he lashed the air first with one arm then the other; his features swelled with rage and suddenly looked youthful.... Now that I come to think of it, he looked exactly the same as on the day of the blue vase, only this time he did not dare to slap me. That's why he gesticulated so wildly. I listened to him at first with an indifferent air; I was accustomed to his storms—well, the thing would soon blow over. And before my eyes the familiar scene, which the lighting up of the chandelier always placidly ushered in, was being set according to the daily ritual—the smoking tureen, which Leontine, who had entered with her padded tread, was placing on the table (she removed her red hands, finger by finger, and stole her sidewise glance at me), and the transparent play of the glasses, with iridescent stems giving back the glitter of the silver and the white sheen of the tablecloth.
Although my eyes were occupied in following intently the details of the dinner-table, a heavy travail was going on within me. A legion of slumbering desires, halting impulses, dead aspirations were rousing themselves noiselessly, almost without my consciousness. Thoughts that come in the morning when one's eyes open, "To-day! to-day," hopes dashed to the ground, deceptions, sighs—their tune rose to the surface and changed to a peal which drew me on. Yet I remained on the spot, like a beast with lowered head led by a rope.
I saw his gesture in time.
He was advancing towards me, his fist raised. Did he mean to strike? What did it matter? I was no longer in a condition to judge. A roll of thunder was shivering my inner trouble into a thousand bits, there was a flash of lightning which unloosened everything, even my tongue. I was speaking, I was speaking at last....
What did I say? Really, almost nothing, because in the frantic swiftness of his anger he broke in upon my first words. "Get out, get out!" He showed me his hand as if he were cursing his hand, too, forever.
The door closing behind me made a very long and very impressive sound.
I was on the landing of the staircase. No sound. The electric light cruelly exaggerated the red spiral of the carpet and touched each copper bar of the banisters with a tiny comet.
Alone.