A terraced garden. If this were another evening, I should be discovering in detail how beautiful the garden is. Each walk opens up a paradise, cool and secret as a spring, and the pebbles shine like glowworms. Borders of irises with violet fragrance dissolving among their stems, a profusion of spreading boughs, and near our bench a thicket from which at intervals darts the straight streak of a gray-bird's flight. Below us in the distant semi-circle across the fading daylight the sparkling apparition of a group of houses lighting up.
The sight of all this beauty fills me with such a glow—almost hurts me—because I feel he is looking at me.... He says: "Your shining curly hair, your broad, clear forehead, your mouth, your eyes." Mentioned in his quivering passionate voice my hair, my forehead, my mouth, my eyes are so new that I close my eyes so as to see them ... And I did not know....
The garden has changed. Pale ochre reflections. Little shivers damp and creeping. Heavy black pockets on the parasol tops of the trees. The mournful andante of a swaying cypress. As though it were the first time, my beloved, that we were alone and had only found each other this evening under the narrow sky.
The shadows spread haphazard piling up in ridges, drawing after them dim white trails. Unknown thoughts escape from everywhere. They are too swift for me. The breeze carries them away. His face at my right, blurred except for the prominent features, is silvered over and turned into a medallion....
Am I quite sure that he is still close to me? I tighten my hand in his. The true, regular pulse at his wrist assures me all is well and down here everything is fair and true. The garden and the leaves, the multiplying lights of the town, the gloaming are all real.
The air is stirring and freshening up. Let us walk. Straight ahead of us as far as the last terrace with its ornamental balustrade; then we will follow the Broad Walk at the entrance of the garden.
He takes my arm gently. I do not dare to lean on it, though the weight of his presence bears me to the ground. I feel I am alone in upholding his life. Who will tell him, who will ever tell him the whole drama that this means? Will he ever know how I see him, how he lives for me? Other people and he himself see his huge figure, always a little bowed as if he never dared to be altogether tall, the steel of his eyes, and the slope of his forehead, which every shadow exaggerates, and his gaze bemired in clouds. They may see his simplicity and transparent kindliness; but at this they stop.
I am caught in what is inexpressible in him. I assume all the questions a man may put to himself without being able to solve them, all the vague poignant evils. And when he appears, I feel that a word has been fashioned to express everything, but not a single word to express his face. It is too outside of everything, too mysterious, perhaps too like my own.
We are at the Broad Walk, a solemn pile in which the trees go two by two, close together, erect—a cathedral. A chilly silence lays a sheet on your shoulders, the nave boldly thrusts its black pillars upwards, and the branches topping the vault wed in the sky.
In spite of yourself you say something in a very low voice. "Up there, that red glow as through a stained-glass window."