“Finish me now,” she urged with a look at the sketchers. “Get done with your drawings.” And she sat as before.
But no one could draw in his usual style, no one was satisfied with his beginning. All were seeking for something, expressions changed, flaming with eagerness or drooping with fatigue. It seemed as if their thoughts tried to catch something fluttering, shifting, something that continually fled them.
Under these looks that were concentrated on her, together with the sharp yellow light, she grew dazzled, hypnotized, her mouth became tired, her eyes closed experimentally a couple of times, and then the lashes remained lowered and she went suddenly to sleep like a child, sinking back on the arm of the chair.
All had ceased drawing and had leaned forward with the same thought. What was she, this remarkable girl? Could all this be true?
Here she had come out of the dark, had come silently as the dark itself, enigmatical, disturbing as a dream, impossible to comprehend, impossible to lay hold of. Was she not just a vision,—not sprung from us, oh, no, but a vision of the slumbering darkness, the uncertain possibility, the great new chance that might come? But her breathing was audible, light and easy; her lean hands had the marks of the sempstress, her clothes were threadbare—an actual girl to be sure, with blood such as ours, a developing soul! What would ever become of her, what would become of her?
As if the question had been put in an audible voice, Jacques took it up, the silent Jacques who was wont to make an epigram out of every conviction and who filed every doubt to the point of a needle. But he now got up to speak, advancing toward the girl with his angular motions like those of a clasp-knife and his pointed head leaning forward.
“What will become of her? What will become of her?” he said; “that’s easy to guess.”
He bent down toward her, but so as not to overshadow her; his hand followed his words, but with light, caressing movements, as if he were touching an invalid. But on the floor his long shadow stood bowed against hers, and his gestures became pointed, sharp as thrusts, merciless, threatening to the slumberer in black.
“What will become of her—you who can wish but not will, you who wear away your time with comparing and feeling and looking, look here at what will become of her! First her mouth will be transformed—her eyes, too, of course, but there the change won’t be permanent all at once; her eyes will go back and forward a long while and kindle and be quenched, but the mouth will retain inflexibly all that is strong enough to force in a wrinkle, to bend a line. The lips will come to shut harder when they are not opened by laughter. Here everything will be constricted together: the weariness of desire, the suffocation of kisses; hate which congeals into loathing, shame that is stifled; and then certitude will encompass them, the certitude that it must be so, that that is the whole.
“The cheek”—he almost touched it as it shone soft and pale in the light—“the cheek gets more sharply modeled, more set in contour, sinks in a little here, as when a flower petal withers. The forehead,—it will stay the same, only a line straight across as if an invisible knife had cut into the brain and divided the thoughts; barred in some to pine away up here, and driven the others to wrestle in nakedness and confinement. The hair,—it will grow darker with age and disfiguring attention, it will droop here and lie like a weight. The eyebrows,—you see there is a bend between them, they sink here, which gives a suggestion of nervous sensibility, of vibrating thoughts; but this will become no longer noticeable when she opens her eyes, nothing will be noticeable then but their depth of weariness, their infinity of freezing chill.