Once or twice during the week Luce"s mother was kept at the factory by her night work. On these nights Luce, in order not to stay alone in that desert quarter, slept in Paris with a girl friend. n.o.body kept watch over her. The two lovers took advantage of this freedom to pa.s.s a portion of the evening together and sometimes they took a simple dinner in a little out-of-the-way restaurant. On leaving after dinner on this mid-March evening they heard the bomb-alert signal sound. They took refuge in the nearest place as if it were an affair of a rain shower, and for some time amused themselves observing their chance comrades. But the danger seeming distant or no longer there, although nothing had occurred to announce the end of the bomb-warning, Luce and Pierre, who did not want to get home too late, went on their way chatting gaily.
They followed an old dark and narrow street near Saint Sulpice. They had just pa.s.sed a hackney coach standing idle, both horse and driver asleep, near the gate of a _porte cochere_. They were twenty steps away and on the other sidewalk, when everything about them shuddered: a red, blinding flash, a roll of thunder, a rain of loosened tiles and broken windowpanes! Near the b.u.t.tress of a house which made a sharp projection into the street they flattened themselves against the wall and their bodies interlaced. By the gleam of the explosion they had seen their own eyes full of love and dismay. And when the darkness fell again Luce"s voice was saying:
"No, Pierre. I want no more."
And Pierre felt upon his own lips the lips and the teeth of the pa.s.sionate girl. They remained palpitating in the darkness of the street. Some paces away some men, issuing from the houses, picked the dying coachman from among the remnants of the smashed vehicle; they pa.s.sed quite close to them with the unfortunate man whose blood was falling drop by drop. Luce and Pierre remained petrified; so closely knit together that when consciousness revived in them it seemed as if their bodies had been naked in the pressure. They loosened their hands and lips grown together which drank of the loved one like roots. And, both of them, they began to tremble.
"Let us go home!" said Luce, invaded by a sacred terror.
She dragged him away.
"Luce! you will not let me leave this life before ...?"
"Oh, G.o.d," said Luce, squeezing his arm, "that thought would be worse than death!"
"My love, my love!" they kept repeating, one to the other.
Once more they came to a stop.
"When shall I be yours?" said Pierre.
(He could not have dared to ask: "When shall you be mine?")
Luce noticed this and was touched by it.
"Adored one," she said to him," ... very soon! Let"s not hurry. You can not desire it more than I wish it!... Let us stay this way a little while.... It is splendid!... This month longer, right to the end!..."
"Until Easter?" he murmured.
(This year Easter was the last day in March.)
"Yes, at the Resurrection."
"Ah," quoth he, "there"s the Death before Resurrection."
"Hush!" she interposed, closing his mouth with her own.
They drew away from each other.
"This night, it"s our betrothal," whispered Pierre.
Huddled against each other while they walked in the shadows, they wept gently with tenderness. The ground crackled underfoot with the broken gla.s.s and the sidewalk was b.l.o.o.d.y. Death and the night were lying in ambush round about their love. But above their heads like a magic circle beyond the embrasure of the two black walls in the narrow street, as through a chimney, the heart of a star throbbed against the deep pulpy grain of the sky....
Lo and behold! The voices of the bells sing out, lights are rekindled and the streets are animate once more. The air is free of foes. Paris breathes again. Death has flown.
THEY had come to the day preceding Palm Sunday. Every day they saw each other for hours together; and they did not even try to hide themselves any more. They no longer had any accounts to render the world. By such gossamer threads were they attached to it and so near to breaking!--Two days before, the German grand offensive had been started. The wave advanced along a front of nearly a hundred kilometers. Fast following emotions caused the City to vibrate: the explosion of Courneuve, which had shaken Paris like an earthquake; the incessant air-bomb alarms which broke in on sleep and wore out nerves. And on this morning of Sat.u.r.day after a troubled night all those who were not able to close an eyelid until very late were roused again by the thunder of the mysterious cannon buried in the far distance, which, beyond the Somme, launched death in trial shots, as if from another planet. In the course of the earlier shots, which were attributed to the coming back of the aerial Gothas, people had taken refuge in a docile way inside their cellars; but a danger that continues becomes in time a habit to which life accommodates itself; and the peril is not far from turning out an attraction even, when the risks run are common to all and are not too great. Besides, the weather was too lovely; it was a pity to bury one"s self alive: before noon all the world was out of doors; and the streets and gardens, the terraces of the cafes had a festival air on this radiant and burning afternoon.
It was this afternoon Pierre and Luce had selected to pa.s.s, far from the crowd, in the forest of Chaville. For the past ten days they had existed in an uplifted calm. Profound peace at the heart, and nerves on edge.
They had a feeling like existing on an islet, about which rushed a frantic current: a vertigo of sight and hearing carried them away. But with eyelids lowered and hands on ears, when the bolt is pushed on the door, suddenly in one"s inner deep there comes a silence, a blinding silence, the moveless summer day, when Joy invisible like a hidden bird sings its song, fresh and liquid, like a brook. O Joy! magical singer, warblings of happiness! I know too well it suffices that a slit should open between my lids or that my finger should cease to push a moment against my ear, and the foam and roar of the stream will follow in.
Frail d.y.k.e! Just to know it so frail exalts the mood of Joy which I know is threatened. Peace and silence itself take on a pa.s.sionate look!...
The woods once reached, they held each other by the hand. The first days of spring are a new wine that rises to the head. The youthful sun intoxicates with the purest juice of its vine. Light still floats over the leafless wood, and athwart the bare branches the blue eye of the sky fascinates the reason and lulls it to sleep.... Scarcely did they endeavor to exchange a few words. Their tongues declined to finish a phrase once started. Their legs were weak and they hated to walk. Under the sunshine and the silence of the woods they tottered. The earth drew them. Just to lie down in the path! Just to let themselves be carried along on the rim of the colossal wheel of the worlds....
They scrambled over the bank of the way-side, entered a thicket and, side by side on the old dead leaves through which violets showed their buds, they stretched themselves out. The first songs of the birds and the distant thuds of the guns mingled with the village bells that were proclaiming the festival of the morrow. The luminous air vibrated hope, faith, love, death. Notwithstanding the solitude they spoke in whispers.
Their hearts were oppressed: by happiness? or by sorrow? They could not have told. They were submerged in their dream. Lucile, immobile, stretched out, her arms close to her body, her eyes open, absorbed and gazing at the sky, felt rising in her a hidden suffering which since the morning she forced herself to drive away in order not to mar the joy of the holiday. Pierre laid his head on Luce"s knees in the hollow of her skirt like a child who goes to sleep with its face close couched against the warmth of the stomach. And Luce without a word caressed with her hands the ears and eyes, the nose and lips of her beloved one. Dear spiritual hands which seemed, as in the tales about fairies, to have little mouths at the finger-tips! And Pierre, a thinking piano, divined the meaning of the little waves that sped under the tips, the emotions that pa.s.sed through the soul of his darling. He heard her sigh before she had begun to sigh. Luce had raised herself with her body leaning forward and, with breathing oppressed, she moaned in a whisper:
"Pierre, oh, Pierre!"
Pierre looked at her troubled.
"Oh, Pierre! What are we, anyway?... What is it they want of us?... What do we want?... What is this going on within us? These guns, these birds, this war, this love.... These hands, body, eyes.... Where am I?... and what am I?"
Pierre, who did not recognize this expression of bewilderment in her, wanted to take her in his arms. But she repulsed him.
"No! No!"
And hiding her face in her hands she thrust face and hands together into the gra.s.s. Pierre was upset and begged of her:
"Luce!..."
He thrust his head close to that of Luce.
"Luce," he repeated, "what"s the matter with you? Is it against me?"
She raised her head.
"No!"
And he saw tears in her eyes.
"Are you in trouble?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don"t know."
"Tell me...."
"Ah, I"m ashamed," she said....
"Ashamed? About what?"