Читать книгу Woman - Magdeleine Marx - Страница 10

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Trude's twenty-fourth birthday. Twenty-four candles around the monster of a cake. Trude announces that Edda, the youngest of us, is to light the candles when we're ready for the toasts and the dessert.

I lent my vases, my old red-flowered armchair, and my draperies. This morning when the preparations were completed and their voices in triple unison leapt to me: "Come and look!" I was in the room in three bounds like an answering echo.

It really looked nice. Who would have recognized Clara's impossible room? Heavy ropes of foliage dotted with roses festooned the walls, my beautiful blue stuff entirely hid the toilet-table, flowers covered the mantelpiece and starred the corners of the mirror; and the table covered with a white cloth was gay with pyramids of fruit.

Now the guests are all here except Markowitch, who said beforehand he would be late. "I am not going to seat you," Clara cries to them above the rising hubbub. "Choose your own places." And she turns her back to give the last touches to the table. Her heavy braided knot hangs low on the nape of her neck. In spite of the two spreading wings of her skirt at her waist line she looks thinner than ever in her greenish dress. Someone glides up behind her, a pink arm for an instant twines about her waist. "Clara, can I help?" She turns round. Dahlia.

Dahlia is not an ordinary creature; she is no one; she is the young girl. But that really is saying nothing. Juliet and Miranda are dead; our times are not made for a creature of the dawn who is supposed to be finer than the promise of herself, but who is already herself; who is supposed not to be ignorant, who is pure and who, in order to love, does not await love.

Dahlia comes of another age; she comes from the country of fjords and legends. Her father was exiled, she wanted to go with him, they had no money; they made almost the whole journey on foot. One evening when their heavy limbs would carry them no further, they were stranded in a squalid quarter on the outskirts of Paris. They took a room.... The next day the man did not get up. And since then Dahlia has bowed her head to the yoke and works all day long for a poor monthly wage in an office where the walls press upon her like a vice. "It's to keep up my father's spirits," she said with a shake of her head when I saw her the second time.

I shall never forget the first time. I had come in a little later than usual, and probably more tired, too. I did not even think of lighting the lamp, the dusk was unreal ... heavens!... a vision took shape between the threshold and the shadows, scarcely daring.... There was a brow set in pale gold, the delicate blur of a face, eyes like a thousand forget-me-nots; between two young arms the strait, retiring modesty of the angels, and their light movements also. She drew nearer. "We have made a cake, the sort we make at home, let's divide." She disappeared. Her present remained behind on my table....

In her thin linen dress this evening, with a whiff of paradise about her, Dahlia seems to be enveloped in a pink illumination. She smiles on everybody as one must smile at happiness when one catches a glimpse of it.

"Your beautiful red dress," she assures Trude, gently clasping the soft spindles of her hands.

How can Trude remain simple and genuinely Puritanical beneath her trappings of beaded crimson plush and cuirass of some hodgepodge of gold caught in at the hips. I fancy she is too simple for finery to add to her personality. Real or imitation the fineries give way; it is she who adorns them. Whatever she wears is sanctified and comes to resemble her, everything except her threefold name, Gertrude, Trude, Trudel.

She has the peculiar brilliance of the Russians, sombre, subterranean, almost undefinable. Whatever she does, whether she laughs, or is excited, or talks with fire of ordinary things, she always has a finger lifted in the air and her wide gaze raised Christ-like. She has the mouth of an evangelist. Her irises set in clear white have glints of jet. She wears the glossy foliage of her black locks straight back from her forehead, an intense forehead crowning her like a diadem.... What other woman would dare the supreme immodesty of displaying a bare forehead? What woman would gain by doing it? The strange thing is, Trude is beautiful only by a kind of miracle; the least little bit more, and her cheeks would stick out over the cheekbones of a Tartar; the least little bit less, and her nose would be obliterated. The lakes of her eyes tranquilly conceal the raging waves in their depths. How many, by a shade of ill-luck, have escaped beauty? Trude, by a miracle, has escaped ugliness.

Mania, her sister, so different with her agile, insinuating body, lovingly fingers the presents. "You have not seen everything, Trude. Do come." Books, prints, china, and elegant embroidered articles—pretty things all from poor people who will soon be setting out on foot in the darkness for their distant lodgings in order to save carfare. For we are all as poor as poor can be. Except Markowitch. Mania told me he was "immensely rich," had at least two hundred dollars a month spending money.

It is hard to say whether it is our poverty that creates this comradeship among us. You come in and you feel at ease, you feel good, you love all of them, even Lonnie, the little Swiss with cheeks lacquered with rouge, and even Michael with his tight compressed nose peaking out of the profile of a hen—Michael perhaps more than the others.

So much the worse for Markovitch: we are going to begin. The hubbub dies down a little; everyone finds a place, two on the same chair, some on the bed, a good many on the floor, young men, young girls holding each other's hands, so close together, so pure, that I can still not accustom myself....

"It is your turn, Mania."

A song, liquid, then fiery, comes from among the reeds and carries you far off—down there—to those wild plains chiseled by the wind where the streams, driven to the surface and threshed by their rocky beds, have the fury of torrents. What a potency of attention on these serious faces!

Isn't that Markovitch?

"Come in!"

With his hardened features wrought in granite he, too, is a force. His bulbous eyes search the gathering and find what they are looking for.... Dahlia raises her head, blushes, and is veiled in delicate purple up to the golden edge of her hair. She is aware of the love of this great spoilt boy; we are all aware of it; but she has refused to be his wife because she does not love him. He will not speak of it again; nevertheless they continue to meet straightforwardly. With a free, rounded movement of her arms, like the handles of an amphora, she points to a vacant place beside her. "Here." Then in dismay: "Don't make a noise."

Prikoff is telling of a childhood recollection. You seem to see him as both the fantastic gnome and the father in the tale. You see huts assailed by icy blizzards, hazy visions of bodies blue with cold, love of somewhere else.... Despite his huge jaw and unkempt mass of hair, what benignity, mildness, and gentleness. It is as though he were talking to little children gathered close about him.

Is time passing? No one notices it, we have forgotten it. Time escapes youth gathered together and bound in a sheaf; it escapes Clara's bosom from which a plaintive lied is rising, while the hungry hands around Dahlia, who is doling out the manna, make time tarry. A real poor folk's supper, the supper of persons who are hungry at all hours. Thick slices of rare meat on bread, solid pastry, big bright fruit. One should see these robust young girls munching even the meat.

How fond I am of them all! Among them I feel for the first time what the human voice really is; for the first time feel the warmth which is shared and communicated from being to being, which makes of a single entity a group of entities, of a field of separate ears of corn the human harvest.

I wouldn't know how to choose among them. But one of the young men might slightly frighten and disconcert me; his accent might seem barbarous. My trim dress, my too-dainty shoes, and my fluffy blouses, all the things that constitute my element, might cause me to feel compunction. And maybe too I might feel ashamed of the hour I spend every morning anxiously pressed close to the glass as if I were begging myself to be beautiful.

I should have the same feeling on behalf of the girls as for myself; at bottom I do not discriminate between men and women. I should go even further. If friendship drew me to one of them, my compunction would change to grief. Really, can one forgive Clara her over-trimmed dress conceived in a nightmare? Can one forgive all of them their down-at-heel shoes, the lack of care and regard for others that they show in their appearance?

Should I adjust my days with no ups and downs in them to their volcanic days? "What's it all coming to?" cries Trude sometimes, and throws herself on her bed sobbing and losing herself in her emotions. Time passes and dies—one day, two days—suddenly she rises. She has forgotten her office, her meals, everything. She leans her forehead against the window-pane, and her tears flow bitterly.

If we became intimate, would they forgive me my neat room, my punctuality, my scrupulous adherence to rule and system, my moderation in everything? In the first days of our being neighbors they used to say: "You know, the little Frenchwoman who always comes and goes at the same time and makes so little noise and uses powder?" That quite described me.

This evening of the reunion of these serious creatures runs on by leaps and bounds and rises to a pitch by fits and starts. There is a glowing dewiness about Dahlia; Markovitch follows her with the green pupils of his bulbous eyes. And all of a sudden the whole company is fired at the same time. Without expecting to they burst into song—who threw the spark?—and the room lights up like a hearth all aglow with voices....

Fifteen flames mingled, but only a single flame. It is a song that rages and mounts higher, and jerks and jolts, and is convulsed with raucous shouts, in which the joy becomes frenetic and the laughter has a shudder in it. They bring to their singing the fervor and the earnestness of application that they bring to everything.

I am sitting in the retreat of the little chimney-piece hidden from their eyes, and I should like to ask their forgiveness for not knowing their fervid song and not being in harmony with them. I should like to ask pardon of all of them for everything.

I should like to ... I should like to....

Breathes there a human being on earth who has nothing to forgive, whom one has nothing to forgive?...

To be with him, his equal, close to him, face to face with him, and alone with one.