第80章 CHAPTER XI(4)

"You mean that all human beings hold within them secrets, and that no allusion even should ever be made to those secrets?"

"Yes."

"I understand."

After a pause he said, anxiously, she thought:

"Am I right, Madame, or is my thought ridiculous?"

He asked it so simply that she felt touched.

"I'm sure you could never be ridiculous," she said quickly. "And perhaps you are right. I don't know. That song makes me think and feel, and so I love it. Perhaps if you heard it alone--"

"Then I should hate it," he interposed.

His voice was like an uncontrolled inner voice speaking.

"And not thought and feeling--" she began.

But he interrupted her.

"They make all the misery that exists in the world."

"And all the happiness."

"Do they?"

"They must."

"Then you want to think deeply, to feel deeply?"

"Yes. I would rather be the central figure of a world-tragedy than die without having felt to the uttermost, even if it were sorrow. My whole nature revolts against the idea of being able to feel little or nothing really. It seems to me that when we begin to feel acutely we begin to grow, like the palm tree rising towards the African sun."

"I do not think you have ever been very unhappy," he said. The sound of his voice as he said it made her suddenly feel as if it were true, as if she had never been utterly unhappy. Yet she had never been really happy. Africa had taught her that.

"Perhaps not," she answered. "But--some day--"

She stopped.

"Yes, Madame?"

"Could one stay long in such a world as this and not be either intensely happy or intensely unhappy? I don't feel as if it would be possible. Fierceness and fire beat upon one day after day and--one must learn to feel here."

As she spoke a sensation of doubt, almost of apprehension, came to her. She was overtaken by a terror of the desert. For a moment it seemed to her that he was right, that it were better never to be the prey of any deep emotion.

"If one does not wish to feel one should never come to such a place as this," she added.

And she longed to ask him why he was here, he, a man whose philosophy told him to avoid the heights and depths, to shun the ardours of nature and of life.

"Or, having come, one should leave it."

A sensation of lurking danger increased upon her, bringing with it the thought of flight.

"One can always do that," she said, looking at him. She saw fear in his eyes, but it seemed to her that it was not fear of peril, but fear of flight. So strongly was this idea borne in upon her that she bluntly exclaimed:

"Unless it is one's nature to face things, never to turn one's back.

Is it yours, Monsieur Androvsky?"

"Fear could never drive me to leave Beni-Moni," he answered.

"Sometimes I think that the only virtue in us is courage," she said, "that it includes all the others. I believe I could forgive everything where I found absolute courage."

Androvsky's eyes were lit up as if by a flicker of inward fire.

"You might create the virtue you love," he said hoarsely.

They looked at each other for a moment. Did he mean that she might create it in him?

Perhaps she would have asked, or perhaps he would have told her, but at that moment something happened. Larbi stopped playing. In the last few minutes they had both forgotten that he was playing, but when he ceased the garden changed. Something was withdrawn in which, without knowing it, they had been protecting themselves, and when the music faded their armour dropped away from them. With the complete silence came an altered atmosphere, the tenderness of mysticism instead of the tenderness of a wild humanity. The love of man seemed to depart out of the garden and another love to enter it, as when God walked under the trees in the cool of the day. And they sat quite still, as if a common impulse muted their lips. In the long silence that followed Domini thought of her mirage of the palm tree growing towards the African sun, feeling growing in the heart of a human being. But was it a worthy image? For the palm tree rises high. It soars into the air. But presently it ceases to grow. There is nothing infinite in its growth.

And the long, hot years pass away and there it stands, never nearer to the infinite gold of the sun. But in the intense feeling of a man or woman is there not infinitude? Is there not a movement that is ceaseless till death comes to destroy--or to translate?