Customers were not slow in coming to Sylvie's. When Annette went calling, she wore the little dressmaker's prettiest creations, and sang her praises. She succeeded in sending to her many young women from her own set. Sylvie, for her part, had no scruples about exploiting the addresses of her old employer's customers. However, she was wise enough not to enlarge the circle of her operations too rapidly. Little by little. Life is long. There is plenty of time. . . . She loved work, but not to the mad degree of certain human ants—and especially feminine ones—whom she had seen kill themselves at their task. She had every intention of leaving time for pleasure. Work is one of them, but it is not the only one. "A little of everything." Hers was the motto of a small appetite, but dainty and curious. . . .
Before long her life was so filled that not much of it remained for Annette. Whatever happened, Sylvie guarded Annette's share; she clung to it. But for Annette's heart, a share was little. She did not know how to give herself in halves, or thirds, or quarters. She still had to learn that in their affections people are like a small merchant: they deliver them retail. She was long in understanding this, still longer in accepting it. As yet she had not passed beyond the first lessons.
Without saying so, she suffered at seeing herself eliminated, little by little, from Sylvie's days. Sylvie was never alone any more, at home or in her shop. She had acquired a new sweetheart. Annette bowed to the inevitable. Her love for her sister now defended her against her old jealous spite and severity of judgment. But it did not defend her against melancholy. Sylvie, who, despite her lightness, loved her sister well enough to sense the pain she was causing her, would occasionally tear herself away from the farandole of her activities, both business and pleasure; and suddenly, in the midst of work or even a tête-à-tête, she would drop the most pressing matters and run off to Annette's. Then there was a whirlwind of passing tenderness. At the moment, Sylvie was no less full of affection than Annette. But it passed; and when the whirlwind carried Sylvie back to her business or her pleasures, filled with Annette, Annette would sigh, grateful for the little tempest of loving chatter, mad confidences, and laughing embraces that had visited her, but feeling more alone than ever and more troubled.
Yet it was not interests that she lacked. Her days were as full as Sylvie's.
Her life, her double life, intellectual and social, that had been broken off since her father's death, had resumed its natural course. Her mental needs, which during the past year had been crowded aside by the needs of her heart, had now reawakened stronger than ever. As much to fill the hours left empty by Sylvie's absence, as because the intelligence of a rich nature is matured by experiences of the passional life, she had again applied herself to her scientific studies, and she was astonished to find that she brought to them a clearer gaze than before. She became interested in biology, and planned a thesis on the origins of the æsthetic sentiment and its manifestations in nature.
She had also picked up the threads of her social life; she returned to the world that she had formerly frequented with her father. And she found in it a fresh pleasure: the pleasure of curiosity, of a greater sophistication that discovered, in people she had thought she knew, unexpected aspects of which she had not dreamed. There were other pleasures too, of a very different sort, some that one acknowledged, and others that one did not confess: the pleasure of pleasing; obscure forces of attraction (of repulsion too) that awake in us and around us magnetic relations which are established between minds and bodies, under cover of deceptive words; dumb possessive instincts that momentarily graze the even and monotonous surface of drawing-room thoughts, instincts that efface themselves, but which quiver beneath the surface. . . .
Yet society and work occupied only the smallest portion of her time. Never had Annette's life been so peopled as now when she was alone. Through the long evenings and night hours, when sleep tosses the mind back into wakefulness, with its hallucinatory thoughts, as the withdrawing tide leaves on the shore a myriad of organisms torn from the nocturnal abysses of ocean,—Annette contemplated the ebb and flow of her interior sea, and the littered shore. It was the great spring equinox.
A part of the forces that stirred within her were not new to her; but, as their energy increased tenfold, the mind became conscious of them with an exalted clarity. Their contradictory rhythms caused an intoxication of the heart, a vertigo. . . . It was impossible to grasp the order hidden in this confusion. The violent shock of sexual passion that, like a summer storm, had shaken Annette's heart, was leaving behind it a lasting perturbation. In vain had the memory of Tullio been effaced, the equilibrium of her being was for a long time shaken. The tranquillity of her life, the absence of events, created an illusion for Annette: she could have believed that nothing had happened, and could have easily repeated the careless cry of those watchmen in the fine Italian nights: Tempo sereno! . . . But the hot night was hatching new storms, and the unstable air was shivering with disquiet eddies. A perpetual disorder. The thrusts of dead souls, revivified, clashed in this soul in fusion. . . . Here, the dangerous paternal heritage consisting of those desires that were ordinarily dormant and forgotten, rose abruptly like a wave from the deep. There, opposing forces: a moral pride, the passion for purity. And that other passion for independence, the imperious constraint of which Annette had already experienced in her union with Sylvie; she anxiously foresaw, too, that this passion for independence would some day engage in still more tragic conflicts with love. All this inner travail occupied her, filled her, during the long winter days. The soul, like a chrysalis encased in a cocoon of foggy light, was dreaming of its future, and indulging itself in its dream. . . .
Suddenly, she went beyond her depth. There occurred one of those lapses of consciousness such as she had experienced last autumn, here and there, in Burgundy; one of those voids into which one sinks. . . . Voids? No, they were not voids; but what went on in their depths? Those strange phenomena, unperceived, perhaps non-existent until ten months before, that had been released especially since the amorous crisis of the summer, and since then had become more frequent. Annette had a vague feeling that these gulfs of consciousness sometimes opened at night, too, while she slept . . . the heavy sleep of hypnosis. . . . When she came out of them, she returned from a great distance; there remained no memory of them, and yet she had the haunting sense that she had encountered important events and worlds, unspeakable things, things beyond what the reason permits and tolerates, bestial and superhuman, reminiscent of the Greek monsters or the cathedral gargoyles. A formless clay adhered to her fingers. One felt oneself bound alive to that stranger of one's dreams. There weighed a sorrow, a shame, the fresh burden of a complicity that could not be defined. One's skin remained impregnated by an unsavory odor that lingered for days. It was as though one bore a secret, in the midst of the day's fugitive images, hidden behind the closed door of a smooth forehead unwrinkled by thought, while one's indifferent eyes turned inward, and one's hands lay sagely folded across one's breast—a sleeping lake. . . .
Wherever she went, Annette carried this perpetual dream: in the bustle of streets, in the studious torpor of lectures and libraries, in the amiable banality of drawing-room conversations, relieved by a hint of flirtation and irony. At evening parties more than one person noticed the absent glance of this young girl who smiled distractedly, less at what was said to her than at what she was saying to herself, while she caught by chance a few passing words, and then went far away again, listening to no-one-knew-what hidden birds in the depths of her aviary.
So noisy was the chorus of little people within Annette that one day she caught herself listening to it when Sylvie was with her,—Sylvie the beloved, laughing at her, deafening her with her dear chatter, saying to her. . . . What was it she was saying? . . . Sylvie perceived it, and she laughingly shook her.
"You're asleep, you're asleep, Annette!"
Annette protested.
"Yes, yes, I saw you, you are dreaming standing up, like an old carriage horse. What do you do with your nights?"
"Wretch! . . . And what about yours, if I asked you? . . ."
"Mine? You want to know? Very well! I'm going to tell you. You won't be bored."
"No! No!" exclaimed Annette, laughing, now thoroughly awake.
She clapped her hand over her sister's mouth. But Sylvie freed herself and, seizing Annette's head, looked straight into her eyes.
"Your beautiful sleep-walker's eyes. . . . Show us a little of what's in there. . . . What are you dreaming, Annette? Tell me, tell me! Tell what you're dreaming. Tell! Come along, let's hear!"
"What do you want me to tell?"
"Say what you are thinking about."
Annette resisted, but she always ended by yielding. For both of them it was an acute pleasure of affection, and perhaps of egotism, to tell each other everything. They left nothing out. So Annette tried to unravel her dreams, much less for Sylvie's benefit than for her own comfort. She explained, not without difficulty, but with a great scrupulousness and seriousness that made Sylvie burst into laughter, all her mad thoughts—the innocent, the candid, the grotesque, the daring, and sometimes even . . .
"Well, well, Annette! I say, when you try! . . ." exclaimed Sylvie, pretending to be scandalized.
Her own inner life was perhaps no less strange (neither more nor less than that of all of us), but she did not suspect it, and she was not interested in it, like a practical little person who believes once for all in what she sees and touches, in the sensible and ordinary dream of superficial earthly existence, and who avoids as absurd everything that might disturb it.
She laughed with all her heart, listening to her sister. Now who would ever have thought that of Annette! With her innocent air, she sometimes tells you the most egregious things in all seriousness. And then she is frightened at the simplest things, that everybody knows. (She shared them with Sylvie, with a comical conviction.) Heaven knows what ridiculous ideas are passing in her noddle! . . . Sylvie found her complicated, adorable, twisted, deucedly tangled up. Always that disease of being tormented to death by things that one should take as they come!
"The trouble is that they sing a half-a-dozen tunes at the same time," said Annette.
"Well, that's amusing," exclaimed Sylvie. "It's like the Lion de Béfort fair."
"Horrors!" cried Annette, stuffing up her ears.
"Why, I adore it. Three or four shooting galleries, tram horns, steam calliopes, bells, whistles, everyone yelling together, till one can't hear oneself think, while one yells louder than all of them,—and snorting, laughing and goings on that delight your heart. . . ."
"Little plebeian!"
"But, my little aristo, it's you (you've just said so), it's you who are like that! If you don't like it, you have only to do as I do. I have everything in order. Everything in its place. Every rabbit in its hutch!"
And indeed she spoke the truth. Whatever hubbub went on in the Place Denfert or in her own little brain, she knew how to manage in one case as well as the other. She could instantly bring order from the most inextricable disorder. She knew how to reconcile all her divers needs, both of mind and body, middle class and otherwise. Each had its pigeon-hole. As Annette said to her:
"A bureau full of drawers. . . . That's what you are! . . ." (showing her the famous Louis XV chiffonier in which their father's letters had been arranged).
"Yes," replied Sylvie, "there a resemblance. . . ."
(It was not of the piece of furniture that she spoke).
". . . At bottom, it's the real me. . . ."
She wanted to vex Annette. But Annette wasn't "rising" any more. She was no longer jealous of her father's heredity; she had her share of it. She could very well have given it up. It was, at times, a rather troublesome guest! . . .