FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129  
130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   >>   >|  
How talkative she was, this maid with unsealed lips! For some reason or other this last statement of hers brought me immense comfort. "Yes?" I whispered breathlessly. "Yes! But in that case what's the use of living in fear and torment?" she went on, revealing a little more of herself to my astonishment. She opened the door for me and added: "Those that don't care to stoop ought at least make themselves happy." I turned in the very doorway: "There is something which prevents that?" I suggested. "To be sure there is. _Bonjour_, Monsieur." PART FOUR CHAPTER I "Such a charming lady in a grey silk dress and a hand as white as snow. She looked at me through such funny glasses on the end of a long handle. A very great lady but her voice was as kind as the voice of a saint. I have never seen anything like that. She made me feel so timid." The voice uttering these words was the voice of Therese and I looked at her from a bed draped heavily in brown silk curtains fantastically looped up from ceiling to floor. The glow of a sunshiny day was toned down by closed jalousies to a mere transparency of darkness. In this thin medium Therese's form appeared flat, without detail, as if cut out of black paper. It glided towards the window and with a click and a scrape let in the full flood of light which smote my aching eyeballs painfully. In truth all that night had been the abomination of desolation to me. After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness of a woman's existence may be called a thought, I had apparently dropped off to sleep only to go on wrestling with a nightmare, a senseless and terrifying dream of being in bonds which, even after waking, made me feel powerless in all my limbs. I lay still, suffering acutely from a renewed sense of existence, unable to lift an arm, and wondering why I was not at sea, how long I had slept, how long Therese had been talking before her voice had reached me in that purgatory of hopeless longing and unanswerable questions to which I was condemned. It was Therese's habit to begin talking directly she entered the room with the tray of morning coffee. This was her method for waking me up. I generally regained the consciousness of the external world on some pious phrase asserting the spiritual comfort of early mass, or on angry lamentations about the unconscionable rapacity of the dealers in fish and vegetables; for after mass it was Therese'
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129  
130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
Therese
 

looked

 

wrestling

 
consciousness
 

talking

 

existence

 

comfort

 

waking

 

nightmare

 

called


detail

 
dropped
 

apparently

 
senseless
 
terrifying
 

thought

 

abomination

 

scrape

 

window

 

aching


desolation

 

thoughts

 

glided

 

eyeballs

 

painfully

 
unable
 

method

 

generally

 

regained

 

external


coffee

 

morning

 
directly
 

entered

 

phrase

 

dealers

 

rapacity

 

vegetables

 

unconscionable

 

spiritual


asserting
 
lamentations
 

condemned

 

acutely

 

suffering

 
renewed
 

powerless

 
hopeless
 
purgatory
 

longing