the house is very quiet to-day. it is your mother's birthday, and you three children have gone with her and mademoiselle potin into the forest to celebrate the occasion. presently i shall join you. the sunlit garden, with its tall dreaming lilies against the trellised vines upon the wall, the cedars and the grassy space about the sundial, have that distinguished stillness, that definite, palpable and almost outlined emptiness which is so to speak your negative presence. it is like a sheet of sunlit colored paper out of which your figures have been cut. there is a commotion of birds in the jasmine, and your barker reclines with an infinite tranquillity, a masterless dog, upon the lawn. i take up this writing again after an interval of some weeks. i have been in paris, attending the sabotage conference, and dealing with those intricate puzzles of justice and discipline and the secret sources of contentment that have to be solved if sabotage is ever to vanish from labor struggles again. i think a few points have been made clearer in that curious riddle of reconciliations....
now i resume this story. i turn over the sheets that were written and finished before my departure, and come to the notes for what is to follow.
perhaps my days of work in paris have carried my mind on beyond the point at which i left the narrative. i sit as it were among a pile of memories that are now all disordered and mixed up together, their proper sequences and connexions lost. i cannot trace the phases through which our mutual passion rode up through the restrained and dignified intentions of our friendship. but i know that presently we were in a white heat of desire. there must have been passages that i now altogether forget, moments of tense transition. i am more and more convinced that our swiftest, intensest, mental changes leave far less vivid memories than impressions one receives when one is comparatively passive. and of this phase in my life of which i am now telling i have clear memories of a time when we talked like brother and sister, or like angels if you will, and hard upon that came a time when we were planning in all our moments together how and when and where we might meet in secret and meet again.
things drift with a phantom-like uncertainty into my mind and pass again; those fierce motives of our transition have lost now all stable form and feature, but i believe there was a curious tormenting urgency in our jealousy of those others, of justin on my part and of rachel on hers. at first we had talked quite freely about rachel, had discussed my conceivable marriage with her. we had indeed a little forced that topic, as if to reassure ourselves of the honesty of our new footing. but the force that urged us nearer pervaded all our being. it was hard enough to be barred apart, to snatch back our hands from touching, to avoid each other's eyes, to hurry a little out of the dusk towards the lit house and its protecting servants, but the constant presence and suggestion of those others from whom there were no bars, or towards whom bars could be abolished at a look, at an impulse, exacerbated that hardship, roused a fierce insatiable spirit of revolt within us. at times we grew angry with each other's formalism, came near to quarrelling....
i associate these moods with the golden stillnesses of a prolonged and sultry autumn, and with slowly falling leaves....
i will not tell you how that step was taken, it matters very little to my story, nor will i tell which one of us it was first broke the barriers down.
