In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [254]
band of girls, who looked as though they had not seen me but were unquestionably engaged in passing a sarcastic judgment on me. Feeling that a meeting between them and us was now inevitable, and that Elstir would be certain to call me, I turned my back like a bather preparing to meet the shock of a wave; I stopped dead and, leaving my illustrious companion to pursue his way, remained where I was, stooping, as if I had suddenly become engrossed in it, towards the window of the antique shop which we happened to be passing at that moment. I was not sorry to give the appearance of being able to think of something other than these girls, and I was already dimly aware that when Elstir did call me up to introduce me to them I should wear that sort of inquiring expression which betrays not surprise but the wish to look surprised—such bad actors are we all, or such good mind-readers our fellow-men—that I should even go so far as to point a finger to my breast, as who should ask “Are you calling me?” and then run to join him, my head lowered in compliance and docility and my face coldly masking my annoyance at being torn from the study of old pottery in order to be introduced to people whom I had no wish to know. Meanwhile I contemplated the window and waited for the moment when my name, shouted by Elstir, would come to strike me like an expected and innocuous bullet. The certainty of being introduced to these girls had had the effect of making me not only feign indifference to them, but actually feel it. Henceforth inevitable, the pleasure of knowing them began at once to contract, to shrink, appeared smaller to me than the pleasure of talking to Saint-Loup, of dining with my grandmother, of making excursions in the vicinity which I would regret being probably forced to abandon in consequence of my relations with people who could scarcely be much interested in old buildings. Moreover, what diminished the pleasure which I was about to feel was not merely the imminence but the incoherence of its realisation. Laws as precise as those of hydrostatics maintain the relative position of the images which we form in a fixed order, which the proximity of the event at once upsets. Elstir was about to call me. This was not at all the way in which I had so often, on the beach, in my bedroom, imagined myself making the acquaintance of these girls. What was about to happen was a different event, for which I was not prepared. I recognised in it neither my desire nor its object; I regretted almost that I had come out with Elstir. But, above all, the shrinking of the pleasure that I had previously expected to feel was due to the certainty that nothing now could take it from me. And it recovered, as though by some latent elasticity in itself, its full extent when it ceased to be subjected to the pressure of that certainty, at the moment when, having decided to turn my head, I saw Elstir, standing a few feet away with the girls, bidding them good-bye. The face of the girl who stood nearest to him, round and plump and glittering with the light in her eyes, reminded me of a cake on the top of which a place has been kept for a morsel of blue sky. Her eyes, even when fixed on an object, gave the impression of mobility, as on days of high wind the air, though invisible, lets us perceive the speed with which it is coursing between us and the sky. For a moment her eyes met mine, like those travelling skies on stormy days which approach a slower cloud, touch it, overtake it, pass it. But they do not know one another, and are soon driven far apart. So, now, our looks were for a moment confronted, each ignorant of what the celestial continent that lay before it held by way of promises or threats for the future. Only at the moment when her gaze was directly coincident with mine, without slackening its pace it clouded over slightly. So on a clear night the wind-swept moon passes behind a cloud and veils its brightness for a moment, but soon reappears. But already Elstir had left the girls without having summoned me. They disappeared down a side-street; he came