In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [92]
On several occasions I sensed that Gilberte was anxious to put off my visits. It is true that when I was at all anxious to see her I had only to get myself invited by her parents who were increasingly persuaded of my excellent influence over her. “Thanks to them,” I thought, “my love is in no danger; seeing that I have them on my side, I can set my mind at rest since they have complete authority over Gilberte.” Until, alas, detecting certain signs of impatience which she betrayed when her father asked me to the house almost against her will, I wondered whether what I had regarded as a protection for my happiness was not in fact the secret reason why that happiness could not last.
The last time I came to see Gilberte, it was raining; she had been asked to a dancing lesson in the house of some people whom she knew too slightly to be able to take me there with her. In view of the dampness of the air I had taken rather more caffeine than usual. Perhaps on account of the weather, perhaps because she had some objection to the house in which this party was being given, Mme Swann, as her daughter was about to leave, called her back in the sharpest of tones: “Gilberte!” and pointed to me, to indicate that I had come there to see her and that she ought to stay with me. This “Gilberte!” had been uttered, or shouted rather, with the best of intentions towards myself, but from the way in which Gilberte shrugged her shoulders as she took off her outdoor clothes I divined that her mother had unwillingly hastened a process, which until then it might perhaps have been possible to arrest, which was gradually drawing my beloved away from me. “One doesn’t have to go out dancing every day,” Odette told her daughter, with a sagacity acquired no doubt in earlier days from Swann. Then, becoming once more Odette, she began to speak to her daughter in English. At once it was as though a wall had sprung up to hide from me a part of Gilberte’s life, as though an evil genius had spirited her far away. In a language that we know, we have substituted for the opacity of sounds the transparency of ideas. But a language which we do not know is a fortress sealed, within whose walls the one we love is free to play us false, while we, standing outside, desperately keyed up in our impotence, can see, can prevent nothing. So this conversation in English, at which a month earlier I should merely have smiled, interspersed with a few proper names in French which served only to intensify and pinpoint my anxieties, and conducted within a few feet of me by two motionless persons, was as painful to me, left me as much abandoned and alone, as the forcible abduction of my companion. At length Mme Swann left us. That day, perhaps from resentment against me, the involuntary cause of her not going out to enjoy herself, perhaps also because, guessing her to be angry with me, I was pre-emptively colder than usual with her, Gilberte’s face, divested of every sign of joy, bleak, bare, ravaged, seemed all afternoon to be harbouring a melancholy regret for the pas-de-quatre which my arrival had prevented her from going to dance, and to be defying every living creature, beginning with myself, to understand the subtle reasons that had induced in her a sentimental attachment to the boston. She confined herself to exchanging with me now and again, on the weather, the increasing violence of the rain, the fastness of the clock, a conversation punctuated with silences and monosyllables, in which I myself persisted,