In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [230]
“Since you’re being kind enough to stay here a moment to console me, you ought to take off your gown, it’s too hot, too stiff, I dare not approach you for fear of crumpling that fine stuff, and there are those fateful birds between us. Undress, my darling.”
“No, I couldn’t possibly take off this dress here. I shall undress in my own room presently.”
“Then you won’t even come and sit down on my bed?”
“Why, of course.”
She remained, however, some way away from me, by my feet. We talked. Suddenly we heard the regular rhythm of a plaintive call. It was the pigeons beginning to coo. “That proves that day has come already,” said Albertine; and, her brows almost knitted, as though she missed, by living with me, the joys of the fine weather, “Spring has begun, if the pigeons have returned.” The resemblance between their cooing and the crow of the cock was as profound and as obscure as, in Vinteuil’s septet, the resemblance between the theme of the adagio and that of the opening and closing passages, it being built on the same key-theme but so transformed by differences of tonality, tempo, etc. that the lay listener who opens a book on Vinteuil is astonished to find that they are all three based on the same four notes, four notes which for that matter he may pick out with one finger upon the piano without recognising any of the three passages. Likewise, this melancholy refrain performed by the pigeons was a sort of cockcrow in the minor key, which did not soar up into the sky, did not rise vertically, but, regular as the braying of a donkey, enveloped in sweetness, went from one pigeon to another along a single horizontal line, and never raised itself, never changed its lateral plaint into that joyous appeal which had been uttered so often in the allegro of the introduction and the finale. I know that I then uttered the word “death,” as though Albertine were about to die. It seems that events are larger than the moment in which they occur and cannot be entirely contained in it. Certainly they overflow into the future through the memory that we retain of them, but they demand a place also in the time that precedes them. One may say that we do not then see them as they are to be, but in memory are they not modified too?
When I saw that she deliberately refrained from kissing me, realising that I was merely wasting my time, that it was only after a kiss that the really soothing moments would begin, I said to her: “Good-night, it’s too late,” because that would make her kiss me and we would go on kissing afterwards. But after saying to me, “Good-night, try and sleep well,” she contented herself with letting me kiss her on the cheek, exactly as she had done twice before. This time I dared not call her back. But my heart beat so violently that I could not lie down again. Like a bird flying from one end of its cage to the other I alternated between anxiety lest Albertine should leave me and a state of comparative calm. This calm was produced by the argument which I kept repeating several times a minute: “She cannot go without warning me, and she never said anything about going,” and I was more or less calmed. But at once I said to myself: “But what if tomorrow I find her gone! My very anxiety must be founded on something. Why didn’t she kiss me?” At this my heart ached horribly. Then it was slightly soothed by the argument which I advanced once more, but I ended with a headache, so incessant and monotonous was this fluctuation of my thoughts. There are thus certain mental states, and especially anxiety,