The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories
gallery and seated herself on the low window-sill, where she commanded
a view of all that went on in the hall and could look out toward the
Gulf. There was a soft effulgence in the east. The moon was coming up,
and its mystic shimmer was casting a million lights across the distant,
restless water.
“Would you like to hear Mademoiselle Reisz play?” asked Robert, coming
out on the porch where she was. Of course Edna would like to hear
Mademoiselle Reisz play; but she feared it would be useless to entreat
her.
“I’ll ask her,” he said. “I’ll tell her that you want to hear her. She
likes you. She will come.” He turned and hurried away to one of the far
cottages, where Mademoiselle Reisz was shuffling away. She was dragging
a chair in and out of her room, and at intervals objecting to the
crying of a baby, which a nurse in the adjoining cottage was
endeavoring to put to sleep. She was a disagreeable little woman, no
longer young, who had quarreled with almost every one, owing to a
temper which was self-assertive and a disposition to trample upon the
rights of others. Robert prevailed upon her without any too great
difficulty.
She entered the hall with him during a lull in the dance. She made an
awkward, imperious little bow as she went in. She was a homely woman,
with a small weazened face and body and eyes that glowed. She had
absolutely no taste in dress, and wore a batch of rusty black lace with
a bunch of artificial violets pinned to the side of her hair.
“Ask Mrs. Pontellier what she would like to hear me play,” she
requested of Robert. She sat perfectly still before the piano, not
touching the keys, while Robert carried her message to Edna at the
window. A general air of surprise and genuine satisfaction fell upon
every one as they saw the pianist enter. There was a settling down, and
a prevailing air of expectancy everywhere. Edna was a trifle
embarrassed at being thus signaled out for the imperious little woman’s
favor. She would not dare to choose, and begged that Mademoiselle Reisz
would please herself in her selections.
Edna was what she herself called very fond of music. Musical strains,
well rendered, had a way of evoking pictures in her mind. She sometimes
liked to sit in the room of mornings when Madame Ratignolle played or
practiced. One piece which that lady played Edna had entitled
“Solitude.” It was a short, plaintive, minor strain. The name of the
piece was something else, but she called it “Solitude.” When she heard
it there came before her imagination the figure of a man standing
beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked. His attitude was
one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging
its flight away from him.
Another piece called to her mind a dainty young woman clad in an Empire
gown, taking mincing dancing steps as she came down a long avenue
between tall hedges. Again, another reminded her of children at play,
and still another of nothing on earth but a demure lady stroking a cat.
The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano
sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier’s spinal column. It was not the
first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the
first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered
to take an impress of the abiding truth.
She waited for the material pictures which she thought would gather and
blaze before her imagination. She waited in vain. She saw no pictures
of solitude, of hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very passions
themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the
waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking,
and the tears blinded her.
Mademoiselle had finished. She arose, and bowing her stiff, lofty bow,
she went away, stopping for neither thanks nor applause. As she passed
along the gallery she patted Edna upon the shoulder.
“Well, how did you like my music?” she asked. The young woman was
unable to answer; she pressed the hand of the pianist convulsively.
Mademoiselle Reisz perceived her agitation and even her tears. She
patted her again upon the shoulder as she said:
“You are the only one worth playing for. Those others? Bah!” and she
went shuffling and sidling on down the gallery toward her room.
But she was mistaken about “those others.” Her playing had aroused a
fever of enthusiasm. “What passion!” “What an artist!” “I have always
said no one could play Chopin like Mademoiselle Reisz!” “That last
prelude! Bon Dieu! It shakes a man!”
It was growing late, and there was a general disposition to disband.
But some one, perhaps it was Robert, thought of a bath at that mystic
hour and under that mystic moon.
X
At all events Robert proposed it, and there was not a dissenting voice.
There was not one but was ready to follow when he led the way. He did
not lead the way, however, he directed the way; and he himself loitered
behind with the lovers, who had betrayed a disposition to linger and
hold themselves apart. He walked between them, whether with malicious
or mischievous intent was not wholly clear, even to himself.
The Pontelliers and Ratignolles walked ahead; the women leaning upon
the arms of their husbands. Edna could hear Robert’s voice behind them,
and could sometimes hear what he said. She wondered why he did not join
them. It was unlike him not to. Of late he had sometimes held away from
her for an entire day, redoubling his devotion upon the next and the
next, as though to make up for hours that had been lost. She missed him
the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as
one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about
the sun when it was shining.
The people walked in little groups toward the beach. They talked and
laughed; some of them sang. There was a band playing down at Klein’s
hotel, and the strains reached them faintly, tempered by the distance.
There were strange, rare odors abroad—a tangle of the sea smell and of
weeds and damp, new-plowed earth, mingled with the heavy perfume of a
field of white blossoms somewhere near. But the night sat lightly upon
the sea and the land. There was no weight of darkness; there were no
shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the
mystery and the softness of sleep.
Most of them walked into the water as though into a native element. The
sea was quiet now, and swelled lazily in broad billows that melted into
one another and did not break except upon the beach in little foamy
crests that coiled back like slow, white serpents.
Edna had attempted all summer to learn to swim. She had received
instructions from both the men and women; in some instances from the
children. Robert had pursued a system of lessons almost daily; and he
was nearly at the point of discouragement in realizing the futility of
his efforts. A certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the
water, unless there was a hand near by that might reach out and
reassure her.
But that night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching
child, who of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first
time alone, boldly and with over-confidence. She could have shouted for
joy. She did shout for joy, as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted
her body to the surface of the water.
A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant
import had been given her to control the working of her body and her
soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She
wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.
Her unlooked-for achievement was the subject of wonder, applause, and
admiration. Each one congratulated himself that his special teachings
had accomplished this desired end.
“How easy it is!” she thought. “It is nothing,” she said aloud; “why
did I not discover before that it was nothing. Think of the time I have
lost splashing about like a baby!” She would not join the groups in
their sports and bouts, but intoxicated with her newly conquered power,
she swam out alone.
She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and
solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the
moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to
be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.
Once she turned and looked toward the shore, toward the people she had
left there. She had not gone any great distance—that is, what would
have been a great distance for an experienced swimmer. But to her
unaccustomed vision the stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect
of a barrier which her unaided strength would never be able to
overcome.
A quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time
appalled and enfeebled her senses. But by an effort she rallied her
staggering faculties and managed to regain the land.
She made no mention of her encounter with death and her flash of
terror, except to say to her husband, “I thought I should have perished
out there alone.”
“You were not so very far, my dear; I was watching you,” he told her.
Edna went at once to the bath-house, and she had put on her dry clothes
and was ready to return home before the others had left the water. She
started to walk away alone. They all called to her and shouted to her.
She waved a dissenting hand, and went on, paying no further heed to
their renewed cries which sought to detain her.
“Sometimes I am tempted to think that Mrs. Pontellier is capricious,”
said Madame Lebrun, who was amusing herself immensely and feared that
Edna’s abrupt departure might put an end to the pleasure.
“I know she is,” assented Mr. Pontellier; “sometimes, not often.”
Edna had not traversed a quarter of the distance on her way home before
she was overtaken by Robert.
“Did you think I was afraid?” she asked him, without a shade of
annoyance.
“No; I knew you weren’t afraid.”
“Then why did you come? Why didn’t you stay out there with the others?”
“I never thought of it.”
“Thought of what?”
“Of anything. What difference does it make?”
“I’m very tired,” she uttered, complainingly.
“I know you are.”
“You don’t know anything about it. Why should you know? I never was so
exhausted in my life. But it isn’t unpleasant. A thousand emotions have
swept through me to-night. I don’t comprehend half of them. Don’t mind
what I’m saying; I am just thinking aloud. I wonder if I shall ever be
stirred again as Mademoiselle Reisz’s playing moved me to-night. I
wonder if any night on earth will ever again be like this one. It is
like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny,
half-human beings. There must be spirits abroad to-night.”
“There are,” whispered Robert, “Didn’t you know this was the
twenty-eighth of August?”
“The twenty-eighth of August?”
“Yes. On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight, and if
the moon is shining—the moon must be shining—a spirit that has haunted
these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating
vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company,
worthy of being exalted for a few hours into realms of the
semi-celestials. His search has always hitherto been fruitless, and he
has sunk back, disheartened, into the sea. But to-night he found Mrs.
Pontellier. Perhaps he will never wholly release her from the spell.
Perhaps she will never again suffer a poor, unworthy earthling to walk
in the shadow of her divine presence.”
“Don’t banter me,” she said, wounded at what appeared to be his
flippancy. He did not mind the entreaty, but the tone with its delicate
note of pathos was like a reproach. He could not explain; he could not
tell her that he had penetrated her mood and understood. He said