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CHAPTER XIX

GHOSTS

We have gone out together and aimlessly; we walk straight forward.

It is an autumnal day--gray lace of clouds and wind. Some dried leaves
lie on the ground and others go whirling. We are in August, but it is
an autumn day all the same. Days do not allow themselves to be set in
strict order, like men.

Our steps take us in the direction of the waterfall and the mill. We
have seldom been there again since our engagement days. Marie is
covered in a big gray cloak; her hat is black silk with a little square
of color embroidered in front. She looks tired, and her eyes are red.
When she walks in front of me I see the twisted mass of her beautiful
fair hair.

Instinctively we both looked for the inscriptions we cut, once upon a
time, on trees and on stones, in foolish delight. We sought them like
scattered treasure, on the strange cheeks of the old willows, near the
tendrils of the fall, on the birches that stand like candles in front
of the violet thicket, and on the old fir which so often sheltered us
with its dark wings. Many inscriptions have disappeared. Some are
worn away because things do; some are covered by a host of other
inscriptions or they are distorted and ugly. Nearly all have passed on
as if they had been passers-by.

Marie is tired. She often sits down, with her big cloak and her
sensible air; and as she sits she seems like a statue of nature, of
space, and the wind.

We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of the
river--slowly, as if we were climbing--towards the stone seat of the
wall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet it
sooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it is
the seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has withered
away and become a crown of thorns.

There are dead leaves on the stone slab. They come from the chestnuts
yonder. They fell on the ground and yet they have flown away as far as
the seat.

On this seat--where she came to me for the first time, which was once
so important to us that it seemed as if the background of things all
about us had been created by us--we sit down to-day, after we have
vainly sought in nature the traces of our transit.

The landscape is peaceful, simple, empty; it fills us with a great
quivering. Marie is so sad and so simple that you can see her thought.

I have leaned forward, my elbows on my knees.