For a few seconds he breathed with greater difficulty, and then a dry cough shook his chest.
"You see, Monsieur Georges," I said to him, with all the gentleness of a maternal reproach, "you are wilfully making yourself sick. You will listen to nothing. And all will have to be begun over again. Great progress we shall make in this way! Be good, I beg of you!
And, if you were very nice, do you know what you would do?
You would go to bed directly."
He withdrew his hand, stretched out on the long chair, and, as I replaced beneath his head the cushions that had slipped down, he sadly sighed:
"After all, you are right; I ask your pardon."
"You have not to ask my pardon, Monsieur Georges; you have to be quiet."
"Yes, yes," he exclaimed, his eyes fixed on the spot in the ceiling where the lamp made a circle of moving light.
"I was a little mad ... to have dreamed for a moment that you could love me,—me who have never had love,—me who have never had anything but suffering. Why should you love me?
It would cure me to love you. Since you have been here beside me, and since the beginning of my desire for you; since you have been here with your youth, and your freshness, and your eyes, and your hands,—your little silky hands, whose attentions are the gentlest of caresses; since the time I began to dream of you alone,—I have felt boiling within me, in my soul and in my body, new vigor, a wholly unknown life. That is to say, I did feel that,—for now ... In short, what do you expect?
I was mad!
And you, you are right."
I was greatly embarrassed.
I knew not what to say; I knew not what to do.
Powerful and opposite feelings pulled me in all directions. An impulse rushed me toward him, a sacred duty held me back. And in a silly fashion, because I was not sincere, because I could not be sincere in a struggle where these desires and this duty combatted with equal force, I stammered:
"Monsieur Georges, be good. Do not think of these ugly things. It makes you sick. Come, Monsieur Georges, be very nice."
But he repeated:
"Why should you love me?
Truly, you are right in not loving me.
You think me ill.
You fear to poison your mouth with the poisons of mine; you are afraid of contracting my disease—the disease of which I am dying, am I not?—from one of my kisses. You are right."
The cruel injustice of these words struck me to the heart.
"Do not say that, Monsieur Georges," I cried, wildly; "what you say is horrible and wicked. And you really give me too much pain, too much pain."
I seized his hands; they were moist and burning.
I bent over him; his breath had the raucous ardor of a forge.
"It is horrible, horrible!"
He continued:
"A kiss from you,—-why! that meant my resurrection, my complete restoration to life.
Oh! you have believed seriously in your baths, in your port wine, in your hair-glove.
Poor little one! It is in your love that I have bathed, it is the wine of your love that I have drunk, it is the revulsion of your life that has set a new blood flowing beneath my skin. It is because I have so hoped and longed and waited for your kiss that I have begun to live again, to be strong,—for I am strong now.
But I am not angry with you for refusing me; you are right in refusing. I understand; I understand. You are a timid little soul, without courage; a little bird that sings on one branch, and then on another, and flies away at the slightest noise ... frroutt!"
"These are frightful things which you are saying, Monsieur Georges."
He still went on, while I wrung my hands:
"Why are they frightful?
No, indeed, they are not frightful; they are true.
You think me sick. You think that one is sick when one has love. You do not know that love is life,—eternal life. Yes, yes, I understand, since your kiss, which is life for me, might, you fancy, be death for you. Let us say no more about it."
I could not listen further.
Was it pity? Was it the bleeding reproach and bitter challenge that these atrocious and sacrilegious words conveyed? Was it simply the impulsive and savage love that suddenly took possession of me?
I do not know. Perhaps it was all of these together.
What I know is that I allowed myself to fall, like a mass, on the long chair, and that, lifting in my hands the child's adorable head, I wildly cried:
"There, naughty boy, see how afraid I am of you! See, then, how afraid I am of you!"
I glued my lips to his lips, I pressed my teeth against his, with such quivering fury that my tongue seemed to penetrate the deepest sores of his chest, to lick them, to drink from them, to draw out of them all the poisoned blood and all the mortal pus.
His arms opened, and closed again about me, in an embrace.
And what was to happen happened.
Well, no.
The more I think about it, the surer I am that what threw me into Georges's arms, what fastened my lips to his, was, first and only, an imperative, spontaneous movement of protest against the base sentiments that Georges—through strategy, perhaps—attributed to my refusal.
It was, above all, an act of fervent, disinterested, and very pure piety, which meant to say:
"No, I do not think that you are sick; no, you are not sick. And the proof is that I do not hesitate to mingle my breath with yours, to breathe it, to drink it in, to impregnate my lungs with it, to saturate with it all my flesh.
And, even though you were really sick, even though your disease were contagious and fatal to any one approaching it, I do not wish you to entertain concerning me this monstrous idea that I am afraid of contracting it, of suffering from it, and of dying from it."
Nor had I foreseen and calculated the inevitable result of this kiss, and that I would not have the strength, once in my friend's arms, once my lips on his, to tear myself from this embrace and put away this kiss.