"Margaret, what ails you these days?" Edward said when she came home from the library and walked past him without saying a word. "It's spring!" He spread his arms dramatically and spoke in his deep, booming teaching voice. "But you come in the door like a blast of winter. The sun pales; gray winds howl; leaves shrivel on their branches." He stopped and then added in an ironic, gently mocking tone, "What is going on, Margaret?"
Problems were delicate, mysterious objects to him, to be handled gingerly, with a mixture of self-deprecation and awe, as a new father handles a new baby. So few things were problems for Edward that when he encountered one, he slowed down the great roar of his being to a soft purr.
"What's the matter, Margaret?" he said again, and he put one hand on her shoulder and stroked her cheek with the other. "What have I done?"
"I don't know," Margaret said.
"But I've done something?"
"Have you?"
"Well, it appears so," he said.
"Aha!" she said, and turned to walk away.
"Margaret," Edward called after her. "Margaret, you know I am a man of unlimited patience. But even unlimited patience has a limit." And his voice was no longer ironic, or gently mocking.
That desire is a state of uneasiness, everyone who reflects on himself will quickly find. Like hope deferred, desire deferred makes the heart grow sick.
My desire and my hope had both been deferred at the sight of my pupil lying in the green grove, there bestowing in so liberal a fashion the favors of her understanding on another. And my underlying desire was of so high a pitch that it now raised my uneasiness to such a level that the heart within me cried out, "Give me the thing desired, give it me or I die!" Life itself and all its enjoyments became such a burden that it could not be borne under the lasting and unremoved pressure of such an uneasiness.
After leaving my student still sitting, with no sign of remorse, upon the shaded green grass, I walked through the grounds of the estate of the Marquise de-, heedless as to my surroundings. I could have been walking in the shade of coconut palms, banana trees, and lemon trees in flower, on the slope of a mountain on a little island in the southern ocean. For all I could see before me was Rameau's niece.
Anyone reflecting upon the thought he has of the delight which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him has the idea we call love. I reflected upon the thought of the delight my pupil had produced in me in the past. I reflected upon it helplessly and without end.
When a man declares in autumn when he is eating them, or in spring when there are none, that he loves grapes, it is no more but that the taste of the grapes delights him. Certainly, I thought, the taste of Rameau's niece had delighted me when she was there to be tasted. And when she was absent, then the recollection of that delight had followed me for hundreds of miles, accompanying me deliciously for days, for week after week, on my trip to Geneva. I had loved her.
But let an alteration of health or constitution destroy the delight of the taste of grapes, and a man can be said to love grapes no longer. On the contrary, the thought of the pain which anything present or absent is apt to produce in us is what we call hatred.
When I thought of my pupil, I thought of the pain she had produced in me, and the thought of that pain did indeed produce in me what we call hatred. I hated Rameau's niece.
The days were getting longer, a little longer, and Margaret waded through swarms of elderly women at the fruit market out into a silvery dusk and an unaccustomed wash of clean, windy air which made her remember many other places and other times, albeit not very specifically. A mountain somewhere in northern Europe or maybe Colorado, a spring walk to school in Massachusetts, a beach, some beach.
This was it, she realized. In New York, this was spring. She had just experienced it, a moment that recalled other moments, that suggested other places where trees and flowers blossomed, rodents awoke, insects hatched, and birds showed off. And now it was over. Springtime in New York. It had come and gone on that one fresh breeze. A bus roared past. A man stood on the corner holding an empty picture frame to his face, hollering, "I been framed!"