Page 42 - swanns-way

‘No, no, leave your mother alone. You’ve said good night
quite enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on up-
stairs.’
And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb
each step of the staircase ‘against my heart,’ as the saying
is, climbing in opposition to my heart’s desire, which was
to return to my mother, since she had not, by her kiss, given
my heart leave to accompany me forth. That hateful stair-
case, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out a
smell of varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made
definite and fixed the special quality of sorrow that I felt
each evening, and made it perhaps even more cruel to my
sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise,
my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone
to sleep with a maddening toothache and are conscious of
it only as a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to
pull out of the water, or as a line of Molière which we repeat
incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that
our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from
any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It
was the precise converse of this relief which I felt when my
anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my con-
sciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous
almost, a manner at once insidious and brutal as I breathed
in—a far more poisonous thing than any moral penetra-
tion—the peculiar smell of the varnish upon that staircase.
Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close
the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-
clothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt. But

42 Swann’s Way