Page 423 - swanns-way

shutters, dosed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden
juice, the light that filled the room within, a light which on
so many evenings, as soon as he saw it, far off, as he turned
into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its message: ‘She
is there—expecting you,’ and now tortured him with: ‘She
is there with the man she was expecting.’ He must know
who; he tiptoed along by the wall until he reached the win-
dow, but between the slanting bars of the shutters he could
see nothing; he could hear, only, in the silence of the night,
the murmur of conversation. What agony he suffered as he
watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere were mov-
ing, behind the closed sash, the unseen and detested pair,
as he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence
of the man who had crept in after his own departure, the
perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at that
moment tasting with the stranger.
And yet he was not sorry that he had come; the torment
which had forced him to leave his own house had lost its
sharpness when it lost itg uncertainty, now that Odette’s
other life, of which he had had, at that first moment, a sud-
den helpless suspicion, was definitely there, almost within
his grasp, before his eyes, in the full glare of the lamp-light,
caught and kept there, an unwitting prisoner, in that room
into which, when he would, he might force his way to sur-
prise and seize it; or rather he would tap upon the shutters,
as he had often done when he had come there very late, and
by that signal Odette would at least learn that he knew,
that he had seen the light and had heard the voices; while
he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as

423