With her elbows on the observatory railing, Salome, disliking popular
fêtes, listened to her familiar poluphloisbious ocean. Calm evening.
Stars out in full company, eternities of zeniths of embers. Why go into
exile?
Salome, milk-sister to the Via Lactea, seldom lost herself in
constellations. Thanks to photo-spectrum analysis the stars could be
classified as to color and magnitudes; she had commanded a set of
diamonds in the proportionate sizes to adorn nocturnally her hair and
her person, over mousseline of deep mourning-violet with gold dots in
the surface. Stars below the sixteenth magnitude were not, were not in
her world, she envisaged her twenty-four millions of subjects.
Isolated nebulous matrices, not the formed nebulæ, were her passion; she
ruled out planetiform discs and sought but the unformed, perforated,
tentacular. Orion's gaseous fog was the Brother Benjamin of her galaxy.
But she was no more the "little" Salome, this night brought a change of
relations, exorcised from her virginity of tissue she felt peer to these
matrices, fecund as they in gyratory evolutions. Yet this fatal
sacrifice to the cult (still happy in getting out of so discreetly) had
obliged her in order to get rid of her initiator, to undertake a step
(grave perhaps), perhaps homicide;--finally to assure silence, cool
water to contingent people,--elixir of an hundred nights' distillation.
It must serve.
Ah, well, such was her life. She was a specialty, a minute specialité.
There on a cushion among the débris of her black ebony lyre, lay Jao's
head, like Orpheus' head in the old days, gleaming, encrusted with
phosphorus, washed, anointed, barbered, grinning at the 24 million
stars.
As soon as she had got it, Salome, inspired by the true spirit of
research, had commenced the renowned experiments after decollation; of
which we have heard so much. She awaited. The electric passes of her
hypnotic manual brought from it nothing but inconsequential grimaces.
She had an idea, however.
She perhaps lowered her eyes, out of respect to Orion, stiffening
herself to gaze upon the nebulæ of her puberties ... for ten minutes.
What nights, what nights in the future! Who will have the last word
about it? Choral societies, fire-crackers down there in the city.
Finally Salome shook herself, like a sensible person, reset, readjusted
her fichu, took off the gray gold-spotted symbol-jewel of Orion, placed
it between Jao's lips as an host, kissed the lips pityingly and
hermetically, sealed them with corrosive wax (a very speedy procedure).
Then with a "Bah!" mutinous, disappointed, she seized the genial boko of
the late Jao Kanan, in delicate feminine hands.
As she wished the head to land plumb in the sea without bounding upon
the cliffs, she gave a good swing in turning. The fragment described a
sufficient and phosphorescent parabola, a noble parabola. But
unfortunately the little astronomer had terribly miscalculated her
impetus, and tripping over the parapet with a cry finally human she
hurtled from crag to crag, to fall, shattered, into the picturesque
anfractuosities of the breakers, far from the noise of the national
festival, lacerated and naked, her skull shivered, paralyzed with a
vertigo, in short, gone to the bad, to suffer for nearly an hour.
She had not even the viaticum of seeing the phosphorescent star, the
floating head of Jao on the water. And the heights of heaven were
distant.
* * * * *
Thus died Salome of the Isles (of the White Esoteric Isles, in especial)
less from uncultured misventure than from trying to fabricate some
distinction between herself and every one else; like the rest of us.