“To know for sure that death is at hand gives you quite another outlook
upon life. An extraordinary attachment to things positive springs up,
together with an intense hate for abstractions. Each renunciation, each
victory over self, is to you like a fresh nail in your coffin.”
“But you surely love your wife?” I asked him, after a pause.
“I do.”
“And your son, too?”
He gave a nod.
“Well, then....” I tried to draw some comforting inference, but
unsuccessfully. “Well, then....” I repeated once more, and once more
relapsed into helpless silence.
“Ah, how kind you are!” he said in a low voice, and looked at me for
some time with a grateful expression. “And how beautiful besides!” he
added unexpectedly.
I felt startled: mere instinct on my part, for I had no reason to fear.
He glanced away from me, and turned his attention to some orchids that
stood close to him, stroking them with his bony hand.
“When I ask myself now for what reason I did what I did, I can find no
answer to my question. Such flowers as these; I have gone through life,
always trampling upon them; why? Why should Obojanski cut them to
pieces, that he may, in them and from them, hit upon some new
abstraction or other—their genus, their species, their variety? Why do
you call them _flowers of farewell_? Oh, now that I know how terrible
the way of self-denial and virtue is, I should this day like to lie on a
bed of flowers such as these.”
“I can answer to your question: You trampled the flowers, because you
were a strong man.”
“Is love of life a weakness then?” He fell a-thinking.
“Perhaps it is. Perhaps I care for life for the same reason that made
Voltaire confess before he died: vital energy giving way. And after all,
life!”
Here I set to explain to him at great length that life is in reality an
evil, and not worth regretting when it goes from us, that in its track
it leaves a bitterness still greater than the bitterness of self-denial
and self-control, and evokes a yet stronger reaction....
To that he said: “Yes, the reaction which life brings is directed
against life, and makes it easier to die. All the better.”
“It is well,” he added. “It is not after all life itself that I wish
for. I wish only to be convinced—convinced by experience that life is an
evil thing. This is all that I would have.”
When he left me, I presented him with a great many flowers, begging him,
as a pretext, to carry them to his wife from me.
Looking out of the window, I saw him going his way, clad in a fur,
notwithstanding the mildness of the weather, and pressing my flowers to
his heart.
In the evening, I sent to Wiazewski, asking him to step in. I thought he
would be some consolation to me; but though he made visible endeavours
to show good humour, he had none. I therefore proposed we should take a
walk.
It was a splendid night, fine and breezy, and steeped in the sweet,
drowsy, dizzying perfume of coming spring. The lamplights twinkled away,
far into the distance, like innumerable strings of diamonds; the streets
were deserted, but brightly lit. The white moon was now and then visible
above the irregular line of the housetops. All was picturesquely calm
and cold—a condition that I especially like.
Our way led us down a great thoroughfare, along which a few belated
carriages were passing.
Stephen was jesting; but it went against the grain. He was telling me
about the tragical fate of some disappointed suitor.
Just in front of us, at the very corner of the street, and opposite the
doorway of a large hotel, a brilliantly elegant equipage, coming at full
speed, suddenly pulled up.
A servant ran to open the carriage-door. Witold jumped out nimbly, and
helped a woman to descend.
Springing lightly from the step, and walking by his side at a rapid
pace, magnificent in billowy furbelows and lace, and spreading around
her an atmosphere of dainty odours, Iseult Lermeaux went in.
Witold’s eye caught mine at the very moment when, helping her out of the
carriage, he was about to take her arm. In the glare of the electric
lamps, I saw him turn deadly pale. He bowed instinctively; his arms
dropped to his side: he was at a loss what to do. Wiazewski’s presence
embarrassed him, and he stood like one transfixed. She turned round and
also glanced at us.
And thus they disappeared as we walked down the long bright vista of the
street, and we saw them no more. “No laggard, that man!” I thought. “The
very next day!”
“As I don’t wish you to feel sorry for me, Stephen, I will inform you
that I have already broken with that gentleman; so that his doings do
not concern me in the least now.”
At my words, Wiazewski slackened his pace.
“Why, in that case, Janka ...” he began.
“Pray, Stephen, don’t. I begged you once before——”
He said nothing further then, and walked on for a considerable time with
head bent down; finally, he said to me in an undertone:
“May we not think of marriage, merely as a bond of friendship?”
“No, no!... Can you not see that a wife never has the disinterestedness
of a friend? How can she be at one with her husband in everything? In
many cases, she would be wronging herself. For instance, what interests
me most in you—your scorn both for things ethical and emotional—would,
if I were your wife, become hateful to me; and your close acquaintance
with feminine psychology and the art of love-making, would either be
dangerous to me, or, as recalling past times, unpleasant at the least.
And you, you would have to become insincere; to gain a wife, you would
necessarily lose a friend: and surely a friend is worth more....”
He walked along in silence, listening to me.
“And besides,” I concluded, “let me tell you that you have come too
late. A year ago, at the time when you never would treat me but as a
friend, it would have been possible. Then I was not unfrequently vexed
with you, calling you (I remember) a boarding school miss, when you
extolled friendship and poured your love-theory into my ears. To-day I
am not for love any more. Not because Fate has dealt me any crushing
blow. Nothing of the sort; but merely because it has all been most
fearfully boring to me. And at present I am taking my revenge for it
upon you, in the proverbial phrase: ‘Let us remain friends.’”
I had quickened my pace. Wiazewski said not a word. I felt as if I was
hastening towards a dark chasm which ever drew back before me, fleeing
as I advanced.... I want all to be over—to lie there, at the bottom of
that murky chasm; and, do what I may, I cannot arrive at the brink. And
my teeth are clenched with pain.
“If you knew how madly I love the exceeding sweetness of his mouth!” The
words flashed then through my mind: a reminiscence of the far-off,
far-off Past!
“I cannot understand you in the least. Never, never, should I have acted
so in your place.”
“Well, Gina, it is over. Tell me now what remedy you would advise me to
take. How do you yourself manage to bear life? To remain passive, doing
nothing—that were surely impossible. Work? But work is of no avail.
Unless something happens to rescue me, I shall have to leave the office;
I fear I am about to go mad.... Are you still interested in art? You
paint very little now; I cannot make out why.”
Gina shook her head with a drowsy air. “I always preferred Life to Art.”
“Why,” I said, noticing that she was in evening dress, “you are going
out to-night!” The thought of staying by myself all the evening made me
shudder. At the same time, I felt my cheeks colouring, for I feared
there was a mortification in store for me which I could not understand.
“I trust you will tell me quite frankly.”
For a few seconds she knit her brows and reflected. Then, “I think,” she
said, “that it will not be impossible.... I have for a long time wished
to make you the proposal; but, in such a matter, one cannot be too
cautious.... Yet, after all, we too have something in common. And I have
learned to know you.”
Abruptly she came to a decision.
“Then—yes, I can recommend something to you. If you hold out, it is only
by its means.”
“Give it me, quick!”
“Wait a little. I must in the first place demand of you to keep this a
profound secret. I hide nothing else that I do: yet this I hide.
Secondly: it is something that, for effects and surroundings’ sake, we
do in conclave. I shall take you there.”
We went.
Radlowski came to open the door. When he saw me, he was taken aback,
though he tried to carry it off under a show of courtesy.
“We have a neophyte here,” Gina explained.
But the explanation rather increased than removed his trouble, though he
at once pretended lively satisfaction. He said aside to Gina: “But
something must be done: Emma is here.”
Gina laughed. “Oh, all the better! If you have nothing but that to make
you uneasy!”
Radlowski was now more at ease. He ushered us into his bedchamber,
beyond the studio, and left us there together. Now and then we could
hear a confused sound of talking, though the voices were low, in the
next room.
“And Emma, who is she?” I asked.
“Oh, a most beautiful woman, though not exactly admissible into society.
One of the celebrated _étoiles_ of beauty, formerly a model of
Radlowski’s.”
Gina, picking up a small phial from the toilet table, took some of the
contents herself, and then gave me directions how the narcotic was to be
taken.
We went into the studio, where a wealth of carpets, hangings, bits of
tapestry, and wide low Ottomans was scattered about. Nothing here
revealed the artistic disorder of the typical _atelier_. In a corner,
however, there stood an easel, with a half-finished canvas—a portrait;
and several paintings hung from the walls.
By the delicate radiance of several glass and paper patterns of artistic
design, I perceived some men and women, who all rose to greet us as we
came in.
Emma I recognized at the first glance. She got up and walked slowly
towards Gina, looking all the time straight at us, out of wonderfully
bright and unnaturally dilated pupils. She wore what was not so much a
dress as a veil, beneath whose light clinging folds, of a steely blue
tint, the shape of her body, not covered by any other garment, was
discernible; and a broad Venetian girdle, gold-wrought and ponderous,
dangled from the wide hips round which it passed.
Many a fair woman have I seen in my life; but, at her sight, I
overflowed with admiration. As soon as I beheld her, I had a desire to
laugh aloud, and kneel down, and thank her for that she was so
marvellously fair.
All that had hitherto fascinated me now seemed to be effete and
colourless. I would never have believed that any being so majestical, so
like a classical antique, so royally more than beautiful, could exist in
the real world. All there was of pure nature in her was—that she
_lived_; the rest appeared like a masterpiece of painting, of sculpture,
of poetry. She was indeed fairer than anything in nature—whether in the
azure heavens, or in the meadows, or in the forests—fairer than a
Midsummer night!
She kissed Gina as she went forward to welcome her. To me she gave her
hand only, with a courteous but frigid mien. Her eyes, looking into
mine, expressed distrust and scrutiny, though she strove to appear icily
serene.
The other woman present belonged without question to “good society”; a
pleasant, handsome, dreamy blonde. Radlowski, when he introduced us to
each other, artfully found means to avoid uttering her name. She was one
of the _irréprochables_, come here incognito. All the men were already
known to me by name: two painters, a few literary men, and a poet. Like
Emma, they too had unnaturally dilated pupils; Radlowski, Gina, and the
irreproachable unknown lady were all alike in this respect.
On making acquaintance with these people, I remarked, not without a
pleasant surprise, that all the collars were immaculate, and none turned
down; that not one tie was eccentric, not one head of hair
superabundant. On the contrary, their dress was in good taste, their
behaviour unaffected, their bearing quietly refined. Seen in the midst
of this company, Emma was a far greater anachronism—twice as striking,
twice as fantastic.
They all speak under their breath; no one contradicts, no one is
excited. There is no general conversation, only a few utterances here
and there. They talk neither of literature, nor of painting; life, and
the present day, is all they speak of. They hold discourse about
frivolous or ordinary matters, with elaborate elegance; and their
fashion of taking things, their tone and temper, shows at once what
manner of men they are. They are of those who have now left behind them
the Past—the stress and storm of finally triumphant Decadentism—and have
arrived at some sort of fragmentary synthesis, which they have set up as
their standard. Their mental equilibrium has bestowed upon them an
amazing excellence of form, a philosophical calm in their way of looking
upon the world, and an ecstatic cult of life, which, from their
standpoint, becomes all but synonymous with the Beautiful. They are all
characterized by great enlightenment, mental distinction, contempt for
all unsightly mediocrity, picturesque in their life, and a moderation
inexpressibly artistic and reposeful—something like the Greek soul.
One of the painters exclaimed: “I should like to remind Emma of the
promise she made us last night, which was so gratifying to us all.”
“Ah, yes: we are all expectant.”
“Emma is something of a _littérateur_, and writes poetry,” a slender
fair-haired young man beside me explained.
An exception to the universal custom took place. She made no bashful
excuses.
“As you like,” she said.
With exquisite grace in every movement, she rose from the sofa, and
traversed the studio slowly, that we might feast our enchanted eyes on
the spectacle of that fairy-like beauty.
Enamoured, not unlike Narcissus, of her own goodly form, and radiant
with her lofty queen-like head, her shoulders moulded as perfectly as a
Greek statue, her cream-hued limbs just visible beneath the clinging
tissue that she wore—she came to a standstill opposite me. With a motion
as harmoniously entrancing as a strain of music, she adjusted the golden
fillet on her superbly chiselled Pagan brow, and began her recitation:
“She is in love, the Ice-Queen,—charmed and spell-bound;
Strings of cold pearls fall from her iced cascades;
Flowers in her frozen cisterns weirdly blossom;
Flowers in her chilly grottoes flame like gold.
“I have this night guessed the stars’ Runic riddle: ...
There, on the verdant banks of Life,—alas!
Some one hath rent in twain the shroud sepulchral....
Under that shroud sepulchral Sleep lies dead.
“Why should I yearn impatient for the morning,
Since it is writ that I expire at dawn?
Oh,—for my heart distraught still loves Life madly,—
I will my true love call to me to-day!
“Come to me, dear one! greet me, but in silence,
Lest thou shouldst wake sad Memory’s sleeping ghosts;
Quietly let them down, the ice-cold curtains:
Quietly draw the silken veils aside.
“Come to my tent, though dark it is around us:
Fear not; the stars are twinkling soft above;
(Fain would my wings of silver soar to join them!):
Cover thine eyes, love, from the dread black night!
“Wilt thou two clusters—grapes with warm blood swelling?
Lay twixt my breasts, O lay thy golden head!
Me let thine arms, mighty with youth’s keen transport,
Clasp in embraces like the serpent’s coil.
“Here is no skiey vault unfathomable;
Here are no stars that gleam athwart the blue.—
They are a silken tent, my silky tresses;
Stars, too, shine bright:—naught but mine eyes are they!
“Take thou my blood, take all that is my being:
Give me my memories, my sleep of yore!—
I had a dream that froze my founts of gladness—
I had a dream, ... dim ghosts with muffled sobs!
“Dreams are but dreams!—Seest thou the sun’s red circle;
Huge, tinged with gore o’ the early dawn?—Thy lips,—
Oh, how I love them—they are crimson roses,
Roses of kingly purple, ... and are mine!
“Broken my wings are: at thy feet I lay them
(Soaring aloft i’ the airy void, they broke):
Oh, how I love thee! Thou’rt a golden garland
Glinting resplendent in my silky hair!”
The recitation over, she waved us a salute, and a gold bracelet flashed
above the elbow of her bare arm. Then she sank on to the nearest sofa,
covered with carpeting of a rich pattern. She received no thanks, nor
did she expect any. There she lay, her hands clasped beneath her head,
and the black diamonds of her eyes gazing steadfastly up to the ceiling.
“Oh, what heavenly bliss I am beginning to feel now!” was the thought
that flashed upon me all at once.
Yes, the narcotic was acting already. Everything in me that was evil, or
pained, or imperfect, had vanished away. I was filled with light—a
chilly splendour, supremely contemptuous of all things, supremely
blissful.
The chill had spread around me. There was,—in the wide-open, quiescent
eyes of all those men, gazing as in a hypnotic trance upon the miracle
of female beauty which they beheld,—the uncanny greenish light which
certain gases in slow combustion give out. We were in an atmosphere of
superhuman delight; a delight that was not earthly; the sempiternally
fascinating delight of Non-Existence.
There was a hearkening to the silence, and a listening with riveted and
petrified attention. The least little murmur of life gave pain. No one
was allowed into the studio; black coffee was poured out by Radlowski
and Gina, and brought to each of us by them. And soft and low fell
slowly from our lips words as of silken tissue, containing thoughts of
delicate essence, recondite and shrouded in mystery.
The unknown blonde was saying to Emma:
“At such moments as these, I never give one thought to my lover.... I
wish to feel no love for him, in order that I may dream of Love
itself.... I see a land such as on earth there is none: where a Not-sun
shines, and where Not-flowers have fragrance! A vision!... I behold a
lover who is not of the earth, and him alone I love.... In a vision....
In my slumbers!”
“There is nothing in the world,” said Emma, “so beautiful as that which
is not in it.... Oh, how sweet is the craving after the love that is
nowhere to be found!”
We were all experiencing an extraordinary and ecstatic glow: and in our
state nothing appeared too naïve or too _exalté_.
I felt full of kindly inclination towards these people, and of deep
gratitude as well, because they were all in such harmony with one
another. It was almost pure ideal friendship, based on community of
admirations and disdains, and mutually uniting all those of the same
caste: the cool and egotistical friendship which one demigod may feel
for another.
The slenderly built young man whom I have mentioned leant forward to me:
“Pray tell me something of love.”
“Love? I know one kind only.”
“And what is that?”
“The fanatical, the Pagan love of Self.”
I clasped my hands, and rested my head upon them. Looking forth into
that infinite distance where all is rigid, where no motion is possible,
and partly unconscious of what I was saying, I spoke thus:
“Oh! how I love myself in all my manifestations! In all my loves and
abhorrences; in all my dreamings and scornings; in all those most
mournful victories of my own unconquerable strength!—Ah! how willingly
would I die this very night, this wonderful night of the blossoming and
perishing of my desires!”
From one instant to the next, my feelings were growing stranger and
stranger. Something akin to dread was now taking hold upon me.
Somewhere—far, far away, as it were down at the very bottom of the gulf
of Life,—I heard a carriage clatter past, and a shudder of unutterable
dismay then shook me. Unwittingly, I drew closer to my next
neighbour.... Presently, I was aware of the soothing, almost spiritual
caress of some one’s cool white hand, passing over my forehead. As I
felt it stroke me so gently, my alarms were dispelled; and again I was
steeped in that phosphorescent zodiacal luminosity, as of gases in slow
combustion.
And now it returned, that vision, that majestic long-forgotten vision.
Once more I saw around me the endless stretches of the icy plains. The
sun was not seen in the jet-black sky; and above the horizon rose the
cold greenish glimmer of the Northern Lights. And lo, those cold dead
dreams of mine had come to life again!
There is no more any Ego of mine.... I am beyond existence and beyond
nothingness—in that world wherein dies the immemorial conflict between
dream and vigil, where Wrong, robed in her queenly purple, is no longer
shadowed by Vengeance, attired in pallid green; where stony Hatred no
longer hugs in her fierce embrace the weeping god of love; where the
marble statue of Pride no more does homage to the grim spectre, Fear;
wherein there are no more wretched victories, nor the portentous
delights of worshipping Self and the Power of Self!
And I am in such bliss—bliss so celestial, so divine!
That?—Oh, _that_?... It has passed away. Only ... from time to time....
Yes, from time to time, I cast away all traces of kisses in the Past—put
aside my wreath of purple velvet flowers—and go, walking tranquilly and
slowly, by the cold light of the moon, to kneel at the grave where my
dreams lie buried, and press my brow to the base of the tombstone that
covers them, ... and muse.
Once, I hung up a wreath of snow-white lilies there; now, I do so no
more. I never carry any flowers to that tomb now.
Nor do I ever strive to roll away the grey stone from the sepulcher—that
stone, with its black fretwork of ferns graven upon it of old.
Then I go home, and again array myself in my purple velvet flowers....
Fragrance, beyond words, wild and fatal perfume of withered roses!
Sweet, most sweet and ardent lips—lips now lost for ever!... Ah, that
houri, with arms like pale dead gold!
All this—I can no longer say whether it was a dream or not....
Ah! but what is this? Have the cool white lilies blossomed once again in
my deserted garden?
A dream!—A dream!
That hand, of pure white tint,
Full fain a bell would swing
That nevermore may ring,
For the long rift within’t.
But why then am I so immensely, so divinely happy?
Those eyes, dim, sweet, and sad, of him who once was mine!—I can no
longer say whether it was all a dream, or not. My ice-plains once more,
my ice-plains!—No—before these—still farther back!... still farther!
Another, and a far different, sweet smell: a fresh delicious perfume—of
meadows in flower, of willow catkins, of the lilacs in blossom.—Yellow
marigolds! (O heavens, those strange far-off memories!) ... O sunshine,
O green fields, O adorable bygone days!... O my childhood!
Tears flow in torrents—tears for the sunshine, for life, for
happiness.—Do not wipe my eyes, for they are dropping pearls! Why brush
those pearls away?
That hand, of pure white tint,
Oh, let it never swing
The bell which cannot ring
For the deep rift that’s in’t.