“Happiness is passing by.”
These sudden words of hers revealed to us the secret of the anguish
within us; she had expressed the spirit of intense melancholy which
pervaded the earth awaiting the renewal of spring. “Happiness is
passing by!”
“Whose hands may arrest her?” I asked myself sharply, in the blind
agitation of my longing for love, in the confused revolt of my deepest
instincts.
The three sisters were leaning their elbows on the stone parapet, their
bare hands without rings stretched out in the sun as in a golden bath:
Massimilla with fingers interlaced; Anatolia with one hand crossed in
the other so that her thumbs were uppermost; Violante, pressing in hers
some of the fading violets out of her belt, and then letting them fall
into space.
“Whose hands may arrest her?”
Anatolia’s looked the strongest and the most sensitive. The firm
outlines of the muscles and tendons supporting the thumbs were clearly
visible beneath the skin. The tips of the thumbs wore rosy nails for
gems, with a half moon of white at the root like a double onyx.
Had they not communicated a sense of their generous power and practical
kindness when first I touched them? Had I not already felt a reviving
warmth in the hollow of her palm?
But Massimilla’s hands were like uncreated things, like dream-shapes
rather, so slender were they; and so white, that the golden sunbeams
failed to gild them; and so symbolically familiar, that in the broad
daylight I could see again the dim shadows of the dusky apse where
first they appeared to me, and see them hovering around the altar, last
relics of a form sunk back again into mystery, and yet fitted--they
alone--to enchant and caress souls. Now with the interlacing of the
clasped fingers they symbolised the fetters of voluntary slavery. “Here
am I, thine own, bound by a tie stronger than any chain. I will open
my arms only when it shall be thy good pleasure to release me. Mine be
it only to worship and obey, to obey and worship,” was the confession
which by these tokens the devout maiden made to her ideal lord. And I
imagined her hands loosed and long scrolls of living silence floating
from them; just as from the hands of the angels painted above and
around altars there float long streamers eloquently inscribed with
verses, and containing history within the mystic sense of the written
words. “Thus, oh Worshipper, mayest thou encircle my wandering spirit
within the living silence of thy love! And I shall become unfaithful
to earth’s solitudes, to the solemn mountains, the musical woods, the
peaceful rivers, even to the starry skies; for no sight on earth can
elevate a man’s spirit like the presence of a beautiful and submissive
soul. It is this which gives to the walls of a narrow room the feeling
of boundless space, like the votive lamp which only increases the vast
darkness of a cathedral. And for this, I should desire to have thee
with me, sweet slave. He who meditates, surrounded by silent adoration,
feels the divinity of his own thoughts and the creative power of a god.”
But the sublime hands of Violante, as they pressed the essence out
of the tender flowers and let them fall crushed to the ground, were
fulfilling an act which corresponded most perfectly, as a symbol,
to the characteristics of my ideal style: they extracted the supreme
flavour of life out of things, took from them the utmost they could
give, and then left them exhausted. Was not this one of the most
important elements in my art of living?
And so Violante appeared to me as a divine and incomparable instrument
of my art. “Relation with her is necessary to me that I may know and
exhaust the innumerable things which lie hidden in the depths of
the human senses, those things of which eternal desire is the only
revelation. The tangible body encloses infinite mysteries which only
the touch of another body can reveal to him that is gifted by Nature to
understand them and religiously celebrate them. And has not her body
the sanctity and magnificence of a temple? Does not her beauty promise
the highest revelations to my senses?”
Thus as before, when we ascended the steps, I felt within me the
attraction of the three complete types, which promised to all my
energies the joy of manifesting themselves and of satisfying themselves
to the uttermost in perfect harmony. One of them--in my dream--watched,
her pure brow radiant with prophecy, over the son of my soul and my
body; another, like the salamander in the alchemist’s furnace, lived
within the fiery circle of my thoughts; and the third called me back to
the devout worship of the body and invited me to learn in mysterious
ceremonies how to live again the life of the ancient gods. They all
three seemed born to serve my ideal of perfection on earth. And the
duty of separating one from the other was as distasteful to me as
destroying some symmetry; it irritated me, it seemed an injustice
done by prejudice and habit. “Why may I not take them all to my home
on a single day and adorn my solitude with their threefold grace? My
love and my art should weave a different spell round each, build a
throne for each, and offer to each the sceptre of an ideal kingdom
peopled with shadows, where she would find her immortal characteristics
transfigured in their different aspects. And since brevity is the most
fitting attribute of ambitious dreams and beautiful life, my love and
my art will be able to bring to these blessed ones (but not to thee,
Anatolia, who art fated to watch for a long time) a harmonious death at
the seasonable hour----”
These thoughts of mine, burning like a soft delirium in the early heat
of the spring sun, were raining down without ceasing on the hands
of the maidens, when Violante let the last of her crushed flowers
fall, and leant over to catch hold of the tips of the long creepers
which grew from the terrace below up to the balustrade, and wreathed
themselves round it. She managed to break off a twig, and examined its
fibres to see if the spring sap had reached it yet.
“They are still asleep,” she said.
And so we bent over the sleep transparent already of those pale
sheaths, in which one of the greatest of earth’s miracles was about to
be worked, called up before us by a word.
“You will see in a few months,” said Anatolia to me, “they will all be
covered with a green mantle; all the trellises will throw shade.”
These plants were not the mothers of the grape, but a kind of leafy
vine with innumerable flying tendrils, which spread like a piece of
netting over the wide surface of the wall and the trellises down the
steps. They looked more like worn-out ropes than plants, torn as they
were by the rain, shrivelled by the sun, fragile as gossamer to behold.
And yet the approaching change made them appear as mystical as the huge
trunks of mountain forest trees. Myriads of young leaves were about to
burst miraculously from the fibres of that lifeless rope.
“In autumn,” said Violante, “everything turns red, a glorious red, and
sometimes on sunny October days the walls and steps seem to be hung
with purple. Then, indeed, the garden has its hour of beauty. If you
are here then, you will see----”
“He won’t be here,” interrupted Antonello, shaking his head.
“Why do you always say that?” I asked him with gentle reproof; “who
knows?”
“No one ever knows anything,” murmured Oddo in that muffled voice of
his, which I could only distinguish from his brother’s by the movement
of the lips. “Who knows what may happen to us between this and the
autumn? Massimilla is the only one who is safe; she has found her
refuge.”
Perhaps there was a tiny drop of bitterness in the last words.
“Massimilla is going to pray for us,” said Anatolia gravely.
The novice bent her head over her clasped hands, and we were silent for
a space, while a flood of vague but overpowering feeling swept over us.
The clearness of the early spring afternoon paled before that
illuminating vision of the autumn purple as we went down the steps,
where a few hours before the three princesses had appeared, as at the
beginning of a fairy tale, with a new-born smile on their lips after a
night of interminable anguish. That morning hour already seemed as far
away as the autumn was near, to which--a dim presentiment told me--a
fate was leading me swift as lightning. And when I pictured the purple
foliage on the bare branches, I also foresaw a shadow of deep mourning
fall on the faces of the three sisters.
And once more the sentiment of death impassioned and elevated my soul
till all things were reflected in it transfigured by poetry. And
in the splendour of the spring air these frail beings seemed to me
“marvellously sad,” like the women in the vision of the Vita Nuova,
which Massimilla had recalled to my memory among the almond blossom and
the ancient mirrors. And I felt as if the ardent spirit possessed me
that burns in the pages of that book, where the youthful Dante shows
how his soul could be shaken to its very foundations, and exalted to
the height of sorrowful madness by imagining the death of Beatrice, and
gazing on her face through the funeral shroud. “Weeping,” I said within
myself. “Certainly it must sometime come to pass that the very gentle
Beatrice will die.... And a great fear fell upon me, and I imagined
that some friend should come to me and say: 'Dost thou not know? Thy
marvellous lady has departed from this world....’ Then my heart that
was so full of love said unto me: 'It is true that our lady lieth dead’
... and so strong was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my
lady in death....” Did not the force of this ineffable inner beauty
come to me from a similar fancy?
A splendid nobility flowed from every action of these maidens, doomed
to die. It lit up the outward things among which they moved. And never
again perhaps did I see them in so much light and shade.
* * * * *
When we had reached the foot of the steps, and entered a glade
surrounded by the green ruins of a box-wood bower, Anatolia paused and
asked me--
“Would you like to see the whole garden? Perhaps you might find some
memories in it.”