bright horses, almost blue in the gloaming, were led by pages at a run,
with cloths of red velvet on their bending necks. Red was the wagon
which they drew, and within it gold shone heavy on the tender bosoms and
slender arms of the seneschal’s daughters. Six damsels rode after it
with hair blonde as grain, their pointed feet playing beneath the hem
of their kirtles; six huntsmen blew calls which seemed to dance and
swing like wheels from the mouths of the crooked horns. The contours of
the plain danced with them and shot past one another in wine-colored
mist, while the clouds above had glittering borders like the wings of
butterflies.
The party formed into a semi-circle, plume by plume, shoulder by
shoulder, around a bush where the captive was tied. The horsecloths
flapped in the wind; the red taking on depth in the shadow, heavy as
hopeless yearning; the red burning in the light, gay as the clamor of
victory. The maidens’ delicate necks leaned forward out of the wagon,
and their conical hoods flowed into one with the descending line of
their shoulders. They were like herons, thought Renaud, and he almost
expected to hear them add a shrill shriek, when the notes of the horns
fell far away like hurled stones, and all became silent. But when he saw
them more plainly with their thin, straight lips and strange, dreaming
eyes, which were always leveled in a chill ecstasy on something
infinitely distant, and their white, indolent hands in their laps, and
the long folds of their garments--they seemed to him wondrously
beautiful, like the most gorgeous saints’ pictures with a dimming glow
of wax tapers at their feet, and it pained him that they should see him
bound. He let his gaze leap further, past the damsels--shy, jaunty birds
that he wanted to frighten with a whistle--past the red faces and
inquisitively gaping mouths of the grooms, past the brown plain, where
he had run himself tired and dreamed himself tired.
He knew what doom awaited him, but when the Iceland falcon was borne
forward and he realized it was this which was to exact the penalty, he
laughed in his joy, and his heart throbbed with pride, as when he
possessed the bird and the long sunny days and the plain with the
listening winds and the swaying trees of autumn yellow.
When the falcon beheld the light and turned to look around, it gathered
its strength for flight, expecting to be swung on the arm of the bearer,
while its glances rapidly sought its prey in the air; these glances were
sharp and fierce with hunger, flaming as with sparks, and they had no
memory in their depths, they recognized no one. But Renaud’s eyes were
fixed in anxious searching on those of the bird and were filled with
tears of sorrow at not meeting them. They should have mirrored his
life’s bold longing, his contempt, and his dreams on the red heather,
but they only waited greedily for their prey, grimly and coldly as the
human spirit of curiosity or jesting on the thin lips of Sir Enguerrand.
He felt his sorrow smart more bitterly than before and turned aside his
head to recover himself, his eyelids closed and his thoughts fluttering.
He lay thus while the herald proclaimed the law--“twelve sols of
silver--six ounces of flesh over the heart--thus does Sir Enguerrand
safeguard the pastime of the nobles.” He did not look up when his skin
was cut so that the scent of blood should attract the falcon, and when
it sank its beak in his breast he gave no cry, merely trembled, so that
the bird’s eyes flamed up in rage and its wings were spread out as if to
beat.
The seneschal’s daughters leaned their heads forward with a gleam of
interest in their strange dreaming eyes, but they did not raise their
hands from their laps, and their garments lay as before in tranquil
folds. The horses snorted at the smell of blood and stamped on the
frosty ground so that the red horsecloths flapped against the pallor of
the deepening blue, but Renaud lay silent, and the huntsmen stood
needlessly with expanded cheeks and horns to their mouths ready to drown
his cries.
The first agony had clutched at his finest fibres, it seemed as if his
heart would come out with them; but afterwards he had grown numb almost
to the degree of pleasure, and while the blood flowed warmly from the
wound, and the pointed beak tore at his breast, Renaud dreamed himself
into the high blue heaven of his visions, until he understood
everything, death and honor, feeling how it burned and dazzled--the
yellow sunlight of heroic story.
When Sir Enguerrand thought that the legal six ounces had been paid, he
gave his men a sign to blow, and the falcon was lifted off, sated with
blood, its eyes filled once more with tranquil pride, and the troop set
itself in motion more gaily even than before toward the sedge that
gleamed yellow in the distance. But Renaud could not be wakened, he had
dreamed himself to death, and they merely loosed him and let him lie
with the red heather under his head.
The Iceland falcon, however, might never sit on its master’s hand, for
Sir Enguerrand did not care to drink of a cup where another’s lips had
pressed a kiss.
OUT OF THE DARK
We had sat in the studio since just after dinner--a couple of us had not
had any dinner either--and had talked, talked the whole time.
We liked to talk, we had each and every one of us convictions and
opinions so firm that they impressed all the others; yes, even
ourselves, as we thought them over. Some had also a share of scepticism,
which at suitable moments was still more impressive; and a couple simply
kept quiet, which was almost the most impressive of all. To be really
deeply silent under wide puffs of cigar smoke, with a broad back against
the wall, and a large indolent glance out of wide-open eyes, which
during the climax of a speaker are turned away in good-natured
boredom--there is surely nothing in this realm of insolvent currency
that is sounder and gives one longer credit.
But now we were nearly all talking about nearly everything except
politics and religion, for we had come past the years when one takes
such things earnestly and had not come to the years when one takes them
practically. Furthermore we had all read at least a couple of French
novels and so had got over all naïveté. But we touched on the subject of
hypnotism, very carefully with a general feeling that “there was
something in it.” Literature we gripped by the throat and said rough
things to her face, thrusting at her a word sharp as a needle, the word
“style.” That was what she lacked, style. It is a splendid word, this;
one can hide as much or as little as one will behind it, and as an
accusation it is almost instantly condemnatory. And so we talked about
pictures and busts and verse, of synthesis and analysis, of symbolism
and realism. We were all idealists and wrapped ourselves in the very
newest imperial robes with genuine spangles of brass.
I don’t know exactly what we were driving at, the utterances were so
varied, but it came out clearly from the total that we had the deuce
knows what resources within us and were some day going to shake new
artistic tendencies out of our sleeves as easily as the trick man does
rabbits. Among some of us there was a general flair for the joy of
living, which was taken up most seriously and discussed--a bit
tediously--as a settled duty; how one should attain to it was left to
one’s own free discretion and it was assumed that he who went to sleep
over “Hans Alienus” had a satisfactory private reason for his conduct
and might take up gymnastics instead.
But above everything we were zealous for “the new”; we held our fingers
on the pulse of the time with the solemnity of one who had universal
pills to sell, and were only afraid that others would get ahead of us in
guessing its complaints, or that these would change, since everything
progresses so fast now.
Leo had then walked about a while, taken an oblique stand where he cut
diagonals across the room, and snapped his fingers at every æsthetic
dogma that had ever been devised--lively, indefatigable Leo, with his
sharp, somewhat affected painter’s glance from behind his glasses, and
his handsome, exalted countenance as of a patentee of ideas; Leo, who
talked the most of all and made the greatest effect.
“Oh, the devil take it!” he had cried--his accent was half that of a
Parisian and half that of a mountaineer--“I’ve a pain in the head. I beg
leave to take the air a bit.”
A moment later the door had slammed, and one might as well have tried to
catch the shadow of a bird as get hold of him. Also, no one else cared
to go, since it was snowing outside, and furthermore the day was so
gray, so strikingly empty and melancholy; the sort of day that stares at
one searchingly, haunting one like a question to which one can find no
answer. But Leo went out in all weathers, distance had no meaning to
him; he walked so fast that the cold could not bite through his thin
overcoat, and besides he swore himself warm at it, fighting it as if it
was a personal enemy and keeping his brain ready to note every beautiful
composition of lines that he passed.
We knew that in a short while he might be back with us again after he
had hurried almost around the city, his headache gone and his buoyant
figure full of nervous energy, with fresh air in his clothes, his
glasses damp with cold, and a new theory of chiaroscuro in his head. We
therefore continued meanwhile to discuss along the same line as before.
The question rose of what the soul of a masterpiece consisted, to what
degree it should be manifest, and what share emotion should play. We
agreed that the artist’s feeling should be suppressed and only reveal
its immeasurable power in lines of form; otherwise it might destroy the
proper effect, and a tendency toward declamation could not be tolerated
under any condition. We said a number of very telling things, but
nevertheless felt a bit weary, either from the yellow lamplight or
because the air was a trifle close.
Thereupon we heard Leo talking outside the front door. He had someone
with him, then. But whom, since we were all here? We turned
inquisitively in the direction of the door. It opened and over the
threshold stepped a little, dark figure with an ugly black hat on her
head, a summer hat whose brim was bent with age and cast a grotesque
shadow on the wall. She was a little girl, but what sort of girl?
A strange girl, to be sure. Without hesitating a moment and before
anyone said anything, she came into the middle of the room, stood still
and looked about her with a reposeful movement of the head, her hands in
the pockets of her cape, her whole slender figure wonderfully composed
and firm, her motion somewhat like a figure in a dream, when one all the
while thinks: just so, that’s what she ought to do,--and yet feels with
mysterious uneasiness that every gesture has meaning, every step hides
the significance of coming events.
While she stood there close to the hanging lamp, which threw a sharp,
dark shadow across her face, Leo explained hurriedly: “I met her by the
street-car line. She was walking and staring up at the snow just as you
see her with her head thrown back, walking slowly in all the cold. I saw
she was pretty with a well-formed head and wanted to find out who she
was. She wasn’t at all afraid to come along.”
“Take off your hat,” he added eagerly; “I haven’t had a good look at you
yet.”
She took off her hat, went toward the door, and laid it with her cape
on a chair, always with the same remarkable composure of movement. Then
she came forward to the light again, and now we could see her face
clearly.
It was pale and narrow, but not small in proportion to her figure. The
chin was strong, projecting, especially as she held her head very high,
and her profile ran into it prettily from the rounded cranium. The nose
was straight, the lips straight and pale, the contour of the cheek
uncommonly severe and beautiful, the eyebrows a little sunk towards the
middle; and the eyes, partly shut against the light, looked steadily and
calmly out from under short, dark lashes. Her hair, too, was dark. It
was hard to tell the color of the eyes, which seemed to shift from the
suggestion of gray that violets have at twilight to the glimmer of the
darkest lake. Also their size must have been more variable than usual,
for according to the thought that burned in them they widened with
distended pupils, or closed around the steel blades of her glance;--the
muscles around them were indicated under the skin with uncommon
sharpness.
Her figure was slim and childish, that of a city girl of fifteen; the
neck slender and supple. Every expression of the face was childish, too,
but her general appearance bore the stamp of firmness, of set
character, which comes from living life all the way through.
She looked at us without letting her glance rest on anyone, looked
beyond us at the studies on the wall, pausing a little longer there,
till at last her gaze met the yellow dials of the clock in the church
tower as it stared in through the dark atmosphere framed by the window,
and her face caught at it in silent recognition. She sat down a little
to one side of us with her thin wrists crossed, her eyes still,
reposeful and dark.
We did not know what we should say to her, she was so strange, so
different from everything else, as she sat there in her black garments.
It was as if the darkness, the unknown darkness outside which hid the
future, had taken form and pressed in amongst us, grave and enigmatical.
“What’s your name?” someone asked.
“Cecilia.”
The name acted as a stimulus to our imagination. Cecilia, the organ song
that rises through the struggling light of the church vaulting, upward,
ever upward, strong as if it knew its goal, pure through the clarity of
space, freezing under the chill of the stars. But what a strange Cecilia
was this! What song did those eyes dream?
“And you go around alone on such an evening, Cecilia! Were you going
anywhere?”
“No, nowhere. I like to feel the snow falling on me.”
“Were you born here, Cecilia?”
“No, I was born out there--we lived there then.” She stared into the
distance, with raised eyebrows, and her tone gave us the impression that
“out there” was some great, dark teeming city on the other side of the
ocean, that it was deep with black memories, painfully intriguing to the
thought. “But I’ve been here a long while,” she concluded.
She was so pretty with her reticent, dark manner; and her brief answers
waked a trembling echo within one, like the commonplace but meaningful
words in a dream. One could have sat there a long while asking questions
at random and could have listened long.
But Leo grew impatient. He burned with zeal to get at his drawing, for
that was why he had taken up with the girl, and he was not to be put
off. He trusted in his art, did Leo; he was wont to talk of distilling
the quintessence out of a physiognomy--and now he wished to do it with
this subject. Just a few strokes and he would have it all in a
concentrated effect: the tranquillity of chin and eyebrows, the falling
line of the neck--the girl’s whole content should be noted there; but if
so there must be no distraction, no emotions and associated thoughts to
make one’s glance stray.
“Let her alone with your prattle,” he said; “she’s prettier when she is
quiet.” And his eyes glanced with restless penetration, as if he was
afraid of losing something, while he and the others chose their places.
She sat motionless; the whole proceeding appeared to be entirely
indifferent to her and she continued to hold her wrists crossed and to
gaze in front of her without seeing.
But we who did not draw felt that the silence was oppressive. Was not
this unfair to her, was it not wrong to keep her there as a mere thing
to be measured? Was not every glint of her eye, every ring in her voice
worth more than all these lines? Was it not presumptuous to attempt to
translate the changing deeps of life into the language of the deaf and
dumb? What did she hide in the vault of her brain?--what was this girl
that sat there?
The sketchers sweated and screwed up their eyes to make them sharp. They
held up their hands against the light--they seemed to have a harder task
than they had realized--and the girl slowly drooped her eyelashes.
With that we broke in, “You’re tired perhaps, Cecilia? It’s getting on
toward bedtime.”
“I never sleep at night,” she answered, “I haven’t done it as long as I
can remember.”
“But what do you do then? Are you up and about?”
“I think,” she said, and her eyes grew deep, as if night were there
before her--“I lie and think and gaze out into the dark. It’s so silent
then; sometimes I think that everybody is dead, and I, too. It _is_ so
calm, the dark is so weightless and soft and pure.”
Her face had grown rigidly earnest; now it suddenly glowed with nervous
life, as if a thought had burst into flames within it.
“But sometimes I can hear. There is someone walking in the street, far
away; the stones ring under his feet, and he is coming nearer. First I
think that there is only one, and I wonder who it can be. I dream that
it’s for me that he is coming, but I don’t get up; I want him to lift me
from just where I am, and take me to him without saying a word, and
carry me far away. Then my heart begins to throb, and there’s a ringing
in my ears, and I hear many steps, a whole flood of trampling and
dancing which fills the street so completely that I think the house will
fall over and be swept away, as when the river breaks up the dirty ice.
“And I’m so glad that I burst out laughing and stuff the blanket into my
mouth so as not to be heard. Sometimes I hear myself sing, hear it
actually, and lie and stretch out my arms; and the dark is no longer
still, or black, it is like red whirlpools only. And I lie and wait, and
know that it’s for me they are coming, and that they’ll lift me on high
and rush forward. And I know how the sky will look: black, with great
white lights. And the air will be cold and clear; it will all be as if
it were at the bottom of the sea. Everything we pass falls to pieces
behind us; there’s a sound of broken iron and a roaring and groaning of
the earth, but we hasten forward, only forward; we do not turn our
heads, we say nothing to each other, only scream with joy, as when it
thunders.”
Her voice had a shrill and brittle ring, jubilant, but nearer to weeping
than laughter. All at once she changed her tone.
“That’s the sort of thing I think at night,” she said wearily.
“But when do you sleep? You must surely sleep.”
She gave a clear, childish laugh.
“All day if I like. Mamma pulls up the curtains of course, but I can
keep on lying. Then I can sleep, especially if there’s sunshine. One can
dream so finely in the sunshine; one can laugh and run, and then it gets
so warm, and when one gets up one is so deliciously tired!”
“But after that? Don’t you go to school, don’t you have any work?”
“Papa wants”--she uttered the first word with a peculiar intonation.
“Papa (I don’t know whether he is my father,” she added indifferently)
“wants me to go away; no matter where, he says. I went to school, but
they didn’t suit me there. Now I’m left in peace. Mamma talks to them
when they come after me; she has such a proud way with her, mamma has.”
“And what do your parents do?”
She looked up with a scornful dismissal of the subject and made no
reply. Suddenly she laughed under her breath.
“Such a funny word!” she said. “It’s out of the catechism, isn’t it?”
“What word?”
“Parents. Oh, I know it means father and mother,” she drawled the words
out to a comic length. “Mother is slender,” she continued, “but she’s
beginning to get fat and lace herself. You ought to see her when she’s
drunk soda water, oh, you just ought to see her! Her teeth aren’t as
pretty any more either; she envies me mine.”
“And what does she want you to be?”
“It’s all the same”--her voice was cuttingly hard--“it’s all the same,
whatever she wants; it’s all the same, what she says. I shan’t do it
anyhow.”
It was easy to imagine her home after that; what was worse, it was easy,
too, to imagine her future.
She seemed to have tired of being examined now, and turned around to one
of the sketchers.
“Why do you paint girls?” she inquired of the corpulent Hans.
“Hm! Because they’re pretty.”
“Why don’t you paint war, or red clouds like those there?” She pointed
to a landscape opposite her.
“Because I’ve never seen a war.”
“But red clouds you’ve seen surely. I’ve seen much handsomer ones than
those; they don’t really burn.”
It was an impressionistic canvas; darkness creeping along the ground,
darkness leaping up to meet one from the fields, and in the midst of the
fading red off in the distance a lonely shivering poplar, the one thing
that rose above the plain, cutting like a sword against the sky proudly
and tragically. As the girl looked at it her pupils widened, contracted
and widened and trembled; she had understood it at once, and her face
became fixed by the sorrow of the picture.
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it hard to learn to paint?”
“That depends. Can you draw?”
“I can’t do anything but play the piano. Mamma taught me that, but I
can play better than she does, though we have no piano now.”
“Do you sing, then?”
“No, I _can’t_ sing”--her voice sounded more mournful than at any time
before, almost despairing--“I can’t sing at all now.”
“Probably your voice is changing; you’ll have plenty of voice if you’ve
had it before.”
“Oh, yes,” she replied impatiently; “it isn’t the voice I’m thinking of,
but I can never sing any more.”
She raised her head slowly and regarded us all with a swift, deep,
strangely searching look.
“What do you do that for?” we asked. “What are you looking for?”
“I’m looking at your eyes.” Her voice was childish, naïvely frank and so
earnest!
“Do you often do so?”
“Yes, among strangers; then I don’t look at them any more.”
“And how have you found our eyes?”
“About like other peoples’. There is none of you who can _see_.”
“How do you mean?”
“I can’t say any more, but there is no one that sees, really sees
straight through you.”
“Hm! Maybe not. Have you met any such person?”
“No, never, but I keep on searching.”
“And if you should see such a person, what would you do?”
“Just wait, wait for the tide.”
“The tide you listen for at night?”
“Yes, for then it will come soon.”
“Finish me now,” she urged with a look at the sketchers. “Get done with
your drawings.” And she sat as before.
But no one could draw in his usual style, no one was satisfied with his
beginning. All were seeking for something, expressions changed, flaming
with eagerness or drooping with fatigue. It seemed as if their thoughts
tried to catch something fluttering, shifting, something that
continually fled them.
Under these looks that were concentrated on her, together with the sharp
yellow light, she grew dazzled, hypnotized, her mouth became tired, her
eyes closed experimentally a couple of times, and then the lashes
remained lowered and she went suddenly to sleep like a child, sinking
back on the arm of the chair.
All had ceased drawing and had leaned forward with the same thought.
What was she, this remarkable girl? Could all this be true?
Here she had come out of the dark, had come silently as the dark itself,
enigmatical, disturbing as a dream, impossible to comprehend, impossible
to lay hold of. Was she not just a vision,--not sprung from us, oh, no,
but a vision of the slumbering darkness, the uncertain possibility, the
great new chance that might come? But her breathing was audible, light
and easy; her lean hands had the marks of the sempstress, her clothes
were threadbare--an actual girl to be sure, with blood such as ours, a
developing soul! What would ever become of her, what would become of
her?
As if the question had been put in an audible voice, Jacques took it up,
the silent Jacques who was wont to make an epigram out of every
conviction and who filed every doubt to the point of a needle. But he
now got up to speak, advancing toward the girl with his angular motions
like those of a clasp-knife and his pointed head leaning forward.
“What will become of her? What will become of her?” he said; “that’s
easy to guess.”
He bent down toward her, but so as not to overshadow her; his hand
followed his words, but with light, caressing movements, as if he were
touching an invalid. But on the floor his long shadow stood bowed
against hers, and his gestures became pointed, sharp as thrusts,
merciless, threatening to the slumberer in black.