While David worked behind the closed doors of the study, Lilla, sitting
down in a damask-covered chair, tried to concentrate her mind on the
new books from New York.
She skimmed the novels to the point where the lovers had their first
embrace, then turned to poems by women, which were pervaded with a
melancholy derived perhaps from disillusionment. As a corrective she
read the books on world politics, economics, esthetic philosophy. In
these last she found, eloquently expressed, the most characteristic
argument of the times--a persuasion to that self-abandonment which
follows materialism and moral skepticism, an announcement that
happiness lay in a religion of the senses, in becoming, indeed,
"divinely animal."
As she laid down the book, there returned to her the words that a young
Roman had poured into her ears one night on Lake Como:
"The splendors of this world and our acceptance of them. Not to
question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours that a thousand
generations have made so complex."
Of a sudden New York rose before her, bathed in the glitter from its
lights, ringing with music and laughter. She saw the multitudes of
pleasure seekers streaming hither and thither, immersing themselves in
startling hues and sounds, in abnormal spectacles and freshly
discovered impulses, which the priests of this new-old cult provided
for them benignly in ever more exacerbating forms and combinations.
There, possibly, amid those emotions gradually approaching a Dionysiac
frenzy, was the logical Mecca of her long pilgrimage, the end of all
this hunger for sensuous reactions--for the pleasures that came from
strange fragrances and harmonies, from contacts with precious fabrics
and the patina of perfect porcelains, from the perception of matchless
color in painted canvas and gems, or from the grace that was fluent in
the moving bodies of human beings and beasts?
She rose, turning away from those books, and from the room full of
objects whose textures were finer and more lasting than flesh.
Crossing the hall, she entered the fernery, where palms rose against
the stone arches of the windows, and hanging baskets overflowed with
long tendrils above a wicker couch that was covered with red cushions.
It was the last refuge of the flowers. Beyond the leaded panes some
snowflakes were floating down upon the flagstone paths of the garden.
Her gaze was attracted to some potted roses languishing in a corner.
She recalled having read somewhere, "The color is in us, not in the
rose." She fell to wondering about the miracle of sight, in fact of
all the senses, through which one derived from vibrations a seeming
impression of surrounding things, and called this impression reality.
Of what nature were those vibrations? Did they truly explain the
objects from which they issued? Suppose the senses caught only the
least of them, or misinterpreted them? In that case one might be
surrounded by things wholly different from what one believed them to
be, awesome things which might be either exquisite or frightful. She
stood horrified by this thought. The familiar world seemed to be
dissolving in a mist, just as in her childhood: and through the mist
she perceived immense, vague apparitions, at once monstrous and
beautiful.
"Ah! why must these things come to me? What crime have I ever
committed?"
The huge, invisible cat was resuming its play with the mouse.
"Yes," she thought, "the capacity for pleasure is balanced by the
capacity for suffering. The more subtle our happy sensations, the more
piercing our painful ones. Yet the thrill from pleasure is gradually
deadened by repetition, and finally, with the passage of time, the
senses no longer feel it; but all the while that pleasure is
diminishing, pain increases. After all, what a tragical farce! Is
there nothing else, nothing better?"
Lilla began again to shrink from life, to mistrust it.
She suffered from trivial, groundless fears, which she magnified, then
abruptly forgot. Growing thinner, she found herself enervated as in
the days of her mourning for Lawrence Teck, and all the while something
at once indefinite and priceless seemed to be lost to her. In the
midst of her sadness she would have fleeting perceptions of blue water,
felucca sails, a town on the edge of a lake--maybe Lausanne--a room
where she sat obediently asleep in a deep leather chair.
Now and again she woke in the morning with dim impressions of having
dreamed a dream of inexpressible grandeur, of supernatural joy, in some
place that she could not remember, and with some person whose face she
could not recall. But as soon as she was wide awake all recollections
of the dream passed away. She found herself burdened with the same
unaccountable distress that she had taken to bed with her last night.
"All this preoccupation with myself! It must end to-day."
She determined to lose herself in David, to live and think and feel for
him alone.