Then what happens to the moon? She, who, shy and veiled, slips out
before dusk to take the air of heaven, wandering timidly among the
columned clouds, and fugitive from the staring of the sun; she, who, when
dusk has come, rules the sentient night with such chaste and icy
spell--whither and how does she retreat?
I came on her one morning--I surprised her. She was stealing into a dark
wintry wood, and five little stars were chasing her. She was
orange-hooded, a light-o'-love dismissed--unashamed and unfatigued,
having taken--all. And she was looking back with her almond eyes, across
her dark-ivory shoulder, at Night where he still lay drowned in the sleep
she had brought him. What a strange, slow, mocking look! So might
Aphrodite herself have looked back at some weary lover, remembering the
fire of his first embrace. Insatiate, smiling creature, slipping down to
the rim of the world to her bath in the sweet waters of dawn, whence
emerging, pure as a water lily, she would float in the cool sky till
evening came again! And just then she saw me looking, and hid behind a
holm-oak tree; but I could still see the gleam of one shoulder and her
long narrow eyes pursuing me. I went up to the tree and parted its dark
boughs to take her; but she had slipped behind another. I called to her
to stand, if only for one moment. But she smiled and went slip ping on,
and I ran thrusting through the wet bushes, leaping the fallen trunks.
The scent of rotting leaves disturbed by my feet leaped out into the
darkness, and birds, surprised, fluttered away. And still I ran--she
slipping ever further into the grove, and ever looking back at me. And I
thought: But I will catch you yet, you nymph of perdition! The wood will
soon be passed, you will have no cover then! And from her eyes, and the
scanty gleam of her flying limbs, I never looked away, not even when I
stumbled or ran against tree trunks in my blind haste. And at every
clearing I flew more furiously, thinking to seize all of her with my gaze
before she could cross the glade; but ever she found some little low
tree, some bush of birch ungrown, or the far top branches of the next
grove to screen her flying body and preserve allurement. And all the
time she was dipping, dipping to the rim of the world. And then I
tripped; but, as I rose, I saw that she had lingered for me; her long
sliding eyes were full, it seemed to me, of pity, as if she would have
liked for me to have enjoyed the sight of her. I stood still,
breathless, thinking that at last she would consent; but flinging back,
up into the air, one dark-ivory arm, she sighed and vanished. And the
breath of her sigh stirred all the birch-tree twigs just coloured with
the dawn. Long I stood in that thicket gazing at the spot where she had
leapt from me over the edge of the world-my heart quivering.