AFTER THE STORM
"I must die, my dear--I must die!" said La Foscarina, in a
heart-rending voice, after a long silence, raising her face from the
cushions where she had buried it, after a stormy scene of passion, in
which the ardent words of her beloved had given her as much pain as
pleasure.
She looked at Stelio, who had thrown himself, half reclining, on a
divan near the balcony, and now lay silent, his eyes half-closed, his
disordered hair touched with a ray of gold from the setting sun. She
realized that she was possessed by an incurable madness, spreading
throughout her declining body. Lost! Lost! She was irrevocably lost!
"Die?" said her beloved, in a dreamy voice, without moving or opening
his eyes, as if he were wrapped in a melancholy trance.
"Yes--die--before you hate me!"
Stelio opened his eyes quickly, raised himself erect and held up one
hand, as if to prevent her from saying more.
"Ah, why do you torment yourself in this way?" he said.
He saw that she was ivory pale; her hair fell in wandering wavy locks
over her cheeks; she seemed consumed by some corrosive poison; her
face was full of terror and misery.
"What are you doing with me? What are we both doing?" she exclaimed in
anguish.
"I love you!"
"Not as I wish, not as I have dreamed; I do not wish to be loved thus."
"But you set my heart on fire, and then madness seizes me."
"It is like the madness of hatred."
"No, no; do not say that!"
"Your fierceness makes me feel that you hate me--that you even wish to
kill me."
"But you make me blind, I tell you, and then I know not what I say or
do."
"What is it that maddens you so? What do you see in me?"
"Ah, I know not--I cannot tell!"
"But I know very well what it is!"
"Why do you torment yourself, I say? I love you! This is the love...."
"That condemns me! I must die of it! Call me once more by the name you
gave me long ago."
"You are mine! You belong to me, and I will not lose you."
"Yes, you will lose me."
"But why? I do not understand. What wild fancy is this of yours? Does
my love offend you? Do you not love me in the same way?"
His irritation and misunderstanding only aggravated her suffering. She
covered her face with her hands. Her heart throbbed with hammer-like
beating in her rigid breast, seeming to echo in her brain.
Presently she raised her head and looked at him with painful effort.
"I have a heart, Stelio," she said, with trembling lips, as if she were
struggling with a sort of fierce timidity in order to force herself
to speak those words. "I suffer from a heart, too keenly alive--oh,
Stelio, alive and eager and anguished as you never will know...."
She smiled the sweet, faint smile with which she sought to disguise her
suffering; hesitated a moment, then reached toward a bunch of violets,
which she took and pressed close to her lips. Her eyelids drooped,
her classic brow, between her dark hair and the flowers, showed its
ivory-like beauty.
"You wound my heart sometimes, Stelio," she said softly, her lips still
caressing the violets. "Sometimes you are cruel to it."
It seemed as if those fragrant, humble blossoms helped her to confess
her sadness, to veil still more the timid reproach she had made to her
beloved. She was silent; Stelio bowed his head. The logs on the hearth
crackled; the autumn rain fell monotonously in the fading garden.
"I long for kindness, with a thirst that you never will understand. For
that deep, true kindness, dear friend, which does not speak but which
comprehends, which knows how to give all in a single look or a single
movement; which is strong, sure, always armed against the evil impulse
that tempts us. Do you know the sort of kindness I mean?"
Her voice, alternately strong and wavering, was so warm with inner
light, was so full of revelation of a soul, that it passed through the
young man's blood more like a spiritual essence than a sound.
"In you, yes, Foscarina, I know it."
He took in his own hands the slender hands that lay filled with
violets on her lap; he bowed his head low over them and kissed them
submissively. Then he knelt at her feet, in the same submission. The
delicate perfume seemed to arouse his tenderness. During the long pause
the fire and the rain continued their murmured speech.
Suddenly she asked in a clear voice:
"Do you think that I believe myself sure of you?"
"Have you not watched over my slumbers?" he replied, but in an altered
tone, for he was suddenly seized by a new emotion: with her query he
had seen rise before him her naked soul; and he felt that that soul had
penetrated his own, and recognized his secret yearning for the belief
and confidence of others in himself.
"Yes, but what does that prove?" was her reply. "Youth sleeps quietly
on any pillow. You are young"--
"I love you and I have faith in you! I give myself entirely to you. You
are my life's companion, and your hand is strong."
He saw the well known sadness in the lines of that loved face, and his
voice trembled with tenderness.
"Kindness!" said she, caressing with light touch the hair on his
temples. "You know how to be kind--you even feel a need to comfort at
times. But a fault has been committed, and it calls for expiation.
Once it seemed to me that for you I could do the humblest as well as
the highest things; but now I feel that I can do only one thing--to go
away, disappear, and leave you free with your destiny."
He interrupted her by springing to his feet and taking the loved face
between his hands.
"I can do this, which love alone could not do," she said softly,
turning pale, and looking at him with an expression he never had seen
before.
Stelio felt that he held her soul in his hands--a living spring,
infinitely beautiful and precious.
"Foscarina, Foscarina! my soul, my life! Yes, you can give me more than
love--I know it well, and nothing is worth to me that which you give
me; no other offer could console me for not having you beside me on my
way. Believe me, believe! I have said this to you so often--don't you
remember?--even before you became all my own, when the compact still
held between us"--
Still holding her face between his palms, he leaned over and kissed her
passionately on her lips.
This time she shivered; the glacial flood she felt at times seemed
passing over her.
"No! no!" she pleaded, turning away from the young man. Dreamily she
bent to gather up the scattered violets.
"The compact!" she said, after an interval of silence. "Why have we
violated it?"
Stelio's eyes were fixed on the changeful splendor of the fire on the
hearth, but in his open hands lingered the strange sensation, the trace
of a miracle--that human face over which, through its sad pallor, had
passed a wave of sublime beauty.
"Why?" the woman repeated sadly. "Ah, confess--confess that you, too,
before we were seized with the blind madness of that night, felt that
the higher life was about to be devastated and lost; that we must not
yield if we wished to save the good that remained in us--that powerful,
intoxicating thing which seemed to be the only treasure left in my
life. Confess, Stelio! speak the truth! I can almost name the exact
moment when the better voice spoke to you in warning. Was it not on the
water, on the way home, when we had with us--Donatella?"
Before pronouncing that name she had hesitated a second, then she felt
an almost physical bitterness--a bitterness that descended from her
lips to the depths of her soul, as if the syllables held poison for
her. She awaited his reply with suffering. "I do not know how to think
about the past, Fosca," the young man replied; "moreover, I do not
wish to think about it. I have lost no good attribute that belonged to
me. It pleases me that your soul springs to your ripe lips, heavy with
sweetness, and that your fair cheek pales when I embrace you."
"Hush, hush!" she begged. "Do not speak like that! Do not prevent me
from saying what it is that troubles me! Why do you not help me?"
She shrank back among the cushions, and looked fixedly at the fire, to
avoid meeting the eyes of her beloved.
"More than once I have seen a look in your eyes that has filled me with
horror," she said at last, with a touch of hoarseness in her effort to
speak.
Stelio started, but dared not contradict her.
"Yes, with horror," she repeated, in a clearer tone, implacable against
herself, having already triumphed over her fear and regained her
courage.
Both were now face to face with the truth.
She continued without faltering.
"The first time I saw it was out there in the garden--that night--you
know! I understood then what it was you saw in me; all the mire over
which I have walked, all the infamy that clung to my feet, all the
impurity for which I have so much disgust! Ah, you could not have
acknowledged the visions that kindled your thoughts that night! Your
eyes were cruel and your mouth was convulsed. When you felt that you
wounded my sensitiveness, you took pity on me. But then--but since
then"--
Her face was covered with blushes; her voice had grown impetuous, and
her eyes were brilliant.
"To have nourished for years, with all the best that was in me, a
sentiment of devotion and unbounded admiration, near you or from afar,
in joy and in sadness; to have accepted in the purest spirit all the
consolation offered by you to mankind through your poetry, and to have
awaited eagerly other gifts, even higher and more consoling; to have
believed in the great force of your genius since its dawn, and never
to have relaxed my watch over your ascent, and to have accompanied
it with a wish that has been my morning and evening prayer all these
years; to have continued, with silent fervor, the effort to give some
beauty and harmony to my own spirit, that it might be more worthy to
approach yours; so many times, on the stage, before an ardent audience,
to have pronounced with a thrill some immortal phrase, thinking of
those which perhaps one day you would communicate to mankind through
my lips; to have worked without respite, to have tried always to rise
to a higher and simpler form in my art, to have aspired unceasingly to
perfection, fearing that nothing less would please you, that otherwise
I should seem inferior to your dream; to have loved my fleeting glory
only because some day it might serve yours; to have hastened, with the
fervent confidence of faith, the latest of your revelations, that I
might offer myself to you as the instrument of your victory before my
own decay; against all and everything, to have defended this secret
ideal in my soul, against all and against myself as much as against
others; to have made of you my melancholy, my steadfast hope, my heroic
test, the symbol of all things good, strong, and free--ah, Stelio!
Stelio!"--
She paused an instant, overcome by that memory as by a new shame.
"And then to have reached that dawn--to have seen you leaving my house
in that way on that horrible morning--Do you remember?"
"I was happy--happy!" cried the young man, in a stifled voice, pale and
agitated.
"No, no! Do you remember? You left me as you would have left some light
love, some passing fancy, after a few hours of idle pastime."
"You deceive yourself!"
"Confess! Come, speak the truth. Only through truth can we now hope to
save ourselves."
"I was happy, I tell you; my whole heart expanded with joy; I dreamed,
I hoped, I felt as if I were born anew."
"Yes, yes!--happy to breathe freely, to feel your youth in the breeze
and the fresh air. What did you see in her who in her renunciation had
so many times suffered keenly--yes, you know it well!--rather than
break the vow that she had taken and borne with her in her wanderings
over the earth? Tell me! what did you see in me, if you did not believe
me a corrupt creature, the heroine of chance amours, the vagabond
actress who in her own life, as on the stage, may belong to any man and
every man?"
"Foscarina! Foscarina!"
Stelio leaned over her and closed her lips with a trembling hand.
"No, no, do not say that! You are mad! Hush! hush!"
"It is horrible!" murmured the woman, sinking back on the cushions,
unnerved by her agitation, submerged in the bitter wave that had
flooded her heart.
But her eyes remained wide open, fixed as two crystal orbs, hard as
if they had no lashes, fastened on Stelio. They prevented him from
speaking, from denying or softening the truth they had discovered. In a
moment or two he found that gaze intolerable, and gently pressed the
lids down with the tips of his fingers, as one closes the eyes of the
dead. She noted the movement, which was full of infinite melancholy;
she felt that only tender love and pity were in that touch. Her
bitterness passed away, her eyes grew moist. She extended her arms,
clasped them around his neck, and raised herself a little. She seemed
to be shutting her soul within herself, and became once more gentle and
weak, full of silent pleading.
"And so I must go," she sighed at last. "Is there no help for it? Is
there no pardon?"
"I love you!" her lover repeated.
She disengaged one arm, and held her open hand toward the fire, as
if to conjure fate. Then once more she clasped her lover in a close
embrace.
"Yes, still a little while! Let me remain with you a little longer.
Then I will go away; I will go somewhere, far-away, and die on a stone
under a tree. But let me stay with you a little longer."
"I love you!"
The blind and indomitable forces of life were whirling over them in
that embrace. And because they realized this with terror their clasp
grew closer; and from that embrace sprang an impulse, both good and
evil, that stirred them to the soul. In the silent room, the voices
of the elements spoke their obscure language, which was like an
uncomprehended reply to their mute questioning. The fire, near them,
and the rain, from without, discoursed, replied, narrated. Little by
little, these voices reached the spirit of the Animator, enticed it,
charmed it, drew it into the world of innumerable myths, born of their
eternity. His keener spiritual senses heard the deep resonance of the
two melodies expressing the intimate essence of the two elementary
wills--the two marvelous melodies that he had found, to weave them
into the symphonic web of the new tragedy. Of a sudden, all sadness
and anxiety left him as in a happy truce, an interval of enchantment.
And the woman's clasp relaxed, as if in obedience to some command of
liberation.
"There is no help for it!" she repeated to herself, seeming to repeat
a formula of condemnation heard by her in the same mysterious way that
Stelio had heard the wonderful melodies.
She leaned forward, resting her chin in her hand and her elbow on her
knee; and in this attitude she gazed a long time into the fire, with a
slight frown on her brow.
As Stelio looked at her, his soul was troubled. He yearned to find some
way of breaking the iron band that oppressed her, of dissipating that
mist of sadness, of leading his beloved back to joy.
The fire in its sudden burst of flame illumined her face and hair; her
forehead was as beautiful as a noble manly brow; something natural and
untamed was suggested in the rippling waves and changeful hue of her
thick hair.
"What are you looking at so intently?" she said at last, feeling his
fixed gaze. "Have you found a gray hair?"
He knelt before his love again, flexible and tender.
"I see only your beauty. In you I always find something that delights
me. I was looking then at the strange wave of your hair here--a wave
not made by the comb, but by the storm!"
He slipped his fingers through the thick tresses. She closed her eyes,
feeling again the spell of his terrible power over her.
"I see only your beauty. When you close your eyes thus, I feel that you
are mine to the depth of your heart--lost in me, as the soul is one
with the body: a single life, mine and thine."
She listened in the half light, and his voice seemed to come from a
long distance, and to be speaking not to her but to another woman;
she felt as if she were overhearing a lover's protestations to his
mistress, and suddenly fancied herself mad with jealousy, possessed
by a desire to kill, filled with a spirit of revenge; but that body
must remain motionless, her hands hanging at her sides, nerveless and
powerless.
"You are my delight and my inspiration. You have a stimulating power
of which you are unconscious. Your simplest act suffices to reveal to
me some truth of which I was ignorant. And love is like the intellect:
it shines in the measure of the truth it discovers. Why, why do you
grieve yourself? Nothing is destroyed, nothing is lost. It was intended
that we should be united, so that together we might rise to joy and
triumph. It was necessary that I should be free and happy in your
true and perfect love in order to create the work of beauty that so
many men expect of me. I need your faith; I need to pass through joy
and to create. Your presence alone suffices to inspire my mind with
incalculable fruitfulness. Just now, when your arms held me close, I
heard a sudden torrent of music, a flood of melody, passing through the
silence."
To whom was he speaking? Whom did he ask for joy? Was not his imperious
demand for music a yearning toward her that sang, transfiguring the
universe with her song? Of whom, if not of fresh youth and maidenhood,
could he ask joy and creation? While she had held him in her embrace,
it was the other woman who had sung and spoken within him! And now,
now--to whom was he speaking, if not to that other woman? She alone
could give him what was necessary for his art and his life. The
maiden was a new force, a closed beauty, an unused weapon, keen and
magnificent for the intoxication of war. Malediction! Malediction!
Mingled sorrow and anger stirred her heart, in that vibrating darkness
which she dared not leave. She suffered the torments of a nightmare; as
if she were rolling toward a precipice with the indestructible burden
of her vanished years--years of misery and of triumph--her fading
face with its thousand masks, her despairing soul, and the thousand
other souls that had inhabited her mortal body. This grand passion of
her life, which was to have saved her, seemed now to be pushing her
relentlessly toward ruin and death. In order to reach her, and through
her to attain to his highest joy, the passion of her beloved was
compelled to make its way through what he believed to be a multitude
of unknown loves; it would contaminate, corrupt and embitter itself,
perhaps even change by slow degrees to disgust. Always that shadowy
multitude must keep alive in him that instinct of brutal ferocity which
lurked in his strong nature. Ah, what had she done? She herself had
armed a furious devastator, and had put him between her friend and
herself. No escape was possible. She herself, on that night of the
flame, had led before him the fresh and beautiful prey, of whom he had
taken possession by one of those looks that are a choice and a promise.
To whom was he speaking now, if not to that other woman. Of whom did he
ask joy?
"Do not be sad! do not be sad!"
But now she heard his words only confusedly, more faint than before, as
if her soul had sunk into a chasm; but she felt his impatient hands as
they touched her caressingly. And, in that red darkness, wherein, as it
seemed to her, all madnesses and folly were born, she felt a surging
revolt in her veins.
"Do you wish me to take you to her? Do you wish me to call her to you?"
cried the unhappy woman, suddenly opening her eyes with an expression
that astonished Stelio; she seized his wrists and shook him with a
grasp so tight that he felt her nails in his flesh. "Go! go! She awaits
you! Why do you remain here? Go, run! She awaits you!"
She sprang up, raising him at the same time, and tried to push him
toward the door. She was no longer recognizable, transfigured by fury
into a dangerous, threatening creature. The strength of her hands was
incredible, like the energy of evil intent in her whole being.
"Who awaits me? What did you say? What is the matter with you? Come
back to your senses, Foscarina!"
He stammered his appeal, he trembled, fancying he saw madness in that
distorted face. But she was like one distraught and heard him not.
"Foscarina!" He called her with all his soul, white with terror, as if
to stop with his cry her escaping reason.
She gave a great start, opened her hands, and gazed around as if just
roused from a long sleep, of which she remembered nothing.
"Come, sit down."
He led her back to the cushions, and gently made her settle herself
among them. She allowed herself to be soothed by his solicitous
tenderness. Presently she moaned:
"Who has beaten me?"
She felt of her bruised arms, and touched her face lightly, trembling
as if she were cold.
"Come; lie down! Put your head here."
He made her lie on the couch; disposed her head comfortably, put a
light cushion over her feet, softly and carefully, leaning over her as
over a dear invalid, giving up to her all his heart still throbbing
with fear.
"Yes, yes," she repeated, in a voice no louder than a sigh, at each
movement he made, as if she would prolong the sweetness of these cares.
"Are you cold?"
"Yes."
"Shall I cover you with something?" Stelio inquired.
"Yes."
He sought for some wrap, and found on a table a piece of antique
velvet, which he spread over her. She smiled faintly.
"Are you comfortable like that?"
She made an affirmative sign by simply closing her eyelids.
Stelio gathered up the violets, now warm and languid, and laid them on
the pillow near her head.
"So?"
Her eyelids drooped even more slightly than before. He kissed her
forehead, amid the perfume of the violets; then he turned to stir the
fire, putting on more wood and raising a fine blaze.
"Do you feel the heat? Are you getting warm?" he asked softly.
He approached and bent over the poor soul. She slept; the contraction
of her face had relaxed, and the lines of her mouth were composed in
the equal rhythm of sleep; a calm like that of death spread over her
pale face. "Sleep! Sleep!" He was so moved by love and pity that he
would have liked to transfuse into that slumber an infinite virtue of
consolation and forgetfulness.
He remained standing on the rug, watching her, counting her
respirations. Those lips had said: "I can do one thing that love alone
cannot do." Those lips had said: "Do you wish me to take you to her? Do
you wish me to call her to you?" He neither judged nor resolved, but
let his thoughts scatter. Once again he felt the blind, indomitable
forces of life whirling over his head, over that sleeping form, and
also his terrible desire to cling to life. "The bow is named BIOS, and
its work is death."
In the silence, the fire and the rain continued to talk. The voice
of the elements, the woman sleeping in her sadness, the imminence of
fate, the immensity of the future, remembrance and presentiment, all
these things created in his mind a state of musical mystery wherein
the yet unwritten work surged anew and illumined his thought. He
listened to his melodies developing themselves indefinitely, and heard
a personage in the drama say: "This alone quenches our thirst, and all
the thirst in us turns eagerly toward this freshness. If it did not
exist, none could live here; we should all die of thirst." He saw a
country furrowed by the dry, white bed of an ancient river, dotted with
bonfires which lighted up the extraordinarily calm, pure evening. He
saw a funereal gleam of gold, a tomb filled with corpses all covered
with gold, and the crowned corpse of Cassandra among the sepulchral
urns. A voice said: "How soft her ashes are! They run between the
fingers like the sands of the sea." Another voice said: "She speaks of
a shadow that passes over things, and of a damp sponge that effaces
all traces." Then night fell; stars sparkled, the myrtles breathed
perfume, and a voice said: "Ah! Behold the statue of Niobe! Before
dying, Antigone sees a stone statue whence gushes an eternal fountain
of tears." The error of the age had passed away; the remoteness of
centuries was abolished.