THE MYSTIC BARK
"L'épouvantable misère de ceux qui vivent
sans amour."
Rusbrock l'Admirable,
_De la Jouissance chaste_.
"Do you know, Madame, that Monsieur Moscowitch has the firm intention
of marrying you?"
"That is quite natural."
"Yes, but what do you say to it?"
"It is agreeable to me."
"Then," asked Entragues, "why did you not let me know?"
"Ah! you would like to have the cards stacked. You do not wish to waste
your time? At first, not any more than yourself, Monsieur Moscowitch
never asked more than the pleasure of seeing me."
"He is fascinating."
"Isn't he?" returned Sixtine. "He pleases me very much and I believe
that with him I shall never be bored."
"Ah! you are quite perverse, but perhaps that is why I love you."
"Perverse, because I do not wish to be bored!"
"No, boredom is the terror of every woman, and they commit half
of their crimes to escape its claws. But it is useless. Boredom,
impassive, smokes his houka and maintains his slaves. I well know that
passion is stronger than he is, but you are incapable of loving."
"No more than another," Sixtine nonchalantly said, "and, besides all
I ask is to be given the chance. I have already told you I was dough
waiting for the hands of the kneader; and, after all I can not fashion
myself alone. But are you coming to warble such poor ditties of
jealousy, and in such a vulgar style. I believed you had more disdain
and a richer vocabulary. Ah, fie! to sing such a romanza to me: 'You
are incapable of loving.' Well, Monsieur, to use your language, I am
at least capable of being loved. You seem to think that in love there
is a category of capacities as in the time of Louis-Philippe? Would it
be a special string that the cithara lacks? All the human instruments
are complete and even women have spare strings, if you care to know.
But skillful citharists are rare and most men only know how to direct
the preliminary chord of the instrument from which they pretend to
draw music. Please speak to me in the language of a logician, since
that is your intellectual profession, and do not imagine that I am
a boarding-school girl who will feel herself burning with love,
through a very noble spirit of contradiction, at the very moment when
a man presents her adroit inaninity: 'You are incapable of loving.'
For you are perhaps very skillful and capable, oh! very capable of
demonstrating the patent lack of logic in my feminine deductions. But,
question me!"
"I get," said Entragues, "much pleasure in listening to you. Your voice
is sweet."
"This time," he thought, "thanks to the mutual impertinences with which
we are offending each other, things will end very well or very badly.
She is very much unnerved and my own mental state lacks poise. We are
going to reach, it is to be hoped, a surprising result."
As she was silent, he resumed:
"There are instruments irremediably out of tune, like those which
undergo the humidity of solitude; but it is not such a great
disaster--you have but to change the strings."
"A turn of the peg perhaps might suffice," said Sixtine, "and first of
all, a ray of sunshine."
That word went straight to his heart. Yet the voice which had
pronounced it was cold and brittle with irony, but he only kept its
sense and saw rising before him, under the form of a sorrowful woman
with imploring gestures, the very figure of Abandonment. Her fingers
dropped arrows at his feet, he was naively touched:
"I have offended you, forgive me."
"Yes," Sixtine said, "you have been spiteful and it has hurt me. Let us
become good friends, while awaiting something better, if it is to be
our destiny that I put my hand in your hand forever. But do rot vent
your anger against a weak woman, unfortunate enough already in not
knowing what she wants. You have no cause to be jealous, and besides,"
she smiled, but not mischievously, "you have not the right, my friend."
He had placed a knee on the ground before her and held her hand in
his hands, without pressing it, with precaution, like a fragile and
precious porcelain.
"Here I am," he thought, "in the attitude of Sidoine before Coquerette,
I have but to bring these fingers and nails to my lips to complete
the resemblance, making allowances for the different natures of the
two women. Coquerette, that capricious and laughing child, might
experience a sudden but momentary change of nature. Her very sincere
passion for Sidoine will last as long as Sidoine does not respond
--perhaps a few days. As Sidoine seeks no more in this pretty little
woman than a diverting intrigue, he is quite capable of yielding on
the very evening, despite the shocked nerves, when this would be but
out of human respect. In that case, Coquerette's passion would not be
protracted: the wood would blaze and quickly become a little heap of
ashes. But how singular! at the very moment of the thunderbolt, and
during all those surprising electric effects, Coquerette is the woman
to give Sidoine, if he quite openly scorned her, a truly great and
real proof of love: she would throw herself through the window, if no
revolver came to her hand. I could write this sequel, or some other,
for there are two or three equally logical denouements in every love
story.... Where was I? Sixtine is quite different from Coquerette...."
A long silence had followed the last words of Sixtine, during which
Entragues, without ceasing to be absorbedly interested in the present,
could nevertheless not curb his analytical imagination.
"I know it, I know it too well," answered Hubert between two attitudes,
"but you say bitter things with such sweetness and charm that they
delight me like tender caresses. The future, where you let me glimpse
the possibility of joy, appears to me like the thought and imagination
of dawn to a poor pilgrim who has stayed too long in the horrors of a
black forest...."
"Imagination, if such is your pleasure, my friend; but strike and the
spring will gush. Strike boldly, make way to my heart, make my blood
flow like a stream, and let me fall into the murderer's arms, dying of
joy and dying of love. I would like, I would like...."
"Ah! tell me just what I would like," Sixtine continued inwardly,
"evoke my will before me, let me see it with my eyes, let me touch
it with my hands. You can do it, you should be able, since you are a
man!..."
She waited a second: the aura of a nervous stroke hovered nearby and
played along her spine, the swelling ball traveled along her neck; her
fingers thrilled in the hand of Entragues, she felt the imperious
necessity of shunning all contact and, suddenly rising, she went to her
piano and feverishly played an incoherent piece of music which saved
her.
"She is strange," thought Entragues. "One might say that she was going
to let herself go and suddenly she flies away from peril. She never
loses her head and I should truly applaud the advice which a diabolic
inspiration made me give this poor Moscowitch. She is not a Coquerette,
she can master herself, but on the day when the river shall have been
crossed, shoulder against shoulder, she will be united to her lover as
iron to iron under the hammer of the good smith:
"Love, good smith of hearts,
Hammer, hammer,
Hammer two by two the hearts,
Hammer, hammer,
Love, good smith of hearts!"
He hummed this verse, improvised at the end of a rhythm that sang
under Sixtine's fingers. Verses, welcome phrases, fine periods rose
to his lips according to the cadence of the music and with the words
came ideas, curious ideas with which he had no acquaintance, plans of
romances, metaphysical romances, interesting views on himself, on his
friends, on love, on politics. During the hour that Sixtine was at the
piano, he lived through several days of a full deep life, and when the
music paused, Hubert felt a violent arrest of thought which seized his
heart and brain, just as an extreme and sudden transition from warm to
cold seizes the flesh and marrow.
"Now," said Sixtine, half turning on her stool, "to prove to you that
you are still a person I trust, despite your blunder, I will tell you
some fragments of my life. Do not take it for a confession, nor for a
secret, nor for an avowal; it is nothing else than goodness of heart
on my part, and the desire to satisfy your curiosity. I hardly like
to explain my past miseries, and I really believe, besides, that no
one has ever seen the spectacle, unless it be the countess and a dead
friend, dear and always dear in memory, of Sixtine tearing aside the
veil of Isis."
"Your past," said Entragues, "is as sacred to me as a religious
mystery. I do not question that you have always behaved like a woman
endowed with natural dignity...."
"Precisely," interrupted Sixtine, "I am and was a woman, and I
committed the crimes of a woman who does not know the meaning of the
word 'duty.' I was taught it, I forgot it, never having understood it."
"If you have forgotten it," said Entragues, "I will not try to have you
learn it anew, before knowing you better. Duty for me consists in doing
my work and cutting down all the obstacles of life; I do not know what
duty is to another."
"Yes, you are an intellectual. Some men are and many might become
intellectuals, but it is not possible for a woman. Those women who have
the air of interesting themselves in things of the mind do so only
through pretense of imitation. The silver circle of sensation clasps
them and sentiment remains sentiment to them. I have been told this and
you are right in thinking that I could not have found it out myself;
besides, it is a matter of indifference to me, since, like other women,
I seek only happiness."
"And you are not happy."
"No, but I can be. I live for that: it is my work, I shall pursue it to
my last hour and I am quite tranquil."
"You will give me your secret," said Entragues.
"In a moment," said Sixtine. "If an adventure like the first came to
me, it would be myself, not the other, who would die. You have perhaps
learned that when any one speaks to me of love, it is not only the
peace of my heart which is at stake, but the light of my eyes. This
should give me, I believe, the right of choosing: well, I will not
choose. Thus, I shall have nothing with which to reproach myself, if I
am shipwrecked. I shall have usurped neither the speaking-trumpet nor
the helm, I will be the passenger who sleeps in the ship and sails with
closed eyes. And to think," she added, as if speaking to herself, "that
it needs but eight days for me to be at sea, embarked towards reefs, in
a capsizing ship and under an inexperienced command! Isn't that what
awaits me? I prefer therefore not to set sail, life is not painful to
me; but I shall depart, for some one will lift me from the ground and
some one's arms ... whose?... will place me on the cushions amid the
rolling waves.... Ah! I am capable of having a very happy voyage, a
voyage of real pleasure through oceans full of sunshine with a calm and
cool port, and smiles of good souls, for my destination, to the very
end...."
"It shall be so," said Entragues.
The tragic simplicity of this woman who vouch-safed to confess
herself, affected him as much as a beautiful sunrise or as perfect
prose in splendid print. At this moment, he no longer felt any love
for her; the impression was wholly literary, and with a remnant of
conscience, he cursed himself for this blasphemy. Yet he noticed this:
the metaphorical developments with which Sixtine had indicated her
conception of the future were analogous to the images which had haunted
him one day in a similar state of-mind. A fugitive state, doubtless,
but one whose birth, though occasional, revealed secret agreements
between their souls. If not the joys of union a great devotion was
at least possible, and it is much that two beings be qualified for
the same sufferings, and that if life strike one heart the other be
wounded. This transitory thought led him back to love: his arms, by a
sudden loosened spring, opened and, if she had fallen into them, they
would have closed again on the infinite. But he was too late by several
minutes: there is a very tiny space between perceived sensation and
analyzed sensation: it is there that the ironic "Too Late" dwells.
Sixtine answered:
"What do you know? Could you, yourself, promise me, on your life, that
the morrows will not bring me the disillusion of your past days? Will
you make such a promise?"
The sun had had its day, and the sky, by slow diminutions, darkened.
Red, green and yellow fires blazed on the stream.
Languid under its trappings, lightly rocked by the eddy, a slow bark
drew near and anchored at the quay. The stones were all covered with
heavy rugs, as were the granite steps and the pavement to the foot-path
where the carriage stopped. Torch carriers lined the road to the bark:
by their flickering flames, the golds and purples of the draperies
brightened and the water of the river assumed the color of garnets and
topazes.
They were alone. Holding each other's hand, they walked in silence,
both garbed in black and resembling shadows.
When they stepped on the plank, they looked and smiled at each other.
They departed alone, they departed together, and yet each saw in the
other's eye the melancholy of voyagers.
The bark put to sea, the torches were extinguished: in the night there
was again but one lantern on the water of the stream.
"Yes," said Entragues.
Sixtine shuddered.
"Yes," repeated Entragues, "if you love me!"
Sixtine continued:
"There's a story intermingled with much prattling.... I am speaking for
myself."
"I deserve my part of the blame," returned Entragues.
And to himself he added:
"If you love me! I have the air of laying down my conditions. What
cowardice made me pronounce these humiliating syllables! I, too, have
spoiled everything. I had only to say 'yes'! And that was my whole
thought, it was my true thought. Yet I love you, Sixtine, I really love
you without conditions, you see! Ah! you will end by understanding it."
Sixtine observed him:
"Ah! my poor friend, will you never understand me, then?"
She said loud:
"But we must end.... It is because I have some modesty in baring
myself in this way.... After all.... No, enough for to-day ... another
time .... Please leave me, now, if you wish to please me ... without
questions ... and without fear ... you will come to-morrow. Good-by, my
friend."