Positively it was the most original mask. People followed me in crowds,
turned me about, jostled me, pinched me. But when, harried, I turned on
my persecutors in anger—uncontrollable laughter seized them. Wherever I
went, a roaring cloud of laughter encompassed and pressed on me; it
moved together with me, and I could not escape from this circle of mad
mirth. Sometimes it seized even myself, and I shouted, sang, and danced
till everything seemed to go round before me, as if I was drunk. But
how remote everything was from me! And how solitary was I under that
mask! At last they left me in peace. With anger and fear, with malice
and tenderness intermingling, I looked at her.
“”Tis I.”
Her long eyelashes were lifted slowly in surprise, and a whole sheaf of
black rays flashed upon me, and a laugh, resonant, joyous, bright as
the spring sunshine—a laugh answered me.
“Yes, it is I; I, I say,” I insisted with a smile. “Why did you not
come this evening?”
But she only laughed, laughed joyously.
“I suffered so much; I felt so hurt,” said I, imploring an answer.
But she only laughed. The black sheen of her eyes was extinguished, and
still more brightly her smile lit up. It was the sun indeed, but
burning, pitiless, cruel.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Is it really you?” said she, restraining herself. “How comical you
are!”
My shoulders were bowed, and my head hung down—such despair was there
in my pose. And while she, with the expiring afterglow of the smile
upon her face, looked at the happy young couples that hurried by us, I
said: “It’s not nice to laugh. Do you not feel that there is a living,
suffering face behind my ridiculous mask—and can’t you see that it was
only for the opportunity it gave me of seeing you that I put it on? You
gave me reason to hope for your love, and then so quickly, so cruelly
deprived me of it. Why did you not come?”
With a protest on her tender, smiling lips, she turned sharply to me,
and a cruel laugh utterly overwhelmed her. Choking, almost weeping,
covering her face with a fragrant lace handkerchief, she brought out
with difficulty: “Look at yourself in the mirror behind. Oh, how droll
you are!”
Contracting my brows, clenching my teeth with pain, with a face grown
cold, from which all the blood had fled, I looked at the mirror. There
gazed out at me an idiotically placid, stolidly complacent, inhumanly
immovable face. And I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. And
with the laughter not yet subsided, but already with the trembling of
rising anger, with the madness of despair, I said—nay, almost shouted:
“You ought not to laugh!”
And when she was quiet again I went on speaking in a whisper of my
love. I had never spoken so well, for I had never loved so strongly. I
spoke of the tortures of expectation, of the venomous tears of mad
jealousy and grief, of my own soul which was all love. And I saw how
her drooping eyelashes cast thick dark shadow over her blanched cheeks.
I saw how across their dull pallor the fire, bursting into flame, threw
a red reflection, and how her whole pliant body involuntarily bent
towards me.
She was dressed as the Goddess of Night, and was all mysterious, clad
in a black, mist-like face, which twinkled with stars of brilliants.
She was beautiful as a forgotten dream of far-off childhood. As I spoke
my eyes filled with tears, and my heart beat with gladness. And I
perceived, I perceived at last, how a tender, piteous smile parted her
lips, and her eyelashes were lifted all a-tremble. Slowly, timorously,
but with infinite confidence, she turned her head towards me, and—
And such a shriek of laughter I never heard!
“No, no, I can’t,” she almost groaned, and throwing back her head, she
burst into a resonant cascade of laughter.
Oh, if but for a moment I could have had a human face! I bit my lips,
tears rolled over my heated face; but it—that idiotic mask, on which
everything was in its right place, nose, eyes, and lips—looked with a
complacency staidly horrible in its absurdity. And when I went out,
swaying on my flowered feet, it was long before I got out of reach of
that ringing laugh. It was as though a silvery stream of water were
falling from an immense height, and breaking in cheerful song upon the
hard rock.