While George sought for some money in his pockets in order to throw it
among the horde, Hippolyte pressed close to him, seized at the throat by
a feeling of disgust, powerless henceforth to master the fantastic
terror which invaded her in this powerful white light in this unknown
land where swarmed so lugubrious a life.
"Stop! Stop!"
"Charity!"
"Pity! Pity!"
But the coachman, becoming angry, rose suddenly on his seat, shook his
whip vigorously, and began to beat the beggars with all his might; and
he accompanied every blow with invectives. The lash whistled. Beneath
his blows the beggars howled maledictions, but did not retreat. Each
wished his share.
"Give me some! Give me some!"
Then George threw a handful of coins in the dust; and the dust covered
the scuffle of the monsters, choked their blasphemies. The man with the
amputated hands and the fellow with the inert limbs still essayed to
follow the carriage for a moment; but, menaced by the whip, they
stopped.
"Don't be afraid, signora," said the coachman. "Nobody will get near us
now, I promise you."
New voices arose, groaning, yelling, invoking the Virgin and Jesus,
announcing the nature of their deformities and sores, recounting the
malady or misfortune. On the other side of the ambush prepared by the
first bandits, a second army in tatters stretched along in a double
chain on the borders of the road as far as the houses of the distant
market town.
"My God, my God! What a cursed country!" murmured Hippolyte, exhausted,
feeling herself fainting. "Let us get away from here. Let us go away!
Please, George, let us go back."
Nothing--not the whirlwind of madness that drove the fanatic bands
around the temple, nor the hopeless cries that seemed to issue from a
place on fire, from a shipwreck or a massacre, nor the inanimate and
bloody old men who lay in heaps along the court of the votive hall, nor
the convulsed women who crawled towards the altar tearing their tongues
against the stone, nor the supreme clamor that issued from the entrails
of the multitude confounded in an unique anguish and in an unique
hope--nothing, nothing, was as terrible as the spectacle of that great
dusty hillside blinding in the glare of the sun, where all these
monsters of human misery, all this debris of a ruined race, these bodies
vilified to the level of the unclean beast and excremental matter,
opened their rags to expose their impurities and proclaim them. The
innumerable horde occupied the slope and the ditches; they had with them
their family, their progeniture, their relatives, their household goods.
One saw women half-naked and as lean as bitches who have just littered,
children green as lizards, emaciated, with rapacious eyes, their mouths
already withered, taciturn, breeding in the blood the hereditary
disease. Each tribe possessed its monster: one-armed, bandy-legged,
subject to goitre, blindness, leprosy, epilepsy. Each had as a
patrimony his ulcer to cultivate, from which to derive an income. Urged
on by his own people, the monster left the group, advanced in the dust,
gesticulated and implored, for the common benefit:
"Charity, charity, if you hope for mercy! Charity! Take pity on me!
Take pity on me!"
A monomere, black and flat-nosed as a mulatto, with a long leonine mane,
picked up the dust in the curls of his hair, then shook his head,
enveloping himself in a cloud. A woman afflicted with hernia, of no
age, having no longer a human face, squatted on a post, raised her apron
to show her hernia, enormous and yellowish like a bladder full of suet.
Seated on the ground, a man afflicted with elephantiasis pointed with
his finger to his leg, massive as the trunk of an oak, covered with
warts and yellow crusts, dotted with black or hardened spots, so
voluminous that one would have said it did not belong to him. A blind
man, on his knees, his hands stretched towards heaven in the attitude of
an ecstatic, had under his high and bald brow two little blood-stained
holes. Others and still others showed themselves in the dazzling glare
of the sun, as far as the view could carry. All the great hillside was
infested by them without an interval. Their supplications continued
uninterruptedly, rising and falling in chorus, in discord, with a
thousand accents. The vast extent of the solitary country, the deserted
and silent sky, the hallucinating reverberation of the fiery road, the
immobility of the vegetable forms--all these environments rendered the
hour tragic, evoked the biblical image of a road of desolation
conducting to the gates of a cursed city.
"Let's go! Let's go back! Please, George, let's go back!" repeated
Hippolyte, with a shudder of horror, dominated by the superstitious idea
of a divine punishment, fearing other spectacles and more atrocious
ones, under this burning and empty sky in which there began to be heard
a metallic rumbling.
"But where can we go? Where shall we go?"
"No matter where. No matter where. Let us go back over there, near the
sea. We'll wait there until it's time to leave. Please!"
The fast, the torture of thirst, the hot, oppressive atmosphere, had
increased in both their uneasiness of mind.
"Do you see? Do you see?" she cried, as if in front of a supernatural
apparition. "Do you see? Will it then never end?"
In the light, the glaring and implacable light, advanced towards them a
band of tattered men and women, and in front of the band marched a sort
of crier who vociferated while agitating a copper tray. These men and
women bore upon their shoulders a trestle covered with a mattress on
which lay an invalid of cadaverous appearance, a yellowish-looking
creature, thin as a skeleton, tightly wrapped in bands of cloth like a
mummy, the feet bare. And the crier--an olive-colored and serpentine
man with the eyes of a madman--pointed to the dying woman, and related
in a high key that this woman, who had been ill from hemorrhage for
years, had obtained the miracle from the Virgin at the very dawn of that
day, and he begged for alms so that, cured of her disease, she could
gain fresh blood. And he shook the copper tray, on which tinkled a few
coins.
"The Madonna has performed the miracle! The miracle! The miracle!
Charity! In the name of the Very Holy and the Very Merciful Mary,
charity!"
The men, the women, all together, contracted their faces as if about to
weep. And the invalid, with a vague gesture, slightly raised her bony
hands, the fingers of which moved as if to seize something in the air;
while her bare feet, as yellow as her hands and face, shiny at the
ankles, had the rigidity of death. And all that was exposed in the
glaring and implacable light--near, near, always nearer.
"Turn back! Turn back!" cried George to the driver. "Turn back, and
whip up your horses."
"We're there, signor. What alarms you?"
"Turn back!"
The injunction was so imperative that the driver turned round his horses
amidst the deafening cries.
"Whip them up! Whip them up!"
From the top to the bottom of the hill the carriage seemed, among the
clouds of thick dust, pierced every now and then by a hoarse yell.
"Where are we going?" asked the driver, bending down.
"Over there, over there, near the sea! Whip them up!"
George was supporting Hippolyte, who had almost fainted, without trying
to revive her. He had but a confused sensation of all that was going
on. Real images, and fantastic images, whirled around his brain and
gave him hallucinations. A continual buzzing filled his ears, and
prevented him from hearing any other sound distinctly. His heart was
oppressed with a keen anguish, as in the nightmare--the anguish to
emerge from the zone of this horrible dream, the anguish to recover his
first lucidity, to feel the loved creature palpitate on his breast, and
to see once more the tender smile.
_Viva Maria!_
Once more the undulation of the hymn reached him; once more the House of
the Virgin appeared to him on the left amid the immense human swarm,
reddish in the solar conflagration, throned on the summits of the
profane tents, irradiating a formidable power.
_Viva Maria!_
_Viva Maria!_
The undulation faded away; and at a bend of the hill the Sanctuary
disappeared. And, suddenly, a cool breath glided over the vast, waving
harvests. And a long blue band cut the horizon.
"The sea! There's the sea!" cried George, as if he had just attained
salvation.
And his heart dilated.
"Courage, my soul! Contemplate the sea!"
*V.*
*TEMPUS DESTRUENDI.*
*CHAPTER I.*
The table, laid in the loggia, presented a gay appearance, with its
transparent porcelain, its bluish glassware, its crimson pinks, under
the golden light of a fixed, large lamp, which attracted the nocturnal
moths scattered in the twilight.
"Look, George, look! A devil moth! It has the eyes of a demon. Do you
see them shine?"
Hippolyte pointed to a moth larger than the others, strange in
appearance, covered with a thick red flush, with projecting eyes which,
under the light, glittered like two carbuncles.
"It's coming on you! It's coming on you! Take care!"
She laughed heartily, making fun of the instinctive alarm that George
exhibited, in spite of himself, when one of these insects threatened to
alight on him. "I must have it!" she cried, with the rapture of a
childish caprice.
And she tried to capture the diabolical moth, which, without settling,
flew around the lamp. Her attempts, abrupt and violent, were
unsuccessful. She upset a glass, knocked over a pyramid of fruit,
almost smashed the lamp-shade.
"What fury!" said George, who wanted to excite her. "But you won't
succeed."
"I shall succeed," replied Hippolyte obstinately, and looking fixedly at
him. "Will you make a bet?"
"What shall we bet?"
"Anything you like."
"Well, then, a love game."
"Very well, a love game."
In the warm light her face was colored with its softest and richest
tints, that ideal coloring, "a compound of pale amber and dull gold in
which were mingled, perhaps, a few tints of faded roses," in which
formerly George had thought he had found all the mystery and all the
beauty of the antique Venetian soul emigrated to the kingdom of Cyprus.
She wore in her hair a pink, ardent as desire. And her eyes, shaded by
the lashes, shone like lakes between the willows in the twilight.
At that instant she appeared the woman of delights, the strong and
delicate instrument of pleasure, the voluptuous and magnificent animal
destined to ornament a banquet, to enliven a bed, to provoke equivocal
phantasies of an aesthetic sensuality. She appeared in the supreme
splendor of her animalism--joyous, active, supple, lascivious, cruel.
George observed her with attentive curiosity, and he thought: "What
different appearances she assumes in my eyes! Her form is sketched by
my desire; her shadows are produced by my thought. Such as she appears
to me each instant, she is only the effect of my continual inner
creation. She exists only in me. Her appearances change like the dreams
of an invalid. _Gravis dum suavis_! When was that?" He retained but a
very confused recollection of the time when he had kissed her brow and
decorated her with this title of ideal nobility. Now, this
glorification of the loved one had become almost inconceivable to him.
He remembered vaguely certain words that she had uttered and that seemed
to reveal a depth of soul. "What spoke in her then? Was it not my own
soul? It was one of my ambitions to offer to my sad soul those sinuous
lips, so she might exhale her sorrow from an instrument of signal
beauty."
He looked at those lips. They were slightly contracted, not
ungracefully, participating in the intense attention with which
Hippolyte waited for an opportunity to seize the night-moth.
She watched for it with sly prudence; she wanted, with one killing blow,
to shut up in the palm of her hand the winged prey that was whirling
restlessly around the light. She contracted her eyebrows and seemed to
be prepared for a spring, ready to jump. She leaped forward two or
three times, but without success. The moth was unseizable.
"Confess that you've lost," said George. "I won't abuse my privilege."
"No."
"Confess that you've lost."
"No! Woe to him and to you, if I catch him."
And she resumed her hunt with trembling impatience.
"Oh, he's gone," cried George, who had lost the agile flame-worshipper
from sight. "He's flown away!"
Hippolyte was really vexed; the wager had excited her.
She rose and cast a keen glance around the room, to discover the
fugitive.
"Here it is!" she cried, triumphant. "There, on the wall! Do you see?"
And she made a sign that she regretted she had cried out.
"Don't stir," she went on in a low tone, turning towards her friend.
The moth had alighted on the luminous wall and stayed there motionless,
similar to a little brown spot. With infinite precaution, Hippolyte
approached, and her beautiful body, slender and flexible, cast a shadow
on the white wall. Quickly her hand was raised, descended, closed.
"I have it! I have it!"
And she exulted with childish joy.
"What forfeit shall I impose? I'll put it down your neck. You are in
my power, too."
And she pretended she was about to execute her threat, as on the day she
ran after him on the hill.
George laughed, conquered by the spontaneity of that joy, which awoke in
him all that still remained to him of his youth. He said:
"Come! now sit down and eat your fruit, quietly."
"Wait, wait!"
"What are you going to do?"
"Wait!"
She drew out the pin which held the pink in her hair, and put it between
her lips. Then, gently, she opened her fist, took the moth by the
wings, got ready to transfix it.
"How cruel you are!" said George. "How cruel you are!"
She smiled, attentive to her work, while the little victim beat its
wings, already despoiled.
"How cruel you are!" repeated George, in a lower but graver voice,
noticing on Hippolyte's physiognomy an ambiguous expression, mingled
with complacency and repugnance, which seemed to signify that she found
a special pleasure in artificially exciting and tormenting her own
feelings.
He recalled that in several circumstances she had already shown a morbid
taste for this kind of excitation. No pure sentiment of pity had
entered her heart, either in presence of the tears and blood of the
pilgrims at the Sanctuary or in the presence of the child in its death
agony. And he saw her again quickening her step towards the group of
curious passers-by leaning against the parapet of the Pincio to
distinguish the traces left on the pavement by the suicide.
"Cruelty is latent at the bottom of her love," he thought. "There is
something destructive in her, and this shows itself all the stronger as
the ardor of her caresses becomes more intense."
And he saw once more the frightful and almost Gorgonian image of this
woman, just as she had often appeared to his half-closed eyes in the
spasm of voluptuousness or in the inertia of the supreme exhaustion.
"Look!" she said, showing him the moth squirming on the pin. "Look how
its eyes shine!"
She presented it in different ways to the light, as when one wishes to
cause the scintillation of a gem. She added:
"What a beautiful jewel!"
And, with an easy gesture, she stuck it in her hair. Then, fixing
George with her gray eyes:
"You do nothing but think, think, think! What are you thinking of? At
least, you used to talk--more perhaps than was necessary. Now you have
grown taciturn, you have an air of mystery and conspiracy.... Are you
angry with me? Speak, even if it will grieve me."
The tone of her voice, which had suddenly changed, expressed impatience
and reproach. Once more she perceived that her lover had been only a
meditative and solitary spectator, a vigilant and maybe hostile witness.
"Do speak! I prefer the cruel words of the old days to this mysterious
silence. What's the matter? Doesn't it please you to be here? Are you
unhappy? Are you tired of me? Are you disappointed in me?"
To be thus suddenly and unexpectedly taken to task exasperated George,
but he repressed his anger--he even tried to smile.
"Why these strange questions?" he said calmly. "Does it worry you? I am
always thinking of you and the things that concern you."
And quickly, with an amiable smile, fearing that she might suspect a
shade of irony in his words, he added:
"You fecundate my brain. When I am in your presence my inner life is so
full that the sound of my own voice displeases me."
She was pleased with this affected phrase, which seemed to elevate her
to a spiritual function, to proclaim her the creator of a superior life.
The expression of her face became serious, while, in her hair, the
nocturnal moth squirmed continuously.
"Permit me to remain silent without being suspected," he continued,
appreciating the change produced by his artifice in this feminine soul,
which the idealities of love fascinated and exalted. "Permit me to
remain silent. Do you ask me to speak when you see me dying under your
kisses? Well, it is not your mouth alone which has the power to give me
sensations surpassing all known limits. Every moment you give me an
excess of sentiment and an excess of thought. You will never imagine
what agitations are aroused in my mind by a single one of your gestures.
When you stir, when you speak, I see a series of prodigies. At times you
give me, as it were, a reminiscence of a life I have never lived.
Immensities of darkness are suddenly illumined and live in my memory
like unlooked-for conquests. What, then, are the bread, the viands, the
fruit--all those material things that make an impression on my senses?
What are the very operations of my organs, the external manifestations
of my corporeal existence? When my mouth speaks, it seems almost as if
the sound of my voice cannot reach the depths in which I live. It seems
to me that, not to disturb my vision, I should rest motionless and mute,
while you pass, perpetually transformed, across the worlds which you
have revealed."
He spoke slowly, his eyes fixed on Hippolyte, fascinated by this
extraordinarily luminous face crowned by hair dark and deep as the night
and in which a living and dying thing caused a continual palpitation.
This face, so near and yet which seemed to him intangible, and these
scattered objects on the table, and these high, purple flowers, and this
whirl of light-winged forms around the source of the light, and the pure
serenity which descended from the stars, and the musical breath which
rose from the sea, and all the images reflected by his feelings--all
seemed to him as in a dream. His very person, his very voice, seemed
fictitious to him. Her thoughts and words were associated in an easy
and vague manner. As on the moonlit night in front of the marvellous
vine, the substance of his life and of the universal life was dissolved
in the mists of the dream.
*CHAPTER II.*
Under the tent erected on the sand, after the bath, still half-nude, he
watched Hippolyte lingering in the sun by the water-side, wrapped in her
white peignoir. He had almost painful scintillations in his eyes, and
the strong noonday sun caused him a novel sensation of physical trouble,
mingled with a sort of vague fear. It was the terrible hour, the
supreme hour of light and silence, hovering over the chasm of life. He
comprehended the pagan superstition, the holy horror of canicular
noon-times on the shore inhabited by a cruel and occult god. At the
bottom of his vague fright stirred something like the anxiety of the man
who expects a sudden and formidable apparition. He appeared to himself
puerilely weak and cowardly, as diminished in courage and strength as
after a trial that has not succeeded. In plunging his body into the
sea, in presenting his brow to the glare of the sun, in swimming a short
distance, in indulging his favorite exercise, in measuring his
respiration by the breath of the endless space, he had felt by
indubitable indications the impoverishment of his youth, the destructive
work of the enemy; he had felt once more the iron band tighten around
his vital activity, and so reduce a new zone to inertia and impotency.
The sensation of this muscular lassitude became all the deeper in
proportion as he regarded more attentively the figure of that woman
standing in the splendor of the day.
To dry her hair, she had unfastened it; and the curls, made heavy by the
water, fell over her shoulders, so dark that they almost appeared
violet. Her erect and slender form, enveloped as in the folds of a
dress, stood out half against the glaucous surface of the sea and half
against the luminous transparency of the sky. Scarcely could one see,
underneath the hair, the profile of her bent and pensive face. She was
wholly absorbed in the alternate pleasures of putting her bare feet in
the torrid sand and keeping them there as long as she could endure the
heat, then in plunging them, all burning, into the caressing waves that
licked the sand. This double sensation seemed to afford her infinite
enjoyment, in which she lost herself. She tempered and fortified her
soul by the contact with free and healthy things, by the complacent
absorption of the salt water and the sunbeams. How, at the same time,
could she be so ill and so well? How could she conciliate in her being
so many contradictions, assume so many aspects in a single day, in a
single hour? The taciturn and sad woman in whom epilepsy was breeding,
the mistress, eager and convulsed, whose ardor was at times alarming,
whose sensuality had at times the lugubrious appearance of agony--this
same creature, standing at the edge of the sea, had senses capable of
gathering and savoring all the natural delights shed over the
surrounding things, of appearing similar to the images of the ancient
Beauty leaning over the harmonious crystal of a Hellespont.
She had an evidently superior power of resistance. George viewed her
with a vexation which, becoming gradually concentrated, ended by
assuming the seriousness of rancor. The sentiment of his own weakness
was disturbed by hatred in proportion as his perspicacity became more
lucid and almost vindictive.
Those bare feet, which by turns she burnt in the sand and cooled in the
water, were not beautiful; the toes were even deformed, plebeian, not at
all delicate--they bore the impress of a lowly origin. George looked at
them attentively, saw only them, with an extraordinary clearness of
perception, as if the details of their shape had revealed a secret to
him. And he thought:
"How many impure things are fermenting in that blood! All the hereditary
instincts of her race persist in her, indestructible, ready to develop
and arise against any restraint whatsoever. I shall never succeed in
making her pure. I shall be able only to superpose her real
individuality above the changing images of my dreams; and she will be
able only to offer to my solitary intoxication the indispensable
instrument of her organs."
But, while his intelligence reduced this woman to be but a simple
_motif_ for his imagination and despoiled of all value the palpable
form, the very acuteness of the present perception made him feel that
what attached him to her the most was precisely the real quality of that
flesh; not only what there was most beautiful in her, but, above all,
_what was least beautiful in her_. The discovery of defect did not
loosen the tie, did not diminish the fascination. The most vulgar
features had an irritating attraction for him. He knew well this
phenomenon, which had often asserted itself. Often, with perfect
clearness of vision, his eyes had seen the slightest defects of
Hippolyte's person accentuated; and they had been for a long time
subject to the attraction, they had been compelled to establish them, to
examine them, to exaggerate them. And by his senses, in his mind, he
had felt an indefinable disquietude, almost always followed by the
sudden ardor of desire. That, certainly, was the most terrible
indication of the great carnal obsession which a human creature
exercises over another human creature. Such was the spell which was
obeyed by the nameless lover who, in his mistress, loved above all the
marks traced by the years on her white neck, the parting of the hair
every day wider, the faded mouth on which the salty tears made the savor
of the kisses more lasting.
He thought of the flight of years, of the chain riveted forever by
custom, of the infinite sadness of the love become a weary vice. He saw
himself, in the future, tied to this flesh like the slave to his iron
collar, deprived of will and thought, stupefied and vacuous; he saw the
concubine fade, grow old, abandon herself without resistance to the slow
work of time, let fall from her inert hands the lacerated veil of
illusions, but preserve, nevertheless, her fatal power; he saw the
deserted house, desolate, silent, awaiting the supreme visitor, Death!
He recalled the shouts of the little bastards, heard on that distant
afternoon in the paternal house. He thought:
"She is barren; her entrails have been visited by a curse. In it the
germs perish as in a fiery furnace. She thus thwarts and betrays the
most profound instinct of life."
The uselessness of his love appeared to him like a monstrous
transgression of the supreme law. But since his love was an uneasy
sensuality only, why had he, then, this character of ineluctable
fatality? Was not the instinct of the perpetuation of the race the
unique and true motive of all sexual love? Was not this blind and
eternal instinct the source of desire, and should not desire have as its
object, occult or manifest, the generation prescribed by Nature? How was
it, then, that so strong a tie attached him to the barren woman? Why
was the terrible "will" of the Species so obstinate in demanding, in
exacting, the vital tribute of that organism ravaged by disease and
incapable of generating? What was lacking in his love was the first
reason of love--the affirmation and the development of life beyond the
limits of individual existence. What was lacking in the woman he loved
was the highest mystery of her sex--the suffering of her who gives
birth. And what caused the misery of both was precisely that persistent
monstrosity.
"Aren't you coming in the sun?" asked Hippolyte, suddenly turning
towards him. "Look how I am standing it! I want to become really what
you say--_like an olive_. Shall I?"
She approached the tent, raising with her two hands the edge of her long
tunic, putting in her gestures an almost lascivious grace, as though
suddenly invaded by languor.
"Shall I?"
She stooped a little to enter the tent. Under the abundance of snowy
folds, her thin and flexible body had movements of feline grace, exhaled
a heat and odor which spurred strangely the disturbed sensibility of the
young man. And, while she stretched herself out on the mat beside him,
there fell all around his flaming face a shower of hair, still wet with
salt water, and through which shone the white of her eyes and the red of
her lips, like fruits among foliage.
In her voice, as on her face, as in her smile, there was a shadow, an
infinitely mysterious and fascinating shadow. It seemed as if she
divined her lover's secret hostility, and was getting ready to triumph
over it.
"What are you looking at?" she asked with a sudden start. "No, no;
don't look at them! They are ugly."
She withdrew her feet, hid them under the folds of her peignoir.
"No, no. I forbid you."
She was vexed and ashamed for a moment; she frowned, as if she had
surprised in George's eyes a spark of the cruel truth.
"Unkind man!" she said again, in an ambiguous tone of pleasantry and
rancor.
He replied, rather enervated:
"You know that, in my eyes, you are beautiful all over."
And he made the gesture as if to draw her to him and kiss her.
"No; wait. Don't look."
She arose and glided to a corner of the tent. Rapidly, with furtive
gestures, she drew on her long black-silk stockings; then she turned
round, immodestly, an indefinable smile hovering on her lips. And,
before George's eyes, holding up, one after the other, her perfect legs
in their shining sheath, she fastened her garters above each knee. In
her action there was something wilfully lascivious, and in her smile
there was a touch of subtle irony. And that mute and terrible eloquence
assumed in the young man's eyes this precise signification: "I am always
the unconquered. You have known with me all the enjoyments for which
your endless desire was thirsty, and I will clothe myself in lies that
will endlessly provoke your desire. What matters to me your
perspicacity? The veil that you tear I can repair in an instant, the
bandage that you pluck off I can fasten in an instant. I am stronger
than your thought. I know the secret of my transfigurations in your
soul. I know the gestures and the words that have the virtue of
metamorphosing me in your eyes. The odor of my skin has the power to
dissolve a world in you."
In him a world was being dissolved while she drew near, serpentine and
insidious, to fling herself at his side on the coarse rush mat. Once
more, the reality was converted into a confused fiction full of
hallucinating images. The reverberation of the sea filled the tent with
a reflection of gold, mingled a thousand golden spangles in the threads
of the tissue. Through the opening was a glimpse of the immensity of
the calm sea, the vast immobility of the waters under an almost
lugubrious blaze. And, gradually, these very appearances faded away.
In the silence, he heard nothing more but the rhythm of his own blood;
in the shade, he saw nothing but two large eyes fixed on him with a kind
of fury. She enshrouded him completely, as if she possessed the nature
of a cloud. And through all the pores of this ardent skin he inhaled the
marine fragrance like a salt volatilized through a flame. And in the
thickness of her still humid hair he beheld the mystery of the deepest
forests of sea-weed. And, in the final bewilderment of his conscience,
he imagined he touched the bottom of an abyss falling to his death.
Then he heard, as if at a distance, amid the rustling of skirts,
Hippolyte's voice, which was saying:
"Do you want to stay a little longer? Are you asleep?"
He opened his eyes; he murmured, all dazed:
"No, I'm not asleep."
"What's the matter?"
"I'm expiring."
He tried to smile. He caught a glance of Hippolyte's white teeth. She
said, smiling:
"Do you want me to help you to dress?"
"No. I'll get dressed presently. Go on; I'll join you," he murmured,
with a sleepy tone.
"Then I'll go back. I'm too hungry. Dress quickly, and come."
"Yes, immediately."
He started when he felt unexpectedly Hippolyte's lips on his lips. He
opened his eyes; he tried to smile.
"Have pity!"
He heard the crunching of the sand under her receding footsteps. A
heavy silence again took possession of the beach. At intervals, a light
splashing came from the edge of the sea and the neighboring rocks, a
feeble noise like that made by animals drinking in a trough.
A few minutes passed, during which he struggled against an exhaustion
that threatened to turn into lethargy. Finally, he sat up, not without
effort; he shook his head to dissipate his clouded thoughts; he looked
all around him with bewilderment. He felt in his whole being a strange
sensation of emptiness; he was no longer able to cooerdinate his ideas;
he was almost incapable of thought, and to accomplish any act he needed
an enormous effort. He threw a glance outside the tent, and was again
invaded by the horror of the light.
"Oh! if, on lying down again, I could never rise again. To die! Never
to see her again!" He felt overwhelmed by the certainty that in a few
instants he must see this woman again, he must stay near her, he must
receive more of her kisses, he must hear her speak.
Before beginning to dress, he hesitated. Several mad ideas passed
through his brain. Then he dressed mechanically. He went out of the
tent, and the glare of the light made him close his eyes. Through the
tissue of his eyelids he saw a great red light. He had a slight
vertigo.
When he reopened his eyes, the spectacle of the external things gave him
an inexpressible sensation. It seemed to him as if he saw everything
again after an indefinite time, during a different existence.
The sandy beach, beaten by the sun, had the whiteness of chalk. On the
immense and lugubrious mirror of the sea the incandescent sky seemed to
subside, every second more under the weight of one of those gloomy
silences that accompany the expectation of an unknown catastrophe. The
sandy promontories, with their large, deserted creeks, rose in the form
of towers above the black rocks, their crests wooded with olive-trees
that stood out against the torrid sky in the attitudes of anger or
madness. Stretched out on the rocks, like some monster ready to spring
on its prey, the Trabocco, with its numerous machines, had a formidable
aspect. In the entanglement of the beams and ropes, one could
distinguish the fishermen stooping towards the waters, steady,
motionless, like bronzes, and over their tragic lives hung the mortal
spell.
All at once, amid the silence, a voice struck the young man's ears. It
was the woman calling him from the height of the Hermitage.
He started; he turned round with an impressive palpitation. The voice
repeated its call, limpid and strong, as if it wished to affirm its
power.
"Come!"
While he climbed up the hill, the smoky mouth of one of the tunnels cast
in the air a rumbling reverberation which resounded throughout the gulf.
He stopped at the edge of the railroad, taken anew with a slight
dizziness; and the flash of an insane idea crossed his wearied brain:
"To lie down across the rails.... The end of all in a second!"
Deafening, rapid, and sinister, the train which passed swept in his face
the wind it displaced; then, whistling and rumbling, it disappeared in
the mouth of the opposite tunnel, the black smoke curling up in the sky.
*CHAPTER III.*
From dawn until twilight, the songs of the reapers--men and
women--alternated on the slopes of the fecund hill. Masculine choruses,
with a bacchic vehemence, were celebrating their joy at the abundant
feast and the richness of the old wine. For the men of the scythe, the
time of the harvest was a time of abundancy. Hour after hour, from dawn
to twilight, according to the old-time custom, they interrupted their
work to eat and drink on the field of stubble, among the newly made
sheaves, in honor of the generous master. And each took from his
porringer the share of nourishment sufficient to satiate one of the
women. Thus, at the hour of the repast, Boaz had said to Ruth the
Moabite: "Come thou hither, and eat of the bread, and dip thou thy
morsel in the vinegar. And Ruth came and sat down beside the reapers,
and was sufficed."
But the feminine choruses were prolonged in almost religious cadences,
with a slow and solemn sweetness, revealing the original holiness of the
alimentary work, the primitive nobility of this task, where, on the
ancestral soil, the sweat of man consecrated the nativity of the bread.
George heard them and followed them, his soul attentive; and gradually a
beneficent and unhoped-for influence penetrated him. His soul seemed to
gradually dilate, by an aspiration always broader and more serene in
proportion as the wave of the chant, propagated in the still torrid
noons, became purer, but in it the hope of the pacifying night began to
spread a species of ecstatic calm. It was a renewed aspiration towards
the sources of life, towards the Origins. It was, perhaps, the supreme
trembling of his youth attacked in the deepest part of its substantial
energy, the supreme panting towards the regaining of happiness lost,
henceforth, forever.
The harvest-time was drawing to its close. Passing along the mown
fields, he caught a glimpse of the nice customs that seemed to be the
rites of a georgic liturgy. One day he stopped close to a field already
despoiled, where the haymakers had just constructed the last haystack,
and he was a witness to the ceremony.
On the things exhausted by the heat hovered the limpid and sweet hour
that was about to gather in its crystalline sphere the impalpable ashes
of the consumed day.
The field was laid out in a parallelogram, on a tableland girt with
gigantic olive-trees, through the branches of which were glimpses of the
blue band of the Adriatic, mysterious as the velum perceived in the
temple behind the silver palms. The high haystacks were erected at
intervals in the form of cones, massive, and opulent with the richness
heaped up by the arms of men, celebrated by the songs of women. When
the toil was ended, the band of haymakers made a circle around its chief
in the centre of the field. They were robust, sunburnt men, dressed in
linen. On their arms, on their legs, on their bare feet, they had
deformities which the long and slow endurance of manual labor imprints
on limbs that toil. In the fist of each man shone a scythe, curved and
thin as the moon in its first quarter. From time to time, with a simple
gesture of their disengaged hand, they wiped the sweat from their brows,
and with it sprinkled the ground where the straw was shining under the
oblique rays of the setting sun.
In his turn, the chief made the same gesture; then, raising his hand as
if to bless, he cried, in his sonorous voice, rich in rhythm and
assonance:
"Let's leave the field, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Ghost!"
In chorus, the men of the scythe replied, with a great cry:
"Amen!"
And the chief went on:
"Blessed be our master, and blessed be our mistress!"
The men replied:
"Amen!"
And the chief, in a voice that gradually gathered strength and fire:
"Blessed be he who brought us good food to eat."
"Amen!"
"Blessed be he who says: 'Don't put water in the wine of the haymaker!'"
"Amen!"
"Blessed be the employer who says to his lady: 'Give without measuring,
and put sapor in the wine of the haymaker!'"
"Amen!"
The benedictions extended from one to another: to him who had killed the
sheep, to him who had washed the herbs and vegetables, to him who had
polished the copper saucepan, to him who had seasoned the meats with
spices. And the chief, in the fire of enthusiasm, in the sudden
transport of a sort of poetic fury, expressed himself, all at once, in
couplets. The band replied to him by immense clamors that reverberated
through all the creeks, while on the iron of the scythes the flashes of
the twilight, and the sheaves arranged on the top of the stacks, had the
appearance of flames.
"Blessed be the woman who sings beautiful songs while bringing pitchers
of old wine!"
"Amen!"
There was a thunderclap of joy. Then all were silent, and watched
approach the chorus of the women, bearers of the last gifts of the mown
field.
The women, in double file, were singing, carrying in their arms the
large painted jars. And the uninitiated spectator, seeing them advance
between the olive-trees, as through a colonnade, against the maritime
background, might imagine he saw one of those votive images that develop
harmoniously in bas-relief on the friezes of the temples or around the
sarcophagi.
As he went back to the house this image of beauty accompanied him along
the road, while he slowly wended his way amid the illusions of the
evening, in which were still floating the waves of the choruses. At a
bend in the road, he stopped to listen to a melodious voice that was
approaching and that he seemed to recognize. As soon as he recognized
it he started joyfully: it was the voice of Favetta, the young singer
with the falconlike eyes, with the vibrating voice that always awoke in
him the memory of that delicious May morning, resplendent on the
labyrinth of the blossoming furze, on the solitude of the garden of gold
in which, to his surprise, he thought he had discovered the secret of
joy.
Without suspecting the presence of the stranger, hidden by a hedge,
Favetta advanced, leading a cow by the tether. And she sang, her head
high, her mouth open towards the sky, the full light on her face; and
from her throat the song gushed forth, fluid, limpid, crystal as a
stream. Behind her the fine, snowy beast ambled gently, and at each step
its fetlock undulated, and its massive udder, swollen with milk by the
pasture, dangled between its legs.
When she perceived the stranger, the singer stopped singing, and seemed
about to halt; but he went to meet her with a joyous air, as if he had
met a friend of the happy days.
"Where are you going, Favetta?" he cried.
Hearing herself addressed by her name, she blushed and smiled with
embarrassment. "I'm taking the cow to the shed," she replied.
As she had suddenly slowed down her step, the snout of the beast grazed
her hips, and her bold bust stood out between the large horns as in the
crescent of a lyre.
"You're always singing," said George, admiring her in this attitude.
"Ah! signor," she said with a smile, "if we couldn't sing, what could we
do?"
"Do you remember that morning when you plucked the furze flowers?"
"The first flowers for your lady?"
"Yes; do you remember?"
"I remember."
"Sing again for me the song you sang that day!"
"I can't sing it alone."
"Well, sing another."
"Like that, all at once, in your presence? I'm ashamed. I'll sing on
the road. Addio, signor."
"Addio, Favetta."
And she resumed her way along the path, dragging the peaceable beast
after her. When she had gone a little way, she struck up the song with
all the strength of her voice that invaded the surrounding luminous
country.
The sun had just set, and an extraordinarily vivid light was shed over
the coasts and over the sea; an immense wave of impalpable gold mounted
from the occidental sky to the zenith and redescended to the opposite
side, the glassy transparency of which it penetrated with infinite
slowness. Gradually the Adriatic became more clear and more gentle,
approaching the green hue of the first leaves of the new shoots of
willows. Alone, the red sails, as superb as if they were of purple,
broke the diffused light.
"It's a holiday," thought George, dazzled by the splendid sunset,
feeling palpitate around him the joy of life. Where does the human
creature breathe for whom the whole day, from dawn to twilight, should
not be a Holiday consecrated by some new conquest?
On the hill, the songs in honor of the nativity of the bread continued
and alternated. The long feminine files appeared on the slopes and
disappeared. Here and there, in the still air, columns of smoke rose
slowly from invisible fires. The spectacle grew solemn and seemed to
sink back into the mystery of the primitive centuries, in the holiness
of a celebration of rural Dionysiacs.
*CHAPTER IV.*
Since the tragic night on which Candia, lowering her voice, had spoken
of the witchcraft that hung over the men of the Trabocco, that great,
whitish framework, stretched along on the rocks, had more than once
attracted the strangers' attention and excited their curiosity. In the
crescent of the little musical bay, that bristling and treacherous form,
continually lying in ambush, seemed to deny the benignity of the
solitude. At the burning and motionless noon-times, at the misty
twilights, it often took on formidable aspects. At times, when all was
still, one could hear the grinding of the capstan and the creaking of
the timber. During the moonless nights, the red light of the torches
was seen reflected by the water.
On an afternoon of oppressive idleness, George proposed to Hippolyte:
"Shall we go and visit the Trabocco?"
She answered:
"We'll go, if you like. But how can I cross the bridge? I have already
tried it once."
"I will lead you by the hand."
"The plank is too narrow."
"We'll try."
They went there. They descended by the path. At the turn they found a
sort of stairway hewn in the granite, hardly practicable, and the
irregular steps of which stretched out as far as the reefs, at the end
of the shaky bridge.
"You see! How can I manage?" said Hippolyte regretfully. "Even looking
at it makes my head swim."
The first portion of the bridge was composed of a single plank, very
narrow, upheld by stanchions fixed on the rock; the other part, broader,
was formed of transverse thin deal boards, of an almost silvery
whiteness, worm-eaten, brittle, badly joined, so thin that they seemed
likely to break under the slightest pressure of the foot.
"Don't you want to try it?" asked George, with an inner sense of strange
relief on finding that Hippolyte would never succeed in accomplishing
the perilous passage. "Look; someone is coming to lend us a hand."
A half-naked child ran toward them from the platform, agile as a cat,
brown as a rich golden bronze. Beneath his unfaltering foot the deal
boards creaked, the rafters bent. Arrived at the end of the bridge, near
the strangers, he encouraged them by energetic gestures to confide in
him, looking up at them with his piercing eyes like the bird at its
prey.
"Don't you want to try?" repeated George, smiling.
Irresolute, she advanced one foot on the shaking plank, looked at the
rocks and water, then drew back, incapable of conquering her agitation.
"I fear vertigo," she said. "I am sure I should fall."
She added, with manifest regret:
"Go, go alone. You're not afraid?"
"No. But what will you do?"
"I will sit down in the shade and wait for you."
She added again, with hesitation, as if to try and retain him:
"But why do you go there?"
"I'm going. I'm curious to see."
She seemed sorry not to be able to follow him, vexed at letting him go
to a place which she could not reach herself; and what seemed to chagrin
and vex her was, not only having to renounce a curiosity and pleasure,
but also some other cause, not distinct. What made her suffer, also,
was the temporary obstacle that was about to be interposed between her
lover and herself, that obstacle over which she was powerless to climb.
So essential had become the necessity of holding her lover always
attached to her by a sensible bond, to be with him in uninterrupted
contact, to dominate him, to possess him!
She said, a scarcely perceptible note of anger in her voice:
"Go, go along."
George became cognizant of a sentiment in himself that contrasted with
the instinctive sentiment of Hippolyte; it was a sort of relief to
establish beyond doubt that there was a place where Hippolyte could not
follow him, a refuge completely inaccessible to the Enemy, a retreat
defended by the rocks and by the sea where he could at last find a few
hours of real repose. And these two impressions of their souls,
although indistinct and even somewhat puerile, but certainly opposed,
demonstrated the actual position of the lovers toward one another: the
one, a conscious victim destined to perish; the other, an unconscious
and caressing executioner.
"I'll go," said George, with a shade of provocation in his voice and
attitude. "Good-by."
Although he did not feel sure of himself, he refused the child's
assistance, and was very careful to take bold and sure steps, not to
hesitate, not to vacillate on the shaking plank. As soon as he had put
foot on the wider part, he hastened his steps, still preoccupied by
Hippolyte's look, instinctively giving to his efforts the heat of a
hostile reaction. When he trod the planks of the platform, he felt the
illusory sensation of finding himself on the bridge of a ship. In one
second, the freshness of the short, splashing sea that broke on the
rocks revived in his memory certain fragments of the life that he had
lived on the Don Juan; and he felt through all his being a sudden thrill
at the chimerical idea of raising the anchor.
Immediately after, his gaze was attracted to the surrounding objects,
the slightest details of which he remarked with his usual lucidity.
Turchino had saluted him abruptly, with a gesture that neither word nor
smile softened, as if no event whatever, however unusual and
extraordinary it might be, would have the power to interrupt even for a
second the terrible preoccupation that appeared on his terrene face,
almost chinless, scarcely larger than a fist, with a long, prominent
nose, pointed like the snout of a pike, between two small, glittering
eyes.
The same preoccupation was legible in the faces of his two sons, who
also saluted in silence, and resumed their work without laying aside
their immutable sadness. They were boys of over twenty, fleshless,
sunburnt, agitated by a continual muscular restlessness, like demoniacs.
All their movements had an air of convulsive contraction, of starts; and
beneath the skin of their chinless faces the muscles could be seen, at
moments, trembling.
"Is the fishing good?" asked George, pointing to the large, immerged
net, whose corners could be seen at the surface of the water.
"Nothing to-day, signor," murmured Turchino, in a tone of suppressed
anger.
After a pause, he added:
"Who knows? Perhaps you've brought us good luck."
"Draw up the net. Let's see."
His sons began to manoeuvre the capstan.
Through the interstices of the planks could be seen the reflecting and
foaming waves. In a corner of the platform stood a low cabin with a
straw roof, the summit of which had a layer of red tiles, and decorated
with a piece of sculptured oak in the form of a bull's head with two
large, connecting horns--a charm against witchcraft. Other amulets were
suspended from the roof, mingled with wooden disks, on which were glued
with pitch pieces of mirror, round as eyes; and a bunch of four-pronged
rusty forks lay before the low door. To right and left, two large
vertical masts were erected, fixed on the rock, fastened at their bases
by stakes of all dimensions, that intercrossed and mingled, riveted to
one another by enormous nails, bound by iron wire and cordage,
strengthened in a thousand ways against the rage of the sea. Two other
horizontal masts crossed the first two and stretched out like bowsprits
beyond the rocks, over the deep water teeming with fish. At the forked
extremities of the four masts hung pulleys provided with cords
corresponding to the corners of the square net. Other cords passed
through other pulleys, at the end of smaller spars; as far a the most
distant rocks, the stakes driven in sustained the re-enforced cables;
innumerable planks, nailed on the beams, strengthened the weakest
points. The long and obstinate struggle against the fury and
treacherousness of the waves was as if written on this enormous carcass
by means of these knots, these nails, this machinery. The machine
seemed to have a life of its own, to have the air and figure of an
animated body. The wood, exposed for years to sun, rain, and tempest,
showed all its fibres, exhibited all its rugosities and knottiness,
revealed every part of its resistant structure, was denuded, was
consumed, was white like a tibia, or shining like silver, or grayish
like silex, acquired a special character and significance, an imprint
just as distinct as that of a person on whom old age and suffering have
achieved their cruel work.
The capstan creaked as it turned by the impulsion of the four bars, and
the whole machine trembled and creaked under the effort, while the vast
net gradually emerged with golden reflections from the green depth.
"Nothing!" grumbled the father, on seeing the empty bottom of the net
rise to the surface of the water.
The sons released the bars together, and with still louder creakings the
capstan began to turn, beating the air with its four brutish arms, that
could have cut a man in twain. The net replunged into the water. All
were silent. In the silence was heard only the breaking of the sea
against the rocks.
The weight of witchcraft crushed these miserable lives. George had lost
all curiosity to question them, to discover, to know; but he felt that
this taciturn and tragic company would soon possess for him the
attraction of dolorous affinity. Was he not, too, the victim of a
malefice? And he looked instinctively toward the beach, where appeared
the figure of the woman outlined against a rock.
*CHAPTER V.*
He returned to the Trabocco almost every day, at different hours. It
became the favorite place for his dreams and his meditations. The
fishermen had become accustomed to his visits; they received him
respectfully, prepared in the shade of the hut a couch for him, made
from an old sail smelling of tar. On his part, he was not illiberal
toward them.
In listening to the murmur of the waters, in watching the top of the
mast, immovable in the azure, he evoked his nautical recollections,
relived his wandering life of long-distant summers, that life of
limitless liberty that to-day seemed to him singularly beautiful and
almost chimerical. He recalled his last voyage on the Adriatic, several
months after the Epiphany of Love, during a period of sorrows and poetic
enthusiasms, under the influence of Percy Shelley, of that divine Ariel
whom the sea had transfigured "into something rich and strange." And he
recalled the debarkation at Rimini, the entry into Malamocco, the
anchorage before the Schiavoni quays, all gilded by the September sun.
Where, now, was his old travelling companion, Adolpho Astorgi? Where
was the _Don Juan_? The preceding week he had received news of it from
Chios, in a letter that seemed still impregnated with the odor of
mastic, and which announced the coming shipment of a quantity of
Oriental confections.
Adolpho Astorgi was truly a fraternal spirit, the only one with whom he
had been able to live a little time in complete communion, without
feeling the embarrassment, uneasiness, and repugnance that prolonged
familiarity with his other friends almost always caused him. How
unfortunate he should be so far away now! And at times he represented
him to himself as an unexpected deliverer who would appear with his
vessel in the waters of San Vito to propose escape to him.
In his incurable weakness, in this total abolition of active will, he
lingered at times in dreams of this kind; he implored the arrival of a
strong and imperious man who would roughly rouse him, and who, breaking
his chains, with an abrupt and definite blow, forever, would enliven
him, carry him off, confine him in some lost region, where he would be
unknown to everybody, where he would know no one, and where he could
either begin life over again or die a less hopeless death.
Die he must. He knew to what he was condemned, knew it to be
irrevocable; and he was convinced that the final act would be
accomplished during the week preceding the _fifth anniversary_, between
the last days of July and the first days of August. Since the
temptation that, in the horror of the torrid noon, before the bright
rails, had traversed his soul like a flash, it even seemed to him that
the means were already found. He had listened intently, ceaselessly, to
the rumbling of the train, and he felt a strange unrest when the time of
its passage approached. As one of the runnels crossed the point of the
Trabocco, he could, from his pallet, hear the dull noise that made the
entire eminence tremble; and at times, when he was distracted by other
thoughts, he experienced a start of fear, as if he had suddenly heard
the rumbling of his destiny.
Was it not the same thought that reigned in him and in these taciturn
men? Did not both they and he feel a similar chill in their hearts,
even in the most burning heat of the dog-days? It was perhaps this
affinity that made him love this place and this company. On the musical
waters, he let himself be lulled in the arms of the phantom created by
himself, while the will to live grew gradually less, as the heat
abandons a corpse.
The great calms of July had come. The sea extended before the view all
white, milky, greenish here and there in the vicinity of the shore. A
mist, slightly tinted with violet, paled the distant coasts: Cape Moro,
the Nicchiola, Cape Ortona, the Vasto Point. The scarcely perceptible
undulations of the smooth sea produced between the rocks a deep-toned
harmony, measured by equal pauses. Holding himself at the extremity of
one of the long, horizontal masts, the child acted as a lookout; with
watchful eye he scrutinized beneath him the mirror of the wave, and,
from time to time, to entice the frightened fish into entering the net,
he threw a stone, the light splash of which increased the surrounding
melancholy.
At times, the visitor dozed beneath the caress of the slow rhythms.
These brief slumbers were the only compensation for his sleepless
nights. And he had the habit of pretending this need of repose, so that
Hippolyte might permit him to rest on the Trabocco as long as he
pleased. George assured her that he could not sleep elsewhere than on
those planks, amid the exhalations of the rocks, amid the music of the
sea.
To this music he lent an ear more and more attentive and subtle. From
now on he knew all its mysteries, understood all its significations.
The feeble splash of the surf, like the lingual sound of a flock
quenching its thirst; the great, sudden roar of a giant wave, which,
arriving from the offing, meets and breaks the wave refracted from the
shore; the most humble note, the most superb note, and the innumerable
intermediate scales, and the diverse measures of the intervals, and the
most simple chords, and the most complex chords, and all the powers of
this profound marine orchestra in the sonorous gulf--he knew all, he
understood all.
Mysterious, the twilight symphony developed and swelled, very slowly,
very slowly, beneath a sky of chaste violets, and between the ethereal
clusters of which shone the first timid glances of the constellations
still covered by a veil. Here and there, errant breezes raised and
pushed the billows, rare at first, then more frequent, then weaker; they
raised and pushed the waves whose delicate crests blossomed, stole a
glint from the twilight, foamed a moment, and fell back languidly. Now
like the dull sound of cymbals, now like the sound of silver disks
clashed against one another, such was the sound produced in the silence
by those falling and expiring waves. New billows arose, engendered by a
stronger gust, curved limpidly, bore in their curvature the grace of the
closing day, broke with a sort of indolence, like restless white
rose-trees shedding their eaves, and leaving durable foam, like petals,
on the mirror that stretched out where they disappeared forever. Still
others arose, increased in velocity and strength, approached the shore,
reached it with a triumphant roar followed by a diffused murmur similar
to the rustling of dry leaves. And, while this illusionary rustling of
the unreal forest lasted, other waves, over there, over there, on the
crescent of the gulf, unfurled at constantly diminishing distances, to
be followed by the same murmur, so that the sonorous zone seemed to
extend to the infinite by the perpetual vibrations of a myriad of dry
leaves.
The water rushed on the unshakable rocks with the impetuous warmth of
love or anger; it dashed over them roaring, washed over them foaming,
invaded with its liquidity the most secret crevices. It seemed that an
ultra-sovereign natural soul was filling with its frantic perturbation
an instrument as vast and multiple as an organ, guilty of every
discordance, touching all the notes of joy and pain.
The water laughed, moaned, prayed, sang, caressed, sobbed,
threatened--by turns joyous, plaintive, humble, ironical, coaxing,
dejected, cruel. It dashed to the summit of the highest rock, to fill
the little cavity round as a votive cup; it crept into the oblique
crevice where swarmed the mollusks; it sank into the soft carpets of
coralline, tearing them and creeping as lightly as a serpent on a bed of
moss. The regular dripping of the waters which ooze in the occult cave,
the rhythmic overflow of the springs similar to the pulsation of a vast
heart, the harsh splashing of the streams on the steep declivity, the
dull rumbling of the torrent imprisoned between two walls of granite,
the reiterated thunder of the river precipitated from the heights of the
cataract--all these sounds produced by running waters on the inert stone
and all the sports of their echoes, the sea imitated. The tender word
that one murmurs apart in the shade, the sigh exhaled by a mortal
anguish, the clamor of a multitude buried in the depths of a catacomb,
the sob of a titanic bosom, arrogant and cruel derision--all these
sounds produced by the human mouth when sad or gay, the sea imitated.
The nocturnal choruses of the spirits with the aerial tongues, the
whispering of the phantoms put to flight by the dawn, the suppressed
grins of fluid and malevolent creatures in ambush on the threshold of
their lairs, the calls of vocal flowers in sensual paradises, the magic
dance in the moonlight--all these sounds that the ears of the poets
listen to in secret, all the enchantments of the antique siren, the sea
imitated. One and multiple, elusive and imperishable, it enclosed in
itself all the languages of Life and Dreamland.
In the attentive mind of the auditor it seemed like the resurrection of
a world. The grandeur of the marine symphony revived in him faith in
the unlimited power of music. He was stupefied at having been able to
deprive his soul so long of this daily nourishment, of having renounced
the only means conceded to man to free himself from the deception of
appearances and to discover in the inner universe of the soul the real
essence of things. He was stupefied at having been able to neglect so
long this religious cult, which, after Demetrius's example, he had
practised with so much fervor since the first years of his infancy. For
Demetrius and for himself, had not music been a religion? Had it not
revealed to both the mystery of the supreme life? To both it had
repeated, but with a different sense, the words of Christ: "My kingdom
is not of this world."
And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full
of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his
forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.
Once more George felt himself penetrated by the supernatural fascination
which that man, existing outside of life, exercised upon him from the
bottom of the tomb. Distant things came back to his memory similar to
indistinct waves of harmony; elements of thought received from that
teacher seemed to take vague forms of rhythm; the ideal sceptre of the
defunct appeared to be transfigured musically, to lose its visible
outlines, to reenter into the profound unity of the being, into that
being which the solitary musician, in the light of his inspiration, had
discovered under the diversity of the Appearances.
"Without doubt," he thought, "it is music that initiated him into the
mystery of Death, that showed him, beyond this life, a nocturnal empire
of marvels. Harmony, an element superior to time and space, had given
him, like a beatitude, a glimpse of the possibility of freeing himself
from space and time, of detaching himself from the individual will that
confined him in the prison of a personality enclosed in a restricted
place, that kept him perpetually subject to the brutish matter of
corporeal substance. How he had a thousand times felt in himself, in
the moments of inspiration, the awakening of the universal will; what
extraordinary joy he had tasted on recognizing the supreme unity that is
at the bottom of things; he believed that death would be a means for
prolonging his existence in the infinite, that he would become dissolved
in the continuous harmony of the Great All and would participate in the
endless voluptuousness of the Eternal. Why should I, too, not have the
same initiator into the same mystery?"
Elevated images arose in his mind, at the same time as the stars
appeared one by one in the silence of the heavens. Some of his most
poetic dreams came back to him. He recalled the immense sentiment of
joy and liberty that he had felt one day in identifying himself in
imagination with an unknown man who was lying in a bier at the summit of
a majestic catafalque, surrounded by torches, while at the back of the
sacred shadow, in the organ, in the orchestra, and in the human voices,
the soul of Beethoven, the divine teacher, spoke with the Invisible. He
saw once more the chimerical vessel laden with a gigantic organ that,
between the sky and the sea, in infinite distances, poured over the calm
wave torrents of harmony from its forests of tubes, while twilight pyres
blazed on the extreme horizon, or the serenity of the moon spread all
over the ecstatic sky, or in the circle of the darkness the
constellations shone from the heights of their crystal chariots. He
reconstructed that marvellous Temple of Death, all of white marble,
where remarkable musicians, stationed between the columns of the
propylon, fascinated with their strains the young men as they passed,
and put so much art in initiating them that never did one initiated,
when placing his foot on the funereal threshold, look back to salute the
light in which, up to then, he had found joy.
"Give me a noble manner of dying. Let Beauty spread one of her wings
out under my last step! It is all I implore from my Destiny."
A lyric breath expanded his thought. The end of Percy Shelley, so often
envied and dreamed of by him under the shadow and flapping of the sail,
reappeared to him in an immense flash of poetry. That destiny had
superhuman grandeur and sadness. "His death is mysterious and solemn as
that of the ancient heroes of Greece which an invisible power removed
unexpectedly from the earth and carried off transfigured into the Jovian
sphere. As in the song of Ariel, nothing of him is destroyed; but the
sea has transfigured him into something rich and strange. His youthful
body is burning on a pyre, at the foot of the Apennine, before the
solitude of the Tyrrhenian Sea, under the blue arch of heaven. He is
burning with aromas, with incense, with oil, with wine, with salt. The
sonorous flames are rising in the still air, vibrating and chanting
towards the sun, a looker-on that makes the marbles scintillate on the
tops of the mountains. As long as the body is not consumed, a seagull
circles the pyre with its flights. And then, when the body, in ashes,
falls apart, the heart appears, bare and intact."
Had not he, too, perhaps, like the poet of _Epipsychidion_, loved
Antigone during an anterior existence?
Beneath him, around him, the symphony of the sea swelled, swelled in the
shade; and over him, the silence of the starry sky grew deeper. But
from the shore came a rumbling without resemblance to any other sound,
very familiar. And, when he turned his gaze on that side, he saw the
two headlights of the train, like the fulguration of two eyes of fire.
Deafening, rapid, and sinister, the train that passed shook the
promontory; in a second it had dashed across the open space; then,
whistling and roaring, it disappeared in the mouth of the tunnel
opposite.
George started to his feet. He perceived that he was alone on the
Trabocco.
"George, George, where are you?" It was the uneasy cry of Hippolyte,
who had come to look for him--it was a cry of anguish and fear.
"George! Where are you?"
*CHAPTER VI.*
Hippolyte exulted from joy when George told her of the near arrival of
the piano and pieces of music. How grateful she was to him for that
kind surprise! At last, they would have something to break the monotony
of the long days and to keep them from temptation.
She laughed as she alluded to that species of erotic fever with which
she maintained continual ardor in her lover; she laughed as she alluded
to their carnalism, interrupted only by the silences of lassitude or by
some caprice of the loved one.
"In that way," she said, laughing, with a touch of irony yet without
bitterness, "in that way you won't have to take refuge on your horrid
Trabocco. Will you?"
She drew close to him, laid her hands on his head, pressed his temples
between her palms, and gazed into the depths of his pupils.
"Confess that you took refuge there _because of that_," she murmured, in
a coaxing voice, as if to induce him to confess.
"Because of what?" he demanded, feeling under the contact of her hands
the sensation one feels when one grows pale.
"Because you are afraid of my kisses."
She pronounced the words slowly, almost scanning the syllables, and in a
voice which had all at once assumed singular limpidity. She had in her
look an indefinable mixture of passion, irony, cruelty, and pride.
"Is it true, is it true?" she insisted.
She continued to press his temples between her palms; but, gradually,
her fingers crept into his hair, slightly tickled his ears, descended to
his neck with one of those multiple kisses in the science of which she
was an accomplished artist.
"Is it true?" she repeated in a subtle, coaxing tone that she knew well,
by experience, was most efficacious in arousing her lover. "Is it
true?"
He did not reply; he closed his eyes; he abandoned himself; he felt life
slipping by--the world fading away.
Once more he was succumbing at the mere contact of those thin hands;
once more the Enemy was triumphantly essaying its power. It seemed as
if she were saying: "You cannot escape me. I know you fear me, but the
desire I arouse in you is stronger than your terror. And nothing
intoxicates me so much as to read that terror in your eyes, to surprise
it in the shudder of your fibres."
In the ingenuousness of her egotism, she did not appear to have the
least consciousness of the evil she was doing, of the work of
destruction that she was carrying on without truce or mercy. Accustomed
as she was to her lover's peculiarities--his melancholies, his intense
and mute contemplations, his sudden uneasiness, his sombre and almost
insane ardor, his bitter and ambiguous words--she did not comprehend all
the gravity of the actual situation, that she was aggravating more every
hour. Gradually, excluded from all participation in George's inner
existence, she had, at first by instinct, and afterwards deliberately,
made it her study to fortify her sensual dominion over him. Their new
way of life, in the open air, in the country, on the seashore, favored
the development of her animalism, aroused in her nature a factitious
strength and the need of exercising that strength to excess. Complete
idleness, the absence of commonplace cares, the continual presence of
the loved one, the common possession of the couch, the scantiness of
their Summer attire, the daily bath--all those new habits concurred to
subtilize and multiply her voluptuous artifices, at the same time
offering her numerous opportunities to repeat them. And it really
seemed as if she were making ample amends for her coldness in the early
days and her inexperience of the early months, and that she was now
corrupting him who had corrupted her.
She had become so expert, so certain of her effects, she was so quick at
unexpected inventions, so graceful in her gestures and attitudes, she
showed at times in the offer of herself such violent frenzy, that George
could no longer see in her the bloodless and wounded creature who used
to submit with profound astonishment, the ignorant and frightened
creature who had given him that fierce and divine spectacle--the agony
of modesty felled by victorious passion.
A short time ago, as he had watched her sleeping, he had thought: "True
sensual communion is also a chimera. The senses of my mistress are not
less obscure than her soul. I shall never succeed in surprising in her
fibres a secret disgust, an appetite unsatisfied, an irritation
unappeased. I shall never succeed in knowing the different sensations
produced in her by the same kiss repeated at different times." Yet
Hippolyte had acquired that science over him, she possessed that
infallible science; she knew her lover's most secret and subtle
sensibilities and knew how to move them with a marvellous intuition of
the physical conditions that depend on them, and their corresponding
sensations and their associations, and their alternatives.
But the inextinguishable desire that she had enflamed in George burned
her, too. A sorceress, she herself felt the effects of her own spell.
The consciousness of her power, essayed a thousand times without
failure, intoxicated her, and this ravishment blinded her, prevented her
from perceiving the great shadow that was thickening every day behind
the head of her slave. The terror that she had surprised in George's
eyes, his attempts at flight, the thinly disguised hostilities, excited
her instead of restraining her. Her artificial taste for transcendent
life, for extraordinary things, for mystery, tastes that George had
educated in her, took pleasure in these symptoms significant of a deep
change. Formerly her lover, separated from her, tortured by the anguish
of desire and jealousy, had written her: "Is that love? Oh, no! It is
a sort of monstrous infirmity that can blossom _only in me_, for my joy
and my martyrdom. I love to think that no other human creature has
experienced that feeling." She was proud at having aroused such a
sentiment in a man so different from the commonplace men she had known;
she became exalted as she recognized, hour by hour, the strange effects
of her exclusive domination on this morbid-minded man. And she had no
other object than to exercise her tyranny, with a mixture of levity and
seriousness, passing by turns from playfulness to wilful abuse.
*CHAPTER VII.*
Sometimes, when at the edge of the sea, contemplating the unconscious
woman standing near the calm and perilous waves, George thought: "I
could easily cause her death. She often tries to swim leaning on me. I
could easily smother her under the water, let her drown. No suspicion
would attach to me; the crime would appear like an accident. Only then,
in front of the corpse of the Enemy, should I have an opportunity to
find the solution of my problem. Since she is now the centre of all my
existence, what change would take place in me after her disappearance?
Have I not more than once experienced a feeling of peace and liberty in
thinking of her as dead, enclosed forever in the tomb? Perhaps I should
succeed in saving myself and reconquering life, if I made the Enemy
perish, if I removed the Obstacle." He dwelt on this thought; he tried
to construct a representation of his being freed and appeased in a
future without love; he took pleasure in enveloping his mistress's
sensual body in a fantastic shroud.
Hippolyte was timid in the water. During her swimming lessons she never
ventured beyond her depth. A sudden terror seized her when, on resuming
the vertical position, she did not at once feel ground under her feet.
George urged her to venture, with his help, as far as a rock situated a
short distance from the shore, about twenty strokes from her depth.
Very slight effort was necessary to swim there.
"Be brave!" he kept repeating, to convince her. "You'll never learn
unless you are courageous. I'll stay near you."
Thus he enveloped her with his homicidal thought; and he had a long
inner thrill each time, during the incidents of the bath, that he became
convinced of the extreme facility with which he could carry his thoughts
into effect. But the necessary energy failed him, and he confined
himself to proposing the swim to the rock and leaving the rest to
chance. In his present, weak condition, he himself would be in peril if
Hippolyte, seized by fright, took violent hold of him. But such a
probability did not dissuade him from making the attempt; on the
contrary, it made him more determined to do so.
"Be brave! Cannot you see that the rock is so near that we can almost
touch it with our hands? Swim slowly, by my side. You can rest when
you're there. We'll sit down; we'll gather some coral. Come, be
brave!"
He dissimulated his own anxiety with difficulty. She resisted,
undecided, wavering between fear and caprice.
"Suppose my strength gives out?"
"I'll be there to help you."
"And if your strength isn't sufficient?"
"It will be. You see how close the rock is."
Smiling, she touched her lips with her wet fingers.
"The water is so salt!" she said, pouting.
Then, her last repugnance overcome, she suddenly made up her mind.
"Come! I'm ready."
Her heart did not beat so fast as the heart of her companion. As the
water was very calm, almost motionless, the first strokes were easy.
But suddenly, through lack of experience, she began to hurry and blow
herself. A false movement filled her mouth with water; panic seized
her; she cried, struggled, drank in more.
"Help, George! Help!"
Instinctively, he dashed to her aid and caught hold of the shrivelled
fingers that clutched him. Under the clutch, and weight, he weakened;
and he had a sudden vision of the foreseen end.
"Don't hold me like that!" he cried. "Don't hold me like that! Leave
me an arm free!"
The brutal instinct of self-preservation restored his strength. He made
an extraordinary effort, swam the short distance with his burden; and he
touched the rock, his strength exhausted.
"Cling hold!" he said to Hippolyte, unable to raise her himself.
Finding herself safe, she had recovered her promptness of action; but,
barely seated on the rocks, gasping and dripping, she burst into sobs.
She cried violently, like a child; and her sobs exasperated George
instead of touching him. He had never seen her cry such a torrent of
tears, with such swollen and burning eyes, making such a grimace. He
thought her ugly and pusillanimous. He felt an angry rancor toward her,
and at heart almost a regret for having given himself that trouble and
taken her from the water. He imagined her drowned, disappeared in the
sea; he imagined his own emotion on seeing her disappear, and then the
signs of grief that he would give in public, his attitude in front of
the cadaver cast up by the waves.
Stupefied at seeing herself left to her tears without a consoling word,
she turned toward him. She had stopped crying.
"What shall I do to get back?" she asked.
"Make another attempt," he answered, with a touch of mockery.
"No, no; never!"
"What, then?"
"I'll stay here."
"Very well. Addio!"
And he made a gesture as if to dive in the sea.
"Addio! I'll shout. They'll come and rescue me."
She passed from sobbing to laughter, her eyes still full of tears.
"What's that on your arm?" she asked.
"The marks of your nails."
He showed her the bleeding scratches.
"Do they hurt?"
She felt sorry, and stroked the arm with her hand.
"It was your fault--only yours, wasn't it?" she continued. "You made me
come. I didn't want to----"
Then, smiling:
"It was perhaps a way to get rid of me?"
A shudder ran through her:
"What a horrible death! The water is so bitter!"
She bent her head down to one side, and felt the water run from her ear,
warm as the blood.
The sun-beaten rock was hot, brownish, and slippery, like the back of a
living animal; and at its base, it swarmed with infinite life. The
green vegetation undulated on the surface of the water with the
suppleness of unloosened hair, with a light, splashing sound. The
solitary rock, which received the heavenly heat, exercised a sort of
seduction, and communicated it to its people of happy creatures.
As if allowing himself to be won by this seduction, George stretched
himself out on his back. For a few seconds he applied his consciousness
to perceive the vague feeling of comfort that penetrated his wet skin
drying in the heat emanated from the stones and in that of the direct
rays. Phantoms of distant sensations came back to his memory. The
thought of the chaste baths of formerly, of the long apathies on the
sand, more ardent and more suave than a female body. Oh! for solitude,
liberty, love without the accessories, love for dead or inaccessible
women! Hippolyte's presence prohibited forgetfulness, recalled
incessantly the image of the physical relation, of the accouplement
operated by ignoble organs, of the infecund and sad spasm which had
since become the unique manifestation of their love.
"Of what are you thinking?" asked Hippolyte, touching him. "Do you want
to stay here?"
He rose. He replied:
"Let's go."
The life of the Enemy was still in his hands. He could still destroy
it. He cast a rapid glance around him. A heavy silence hung over the
hill and the beach; on the Trabocco, the taciturn fishermen were
watching their net.
"Come, be brave!" he repeated, smiling.
"No, no; never again!"
"Let's stay here, then."
"No. Let's call the men of the Trabocco."
"They'll laugh at us."
"Very well! I'll call them myself."
"If you didn't get frightened--if you didn't clutch me so, I should be
strong enough to carry you."
"No, no. I want to go back in the fannizza."
She was so determined that George let her have her way. He stood up on
the rock, and, making a speaking trumpet of his hands, he called one of
Turchin's sons.
"Daniel! Daniel!"
On hearing this repeated shout, one of the fishermen left the capstan,
crossed the bridge, climbed down, and began to run along the beach.
"Daniel, bring the _cannizza_."
The man heard, turned back, went toward the boathouse, dragged the
little dingy into the water, and, pushing off with a long pole,
proceeded towards the rock.
*CHAPTER VIII.*
The next morning--it was a Sunday--George, seated beneath the oak, was
listening to old Colas, who was relating how, several days before, at
Tocco Casauria, the new Messiah had been arrested by the police and led
to the Saint Valentine prison with several of his disciples. The old
man said, shaking his head:
"Our Lord Jesus Christ himself suffered from the hate of the Pharisees.
Oreste came into the district to bring peace and abundance, and they put
him in prison!"
"O father, don't grieve," cried Candia. "The Messiah can leave the
prison when he wishes to, and we'll see him again here. Wait and see!"
She was leaning against the door-post, supporting, without fatigue, the
weight of her peaceful maternity; and in her large ashen eyes shone an
infinite serenity.
All at once, Albadora, the septuagenarian Sibyl, who had brought into
the world twenty-two children, remounted to the court, by the path; and,
pointing to the neighboring shore of the left promontory, she announced,
deeply moved:
"A child has been drowned yonder!"
Candia made the sign of the cross.
George rose and ascended to the loggia, in order to observe the point
indicated. On the beach, at the foot of the promontory, near the reefs
and the tunnel, there was a white spot, doubtless the cloth that covered
the little corpse. A group of people stood close by.
As Hippolyte had gone to mass with Helen, to the chapel of the Port, he
was curious to go down, and said to his hosts:
"I'll go and see."
"Why do you want to put a pain in your heart?" asked Candia.
He turned quickly into the path, took a short cut to the beach, walked
along the edge of the sea. On arriving at the place of the accident, he
was panting a little. He asked:
"What has happened?"
The assembled peasants saluted him, making room for him. One of them
answered, calm:
"It's the _son of a mother_, who's been drowned."
Another, clothed in linen, who appeared to be in charge of the corpse,
stooped, and raised the cloth.
The little body appeared, inert, stretched on the hard beach. It was
the body of a child of eight or nine, a thin and frail blond. For a
pillow, they had put beneath his head his poor rags rolled up in a
bundle: his shirt, blue breeches, red belt, soft felt hat. His face was
scarcely livid, with a snub nose, prominent forehead, very long
eyelashes, a half-open mouth with large, violet-colored lips between
which showed the white teeth, spaced one from another. His neck was
thin, flaccid, like a withered stem, marked with tiny folds. The
tendons of the arm were weak; the arms were slender, covered with a down
like the fine feathers that cover a newly hatched bird. His ribs were
prominent and distinct; a darker line divided the skin in the middle of
the chest; the umbilicus protruded like a knot. The feet, a little
swollen, had the same yellowish color as the hands; and the small hands
were callous, covered with warts, with white nails that were beginning
to turn livid. On the left arm, on the thighs near the groin, and lower
down, on the knees, along the limbs, reddish spots appeared. All the
particularities of this miserable body assumed an extraordinary
significance in George's eyes, immobilized as they were, and fixed
forever in the rigidity of death.
"How did he get drowned? Where?" he asked in a low voice.
The man clad in linen began, not without some signs of impatience, the
story, that, doubtless, he had already repeated too often. He had a
square, bestial face, hairy eyebrows, and a broad, hard, fierce mouth.
The story he told was as follows:
Immediately after having taken his sheep back to the barn, the child had
eaten his lunch and had gone down to bathe in company with a comrade.
But scarcely had he put foot in the water than he fell and was drowned.
At his comrade's cries, someone had run from the house built on the
cliffs, and had drawn him out half-dead, without getting wet above the
knees. He had lowered the head to cause vomiting, had shaken him, but
uselessly. And, so as to illustrate just where the poor little fellow
had gone down, the man picked up a stone and threw it into the sea.
"There, just there--three arms' length from the shore."
The calm sea breathed softly near the head of the little corpse. But
the sun blazed on the beach; and, in presence of this pallid corpse,
there seemed something implacable in that burning sky and these coarse
witnesses.
George asked:
"Why don't you carry him into the shade, to a house, a bed?"
"He mustn't be moved," replied the guardian sententiously. "Until the
arrival of the Authorities, he must not be moved."
"But, at least, carry him into the shade--there, under that embankment."
Obstinately, the guardian repeated:
"He must not be moved."
And nothing could be more sad than that frail, lifeless creature,
stretched on the strand, and guarded by that impassive brute, who always
repeated the same tale in the same words, who always made the same
motion when throwing the stone into the sea.
"There, just there."
A woman came up, a hook-nosed scold, with hard eyes and a bitter
tongue--the comrade's mother. One could plainly see on her features a
suspicious anxiety, as if she feared an accusation against her own son.
She spoke sourly, and displayed almost irritation against the victim.
"It was his fate. God told him, 'Go in the sea and die.'"
She gesticulated vehemently.
"Why did he go in when he couldn't swim?"
A child who did not belong to the district, a boatman's son, repeated
disdainfully:
"Why did he go in? Yes, we fellows all know how to swim."
People came up, looked on with cold curiosity, stopped or passed on.
One group occupied the railway embankment; another group was looking
from the top of the promontory, as at a spectacle. Children, seated or
kneeling, played with the little pebbles that they threw in the air to
catch them alternately on the backs of their hands and in their palms.
Everyone displayed profound indifference at the sight of another's
misfortune, and at death.
Another woman, on her way back from mass, came up, in a silk dress,
decked with all her gold trinkets. To her, also, the weary guardian
repeated his story, and showed the place in the water. This woman was
loquacious.
"I always say to my children, 'Don't go near the sea, or I'll kill you.'
The sea is the sea. You can't save yourself."
She related stories of drowned people. She recalled the case of the
headless corpse that the sea had thrown up at San Vito and which a child
had discovered among the rocks.
"There, between those rocks you see. The child came running up, saying,
'There's a dead man.' We thought he was joking. All the same, we went,
and we found it. The body had no head. The Authorities came. They
buried him in a ditch; then, at night, he was taken up again. He was all
mangled and decomposed, but he still had his shoes on his feet. The
magistrate said, 'Look, they are better than mine.' He must be a rich
man. And he was a cattle-dealer. He had been assassinated; they had
cut his head off and thrown him into the Tronto." ...
She continued in a shrill treble, swallowing the excessive saliva, from
time to time, with a light, whistling sound:
"Where's the mother? When will the mother come?"
All the assembled women uttered exclamations of pity at that name.
"The mother. The mother will come."
They all turned around, thinking they saw her in the distance, on the
burning sand. Others gave information concerning her. Her name was
Riccangela; she was a widow with seven children. She had placed this
one with the farmers to feed the sheep and earn his bread.
One was saying, as she looked at the corpse:
"His mother had so much trouble to raise him!"
Another said:
"She has even begged alms so as to nourish her children."
A third told that, several months previously, the poor youngster had
already come near drowning himself in a stable-yard pond--in three
inches of water!
Everyone repeated:
"It was his destiny. He was to die so."
Waiting rendered them uneasy, anxious.
"The mother! The mother's coming!"
George, deeply affected, cried:
"Carry him into the shade, won't you? Or into a house, so that his
mother will not see him naked on the sand in the broiling sun!"
The guardian objected obstinately:
"He mustn't be moved. Until the arrival of the Authorities, he mustn't
be moved."
The assistants looked at _Candia's stranger_ with surprise. Their number
increased. Some occupied the embankment, planted with acacias; others
crowned the arid promontory rearing up perpendicularly above the rocks.
Here and there, lying on the great, monstrous blocks, clumps of reeds
shone like gold, at the foot of the enormous slide of the cliffs,
resembling a ruin of a cyclopean tower in front of the immense sea.
Suddenly, above the heights, a voice announced:
"Here she is."
Other voices followed:
"The mother, the mother!"
Everybody turned round; some came down from the embankment; those on the
promontory leaned forward. Expectation rendered all dumb. The guardian
recovered the corpse with the cloth. In the silence, the sea scarcely
gasped, the acacias scarcely rustled.
And then, in the silence, one heard the cries of the new arrival.
The mother came along the shore, in the sun, crying. She was dressed in
widow's weeds. Her body bent, she stumbled along on the sand, crying:
"My son! My son!"
She raised her hands to heaven, crying:
"My son!"
One of her older sons, with a red handkerchief knotted about his neck,
followed her with a stupefied air, wiping away his tears with the back
of his hand.
She walked along the shore, bent, striking her knees, directing her
steps toward the white cloth. And while she called the dead, her mouth
uttered cries that had nothing human about them, like the yelping of a
savage dog. The nearer she came the lower she bent, almost stooping on
all fours; when she reached the body, she threw herself on the cloth
with a shriek.
She arose. With her coarse and blackened hand, a hand hardened by every
toil, she uncovered the corpse. She looked at it for a few instants,
motionless, as if petrified. Then, several times, in a piercing voice,
with all the force of her lungs, she cried as if to awaken the dead:
"My son! My son! My son!"
The sobs choked her. On her knees, furious, she struck her sides with
her fists. Her hopeless gaze wandered around on the people present.
And during a lull in that violent tempest she seemed to collect herself.
Then she began to chant.
She chanted her sorrow in a rhythm that rose and fell regularly, like
the palpitation of a heart.
It was an ancient monody that, from time immemorial, in the region of
the Abruzzi, the women chanted over the loss of their kin. It was the
melodious eloquence of the sacred sorrow that spontaneously wells up
from the depths of the being, that hereditary rhythm in which the
mothers of other times had modulated their lament.
She chanted, chanted:
"Open your eyes, arise, walk, my son! How beautiful you are! How
beautiful you are!"
She chanted:
"For a morsel of bread, I have drowned you, my son! For a morsel of
bread, I sent you to death! It was for this, then, that I raised you!"
But the woman with the hooked nose interrupted her, snappishly:
"No, you have not drowned him. It was Destiny. No, you didn't send him
to his death. _You put it in the midst of the bread_."
And with a gesture towards the hill on which stood the house that had
given hospitality to the child, she added:
"They took care of him there _like a jewel in its casket_."
The mother continued:
"O my son! Who sent you here? Who sent you here, to be drowned?"
And the snappy woman:
"Who sent him? It was our Lord. He said to him, 'Go into the sea and
drown.'"
As George observed in a low voice to one of the bystanders that the
child, succored in time, could have been saved, and that they had killed
him by putting his head low and suspending him by the feet, he felt the
mother's gaze fixed on himself.
"Do something for him, signor," she implored. "Do something for him."
She prayed:
"O Madonna of Miracles, perform the miracle!"
She repeated, touching the head of the dead:
"My son! My son! My son! Arise! Walk!"
Before her, on his knees, was the brother of the dead child; and he
sobbed with grief, gazing about him from time to time with a face that
had suddenly become indifferent. Another brother, the eldest, remained
seated near by in the shadow of a rock, and he simulated grief by hiding
his face in his hands. In order to console the mother, the women bent
around her with gestures of pity, and accompanied the monody with a few
groans.
She chanted:
"Why did I send you away from my house? Why have I sent you to your
death? I have done everything to feed my sons, everything but sold
myself. And it is for a morsel of bread that I have lost you! That,
that is how you were to end. They have drowned you, my son!"
Then the woman with the rapacious nose in a burst of anger raised her
skirt, entered the water as far as the knees, and cried:
"Look! He went in this far. Look! The water is like oil. It is a
sign that he was to die in this manner."
And she regained the shore in two long strides.
"Look, look!" she repeated, pointing out on the sand the deep imprints
of the man who had drawn out the body.
The mother looked on in a stupor; but one would have said that she did
not see, that she understood nothing. After the hopeless explosions of
grief, there supervened in her short pauses, like the dulling of
consciousness. She remained silent; she touched her foot, or leg,
mechanically; she dried her tears with her black apron; she seemed to
become composed. Then suddenly a new explosion shook her entire frame;
she fell on the corpse.
"And I cannot take you away! I cannot take you in my arms to the
church! My son! My son!"
She felt him from head to foot, with a slow caress. Her wild anguish
became more gentle, more touching. Her hand, sunburnt and callous by
work, became infinitely coaxing when she touched her son's eyes, mouth,
and forehead.
"How beautiful you are! How beautiful you are!"
She touched his lower lip, already violet-hued; and this slight pressure
caused a flow of whitish foam to flow from the mouth. She removed from
between the eyelashes a bit of straw, gently, gently, as if she feared
to hurt him.
"How beautiful you are, you mother's pet!"
The eyelashes of the child were very long and very blond. On the
temples, on the cheeks, a light down gave a golden reflection.
"Don't you hear me? Arise! Walk!"