him. She said:
"I want to keep this as a relic; I want to carry it always on my heart."
She took the red waistband, and said:
"I wish to dress you."
The rough woman who had not left her place approved:
"Yes, let us dress him."
She herself removed the clothes from beneath the head of the corpse,
felt in the vest pocket, and found there a piece of bread and a fig.
"You see! They had just given him his meal. They took care of him
there _like a jewel in its casket_."
The mother looked at the little shirt, dirty, torn, on which her tears
were falling, and she said:
"Put this shirt on him!"
Promptly the woman shouted up to one of her people on the heights above:
"Bring quickly one of Nufrillo's clean shirts."
The clean shirt was brought. When the mother raised the small body, a
little water came from the mouth and rolled down the chest.
"O Madonna of Miracles, perform the miracle!" she prayed, raising her
eyes to heaven in a supreme supplication.
Then she laid her sweet burden down again. She took the old shirt, the
red waistband, the hat; she rolled them all up into a bundle, and said:
"It will be my pillow; at night I shall rest my head on it. I want to
die on it."
She placed the poor relic on the sand near the child's head, placed her
temple on it, and stretched out as if on a bed.
They both lay there, side by side, the mother and son, on the hard
stones, beneath the burning sky, near the homicidal sea. And she
chanted the same cantilena that had formerly shed a chaste slumber over
the cradle.
"Get up, Riccangela; get up!" repeated the women around her.
She was not listening to them.
"My son is lying on the stones, and I could not rest there, too! Oh! my
son, on these stones."
"Get up, Riccangela. Come!"
She rose. She gazed once more and with terrible intensity on the livid
face of the corpse. She called once more, with all the force of her
lungs:
"My son! My son! My son!"
Then, with her own hands, she re-covered her heavy loss with the cloth.
And the women surrounded her, drew her a little farther away under the
shade of a rock, forced her to sit down, lamented with her.
Gradually the spectators disbanded, dispersed. There remained only a
few consolers, and also the man clothed in linen, the impassive guardian
who waited for the Authorities. The canicular sun beat down on the
beach, and imparted to the funereal cloth a dazzling whiteness. The
promontory, perpendicular above the jagged rocks, towered up in the
conflagration with its desolate aridity. The sea, immense and green,
breathed always evenly. And it seemed that the slow hour would never
end.
In the shade of the rock, before the white cloth raised by the rigid
form of the corpse, the mother continued her monody in the rhythm
rendered sacred by so many sorrows, ancient and recent, of her race.
And it seemed as if her lamentation would never cease.
*CHAPTER IX.*
On her return from the chapel of the Port, Hippolyte had heard of the
accident. Accompanied by Helen, she had wished to rejoin George on the
beach. But when near the tragic spot, at the sight of the cloth that
made a white spot on the sand, she had felt her strength fail her.
Seized by an outburst of sobs, she had retraced her steps, had gone back
to the house, had waited for George, weeping.
She felt less compassion for the little body than she felt for herself,
haunted by the recollection of the peril she had so lately incurred at
the bath. And an instinctive, indomitable repulsion arose in her
against that sea.
"I do not want to bathe in the sea any more. I do not want you to bathe
there," she enjoined George, almost roughly, in a tone that expressed a
firm, unyielding resolution. "I will not have it. Do you hear?"
They passed the rest of that Sunday in an anxious restlessness,
returning ceaselessly to the loggia, to look at the white spot, over
there, on the beach. George had the image of the corpse constantly
before his eyes so strongly outlined that it seemed to him almost
tangible. And in his ears was constantly the cadence of the monody
chanted by the mother. Was the mother still lamenting in the shade of
the rock? Had she stayed there alone with the sea and the dead? He saw
again in imagination another unfortunate. He relived the hour of that
May morning, long ago, in the house far away, when he had felt all at
once the maternal life come in contact with his own life with a sort of
adherence, when he had felt the mysterious correspondences of blood, of
sorrow, and of destiny suspended over the heads of both. Would he ever
see her again with mortal eyes? Would he ever again see that feeble
smile, which, without changing a line of the face, seemed to spread a
light veil of hope, too fugitive, alas! over the indelible imprints of
pain? Would it be permitted him ever to kiss that long and emaciated
hand again, whose caress could be compared to no other? And he relived
the distant hour of the tears when, at the window, he had received the
terrible revelation from the glimmer of a smile: when he had at last
heard the dear voice, the only and unforgettable voice, the voice of
comfort, of counsel, of forgiveness, of infinite goodness--when he had
at last recognized the tender creature of long ago, the adored one. And
he relived the hour of the farewell, the farewell tearless, and yet so
cruel, when he had lied for shame on reading in his deceived mother's
eyes the too sad question: "For whom are you abandoning me?" And all
the past sorrows arose again in his memory, with all their dolorous
images: that emaciated face, those swollen eyelids, red and burning,
Christine's gentle and heart-rending smile, the sickly child whose large
head was always resting on a chest barren of all but sighs, the
cadaveric mask of the poor idiotic gormand.... And the tired eyes of
his mother repeated: "For whom are you abandoning me?"
He felt himself penetrated by a wave of gentle feeling; he languished,
dissolved; he felt a vague desire to bend his forehead, to hide his face
on a bosom, to be caressed chastely, to savor slowly this secret
bitterness, to doze, to perish gradually. It was as if all the
effeminations of his soul had blossomed at the same time, and were
floating.
A man passed by on the path, bearing on his head a little white-pine
coffin.
Later in the afternoon the Authorities arrived at the beach. The little
corpse, lifted up away from the stones, had been carried to the heights,
disappeared. Piercing shrieks reached the Hermitage. Then all was
quiet. The silence, ascending from the calm sea, regained possession of
the surrounding parts.
The sea was so calm, the air was so calm, that life seemed suspended. A
bluish light spread uniformly over everything.
Hippolyte had reentered, and had thrown herself on her bed. George
remained in the loggia, seated on a chair. Both suffered, and they could
not speak of their pain. Time slipped by.
"Did you call me?" asked George, who thought he heard his name.
"No, I didn't call you," she answered.
"What are you doing? Are you going to sleep?"
She did not answer.
George reseated himself, and half-closed his eyes. His thoughts always
went back towards the mountain. In this silence, he felt the silence of
the solitary and abandoned garden in which the little cypress-trees,
tall and straight, reared up motionless toward the sky, religiously,
like votive wax candles; from which, through the windows of the deserted
chambers, still intact like reliquaries, came a religious sweetness of
recollections.
And he appeared to him, 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.
"Oh! why," said he to Demetrius, "why did I not obey your suggestion,
the last time I entered the chambers inhabited by your spirit? Why did
I wish to make a new trial of life, and cover myself with shame before
your eyes? How could I have made the mistake of pursuing the _sure
possession_ of another soul, when I possessed yours, and when you lived
in me?"
After the physical death, the soul of Demetrius had been preserved in
the survivor without any diminution, and in him it had even attained,
and retained, its supreme intensity. All that the living person had
consumed in contact with his fellows, all the words sown in the course
of time, all the diverse manifestations that had determined the special
character of his being compared with other beings, all the ways,
constant or variable, that had distinguished his personality among other
personalities and made of him a man apart in the human multitude; in
short, all that had differentiated his own life from other lives--all
that was collected, concentrated, circumscribed in the unique, ideal tie
that attached the defunct to the survivor. And the divine ostensory
preserved in the Duomo of the natal town seemed to consecrate this high
mystery: _Ego Demetrius Aurispa et unicus Georgius filius meus_.
The impure creature who was now lying on that unchaste bed had
interposed between. The terrible corrupter was not only the obstacle to
life, but also an obstacle to death--_to that death_. She was the Enemy
of both.
And George, in thought, returned to the mountain, once more reached the
old mansion, reentered the deserted rooms. As on that May morning, he
crossed the tragic threshold. And, as on that day, he felt the obscure
obsession over his will. The fifth anniversary was near. In what
manner should he celebrate it?
A sudden cry from Hippolyte made him start violently. He jumped up and
ran.
"What's the matter?"
Seated up in bed, terrified, she was passing her hands over her brow and
eyelids, as though to thrust off something that tormented her. She
fixed large, haggard eyes on her lover. Then, with an abrupt gesture,
she threw her arms round his neck, covered his face with kisses and
tears.
"What's the matter? What's the matter?" he asked, astonished, uneasy.
"Nothing, nothing----"
"Why are you crying?"
"I had a dream----"
"What did you dream? Tell me!"
Instead of replying, she clasped him close, kissed him again.
He seized her wrists, disengaged himself from her grasp, tried to look
in her face.
"Tell me, what did you dream?"
"Nothing--a horrid dream----"
"What kind of dream?"
She resisted his persistence. He, on his part, grew more uneasy as his
desire to know became greater.
"Tell me!"
Shaken with another shudder, she stammered:
"I dreamed--that I drew aside the shroud--and I saw--you----"
She smothered this last word in kisses.
*VI.*
*THE INVINCIBLE.*
*CHAPTER I.*
Chosen by a friend and hired at Ancona, sent to San Vito, transported,
not without difficulty, to the Hermitage, the piano was received by
Hippolyte with childish joy. It was placed in the room that George
called the library, the largest and best decorated, that in which were
the divan laden with cushions, the long cane chairs, the hammock, the
mats, the rugs, all the objects conducive to indolence and dreams.
There arrived also from Rome a box of music.
Thereafter, for many days, there was new ecstasy. Invaded, both of
them, by a quasi-delirious fever, they did nothing, forgot everything,
lost themselves entirely in this new pleasure.
They were no longer embarrassed by the monotony of the long afternoons;
they no longer felt the heavy, irresistible drowsiness; they could
lengthen their vigils almost until daybreak; they could prolong their
fasts without suffering by doing so, without noticing it, as if their
corporeal life had been refined, as if they were sublimated,
dispossessed of all vulgar needs. It seemed to them that their passion
ascended chimerically beyond all limit, that the palpitation of their
hearts attained a prodigious power. Sometimes it seemed to them that
once more they had found that moment of supreme oblivion, that moment
unique that they had enjoyed when their lips first met; sometimes it
seemed to him that they had recovered that indefinable and confused
sensation of being dispersed into space with the lightness of vapor.
Sometimes it seemed to both that the spot that they had chosen was
indefinably distant from other places, very distant, very isolated,
inaccessible, outside of the world.
A mysterious power drew them together, joined them, blended them, melted
them one in the other, similarized them in body and spirit, united them
into one single being. A mysterious power separated them, disjoined
them, forced them back into their solitude, dug an abyss between them,
planted in the core of their being a hopeless and mortal desire.
In these alternatives both found pleasure and suffering. They reascended
to the first ecstasy of their love, and they redescended to extreme and
useless efforts to repossess each other. They reascended again,
remounted to the origin of the earthly illusion, inhaled the mystic
shadow, where for the first time their trembling souls had exchanged the
same silent sentiment; and they redescended again, redescended to the
torture of unrealized expectation, entered into an atmosphere of fog,
thick and suffocating, like a whirlwind of sparks and hot cinders.
Each of those musicians whom they loved weaved a different charm about
their supersensitive feelings. A page of Robert Schumann evoked the
phantom of a very old amour that extended over him, in the guise of an
artificial firmament, the woof of his most beautiful recollections,
which, with an astonished and melancholy gentleness, he saw fade
gradually away. An _Impromptu_ of Frederic Chopin was saying, as if in
a dream: "At night, when you are sleeping on my heart, I hear in the
silence of the night a drop falling, slowly falling, always falling, so
near, so far! I hear, at night, the drop falling from my heart, the
blood that, drop by drop, falls from my heart, when you are sleeping,
when you are sleeping, I alone." High purple curtains, dark as a
merciless passion, around a bed deep as a sepulchre--that is what is
evoked by the _Erotic_ of Edward Grieg; and also a promise of death in
silent voluptuousness, and a boundless kingdom, rich in all the wealth
of the earth, waiting in vain for its vanished king, its dying king, in
the nuptial and funereal purple. But, in the prelude to "Tristan and
Ysolde," the leap of love toward death was unchained with inconceivable
violence; the insatiable desire was exalted even to the intoxication of
destruction. "... To drink yonder the cup of eternal love in thy honor,
I would, on the same altar, consecrate thee to death with myself."
And that immense wave of harmony irresistibly enveloped them both,
closed in on them, carried them away, transported them to "the
marvellous empire."
It was not by means of the miserable instrument, incapable of giving the
slightest echo of that torrential plenitude, but in the eloquence, in
the enthusiasm of the exegesis, that Hippolyte seized all the grandeur
of that tragic Revelation. And, as the lover's imagery had one day
pictured to her the Guelph's deserted city, the city of convents and
monasteries, so to-day appeared to her imagination the old, gray city
town of Bayreuth, solitary among the Bavarian mountains, in a mystic
landscape over which hovered the same soul that Albrecht Duerer
imprisoned beneath the network of the lines at the bottom of his
engravings and canvases.
George had not forgotten any episode of his first religious pilgrimage
to the Ideal Theatre; he could relive every instant of his extraordinary
emotion when he had discovered on the gentle hill, at the extremity of
the great shady avenue, the edifice consecrated to the supreme feast of
art; he could reconstitute the solemnity of the vast amphitheatre girt
with columns and arcades, the mystery of the Mystic Gulf. In the
religious shadow and silence of the place, in the shadow and ecstatic
silence of every soul, a sigh went up from the invisible orchestra, a
moan was uttered, a murmuring voice made the first mournful call of
solitary desire, the first and confused anguish in presentiment of the
future torture. And that sigh and that moan and that voice mounted from
the vague suffering to the acuteness of an impetuous cry, telling of the
pride of a dream, the anxiety of a superhuman aspiration, the terrible
and implacable desire of possession. With a devouring fury, like a
flame bursting from a bottomless abyss, the desire dilated, agitated,
enflamed, always higher, always higher, fed by the purest essence of a
double life. The intoxication of the melodious flame embraced
everything; everything sovereign in the world vibrated passionately in
the immense ravishment, exhaled its joy and most hidden sorrow, while it
was sublimated and consumed. But, suddenly, the efforts of a
resistance, the cholers of a battle, shuddered and rumbled in the flight
of that stormy ascension; and that great spout of life, suddenly broken
against an invisible obstacle, fell back again, died out, spouted forth
no longer. In the religious shadow and silence of the place, in the
shadow and thrilling silence of every soul, a sigh arose from the Mystic
Gulf, a moan died away, a broken voice told of the sadness of eternal
solitude, the aspiration toward the eternal night, toward the divine,
the primal oblivion.
And here another voice, a human voice, modulated by human lips, young
and strong, mingled with melancholy, irony, and menace, sang a song of
the sea, from the head of a mast, on the ship that carried to King Mark
the blond Irish spouse. It sang: "Toward the Occident wanders the gaze;
toward the Orient sails the ship. The breeze blows fresh toward the
natal land. O daughter of Ireland, where dost thou linger? Is it thy
sighs that swell my sail? Blow, blow, O wind! Woe, ah! woe, daughter of
Ireland, my wild love!" It was the admonition of the lookout, the
prophetic warning, joyous and menacing, full of caress and of raillery,
indefinable. And the orchestra became silent. "Blow, blow, O wind!
Woe, ah! woe, daughter of Ireland, my wild love!" The voice sang over
the tranquil sea, alone in the silence, while under the tent, Ysolde,
motionless, on her couch, seemed plunged in the obscure dream of her
destiny.
Thus opened the drama. The tragic breath, that had already been given
by the prelude, passed and repassed in the orchestra. Suddenly the
power of destruction was manifested in the enchantress against the man
of her choice, whom she had devoted to death. Her anger was unchained
with the energy of the blind elements; she invoked all the terrible
forces of earth and heaven to destroy the man whom she could not
possess. "Awake at my call, indomitable power; come forth from the
heart where thou art hidden! O, uncertain winds, hear my will! Awake
the lethargy of this dreamy sea, resuscitate from the depths implacable
covetousness, show it the prey which I offer! Crush the vessel, engulf
the wreckage! Everything that palpitates and breathes, O winds, I give
to thee in recompense." To the admonition of the lookout responded the
sentiment of Brangane: "O, woe! what ruin I foresee, Ysolde!" And the
gentle and devoted woman tried to appease that mad fury. "Oh! tell me
thy sorrow, Ysolde! Tell me thy secret!" And Ysolde replied: "My heart
is choking. Open, open wide the curtain!"
Tristan appeared, upright, motionless, his arms crossed, his gaze fixed
on the distances of the sea. From the masthead the lookout resumed his
song, on the wave mounting from the orchestra, "Woe, ah! woe--" And,
while Ysolde's eyes, lit up by a sombre flame, contemplated the hero,
the fatal motif arose from the Mystic Gulf: the great and terrible
symbol of love and death, in which was enclosed every essence of the
tragic fiction. And, with her own mouth, Ysolde predicted the end:
"Chosen of mine, lost by me."
Passion aroused in her a homicidal mania, awakened in the roots of her
being a hostile instinct to existence, a need of dissolution, of
annihilation. She raged to find in herself and all about her a crushing
power that would strike and destroy without leaving a trace. Her hate
became fiercer at the sight of the calm and motionless hero, who felt
the menace concentrate upon his head and who knew the uselessness of any
resistance. Her mouth was filled with bitter sarcasm. "What thinkest
thou of that slave?" she demanded of Brangane, with an uneasy smile. Of
a hero she made a slave; she declared herself the conqueror. "Tell him
that I, Ysolde, command my vassal to fear his sovereign." Such was the
defiance she cast at him for a supreme struggle; such was the gauntlet
that force threw down to force. A sombre solemnity accompanied the
hero's march toward the threshold of the tent when the irrevocable hour
had sounded, when the philter had already filled the cup, when destiny
had already closed its circle around the two lives. Ysolde, leaning on
her couch, pale as if the great fever had consumed all the blood in her
veins, waited, silently. Tristan appeared on the threshold: both erect
to their full height. But the orchestra told of the inexpressible
anxiety of their souls.
From this moment recommenced the tempestuous ascension. It seemed that
the Mystic Gulf had once more become inflamed like a furnace and shot
higher, even higher, its sonorous flames. "Only comfort for an eternal
mourning, salutary draught of oblivion, I drink thee without fear!" And
Tristan placed the cup to his lips. "Half for me! I drink it for
thee!" cried Ysolde, snatching the cup from his hands. The golden cup
fell, empty. Had they both drunk death? Must they die? Instant of
superhuman agony. The philter of death was but a poison of love that
filled them with an immortal fire. At first, astonished, motionless,
they looked at each other, sought in one another's eyes the symptom of
the death to which they believed they had devoted themselves. But a new
life, incomparably more intense than that they had lived, agitated their
very fibre, beat at their temples and at their wrists, swelled their
hearts with an immense wave. "Tristan!" "Isolde!" They called one
another; they were alone; nothing breathed about them; appearances were
effaced; the past was wiped out; the future was a dark night that even
their recent intoxication could not pierce. They lived; they called one
another in hot, passionate tones; each was drawn to the other by a
fatality that henceforth no power could arrest. "Tristan!" "Ysolde!"
And the melody of the passion spread out, enlarged, exalted itself,
throbbed and sobbed, cried and chanted above the profound tempest of
harmonies that became more and more agitated. Mournful and joyous, it
took an irresistible flight toward the heights of unknown ecstasies,
toward the heights of the supreme voluptuousness. "Delivered from the
world, I possess thee at last, O! thou, who alone fill my soul, supreme
voluptuousness of love!"
"Hail! Hail to Mark! Hail!" cried the crew amid the blasts of the
trumpets, saluting the king, who drew away from the shore to go to meet
his blond spouse. "Hail to Cornwall!"
It was the tumult of common life, the clamor of profane joy, the
dazzling splendor of the day. The Elect, the Lost, with a look in which
floated the sombre shadow of a dream, demanded: "Who comes hither?"
"The King." "What king?" Ysolde, pale and convulsed beneath the royal
mantle, asked: "Where am I? Do I still live? Must I still live?"
Gentle and terrible, the motif of the philter ascended, enveloped them,
enclosed them in its ardent spiral. The trumpets sounded. "Hail to
Mark! Hail to Cornwall! Glory to the King!"
But, in the second prelude, all the sobs of too strong a joy, all the
pantings of exasperated desire, all the starts of furious expectation,
alternated, mingled, were confounded. The impatience of the feminine
soul communicated its thrills to the immensity of the night, to all the
things that, in the pure summer night, breathed and watched. The
ravished soul threw its appeals to everything, that they might remain
vigilant beneath the stars, that they might be present at the festival
of its love, at the nuptial banquet of its joy. Insubmergible over the
restless ocean of harmony, the fatal melody floated, growing light,
clouding. The wave from the Mystic Gulf, like the respiration of a
superhuman bosom, swelled, rose, fell back to rise again, to fall again
and slowly die away.
"Dost thou hear? It seems to me that the sound has died away in the
distance." Ysolde heard nothing more but the sounds imagined by her
desire. The horns of the nocturnal chase resounded in the forest,
distinct, coming nearer. "It is the deceptive whispering of the leaves
that the wind rustles in its sport. That gentle sound is not that of
horns; it is the murmur of the mountain stream that gushes forth and
falls in the silent night." She heard nothing but the enchanting sounds
born in her soul by the desire left there by the old yet ever new charm.
In the orchestra, as in her abused senses, the resonances of the chase
were magically transformed, dissolving into the infinite murmurs of the
forest, into the mysterious eloquence of the summer night. All those
smothered voices, all the subtle seductions, enveloped the panting woman
and suggested to her the approaching ravishment, while Brangane warned
and begged in vain, in the terror of his presentiment: "Oh! let the
protecting torch blaze! Let its light show thee the peril!" Nothing
had the power of enlightening the blindness of desire. "Were this the
torch of my life, I would extinguish it without fear. And I extinguish
it without fear." With a gesture of supreme disdain, intrepid and
superb, Ysolde threw the torch to the ground; she offered her life and
that of the Elect to the fatal night; she entered with him into the
shadow forever.
Then the most intoxicating poem of human passion was triumphantly
unfolded, like a spiral, to the summits of delirium and ecstasy. It was
the first frantic embrace, the mingling of voluptuousness and of
anguish, in which the souls, eager to melt into one another, encountered
the impenetrable obstacle of the body; it was the first rancor against
the time when love did not exist, against the empty and useless past.
It was the hate against hostile light, against the perfidious day, that
sharpened all their sufferings, that revived all the fallacious
appearances, that favored pride and oppressed tenderness. It was the
hymn to the friendly night, to the beneficent shade, to the divine
mystery of which the marvels and inner visions were unveiled, in which
were heard the distant voices of the spheres, in which the ideal
corollas flourished on inflexible stems. "Since the sun is hidden in
our bosom, the stars of happiness shed their laughing light."
And, in the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy, wept every
misery, that the human voice had ever expressed. The melodies emerged
from the symphonic depths, developing, interrupting, superposing,
mingling, melting into one another, dissolving, disappearing to again
appear. A more and more restless and poignant anxiety passed over all
the instruments and expressed a continual and ever-vain effort to attain
the inaccessible. In the impetuosity of the chromatic progressions
there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that eluded every grasp,
although it shone ever so near. In the changings of the tone, rhythm,
and measure, in the succession of syncopes, there was a truceless
search, there was a limitless covetousness, there was the long torture
of desire ever deceived and ever extinguished. A motif, a symbol of
eternal desire, eternally exasperated by a deceptive possession,
returned every instant with a cruel persistence; it enlarged, it
dominated, now illuminating the crests of the harmonic waves, now
obscuring them with funereal darkness.
The frightful power of the philter operated on the soul and on the flesh
of the two lovers already consecrated to death. Nothing could
extinguish or soften that fatal ardor; nothing, except death. They had
vainly tried every caress; they had vainly summoned all their strength
to unite in a supreme embrace, to finally possess one another, to become
one and the same being. Their sighs of voluptuousness were transformed
into agonizing sobs. An infrangible obstacle was interposed between
them, separated them, rendered them strangers and solitary. The
obstacle was their corporeal substance, their living personality. And a
secret hate was born in both. A longing to destroy themselves, to
annihilate themselves; a desire to cause death and a desire to die.
Even in the caress they recognized the impossibility of crossing the
material limits of their human senses. Lips met lips and stopped. "Why
not succumb to death," said Tristan, "rather than separation, and what
prevents Tristan from loving Ysolde forever, living hereafter eternally
for her alone?" And already they entered into the infinite darkness.
The outside world disappeared. "So," said Tristan, "so should we die,
unwilling to live but for love, inseparable, forever united, without
end, without awakening, without fear, without name in the bosom of
love." The words were distinctly heard in the _pianissimo_ of the
orchestra. A new ecstasy ravished the two lovers and carried them to
the threshold of the marvellous nocturnal empire. Already they tasted
in advance the beatitude of dissolution, felt themselves delivered from
the weight of the body, felt their substance sublimated and float,
diffused in an endless joy. "Without end, without awakening, without
fear, without name...."
"Take care! Take care! Behold the night giving way to the day," warned
from above the invisible Brangane. "Take care!" And the shudder of the
matinal frost traversed the park, awoke the flowers. The cold light of
the dawn ascended slowly and covered up the stars that palpitated more
strongly. "Take care!" Vain warning of the faithful watcher. They
were not listening; they would not, could not, awaken themselves. Under
the menace of the day, they plunged still further on into that darkness
from which could never come the slightest glint of twilight. "Let the
night eternally envelop us." And a whirlwind of harmonies enveloped
them, clasped them close in its vehement spirals, transformed them to
the distant shore invoked by their desire, there where no anguish
oppressed the flights of the loving soul, beyond all languor, beyond all
pain, beyond all solitude, in the infinite serenity of their supreme
dream.
"Save thyself, Tristan!" It was the cry of Kurvenal after the cry of
Brangane. It was the unexpected and brutal assault that interrupted the
ecstatic embrace. And, while the theme of love persisted in the
orchestra, the motif of the hunt burst out with a metallic clash. The
king and his courtiers appeared. Tristan hid Ysolde, stretched on the
bed of flowers, beneath his ample mantle; he hid her from both gaze and
light, affirming by this act his domination, signifying his undoubted
right. "The sad day--for the last time!" For the last time, in the
calm and resolute attitude of a hero, he accepted the battle with the
unknown forces, sure henceforth that nothing could modify or suspend the
course of his destiny. While the sovereign sorrow of King Mark was
exhaled in a slow and deep melopee, he remained silent, immovable in his
secret thought. And finally he responded to the king's questions:
"Never can I reveal that mystery. Never can you know what thou dost
ask." The philter motif condensed in this response the obscurity of the
mystery, the gravity of the irreparable event. "Dost thou wish to
follow Tristan, O, Ysolde?" he demanded of the queen, simply, in the
presence of all. "In the land where I am going the sun does not shine.
It is the land of shadows; it is the land of night from which my mother
sent me when, conceived by her in death, in death I came to life." And
Ysolde: "There where the country of Tristan is, there would Ysolde go.
She wants to follow him, gentle and faithful, in the path that he will
point out."
And the dying hero preceded her to that land, struck by the traitor
Melot.
Meanwhile, the third prelude evoked the vision of the distant shore, the
arid and desolate rocks, where, in the secret caves, the sea seemed to
weep ceaselessly in inconsolable mourning. A mist of legend and of
mysterious poesy enveloped the rigid forms of the rock, perceived as in
an uncertain dawn or in an almost extinguished twilight. And the sound
of the pastoral pipe awoke the confused images of the past life, of the
things lost in the night of time.
"What says the ancient lament?" sighed Tristan. "Where am I?"
On the fragile reed the shepherd modulated the imperishable melody
transmitted by our ancestors through the ages; and, in his profound
unconsciousness, he was without inquietude.
And Tristan, to whose soul these humble notes had revealed all: "I did
not linger in the place of my awakening. But where have I dwelt? I
could not say. There I saw neither the sun, nor the land, nor the
inhabitants; but what I saw then, I could not say.... It was there
where I always was, there where I will go forever; in the vast empire of
the universal night. Yonder, a single and unique science is given us:
the divine, the eternal, the original oblivion!" The delirium of fever
agitated him; the ardor of the philter corroded his inmost fibres. "Oh!
what I suffer thou canst not suffer! The terrible desire which devours
me, that implacable fire which consumes me! Ah! if I could tell thee!
If thou couldst understand me!"
And the unconscious shepherd breathed, breathed into his reed. It was
the same air; the notes were always the same; they spoke of the life
that was no more, they spoke of distant and annihilated things.
"Old and grave melody," said Tristan. "Your lamenting sounds reached me
even on the evening wind, as when, in distant times, the death of the
father was announced to the son. In the sinister dawn thou didst seek
me, more and more uneasy, when the son learned of the departure of the
mother. When my father engendered me and died, when my mother brought
me to light and died, the old melody came to their ears also,
languishing and sad. She interrogated me one day, and now she is
speaking to me again. To what destiny was I born? To what destiny? The
old melody is repeating it to me: To desire and to die! to die of
desire! Oh! no, no. Such is not your true sense. To desire, to
desire, to desire, even unto death; but not to die of desire!" Stronger
and stronger, more and more tenacious, the philter corroded him to the
marrow. All his being writhed in the unbearable spasm. At moments, the
orchestra had the crepitations of a funereal pyre. The violence of the
pain traversed him at times with tempestuous impetuosity, reviving the
flames. Sudden starts shook him; atrocious cries escaped from it;
choking sobs were extinguished in it. "The philter! the philter! the
terrible philter! with what fury I feel it mount from my heart to my
brain! Henceforth no remedy, no sweet death, can deliver me from the
torture of desire. In no place, in no spot, alas! shall I find repose.
The night repulses me toward the day, and the eye of the sun feeds on my
perpetual suffering. Ah! how the ardent sun burns me and consumes me!
And not even to have, never to have, the refreshment of a shade for that
devouring ardor! What balm would procure a relief to my horrible
torture?" He bore in his veins and marrow the desire of all men, of
every species, amassed generation after generation, aggravated by the
faults of all the fathers and of all the sons, the intoxications of all,
the anguishes of all. In his blood blossomed the germs of the secular
concupiscence, remingled the most diverse impurities, refermented the
venoms, the most subtle and violent, that, since immemorial ages, the
purplish sinuous mouths of women had poured out on eager and subjugated
males. He was the heir of the eternal evil. "That terrible philter
which condemns me to torture, it is I, I myself, who have compounded it.
With the agitations of my father, with the convulsions of my mother,
with all the tears of love shed in other times, with laughter and with
tears, with pleasures and with wounds, I myself have compounded the
poison of that philter. And I have drunk it by deep, enjoyable
draughts. A curse on thee, terrible philter! A curse on he who
compounded thee!" And he fell back on his couch, exhausted, inanimate,
to recover his equanimity, to feel once more the ardor of his wound, to
see once more with his hallucinated eyes the sovereign image crossing
the fields of the sea. "She is coming, she is coming towards land,
softly rocked on the great waves of intoxicating flowers. Her smile
throws on me a divine consolation; she brings me the supreme
refreshment." Thus he invoked, thus _he saw_, with his eyes closed
henceforth to the common light, the sorceress, the mistress of balms,
the healer of all wounds. "She comes, she comes! Dost thou not see
her, Kurvenal; dost thou not see her?" And the agitated waves of the
Mystic Gulf gathered confusedly from the depths all the melodies already
heard, mingling them, raising them up, submerging them in an abyss,
repulsing them again to the surface, crushing them: those that could
have expressed the anguish of the decisive conflict on the bridge of the
ship, those in which one heard the boiling of the draught poured into
the golden cup and the buzzing in the arteries invaded by the liquid
fire, those in which had been heard the mysterious breath of the summer
night inviting voluptuousness without end, all the melodies, with all
the images and all the recollections. And on this immense shipwreck the
fatal melody passed, proud, sovereign, implacable, repeating at
intervals the atrocious condemnation: "To desire, to desire, to desire
even unto death: but not to die of desire!"
"The vessel drops its anchor! Ysolde! behold Ysolde! She springs to the
shore!" cried Kurvenal from the top of the tower. And, in the delirium
of joy, Tristan tore off the bandages of his wound, excited his own
blood to flow, to inundate the earth, to empurple the world. At the
approach of Ysolde and Death, he believed he _heard_ the light. "Do I
not hear the light? Do not my ears hear the light?" A great inner sun
dazzled him; every atom of his substance darted rays of sunlight that,
in luminous waves, expanded through the universe. The light was music;
the music was light.
And then the Mystic Gulf truly became irradiated like a sky. The
sonorities of the orchestra seemed to imitate those distant planetary
harmonies that, long ago, the souls of vigilant contemplators believed
they surprised in the nocturnal silence. Gradually, the long tremblings
of restlessness, the long bursts of anguish, the pantings of vain
pursuits, and the efforts of the ever-deceived desire, and all the
agitations of terrestrial misery, were appeased, became dissipated.
Tristan had finally crossed the limit of the "marvellous empire"; he had
finally entered into eternal night. And Ysolde, bent over the inert
shell, felt at last the heavy weight that still crushed her slowly
dissolve. The fatal melody, become clearer and more solemn, consecrated
the great funereal hymn. Then the notes, like ethereal chords, began to
weave about the lover veils of diaphanous purity. Thus commenced a sort
of joyous assumption, by degrees of splendor, on the wing of a hymn.
"What a sweet smile he is smiling! Dost thou not see? Dost thou not
hear? Am I alone to hear that new melody, infinitely sweet and
consoling, that streams from the depths of his being, and ravishes me,
and penetrates me, and envelops me?" The Irish sorceress, the
formidable mistress of philters, the hereditary arbitrator of obscure
terrestrial powers, she who, from the tops of the ship, had invoked the
whirlwinds and tempests, she whose love had chosen the strongest and
most noble of heroes to intoxicate and destroy him, she who had closed
the path of glory and victory to a "conqueror of the world," the
poisoner, the homicide, became transfigured by the power of death into a
being of light and of joy, exempt from all impure covetousness, free
from all base attachment, throbbing and respiring in the breast of the
diffused soul of the universe. "Are not these clearer sounds that murmur
in my ear the soft waves of the air? Must I respire, drink, plunge
myself, slowly drift in the vapors and perfumes?" All in her dissolved,
melted, dilated, returned to the original fluidity, to the immense
elementary ocean in which the forms were born, in which the forms
disappeared to become renewed and to be reborn. In the Mystic Gulf the
transformations and transfigurations were being accomplished, note by
note, harmony by harmony, without interruption. It seemed as if all
things there were decomposed, exhaling their hidden essences, changing
into immaterial symbols. Colors never before seen on petals of the most
delicate terrestrial flowers, perfumes of an almost imperceptible
subtlety, floated there. Visions of secret paradises were revealed in a
flash of light; the germs of worlds to be born blossomed there. And the
panicky intoxication ascended, ascended; the chorus of the Great All
covered the unique human voice. Transfigured, Ysolde entered into the
marvellous empire triumphantly. "To lose oneself, to throw oneself into
the abyss, to swoon without consciousness in the infinite throbbing of
the universal soul: supreme voluptuousness."
*CHAPTER II.*
For two entire days the two hermits lived thus amid great fiction,
respired that burning atmosphere, saturated themselves with that mortal
forgetfulness. They believed they had transfigured themselves, that
they had attained superior heights of existence. In the vertiginous
heights of their love-dream they believed they equalled the personages
in the drama. Did it not seem to them that they, too, had drunk a
philter? Were not they also tormented by a limitless desire? Were they
not also linked together by an indissoluble bond, and did they not often
feel in voluptuousness the horrors of the death-agony; did they not hear
the rumbling of death? George, like Tristan when he heard the ancient
melody modulated by the shepherd, found in that music the direct
revelation of an anguish in which he believed he had at last surprised
the true essence of his soul and the tragic secret of his destiny. No
man could better penetrate the symbolic and mythical sense of the
philter, and no man better than himself could better measure the depth
of the inner drama, solely inner, in which the pensive hero had consumed
his strength. Nor could any one better understand the despairing cry of
the victim: "That terrible philter which has condemned me to torture,
_it is I, I myself, who compounded it_."
He then undertook the funereal seduction of his mistress. He wished to
slowly persuade her to die; he wished to entice her to go with him
toward a mysterious and comfortable end, during that beautiful Adriatic
summer, full of transparencies and perfumes. The great phrase of
love--that spread out in such a wide circle of light around the
transfiguration of Ysolde--had also enclosed Hippolyte in its charm.
She repeated it ceaselessly in a low tone, sometimes even in a loud
voice, with signs of exuberant joy.
"Wouldn't you like to die such a death as Ysolde's?" asked George, with
a smile.
"I would," she answered. "But, on earth, people don't die like that."
"And if I died?" he went on, always smiling. "Suppose you saw me dead
_in fact, not in fancy_?"
"I believe I should die, too, but of despair."
"And suppose I proposed to you to die with me, at the same time, in the
same manner?"
For a few seconds she remained thoughtful, her eyes cast down. Then,
raising toward the tempter a look full of all the sweetness of life:
"Why die," she said, "if I love you, if you love me, if nothing
henceforth prevents us from living for ourselves alone?"
"Is life sweet to you?" he murmured with veiled bitterness.
"Yes," she answered, with a sort of vehemence. "Life is sweet to me
because I love you."
"And if I should die?" he went on, without a smile, because once more he
felt arise in him the instinctive hostility against this beautiful,
sensual creature who breathed in the very air as if it were happiness.
"You won't die," she affirmed, with the same assurance. "You are young;
why should you die?"
In her voice, in her attitude, in all her person there was an unusual
diffusion of happiness. Her appearance was such as living creatures
have only at the time their lives flow harmoniously in a temporary
equilibrium of all the energies in accord with favorable external
conditions. As at other times, she seemed to blossom in the strong sea
air, in the coolness of the summer evening; and she recalled one of
those magnificent twilight flowers that open the crown of their petals
at sunset.
After a long pause, during which one heard the murmur of the sea on the
shore like the rustling of dry leaves, George asked:
"Do you believe in Destiny?"
"Yes, I do."
Ill disposed to the sad gravity toward which George's words seemed to
tend, she had answered in a light, jesting tone. Hurt, he retorted
quickly and bitterly:
"Do you know what day this is?"
Perplexed, uneasy, she asked:
"What day is it?"
He hesitated. Up to then he had avoided recalling to the forgetful
woman the anniversary of Demetrius's death; a repugnance that grew every
minute prevented him from uttering that holy name, from evoking outside
of the sanctuary that noble image. He felt that he would have profaned
his religious sorrow in admitting Hippolyte as a participant. And what
further intensified this feeling was that he was then passing through
one of those frequent periods of cruel lucidity in which he saw in
Hippolyte only the woman of pleasure, the "flower of concupiscence," the
Enemy. He contained himself; and, with a sudden and false laugh:
"Look!" he cried. "There is a festival at Ortona."
He pointed in the pale-green distance to the maritime city that was
being crowned with fire.
"How strange you are to-day!" she said.
Then, looking steadily at him with that singular expression which she
was in the habit of assuming when she wished to appease and soften him,
she added:
"Come here; come and sit by my side."
He was standing in the shadow, on the threshold of one of the doors that
opened on the loggia. She was seated outside, on the parapet, clothed
in a light, white robe, in a languorous pose, her bust outlined against
the background of the sea, where still lingered the glints of twilight,
and the profile of her brown head was outlined in a zone of limpid
amber. He seemed as if reborn, as if he had stepped out from a close
and suffocating place, from an atmosphere heavy with poisonous
exhalations. In George's eyes she seemed as if she were evaporating
like a vial of perfumes, were losing the ideal life accumulated in her
by the power of Music, were gradually emptying herself of importunate
dreams, were returning to primitive animalism.
George thought: "As always, she has done nothing but receive and
obediently retain the attitudes I have given her. The inner life has
always been and will always be factitious in her. Directly my
suggestion is interrupted, she returns to her own nature, she becomes a
woman again, an instrument of low lasciviousness. Nothing will ever
change her substance, nothing will purify her. She has plebeian blood,
and, in her blood, God knows what ignoble heredities! But I, too, shall
never be able to free myself from the desire with which she fires me; I
can never extirpate it from my flesh. Henceforth, I can neither live
with her nor without her. I know I must die; but shall I leave her for
a successor?" His hate against the unconscious creature had never been
aroused with so much violence. He dissected her pitilessly, with
acrimony that astonished even himself. It was as if he were avenging
some infidelity, some disloyalty, that had surpassed all the limits of
perfidy. He felt the envious rancor of the shipwrecked sailor who, at
the moment of sinking, sees near him his comrade about to save himself,
to cling to life again. For him that anniversary brought a new
confirmation of the decree which he already knew was irrevocable. For
him that day was the Epiphany of Death. He felt that he was no longer
master of himself; he felt the absolute domination of the fixed idea
that, from instant to instant, might suggest the supreme act to him,
and, at the same time, communicate the effective impulsion to his will.
And while criminal images confusedly passed through his brain, "Must I
die alone?" he repeated to himself. "Must I die alone?"
He shuddered when Hippolyte touched his face and passed her arm around
his neck.
"Did I frighten you?" she asked.
On seeing him disappear in the still deepening shadow of the door, a
singular restlessness had seized her, and she had risen to embrace him.
"Of what are you thinking? What's the matter? Why are you like that
to-day?"
She spoke in an insinuating tone, and, still with her arms about him,
she caressed his head. In the obscurity he saw the mysterious pallor of
that face, the light of those eyes. An irresistible trembling seized
him.
"You are trembling! What ails you? What's the matter?"
She disengaged herself, found a candle on the table, and lit it. She
went up to him, anxious; took both his hands.
"Are you ill?"
"Yes," he stammered. "I don't feel well. This is one of my bad days."
This was not the first time she heard him complain of vague physical
suffering, of heavy and wandering pains, of painful twitchings and
tinglings, of vertigos and nightmares. She believed these sufferings
imaginary; she saw in them the effects of habitual melancholy, the
excesses of thought, and she knew no better remedy for them than kisses,
laughter, and joyousness.
"Where are you suffering?"
"I could not say."
"Oh, I know what it is. The music excites you too much. We must have
no more for a week."
"No, we will have no more."
"No more."
She went to the piano, shut the cover over the keys, locked it, and hid
the little key.
"To-morrow we will resume our long walks; we will spend all morning on
the beach. Shall we? And now come into the loggia."
She drew him toward her with a tender gesture.
"See how beautiful the evening is! Smell how the rocks embalm the air!"
She breathed in the briny odor, trembling and clasping him close.
"We have everything to make us happy, and you--how you will regret these
days when they are gone! Time flies. It will be soon three months that
we are here."
"Do you already think of leaving me?" he asked, uneasy, suspicious.
She wanted to reassure him.
"No, no," she replied; "not yet. But the prolongation of my absence
becomes difficult on account of my mother. I received only to-day a
letter recalling me. You know she needs me. When I am not at home all
goes wrong."
"Then you must soon return to Rome?"
"No. I shall have to find another pretext. You know that my mother
believes I am here in company with an old girl friend of mine. My
sister has helped me, and still helps me, in rendering this fiction
probable; and, besides, my mother knows that I need sea-baths, and that,
last year, I was ill from not having taken them. Do you remember? I
spent the summer at Caronno, at my sister's. What a horrible summer!"
"Well, what to do?"
"I can certainly remain with you this whole month of August, perhaps
also the first week of September."
"And after that?"
"After that you will permit me to return to Rome, and you will come and
rejoin me there. There we will arrange concerning the future. I have
already an idea in my head."
"What?"
"I will tell you. But just now let us dine. Aren't you hungry?"
The dinner was ready. As usual, in the loggia, the table was spread in
the open air. They lit the large lamp.
"Look!" she cried, when the domestic had brought to the table the
steaming soup tureen. "That is Candia's work."
She had asked Candia to make a rustic soup for him, after the manner of
the country--a savory mixture, rich in ginger, colored, and odorous.
She had already tasted it several times, attracted by its odor in the
houses of the old people, and she had become greedy for it.
"It is delicious. You will enjoy it."
And she filled a bowl full with a gesture of childish greediness, and
she swallowed the first spoonful hastily.
"I have never tasted anything more delicious!"
She called Candia to praise her work.
"Candia! Candia!"
The woman showed herself at the foot of the stairway, laughing:
"Does the soup please you, signora?"
"It is perfect."
"May it change into good blood for you!"
And the naive laughter of the enceinte woman arose in the still air.
George took part in this gayety, and showed it. The sudden change in
his humor was evident. He poured out some wine, and drank it at a gulp.
He made an effort to conquer his repugnance to eat, that repugnance
which, latterly, had become so serious that at times he could not bear
the sight of underdone meat.
"You feel better, don't you?" asked Hippolyte, leaning toward him, and
moving her chair a little to get a little closer to him.
"Yes; I feel bettor now."
He drank again.
"Look!" she cried. "Look at Ortona in holiday attire!"
Both looked towards the distant city, crowned with fire, on the hill
that stretched along by the shadowy sea. Groups of fire balloons, like
constellations of flame, were rising slowly in the still air; they
seemed to multiply ceaselessly; they peopled all that part of the sky.
"My sister is at Ortona now. She's staying with the Vallereggia,
relatives of ours."
"Has she written to you?"
"Yes."
"How happy I should be to see her! She resembles you, doesn't she?
Christine is your favorite."
For a few seconds she remained pensive. Then she went on:
"How happy I should be to see your mother! I have so often thought of
her!"
And, after another pause, in a tender voice:
"How she must adore you!"
An unexpected emotion swelled George's heart, and before him reappeared
the interior vision of the house he had abandoned, forgotten, and, for a
moment, all the past sorrows came back to his mind, together with all
the painful pictures: his mother's emaciated face, her eyelids swollen
and reddened by tears; the sweet and heart-breaking remembrance of
Christine; the sickly child whose large head was always bent on a breast
barren of all but sighs; the cadaveric mask of the poor idiotic gormand.
And the tired eyes of his mother asked him again, as when they
separated: "_For whom_ are you abandoning me?"
Again his soul stretched out toward the distant house, suddenly
inclining before it like a tree before a squall. And the secret
resolution--made in the obscurity of the chamber, between Hippolyte's
arms--vacillated beneath the shock of an obscure warning when he saw
again, in memory, the closed door behind which was Demetrius's bed, when
he saw again the mortuary chapel at the corner of the cemetery, in the
bluish and solemn shadow of the protecting mountain.
But Hippolyte was speaking, becoming loquacious. As at other times, she
imprudently abandoned herself to her domestic reminiscences. And he, as
at other times, began to listen, observing with uneasiness certain
vulgar lines that the mouth of this woman fell into, during the
abundance and heat of the discourse, observing, as he had done so often
before, the particular gesture that was habitual to her when she was
excited, that ungraceful gesture that did not seem to belong to her.
She was saying:
"You saw my mother one day in the street. Do you remember? What a
difference between my mother and my father! My father was always good
and affectionate to us, incapable of beating us or severely scolding us.
My mother is violent, impetuous, almost cruel. Ah, if I told you of the
martyrdom of my sister, poor Adriana! She always rebelled; and her
rebellion exasperated my mother, who used to beat her until the blood
came. I knew enough to disarm her by recognizing my fault and asking
her pardon. For all that, with all her severity, she had an immense
love for us. Our apartment had a window that led out on a cistern, and
we, in play, often used to stand at this window and draw up the water
with a little pail. One day my mother went out, and by chance we were
left alone. A few minutes after, we were surprised to see her come in
again, all in tears, agitated, upset. She took me in her arms and
covered me with kisses, sobbing as if insane, in the street she had had
a presentiment that I had fallen from that window."
George saw again, in memory, the face of that hysterical old woman in
which was exaggerated all the defects of her daughter's face: the
development of the lower jaw, the length of the chin, the width of the
nostrils. He saw again that forehead, like that of a Fury, over which
bristled the gray hair, thick and dry, and those dark eyes, deep-set
beneath the superciliary ridge, that revealed the fanatic ardor of a
bigot and the obstinate avarice of an insignificant bourgeoise.
"You see that scar beneath my chin?" went on Hippolyte. "My mother did
that. My sister and I went to school, and we had very nice dresses that
we had to take off on our return. One evening, on going home, I found
on the table a foot-warmer, that I took to rewarm my frozen hands. My
mother said to me: 'Go and undress!' I replied: 'I'm going,' and I
continued to warm myself. She repeated: 'Go and undress!' I repeated:
'I'm going.' She had in her hand a large brush, and was brushing a
dress. I lingered in the middle of the room with the foot-warmer. My
mother repeated for the third time: 'Go and undress!' And I repeated:
'I'm going.' Furious, she threw the brush at me. It struck and broke
the foot-warmer. A splinter of the handle struck me here, beneath the
chin, and cut a vein. The blood flowed. My aunt ran to me quickly, but
my mother neither moved nor looked at me. The blood flowed. By good
fortune they soon found a surgeon who ligated the vein. My mother
remained obstinately silent. When my father came home and saw me
bandaged he asked what was the matter. My mother, without a word,
looked at me fixedly. I replied: 'I fell down the staircase.' My
mother said nothing. As a consequence, I have suffered considerably from
that loss of blood. But how Adriana was beaten!--particularly on
account of Giulio, my brother-in-law. I shall never forget a terrible
scene."
She stopped. Perhaps she had just noticed on George's face some
equivocal sign.
"I bore you, don't I, with all this gossip?"
"No, no. Continue, please. Don't you see I am listening?"
"We lived then in Ripetta, in the house of a family of the name of
Angelini, with whom we became very friendly. Luigi Sergi, the brother of
my brother-in-law, Giulio, occupied the lower floor with his wife,
Eugenia. Luigi was a well-educated man, studious, modest. Eugenia was
a woman of the worst kind. Although her husband made a good deal of
money, she was always running him into debt, and no one knew in what
manner she spent all the money. Gossip had it that it went to pay her
lovers. She was very homely, so the story was generally believed. My
sister had become attached to Eugenia, I do not know how, and she was
forever going downstairs, on the pretext of taking lessons in French
from Luigi. That displeased my mother, rendered suspicious by
Angelina's sisters, old maids, who pretended to have friendship for the
Sergis, but who, in reality, deserted them like _buzzurri_, and were
happy to be able to slander them. 'Allowing Adriana to visit the house
of an abandoned woman!' Hard words increased. But Eugenia always
favored Giulio's and Adriana's amours. Giulio often came to Rome from
Milan on business. And, one day, just as he was coming, my sister made
great haste to go downstairs. My mother forbade her to move. My sister
insisted. In the dispute my mother raised her hand. They seized each
other by the hair. My sister went so far as to bite her arms, and
escaped by the staircase. But as she knocked at the Sergi door my
mother fell on her, and in the open landing place there was such a scene
of violence as I shall never forget. Adriana was brought back home
almost dead. She fell ill and had convulsions. My mother, repentant,
surrounded her with care, became more gentle than she ever was before.
A few days later, even before she was entirely cured, Adriana eloped
with Giulio. But that, I believe, I have already told you."
And after all this innocent gossip, in which she forgot herself, without
suspecting the effect produced on her lover by her commonplace
recollections, she again took to her interrupted supper.
There was an interval of silence; then she added, smiling:
"You see what a terrible woman my mother is? You don't know, and you
can never know, how much she has tortured me, when the struggle broke
out against him. My God! What torture!"
She remained thoughtful for a few moments.
George fixed upon the imprudent woman a look charged with hate and
jealousy, suffering in that moment all his sufferings of the past two
years. With the fragments with which she had had the imprudence to
furnish him, he reconstructed Hippolyte's life in her own circle, not
without attributing to it the meanest vulgarities, not without lowering
it to the most dishonorable contacts. If the marriage of the sister
took place under the auspices of a nymphomaniac, under what conditions,
as a consequence of what circumstances, was that of Hippolyte concluded
then? In what world had her early years been passed? By what intrigues
had she fallen into the hands of the odious man whose name she bore?
And he represented to himself the hidden and sordid life in certain
little middle-class homes of old Rome--homes that exhaled at the same
time a stench of cooking and the musty smell of a sacristy, that
fermented with the double corruption of the family and the church. The
prediction of Alphonso Exili returned to his memory: "Do you know who
your probable successor is? It is Monti, the _mercante di campagna_.
Monti has money." It appeared probable to him that Hippolyte would end
in that way, by lucrative amours, and that she would have the tacit
consent of her people, gradually allured by an easier existence,
disembarrassed of domestic cares, surrounded once more by comforts far
greater than those which the matrimonial state of their daughter had
procured for them. "Could not I myself make an offer like that, propose
that _position_ frankly to Hippolyte?" She said, the other day, that
she had something in view for the winter, for the future. Very well!
Could we not arrange it? I am sure that, after having seriously
considered the offer, and the stability of the position, that sour old
woman would not have much repugnance in accepting me as a substitute for
the fugitive son-in-law. Perhaps we should even end by all becoming a
happy family for the end of our days?" The sarcasm wrenched his heart
with intolerable cruelty. Nervously he poured out some more wine and
drank.
"Why are you drinking so much this evening?" asked Hippolyte, looking
into his eyes.
"I am thirsty. You are not drinking, are you?"
Hippolyte's glass was empty.
"Drink!" said George, making a gesture as if about to fill her glass.
"No," she answered. "I prefer water, as usual. No wine pleases me,
except champagne. Do you remember, at Albano, the astonishment of that
good Pancrace when the cork would not pop, and he had to use a
corkscrew?"
"There must be still several bottles below, in the case. I will go and
find them."
And George rose quickly.
"No, no! Not this evening!"
She wanted to retain him. But, as he was preparing to descend, "I will
go, too," she said.
Gayly, lightly, she descended with him into a room on the ground floor
that served as a store-room.
Candia hastened to them with a lamp. They searched at the bottom of the
case and recovered two bottles with silvered necks, the last.
"Here they are!" exclaimed Hippolyte, already excited sensually. "Here
they are. Two more."
She lifted them up, brilliant, toward the lamp.
"Let us go."
She ran out laughing, ascended the stairs, placed the bottles on the
table. For a few seconds she sat as if bewildered, panting somewhat.
Then she shook her head.
"Look at Ortona!"
She stretched out her hand toward the distant town, beautiful in its
gala dress, and which seemed to be wafting its joy as far as where she
sat. A crimson glare was spread over the top of the hill as over an
active crater; and from the lighted area kept rising innumerable
balloons in the deep azure, drifting in vast circles, presenting a
picture of an immense illuminated dome reflected by the sea.
On the table, rich in flowers, fruits, and sweetmeats, the night-moths
were whirling. The froth from the generous wine splashed over the rush
mats.
"I drink to our happiness!" she said, lifting her glass toward her
lover.
"I drink to our peace!" he said, holding out his own.
The glasses clashed together so roughly that both were broken. The
golden wine was spilled on the table, inundated a pile of fine,
succulent peaches.
"A good omen! A good omen!" cried Hippolyte, more merry at this
sprinkling than if she had drunk deeply.
And she placed her hand on the wet fruit piled before her. They were
magnificent peaches, of a deep crimson on one side as if the rising sun
had painted them on seeing them hanging ripe on the branch. That
strange dew seemed to revivify them.
"What a marvel!" she said, taking the most luxurious one.
Without removing the skin, she bit it greedily. The juice ran from the
corners of her mouth, yellow as liquid honey.
"You bite now!"
She held the streaming peach out to her lover, with the same gesture she
had offered him the rest of the bread beneath the oak in the twilight of
the first day.
That recollection awoke in George's memory; and he felt a desire to
speak of it.
"Do you remember," he said, "do you remember the first evening, when you
bit the bread fresh from the oven, and you gave it me all warm and
humid? Do you remember? How good it seemed to me!"
"I remember everything. Can I forget the slightest incident of that
day?"
She saw again, in imagination, the path all strewn with furze, the fresh
and delicate homage shed on her path. For a few moments she remained
silent, absorbed by that vision of poesy.
"The furze!" she murmured, with an unexpected smile of regret.
Then she added:
"Do you remember? The entire hill was clothed in yellow, and the
perfume gave one vertigo."
"Drink!" said George, pouring the sparkling wine into the new glasses.
"I drink to the coming springtime of our love!" said Hippolyte.
And she drank to the last drop.
George immediately refilled her empty glass.
She put her fingers into a box of _loukoumes_, asking:
"Will you have amber or pink?"
They were Oriental confections sent to them by Adolpho Astorgi--a sort
of elastic paste colored amber and pink, and powdered with pistache, and
so perfumed that they gave to the mouth the illusion of a fleshy flower
rich in honey.
"Who knows where the Don Juan is now?" said George, on receiving the
sweetmeat from Hippolyte's fingers, white with sugar.
And over his soul passed the nostalgia of the distant isles, the isles
embalmed by the mastic, and which at the very moment, perhaps, were
sending all their nocturnal delights on the breeze to swell the great
sail.
Hippolyte detected the note of regret in George's words: "So you prefer
to be on board, away over there, with your friend, rather than here
alone with me?" she said.
"Neither here nor there. Somewhere else!" he replied smiling, in a
bantering tone.
And he rose to offer his lips to his companion.
She gave him a long kiss, with her mouth all sticky and covered with the
sugar of the still unswallowed _bon-bon_, while the moths whirled round
about them.
"You do not drink," he said after the kiss, his voice slightly changed.
She emptied the glass at a draught.
"It is almost warm," said she, as she laid it down. "Do you remember the
iced champagne at Danieli's in Venice? Oh, how I love to see it flow
slowly, slowly, in thick flakes!"
When she spoke of the things that pleased her or of the caresses that
she preferred, she had in her voice a singular delicacy; to modulate the
syllables, her lips moved in a manner that expressed profound
sensuality. Now, in every one of these words, in each of these
movements, George found a motif of the keenest suffering. That
sensuality which he had himself aroused in her he believed had now come
to the point where desire, untiring and tyrannical, could no longer
support any bridle and claimed immediate satisfaction. Hippolyte
appeared to him like a woman irresistibly addicted to pleasure in all
its forms, no matter what degradation it might cost her. When he had
gone away, or when she had tired of his "love," she would accept the
most generous and most practical offer. Perhaps she would even succeed
in raising the price very high. Where, in fact, could a rarer
instrument of voluptuousness be found? She possessed at present every
seduction and every science; she had that beauty which strikes men at
sight, which disturbs them, which awakens in their blood implacable
covetousness; she had feline elegance of person, refined taste in dress,
exquisite art in colors and styles that harmonized with her grace; she
had learned to modulate, in a voice suave and warm as the velvet of her
eyes, the slow syllables that evoked dreams and lulled pain; she bore in
the depths of her being a secret malady that seemed at times to
mysteriously illumine her sensibility; she had, by turns, the languors
of the malady and the vehemence of health; and, finally, she was barren.
United in her, then, were the sovereign virtues that destine a woman to
dominate the world by the scourge of her impure beauty. Passion had
refined and complicated these virtues. She was now at the zenith of her
power. If, all at once, she found herself free and untrammelled, what
road would she choose in life? George had no longer the slightest doubt;
he knew what that choice would be. He was confirmed in the certitude
that his influence over her was bounded by the senses and by certain
factitious attitudes of her mind. The plebeian foundation had
persisted, impenetrable in its thickness. He was convinced that this
plebeian foundation would permit her to adapt herself without
compunction to the contact of a lover who would not be distinguished by
any superior qualities, physical or moral: in short, a commonplace
lover. And, while he filled her empty glass again with the wine she
preferred, the wine that one uses to enliven secret suppers, to animate
little modern orgies behind closed doors, he attributed, in imagination,
attitudes of outrageous immodesty to "the pale and voracious Roman,
incomparable in the art of tiring the loins of men."
"How your hand trembles," observed Hippolyte, looking at it.
"It's true," he said, with a convulsion that simulated gayety. "I think
I've already had too much. Why don't you drink? That's not fair."
She laughed, and drank for the third time, filled with a childish joy at
the thought of getting tipsy, at feeling her intelligence become
gradually obscured. The fumes of the wine were already operating in
her. The hysterical demon began to move her.
"See how sunburnt my arms are!" she cried, drawing her large sleeves up
to the elbows. "Just look at my wrists!"
Although she was a carnation brunette, of a warm, dull-gold color, the
skin at her wrists was extremely transparent and of a strange pallor.
The sun had burnt the parts exposed; but on the under side the wrists
had remained pale. And on that fine skin, through that pallor, the veins
shone through, subtle, and yet very visible, of an intense azure
slightly approaching a violet. George had often repeated the words of
Cleopatra to the messenger from Italy: "Here are my bluest veins to
kiss."
Hippolyte held out her wrists to him and said:
"Kiss them!"
He seized one, and made a motion with his knife as if about to cut it
off.
She dared him to.
"Cut, if you want to. I won't move."
During the gesture he looked fixedly at the delicate blue network on her
skin, so clearly defined that it seemed to belong to another body, to
the body of a blond woman. And that singularity attracted him, tempted
him aesthetically by the suggestion of a tragic image of beauty.
"It is your vulnerable spot," he said with a smile. "It is a sure
indication. You will die from cut veins. Give me the other hand."
He placed the two wrists together, and again made a gesture as to cut
them off with a single blow. The complete image arose in his
imagination. On the marble threshold of a door, full of shadow and
expectation, the woman who was about to die appeared, extending her
naked arms; and at the extremities of the arms, from the slashed veins,
spouted and palpitated two red fountains. And, between these red
fountains, the face slowly assumed a supernatural pallor, the cavities
of the eyes were filled with an infinite mystery, the phantom of an
inexpressible word was outlined on the closed mouth. All at once the
double jet ceased to flow. The exsanguined body fell backwards like a
mass, in the shadow.
"Tell me your dream!" begged Hippolyte, seeing him absorbed.
He described the image to her.
"Very beautiful," said she, with admiration, as if before an engraving.
And she lit a cigarette. She puffed a wave of smoke from between her
lips against the lamp around which the night-moths were whirling. She
watched for a moment the agitation of the little variegated wings
between the moving veils of the cloud. Then she turned toward Ortona,
which scintillated with fire. She arose and raised her eyes to the
stars.
"How warm the night is!" she said, breathing heavily. "Aren't you warm
too?"
She threw away her cigarette. Again she uncovered her arms. She came
close to him; she suddenly threw his head back; she enveloped him in a
long caress; her mouth glided over all his face, languishing and ardent,
in a multiple kiss. Feline-like, she clung to him, entwined him, and
with an almost inexplicable movement, agile and furtive, she seated
herself on his knees, intoxicating him with the perfume of her skin,
that perfume, at once irritating and delicious, that always had the same
exhilarating effect on him as the scent of the tuberose.
Every fibre of his being trembled, like a few moments before when she
had clasped him ardently in the room filled with the last shadows of
twilight. She noticed his emotion and it aroused desire in her. Her
hands became bold.
"No, no; let me be!" he stammered, repulsing her. "We shall be seen."
She tore herself away. She tottered slightly, and appeared really
influenced by the wine. It seemed as though a mist, passing over her
eyes and into her brain, obscured her sight and thought. She put her
hands to her forehead and burning cheeks.
"How warm it is!" she sighed. "I wish I had nothing on."
Possessed from now on by that one fixed idea, George repeated to
himself: "Must I die alone?" As the fatal hour drew nearer, the deed of
violence seemed more necessary. Behind him, in the shadow in the
bedroom, he heard the ticktack of the clock; he heard the rhythmic blows
of a flax-brake on a distant field. These two sounds, cadenced and
dissimilar, intensified in him the sensation of the flight of time, gave
him a sort of anxious terror.
"Look at Ortona aflame!" cried Hippolyte. "What a number of rockets!"
The festive city illuminated the sky. Innumerable sky-rockets, parting
from a central point, spread out in the sky like a broad golden fan,
that slowly, from top to bottom, dissolved into a shower of scattered
sparks, and, suddenly, in the midst of the golden rain, a new fan was
formed, entire and splendid, to dissolve again and reform again, while
the waters reflected the changing picture. One heard a low crepitation,
like a distant fusilade, interspersed with deeper reports that followed
the explosions of multi-colored bombs in the heights of the sky. And at
every report the city, the port, the great stretched-out mole, appeared
in a different light, fantastically transfigured.
Upright against the parapet, Hippolyte admired the spectacle, and
saluted the brighter splendors with exclamations of delight. From time
to time it spread over her person like the reflection of a fire.
"She is overexcited, a little inebriated, ready for any madness,"
thought George as he watched her. "I could suggest a walk, which she
has often wanted to take: to go through one of the tunnels by the light
of a torch. I would go down to the Trabocco to get a torch. She could
wait for me at the end of the bridge. I would lead her then to the
tunnel by a path that I know. I would manage that the train should come
upon us while we were in the tunnel--foolhardiness, accident."
The idea seemed to him easy of realization: it had presented itself to
his imagination with extraordinary clearness, as if it had formed an
integral part of his consciousness since that first day when, before the
shining rails, he received the first confused glimmer from them. "She
must die, too." His resolution became strengthened, immutable. He heard
behind him the ticking of the clock. He felt a feeling of intense
anxiety he could not master. It was getting late. Perhaps there was
scarcely time for them to go down. He must act without delay, assure
himself immediately as to the precise time indicated by the clock. But
it seemed impossible for him to rise from his chair; it seemed to him
that if he spoke to her carelessly, his speech would fail him.
He started to his feet as he heard in the distance the well-known
rumbling. Too late! And his heart beat so fast that he believed he
would die of anguish as he heard the rumbling and whistling draw nearer.
Hippolyte turned.
"The train!" she said. "Come and see!"
He went; and she encircled his neck with her bare arm, leaning on his
shoulder.
"It is entering the tunnel," she said again, prompted by the difference
in sound.
In George's ears the rumbling increased in a frightful manner. He saw,
as in a hallucination, his mistress and himself beneath the dark roof,
the rapid approach of the headlight in the dark, the short struggle on
the rails, the simultaneous fall, the bodies crushed by the horrible
violence; and, at the same time, he felt the contact of the supple
woman, caressing, always triumphant. And, added to the physical horror
of this barbarous destruction, he felt an exasperated rancor against her
who seemed to escape his hate.
Both leaning against the parapet, they watched the deafening train,
rapid and sinister, that shook the house to its very foundations, and
even imparted the shock to them.
"At night," said Hippolyte, pressing still closer to him, "I'm afraid
when the train shakes the house as it passes. Aren't you, too? I have
often felt you tremble."
He did not hear her. An immense tumult stirred his whole being; it was
the rudest and most obscure agitation that his soul had ever
experienced. Incoherent thoughts and images whirled in his brain, and
his heart writhed beneath a thousand cruel punctures. But one fixed
image dominated all the others, invaded the centre of his soul. What
was he doing at this hour five years before? He was holding vigil over
a cadaver; he was contemplating a face hidden beneath a black veil, a
long, pale hand----
Hippolyte's restless hands touched him, crept into his hair, tickled his
neck. On his neck, on his ear, he felt a warm mouth. With an
instinctive motion that he could not repress, he drew aside, walked
away. She laughed that singular laugh, ironical and immodest, which
burst out and resounded from between her teeth whenever her lover
refused himself to her. And under this obsession he heard once more the
slow and limpid syllables: "For fear of my kisses!"
A low crepitation, mingled with the distinct reports, still came from
the festive town. The fireworks were beginning again.
Hippolyte turned toward the spectacle.
"Look! One would think that Ortona were on fire."
A vast crimson glare lit up the heavens and was reflected in the waters,
and in the midst of the light the profile of the flaming town was
outlined. The rockets burst overhead like splendid large roses.
"Shall I live through this night? Shall I recommence to live to-morrow?
And how long?" A disgust, bitter as a nausea, an almost savage hate,
arose from his heart at the thought that the following night he would
again have that woman near him on the same pillow, that he would again
hear the breathing of the sleeping woman, that he would again smell the
odor and feel the contact of that heated skin, and then that the day
would break again and pass by in the usual idleness, amidst the torture
of perpetual alternatives.
A burst of light struck him, attracted his gaze to the spectacle
outside. A vast pink lunary light blossomed over the festive town, and
yonder, on the shore, illuminated the succession of little indented bays
and jutting points as far as the sight could reach. Cape Moro, the
Nicchiola, the Trabocco, the rocks, near or distant, as far as the Vasto
Point, appeared a few seconds in the immense irradiation.
"The promontory!" suggested a secret voice to George suddenly, while his
gaze was carried to the heights crowned by the twisted olive-trees.
The white light faded away. The distant town became silent, still
outlined against the shadows by its illuminations. In the silence,
George perceived again the oscillations of the pendulum and the rhythmic
beats of the flax brake. But now he was master of his anguish; he felt
himself stronger and his mind clearer.
"Shall we go out a little?" he asked Hippolyte, in a slightly changed
voice. "We'll go to some spot in the open; we'll stretch ourselves out
on the grass, and breath in the fresh air. Look! The night is almost
as light as if it were full moon."
"No, no; let us stay here!" she answered nonchalantly.
"It's not late. Are you sleepy already? I cannot go to bed too early,
you know: I do not sleep, I suffer. I would gladly take a little walk.
Come, do not be so lazy! You could come just as you are."
"No, no; let us stay here."
And, once more, she passed her bare arms around his neck, languishing,
seized by desire.
"Let us stay here. Come indoors; let us lie down a little. Come!"
She tried to coax him, to entice him, seized by desire that became all
the fiercer as she noticed George's resistance. She was all ardor, and
her beauty was at its best, illuminated as by a torch. Her long,
serpentine body trembled through her thin wrapper. Her large dark eyes
shed the fascinating charm of the supreme hours of passion. She was the
sovereign Sensualism repeating: "I am forever the unconquered. I am
stronger than your thought. The odor of my skin has the power to
dissolve a world in you."
"No, no; I do not want to," declared George, seizing her wrists with an
almost brutal violence that he could not moderate.
"Ah! you don't want to?" she echoed mockingly, amused by the struggle,
sure of conquering, incapable of giving way in her caprice.
He regretted his roughness. To draw her into the snare, he must be mild
and coaxing, must simulate ardor and tenderness. After that, he would
certainly induce her to take the nocturnal walk--the last walk. But, on
the other hand, he also felt the absolute necessity of not losing that
nervous momentary energy that was indispensable for the approaching
action.
"Ah! So you don't want to?" she repeated, throwing her bare arms about
him, gazing up at him, looking into the depths of his eyes with a
species of repressed frenzy.
George permitted himself to be led into the room.
Then all the Enemy's feline lasciviousness broke loose over him whom she
believed already vanquished. She let down her hair, loosened her dress,
permitted her natural perfume to be exhaled like a shrub of odoriferous
flowers. She seemed to realize that she must disarm this man, that she
must enervate him, and that she must crush him to prevent him from
becoming dangerous.
George felt he was lost. Once more the Enemy had asserted her
superiority.
Suddenly she was seized with laughter, nervous, frantic, ungovernable,
lugubrious as the laughter of the insane.
Frightened, he let her go. He looked at her with manifest horror,
thinking, "Is this madness?"
She laughed, laughed, laughed, writhing, hiding her face in her hands,
biting her fingers, holding her sides; she laughed, laughed in spite of
herself, shaken by long, sonorous hiccoughs.
At intervals, she stopped for a second; then recommenced with renewed
violence. And nothing was more lugubrious than these mad laughs in the
silence of the magnificent night.
"Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid!" she said, during the pauses, at the
sight of her perplexed and frightened lover. "I am calmer now. Go out,
please. Please go out!"
He went back on the loggia, as if in a dream. Nevertheless, his brain
retained a strange lucidity and strange wakefulness. All his acts, all
his perceptions had for him the unreality of a dream, and assumed at the
same time a signification as profound as that of an allegory. He still
heard behind him the ill-repressed laughter; he retained still in his
fingers the sensation of the impure thing. He saw above and around him
the beauty of the summer evening. He knew what was on the point of
being accomplished.
The laughs ceased. Again, in the silence, he perceived the vibrations
of the pendulum and the beats of the flax brake on the distant area. A
groan coming from the house of the old people made him shudder: it was
the pain of her who was now in childbirth.
"All must be accomplished!" he thought.
And, turning, he crossed the threshold with a firm step.
Hippolyte lay upon the sofa, recomposed, pale, her eyes half-closed. At
the approach of her lover, she smiled.
"Come, sit down!" she murmured, with a vague gesture.
He bent over her, and saw tears between her eyelashes.
"Are you suffering?" he asked.
"I feel a slight suffocation. I have a weight here, as if a ball were
rising and falling."
She pointed to the centre of her chest. He said: "It is suffocating in
this room. Make an effort, and get up. Let us go out. The air will do
you good. Come!"
He rose, and held out his hands. She gave him hers, and let him raise
her. When on her feet, she shook her head to throw back her hair, which
was still untied. Then she bent down to search for her lost hairpins.
"Where can they be?"
"What are you looking for?"
"My hairpins."
"Let them be! You'll find them to-morrow."
"But I need them to fasten my hair."
"Leave your hair as it is. It pleases me that way."
She smiled. They went out into the loggia. She raised her face towards
the stars and breathed the perfume of the summer night.
"You see how beautiful the night is!" said George, in a hoarse yet
gentle voice.
"They are beating the flax," said Hippolyte, listening attentively to
the continuous rhythm.
"Let us go down," said George. "Let us walk a little. Let us go as far
as the olive-trees, yonder."
He seemed to hang on Hippolyte's lips.
"No, no. Let us remain here. You see in what a state I am!"
"What does that matter? Who will see you? We shall not meet a living
soul at this hour. Come as you are. I'd go without my hat. The
country is almost like a garden for us. Let us go down."
She hesitated a few seconds. But she, too, felt the need of fresh air,
of getting away from this house that still seemed to resound with the
echo of her horrible laughs.
"Let us go down," she finally consented.
At these words, George felt as if his heart had ceased to beat.
With an instinctive movement he approached the threshold of the
illuminated room. He cast toward the interior a look of anguish, a look
of farewell. A hurricane of recollections arose in his distracted soul.
"Shall we leave the lamp lit?" he asked, without thinking of what he was
saying.
And his own voice gave him an indefinable sensation as of some distant
and strange thing.
"Yes," answered Hippolyte.
They went down.
On the staircase they took each other by the hand, slowly descending
step by step. George made so violent an effort to repress his anguish
that the effort caused in him a strange exaltation. He considered the
immensity of the nocturnal sky, and believed it to be filled by the
intensity of his own life.
They perceived on the parapet of the courtyard the shadow of a man,
motionless and silent. They recognized old Colas.
"You here at this hour, Colas?" said Hippolyte. "Are you not sleepy?"
"I am keeping vigil for Candia, who is in childbirth," responded the old
man.
"And is everything going well?"
"Yes, very well."
The door of the habitation was lit up.
"Wait a minute," said Hippolyte. "I want to see Candia."
"No, do not go there now," begged George. "You will see her on your
return."
"That is so; I will see her on my return. Good-by, Colas."
She stumbled as she entered the path.
"Take care," cautioned the shadow of the old man.
George offered her his arm.
"Do you want to lean on me?"
She took George's arm.
They walked several steps in silence.
The night was bright, glorious in all directions. The Great Bear shone
on their heads in all its sextuple mystery. Silent and pure as the
heaven above, the Adriatic gave as the only indication of its existence
its respiration and its perfume.
"Why do you hurry so?" asked Hippolyte.
George slowed down his step. Dominated by a single thought, pursued by
the necessity of the act, he had only a confused consciousness for
everything else. His inner life seemed to disintegrate, to decompose,
to dissolve in a heavy fermentation that invaded even the deepest depths
of his being, and brought to the surface shapeless fragments, of diverse
nature, as little recognizable as if they had not belonged to the life
of the same man.
All these strange, inextricable, abrupt, violent things he vaguely
perceived, as if in a half-slumber, while at the same time one single
point in his brain retained an extraordinary lucidity, and, in a rigid
line, guided him toward the fatal act.
"How melancholy the sound of the flax brake in that field is," said
Hippolyte, stopping. "All night long they beat the flax. Does that not
make you feel melancholy?"
She abandoned herself on George's arm, brushed his cheek with her
tresses.
"Do you recall, at Albano, the pavers who were beating the pavement from
morning to night beneath our window?"
Her voice was veiled with sadness, somewhat tired.
"We became accustomed to that noise."
She stopped, restless.
"Why do you keep turning around?"
"It seems to me that I hear a man walking barefoot," responded George in
a low voice. "Let us stop."
They stopped, listened.
George was under the empire of the same horror that had frozen him in
front of the door of the funereal chamber. All his being trembled,
fascinated by the mystery; he seemed to have already crossed the
confines of an unknown world.
"It is Giardino," said Hippolyte, on perceiving the dog, which
approached. "He has followed us."
And, several times, she called the faithful animal, which came running
up friskily. She bent down to caress him, spoke to him in the special
tone she habitually used when she petted animals she was fond of.
"You never leave your friend, do you? You never leave her?"
The grateful animal rolled in the dust.
George made a few steps. He felt a great relief on feeling himself free
from Hippolyte's arm; up to now, this contact had given him an
indefinable physical uneasiness. He imagined the sudden and violent act
he was about to accomplish; he imagined the mortal embrace of his arms
around the body of this woman, and he would have liked to touch her only
at the supreme instant.
"Come, come; we'll soon be there," he said, preceding her in the
direction of the olive-trees, whitened by the moonlight and stars.
He halted on the edge of the plateau, and turned around to assure
himself that she was following him. Once more he gazed around him
distractedly, as if to embrace the image of the night. It seemed to him
that, on this plateau, the silence had become more profound. Only the
rhythmic beats of the flax brake could be heard from the distant fields.
"Come!" he repeated in a clear voice, strengthened by a sudden energy.
And, passing between the twisted trunks, feeling beneath his feet the
softness of the grass, he directed his steps towards the edge of the
precipice.
This edge formed a circular projection, entirely free in every
direction, without any kind of railing. George pressed his hands on his
knees, bent his body forward on this support, and advanced his head
cautiously. He examined the rocks below him; he saw a corner of the
sandy beach. The little corpse stretched out on the sand reappeared to
him. There appeared to him also the blackish spot he had seen with
Hippolyte from the heights of the Pincio, at the foot of the wall; and
he heard again the answers of the teamster to the greenish-looking man;
and, confusedly, all the phantoms of that distant afternoon repassed
before his soul.
"Take care!" cried Hippolyte, as she came up to him. "Take care!"
The dog barked among the olive-trees.
"Do you hear me, George? Come away!"
The promontory fell perpendicularly down to the black and deserted
rocks, around which the water scarcely moved, splashing feebly, rocking
in its slow undulations the reflections of the stars.
"George! George!"
"Have no fear!" he said in a hoarse voice. "Come nearer! Come! Come
and see the fishermen, fishing by torchlight among the rocks."
"No, no! I am afraid of vertigo."
"Come! I will hold you."
"No, no."
She seemed frozen by the unusual tone in George's voice, and a vague
fright commenced to invade her.
"Come!"
And he approached her, his hands extended. Suddenly he seized her
wrists, dragged her several steps; then he seized her in his arms, made
a bound, and attempted to force her towards the abyss.
"No! no! no!"
She resisted with furious energy.
She succeeded in disengaging herself, jumped back, panting and
trembling.
"Are you mad?" she cried, choked by anger. "Are you mad?"
But when she saw him come after her without speaking a word, when she
felt herself seized with more brutal violence and dragged again toward
the precipice, she understood all, and a great, sinister flash of light
struck terror to her soul.
"No, George, no! Let me be! Let me be! Only one minute! Listen!
Listen! One minute! I want to tell you----"
Insane with terror, she supplicated him, writhing. She hoped to stop
him, to move him to pity.
"One minute! Listen! I love you! Forgive me! Forgive me!"
She stammered incoherent words desperately, feeling herself becoming
weaker, losing her ground, seeing death before her.
"Assassin!" she then shrieked, furious.
And she defended herself with her nails, with her teeth, like a beast.
"Assassin!" she shrieked, as she was seized by the hair, thrown to the
ground on the edge of the precipice, lost.
The dog barked at the tragic group.
It was a brief and fierce struggle, like the sudden outburst of supreme
hate which, up to then, had been smouldering, unsuspected, in the hearts
of implacable enemies.
And they both crashed down to death, clasped in each other's arms.
* * * * * * * *
*SOME FINE NOVELS*
*Lately Published by*
*GEO. H. RICHMOND & Co.*
*12 East 15th St., New York*
*DAYBREAK*
*By JAMES COWAN*
A Romance of an Old World. With illustrations by WALTER C. GREENOUGH.
_12mo, cloth extra, gilt top, $1.50._
* * * * *
*RED AND BLACK*
*By MARIE-HENRI BEYLE ("De Stendhal")*
Translated from the French by E. P. ROBINS. With 18 etchings by
DUBOUCHET, etched by G. MERCIER.
_3 vols., 16mo, cloth extra, gilt tops, uncut._
* * * * *
*LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME*
*By MARIE-HENRI BEYLE ("De Stendhal")*
Translated from the French by E. P. ROBINS. Illustrated with 32
etchings by G. MERCIER from designs by N. FOULQUIER, and with a portrait
of the author.
_3 vols., 16mo, cloth, extra, gilt tops, uncut._
* * * * *
*TALES FROM A MOTHER-OF-PEARL CASKET*
*By ANATOLE FRANCE*
Translated by HENRI PENE DU BOIS.
_l6mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.25._
* * * * *
*THE FOOL AND HIS HEART*
*By F. NORREYS CONNELL*
Being the Plainly Told Story of Basil Thimm.
_Crown 8vo, cloth, uncut, $1.50._
* * * * *
*YELLOW PINE BASIN*
*By HENRY G. CATLIN*
The Story of a Prospector.
_12mo, cloth extra, gilt top, $1.35._