His anger against his friends was extinguished. He was glad that they
were not here.
He was afraid of meeting any of his many Parisian acquaintances and
passed through the streets with lowered eyes. The thought was repulsive
to him that he would be forced to speak to them of Eva Sorel, and then
to see their indifferent or curious faces, beneath which there could be
no feeling akin to his own.
He avoided the painter Weikhardt, for the latter would rob him of the
illusion that he, Crammon, had discovered Eva Sorel, and that for the
present she lived only in his consciousness as the miracle that he felt
her to be.
He went about like an unrecognized rich man, or else as troubled as
a miser who knows that thieves lie in wait for his treasure. All who
carried their chatter of delight from the Théâtre Sapajou out into the
world he regarded as thieves. They threatened to attract to the little
playhouse the crowd of the stupid and the banal who drag great things
into the dust by making them fashionable.
He nursed the dream of kidnapping the dancer and of fleeing with her to
a deserted island of the sea. He would have been satisfied to adore her
there and would have asked nothing of her.
For Lorm he had demanded applause. But he hated the favour which the
dancer gained. Not because she was a woman. It was not the jealousy
of the male. He did not think of her under the aspect of sex. Her
being was to him the fulfilment of dark presentiments and visions; she
represented the spirit of lightness as opposed to the heaviness of
life which weighed him and others down; she was flight that mocked the
creeping of the earth-bound, the mystery that is beyond knowledge, form
that is the denial of chaos.
He said: “This boasted twentieth century, young as it is, wearies my
nerves. Humanity drags itself across the earth like an ugly clumsy
worm. She desires freedom from this condition, and in her yearning to
escape the chrysalis she finds the dance. It is a barbaric spirit of
comedy at its highest point.”
He knew well that the life he led was a challenge and a disturbance to
his fellow men who earned their bread by the sweat of their toil. He
was an enthusiastic admirer of those ages in which the ruling classes
had really ruled, when a prince of the Church had had a capon stuffer
amid the officials of his court, and an insignificant count of the
Holy Roman Empire had paid an army that consisted of one general, six
colonels, four drummers, and two privates. And he was grateful to the
dancer because she lifted him out of his own age even more thoroughly
than the actor had done.
He made an idol of her, for the years were coming in which he needed
one--he who, satiated, still knew hunger with senses avid for the
flight of birds.