I
Crammon had been a true prophet. Ten months had sufficed to fix the
eyes of the world upon the dancer, Eva Sorel. The great newspapers
coupled her name with the celebrated ones of the earth; her art was
regarded everywhere as the fine flower of its age.
All those to whose restless spiritual desires she had given form and
body were at her feet. The leaders of sorely driven humanity drew a
breath and looked up to her. The adorers of form and the proclaimers of
new rhythms vied for a smile from her lips.
She remained calm and austere with herself. Sometimes the noise of
plaudits wearied her. Hard beset by the vast promises of greedy
managers, she felt not rarely a breath of horror. Her inner vision,
fixed upon a far and ideal goal, grew dim at the stammered thanks of
the easily contented. These, it seemed to her, would cheat her. Then
she fled to Susan Rappard and was scolded for her pains.
“We wandered out to conquer the world,” said Susan, “and the world has
submitted almost without a struggle. Why don’t you enjoy your triumph?”
“What my hands hold and my eyes grasp gives me no cause to feel very
triumphant yet,” Eva answered.
Susan lamented loudly. “You little fool, you’ve literally gone hungry.
Take your fill now!”
“Be quiet,” Eva replied, “what do you know of my hunger?”
People besieged her threshold, but she received only a few and chose
them carefully. She lived in a world of flowers. Jean Cardillac had
furnished her an exquisite house, the garden terrace of which was like
a tropical paradise. When she reclined or sat there in the evening
under the softened light of the lamps, surrounded by her gently
chatting friends, whose most casual glance was an act of homage, she
seemed removed from the world of will and of the senses and to be
present in this realm of space only as a beautiful form.
Yet even those who thought her capable of any metamorphosis were
astonished when a sudden one came upon her and when its cause seemed
to be an unknown and inconsiderable person. Prince Alexis Wiguniewski
had introduced the man, and his name was Ivan Michailovitch Becker. He
was short and homely, with deep-set Sarmatian eyes, lips that looked
swollen, and a straggling beard about his chin and cheeks. Susan was
afraid of him.
It was on a December night when the snow was banked up at the windows
that Ivan Michailovitch Becker had talked with Eva Sorel for eight
hours in the little room spread with Italian rugs. In the adjoining
room Susan walked shivering up and down, wondering when her mistress
would call for help. She had an old shawl about her shoulders. From
time to time she took an almond from her pocket, cracked it with her
teeth, and threw the shells into the fireplace.
But on this night Eva did not go to bed, not even when the Russian had
left her. She entered her sleeping chamber and let her hair roll down
unrestrained so that it hid her head and body, and she sat on a low
stool holding her fevered cheeks in her hollow hands. Susan, who had
come to help her undress, crouched near her on the floor and waited for
a word.
At last her young mistress spoke. “Read me the thirty-third canto of
the _Inferno_,” she begged.
Susan brought two candles and the book. She placed the candles on the
floor and the volume on Eva’s lap. Then she read with a monotonous
sound of lamentation. But toward the end, especially where the poet
speaks of petrified and frozen tears, her clear voice grew firmer and
more eloquent.
“Lo pianto stesso lì pianger non lascia;
E il duol, che trova in sugli occhi rintoppo,
Si volve in entro a far crescer l’ambascia:
Chè le lagrime prime fanno groppo,
E, sì come visiere di cristallo,
Riempion sotto il ciglio tutto il coppo.”[1]
[1] “The very weeping there allows them not to weep; and the grief,
which finds impediment upon their eyes, turns inward to increase the
agony: for their first tears form a knot, and, like crystal vizors,
fill up all the cavity beneath their eye-brows.”
When she had finished she was frightened by the gleaming moisture in
Eva’s eyes.
Eva arose and bent her head far backward and closed her eyes and said:
“I shall dance all that--damnation in hell and then redemption!”
Then Susan embraced Eva’s knees and pressed her cheek against the
bronze coloured silk of the girl’s garment and murmured: “You can do
anything you wish.”
From that night on Eva was filled with a more urgent passion, and her
dancing had lines in which beauty hovered on the edge of pain. Ecstatic
prophets asserted that she was dancing the new century, the sunset of
old ideas, the revolution that is to come.