One night she stood on the height of the leads of the tower. The pigeons
had gone to roost; the bells had swung themselves into stillness; far
below the changing crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm
altitude no sound arose from them. The stars were out, and a great
silver moon bathed half the skies in its white glory. In the stones of
the parapet wind-sown blossoms blew to and fro heavy with dew.
The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had toiled all through it,
seeking, seeking, seeking, what she never found. She was covered with
dust; parched with thirst; foot-weary; sick at heart. She looked down on
the mighty maze of the city, and thought, "How long,--how long?"
Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice murmured at her ear,--
"You are not tired, Folle-Farine?"
Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great terror held her mute
and breathless there; gazing in the paralysis of horror at this frail
life, which was for her the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips
the world said to her, "Come, eat and drink, and sew your garments with
gems, and kiss men on the mouth whilst you slay them, and plunder and
poison, and laugh and be wise. For all your gods are dead; and there is
but one god now,--that god is gold."
"You must be tired, surely," the old man said, with soft insistance.
"You never find what you seek; you are always alone, always hungered and
poor; always wretched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my golden
pear. It was not wise."
He said so little; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief phrases pierced
her heart with the full force of their odious meaning. She leaned
against the wall, breathing hard and fast, mute, for the moment
paralyzed.
"You fled away from me that night. It was heroic, foolish, mad. Yet I
bear no anger against it. You have not loved the old, dead gods for
naught. You have the temper of their times. You obey them; though they
betray you and forget you, Folle-Farine."
She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of him, as the bird by
the snake.
"Who told you?" she muttered. "Who told you that I dwell here?"
"The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million eyes; do you not
know? There is nothing you have not done that has not been told to me.
But I can always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong; you are very
weak, of course;--you have a faith, and you follow it; and it leads you
on and on, on and on, and one day it will disappear,--and you will
plunge after it,--and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you
cannot find even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for her
lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage where the vultures
soon pick bare the bones of the slain, and all skeletons look alike, and
are alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine."
"You came--to say this?" she said, through her locked teeth.
"Nay--I came to see your beauty: your ice-god tired soon; but I----My
golden pear would have been better vengeance for a slighted passion than
his beggar's quarter, and these wretched rags----"
She held her misery and her shame and her hatred alike down under
enforced composure.
"There is no shame here," she said, between her teeth. "A beggar's
quarter, perhaps; but these poor copper coins and these rags I earn with
clean hands."
He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign mockery, which
stung her so ruthlessly.
"No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, that, live as you may,
shame will be always your garment in life and in death? You--a thing
beautiful, nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be
innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with shame, whether you
choose it or not. But the world, as I say, will give you one choice.
Take its red robe boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it
with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white garments of virtue
will envy you the red robe bitterly then."
Her arms were crossed upon her breast; her eyes gazed at him with the
look he had seen in the gloom of the evening, under the orchards by the
side of the rushing mill-water.
"You came--to say this?"
"Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your northern god soon
tired, I say; but I----Look yonder a moment," he pursued; and he
motioned downward to where the long lines of light gleamed in the
wondrous city which was stretched at their feet; and the endless murmur
of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to them on the soft night
air. "See here, Folle-Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the
slave of street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the
beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a crust and a copper coin;
you have the fate of your namesake, the dust, to wander a little while,
and then sink on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy
and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful
fool! what would your lost lover say if beholding you here amidst the
reek of the mob and the homage of thieves? He would say of you the most
bitter thing that a man can say of a woman: 'She has sunk into sin, but
she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make it of more profit than
was her innocence.' And a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels
for a woman who sells her soul--at a loss. You see?--ah, surely, you
see, Folle-Farine?"
She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow and lustrous
moonlight about her. She saw--she saw now!
And she had been mad enough to dream that if she lived in honesty, and,
by labor that she loathed won back, with hands clean of crime as of
alms, the gold which he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty,
and found him and gave it to him without a word, he would at least
believe--believe so much as this, that her hunger had been famine, and
her need misery, and her homelessness that of the stray dog which is
kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard: but that
through it all she had never touched one coin of that cruel and
merciless gift.
"You see?" pursued the low, flutelike moaning mockery of her tormentor's
voice. "You see? You have all the shame: it is your birthright; and you
have nothing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman who
has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies the world, which when I saw you
last was to you only an empty name. Now you know it--know it, at least,
enough to be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if you
took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle-Farine,--to stand homeless
under the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summer dust among the
rolling carriages; to stand outcast and famished before the palace
gates; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on them all not one
smile upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that you may buy a
little bread to eat, a little straw to rest on! You must be tired,
Folle-Farine!"
She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with the clouds seeming
to lean and touch her, and far beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights
shining through the soft darkness of the summer night.
Tired!--ah, God!--tired, indeed. But not for any cause of which he
spake.
"You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; and there, where the
world lies yonder at our feet, no name shall be on the mouths of men as
your name shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by
horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean above them from a gilded
gallery, and mock them at your fancy there on high in a cloud of
flowers. Great jewels shall beam on you like planets; and the only
chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a
priestess of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer's wand, to bring
you the thing of your idlest desire. You have been despised!--what
vengeance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your glance, as the
swine at the feet of Circe? You have been scorned and accursed!--what
retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the sweetness and
magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and fall, and worship the
Evil which begot you? Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you
can hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance--so
symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity cast you out to
wither at your birth,--a thing rootless, nameless, only meet for the
snake and the worm. If you bear poison in your fruit, is that your
fault, or the fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed
out on the dunghill to perish? I do not speak of passion. I use no
anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored; and I know that, any way,
you will forever hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more
beautiful than the meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is
the lioness in you that I care to chain; but your chain shall be of
gold, Folle-Farine; and all women will envy. Name your price, set it
high as you will; there is nothing that I will refuse. Nay, even I will
find your lover, who loves not you; and I will let you have your fullest
vengeance on him. A noble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of
your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be made known to men;
and, before another summer comes, all the world shall toss aloft in
triumph the name that is now nothing as the dust is;--nothing as you
are, Folle-Farine!"
She heard in silence to the end.
On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars seemed to beam
close against her sight; below was the infinite space of the darkness,
in which lines of light glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all
creatures near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted
in the spaces of the stones.
As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in answer she
reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft of the yellow
wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn of her wrist down into the
void of the darkness.
"What do I say?" she said, slowly. "What? Well, this: I could seize you,
and cast you down into the dark below there, as easily as I cast that
tuft of weed. And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be just."
And she turned away and walked from him in the gloom, slowly, as though
the deed she spake of tempted her.