Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, imprisoned air;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each new-born and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you ever more residing
In the ether’s star translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.
Then Maria came and after a cheerful meal I accompanied her to our
little room. She was lovelier that evening, warmer and more intimate
than she had ever been. The love she gave me was so tender that I felt
it as the most complete abandon. “Maria,” said I, “you are as prodigal
to-day as a goddess. Don’t kill us both quite. To-morrow after all is
the Ball. Whom have you got for a cavalier to-morrow? I’m very much
afraid it is a fairy prince who will carry you off and I shall never
see you any more. Your love to-night is almost like that of good lovers
who bid each other farewell for the last time.”
She put her lips close to my ear and whispered:
“Don’t say that, Harry. Any time might be the last time. If Hermine
takes you, you will come no more to me. Perhaps she will take you
to-morrow.”
Never did I experience the feeling peculiar to those days, that
strange, bitter-sweet alternation of mood, more powerfully than on
that night before the Ball. It was happiness that I experienced. There
was the loveliness of Maria and her surrender. There was the sweet and
subtle sensuous joy of inhaling and tasting a hundred pleasures of the
senses that I had only begun to know as an elderly man. I was bathed
in sweet joy like a rippling pool. And yet that was only the shell.
Within all was significant and tense with fate, and while, love-lost
and tender, I was busied with the little sweet appealing things of love
and sank apparently without a care in the caress of happiness, I was
conscious all the while in my heart how my fate raced on at breakneck
speed, racing and chasing like a frightened horse, straight for the
precipitous abyss, spurred on by dread and longing to the consummation
of death. Just as a short while before I had started aside in fear
from the easy thoughtless pleasure of merely sensual love and felt a
dread of Maria’s beauty that laughingly offered itself, so now I felt
a dread of death, a dread, however, that was already conscious of its
approaching change into surrender and release.
Even while we were lost in the silent and deep preoccupation of our
love and belonged more closely than ever we had to one another, my soul
bid adieu to Maria, and leave of all that she had meant to me. I had
learnt from her, once more before the end, to confide myself like a
child to life’s surface play, to pursue a fleeting joy, and to be both
child and beast in the innocence of sex--a state that (in earlier life)
I had only known rarely and as an exception. The life of the senses and
of sex had nearly always had for me the bitter accompaniment of guilt,
the sweet but dread taste of forbidden fruit that puts a spiritual man
on his guard. Now, Hermine and Maria had shown me this garden in its
innocence, and I had been a guest there and thankfully. But it would
soon be time to go on further. It was too agreeable and too warm in
this garden. It was my destiny to make another bid for the crown of
life in the expiation of its endless guilt. An easy life, an easy love,
an easy death--these were not for me.
From what the girls told me I gathered that for the Ball next day, or
in connection with it, quite unusual delights and extravagances were
on foot. Perhaps it was the climax, and perhaps Maria’s suspicion was
correct. Perhaps this was our last night together and perhaps the
morning would bring a new unwinding of fate. I was aflame with longing
and breathless with dread; I clung wildly to Maria; and there flared
within me a last burst of wild desire....
* * * * *
I made up by day for the sleep I had lost at night. After a bath I went
home dead tired. I darkened my bedroom and as I undressed I came on the
verses in my pocket; but I forgot them again and lay down forthwith.
I forgot Maria and Hermine and the Masked Ball and slept the clock
round. It was not till I had got up in the evening and was shaving that
I remembered that the Ball began in an hour and that I had to find
a dress shirt. I got myself ready in very good humour and went out
thereafter to have dinner.
It was the first Masked Ball I was to participate in. In earlier days,
it is true, I had now and again attended such festivities and even
sometimes found them very entertaining, but I had never danced. I had
been a spectator merely. As for the enthusiasm with which others had
talked and rejoiced over them in my hearing, it had always struck me as
comic. And now the day had come for me too to find the occasion one of
almost painful suspense. As I had no partner to take, I decided not to
go till late. This, too, Hermine had counselled me.
I had seldom of late been to the Steel Helmet, my former refuge, where
the disappointed men sat out their evenings, soaking in their wine and
playing at bachelor life. It did not suit the life I had come to lead
since. This evening, however, I was drawn to it before I was aware.
In the mood between joy and fear that fate and parting imposed on me
just now, all the stations and shrines of meditation in my life’s
pilgrimage caught once more that gleam of pain and beauty that comes
from things past; and so too had the little tavern, thick with smoke,
among whose patrons I had lately been numbered and whose primitive
opiate of a bottle of land-wine had lately heartened me enough to spend
one more night in my lonely bed and to endure life for one more day.
I had tasted other specifics and stronger stimulus since then, and
sipped a sweeter poison. With a smile I entered the ancient hostel.
The landlady greeted me and so, with a nod, did the silent company of
habitués. A roast chicken was commended and soon set before me. The
limpid Elsasser sparkled in the thick peasant glass. The clean white
wooden tables and the old yellow wainscoting had a friendly look. And
while I ate and drank there came over me that feeling of change and
decay and of farewell celebrations, that sweet and inwardly painful
feeling of being a living part of all the scenes and all the things of
an earlier life that has never yet been parted from, and from which the
time to part has come. The modern man calls this sentimentality. He
has lost the love of inanimate objects. He does not even love his most
sacred object, his motor-car, but is ever hoping to exchange it as soon
as he can for a later model. This modern man has energy and ability.
He is healthy, cool and strenuous--a splendid type, and in the next
war he will be a miracle of efficiency. But all that was no concern
of mine. I was not a modern man, nor an old-fashioned one either. I
had escaped time altogether, and went my way, with death at my elbow
and death as my resolve. I had no objection to sentimentalities. I was
glad and thankful to find a trace of anything like a feeling still
remaining in my burnt-out heart. So I let my memories of the old tavern
and my attachment to the solid wooden chairs and the smell of smoke and
wine and the air of use and wont and warmth and homeliness that the
place had carry me away. There is beauty in farewells and a gentleness
in their very tone. The hard seat was dear to me, and so was the
peasant glass and the cool racy taste of the Elsasser and my intimacy
with all and everything in this room, and the faces of the bent and
dreaming drinkers, those disillusioned ones, whose brother I had been
for so long. All this was bourgeois sentimentality, lightly seasoned
with a touch of the old-fashioned romance of inns, a romance coming
from my boyhood when inns and wine and cigars were still forbidden
things--strange and wonderful. But no Steppenwolf rose before me baring
his teeth to tear my sentiment to pieces. I sat there in peace in the
glow of the past whose setting still shed a faint after-glow.
A street seller came in and I bought a handful of roasted chestnuts.
An old dame came in with flowers and I bought a bunch of violets and
presented them to the landlady. It was not till I was about to pay my
bill and felt in vain for the pocket of the coat I usually wore that I
realised once more than I was in evening dress. The Masked Ball. And
Hermine!
It was still early enough, however. I could not convince myself to go
to the Globe Rooms straight away. I felt too--as I had in the case of
all the pleasures that had lately come my way--a whole array of checks
and resistances. I had no inclination to enter the large and crowded
and noisy rooms. I had a schoolboy’s shyness of the strange atmosphere
and the world of pleasure and dancing.
As I sauntered along I passed by a cinema with its dazzling lights and
huge coloured posters. I went on a few steps, then turned again and
went in. There till eleven I could sit quietly and comfortably in the
dark. Following the attendant with the pocket light I stumbled through
the curtains into the darkened hall, found a seat and was suddenly
in the middle of the Old Testament. The film was one of those that
are nominally not shown for money. Much expense and many refinements
are lavished upon them in a more sacred and nobler cause, and at
midday even school-children are brought to see them by their religious
teachers. This one was the story of Moses and the Israelites in Egypt,
with a huge crowd of men, horses, camels, palaces, splendours of the
Pharaohs and tribulations of the Jews in the desert. I saw Moses, whose
hair recalled portraits of Walt Whitman, a splendidly theatrical Moses,
wandering through the desert at the head of the Jews, with a dark and
fiery eye and a long staff and the stride of a Wotan. I saw him pray to
God at the edge of the Red Sea, and I saw the Red Sea parted to give
free passage, a deep road between piled-up mountains of water (the
confirmation classes conducted by the clergy to see this religious film
could argue without end as to how the film people managed this). I saw
the prophet and his awestruck people pass through to the other side,
and behind them I saw the war-chariots of Pharaoh come into sight and
the Egyptians stop and start on the brink of the sea, and then, when
they ventured courageously on, I saw the mountainous waters close over
the heads of Pharaoh in all the splendour of his gold trappings and
over all his chariots and all his men, recalling, as I saw it, Handel’s
wonderful duet for two basses in which this event is magnificently
sung. I saw Moses, further, climbing Sinai, a gloomy hero in a gloomy
wilderness of rocks, and I looked on as Jehovah in the midst of storm
and thunder and lightning imparted the Ten Commandments to him, while
his worthless people set up the golden calf at the foot of the mountain
and gave themselves over to somewhat roisterous celebrations. I found
it so strange and incredible to be looking on at all this, to be seeing
the sacred writ, with its heroes and its wonders, the source in our
childhood of the first dawning suspicion of another world than this,
presented for money before a grateful public that sat quietly eating
the provisions brought with it from home. A nice little picture,
indeed, picked up by chance in the huge wholesale clearance of culture
in these days! My God, rather than come to such a pass it would have
been better for the Jews and every one else, let alone the Egyptians,
to have perished in those days and forthwith of a violent and becoming
death instead of this dismal pretence of dying by inches that we go in
for to-day. Yes indeed!
My secret repressions and unconfessed fright in face of the Masked
Ball were by no means lessened by the feelings provoked in me by the
cinema. On the contrary, they had grown to uncomfortable proportions
and I had to shake myself and think of Hermine before I could go to
the Globe Rooms and dared to enter. It was late, and the Ball had been
for a long time in full swing. At once before I had even taken off my
things I was caught up, shy and sober as I was, in the swirl of the
masked throng. I was accosted familiarly. Girls summoned me to the
champagne rooms. Clowns slapped me on the back, and I was addressed
on all sides as an old friend. I responded to none of it, but fought
my way through the crowded rooms to the cloak-room, and when I got my
cloak-room ticket I put it in my pocket with great care, reflecting
that I might need it before very long when I had had enough of the
uproar.
Every part of the great building was given over to the festivities.
There was dancing in every room and in the basement as well. Corridors
and stairs were filled to overflowing with masks and dancing and
music and laughter and tumult. Oppressed in heart I stole through the
throng, from the nigger orchestra to the peasant band, from the large
and brilliantly lighted principal room into the passages and on to
the stairs, to bars, buffets and champagne parlours. The walls were
mostly hung with wild and cheerful paintings by the latest artists.
All the world was there, artists, journalists, professors, business
men, and of course every adherent of pleasure in the town. In one
of the orchestras sat Pablo, blowing with enthusiasm in his curved
mouth-piece. As soon as he saw me he sang out a greeting. Pushed hither
and thither in the crowd I found myself in one room after another,
upstairs here and downstairs there. A corridor in the basement had
been staged as hell by the artists and there a band of devils played
furiously. After a while, I began to look for Hermine or Maria and
strove time after time to reach the principal room; but either I missed
my way or had to meet the current. By midnight I had found no one, and
though I had not danced I was hot and giddy. I threw myself into the
nearest chair among utter strangers and ordered some wine, and came to
the conclusion that joining in such rowdy festivals was no part for
an old man like me. I drank my glass of wine while I stared at the
naked arms and backs of the women, watched the crowd of grotesquely
masked figures drifting by and silently declined the advances of a few
girls who wished to sit on my knee or get me to dance. “Old Growler,”
one called after me; and she was right. I decided to raise my spirits
with the wine, but even the wine went against me and I could scarcely
swallow a second glass. And then the feeling crept over me that the
Steppenwolf was standing behind me with his tongue out. Nothing
pleased me. I was in the wrong place. To be sure, I had come with the
best intentions, but this was no place for me to be merry in; and all
this loud effervescence of pleasure, the laughter and the whole foolery
of it on every side, seemed to me forced and stupid.
Thus it was that, at about one o’clock, in anger and disillusionment I
steered a course for the cloak-room, to put on my coat again and go. It
was surrender and backsliding into my wolfishness, and Hermine would
scarcely forgive it me. But I could not do otherwise. All the way as I
squeezed through the throng to the cloak-room, I still kept a careful
look-out in case I might yet see one of my friends, but in vain. Now I
stood at the counter. Already the attendant was politely extending his
hand for my number. I felt in my waistcoat pocket--the number was no
longer there! The devil was in it if even this failed me. Often enough
during my forlorn wanderings through the rooms and while I sat over my
tasteless wine I had felt in my pocket, fighting back the resolve to go
away again, and I had always found the round flat check in its place.
And now it was gone. Everything was against me.
“Lost your number?” came in a shrill voice from a small red and yellow
devil at my elbow. “Here, comrade, you can take mine,” and he held it
out to me without more ado. While I mechanically took it and turned it
over in my fingers the brisk little fellow rapidly disappeared.
When, however, I examined the pasteboard counter for a number, no
number was to be seen. Instead there was a scribble in a tiny hand. I
asked the attendant to wait and went to the nearest light to read it.
There in little crazy letters that were scarcely legible was scrawled:
TO-NIGHT AT THE MAGIC THEATRE
FOR MADMEN ONLY
PRICE OF ADMITTANCE YOUR MIND.
NOT FOR EVERYBODY. HERMINE IS IN HELL.
As a marionette whose thread the operator has let go for a moment wakes
to new life after a brief paralysis of death and coma and once more
plays its lively part, so did I at this jerk of the magic thread throw
myself with the elasticity and eagerness of youth into the tumult from
which I had just retreated in the listlessness and weariness of elderly
years. Never did sinner show more haste to get to hell. A moment
before my patent-leather shoes had galled me, the heavily scented air
disgusted me, and the heat undone me. Now on my winged feet I nimbly
one-stepped through every room on the way to hell. The very air had
a charm. The warmth embedded me and wafted me on, and so no less did
the riotous music, the intoxication of colours, the perfume of women’s
shoulders, the clamour of the hundred tongues, the laughter, the rhythm
of the dance, and the glances of all the kindled eyes. A Spanish
dancing girl flung herself into my arms: “Dance with me!” “Can’t,” said
I. “I’m bound for hell. But I’ll gladly take a kiss with me.” The red
mouth beneath the mask met mine and with the kiss I recognised Maria. I
caught her tight in my arms and like a June rose bloomed her full lips.
By this time we were dancing, our lips still joined. Past Pablo we
danced, who hung like a lover over his softly wailing instrument. Those
lovely animal eyes embraced us with their half-abstracted radiance. But
before we had gone twenty steps the music broke off and regretfully I
let go of Maria.
“I’d have loved to have danced with you again,” I said, intoxicated
with her warmth. “Come with me a step or two, Maria. I’m in love with
your beautiful arm. Let me have it a moment longer! But, you see,
Hermine has summoned me. She is in hell.”
“I thought so. Farewell, Harry. I won’t forget you.” She left me--left
me indeed. Yes, it was autumn, it was fate, that had given the summer
rose so full and ripe a scent.
On I went through the long corridors, luxuriously thronged, and down
the stairs to hell. There, on pitch-black walls shone wicked garish
lights, and the orchestra of devils was playing feverishly. On a high
stool at the bar there was seated a pretty young fellow without a mask
and in evening dress who scrutinised me with a cursory and mocking
glance. Pressed to the wall by the swirl of dancers--about twenty
couples were dancing in this very confined space--I examined all the
women with eager suspense. Most were still in masks and smiled at me,
but none was Hermine. The handsome youth on the high stool glanced
mockingly at me. At the next pause, thought I, she will come and summon
me. The dance ended but no one came.
I went over to the bar which was squeezed into a corner of the small
and low room, and taking a seat near the young man ordered a whisky.
While I drank it I saw his profile. It had a familiar charm, like a
picture from long ago, precious for the very dust that has settled on
it from the past. Oh, then it flashed through me. It was Herman, the
friend of my youth.
“Herman!” I stammered.
She smiled. “Harry? Have you found me?”
It was Hermine, barely disguised by the make-up of her hair and a
little paint. The stylish collar gave an unfamiliar look to the pallor
of her intelligent face, the wide black sleeves of her dress-coat and
the white cuffs made her hands look curiously small, and the long black
trousers gave a curious elegance to her feet in their black and white
silk socks.
“Is this the costume, Hermine, in which you mean to make me fall in
love with you?”
“So far,” she said, “I have contented myself with turning the heads of
the ladies. But now your turn has come. First, let’s have a glass of
champagne.”
So we did, perched on our stools, while the dance went on around us
to the lively and fevered strain of the strings. And without Hermine
appearing to give herself the least trouble I was very soon in love
with her. As she was dressed as a boy, I could not dance with her nor
allow myself any tender advances, and while she seemed distant and
neutral in her male mask, her looks and words and gestures encircled
me with all her feminine charm. Without so much as having touched her
I surrendered to her spell, and this spell itself kept within the
part she played. It was the spell of a hermaphrodite. For she talked
to me about Herman and about childhood, mine and her own, and about
those years of childhood when the capacity for love, in its first
youth, embraces not only both sexes, but all and everything, sensuous
and spiritual, and endows all things with a spell of love and a
fairy-like ease of transformation such as in later years comes again
only to a chosen few and to poets, and to them rarely. Throughout she
kept up the part of a young man, smoking cigarettes and talking with a
spirited ease that often had a little mockery in it; and yet it was all
iridescent with the rays of desire and transformed, as it reached my
senses, into a charming seduction.
How well and thoroughly I thought I knew Hermine, and yet what a
completely new revelation of herself she opened up to me that night!
How gently and inconspicuously she cast the net I longed for around me,
and how playfully and how like a pixie she gave the sweet poison to
drink!
We sat and talked and drank champagne. We strolled through the rooms
and looked about us. We went on voyages of exploration to discover
couples whose love-making it amused us to spy upon. She pointed out
women whom she recommended me to dance with, and gave me advice as to
the methods of attack to be employed with each. We took the floor as
rivals and paid court for a while to the same girl, danced with her
by turns and both tried to win her heart. And yet it was all only a
carnival, only a game between the two of us that caught us more closely
together in our own passion. It was all a fairy tale. Everything had a
new dimension, a deeper meaning. Everything was fanciful and symbolic.
There was one girl of great beauty but looking tragic and unhappy.
Herman danced with her and drew her out. They disappeared to drink
champagne together, and she told me afterwards that she had made a
conquest of her not as a man but as a woman, with the spell of Lesbos.
For my part, the whole building, reverberating everywhere with the
sound of dancing, and the whole intoxicated crowd of masks, became by
degrees a wild dream of paradise. Flower upon flower wooed me with its
scent. I toyed with fruit after fruit. Serpents looked at me from green
and leafy shadows with mesmeric eyes. Lotus blossoms luxuriated over
black bogs. Enchanted birds sang allurement from the trees. Yet all was
a progress to one longed-for goal, the summons of a new yearning for
one and one only. Once I was dancing with a girl I did not know. I had
swept her with the ardour of a lover into the giddy swirl of dancers
and while we hung in this unreal world, she suddenly remarked with
a laugh: “One wouldn’t know you. You were so dull and flat before.”
Then I recognised the girl who had called me “Old Growler” a few hours
before. She thought she had got me now, but with the next dance it was
another for whom my ardour glowed. I danced without ceasing for two
hours or more--every dance and some, even, that I had never danced
before. Every now and then Herman was near me, and gave me a nod and a
smile as he disappeared in the throng.
An experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never
known in all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper and
student--the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious
merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy. I
had often heard it spoken of. It was known, I knew, to every servant
girl. I had often observed the sparkle in the eye of those who told me
of it and I had always treated it with a half-superior, half-envious
smile. A hundred times in my life I had seen examples of those whom
rapture had intoxicated and released from the self, of that smile,
that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads have been turned by
a common enthusiasm. I had seen it in drunken recruits and sailors,
and also in great artists in the enthusiasm, perhaps, of a musical
festival; and not less in young soldiers going to war. Even in recent
days I had marvelled at and loved and mocked and envied this gleam and
this smile in my friend, Pablo, when he hung over his saxophone in the
blissful intoxication of playing in the orchestra, or when, enraptured
and ecstatic, he looked over to the conductor, the drum, or the man
with the banjo. It had sometimes occurred to me that such a smile,
such a childlike radiance could be possible only to quite young persons
or among those peoples whose customs permitted no marked differences
between one individual and another. But to-day, on this blessed night,
I myself, the Steppenwolf, was radiant with this smile. I myself swam
in this deep and childlike happiness of a fairy-tale. I myself breathed
the sweet intoxication of a common dream and of music and rhythm and
wine and women,--I, who had in other days so often listened with
amusement, or dismal superiority, to its panegyric in the ball-room
chatter of some student. I was myself no longer. My personality was
dissolved in the intoxication of the festivity like salt in water. I
danced with this woman or that, but it was not only the one I had in
my arms and whose hair brushed my face that belonged to me. All the
other women who were dancing in the same room and the same dance and to
the same music, and whose radiant faces floated past me like fantastic
flowers, belonged to me, and I to them. All of us had a part in one
another. And the men too. I was with them also. They, too, were no
strangers to me. Their smile was mine, and mine their wooing and theirs
mine.
A new dance, a fox-trot, with the title _Yearning_, had swept the
world that winter. Once we had heard it we could not have enough of it.
We were all soaked in it and intoxicated with it and every one hummed
the melody whenever it was played. I danced without stop and with any
one who came in my way, with quite young girls, with women in their
earlier or their latter prime, and with those who had sadly passed them
both; and with them all I was enraptured--laughing, happy, radiant. And
when Pablo saw me so radiant, me whom he had always looked on as a very
lamentable poor devil, his eyes beamed blissfully upon me and he was so
inspired that he got up from his chair and blowing lustily in his horn
climbed up on it. From this elevation he blew with all his might, while
at the same time his whole body, and his instrument with it, swayed to
the tune of _Yearning_. I and my partner kissed our hands to him
and sang loudly in response. Ah, thought I, meanwhile, let come to me
what may, for once at least, I, too, have been happy, radiant, released
from myself, a brother of Pablo’s, a child.
I had lost the sense of time, and I don’t know how many hours or
moments the intoxication of happiness lasted. I did not observe
either that the brighter the festal fire burned the narrower were the
limits within which it was confined. Most people had already left.
The corridors were silent and many of the lights out. The stairs
were deserted and in the rooms above one orchestra after another had
stopped playing and gone away. It was only in the principal room and
in Hell below that the orgy still raged in a crescendo. Since I could
not dance with Hermine as a boy, we had only had fleeting encounters
in the pauses between the dances, and at last I lost sight of her
entirely--and not only sight but thought. There were no thoughts left.
I was lost in the maze and whirl of the dance. Scents and tones and
sighs and words stirred me. I was greeted and kindled by strange eyes,
encircled by strange faces, borne hither and thither in time to the
music as though by a wave.
And then of a sudden I saw, half coming to my senses for a moment,
among the last who still kept it up in one of the smaller rooms,
and filled it to overflowing--the only one in which the music still
sounded--of a sudden I saw a black Pierrette with face painted
white. She was fresh and charming, the only masked figure left and a
bewitching apparition that I had never in the whole course of the night
seen before. While in every one else the late hour showed itself in
flushed and heated faces, crushed dresses, limp collars and crumpled
ruffs, the black Pierrette stood there fresh and neat with her white
face beneath her mask. Her costume had not a crease and not a hair
was out of place. Her ruff and pointed cuffs were untouched. I rushed
towards her, put my arms around her, and drew her into the dance. Her
perfumed ruff tickled my chin. Her hair brushed my cheek. The young
vigour of her body answered my movements as no one’s else had done that
night, yielding to them with an inward tenderness and compelling them
to new contacts by the play of her allurements. I bent down to kiss her
mouth as we danced. Its smile was triumphant and long familiar. Of a
sudden I recognised the firm chin, the shoulders, arms and hands. It
was Hermine, Herman no longer. Hermine in a change of dress, fresh,
perfumed, powdered. Our lips met passionately. For a moment her whole
body to her knees clung in longing and surrender to mine. Then she drew
her mouth away and, holding back, fled from me as we danced. When the
music broke off we were still clasped where we stood. All the excited
couples round us clapped, stamped, cried out and urged the exhausted
orchestra to play _Yearning_ over again. And now a feeling that
it was morning fell upon us all. We saw the ashen light behind the
curtains. It warned us of pleasure’s approaching end and gave us
symptoms of the weariness to come. Blindly, with bursts of laughter, we
flung ourselves desperately into the dance once more, into the music,
and the light that began to flood the room. Our feet moved in time to
the music as though we were possessed, every couple touching, and once
more we felt the great wave of bliss break over us. Hermine abandoned
her triumphant air, her mockery and coolness. She knew that there was
no more to do to make me in love with her. I was hers, and her way
of dancing, her looks and smiles and kisses all showed that she gave
herself to me. All the women of this fevered night, all that I had
danced with, all whom I had kindled or who had kindled me, all whom
I had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had
followed with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one,
the one whom I held in my arms.
On and on went this nuptial dance. Time after time the music flagged.
The wind let their instruments fall. The pianist got up from the
piano. The first fiddle shook his head. And every time they were won
over by the imploring persistence of the last intoxicated dancers and
played once more. They played faster and more wildly. Then at last, as
we stood, still entwined and breathless after the last eager dance,
the piano was closed with a bang, and our arms fell wearily to our
sides like those of the wind and strings and the flutist, blinking
sleepily, put his flute away in its case. Doors opened, the cold air
poured in, attendants appeared with cloaks and the bar-waiter turned
off the light. The whole scene vanished eerily away and the dancers
who a moment ago had been all on fire shivered as they put on coats
and cloaks and turned up their collars. Hermine was pale but smiling.
Slowly she raised her arm and pushed back her hair. As she did so one
arm caught the light and a faint and indescribably tender shadow ran
from her arm-pit to her hidden breast, and this little trembling line
of shadow seemed to me to sum up all the charm and fascination of her
body like a smile.
We stood looking at one another, the last in the hall, the last in the
whole building. Somewhere below I heard a door bang, a glass break,
a titter of laughter die away, mixed with the angry hurried noise of
motor-cars starting up. And somewhere, at an indeterminable distance
and height, I heard a laugh ring out, an extraordinarily clear and
merry peal of laughter. Yet it was eerie and strange. It was a laugh,
made of crystal and ice, bright and radiant, but cold and inexorable.
Where had I heard this laugh before? I could not tell.
We stood and looked at one another. For a moment I came to my sober
self. I felt a fearful weariness descend upon me. I felt with
repugnance how moist and limp my clothing hung around me. I saw my
hands emerging red and with swollen veins from my crumpled and wilted
cuffs. But all at once the mood passed, banished by a look from
Hermine. At this look that seemed to come from my own soul all reality
fell away, even the reality of my sensuous love of her. Bewitched we
looked at one another, while my poor little soul looked at me.
“You’re ready?” asked Hermine, and her smile fled away like the shadows
on her breast. Far up in unknown space rang out that strange and eerie
laughter.