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. AnImpromptuof 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 theEroticof 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 Dürer 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 thepianissimoof 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, thushe 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 heheardthe 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 deadin 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 naïve 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 whomare 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 likebuzzurri, 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, themercante 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 thatpositionfrankly 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 ofloukoumes, 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 unswallowedbon-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 æsthetically 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.
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. AnImpromptuof 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 theEroticof 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 Dürer 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 thepianissimoof 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, thushe 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 heheardthe 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 deadin 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 naïve 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 whomare 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 likebuzzurri, 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, themercante 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 thatpositionfrankly 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 ofloukoumes, 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 unswallowedbon-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 æsthetically 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.