Front matter (continued 6)

"Where are we going?" asked the driver, bending down.

"Over there, over there, near the sea! Whip them up!"

George was supporting Hippolyte, who had almost fainted, without trying to revive her. He had but a confused sensation of all that was going on. Real images, and fantastic images, whirled around his brain and gave him hallucinations. A continual buzzing filled his ears, and prevented him from hearing any other sound distinctly. His heart was oppressed with a keen anguish, as in the nightmare—the anguish to emerge from the zone of this horrible dream, the anguish to recover his first lucidity, to feel the loved creature palpitate on his breast, and to see once more the tender smile.

Viva Maria!

Once more the undulation of the hymn reached him; once more the House of the Virgin appeared to him on the left amid the immense human swarm, reddish in the solar conflagration, throned on the summits of the profane tents, irradiating a formidable power.

Viva Maria!

Viva Maria!

The undulation faded away; and at a bend of the hill the Sanctuary disappeared. And, suddenly, a cool breath glided over the vast, waving harvests. And a long blue band cut the horizon.

"The sea! There's the sea!" cried George, as if he had just attained salvation.

And his heart dilated.

"Courage, my soul! Contemplate the sea!"

V.

TEMPUS DESTRUENDI.

CHAPTER I.

The table, laid in the loggia, presented a gay appearance, with its transparent porcelain, its bluish glassware, its crimson pinks, under the golden light of a fixed, large lamp, which attracted the nocturnal moths scattered in the twilight.

"Look, George, look! A devil moth! It has the eyes of a demon. Do you see them shine?"

Hippolyte pointed to a moth larger than the others, strange in appearance, covered with a thick red flush, with projecting eyes which, under the light, glittered like two carbuncles.

"It's coming on you! It's coming on you! Take care!"

She laughed heartily, making fun of the instinctive alarm that George exhibited, in spite of himself, when one of these insects threatened to alight on him. "I must have it!" she cried, with the rapture of a childish caprice.

And she tried to capture the diabolical moth, which, without settling, flew around the lamp. Her attempts, abrupt and violent, were unsuccessful. She upset a glass, knocked over a pyramid of fruit, almost smashed the lamp-shade.

"What fury!" said George, who wanted to excite her. "But you won't succeed."

"I shall succeed," replied Hippolyte obstinately, and looking fixedly at him. "Will you make a bet?"

"What shall we bet?"

"Anything you like."

"Well, then, a love game."

"Very well, a love game."

In the warm light her face was colored with its softest and richest tints, that ideal coloring, "a compound of pale amber and dull gold in which were mingled, perhaps, a few tints of faded roses," in which formerly George had thought he had found all the mystery and all the beauty of the antique Venetian soul emigrated to the kingdom of Cyprus. She wore in her hair a pink, ardent as desire. And her eyes, shaded by the lashes, shone like lakes between the willows in the twilight.

At that instant she appeared the woman of delights, the strong and delicate instrument of pleasure, the voluptuous and magnificent animal destined to ornament a banquet, to enliven a bed, to provoke equivocal phantasies of an æsthetic sensuality. She appeared in the supreme splendor of her animalism—joyous, active, supple, lascivious, cruel.

George observed her with attentive curiosity, and he thought: "What different appearances she assumes in my eyes! Her form is sketched by my desire; her shadows are produced by my thought. Such as she appears to me each instant, she is only the effect of my continual inner creation. She exists only in me. Her appearances change like the dreams of an invalid. Gravis dum suavis! When was that?" He retained but a very confused recollection of the time when he had kissed her brow and decorated her with this title of ideal nobility. Now, this glorification of the loved one had become almost inconceivable to him. He remembered vaguely certain words that she had uttered and that seemed to reveal a depth of soul. "What spoke in her then? Was it not my own soul? It was one of my ambitions to offer to my sad soul those sinuous lips, so she might exhale her sorrow from an instrument of signal beauty."

He looked at those lips. They were slightly contracted, not ungracefully, participating in the intense attention with which Hippolyte waited for an opportunity to seize the night-moth.

She watched for it with sly prudence; she wanted, with one killing blow, to shut up in the palm of her hand the winged prey that was whirling restlessly around the light. She contracted her eyebrows and seemed to be prepared for a spring, ready to jump. She leaped forward two or three times, but without success. The moth was unseizable.

"Confess that you've lost," said George. "I won't abuse my privilege."

"No."

"Confess that you've lost."

"No! Woe to him and to you, if I catch him."

And she resumed her hunt with trembling impatience.

"Oh, he's gone," cried George, who had lost the agile flame-worshipper from sight. "He's flown away!"

Hippolyte was really vexed; the wager had excited her.

She rose and cast a keen glance around the room, to discover the fugitive.

"Here it is!" she cried, triumphant. "There, on the wall! Do you see?"

And she made a sign that she regretted she had cried out.

"Don't stir," she went on in a low tone, turning towards her friend.

The moth had alighted on the luminous wall and stayed there motionless, similar to a little brown spot. With infinite precaution, Hippolyte approached, and her beautiful body, slender and flexible, cast a shadow on the white wall. Quickly her hand was raised, descended, closed.

"I have it! I have it!"

And she exulted with childish joy.

"What forfeit shall I impose? I'll put it down your neck. You are in my power, too."

And she pretended she was about to execute her threat, as on the day she ran after him on the hill.

George laughed, conquered by the spontaneity of that joy, which awoke in him all that still remained to him of his youth. He said:

"Come! now sit down and eat your fruit, quietly."

"Wait, wait!"

"What are you going to do?"

"Wait!"

She drew out the pin which held the pink in her hair, and put it between her lips. Then, gently, she opened her fist, took the moth by the wings, got ready to transfix it.

"How cruel you are!" said George. "How cruel you are!"

She smiled, attentive to her work, while the little victim beat its wings, already despoiled.

"How cruel you are!" repeated George, in a lower but graver voice, noticing on Hippolyte's physiognomy an ambiguous expression, mingled with complacency and repugnance, which seemed to signify that she found a special pleasure in artificially exciting and tormenting her own feelings.

He recalled that in several circumstances she had already shown a morbid taste for this kind of excitation. No pure sentiment of pity had entered her heart, either in presence of the tears and blood of the pilgrims at the Sanctuary or in the presence of the child in its death agony. And he saw her again quickening her step towards the group of curious passers-by leaning against the parapet of the Pincio to distinguish the traces left on the pavement by the suicide.

"Cruelty is latent at the bottom of her love," he thought. "There is something destructive in her, and this shows itself all the stronger as the ardor of her caresses becomes more intense."

And he saw once more the frightful and almost Gorgonian image of this woman, just as she had often appeared to his half-closed eyes in the spasm of voluptuousness or in the inertia of the supreme exhaustion.

"Look!" she said, showing him the moth squirming on the pin. "Look how its eyes shine!"

She presented it in different ways to the light, as when one wishes to cause the scintillation of a gem. She added:

"What a beautiful jewel!"

And, with an easy gesture, she stuck it in her hair. Then, fixing George with her gray eyes:

"You do nothing but think, think, think! What are you thinking of? At least, you used to talk—more perhaps than was necessary. Now you have grown taciturn, you have an air of mystery and conspiracy.... Are you angry with me? Speak, even if it will grieve me."

The tone of her voice, which had suddenly changed, expressed impatience and reproach. Once more she perceived that her lover had been only a meditative and solitary spectator, a vigilant and maybe hostile witness.

"Do speak! I prefer the cruel words of the old days to this mysterious silence. What's the matter? Doesn't it please you to be here? Are you unhappy? Are you tired of me? Are you disappointed in me?"

To be thus suddenly and unexpectedly taken to task exasperated George, but he repressed his anger—he even tried to smile.

"Why these strange questions?" he said calmly. "Does it worry you? I am always thinking of you and the things that concern you."

And quickly, with an amiable smile, fearing that she might suspect a shade of irony in his words, he added:

"You fecundate my brain. When I am in your presence my inner life is so full that the sound of my own voice displeases me."

She was pleased with this affected phrase, which seemed to elevate her to a spiritual function, to proclaim her the creator of a superior life. The expression of her face became serious, while, in her hair, the nocturnal moth squirmed continuously.

"Permit me to remain silent without being suspected," he continued, appreciating the change produced by his artifice in this feminine soul, which the idealities of love fascinated and exalted. "Permit me to remain silent. Do you ask me to speak when you see me dying under your kisses? Well, it is not your mouth alone which has the power to give me sensations surpassing all known limits. Every moment you give me an excess of sentiment and an excess of thought. You will never imagine what agitations are aroused in my mind by a single one of your gestures. When you stir, when you speak, I see a series of prodigies. At times you give me, as it were, a reminiscence of a life I have never lived. Immensities of darkness are suddenly illumined and live in my memory like unlooked-for conquests. What, then, are the bread, the viands, the fruit—all those material things that make an impression on my senses? What are the very operations of my organs, the external manifestations of my corporeal existence? When my mouth speaks, it seems almost as if the sound of my voice cannot reach the depths in which I live. It seems to me that, not to disturb my vision, I should rest motionless and mute, while you pass, perpetually transformed, across the worlds which you have revealed."

He spoke slowly, his eyes fixed on Hippolyte, fascinated by this extraordinarily luminous face crowned by hair dark and deep as the night and in which a living and dying thing caused a continual palpitation. This face, so near and yet which seemed to him intangible, and these scattered objects on the table, and these high, purple flowers, and this whirl of light-winged forms around the source of the light, and the pure serenity which descended from the stars, and the musical breath which rose from the sea, and all the images reflected by his feelings—all seemed to him as in a dream. His very person, his very voice, seemed fictitious to him. Her thoughts and words were associated in an easy and vague manner. As on the moonlit night in front of the marvellous vine, the substance of his life and of the universal life was dissolved in the mists of the dream.

CHAPTER II.

Under the tent erected on the sand, after the bath, still half-nude, he watched Hippolyte lingering in the sun by the water-side, wrapped in her white peignoir. He had almost painful scintillations in his eyes, and the strong noonday sun caused him a novel sensation of physical trouble, mingled with a sort of vague fear. It was the terrible hour, the supreme hour of light and silence, hovering over the chasm of life. He comprehended the pagan superstition, the holy horror of canicular noon-times on the shore inhabited by a cruel and occult god. At the bottom of his vague fright stirred something like the anxiety of the man who expects a sudden and formidable apparition. He appeared to himself puerilely weak and cowardly, as diminished in courage and strength as after a trial that has not succeeded. In plunging his body into the sea, in presenting his brow to the glare of the sun, in swimming a short distance, in indulging his favorite exercise, in measuring his respiration by the breath of the endless space, he had felt by indubitable indications the impoverishment of his youth, the destructive work of the enemy; he had felt once more the iron band tighten around his vital activity, and so reduce a new zone to inertia and impotency. The sensation of this muscular lassitude became all the deeper in proportion as he regarded more attentively the figure of that woman standing in the splendor of the day.

To dry her hair, she had unfastened it; and the curls, made heavy by the water, fell over her shoulders, so dark that they almost appeared violet. Her erect and slender form, enveloped as in the folds of a dress, stood out half against the glaucous surface of the sea and half against the luminous transparency of the sky. Scarcely could one see, underneath the hair, the profile of her bent and pensive face. She was wholly absorbed in the alternate pleasures of putting her bare feet in the torrid sand and keeping them there as long as she could endure the heat, then in plunging them, all burning, into the caressing waves that licked the sand. This double sensation seemed to afford her infinite enjoyment, in which she lost herself. She tempered and fortified her soul by the contact with free and healthy things, by the complacent absorption of the salt water and the sunbeams. How, at the same time, could she be so ill and so well? How could she conciliate in her being so many contradictions, assume so many aspects in a single day, in a single hour? The taciturn and sad woman in whom epilepsy was breeding, the mistress, eager and convulsed, whose ardor was at times alarming, whose sensuality had at times the lugubrious appearance of agony—this same creature, standing at the edge of the sea, had senses capable of gathering and savoring all the natural delights shed over the surrounding things, of appearing similar to the images of the ancient Beauty leaning over the harmonious crystal of a Hellespont.

She had an evidently superior power of resistance. George viewed her with a vexation which, becoming gradually concentrated, ended by assuming the seriousness of rancor. The sentiment of his own weakness was disturbed by hatred in proportion as his perspicacity became more lucid and almost vindictive.

Those bare feet, which by turns she burnt in the sand and cooled in the water, were not beautiful; the toes were even deformed, plebeian, not at all delicate—they bore the impress of a lowly origin. George looked at them attentively, saw only them, with an extraordinary clearness of perception, as if the details of their shape had revealed a secret to him. And he thought:

"How many impure things are fermenting in that blood! All the hereditary instincts of her race persist in her, indestructible, ready to develop and arise against any restraint whatsoever. I shall never succeed in making her pure. I shall be able only to superpose her real individuality above the changing images of my dreams; and she will be able only to offer to my solitary intoxication the indispensable instrument of her organs."

But, while his intelligence reduced this woman to be but a simple motif for his imagination and despoiled of all value the palpable form, the very acuteness of the present perception made him feel that what attached him to her the most was precisely the real quality of that flesh; not only what there was most beautiful in her, but, above all, what was least beautiful in her. The discovery of defect did not loosen the tie, did not diminish the fascination. The most vulgar features had an irritating attraction for him. He knew well this phenomenon, which had often asserted itself. Often, with perfect clearness of vision, his eyes had seen the slightest defects of Hippolyte's person accentuated; and they had been for a long time subject to the attraction, they had been compelled to establish them, to examine them, to exaggerate them. And by his senses, in his mind, he had felt an indefinable disquietude, almost always followed by the sudden ardor of desire. That, certainly, was the most terrible indication of the great carnal obsession which a human creature exercises over another human creature. Such was the spell which was obeyed by the nameless lover who, in his mistress, loved above all the marks traced by the years on her white neck, the parting of the hair every day wider, the faded mouth on which the salty tears made the savor of the kisses more lasting.

He thought of the flight of years, of the chain riveted forever by custom, of the infinite sadness of the love become a weary vice. He saw himself, in the future, tied to this flesh like the slave to his iron collar, deprived of will and thought, stupefied and vacuous; he saw the concubine fade, grow old, abandon herself without resistance to the slow work of time, let fall from her inert hands the lacerated veil of illusions, but preserve, nevertheless, her fatal power; he saw the deserted house, desolate, silent, awaiting the supreme visitor, Death!

He recalled the shouts of the little bastards, heard on that distant afternoon in the paternal house. He thought:

"She is barren; her entrails have been visited by a curse. In it the germs perish as in a fiery furnace. She thus thwarts and betrays the most profound instinct of life."

The uselessness of his love appeared to him like a monstrous transgression of the supreme law. But since his love was an uneasy sensuality only, why had he, then, this character of ineluctable fatality? Was not the instinct of the perpetuation of the race the unique and true motive of all sexual love? Was not this blind and eternal instinct the source of desire, and should not desire have as its object, occult or manifest, the generation prescribed by Nature? How was it, then, that so strong a tie attached him to the barren woman? Why was the terrible "will" of the Species so obstinate in demanding, in exacting, the vital tribute of that organism ravaged by disease and incapable of generating? What was lacking in his love was the first reason of love—the affirmation and the development of life beyond the limits of individual existence. What was lacking in the woman he loved was the highest mystery of her sex—the suffering of her who gives birth. And what caused the misery of both was precisely that persistent monstrosity.

"Aren't you coming in the sun?" asked Hippolyte, suddenly turning towards him. "Look how I am standing it! I want to become really what you say—like an olive. Shall I?"

She approached the tent, raising with her two hands the edge of her long tunic, putting in her gestures an almost lascivious grace, as though suddenly invaded by languor.

"Shall I?"

She stooped a little to enter the tent. Under the abundance of snowy folds, her thin and flexible body had movements of feline grace, exhaled a heat and odor which spurred strangely the disturbed sensibility of the young man. And, while she stretched herself out on the mat beside him, there fell all around his flaming face a shower of hair, still wet with salt water, and through which shone the white of her eyes and the red of her lips, like fruits among foliage.

In her voice, as on her face, as in her smile, there was a shadow, an infinitely mysterious and fascinating shadow. It seemed as if she divined her lover's secret hostility, and was getting ready to triumph over it.

"What are you looking at?" she asked with a sudden start. "No, no; don't look at them! They are ugly."

She withdrew her feet, hid them under the folds of her peignoir.

"No, no. I forbid you."

She was vexed and ashamed for a moment; she frowned, as if she had surprised in George's eyes a spark of the cruel truth.

"Unkind man!" she said again, in an ambiguous tone of pleasantry and rancor.

He replied, rather enervated:

"You know that, in my eyes, you are beautiful all over."

And he made the gesture as if to draw her to him and kiss her.

"No; wait. Don't look."

She arose and glided to a corner of the tent. Rapidly, with furtive gestures, she drew on her long black-silk stockings; then she turned round, immodestly, an indefinable smile hovering on her lips. And, before George's eyes, holding up, one after the other, her perfect legs in their shining sheath, she fastened her garters above each knee. In her action there was something wilfully lascivious, and in her smile there was a touch of subtle irony. And that mute and terrible eloquence assumed in the young man's eyes this precise signification: "I am always the unconquered. You have known with me all the enjoyments for which your endless desire was thirsty, and I will clothe myself in lies that will endlessly provoke your desire. What matters to me your perspicacity? The veil that you tear I can repair in an instant, the bandage that you pluck off I can fasten in an instant. I am stronger than your thought. I know the secret of my transfigurations in your soul. I know the gestures and the words that have the virtue of metamorphosing me in your eyes. The odor of my skin has the power to dissolve a world in you."

In him a world was being dissolved while she drew near, serpentine and insidious, to fling herself at his side on the coarse rush mat. Once more, the reality was converted into a confused fiction full of hallucinating images. The reverberation of the sea filled the tent with a reflection of gold, mingled a thousand golden spangles in the threads of the tissue. Through the opening was a glimpse of the immensity of the calm sea, the vast immobility of the waters under an almost lugubrious blaze. And, gradually, these very appearances faded away.

In the silence, he heard nothing more but the rhythm of his own blood; in the shade, he saw nothing but two large eyes fixed on him with a kind of fury. She enshrouded him completely, as if she possessed the nature of a cloud. And through all the pores of this ardent skin he inhaled the marine fragrance like a salt volatilized through a flame. And in the thickness of her still humid hair he beheld the mystery of the deepest forests of sea-weed. And, in the final bewilderment of his conscience, he imagined he touched the bottom of an abyss falling to his death.

Then he heard, as if at a distance, amid the rustling of skirts, Hippolyte's voice, which was saying:

"Do you want to stay a little longer? Are you asleep?"

He opened his eyes; he murmured, all dazed:

"No, I'm not asleep."

"What's the matter?"

"I'm expiring."

He tried to smile. He caught a glance of Hippolyte's white teeth. She said, smiling:

"Do you want me to help you to dress?"

"No. I'll get dressed presently. Go on; I'll join you," he murmured, with a sleepy tone.

"Then I'll go back. I'm too hungry. Dress quickly, and come."

"Yes, immediately."

He started when he felt unexpectedly Hippolyte's lips on his lips. He opened his eyes; he tried to smile.

"Have pity!"

He heard the crunching of the sand under her receding footsteps. A heavy silence again took possession of the beach. At intervals, a light splashing came from the edge of the sea and the neighboring rocks, a feeble noise like that made by animals drinking in a trough.

A few minutes passed, during which he struggled against an exhaustion that threatened to turn into lethargy. Finally, he sat up, not without effort; he shook his head to dissipate his clouded thoughts; he looked all around him with bewilderment. He felt in his whole being a strange sensation of emptiness; he was no longer able to coördinate his ideas; he was almost incapable of thought, and to accomplish any act he needed an enormous effort. He threw a glance outside the tent, and was again invaded by the horror of the light.

"Oh! if, on lying down again, I could never rise again. To die! Never to see her again!" He felt overwhelmed by the certainty that in a few instants he must see this woman again, he must stay near her, he must receive more of her kisses, he must hear her speak.

Before beginning to dress, he hesitated. Several mad ideas passed through his brain. Then he dressed mechanically. He went out of the tent, and the glare of the light made him close his eyes. Through the tissue of his eyelids he saw a great red light. He had a slight vertigo.

When he reopened his eyes, the spectacle of the external things gave him an inexpressible sensation. It seemed to him as if he saw everything again after an indefinite time, during a different existence.

The sandy beach, beaten by the sun, had the whiteness of chalk. On the immense and lugubrious mirror of the sea the incandescent sky seemed to subside, every second more under the weight of one of those gloomy silences that accompany the expectation of an unknown catastrophe. The sandy promontories, with their large, deserted creeks, rose in the form of towers above the black rocks, their crests wooded with olive-trees that stood out against the torrid sky in the attitudes of anger or madness. Stretched out on the rocks, like some monster ready to spring on its prey, the Trabocco, with its numerous machines, had a formidable aspect. In the entanglement of the beams and ropes, one could distinguish the fishermen stooping towards the waters, steady, motionless, like bronzes, and over their tragic lives hung the mortal spell.

All at once, amid the silence, a voice struck the young man's ears. It was the woman calling him from the height of the Hermitage.

He started; he turned round with an impressive palpitation. The voice repeated its call, limpid and strong, as if it wished to affirm its power.

"Come!"

While he climbed up the hill, the smoky mouth of one of the tunnels cast in the air a rumbling reverberation which resounded throughout the gulf. He stopped at the edge of the railroad, taken anew with a slight dizziness; and the flash of an insane idea crossed his wearied brain: "To lie down across the rails.... The end of all in a second!"

Deafening, rapid, and sinister, the train which passed swept in his face the wind it displaced; then, whistling and rumbling, it disappeared in the mouth of the opposite tunnel, the black smoke curling up in the sky.

CHAPTER III.

From dawn until twilight, the songs of the reapers—men and women—alternated on the slopes of the fecund hill. Masculine choruses, with a bacchic vehemence, were celebrating their joy at the abundant feast and the richness of the old wine. For the men of the scythe, the time of the harvest was a time of abundancy. Hour after hour, from dawn to twilight, according to the old-time custom, they interrupted their work to eat and drink on the field of stubble, among the newly made sheaves, in honor of the generous master. And each took from his porringer the share of nourishment sufficient to satiate one of the women. Thus, at the hour of the repast, Boaz had said to Ruth the Moabite: "Come thou hither, and eat of the bread, and dip thou thy morsel in the vinegar. And Ruth came and sat down beside the reapers, and was sufficed."

But the feminine choruses were prolonged in almost religious cadences, with a slow and solemn sweetness, revealing the original holiness of the alimentary work, the primitive nobility of this task, where, on the ancestral soil, the sweat of man consecrated the nativity of the bread.

George heard them and followed them, his soul attentive; and gradually a beneficent and unhoped-for influence penetrated him. His soul seemed to gradually dilate, by an aspiration always broader and more serene in proportion as the wave of the chant, propagated in the still torrid noons, became purer, but in it the hope of the pacifying night began to spread a species of ecstatic calm. It was a renewed aspiration towards the sources of life, towards the Origins. It was, perhaps, the supreme trembling of his youth attacked in the deepest part of its substantial energy, the supreme panting towards the regaining of happiness lost, henceforth, forever.

The harvest-time was drawing to its close. Passing along the mown fields, he caught a glimpse of the nice customs that seemed to be the rites of a georgic liturgy. One day he stopped close to a field already despoiled, where the haymakers had just constructed the last haystack, and he was a witness to the ceremony.

On the things exhausted by the heat hovered the limpid and sweet hour that was about to gather in its crystalline sphere the impalpable ashes of the consumed day.

The field was laid out in a parallelogram, on a tableland girt with gigantic olive-trees, through the branches of which were glimpses of the blue band of the Adriatic, mysterious as the velum perceived in the temple behind the silver palms. The high haystacks were erected at intervals in the form of cones, massive, and opulent with the richness heaped up by the arms of men, celebrated by the songs of women. When the toil was ended, the band of haymakers made a circle around its chief in the centre of the field. They were robust, sunburnt men, dressed in linen. On their arms, on their legs, on their bare feet, they had deformities which the long and slow endurance of manual labor imprints on limbs that toil. In the fist of each man shone a scythe, curved and thin as the moon in its first quarter. From time to time, with a simple gesture of their disengaged hand, they wiped the sweat from their brows, and with it sprinkled the ground where the straw was shining under the oblique rays of the setting sun.

In his turn, the chief made the same gesture; then, raising his hand as if to bless, he cried, in his sonorous voice, rich in rhythm and assonance:

"Let's leave the field, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!"

In chorus, the men of the scythe replied, with a great cry:

"Amen!"

And the chief went on:

"Blessed be our master, and blessed be our mistress!"

The men replied:

"Amen!"

And the chief, in a voice that gradually gathered strength and fire:

"Blessed be he who brought us good food to eat."

"Amen!"

"Blessed be he who says: 'Don't put water in the wine of the haymaker!'"

"Amen!"

"Blessed be the employer who says to his lady: 'Give without measuring, and put sapor in the wine of the haymaker!'"

"Amen!"

The benedictions extended from one to another: to him who had killed the sheep, to him who had washed the herbs and vegetables, to him who had polished the copper saucepan, to him who had seasoned the meats with spices. And the chief, in the fire of enthusiasm, in the sudden transport of a sort of poetic fury, expressed himself, all at once, in couplets. The band replied to him by immense clamors that reverberated through all the creeks, while on the iron of the scythes the flashes of the twilight, and the sheaves arranged on the top of the stacks, had the appearance of flames.

"Blessed be the woman who sings beautiful songs while bringing pitchers of old wine!"

"Amen!"

There was a thunderclap of joy. Then all were silent, and watched approach the chorus of the women, bearers of the last gifts of the mown field.

The women, in double file, were singing, carrying in their arms the large painted jars. And the uninitiated spectator, seeing them advance between the olive-trees, as through a colonnade, against the maritime background, might imagine he saw one of those votive images that develop harmoniously in bas-relief on the friezes of the temples or around the sarcophagi.

As he went back to the house this image of beauty accompanied him along the road, while he slowly wended his way amid the illusions of the evening, in which were still floating the waves of the choruses. At a bend in the road, he stopped to listen to a melodious voice that was approaching and that he seemed to recognize. As soon as he recognized it he started joyfully: it was the voice of Favetta, the young singer with the falconlike eyes, with the vibrating voice that always awoke in him the memory of that delicious May morning, resplendent on the labyrinth of the blossoming furze, on the solitude of the garden of gold in which, to his surprise, he thought he had discovered the secret of joy.

Without suspecting the presence of the stranger, hidden by a hedge, Favetta advanced, leading a cow by the tether. And she sang, her head high, her mouth open towards the sky, the full light on her face; and from her throat the song gushed forth, fluid, limpid, crystal as a stream. Behind her the fine, snowy beast ambled gently, and at each step its fetlock undulated, and its massive udder, swollen with milk by the pasture, dangled between its legs.

When she perceived the stranger, the singer stopped singing, and seemed about to halt; but he went to meet her with a joyous air, as if he had met a friend of the happy days.

"Where are you going, Favetta?" he cried.

Hearing herself addressed by her name, she blushed and smiled with embarrassment. "I'm taking the cow to the shed," she replied.

As she had suddenly slowed down her step, the snout of the beast grazed her hips, and her bold bust stood out between the large horns as in the crescent of a lyre.

"You're always singing," said George, admiring her in this attitude.

"Ah! signor," she said with a smile, "if we couldn't sing, what could we do?"

"Do you remember that morning when you plucked the furze flowers?"

"The first flowers for your lady?"

"Yes; do you remember?"

"I remember."

"Sing again for me the song you sang that day!"

"I can't sing it alone."

"Well, sing another."

"Like that, all at once, in your presence? I'm ashamed. I'll sing on the road. Addio, signor."

"Addio, Favetta."

And she resumed her way along the path, dragging the peaceable beast after her. When she had gone a little way, she struck up the song with all the strength of her voice that invaded the surrounding luminous country.

The sun had just set, and an extraordinarily vivid light was shed over the coasts and over the sea; an immense wave of impalpable gold mounted from the occidental sky to the zenith and redescended to the opposite side, the glassy transparency of which it penetrated with infinite slowness. Gradually the Adriatic became more clear and more gentle, approaching the green hue of the first leaves of the new shoots of willows. Alone, the red sails, as superb as if they were of purple, broke the diffused light.

"It's a holiday," thought George, dazzled by the splendid sunset, feeling palpitate around him the joy of life. Where does the human creature breathe for whom the whole day, from dawn to twilight, should not be a Holiday consecrated by some new conquest?

On the hill, the songs in honor of the nativity of the bread continued and alternated. The long feminine files appeared on the slopes and disappeared. Here and there, in the still air, columns of smoke rose slowly from invisible fires. The spectacle grew solemn and seemed to sink back into the mystery of the primitive centuries, in the holiness of a celebration of rural Dionysiacs.

CHAPTER IV.

Since the tragic night on which Candia, lowering her voice, had spoken of the witchcraft that hung over the men of the Trabocco, that great, whitish framework, stretched along on the rocks, had more than once attracted the strangers' attention and excited their curiosity. In the crescent of the little musical bay, that bristling and treacherous form, continually lying in ambush, seemed to deny the benignity of the solitude. At the burning and motionless noon-times, at the misty twilights, it often took on formidable aspects. At times, when all was still, one could hear the grinding of the capstan and the creaking of the timber. During the moonless nights, the red light of the torches was seen reflected by the water.

On an afternoon of oppressive idleness, George proposed to Hippolyte:

"Shall we go and visit the Trabocco?"

She answered:

"We'll go, if you like. But how can I cross the bridge? I have already tried it once."

"I will lead you by the hand."

"The plank is too narrow."

"We'll try."

They went there. They descended by the path. At the turn they found a sort of stairway hewn in the granite, hardly practicable, and the irregular steps of which stretched out as far as the reefs, at the end of the shaky bridge.

"You see! How can I manage?" said Hippolyte regretfully. "Even looking at it makes my head swim."

The first portion of the bridge was composed of a single plank, very narrow, upheld by stanchions fixed on the rock; the other part, broader, was formed of transverse thin deal boards, of an almost silvery whiteness, worm-eaten, brittle, badly joined, so thin that they seemed likely to break under the slightest pressure of the foot.

"Don't you want to try it?" asked George, with an inner sense of strange relief on finding that Hippolyte would never succeed in accomplishing the perilous passage. "Look; someone is coming to lend us a hand."

A half-naked child ran toward them from the platform, agile as a cat, brown as a rich golden bronze. Beneath his unfaltering foot the deal boards creaked, the rafters bent. Arrived at the end of the bridge, near the strangers, he encouraged them by energetic gestures to confide in him, looking up at them with his piercing eyes like the bird at its prey.

"Don't you want to try?" repeated George, smiling.

Irresolute, she advanced one foot on the shaking plank, looked at the rocks and water, then drew back, incapable of conquering her agitation.

"I fear vertigo," she said. "I am sure I should fall."

She added, with manifest regret:

"Go, go alone. You're not afraid?"

"No. But what will you do?"

"I will sit down in the shade and wait for you."

She added again, with hesitation, as if to try and retain him:

"But why do you go there?"

"I'm going. I'm curious to see."

She seemed sorry not to be able to follow him, vexed at letting him go to a place which she could not reach herself; and what seemed to chagrin and vex her was, not only having to renounce a curiosity and pleasure, but also some other cause, not distinct. What made her suffer, also, was the temporary obstacle that was about to be interposed between her lover and herself, that obstacle over which she was powerless to climb.

So essential had become the necessity of holding her lover always attached to her by a sensible bond, to be with him in uninterrupted contact, to dominate him, to possess him!

She said, a scarcely perceptible note of anger in her voice:

"Go, go along."

George became cognizant of a sentiment in himself that contrasted with the instinctive sentiment of Hippolyte; it was a sort of relief to establish beyond doubt that there was a place where Hippolyte could not follow him, a refuge completely inaccessible to the Enemy, a retreat defended by the rocks and by the sea where he could at last find a few hours of real repose. And these two impressions of their souls, although indistinct and even somewhat puerile, but certainly opposed, demonstrated the actual position of the lovers toward one another: the one, a conscious victim destined to perish; the other, an unconscious and caressing executioner.

"I'll go," said George, with a shade of provocation in his voice and attitude. "Good-by."

Although he did not feel sure of himself, he refused the child's assistance, and was very careful to take bold and sure steps, not to hesitate, not to vacillate on the shaking plank. As soon as he had put foot on the wider part, he hastened his steps, still preoccupied by Hippolyte's look, instinctively giving to his efforts the heat of a hostile reaction. When he trod the planks of the platform, he felt the illusory sensation of finding himself on the bridge of a ship. In one second, the freshness of the short, splashing sea that broke on the rocks revived in his memory certain fragments of the life that he had lived on the Don Juan; and he felt through all his being a sudden thrill at the chimerical idea of raising the anchor.

Immediately after, his gaze was attracted to the surrounding objects, the slightest details of which he remarked with his usual lucidity.

Turchino had saluted him abruptly, with a gesture that neither word nor smile softened, as if no event whatever, however unusual and extraordinary it might be, would have the power to interrupt even for a second the terrible preoccupation that appeared on his terrene face, almost chinless, scarcely larger than a fist, with a long, prominent nose, pointed like the snout of a pike, between two small, glittering eyes.

The same preoccupation was legible in the faces of his two sons, who also saluted in silence, and resumed their work without laying aside their immutable sadness. They were boys of over twenty, fleshless, sunburnt, agitated by a continual muscular restlessness, like demoniacs. All their movements had an air of convulsive contraction, of starts; and beneath the skin of their chinless faces the muscles could be seen, at moments, trembling.

"Is the fishing good?" asked George, pointing to the large, immerged net, whose corners could be seen at the surface of the water.

"Nothing to-day, signor," murmured Turchino, in a tone of suppressed anger.

After a pause, he added:

"Who knows? Perhaps you've brought us good luck."

"Draw up the net. Let's see."

His sons began to manoeuvre the capstan.

Through the interstices of the planks could be seen the reflecting and foaming waves. In a corner of the platform stood a low cabin with a straw roof, the summit of which had a layer of red tiles, and decorated with a piece of sculptured oak in the form of a bull's head with two large, connecting horns—a charm against witchcraft. Other amulets were suspended from the roof, mingled with wooden disks, on which were glued with pitch pieces of mirror, round as eyes; and a bunch of four-pronged rusty forks lay before the low door. To right and left, two large vertical masts were erected, fixed on the rock, fastened at their bases by stakes of all dimensions, that intercrossed and mingled, riveted to one another by enormous nails, bound by iron wire and cordage, strengthened in a thousand ways against the rage of the sea. Two other horizontal masts crossed the first two and stretched out like bowsprits beyond the rocks, over the deep water teeming with fish. At the forked extremities of the four masts hung pulleys provided with cords corresponding to the corners of the square net. Other cords passed through other pulleys, at the end of smaller spars; as far a the most distant rocks, the stakes driven in sustained the re-enforced cables; innumerable planks, nailed on the beams, strengthened the weakest points. The long and obstinate struggle against the fury and treacherousness of the waves was as if written on this enormous carcass by means of these knots, these nails, this machinery. The machine seemed to have a life of its own, to have the air and figure of an animated body. The wood, exposed for years to sun, rain, and tempest, showed all its fibres, exhibited all its rugosities and knottiness, revealed every part of its resistant structure, was denuded, was consumed, was white like a tibia, or shining like silver, or grayish like silex, acquired a special character and significance, an imprint just as distinct as that of a person on whom old age and suffering have achieved their cruel work.

The capstan creaked as it turned by the impulsion of the four bars, and the whole machine trembled and creaked under the effort, while the vast net gradually emerged with golden reflections from the green depth.

"Nothing!" grumbled the father, on seeing the empty bottom of the net rise to the surface of the water.

The sons released the bars together, and with still louder creakings the capstan began to turn, beating the air with its four brutish arms, that could have cut a man in twain. The net replunged into the water. All were silent. In the silence was heard only the breaking of the sea against the rocks.

The weight of witchcraft crushed these miserable lives. George had lost all curiosity to question them, to discover, to know; but he felt that this taciturn and tragic company would soon possess for him the attraction of dolorous affinity. Was he not, too, the victim of a malefice? And he looked instinctively toward the beach, where appeared the figure of the woman outlined against a rock.

CHAPTER V.

He returned to the Trabocco almost every day, at different hours. It became the favorite place for his dreams and his meditations. The fishermen had become accustomed to his visits; they received him respectfully, prepared in the shade of the hut a couch for him, made from an old sail smelling of tar. On his part, he was not illiberal toward them.

In listening to the murmur of the waters, in watching the top of the mast, immovable in the azure, he evoked his nautical recollections, relived his wandering life of long-distant summers, that life of limitless liberty that to-day seemed to him singularly beautiful and almost chimerical. He recalled his last voyage on the Adriatic, several months after the Epiphany of Love, during a period of sorrows and poetic enthusiasms, under the influence of Percy Shelley, of that divine Ariel whom the sea had transfigured "into something rich and strange." And he recalled the debarkation at Rimini, the entry into Malamocco, the anchorage before the Schiavoni quays, all gilded by the September sun. Where, now, was his old travelling companion, Adolpho Astorgi? Where was the Don Juan? The preceding week he had received news of it from Chios, in a letter that seemed still impregnated with the odor of mastic, and which announced the coming shipment of a quantity of Oriental confections.

Adolpho Astorgi was truly a fraternal spirit, the only one with whom he had been able to live a little time in complete communion, without feeling the embarrassment, uneasiness, and repugnance that prolonged familiarity with his other friends almost always caused him. How unfortunate he should be so far away now! And at times he represented him to himself as an unexpected deliverer who would appear with his vessel in the waters of San Vito to propose escape to him.

In his incurable weakness, in this total abolition of active will, he lingered at times in dreams of this kind; he implored the arrival of a strong and imperious man who would roughly rouse him, and who, breaking his chains, with an abrupt and definite blow, forever, would enliven him, carry him off, confine him in some lost region, where he would be unknown to everybody, where he would know no one, and where he could either begin life over again or die a less hopeless death.

Die he must. He knew to what he was condemned, knew it to be irrevocable; and he was convinced that the final act would be accomplished during the week preceding the fifth anniversary, between the last days of July and the first days of August. Since the temptation that, in the horror of the torrid noon, before the bright rails, had traversed his soul like a flash, it even seemed to him that the means were already found. He had listened intently, ceaselessly, to the rumbling of the train, and he felt a strange unrest when the time of its passage approached. As one of the runnels crossed the point of the Trabocco, he could, from his pallet, hear the dull noise that made the entire eminence tremble; and at times, when he was distracted by other thoughts, he experienced a start of fear, as if he had suddenly heard the rumbling of his destiny.

Was it not the same thought that reigned in him and in these taciturn men? Did not both they and he feel a similar chill in their hearts, even in the most burning heat of the dog-days? It was perhaps this affinity that made him love this place and this company. On the musical waters, he let himself be lulled in the arms of the phantom created by himself, while the will to live grew gradually less, as the heat abandons a corpse.

The great calms of July had come. The sea extended before the view all white, milky, greenish here and there in the vicinity of the shore. A mist, slightly tinted with violet, paled the distant coasts: Cape Moro, the Nicchiola, Cape Ortona, the Vasto Point. The scarcely perceptible undulations of the smooth sea produced between the rocks a deep-toned harmony, measured by equal pauses. Holding himself at the extremity of one of the long, horizontal masts, the child acted as a lookout; with watchful eye he scrutinized beneath him the mirror of the wave, and, from time to time, to entice the frightened fish into entering the net, he threw a stone, the light splash of which increased the surrounding melancholy.

At times, the visitor dozed beneath the caress of the slow rhythms. These brief slumbers were the only compensation for his sleepless nights. And he had the habit of pretending this need of repose, so that Hippolyte might permit him to rest on the Trabocco as long as he pleased. George assured her that he could not sleep elsewhere than on those planks, amid the exhalations of the rocks, amid the music of the sea.

To this music he lent an ear more and more attentive and subtle. From now on he knew all its mysteries, understood all its significations. The feeble splash of the surf, like the lingual sound of a flock quenching its thirst; the great, sudden roar of a giant wave, which, arriving from the offing, meets and breaks the wave refracted from the shore; the most humble note, the most superb note, and the innumerable intermediate scales, and the diverse measures of the intervals, and the most simple chords, and the most complex chords, and all the powers of this profound marine orchestra in the sonorous gulf—he knew all, he understood all.

Mysterious, the twilight symphony developed and swelled, very slowly, very slowly, beneath a sky of chaste violets, and between the ethereal clusters of which shone the first timid glances of the constellations still covered by a veil. Here and there, errant breezes raised and pushed the billows, rare at first, then more frequent, then weaker; they raised and pushed the waves whose delicate crests blossomed, stole a glint from the twilight, foamed a moment, and fell back languidly. Now like the dull sound of cymbals, now like the sound of silver disks clashed against one another, such was the sound produced in the silence by those falling and expiring waves. New billows arose, engendered by a stronger gust, curved limpidly, bore in their curvature the grace of the closing day, broke with a sort of indolence, like restless white rose-trees shedding their eaves, and leaving durable foam, like petals, on the mirror that stretched out where they disappeared forever. Still others arose, increased in velocity and strength, approached the shore, reached it with a triumphant roar followed by a diffused murmur similar to the rustling of dry leaves. And, while this illusionary rustling of the unreal forest lasted, other waves, over there, over there, on the crescent of the gulf, unfurled at constantly diminishing distances, to be followed by the same murmur, so that the sonorous zone seemed to extend to the infinite by the perpetual vibrations of a myriad of dry leaves.

The water rushed on the unshakable rocks with the impetuous warmth of love or anger; it dashed over them roaring, washed over them foaming, invaded with its liquidity the most secret crevices. It seemed that an ultra-sovereign natural soul was filling with its frantic perturbation an instrument as vast and multiple as an organ, guilty of every discordance, touching all the notes of joy and pain.

The water laughed, moaned, prayed, sang, caressed, sobbed, threatened—by turns joyous, plaintive, humble, ironical, coaxing, dejected, cruel. It dashed to the summit of the highest rock, to fill the little cavity round as a votive cup; it crept into the oblique crevice where swarmed the mollusks; it sank into the soft carpets of coralline, tearing them and creeping as lightly as a serpent on a bed of moss. The regular dripping of the waters which ooze in the occult cave, the rhythmic overflow of the springs similar to the pulsation of a vast heart, the harsh splashing of the streams on the steep declivity, the dull rumbling of the torrent imprisoned between two walls of granite, the reiterated thunder of the river precipitated from the heights of the cataract—all these sounds produced by running waters on the inert stone and all the sports of their echoes, the sea imitated. The tender word that one murmurs apart in the shade, the sigh exhaled by a mortal anguish, the clamor of a multitude buried in the depths of a catacomb, the sob of a titanic bosom, arrogant and cruel derision—all these sounds produced by the human mouth when sad or gay, the sea imitated. The nocturnal choruses of the spirits with the aërial tongues, the whispering of the phantoms put to flight by the dawn, the suppressed grins of fluid and malevolent creatures in ambush on the threshold of their lairs, the calls of vocal flowers in sensual paradises, the magic dance in the moonlight—all these sounds that the ears of the poets listen to in secret, all the enchantments of the antique siren, the sea imitated. One and multiple, elusive and imperishable, it enclosed in itself all the languages of Life and Dreamland.

In the attentive mind of the auditor it seemed like the resurrection of a world. The grandeur of the marine symphony revived in him faith in the unlimited power of music. He was stupefied at having been able to deprive his soul so long of this daily nourishment, of having renounced the only means conceded to man to free himself from the deception of appearances and to discover in the inner universe of the soul the real essence of things. He was stupefied at having been able to neglect so long this religious cult, which, after Demetrius's example, he had practised with so much fervor since the first years of his infancy. For Demetrius and for himself, had not music been a religion? Had it not revealed to both the mystery of the supreme life? To both it had repeated, but with a different sense, the words of Christ: "My kingdom is not of this world."

And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

Once more George felt himself penetrated by the supernatural fascination which that man, existing outside of life, exercised upon him from the bottom of the tomb. Distant things came back to his memory similar to indistinct waves of harmony; elements of thought received from that teacher seemed to take vague forms of rhythm; the ideal sceptre of the defunct appeared to be transfigured musically, to lose its visible outlines, to reënter into the profound unity of the being, into that being which the solitary musician, in the light of his inspiration, had discovered under the diversity of the Appearances.

"Without doubt," he thought, "it is music that initiated him into the mystery of Death, that showed him, beyond this life, a nocturnal empire of marvels. Harmony, an element superior to time and space, had given him, like a beatitude, a glimpse of the possibility of freeing himself from space and time, of detaching himself from the individual will that confined him in the prison of a personality enclosed in a restricted place, that kept him perpetually subject to the brutish matter of corporeal substance. How he had a thousand times felt in himself, in the moments of inspiration, the awakening of the universal will; what extraordinary joy he had tasted on recognizing the supreme unity that is at the bottom of things; he believed that death would be a means for prolonging his existence in the infinite, that he would become dissolved in the continuous harmony of the Great All and would participate in the endless voluptuousness of the Eternal. Why should I, too, not have the same initiator into the same mystery?"

Elevated images arose in his mind, at the same time as the stars appeared one by one in the silence of the heavens. Some of his most poetic dreams came back to him. He recalled the immense sentiment of joy and liberty that he had felt one day in identifying himself in imagination with an unknown man who was lying in a bier at the summit of a majestic catafalque, surrounded by torches, while at the back of the sacred shadow, in the organ, in the orchestra, and in the human voices, the soul of Beethoven, the divine teacher, spoke with the Invisible. He saw once more the chimerical vessel laden with a gigantic organ that, between the sky and the sea, in infinite distances, poured over the calm wave torrents of harmony from its forests of tubes, while twilight pyres blazed on the extreme horizon, or the serenity of the moon spread all over the ecstatic sky, or in the circle of the darkness the constellations shone from the heights of their crystal chariots. He reconstructed that marvellous Temple of Death, all of white marble, where remarkable musicians, stationed between the columns of the propylon, fascinated with their strains the young men as they passed, and put so much art in initiating them that never did one initiated, when placing his foot on the funereal threshold, look back to salute the light in which, up to then, he had found joy.

"Give me a noble manner of dying. Let Beauty spread one of her wings out under my last step! It is all I implore from my Destiny."

A lyric breath expanded his thought. The end of Percy Shelley, so often envied and dreamed of by him under the shadow and flapping of the sail, reappeared to him in an immense flash of poetry. That destiny had superhuman grandeur and sadness. "His death is mysterious and solemn as that of the ancient heroes of Greece which an invisible power removed unexpectedly from the earth and carried off transfigured into the Jovian sphere. As in the song of Ariel, nothing of him is destroyed; but the sea has transfigured him into something rich and strange. His youthful body is burning on a pyre, at the foot of the Apennine, before the solitude of the Tyrrhenian Sea, under the blue arch of heaven. He is burning with aromas, with incense, with oil, with wine, with salt. The sonorous flames are rising in the still air, vibrating and chanting towards the sun, a looker-on that makes the marbles scintillate on the tops of the mountains. As long as the body is not consumed, a seagull circles the pyre with its flights. And then, when the body, in ashes, falls apart, the heart appears, bare and intact."

Had not he, too, perhaps, like the poet of Epipsychidion, loved Antigone during an anterior existence?

Beneath him, around him, the symphony of the sea swelled, swelled in the shade; and over him, the silence of the starry sky grew deeper. But from the shore came a rumbling without resemblance to any other sound, very familiar. And, when he turned his gaze on that side, he saw the two headlights of the train, like the fulguration of two eyes of fire.

Deafening, rapid, and sinister, the train that passed shook the promontory; in a second it had dashed across the open space; then, whistling and roaring, it disappeared in the mouth of the tunnel opposite.

George started to his feet. He perceived that he was alone on the Trabocco.

"George, George, where are you?" It was the uneasy cry of Hippolyte, who had come to look for him—it was a cry of anguish and fear.

"George! Where are you?"

CHAPTER VI.

Hippolyte exulted from joy when George told her of the near arrival of the piano and pieces of music. How grateful she was to him for that kind surprise! At last, they would have something to break the monotony of the long days and to keep them from temptation.

She laughed as she alluded to that species of erotic fever with which she maintained continual ardor in her lover; she laughed as she alluded to their carnalism, interrupted only by the silences of lassitude or by some caprice of the loved one.

"In that way," she said, laughing, with a touch of irony yet without bitterness, "in that way you won't have to take refuge on your horrid Trabocco. Will you?"

She drew close to him, laid her hands on his head, pressed his temples between her palms, and gazed into the depths of his pupils.

"Confess that you took refuge there because of that," she murmured, in a coaxing voice, as if to induce him to confess.

"Because of what?" he demanded, feeling under the contact of her hands the sensation one feels when one grows pale.

"Because you are afraid of my kisses."

She pronounced the words slowly, almost scanning the syllables, and in a voice which had all at once assumed singular limpidity. She had in her look an indefinable mixture of passion, irony, cruelty, and pride.

"Is it true, is it true?" she insisted.

She continued to press his temples between her palms; but, gradually, her fingers crept into his hair, slightly tickled his ears, descended to his neck with one of those multiple kisses in the science of which she was an accomplished artist.

"Is it true?" she repeated in a subtle, coaxing tone that she knew well, by experience, was most efficacious in arousing her lover. "Is it true?"

He did not reply; he closed his eyes; he abandoned himself; he felt life slipping by—the world fading away.

Once more he was succumbing at the mere contact of those thin hands; once more the Enemy was triumphantly essaying its power. It seemed as if she were saying: "You cannot escape me. I know you fear me, but the desire I arouse in you is stronger than your terror. And nothing intoxicates me so much as to read that terror in your eyes, to surprise it in the shudder of your fibres."

In the ingenuousness of her egotism, she did not appear to have the least consciousness of the evil she was doing, of the work of destruction that she was carrying on without truce or mercy. Accustomed as she was to her lover's peculiarities—his melancholies, his intense and mute contemplations, his sudden uneasiness, his sombre and almost insane ardor, his bitter and ambiguous words—she did not comprehend all the gravity of the actual situation, that she was aggravating more every hour. Gradually, excluded from all participation in George's inner existence, she had, at first by instinct, and afterwards deliberately, made it her study to fortify her sensual dominion over him. Their new way of life, in the open air, in the country, on the seashore, favored the development of her animalism, aroused in her nature a factitious strength and the need of exercising that strength to excess. Complete idleness, the absence of commonplace cares, the continual presence of the loved one, the common possession of the couch, the scantiness of their Summer attire, the daily bath—all those new habits concurred to subtilize and multiply her voluptuous artifices, at the same time offering her numerous opportunities to repeat them. And it really seemed as if she were making ample amends for her coldness in the early days and her inexperience of the early months, and that she was now corrupting him who had corrupted her.

She had become so expert, so certain of her effects, she was so quick at unexpected inventions, so graceful in her gestures and attitudes, she showed at times in the offer of herself such violent frenzy, that George could no longer see in her the bloodless and wounded creature who used to submit with profound astonishment, the ignorant and frightened creature who had given him that fierce and divine spectacle—the agony of modesty felled by victorious passion.

A short time ago, as he had watched her sleeping, he had thought: "True sensual communion is also a chimera. The senses of my mistress are not less obscure than her soul. I shall never succeed in surprising in her fibres a secret disgust, an appetite unsatisfied, an irritation unappeased. I shall never succeed in knowing the different sensations produced in her by the same kiss repeated at different times." Yet Hippolyte had acquired that science over him, she possessed that infallible science; she knew her lover's most secret and subtle sensibilities and knew how to move them with a marvellous intuition of the physical conditions that depend on them, and their corresponding sensations and their associations, and their alternatives.

But the inextinguishable desire that she had enflamed in George burned her, too. A sorceress, she herself felt the effects of her own spell. The consciousness of her power, essayed a thousand times without failure, intoxicated her, and this ravishment blinded her, prevented her from perceiving the great shadow that was thickening every day behind the head of her slave. The terror that she had surprised in George's eyes, his attempts at flight, the thinly disguised hostilities, excited her instead of restraining her. Her artificial taste for transcendent life, for extraordinary things, for mystery, tastes that George had educated in her, took pleasure in these symptoms significant of a deep change. Formerly her lover, separated from her, tortured by the anguish of desire and jealousy, had written her: "Is that love? Oh, no! It is a sort of monstrous infirmity that can blossom only in me, for my joy and my martyrdom. I love to think that no other human creature has experienced that feeling." She was proud at having aroused such a sentiment in a man so different from the commonplace men she had known; she became exalted as she recognized, hour by hour, the strange effects of her exclusive domination on this morbid-minded man. And she had no other object than to exercise her tyranny, with a mixture of levity and seriousness, passing by turns from playfulness to wilful abuse.

CHAPTER VII.

Sometimes, when at the edge of the sea, contemplating the unconscious woman standing near the calm and perilous waves, George thought: "I could easily cause her death. She often tries to swim leaning on me. I could easily smother her under the water, let her drown. No suspicion would attach to me; the crime would appear like an accident. Only then, in front of the corpse of the Enemy, should I have an opportunity to find the solution of my problem. Since she is now the centre of all my existence, what change would take place in me after her disappearance? Have I not more than once experienced a feeling of peace and liberty in thinking of her as dead, enclosed forever in the tomb? Perhaps I should succeed in saving myself and reconquering life, if I made the Enemy perish, if I removed the Obstacle." He dwelt on this thought; he tried to construct a representation of his being freed and appeased in a future without love; he took pleasure in enveloping his mistress's sensual body in a fantastic shroud.

Hippolyte was timid in the water. During her swimming lessons she never ventured beyond her depth. A sudden terror seized her when, on resuming the vertical position, she did not at once feel ground under her feet. George urged her to venture, with his help, as far as a rock situated a short distance from the shore, about twenty strokes from her depth. Very slight effort was necessary to swim there.

"Be brave!" he kept repeating, to convince her. "You'll never learn unless you are courageous. I'll stay near you."

Thus he enveloped her with his homicidal thought; and he had a long inner thrill each time, during the incidents of the bath, that he became convinced of the extreme facility with which he could carry his thoughts into effect. But the necessary energy failed him, and he confined himself to proposing the swim to the rock and leaving the rest to chance. In his present, weak condition, he himself would be in peril if Hippolyte, seized by fright, took violent hold of him. But such a probability did not dissuade him from making the attempt; on the contrary, it made him more determined to do so.

"Be brave! Cannot you see that the rock is so near that we can almost touch it with our hands? Swim slowly, by my side. You can rest when you're there. We'll sit down; we'll gather some coral. Come, be brave!"

He dissimulated his own anxiety with difficulty. She resisted, undecided, wavering between fear and caprice.

"Suppose my strength gives out?"

"I'll be there to help you."

"And if your strength isn't sufficient?"

"It will be. You see how close the rock is."

Smiling, she touched her lips with her wet fingers.

"The water is so salt!" she said, pouting.

Then, her last repugnance overcome, she suddenly made up her mind.

"Come! I'm ready."

Her heart did not beat so fast as the heart of her companion. As the water was very calm, almost motionless, the first strokes were easy. But suddenly, through lack of experience, she began to hurry and blow herself. A false movement filled her mouth with water; panic seized her; she cried, struggled, drank in more.

"Help, George! Help!"

Instinctively, he dashed to her aid and caught hold of the shrivelled fingers that clutched him. Under the clutch, and weight, he weakened; and he had a sudden vision of the foreseen end.

"Don't hold me like that!" he cried. "Don't hold me like that! Leave me an arm free!"

The brutal instinct of self-preservation restored his strength. He made an extraordinary effort, swam the short distance with his burden; and he touched the rock, his strength exhausted.

"Cling hold!" he said to Hippolyte, unable to raise her himself.

Finding herself safe, she had recovered her promptness of action; but, barely seated on the rocks, gasping and dripping, she burst into sobs.

She cried violently, like a child; and her sobs exasperated George instead of touching him. He had never seen her cry such a torrent of tears, with such swollen and burning eyes, making such a grimace. He thought her ugly and pusillanimous. He felt an angry rancor toward her, and at heart almost a regret for having given himself that trouble and taken her from the water. He imagined her drowned, disappeared in the sea; he imagined his own emotion on seeing her disappear, and then the signs of grief that he would give in public, his attitude in front of the cadaver cast up by the waves.

Stupefied at seeing herself left to her tears without a consoling word, she turned toward him. She had stopped crying.

"What shall I do to get back?" she asked.

"Make another attempt," he answered, with a touch of mockery.

"No, no; never!"

"What, then?"

"I'll stay here."

"Very well. Addio!"

And he made a gesture as if to dive in the sea.

"Addio! I'll shout. They'll come and rescue me."

She passed from sobbing to laughter, her eyes still full of tears.

"What's that on your arm?" she asked.

"The marks of your nails."

He showed her the bleeding scratches.

"Do they hurt?"

She felt sorry, and stroked the arm with her hand.

"It was your fault—only yours, wasn't it?" she continued. "You made me come. I didn't want to——"

Then, smiling:

"It was perhaps a way to get rid of me?"

A shudder ran through her:

"What a horrible death! The water is so bitter!"

She bent her head down to one side, and felt the water run from her ear, warm as the blood.

The sun-beaten rock was hot, brownish, and slippery, like the back of a living animal; and at its base, it swarmed with infinite life. The green vegetation undulated on the surface of the water with the suppleness of unloosened hair, with a light, splashing sound. The solitary rock, which received the heavenly heat, exercised a sort of seduction, and communicated it to its people of happy creatures.

As if allowing himself to be won by this seduction, George stretched himself out on his back. For a few seconds he applied his consciousness to perceive the vague feeling of comfort that penetrated his wet skin drying in the heat emanated from the stones and in that of the direct rays. Phantoms of distant sensations came back to his memory. The thought of the chaste baths of formerly, of the long apathies on the sand, more ardent and more suave than a female body. Oh! for solitude, liberty, love without the accessories, love for dead or inaccessible women! Hippolyte's presence prohibited forgetfulness, recalled incessantly the image of the physical relation, of the accouplement operated by ignoble organs, of the infecund and sad spasm which had since become the unique manifestation of their love.

"Of what are you thinking?" asked Hippolyte, touching him. "Do you want to stay here?"

He rose. He replied:

"Let's go."

The life of the Enemy was still in his hands. He could still destroy it. He cast a rapid glance around him. A heavy silence hung over the hill and the beach; on the Trabocco, the taciturn fishermen were watching their net.

"Come, be brave!" he repeated, smiling.

"No, no; never again!"

"Let's stay here, then."

"No. Let's call the men of the Trabocco."

"They'll laugh at us."

"Very well! I'll call them myself."

"If you didn't get frightened—if you didn't clutch me so, I should be strong enough to carry you."

"No, no. I want to go back in the fannizza."

She was so determined that George let her have her way. He stood up on the rock, and, making a speaking trumpet of his hands, he called one of Turchin's sons.

"Daniel! Daniel!"

On hearing this repeated shout, one of the fishermen left the capstan, crossed the bridge, climbed down, and began to run along the beach.

"Daniel, bring the cannizza."

The man heard, turned back, went toward the boathouse, dragged the little dingy into the water, and, pushing off with a long pole, proceeded towards the rock.

CHAPTER VIII.

The next morning—it was a Sunday—George, seated beneath the oak, was listening to old Colas, who was relating how, several days before, at Tocco Casauria, the new Messiah had been arrested by the police and led to the Saint Valentine prison with several of his disciples. The old man said, shaking his head:

"Our Lord Jesus Christ himself suffered from the hate of the Pharisees. Oreste came into the district to bring peace and abundance, and they put him in prison!"

"O father, don't grieve," cried Candia. "The Messiah can leave the prison when he wishes to, and we'll see him again here. Wait and see!"

She was leaning against the door-post, supporting, without fatigue, the weight of her peaceful maternity; and in her large ashen eyes shone an infinite serenity.

All at once, Albadora, the septuagenarian Sibyl, who had brought into the world twenty-two children, remounted to the court, by the path; and, pointing to the neighboring shore of the left promontory, she announced, deeply moved:

"A child has been drowned yonder!"

Candia made the sign of the cross.

George rose and ascended to the loggia, in order to observe the point indicated. On the beach, at the foot of the promontory, near the reefs and the tunnel, there was a white spot, doubtless the cloth that covered the little corpse. A group of people stood close by.

As Hippolyte had gone to mass with Helen, to the chapel of the Port, he was curious to go down, and said to his hosts:

"I'll go and see."

"Why do you want to put a pain in your heart?" asked Candia.

He turned quickly into the path, took a short cut to the beach, walked along the edge of the sea. On arriving at the place of the accident, he was panting a little. He asked:

"What has happened?"

The assembled peasants saluted him, making room for him. One of them answered, calm:

"It's the son of a mother, who's been drowned."

Another, clothed in linen, who appeared to be in charge of the corpse, stooped, and raised the cloth.

The little body appeared, inert, stretched on the hard beach. It was the body of a child of eight or nine, a thin and frail blond. For a pillow, they had put beneath his head his poor rags rolled up in a bundle: his shirt, blue breeches, red belt, soft felt hat. His face was scarcely livid, with a snub nose, prominent forehead, very long eyelashes, a half-open mouth with large, violet-colored lips between which showed the white teeth, spaced one from another. His neck was thin, flaccid, like a withered stem, marked with tiny folds. The tendons of the arm were weak; the arms were slender, covered with a down like the fine feathers that cover a newly hatched bird. His ribs were prominent and distinct; a darker line divided the skin in the middle of the chest; the umbilicus protruded like a knot. The feet, a little swollen, had the same yellowish color as the hands; and the small hands were callous, covered with warts, with white nails that were beginning to turn livid. On the left arm, on the thighs near the groin, and lower down, on the knees, along the limbs, reddish spots appeared. All the particularities of this miserable body assumed an extraordinary significance in George's eyes, immobilized as they were, and fixed forever in the rigidity of death.

"How did he get drowned? Where?" he asked in a low voice.

The man clad in linen began, not without some signs of impatience, the story, that, doubtless, he had already repeated too often. He had a square, bestial face, hairy eyebrows, and a broad, hard, fierce mouth. The story he told was as follows:

Immediately after having taken his sheep back to the barn, the child had eaten his lunch and had gone down to bathe in company with a comrade. But scarcely had he put foot in the water than he fell and was drowned. At his comrade's cries, someone had run from the house built on the cliffs, and had drawn him out half-dead, without getting wet above the knees. He had lowered the head to cause vomiting, had shaken him, but uselessly. And, so as to illustrate just where the poor little fellow had gone down, the man picked up a stone and threw it into the sea.

"There, just there—three arms' length from the shore."

The calm sea breathed softly near the head of the little corpse. But the sun blazed on the beach; and, in presence of this pallid corpse, there seemed something implacable in that burning sky and these coarse witnesses.

George asked:

"Why don't you carry him into the shade, to a house, a bed?"

"He mustn't be moved," replied the guardian sententiously. "Until the arrival of the Authorities, he must not be moved."

"But, at least, carry him into the shade—there, under that embankment."

Obstinately, the guardian repeated:

"He must not be moved."

And nothing could be more sad than that frail, lifeless creature, stretched on the strand, and guarded by that impassive brute, who always repeated the same tale in the same words, who always made the same motion when throwing the stone into the sea.

"There, just there."

A woman came up, a hook-nosed scold, with hard eyes and a bitter tongue—the comrade's mother. One could plainly see on her features a suspicious anxiety, as if she feared an accusation against her own son. She spoke sourly, and displayed almost irritation against the victim.

"It was his fate. God told him, 'Go in the sea and die.'"

She gesticulated vehemently.

"Why did he go in when he couldn't swim?"

A child who did not belong to the district, a boatman's son, repeated disdainfully:

"Why did he go in? Yes, we fellows all know how to swim."

People came up, looked on with cold curiosity, stopped or passed on. One group occupied the railway embankment; another group was looking from the top of the promontory, as at a spectacle. Children, seated or kneeling, played with the little pebbles that they threw in the air to catch them alternately on the backs of their hands and in their palms. Everyone displayed profound indifference at the sight of another's misfortune, and at death.

Another woman, on her way back from mass, came up, in a silk dress, decked with all her gold trinkets. To her, also, the weary guardian repeated his story, and showed the place in the water. This woman was loquacious.

"I always say to my children, 'Don't go near the sea, or I'll kill you.' The sea is the sea. You can't save yourself."

She related stories of drowned people. She recalled the case of the headless corpse that the sea had thrown up at San Vito and which a child had discovered among the rocks.

"There, between those rocks you see. The child came running up, saying, 'There's a dead man.' We thought he was joking. All the same, we went, and we found it. The body had no head. The Authorities came. They buried him in a ditch; then, at night, he was taken up again. He was all mangled and decomposed, but he still had his shoes on his feet. The magistrate said, 'Look, they are better than mine.' He must be a rich man. And he was a cattle-dealer. He had been assassinated; they had cut his head off and thrown him into the Tronto." ...

She continued in a shrill treble, swallowing the excessive saliva, from time to time, with a light, whistling sound:

"Where's the mother? When will the mother come?"

All the assembled women uttered exclamations of pity at that name.

"The mother. The mother will come."

They all turned around, thinking they saw her in the distance, on the burning sand. Others gave information concerning her. Her name was Riccangela; she was a widow with seven children. She had placed this one with the farmers to feed the sheep and earn his bread.

One was saying, as she looked at the corpse:

"His mother had so much trouble to raise him!"

Another said:

"She has even begged alms so as to nourish her children."

A third told that, several months previously, the poor youngster had already come near drowning himself in a stable-yard pond—in three inches of water!

Everyone repeated:

"It was his destiny. He was to die so."

Waiting rendered them uneasy, anxious.

"The mother! The mother's coming!"

George, deeply affected, cried:

"Carry him into the shade, won't you? Or into a house, so that his mother will not see him naked on the sand in the broiling sun!"

The guardian objected obstinately:

"He mustn't be moved. Until the arrival of the Authorities, he mustn't be moved."

The assistants looked at Candia's stranger with surprise. Their number increased. Some occupied the embankment, planted with acacias; others crowned the arid promontory rearing up perpendicularly above the rocks. Here and there, lying on the great, monstrous blocks, clumps of reeds shone like gold, at the foot of the enormous slide of the cliffs, resembling a ruin of a cyclopean tower in front of the immense sea.

Suddenly, above the heights, a voice announced:

"Here she is."

Other voices followed:

"The mother, the mother!"

Everybody turned round; some came down from the embankment; those on the promontory leaned forward. Expectation rendered all dumb. The guardian recovered the corpse with the cloth. In the silence, the sea scarcely gasped, the acacias scarcely rustled.

And then, in the silence, one heard the cries of the new arrival.

The mother came along the shore, in the sun, crying. She was dressed in widow's weeds. Her body bent, she stumbled along on the sand, crying:

"My son! My son!"

She raised her hands to heaven, crying:

"My son!"

One of her older sons, with a red handkerchief knotted about his neck, followed her with a stupefied air, wiping away his tears with the back of his hand.

She walked along the shore, bent, striking her knees, directing her steps toward the white cloth. And while she called the dead, her mouth uttered cries that had nothing human about them, like the yelping of a savage dog. The nearer she came the lower she bent, almost stooping on all fours; when she reached the body, she threw herself on the cloth with a shriek.

She arose. With her coarse and blackened hand, a hand hardened by every toil, she uncovered the corpse. She looked at it for a few instants, motionless, as if petrified. Then, several times, in a piercing voice, with all the force of her lungs, she cried as if to awaken the dead:

"My son! My son! My son!"

The sobs choked her. On her knees, furious, she struck her sides with her fists. Her hopeless gaze wandered around on the people present. And during a lull in that violent tempest she seemed to collect herself.

Then she began to chant.

She chanted her sorrow in a rhythm that rose and fell regularly, like the palpitation of a heart.

It was an ancient monody that, from time immemorial, in the region of the Abruzzi, the women chanted over the loss of their kin. It was the melodious eloquence of the sacred sorrow that spontaneously wells up from the depths of the being, that hereditary rhythm in which the mothers of other times had modulated their lament.

She chanted, chanted:

"Open your eyes, arise, walk, my son! How beautiful you are! How beautiful you are!"

She chanted:

"For a morsel of bread, I have drowned you, my son! For a morsel of bread, I sent you to death! It was for this, then, that I raised you!"

But the woman with the hooked nose interrupted her, snappishly:

"No, you have not drowned him. It was Destiny. No, you didn't send him to his death. You put it in the midst of the bread."

And with a gesture towards the hill on which stood the house that had given hospitality to the child, she added:

"They took care of him there like a jewel in its casket."

The mother continued:

"O my son! Who sent you here? Who sent you here, to be drowned?"

And the snappy woman:

"Who sent him? It was our Lord. He said to him, 'Go into the sea and drown.'"

As George observed in a low voice to one of the bystanders that the child, succored in time, could have been saved, and that they had killed him by putting his head low and suspending him by the feet, he felt the mother's gaze fixed on himself.

"Do something for him, signor," she implored. "Do something for him."

She prayed:

"O Madonna of Miracles, perform the miracle!"

She repeated, touching the head of the dead:

"My son! My son! My son! Arise! Walk!"

Before her, on his knees, was the brother of the dead child; and he sobbed with grief, gazing about him from time to time with a face that had suddenly become indifferent. Another brother, the eldest, remained seated near by in the shadow of a rock, and he simulated grief by hiding his face in his hands. In order to console the mother, the women bent around her with gestures of pity, and accompanied the monody with a few groans.

She chanted:

"Why did I send you away from my house? Why have I sent you to your death? I have done everything to feed my sons, everything but sold myself. And it is for a morsel of bread that I have lost you! That, that is how you were to end. They have drowned you, my son!"

Then the woman with the rapacious nose in a burst of anger raised her skirt, entered the water as far as the knees, and cried:

"Look! He went in this far. Look! The water is like oil. It is a sign that he was to die in this manner."

And she regained the shore in two long strides.

"Look, look!" she repeated, pointing out on the sand the deep imprints of the man who had drawn out the body.

The mother looked on in a stupor; but one would have said that she did not see, that she understood nothing. After the hopeless explosions of grief, there supervened in her short pauses, like the dulling of consciousness. She remained silent; she touched her foot, or leg, mechanically; she dried her tears with her black apron; she seemed to become composed. Then suddenly a new explosion shook her entire frame; she fell on the corpse.

"And I cannot take you away! I cannot take you in my arms to the church! My son! My son!"

She felt him from head to foot, with a slow caress. Her wild anguish became more gentle, more touching. Her hand, sunburnt and callous by work, became infinitely coaxing when she touched her son's eyes, mouth, and forehead.

"How beautiful you are! How beautiful you are!"

She touched his lower lip, already violet-hued; and this slight pressure caused a flow of whitish foam to flow from the mouth. She removed from between the eyelashes a bit of straw, gently, gently, as if she feared to hurt him.

"How beautiful you are, you mother's pet!"

The eyelashes of the child were very long and very blond. On the temples, on the cheeks, a light down gave a golden reflection.

"Don't you hear me? Arise! Walk!"

She took the little hat, worn, soft as a rag. She gazed on him, kissed him. She said:

"I want to keep this as a relic; I want to carry it always on my heart."

She took the red waistband, and said:

"I wish to dress you."

The rough woman who had not left her place approved:

"Yes, let us dress him."

She herself removed the clothes from beneath the head of the corpse, felt in the vest pocket, and found there a piece of bread and a fig.

"You see! They had just given him his meal. They took care of him there like a jewel in its casket."

The mother looked at the little shirt, dirty, torn, on which her tears were falling, and she said:

"Put this shirt on him!"

Promptly the woman shouted up to one of her people on the heights above:

"Bring quickly one of Nufrillo's clean shirts."

The clean shirt was brought. When the mother raised the small body, a little water came from the mouth and rolled down the chest.

"O Madonna of Miracles, perform the miracle!" she prayed, raising her eyes to heaven in a supreme supplication.

Then she laid her sweet burden down again. She took the old shirt, the red waistband, the hat; she rolled them all up into a bundle, and said:

"It will be my pillow; at night I shall rest my head on it. I want to die on it."

She placed the poor relic on the sand near the child's head, placed her temple on it, and stretched out as if on a bed.

They both lay there, side by side, the mother and son, on the hard stones, beneath the burning sky, near the homicidal sea. And she chanted the same cantilena that had formerly shed a chaste slumber over the cradle.

"Get up, Riccangela; get up!" repeated the women around her.

She was not listening to them.

"My son is lying on the stones, and I could not rest there, too! Oh! my son, on these stones."

"Get up, Riccangela. Come!"

She rose. She gazed once more and with terrible intensity on the livid face of the corpse. She called once more, with all the force of her lungs:

"My son! My son! My son!"

Then, with her own hands, she re-covered her heavy loss with the cloth.

And the women surrounded her, drew her a little farther away under the shade of a rock, forced her to sit down, lamented with her.

Gradually the spectators disbanded, dispersed. There remained only a few consolers, and also the man clothed in linen, the impassive guardian who waited for the Authorities. The canicular sun beat down on the beach, and imparted to the funereal cloth a dazzling whiteness. The promontory, perpendicular above the jagged rocks, towered up in the conflagration with its desolate aridity. The sea, immense and green, breathed always evenly. And it seemed that the slow hour would never end.

In the shade of the rock, before the white cloth raised by the rigid form of the corpse, the mother continued her monody in the rhythm rendered sacred by so many sorrows, ancient and recent, of her race. And it seemed as if her lamentation would never cease.