BOOK V

I

THE SUPREME NIGHT

"You are loved of the gods," said the old gaoler. "If I, a poor slave, had committed the hundredth part of your crimes, I should have been bound upon the rack, hung up by the feet, lashed with thongs, burnt with pincers. They would have poured vinegar into my nostrils, overwhelmed and crushed me with bricks, and if I had died under the agony, my body would already he food for the jackals of the burning plains. But you who have stolen, assassinated, profaned, you may expect nothing more than the gentle hemlock, and in the meanwhile you enjoy a good room. May Zeus blast me with his thunderbolt if I can tell why! You probably know somebody at the palace."

"Give me figs," said Chrysis; "my mouth is dry."

The old slave brought her a dozen ripe figs in a green basket.

Chrysis was left alone.

She sat down and got up again, she walked round the room, she struck the walls with the palms of her hands without thinking of anything whatever. She let down her hair to cool it, and then put it up again almost immediately.

They had dressed her in a long garment of white wool. The stuff was hot. Chrysis was bathed in perspiration. She stretched her arms, yawned, and leaned herself against the lofty window.

Outside, the silvery moon shone in a sky of liquid purity, a sky so pale and clear that not a star was visible.

It was on just such a night that, seven years before, Chrysis had left the land of Gennesaret.

She remembered . . . They were five. They were sellers of ivory. Their long-tailed horses were adorned with parti-coloured tufts. They had met the child at the edge of a round cistern . . .

And before that, the blue lake, the transparent sky, the light air of the land of Galilee . . .

The house was environed with pink flax-plants and tamarisks. Thorny caper-bushes pricked one's fingers when one went a-catching butterflies . . . One could almost see the wind in the undulations of the pine grasses . . .

The little girls bathed in a limpid brook where one found red shells under the flowering laurels: and there were flowers upon the water, and flowers all over the mead, and great lilacs upon the mountains, and the line of the mountain was that of a young breast . . .

Chrysis closed her eyes with a faint smile which suddenly died away. The idea of death had just occurred to her. And she felt that, until the last, she would be incapable of ceasing to think.

"Ah!" she said to herself, "what have I done? Why did I meet that man: Why did he listen to me? Why did I let myself be caught in the trap? How is it that, even now, I regret nothing?

"Not to love or to die: that is the choice God has given me. What have I done to deserve punishment?"

And fragments of sacred verses occurred to her that she had heard quoted in her childhood. She had not thought of them for seven years. But they returned, one after the other, with an implacable precision, to apply to her life and predict her penalty.

She murmured:

"It is written:

I remember thy love when thou wast young. For of old thou hast broken thy yoke. And burst thy bonds; And thou hast said: I will no longer serve. But upon every high hill, And under every green tree, Thou hast wandered, playing the harlot. [1]

"It is written:

I will follow after my lovers, Who give me my bread and my wine, And my wool and my flax, And my oil and my wine. [2]

"It is written:

How canst thou say: I am not polluted? See thy way in the valley, Know what thou hast done, O thou dromedary traversing her ways, O thou wild ass, Painting and ever lustful, Who could prevent thee from satisfying thy desire? [3]

"It is written:

_She has played the harlot in the land of Egypt._ She has doted upon paramours Whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, And whose issue is like the issue of horses. Thus thou callest to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, In bruising thy teats by the Egyptians For the paps of thy youth." [4]

"Oh!" she cried. "It is I! It is I!"

"And it is written again:

Thou hast played the harlot with many lovers, And thou wouldst return again to me! saith the Lord. [5]

"But my chastisement also is written:

Behold: I raise up thy lovers against thee: They shall judge thee according to their judgments. They shall take away thy nose and thine ears, And thy remnant shall fall by the sword. [6]

"And again:

She is undone; she is stripped naked, she is led away Her servants wail like doves captive And tabor upon their breasts. [7]

"But does one know what the Scripture says?" she added to console herself. "Is it not written elsewhere:

I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom. [8]

"And elsewhere does not Scripture give this advice:

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart: for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always white, and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest. [9]

She shivered, and repeated in a low voice:

For there is no work, nor device nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, _whither thou goest!_

Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is to see the sun. [10]

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thy heart and in the sight of thine eyes, or ever thou goest to thy long home and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, or the dust return to the earth as it was. [11]

Shivering once more, she repeated slowly:

Or the dust return to the earth as it was.

And as she took her head in her hands in order to stifle her thoughts, she suddenly felt, without having foreseen it, the mortuary form of her cranium through the living skin: the empty temples, the enormous orbits, the flat nose under the cartilage, and the protruding jaws.

Horror! this it was, then, that she was about to become! With frightful lucidity, she had the vision of her corpse, and she passed her hands over her whole body in order to probe to the bottom an idea which, though simple, had never yet occurred to her--that she bore _her skeleton within her_, that it was not a result of death, a metamorphosis, a culmination, but a thing one carries about, a spectre inseparable from the human form, and that the framework of life is already the symbol of the tomb.

A furious desire to live, to see everything again, to begin everything again, to do everything again, suddenly came over her. It was a revolt in the presence of death: the impossibility of admitting that she would never see the evening of the dawning day: the impossibility of understanding how this beauty, this body, this active thought, this opulent life of the flesh could cease to be, in its zenith, and go to rottenness.

The door opened quietly.

Demetrios entered.

[1] _Jeremiah_ II, 2, 20.

[2] _Hosea_ II, 7.

[3] _Jeremiah_ II, 23, 24.

[4] _Ezekiel_ XXIII, 20, 21.

[5] _Jeremiah_ III, 1.

[6] _Ezekiel_ XXIII, 22, 25.

[7] _Nabum_ III, 8.

[8] _Hosea_ IV, 14.

[9] _Ecclesiastes_ IX, 7, 10.

[10] _Ecclesiastes_ XI, 7.

[11] _Ecclestiastes_ XII, 1, 8, 9.

II

DUST RETURNS TO EARTH

"Demetrios!" she cried.

And she rushed forward.

But after carefully dropping the wooden bolt, the young man remained motionless, and his glance betrayed such profound tranquility that Chrysis was suddenly stricken with a cold chill.

She had hoped for an impulse of generosity, a movement of the arms, the lips, anything, an outstretched hand . . .

Demetrios did not move.

He waited in silence for an instant, in an extremely correct attitude, as if he wished clearly to disavow all responsibility in the case.

Then, seeing that nothing was asked of him, he strode towards the window and planted himself in the embrasure to contemplate the dawn of day.

Chrysis sat upon the low bed, with a fixed look in her dulled eyes.

Then Demetrios began to commune with himself.

"It is better thus," He said to himself. "Such trivial amusements on the very eve of death would, as a matter of fact, be most lugubrious. I wonder, however, that she should not have had a presentiment of it from the very beginning, and I marvel that she should have received me so enthusiastically. As for me, it is an adventure terminated. I regret somewhat this denouement, for all things considered, the only crime of which Chrysis is guilty is to have expressed very frankly an ambition which might have been shared by most women, without doubt, and if it were not necessary to cast a victim to the public indignation, I should be satisfied with the banishment of this too-ardent young woman, in order to get rid of her and at the same time leave her the joys of life. But there has been a scandal, and none can stop the course of events. Such are the effects of passion. Thoughtless sensuality, or its contrary, the idea without the reality, do not involve these fatal consequences. We ought to have many mistresses, but to beware, with the help of the gods, of forgetting that all mouths resemble one another."

Having thus, in an audacious aphorism, summed up one of his moral theories, he lightly resumed the normal course of his ideas.

He remembered vaguely an invitation to dine that he had accepted for the night before and then forgotten in the whirl of events, and he resolved to send an apology.

He considered whether he should put his slave-tailor up for sale, an old man who had remained attached to the fashionable cut of the former regime, and who succeeded very imperfectly with the new puckered tunics.

His mind was even so free from all preoccupation that he stumped out upon the wall a rough study of his group of _Zagreus and the Titans_, a variant which modified the position of the principal character's right arm.

Hardly had he finished, when a gentle knock was heard at the door.

Demetrios opened without haste. The old executioner entered, followed by two helmeted hoplites.

"I bring the little cup," he said, smiling obsequiously at the royal lover.

Demetrios kept silence.

Chrysis, half beside herself, raised her head. "Come, my girl," continued the gaoler, "the hour has come. The hemlock is crushed. There is really nothing left but to take it. Do not be afraid. There is no pain."

Chrysis looked at Demetrios, who did not turn away his eyes.

Still continuing to regard him with her great black eyes that were rimmed with green light, Chrysis stretched out her hand, took the cup, and slowly raised it to her mouth.

She dipped her lips in it. The bitterness of the poison and also the pangs of the poisoning had been tempered with honey and narcotics.

She drank half the contents of the cup, then, whether it was that she had seen this gesture at the Theatre, in the _Thyestes_ of Agathon, or whether it was really the outcome of a spontaneous sentiment, she handed the poison to Demetrios. But the young man waved away this indiscreet suggestion.

Then the Galilæan drank the rest of the beverage even to the green slime at the bottom. An agonising smile overspread her cheeks, a smile in which there was certainly a little contempt.

"What must I do?" she said to the gaoler.

"Walk about the room, my girl, until you feel a heaviness in the legs. Then lie down on your back, and the poison will do the rest."

Chrysis walked to the window, leaned her head against the wall, with her temples in her hand, and cast a last look of vanished youth upon the violet dawn.

The orient was bathed in a sea of colour. A long band, livid as a water leaf, enveloped the horizon with an olive-coloured girdle. Higher up, several tints sprang out of one another, liquid sheets of blue-green sky, irisated, or lilac-coloured, melting insensibly into the leaden azure of the upper heavens. Then, these tiers of colour rose slowly, a line of gold appeared, mounted, expanded: a thin thread of purple illumined this melancholic dawn, and, in a flood of blood, the sun was born.

It is written:

"The light is sweet . . ."

She remained thus, standing, so long as her legs could sustain her. When she showed signs of reeling, the hoplites carried her to the bed.

There, the old man disposed the white folds of the robe along the rigid limbs. Then he touched her feet and asked her:

"Do you feel anything?"

She answered:

"No."

He touched her knees and asked her:

"Do you feel anything?"

She made a sign to him that she felt nothing, and suddenly, with a movement of her mouth and shoulders (for her very hands were dead), seized with a supreme frenzy of passion, and perhaps with regret, at this sterile hour, she raised herself towards Demetrios, but before he could answer she fell back lifeless, with the light for ever gone from out of her eyes.

Then the executioner covered her face with the upper folds of her garment: and one of the assistant soldiers, supposing that a more tender past had once united this young man and woman, severed with his sword the uttermost lock of her hair, and it fell down upon the paving-stones.

Demetrios took it in his hand, and in truth it was Chrysis in her entirety, the gold that survived her beauty, the very pretext of her name . . .

He took the warm lock between his thumb and his fingers, severed the strands slowly, dropped them to the-earth, and ground them into the dust under the sole of his shoe.

III

CHRYSIS IMMORTAL

When Demetrios found himself alone in his red studio, littered with marble statuary, rough models, trestles, and scaffoldings, he endeavoured to apply himself once more to his work.

With his chisel in his left hand and his mallet in his right, he resumed, but without ardour, an interrupted rough study. It was the breast and shoulders of a gigantic horse intended for the temple of Poseidon. Under the close-cropped mane, the skin of the neck, puckered by a movement of the head, curved in geometrically like an undulating marine basin.

Three days before, the details of this regular muscular arrangement had entirely absorbed all Demetrios's interest; but on the morning of the death of Chrysis, the aspect of things seemed changed. Less calm than he could have wished, Demetrios could not succeed in fixing his preoccupied thoughts. A sort of veil which he could not lift interposed itself between him and the marble. He throw down his mallet and began to pace about amongst the dusty pedestals.

Suddenly he crossed the court, called a slave, and said to her:

"Prepare the piscina and the aromatics. Bathe me and perfume me, give me my white garments, and light the round perfume-pans."

When he had finished his toilette, he summoned two other slaves.

"Go," said he, "to the Queen's prison; hand the gaoler this lump of potter's earth, and tell him to place it in the death-chamber of Chrysis the courtesan. If the body has not already been thrown into the dungeon, charge him to take no action until he receives my orders. Go quickly."

He put a roughing-chisel into the fold of his girdle and opened the principal door which gave upon the deserted avenue of the Dromos.

Suddenly he halted on the threshold, stupefied by the immense midday light of Africa.

The street was certainly white and the houses white too, but the flame of the perpendicular sunbeams bathed the gleaming surfaces with such a fury of reflections that the limestone walls and the pavements danced with prodigious incandescence in dark blue, red, green, raw ochre, and hyacinth. Great palpitating pillars of colour seemed to hang in the air and to be superimposed in transparent masses over the shimmering, flaming facades. The very lines of the houses lost their shape behind this dazzling magnificence; the right wall of the street rounded off dimly into space, floated like a piece of drapery, and in certain places became invisible. A dog lying near a street-post was literally bathed in crimson.

Lost in admiration, Demetrios saw a symbol of his new existence in this spectacle. He had lived long enough in solitary night, in silence, and in peace. Long enough had he taken moon-beams for light, and, for his ideal, the languid line of a too delicate pose, His work was not virile. There was an icy shiver on the skin of his statues.

During the tragic adventure which had just convulsed his intelligence, he had, for the first time, felt the great living breath of life inflate his breast. If he feared a second ordeal; if, victorious in the struggle, he swore above all things not to run the risk of flinching from the beautiful attitude he had adopted in the face of the world, at any rate he had just realised that that only is worthy of being imagined which penetrates by means of marble, colour or speech to one of the profundities of human emotion--and that formal beauty is merely so much uncertain matter, ever capable of being transfigured by the expression of sorrow or joy.

Just as he was finishing this line of thought, he arrived before the door of the criminal prison.

His two slaves were waiting for him.

"We have brought the lump of red clay," they said. "The body is on the bed. It has not been touched. The gaoler salutes you and hopes you will not forget him."

The young man entered in silence, Followed the long corridor, mounted some steps, and penetrated into the death-chamber. He carefully closed the door after him.

The body lay upon the bed, with the head covered with a veil, the fingers extended, and the feet close together. The fingers were laden with rings: two silver bangles encircled the pale ankles, and the nails of each toe were still red with powder.

Demetrios laid his hand on the veil in order to raise it; but he had no sooner touched it than a dozen flies rapidly escaped from the opening.

He shivered from head to foot. Nevertheless he removed the tissue of white wool and wound it round the hair.

Chrysis' face had little by little become illumined with the expression of eternity that death dispenses to the eyelids and hair of corpses. In the bluish whiteness of the cheeks, the azure veinlets gave the immobile head the appearance of cold marble. The diaphanous nostrils were distended above the fine lips. The fragile ears had something immaterial about them. Never, in any light, even in his dreams, had Demetrios seen such superhuman beauty and such a brilliancy of fading skin.

* * * * *

And then he remembered the words uttered by Chrysis during their first interview: "You only know my face. You do not know how beautiful I am!" An intense emotion suddenly stifles him. He wishes to know. He has the power.

Of his three days of passion he wishes to keep a souvenir which shall last longer than himself.--to lay bare the admirable body, to pose it as a model in the violent attitude in which he saw it in his dreams, and to create, from the corpse, the statue of Immortal Life.

He unclasps the buckle and unties the knot. He throws back the draperies. The body is heavy. He raises it. The head falls backwards. The breasts tremble. The arms drop pendent. He withdraws the robe entirely and casts it into the middle of the chamber. Heavily, the body falls back again.

Placing his two hands under the icy armpits, Demetrios pulls the dead woman to the upper end of the bed. He turns the head over on to the left cheek, collects and arranges the hair splendidly under the back. Then he raises the right arm, bends the forearm over the forehead, closes the still soft fingers over the stuff of a cushion: two admirable muscular lines, descending from the ear and elbow, meet under the right breast and bear it like a fruit.

Afterwards, he arranges the legs, one stretched out stiffly on one side, the other with the knee raised and the heel almost touching the croup. He rectifies a few details, turns over the waist a little to the left, straightens out the right foot and takes off the bracelets, the necklaces and the rings, in order not to mar by a single dissonance the pure and complete harmony of feminine nudity.

The Model has taken the pose.

Demetrios casts the dark lump of clay upon the table. He presses it, kneads it, lengthens it out into human form: a sort of barbarous monster takes shape under his burning fingers: he looks.

The motionless corpse preserves its attitude of passion. But a thin thread of blood trickles from the right nostril, flows upon the lip, and falls, drop by drop, under the half-opened mouth.

Demetrios continues. The rough figure takes life and precision. A prodigious left arm circles over the body as if it were clasping someone in a tight embrace. The muscles of the thigh stand out violently. The heels are bent upwards.

* * * * *

When night mounted from the earth and darkened the low chamber, Demetrios had finished the statue.

He had it carried to his studio by four slaves. That very evening, by lamplight, he had a block of Parian marble rough-hewed, and a year after that day he was still working at the marble.

IV

PITY

"Gaoler, open! Gaoler, open!"

Rhodis and Myrtocleia knocked at the closed door.

The door opened half way.

"What do you want?"

"To see our friend," said Myrto. "To see Chrysis, poor Chrysis, who died this morning."

"It is not allowed; go away!"

"Oh, let us enter. No one will know. We will tell no one. She was our friend, let us see her once more. We will go out again. We will go out again quickly. We will make no noise."

"And supposing I am caught, my little girls? Supposing I am punished on your account? You will not pay the fine?"

"You will not be caught. You are alone here. There are no other inmates of the prison. You have sent away the soldiers. We know this. Let us enter."

"Well, well! Do not stay too long. Here is the key. It is the third door. Tell me when you go away. It is late and I want to go to bed."

The kindly old man handed them a key of beaten iron which hung from his girdle, and the two little virgins ran immediately, on their noiseless sandals, along the obscure corridors.

Then the gaoler re-entered his lodge, and did not insist any further upon a useless surveillance. The penalty of imprisonment was not applied in Greek Egypt, and the little white house that was placed under the care of the gentle old man served merely for the reception of culprits condemned to death. In the interval between executions it remained almost deserted.

The moment the great key entered the lock, Rhodis arrested her friend's hand:

"I do not know whether I dare see her," she said. "I loved her well, Myrto . . . I am afraid . . . Go in first, will you?"

Myrtocleia pushed open the door; but as soon as she had cast a glance into the chamber she cried:

"Do not enter, Rhodis! Wait for me here."

"Oh! What is there? You are afraid too . . . What is there on the bed? Is she not dead?"

"Yes, wait for me . . . I will tell you . . . Stay in the corridor and do not look."

The body was still in the ecstatic attitude in which Demetrius had arranged it for his Statue of Immortal Life. But the transports of extreme joy confine upon the convulsions of extreme pain, and Myrtocleia asked herself what atrocious sufferings, what agonies had produced such an upheaval in the corpse.

She approached the bed on tiptoe.

The thread of blood continued to flow from the diaphanous nostril. The skin of the body was perfectly white; the pale tips of the breasts receded like delicate navels; not a single rose-coloured reflection gave life to the ephemeral recumbent statue; but some emerald-coloured spots that tinted the smooth belly signified that millions of new lives were germinating in the scarcely--cold flesh, and were demanding "the right of succession!"

Myrtocleia took the dead arm and laid it flat along the hip. She tried also to pull out the left leg; but the knee was almost rigid, and she did not succeed in pulling it out completely.

"Rhodis," she said, in a troubled voice, "come; you can enter now."

The trembling child penetrated into the chamber. Her features contracted, her eyes opened wide.

As soon as they felt that there were two of them, they fell into one another's arms and burst into long-drawn sobs.

"Poor Chrysis! Poor Chrysis!" repeated the child.

They kissed one another on the cheek with a desperate affection from which all sensuality had disappeared and the taste of the tears upon their lips filled their forlorn little souls with bitterness.

They wept, and wailed, they looked at one another other with anguish, and sometimes they spoke both together in a hoarse voice of agony, and their words ended in sobs.

"How we loved her! She was not a friend for us. She was a little mother for both of us . . ."

Rhodis repeated:

"Like a little mother . . ."

And Myrto, dragging her to the side of the dead woman, said in a low voice:

"Kiss her."

They both bent down, and placed their hands upon the bed, as, with fresh sobs, they touched the icy forehead with their lips.

And Myrto took the head between her two hands, buried them in the hair, and spoke to her thus:

* * * * *

"Chrysis, my Chrysis, you who were the most beautiful and the most adored of women, who were so like the goddess that the people took you for her, where are you now, what have they done with you? You lived to impart beneficent joy. No fruit was ever sweeter than your mouth, no light brighter than your eyes; your skin was a glorious robe that you would not veil; voluptuousness floated upon it like a perpetual odour; and when you unclasped your hair, all desires flowed from it; and when you clasped your naked arms, one implored the gods for permission to die."

* * * * *

Rhodis sat huddled up on the ground, sobbing.

* * * * *

"Chrysis, my Chrysis." pursued Myrtocleia, "but yesterday you were living, and young, and hoping for length of days, and now you are dead, and no power on earth can induce you to speak a word to us. You have closed your eyes, and we were not there. You have suffered and you did not know that we wept for you behind the walls. Your dying eyes looked for someone and did not meet our eyes stricken with sorrow and pity."

The flute-girl wept continually. The singing girl took her by the hand.

* * * * *

Chrysis, my Chrysis, you once told us that one day, thanks to you, we should marry. Our union is one of tears, and sad is the betrothal of Rhodis and Myrtocleia. But sorrow, rather than love, welds together two enclasped hands. Those who have once wept together will never desert one another. We are going to lay your dear body under the ground, Chrysidion, and we will both of us cut off our hair upon your tomb.

* * * * *

She enveloped the beautiful body and then she said to Rhodis:

"Help me."

They lifted her up gently; but the burden was a heavy one for the little musicians, and they laid it down upon the ground.

"Let us take off our sandals," said Myrto. "Let us walk bare-footed in the corridors. The gaoler is surely asleep. If we do not wake him we shall pass, but if he sees us he will prevent us . . . To-morrow matters not: when he sees the empty bed, he will say to the Queen's soldiers that he has thrown the body into a ditch, according to the law. Let us fear nothing, Rhodis! . . . Put your sandals in your girdle, like me. And come! Take the body under the knees. Let the feet hang behind. Walk without noise, slowly, slowly . . ."

V

PIETY

After the turning of the second street, they laid the body down a second time in order in put on their sandals. Rhodis's feet, too delicate to walk naked, were torn and bleeding.

The night was full of brilliancy. The town was full of silence. The iron-coloured shadows lay in square blocks in the middle of the streets, according to the profile of the houses.

The little virgins resumed their load.

"Where are we going to?" asked the child. "Where are we going to bury it?"

"In the cemetery of Hermanubis. It is always deserted, it will be in peace there."

"Poor Chrysis! Could I ever have thought that on her last day, I should bear her body without torches and without funeral car, secretly, like a thing stolen."

Then both began to talk volubly as if they were afraid of the silence, cheek by jowl with the corpse. The last day of Chrysis's life filled them with astonishment. Where had she got the mirror, the necklace and the comb? She could not have taken the pearls of the goddess herself. The temple was too well guarded for a courtesan to be able to enter it. Then somebody must have acted for her? But who? She was not known to possess any lover amongst the Stolists to whom the guard of the divine statue was entrusted. And then, if someone had acted for her, why had she not denounced him? And, in any case, why these three crimes? Of what had they availed her, except to deliver her over to punishment? A woman does not commit such follies without an object, unless she be in love? Was Chrysis in love? and who could it be?

"We shall never know", concluded the flute-player. "She has taken her secret with her, and even if she had an accomplice he would be the last to enlighten us."

At this point, Rhodis, who had been resting for several instants, sighed:

"I cannot carry her any longer, Myrto. I shall fall down on my knees, I am broken with fatigue and grief."

Myrtocleia took her by the neck:

"Try again, my darling. We _must_ carry her. Her nether life is at stake. If she has no sepulture and no obol in her hand, she will roam eternally on the banks of the river of hell, and when we in our turn, Rhodis, go down to the dead, she will reproach us with our impiety, and we shall not know what to answer her."

But the child, overcome with weakness, burst into tears.

"Quickly, quickly!" exclaimed Myrtocleia.

"Somebody is coming along the end of the street. Place yourself in front of the body with me. Let us hide it behind our tunics . . . If it is seen, all is lost . . ."

She stooped short.

"It is Timon. I recognise him. Timon with four women. Ah, gods! what is going to happen? He laughs at everything and will mock us . . . But no, stay here, Rhodis; I will speak to him."

And, inspired by a sudden thought, she ran down the street to meet the little group.

"Timon," she said, and her voice was full of supplication; "Timon, stop. I have grave words to utter to you alone."

"My poor little thing," said the young man, "how excited you are! Have you lost your shoulder-knot or have you dropped your doll and broken its nose? This would be an irreparable disaster."

The girl threw him a look of anguish; but the four women, Philotis, Seso of Cnidos, Callistion, and Tryphera, were already clamouring round her with impatience.

"Get away, little idiot!" said Tryphera, "if you have dried up your nurse's teats, we cannot help it, we have no milk. It is almost daylight, you ought to be in bed; what business have children to roam about in the moonlight?"

"Her nurse?" said Philotis. "She wants to steal away Timon."

"The whip! She deserves the whip!" said Callistion, who put one arm round Myrto's waist, lifting her off the ground and raising her little blue tunic, But Seso interposed:

"You are mad," she cried. "Myrto has never known a man. If she calls Timon, it is not to sleep with him. Let her alone, and let us have done with it!"

"Come," said Timon, "what do you want with me? Come here. Whisper in my ear. Is it really serious?"

"The body of Chrysis is there, in the street," said the young girl tremblingly. "We are carrying into the cemetary, my little friend and I. but it is heavy, and we ask you if you will help us. It will not lake long. Immediately afterwards you can rejoin your women . . ."

Timon's look reassured her.

"Poor girls! To think that I laughed! You are better than we are . . . Certainly I will help you. Go and join your friend and wait for me, I am coming."

Turning to the four women . . .

"Go to my house," he said, "by the street of the Potters. I shall be there in a short time. Do not follow me."

Rhodis was still sitting in front of the corpse. When she saw Timon coming, she implored him:

"Do not tell! We have stolen it to save her shade. Keep our secret, we will love you, Timon."

"Have no fears," said the young man.

He took the body under the shoulders and Myrto took it under the knees, and they walked on in silence, with Rhodis tottering along behind.

Timon said not a word. For the second time in two days, human passion had carried off one of the transitory guests of his bed, and he marvelled at the unreason that drove people out of the enchanted road that leads to perfect happiness.

"Impassivity," he thought, "indifference, quietude, voluptuous serenity! who amongst men will appreciate you? We fight, we struggle, we hope, when one thing only is worth having: namely, to extract from the fleeting moment all the joys it is capable of affording, and to leave one's bed as little as possible."

They reached the gate of the ruined necropolis.

"Where shall we put it?" said Myrto.

"Near the god."

"Where is the Statue? I have never been in here before. I was afraid of the tombs and the inscriptions. I do not know the Hermanubis. It is probably in the centre of the little garden. Let us look for it. I once came here before when I was a child, in quest of a lost gazelle. Let us follow the alley of white sycamores. We cannot fail to discern it."

Nor did they fail to find it.

Dawn mingled its delicate violets with the moonbeams on the monuments. A vague and distant harmony floated in the cypress branches. The regular rustling of the palms, so similar to tiny drops of falling rain, cast an illusion of freshness.

Timon opened with difficulty a pink stone imbedded in the earth. The sepulture was excavated beneath the hands of the funerary god, whose attitude was that of the embalmer. It must have contained a body, formerly; but at present nothing was to be found but a handful of brownish dust.

The young man jumped into the grave, as far as his waist, and held out his arms:

"Give it to me," he said to Myrto. "I am going to lay it at the far end, and we will close up the tomb again."

But Rhodis threw herself on the body.

"No, do not bury her so quickly! I want to see her again! One last time! One last time! Chrysis! My poor Chrysis! Ah! the horror of it . . . How she has changed! . . ."

Myrtocleia had just disarranged the blanket which covered the dead woman, and the sight of the sudden change the face had undergone made the two girls recoil. The checks had become square, the eyelids and lips were puffed out like half-a-dozen white pads. Nothing was left of all that superhuman beauty. They drew the thick winding-sheet over her again: but Myrto slipped her hand under the stuff and placed an obol for Charon in her fingers.

Then, shaken by interminable sobs, they passed the limp inert body to Timon.

And when Chrysis was laid in the bottom of the sandy tomb, Timon opened the winding-sheet again. He fixed the silver obol tightly in the nerveless hand; he propped up the head with a flat stone; he spread the long deep-gold hair over her body from the forehead to the knees.

Then he left the tomb, and the musicians, kneeling before the yawning opening, cut off their young hair, bound it together in one sheaf, and buried it with the dead.

[Greek: TOIONDE PERAS ESCHE TO SYNTAGMA TÔN PERI CHRYSIDA KAI DÊMÊTRION]