Chapter 36

While David worked behind the closed doors of the study, Lilla, sitting down in a damask-covered chair, tried to concentrate her mind on the new books from New York.

She skimmed the novels to the point where the lovers had their first embrace, then turned to poems by women, which were pervaded with a melancholy derived perhaps from disillusionment. As a corrective she read the books on world politics, economics, esthetic philosophy. In these last she found, eloquently expressed, the most characteristic argument of the times--a persuasion to that self-abandonment which follows materialism and moral skepticism, an announcement that happiness lay in a religion of the senses, in becoming, indeed, "divinely animal."

As she laid down the book, there returned to her the words that a young Roman had poured into her ears one night on Lake Como:

"The splendors of this world and our acceptance of them. Not to question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours that a thousand generations have made so complex."

Of a sudden New York rose before her, bathed in the glitter from its lights, ringing with music and laughter. She saw the multitudes of pleasure seekers streaming hither and thither, immersing themselves in startling hues and sounds, in abnormal spectacles and freshly discovered impulses, which the priests of this new-old cult provided for them benignly in ever more exacerbating forms and combinations. There, possibly, amid those emotions gradually approaching a Dionysiac frenzy, was the logical Mecca of her long pilgrimage, the end of all this hunger for sensuous reactions--for the pleasures that came from strange fragrances and harmonies, from contacts with precious fabrics and the patina of perfect porcelains, from the perception of matchless color in painted canvas and gems, or from the grace that was fluent in the moving bodies of human beings and beasts?

She rose, turning away from those books, and from the room full of objects whose textures were finer and more lasting than flesh. Crossing the hall, she entered the fernery, where palms rose against the stone arches of the windows, and hanging baskets overflowed with long tendrils above a wicker couch that was covered with red cushions. It was the last refuge of the flowers. Beyond the leaded panes some snowflakes were floating down upon the flagstone paths of the garden.

Her gaze was attracted to some potted roses languishing in a corner.

She recalled having read somewhere, "The color is in us, not in the rose." She fell to wondering about the miracle of sight, in fact of all the senses, through which one derived from vibrations a seeming impression of surrounding things, and called this impression reality.

Of what nature were those vibrations? Did they truly explain the objects from which they issued? Suppose the senses caught only the least of them, or misinterpreted them? In that case one might be surrounded by things wholly different from what one believed them to be, awesome things which might be either exquisite or frightful. She stood horrified by this thought. The familiar world seemed to be dissolving in a mist, just as in her childhood: and through the mist she perceived immense, vague apparitions, at once monstrous and beautiful.

"Ah! why must these things come to me? What crime have I ever committed?"

The huge, invisible cat was resuming its play with the mouse.

"Yes," she thought, "the capacity for pleasure is balanced by the capacity for suffering. The more subtle our happy sensations, the more piercing our painful ones. Yet the thrill from pleasure is gradually deadened by repetition, and finally, with the passage of time, the senses no longer feel it; but all the while that pleasure is diminishing, pain increases. After all, what a tragical farce! Is there nothing else, nothing better?"

Lilla began again to shrink from life, to mistrust it.

She suffered from trivial, groundless fears, which she magnified, then abruptly forgot. Growing thinner, she found herself enervated as in the days of her mourning for Lawrence Teck, and all the while something at once indefinite and priceless seemed to be lost to her. In the midst of her sadness she would have fleeting perceptions of blue water, felucca sails, a town on the edge of a lake--maybe Lausanne--a room where she sat obediently asleep in a deep leather chair.

Now and again she woke in the morning with dim impressions of having dreamed a dream of inexpressible grandeur, of supernatural joy, in some place that she could not remember, and with some person whose face she could not recall. But as soon as she was wide awake all recollections of the dream passed away. She found herself burdened with the same unaccountable distress that she had taken to bed with her last night.

"All this preoccupation with myself! It must end to-day."

She determined to lose herself in David, to live and think and feel for him alone.