Part 13

He left her alone. A few moments later he heard the splashing of the water which ran from the enormous sponge and fell back again into the bath-tub. He knew the icy coldness of this spring water well, and he imagined the little starts of Hippolyte's body, that long and flexible body, beneath the refreshing shower.

Then there remained nothing in his mind than thoughts of fire. Everything about him disappeared. And, when the splashing stopped, he was seized by a trembling so strong that his teeth began to chatter, as if shivering from a mortal fever. With the terrible eyes of desire, he saw the woman disengage herself from her dressing-gown, already dried, pure, delicate as an alabaster with golden tones.

*CHAPTER VIII.*

More fatigued now, almost fainting, Hippolyte sank gradually into slumber. By degrees the smile on her mouth became unconscious, disappeared. Her lips met for a second; then, with infinite slowness, they opened, and from between appeared a jasminelike whiteness. Again the lips met for a second; and again, slowly, very slowly, they parted, and from between reappeared the whiteness, moistened.

Raised on one elbow, George looked at her. She appeared so beautiful, so beautiful, beautiful in the same way as he had seen her the first time, in the mysterious oratory, in front of the philosopher Alexander Memmi's orchestra, amidst the evaporated perfume of the incense and the violets. She was pale, very pale, just as on that day.

She was pale, but it was that singular pallor which George had never found in any other woman--an almost mortal pallor, a profound and dead pallor which, when in the shade, became almost livid. A long shadow was cast on the upper part of her cheeks by the eyelashes; a masculine shadow, barely perceptible, veiled the upper lip. The mouth, large if anything, had a sinuous curve, very soft and yet sad, which, in the absolute silence, took on a very intense expression.

George thought: "How spiritual her beauty becomes in illness and in languor! Tired as she is now, she pleases me more. I recognize the unknown woman who passed before me that February evening--the woman _who had not a single drop of blood left in her body_. I believe that when she is dead she will attain the supreme perfection of her beauty.... Dead? And if she were to die? She would then become an object for thought, a pure ideality. I should love her after life without jealous inquietude, with a soothed and always even sorrow."

He recalled that in other circumstances he had already imagined Hippolyte's beauty in the peacefulness of death. "Oh, that day of the roses! Great sheafs of white roses languished in the vases in June, at the beginning of their love. She was dozing on the divan, motionless, almost breathless. And he had contemplated her for a long time; then a sudden phantasy had taken him to cover her with roses, softly, softly, so as not to awaken her; and he had arranged a few roses in her hair. But thus flowered and garlanded, she had appeared to him like a body without a soul, a corpse. This spectacle had filled him with terror; he had shaken her to arouse her; but she remained inert, paralyzed by one of those syncopes to which she was subject at that time. Oh, what terror, what anguish, until she recovered her senses! And also what enthusiasm for the sovereign beauty of that face, which was so extraordinarily ennobled by that reflection of death!" This episode recurred to his memory; but while he lingered over these strange thoughts, he felt a sudden impulse of pity and of remorse. He bent over to kiss the forehead of the sleeper, who remained unconscious of his kiss. It was with the greatest difficulty that he restrained himself from embracing her more ardently, so that she might be cognizant of his caress, and respond to it. And then he felt all the vanity of a caress which would not be to the loved object a rapid communication of joy; he felt all the vanity of a love which would not be a continual and immediate correspondence of acute sensations; he felt the impossibility of becoming intoxicated unless an equally intense intoxication should correspond with his own.

"Am I certain," he thought, "am I positively certain that always, when I have enjoyed her, she has enjoyed me? How often has she been present, a lucid witness, during my moments of delirium? How often has my ardor appeared senseless to her?" A heavy wave of anxieties invaded him while he contemplated the sleeping woman. "The true and profound sensual communion is also a chimera. The senses of my mistress are as obscure as her soul. Never shall I succeed in surprising in her fibres a secret disgust, an appetite unsatisfied, an irritation unappeased. Never shall I succeed in knowing the different sensations which are given to her by a similar caress repeated at different moments. In the course of a single day, an organism as unhealthy as hers passes through a great number of physical states, each in discord with the other, and sometimes in complete opposition. Such an instability misleads the most penetrating clairvoyance. The same caress which, at dawn, draws from her moans of pleasure, may, an hour later, seem to her importunate. Consequently, it is possible that her nerves become hostile towards me, in spite of her will. A kiss which I prolong too far, and which gives me the vertigo of supreme enjoyment, may in her flesh arouse impatience. In the matter of sensuality, however, simulation and dissimulation are common to all women, to those who love and to those who do not. What do I say? The woman who loves, the passionate woman, is more inclined to physical simulation and dissimulation; because she fears to grieve her lover if she shows she is little disposed to surrender herself entirely. Moreover, the passionate woman often delights in exaggerating the semblance of pleasure; because she knows well that that will flatter the man's virile pride and increase his ecstasy. I confess that a proud joy swells my heart when I see Hippolyte delirious with sensual delight. I feel she is happy at thus showing herself so vanquished and prostrated by my power; and she also knows that my vain ambition as a young lover is precisely to succeed in making her plead for mercy, in drawing from her a convulsive cry, in seeing her fall back exhausted on the pillow. Which, then, in these demonstrations, is the share of the physical sincerity and that of the passionate exaggeration? Is not her ardor an artificial attitude, assumed to please me? Does she not often sacrifice herself to my desire without desiring me? Has she not, at times, to repress a commencement of repugnance?"

Attentive and almost anxious, he leaned over the impenetrable creature. But, little by little, the contemplation of her beauty seemed to appease him. And he began to consider his new state. So, from this day on, a new life commenced for him.

For a minute, he concentrated mind and ear, in order to lose nothing of the great peace surrounding him. Only the slow, monotonous wash of the calm sea was to be heard in the propitious silence. Against the window-panes the branches of the olive-tree swayed imperceptibly, silvered by the sun, balancing light shadows on the whiteness of the curtains. At intervals a few human voices were heard, and almost unintelligible.

After this perception of the environing peace, he leaned once more over the adored one. A manifest harmony existed between the respiration of the woman and the respiration of the sea; and the concordance of the two rhythms gave an added charm to the sleeper.

She reposed on her right side, in a graceful attitude. Her form was supple and long, rather too long perhaps, but of serpentine elegance. The narrowness of the thigh made it resemble that of an adolescent. The sterile abdomen had preserved its primitive virginal purity. The bosom was small and firm, as if sculptured in very delicate alabaster, and the points of her extraordinarily erect breasts were of a rose-violet hue. The posterior part of her body, from the nape of the neck down to the middle, made one think once more of an Ephebe: it was one of those fragments of the ideal human type which Nature sometimes throws among the multitude of mediocre imprints by which the race perpetuates itself. But the most precious singularity of this body was, in George's eyes, the coloration. The skin had an indescribable color, very rare, very different from the ordinary color of brunettes. The comparison of an alabaster gilded by an inner flame but scarcely conveyed the idea of this divine fineness. It seemed that a diffusion of gold and impalpable amber enriched the tissues, variegating them with a variety of harmonious pallors, like music, darker in the depressions of the loins and where the loins join the sides, lighter on the breast and on the groins, where the epidermis makes its most exquisite suavity.

George thought of Othello's words: "I had rather be a toad, and live upon the vapour of a dungeon, than keep a corner in the thing I love for others' uses."

In her slumber, Hippolyte made a movement, with a vague air of suffering, which disappeared immediately. She threw back her head on the pillow, exposing her extended breast, on which was defined the light network of the veins. Her lower jaws were rather powerful, the chin rather long in profile, the nostrils broad. In the abstract, the defects of her head were accentuated; but they did not displease George, because it would have been impossible for him to imagine that they could be corrected without removing from the physiognomy an element of living expression. The expression, that immaterial thing which irradiates all matter, that changing and immeasurable force which invades the corporeal face and transfigures it, that significative external which superposes a symbolic beauty of an order far more elevated and complex on the precise reality of the lines--that was Hippolyte Sanzio's great charm, because it offered to the passionate thinker a continual motive of emotions and dreams.

"Such a woman," he thought, "has belonged to others before being mine. She has shared the couch of another man; she has slept with another man in the same bed, on the same pillow. In all women there exists a sort of extraordinarily active physical memory, the memory of sensations. Does she remember the sensations which she received from that man? Can she have forgotten him who was the first, and who violated her? What were her feelings beneath her husband's caress?" At these questions, which he repeated to himself for the thousandth time, a well-known anguish oppressed his heart. "Oh! why can we not put to death the creature we love, and resuscitate her afterwards with a virgin body, with a new soul?"

He recalled certain words which Hippolyte had said in an hour of supreme intoxication: "You are embracing a virgin; I have never known _any voluptuousness_ in love."

Hippolyte was married the spring preceding that of their love. A few weeks after the wedding, she had begun to suffer from a slow and cruel malady which had confined her to bed, and kept her for a long time between life and death. But, happily, this malady had spared her all new contact with the odious man who had seized her like an inert prey. When she emerged from her long convalescence, she gave herself up to passion as in a dream: suddenly, blindly, passionately, she abandoned herself to the young stranger whose soft and curious voice had addressed to her words she had never heard before. And she had not lied when saying to him: "You are embracing a virgin; I have never known any voluptuousness."

Since then, what a profound change in this woman! Something new, indefinable yet real, had entered into her voice, into her gestures, into her eyes, into her slightest tones, into her slightest movements, into the slightest external signs. George had been present at the most intoxicating spectacle of which an intellectual lover can dream. He had seen the loved woman become metamorphosed after his own image, borrow his thoughts, his judgments, his tastes, his disdains, his predilections, his melancholies, all that which gives a special imprint and character to the mind. In speaking, Hippolyte used the forms of speech he preferred, pronounced certain words with the inflexion peculiar to him. In writing, she imitated even his hand. Never had the influence of one being on another been so rapid and so strong. Hippolyte had merited the device which George had given her: _Gravis dum suavis_. But this grave and suave creature, she in whom he had succeeded in inculcating, with so much art, the disdain for a commonplace existence, among what humiliating contacts had she spent the distant hours?

George thought again of his anguish of long ago, when he saw her go away, return beneath the conjugal roof, into the house of a man of whom he knew nothing, into a world of which he knew nothing, into the platitudes and the pettiness of the middle-class life in which she was born, and in which she had grown like a rare plant in a common flower-pot. Had she, at that time, never hidden anything from him? Had she never lied to him? Had she always been able to withdraw from her husband's importunities on the pretext that her cure was not yet complete? Always?

George remembered the horrible pang he felt one day when she came late, panting, her cheeks more colored and warmer than usual, with a persistent odor of tobacco in her hair, that bad odor which impregnates him who remains a long time in a room where there are many smokers. "Pardon me, if I am late," she had said to him; "but I had several of my husband's friends to dinner, and they kept me until now." And these words had suggested to him the vision of a vulgar-looking dining-table around which the boors exhibited their brutality.

George recalled a thousand similar little details, and an infinity of other cruel sufferings, and also recent sufferings, caused by Hippolyte's new condition--her stay at her mother's, in a house not less unknown and not less free from suspicion. "At last, here she is now with me! Every day, every minute, continually, I shall see her, I shall enjoy her; I will see that her thoughts are occupied continually with me, my thoughts, my dreams, my sorrows. I will consecrate to her every instant, uninterruptedly; I will invent a thousand new ways of pleasing her, of agitating her, of making her sad, of exalting her; I will so penetrate her with my being that she will end by believing me to be an essential element of her own life."

He bent over her softly; he kissed her softly on the shoulder near the arm, on that little rounded eminence of exquisite form and color, whose skin had the softness of velvet fine enough as to seem almost impalpable. He respired the perfume of this woman, so subtle and sweet, that cutaneous perfume which, during the instant of pleasure, became as intoxicating as that of tuberoses and gave a terrible lash to desire. Watching thus closely the sleep of this delicate and complicated creature, whom slumber enveloped in a mystery, that strange creature who from every pore seemed to irradiate towards him some occult fascination of unbelievable intensity, he remarked once more in his inner self a vague movement of instinctive terror.

Again Hippolyte changed her position, without awakening, but with a faint moan. She turned on her back. A light perspiration imparted a dampness to her temples; through her half-closed mouth the breathing respired came more rapidly, rather irregularly; at moments, her eyebrows contracted. She was dreaming. Of what was she dreaming?

George, seized by an inquietude which soon increased to an insane anxiety, set himself to detect upon her face the slightest indications, in the hope of surprising there some revealing sign. Revealing what? He was incapable of reflecting, incapable of repressing the furious tumults of fears, doubts, and suspicions.

In her slumber Hippolyte started; her entire body was convulsed as if racked by nightmare; she turned over on her side towards George; she groaned, and cried:

"No, no!"

Then she drew two or three breaths, almost like sobs, and started again.

A prey to insane fear, George watched her fixedly, his ear strained--fearing to hear other words, another's name, the name of a man! He waited, in horrible uncertainty, as if under the menace of a thunderbolt which could destroy him in a second.

Hippolyte awoke; she saw him confusedly, without thinking, still sleeping; she nestled close up to him, with an almost unconscious movement.

"Of what were you dreaming?" he asked her, in a changed voice which seemed to reverberate his heart-beats.

"I do not know," she answered, languid, still drowsy, leaning her cheek on her lover's breast. "I don't remember."

She fell asleep again.

Under the soft pressure of her cheek, George remained motionless, with a dull rancor at the bottom of his soul. He felt himself a stranger to her, isolated from her, uselessly curious. All his bitter recollections came back to him in a tumult. He lived over again, in a single instant, his miseries of two years. He could oppose nothing to the immense doubts which crushed his soul and made the head of his loved one seem as heavy as a rock.

Suddenly Hippolyte started a second time, moaned, twisted, cried again. And she opened her eyes, frightened, groaning.

"Oh! my God!"

"What ails you? Of what were you dreaming?"

"I do not know."

Her face was contracted convulsively.

She added:

"You must have been leaning on me. I thought you were pushing me, hurting me."

She suffered visibly.

"Oh! my God! My pains have come back."

Since her illness, she sometimes had short attacks, spasms that quickly passed, but whose passage forced from her a groan or cry.

She turned towards George, looked fixedly into his eyes, and found there the traces of the tempest. And in a coaxing, reproachful tone she repeated:

"You did so hurt me!"

All at once George seized her in his arms, clasped her passionately to his breast, and smothered her under his kisses.

*CHAPTER IX.*

As the air was of an almost summer-like warmth, George proposed:

"Shall we dine outside?"

Hippolyte consented. They went down.

On the stairway they held each other's hand; and went down step by step slowly, stopping to look at the crushed flowers, turning round towards each other simultaneously, as if they saw each other for the first time. Each saw in the other eyes larger, more profound, as if more distant, and circled by an almost supernatural shadow. They smiled at each other without speaking, both dominated by the charm of that indefinable sensation which seemed to disperse into the uncertainty of space the substance of their being, transformed into a fluid like a vapor. They walked towards the parapet; they stopped to look around, to listen to the sea.

What they saw was unusual, extraordinarily great, yet illumined by an inner light and as if by an irradiation of their hearts. What they heard was unusual, extraordinarily high, yet contemplated as if a secret revealed to them alone.

A second, as quickly passed! They were recalled to themselves, not by a gust of the wind nor by the noise of a wave, nor by a bellowing, nor by a bark, nor by a human voice, but by the very anxiety which arose from their too intense joy. A second, as quickly passed, irrevocable! And both recommenced to feel that life was slipping by, that time was flying; that everything was becoming once more foreign to their being, that their souls were becoming anxious again and their love imperfect. This second of supreme oblivion, this unique second, was gone forever.

Hippolyte, moved by the solemnity of the solitude, oppressed by a vague fright in the presence of those vast waters, beneath that desert sky, which, from the zenith to the horizon, paled by slow gradations, murmured:

"What endless space!"

It seemed now to both that the point of space in which they breathed was infinitely distant from the frequented spots, out of the way, isolated, unknown, inaccessible, almost outside of the world. Now they saw the wish of their hearts realized, they both felt the same inward terror, as if they foresaw their impotence to sustain the plenitude of the new life. For a few instants longer, silent, standing side by side, but apart, they continued to contemplate the melancholy and icy Adriatic, whose great white-capped waves sported in endless playfulness. From time to time a stiff breeze swept through the tufts of the acacias, bearing off their perfume.

"Of what are you thinking?" asked George, drawing himself up, as if to rebel against the importunate sadness which was about to conquer him.

He was there, alone with his mistress, living and free; and, nevertheless, his heart was not satisfied. Did he, then, bear in himself an inconsolable hopelessness?

Feeling anew a separation between the silent creature and himself, he took her again by the hand, and gazed into the pupils of her eyes.

"Of what are you thinking?"

"I am thinking of Rimini," answered Hippolyte, with a smile.

Always the past! She remembers bygone days at such a moment! Was it the same sea which lay extended before their eyes, veiled in the same illusion? His first motion was one of hostility against the unconscious evocatrice. Then, as if in a lightning flash, with sudden uneasiness, he saw all the summits of his love light up, and scintillate in the past, prodigiously. Far-distant things came back to his memory, accompanied by waves of music which exalted and transfigured them. He lived again, in one second, the most lyric hours of his passion, and he lived them again in propitious places, among the sumptuous scenery of nature and art which had rendered his joy nobler and more profound. Why then, now, in comparison with that past, had the moment just previous lost part of its charm? In his eyes, dazzled by the rapid gleam of his recollections, everything now seemed colorless. And he perceived that the progressive diminution of the light caused him a kind of indefinable corporeal uneasiness, as if this external phenomenon were in immediate correspondence with some element of his own life.

He sought some phrase that would bring Hippolyte closer to him, to attach her to him by some sensitive tie, to restore to himself of the present reality the exact feeling which he had just lost. But this search was painful to him; the ideas escaped him, dispersed, left him void.

As he had heard a rattle of plates, he asked:

"Are you hungry?"

This question, suggested by a slight material fact, and propounded unexpectedly, with puerile vivacity, made Hippolyte smile.

"Yes, a little," she answered, smiling.

And they turned round to look at the table spread beneath the oak. In a few minutes the dinner would be ready.

"You must be satisfied with what there is," said George. "Very countrified cooking."

"Oh! I should be very well satisfied with grass."

And, gayly, she approached the table, examined with curiosity the cloth, the knives and forks, the glassware, the plates, found everything pretty; rejoiced like a child at the sight of the large flowers which decorated the white and fine porcelain.

"Everything here pleases me," she said.

She bent over a large round loaf of bread, yet warm beneath its beautiful browned and rounded crust. She breathed in the odor with delight.

"Oh! what a delightful odor!"

And, with childish greediness, she broke off the crusty edge of the loaf.

"What fine bread!"

Her white and strong teeth shone in the bitten bread; the play of her sinuous mouth expressed vigorously the pleasure enjoyed. In this act, her whole person shed a pure and simple grace which seduced and surprised George as if it were an unexpected novelty.

"Here! taste how good it is."