The Chateau d'Argol Page 2

  To the south stretched the highlands of Storrvan. From the foot of the castle walls the forest spread out in a semicircle as far as the eye could see: a wild and gloomy forest, a sleeping forest whose absolute stillness seemed to clutch the soul. It encircled the castle like the coils of a heavily inert serpent whose mottled skin was almost imitated by the dark patches of cloud-shadow as they ran over its rugose surface. These clouds in the heavens, flat and white, seemed to be floating at an enormous height over the green abyss. And the sight of this green ocean filled one with an obscure disquietude, giving Albert the curious feeling that this forest must be alive, and that, like a forest in a fairy tale or in a dream, it had not yet said its first word. Toward the west, high rocky barriers covered all over with trees, ran parallel; a brimming river flowed through these deep valleys, its surface roughened by a gust of wind, like skin by the cold, and suddenly thousands of bright facets reflected the blinding sunlight with a radiance that was curiously immobile. But the trees remained mute and menacing up to the blue heights of the horizon.

  Albert opened a low door leading into the round tower that overlooked the terrace. He found it furnished as a study with shelves of precious woods and with four oval windows from which the eye could view all the divers landscapes of the countryside around the castle. In the bed chambers situated in the upper portion of the edifice, that sumptuous prodigality of furs, so noticeable the moment one entered the castle, became a sort of haunting leitmotif, reiterated everywhere. They were scattered in profusion on the floor, while the walls were hidden by fur panels made into a chequered design of richly worked skins of the snow leopard and the polar bear, alternating regularly. A lavish negligence seemed to hold sway everywhere; even the beds appeared to consist simply of a heap of furs. The long low anomalous openings, which Albert had noticed in the façade, were here made use of to procure a particular effect: each room was lighted by these long horizontal apertures only three feet high and not more than one foot from the floor, extending the whole length of the wall against which the bed was placed, so that on waking the sleeper was forced to plunge his eyes into the abyss of trees below, and might fancy himself wafted on a magic ship over the deep billows of the forest. In the corner of the room opposite the bed, a basin of light-coloured marble was sunk in the floor, and toilet accessories, shining with the clean brightness of surgical instruments, offered a pleasing contrast to the long silky whiteness of the furs.

  The library occupied the top of the square tower. Wooden panels carved with scenes from Works and Days ran all around the walls, but without extending to the ceiling they left a large frieze of dull white stone visible above them, and this refuge of thought was lighted by panes of thick green glass, symbols of the all-powerful and living hope of knowledge, and was furnished with lecterns of carved oak. Albert lingered there, fingering the pages of many of the curious ancient volumes with iron clasps, but a noise as of leaden grains pelting against the window-panes made him look up; the rain was beating on them violently, and anxious to witness the alteration of the landscape the elements now offered, he hastened to make his way to the terrace again.

  The storm was raging over Storrvan. Heavy clouds with jagged edges rushed out of the west, almost brushing against the tower, and at moments enveloping it in streamers of vertiginous white mist. But the wind, above all the wind filled space with its unbridled and appalling power. Night had almost fallen. The tempest, passing as though through a head of fragile hair, opened quick fugitive furrows through the masses of grey trees, parting them like blades of grass, and for the space of a second one could see the bare soil, black rocks, the narrow fissures of the ravines. Madly the storm twisted this grey mane! Out of it came an immense rustling; the trunks of the trees, before hidden by the frothing leaves, were bared now by the wind's furious blasts; one could see their frail grey limbs as taut as a ship's rigging. And they yielded, they yielded—a dry crackling was the prelude to the fall, then suddenly a thousand cracklings could be heard, a cascade of resounding noises drowned by the howling of the storm, and the giants were engulfed. Now the shower let loose the icy chill of its deluge like the brutal volley of handfuls of pebbles, and the forest answered with the metallic reverberation of its myriad leaves. Bare rocks glinted like ominous cuirasses, the liquid yellowish splendour of the wet fog crowned for an instant the crest of each forest tree, for an instant a yellow and luminous and marvellously translucid band shone along the horizon against which every branch of every tree stood silhouetted, and made the drenched stones of the parapet, Albert's blond hair soaked by the rain, the cold wet fog rolling around the tops of the trees, shine with a golden gleam, icy and almost inhuman—then went out and night fell like the blow of an axe. The horrible violence of this savage nature, in an instant so different from what it had appeared at first, filled Albert's soul with sombre forebodings. Drenched with rain, he retraced his steps through the deserted rooms. The ruddy glow of a stained glass window, the far-off sound of a clock lost in some distant and lonely corridor made him shudder for a moment like a child. He shrugged his shoulders at these commonplace snares of terror but was, nonetheless, unable to shake off the weight of a persistent anxiety. Perhaps really something had happened! Turning the corner of a corridor his foot struck a sleeping form: it was the servant who had come to meet him, and who was now lying asleep, stretched out on the flagstones in the pose of an animal overwhelmed by a sickening fatigue—and involuntarily Albert shuddered. At last he reached the heart of that anxiety with which all afternoon he had been investing the landscape, and deservedly no doubt in many respects. In the middle of the great drawing-room a square of paper lay on a copper tray. He broke the seal of the message and read: "I shall arrive at Argol Friday. Heide will come with me."

  THE GRAVEYARD

  THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED were for Albert, like vacation days, capricious and profound. He was as pleased as a child with his mysterious dwelling and gave himself up to the charm of virgin nature. Brittany was lavish with her meagre seductions, her humble flowers: gorse, broom and heather covered the moors over which Albert took interminable rides on horseback every day.

  Sometimes a heavy shower surprised him in the midst of this countryside; he sought refuge in poor granite huts, under dolmens thickly overgrown with moss. Only into the forest of Storrvan he dared not venture, and the terror that the storm on the evening of his arrival had awakened in him still persisted in his heart.

  He nevertheless worked ardently deciphering the difficult pages of that Logic from which the whole Hegelian system seems to rise on august and angelic wings. For the myths that have cradled humanity throughout its long history, Albert had always evinced abounding curiosity, searched passionately for their secret significance; and one morning he was surprised to find that Hegel, in spite of his professed aversion to examples, had seen fit to give an explanation of the myth of the Fall of man:

  "Examining more closely the story of the Fall we find, as we have said, that it exemplifies the universal bearings of knowledge upon the spiritual life. In its instinctive and natural form, spiritual life wears the garb of innocence and trustful simplicity: but the very essence of spirit implies the absorption of this immediate condition into something higher. Spiritual life is distinguished from natural life, and more especially from animal life, in that it does not continue a blind fact, but rises to the consciousness of itself, and a being of its own. This division must in its turn vanish and be absorbed, and then the spirit can open up the victorious road to peace again. The concord then is spiritual; that is, the principle of restoration is found in thought, and thought alone. The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it."

  From these pages seemed to wing a glorious certainty. Surely only knowledge and not a humiliating and human love, that Albert had always succeeded in killing through defiance, could reconcile him lastingly with himself; and if he were not deceiving himself, thus it must be: "You shall be as Gods, having knowledge of good and evil." That was the
cause of the Fall, but also, it was the only possible redemption.

  And he read again: "Spirit is not pure instinct; on the contrary, it implies essentially the tendency toward reasoning and meditation. Childish innocence has, no doubt, much charm and sweetness, but only because it reminds us of what the spirit must succeed in conquering for itself." This magnificent dialectic seemed like an answer from on high to Albert's disquietudes. Thus one could be freed only by knowledge, essential, living knowledge: Albert scanned with his mind's eye his studious and sequestered life, and now proudly felt himself completely vindicated. But could it be that these new and wild surroundings, to which his life had been transferred, had already so strongly worked on the romantic fibres of his heart that he now felt the necessity of justifying to himself his way of life? This rejoinder of his mind seemed to him presumptuous, and for a few moments, with rapid strides, he paced the terrace to and fro.

  With Herminien's arrived, Albert would once more meet his most cherished friend. In him a never-failing ease of manner, a perfect aplomb, a genius for human intrigue captivated Albert, who was ever too inclined toward the heights, too given to flights into obscure and intoxicating regions that had won him the nickname—and he could still hear Herminien's deep and dubious voice pronouncing it—of "Doctor Faust." Especially surprising in Herminien was his singular aptitude for throwing light on the most obscure motives in human conduct. The recollection of long and subtle conversations, often continued until dawn in his high student's room where the light would hang like a belated star above the street, or in a country inn where, in the middle of a rambling cross-country walk, fatigue would stay them, conversations in which each with perfect good faith would try truthfully to get nearer to his own most hidden nature in a sort of dialogued confession, one mind, to take flight, continually seeking the support of the other mind, attentive and understanding, now brought back to Albert the imminent sensation of that faculty of double sight.

  It had always seemed to him that Herminien made use of—and would always make use of—his unflagging power of analysis with perfect nonchalance and unconcern. Perhaps the bonds attaching him to life appeared to be lacking in strength, for his curiosity, manifold and always probing, was being forever dissipated. Sometimes it was the incomparable execution of certain rare paintings that took him through the museums of Europe, sometimes a woman was, for an instant, the pole of that avid human magnetism; Herminien would involve her in a whirlwind of intrigues in which insoluble complications seemed to spring up, as by enchantment, at every step. But these intrigues, at the very moment when they seemed to be assuming a fatal character, had invariably been brought to an abrupt halt, for Herminien, at the very moment his partner was to make her entrance upon the heroic stage where the whole setting complicitly encouraged drama and prompted the projection of her ardent passion, knew to perfection how to use the weapon of detached and sarcastic irony which he would skilfully handle, as an arm or as a charm, and which up until now, no tragic passion had been able to withstand. These extravagant games of mind and heart which he was constantly proposing and whose insignificance, at every instant, was emphasized by his marvellously natural attitude, left a lasting resentment in all the women invited to play a role, which he himself delineated at every moment in its slightest details.

  Herminien possessed the gift of penetrating the secrets of literature and art with subtle and perfect taste, revealing, however, their mechanism rather than all the power of the grace they contained. And yet an enthusiasm, a cold susceptibility, a veritable exaltation was apparent in these perilous exercises: his calm expression would become animated, his eye luminous, physical fatigue would be without a hold on this body of steel, and discussion or analysis could be prolonged without effort on his part for whole days and nights at a time, until a logical conclusion had been reached. In the very core of his being, in his most febrile moments, an impenetrable reserve and a demoniac lucidity were ever present. Perhaps Albert was mistaken in gracing with the name of friendship a relationship which, everything considered, was extremely dubious, and which by the almost exact similarity of their tastes, by their way of broaching the ambiguities of language, and by a system of values, belonging to themselves alone, which ever present, but like an invisible thread, ran through every conversation they carried on in the presence of a third person, deserved rather the qualification, in every respect more disturbing, of complicity. So many curious tastes enjoyed in common, ritualistic perversions of a language of their own, mutually taught, ideas fashioned by the repeated shock of their rapier-like minds, signals given by an inflection of the voice too often exchanged, a reference to a book, a melody, a name bringing with it a whole throng of common recollections, had in the end created between them a dangerous, intoxicating, vibratile atmosphere, dissipated and reborn by their contact like the withdrawal and approach of the plates of an electric condenser.

  Placed at this human focal point, every object appeared in a new and menacing light: the reverberation of words, the flashing of beauty engendered abnormal and prolonged vibrations, as though the proximity of this human charge in suspense, heavy and immobile, had brought all phenomena to their supreme degree of explosion, to their most immediate and frenzied consequences. And both of them for a long time now had been unconsciously feeding on this vitiated air, delicious and subtler than that of other men—the human condenser seemed to be born from the reunion of these two merging figures who with the darting rapidity of lightning seemed constantly pointing out to each other all the delirium of the fever and the danger.

  The gifts of life, the gifts of beauty, the most enthralling experiences had no longer any value for either of them until brought into the full light of this double reflector which then penetrated them with its magic rays; they had even, perhaps, reached the point where they could no longer enjoy any prey until they had dragged it to their common lair, could not see with their individual eyes any human thing, which they could then penetrate like an empty crystal, until the other had lent the screen of his intimate and redoubtable hostility. For they were enemies too, but they dared not admit it. They dared not admit it to each other, nor tolerate the remotest suggestion that a relationship in any way strange could exist between them. Perhaps Hegel would have smiled to see, walking by the side of each, like a dark and glorious angel, the phantom both of his double and his contrary, and would then have ruminated on the form of this necessary union which this book must needs have as its goal—among others—finally to elucidate. Thus they walked, side by side and silent, mingling their exquisite taste for death whose near and enigmatic image each in turn reflected in the frenzies of a life that was what they shared.

  Of the figure of Heide, Albert knew almost nothing. Spasmodic rumours, and until now unverifiable, pointed to the invariable coincidence of the arrival of Heide in any part of the globe with violent revolutionary outbreaks, abnormally numerous in these last few years, especially in the peninsulas of the Mediterranean and in America, and according to many it would seem that only in the atmosphere of such social upheavals, could this soul of ice and fire find its natural rhythm. Furthermore, during the last few weeks there had been an almost total silence on the subject of Heide, and now Albert realized with a strange feeling of uneasiness that in all these confused political rumours to which, as to all such preoccupations, he had lent an absent ear, he had never given a thought to the sex of his future guest, which the name Heide alone was not sufficient to elucidate, and that, up to the very moment of this enigmatic person's arrival, it would remain a mystery.

  The day of this arrival, a pale sun shone over the country of Argol, and Albert started out on horseback for a long ride in the direction of the sea which from the castle towers he had seen shimmering in the distance. He took a path that ran along the edge of the valley between moss-covered cliffs on one side, and on the other a veritable wall of verdure whose long flexible green branches the indefatigable wind from the sea kept brushing against the rocks, as the neighbouring w
aves might have tossed pale forests of seaweed against the reefs, so that the path was entirely overhung by a dense bower of leaves through which the sun set a flickering maze of dazzling spots dancing along the ground. The path came out on to a desolate beach.

  The last vestiges of life in this region seemed to be the long grey grasses whose thin whistling tufts clung untidily to the dunes and were matted together like long sea-drenched tresses by the gusts of wind. To the east, the view was arrested by a high black promontory. This sea, where neither bird nor sail met the eye which swept in an instant its vast expanse, seemed to him particularly unbearable in its mortal vacuity, for remaining a dull greyish white under a radiant sky, its surface perfectly rounded whose curve the glance involuntarily followed, irresistibly evoked the image of an eyeball whose pupil had rolled back into the socket leaving only the hideous dull white visible so that it was the entire surface which looked, and posed for the soul the most intolerable of questions. Not far out in the watery element, thin white lines, which seemed to duplicate the complicated festoons of the contours of the bay, advanced at intervals silently toward the shore: soon the ear was surprised by the noise as of a crashing wall of water, and then a wide wet tongue like the cool rough tongue of an ox, licked the sand with a rasping sound.