The Chateau d'Argol Page 4

  What he could not have known in advance was what Heide would become for him at Argol, and yet he did not hesitate to raise a question that involved nothing less than his whole peace of mind. And he now felt—and the full consciousness of it beat against his brain like the wings of madness itself—that he had brought her to Albert in order to plunge her into the heart of their double life, to kindle her with the blaze of a light unknown to men, which had constituted his whole life until now—in order that, marked with the sign of this indelible sacrament, she should henceforth become for him more completely close, more inseparable than his own pulse-beat. Thus, with startling rapidity, his mind in its eagle flight effected this decisive circuit of the horizon that finally closed on itself with the conclusive click of a sprung trap, and the night, which had now established her empire around the living heart of the castle, seemed to him to close the last exits, one by one.

  HERMINIEN

  VIGILANT, THE SOLITUDES encompassing the castle closed around the visitors, whose sojourn soon seemed destined to take on the aspect of indefinite duration.

  As for Heide, she felt herself to be at one of those nodes of the planet's human vibrations where absolute calm, albeit engendered by the juggling interference of contrary motions, is all the more soothing in its perilous instability—and nature now appeared to her in the light of a seductive and inexhaustible freshness—with animal unconsciousness she feasted on the sharp and stimulating air, the sparkle of grass and trees, the purity of living waters. She seemed clothed in freshness and in innocence. A spring, a grove of oaks, a sunlit clearing were the goals of her unpremeditated excursions, from which all strictly human incentive seemed momentarily excluded. She haunted the woods of Storrvan, the ocean's shores where her dramatic appearances rivalled the rarest spectacles of this world of virgin nature filled with the play of living water and of the wind, on whose wings with marvellous majesty she abandoned the folds of her long white cape.

  Life flowed ardently through her limbs, beloved of the light, which ceaselessly bathed them in a delicate vapour. The presence of Albert seemed to her to extend to the extreme limits of his enchanted domain, to such a point that more than once the invigorating virtue of his adored body seemed even nearer to her and more real beside some cool spring, in some unexplored forest retreat, than on the terrace the first evening when she had offered him that kiss whose temerity filled her with an enduring stupefaction.

  Their life together fell naturally into a succession of distinct and barely real scenes like those of a play in which the purely interior character of the drama is emphasized by the extremely restricted number of the cast. It generally happened that during the first half of the day each actor was left to his own devices in complete independence, as in the exposition of a play each character is first presented to the audience in all his freshness, still untrammelled by the plot which grows ever more fatal and gradually sets a sinister restriction on each of his slightest gestures up to the final catastrophe of the play.

  Thus, the mornings were often consecrated to solitary walks to the sea or in the forest, and the spell of the sunlight, all the blooming freshness that seemed to be presiding over a new creation of the earth rising out of chaos, with insidious malignity made each of them believe that life was once more open before them, free of all hindrance; they breathed in deep draughts of this recreated air of the childhood of the earth, their minds seemed to grow virginal, seemed, in their exciting liberty, to have escaped without difficulty from the influence of the subtle atmosphere which the storm of the first evening had left stagnating around the castle like the nitrous odour that lingers after an electric discharge. But in all this an initiated mind would see only a refinement of fate which lavished these treacherous consolations upon them just as wine is mixed with aromatic spices to fortify bodies under torture, in order to intensify the sharpness of fresh torments and make the victim feel to the full the excruciating bliss. In the afternoon, a torpor that the sun let fall heavily over the courts and apartments of the castle, warned their nerves, on edge with waiting, of the prelude to a deadly game. Some force drew Heide and Albert together, and for endless hours they would disappear, would lose themselves in the nearby forest in a perilous tête-à-tête. These aimless excursions through the forest soon acquired for them both an irremediable charm. It now seemed to Heide that, at every instant, the world died and was reborn to the joint reverberation of their footsteps, and that, light and vacillating, her whole life hung on Albert's arm.

  But an uneasiness soon followed these moments of abandon. All her blood would stir, awaken in her, filling her arteries with an overwhelming ardour, like a purple tree sending out its shoots in the heavenly shade of the forest. She became a motionless column of blood, and a monstrous anguish awoke in her; it seemed to her that her veins could not contain another instant the appalling flow of this blood which leapt in her furiously at the mere touch of Albert's arm, and that it was about to gush forth and spatter the trees with its hot jet, while she would be seized by the chill of death whose dagger point she seemed already to feel plunged between her shoulder blades. Then, trembling, she would drop Albert's arm, would lie down on the moss at his feet and hide her head in her arms, not yet willing to let him read in the depths of her eyes her crushing defeat. And while he stood leaning against the low branch of a tree, turning toward her the brightness of his lucid and cruel eyes, she, in surrender and angelic trust—like a wholly submissive slave—offered him like a prayer the treasures of her body utterly dedicated to him.

  She untied her sandals and her bare feet glistened on the cool carpet of moss. Under the light silk of her dress the palpitation of her breasts was barely perceptible. She loosened her hair and let it spread like a pool around her on the grass. She stretched out her arms and the warm muscles trembled with the ardour of an enchanted life. At last she turned her eyes toward him and let a viscid glow filter through them even like the veil of blood it traversed. She lay there before him wholly offered up to the one from whom, with every instant, she drew the miracle of the prolongation of her life, and it seemed to her at times that a mass of molten metal of a consuming heat was born from her swelling tortured breasts, and filled the caverns of her flesh with floods of liquid fire; at others, deliriously light she felt herself lifted and inhaled by the blue and distant sky which was like a well of cool light through the tops of the trees above her. And such was the explosion of life within her that it seemed to her that her body in the consuming heat was about to open like a ripe peach, and her skin in all its massive thickness to be torn from her, turned inside out toward the sun to exhaust the fires of love in all her red arteries, and that her most secret flesh as well would be torn out of her very depths in quivering shreds, and burst through all her thousand recesses like a banner of blood and flame flashing in the face of the sun in a final inexpressible and appalling nudity.

  But although his heart weighed all the compassion of such a surrender, Albert remained insensible. Did he, perhaps, despise a triumph for which he had not contended, feel chagrined that his will was held at nought by capricious fortune who surrendered into his hands with the irony of total gratuitousness, the most ravishing of creatures? But above all it seemed to him impossible that Heide, of all people, could admit a solution of such equivocal facility—that the possession of this splendid and surrendered body might be—from any point of view whatsoever—the solution. He looked at Heide lying at his feet—and straightway another image rose before him with haunting persistence: he saw once more the castle towers around which dusk's melancholy shadows were falling just as, at the turn of the path, the two white figures of Heide and Herminien, heads bowed, lips tightly closed over an indecipherable message, appeared in the hermetic silence of their fabulous arrival—and the absurdity, the impossibility of reconciling these two images grew ever more irresistible. And he saw Heide again as she was to appear at the table later that evening, dramatic and unreal like a princess in a play—behind the ramparts of her i
nviolate beauty—he heard again the subtle words he had exchanged with Herminien whose stimulating presence permitted him to see her for the first time—and the idea that she should, that she could, make him the gift of herself seemed to him a particularly gross and reprehensible subterfuge, although its exact nature still escaped him. Then addressing Heide in terms of a tender and henceforth inseparable friendship, he led her back to the castle where Herminien was waiting for them.

  Those long evenings which they spent together in closest intimacy, little by little, came to be for Albert the only moment of the day when he felt he could relish his life in all its plenitude. As soon as Heide and Herminien were together, Albert became palpably aware of that agonizing secret something that he seemed to divine between them and that had given such a startling radiance to their presence that first evening as they stood at the castle door. And so now, to every word, to every glance that was exchanged between them, his ears and his eyes attributed some magnetic virtue; and he sought to surprise the inviolable secret they seemed, at the moment, to be communicating to each other. It seemed to him that Heide, so close to him, and so utterly abandoned to his mercy during the afternoon, now escaped him as though responding to a magnetic call, as though under some urgent, superior, and secret obligation. Toward her Herminien affected an invariably courteous and reserved manner, from which even a certain coldness was not absent, but at the same time Albert was aware of a ferocious irony shining in his eyes as they lazily turned from Heide to him, from him to Heide, and the mere suspicion of such an irony made him erect between himself and Herminien a solid wall of hostility. Heide, stimulated perhaps by a sort of regal state that her sex conferred upon her in the presence of these two men, shone brilliantly in the conversation, and a sort of superior coquetry that appeared in her seemed the complaisant result of a situation in which every advantage was hers, rather than that of any personal contribution on her part. Every gesture and the bright music of her words bore the accent of triumph, and at moments the eyes of her two interlocutors would turn toward her with an identical movement, as though to pay her an involuntary homage. Then their eyes would meet, and a hostility, very different from the uneasiness of the glance exchanged on that first evening, might be read in them.

  And sometimes it happened in the conduct of these evenings that it was Herminien in his turn who assumed the directing role, the character of which was particularly intolerable to Albert. It consisted in implying by his words—and more especially by his delicate reticences and an affected care not to embarrass them by too direct allusions—that there existed between Heide and Albert a subtle and unusual relationship. And then his courteous, smiling glance, as it turned from one to the other, seemed to be mocking them, and in the most offensive way to be excusing them as though to place himself on a superior plane of intelligence. And to Albert it seemed then that Herminien really held them in his hands, that he recreated them, manipulated them, twisted them together according to his fancy—tangled them and untangled them at his leisure—so perfect was the subtle play of his allusions and of his infinitely shaded reservations. He seemed to invest them with a guilty poetry, to attribute to them a thousand illicit entanglements, enveloping them with a palpable air of conspiracy, and in Albert, who well knew the excessive and, for him, insipid simplicity of the passion that had been awakened in Heide for him, a deep anger arose before this veritable creation that Herminien presented each evening, before what must appear to him a despicable expropriation. With an insufferable ease and detachment it seemed to him that Herminien—whom fate was apparently keeping so completely out of the game—brought together these ties—so easily explicable in themselves when unrelated to him—simply by his gift of comprehension, invention, and intrigue.

  And the extreme poverty of Albert's sentiments for Heide, made him each night the helpless victim of Herminien's imagination—for he perceived that he could now no longer get along without seeing represented every evening for him and to his furious stupefaction, the masterpiece that Herminien like a magician stage director, in the course of the conversation and with the assistance of infinite art, would create out of the crude material that Heide and Albert in the afternoon seemed to have accumulated only for him. He could not now reject this iridescent, malignant, peerless translation that Herminien with nonchalant virtuosity, a tender and terrible connivance that silently referred to the years of blind complicity, offered him every evening when the reunion of these three strange actors gave the signal for the play to begin. He could not resist the reminder of such a long-tested alliance, and the delicate machinery as though polished by long use, a winged machine, seemed to be set in motion with fatal slowness and to drag him along after Herminien, with the insistence of a spell, toward an end for him, in every respect, unpredictable. Thus day by day proceeded this annexation, ceaselessly watched over by Herminien with the cold and cruelly fascinating eye of a dazzling reptile.

  Herminien kept thinking of Heide. His days, which Albert supposed filled with the substance of rewarding work, with arduous meditations, were almost wholly spent lying on his bed, from which he could plunge his eyes into the melancholy woods of Storrvan. Hardly had he seen Heide's white skirt disappear through the nearest trees, than it seemed to him that life had gone from him and that the sun now shone over utterly arid horizons. Then, as a last resort, he would plunge his face into the cool darkness of his pillows, savagely biting the delicate white linen, and his pitilessly lucid mind would call up before him the image of Heide and Albert wandering together through the heart of the fragrant forest, for him rendered impenetrable by the most barbarous of enchantments; with his minďs eye he would follow the footsteps of the one whom he had brought here that he might realize her great price when she had been taken from him.

  Then the swinging pendulum of the clock, with a poignant familiarity of the first evening, would remind him of the torture that each second until the hour of dinner held for him, an empty and altogether fantastic Time, whose horror consisted entirely in the differentiation, for the first time, of the course of its duration, a Time from which the passage of all really vital phenomena had completely vanished since Heide was now beyond his reach. But when in the great drawing-room of the castle, evening had restored for him the unity of a world that seemed to be completely contained within those walls, his mind was seized with a tremulous exaltation. With the fervour of semi-delirium, with a sort of vertiginous volubility, he now threw out his words like the meshes of a net in which he sought to envelop in a despairing embrace the woman who seemed henceforth separated from him by an atrocious malediction. To stay her, to hold her, to charm her he would have liked to fill the drawing-room and the entire manor with his dangerous arabesques, with his overpowering incantations, and with marvellously active vigilance, to stake out with his thoughts all the avenues that might be open to Heide's soul—to spread out his mind to the extreme limits of the world like a magic and living carpet covered with giant flowers, beyond which her foot would have no chance to stray. And with a sublime desperation, in the mad defiance of his heart, each evening was woven anew this Penelope's web, this spidery tissue that Heide, all unconscious, would instantly and easily rend, but whose thousand meshes Albert felt descending over him like a shadow over his brain.

  THE SWIM

  ONE MORNING when the light mist that lingered among the trees presaged the advent of a torrid day, they started out for a swim in the gulf, whose watery and eternally deserted wastes could be seen sparkling from the castle. A powerful car took them jolting over stony roads. The landscape, which had first appeared to Albert as so intensely dramatic, was now covered with a soft translucent mist. The air was full of a salty tingling freshness that came to them from the chasms of the sea, redolent of an odour headier than the smell of earth after rain: it seemed that each particle of skin simultaneously consumed all these profound delights, and if one closed one's eyes, the body suddenly to the senses had the form of a wine skin wholly closed around with warm darkness
, whose marvellous living wall could be felt everywhere and at the same time by its contact with a coolness, no longer accidental but telluric, seeming to be radiated by all the pores of the planet, as its intolerable heat is radiated by the sun.

  The driving wind from the sea in long smooth waves whipped their faces and tore from the damp sand a sparkling dust—and great sea birds with long wings seemed, by their jerky flights and sudden stops, to mark, like the sea, their ebb and flow on invisible beaches of the sky where, with outspread, motionless wings, they appeared to be stranded at times like white medusae. The wet shores were hidden by endless banks of fog which the unruffled sea, reflecting the almost horizontal rays of the sun, lighted from below with a powdery radiance, and the smooth streamers of mist could hardly be distinguished by the marvelling eye from the pools of water and the uniform expanses of wet sand—so in the morning of creation the charmed eye might have watched the unfolding of the naïve mystery of the separation of the elements.

  They undressed among the graves. The sun burst through the mist, lighting the scene with its rays just as Heide in her dazzling nudity walked toward the sea with a step more mettlesome and light than that of a mare of the desert sands. In that shimmering landscape formed by those long watery reflections, in the omnipotent horizontality of those banks of mist, of those smooth flat waves, of those gliding rays of the sun, she suddenly startled the eye by the miracle of her verticality. All along the sun-devoured shore from which all shadows had fled, she set sublime reflections flowing. It seemed as though she were walking on the waters. In front of Herminien and Albert, whose eyes ran lingeringly over her strong, shadowy smooth back, over the heavy masses of her hair, and whose chests rose and fell to the marvellous slow rhythm of her legs, she stood out against the disc of the rising sun which sent streaming to her feet a carpet of liquid fire.