The Chateau d'Argol Page 8

  Nothing can convey an idea of the suggestive power of this road, open for the soul alone in the heart of a forest isolated from the world, and which, by the disconcerting amplitude of its useless dimensions, seemed to render more complete the solitude of these sequestered regions. At this moment the sun, low in its course, shone in the very middle of the trench, which the avenue cut through the trees all the way to the distant horizon, and filled the theatrical vessel with a flood of golden light: as far as the eye could see the double colonnade of trees, more motionless than a curtain of leaves reflected in a sheet of water, seemed to make way before it; and, as on a path opened through the sea, and in the midst of a silence more sumptuous than that of an empty palace and which seemed to hold all things in suspense in the sustained flash of its enchantment, Heide and Albert started down the middle of the avenue. For a long time through the declining hours of the day, they followed the implacable rigidity of the route, colliding with the suffocating walls of their destiny.

  Sometimes a bird flew like a triumphant arrow across the avenue, and its particular and now surprising immunity, during its whole passage across what seemed, even to the least initiated eye, one of the authentic high-tension lines of the globe, had an effect on the mind akin to watching the nerve-racking gymnastics of a sparrow on an electric wire. Sometimes a brook crossed the path, recognized far off by the singular gaiety, the entirely gratuitous musicality of the murmur of its transparent waters, and Albert then with a fraternal grace, would take Heide's shoes from her tired feet, improvising a scene comparable, by the excessive force of its effect upon the soul abandoned in these lonely haunts, with that scene which the critic of symphonies has designated by a completely strange title—because it suggests, and intends to suggest, that certain human relations lost in an animality as pure and fluent as thought, are completely reducible to an element for the first time envisaged from within—of "scene beside the brook".

  At last night fell over the forest and the sky revealed all its stars, but nothing could stop their divine course, guarded more surely within the temple in the woods than by the tutelary sphinxes along the avenues of the Egyptian tombs. Trust, restored Albert and Heide to the state of pure virtue and resembling the milky emanation of the night bathed by the moon, visited them with all its primitive grace. As once before, on that harrowing day, across the watery plains of the sea, retreat was now no longer possible. But the night lingered and the avenue stretched out in all its fatal length. And they knew now that their road would end only with the surprising splendour of the morning. And this couple, arms linked over shoulders, endlessly prolonged their enchanted walk with eyes closed, hair flying, bare feet on moss out of the strange tales of chivalry, and with their slightest gestures visibly surrounded by all the signs of a false elegance a thousand times more disturbing than the real.

  Long lingered the hours of the profound night. And now a vague feeling they were powerless to resist invaded the souls of Heide and of Albert. It seemed to them that the planet, swept along by the heart of the night which it belaboured with the crests of all its trees, overturned and spun backward following the obstinate direction of the avenue, more unreal than the axis of the poles, more abundant than the sun's rays drawn in chalk on a blackboard. And as though lifted by a prodigious effort onto the roof of the smooth planet, onto the nocturnal ridge of the world, they felt, with a divine shudder of cold, the sun sinking under them to an immense depth, and the unballasted avenue as it climbed right through the thickness of the true night revealing to them, minute by minute, all its secret and untrodden paths. In the silence of the woods, hardly distinguishable from that of the stars, they lived through a night of the world in all its sidereal intimacy, and the revolution of the planet, its thrilling orb, seemed to govern the harmony of their most ordinary gestures.

  Now, however, it appeared to them that they were crossing low and watchful plains, interspersed with stagnant waters, where reeds like spears rose in supernatural immobility, then the road slowly climbed an imposing hill where a lighter air presaged still incommensurable altitudes—and often they would look back avidly, trying to make out the levelled landscape still completely covered by the dense veils of night. But their mad anguish was drawing to an end. A gentle breeze out of the black sky swayed the funereal folds of what seemed at first the unknown and unnameable substance of primeval chaos itself, but that finally proved to be only a heavy covering of grey clouds hovering over this nightmare landscape. And morning with its wings swept the shivering stretches of pure solitude. And, as though at the brusque signal of a warning gun, Heide and Albert stood still.

  The gigantic avenue ended at the very summit of the plateau. In the middle of a level heath swept at this moment by the morning breeze, stretched a vast circular arena, appearing and disappearing in the capricious vagaries of the trailing mist, and very exactly delimited by a tender and luminous grassy turf which rendered its circumference clearly discernible, and contrasted strangely with the dishevelled, brambly and in every way utterly lugubrious character of the bushes carpeting the hillside. Cordons of stones scattered negligently here and there, which owed to the growth of the lichen now cloaking them their eerie hue of long bleached bones, accentuated for the eye the exorbitant circumference, and redoubled an almost intolerable perplexity. For, avenues in every respect exactly similar to the one Heide and Albert had been following here converged from all parts of the horizon, and from this vantage point the eye could encompass the entire vast perspective. It would be difficult for me to make the reader fully understand the impression produced upon Heide and Albert by this very strictly incongruous manifestation of the combined efforts of nature and art, unless it is realized that the most conclusive motive for the oppression transmitted to their minds from all sides, was that of an irrevocable and yet incomprehensible necessity. And perhaps the word rendezvous with the double meaning it implies—by a twist, whose profound cruelty is here apparent—of carefully concerted machinations and, at the same time, of the entire abdication of all the purely defensive reflexes, would best translate the dismayed impression instantly produced on the spectators of the scene by the perverse uselessness of this grandiose décor.

  Meantime, while they wandered lost in the last shreds of shadow still lingering over these uplands, the pounding of a runaway horse's hoofs could be heard, and soon the animal appeared filling the deserted plateau with the noise of its furious galloping, its body covered with foam which it tossed wildly around it on every side, while on its back—and apparently the very centre of those convulsions which at moments started it frantically plunging—could be seen an empty saddle. Then they both recognized—and with a shudder of sudden anguish identified by that empty saddle—Herminien's favourite horse.

  Fallen in the grass, coiled in the grass, more motionless than a meteoric stone, with the strange floating uncertainty of his wide-open corpse's eyes, as though revived in his face after death by the secret hand, and with the disquieting insinuations of an embalmer, the eyelids seemingly touched by the majestic makeup of death, Herminien lay nearby, and his uncovered face in the icy nakedness of the morning radiated a silent horror, as though, through the effect of a bloody irony, the blackness of a crime accomplished without a witness were painted on the face of the victim himself. Near him a block of sandstone half hidden in the grass was the very one on which his horse's hoof must have stumbled.

  Silently they lifted him, removed his clothes, and his torso appeared, white, vigorous and soft—and their eyes obstinately avoided each other—and in his side below his ribs, appeared the hideous wound where the horse's shoe had struck, black and bloody, circled with clotted blood as though the haemorrhage had been stopped only by the effect of a charm or of a philtre. Little by little, they felt life returning under their fingers and it was not long before the doors of the castle closed behind the wounded man in a silence full of foreboding. And all during the grey and ghostly day, filled with the same magic as the night, while the sun's white d
isc remained obstinately hidden behind heavy mists, Albert continued to wander through the long empty corridors lighted, as though by the eerie reflections of the snow, by the continuously diffused light of the white sky, soft, and with a look of blindness, a prey to an intense agitation comparable only to the highest state of tension of one who keeps vigil. And whenever he passed in front of the closed door of Herminien's room, behind which the timid clink of a glass, and the musical and surprising sound of an isolated sigh in the heart of the tense silence acquired the majestic and uncertain accents of life and death themselves, all the blood in his veins would leap up in a fiery surge.

  Worn out with fatigue, he at last lay down outside that forbidden door, and was soon visited by funereal visions. His dream seemed to take him back to those far-off days when, with Herminien on calm summer nights, their intoxicating walks would take them all over sleeping Paris, revealing to them, in the midst of a conversation inordinately interrupted by silence and invariably leading them by capricious roundabout ways to the vicinity of the jardin du Luxembourg, mysteriously deserted at that hour, the splendour of the nocturnal leaves, more entrancing than a stage setting in the light of the street lamps. And now, for the last few moments, their ears, no longer heeding their own desultory words, seemed to distinguish besides the hypnotic hissing of the arc lights, a similar and surprisingly moving noise coming from behind the high black walls cutting off their view on all sides, which was, it soon became evident, the collective murmuring of a kneeling invisible crowd praying in the middle of the street in a perfect delirium of unrestrained fervour. And now they found themselves drawn by these sounds into the maze of narrow and perpetually deserted streets that connect the place Saint-Sulpice with the rue de Vaugirard.

  Little by little, the noise of the voices seemed to fill the sky like a fiery red illumination, and the rumbling roar of those multitudinous voices in the midst of the starry night, together with the endless humming of the arc lights, ended by completely bewildering them. And at the same moment they knew, and knew, both of them, that they knew: it was for the soul of Herminien, Herminien, condemned to death, that this crowd was praying, and its verdict was accepted by both of them at the same instant with an air of heroic and indifferent resolution. A few steps farther on they entered the vestibule of a dark house, and saw straight ahead of them (communicating apparently with the street through the intermediary of a particular phenomenon which consisted in this: that as the noise of the prayers diminished in the street a similar murmur of voices grew proportionately louder but whose character was nevertheless indefinably interior) what appeared to be—because of the huge blackboard, the childish scrawlings in chalk, the shiny aspect and tiny dimensions of the tables and benches with which it was furnished—a simple school room. Judges were sitting on a long low platform and through the open door could be heard the confused hum of their voices chanting in unison with curious emphasis.

  At the same time, in the midst of a scattered audience, filling the benches in semi-darkness, whose empty faces seemed to him to reflect only the particularly tedious reading of the verdict, Albert through a mass of backs silhouetted against the light and cutting curiously across his horizon, was finally able to examine the ominous instrument of death, which appeared to consist of two long wooden bars moving freely in space in front of the blackboard, as though before this surface, now grown magical, the enigmatic play of two straight lines in space (which the impotent hand of the schoolmaster had so often tried to summon to the heart of a space, real at last) had leapt into an existence whose very crudeness, whose curious air of imperfection, seemed to constitute the seal of their terrible reality—and had finally begun, on their own account, the malefic and disquieting orgy of their unpredictable movements. Then Herminien took his place on the platform in front of the blackboard and instantly became the room's living centre of attention. At first it seemed that the long wooden bars, nimbler than knitting needles, were executing all around him an interminable and graceful dance, in which the play of constantly variable angles in itself constituted for him a profound intellectual diversion, then the tempo was accelerated, and, like the sharp plunges of a maddened beast, they improvised flourishes more harrowing than a dance of swords.

  Soon, however, in a movement become suddenly calm, with a curious and excessive slowness, now for the first time the bars seemed to have a tendency to become parallels, approaching each other in a henceforth inexorable movement, giving to this intoxicating exercise the indefinable glitter, the suddenly jerky and feverish movements of a dance of death, for Herminien's neck was now caught between the bars, and the whole audience, becoming aware of this at the same instant, fastened upon it with one accord their passionate attention. For everyone it became evident from now on that the two bars, whose abstract character of purely geometric straight lines had never been lost sight of in the course of this dance of magic rods, and was now felt to constitute all the veritable horror, engaged as they were in this parallel movement seeming to have no other object than to become absorbed in each other, to return to their primitive unity. And then, in the midst of the tense silence, could be heard the unmistakable noise of cartilages cracking under a pressure which was already beyond endurance. Meanwhile, on Herminien's face, impassive up to the moment, just as the first fissure in a building through its very insignificance seems to contain in its fatal and still imperceptible beginning all the overwhelming horror of an earthquake, a first imperceptible wrinkle at the corner of his lips seemed now the sign of an atrocious and startling alteration of the features—and on the very threshold of madness a pious hand turned Albert's head away, and standing beside him he then recognized (aware of her presence by the fact that she alone, at the same moment, also turned her head away)—Heide.

  THE ROOM

  MEANWHILE, HERMINIEN came slowly out of the shadow of death, and soon his still faltering footsteps could be heard echoing through the mournful labyrinths of the castle which Heide now obstinately shunned—and began a slow convalescence whose final issue was still rendered uncertain by his persistent and abnormal pallor. A poignant feeling of mystery now kept drawing Albert toward his room, where the shutters were always closed, and which seemed sanctified by the enigma of his resurrection—and he would stay there gazing at the mysterious door, lingering outside the threshold with a mad smile on his lips. But it became more and more difficult for him to wait, the desire that possessed him having long since passed the limits of ordinary curiosity. He was obsessed by the idea, which grew stronger day by day, that the room, bewitched by that hidden and now intensely dramatic presence, would perhaps reveal the secret which he had never ceased—he admitted it now in the fever of danger—to seek during the whole course of this friendship, so long, so dubious and so treacherous, that he had formed with Herminien. Forever before his eyes, and as in a semi-delirium, stretched the inviolable, nocturnal avenue, and it seemed to him in the light of the recollection of that night, that even the most notoriously insignificant events of his life—and along practically uncharted paths—had oriented him toward the one who held in his hands the enigma whose solution alone now seemed to him above all others necessary, even were he to pay for it the reprehensible price of his own life which was, in any case, inextricably bound up with it.

  One cold morning in November, Albert entered the room Herminien had just left. The yellow rays of the sun, streaming through the high windows, greeted him on the threshold, traversed its whole immense length, and seemed gloriously to devastate it like the sword of the avenging angel. At first glance it appeared that this large and empty room would hardly offer any of the surprises that Albert, with the naïve and frenzied excitement of a child, might have imagined in advance. But above all, was the soul overwhelmed by an air of savage liberty permeating the whole atmosphere, by the blinding and stark streaming of the light which seemed to bring with it into the room the air of the high seas dilating the lungs even to the limit of its own incalculable volume, and the rockets of light t
hat traversed the apartment and that seemed to be supporting it like girders, called to mind in the most striking manner, the extraordinarily serene atmosphere with which Dürer surrounds the figure of the Evangelist. Entire plains of a buoyant and translucid air, charged with an exhilarating odour, were contained between these high walls.

  Quickly Albert went over to a heavy oaken bookcase occupying one side of the room, filled entirely with thick leather volumes which at first glance seemed to have been until now completely neglected by Herminien. Only in one corner an inextricable conglomeration of books, engravings and prints overflowing onto the floor in heaps, revealed the persistent and suggestive activity, even in these desolate regions given over to wind and sun, of this mind whose preoccupations—although secret and not easily fathomable—had not escaped Albert altogether. At first Herminien's reading did not appear particularly significant—and would have struck an ordinary observer only by the pronounced taste for speculation it at once revealed. Although his tastes had tended, and evidently with an ever-growing passion, toward metaphysical research, it was also clear that certain epochs of human thought had held him by their persistent charm, and more especially the period toward the decline of the Alexandrine school of philosophy, as well as the first dawning of what is usually called German idealism, and which shines with such sibylline brightness through the glorious works of Schelling and Fichte. But such enticements were too familiar to Albert himself to hold his attention long—and slowly and pensively he began turning over some ancient and precious engravings—carelessly placed on one of the shelves of the bookcase—which seemed to have been the object of a daily preoccupation, and by their unusual disposition attracted the eye in the same indefinable and inadvertent way that, among a thousand other objects, a detective's eye is caught by an indubitable piece of evidence.