AN EVENING IN SOCIETY
"En résumé, la fête me paraissait un bal
de fantômes."
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,
l'Amour suprême.
Hubert gladly mingled in the conversations, dances, scandals, the many (rather charming) frivolities which took place from eleven o'clock in the evening until six o'clock in the morning at the home of the Countess Aubry.
Flowers, music, vocal screeches and caresses, shoulders, diamonds, bedizened uniforms, for the countess had connections with foreign diplomacy.
Sixtine, an augural apparition, appeared through the clinking Japanese portiere; one of her hands played with her multicolored pearls.
She advanced, Moscowitch behind her, his eyes fixed on her pure shoulders. His huge stature dominated the young woman by a whole head; he walked after her and Sixtine, faltering, seemed a very little girl kept in leading-strings by a giant. Hubert, with a bow of impertinent familiarity, passed between them and offered Sixtine his arm towards a chair. The Russian, resigned, joined a group of men and watched the talkers.
"You looked as though you were under the guardianship of that strong man, and I wanted to deliver you."
She began to laugh, quite an enigmatical laugh:
"No, he doubtless followed me for pleasure, wanting to have me under his eyes. Can a woman at a ball do anything better than let herself be seen?"
"And is it not a keen pleasure," returned Hubert, "to reveal one's arms, shoulders and neck?..."
"Very keen, no, but really the desires one evokes murmur in the ears like a flight of vernal butterflies and the rustling of their wings is sometimes soothing to the skin. You cannot understand, it is too feminine."
"Yes," murmured Hubert with a tender but undeniable irony. "Woman is a religion full of mysteries. I wish merely to adore without understanding, to kneel in the gloom, my eyes unraised towards the symbolic little red lamp: joyous mysteries and sad mysteries, to contemplate them alternatively, to know them never, perhaps, in their secret essence, and to love the dear creature whose emanation they are."
She raised her saddened eyes towards him, then, with a little anger:
"Poet and lying poetry! Tenderness is on your lips and not in your heart. Do you remember our first meeting, under the drooping branches of the old sacred firs, down there, in the gloomy avenue? You declared that nothing exists except through an evoking will. I remember it, and since then your words, often meditated, have acquired a terrible and clear meaning. You love a dream creature which you have incarnated under a semblance which is mine; you do not love me as I am, but as you have made me. You do not love a woman, but a heroine of a romance, and everything for you is but a romance.... I will tell you about this at greater length some other time, if I have leisure. Ah! my friend, there often is much charm in you, ah! if you wished and if you knew!... Do something to make me love you sufficiently to resign myself to be loved as the moving shadow of a dream. Do this ... but what do I know? To-morrow, I shall perhaps give you merely a brief no. Perhaps it will be too late to-morrow. Trust no woman, even the sincerest. Their flight is as capricious as the flight of a swallow; this one flies, that one.... They go whither their caprice takes them and then ... and then they follow the sun and kisses are fascinating beams.... Do you find that I seem to be giving you a course in seduction, according to my practice. Ah! perhaps it would be better were you contented with the dream. You could shape it according to your desire, while I, for example, will I not be malleable in vain, if I revolt against your candor? Good-by, the countess has beckoned to me and you know that I am her right hand on all grand occasions.... Good-by, Hubert, oh! we shall doubtless meet once or twice in the course of the evening.... Why not? We have so many things to say to each other.... Give me your arm."
"Strange creature, yet you belong to me! Inextricable problem, I shall decipher you by force of love, for love is the golden key which opens all women's hearts. You have the evangelical good will, you wish to love, you will love, and whom could you love except me? I shall have the curiosity to admit all your phantasies, even those which make me suffer; I do not dislike torture: this helps one to reflect on the inconveniences of being a man."
"Are you enjoying yourself?"
It was Calixte, satisfied to exhale his ennui with this simple interrogation.
"I am not bored, first, for secret reasons, then, there are some pretty dresses. It would be pleasant perhaps to imagine the nude; it is quite another matter to contemplate it: not one woman in ten gives the slighest desire to see more of her. One can be diverted for an hour or two in phonographing some fragments of the conversations in one's memory. But it is too early; this becomes somewhat eccentric only around two o'clock in the morning.
"And also," said Calixte, "to trouble some naive hearts with burning avowals."
"Ah!" answered Hubert, "are you become a dilettante? Yes, this is quite a sadistic pleasure...."
"Nevertheless...."
"Oh!" continued Hubert, "the casuists, whom fools scorn, were profound analysts of human nature. They gave concessions to love which the modern Malthusians find extreme, the hypocrites! And in this is manifest their wisdom and a marvellous intuition about physiological needs. There is not a kiss which the disdainful boldness of Ligouri does not concede to the sadness of flesh; nothing astonishes him and he condemns the most complex satiations as only venial, provided the dignity of the act be consecrated by the supreme finality."
Calixte was too spontaneous to like casuistry.
"Destiny," he told Hubert, "should have made you a monk in a Spanish monastery of the sixteenth century."
"Ah!" acquiesced Hubert, "with the grace of God I should have written fine folios."
"But you are living in the world, in an age little given to procreation, and if you put your theories to practice...."
"You well know," interrupted Hubert, "that I am, practically, abstemious, and one need not take account of accidents. Ho! I should not dislike to have some progeniture. If life were better, it would be justifiable; if it were good, it would be a strict commandment. But I have the consciousness of my wretchedness and this will spare existence to the generations who might have issued from me. Do you know my principle? It is short, strict, and I would wish it universal: No children."
Renaudeau and André de Passavant approached.
"Oh!" continued Hubert, "practically, it would be absurd and terrible, but, the principle admitted, its too numerous violations would suffice for an always excessive peopling. I should accept this cross, if it were necessary. My children would bear life as I bear it, without joy but without despair. The transcendent rascal has not killed all the swans!"
"Not yet, but he will kill them all," said André. "The lakes will be deserted and the forests silent, for they no longer will have souls to people the lakes with dreams and the forests with ideal music. Then fire will lay waste the terrestrial marsh...."
"And we shall begin again at the beginning," interrupted Renaudeau.
He disappeared without adding anything further, and Passavant, who followed him with his eyes, explained this sudden flight by seeing him glide swiftly towards Madame Aubry, who was smiling at him:
"They claim that he has already succeeded in undermining Fortier and that he is going to replace him in the review, if it is not already effected—and elsewhere, naturally."
"It was to be foreseen," said Hubert. "But as for myself, I shall not submit to his impertinences. If a few friends wished to follow me, I should sacrifice whatever sums were necessary to start a magazine that will be stricter in its choosing."
"And slightly theological?" added Passavant.
"Mystic theology in fine style...."
"Yes, yes," responded Hubert, suddenly absent-minded.
He instantly recalled that the present imposed other thoughts upon him. For the first time in his life, perhaps, he escaped the exclusive domination of art. Sixtine arose before his vision of the world like a gigantic tree whose boughs and shadows conceal the thick woods stretching behind it.
"What! Baillot here!" said Passavant, shocked.
"What has he done to you?" asked Calixte.
"Do you not remember that he denounced Desnoyers, the architect of Mont Saint-Michel, as a clerical?"
"I have seen," said Hubert, "his restorations, and they are admirable. When the years will have covered the too fresh richness with its patina, they will be masterpieces marvelously harmonizing with the architectural creations of ancient time. But I believe that it is just because he is a believer that he was able to reconstitute, as much by love as by science, such superb testimonies of a Christian epoch. What would you, a Maecenas was needed and they got a pedant!"
At this moment, Moscowitch found himself face to face with Entragues. The Russian knitted his eyebrows, but a smile, at the same instant, extenuated it:
"My dear, for the moment I renounce my dramatic projects. This damp winter is unfavorable to me, and I am going to pass a few months in the south. Thanks for all your excellent advice. They have helped me beyond your hopes."
This tone of haughty irony displeased Entragues, who answered:
"Take care, Monsieur. Are you so sure of being at such a stage where absence cannot injure you? Do you leave with the certainty of receiving letters of recall? Think that more than another I am interested in a denouement to which I have not been a stranger. Calixte, my friend, give Monsieur Moscowitch a commentary of the thirty-fourth chapter of Stendhal. Madame Magne, I think, has a word to tell me, and I am going to her."
He had perceived Sixtine visibly bored by some fool's compliments.
"At least," he thought, "she will be thankful to me for having delivered her."
Moscowitch patiently listened to Calixte whose amusing discourse on discretion yet seemed to him a contrived raillery. During this torture, Hubert sought to resume his interrupted talk with Sixtine. But she was distracted and almost meditative. Hubert related to her the poetry of his desire and she gazed at him, without having the air of understanding. Playing with her dance card, she said:
"You have not even had the idea of putting your name here and I am no longer free. Those who have requested to dance with me will come, each in proper turn, to claim the promised minutes, and, you see, it is full."
Hubert took the little card and read the inscribed names:
"Well, sacrifice one of these persons for me, the Russian for example. That would be specially agreeable."
"No," said Sixtine, "that is not possible."
"I see that you take to the man, even more than to his portrait."
"What portrait?"
"That one signed with initials which belongs to your name, and which was dedicated, still in abbreviation, to Monsieur Sabas Moscowitch...."
"Ah! that amusement of a rainy afternoon?... Is my past not sacred to you, then?"
"It dismays me. What I do not know bewilders me ... I want to know."
"But what do you gain by tormenting me thus? And by what right do you ask such questions? You are wicked to make me suffer in my soul and flesh. Leave me, or I shall tell you cruel things ..."
"I can listen to them."
"No, really, I am tired, ah! how tired I am!"
And her eyes repeated the avowal of her lips.
"But," she continued, "let us have a truce, I want to amuse myself, I want to forget, in purely nervous excitements, the struggle I am engaged with. Leave me to my partners and come to-morrow. I am very much disturbed. Come with confidence: no one has as many privileges with me as you have, Hubert, but think of all that can happen in a second, a single brief second. Here is Monsieur de Fortier come to claim me.... A demain!"
Then, instead of rejoining his friends, he strolled about, insinuating himself into groups, watching, listening.
A young girl, thin and ugly, despite large dark eyes, was languidly dreaming in a chair. The fancy seized him to amuse this child. He bowed to her and the young girl, heedless of etiquette, let herself be lifted into these strange arms. The waltz made her little heart beat, her pale cheeks grew rosy, she pressed Entragues hand and in the boldness of pleasure let her bent and radiant head fall on his shoulder. He made her chat, treated her as a woman, conducted her to the refreshment-room, made her tipsy with a little champagne and a few compliments: he was thanked with a smile, which expressed the gift of a life.
In bringing her back to her place, he was almost as happy as she was and he thought that the only happiness lies in giving happiness without demanding a return.
Towards two o'clock, he resisted Calixte Heliot who discreetly tried to draw him away. Later, he saw Moscowitch, after consulting his watch, disappear into the antechamber. Sixtine brushed past him at the same instant; she turned around, chattering, on the arm of Renaudeau, who seemed to be telling her something malicious. For an hour, perhaps more, he remained in the same place, alone and motionless, watching her pass from hand to hand, carefree and smiling. He watched with an empty brain, rendered anaemic by the late hour, fuddled by the incessant bustle. Finally the rooms began to thin. While he was hesitating to offer himself to Sixtine as an escort, she vanished, flying, without turning her head, like a woman quite decided to refuse or to accept only with boredom and bad grace the arm of a man.
He suffered her to leave, went to compliment the countess, bowed to the young girl who gave him her hand, drank a last glass of punch, so as to be less affected by the morning chill, then departed in his turn and returned on foot to his dwelling.