DREAM FIGURE
"O Créateur de l'universel monde,
Ma pauvre âme est troublée grandement!"
Heures à l'usaige de Paris, 1488.
Sixtine was far from him, and yet he believed that he saw her nearby.
All afternoon he preserved the illusion of walking in her company. She suddenly appeared in a dress of changing colors: the cloth, a light and pale green silk, had golden clasps. Her shoes made no sound; her smile, instead of speech, and diverse inflexions of her muscles, expressed her thoughts; nevertheless, but only once, he positively heard the sound of her voice. "So you would like me to tell you the history of the portrait chamber?" Preoccupied in establishing the fundamental sound of the recovered sequence which for an instant tyrannized him, Entragues listened to the question without immediately perceiving its sense. He was going to reply and agree, but Sixtine, under the parasol which she had opened, was reading and he dared not disturb her. The parasol, too, by its oddness, caused his mind to wander. It was of such limpid and transparent yellow that through it he beheld, barely shaded by a luminous shadow, the shoulders of Sixtine and her head bent upon the book.
They walked along the quay, from the rue du Bac, where he had begun to feel her presence, to the Saint-Michel Square. The charming, shining Seine was iridescent with the play of oblique rays striking against its current; sparkling foam fell on the prows; the fringe of the bank was dotted with sails on which a keen wind played; the canvas crackled like flames; the lines of anchored boats here and there rumbled under the shock; the multicolored parapets retreated.
Entragues bought no lexicon; he looked at the serried backs of books, without even reading the black or golden titles.
In a deserted spot, along the wooden balustrade, and as the first gas light flickered in a café, he was accosted by a young man who passed as a poet, perhaps because of the rare beauty of his face.
"How singular! You are alone, yet one would swear that an invisible person accompanied you."
"I am now alone, my dear Sanglade."
Sixtine, in fact, had just disappeared from Entragues sight and Sanglade had the impression of having awkwardly interrupted a tête-à-tête, an impression that was quite metaphorical, for with an air of bantering timidity, he added:
"You are seeking rhymes. I will give you some, I have them all at my command. Without this gift, I would not be a poet."
"Yes, without this you would be a poet."
"In prose, perhaps," answered Sanglade, "but in verse?"
Entragues purposely let him run on, having no mind for esthetic tournaments. They went up the boulevard. At the Luxembourg, Sanglade, tired of discoursing in monologue, took advantage of a passing friend and returned. Entragues made for a quiet café, protected with carpets, where his horror of sound could readily be satisfied.
Since his return, save for a brief interview on the first morning, he had been able to abstract Sixtine from his immediate thoughts. It was with a perfect coldness that he had recopied into good French his brief travel notes where, towards the end, the name of this woman, hardly known, recurred with each verse, like an amen. But, and here he recognized the occult power of words, the material transcription of those syllables had acted violently on his imagination. He had lived whole hours with her, and now that the mystic power of the vision was spent, he still thought of the absent one.
"She must have gone to Bagnoles for one of those imaginary illnesses which women never think of treating save in their periods of boredom. Restless or bored: she had these two states in almost equal doses. Then if her head is troubled with love, she will not experience it until the time when one questions oneself: uncertain questions, uncertain answers! And boredom? To explain it, you must admit that the advance or recoil of this dawning caprice has nothing to do with her will and that she may be unconscious of her own sentiment. That is it: she loves, therefore the uneasiness; but she does not know it, therefore the ennui. It is necessary to note this. Could she have returned?"
Hubert believed himself merely touched by a simple analytical fever. Often, for the sole pleasure of taking stock with himself, he had followed, in their psychic evolutions, many interesting subjects; of women, particularly, but deceived by a consideration of the inscrutable motive, they had divined another one and had begun to simper at the investigator. Thus it used to end, whether Entragues digressed, or whether a series led him into a secret laboratory experiment.
Even in this last case, it was short, for he had hardly ever tried his tests except upon vile souls often belonging to prostituted organisms.
Sixtine was of the caste numbered one or two, coming from an aristocratic convent and from an idle leisurely family.
Nothing certain at the first approach, because of the modern confusion and personal reclassification, but fallen rather than parvenu, belonging at least to those who cultivate a relative leisure in an avowed independence. As for certain other problems which puzzled him, he would amuse himself in resolving them gradually, at her home, with the aid of subtle questions, for he meant to accept her invitation and would go to see her.
Such a minute revery denoted a certain possession. Entragues did not yet suspect, or perhaps did not wish to condescend to admit to himself that the agreeable and feminine form of mystery acted on his imagination more than on his curiosity.
Sixtine was graceful and her contours corresponded with the harmony requisite to evoke the word of beauty. Blond her hair, and a golden green, her eyes; violent the mouth and exquisitely white, her teeth! Ah! the violent mouth broke the harmony, a cold esthetician would have said, but, and this was the proof that Hubert already was a prey to desire, he loved its destructive violence, seeing it in but a more assured promise of pleasure. Just then Entragues gave such a sharp start that the gamblers close to him held the dice-box sus-about to make. The dice rattled in the copper box pended in air, and suppressed the bets they were and Entragues reflected on his nerves.
"It was because of the ambiguity, that was the cause, my soul! The ambiguity threw the poison."
"Oh! was he going to take as a serious confession idle words playfully uttered on the wings of a causerie. This time, was it not really the old malady of chimerical fancies? He smiled at himself, and almost grew out of patience. Ah! the thing was not to accuse her because of a confession, not to reveal himself as devoid of criticism as a public accuser, but not to deny her criminal potentiality. What a doll full of bran instead of blood, seamed with threads instead of nerves, is a woman incapable of crime! As well say that she is incapable of passion! Our cowardly civilization, itself, absolves the bloody consequences of love, sparing such women the futile expiation of an inevitable act. The equivocation he had read on Sixtine's face was the mark of election, the sign of possible passion, the proof that she was a woman."
This deduction reassured Entragues. Henceforth, instead of trembling before the word crime, he would have to qualify it. A preliminary distinction would have spared him the start which had frightened the dice players. Now he willingly accepted a Sixtine who was a neighbor to crime, and even a criminal Sixtine. In the latter case it meant, for example, that she loved, that she was deceived, that she had poisoned the deceiver. Ah! there are luckless poisoned ones whose fate may trouble sensibilities after the deed. But if, instead of defending herself, Sixtine had died, what sort of person would the assassin have been?
This crime, at first so disturbing, insensibly gained some considerations of attraction. An old desire, like an old viper, stirred in his head. Ah! to kiss hands that had used poison! To caress the flesh of a murderess! Through contempt of all morality, to give pleasure to the woman who had provoked, for her peace, frightful agonies!... And perhaps there truly was nothing in it at all! Oh! she had, with a single word, confessed too thoroughly not to go, some day, to the end of the avowal: he would know how to win her confidence. For the time being, as it was impossible to penetrate further, lacking sufficient enlightenment, Entragues abandoned all analysis and dined.
Afterwards, he recopied the sequence which, in his revery, had been dimly refashioned. The desired words took their assigned place, the rhythm polished the breaks that appeared too rude, the imperfections were effaced.
It went thus:
DREAM FIGURE
Séquence
La très chère aux yeux clairs apparaît sous la lune,
Sous la lune éphémère et mère des beaux rêves.
La lumière bleuie par les brumes cendrait
D'une poussière aérienne
Son front fleuri d'etoiles, et sa légère chevelure
Flottait dans l'air derrière ses pas légers:
La chimère dormait au fond de ses prunelles.
Sur la chair nue et frêle de son cou,
Les stellaires sourires d'un rosaire de perles
Etageaient les reflets de leurs pâle éclairs. Ses poignets
Avaient des bracelets tout pareils; et sa tête,
La couronne incrustée des sept pierres mystiques
Dont les flammes transpercent le coeur comme des glaives
Sous la lune éphémère et mère des beaux rêves.
He signed his name and the date, adding farther down, as an envoy "To Madame Sixtine Magne." To spare himself reflections of this sort: "Shall I send it to her, shall I not send it to her?" he addressed an envelope, affixed a stamp, and immediately carried it to the mailbox.
Then, to divert himself by gaining an hour of rest, he repeated the story with which Monsieur de B——. had amused them, one evening, at the home of the countess—a quite unadorned story, as becomes such a trifle—just such a thing as could be written by those whose occasional simplicity is not due to a poverty of language or to an imaginative sterility.