PANTOMIME
"Il paraît que l'opéra était fini."
E. and J. de Goncourt,
Idées et Sensations.
Entragues, endowed with a deductive mind, liked to find his bearings—to know what he was about. To recall the past, confront it with the present, determine the resultant of the two terms, the future—this he called living. Nothing, in fact, clarifies the conscious mind more than these analytical processes. What a philter! The state of one's soul is clearly perceived. It is an egoistic enjoyment, but as salubrious as opening the windows after awaking in the morning.
He saw the cold gardens, the trees despoiled of their illusions: could he, with a glance, warm the earth again and bedeck the trees?
No, he only acquired the certainty of his impotence, an immense acquisition.
"With a glance? There certainly is a certain way of looking at things which makes them tremble like conquests under the conqueror's eyes. The book of universal magic should teach this. Satan knows it. But Faust is in hell. That denouement was a good lesson: we will not be caught again! Now, what is momentary love at the cost of eternal life?
"I must confess that I was deliciously agitated yesterday. But why? I realize it now, though I did not yesterday. Yesterday I revelled in perfect unselfconsciousness: I had to leave the flower-bed in order to breathe the perfume of flowers.
"It is true that I had breathed them in advance. Ah! I remember it all. It was not a flower-bed, but a forest,—it comes to the same thing: one can take the wrong symbol.
"So, there is no present. My calculations are simplified. The future is uncertain, for, thinking that I was penetrating the jungle of a somewhat disordered forest, I found myself in the smooth walks of a pretty little parterre: we were very well-behaved there, we did not trample on the flower-beds with heedless feet, and we breathed the fragrance of the flowers with fitting gestures of assent. Thus only the past has some chances of existence.
"Here is the question reduced to the simplest unity: is it worth while traveling for the sake of memories? All who have gone to Constantinople or to the Gobelins can respond.
"But to live again, one must have lived.
"Is it I who have spoken? I thought I heard an oracular voice.
"No matter, the premise of my logic was false, for the conclusion is absurd.
"We live in imaginary realms, that is to say in the transcendental or supernatural reality; then why not place both feet on the same plane? To dream of love, must I have pressed against my flesh the flesh of my beloved? Naïveté. Did Guido touch his madonna? It she a woman he has possessed—or only played with? For its is a true pleasure of love to reinvolve its illusory carnality in order to love, in the person of the woman, the intangible creature of one's dreams!
"I reason well, decidedly. I am a logician.
"I should have followed this career.... Ah! here is the house! Already? The same exclamation as yesterday evening! I do not get bored with myself. No, and here I am returned to the place I left."
Entragues shrugged his shoulders, thinking: "One would say that above is someone who is stronger and who mocks at us."
Then, he rang.
She was tired, pale despite the red of her robe, reclining in a large arm-chair, barricaded with cushions, very near a big wood fire; she was reading, her head thrown back.
The light, feeble and bluish, fell from a suspended lamp. Hubert suspected that she could not decipher the printed pages and thought she had assumed an attitude, but he was mistaken: Sixtine, like many women, had the eyes of a cat; she was very seriously reading les Victimes d'Amour.
Seeing this title on the rose-colored cover of the volume which Sixtine had thrown on the ground at his approach, Hubert had a moment of anguish.
"I misunderstood the woman!"
It seemed to him that his love was rendered abject in promiscuity with the banal adventures in this head, which nevertheless was charming and delicate under this fawn-colored hair.
"So these are the things she loves!"
"Are you annoyed?" she asked.
"Yes," Hubert answered frankly, and to get a reassuring answer, "it is because I see you taking pleasure in unworthy books."
"But I swear to you that this book is agreeable and most exciting. It pleases me, as you say, and indeed! it would be very painful to me had I mislaid the other books. I thought I had, at first: thank Heaven, the anguish was brief. Here they are," she added, searching among the cushions, "and I am sorry that there are only three of them and that I shall be obliged, after finishing them, to commence some other story again. Oh! for this sort of distraction, the quality of literature is quite indifferent to me: all I ask is that it be complicated, threatening, as absurd as impossible. It is my opium, or, if you wish, my supply of cigars. In what would you really have me interested, in your analytical things and ... what? symbolical things?"
"But yesterday?" hazarded Hubert.
"Yesterday, the esthetic emotion was presentable. It harmonized with the nuance of my robe and the form of my bodice, to which, moreover, you paid no attention."
"I beg your pardon! the shade was light green and the form was that of Brittany. You looked like a severe lady of yore confining in a rigid corselet breasts that have been mortified by penitence."
"Yes, but you acted as if I were incorporeal and only garbed with the charms of my virtues. I warn you, Monsieur, that on any future occasion when I walk with you (quite improbable occasion!), I will put on the severest black of the severest woolen robe I have."
She continued, after listlessly stirring the embers in the grate.
"The pleasure in pretty robes is quite ended. I would like a uniformed costume like nuns, not too unbecoming, so as not to weary my eyes in mirrors."
"Black," said Hubert, "would be agreeable, but why this renunciation?"
"So that the external gayety might not make a false contrast with the darkness of my soul ... I should not have received you this evening, for I am sad and forlorn."
"You promised."
"That is no reason. I have had more important promises made to me which were never fulfilled. I bear no malice, only regret."
"Let me love you?"
"And to what purpose?" asked Sixtine, drawing herself up in her chair as if stupefied.
"It will perhaps console you."
"Oh! my dear, do what you wish, I am patient and passive, but I warn you, it will be the worse for you."
"You are so discouraging!" Hubert gently returned. "Thus, you should have let me enter with you yesterday evening...."
"Did I forbid you?"
"You refused to let me."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Did I forbid you to take hold of the door when I was closing it? Did I forbid you to ring if the first stratagem did not succeed? Did I forbid you to hasten after me while I slowly climbed the steps?... Yesterday, it was necessary to enter, and to-day it is necessary to leave ... because," she quickly added, "I am ill and inclined to go to bed. It is not an idealistic sight, I do not invite you to it. Your modesty would suffer, and mine perhaps. A bientôt, come again, do not fail to come again."
Without answering such impertinences, Hubert arose and violently imprisoned her in his two arms. She closed her eyes, he kissed them; he kissed her mouth; Sixtine, with a sudden start, half lifted herself, then they fall back against the cushions, interlaced. There, profiting by the fact that one of his arms relaxed its hold to travel along the body towards the bottom of the robe, she freed herself entirely (it is the moment when complicity is necessary), and standing, with crossed arms, she ironically regarded Hubert who was still on his knees.
This time it was she who walked towards him.
She took his hand, led him under the little suspended lamp and silently pointed with her finger to two or three significant red spots that were swelling at the corner of her mouth.
"Do not say a word, please, but go. It is perhaps a pity ... but I have no heart for love this evening.... You should have perceived it, my dear, if only by the color of my voice...."