THE ESTHETIC THRILL
"Le style est inviolable."
Ernest Hello.
"Besides, here is the spring, it will enliven me. You will see," said the actor, with a malicious smile. "You will see. I do not detest the country, once in a while. It inspires fresh ideas that sometimes are lucrative. It is like the theater...."
"The public seems uneasy," said Sixtine. "One would swear that it does not understand."
"While waiting to be shocked. It is permissible to curse gold, not to scorn it. Would you," continued Hubert, "incite men to the mockery of the secret quintessence of their ideal? To scoff at lucre in the theater is to blaspheme God in a church."
"Oh! my manner, Monsieur," said the actress, "never signifies anything...."
This was taken by Sixtine almost as a personal allusion. She would have liked to hear herself addressed in a phrase which permitted such a reply. All the hypocrisy imposed on women protected in syllables against the stupidity of men who never guess. When she heard:
"... Yes ... I believe you have some illusions concerning my true nature...."
Her hands came together in a gesture of applause. She, too, was misunderstood; she felt herself capable of using a similar phrase. The audience murmured.
"You are mistaken," she told Hubert. "Here is sympathy, if these sounds are, as I believe, a mark of indignation against the impudent foolishness of this man."
"I think," said Hubert, "that they are growing angry against the boldness of the woman. Visibly before them, she lies to her duty which is to lie and go noiselessly about her love affairs."
"... Be honest and rich, the rest is vanity...."
"There is an unbending," remarked Hubert. "This last has been received as a flattery. They now believe she is going to reproach him because she has only been honest and rich, thanks to herself. There! that's right. This is fine, this is invigorating! Ah! ah!"
"I told you of admirable things of the earth, I told you of the true reality, that which you must choose...."
"Sixtine leaned forward, drawn by the magnetism of the noble speech, then fell back in her seat, dreamy, her fingers trembling, feeling the imperious desire of a hand to envelop her hand. Without moving her head, she turned her eyes towards Hubert: he was listening, less moved than fascinated.
"I want to live! Do you understand, madman that you are!... I thirst after serious things! I want to breathe the full air of the sky!"
The same esthetic thrill shook them at the same instant: their breath came faster, they had grown pale; their lips opened as for silent exclamations.
The electric current which descended down their spines with rapid waves stirred their limb, and at last, unconsciously attracted to each other, they were forced to let their hands obey the attraction of the fluids.
Then, the intensity of the emotional excitement doubled: their beings floated in a warm and caressing eddy, under the delicious downpour of a water-fall warmed by a mysterious sun, and the corporeal flowers of sensuality burned to open.
They listened, without letting a syllable of the magic prose escape their ears, and they dreamed while listening; they forgot "the omnipotence of inferior minds;" they deified each other, they ascended, supple and light, the mystic steps, summoned now by the illusion of a very pure and very expanding air at the summit of a narrow mountain above the clouds. Indeed, they had, "agitated minds," as the male character of the piece had so well said; they said to the whole world: "Your joys are not my joys;" all that stirred outside of them, all things that agitated below their flight were quite truly "infantile and noxious," in the silence they were in rapport with their "old friend"; they cried aloud to life: "It is no longer a question of all this! Adieu!..."
And at the end, when they went down with the curtain's fall to the stupefied room, the same stifled cry issued from their mouths, the cry of Hamlet:
"Horrible! Horrible! Horrible!"
Entragues, swept away by a movement of anger, so little in accord with his usual character, thus challenged a man who was hissing:
"Monsieur, you are a cur!"
As the rascal contented himself with shrugging his shoulders, in this way taking his key away, Entragues felt sadness and shame welling within him in place of anger.
"We will protest," said Sixtine, "by foregoing the rest of the play."
It was nine o'clock. Some persons, having been spared the rise of the curtain, were strolling under the Odéon galleries, looking at the latest novels: Hubert recognized several eminent critics and thought he could read, underneath the ribbon of their hats, the repetition of the naive avowal Collé made in his Journal: "I undertake to criticize plays because I cannot write any myself." They spoke of the revival of the little machine, and one of them deemed, in a simple and new style, that "the need of it did not perhaps make itself very acutely perceived." This irony was relished.
"We shall go on foot," said Sixtine.
The weather was humid, but mild. They walked through little dark streets, grazed by occasional passersby, in silence.
She asked him if he personally knew the author of this piece so unlike the things ordinarily heard at the theater.
"He is dead," said Hubert. "He was the noblest writer of our time."
Half of the young writers recognized him as their master and almost all had been touched by his influence. In his works were pages of an incomparable magnificence and purity of language. He truly gave the impression of the two souls of Goethe and Edgar Allen Poe melted into one and lodged in the same person.
Sixtine was surprised that he was not better known, but Hubert assured her that he was known to those who could understand him. Others would only be capable of acquiring the verbal knowledge of his name, and to what end? He proceeded just like some other contemporaries whom Hubert named, but when the thieves of glory would have used up their life-interest, the others would enter the house, the parchment of immortality in their hands, and would expel the intruders. Perhaps at this very hour still others, more unknown, were lying in a cellar or were dying bedridden, whose names would to-morrow fill the world with an unexpected gleam.
"Well! Madame, think that Jesus, who was the son of God and whose works and speech, sown in time and space, have yielded great harvests, think that Jesus died so unknown that Josephus, almost his contemporary, the grandson of the high-priests and descendant of the Maccabees, captain general of the Galileans, historian of all the little details of Jewish history,—Josephus had never heard of Jesus. I could give you more accessible examples, but this is primordial and those among us, who go through with an obscure life, unjustly, should not deem themselves humiliated: their day will come if they are worthy, and if not, it is quite useless that a light should spring up which will have to be extinguished."
"You are all quite haughty," said Sixtine, "you would not be vexed to be compared, in your wretched distresses, with the Son of Man."
"Oh!" answered Hubert, "I never dreamed of such a ridiculous blasphemy. Just as saints and less lofty souls, endowed with good will, take for example the human career of Jesus, and console themselves for their merited sufferings by thinking of the unmerited injuries of Christ, so it is permitted us to assuage the feeling of our disappointments by similar meditations. Would you have us take for themes of prayer the life of Socrates, who died unknown to the Greeks? Would you have us take Spinoza? He was a polisher of spectacle glasses, a drinker of milk, and he died of starvation, not of penury, because his mind was distracted and he forgot to nourish himself, having other things to do."
Sixtine was confounded with astonishment that he should give her such barren talk after their mutual esthetic and sentimental emotions. She attempted to reascend to the source to see if, this time, the craft would not take another branch of the stream.
She spoke of the acting, which she found perfect.
"Alas!" said Hubert. "Ignorance, sometimes, resembles genius among actors. Whoever is ignorant and yet must get out of a difficulty, invents badly or well, has recourse to personal souvenirs, to intuitive gestures. No, those we heard are perfect: they know all they have learned. Especially, nothing unforeseen: the foot goes like this, the hand like that, etc."
"At least," said Sixtine, "they pronounce well and speak clearly."
"It is proper, but without conviction. What woman, besides, outside of two or three select creatures...."
"I," thought Sixtine, "I, for example."
"... Could take this rôle royally enough to make one feel that it is not a rôle? Oh! the public is not exacting. The women come here to distract themselves, the men because it gives them ideas after a good dinner. Pathetic things to the former, cantharides to the latter. If they followed their inclinations most women would go to the Eden and most men to the Ambigu."
"I owe you," said Sixtine, "a very noble pleasure and I am grateful. We are at my door."
Hubert, recognizing the door, had a vision of lost time; he uttered a word which atoned somewhat for his awkward digressions:
"Already!"
"If it were not so late, I should have offered you a cup of tea, ten minutes by the fire-place which awaits me, but really...."
"Oh! I entreat you!"
"It is because ... no, it is not possible."
"In that case, you should not have made me think of it," said Hubert in a tone of chagrin.
"You had not thought of it? Then, go back to the very place where you did not think of it, and you will return in peace."
"Five minutes, only five minutes!"
"Be sensible, I will look for you to-morrow."
"Only as far as your door!"
"For what reason, then? Come, ring for me, if you please."
He obeyed. The door opened, she offered him her hand, then slowly, with movements of weariness or regret, she crossed the threshold. Still more slowly she pushed the door behind her, pausing twice before closing it.
At the moment of the inexorable sound, Hubert experienced a great sadness. He remained there for a few seconds, without thought, then suddenly a quite illogical association of ideas made him see once more the quasi-nuptial room of the "dark Marceline," and in this story he now divined, without really knowing why, premonitory ironies. Then he walked away, dreaming of doors which close, of doors which have been opened and which no longer open.