The Intruder

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

IV.

In the afternoon of that same Saturday, I had a strange attack of melancholy.

The post had arrived at the Badiola, and I happened to be in the billiard-room with my brother, glancing through the newspapers. My eyes fell by chance on the name of Filippo Arborio, mentioned in an article. A sudden agitation seized me. Thus it is that a slight jar will stir up the dregs of a quiescent liquid.

I remember. It was a foggy afternoon, illuminated by the fatigued reverberation of a whitish light. Outside, before the window looking on the lawn, Juliana passed with my mother, arm in arm, chatting. Juliana carried a book, and walked as if fatigued.

With the incoherence of the images that unrolled before me in thought, there arose in my mind certain remnants of my past life: Juliana before the mirror, on that November day; the bouquet of white chrysanthemums; my anxiety on hearing the air from Orpheus; the words written on the fly-leaf of The Secret; the color of Juliana's dress; my soliloquy at the window; Filippo Arborio's face, dripping with perspiration; the scene in the dressing-room of the salle d'armes. I thought with a shudder of fear, like a man who suddenly finds himself leaning over the edge of a precipice: "Can it be possible that I am lost?"

Overcome by anguish, feeling a desire to be alone in order to commune with myself, to meet my fear face to face, I took leave of my brother, left the hall, and returned to my room.

My agitation was mingled with impatience and anger. I was like a man who, in the midst of the comfort of an illusory cure, in the full assurance of having regained his health, would feel all at once the sting of his old malady, would perceive that in his flesh the ineradicable disease still remained, and would be constrained to watch himself, to note his symptoms, in order to convince himself of the horrible truth. "Can it be possible that I am lost? And why?"

In the strange forgetfulness in which the entire past was buried, in that sort of obscurity which seemed to have entirely invaded one layer of my conscience, the doubt against Juliana, that odious doubt, had also vanished, was dissolved. My soul had so great a desire to lull itself with illusions, to believe and to hope! My mother's saintly hand, in caressing Juliana's hair, had rekindled for me the aureole around that head. By one of those sentimental errors frequent during the period of weakness, when I had seen the two women leading the same existence in such sweet concord, I had involved them in the same irradiation of purity.

But now, a slight accidental fact, a mere name read by chance in a journal, the awakening of a recollection had sufficed to upset me, to frighten me, to open an abyss beneath my feet; and I did not dare sound the depths of a resolute scrutiny, because my dream of happiness withheld me, drew me back, clung to me obstinately. I wavered at first in an obscure and indefinable anguish, traversed at moments by dreadful glimpses. "It may be that she is not pure, and then? Filippo Arborio, or another ... who knows? Were I certain of the sin, could I pardon it? What sin? What pardon? You have not the right to judge her; you have not the right to raise your voice. She has kept silent too often. Now, it is your duty to keep silent. And your happiness? The happiness that you dream of, is it your own or does it belong to both of you? To both of you, of course; for the shadow of her sorrow would suffice to obscure all your joys. You suppose that, if you are happy, she will be happy also—you with your past of constant misconduct, she with her past of constant martyrdom? The happiness that you dream of has for its only foundation the abolition of the past. Why, then, if she had truly ceased to be pure, would it be impossible to throw a veil over it or condone her sin as you would your own? Why, if she forgets, should you not forget, yourself? Why, if you claim to be a man without prejudice and completely freed from social convention, should you not consider her also as a woman in the same state of being? Such an inequality would be perhaps the worst of your injustices. But the Ideal? But the Ideal? My own felicity would not be possible except on the condition of recognizing in Juliana a creature absolutely superior, impeccable, worthy of every adoration; and it is precisely also in the innate feeling of this superiority, in the consciousness of her personal moral greatness, that she would find the most precious elements of her own felicity. I should not succeed in forgetting my own past or hers, because the existence of this special happiness presupposes both the profligacy of my former life and her unconquered and almost superhuman heroism, the image of which has always constrained my mind to bow before it. But do you take into account the amount of egotism and high ideality that enters into your dream? Do you believe you merit that supreme prize, happiness? By what privilege? So your long misconduct has entitled you, not to expiation, but to a reward?"

I rose hastily to my feet to cut short this debate. "In brief, it concerns only an old suspicion, very vague, and awakened by chance. This unreasonable agitation will go away. I have made a substance of a shadow. In two or three days, after Easter, we will go to the Lilacs, and then I shall know, I shall unquestionably feel the truth. But is not that profound and immutable melancholy which is in her eyes also suspicious? That bewildered air, that species of continual preoccupation which is marked so heavily on her brow, that great fatigue which is revealed by certain attitudes, that anguish which she cannot succeed in dissimulating at your approach—is not all that suspicious?" The ambiguity of such symptoms bore also a favorable interpretation. Then, submerged by a flood of the most violent pain, I went up to the window, with the instinctive desire of plunging into the spectacle of the outer world to discover there something that would correspond to the state of my soul—a revelation or an appeasement.