And, once more, George evoked the figure of Oreste, attired in his red tunic, going up the little, sinuous river, where, beneath the endless shivering of the poplars, a stream of water ran over a bed of polished sand.
"Who knows," he thought, "if this unexpected revelation will not be my salvation? In order that I should be myself again, in order that I should recognize my true essence, do I not need to put myself in immediate contact with the race from which I have sprung? In burying again the roots of my being in the natal soil, shall I not suck up a pure and revivifying sap, which will have the power to expel all that is false and heterogeneous in me, all that I have consciously and unconsciously received by a thousand contagions? Just now, I do not seek the truth; I seek only to recuperate my own substance, to replace in myself the characters of my race, so as to strengthen them and render them as intense as possible. In thus harmonizing my soul with the diffused soul, I shall recover that equilibrium which I lack. For the intellectual man, the secret of equilibrium is to know how to transport the instincts, the wants, the tendencies, and the fundamental sentiments of his race to a superior order."
Mystery and rhythm were scattered everywhere. Near by, on the foaming beach, the sea breathed at equal intervals; but during the pauses one heard, more and more feebly, the cadences of the waves, which touched the shore at constantly increasing periods. Reverberated, doubtless by the echo of some sonorous hollow, the chant of the pilgrims was heard once more, then died away. Over the Vasto d' Aimone the sky was lit up by frequent flashes of lightning, and in the calm moonlight the flashes appeared red. Hippolyte was dreaming, leaning against the trunk of a tree, her eyes watching the silent flashes.
She had not made a single movement. Her prolonged immobility in the same attitude was frequent enough; and, at times, it took on a cataleptic appearance which was almost alarming. She had then no longer the young and kind aspect which the plants and beasts knew so well, but the appearance of a taciturn and indomptable creature in whom were concentrated all the isolated, exclusive, and destructive virtues of the passion of love. The three divine elements of her beauty—her brow, her eyes, her mouth—had perhaps never attained such a degree of symbolic intensity to illustrate the principle of the eternal feminine fascination. It seemed that the serene night favored this sublimation of her form, that it liberated the true, ideal essence of her being, that it permitted her lover to know her entirely, not by the acuteness of view but by that of thought. The summer night, full of lunary brilliancy and of dreams, and of pale or invisible stars, and of the most melodious marine voices, seemed the natural field of that sovereign image. The same as the shadow grew at times out of entire proportion to the body that caused it, the same as against the infinity of that background, the fatality of love rendered the person of Hippolyte higher and more tragic for the spectators whose prescience became every instant more lucid and more terrible.
Was it not, in the same immobility, the same woman who, from the height of the loggia, had contemplated the single white sail on the dead waters? It was she; and now again, in spite of the night which despoiled her person of all brutal reality, the same hatred moved under the sentiment excited by her—that mortal hatred of the sexes which is at the bottom of love, and which, occult or openly, subsists at the bottom of every effect, from the first glance up to extreme disgust.
"So," he thought, "she is the Enemy. As long as she lives, as long as she can exercise her empire over me, she will prevent me from putting foot on the threshold I perceive. And how can I recover my substance, if a great portion of myself is in the hands of this woman? Vain is the aspiration towards the new world, towards a new life. As long as love endures, the axis of the world rests on a single being, and life is shut in by a narrow circle. To revive and conquer, I must free myself from love; I must deliver myself from the Enemy."
Once more he imagined her dead.
"Dead, she would become an object for thought, a pure ideality. From a precarious and imperfect existence, she would enter into an integral and definite one, freed forever from her weak flesh, so frail and sensual. Destroy to possess! He who seeks the absolute in love has no other means."
Suddenly, Hippolyte started violently, as if an extraordinary shudder had shaken her. She said, alluding to the common superstition:
"Death has just passed."