He arose, embraced her, disengaged himself, went out, ascended to his room, and leaned on the balcony. He saw the Majella all pink in the twilight, enormous and delicate, against a greenish sky. The deafening cries of the swallows which were whirling around drove him in. He went to lie down on his bed.
As he lay on his back, he thought to himself: "Good; I live, I breathe. But what is the substance of my life? To what forces is it subjected? What laws govern it? I do not belong to myself—I escape from myself. The sensation I have of my being resembles that of a man who, condemned to hold himself upright on a surface constantly in oscillation and never in equilibrium, feels support constantly lacking, no matter where he places his foot. I am in a perpetual anguish, and even this anguish is not well defined. Is it the anguish of the fugitive who feels someone at his heels? Is it the anguish of the follower who can never reach his aim? Perhaps it is both."
The swallows twittered as they passed and repassed in flocks, like black arrows, before the pale rectangle formed by the balcony.
"What do I lack? What is the lacuna of my moral being? What is the cause of my impotency? I have the most ardent desire to live, to give all my faculties a rhythmic development, to feel myself complete and harmonious. And, on the contrary, I secretly destroy myself every day; each day my life goes out by invisible and innumerable fissures; I am like a half-emptied bladder, which becomes misshapen in a thousand different ways at every agitation of the liquid it contains. All my strength does not serve me more than to enable me to drag, with immense fatigue, a little grain of dust to which my imagination gives the weight of a gigantic rock. A perpetual conflict confuses all my thoughts and renders them sterile. What is it I lack? Who is it holds in his power that portion of my being which eludes my consciousness and yet which, I feel sure, is indispensable for the continuance of my life? Or rather, is not this portion of my existence already dead, so that only death will enable me to regain it? Yes, that is it. In fact, death attracts me."
The bells of Santa Maria Maggiore tolled for vespers. Again he saw the funeral convoy, the coffin, the cowled men, and the ragged children who strove to collect the waxen tears, walking unevenly, painfully, the body bent, their eyes fixed on the flickering flames.
These children greatly preoccupied him. Later, when he wrote to his mistress, he developed the secret allegory which his mind, interested in such studies, had confusedly perceived:
"One of them, sickly, yellowish, leaning with one arm on a crutch and collecting the wax in the hollow of his disengaged hand, dragged himself along by the side of a species of giant with a hood, whose enormous fist brutally grasped the taper. I still see them both, and I shall not forget them. Perhaps there is something in myself which makes me resemble that child. My real life is in the power of some one, a mysterious and unknowable being who holds it in a grasp of iron; and I see it being consumed, and I drag myself after it, and I tire myself trying to collect at least a few drops, and every drop that falls burns my poor hand."
CHAPTER III.
On the table, in a vase, there was a bunch of fresh roses, May roses, which Camille, his younger sister, had gathered in the garden. Around the table were seated the father, the mother, the brother Diego, Albert—Camille's fiancé, invited to dinner—and the elder sister Christine, with her husband and child, a blond boy with a snowy-white complexion, fragile as a blooming lily.
George was seated between his father and mother. Christine's husband, Don Bartolomeo Celaia, Baron of Palleaura, was speaking of municipal intrigues in an irritating tone. He was a man approaching fifty, dried up, bald at the top of his head, as if tonsured, his face clean shaven. The almost insolent acrimony of his gestures and manners contrasted strangely with his ecclesiastic aspect.