Near the piano, where Chardon turned as he waited Madame Patel's return from her dressing-room, there swung a picture whose violence was not dissipated by the gloom of the half-hidden corner. He approached it with a lamp. Staring eyes saluted him, eyes saturated with the immitigable horror of life; eyes set in grotesque faces and smothered in a sinister Northern landscape. It was one of Edvard Munch's ferocious and ironic travesties of existence. And on the white margin of the lithograph the artist had pencilled: "I stopped and leaned against the balustrade almost dead with fatigue. Over the blue-black fjord hung clouds red as blood—as tongues of flame. My friends passed on, and alone, trembling with anguish, I listened to the great infinite cry of Nature."
She tapped him on the shoulder. "Come," she said gravely, "leave that awful picture and eat. You must be dead—you poor man!" Chardon blushed happily until he saw her cold eyes. "I was trying to catch the color of that painter's mind—that Norwegian, Munch. Disordered, farouche as is his style its spiritual note enchains me. The title of the picture means nothing, yet everything—'Les Curieux,' is it not?" "Yes, you know it well enough by this time. What M. Patel could see in it I can't say." As she sat down to the table—not at the head: that was significantly empty—he admired her figure, maidenly still despite her majestic bearing; admired the terse contour of her head and noticed, not without a sigh, her small selfish ear. Madame Patel was nearing forty and her November hair had begun to whiten, but in her long gray eyes was invincible youth, poised, self-centred youth. She was deliberate in her movements and her complexion a clear brown. Chardon followed her example, eating and drinking, for they were exhausted by the ordeal of hearing under the most painful conditions, a posthumous opera.
"The great, infinite cry of Nature,"—he returned to the picture. "How difficult that is to get into one's art." "Yes, mon ami; but our dead one succeeded, did he not?" She was plainly obsessed by the theme. "His enemies—ah! the fools, fools. What a joy to see their astonished faces! Did you notice the critics, did you notice Millé in particular? He was in despair; for years that man pursued with his rancorous pen every opera by M. Patel." She paused. "But now he is conquered at last. Ah! Chardon, ah! Robert, Patel loved you, trusted you—and you helped him so much with your experience, your superior dramatic knowledge, your poetic gifts. You have been a noble friend indeed." She pressed his hand while he sat beside her in a stupor. "The great, infinite cry of Nature," he muttered. "And think of his kindness to me, a poor singer, so many years younger than himself! No father could have treated a daughter with such delicacy!" ...
Chardon looked up. "Yes," he assented, "he was very, very old—too old for such a beautiful young wife." She started. "Not too old, M. Chardon," she said, slightly raising her contralto voice: "What if he was thirty years my senior! He married me to spare me the peril and fatigue of a singer's life; few women can stand them—I least of all. He loved me with a pure, narrow affection. I was his daughter, his staff. You, he often called 'Son.'" She grazed the hem of tears. Chardon was touched; he seized her large, shapely hand, firm and cold as iron, and spoke rapidly.
"Listen, Madame Patel, listen Olivie—you were like a daughter to him, I know it, he told me. I was his adopted son. I tried to repay him for his interest in a young, unknown poet and composer—well, I compose a bit, you know—and I feel that I pleased him in my libretto of 'The Iron Virgin.' You remember the summer I spent at Nuremberg digging up the old legend, and the numberless times I visited the torture chamber where stands the real Iron Virgin, her interior studded with horrid spikes that cruelly stabbed the wretches consigned to her diabolical embraces? You recall all this?" he went on, his vivacity increasing. "Now on the night of the successful termination of our artistic enterprise, the night when all Paris is ringing with the name of Patel, with 'The Iron Virgin'"—he did not dare to add his own name—"let me tell you what you know already: I love you, Olivie. I have always loved you and I offer you my love, knowing that our dear one—" She dragged her hand from his too exultant grasp and sat down breathless on a low couch. Her eye never left his and he wavered at the thought of following her.
"So this is the true reason for your friendship!" she protested in sorrowful accents. "For this you cultivated the good graces of an unsuspecting old man." "Olivie!" he exclaimed. "For this," she sternly pursued, "you sought my company after his death. Oh, Chardon! Robert! How could you be so soon unfaithful to the memory of a man who loved you? He loved you, Robert, he made you! Without him what would you be?" "What am I?" She did not reply for she was gazing at the portrait over the fireplace. "A neglected genius," she mused. "He was forced to conduct operas to support his life—and mine. Yet he composed a masterpiece. He composed 'The Iron Virgin.'" "Could he have done it without me?" Madame Patel turned upon him: "You ask such a question, you?" Chardon paced between table and piano. He stopped to look at the Munch picture and bit his lips: "The great, infinite cry of Nature! Much Patel knew of music, of nature and her infinite cries." His excitement increased with every step.
"Olivie Patel, we must come to an understanding. You wonder at that picture, wonder what dread thing is happening. Perhaps the eyes are looking into this room, peering into our souls, into my soul which is black with sin and music." Like some timid men aroused he had begun to shout. The woman half rose in alarm but he waved her back. His forehead, full of power, an obstinate forehead, wrinkled with pain; his hands—the true index of the soul—were clasped, the fingers interlocked, wiry fingers agile with pen and piano. "Hear me out, Olivie," he commanded. "I've been too good a friend to dismiss because I've offended your sense of propriety"—she made an indignant gesture—"well, your idea of fidelity. But there is the other side of the slate: I've been a faithful slave, I've worked long years for my reward; and disciple of Nietzsche as I am, I have never attempted to assert my claims." "Your claims!" she uttered scornfully. "Yes, my claims, the claims of a man who sees his love sacrificed to miserable deception. Sit still! You must hear all now. I loved poetry but I loved you better. It was for that I endured everything. I spoke of my black soul—it is black, I've poisoned it with music, slowly poisoned it until now it must be deadened. Like the opium eater I began with small doses of innocent music: I absorbed Haydn, Mozart. When Mozart became too mild I turned to Beethoven; from Beethoven to the mad stuff of Schubert, Schumann, Chopin—sick souls all of them. They sustained me until even they failed to intoxicate. My nerves needed music that would bite—I found it in Liszt, Wagner and Tschaïkowsky; and like absinthe-drinkers I was wretched without my daily draughts." "You drink absinthe also, do you not?" she asked in her coldest manner. He did not notice her. "My soul gradually took on the color of the evil I sucked from all this music. Why? I can't say; perhaps because a poet has nothing in common with music—it usually kills the poetry in him. That is why I wonder what music Edvard Munch hears when he paints such pictures. It must be dire! Then Richard Strauss swept the torrid earth and my thirsty soul slaked itself in his tumultuous seas. At last I felt sure I had met my match. Your husband was like a child in my hands." She listened eagerly. "I did with him what I wished—but to please you I wrote 'The Iron Virgin.'" ...
"The book," she calmly corrected. "As I wrote 'The Iron Virgin' I thought of you: You were my iron virgin, you, the wife of Patel. Will you hear the truth at last, the truth about a soul damned by music? Patel knew it. He promised me on his death-bed—" Olivie pushed by him and stood in the doorway. He only stared at her. "You are an Oread," he mumbled, "you still pine for your lost Narcissus till nothing is left of you but a voice—a voice which echoes him, echoes Ambroise Patel."
She watched him until his color began to return. "Robert," she said almost kindly, "Robert, the excitement of to-night has upset your nerves. Drink some brandy, and sit down." He eyed her piteously, then covered his face with nervous hands, his hair falling over them. She felt surer of him. "You called me an echo a moment ago, Robert," she resumed, her voice deepening. "I can never forget Patel. And it was because of this and because of my last promise to him that your offer shocked me; I ask your pardon for my rudeness. You have been so like a brother for the past years that marriage seems sacrilegious. Come, let us be friends—we have been trusty comrades. 'The Iron Virgin' is a success"—"Yes," he whispered, "the iron virgin is always a success." "—and why should our friendship merely be an echo of the past? Come, let us be more united than ever, Patel, you and I." Her smooth voice became vibrant as she pointed triumphantly at the portrait. He followed her with dull eyes from which all fire had fled.
"The echo," he said, drinking a tumbler of brandy. "The echo! I have it now: they see the echo in that picture back of me. Munch is the first man who painted tone; put on canvas that ape of music, of our souls, the ape which mocks us, leaps out after our voice, is always ready to follow us and show its leering shape when we pass under dark, vaulted bridges or stand in the secret shadow of churches. The echo! What is the echo, Olivie, you discoursed of so sweetly? It is the sound of our souls escaping from some fissure of the brain. It has color, is a living thing, the thin wraith that pursues man ever to his grave. Patel was an echo. When his soul leans naked against the chill bar of heaven and bears false witness, then his echo will tell the truth about his music—this damnable reverberating Doppelgänger which sneaks into corners and lies in wait for our guilty gliding footsteps." She began to retreat again; she feared him, feared the hypnotism of his sad voice. "Robert, I firmly believe that picture has bewitched you—you, a believer in the brave philosophy of Nietzsche!" He moved toward her. "Madame Patel, it is you who are the cruel follower of Nietzsche. So was the original iron virgin; so is the new 'Iron Virgin' which I had the honor to surround with—" "You mean instrumentation," she faltered. "Ah! you acknowledge so much?"