"In apathy of life unrealised,
And days to Lethe floating unenjoyed."
But now he stands on his turrets and summons the events which had avoided him. They come—and they overpower him. It is love that brings the events. "How beautiful she is," he says, bending over Alladine while she is asleep. "I will kiss her without her knowing it, holding back my poor white beard." He would fain make her his queen; but she returns the love which Palomides, untrue to Astolaine, conceives for her. Astolaine discovers the truth; but she, the first of Maeterlinck's strong, emancipated women, feels no jealousy. Her behaviour is similar to that of Selysette in a later play; but her character is identical with Aglavaine's in that play: the rôles of the women in Aglavaine and Selysette are reversed. It is Aglavaine's beautiful soul for the sake of which Méléandre is untrue to Selysette. Palomides recognises, when his love turns from the woman to the child, "that there must be something more incomprehensible than the beauty of the most beautiful soul or the most beautiful face"; and something more powerful too, for he cannot help obeying it. Palomides is quite aware that Astolaine is a type superior to Alladine. He loves her even when he is faithless. "I love you," he says to her, "more than her I love." (The situation is the same in Grillparzer's Sappho: Phaon prefers Melitta, also a little Greek slave, to the renowned and noble poetess.) "She has a soul," Palomides says of Astolaine, "that you can see round her, that takes you in its arms as though you were a suffering child, and which, without speaking, consoles you for everything...." This doctrine of the soul's fluidity appears in the scene in which Astolaine tells her father that she has ceased to love Palomides:
ABLAMORE: Come hither, Astolaine. It is not so that you were accustomed to speak to your father. You are waiting there, on the threshold of a door that is hardly open, as though you were ready to run away; and with your hand on the key, as though you wished to close the secret of your heart on me for ever. You know well that I have not understood what you have just said, and that words have no meaning when souls are not within reach of each other. Come nearer, and speak no more. (ASTOLAINE comes slowly nearer.) There is a moment when souls touch and know everything without there being any need of moving the lips. Come nearer.... Our souls do not reach each other yet, and their ray [2] is so dim around us!... (ASTOLAINE holds still.) You dare not?—You know then how far one can go? Very well then, I will come to you.... (With slow steps he comes near ASTOLAINE, then stops, and looks at her long.) I see you, Astolaine....
ASTOLAINE: My father!... (She sobs and embraces the old man.)
ABLAMORE: You see that it was useless ...
Palomides promises Alladine that he will take her away from this cold clime where the sky is like the vault of a cave to a land where Heaven is sweet, where the trees are not a wilderness of boughs blackening the steep hill-sides like carrion ribs, but a wind-waved sea of rustling shade.... They are both poor little wandering souls aweary in exile. While they are preparing their flight, the events Ablamore has summoned drive him mad; and now, with golden keys in his hand (gold glinting against white walls, no doubt, another Pre-Raphaelite picture), he
"Wanders along the marble corridors
That interlace their soundless floors around
And to the centre of his royal home,"
singing a dirge with a refrain which is Maeterlinck's best lyric line: Allez où vos yeux vous mènent. He thwarts the lovers' plans by shutting them up, blindfolded and pinioned, in the vast caverns under the castle. "These caverns," comments Mieszner, "are the place we all dream in, the place where our longing for the light leads us astray into strange, contradictory deeds." The symbolism of the play is concentrated in these scenes below the ground: the thought that life is sublimated in moments of enchantment which pitiless light soon dispels. The prisoners break their bonds. When their eyes get used to the light, it seems to them that they are in a great blue hall, whose vault, drunken with jewels, is held aloft by pillars wreathed by innumerable roses. They see below them a lake so blue that the sky might have flowed thither.... It is full of strange and stirless flowers.... They think they are embracing in the vestibules of Heaven.... But suddenly they hear the din of iron ringing on the rock above them.... Stones fall from the roof; and as the light pours in through the opening, "it reveals to them little by little the wretchedness of the cave they had deemed wonderful; the miraculous lake grows dull and sinister; the jewels lose their light; and the glowing roses are seen to be the stains of rubbish phosphorescent with decay."
Ablamore has fled raving into the land; and the good Astolaine (this woman of Maeterlinck we love) has come to rescue the forsaken lovers. She comes too late—they have been poisoned by the deadly reek of the unreal in the caverns they dreamed in; and they die moaning piteously to each other across the corridor that parts their beds:
ALLADINE'S VOICE: They were not jewels....
PALOMIDES' VOICE: And the flowers were not real....
The passion of love may break the bonds of custom, and for a swift space the world may seem lit by a magic light; but the awakening comes, and the poison works, and in the cold wretchedness of reality even love will die. Love (sensual love) is a short dream of fair things that fade....
Interior, which was performed at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in March, 1895, is better than The Intruder in so far as the coming of death is not indicated by suspicious signs (which turn out to be from natural causes) and dim forebodings (which might possibly be the drivelling of old age). Here everything is taken absolutely from life. Interior, too, shows a great mastery of "active silence": some of the scenes in Alladine and Palomides approach pantomime; in Interior we have actual pantomime—the family whom the tragedy befalls are seen sitting in the lamplit room of their house, mute characters, and the spectators, together with the speaking characters, see them, through the three windows, resting from their day's toil. There are three daughters in the family, as in The Intruder; but one of them has drowned herself.