III
Johannes went back to town. And days and years passed, a long, eventful time of work and dreams, of lectures and verse. He was getting on well, he had succeeded in writing a poem about Esther, "a Jew Girl who was made Queen of Persia," a work which was printed and for which he got paid. A second poem, "Love's Labyrinth," which he put into the mouth of Friar Vendt, made his name known.
Ah, what was Love? A breeze whispering in the roses; no, a yellow phosphorescence in the blood. Love was a music hot as hell which stirs even old men's hearts to dance. It was like the daisy that opens wide to the coming of night, and it was like the anemone that closes at a breath and dies at a touch.
Such a thing was Love.
It might ruin its man, raise him up again and brand him anew; it might love me today, you tomorrow and him tomorrow night, so inconstant was it. But again it might hold like an unbreakable seal and burn with an unquenchable flame even to the hour of death, for so eternal was it. How then was Love?
Oh, Love is the summer night with stars in the sky and fragrance on the earth. But why does it make the youth seek hidden paths and why does it make the greybeard stand tiptoe in his lonely chamber? Ah, Love turns the heart of man to a garden of fungus, a luxuriant and shameless garden wherein mysterious and immodest toadstools raise their heads.
Does it not lead the friar to slink into closed gardens and glue his eyes to the windows of the sleepers at night? And does it not possess the nun with folly and darken the understanding of the princess? It casts the king's head to the ground so that his hair sweeps all the dust of the highway, and he whispers unseemly words to himself the while and laughs and puts out his tongue.
Such was Love.
No, no, it was again something very different and it was like nothing else in the whole world. It came to earth one spring night when a youth saw two eyes, two eyes. He gazed and saw. He kissed a mouth, and then it was as though two lights met in his heart, a sun flashing towards a star. He fell into an embrace, and then he heard and saw no more in all the world.