Psyche got up.
“No...!” she exclaimed, “I will not become a spider, I will weave no web. I have sinned, but I will weave no web; I have sinned and will do penance. The world is awful—desert and wood and space; life is awful—love and pain, joy and despair, sin and punishment. And if fate is as it is, it is in vain to weave a web and to heap up treasures of dust. Spider, were it not more human to love, to live, and even to sin, than to weave web upon web? Spider, I envy you not your sacredness...!”
The spider puffed itself out maliciously.
“You seem to be still proud of your murder and your immorality and shamelessness! Your princely name you have dragged through the mire, your wings you have given up for a panther’s skin and a grape-wreath, and know not yet what repentance is. If you had been wise and become a spider, you would have served Emeralda, and there would have been no need to go down to the Under-world!”
But Psyche was no longer afraid. She had come to kiss her father’s coffin; she left her jewelled tears in the treasure, which the spiders watched over, and ascended the hundreds of steps and came on to the terrace of the battlements.
There as a child she had wandered and gazed, a child with wings, and innocent, her soul full of dreams. Now she wandered again along the ramparts and battlements high as a man; the doves fluttered about her, the swans looked up at her ... and full of dejection for former innocence and youth, she wept and wept: no longer a brook, but topazes, rubies, tears of sin, that, rattling down, frightened the doves and the swans, which, indignant, thought that she was pelting them with stones. The doves flew away, and the swans, offended, turned their backs on her. Then she sat down in an embrasure—no wings now lay against the stone-work—and she folded her arms round her knees. She looked towards the horizon; behind it loomed other horizons, first pink, then silver; blue, then gold; behind the grey, pale and misty, and then fading away. Then beyond, the horizon became milk-white, like an opal, and in the reflection of the last rays of the setting sun, it seemed as if lakes were mirrored there; islands rose in the air, aerial paradises, watery streaks of blue sea, oceans of ether and light-quivering nothingness.
And Psyche bowed her head, full of sadness, and sobbed.
The world was not changed, but more beautiful than ever; gloriously beautiful loomed the ever-changing horizon. Yet Psyche sobbed, full of sadness. She knew that the horizons were pure delusions, and that behind them was the desert with the Sphinx. Oh! if she could once more believe in the aerial paradises, the purple seas, the golden regions with people of light, who lived under rosy bananas! Alas! had she not trod a paradise, the sweet Present, the adorable garden of a moment, so little and so short in duration? It was past, it was past! Oh, how her soul scorched, how her shoulders pained, how her eyes burned!
She wept and she sobbed, and hid her face in her hands. She did not notice that the wind was rising, that the horizon quivered, that clouds were speeding through the air, white colossi like towers and dragons, riders and horses. She did not see the changes in the sky; she did not see the going up and down of wings, of flaming wings in the silver lightning, that flashed from the sky; she did not hear the warning thunder, nor did she see the clouds emitting sparks. But suddenly she distinctly heard a voice:
“Psyche! Psyche!”