“What do you say to Kruepper, Signora Sanna?” said the San Celso, who passed, leaning on the arm of her young adorer, like a ruin about to fall to pieces.
“I haven’t yet seen it, Duchess.”
“Pray look at it: that German has something in him, he is inspired; don’t you think so, Gargiulo?”
“You always express yourself so well and artistically,” replied the latter, with a tender inflexion in his voice, bending to kiss the bare skinny arm and hand which displayed the swollen veins of old age.
They passed on. The crowd increased. The murmur of voices waxed louder; they smiled and jested more freely amid the luxuriant bloom; some of them disappeared amid the shrubs and blossoming plants to chat with their friends, to reappear with flushed faces and laughing behind their fans. The atmosphere grew heavier and more than ever charged with ylang-ylang, opoponax, new-mown hay, and other pungent feminine odours, and the perfume exhaled by silken stuffs, silken tresses, and lace that had lain amid sachets of orris. Those women were so many artificial flowers, with lips and cheeks tinted like their petals, with eyes as dark as the velvet heartsease, and skins as white and fragrant as gardenias. And it seemed as if the vitiated atmosphere suited their morbid brains and lungs, refreshed their sickly blood, and revived their worn-out nerves. Lucia’s face was tinted with pink in patches; her melancholy, leaden eyelids were raised, unveiling the lightning of her glance; pleasure acute as it was intense imprinted the smile on her lips.
Andrea began to see the spectacle as in a dream. He could no longer struggle against the torpor that was numbing his overtaxed brain. He made violent efforts to shake it off, but in vain, for he was mastered by a prostration that seemed to break his joints. As to his legs, they felt like cotton-wool, lifeless and powerless. He could only feel the leaden weight of his head, and he feared that it would fall upon his chest because the throat had ceased to support it. Unconsciously he wiped great beads of perspiration from his forehead, while his listless eyes still followed Lucia.
“Here is Kruepper, of Naples,” said Lucia. “Oh! look, look, Andrea.”
Kruepper, of Naples, exhibited many gradations of vases, wherein a monstrous tropical vegetation of cactus contorted itself with the twists and bends of a venomous green serpent: its pricks might have been fangs, its branches reared themselves or fell back as if their spine had been broken, or turned on one side as if overcome with sleep. These horror-inspiring branches supported a rich cup-like flower of transparent texture and yellow pistils, or a white blossom like a lily: superb flowers that lived with splendour and intensity for twenty-four hours, chalices wherein burned strong incense. Lucia bent over one of them to inspire its perfume, as if she would fain have drawn all its essence from it. When she raised her head, her lips were powdered with fine yellow dust.
“Smell them, Andrea, they are intoxicating.”
“No, it would make me ill,” he said, rubbing his eyes to clear them of the mist that veiled them. The truth was that he would have given anything to sit down and go to sleep, or rather to stretch his full length on a sofa, or throw himself prone on the ground. Sleep was gradually creeping on him while he strove with all his might, but in vain, to keep awake. He kept his eyes open by force and squeezed one hand in the other, trying to think of something to keep himself awake with. But he longed to lay his head somewhere, no matter where, against something, only to sleep for five minutes. Five minutes would have sufficed, he knew it; he was nodding already. The passers-by looked more than ever like phantoms gliding over the ground; there was no noise, only an ever increasing haze, in which the flowers dilated, expanded and contracted, assuming fantastic aspects, strange colours and perfumes. Oh! the perfume. Andrea felt it more acutely than anything else. It burned in his head like a flame, it filtered through the recesses and blended with the phosphorus of his brain. His nerves vibrated until exhaustion supervened, and then somnolence, and that all-compelling catalepsy from which his prisoned will struggled in vain to free itself.