Flames

by Robert Hichens

Valentine answered:

"I may presently. We mustn't stay in here all the evening."

There was a knock at the door of the box. An attendant appeared to ask their orders. Valentine spoke some words to him, and in a few minutes he brought three long drinks to the box. Julian drank his mechanically. His eyes were always on the ballet. The betrayal of poor Margaret had now been accomplished and the soldiers were returning from the wars. Beyond the wall of the garden the tramp of their feet was heard, a vision of the tops of their passing weapons was seen. The orchestra played the fragment of a march. Cuckoo sipped her brandy and soda, and gazed sometimes at the stage indifferently, often at the audience eagerly, and then at Julian. When her eyes were on Julian's face a light came into them that made her expression young, and even pure. A simplicity hovered about her lips, and a queer dawning of something that was almost refinement spoke in her attitude. But if she chanced to meet the eyes of Valentine her face was full of fear.

And now the last great scene of the pageant approached, and the two schoolboys leant forward in their stalls in a passion of greedy excitement. Julian happened to see them, and instead of smiling at their frankly lustful attitudes with the superiority of the drilled man over the child, he was conscious of an eager sympathy with their vigour of enjoyment and of desire. His nature retrograded and became a schoolboy's nature, with the whole garden of life flowering before its feet. Suddenly there came to him the need of touching something human. He stole his arm closely around Cuckoo's waist. She glanced at him surprised. But his eyes were turned away to the stage. Valentine pushed his chair a little backwards. He was watching them, and when he saw the movement of Julian's arm, he laughed to himself. The classical Sabbath sprang into view, and it seemed to be just then that the feet of the hours first began to move in the opening steps of their great dance of that night. Was it the magnificent Cleopatra that gave them the signal? Or did Venus herself whisper in their ears that the time for their fête was come at length, that the paid vagaries of the stage demanded companionship, and that the audience, too, must move in great processions, whirl in demon circles, rise up in heart to the clash of cymbals, bow down before the goddesses of the night, the women who gave to modern men the modern heaven that they desire in our days? The stage was a waving sea of scarlet, through which one white woman floated, like a sin with pale cheeks in the midst of the rubicund virtues. She was, perhaps, not beautiful, but she was provocative and alluring, and her whiteness made her as voluptuous as innocence is when it moves through the habitations of the wicked. Julian watched her come to Faust and win him from the scarlet dancers and from the arms of Cleopatra, and the strange rejuvenation of this philosopher who had been old, and known decaying faculties, and the flight of the heart from the warm closes of the summer to the white and iron winter plains, filled him with sympathy. It must be easy to use your youth after you have known the enforced reserve of age. For age is a bitter lesson. The dance grew more wild and rattling. The frou-frou of the swinging scarlet skirts filled the great house with sound as the glitter of spangles filled it with a shimmering light. Faust was surrounded by fluttering women moving in complicated evolutions with a trained air of reckless devilry. And Julian gave himself to the illusion created by the skill of Katti Lanner, ignoring entirely the real care of the dancers, and choosing to consider them as merely driven by wild impulse, vagrant desires of furious motion, and the dashing gaiety of keen sensual sensation. They danced to fire a real Faust, and he was Faust for the moment. His arm closed more firmly round the waist of Cuckoo, and he could feel the throbbing of her heart against the palm of his hand. He did not look at her, and so he did not see the dawning anxiety with which she was beginning furtively to regard him. Entirely engrossed with the stage spectacle, the movement of his arm had been entirely mechanical, prompted by the hardening pressure of excitement in his mind. If he had actually crushed Cuckoo and hurt her he would have been unconscious that he was doing it.

And Valentine all this time leaned back in his chair, that stood in the shadow of the box, and looked at the enlaced figures before him with an unvarying smile.

Contrast and surprise are the essence of the successful "spectacle." Just as the scarlet dervish whirl was at its height the character of the music changed, slackened, softened, died from the angrily sensuous into an ethereal delicacy. The stage filled with clouds that faded in golden light, and a huge and glittering stairway rose towards the painted sky. On either side of it hung in the blue ether guardian angels with outstretched wings, and between their attentive ranks stood the radiant figure of the purified Margaret, at whose white feet the red crowd of women, even the majestic Cleopatra and pale voluptuous Venus, sank abashed. Harps sounded frostily, suggesting that crystal heaven of St. John, in which the beauties we know in nature are ousted by unbreathing jewels, the lifeless pearl and chrysolite. The air filled with thin and wintry light, that deepened, and began to glow, through lemon to amber and to rose. The angels swam in it, and then the huge stairway leading up to heaven shone with the violence of a gigantic star. Faust fell in repentance before the girl he had ruined and failed to ruin, the girl who bent as if to bless him upon this fiery ascent to heaven. And Julian, absorbed, devoured the wide and glowing scene with his eyes, which were attracted especially by the living flames that were half veiled and half revealed beneath the feet of Margaret. The music of the orchestra rippled faintly, and then it seemed to Julian that, as if in answer, there rippled up from the golden stairs and from the hidden company of flames that faint, thin riband of shadowy fire which had already so strangely been with him in the dawn and in the dusk. It came from beneath the pausing feet of the girl who blessed Faust, and trembled upwards slowly above her glittering hair. Julian felt a burning sensation at his heart, as if the tiny fire found its way there. He turned round sharply, withdrawing his arm from Cuckoo's waist with an abruptness that startled her.

"Valentine!" he exclaimed in a whisper. "There; now you see it."

Valentine leaned to him.

"See what?"

"The flame. It's no fancy. It's no chimera. Look, it is mounting up behind Margaret. Watch it, Valentine, and tell me what it is."