But by heaven! Am I mad? Is not this on the contrary the sanest hour of my existence? I have lived like an automaton for forty years, and I suddenly awake to find myself a man. I don’t care whether I sleep or not. I feel gloriously, exultingly young. I am but twenty. As I have never lived, I have never grown old. Life translates itself into music—a wild “Invitation to the Waltz” by some Archangel Weber. I laugh out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta’s corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. Heigh, old boy? Do the pulsations of the music throb in your veins, too? Come along and let us make a night of it. To the Devil with sleep. We’ll go together down to the cellar and find a bottle of Pommery, and we will drink to Life and Youth and Love and the Splendour and the Joy thereof.
He utters a little cry of delight and frisks around me. In the blackness of the cellar his one eye gleams like a star and he purrs unutterable rapture. My hand passed over his back produces a shower of sparks. We return up the silent stairs, I carry a bottle of Pommery and a milkjug—for you shall revel, too, Polyphemus; and as I have forgotten to bring a saucer, you shall drink, as no cat has drunk before, from an old precious platter bearing the arms of the Estes of Ferrara—over which Lucrezia Borgia laughed when the world was young. It is a pity cats don’t drink champagne. I would have made you to-night as drunk as Bacchus. We drink, and in the stillness the glouglou of his tongue forms a bass to the elfin notes of the Pommery in the soda-water tumbler.
Ha! Twin purveyors of the milk of paradise, I wonder like Omar what you buy one-half so precious as the stuff you sell. Motor-cars for Mrs. Pommery and cakes for the little Grenos? I do not like to regard you as common humans addicted to silk hats and umbrellas and the other vices of respectability. Ye are rather beneficent demigods, Castor and Pollux of the vine, dream entities who pour from the sunset lands of Nowhere the liquid gold of life’s joyousness.
A few words scribbled on this telegraph form would bring her here tomorrow night. But no. What is a week? Leaden-footed, it is an eternity; but winged with the dove’s iris it is a mere moment. Besides, I must accustom myself to my youth. I must investigate its follies, I must learn the grammar of its wisdom. We’ll take counsel together, Polyphemus, how to turn these chambers, fusty with decayed thought, into a bridal bower radiant and fragrant with innumerable loves. Let us drink again to her witchery. It is her breath itself distilled by the Heavenly Twins that foams against my lips. I would give the soul out of my body to marry her, did I say? It were like buying her for a farthing. I would pledge the soul of the universe for a kiss.
I catch up Polyphemus under the arm-pits, and his hind legs dangle. He continues to lick his chops and looks at me sardonically. He is stolid over his cups—which is somewhat disappointing. No matter; he can be shaken into enthusiasm.
“I care not,” I cry, “for man or devil, Polyphemus.
‘Que je suis grand ici! mon amour de feu
Va de pair cette nuit avec celui de Dieu!’’
You may say that it’s wrong, that the first line is a syllable short, and that Triboulet said ‘colere’’ instead of amour. You always were a dry-as-dust, pedantic prig. But I say amour-love, do you hear? I’ll translate, if you like:
‘Now am I mighty, and my love of fire
To-night goes even with a god’s desire.’
Yes; I’ll be a poet even though you do scratch my wrist with your hind claws, Polyphemus.”