Part 6

But from the balcony one could at least range outside with one’s eyes, and that is why they stood there, one generation after the other, and all stared into the distance, each one with pro and each one with his con. Arms adorned with golden bracelets have lain on the edge of the iron railing and many a silk-covered knee has pressed against the black arabesques, the while colored ribbons waved from all its points as signals of love and rendezvous. Heavy, pregnant housewives have also stood here and sent impossible messages out into the distance. Large, opulent, deserted women, pale as hatred... could one but kill with a thought or open hell with a wish!... Women and men! It is always women and men, even these emaciated white virgin souls which press against the black latticework like a flock of lost doves and cry out, “Take us!” to imagined, noble birds of prey.

One might imagine a _proverbe_ here.

The scenery would be very suitable for a _proverbe_.

The wall there, just as it is; only the road would have to be wider and expand into a circular space. In its center there would have to be an old, modest fountain of yellowish tuff and with a bowl of broken porphyry. As figure for the fountain a dolphin with a broken-off tail, and one of the nostrils stopped up. From the other the fine jet of water rises. On one side of the fountain a semicircular bench of tuff and terracotta.

The loose, grayish white dust; the reddish, molded stone, the hewn, yellowish, porous tuff; the dark, polished porphyry, gleaming with moisture, and the living, tiny, silvery jet of water: material and colors harmonize rather well.

The characters: two pages.

Not of a definite, historical period, for the pages of reality in no way correspond with the pages of the ideal. The pages here, however, are pages such as dream in pictures and books. Accordingly it is merely the costume which has a historical effect.

The actress who is to represent the youngest of the pages wears thin silk which clings closely and is pale-blue, and has heraldic lilies of the palest gold woven into it. This and as much lace as can possibly be employed are the most distinctive feature of the costume. It does not aim at any definite century, but seeks to emphasize the youthful voluptuousness of the figure, the magnificent blond hair, and the clear complexion.

She is married, but it lasted only a year and a half, when she was divorced from her husband, and she is said to have acted in anything but a proper fashion towards him. And that may well be, but it is impossible to imagine anything more innocent in appearance than she. That is to say, it is not the gracious elemental innocence which has such attractive qualities; but it is rather the cultivated, mature innocence, in which no one can be mistaken, and which goes straight to the heart. It captivates one with all the power which something that has reached completion only can have.

The second actress in the _proverbe_ is slender and melancholy. She is unmarried and has no past, absolutely none. There is no one who knows the least thing about her. Yet these finely delineated, almost lean limbs, and these amber-pale, regular features are vocal. The face is shaded by raven-black curls, and borne on a strong masculine neck. Its mocking smile, in which there is also hungry desire, allures. The eyes are unfathomable and their depths are as soft and luminous as the dark petals in the flower of the pansy.

The costume is of pale-yellow, in the manner of a corselet with wide, up-and-down stripes, a stiff ruff and buttons of topaz. There is a narrow frilled stripe on the edge of the collar, and also on the close-fitting sleeves. The trunks are short, wide-slashed, and of a dead-green color with pale purple in the slashes. The hose is gray.--Those of the blue page, of course, are pure white.--Both wear barrets.

Such is their appearance.

And now the yellow one is standing up on the balcony, leaning over the edge, the while the blue is sitting on the bench down by the fountain, comfortably leaning back, with his ring-covered hands clasped around one knee. He stares dreamily out upon the Campagna.

Now he speaks:

“No, nothing exists in the world but women!--I don’t understand it... there must be a magic in the lines out of which they are created, merely when I see them pass: Isaura, Rosamond, and Donna Lisa, and the others. When I see how their garment clings around their figure and how it drapes as they walk, it is as if my heart drank the blood out of all my arteries, and left my head empty and without thoughts and my limbs trembling and without strength. It is as though my whole being were gathered into a single, tremulous, uneasy breath of desire. What is it? Why is it? It is as if happiness went invisibly past my door, and I had to snatch it and hold it close, and make it my own. It is so wonderful--and yet I cannot seize it, for I cannot see it.”

Then the other page speaks from his balcony:

“And if now you sat at her feet, Lorenzo, and lost in her thoughts she had forgotten why she had called you, and you sat silent and waiting, and her lovely face were bent over you further from you in the clouds of its dreams than the star in the heavens, and yet so near you that every expression was surrendered to your admiration, every beauty-engendered line, every tint of the skin in its white stillness as well as in its soft rosy glow--would it not then be as if she who is sitting there belonged to another world than the one in which you kneel in adoration! Would it not be as if hers were another world, as if another world surrounded her, in which her festively garbed thoughts are going out to meet some goal which is unknown to you? Her love is far away from all that is yours, from your world, from everything. She dreams of far distances and her desires are of far distances. And it seems as if not the slightest space could be found for you in her thoughts, however ardently you might desire to sacrifice yourself for her, your life, your all, to the end that that might be between her and you which is hardly a faint glimmer of companionship, much less a belonging together.”

“Yes, you know that it is thus. But....” Now a greenish-yellow lizard runs along the edge of the balcony. It stops and looks about The tail moves....

If one could only find a stone...

Look out, my four-legged friend.

No, you cannot hit them, they hear the stone long before it reaches them. Anyhow he got frightened.

But the pages disappeared at the same moment.

The blue one had been sitting there so prettily. And in her eyes lay a yearning which was genuine and unconscious and in her movements a nervousness that was full of presentiment. Around her mouth was a faint expression of pain, when she spoke, and even more when she listened to the soft, somewhat low voice of the yellow page, which spoke to her from the balcony in words that were provocative and at the same time caressing, that had a note of mockery and a note of sympathy.

And doesn’t it seem now as if both were still here!

They are there, and have carried on the action of the _proverbe_, while they were gone. They have spoken of that vague young love which never finds peace but unceasingly flits through all the lands of foreboding and through all the heavens of hope; this love that is dying to satisfy itself in the powerful, fervent glow of a single great emotion! Of this they spoke; the younger one in bitter complaint, the elder one with regretful tenderness. Now the latter said--the yellow one to the blue--that he should not so impatiently demand the love of a woman to capture him and hold him bound.

“For believe me,” he said, “the love that you will find in the clasp of two white arms, with two eyes as your immediate heaven and the certain bliss of two lips--this love lies nigh unto the earth and unto the dust. It has exchanged the eternal freedom of dreams for a happiness which is measured by hours and which hourly grows older. For even if it always grows young again, yet each time it loses one of the rays which in a halo surround the eternal youth of dreams. No, you are happy.”

“No, you are happy,” answered the blue one, “I would give a world, were I as you are.”

And the blue one rises, and begins to walk down the road to the Campagna, and the yellow one looks after him with a sad smile and says to himself: “No, he is happy!”

But far down the road the blue one turns round once more toward the balcony, and raising his barret calls: “No, you are happy!”

*****

There should have been roses.

And now a breath of wind might come and shake a rain of rose-leaves from the laden branches, and whirl them after the departing page.

MRS. FONSS

In the graceful pleasure-gardens behind the Pope’s ancient palace in Avignon stands a bench from which one can overlook the Rhone, the flowery banks of the Durance, hills and fields, and a part of the town.

One October afternoon two Danish ladies were seated on this bench, Mrs. Fonss, a widow, and her daughter Elinor.

Although they had been here several days and were already familiar with the view before them, they nevertheless sat there and marveled that this was the way the Provence looked.

And this really was the Provence! A clayey river with flakes of muddy sand, and endless shores of stone-gray gravel; pale-brown fields without a blade of grass, pale-brown slopes, pale-brown hills and dust-colored roads, and here and there near the white houses, groups of black trees, absolutely black bushes and trees. Over all this hung a whitish sky, quivering with light, which made everything still paler, still dryer and more wearily light; never a glimmer of luxuriant, satiated hues, nothing but hungry, sun-parched colors; not a sound in the air, not a scythe passing through the grass, not a wagon rattling over the roads; and the town stretching out on both sides was also as if built of silence with all the streets still as at noon time, with all the houses deaf and dumb, every shutter closed, every blind drawn, each and every one; houses that could neither see nor hear.

Mrs. Fonss viewed this lifeless monotony with a resigned smile, but it made Elinor visibly nervous; not actively nervous as in the case of annoyance, but mournful and weary, as one often becomes after many days of rain, when all one’s gloomy thoughts seem to pour down upon one with the rain; or as at the idiotically consoling tick-tack of a clock, when one sits and grows incurably tired of one’s self; or at watching the flowers of the wall-paper, when the same chain of worn-out dreams clanks about against one’s will in the brain and the links are joined and come apart and in a stifling endlessness are united again. It actually had a physical effect upon her, this landscape, almost causing her to faint. To-day everything seemed to have conspired with the memories of a hope which was dead and of sweet and lively dreams which had become disagreeable and nauseous; dreams which caused her to redden when she thought of them and which yet she could not forget. And what had all that to do with the region here? The blow had fallen upon her far from here amid the surroundings of her home, by the edge of a sound with changing waters, under pale green beech-trees. Yet it hovered on the lips of every pale brown hill, and every green-shuttered house stood there and held silence concerning it.

It was the old sorrow for young hearts which had touched her. She had loved a man and believed in his love for her, and suddenly he had chosen some one else. Why? For what reason? What had she done to him? Had she changed? Was she no longer the same? And all the eternal questions over again. She had not said a word about it to her mother, but her mother had understood every bit of it, and had been very concerned about her. She could have screamed at this thoughtfulness which knew and yet should not have known; her mother understood this also, and for that reason they had gone traveling.

The whole purpose of the journey was only that she might forget.

Mrs. Fonss did not need to make her daughter feel uneasy by scrutinizing her face in order to know where her thoughts were. All she had to do was to watch the nervous little hand which lay beside her and with such futile despair stroked the bars of the bench; they changed their position every moment like a fever-patient tossing from side to side in his hot bed. When she did this and looked at the hand, she also knew how life-weary the young eyes were that stared out into the distance, how pain quivered through every feature of the delicate face, how pale it was beneath its suffering, and how the blue veins showed at the temples beneath the soft skin.

She was very sorry for her little girl, and would have loved to have had her lean against her breast, and to whisper down to her all the words of comfort she could think of, but she had the conviction that there were sorrows which could only die away in secret and which must not be expressed in loud words, not even between a mother and daughter. Otherwise some day under new circumstances, when everything is building for joy and happiness, these words may become an obstacle, something that weighs heavily and takes away freedom. The person who has spoken hears their whisper in the soul of the other, imagines them turned over and judged in the thoughts of the other.

Then, too, she was afraid of doing injury to her daughter if she made confidences too easy. She did not wish to have Elinor blush before her; she did want, however much of a relief it might be, to help her over the humiliation, which lies in opening the inmost recesses of one’s soul to the gaze of another. On the contrary the more difficult it became for both, the more she was pleased, that the aristocracy of soul which she herself possessed was repeated in her young daughter in a certain healthy inflexibility.

Once upon a time--it was a time many, many years ago, when she herself had been an eighteen-year old girl, she had loved with all her soul, with every sense in her body, every living hope, every thought. It was not to be, could not be. He had had nothing to offer except his loyalty which would have involved the test of an endlessly long engagement, and there were circumstances in her home which could not wait. So she had taken the one whom they had given her, the one who was master over these circumstances. They were married, then came children: Tage, the son, who was with her in Avignon, and the daughter, who sat beside her, Everything had turned out so much better than she could have hoped for, both easier and more friendly. Eight years it lasted, then the husband died, and she mourned him with a sincere heart. She had learned to love his fine, thin-blooded nature which with a tense, egotistic, almost morbid love loved whatever belonged to it by ties of relationship or family, and cared nought for anything in all the great world outside, except for what they thought, what their opinion was--nothing else. After her husband’s death she had lived chiefly for her children, but she had not devoted herself exclusively to them; she had taken part in social life, as was natural for so young and well-to-do a widow; and now her son was twenty-one years old and she lacked not many days of forty. But she was still beautiful. There was not a gray thread in her heavy dark-blonde hair, not a wrinkle round her large, courageous eyes, and her figure was slender with well-balanced fullness. The strong, fine lines of her features were accentuated by the darker more deeply colored complexion which the years had given her; the smile of her widely sweeping lips was very sweet; an almost enigmatical youth in the dewy luminosity of her brown eyes softened and mellowed everything again. And yet she also had the round fullness of cheek, the strong-willed chin of a mature woman.

“That surely is Tage coming,” said Mrs. Fonss to her daughter when she heard laughter and some Danish exclamations on the other side of the thick hedge of hornbeam.

Elinor pulled herself together.

And it was Tage, Tage and Kastager, a wholesale merchant from Copenhagen, with his sister and daughter; Mrs. Kastager lay ill at home in the hotel.

Mrs. Fonss and Elinor made room for the two ladies; the men tried for a moment to converse standing, but were lured by the low wall of stone which surrounded the spot. They sat there and said only what was absolutely necessary, for the newcomers were tired from a little railway excursion they had taken into the Provence with its blooming roses.

“Hello!” cried Tage, striking his light trousers with the flat of his hand, “look!”

They looked.

Out in the brown landscape appeared a cloud of dust, over it a mantle of dust, and between the two they caught sight of a horse. “That’s the Englishman, I told you about, who came the other day,” said Tage, turning toward his mother.

“Did you ever see any one ride like that?” he asked, turning toward Kastager, “he reminds me of a gaucho.”

“Mazeppa?” said Kastager, questioningly.

The horseman disappeared.

Then they all rose, and set out for the hotel.

They had met the Kastagers in Belfort, and since they were pursuing the same itinerary through southern France and along the Riviera, they for the time being traveled together. Here in Avignon both families had made a halt; Kastager because his wife had developed a varicose vein, the Fonss’ because Elinor obviously needed a rest.

Tage was delighted at this living together. Day by day he fell more and more incurably in love with the pretty Ida Kastager. Mrs. Fonss did not especially like this. Though Tage was very self-reliant and mature for his age, there was no reason for a hasty engagement--and there was Mr. Kastager! Ida was a splendid little girl, Mrs. Kastager was a very well-bred woman of excellent family, and Kastager himself was capable, rich, and honest, but there was a hint of the absurd about him. A smile came upon people’s lips and a twinkle into their eyes when any one mentioned Mr. Kastager.

The reason for this was that he was full of fire and given to extraordinary enthusiasms; he was frankly ingenuous, boisterous, and communicative, and nowadays it requires a great deal of tact to be lavish with enthusiasm. But Mrs. Fonss could not bear the thought that Tage’s father-in-law should be mentioned with a twinkle in the eye and a smile round the mouth, and for that reason she exhibited a certain coldness toward the family to the great sorrow of the enamored Tage.

*****

On the morning of the following day Tage and his mother had gone to look at the little museum of the town. They found the gate open, but the doors to the collection locked; ringing the bell proved fruitless. The gateway, however, gave admission to the not specially large court which was surrounded by a freshly whitewashed arcade whose short squat columns had black iron bars between them.

They walked about and looked at the objects placed along the wall: Roman sepulchral monuments, pieces of sarcophagi, a headless draped figure, the dorsal vertebra of a whale, and a series of architectural details.

On all the objects of interest there were fresh traces of the masons’ brushes.

By now they had come back to their starting point.

Tage ran up the stairs to see if there might not be people somewhere in the house, and Mrs. Fonss in the meantime walked up and down the arcade.

As she was on the turn toward the gate a tall man with a bearded, tanned face, appeared at the end of the passage directly in front of her. He had a guide-book in his hand; he listened for something, and then looked forward, straight at her.

The Englishman of yesterday immediately came to her mind.

“Pardon me?” he began interrogatively, and bowed.

“I am a stranger,” Mrs. Fonss replied, “nobody seems to be at home, but my son has just run upstairs to see whether....”

These words were exchanged in French.

At this moment Tage arrived. “I have been everywhere,” he said, “even in the living quarters, but didn’t find as much as a cat.”

“I hear,” said the Englishman, this time in Danish, “that I have the pleasure of being with fellow-countrymen.”

He bowed again and retreated a couple of steps, as if to indicate that he had merely said this to let them know that he understood what they were saying. Suddenly he stepped closer than before with an intent, eager expression on his face, and said to Mrs. Fonss, “is it possible that you and I are old acquaintances?”

“Are you Emil Thorbrogger?” exclaimed Mrs. Fonss, and held out her hand.

He seized it. “Yes, I am he,” he said gayly, “and you are she?”

His eyes almost filled with tears as he looked at her.

Mrs Fonss introduced Tage as her son.

Tage had never in his life heard mention of Thorbrogger, but that was not his thoughts; he thought only of the fact that this gaucho turned out to be a Dane; when a pause set in, and some one had to say something he could not help exclaiming, “and I who said yesterday that you reminded me of a gaucho!”

“Well,” replied Thorbrogger, “that wasn’t far from the truth; for twenty-one years I have lived in the plains of La Plata, and in those years certainly spent more time on horse-back than on foot.”

And now he had come back to Europe!

Yes, he had sold his land and his sheep and had come back to have a look around in the old world where he belonged, but to his shame he had to confess that he often found it very much of a bore to travel about merely for pleasure.

Perhaps, he was homesick for the prairies?

No, he had never had any special feeling for places and countries; he thought it was only his daily work which he missed.

In that way they went on talking for a while. At last the custodian appeared, hot and out of breath, with heads of lettuce under his arms and a bunch of scarlet tomatoes in his hand, and they were admitted into the small, stuffy collection of paintings, where they gained only the vaguest impression of the yellow thunder-clouds and black waters of old Vernet, but on the contrary told each other with considerable detail of their lives and the happenings during all the years since they had parted.