CHAPTER IV

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Now it was no longer Hippolyte, but George, who proposed long excursions, long explorations. Condemned to "be always waiting for life," he believed in going to meet it, to find and gather it in the visible realities.

His factitious curiosity was attracted now to those things which, scarcely capable of effectively moving the surface of the soul, could not penetrate it and stir it to its depth. He tried to discover, between his soul and certain things, connections which did not exist; he tried to shake the indifference of his inmost being, that inert indifference that had rendered him so long a stranger to all external agitation. Collecting all the perspicuous faculties he possessed, he applied himself to find some living resemblance between himself and the surrounding nature that he might reconcile himself in a filial way with that nature, and vow to it eternal fidelity.

But there was not awakened in him the extraordinary emotion which had several times exalted and astounded him in the first days of his stay at the Hermitage, before the arrival of the loved one. He could resuscitate neither the panicky intoxication of the first day, when he had believed he truly felt the sun in his heart, nor the melancholy charm of the first solitary walk, nor the unexpected and divine joy which had been communicated to him on that May morning by the song of Favetta and the perfume of the furze, freshened by the dew. On the earth and on the sea, men cast a tragic shadow. Poverty, disease, dementia, terror, and death lay in wait, or were exhibited everywhere on his path. A wave of fierce fanaticism was sweeping from one end of the country to the other. Night and day, far and near, religious hymns resounded, monotonous and interminable. The Messiah was expected, and the poppies in the wheat recalled the image of his red tunic.

Around him, faith consecrated every vegetable form. The Christian legend twined itself around the trunks of the trees, blossomed amid the branches. On the knees of the Madonna, a fugitive, and pursued by the Pharisees, the Infant Jesus was changed into wheat that overflowed. Hidden in the bin, he made the dough rise and rendered it inexhaustible. Over the dry and thorny lupines which had wounded the Virgin's gentle feet was suspended a curse; but the flax was blessed, because their hulls had dazzled the Pharisees. Blessed also the olive-tree for having given shelter to the Holy Family in its open trunk, in the form of a cabin, and for having lighted it with its pure oil; blessed the juniper for having held the Infant enclosed in its tufts; and blessed the holly for the same courteous service; and blessed the laurel because it springs from the soil sprinkled by the water in which had been washed the Son of God.

How could he escape the fascination of the mystery which spread over all created things and transfigured them into signs and emblems of another life?

George, troubled by these suggestions, which provoked in him the confused rising of all his mystic tendencies, said to himself: "Oh! if I possessed the true faith, that faith which enabled Saint Theresa to _actually_ see God in the host." And this was not a vague or passing desire: it was a profound and fervent aspiration of his entire soul, and it was also an extraordinary anguish, which distressed all the elements of his substance; because he felt that this was the secret of his unhappiness and weakness. Like Demetrius Aurispa, George was an ascetic without a God.

And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

Demetrius was his real father. By a singular coincidence of names, that spiritual paternity seemed consecrated in the legend inscribed around the marvellous ostensory given by the ancestors, and preserved in the cathedral at Guardiagrele.

[Double dagger symbol] EGO DEMETRIUS AURISPA ET UNICUS GEORGIUS FILIUS MEUS DONAMUS ISTUD TABERNACULUM ECCLESIAE S. M. DE GUARDIA, QUOD FACTUM EST PER MANUS ABBATIS JOANNIS CASTORII DE GUARDIA, ARCHIPRESBYTERI, AD USUM EUCHARISTIAE.

[Double dagger symbol] NICOLAUS ANDRAE DE GUARDIA ME FECIT A.D. MCCCCXIII.

Both, in fact, beings of intelligence and sentiment, bore the mystic heredity of the house of Aurispa; both had the religious soul, inclined to mystery, apt to live in a forest of symbols or in a heaven of pure abstractions; both loved the ceremonies of the Latin Church, sacred music, the perfume of incense, all the sensualities of worship, the most violent and the most delicate. But they had lost faith. They knelt before an altar deserted by God. Their misery arose therefore from a metaphysical need, which implacable doubt prohibited to blossom, to satisfy, to repose on the divine lap. As they had not conformed themselves in such a manner that they could accept and sustain the battle for vulgar existence, they had learned the necessity of seclusion. But how could the man exiled from life rest in a cell which lacked the sign of the Eternal? Solitude is the supreme proof of the humility or the sovereignty of a soul; because it is only borne on the condition of having renounced all for God, or on the condition of having a soul so strong that it might serve as an immovable foundation for a world.

All at once, one of them, feeling perhaps that the violence of his pain began to exceed the resistance of his organs, had wished to transform himself by death into a higher being; and he launched into the mystery, from which he contemplated the survivor with undimmed eyes.--_Ego Demetrius Aurispa et unicus Georgius filius meus_.

Now, in his lucid moments, the survivor comprehended that he would in no way succeed in realizing the type of exuberant life, the "Dionysiac" ideal seen as in a lightning flash beneath the great oak, when he had tasted the bread freshly broken by the young and joyous woman. He realized that his intellectual and moral faculties, too disproportioned, would never succeed in finding their equilibrium and their model. He realized, finally, that, instead of striving to reconquer himself for himself, it was himself he should renounce, and that two ways only could lead him to it: either to follow the example of Demetrius, or to give himself to heaven.

The second alternative fascinated him. In considering it, he made an abstraction of the unfavorable circumstances and immediate obstacles, impelled by his irresistible desire to completely construct all his illusions and to inhabit them for a few hours. On this natal earth, did he not feel himself enveloped by the ardor of faith much more than by the fire of the sun? Had he not in his veins the purest Christian blood? Did not the ascetic ideal circulate in the branches of his race, from the noble donor Demetrius down to the pitiful creature named Joconda? Was it, therefore, impossible that this ideal should be regenerated in him, should be elevated to its supreme heights, should attain the limit of human ecstasy in God? In him, all was ready to magnify the event. He possessed every quality of the ascetic; the contemplative mind, the taste for symbols and allegories, the faculty of abstraction, an extreme sensibility for visual and aural suggestions, an organic tendency towards dominating images and hallucinations. He lacked but one thing, a great thing, but which perhaps was not dead in him, and only slumbered: the faith, the ancient faith of the donor, the ancient faith of his race, that which came down from the mountain and chanted praises on the seashore.

How to awaken it? How to resuscitate it? No artifice would be efficacious. He must wait for a sudden spark, an unexpected shock. He must, perhaps, like the followers of Oreste, see the lightning flash and hear the Word in the midst of a field, at the turn of a road.

And, once more, he recalled the figure of Oreste, attired in his red tunic, advancing along the side of a little, sinuous river, where, beneath the shivering of the poplars, a stream of water coursed over a bed of polished sand. He imagined a meeting, a conversation with Oreste. It was at noon, on the coast, close to a field of wheat. The Messiah spoke like a simple, humble man, smiling with virginal candor; and his teeth were as white as jasmine. In the great silence of the sea, the continuous murmur of the breakers at the foot of the promontory imitated the distant chords of an organ. But, behind this mild person, in the gold of the ripe harvest, waved the poppies, violent symbols of desire.

"Desire!" thought George, thus recalling his mistress and the corporeal sorrow of his love. "Who will kill desire?" The admonitions of Ecclesiastes recurred to him. _Non des mulieri potestatem animae tuae. A muliere initium factum est peccati, et per illam omnes morimur_. He saw, at the sacred dawn of the ages, in a delicious garden, the first man, solitary and sad, attracted by the first companion; and he saw this companion become the scourge of the world, spread everywhere pain and death. But voluptuousness, contemplated as a sin, appeared to him prouder, more disturbing; it seemed to him that no other intoxication equalled the frantic intoxication of the embraces to which the martyrs of the early church surrendered themselves, in the prisons where they awaited punishment. He evoked pictures of women who, mad with terror and love, presented for kisses their faces bathed in silent tears.

In aspiring to faith and redemption, what did he, therefore, but aspire to new thrills and spasms, to unknown voluptuous sensations? Infringe on duty and obtain pardon; commit a fault and confess it tearfully; confess the slightest miseries while exaggerating them, and accuse oneself of mediocre vices while magnifying them almost to enormity; incessantly place one's sick soul and ailing flesh in the hands of a merciful physician--had not these things an entirely sensual fascination?

From the beginning, his passion had been impregnated with a pious odor of incense and violets. He recalled the Epiphany of Love, in the deserted oratory of the Via Belsiana: the little, mysterious chapel was plunged in a bluish penumbra; a choir of young girls garlanded the rostrum, curved like a balcony; below, an orchestra of string instruments stood up before the music stands of white pine; roundabout, in the oaken stalls, were seated the few auditors, almost all gray or bald; the chapel-master beat time; a religious odor of evaporated incense and of violets mingled with the music of Sebastian Bach.

He recalled also the dream of Orvieto, conjured up once more the vision of the silent city of the Guelphs: windows closed; grayish alleys in which the grasses grew; a capuchin monk crossing a square; a bishop all in black, descending from a carriage which has stopped in front of a hospital, with a decrepit servant at the carriage door; a tower rising against a white and rainy sky; a clock slowly chiming the hour; and all of a sudden, at the bottom of a street, a miracle--the Duomo.

Had he not dreamt of taking refuge at the summit of that rock of tufa, crowned by monasteries? Had he not, more than once, sincerely aspired to that silence, that peace? And now this dream also returned to his soul, suggested by an effeminate languor on this warm and ashy April day. To have a mistress, or, to express it better, a sister-lover, who would be very devoted; to go away yonder and stay there.... To spend hours and hours in the cathedral, in front of it, around it; to go and gather roses in the gardens of the convents; to visit the sisters and eat preserves.... To love a great deal and sleep a great deal, in a soft bed, all veiled in virginal white, between two praying-stools....

He was seized once more by the languid nostalgia of the darkness, of the silence, of the closed and isolated retreat in which could blossom the most frail flowers, the most subtle thoughts, the most disturbing sensualities. All that dazzling sunlight on those lines, too distinct and too strong, appeared almost offensive to him. And the same as the image of the murmuring spring fascinates the brain of him who is thirsty, so he was haunted by the cool and meditative shadow of a Roman nave.

The summons of the bells did not reach as far as the Hermitage, or, at least, it only arrived at rare intervals on the swells of a light breeze. The church of the market town was too far away, commonplace perhaps, certainly without any reputation for beauty or ancient tradition. George wanted a retreat nearer at hand, and one worthy of him, where his mysticism might flower aesthetically as in that deep marble urn which enclosed the Dantesque visions of Luca Signorelli.

He recalled the abbey of Saint Clement at Casauria, seen in one of the distant days of his adolescence, and he remembered that he had visited it in the company of Demetrius. The recollection, like all recollections connected with his kinsman, was as distinct and precise as if it had dated only from the day before.

He and Demetrius were descending the highroad towards the abbey, still hidden by the trees. An infinite calm reigned in the neighborhood of the solitary and magnificent spot, over the wide road of grasses and stones, deserted, uneven, as if marked with gigantic and silent vestiges, and the beginning of which was lost in the mystery of the distant and sacred mountains. One felt still floating there a primordial holiness, as if the grasses and stones had just been trodden by a long migration of biblical bands in search of a maritime horizon. Below, on the plain, the basilica appeared--almost a ruin. All around, the ground was encumbered with debris and brambles; fragments of sculptured stone were heaped against the pillars; wild grasses hung from every crevice; recent constructions, of brick and lime, closed up large openings in the lateral arcades; the doors were off their hinges. A band of pilgrims were taking a siesta in the court, brutishly, under the very noble portal erected by Leonato the Magnificent. But the three intact arched windows, above the several capitals, looked so graceful and proud, and the September sun gave to the light and soft stone such a precious appearance, that both of them, Demetrius and himself, had felt they were in the presence of a sovereign beauty.

Fascinated by the remembrance, the survivor had only one wish, a chimerical one--to return to the spot, to see the basilica again, to take up his dwelling there so as to protect it from ruin, to restore it to its primitive beauty, to reestablish there the great worship, and, after so long a period of desertion and oblivion, renew the Chronicon Casaurienne.

He said to Hippolyte:

"Perhaps we'll change our quarters. Do you remember the dream of Orvieto?"

"Oh, yes," she cried; "the city of convents, where you wanted to take me!"

"I want to take you to a deserted abbey, more lonely than our Hermitage, beautiful as a cathedral, full of very old memories, where there is a great candelabra of white marble, a marvellous work of art by some unknown artist. Erect on the candelabra, in the silence, you will illuminate with your face the meditations of my soul."

He smiled at this lyric phrase, while contemplating at the same time the beautiful image evoked. And she, in the ingenuousness of her egotism, with that tenacious animalism which is the basis of the feminine being, was intoxicated by nothing more than by this passing poesy. Her happiness was to appear in her lover's eyes idealized, like the first evening in the bluish street, or again in the secret oratory amid the religious music and the faded perfumes, or like on the wild path strewn with furze.

In her most chaste voice, she asked:

"When do we go?"

"Will you go to-morrow?"

"Very well--to-morrow."

"Take care! If you rise, you won't be able to come down."

"What does it matter? I'll watch you."

"You will burn, you'll be consumed like a candle."

"I will light you."

"You will also light my funeral."

He spoke lightly; but at heart, with his ordinary intensity for imaginary life, he composed a mystic fable. After long years of error on the abyss of sensuality, repentance had come to him. Initiated by this woman in all the mysteries which his concupiscence excited, he now implored from the All Merciful the grace which would dissipate the unbearable sadness of this carnal love. "Pity for my pleasures in the past, and for my suffering in the present! Grant, O God! that I may have the strength to accomplish the Sacrifice in your name!" And he fled, followed by his mistress in search of the refuge. And, finally, on the threshold of the refuge the miracle was accomplished; for the impure, the corrupt, the implacable Enemy, the Rose of Hell, was now suddenly cleansed of all sin, and stood, chaste and immaculate, ready to follow her loved one to the altar. On the summit of the high marble candelabra, which had not heard the voice of the light for centuries, she burned in the inextinguishable and silent flame of her love. "Erect on the candelabra, in the silence, you will illuminate the meditations of my soul, until death." She was burning with an inner fire, without ever claiming any food for the flames, without ever asking anything from the loved one in return. She renounced forever all possession: higher in her purity than God himself, since God loves his creatures but exacts from them a reciprocity of love, and becomes terrible against those who refuse to love him. Her love was Stylite love, sublime and solitary, nourishing itself with one blood and one soul. She had felt fall around her that part of her substance which was opposed to an entire offering. Nothing disquieting or impure remained in her. Her body had been metamorphosed into a subtle, agile, diaphanous, incorruptible element; her senses had dissolved into one supreme and only voluptuousness. Set up on the summit of the marvellous stela, she burned up from and enjoyed her ardor and her splendor like a flame conscious of its own enflamed existence.

Hippolyte listened intently, and said:

"Don't you hear? Another procession! To-morrow is the Vigil."

The dawns, the noons, the twilights and the nights rang with the religious chants. One procession followed the other, in the hot glare of the sun, in the silvery rays of the moon. All were emigrating to the same land and were celebrating the same name, animated by the vehemence of a similar passion, terrible and wretched in appearance, deserting on the highroads the sick and the dying, without stopping, prompt to throw down no matter what obstacle to reach the place where awaited them the balm for all their ills, the promise of all their hopes. They marched, marched ceaselessly, obliterating with their own sweat their footprints in the endless dust.

What an immense irradiation of strength that simple image must possess, to move and allure all these masses of heavy flesh! Almost four centuries before, an old septuagenarian, in a plain devastated by the hail, thought he perceived the Virgin of Mercy in the tops of a tree; and since then, each year, on the anniversary of the apparition, all the peoples of the mountains and the coast have gone on a pilgrimage to the holy place to beseech mercy for its sufferings.

Hippolyte had already heard the legend from Candie; and for the past few days she had nourished a secret desire to visit the Sanctuary. The predominance of love and the habit of sensual pleasure had banished all religious sentiment in her; but, a Roman of good family, and, what is more, born in the Trastevere, brought up in one of those _bourgeois_ families in which, according to immemorial tradition, the key of the conscience is always in the hands of a priest, she was a strict Catholic, devoted to all the external practices of the Church, subject to periodical returns of exalted fervor.

"Meanwhile, why should we not go to Casalbordino, too? To-morrow is the Vigil. Let us go there--shall we? It will be a great sight for you. We'll take the old man with us."

George consented. Hippolyte's desire corresponded with his own. He thought it necessary to him to follow this deep current, to form part of this wild conglomeration of men, to experience material contact with the inferior classes of his race, those dense and immutable layers on which the primitive impressions had perhaps been preserved intact.

"We'll start to-morrow," he added, seized by a kind of anxiety as he heard the chant approaching.

Hippolyte told him, as related by Candie, some of the atrocious tests to which the pilgrims had vowed to submit. She shuddered with horror. And, while the chant grew louder, both felt a tragic breath pass over their souls.

They were on the hill, at night. The moon was high in the sky. A cool humidity extended over the vast vegetable masses, still vibrating from the storm of the afternoon.

All the leaves were weeping, and these myriads of tears, scintillating like diamonds in the moonlight, transfigured the forest. As George had accidentally stumbled over the trunk of a tree, the luminous drops of the shaken branches fell on Hippolyte, covering her with constellations. She gave a little cry, and began to laugh.

"Ah, traitor!" she murmured, convinced that George had done it intentionally.

And she took measures for reprisals.

Thus shaken, the trees and bushes threw off their liquid gems with a lively crepitation, while Hippolyte's laughs resounded at intervals, on the slope of the hill. George also laughed, suddenly forgetful of his nightmare, permitting himself to be won by the seduction of youth, permitting himself to be penetrated by this bracing nocturnal coolness in which was distilled all the fragrance of the earth. He tried to reach first the tree whose foliage seemed most heavily laden with water; and she tried to reach it before him, running courageously on the slippery declivity. They almost always reached the tree at the same time, and they shook it together, both remaining under the shower. In the unsteady shadow of the foliage the whiteness of Hippolyte's eyes and teeth assumed extraordinary lustre; and the tiny drops, like diamond dust, glittered on the pretty curls on her temples, on her cheeks, on her lips, even on her eyelashes, trembling from her laughter.

"Ah, you magician!" cried George, letting go of the tree and seizing the woman, who once more appeared to him in a mysterious flash of nocturnal beauty.

He began to kiss her all over her face; and to his lips she was cool and wet with dew, like fruit just plucked from the tree.

"There! there! there!"

He imprinted hearty, resounding kisses on her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes, her temples, her neck, as insatiable as if the flesh were a novelty to him. And, as she felt the kisses, Hippolyte took that almost ecstatic attitude usual with her when she felt that her lover was in one of his moments of true intoxication. At those times, she seemed anxious to release from the depths of her own substance the sweetest and most powerful perfume of love, to excite George's intoxication to the point of anguish.

"There!"

He stopped, seized by anguish. He had reached the extreme limit of sensation, and could not go beyond.

They said no more; they took each other's hand; they continued on their way to the Hermitage, cutting across the fields because, in their thoughtless frolic, they had wandered from the road. They felt now indefinable lassitude and melancholy. George seemed astonished. So Life, unexpectedly, like a furtive gesture in the shadow, had offered him a new savour--a new sensation, real and profound, at the close of a day full of anxiety, spent in a cloister of flitting phantoms! But was that Life? Was it not rather Dreamland? "The one is always the shadow of the other," he thought. There where is Life, there is Dreamland; there where is Dreamland, there is Life.

"Look!" interrupted Hippolyte, with a start of admiration.

It was as if she illustrated with a picture the thought he had not revealed.

In the moonlight, a vine was there, silent. The upright vine-stocks were twined around the reeds like around agile thyrses; and the streaming branches, diaphanous against the luminous horizon with a thousand intertwinings of their subtle ribs, in the perfect immobility of mineral things, and with an appearance of indescribably fragile and ephemeral crystal, had neither terrestrial reality nor any communion with the environing forms, but seemed to be the last visible fragment of an allegorical world conceived by a theurgy and about to fade away.

Spontaneously arose in George's memory the verse of the hymn: "_Vinea mea coram me est._"

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