CHAPTER II

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Under the tent erected on the sand, after the bath, still half-nude, he watched Hippolyte lingering in the sun by the water-side, wrapped in her white peignoir. He had almost painful scintillations in his eyes, and the strong noonday sun caused him a novel sensation of physical trouble, mingled with a sort of vague fear. It was the terrible hour, the supreme hour of light and silence, hovering over the chasm of life. He comprehended the pagan superstition, the holy horror of canicular noon-times on the shore inhabited by a cruel and occult god. At the bottom of his vague fright stirred something like the anxiety of the man who expects a sudden and formidable apparition. He appeared to himself puerilely weak and cowardly, as diminished in courage and strength as after a trial that has not succeeded. In plunging his body into the sea, in presenting his brow to the glare of the sun, in swimming a short distance, in indulging his favorite exercise, in measuring his respiration by the breath of the endless space, he had felt by indubitable indications the impoverishment of his youth, the destructive work of the enemy; he had felt once more the iron band tighten around his vital activity, and so reduce a new zone to inertia and impotency. The sensation of this muscular lassitude became all the deeper in proportion as he regarded more attentively the figure of that woman standing in the splendor of the day.

To dry her hair, she had unfastened it; and the curls, made heavy by the water, fell over her shoulders, so dark that they almost appeared violet. Her erect and slender form, enveloped as in the folds of a dress, stood out half against the glaucous surface of the sea and half against the luminous transparency of the sky. Scarcely could one see, underneath the hair, the profile of her bent and pensive face. She was wholly absorbed in the alternate pleasures of putting her bare feet in the torrid sand and keeping them there as long as she could endure the heat, then in plunging them, all burning, into the caressing waves that licked the sand. This double sensation seemed to afford her infinite enjoyment, in which she lost herself. She tempered and fortified her soul by the contact with free and healthy things, by the complacent absorption of the salt water and the sunbeams. How, at the same time, could she be so ill and so well? How could she conciliate in her being so many contradictions, assume so many aspects in a single day, in a single hour? The taciturn and sad woman in whom epilepsy was breeding, the mistress, eager and convulsed, whose ardor was at times alarming, whose sensuality had at times the lugubrious appearance of agony--this same creature, standing at the edge of the sea, had senses capable of gathering and savoring all the natural delights shed over the surrounding things, of appearing similar to the images of the ancient Beauty leaning over the harmonious crystal of a Hellespont.

She had an evidently superior power of resistance. George viewed her with a vexation which, becoming gradually concentrated, ended by assuming the seriousness of rancor. The sentiment of his own weakness was disturbed by hatred in proportion as his perspicacity became more lucid and almost vindictive.

Those bare feet, which by turns she burnt in the sand and cooled in the water, were not beautiful; the toes were even deformed, plebeian, not at all delicate--they bore the impress of a lowly origin. George looked at them attentively, saw only them, with an extraordinary clearness of perception, as if the details of their shape had revealed a secret to him. And he thought:

"How many impure things are fermenting in that blood! All the hereditary instincts of her race persist in her, indestructible, ready to develop and arise against any restraint whatsoever. I shall never succeed in making her pure. I shall be able only to superpose her real individuality above the changing images of my dreams; and she will be able only to offer to my solitary intoxication the indispensable instrument of her organs."

But, while his intelligence reduced this woman to be but a simple _motif_ for his imagination and despoiled of all value the palpable form, the very acuteness of the present perception made him feel that what attached him to her the most was precisely the real quality of that flesh; not only what there was most beautiful in her, but, above all, _what was least beautiful in her_. The discovery of defect did not loosen the tie, did not diminish the fascination. The most vulgar features had an irritating attraction for him. He knew well this phenomenon, which had often asserted itself. Often, with perfect clearness of vision, his eyes had seen the slightest defects of Hippolyte's person accentuated; and they had been for a long time subject to the attraction, they had been compelled to establish them, to examine them, to exaggerate them. And by his senses, in his mind, he had felt an indefinable disquietude, almost always followed by the sudden ardor of desire. That, certainly, was the most terrible indication of the great carnal obsession which a human creature exercises over another human creature. Such was the spell which was obeyed by the nameless lover who, in his mistress, loved above all the marks traced by the years on her white neck, the parting of the hair every day wider, the faded mouth on which the salty tears made the savor of the kisses more lasting.

He thought of the flight of years, of the chain riveted forever by custom, of the infinite sadness of the love become a weary vice. He saw himself, in the future, tied to this flesh like the slave to his iron collar, deprived of will and thought, stupefied and vacuous; he saw the concubine fade, grow old, abandon herself without resistance to the slow work of time, let fall from her inert hands the lacerated veil of illusions, but preserve, nevertheless, her fatal power; he saw the deserted house, desolate, silent, awaiting the supreme visitor, Death!

He recalled the shouts of the little bastards, heard on that distant afternoon in the paternal house. He thought:

"She is barren; her entrails have been visited by a curse. In it the germs perish as in a fiery furnace. She thus thwarts and betrays the most profound instinct of life."

The uselessness of his love appeared to him like a monstrous transgression of the supreme law. But since his love was an uneasy sensuality only, why had he, then, this character of ineluctable fatality? Was not the instinct of the perpetuation of the race the unique and true motive of all sexual love? Was not this blind and eternal instinct the source of desire, and should not desire have as its object, occult or manifest, the generation prescribed by Nature? How was it, then, that so strong a tie attached him to the barren woman? Why was the terrible "will" of the Species so obstinate in demanding, in exacting, the vital tribute of that organism ravaged by disease and incapable of generating? What was lacking in his love was the first reason of love--the affirmation and the development of life beyond the limits of individual existence. What was lacking in the woman he loved was the highest mystery of her sex--the suffering of her who gives birth. And what caused the misery of both was precisely that persistent monstrosity.

"Aren't you coming in the sun?" asked Hippolyte, suddenly turning towards him. "Look how I am standing it! I want to become really what you say--_like an olive_. Shall I?"

She approached the tent, raising with her two hands the edge of her long tunic, putting in her gestures an almost lascivious grace, as though suddenly invaded by languor.

"Shall I?"

She stooped a little to enter the tent. Under the abundance of snowy folds, her thin and flexible body had movements of feline grace, exhaled a heat and odor which spurred strangely the disturbed sensibility of the young man. And, while she stretched herself out on the mat beside him, there fell all around his flaming face a shower of hair, still wet with salt water, and through which shone the white of her eyes and the red of her lips, like fruits among foliage.

In her voice, as on her face, as in her smile, there was a shadow, an infinitely mysterious and fascinating shadow. It seemed as if she divined her lover's secret hostility, and was getting ready to triumph over it.

"What are you looking at?" she asked with a sudden start. "No, no; don't look at them! They are ugly."

She withdrew her feet, hid them under the folds of her peignoir.

"No, no. I forbid you."

She was vexed and ashamed for a moment; she frowned, as if she had surprised in George's eyes a spark of the cruel truth.

"Unkind man!" she said again, in an ambiguous tone of pleasantry and rancor.

He replied, rather enervated:

"You know that, in my eyes, you are beautiful all over."

And he made the gesture as if to draw her to him and kiss her.

"No; wait. Don't look."

She arose and glided to a corner of the tent. Rapidly, with furtive gestures, she drew on her long black-silk stockings; then she turned round, immodestly, an indefinable smile hovering on her lips. And, before George's eyes, holding up, one after the other, her perfect legs in their shining sheath, she fastened her garters above each knee. In her action there was something wilfully lascivious, and in her smile there was a touch of subtle irony. And that mute and terrible eloquence assumed in the young man's eyes this precise signification: "I am always the unconquered. You have known with me all the enjoyments for which your endless desire was thirsty, and I will clothe myself in lies that will endlessly provoke your desire. What matters to me your perspicacity? The veil that you tear I can repair in an instant, the bandage that you pluck off I can fasten in an instant. I am stronger than your thought. I know the secret of my transfigurations in your soul. I know the gestures and the words that have the virtue of metamorphosing me in your eyes. The odor of my skin has the power to dissolve a world in you."

In him a world was being dissolved while she drew near, serpentine and insidious, to fling herself at his side on the coarse rush mat. Once more, the reality was converted into a confused fiction full of hallucinating images. The reverberation of the sea filled the tent with a reflection of gold, mingled a thousand golden spangles in the threads of the tissue. Through the opening was a glimpse of the immensity of the calm sea, the vast immobility of the waters under an almost lugubrious blaze. And, gradually, these very appearances faded away.

In the silence, he heard nothing more but the rhythm of his own blood; in the shade, he saw nothing but two large eyes fixed on him with a kind of fury. She enshrouded him completely, as if she possessed the nature of a cloud. And through all the pores of this ardent skin he inhaled the marine fragrance like a salt volatilized through a flame. And in the thickness of her still humid hair he beheld the mystery of the deepest forests of sea-weed. And, in the final bewilderment of his conscience, he imagined he touched the bottom of an abyss falling to his death.

Then he heard, as if at a distance, amid the rustling of skirts, Hippolyte's voice, which was saying:

"Do you want to stay a little longer? Are you asleep?"

He opened his eyes; he murmured, all dazed:

"No, I'm not asleep."

"What's the matter?"

"I'm expiring."

He tried to smile. He caught a glance of Hippolyte's white teeth. She said, smiling:

"Do you want me to help you to dress?"

"No. I'll get dressed presently. Go on; I'll join you," he murmured, with a sleepy tone.

"Then I'll go back. I'm too hungry. Dress quickly, and come."

"Yes, immediately."

He started when he felt unexpectedly Hippolyte's lips on his lips. He opened his eyes; he tried to smile.

"Have pity!"

He heard the crunching of the sand under her receding footsteps. A heavy silence again took possession of the beach. At intervals, a light splashing came from the edge of the sea and the neighboring rocks, a feeble noise like that made by animals drinking in a trough.

A few minutes passed, during which he struggled against an exhaustion that threatened to turn into lethargy. Finally, he sat up, not without effort; he shook his head to dissipate his clouded thoughts; he looked all around him with bewilderment. He felt in his whole being a strange sensation of emptiness; he was no longer able to cooerdinate his ideas; he was almost incapable of thought, and to accomplish any act he needed an enormous effort. He threw a glance outside the tent, and was again invaded by the horror of the light.

"Oh! if, on lying down again, I could never rise again. To die! Never to see her again!" He felt overwhelmed by the certainty that in a few instants he must see this woman again, he must stay near her, he must receive more of her kisses, he must hear her speak.

Before beginning to dress, he hesitated. Several mad ideas passed through his brain. Then he dressed mechanically. He went out of the tent, and the glare of the light made him close his eyes. Through the tissue of his eyelids he saw a great red light. He had a slight vertigo.

When he reopened his eyes, the spectacle of the external things gave him an inexpressible sensation. It seemed to him as if he saw everything again after an indefinite time, during a different existence.

The sandy beach, beaten by the sun, had the whiteness of chalk. On the immense and lugubrious mirror of the sea the incandescent sky seemed to subside, every second more under the weight of one of those gloomy silences that accompany the expectation of an unknown catastrophe. The sandy promontories, with their large, deserted creeks, rose in the form of towers above the black rocks, their crests wooded with olive-trees that stood out against the torrid sky in the attitudes of anger or madness. Stretched out on the rocks, like some monster ready to spring on its prey, the Trabocco, with its numerous machines, had a formidable aspect. In the entanglement of the beams and ropes, one could distinguish the fishermen stooping towards the waters, steady, motionless, like bronzes, and over their tragic lives hung the mortal spell.

All at once, amid the silence, a voice struck the young man's ears. It was the woman calling him from the height of the Hermitage.

He started; he turned round with an impressive palpitation. The voice repeated its call, limpid and strong, as if it wished to affirm its power.

"Come!"

While he climbed up the hill, the smoky mouth of one of the tunnels cast in the air a rumbling reverberation which resounded throughout the gulf. He stopped at the edge of the railroad, taken anew with a slight dizziness; and the flash of an insane idea crossed his wearied brain: "To lie down across the rails.... The end of all in a second!"

Deafening, rapid, and sinister, the train which passed swept in his face the wind it displaced; then, whistling and rumbling, it disappeared in the mouth of the opposite tunnel, the black smoke curling up in the sky.

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