CHAPTER VI

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Hippolyte exulted from joy when George told her of the near arrival of the piano and pieces of music. How grateful she was to him for that kind surprise! At last, they would have something to break the monotony of the long days and to keep them from temptation.

She laughed as she alluded to that species of erotic fever with which she maintained continual ardor in her lover; she laughed as she alluded to their carnalism, interrupted only by the silences of lassitude or by some caprice of the loved one.

"In that way," she said, laughing, with a touch of irony yet without bitterness, "in that way you won't have to take refuge on your horrid Trabocco. Will you?"

She drew close to him, laid her hands on his head, pressed his temples between her palms, and gazed into the depths of his pupils.

"Confess that you took refuge there _because of that_," she murmured, in a coaxing voice, as if to induce him to confess.

"Because of what?" he demanded, feeling under the contact of her hands the sensation one feels when one grows pale.

"Because you are afraid of my kisses."

She pronounced the words slowly, almost scanning the syllables, and in a voice which had all at once assumed singular limpidity. She had in her look an indefinable mixture of passion, irony, cruelty, and pride.

"Is it true, is it true?" she insisted.

She continued to press his temples between her palms; but, gradually, her fingers crept into his hair, slightly tickled his ears, descended to his neck with one of those multiple kisses in the science of which she was an accomplished artist.

"Is it true?" she repeated in a subtle, coaxing tone that she knew well, by experience, was most efficacious in arousing her lover. "Is it true?"

He did not reply; he closed his eyes; he abandoned himself; he felt life slipping by--the world fading away.

Once more he was succumbing at the mere contact of those thin hands; once more the Enemy was triumphantly essaying its power. It seemed as if she were saying: "You cannot escape me. I know you fear me, but the desire I arouse in you is stronger than your terror. And nothing intoxicates me so much as to read that terror in your eyes, to surprise it in the shudder of your fibres."

In the ingenuousness of her egotism, she did not appear to have the least consciousness of the evil she was doing, of the work of destruction that she was carrying on without truce or mercy. Accustomed as she was to her lover's peculiarities--his melancholies, his intense and mute contemplations, his sudden uneasiness, his sombre and almost insane ardor, his bitter and ambiguous words--she did not comprehend all the gravity of the actual situation, that she was aggravating more every hour. Gradually, excluded from all participation in George's inner existence, she had, at first by instinct, and afterwards deliberately, made it her study to fortify her sensual dominion over him. Their new way of life, in the open air, in the country, on the seashore, favored the development of her animalism, aroused in her nature a factitious strength and the need of exercising that strength to excess. Complete idleness, the absence of commonplace cares, the continual presence of the loved one, the common possession of the couch, the scantiness of their Summer attire, the daily bath--all those new habits concurred to subtilize and multiply her voluptuous artifices, at the same time offering her numerous opportunities to repeat them. And it really seemed as if she were making ample amends for her coldness in the early days and her inexperience of the early months, and that she was now corrupting him who had corrupted her.

She had become so expert, so certain of her effects, she was so quick at unexpected inventions, so graceful in her gestures and attitudes, she showed at times in the offer of herself such violent frenzy, that George could no longer see in her the bloodless and wounded creature who used to submit with profound astonishment, the ignorant and frightened creature who had given him that fierce and divine spectacle--the agony of modesty felled by victorious passion.

A short time ago, as he had watched her sleeping, he had thought: "True sensual communion is also a chimera. The senses of my mistress are not less obscure than her soul. I shall never succeed in surprising in her fibres a secret disgust, an appetite unsatisfied, an irritation unappeased. I shall never succeed in knowing the different sensations produced in her by the same kiss repeated at different times." Yet Hippolyte had acquired that science over him, she possessed that infallible science; she knew her lover's most secret and subtle sensibilities and knew how to move them with a marvellous intuition of the physical conditions that depend on them, and their corresponding sensations and their associations, and their alternatives.

But the inextinguishable desire that she had enflamed in George burned her, too. A sorceress, she herself felt the effects of her own spell. The consciousness of her power, essayed a thousand times without failure, intoxicated her, and this ravishment blinded her, prevented her from perceiving the great shadow that was thickening every day behind the head of her slave. The terror that she had surprised in George's eyes, his attempts at flight, the thinly disguised hostilities, excited her instead of restraining her. Her artificial taste for transcendent life, for extraordinary things, for mystery, tastes that George had educated in her, took pleasure in these symptoms significant of a deep change. Formerly her lover, separated from her, tortured by the anguish of desire and jealousy, had written her: "Is that love? Oh, no! It is a sort of monstrous infirmity that can blossom _only in me_, for my joy and my martyrdom. I love to think that no other human creature has experienced that feeling." She was proud at having aroused such a sentiment in a man so different from the commonplace men she had known; she became exalted as she recognized, hour by hour, the strange effects of her exclusive domination on this morbid-minded man. And she had no other object than to exercise her tyranny, with a mixture of levity and seriousness, passing by turns from playfulness to wilful abuse.

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