IX
What unparalleled guilelessness it argues to believe that there could be love without passion! There was danger even in the secret which existed between us. It was like a child conceived in secrecy, it grew and strove to see the light.
Our longing to meet and compare notes increased; we yearned to live again through the last year in which we had been trying to deceive one another. We resorted to all kinds of trickery. I introduced the Baroness to my sister, who, having married the head-master of a school, a man with an old, aristocratic name, in a way belonged to her set.
We often met by appointment; our meetings were harmless to begin with, but after a while passion sprang up and desire awoke.
In the first days following our mutual confession, she gave me a packet of letters, written partly before, partly after the thirteenth of March. These letters, into which she had poured all her sorrow, all her love, had never been intended to reach me.
“Monday.
“MY DEAR FRIEND,
“I am longing to see you, to-day as always. I want to thank you for listening to me yesterday without that sarcastic smile with which it is now your rule to regard me! I turn to you trustfully, at a moment when I am in dire need of your friendship, and you cover your face with a mask. Why? Is it necessary that you should disguise your feelings? You have yourself admitted in one of your letters that it is a mask. I hope it is, I can see it is, and yet it hurts me, for it makes me think that I have committed a fault of some sort... and I wonder: What is he thinking of me?
“I am jealous of your friendship; I am afraid that some day you might despise me. Tell me that it will never happen! You must be good and loyal to me. You must forget that I am a woman—don’t I only too often forget it myself!
“I was not angry with you for what you said yesterday, but it surprised and pained me. Do you really believe me capable of wanting to excite my husband’s jealousy for the sake of taking a mean revenge? Think of the danger to which I should expose myself if I attempted to win him back through jealousy! What should I gain? His anger would fall upon your head, and we should for ever be separated! And what would become of me without you, who are dearer to me than life!
“I love you with a sister’s tenderness, not with the whims of a coquette.... It is true that I have known moments when I longed, when it would have been heaven, to take your head into my hands, to look deep into your dear eyes, so full of wisdom; and I am sure I should have kissed you on your forehead, but never in your life would you have received a purer kiss.
“I am not responsible for my affectionate temperament, and if you were a woman, I should love you just as much, provided that I could respect a woman as highly as I respect you....
“Your opinion of Matilda makes me very happy. One has to be a woman to be pleased about such a thing. But what am I to do? Think of my position in case everybody sided with her! And I am to blame for whatever happens. I encouraged this flirtation because I considered it no more serious than a child’s game. Feeling sure of his affection, I allowed my husband perfect liberty. The consequences have proved my error....
“Wednesday.
“He is in love with her and has told me so. The matter has surpassed all limits, and I have laughed at it.... Think: after seeing you to the door, he came back to me, took my hands, looked into my face—I trembled, for my conscience was not clear—and said entreatingly: ‘Don’t be angry with me, Marie! I love Matilda!’ What was I to do? Should I cry or laugh? And he confessed this to me, to me who am tormented by remorse, forced to love you from afar, hopelessly! Oh, these stupid ideas of honour! How senseless they are! Let him indulge his passion! You are my dear love, and my woman’s heart shall never get the better of me and make me forget my duties as a wife and mother. But... notice the conflicting double nature of my feelings... I love you both, and I could never live without him, the brave, honest friend of my heart... nor without you either.”
“Friday.
“At last you have lifted the veil which for so long has hidden the secret of my heart. And you don’t despise me! Merciful God! You even love me. You have spoken the words which you had determined to leave for ever unspoken. You love me! And I am a guilty woman, a criminal, because I love you in return. May God forgive me! For I love him too, and could not bear the thought of leaving him.
“How strange it is!... To be loved! Loved tenderly! By him and by you! I feel so happy, so calm, that my love cannot possibly be a crime! Surely I should feel remorse if it were—or am I so hardened?
“How ashamed I am of myself! It was I who had to speak the first word of love. My husband is here, he puts his arms round me, and I let him kiss me. Am I sincere? Yes! Why did he not take care of me while there was yet time?
“The whole is like a novel. What will be the end? Will the heroine die? Will the hero marry another? Will they be separated? And will the end be satisfactory from a moral point of view?
“If I were with you at this moment, I should kiss your brow with the same devotion with which the devotee kisses the crucifix, and I should put from me all baseness, all artificiality....
Was this hypocrisy, or did I deceive myself? Were they nothing but passion, these semi-religious ecstasies? No, not passion only. The desire of propagation has become more complicated, and even with the lower animals moral characteristics are transmitted through sexual love. Therefore love affects both body and soul, and one is nothing without the other. If it were but passion, why should she prefer a delicate, nervous, sickly youth to a giant like him? If it were only the love of the soul, why this longing to kiss me, why this admiration for my small feet, my well-shaped hands and nails, my intellectual forehead, my abundant hair? Or were those hallucinations caused by the intoxication of her senses, excited by her husband’s excesses? Or did she feel instinctively that an ardent youth like me would make her far more happy than the inert mass which she called her husband? She was no longer jealous of his body, therefore she had ceased looking upon him in the light of a lover. But she was jealous of my person, and therefore she was in love with me!...
One day, when visiting my sister, the Baroness was seized with an attack of hysterics. She threw herself on the sofa and burst into tears, infuriated with the disgraceful conduct of her husband, who was spending the evening with Matilda at a regimental ball.
In a passionate outburst she threw her arms round me and kissed me on the forehead. I returned kiss for kiss. She called me by endearing names.
The bond between us was growing stronger and my passion was increasing.
In the course of the evening I recited Longfellow’s “Excelsior” to her. Genuinely touched by this beautiful poem, I fixed my eyes on her, and as if she were hypnotised, her face reflected every shade of feeling expressed on my own. She had the appearance of an ecstatic, of a seer.
After supper her maid called for her with a cab to take her home. I meant to come no further with her than the street, but she insisted on my getting into the cab, and in spite of my protestations she ordered her maid to sit on the box, by the side of the driver. As soon as I was alone with her I took her in my arms, silently, without a word. I felt her delicate body thrill and yield under my kisses. But I shrank from crime—and left her at her door, unhurt, ashamed of herself and, perhaps, also a little angry.
I no longer had any doubts now; I saw clearly. She was trying to tempt me. It was she who had given the first kiss, she who had taken the initiative in everything. From this moment I was going to play the part of the tempter, for, although a man of firm principles on the point of honour, I was by no means a Joseph.
On the following day we met at the National Museum.
How I adored her as I saw her coming up the marble staircase, under the gilded ceiling, as I watched her little feet tripping over the flags of variegated stucco, her aristocratic figure clothed in a black velvet costume, trimmed with military braid. I hurried to meet her and, like a page, bent my knees before her. Her beauty, which had blossomed under my kisses, was striking. The rich blood in her veins shone through her transparent cheeks: this statue, almost the statue of an old maid, had quickened under my caresses, and grown warm at the fire of life. Pygmalion had breathed on the marble and held a goddess in his arms.
We sat down before a statue of Psyche, acquired in the Thirty Years’ War. I kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her lips, and she received my kisses with a rapturous smile. I played the tempter, employing all the sophisms of the orator, all the arts of the poet.
“I entreat you,” I said, “leave your polluted house; don’t consent any longer to live this life of three—or you’ll force me to despise you. Return to your mother, devote yourself to art; in a year you will be able to appear before the footlights. Then you will be free to live your own life.”
She added fuel to the fire; I became more and more incensed and warmed to my subject. I deluged her with a flood of words, the object of which was to extract a promise from her to tell her husband everything, for then, I argued, we should no longer be responsible for the consequences.
“But supposing things end badly for us?” she interposed.
“Even if we should lose everything! I could no longer love you if I could no longer respect both of us. Are you a coward? Do you crave the reward and refuse to bring the sacrifice? Be as noble as you are beautiful, dare the fatal leap, even at the risk of perishing! Let everything be lost save our honour! If we go on like this, we shall both be guilty in a very short time, for my love is like lightning, which will strike you! I love you as the sun loves the dew—to drink it. Therefore, quick to the scaffold! Sacrifice your head so that you may keep your hands clean! Don’t imagine that I could ever debase myself and be content to share you with a third, never, never!”
She feigned resistance, but in reality she threw a grain of powder into the open flames. She complained of her husband and hinted at things, the very thought of which made my blood boil.
He, the numskull, poor as myself, without prospects, indulged in the luxury of two mistresses, while I, the man of talent, the aristocrat of the future, sighed and writhed under the torture of my unsatisfied longings.
But all of a sudden she veered round and tried to calm my excited nerves by reminding me of our agreement to be brother and sister.
“No, not that dangerous game of brother and sister! Let us be man and woman, lover and beloved! This alone is worthy of ourselves! I adore you! I adore everything belonging to you, body and soul, your golden hair and your straightforwardness, the smallest feet that ever wore shoes in Sweden, your candour, your eyes which shine in the dusk, your bewitching smile, your white stocking and your cherry-coloured garter....
“What?”
“Yes, my lovely princess, I have seen everything! And now I want to kiss your throat and the dimples on your shoulders; I will smother you with my kisses, strangle you between my arms as with a necklet. My love for you fills me with the strength of a god. Did you think me delicate? I was an imaginary invalid, or, rather, I pretended to be ill! Beware of the sick lion! Don’t come near his den or he will kill you with his caresses! Down with the dishonest mask! I want you and I will have you! I’ve wanted you from the first moment I set eyes on you! The story of Selma, the Finlander, is nothing but a fairy tale... the friendship of our dear Baron a lie... he loathes me, the man of the middle-classes, the provincial, the déclassé, as I loathe him, the aristocrat!”
This avalanche of revelations excited her very little, for it told her nothing new: she had been aware of it without my avowal.
And we separated with the firm resolution not to meet again until she had told her husband everything.
I spent the evening at home, anxious and uneasy, waiting for telegrams from the seat of war. To distract my thoughts, I emptied a sack containing old books and papers on the floor, and sat down among this litter to examine and classify it. But I found it impossible to concentrate my thoughts on my task; I stretched myself out at full length, resting the back of my head on my hands and, my eyes fixed with a hypnotic stare on the candles burning in the old chandelier, I lost myself in a reverie. I was longing for her kisses, and thinking out plans of making her my own. As she was sensitive and strange, I felt that the utmost delicacy would be necessary, that I must allow matters to arrange themselves; that a single clumsy movement would spoil everything.
I lighted a cigarette and imagined that I was lying in a meadow; it amused me to view my little room from below. Everything seemed new to me. The sofa, the witness of many pleasant hours, brought me back to my dreams of love, which, however, were quickly paralysed by the fear that happiness would be wrecked on the rocks of my uncompromising principles.
Analysing the thought which had checked my ardour, I discovered in it a great deal of cowardice, fear of the consequences, a little sympathy with the man who stood in danger of being betrayed, a little disgust with the unclean pell-mell; a little genuine respect for the woman whom I could not bear to see degrading herself; a little pity with the daughter, a mere nothing of compassion with the mother of my beloved, in case of a scandal; and quite in the background of my miserable heart a vague presentiment of the difficulty I should find later on, if ever I should wish to sever our connection.
“No,” I said to myself, “all or nothing! She must be mine alone, and for ever!”
While I was thus musing, there came a gentle tapping at my door, and almost simultaneously a lovely head appeared in the opening, flooding my attic with sunshine, and with its roguish smile drawing me away from my papers into the arms of my beloved. After a hailstorm of kisses on her lips, which were fresh with the cold outside, I asked—
“Well, what has he decided to do?”
“Nothing! I haven’t told him yet!”
“Then you are lost! Flee, unhappy woman!”
And keeping firm hold of her, I took off her close-fitting fur coat, removed her beaded hat and drew her to the fire. Then she found words.
“I hadn’t the courage.... I wanted to see you once again before the catastrophe, for God knows, he may decide to divorce me....”
I closed her lips with mine, pushed a little table to her seat and brought from my cupboard a bottle of good wine and two glasses. By the side of them I set a basket with roses and two lighted candles, arranging everything in the manner of an altar. For a footstool I gave her a priceless old edition of Hans Sachs, bound in calf, furnished with gold locks and ornamented with a portrait of Luther. I had borrowed the book from the Royal Library.
I poured out some wine. I gathered a rose and fastened it in the golden thicket of her hair. My lips touched the glass raised to drink to her health, to our love. I knelt down before her and worshipped her.
“How beautiful you are!”
For the first time she saw me as a lover. She was delighted. She took my head between her hands, kissed it and smoothed with her fingers the tangled strains of my unruly hair.
Her beauty filled me with respect. I looked at her with veneration, as one looks at the statue of a saint. She was enchanted to see me without the hated mask; my words intoxicated her, and she was filled with delirious joy when she found that my love for her was at once tender, respectful and full of ardour.
I kissed her shoes, blackening my lips; I embraced her knees without touching the hem of her dress; I loved her just as she was, fully dressed, chaste as an angel, as if she had been born clothed, with wings outside her dress.
Suddenly the tears came into my eyes, I could not have said why.
“Are you crying?” she asked. “What is the matter?”
“I don’t know. I’m too happy, that’s all.”
“You, capable of tears! You, the man of iron!”
“Alas! I know tears only too well!”
Being a woman of experience, she imagined that she possessed the secret remedy for my secret sorrow.
She rose from the sofa and pretended to be interested in the papers scattered about on the floor.
“You seemed to be stretched out on the grass when I came in,” she said, smiling archly. “What fun to make hay in the middle of the winter!”
She sat down on a pile of papers; I threw myself down beside her. Another hailstorm of kisses, the goddess stooped towards me, ready to surrender.
Gradually I drew her closer to me, holding her captive with my lips, so as not to give her time to break the spell my eyes had cast over her, and free herself. We sat on the “grass” like lovers, yielding to our passion like fully dressed angels, and rose up content, happy, without remorse, like angels who have not fallen.
Love is inventive! We had sinned without sinning, yielded without surrendering. How precious is the love of a woman of experience! She is merciful to the young apprentice; she finds her pleasure in giving, not in receiving....
Suddenly she recovered her senses, remembered the claims of reality and prepared to go.
“Until to-morrow, then!”
“Until to-morrow!”