French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (35 page)

‘Have you thought of doing so?’ I asked. ‘Wringing the neck of Remorse?’

‘I have thought of it,’ answered Monsieur de la Hogue. ‘But what would be the point? There is no meaning whatever in this grim and ridiculous bird, except that which I choose to give to it; all I need to do is to withdraw that, and it would be as dead as a stuffed bird. Do you really think I am duped by its inanity? Do you think I’m mad?’

The old man had risen, shaking out his long, grey locks that fell upon his pallid, hollow cheeks; and then, suddenly relaxed, he fell back into his armchair.

He asked me again, but now quite at ease, and with a touch of mockery:

‘At least, I presume you don’t think I’m mad?’

As I looked back at him with a smile, and moved my hand unthinkingly towards the feathers of the motionless bird, he jumped up again:

‘Do not touch the Missionary!’

And he uttered these words in the tone of voice Charles I must have used to a bystander on the scaffold: ‘Do not touch the axe!’

or The Happiest of the Three

O
MONOTONOUS
and ill-favoured country!…

The solitary island, done out in yellow-grey dunes; under meandering skies; and everywhere the sea blocking the view, and the cries of hope and of melancholy.

The sea! From whatever angle you look at it, hour after hour, whatever moment you surprise it: it is always itself, nothing is ever missing, always alone, empire of the unclubbable, weighty matter in process, ill-digested cataclysm;—as if the liquid state we witness were no more than a destitution! And then there are the days it starts to stir up that liquid state! And even worse, the days it takes on those injured tones that have no face of its quality to look into it, who has no one! The sea, always and unfailingly present and correct, every instant! And in short, not the slightest skirt-tail of a friend. (Oh, really! We must be done with the idea of sharing grudges after confidences, however lonely we have been together all this time.)

O monotonous and ill-favoured country!… When will it all end?—And even, where infinity is concerned: space monopolized by nothing but the indifferently limitless sea, time by nothing but skies in their seasonal transitions marked out by the passage of grey migrant birds, shrieking and untameable!—What on earth can we make of all this, of all this enormous and ineffable fit of the sulks?
*
It were better to die forthwith, blessed as we are from birth with a good and feeling heart.

The sea, this afternoon, is quite ordinary, uniformly and extensively dark green; it is an endless enchainment of white foam lighting up, going out, lighting up again, it is a legion of sheep swimming,
drowning, bobbing up again, and never arriving, until they are ambushed by darkness. And over their heads frolic the four winds, frolicking for the love of art, for the pleasure of killing the afternoon, whipping it up into prismatic particles, cresting the foam. And should a sunbeam strike, there’s a rainbow running over the wavebacks like a rich gold lining—that rises for a moment and then dives back down, foolishly untrusting.

And that is all. O monotonous and ill-favoured country!…

Into the inner reaches between two grottoes, downed with eider feather and pale beds of guano, the vast and monotonous sea comes panting and streaming. But its lament does not cover the little moans, the little sharp and raucous moans of Andromeda, who, flat on her belly and propped on her elbows, stares without seeing at the mechanical waves, swelling and dying as far as the eye can see. Andromeda is moaning over herself. She moans; but suddenly she becomes aware that her lament is in chorus with that of the sea and the wind, two unsociable beings, two powerful ringmasters that don’t so much as look at her. So she stops abruptly; and then looks around for something to take it out on. She calls out:

‘Monster!’

‘Poppet?…’

‘Hey! Monster!…’

‘Poppet?…’

‘What are you doing now?’

The Dragon-Monster, squatting at the entrance to his cave, turns round, and in turning all the rich, sub-aquatic, jewelled impasto along his spine shines out, and with compassion he raises his multicoloured cartilaginously fingered eyelashes, to reveal two large, watery-glaucous orbs, and says (in the voice of a distinguished gentleman who has fallen on hard times):

‘As you can see, Poppet, I am breaking and polishing stones for your train; further flights of birds are forecast before sunset.’

‘Stop it, the noise gets on my nerves. And I want to stop killing the birds that fly by here. Oh, let them pass and see their homelands.—O migratory flights that pass me oblivious, O legions of waves that come in and die, bearing me nothing, how bored I am!
*
And this time I am truly ill…—Monster?…’

‘Poppet?’

‘Why have you not brought me any more of those jewels? What have I done to displease you, my nuncle?’

The Monster gave a sumptuous shrug of his shoulders, scratched in the sand to his right, lifted a pebble, and extracted a fistful of pink pearls and crystallized anemones, that he had kept in reserve for a caprice of this kind. He waved them in front of Andromeda’s pretty nose and laid them down before her. Andromeda, still flat on her tummy and propped on her elbows, sighed without moving:

‘And what if I were to refuse them, and refuse them with inexplicable stubbornness?’

The Monster took his treasure back and flung it away, where it sank to its aquatic Golconda depths.

At which Andromeda rolled groaning on the sand, twisting her hair about her face in tragical disarray:

‘Oh! My pink pearls! My crystal sea-anemones! Oh, I shall die! And it will be all your fault; can you conceive the irreparable?’

But brusquely she stopped her wailing and took up her wheedling, crawling in her usual way underneath the Monster’s chin and encircling his neck, his purplish-striped and viscous neck, with her white arms. The Monster gave a sumptuous shrug of his shoulders and, always kind-hearted, started to secrete wild musk from every pore over which he felt brushed by those plump little arms, the little arms of the dear child, who soon took up her plaint:

‘O Monster, O Dragon, you say you love me and yet you can do nothing for me. You can see that I am dying of boredom and yet you do nothing. How much I should love you, if you could only heal me! Do something!…’

O noble Andromeda, daughter of the king of Ethiopia!
*
The reluctant dragon can only answer you in a vicious circle:—‘I cannot cure you until you love me, for it is in loving me that you will be cured.’

‘Always the same conundrum! But when I tell you that I do love you!’

‘I don’t feel it any more than you do. It’s no use; I remain just a little monster of a dragon, just an unhappy Catoblepas.’
*

‘But you could at least carry me on your back, and bring me to a country where there might be some company. (Oh, I do so want to go into society!) Once we got there, I’d gladly give you a little kiss for your trouble.’

‘I have already told you it’s impossible. It is here that we must live out our destinies.’

‘Oh yes? How can you possibly know that?’

‘I know nothing more than you do, O Noble Andromeda of the orange hair.’

‘Our destinies, our destinies! But I’m getting older every day! I can’t go on like this!’

‘Do you want to go on a little sea-trip?’

‘Oh, I know all about your little sea-trips! Find something else.’

Andromeda flung herself down on her belly on the sand, that she scratched and furrowed all the way down her legitimately hungry flanks, and started up her little groans and whimpers again.

The Monster thought it a good moment at which to adopt the falsetto voice of the poor child who was growing up, to make fun of her histrionic grievances, and he began to recite, in a neutral tone:

‘
Pyramus and Thisbe
.
*
Once upon a time…’

‘No, please, no! Any more of your worn-out stories and I shall kill myself!’

‘Now, now, what’s all this? You must pull yourself together! Go fishing, go hunting, make up rhymes, blow the conch at the four points of the compass, renew your collection of shells; or, I know—carve symbols onto recalcitrant stones (that
really
passes the time!)…’

‘I can’t, I can’t; everything bores me, I’ve told you.’

‘Oh! Look up there, poppet! Shall I get the sling?’

It was the third group of autumn migrants to pass over since morning; their triangle went away with the same pulsing regularity, and no laggards. They passed over, and this evening they would be far away…

‘Oh! To go where they go! To love, to love!…’ cried poor Andromeda.

And the little fury leaped up in a single bound and, screaming into the squalls, went galloping through the grey dunes of the island.

The Monster smiled indulgently and returned to polishing his pebbles, much as the sage Spinoza
*
must have polished his lenses.

L
IKE
a small, wounded animal, Andromeda goes galloping, galloping like a long-legged stilt through the gravel pits; and further maddened, as she has forever to be shaking back her long red hair the
wind blows in her eyes and mouth. Where can she be going like this, puberty, O puberty! through the wind and the dunes, keening like one of the wounded?

Andromeda! Andromeda!

Her perfect feet are shod in espadrilles of lichen, there’s a necklace of wild coral attached by a twist of seaweed round her neck, and otherwise immaculately naked, naked and austere, she has grown up like this, through squall and sun, bathing in the sea and sleeping under the stars.

Her face and hands are neither more nor less pale than the rest of her body; the whole of her little person, her silky red hair falling to her knees, is the same shade as rinsed terracotta. (Oh those leaps and bounds!) All toned and springy and tanned, this wild adolescent on ususually long and slender legs, with proud, straight hips cambering into a high waist just below the breasts, a childish chest with the merest bud of breasts, so meagre that her breathlessness scarcely lifts them (and when and how might they have formed, always driven against the salty sea-wind and the fierce, cold drenching of the waves?) and the long neck and the small babyish head, all drawn under its red fleece and her eyes either flashing like the seabirds or as dull as the waters of the everyday. In short, an accomplished girl. Oh those leaps, those bounds! And the mews of the wounded little thing whose life is so hard! Thus has she grown, I tell you, naked and toned and tanned, with her red fleece flying through gallops and squalls, sea-dips and starlight.

But where can she be going like this, puberty, O puberty?

At the end, part of a promontory, is a singular cliff; Andromeda scales it by means of a labyrinth of natural ledges. From the narrow platform she overlooks the island and the moving solitude that encircles it. Into the centre of this platform the rains have worn a basin. Andromeda has tiled this with pebbles of black ivory, and she keeps it filled with clean water; for since the spring this has been her mirror, and the only secret she has in all the world.

For the third time today she returns to look at herself. She does not smile into it, she looks sulkily rather, trying to deepen the depths of her eyes, and her eyes never relinquish their depth. But her mouth! She never wearies of admiring the innocent flowering of her mouth. Oh, but who will ever comprehend her mouth?

‘I really am very mysterious!’ she ponders.

And then she runs through all her airs.

‘So that’s it, that’s me, nothing more and nothing less; you must take it or leave it.’

Then she falls to thinking that she is really nothing special at all!

But she comes back to her eyes. Her eyes are beautiful, touching, and very much hers. She never wearies of meeting them; she would like to remain there quizzing them until the dying of the light. How can they remain in that infinity of theirs? Or why can she not be someone else, to spy on them, and to ponder their secret while making no noise!…

But she admires herself in vain! For her face, just like her, remains expectant and serious and remote.

Then she attacks that red fleece of hers, trying out twenty different hairstyles, but they all end up too heavy for her little head.

And now the storm-clouds come over, they will blur her mirror. She also keeps there, under a stone, a dried fish-skin that she uses as a nail-file. So she sits down and does her nails. The storm-clouds arrive and they break in a tremendous sounding deluge. Andromeda zigzags down the cliff and resumes her gallop to the sea, keening through the shower:

O who can cure
Poor little Andromeda
Naughty naughty
Naughty thing

Tears run down her childish breast, the song being so sad. The shower has already passed and now the wind ruffles her hair, and it’s squalling everywhere…

Naughty naughty
Miaow miaow
Since no one comes to help me
I’ll throw myself in the water!