The Chateau d'Argol (6 page)

Herminien kept thinking of Heide. His days, which Albert supposed filled with the substance of rewarding work, with arduous meditations, were almost wholly spent lying on his bed, from which he could plunge his eyes into the melancholy woods of Storrvan. Hardly had he seen Heide's white skirt disappear through the nearest trees, than it seemed to him that life had gone from him and that the sun now shone over utterly arid horizons. Then, as a last resort, he would plunge his face into the cool darkness of his pillows, savagely biting the delicate white linen, and his pitilessly lucid mind would call up before him the image of Heide and Albert wandering together through the heart of the fragrant forest, for him rendered impenetrable by the most barbarous of enchantments; with his minďs eye he would follow the footsteps of the one whom he had brought here that he might realize her great price when she had been taken from him.

Then the swinging pendulum of the clock, with a poignant familiarity of the first evening, would remind him of the torture that each second until the hour of dinner held for him, an empty and altogether fantastic Time, whose horror consisted entirely in the differentiation, for the first time, of the course of its duration, a Time from which the passage of all really vital phenomena had completely vanished since Heide was now beyond his reach. But when in the great drawing-room of the castle, evening had restored for him the unity of a world that seemed to be completely contained within those walls, his mind was seized with a tremulous exaltation. With the fervour of semi-delirium, with a sort of vertiginous volubility, he now threw out his words like the meshes of a net in which he sought to envelop in a despairing embrace the woman who seemed henceforth separated from him by an atrocious malediction. To stay her, to hold her, to charm her he would have liked to fill the drawing-room and the entire manor with his dangerous arabesques, with his overpowering incantations, and with marvellously active vigilance, to stake out with his thoughts all the avenues that might be open to Heide's soul—to spread out his mind to the extreme limits of the world like a magic and living carpet covered with giant flowers, beyond which her foot would have no chance to stray. And with a sublime desperation, in the mad defiance of his heart, each evening was woven anew this Penelope's web, this spidery tissue that Heide, all unconscious, would instantly and easily rend, but whose thousand meshes Albert felt descending over him like a shadow over his brain.

THE SWIM

O
NE
MORNING
when the light mist that lingered among the trees presaged the advent of a torrid day, they started out for a swim in the gulf, whose watery and eternally deserted wastes could be seen sparkling from the castle. A powerful car took them jolting over stony roads. The landscape, which had first appeared to Albert as so intensely dramatic, was now covered with a soft translucent mist. The air was full of a salty tingling freshness that came to them from the chasms of the sea, redolent of an odour headier than the smell of earth after rain: it seemed that each particle of skin simultaneously consumed all these profound delights, and if one closed one's eyes, the body suddenly to the senses had the form of a wine skin wholly closed around with warm darkness, whose marvellous living wall could be felt everywhere and at the same time by its contact with a coolness, no longer accidental but telluric, seeming to be radiated by all the pores of the planet, as its intolerable heat is radiated by the sun.

The driving wind from the sea in long smooth waves whipped their faces and tore from the damp sand a sparkling dust—and great sea birds with long wings seemed, by their jerky flights and sudden stops, to mark, like the sea, their ebb and flow on invisible beaches of the sky where, with outspread, motionless wings, they appeared to be stranded at times like white medusae. The wet shores were hidden by endless banks of fog which the unruffled sea, reflecting the almost horizontal rays of the sun, lighted from below with a powdery radiance, and the smooth streamers of mist could hardly be distinguished by the marvelling eye from the pools of water and the uniform expanses of wet sand—so in the morning of creation the charmed eye might have watched the unfolding of the naïve mystery of the
separation of the elements.

They undressed among the graves. The sun burst through the mist, lighting the scene with its rays just as Heide in her dazzling nudity walked toward the sea with a step more mettlesome and light than that of a mare of the desert sands. In that shimmering landscape formed by those long watery reflections, in the omnipotent
horizontality
of those banks of mist, of those smooth flat waves, of those gliding rays of the sun, she suddenly startled the eye by the miracle of her
verticality.
All along the sun-devoured shore from which all shadows had fled, she set sublime reflections flowing. It seemed as though she were
walking on the waters
. In front of Herminien and Albert, whose eyes ran lingeringly over her strong, shadowy smooth back, over the heavy masses of her hair, and whose chests rose and fell to the marvellous slow rhythm of her legs, she stood out against the disc of the rising sun which sent streaming to her feet a carpet of liquid fire.

She raised her arms and without an effort, like a living caryatid, supported the sky on her hands. It seemed that the flow of that captivating and mysterious grace could not continue another instant without the vessels bursting in their perilously pounding hearts. Then she threw back her head, and in a frail sweet gesture raised her shoulders, and the foam that blew against her breasts and against her belly sent such an intolerably voluptuous sensation coursing through her that her lips drew back over her teeth in a passionate grimace—and to the surprise of the two spectators, at that instant there burst from this exultant figure the disordered and fragile movements of a woman.

Herminien, lingering on the shore, was transfixed by a tumultuous image. He was living over again that moment when the sun, breaking through the mists suddenly with its fiery darts, imprinted Heide in the depth of his heart—and those tragic moments when, with head thrown back between her shoulders as from too violent a shock, there escaped from her like an involuntary admission, the gestures of possession. Then her long and liquid eyes rolled back, her hands opened, each finger slowly unfolding as in the free surrender of a last resistance, her teeth glittered in the sunlight one by one in all their insolence, her lips parted like a wound henceforth impossible to conceal, her whole body trembled all through its solid thickness, and the toes rose as though all the nerves of the body were stretched to breaking point, like the rigging of a ship ravaged by an unknown wind.

They swam, the three of them, toward the high sea. Lying almost on the surface of the water, they watched the heavy waves come rolling toward them from the horizon in regular succession, and in the vertiginous tumult of their senses it seemed to them that the entire weight of the waters fell on their shoulders and must surely crush them—before forming beneath them a swell of softness and of silence which would lift them lazily on its weary back with a sensation of exquisite lightness. Sometimes the crest of a wave would brusquely throw its shadow over Heide's face, sometimes the salty gleam of her wet cheek would reappear. It seemed to them that, little by little, their muscles began to partake of the dissolving power of the element that bore them along: their flesh seemed to lose some of its density and to become identified, by an obscure osmosis, with the liquid meshes that entangled them. They felt a matchless purity, an incomparable freedom being born in them—they smiled, all three of them, a smile unknown to men, as they braved the incalculable horizon.

They were headed
out to sea
, and so many were the waves that had already rolled under them, so many the sudden and threatening crests they had breasted, and behind which appeared once more all the aridity of those plains, consecrated to the sun alone, that it seemed to them that the earth behind them must already have disappeared from sight, abandoning them to their enchanted migration in the midst of the waves. And with exultant cries, they encouraged each other in their flight. And it seemed to Albert that the water was actually
flowing
under them rushing at an unimaginable speed, and would overflow the melancholy shore, while he with his travelling companions pursued a voyage that, in his mind, increasingly took on the character of enchantment. They swam on and on at what seemed to them a constantly accelerated speed. A sharp challenge appeared in their eyes, gaining strength as they pursued this race without a goal. A few minutes more and, with the consciousness of the great distance already covered, an icy conviction became fixed in their minds. It seemed to them, to the three of them at the same moment, that now they would
no longer
dare to turn back, would not dare to look toward the shore, and with a glance they exchanged a pledge that bound them body and soul.

Each of them seemed to see this mortal challenge in the others' eyes—to feel that the other two were sweeping him along by the whole force of their bodies and their wills—out to sea—further—toward unknown spaces—toward a gulf from which return would be impossible—and neither of them had any doubt as to the insidious character of this abrupt accord of their wills and of their destinies.
It was no longer possible to retreat.
They swam to rhythmic gasps escaping from their three chests, and with the thrilling chill of death the keen air penetrated their tired lungs. They looked lingeringly at one another. They could not detach their eyes one from the other, while lucidly their minds calculated the unretraceable distance already covered. And in a voluptuous transport, each recognized on the other faces the indubitable signs, the reflection of his own conviction, stronger with every second—now it was certain, they
would no longer have strength enough to return.

And with a holy ardour they plunged forward through the waves, and in the joy of their peremptory discovery, at the price of their common death, every instant more inevitable, each yard gained redoubled their inconceivable felicity. And, beyond hate and beyond love, they felt themselves melting, all three of them, while they glided now with furious energy into the abyss—in one single vaster body, in the light of a superhuman hope that filled their eyes, drowned in blood and brine, with the reassuring peace of tears. Their hearts leaped in their breasts, and the very limit of their strength seemed now at hand—they knew that not one of them would break the silence, would ask to turn back—their eyes shone with savage joy. Beyond life and beyond death they now looked at one another for the first time with sealed lips, and through transparent eyes plumbed the darkness of their hearts with devastating bliss—and their souls touched in an electric caress. And it seemed to them that death would reach them, not when the swelling chasms beneath them should claim their prey, but when the lenses of their staring eyes—fiercer than the mirrors of Archimedes—should consume them in the convergence of an all-devouring communion.

Suddenly Heide's head disappeared under the water and all movement in her seemed to cease. Then Herminien, with a sudden shudder,
awoke
and out of his breast rose an astonishing cry. They plunged into the watery half-light. White shapes floated before their eyes as one or another of their limbs appeared, slowly moving through the opaque greenness in which they seemed profoundly ensnared. Suddenly, in this submarine quest their eyes met, and seemed to touch, and they closed them with the sensation of an intolerable danger, as though confronted by the eye of the abyss itself, magnetic and hideous, engendering an icy dizziness.

In this frenzied search, during which it seemed to them that their hands brandished invisible knives, the form of a breast, as hard as stone, suddenly floated into Herminien's palm, then an arm which he seized with desperate violence, and when he opened his eyes above the surface of the water out of the choking terror that had surrounded him, he found the three of them reunited.

The sun blinded them like a flow of molten metal. Far away a yellowish line, thin and almost unreal, marked the beginning of that element which they had thought to have renounced forever. A spell was broken. They felt the earth's call, it echoed like an alarm bell, sounded deep in their muscles and in their brains. Anguish tightened around their temples, unnerved their hands; straining their wills to the uttermost, they swam towards land, and it seemed to them that they would never reach it now—the effort of their hands in the water seemed to be detached from them and like the dip of a useless oar. There was a burst of sunlight, and the whole bay was resplendent as for a melancholy celebration, a last irony of nature before their now inevitable end. Unendurably the blood tore like searing lightning through their brains.

But at last sand slipped under their feet; and with arms outflung they lay with all their weight, in mortal fatigue, on the wet beach, their eyes following the soothing movement of the clouds in the sky, and feeling all along their now supported limbs, the calm gladness of the earth. The wind caressed their faces and flew away like an insect from a flower, and they were astonished by the regular movement of the clouds, the agility of the grass, the noisy enthusiasm of the waves, and the mystery of their respiration that seemed to come to them like an unknown and charitable guest.

The hesitating spark of life wakened deeper and deeper zones of their flesh and, little by little, out of the mass of dense cold air, the clouds, and the penetrating humidity of the sand, like a statue out of its block of marble, they were born, they were detached. As in the morning of the world they expanded in the torrid heat of the sun, they began to stir on the sand and at last rising, they stood there erect on the shore, each surprised to assume again his own particular stature, surprised that life as it returned in its individual poverty, should hold out to them so quickly the decorous garments and the matrix of an ineluctable
personality.
But even now, still they
did not dare to speak:
had it been lost, drowned in the midst of the insatiable waves, the perverse secret of their hearts?