Read The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) Online
Authors: Brian Stableford
The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) (20 page)
In a flash, Fanfreluche disentangled himself and sprang to his feet, gesticulating as if he would say, “Ah, the little dears!”
“Ah, the rorty little things!”
“Ah, the little ducks!”
for he was so fond of children.
Scarcely had he caught one by the thigh than a quick rush was made by everybody for the succulent limbs; and how they tousled them and mousled them!
The children cried out, I can tell you.
Of course there were not enough for everybody, so some had to share, and some had simply to go on with what they were doing before.
I must not, by the way, forget to mention the independent attitude taken by six or seven of the party, who sat and stood about with half-closed eyes, inflated nostrils, clenched teeth, and painful, parted lips, behaving like the Duc de Broglio when he watched the amours of the Regent d’Orleans.
Now as Fanfreluche and his friends began to grow tired and exhausted with the new debauch, they cared no longer to take the initiative, but, relaxing every muscle, abandoned themselves to passive joys, yielding utterly to the ardent embraces of the intoxicated satyrs, who waxed fast and furious, and seemed as if they would never come to the end of their strength.
Full of the new tricks they had learnt that morning, they played them passionately and roughly, making havoc of the cultured flesh, and tearing the splendid frocks and dresses into ribands.
Duchesses and Maréchales, Marquises and Princesses, Dukes and Marshalls, Marquesses and Princes, were ravished and stretched and rumpled and crushed beneath
the interminable vigour and hairy breasts of the inflamed woodlanders.
They bit at the white thighs and nozzled wildly in the crevices.
They sat astride the women’s chests and consummated frantically with their bosoms; they caught their prey by the hips and held it over their heads, irrumating with prodigious gusto.
It was the triumph of the valley.
High up in the heavens the sun had mounted and filled all the air with generous warmth, whilst shadows grew shorter and sharper.
Little light-winged papillons flitted across the stage, the bees made music on their flowery way, the birds were very gay and kept up a jargoning and refraining, the lambs were bleating upon the hill side, and the orchestra kept playing, playing the uncanny tunes of Titurel.
VII
Venus and Tannhauser had retired to the exquisite little boudoir or pavilion Le Con had designed for the queen on the first terrace, and which commanded the most delicious view of the parks and gardens.
It was a sweet little place, all silk curtains and soft cushions.
There were eight sides to it, bright with mirrors and candelabra, and rich with pictured panels, and the ceiling, dome shaped and some thirty feet above the head, shone obscurely with gilt mouldings through the warm haze of candle light below.
Tiny wax statuettes dressed theatrically and smiling with plump cheeks, quaint magots that looked as cruel as foreign gods, gilded monticules, pale celadon vases, clocks that said nothing, ivory boxes full of secrets, china figures playing whole scenes of plays, and a world of strange preciousness
crowded the curious cabinets that stood against the walls.
On one side of the room there were six perfect little card tables, with quite the daintiest and most elegant chairs set primly round them; so, after all, there may be some truth in that line of Mr.
Theodore Watts, – “I played at picquet with the Queen of Love”.
Nothing in the pavilion was more beautiful than the folding screens paintedby De La Pine, with Claudian landscapes – the sort of things that fairly make one melt, things one can lie and look at for hours together, and forget the country can ever be dull and tiresome.
There were four of them, delicate walls that hem in an amour so cosily, and make room within room.
The place was scented with huge branches of red roses, and with a faint amatory perfume breathed out from the couches and cushions – a perfume Chateline distilled in secret and called L’Eau Lavante.
Those who have only seen Venus at the Louvre or the British Museum, at Florence, at Naples, or at Rome, can have not the faintest idea how sweet and enticing and gracious, how really exquisitely beautiful she looked lying with Tannhauser upon rose silk in that pretty boudoir.
Cosmé’s precise curls and artful waves had been finally disarranged at supper, and strayed ringlets of the black hair fell loosely over her soft, delicious, tired, swollen eyelids.
Her frail chemise and dear little drawers were torn and moist, and clung transparently about her, and all her body was nervous and responsive.
Her closed thighs seemed like a vast replica of the little bijou she held between them; the beautiful tétons du derrière were as firm as a plump virgin’s cheek, and promised a joy as profound as the mystery of the Rue Vendôme, and the minor chevelure, just profuse enough, curled as prettily as the hair upon a cherub’s head.
Tannhauser, pale and speechless with excitement, passed his gem-girt fingers brutally over the divine limbs; tearing away smock and pantaloon and stocking, and then, stripping himself of his own few things, fell upon the splendid lady with a deep-drawn breath!
It is, I know, the custom of all romancers to paint heroes who can give a lady proof of their valliance at least twenty times a night.
Now Tannhauser had no such Gargantuan facility, and was rather relieved when, an hour later, Priapusa and Doricourt and some others burst drunkenly into the room and claimed Venus for themselves.
The pavilion soon filled with a noisy crowd that could scarcely keep its feet.
Several of the actors were there, and Lesfesses, who had played Fanfreluche so brilliantly, and was still in his makeup, paid tremendous attention to Tannhauser.
But the Chevalier found him quite uninteresting off the stage, and rose and crossed the room to where Venus and the manicure were seated.
“How tired the dear baby looks,” said Priapusa.
“Shall I put him in his little cot?”
“Well, if he’s as sleepy as I am,” yawned Venus, “you can’t do better.”
Priapusa lifted her mistress off the pillows, and carried her in her arms in a nice, motherly way.
“Come along, children,” said the fat old thing, “come along, it’s time you were both in bed.”
**********
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
If you loved me ever so little,
I could bear the bonds that gall,
I could dream the bonds were brittle;
You do not love me at all.
O beautiful lips, O bosom
More white than the moon’s and warm,
A sterile, ruinous blossom
Is blown your way in a storm.
As the lost white feverish limbs
Of the Lesbian Sappho, adrift
In foam where the sea-weed swims,
Swam loose for the streams to lift,
My heart swims blind in a sea
That stuns me; swims to and fro,
And gathers to windward and lee
Lamentation, and mourning, and woe.
A broken, an emptied boat,
Sea saps it, winds blow apart,
Sick and adrift and afloat,
The barren waif of a heart.
Where, when the gods would be cruel,
Do they go for a torture?
where
Plant thorns, set pain like a jewel?
Ah, not in the flesh, not there!
The racks of earth and the rods
Are weak as foam on the sands:
In the heart is the prey for gods,
Who crucify hearts, not hands.
Mere pangs corrode and consume,
Dead when life dies in the brain;
In the infinite spirit is room
For the pulse of an infinite pain.
I wish you were dead, my dear;
I would give you, had I to give,
Some death too bitter to fear;
It is better to die than live.
I wish you were stricken of thunder
And burnt with a bright flame through.
Consumed and cloven in sunder,
I dead at your feet like you.
If I could but know after all,
I might cease to hunger and ache,
Though your heart were ever so small,
If it were not a stone or a snake.
You are crueller, you that we love,
Than hatred, hunger, or death;
You have eyes and breasts like a dove,
And you kill men’s hearts with a breath.
As plague in a poisonous city
Insults and exults on her dead,
So you, when pallid for pity
Comes love, and fawns to be fed.
As a tame beast writhes and wheedles,
He fawns to be fed with wiles;
You carve him a cross of needles,
And whet them sharp as your smiles.
He is patient of thorn and whip,
He is dumb under axe or dart;
You suck with a sleepy red lip
The wet red wounds in his heart.
You thrill as his pulses dwindle,
You brighten and warm as he bleeds,
With insatiable eyes that kindle
And insatiable mouth that feeds.
Your hands nailed love to the tree,
You stript him, scourged him with rods,
And drowned him deep in the sea
That hides the dead and their gods.
And for all this, die will he not;
There is no man sees him but I;
You came and went and forgot;
I hope he will some day die.
**********
by Ernest Dowson
I
He had lived so long in the meditation of death, visited it so often in others, studied it with such persistency, with a sentiment in which horror and fascination mingled; but it had always been, as it were, an objective, alien fact, remote from himself and his own life.
So that it was in a sudden flash, quite too stupefying to admit in the first instance of terror, that knowledge of his mortality dawned on him.
There was an absurdity in the idea too.
“I, Francis Donne, thirty-five and some months old, am going to die,” he said to himself; and fantastically he looked at his image in the glass, and sought, but quite vainly, to find some change in it which should account for this incongruity, just as, searching in his analytical habit into the recesses of his own mind, he could find no such alteration of his inner consciousness as would explain or justify his plain conviction.
And quickly, with reason and casuistry, he sought to rebut that conviction.
The quickness of his mind – it had never seemed to him so nimble, so exquisite a mechanism of syllogism and deduction – was contraposed against his blind instinct of the would-be self-deceiver, in a conflict to which the latter brought something of desperation, the fierce,
agonized desperation of a hunted animal at bay.
But piece by piece the chain of evidence was strengthened.
That subtile and agile mind of his, with its special knowledge, cut clean through the shrinking protests of instinct, removing them as surely and as remorselessly, he reflected in the image most natural to him, as the keen blades of his surgical knives had removed malignant ulcers.
“I, Francis Donne, am going to die,” he repeated, and, presently, “
I am going to die soon
; in a few months, in six perhaps, certainly in a year.”
Once more, curiously, but this time with a sense of neutrality, as he had often diagnosed a patient, he turned to the mirror.
Was it his fancy, or, perhaps, only for the vague light that he seemed to discover a strange grey tone about his face?
But he had always been a man of a very sallow complexion.
There were a great many little lines, like pen-scratches, scarring the parchment-like skin beneath the keen eyes: doubtless, of late, these had multiplied, become more noticeable, even when his face was in repose.
But, of late, what with his growing practice, his lectures, his writing; all the unceasing labour, which his ambitions entailed, might well have aged him somewhat.
That dull, immutable pain, which had first directed his attention from his studies, his investigations, his profession, to his corporal self, the actual Francis Donne, that pain which he would so gladly have called inexplicable, but could explain so precisely, had ceased for the moment.
Nerves, fancies!
How long it was since he had taken any rest!
He had often intended to give himself a holiday – he would grudge nothing – somewhere quite out of the way, somewhere, where there was fishing; in Wales, or perhaps in Brittany; that would surely set him
right.
And even while he promised himself this necessary relaxation in the immediate future, as he started on his afternoon round, in the background of his mind there lurked the knowledge of its futility; rest, relaxation, all that, at this date, was, as it were, some tardy sacrifice, almost hypocritical, which he offered to powers who might not be propitiated.
Once in his neat brougham, the dull pain began again; but by an effort of will he put it away from him.
In the brief interval from house to house – he had some dozen visits to make – he occupied himself with a medical paper, glanced at the notes of a lecture he was giving that evening at a certain Institute on the “Limitations of Medicine.”
He was late, very late for dinner, and his man, Bromgrove, greeted him with a certain reproachfulness, in which he traced, or seemed to trace, a half-patronizing sense of pity.
He reminded himself that on more than one occasion, of late, Bromgrove’s manner had perplexed him.
He was glad to rebuke the man irritably on some pretext, to dismiss him from the room, and he hurried, without appetite, through the cold or overdone food which was the reward of his tardiness.
His lecture over, he drove out to South Kensington, to attend a reception at the house of a great man – great not only in the scientific world, but also in the world of letters.
There was some of the excitement of success in his eyes as he made his way, with smiles and bows, in acknowledgement of many compliments, through the crowded rooms.
For Francis Donne’s lectures – those of them which were not entirely for the initiated – had grown into the importance of a social function.
They had almost succeeded in making science fashionable, clothing its dry bones in a garment of so elegantly literary a
pattern.
But even in the ranks of the profession it was only the envious, the unsuccessful, who ventured to say that Donne had sacrificed doctrine to popularity, that his science was, in their contemptuous parlance, “mere literature.”
Yes, he had been very successful, as the world counts success, and his consciousness of this fact, and the influence of the lights, the crowd, the voices, was like absinthe on his tired spirit.
He had forgotten, or thought he had forgotten, the phantom of the last few days, the phantom which was surely waiting for him at home.
But he was reminded by a certain piece of news which late in the evening fluttered the now diminished assembly: the quite sudden death of an eminent surgeon, expected there that night, an acquaintance of his own, and more or less of each one of the little, intimate group which tarried to discuss it.
With sympathy, with a certain awe, they spoke of him, Donne and others; and both the awe and the sympathy were genuine.
But as he drove home, leaning back in his carriage, in a discouragement, in a lethargy, which was only partly due to physical reaction, he saw visibly underneath their regret – theirs and his own – the triumphant assertion of life, the egoism of instinct.
They were sorry, but oh, they were glad!
royally glad, that it was another, and not they themselves whom something mysterious had of a sudden snatched away from his busy career, his interests, perhaps from all intelligence; at least, from all the pleasant sensuousness of life, the joy of the visible world, into darkness.
And honestly dared not to blame it.
How many times had not he, Francis Donne himself experienced it, that egoistic assertion of life in the presence of the dead – the poor, irremediable dead?.… And now, he was only good to give it to others.
Latterly, he had been in the habit of subduing
sleeplessness with injections of morphia, indeed in infinitesimal quantities.
But to-night, although he was more than usually restless and awake, by a strong effort of reasonableness he resisted his impulse to take out the little syringe.
The pain was at him again with the same dull and stupid insistence; in its monotony, losing some of the nature of pain and becoming a mere nervous irritation.
But he was aware that it would not continue like that.
Daily, almost hourly, it would gather strength and cruelty; the moments of respite from it would become rarer, would cease.
From a dull pain it would become an acute pain, and then a torture, and then an agony, and then a madness.
And in those last days, what peace might be his would be the peace of morphia, so that it was essential that, for the moment, he should not abuse the drug.
And as he knew that sleep was far away from him, he propped himself up with two pillows, and by the light of a strong reading lamp settled himself to read.
He had selected the work of a distinguished German savant upon the cardiac functions, and a short treatise of his own, which was covered with recent annotations, in his crabbed handwriting, upon “Aneurism of the Heart”.
He read avidly, and against his own deductions, once more his instinct raised a vain protest.
At last he threw the volumes aside, and lay with his eyes shut, without, however, extinguishing the light.
A terrible sense of helplessness overwhelmed him; he was seized with an immense and heartbreaking pity for poor humanity as personified in himself; and, for the first time since he had ceased to be a child, he shed puerile tears.
II
The faces of his acquaintance, the faces of the students at his lectures, the faces of Francis Donne’s colleagues at the hospital, were altered; were, at least, sensibly altered to his morbid self-consciousness.
In every one whom he encountered, he detected, or fancied that he detected, an attitude of evasion, a hypocritical air of ignoring a fact that was obvious and unpleasant.
Was it so obvious, then, the hidden horror which he carried incessantly about him?
Was his secret, which he would still guard so jealously, become a by-word and an anecdote in his little world?
And a great rage consumed him against the inexorable and inscrutable forces which had made him to destroy him; against himself, because of his proper impotence; and, above all, against the living, the millions who would remain when he was no longer, the living, of whom many would regret him (some of them his personality, and more, his skill), because he could see under all the unconscious hypocrisy of their sorrow, the exultant self-satisfaction of their survival.
And with his burning sense of helplessness, of a certain bitter injustice in things, a sense of shame mingled; all the merely physical dishonour of death shaping itself to his sick and morbid fancy into a violent symbol of what was, as it were, an actual
moral
or intellectual dishonour.
Was not death, too, inevitable and natural an operation as it was, essentially a process to undergo apart and hide jealously, as much as other natural and ignoble processes of the body?
And the animal, who steals away to an uttermost place in the forest, who gives up his breath in a solitude and hides his dying like a shameful thing, – might he not offer an example that it would be well for the dignity of
poor humanity to follow?
Since Death is coming to me, said Francis Donne to himself, let me meet it, a stranger in a strange land, with only strange faces round me and the kind indifference of strangers, instead of the intolerable pity of friends.
III
On the bleak and wave-tormented coast of Finisterre, somewhere between Quiberon and Fouesnant, he reminded himself of a little fishing-village: a few scattered houses (one of them being an
auberge
at which ten years ago he had spent a night), collected round a poor little grey church.
Thither Francis Donne went, without leave-takings or explanation, almost secretly, giving but the vaguest indications of the length or direction of his absence.
And there for many days he dwelt, in the cottage which he had hired, with one old Breton woman for his sole attendant, in a state of mind which, after all the years of energy, of ambitious labour, was almost peace.
Bleak and grey it had been, when he had visited it of old, in the late autumn; but now the character, the whole colour of the country was changed.
It was brilliant with the promise of summer, and the blue Atlantic, which in winter churned with its long crested waves so boisterously below the little white lighthouse, which warned mariners (alas!
so vainly), against the shark-like cruelty of the rocks, now danced and glittered in the sunshine, rippled with feline caresses round the hulls of the fishing-boats whose brown sails floated so idly in the faint air.
Above the village, on a grassy slope, whose green
was almost lurid, Francis Donne lay, for many silent hours, looking out at the placid sea, which could yet be so ferocious, at the low violet line of the Island of Groix, which alone interrupted the monotony of sky and ocean.
He had brought many books with him but he read in them rarely; and when physical pain gave him a respite for thought, he thought almost of nothing.
His thought was for a long time a lethargy and a blank.
Now and again he spoke with some of the inhabitants.
They were a poor and hardy, but a kindly race: fishers and the wives of fishers, whose children would grow up and become fishermen and the wives of fishermen in their turn.
Most of them had wrestled with death; it was always so near to them that hardly one of them feared it; they were fatalists, with the grim and resigned fatalism of the poor, of the poor who live with the treachery of the sea.
Francis Donne visited the little cemetery, and counted the innumerable crosses which testified to the havoc which the sea had wrought.
Some of the graves were nameless; holding the bodies of strange seamen which the waves had tossed ashore.
“And in a little time I shall lie here,” he said to himself; “and here as well as elsewhere,” he added with a shrug, assuming, and, for once, almost sincerely, the stoicism of his surroundings, “and as lief to-day as tomorrow.”
On the whole, the days were placid; there were even moments when, as though he had actually drunk in renewed vigour from that salt sea air, the creative force of the sun, he was tempted to doubt his grievous knowledge, to make fresh plans for life.
But these were fleeting moments, and the reaction from them was terrible.
Each day his hold on life was visibly more slender, and the people of the village saw, with a rough
sympathy, which did not offend him, allowed him to perceive that they saw, the rapid growth and the inevitableness of his end.
