Too tormented in mind to accompany my father to Nauheim once more, I let him take his cure alone then go on to Monte Carlo for treatment in the care of a nurse, for in his precarious state of health he needed observation.
Knowing that Renée had invited Eva to join her in her box at the opera to watch Manfred, with Eva's complicity I took her place. Renée greeted me with open arms and we listened to the music of Schumann rapturously entwined, watched by the vigilant eye of the governess who was sitting in state in the corner of the box next to Levy-Dhurmer for whom Renée had just posed. As she drove me back to my hotel, Renée promised to meet me again the next day. Since the hour she had suggested had already passed, and as I had to take the train to Monte Carlo that very day, I summoned the courage to telephone her. "One cannot play one's life over again," she told me. Then, when she heard that I had just received a telegram saying that my father's health had deteriorated, she added, hesitantly, "If his health gives cause for alarm and you need me... "
"I don't need anyone," I replied bravely and hung up, with death in my soul.
When I reached Monte Carlo the following morning the nurse, who was there to meet me at the station, told me that my father had had another heart attack while I was on my way to him and that he had died peacefully in the night. I had never seen death at close quarters before and I stood respectfully beside his now serene face, while the nurse told me that the night before he died he had had a happy dream in which he saw a room full of flowers for my wedding. So, right up to his last breath, my poor father had dreamed of seeing me married to Freddy.
Freddy and Eva were waiting for me in Paris. I followed my father's coffin to Père-Lachaise on my own, then my two friends accompanied me to Le Havre with his ashes. It was on a sad grey day that I boarded the transatlantic liner but, instead of bidding me farewell, they decided with one accord to make the crossing with me. My mother, my sister and one of my father's brothers were there to meet me in New York. Once the funeral ceremonies and estate formalities were over, I left for France with my two companions. There Eva and I moved temporarily into Freddy's apartment at 4 Rue Chalgrin, almost opposite Renée's house.
There was very little furniture in this apartment—two divans, a sofa and a few chairs, all of which had still to be covered, and, rare treasure, a large Boule table.
Freddy preferred to stay in a hotel, not wanting to live in his apartment until it was fully-furnished—but would it ever be? He demanded such perfection: handmade sheets of Irish linen as fine as his handkerchiefs; curtains of I forget what silk; carpets from the lost Orient; a collection of "fleur de capucine" porcelain; China cups "a la lune ravie," silver gilt spoons, each with a different decoration made by the same jeweler-goldsmith in the Rue de la Paix where he ordered a ring—which he hoped one day to see me wear—set with diamonds and the enamel eye of a peacock at the center, to represent his coat of arms.
He noticed that I scattered my hair pins liberally about and he had some made of the same shape but of fine gold, all a standard size, so that I could lose them in city or in forest where some poor woman might pick them up, ignorant of their real value!
Absorbed by plans and schemes, he neglected to renew his wardrobe. When I pointed this out to him, he replied, "Why not be as shabby as a Duke?" Does one not need a touch of madness to live in such a precarious fashion but with such imagination?
Since I had inherited part of my father's fortune and was of the opinion that my parents had brought me into the world to live my own life rather than theirs, I took advantage of this freedom to fulfill my one ambition: getting Renée back. That's when I learned of the machinations of our governess. Taking advantage of Renée's credulous jealousy, she had persuaded her—backed by hard evidence—that one of my suitors, the Comte de la Palisse, had gone to the States expressly to marry me. How could Renée have believed such an absurdity? Since she violently repelled the slightest advance on the part of any of her suitors, perhaps she simply did not understand why I made myself agreeable, nor that I often found the company of intelligent men more interesting and more agreeable than that of a pretty woman. In some I confided quite freely, and generally behaved toward men as a friend and brother. Anyway, why these "angry looks" between Sodom and Gomorrah instead of unambiguous fellow-feeling?
A sociable, well-balanced person, I was unable to anticipate Renée's irrational change of heart and was deeply hurt by it.
Our governess' clumsy trick had nevertheless succeeded in throwing poor, unhappy Renée into the arms of another! By what chance, or by what intrigue was it that the arms were those of one of the richest women in the Israelite world? This huge, self-willed personage was known not only for her exclusive tastes but also for setting up her successive mistresses in sumptuous homes with an income for life. This prodigality did not explain why Renée who, as I have explained, had a considerable fortune, had fallen for the gilded cage. Our governess, having set up the little apartment at great expense, seeing it chosen then abandoned, next presided over the luxurious furnishing of the spacious ground floor. Everything passed through her hands and she was also generously rewarded for her role as guardian to the captive — though the captive was probably held of her own free will, having immense need of calm and security after Violette's death and the crafty lies she had been told about me.
I received a telegram in the Rue Chalgrin from an Austrian Princess who was a great friend of Eva's and mine. She told me that Renée had just arrived at Bayreuth, and that she was alone. So we went off to the Wagnerian festival and succeeded in procuring two tickets, thanks to some friends of the Princess. I sighted Renée at the very first performance of the Tetralogy and watched her from our balcony. Eva went down immediately to tell her I was waiting for her up there. Renée gave Eva her seat and came and sat next to me: captivated by the music, first our eyes then our hands met in the shadows, and each evening found us together. As I aspired to get her back independent of this Wagnerian communion, I had a long prose poem delivered to her entitled Je me souviens [I remember] which I had written for her, hoping that she would be moved when she saw how much her loss had affected me.
Let us forget the days of anger and the days of reason and all
that separates your hand from my loving hand.
Was it you who wrote, "I would exchange the whole of human
existence for one hour," and would you dare face the "divine
peril" of your songs?
Have you put all your courage, all your poetry into your poems
that so little is left for your life?
The evening stretches toward you, I am the evening at your
window... close your eyes... let me love you. No action is
stranger than that of the night.
Go mad with me, for madness is the wisdom of the shadows.
Since the end of her stay was drawing near, and she had not yet responded to my appeal, doubtless alarmed by the tone of my demands, I resolved, regretfully, resignedly, to end things:
Close by, in the middle of town, in the middle of summer,
is a sad and lonely garden which fall never forsakes.
"Will you go there with me?"
A deserted palace gazes at itself in dead waters upon which
float leaves long-withered; two swans, hostile and alike, come
and go amongst them, leaving no eddies in their wake. There is
no life in this place save the reflection of things past; no other
dream than memory.
"Will you go there with me?"
And that is where she met me the evening she left Bayreuth. As she said goodbye, with tears in her eyes, she promised to arrange things so that she could see me again before the end of August, the current month. We would meet in Vienna and travel on together in the Orient-Express via Constantinople to Mytilene.
This time she kept her word and my elation upon seeing her again was boundless, though I had to suppress it as she was still on the defensive. She did, however
, identify me with her cult of Lesbos, writing:
Now my soul has taken flight once more,
Sweet mistress of my songs, let us go to Mytilene.
…
Let us enjoy the welcome of delightful maidens:
The tears of return will find our eyes:
At last we will see the lands of lifeless love
…
Grow distant.
How important the landscape was to her! While I would have been happy to be with her anywhere, away from the world, on condition that she be entirely present.
So I was less disappointed than she by our first sight of this island which Countess Sabini had described as "shaped like a lyre stretched out upon the sea." As we approached Mytilene we heard a phonograph on the port droning out: "Viens poupoule, viens poupoule, viens!" [Hey chick, here chick, c'mere]. Renée who had been waiting for this moment, standing on the prow of the ship since break of day, turned pale with horror! We remembered our pilgrimage when we trod the dust made sacred by the sandals of Sappho and her poetesses, despite modern interventions. I was careful not to point out that far from encountering the Greek profile of Sappho's beautiful companions while we were on Lesbos, we saw not a single woman worthy of her ancestry but only a few handsome dockers, fishermen and shepherds. The facial features of the rest of the population were as debased as their language which Renée found no longer sounded like classical Greek. Only the little rustic hotel where we stayed had kept its ancient simplicity, with its terra-cotta water pots and its good food cooked in olive oil, served by an old servant with a cloth wrapped around her head, followed by a balding, ageless dog.
The nights were more beautiful than all those which had gone before and from the first what a cry of victory I had to stifle!
Welcome into your orchards a feminine couple.
Island of melody where caresses abound...
In the heavy scent of oriental jasmine,
You have not forgotten Sappho or her mistresses...
Island of melody where caresses abound...
Welcome into your orchards a feminine couple.
The next day the whole island lay down before us like a bed: stretched out in the sun on great banks of soft seaweed, smelling the salt air, we continued to dream on the murmuring shores of the Aegean Sea, which Renée described as follows in her poem on Mytilene:
When the lovers sighed weary, exhausted words,
Throwing their bodies down on dry seaweed beds,
You mingled your scent of rose and peach,
With the long whispers which come after kisses...
Sighing weary, exhausted words in our turn
We threw our bodies down on your dry seaweed beds...
Had it not been for the phalanstery of the Levantines in their summer villas, we could have believed ourselves in the fifth century B.C. Renée acquired several medallions dating from that period, struck with Sappho's profile.
During this enchanted stay, with no mail and no memories, we rented two little villas connected by an orchard, for Renée was determined not to leave Mytilene and would wait for me there "faithfully, without moving" if I had business elsewhere later on. "I have even less business elsewhere than you do," I imprudently replied, for this reminder made her frown, wrinkling her fine eyebrows. I continued quickly with an idea which I knew would please her. "Why don't we start our longed for poetry school right here, where young women vibrating with poetry, youth and love would come to us like the poetesses of old, traveling from all parts of the world to be with Sappho?"
Renée was indeed entranced by this prospect. She had moved into the bigger of the two villas and started work again on her translation of Sappho which was now nearly finished.
"But where is Atthis?" I asked.
"Atthis is right here," she replied, pulling Cinq petits dialogues grecs out of her bag, together with the manuscript of Je me souviens which I had given her in Bayreuth. The manuscript, intimate traveling companion of her cold cream, carried traces of the latter on its cover.
"We should have it published before it gets quite ruined."
"I wrote it for you alone."
"And as you see, it has never left my side."
Opening my little book of dialogues, I saw that she had underlined certain passages about Sappho and, intrigued, I re-read:
"Do you believe she was as irresistible as they say?"
"She was as irresistible as all who have obeyed their own
nature. She is as irresistible as Destiny itself."
"Why did she only really love women?"
“Because only women are complex enough to attract her,
fleeting enough to hold her. Only they can offer her all the
ecstasy, all the torment... She loses us in ourselves, finds us
again in others. I believe she is more faithful in her inconstancy
than others in their fidelity."
Leaning on my shoulder to read the book with me, Renée murmured in my ear:
"That Sappho there is you."
"What one describes in print is not who one is, but who one would like to be."
"Who we would like to be, so that 'someone in some future time will remember us.'"
"Thanks to your translation of Sappho and the work of these poetesses, I will write a play whose plot I have already worked out. It will destroy the myth of Phaon, for Sappho will die because she has been betrayed by the best-beloved of her friends, as is fitting."
"Let us not talk of grief and betrayal in 'the house of the poet where grief does not enter.’”
One day we left our beds of seaweed to be rocked in a boat to Smyrna. Toward evening we heard the sound of an Asian flute and the bells of our first caravan:
It is evening. We hear the caravans pass.
The camels pace their heavy steps in rhythm.
The bells at their necks play a muffled refrain.
Smyrna sleeps, the satisfied sleep of a courtesan.
We knew that our mail awaited us at the hotel. Should we avoid it? But then where would we spend the night? As we walked into the hotel a parrot greeted us in a strident, mocking voice and the concierge handed us our letters as soon as we gave her our names. Throw them in the sea without even opening them? But then, worried by our silence, might not someone come here and disturb us? Would it not be better to open it and, perhaps, reply? A letter from Renée's friend informed her that she would like to come and visit this famous island with her, and asked her to meet her forthwith in Constantinople. Renée had only time enough to send a telegram to stop her taking the Orient-Express, saying that she was already on her way home.
Was it not more loyal to go and tell her she wanted to break up, than to give her the shock of learning such a thing from a telegram which would, in any case, not stop her? She was not the kind to be left or deceived without putting up a fight. She would come here, and then what scenes would we have to put up with? I suggested that we hide ourselves "anywhere away from the world."
"She would alert the consulates, the secret police of the whole world. Her power, like her fortune, is limitless. And even if you went away and I let her come here, instead of tiring of this kind of life she would cling on and, if she suspected something, she would move into your place. And that I could not bear."
So we had to leave in order to come back and live here in peace to develop our illustrious plan without fear or constraint. Meanwhile we had to resign ourselves to getting back on the boat which brought us here. The faithful servant, followed by her big bald dog, served our last luncheon in the orchard. We picked figs from above our heads, warmed in the sun which shone so cruelly on our departure. Renée, wanting to eat only the figs, gave her meal to the dog which, up till then, she had endeavored to avoid. Astonished by this gesture I reminded her that she loathed the beast.
"Yes," she replied, "I hate the dog as much as ever, but why should it know that?"
What compromises would she not countenance in telling her friend, who was so dea
r, that she wanted to leave her?
I hardly noticed the places we passed through on the return journey, for I was traveling not so much to discover a country as a person: I saw and felt everything through her eyes. My vision was troubled most acutely by a cloud of doubt which hung over me and grew to the point of anguish at the parting of our ways. She went on to join her friend, I to Paris where she had asked me to find a house next to the villas I had rented in Neuilly-Saint-James. In the meantime she could live in the one which stood at the bottom of my garden, at the corner of the Rue de Boulogne and the Rue Longchamps. We need only knock down a fence to join them up, a little like the ones we had just left.
As I began to get our houses ready, I was in a state of feverish impatience waiting for Renée to come, or at least for some message, via the intermediary of Professor B.C., as arranged. He was helping her correct the proofs of her Greek translation. The first one arrived at last, filling me with images of a disillusioned, dispirited Renée, the victim of incurable regrets. Others followed begging me not to break her all over again, promising to "end this hypocritical, trivial life," calling me "her Inspiration," herself "glorified, transfigured, almost inaccessible, imperceptible except in rare moments of joy and grief." Then the messages stopped and Monsieur B.C. asked me to meet him so that he could put to me a delicate proposition with which he had been entrusted. He came to tell me that Renée's friend wished to go and stay on Mytilene, explaining that in this case the house rented in my name would pose "a very great risk." Renée, fearful of painful complications for herself and for her friend, whom she loved "so sadly and so tenderly," implored me to give up the house to her. She had begun to write me a long letter about this but was nearly caught in the act. Moved, I renounced everything except the memory of that enchanted island which had now lost all attraction for me. Renée's changes of heart continued for a long time. Now fleeing from me—“Siren return to the sea, because I, daughter of the Earth, have returned to the black depths…”—now assuring me of her unshakeable attachment, she kept me in a state of endless uncertainty.
A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney Page 7