From somewhere the soft music of Italy could be heard, from somewhere else the music of Spain with the rhythmic beat of castanets. But loudest of all was the current ephemeral music-box melody: the cancan, which neither Orpheus nor the beautiful Helen had ever heard. If a wheelbarrow could have danced that melody would have made it do so. The dryad did dance; she floated and flew, and changed her color as a hummingbird does in the sun. Every house and the world within it reflected itself in her dress.
As a lotus flower, freed from its roots, drifts with the current, so the dryad drifted through the city, and everywhere she stopped she changed shape, and therefore no one could follow her, or recognize and observe her.
To the wood nymph, the world moved by like cloud pictures. Faces blended with faces. Not one of them did she recognize, none had she ever seen before. Two bright eyes came into her mind. She thought of Marie, the poor child dressed in rags, with red flowers braided in her black hair. She lived in the great city and was happy and rich. The dryad remembered her in her carriage as she had driven past the oak tree beneath which the priest had sat. “Poor Marie,” he had said.
Somewhere in this chaos, in this noise, she could be found. Maybe right at this moment she was stepping out of her elegant carriage.
The dryad had come to a place where, indeed, one elegant carriage after another drew up. Servants in gold-embroidered livery opened the doors. The passengers were all women: richly dressed ladies. They walked through an open gate and up tall broad stairs that led to a building with white marble columns. Was that the “wonder of the world”? Surely Marie would be in there.
“Santa Maria,” sang the choir. Clouds of incense hung in the still air under the great gilded arches where dusk reigned eternally. The dryad had entered the Church of Mary Magdalene.
Clothed in costly black dresses sewn according to the latest fashion, refined, wealthy ladies strode across the marble floor of the church. Their prayer books had coats of arms depicted in silver or gold on their velvet bindings. On their perfumed handkerchiefs, fringed with Brussels lace, the same emblems of vanity were embroidered. Some of the ladies were kneeling in silent prayer in front of the altars, others were in the confession boxes.
The dryad felt a strange agitation, a fear that she had entered a place where she was not allowed to be. This was the home of silence, the grand palace of secrets. Here no one talked, but all whispered; almost soundlessly they confided what could not be said aloud.
The dryad saw herself disguised in black silk, wearing a veil. She looked like any of the noblewomen around her: were they, too, children of longing? Someone sighed, so deeply, so painfully. Did it come from a dark confession box or from the breast of the poor wood nymph? Here she breathed not fresh air but incense. This was not the place where her yearning could find rest.
Away! Away! In constant flight, for the mayfly cannot rest; to that poor insect, flight is life.
Once again the dryad was out on the boulevard, underneath the gas candelabra. Near her was a beautiful fountain. Someone in the crowd said, “Not all the water in the fountain can wash this place clean of the innocent blood that once was shed here.” They were foreigners—visitors. They spoke loudly, for they meant to be heard; they were not like the people in the palace of secrets that the dryad had just come from.
A large slab of stone was lifted and turned like a door. The dryad looked into a dark passage leading down into the earth. She did not know what it was or where it led to. The strangers decended into the dark, away from the starlit night and the bright gaslight, away from life itself.
“I’m afraid to go down,” one of them said. It was a woman. “Please stay up here with me. What’s the point of seeing that?”
“You want to go home without having seen this? Why, people call it the wonder of our time, and it was created by one man’s genius,” replied her husband.
“I don’t care, I am not going down,” said the woman.
“The wonder of our time!”
The words were repeated and the dryad understood them. This must be the wonder that she had wanted to see, the goal of her longing. This was the entrance; but that this “wonder” would lie deep underneath the city of Paris, she had never thought possible. Still, that was what they said, and when she saw the strangers descend she followed them.
The iron stairs that led down like a spiral were broad and comfortable. A lamp lighted the shaft; deep down she could see another lamp.
They were in a labyrinth of vaulted corridors and halls. All the streets of Paris were here reproduced, like a reflection in a dirty mirror. The names of the streets could be read on large signs and every house had a number down here too. These were the roots of the houses. Along the canals of mire ran narrow macadamized sidewalks. Above the canals were pipes of fresh water, and under the vaulted ceiling a mass of telegraph wires and gas pipes could be seen. A few widely separated lamps lighted the scene. Every once in a while one could hear the rumble from above, as a heavy cart drove across one of the stone entrances.
Where was the dryad? You have heard of the catacombs of Rome. Well, they are nothing compared to this new subterranean world of our times, the wonder of the world, the sewage system of Paris. It was here the dryad had come, instead of to the Field of Mars where the World’s Fair was located. Around her, her fellow spectators spoke enthusiastically about what they were looking at.
“From this place grows the health of the city. Good sewers will add years of life to the citizens who live above them. Our age is the age of progress, and progress is a blessing.”
That was the opinion of a human being spoken in human language. But it was not the opinion of the citizens of the sewers themselves, those who had been born and bred there. The dryad could hear them whimper and whine behind the walls. An old male rat, who had had half of its tail bitten off, squeaked, heart-rendingly, his feeling in the matter—which was the only correct one, as his whole family agreed.
“It makes me sick to my stomach, all this meow, this human meow: ‘Isn’t it beautiful here, with gas and porcelain!’ That is the voice of abysmal ignorance speaking. Who eats gas and porcelain? I don’t! The sewers have gotten so light and clean that it makes you feel ashamed; and the worst of it is that you do not even know why you feel ashamed. I wish I lived in the age of the tallow candle. It is not so long ago. That was the romantic period, as the human beings call it.”
“I didn’t hear everything you said, and I don’t quite understand you. Won’t you explain it to me again?” asked the dryad.
“He was talking about the old times,” squeaked the other rats in a chorus. “The wonderful old times of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. It was very elevating for a rat to be allowed to live down here then. It was the greatest rats’ nest in all of Paris. Old Mother Plague lived down here. She killed human beings but never rats. Robbers and smugglers could breathe freely here; this was the refuge of the most interesting personalities. Today you can only meet such people in the melodramas at the theaters. The times of romance are over even in our rats’ nest. Fresh air and petroleum have killed it.” This was the manner in which the rats squeaked against the modern times and in favor of the old: of the time of Mother Plague.
In the largest of the tunnels, the sidewalks were so broad that a little cart could be driven there. The company stepped on board and the two little horses drew them briskly along underneath the great Boulevard Sebastopol; just above them milled the crowds of Paris. The cart disappeared in the darkness. The dryad was not among the passengers. She had returned up through the entrance shaft to the world of light above. She felt sure that the wonder she was seeking could not be found in the silent, vaulted passages below the earth. No, the wonder of the world that she sought in this short life of hers, of only one night, must shine even brighter than all the gas flames of the city; yes, even brighter than the moon, which was just rising.
There it must be! The wood nymph saw an entrance brightly lighted by a hundred lamps, and sh
e thought that they were beckoning to her.
Through the radiant portal she entered. The garden was filled with light and music. Gaslights illuminated little lakes in which artificial lotus flowers floated. In the center of these tin flowers—which had been cut out, shaped, and painted most charmingly—a jet of water rose. Weeping willow trees lined the shores; their long, fresh, green branches hung like a veil down into the water. A fire was burning and its red light shone upon the small, silent bowers within the garden. Music tickled the ear, charmed and captivated the listener, making his blood rush more quickly.
There were young girls everywhere. They were beautiful and dressed as though they were at a ball. On their lips were innocent smiles; they were lighthearted, ready to laugh: “young Maries” with roses in their hair, but without carriages or grooms. How wildly they danced; they were dancing the tarantella. They were ecstatic. They twisted and twirled as if the music bit them. They laughed and seemed so happy to be alive that they could have embraced the whole world.
The wood nymph felt herself being carried away by the music and the dance. On her little feet were fine silk boots made for dancing. They were chestnut brown, the same color as the ribbons that hung from her hair down over her bare shoulders. Her green silk dress moved in waves as she danced, and did not hide her pretty legs or her little feet that made magic circles in the air to enchant any young man who saw them.
Where was she? Was she in the magic garden of Armida? What was the name of this place?
It could be read outside above the gate in colored gaslight; it was called:
MABILE
The clapping to the rhythm of the music, the splashing sound of the water from the fountains, and the loud thump when champagne bottles were uncorked, blended together. A rocket rose, the dance grew as wild as a bacchanal, while high above in the sky the moon sailed a little crookedly. The air was fresh and the sky was cloudless. It was as if one could see right up into heaven from Mabile. The dryad felt herself being devoured by her own lust for life, as though she were in an opium dream.
Her eyes spoke and her lips spoke, but her words could not be heard above the music of the violins and the flutes.
Her partner whispered something in her ear, as their bodies swayed to the rhythm of the cancan. She did not understand his words—we do not understand them. Her partner stretched out his arms, intending to embrace her, but he encircled only the gaslit air.
A current of air had carried the dryad upward as the wind carries the petal of a rose. From up there she saw a flame, a blinking light from a tall tower. It was the beacon from the Field of Mars, the vision that was the goal of her dreams. She was borne by the spring wind to the great red lighthouse. She encircled it and then descended to the ground. Some workmen who had watched her thought they had seen a butterfly that was gliding to earth to die, because it had come too soon.
The moon shone, and gaslights and lanterns illuminated the great exhibition halls and the pavilions representing all the countries of the world. The light shone on the paths and the grass and the high cliffs that had been built so a waterfall could cascade down over them. Master Bloodless, the machine, pumped it back up so it could repeat its journey. Inside the mountain were caves, where there were great aquariums in which all the fishes of the world could be seen. One felt as if one were visiting the very depths of the ocean in a great glass diving bell. The water pressed against the thick glass walls. A great slimy, cunning octopus with its long tentacles descended slowly to the bottom; a big lazy flounder lay comfortably in the sand; a crab crawled like a giant spider, while the shrimps swam swiftly by—they are the butterflies or moths of the ocean.
In the fresh-water basins water lilies grew, amid reeds; and the goldfishes stood in rows like little cows tethered in a field. All had turned their heads in the same direction and their mouths were open; that was because of the current. Big fat carp glared with their stupid eyes through the glass wall. They knew where they were, they had journeyed for days in barrels filled with fresh water to get there. The railway trip had made them landsick and they had been as uncomfortable as some human beings are on board a boat. They had come to see the Paris World’s Fair, too, and they saw it from their own particular fresh-water box. The fishes saw the mass of human beings who passed during the day and evening in front of the glass walls, and they thought that all the men and women of the world had been gathered here and put on exhibition so that they could look at them, examine them, and discuss them.
“They have scales just as we do, but they can change theirs. They do it two or three times a day,” said a little muddy roach. “And they can make noises with their mouths—talk, they call it. We don’t change our scales; it is indecent. And when we want to express ourselves we do it with the corner of our mouths and our eyes. We are far more advanced than man.”
“They have learned to swim,” said another little fresh-water fish. “My home is a very large lake and I have often seen human beings swim in it. But first they take off their scales and then they swim. I think the frogs have taught them: they kick with their hind legs and row with their front ones. They can’t do it for very long though. They want to be like us, but they won’t achieve it, poor things!”
The fishes stared. They thought the teeming multitude of human beings that they had seen during the daytime were still there. They were sure they still saw the very figures that had first made an impression on their senses.
A little perch with tiger-striped skin and a beautifully rounded back told everyone that the “human mud” was still there, she could see it.
“I can see them, too, very distinctly,” said a tench, with yellow skin as if she were suffering from jaundice. “I see very clearly a lovely-shaped human being: a legged lady. I think she is female. She has our eyes, made for staring, and a big mouth that slants down in the prettiest manner. She is well fed and that shows both in front and in back; but she has seaweed around her neck and loose scales on her body. She ought to get rid of all that and do as we do. If she would let herself be as the Creator made her, then she would make quite a decent tench.”
“What happened to the one in the chair? The one they pushed?”
“The one who had paper and ink and wrote everything down? The others called him a writer!”
“He is still out there,” answered an old algae-covered carp. She was an old maid whom the world had treated cruelly. She had swallowed a hook when young and still carried it in her throat, which made her hoarse, poor thing.
“A writer,” she said, “is a kind of octopus among human beings.”
This was the way the fishes talked in their artificially made lakes. The exhibitions were closed for the night, but still the sound of hammer and saws could be heard inside the caves, for the work wasn’t altogether finished. In the daytime there were visitors, so the night had to be used for work. Some of the workmen sang, and their song became part of the dryad’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which would soon be over.
“There are the goldfishes!” The dryad nodded to them. “I know you, the swallow told me about you, and now I have seen you. How beautiful you are, all shiny. I could kiss every one of you! I recognize the rest of you, too. There is the tench, and the perch and the fat old algae-covered carp. I know you, but you do not know me.”
The fish stared. They did not understand a word she said.
She was gone. She had left the cave to go out into the fresh air, into the great gardens, where plants from all the countries of the world blossomed; the lands where black bread is eaten, the ones where the codfish is dried, where eau de cologne is made, where camphor is produced—all different and strange to one another.
When we drive home in the early morning, after having attended a ball, all the melodies we have heard still echo in our ears, and we can hum every one of them. They say, too, that in the pupils of a dead man’s eyes are photographed the last things he has seen, and the picture fades slowly. For the dryad, the hours of the night still seemed to co
ntain the noise and bustle of the day before, and because she could still sense it all, she thought: “Tomorrow it will all be repeated, and again the river of life will roar and rush through this river bed.”
The dryad stood among the roses and thought she recognized them. They were the roses from the castle park and the priest’s garden of the village she came from. There was a pomegranate flower like the one that Marie had worn in her black hair. Memories from home, from the country, invaded her mind, filled her thoughts. But still her eyes craved to see more, and a restless fever racked her body. She hurried on through the great halls filled with wonders.
She felt more and more tired. She wanted to rest, to lie down on the thick colorful carpets from India, or sit under the weeping willow tree near the clear pool of water. But the mayfly cannot rest; in minutes her life would be over.
Her body shook, her mind trembled. She fell in the grass by the running water.
“You who spring from the depth of the earth and have everlasting life,” she whispered, “let me drink from you. Refresh me, eternal one.”
“I do not spring from our eternal mother,” answered the water. “My water rushes because a machine wills it.”
“Let me borrow freshness from you, green grass and flowering plants, please!” pleaded the dryad.
“If we are torn from the soil where we grow, then we die,” answered the grass and the flowers.
“Then kiss me, wind. Kiss me once more, you giver of life!”
“Soon the sun will kiss the clouds until they blush,” answered the wind. “Then you will be among the dead. Gone, as all this will be gone before the year is over. Then the Field of Mars will again be my playing field, and I shall blow its dust into little clouds, for all is dust, only dust.”
The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories Page 107