French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  ‘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.

  II

  LIKE 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!

  But it’s just a dip, she’s running to take a dip in the sea, that’s all. And just as she’s about to plunge in, she turns back. Sea-bathing, endless sea-bathing! She is so weary of playing with the waves, with her swollen, uncouth sisters the waves, whose manners and surface she knows inside out. So she lays herself out, star-wise on her back, on the wet sand, facing the unfurling waves. It’s better this way, all she needs to do is wait for a great packet of water. After a few menacing approaches, a rearing breaker runs in and deluges her. With her eyes closed, Andromeda receives it full on, with a long throaty scream, and she wriggles all her limbs to keep the icy moving pillow of water over her, though it runs off and leaves her with nothing between her arms…

  She sits up, dazed, and contemplates her runnelled, streaming body, and plucks some shreds of seaweed from her tresses that the wave brought with it.

  And then she plunges decidedly into the water; beats the waves like a water-mill, dives and comes up again, gasps for breath, floats; a new front of waves comes in, and now watch the little demon, knocked over at first but then jumping like a carp to straddle the breakers! She catches one by the fringe, and beats it for an instant with cruel yells; a second unbalances her by stealth, but she grabs hold of another. And then the whole lot gives way beneath her, unable to wait. But the sea, warming to the game, becomes uncontrollable; so Andromeda plays dead, and lets herself be thrown up sprawling on the sand, crawls up the beach a bit and flops down on her belly on the moving sand.

  And here comes a fresh bundle of showers passing over the island. Andromeda doesn’t move; and whimpering under the great deluge, she receives the shower, the yelping shower, which gurgles and bubbles in the small of her back. She feels the sodden sand give way a little beneath her, and she wriggles herself further into it. (Oh submerge me, bury me alive!)

  But the storm-clouds pass on just as they had come, the roar dies away, leaving the island to its Atlantic loneliness.

  Andromeda sits down and gazes at the horizon, that is clearing, still with nothing to report. What can she do? When the wind has dried her, she runs off to scramble up her cliff again, where at least some intelligence, in the form of her mirror, awaits her.

  But the wicked rain has clouded the surface of her mournful mirror!

  Andromeda turns away, on the brink of bursting into tears, but now there’s a great seabird arriving, all sails flying, heading straight for the island, towards the cliff, coming for her perhaps! She lets out a prolonged and pleading ululation, and backs up against a rock, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed. Oh let the great bird marry itself to her little Promethean person, offered up by the gods; and perched on her knees, let it, with its implacable, salutary beak, peck out the place where it burns and hurts!

  But she feels the flight of the great bird cover her, then opens her eyes, and already it is far away, its mind on other, differently intriguing carcasses no doubt.

  Poor Andromeda, it is clear that she doesn’t know where to turn for relief from her own being.

  What to do? If not stare once more at the sea, so blinkered and yet alone so open to hope… And more than this, what a cry-baby her own torment is compared to this unlimited solitude! With one breaker, the sea can soothe her unto death; but how can she, sl
ender little body, soothe and comfort the sea! She would gladly stretch out her arms, but in vain!… And anyway, she is so weary! In days gone by she would roam about her domain, but now, with these palpitations about her heart… And here’s another of those big seabirds passing over. She would so like to adopt one, and to rock it in her arms! But none ever lands on the island. You’d have to kill them with a sling to get anywhere near them.

  To rock, to be rocked, the sea does not rock obligingly enough.

  The wind has dropped, and now it’s the doldrums, and the horizon is wiped clean in preparation for the ceremony of sunset.

  To rock, to be rocked!… And Andromeda’s weary little head fills with maternal rhythms; and the only human rhyme that she knows, the legend The Truth About Everything,* comes back to her; it was the little sacred poem with which her guardian the Dragon lulled her to sleep as a child.

  In the beginning was Love, the universal organizing Law, unconscious, infallible. And it is, immanent within the solid-forming whirlpools of phenomena, the infinite aspiration to the ideal.

  The Sun is for the Earth—Keystone, Reservoir, Wellspring.

  Which is why morning and springtime are about happiness, and why twilight and autumn are about death. (But since there is nothing that tickles superior organisms more than feeling they are about to die, when there is no danger of it, twilight and autumn, the drama of sun and death are aesthetic emotions par excellence.)

  The ideal Will has always been in action and always in infinite space it formulates into countless worlds that solidify, the acme of their organic evolution attained as far as their elements permit, and then they disintegrate into further novel formulations.

  As for the primitive unconscious, all it has to do is busy itself with the higher world, it has its particular tasks and watches over certain livelier and graver worlds; nothing could ever turn it away from its dream of futurity.

  And the planets which, having attained the degree of evolution already possessed by the unconscious, serve as a laboratory for the Life of futurity, with these the Unconscious is not concerned: their minor evolutions happen of necessity, following on from the given drive, like so many identical and negligible proofs of an exhausted threadbare cliché.

  And so it is that just as the necessary human evolution, in the womb of the mother, is a miniature reflex of the whole of terrestrial evolution, terrestrial evolution is only a miniature reflex of the Gigantic Unconscious Evolution in time.

  Elsewhere, elsewhere, within infinite space, the Unconscious is more advanced. What larks!…

  The Earth, even if she is to produce superiors to Man, is but an identical and repetitive cliché of trial and error.

  But the goodly Earth, come down from the Sun, is everything for us, because we have five senses, and the whole Earth fits in with them. O succulence, sensory wonders, smells, noises, ravishing visions as far as the eye can see, Love! O my own life!

  Man is but an insect under the heavens; let him but respect himself, and he is a very God. One spasm from the creature is worth the whole of nature.

  This is what Andromeda chants to herself miserably as yet another evening falls; nothing but the weariness of lessons learned. Ah! She groans and stretches.

  Ah! For how long must she stretch and groan?…

  And then she says aloud from out of the Atlantic solitude of her island:

  ‘Yes, but when I do not know what sixth sense may open—and nothing, but nothing, may respond to it! Ah!—the real point is that I am alone, and isolated, and I don’t quite see how all this is going to end.’

  She strokes her arms and then, furious, clenches her teeth and scratches long stripes in her arms with a piece of flint she found lying there.

  ‘But I can’t end my life if I want to see what happens to me, O gods!’

  She bursts into tears.

  ‘No, it’s too much, I have been left too much alone! And even if anyone does come to fetch me now, I shall be bitter about it all my life, I shall always retain a little bitterness.’

  III

  YET another evening about to fall, another preening sunset; the classic programme, the programme even more than classic!

  Andromeda tosses back her red mane and sets off for home.

  The Monster does not come out to meet her. What can this mean? The Monster has gone! She calls out:

  ‘Monster! Monster!’

  No answer. She blows on the conch. Nothing. She returns to the cliff that dominates the island and blows and calls, my god!… There’s no one there! She returns to the house.

  ‘Monster! Monster!… Oh disaster! What if he has dived underwater forever, what if he’s gone, leaving me all alone, saying that I tormented him too much and made his life unbearable!…’

  And now the island seems all of a sudden extravagantly and impossibly lost! She flings herself down on the sand in front of the cave, and lets out a long, long moan, as if she might die there, as if that is indeed all she can expect…

  When she gets up the Monster is there, in his usual murk, busy piercing holes in one of the shells he uses as an ocarina.

  ‘So there you are,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘I’ve no choice. I am your gaoler, which I shall be for as long as I live, fearless and faultless.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I was saying that for as long as I live…’

  ‘Yes, yes, we know all that.’

  Silence and horizon; the horizon over the sea swept clean by the sunset.

  ‘Why don’t we play draughts,’ sighs Andromeda, visibly exasperated.

  ‘Let’s play draughts.’

  The board, inlaid with white-and-black mosaic, is encrusted at the entrance to the cave. But no sooner has the game begun than Andromeda, visibly exasperated, sweeps the board clean.

  ‘Impossible! I’d lose; I can’t concentrate, and it’s not my fault. I am visibly exasperated.’

  Silence and horizon! After all the turbulence of the afternoon, the wind has calmed and the sky is hushed as the Star performs its classic withdrawal.

  The Star!…

  Over there, on the dazzling horizon where the mermaids hold their breath.

  The sunset sends up its scaffolding;

  From footlight to footlight the theatre stalls rise up;

  The artificers give the last nudge;

  A series of golden moons blossom out, like the embouchures of cornets from where phalanxes of heralds would thunder out!

  The slaughterhouse is ready, the hangings taken in;

  On beds of diadems, harvests of Venetian lanterns, on spreads and garlands,

  Dammed by banks of alloy already strafing,

  Pasha Star,

  His Scarlet Eminence,

  Toga’d with catastrophe,

  Fatally triumphal, descends

  For minutes on end, through the Heavenly Door!…

  And now it lies upon its side, marbled all over with atrabilious stigmata.

  Quick, someone come and squash this punctured pumpkin with their foot!…

  Farewell baskets, the grape harvest is in!…

  The row of cornets are lowered, the ramparts collapse with their brilliant prismatic carafes. Cymbals fly, the whole army breaks camp, its followers tripping over the draped standards, the tents folded away, and occidental basilicas, wine-presses, idols, chopping-blocks, vestals, offices, ambulances, whole choirs in their ranks and all the official auxiliaries.

  And they vanish in a puff of pink gold.

  Well! It all went off perfectly!…

  ‘Fabulous, fabulous!’ gushes the Taciturn Monster in ecstasy; his huge watery eyeballs still lit up by the last streaks in the west.

  ‘Farewell baskets, the harvest is in,’ sighs Andromeda in crepuscular fashion, and her red mane seems quite dull after such fires.

  ‘Well, now we just have to light the evening lamps, take a little supper, and bless the moon, before going to bed, to wake tomorrow and begin an identical day.’<
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  So, silence and horizon readies for the mortuary Moon—when! Oh blessed be the gods who sent, and just at the right time too, a third personage.

  He comes in like a rocket, the hero in diamond on a snowy Pegasus whose wings are tinted with the trembling sunset, and he is cleanly reflected in the immense melancholy mirror of the Atlantic on a gala evening…

  No doubt about it, it’s Perseus!

  Andromeda, palpitating all over with her girlish palpitations, rushes to crush herself under the Monster’s chin.

  And big tears brim at the Monster’s eyelids like flower baskets at balustrades. And he speaks with a voice we have never heard before:

  ‘Andromeda, O noble Andromeda, do not be afraid, it is Perseus. It is Perseus, son of Danaë and of Zeus in the shower of gold. He is going to kill me and rescue you.’

  ‘No, no, he won’t kill you!’

  ‘He will kill me.’

  ‘He won’t kill you if he loves me.’

  ‘He can only rescue you by killing me.’

  ‘No, no, we’ll come to an agreement. We always do. I’ll settle this in your favour.’

  Andromeda got up from her usual place and stared.

  ‘Andromeda, Andromeda! consider the value of your priceless flesh, the price of your fresh soul, a mismatch is so easily entered into!’

  But what is this that she hears! Face held high, elbows into her body, fingers clenched at her sides, she stands on the beach, so forthright and feminine, still.

  Perseus draws near, miraculous and very polished, the wings of his hippogriff slowing down;—and the closer he gets, the more provincial Andromeda feels, not knowing what to do with her lovely arms.

  Within a few yards of Andromeda, the well-schooled griffin halts, plunges up to its knees in the waves, while keeping itself upright with a pink vibration of its wings; and Perseus bows. Andromeda lowers her head. So that is her fiancé. What will his voice sound like, and what will be the first thing he says?

  But he’s off again without a word, and taking to the air, he passes and repasses in front of her, describing a series of ovals, cantering along the miraculous sea-mirror, narrowing his eyes and staring at Andromeda, as if giving the little virgin time to admire and to desire him. He is in truth a most remarkable sight!…