Ecstasy

by Louis Couperus

  II

  And what then? How to find the mean between the two poles of his nature. He shrugged his shoulders. He knew he could never find it. He lacked some quality, or a certain power, necessary to find it. He could do nothing but allow himself to swing to and fro. Very well then: he would let himself swing. There was nothing else to do. For now, in the lassitude following his outburst of savagery, he began to experience again an ardent longing, like someone who, after a long evening passed in a ball-room, heavy with foul air of gaslight and a stifling crush and oppression of human breath, craves a high heaven and width of atmosphere; a passionate longing towards Cecile. And he smiled, glad that he knew her, that he was able to go to her, that it was his privilege to enter into the chaste enclosure of her sanctity, as into a temple; he smiled, glad that he felt this longing, and proud, exalting himself above all other men. Already he tasted the pleasure of confessing to her how he had lived during the last three weeks; and already he heard her voice, although he could not distinguish the words …

  Jules descended from the ladder. He was disappointed that Quaerts had not followed his arrangement of the weapons upon the rack, and his drapery of the stuff around them. But he had quietly continued his work, and now that it was finished, he came down and went quietly to sit upon the floor, with his head against the foot of the sofa where his friend lay thinking. Jules never said a word; he looked straight before him, a little sulkily, knowing that Quaerts was looking at him.

  “Jules!” said Quaerts.

  But Jules did not answer, still staring.

  “Tell me, Jules! Why do you like me so much?”

  “How should I know?” answered Jules, with thin lips.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No. How can you know why you are fond of anyone?”

  “You ought not to be so fond of me, Jules. It’s not good.”

  “Very well, I will be less so in the future.”

  Jules rose suddenly, and took his hat. He held out his hand, but, laughing, Quaerts held him.

  “You see, scarcely anyone is fond of me, save … you and your father. Now, I know why your father is fond of me, but not why you are.”

  “You are always wanting to know something.”

  “Is that so very wrong?”

  “Certainly. You will never be satisfied. Mamma always says that no one knows anything.”

  “And you?”

  “I … nothing …”

  “What do you mean … nothing?”

  “I know nothing at all … Let me go.”

  “Are you cross, Jules?”

  “No; but I have an engagement.”

  “Can’t you wait until I have dressed, then we can go together? I am going to Aunt Cecile’s.”

  Jules objected.

  “Very well, only hurry.”

  Quaerts rose up. He now saw the arrangement of the weapons, about which he had quite forgotten: “You have done it very prettily, Jules,” he said, admiringly. “Thank you very much.”

  Jules did not answer, and Quaerts went through into his dressing-room. The lad sat down on the sofa, bolt upright, looking out upon the Palace, across the bareness of the withered trees. His eyes filled with great round tears, which fell down. Stiff and motionless, he wept.

  III

  Cecile had passed those same three weeks in a state of ignorance which had filled her with pain. Through Dolf she had indeed heard that Quaerts was away shooting, but beyond that nothing. A thrill of joy electrified her when the door behind the screen opened, and she saw him enter the room. He stood before her before she could recover herself, and as she was trembling she did not rise up, but still sitting, reached out her hand to him, her fingers quivering imperceptibly.

  “I have been out of town,” he began.

  “So I heard …”

  “Have you been well all this time?”

  “Quite well, thank you.”

  He noticed she was somewhat pale, that she had a light blue shadow under her eyes, and that there was lassitude in all her movements. But he thought there was nothing extraordinary in that, or that perhaps she seemed pale in the cream colour of her soft white dress, like silken wool, even as her form was yet slighter in the constraint of the scarf about her waist, with its long white fringe falling to her feet. She sat alone with Christie, the child upon his footstool with his head in her lap, a picture-book upon his knees.

  “You two are a perfect Madonna and Child,” said Quaerts.

  “Little Dolf is gone out to walk with his godfather,” she said, looking fondly upon her child, and gently motioning to him.

  At which bidding the little boy stood up and shyly approached Quaerts, offering him a tiny hand. Quaerts took him up and set him upon his knee.

  “How light he is!”

  “He is not strong,” said Cecile.

  “You coddle him too much.”

  She laughed.

  “Pedagogue!” she said, bantering. “How do I coddle him?”

  “I always find him nestling against your skirts. He must come with me one of these days. You should let him try some gymnastics.”

  “Jules horse-riding and Christie gymnastics!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes, sport in fact,” he replied, with a look of malice.

  She looked back at him, and sympathy smiled from the depths of her gold-grey eyes. He felt thoroughly happy, and with the child still upon his knees he said:

  “I come to confess to you … Lady!”

  Then, as though startled, he put the child away from him.

  “To confess?”

  “Yes … Christie, go back to Mamma; I must not keep you by me any longer.”

  “Very well,” said Christie, with great wondering eyes.

  “The child would forgive too easily,” said Quaerts.

  “And I, have I anything to forgive you?” she asked.

  “I shall be only too happy if you will see it in that light.”

  “Begin then.”

  “Le petit Jésus …” he hesitated.

  Cecile stood up; she took the child, kissed him, and sat him on a stool by the window with his picture-book. Then she came back to the chaise-longue.

  “He will not hear …”

  And Quaerts began the story, choosing his words; he spoke of the shooting, the escapades, the peasant-woman, and of Brussels. She listened attentively, with dread in her eyes at the violence of such a life, the echo of which reverberated in his words, even though the echo was softened by his reverence.

  “And is all this a sinfulness needing absolution?” she asked, when it was finished.

  “Is it not?”

  “I am no madonna, but … a woman whose ideas have been somewhat emancipated. If you were happy in what you did it was no sin, for happiness is good … Were you happy then, I ask you? For in that case what you did was … good.”

  “Happy?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No … therefore I have sinned, sinned against myself, have I not? Forgive me … Lady.”

  She was troubled at the sound of his voice, which, caressively broken, wrapped her about in a charm; she was troubled to see him sitting there, filling with his personality a place in her room beside her. In one second she lived whole hours, feeling her calm love heavy within her, a not oppressive weight, feeling a longing to throw her arms about him and tell him that she worshipped him; feeling also fervent sorrow at what he had confessed: that again he had been unhappy. Hardly able to control herself in her compassion, she stood up, stepped towards him, and laid her hand upon his shoulder:

  “Tell me, do you mean all this? Is it all true? Is it true that you have lived as you say, and yet have not been happy?”

  “Perfectly true, on my soul.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “I could not do otherwise.”

  “You were unable to force yourself to moderation?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then I should like to teach you.”

  “A
nd I should not like to learn, from you. For it is and always will be my best happiness to be immoderate also where you are concerned; excessive in the emotion of my secret self, my soul, just as I have now been excessive in the grossness of my evident self.”

  Her eyes grew dim, she shook her head, her hand still upon his shoulder.

  “That is not right,” she said, deeply distressed.

  “It is a joy … for both those beings. I must be so … I cannot but be immoderate … both demand it.”

  “But that cannot be right,” she insisted. “Pure enjoyment …”

  “The lowest, but also the highest …”

  A shiver passed through her, a deadly fear for him.

  “No, no,” she persisted. “Do not think that. Do not do it. Neither the one nor the other. Really, it is all wrong. Pure joy, unbridled joy, even the highest, is not good. In that way you force your life. When you speak so, I am afraid for your sake. Try to recover some balance. You have so many possibilities of being happy.”

  “Oh, yes …”

  “Yes; but what I mean is, do not be fanatical. And … and also, for the love of God, do not again run so madly after pleasure.”

  He looked up at her, he saw her beseeching him with her eyes, with the expression of her face, with her whole attitude as she stood bending slightly forward. He saw her beseeching him, as he heard her, and then he knew that she loved him. A feeling of bright rapture came upon him, as if something high descended upon him to guide him. He did not stir – he felt her hand thrilling at his shoulder – afraid, lest with the smallest movement he should drive that rapture away. It did not occur to him for a moment to speak one word of tenderness to her, or to take her in his arms and press her to him; she was so transfigured in his eyes that any such profane desire remained far away from him.

  Yet he felt at that moment that he loved her; but as he had never yet loved any before; so completely and exclusively, with the noblest that is hidden away in the soul, often unknown even to itself. He felt that he loved her with newborn feelings of frank youth and fresh vigour, and pure unselfishness. And it seemed to him that it was all a dream of something which did not exist, a dream lightly woven about him, a web of sunbeams.

  “Lady!” he whispered. “Forgive me …”

  “Promise then …”

  “Willingly, but I shall not be able to keep my promise. I am weak …”

  “No.”

  “Ah, I am. But I give my promise, and I promise also to try my utmost to keep it. Will you forgive me now?”

  She nodded to him; her smile fell on him like a burst of sunlight. Then she went to the child, took him in her arms, and brought him to Quaerts:

  “Put your arms round his neck, Christie, and give him a kiss.”

  He took the child from her; he threw his little arms about his neck, and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Le petit Jésus!” he whispered.

  IV

  They stayed long talking to one another, and no one came to disturb them. The child had gone back to sit by the window. Twilight began to strew pale ashes in the room. He saw Cecile sitting there, sweetly white; the melody of her half-breathed words came rippling towards him benignly. They talked of many things: of Emerson; Van Eeden’s new poem in the Nieuwe Gids; views of life. He accepted a cup of tea only for the pleasure of seeing her move with the febrile lines of her graciousness, standing before the tea-table in the corner. In her white dress there was something about her of marble grown lissom with inspiration and warm life. He sat motionless, listening reverently, swathed in a still rapture of delight; a mood which defied analysis, without a visible origin, springing from their sympathetic fellowship as a flower springs from an invisible seed after a drop of rain and a kiss of sunshine. She too was happy; she no longer felt the pain his reverence had caused her. True she was a little sad by reason of what he had told her, but she was happy for the sake of the speck of the present. No longer did she see that dark stream, that inken sky, that night landscape; everything now was light and calm, and happiness breathed about her, tangible, a living caress. Sometimes they ceased speaking and looked towards the child, reading; or he would ask them something and they would answer. Then they smiled one to another because the child was so good and did not disturb them.

  “If only this could continue for ever,” he ventured to say, though still fearing lest a word might break the crystalline transparency of their happiness. “If you could only see into me now, how all in me is peace. I do not know why, but so it is. Perhaps because of your forgiveness. Forgiveness is a thing so dear to people of weak character.”

  “But I cannot think your character weak. It is not. You tell me you know sometimes how to place yourself above ordinary life, whence you can look down upon its griefs as on a comedy which makes one laugh sadly for a minute, but which is not true. I too believe that life as we see it is only a symbol of a true life concealed beneath it, which we do not see. But I cannot, for my part, rise beyond the symbol, while you can. Therefore you are strong and know yourself great.”

  “How strange, when I just think myself weak, and you great and powerful. You dare to be what you are, in all your harmony; I always hide, and am afraid of people individually, though sometimes I am able to rise above life in the mass. But these are riddles which it is vain for me to attempt to solve, and though I have not the power to solve them, at this moment I feel nothing but happiness. Surely I may say that once, audibly, may I not – audibly?”

  She smiled to him in the blessedness of making him happy.

  “It is the first time I have felt happy in this way,” he continued. “Indeed it is the first time I have felt happy at all …”

  “Then do not analyse it.”

  “There is no need. It is standing before me in all its simplicity. Do you know why I am happy?”

  “Do not analyse it …” she repeated, frightened.

  “No,” he said, “but may I tell you, without analysis?”

  “No, do not,” she stammered, “because … because I know …”

  She besought him, very pale, with folded trembling hands. The child looked at them; he had closed his book, and come to sit down on his stool by his mother, with a look of merry sagacity in his pale blue eyes.

  “I obey you,” said Quaerts, with some difficulty.

  And they were both silent, their eyes expanded as with the lustre of a vision. It seemed to be gently beaming about them, through the pale ashen twilight.

  V

  This evening Cecile had written a great deal into her diary, and now she paced up and down in her room, with locked hands hanging down, her head slightly bowed, and with a fixed look. There was anxiety about her mouth. Before her was the vision, as she had conceived it. He loved her with his soul alone, not as a woman who is pretty and good; with a higher love than that, with the finest fibre of his being – his real being – with supreme emotion of the very essence of his deepest soul. Thus she felt that he had loved her and no other way, with contemplation, with adoration. Thus she felt it in truth through that identity of sympathy by which each of them knew what passed within the other. And that was his happiness – his first, as he said – thus to love her, and no other wise.

  Oh, she well understood him. She understood his illusion, what he saw in her; and now she knew that, if she really wished to love him for his, and not for her own sake, she must seem no other before him, she must preserve his illusion of a woman not of flesh, who desired nothing of the earth, as other women were to him; who should be soul alone; a sister soul to his. But while she saw before her this vision of her love, calm and radiant, she saw also the struggle which awaited her; the struggle with herself, with her own distress: distress that he thought upon her so highly, and named her madonna, the while she longed only to be lowly and his slave. She would have to seem the woman he saw in her, for the sake of his happiness, and the part would be a heavy one for her to support, for she loved him, ah! with such simplicity, with all her woman’s hear
t, wishing to give herself to him entirely, as only once in her life a woman gives herself, whatever the sacrifice might cost her, the sacrifice made in ignorance of herself, and perhaps later to be made in bitterness and sorrow.

  The outward appearance of her conduct and her inward consciousness of herself; the conflict of these would fall heavily upon her, but she thought upon the struggle with a smile, with joy beaming through her heart, for this bitterness would be endured for him, deliberately for him, alone for him. Oh, the luxury to suffer for one loved as she loved him; to be tortured with longing within oneself, that he might not come to her with the embrace of his arms and the kiss of his mouth; and to feel that the torture was for the sake of his happiness, his! To feel that she loved him sufficiently to go to him with wide arms and beg for alms of his caresses; but also to feel that she had more love for him than that, and higher, and that – not out of pride or bashfulness, which are really egoism, but solely from sacrifice of herself to his happiness – she never would, never could, be a suppliant in that sense.

  To suffer, to suffer for him! To wear a sword through her soul for him! To be a martyr for her god, for whom there was no happiness save through her martyrdom! And she had passed her life, long, long years, without having felt until this day that such luxury could exist, not as fantasy in rhymes, but as reality in her heart. She had been a young girl, and had read the poets and what they rhyme of love, and she had thought she understood it all, with a subtle comprehension; yet without ever having had the least acquaintance with the emotion itself. She had been a young woman, had been married, had borne children. Her married life dashed through her mind in a lightning-flash of memory, and she stopped still before the portrait of her dead husband, standing there on its easel, draped in sombre plush. The mask it wore was of ambition: an austere, refined face, with features sharp, as if engraved in fine steel; coldly intelligent eyes with a fixed portrait look; thin, clean-shaven lips, closed firmly like a lock. Her husband! And she still lived in the same house where she had lived with him, where she had had to receive her many guests when he was Foreign Minister.