The Chateau d'Argol (11 page)

Little by little, the noise of the voices seemed to fill the sky like a fiery red illumination, and the rumbling roar of those multitudinous voices in the midst of the starry night, together with the endless humming of the arc lights, ended by completely bewildering them. And at the same moment they knew, and knew, both of them, that they knew: it was for the soul of Herminien, Herminien,
condemned to death
, that this crowd was praying, and its verdict was accepted by both of them at the same instant with an air of heroic and indifferent
resolution.
A few steps farther on they entered the vestibule of a dark house, and saw straight ahead of them
(
communicating
apparently with the street through the intermediary of a particular phenomenon which consisted in this: that as the noise of the prayers diminished in the street a similar murmur of voices grew proportionately louder but whose character was nevertheless indefinably
interior)
what appeared to be—because of the huge blackboard, the childish scrawlings in chalk, the shiny aspect and tiny dimensions of the tables and benches with which it was furnished—a simple school room. Judges were sitting on a long low platform and through the open door could be heard the confused hum of their voices chanting in unison with curious emphasis.

At the same time, in the midst of a scattered audience, filling the benches in semi-darkness, whose empty faces seemed to him to reflect only the particularly tedious reading of the verdict, Albert through a mass of backs silhouetted against the light and cutting curiously across his horizon, was finally able to examine the ominous instrument of death, which appeared to consist of two long wooden bars
moving freely
in space in front of the blackboard, as though before this surface, now grown magical, the enigmatic play of
two straight lines in space
(which the impotent hand of the schoolmaster had so often tried to summon to the heart of a space, real at last) had leapt into an existence whose very crudeness, whose curious air of imperfection, seemed to constitute the seal of their terrible reality—and had finally begun, on their own account, the malefic and disquieting orgy of their unpredictable movements. Then Herminien took his place on the platform in front of the blackboard and instantly became the room's living centre of attention. At first it seemed that the long wooden bars, nimbler than knitting needles, were executing all around him an interminable and graceful dance, in which the play of constantly variable angles in itself constituted for him a profound intellectual
diversion
, then the tempo was accelerated, and, like the sharp plunges of a maddened beast, they improvised flourishes more harrowing than a dance of swords.

Soon, however, in a movement become suddenly calm, with a curious and excessive slowness, now for the first time the bars seemed to have a tendency to become
parallels
, approaching each other in a henceforth inexorable movement, giving to this intoxicating exercise the indefinable glitter, the suddenly jerky and feverish movements of a dance of death, for
Herminien'
s
neck
was now caught between the bars, and the whole audience, becoming aware of this at the same instant, fastened upon it with one accord their passionate attention. For everyone it became evident from now on that the two bars, whose abstract character of purely geometric
straight lines
had never been lost sight of in the course of this dance of magic rods, and was now felt to constitute all the veritable horror, engaged as they were in this parallel movement seeming to have no other object than to become absorbed in each other, to return to their primitive unity. And then, in the midst of the tense silence, could be heard the unmistakable noise of cartilages cracking under a pressure which was already beyond endurance. Meanwhile, on Herminien's face, impassive up to the moment, just as the first fissure in a building through its very
insignificance
seems to contain in its fatal and still imperceptible beginning all the overwhelming horror of an earthquake, a first imperceptible wrinkle at the corner of his lips seemed now the sign of an atrocious and startling alteration of the features—and on the very threshold of madness a pious hand turned Albert's head away, and standing beside him he then recognized (aware of her presence by the fact that she alone, at the same moment, also turned her head away)—Heide.

THE ROOM

M
EANWHILE
,
HERMINIEN
came slowly out of the shadow of death, and soon his still faltering footsteps could be heard echoing through the mournful labyrinths of the castle which Heide now obstinately shunned—and began a slow convalescence whose final issue was still rendered uncertain by his persistent and abnormal pallor. A poignant feeling of mystery now kept drawing Albert toward his room, where the shutters were always closed, and which seemed sanctified by the enigma of his resurrection—and he would stay there gazing at the mysterious door, lingering outside the threshold with a mad smile on his lips. But it became more and more difficult for him to
wait
, the desire that possessed him having long since passed the limits of ordinary curiosity. He was obsessed by the idea, which grew stronger day by day, that the room, bewitched by that hidden and now intensely dramatic presence, would perhaps reveal the
secret
which he had never ceased—he admitted it now in the fever of danger—to seek during the whole course of this friendship, so long, so dubious and so treacherous, that he had formed with Herminien. Forever before his eyes, and as in a semi-delirium, stretched the inviolable, nocturnal avenue, and it seemed to him in the light of the recollection of that night, that even the most notoriously insignificant events of his life—and along practically uncharted paths—had oriented him toward the one who held in his hands the enigma whose solution alone now seemed to him above all others necessary, even were he to pay for it the reprehensible price of his own life which was, in any case, inextricably bound up with it.

One cold morning in November, Albert entered the room Herminien had just left. The yellow rays of the sun, streaming through the high windows, greeted him on the threshold, traversed its whole immense length, and seemed gloriously to
devastate
it like the sword of the avenging angel. At first glance it appeared that this large and empty room would hardly offer any of the surprises that Albert, with the naïve and frenzied excitement of a child, might have imagined in advance. But above all, was the soul overwhelmed by an air of savage liberty permeating the whole atmosphere, by the blinding and stark streaming of the light which seemed to bring with it into the room the
air of the high seas
dilating the lungs even to the limit of its own incalculable volume, and the rockets of light that traversed the apartment and that seemed to be supporting it like girders, called to mind in the most striking manner, the extraordinarily
serene
atmosphere with which Dürer surrounds the figure of the Evangelist. Entire plains of a buoyant and translucid air, charged with an exhilarating odour, were contained between these high walls.

Quickly Albert went over to a heavy oaken bookcase occupying one side of the room, filled entirely with thick leather volumes which at first glance seemed to have been until now completely neglected by Herminien. Only in one corner an inextricable conglomeration of books, engravings and prints overflowing onto the floor in heaps, revealed the persistent and suggestive activity, even in these desolate regions given over to wind and sun, of this mind whose preoccupations—although secret and not easily fathomable—had not escaped Albert altogether. At first Herminien's reading did not appear particularly significant—and would have struck an ordinary observer only by the pronounced taste for speculation it at once revealed. Although his tastes had tended, and evidently with an ever-growing passion, toward metaphysical research, it was also clear that certain epochs of human thought had held him by their persistent charm, and more especially the period toward the decline of the Alexandrine school of philosophy, as well as the first dawning of what is usually called German idealism, and which shines with such sibylline brightness through the glorious works of Schelling and Fichte. But such enticements were too familiar to Albert himself to hold his attention long—and slowly and pensively he began turning over some ancient and precious engravings—carelessly placed on one of the shelves of the bookcase—which seemed to have been the object of a daily preoccupation, and by their unusual disposition attracted the eye in the same indefinable and inadvertent way that, among a thousand other objects, a detective's eye is caught by an indubitable
piece of evidence.

The most engaging and successful specimens of human art, avid to preserve unalterably the expressions of a face ravaged by violent and abnormal passion, seemed to be vying with each other here, and made of this unique collection a treasure almost without price. And more particularly the figurations of the mystic ardours of
grace
flooding a woman's countenance, and for a brief moment causing secret splendours, as though released from the coarse grain of the skin like a volatile essence, to flow over its surface, seemed to have been assembled here from all over the world through the urge of some intimate predilection whose overwhelming intensity was manifest in the well-known rarity, apparent to Albert at a glance, of certain examples. But Albert felt his reason falter when, by the operation of a relentless analogy, the last notes of the improvisation which Herminien had given vent to in the chapel, and of which these various engravings Albert was now examining seemed but a timid and awkward graphic evaluation, again burst upon his ear in the highest register and with their fullest splendour.

As he was replacing the engravings on the high shelf of the oaken bookcase in order to wipe his forehead, suddenly bathed in sweat, his attention was drawn for the first time by another engraving of minute dimensions which lay on a stand by Herminien's bed, and whose slightly wavy edges seemed to have kept the traces of recent handling, even, as it were, the warmth of the eager fingers which had only a moment ago seized it and put it down again as in an act of perpetual and ecstatic contemplation. It bore witness to a composition extraordinarily different in every way from the other works Albert had examined, and, in the unbelievable minuteness of detail which the artist had lavished upon it and which seemed to bear the very mark of a fathomless love for his art, approached more particularly the style of certain of the most hermetic works of Dürer.

It represented the sufferings of King Amphortas. Standing in the very centre of a temple, gigantic in its proportions and of a heavy, violent and tortured architecture like that to be seen in the works of Piranesi, and in which the thickness of the vaulted ceiling and of the walls, through an almost incredible effort of genius, seemed indicated in the inclination of the smooth surfaces alone, and rendered forever prodigious the vertical descent of a dense and brilliant ray of sunlight into those abysmal depths, Parsifal was touching the side of the fallen king with the mystic lance, and on the very threshold of the miracle the faces of the knights, wrapped in their long robes, were lighted up with a supernatural exaltation. The delicious confusion of Kundry, the grave joy of Gurnemanz, the artist had painted with perfect simplicity and truth. Incontestably, this was a marvellous and singular work, a profound and singular work, and no one could deny its convincing and sovereign perfection.

And yet such a judgment, however much it implied an unreserved approbation of the artist's technical and spiritual resources and the immeasurable and rich harmony with which they were here co-ordinated,
could
not convey all the significance of this work, nor render, in the least degree, the perturbation awakened in the soul of the beholder, which seemed to recur incessantly from an uncontrollable contradiction. And in the last analysis this could be ascribed to the
hierarchy
,
in all points unusual, that the composition in the end forced upon the spectator's attention. For in this pathetic couple—which the piercing rays of the sun designated as the heart of the composition and between whom the flash of the Lance formed a link far surpassing the miracle—it was apparent that the face of the divine Saviour paled in the presence of the secret wound from which he had drawn the spell and the ardour forever. And, ignoring a sacrilegious equivalence as in the delirium of an infamous inspiration, it was clear that the artist, whose unparalleled hand could not betray him, had taken from the very blood of Amphortas, which spread in a great pool on the flagstones, the glowing matter streaming in the Grail, and that it was from the wound itself that the flames of an inextinguishable fire surged from every side, whose ardour dried the throat like an unquenchable thirst.

And clear, too, that the guileless and faithful knight no longer hoped at the end of his quest, whose painful and uncertain vicissitudes were evident in the dust that dimmed his cuirass, to have found at last the power to close the august revolutions of the Sacred Blood flowing in their fierce mystery in the heart of a universe situated forever outside his reach, but only to consecrate to it the testimony of his life, stamped now forever by the mark of chance with a cruel and provocative gratuitousness. And from the humiliation of the one who had wandered through the world amid untold suffering only to revive forever the radiance of the incomparable wound, and offer the avowal of his henceforth perpetual dependence, one gathered that the artist for his own glorification had obscurely wished to suggest that the quality of saviour was never obtained but always given, and could in no case be measured by merit, but only by the permanence of its inexhaustible effects. For in one corner of the engraving framed in an iron ring hanging on the wall, he had himself paraphrased his work in the bitter device, which seems forever to close—and to close forever around nothing but itself, the
cycle
of the Grail: "Redemption to the Redeemer".