The Chateau d'Argol (3 page)

"Examining more closely the story of the Fall we find, as we have said, that it exemplifies the universal bearings of knowledge upon the spiritual life. In its instinctive and natural form, spiritual life wears the garb of innocence and trustful simplicity: but the very essence of spirit implies the absorption of this immediate condition into something higher. Spiritual life is distinguished from natural life, and more especially from animal life, in that it does not continue a blind fact, but rises to the consciousness of itself, and a being of its own. This division must in its turn vanish and be absorbed, and then the spirit can open up the victorious road to peace again. The concord then is spiritual; that is, the principle of restoration is found in thought, and thought alone.
The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it.
"

From these pages seemed to wing a glorious certainty. Surely only knowledge and not a humiliating and human love, that Albert had always succeeded in killing through defiance, could reconcile him lastingly with himself; and if he were not deceiving himself, thus it must be: "You shall be as Gods, having knowledge of good and evil." That was the cause of the Fall, but also, it was the only possible redemption.

And he read again: "Spirit is not pure instinct; on the contrary, it implies essentially the tendency toward reasoning and meditation. Childish innocence has, no doubt, much charm and sweetness, but only because it reminds us of what the spirit must succeed in conquering for itself." This magnificent dialectic seemed like an answer from on high to Albert's disquietudes. Thus one could be freed only by knowledge, essential, living knowledge: Albert scanned with his mind's eye his studious and sequestered life, and now proudly felt himself completely vindicated. But could it be that these new and wild surroundings, to which his life had been transferred, had already so strongly worked on the
romantic
fibres of his heart that he now felt the necessity of justifying to himself his way of life? This rejoinder of his mind seemed to him presumptuous, and for a few moments, with rapid strides, he paced the terrace to and fro.

With Herminien's arrived, Albert would once more meet his most cherished friend. In him a never-failing ease of manner, a perfect aplomb, a genius for human intrigue captivated Albert, who was ever too inclined toward the heights, too given to flights into obscure and intoxicating regions that had won him the nickname—and he could still hear Herminien's deep and dubious voice pronouncing it—of "Doctor Faust." Especially surprising in Herminien was his singular aptitude for throwing light on the most obscure motives in human conduct. The recollection of long and subtle conversations, often continued until dawn in his high student's room where the light would hang like a belated star above the street, or in a country inn where, in the middle of a rambling cross-country walk, fatigue would stay them, conversations in which each with perfect good faith would try truthfully to get nearer to his own most hidden nature in a sort of dialogued confession, one mind, to take flight, continually seeking the support of the other mind, attentive and understanding, now brought back to Albert the imminent sensation of that faculty of double sight.

It had always seemed to him that Herminien made use of—and would always make use of—his unflagging power of analysis with perfect nonchalance and unconcern. Perhaps the bonds attaching him to life appeared to be lacking in strength, for his curiosity, manifold and always probing, was being forever dissipated. Sometimes it was the incomparable execution of certain rare paintings that took him through the museums of Europe, sometimes a woman was, for an instant, the pole of that avid human magnetism; Herminien would involve her in a whirlwind of intrigues in which insoluble complications seemed to spring up, as by enchantment, at every step. But these intrigues, at the very moment when they seemed to be assuming a fatal character, had invariably been brought to an abrupt halt, for Herminien, at the very moment his partner was to make her entrance upon the heroic stage where the whole setting complicitly encouraged drama and prompted the projection of her ardent passion, knew to perfection how to use the weapon of detached and sarcastic irony which he would skilfully handle, as an arm or as a charm, and which up until now, no tragic passion had been able to withstand. These extravagant games of mind and heart which he was constantly proposing and whose insignificance, at every instant, was emphasized by his marvellously natural attitude, left a lasting resentment in all the women invited to play a role, which he himself delineated at every moment in its slightest details.

Herminien possessed the gift of penetrating the secrets of literature and art with subtle and perfect taste, revealing, however, their mechanism rather than all the power of the grace they contained. And yet an enthusiasm, a cold susceptibility, a veritable exaltation was apparent in these perilous exercises: his calm expression would become animated, his eye luminous, physical fatigue would be without a hold on this body of steel, and discussion or analysis could be prolonged without effort on his part for whole days and nights at a time, until a logical conclusion had been reached. In the very core of his being, in his most febrile moments, an impenetrable reserve and a demoniac lucidity were ever present. Perhaps Albert was mistaken in gracing with the name of friendship a relationship which, everything considered, was extremely dubious, and which by the almost exact similarity of their tastes, by their way of broaching the ambiguities of language, and by a system of values, belonging to themselves alone, which ever present, but like an invisible thread, ran through every conversation they carried on in the presence of a third person, deserved rather the qualification, in every respect more disturbing, of complicity. So many curious tastes enjoyed in common, ritualistic perversions of a language of their own, mutually taught, ideas fashioned by the repeated shock of their rapier-like minds, signals given by an inflection of the voice too often exchanged, a reference to a book, a melody, a name bringing with it a whole throng of common recollections, had in the end created between them a dangerous, intoxicating, vibratile atmosphere, dissipated and reborn by their contact like the withdrawal and approach of the plates of an electric condenser.

Placed at this human focal point, every object appeared in a new and menacing light: the reverberation of words, the flashing of beauty engendered abnormal and prolonged vibrations, as though the proximity of this human charge in suspense, heavy and immobile, had brought all phenomena to their supreme degree of
explosion
, to their most immediate and frenzied consequences. And both of them for a long time now had been unconsciously feeding on this vitiated air, delicious and subtler than that of other men—the
human condenser
seemed to be born from the reunion of these two merging figures who with the darting rapidity of lightning seemed constantly pointing out to each other all the delirium of the fever and the danger.

The gifts of life, the gifts of beauty, the most enthralling experiences had no longer any value for either of them until brought into the full light of this double reflector which then penetrated them with its magic rays; they had even, perhaps, reached the point where they could
no longer
enjoy any prey until they had dragged it to their common lair, could not
see
with their individual eyes any human thing, which they could then penetrate like an empty crystal, until the other had lent the screen of his intimate and redoubtable hostility. For they were enemies too, but they dared not admit it.
They dared not admit it to each other
, nor tolerate the remotest suggestion that a relationship in any way strange could exist between them. Perhaps Hegel would have smiled to see, walking by the side of each, like a dark and glorious angel, the phantom both of his double and his contrary, and would then have ruminated on the form of this necessary
union
which this book must needs have as its goal—among others—finally to elucidate. Thus they walked, side by side and silent, mingling their exquisite taste for death whose near and enigmatic image each in turn reflected in the frenzies of a life that was
what they shared.

Of the figure of Heide, Albert knew almost nothing. Spasmodic rumours, and until now unverifiable, pointed to the invariable coincidence of the arrival of Heide in any part of the globe with violent revolutionary outbreaks, abnormally numerous in these last few years, especially in the peninsulas of the Mediterranean and in America, and according to many it would seem that only in the atmosphere of such social upheavals, could this soul of ice and fire find its natural rhythm. Furthermore, during the last few weeks there had been an almost total silence on the subject of Heide, and now Albert realized with a strange feeling of uneasiness that in all these confused political rumours to which, as to all such preoccupations, he had lent an absent ear, he had never given a thought to the
sex
of his future guest, which the name Heide alone was not sufficient to elucidate, and that, up to the very moment of this enigmatic person's arrival, it would remain a mystery.

The day of this arrival, a pale sun shone over the country of Argol, and Albert started out on horseback for a long ride in the direction of the sea which from the castle towers he had seen shimmering in the distance. He took a path that ran along the edge of the valley between moss-covered cliffs on one side, and on the other a veritable wall of verdure whose long flexible green branches the indefatigable wind from the sea kept brushing against the rocks, as the neighbouring waves might have tossed pale forests of seaweed against the reefs, so that the path was entirely overhung by a dense bower of leaves through which the sun set a flickering maze of dazzling spots dancing along the ground. The path came out on to a desolate beach.

The last vestiges of life in this region seemed to be the long grey grasses whose thin whistling tufts clung untidily to the dunes and were matted together like long sea-drenched tresses by the gusts of wind. To the east, the view was arrested by a high black promontory. This sea, where neither bird nor sail met the eye which swept in an instant its vast expanse, seemed to him particularly unbearable in its mortal
vacuity
, for remaining a dull greyish white under a radiant sky, its surface perfectly rounded whose curve the glance involuntarily followed, irresistibly evoked the image of an eyeball whose pupil had rolled back into the socket leaving only the hideous dull white visible so that it was the entire surface which
looked
, and posed for the soul the most intolerable of questions. Not far out in the watery element, thin white lines, which seemed to duplicate the complicated festoons of the contours of the bay, advanced at intervals silently toward the shore: soon the ear was surprised by the noise as of a crashing wall of water, and then a wide wet tongue like the cool rough tongue of an ox, licked the sand with a rasping sound.

At the other end of the bay, where the wretched grasses gave place to naked beaches, Albert urged his horse toward a melancholy assemblage of worn grey stones fashioned by the hand of man and which, as he drew nearer, seemed to all appearances, to be a graveyard long since abandoned. The invading sands had already reached the level of the stone wall, and seemed to have completely filled the mortuary enclosure. Massive stone crosses with strangely short arms like those of Gaelic crosses emerged from the sand without any apparent order, and barely visible mounds still indicated the site of the graves. The wild desolation of this place, abandoned by man, inspired in Albert no more than a morbid curiosity, and tying his horse to the arm of one of the crosses, he walked rapidly along the paths smothered in sand. Not an inscription was any longer legible, and the agent of this pitiless and twofold sacrilegious destruction was revealed by the incessant whistling of grains of sand that the wind with horrible ferocity kept hurling in a fine dust against the granite. It seemed to flow from
His
inexhaustible palm, from the horrible palm of the sandman Time!

Albert's pale face now grew paler, and the wind madly tossed the locks of his blond and so strangely lustreless hair, which was the colour of ripe oats and of sand. His gaze was arrested by a stone cross planted a little apart from the others, and that seemed, as far as could be judged from the uneven inroads of the sand, quite notably higher than the others. But what struck Albert as peculiarly disquieting about the situation of this particular cross, was that no swelling of the ground, such as mournfully accounted for the presence of the other emblems of redemption in this deserted spot, was apparent in its vicinity where nothing could be seen but the uneven striatums of the sand, so that the soul long hesitated to decide whether this cross, like the others, was the sign of Death, lying in the earth at its feet, or whether, on the contrary, it confronted this sleeping people of the graves with the proud image of eternal Life, present even in the midst of these funereal solitudes.

Little by little the enigma of this gibbet, equivocal and available, took possession of his mind, and with some force guiding his arm, while the almost insane smile, brought to his lips by some mysterious comparisons still lingered, he walked quickly toward the cross, and picking up a sharp piece of stone, roughly engraved on it the name of

HEIDE

A cloud at that moment hung heavily over the graveyard, and Albert threw back his head as much to enjoy a final look at the splendour of the bay as to discover the cause of this sudden eclipse. An enormous cloud was sailing slowly over the expanse of sea like a compassionate visitor to those watery plains unknown to any ship. Nothing can describe the slow and prodigal majesty with which this celestial navigation was accomplished. For a moment it seemed to proceed toward the farthest end of the bay, then, making a solemn turn, it veered toward the east, displaying like an aerial sailing vessel the contrast of the pure and dazzling whiteness of its swelling side with the deep gulfs of shadow that opened in its bosom. For an instant its huge bulk wavered over the graveyard illuminating with its stormy, pure and regal stateliness this landscape of death, then passed on, and an instant later the incessant whistling of the wind in the dry grasses, and the monotonous and muffled stamping of a horse's hoofs in the sand, were the only signs of life left on the deserted shore.