Ancient Manners; Also Known As Aphrodite Part 41

[Ill.u.s.tration: The hoplites carried her to the bed.]

She answered:

"No."

He touched her knees and asked her:

"Do you feel anything?"

She made a sign to him that she felt nothing, and suddenly, with a movement of her mouth and shoulders (for her very hands were dead), seized with a supreme frenzy of pa.s.sion, and perhaps with regret, at this sterile hour, she raised herself towards Demetrios, but before he could answer she fell back lifeless, with the light for ever gone from out of her eyes.

Then the executioner covered her face with the upper folds of her garment: and one of the a.s.sistant soldiers, supposing that a more tender past had once united this young man and woman, severed with his sword the uttermost lock of her hair, and it fell down upon the paving-stones.

Demetrios took it in his hand, and in truth it was Chrysis in her entirety, the gold that survived her beauty, the very pretext of her name . . .

He took the warm lock between his thumb and his fingers, severed the strands slowly, dropped them to the-earth, and ground them into the dust under the sole of his shoe.

III

CHRYSIS IMMORTAL

When Demetrios found himself alone in his red studio, littered with marble statuary, rough models, trestles, and scaffoldings, he endeavoured to apply himself once more to his work.

With his chisel in his left hand and his mallet in his right, he resumed, but without ardour, an interrupted rough study. It was the breast and shoulders of a gigantic horse intended for the temple of Poseidon. Under the close-cropped mane, the skin of the neck, puckered by a movement of the head, curved in geometrically like an undulating marine basin.

Three days before, the details of this regular muscular arrangement had entirely absorbed all Demetrios's interest; but on the morning of the death of Chrysis, the aspect of things seemed changed. Less calm than he could have wished, Demetrios could not succeed in fixing his preoccupied thoughts. A sort of veil which he could not lift interposed itself between him and the marble. He throw down his mallet and began to pace about amongst the dusty pedestals.

Suddenly he crossed the court, called a slave, and said to her:

"Prepare the piscina and the aromatics. Bathe me and perfume me, give me my white garments, and light the round perfume-pans."

When he had finished his toilette, he summoned two other slaves.

"Go," said he, "to the Queen's prison; hand the gaoler this lump of potter's earth, and tell him to place it in the death-chamber of Chrysis the courtesan. If the body has not already been thrown into the dungeon, charge him to take no action until he receives my orders. Go quickly."

He put a roughing-chisel into the fold of his girdle and opened the princ.i.p.al door which gave upon the deserted avenue of the Dromos.

Suddenly he halted on the threshold, stupefied by the immense midday light of Africa.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The street was certainly white and the houses white too, but the flame of the perpendicular sunbeams bathed the gleaming surfaces with such a fury of reflections that the limestone walls and the pavements danced with prodigious incandescence in dark blue, red, green, raw ochre, and hyacinth. Great palpitating pillars of colour seemed to hang in the air and to be superimposed in transparent ma.s.ses over the shimmering, flaming facades. The very lines of the houses lost their shape behind this dazzling magnificence; the right wall of the street rounded off dimly into s.p.a.ce, floated like a piece of drapery, and in certain places became invisible. A dog lying near a street-post was literally bathed in crimson.

Lost in admiration, Demetrios saw a symbol of his new existence in this spectacle. He had lived long enough in solitary night, in silence, and in peace. Long enough had he taken moon-beams for light, and, for his ideal, the languid line of a too delicate pose, His work was not virile.

There was an icy shiver on the skin of his statues.

During the tragic adventure which had just convulsed his intelligence, he had, for the first time, felt the great living breath of life inflate his breast. If he feared a second ordeal; if, victorious in the struggle, he swore above all things not to run the risk of flinching from the beautiful att.i.tude he had adopted in the face of the world, at any rate he had just realised that that only is worthy of being imagined which penetrates by means of marble, colour or speech to one of the profundities of human emotion--and that formal beauty is merely so much uncertain matter, ever capable of being transfigured by the expression of sorrow or joy.

Just as he was finishing this line of thought, he arrived before the door of the criminal prison.

His two slaves were waiting for him.

"We have brought the lump of red clay," they said. "The body is on the bed. It has not been touched. The gaoler salutes you and hopes you will not forget him."

The young man entered in silence, Followed the long corridor, mounted some steps, and penetrated into the death-chamber. He carefully closed the door after him.

The body lay upon the bed, with the head covered with a veil, the fingers extended, and the feet close together. The fingers were laden with rings: two silver bangles encircled the pale ankles, and the nails of each toe were still red with powder.

Demetrios laid his hand on the veil in order to raise it; but he had no sooner touched it than a dozen flies rapidly escaped from the opening.

He shivered from head to foot. Nevertheless he removed the tissue of white wool and wound it round the hair.

Chrysis' face had little by little become illumined with the expression of eternity that death dispenses to the eyelids and hair of corpses. In the bluish whiteness of the cheeks, the azure veinlets gave the immobile head the appearance of cold marble. The diaphanous nostrils were distended above the fine lips. The fragile ears had something immaterial about them. Never, in any light, even in his dreams, had Demetrios seen such superhuman beauty and such a brilliancy of fading skin.

And then he remembered the words uttered by Chrysis during their first interview: "You only know my face. You do not know how beautiful I am!"

An intense emotion suddenly stifles him. He wishes to know. He has the power.

Of his three days of pa.s.sion he wishes to keep a souvenir which shall last longer than himself.--to lay bare the admirable body, to pose it as a model in the violent att.i.tude in which he saw it in his dreams, and to create, from the corpse, the statue of Immortal Life.

He unclasps the buckle and unties the knot. He throws back the draperies. The body is heavy. He raises it. The head falls backwards.

The b.r.e.a.s.t.s tremble. The arms drop pendent. He withdraws the robe entirely and casts it into the middle of the chamber. Heavily, the body falls back again.

Placing his two hands under the icy armpits, Demetrios pulls the dead woman to the upper end of the bed. He turns the head over on to the left cheek, collects and arranges the hair splendidly under the back. Then he raises the right arm, bends the forearm over the forehead, closes the still soft fingers over the stuff of a cushion: two admirable muscular lines, descending from the ear and elbow, meet under the right breast and bear it like a fruit.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The rough figure takes life and precision.]

Afterwards, he arranges the legs, one stretched out stiffly on one side, the other with the knee raised and the heel almost touching the croup.

He rectifies a few details, turns over the waist a little to the left, straightens out the right foot and takes off the bracelets, the necklaces and the rings, in order not to mar by a single dissonance the pure and complete harmony of feminine nudity.

The Model has taken the pose.