Pan's Flute

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  At a sign from the assistant priests, the muzzles were removed from the faces; the master-potter murmured in a profound voice:

  “Take away this beautiful slave, Mantus; and remember that her daughters will be consecrated, like her, to the Veiled Gods, if they are born among us and if they are desirable. Although she will be yours forever, it is necessary for you to treat her as if she were free, for her flesh is sacred. She must not know punishments or servile tortures. The Gods would be irritated by that, and you would know misfortune.”

  He led the couple to the edge of the ditch. And at that moment a sort of melancholy fell upon the watchers: the vision of the ancestral sacrifice in which marriage and death were confounded in subterranean darkness.

  Torches were burning near the Wall of the Ancestors; the Veilans had concluded the repast in which they communicated at great festivals. The flutes, lyres and bells mingled their voices with the songs of drunken men. Licentious couples disappeared along the Volturne.

  Slyly, Dionys drew Dehva into a path that led to a marsh. Tall green reeds, parting and closing their blades, soon separated them from everyone else.

  Their hearts beat more rapidly with every step they took. They stopped. He pulled her toward him gently, but without embracing her. They did not speak.

  The water, cool beneath the nocturnal sky, exhaled a delicate breeze. The distilled perfume of the sunlight emerged from the flowers with the breath of Campania, full of incense and aromas: the odor of Venus, which springs from plants like a tender cry, in which intoxicated joy and a subtle plaint are mingled.

  The reeds, inclining in the abundant silvering of the moon, the sound of frogs, sometimes hopping, sometimes appealing with little human voices, the undulating shadows of the foliage, the waves extending over the expanse, and the pallid stars in the bright firmament, increased the languor of the young souls.

  Dehva made a slight movement, and the Syracusan, moved by the perfection of her allure, said: “Blessed by the god or goddess who watched over your birth and gave you such beautiful gestures.”

  She blushed. She looked at Dionys with a tremulous gaze. Eros was within her, like a warrior.

  Fear and delight tormented her simultaneously. The instinct to flee mingled with tender surprise; a gentle and unbearable asphyxiation inflated her bosom. She was like a fearful being lost among wild beasts, or a rose quivering at sunrise.

  Dionys picked an iris flower and handed it to his friend. Then he murmured: “My heart is glad of your existence, beloved. You render the world more elegant by consenting to live in it. Of all the prodigies that there are among humans, the most beautiful is that you were born in my time and that I have encountered you on my route. By virtue of that, my days are divine and I shall have lived tenfold!”

  She did not know how to reply. She had no terms that corresponded to her emotion. She was ill with Dionys. She was full of submission. Her indecisive head tilted slightly in the white stem of her neck, with a languid mouth in which the little mirrors of the teeth reflected the light of the moon like nacre.

  The tender frenzy of caresses burned Dionys. He took that charming head in both hands. His kiss could not quit the moist lips from which he drank the soul of his beloved.

  Wisps of hair drifted in the breeze; Dehva, paling, had her face upturned and her eyes closed.

  The fastening of the stola broke. The cleavage appeared in its divine youth.

  The small breasts rose up, soft and proud, with their hesitant areolas. Their present beauty was full of their future beauty. A white shadow separated them, and undulant lines, in infinite nuances, attached them to the neck and the shoulders. Pink, mauve and blue gleams mingled with their dazzling whiteness. Dionys sighed sensuously, but also with a sort of plastic ecstasy. His hand stroked them, like vases created by a prodigious potter.

  And the child, under that light hand, reddened less than under the kiss on the lips. She felt respect, the worship of art, and almost dread, in the man.

  However, in feeling those warm globes palpitate, desire returned to Dionys. He seized Dehva in a rougher embrace.

  Pushing him away, she stammered, plaintively: “Don’t forget that I’m consecrated to Diana!”

  He moved away. A sacred pity, a supreme tenderness, agitated his being. He did not sense against Dehva any of the warlike and vindictive impulses that a woman’s resistance stimulates.

  From a moment, in silence, they listened to the distant sound of a flute and human voices. Dehva shivered, and said: “It’s necessary to go back, Dionys.”

  They resumed the route through the reeds, in a green shade, striped with lilac, and found themselves back in the plain. They perceived the violet-tinted crowd near the Wall of the Ancestors; couples were moving away, in the trees, along the banks of the Volturne, for the secret festival of amour.

  On the edge of a wood of turpentine trees, a solitary form appeared before Dionys. He recognized the Umbrian woman with the tawny eyes. She darted a strange, ironic, familiar smile at him, which held him astir, while he slowly took his companion home.

  VII. The Umbrian Woman

  One night, Dionys could not sleep. The sweet and terrible hours passed over his couch. Eros was within him. The god tormented his flesh and his soul, sometimes as suave as the odorant approach of Carthaginian shores, sometimes as wild as the wind of Khamsin.

  The Syracusan sighed toward Dehva’s beauty. He raised imploring arms in the darkness. He talked to himself.

  “Why have I seen the secret form of her breasts? It has given me a burn that will no longer be soothed, but I cannot betray her vows, nor belie an oath made to my host!”

  He got up, opened the door and looked out into the night. The moon, red and diminished by a third, rose above the black poplars of the Volturne. It was like a potters’ kiln when the wood has lost its flame and only yields a somber light. It populated the solitude, the only living thing in an immobile universe. The perfume of the flowers seemed to be its perfume, and its mystery augmented Dionys’ anxiety.

  He picked up the Syrinx and walked all the way to the river. The naiads were amusing themselves among the willows. Their vaporous voices mingled with their luminous smiles; and the reeds extended their tips like a legion of swords.

  Dionys inhaled the moist air. He gazed for a long time at the sycamores casting their shadows all the way to the horizon. But the star was rising in the blue flesh of the firmament, as pale as the broken mirror of a hetaira. The young man sighed more deeply. Eros rendered the beauty of things too visible. The entire earth seemed penetrated by Dehva.

  And the force that had impelled him to the bank of the Volturne drew him all the way to Tarao’s garden.

  His heart was groaning like a torrent. A mist covered his eyes. He leaned against a turpentine tree, overwhelmed by the excessive tenderness of his desire.

  He finally emerged from that swoon. He could not help confiding his trouble to the darkness and to the one who was asleep under the great somber roof outlined amid the serpentine vines.

  The flute told the adventure well, melancholy and forever mysterious. A thousand sighing souls rose up. They murmured the splendor of the world, and its anguish, the fearful daughter of desire, and united in the amorous heart of Dionys the amorous hearts of times past; for such is the power of Syrinx.

  Dehva was asleep, her slumber devoid of strength. She awoke to the magical peril, of which she was afraid, and which she found cherishable. The extended hand of Dionys never ceased to weigh upon her breast and cause her to respire languorously. She did not know whether she ought to implore Diana to preserve her, or whether she would rather die than not know that disturbance.

  She heard Syrinx in a dream. She woke up. The long, light voice enveloped her as the voluptuous hands had before. She knew that she had been told how the origin of gods and men was her own petty origin, and that the plaintive sighs and dying embroideries of the flute were saying everything that inhabited her heart.

  It became intolerabl
e for her to remain lying down. She got up and looked out into the airy darkness. Her heart agitated like a grouse in a snare. She could not help opening the door. The light of the little lamp in the hearth of the atrium, and the lares outlined in their niches, gave her courage.

  She turned toward the most ancient of the gods, devoured by the ages, which she believed to be the most indulgent and the most tender.

  “O god of the hearth,” she whispered, “you who protected all my ancestors, I cannot resist the voice of Dionys. Enable my action to be innocent!”

  She dared not pray to Diana. She feared that grim goddess, whom she knew to be harsh and unforgiving of offenses. But she also felt that she could not flee the force of the imperious Syrinx.

  However, she had picked up her stola and she draped it over her shoulder. She tied the laces of her shoes; slowly, she traversed the atrium and the vestibule. Nothing could be heard but the sighing flute and the slight creak of wooden paneling. It was the hour when Tarao’s slumber was heavy. Lying on his good ear, he could scarcely hear, and the slaves would be like logs until dawn.

  Dehva lifted the latch. She saw the sapphire and nacre space, the face of Hecate all white beneath the sycamores, and then, at the far end of the garden, Dionys among the Libyan fig trees.

  Then she felt faint. Her flesh seemed to be a warm liquid. She advanced toward the Syracusan like the girls who, touched by Persian mages, walk in their sleep.

  The voice of the flute died away. Dionys watched the white form approach. Then he ran over the field of clover with a prodigious joy.

  “You’ve come, Dehva? You’ve come?”

  She replied in an ardent voice that was also plaintive: “I wasn’t free not to come. You have put into the Syrinx a voice more powerful than that of the gods. I have come as a cloud comes in a storm.”

  He took her on his knees.

  “Oh, little daughter of men, I consent to die for having been loved by you...and it is more than immortality to embrace your divine form!”

  She pushed him away gently; their eyes filled with one another. He saw that new bosom rise, and as before, he drew it against his heart. She did not put up any resistance. She merely adjusted her stola at the waist.

  Dionys uncovered her shoulders gently. They appeared, swansdown, nacre, or rather made of the flesh of white flowers, pensive nymphs over solitary pools, lilies of the valley hidden in ravines. And their tender and pure lines were lost in the troubled young breasts, admirable reserves of amour and life. Dionys’ tremulous hand modeled itself to their form; Dehva felt herself entering into him through the amorous hands as through the sparkling eyes. But when he reached the girdle, he found himself stopped by little trembling hands.

  “Have pity on one who loves you! She would die for violating her vow!”

  She buckled under his arm, with her breasts palpitating with sensuality, set ablaze by implacable Eros. And he, gazing at her magnificent nudity, was like a ship in a tempest.

  But Dehva’s supplication filled him with fear. He saw the torture and death distinctly. Grimly, he lowered his head. They both execrated the grim goddess.

  “Leave!” she said.

  Their faces encountered one another, they took one another by the mouth, with a violent tenderness. He understood that all courage would be annihilated if he did not leave at that very moment. With a great effort, trembling in every limb and uttering a plaint, he fled toward the Volturne.

  He walked for a long time, without seeing anything, without hearing anything but his desire, striking him within like a blacksmith’s hammer.

  He finally stopped at a bend in the river, where exceedingly old trees were leaning over, some burned by lightning and others half-stripped of their branches. On the far bank, a plain could be seen, marshes, and, near the sky, a blue forest. In the far distance, a wolf howled. The water flowed more blackly, more alive. It elongated in its bosom the image of Hecate and the figures of the constellations; she fled grimly with her thousand voices, under the hanging branches, and reappeared like a lake of quicksilver.

  Dionys sat down on a promontory surrounded by tall trees, where the grass was as beautiful as if it were maintained by a skillful gardener.

  He dreamed about his adventure. It overwhelmed him with a prodigious happiness mingled with a savage impatience. His breast was bursting like a volcano. He plunged his face and bare arms into the grass, in order to find a little coolness and tranquility.

  Then he heard a rustle under the trees.

  He raised his head, and saw the form of a woman in a long brown palla. Her head was covered by a veil, her feet clad in little red shoes held by numerous laces.

  He recognized, in the visage placed in the moonlight, the charming Umbrian woman who had sung the Arquinian dance.

  He leapt to his feet and, in a laughing voice, she said: “I followed you, Syracusan. I know what god has chased you from your bed. It’s the same one that drew me into the night!”

  He remained speechless. That woman alone could contest with the image of Dehva. And Dionys, without thinking about the singularity of the adventure, but drawn by his delectation, put out his arms tenderly. The Umbrian woman threw herself backwards.

  “I’m not a she-wolf! And the voice of Amour, whom you call Eros, doesn’t invite me to any sudden action. You don’t even know why it’s you that I followed. I might have preferred one of the young potters with skin of clay and imperious arms.”

  As that mouth spoke, quivering like the clay bell in Tarao’s house, Dionys felt a measure of patience returning. The area was tranquil, the village distant, the woman quite alone beside him. He could wait.

  “I’ll listen,” he said, in a soft and hollow voice, “to anything you want to say to me. Why have you preferred me?”

  “Because, being beautiful, and truly beautiful, I venerate beauty—like you and Tarao, alone in this lost village.”

  She fell silent, gravely, but without a smile ceasing to appear in her magnificent eyes, full of changing fire, and a power that penetrated the Syracusan’s flexible soul.

  “I’m not jealous,” she went on, “and I don’t intend to detach you from another amour. But I want your worship!”

  Then, slowly, she removed the veil from her head. Her hair shone like a sunset. Then her long brown palla was detached from her shoulder and breast, but retained and closed above her hips. Dionys uttered a great sigh of anguish and ecstasy; for she was as beautiful as Dehva, but quite differently, the shoulder rounder and the arm and the marvelous line that cambered her loins. Her skin was molded from Alpine snow. One might have thought that as much light sprang from it as from the star itself. The admirable globes of her breasts, endowed with force, race and delicacy, seemed beautiful vases full of a youthful, interior flame. Every movement underlined the perfect curve of her neck and the triple crease of sensuality.

  He stood there, bewildered, as if before some perfect statue of Cytherea. And he also thought that she resembled, with the veiled lower part of her body, the daughters of the sea who drag men down into the gulf.

  “You may also,” said the Umbrian woman, “see with your hand whether my form is excellent—and I desire it.”

  He closed his eyes, and stroked the contour of that resplendent skin; he found no fault in it. That contact was also different from that of Dehva, like a flower as silken, but born on other shores.

  Dionys’ gaze darkened, the disturbance of the man dominating that of the artist. He seized the Umbrian woman’s waist violently, and sought the flavorsome lips. But she did not want that. She stopped him with her folded arms, as wrestlers do.

  “Not now,” she said, and she pulled away, proudly. “See how my hair clothes me.” She undid it; the tresses streamed. The cascades of copper and Arachne’s webs hid her torso.

  The Umbrian woman appeared in profile, sometimes as in a glorious shadow, sometimes as in a wave, and sometimes as in autumn foliage. Her skin was reminiscent of a bed of sparkling sand, her eyes of torches in a forest
. That hair fell over the palla, extending all the way to the red shoes, and quivered like a wild animal or a sycamore in the rain.

  Dionys understood more fully that a woman was the representation of all nature, a universal work of art in which the sky, rivers, hills, meadows, forests and animals were reflected in beauty. Before that tawny fleece his lust rose up, roaring. He advanced with prayers.

  But the Umbrian woman disconcerted him with her laughter, took her hair in both hands, and threw it back over her right shoulder, like a lion’s mane. She appeared beautiful, with a more terrible beauty. Her eyes were magnified. They quivered, like the star Sirius when it rises in a vaporous night. Her mouth opened; between her parted lips of red fire, the teeth shone like little snowy seashells between two coral stones.

  “Ah!” he cried, in a supplicant voice. “Have pity on me, Umbrian! To see your beauty makes me suffer!”

  In her turn, she said: “You aren’t suffering, or, at least, your suffering is preferable to lust. It’s desirable that men know that tormenting beauty.” She raised her arms toward her head and, with rounded arms, formed the double handle of an admirable amphora. Dionys was surprised by her words. She continued: “I haven’t always belonged to old Licinius. The man who bought me when a Roman merchant sold my father and his posterity at auction made statues for emperors. He taught me to adore myself and to conceive that the men whose desire I slaked without proof could not render me a just homage. I am worthy of worship, and I prefer the impotent admiration of old Licinius to the amour of a Campanian brute.”