by Jean Lorrain
Golden silences whipped by the wings of cantharids!
An aromatic beverage was steaming in the proffered porcelain cups. A profusion of jostling hands came to take up the cups, with much laughter, wheedling whispers and inquisitive questions addressed to the little idols. Javanese servants were at a premium in Paris, and the women immediately cornered them, holding the exotic figures prisoner in a circle of black costumes.
‘The Marquise Naydorff and Princess Olga are withdrawing, now that the orgy is beginning,’ I commented to Claudius.
‘You think so! Spite is driving them away. They are no longer the game of the moment, with whom the men choose to mingle. Then again, the presence of the Duchess Sophie may have reawakened their modesty. They’ll make some catty remark to me, I’ll wager.’
Indeed, the Sicilian and the Slav were wending their way towards Ethal.
‘Very successful, your soiree! Are you waiting for the Infanta?’ asked the Marquise.
‘She might still come. Have you been introduced?’ Claudius riposted.
‘If you supply a list to Le Figaro, please do not include our names,’ the princess put in.
‘As you wish.’
How the Marquise exaggerated her farewells! ‘So you know the entire nation?’ she persisted. ‘All Gotha bears a path to your door.’
‘And all Gomorrah too,’ riposted the painter.
The two women left. The atmosphere became more relaxed after their departure.
An Intermezzo provided by the lovely Maud brought Her Highness and the tragedienne together. Duchess Sophie complimented the brother and the sister. ‘What day will you come to dinner with me? You must both come tomorrow. What time would you prefer?’
The groups were fusing now. The ancient Althorney-share took over the handsome Dario – after the musician, the painter. ‘What a marvellous talent you have, monsieur,’ simpered the ancestral doll. ‘I have seen pictures by Velasquez in the Prado in Madrid which are not equal to yours; some of your portraits …’
‘Oh, mere variations on the theme of women’s faces,’ protested La Psara, who did not believe such flattery.
Little Delabarre, having escaped the fleshless fingers of the ex-dancer, had fallen into the chaplet-entangled hands of Mein Herr Schappman. ‘From Charybdis to Scylla,’ Ethal breathed into my ear as he passed by; but the pretty little composer was thinking about a series of concerts in Berlin – perhaps even, the following winter, a season in Cairo – and so he tolerated the German opossum’s little gestures, touches and infantile babble. In his turn, the musician made polite inquiries about the export trade.
Muzarett was interviewing the sombre Chasteley Dosan: the great and noble poet fawning over the member of the Comédie-Française. ‘How could the committee have accepted that piece?’ complained the clipped voice of the Comte. ‘I can only put it down to the influence of the author’s dinner-parties.’
To which the actor, under pressure, replied: ‘That’s theatre.’
And when the count bewailed the inferiority of poetry, Dosan declared, with his lips drawn back to expose his strong white teeth, as if he were the voice of the oracle, ‘Verse is perfectly okay’ – which official declaration reassured the author of Winged Rats while annoying the poet.
‘Vanity Fair!’ observed Ethal mockingly, having returned at last to my side. Ethal seemed truly diabolical in the middle of his sabbat of covetous desires, hypocrisies, rivalries, rancours and base instincts, which he had set in motion and now left to its own momentum.
‘Am I a good enough director of consciences?’ he chortled, choking on a contented laugh. ‘Do you like me in that role? How their lovely little souls rally in order to embellish their skin with petty blushes, eh? Except, of course, for the ancient Althorneyshare and the Princess of Seiryman. They make no concessions, those two. Look at the princess!’
The American, standing a little apart, was talking to the two little Javanese, who replied in a strange and twittering English. All the while, the princess was touching their shoulders, feeling the grain of their skin and testing the weight of their necklaces like a collector noting the details of some rare trinket. Then she abruptly turned her back on them and came straight towards us.
‘They are very amusing, Ethal, your Far-Eastern idols. Would you like to lend them to me for a day or two – long enough for three sittings? I would like to make a sketch of those little heads.’
When Ethal silently bowed the Yankee continued: ‘What day would you like to send them to my studio? I am there after two o’clock.’
‘Whenever you please, Princess.’
‘Very well – tomorrow. I may count on it, may I not? Where is Monsieur de Muzarett?’
Muzarett hurried over; the princess demanded her cloak.
This was the signal for a mass departure. Her Highness Sophie followed, with La Psara and Chasteley Dosan, who had brought her. Mein Herr Schappman removed his Hindu. Little Delabarre slipped away on his own.
The florid English clique remained stubbornly in place, intoxicated by a combination of raki and cigarettes – short, slim cigarettes which the Javanese were now bringing round. They also offered decanters of Greek liqueur, raki, mastic and eau de jasmin: a whole alcoholic perfumery, sickly sweet and yet wild, dangerous to European brains. The Duchess of Althorneyshare, stiff and still beneath her diamonds and her face-powder, seemed more and more like a Madonna of Depravity, stigmatised by her nickname of Our Lady of the Seven Deadly Sins. I wondered what could be keeping the old crone. What was she waiting for? Ethal did his utmost to retain – and, indeed, succeeded in hanging on to – Maud White and her brother, who were talking about leaving.
The candles were already burning low, half-consumed in the copper chandeliers liberally spattered with tears of wax. There was something funereal in the atmosphere, although it remained warm and tepid; it was as if the odour of the decaying flowers of a memorial wreath were suspended there. Something else was in preparation but had not yet begun. Ethal, visibly wearied by impatience, launched frequent glances in the direction of the door. Taking the hint, all other eyes followed his. We were waiting for someone whose arrival was imminently expected.
Finally, the door-curtain was lifted up and a tall young man in a tight black suit came through. He was perhaps a little too tall, and too loosely-built.
‘Thomas! At last!’ Ethal exclaimed, hurrying towards the new arrival. He seized his hands feverishly, bringing him to join us.
‘My friend from Ireland – Sir Thomas Welcome!’
I had never seen Claudius so emotional.
Sir Thomas Welcome bowed, rather coldly. He was a very handsome gentleman with a gentle and mournful bearing, lightened by two great bright eyes of some indefinable colour: green and violet at the same time, like the water of a stagnant pool. Those eyes immediately attracted my curiosity. A long blond moustache divided his charming face, and yet the wavy hair of his head was black. He had very pale skin and huge hands: the huge hands of a well-groomed executioner. They were well-scrubbed and, like Ethal’s hands, boasted rings on every finger. His robust body seemed subject to an infinite lassitude, as if labouring under some heavy and mysterious burden. His expression was melancholy.
Welcome made hardly any response to the effusions of his host, and seemed to regret having come.
‘We may proceed now,’ Claudius declared, giving instructions to the Javanese servants. Then, taking the newcomer to one side, he said: ‘Why are you so late, Thomas? I was worried. I feared that you might not come at all.’
To which the Irishman replied, in a calm voice: ‘You knew that I would come. I promised that I would.’
OPIUM
The Javanese servants had provided each of us with a small pipe crammed with greenish paste. A negro dressed entirely in white, who suddenly appeared between the tapestries, lighted each of them in turn with brightly-glowing charcoals from a small silver brazier. Seated in a semi-circle on cushions set upon the Asian carpet, with our hands resting
on squares of embroidered silk or Persian velvet, we smoked in silence, concentrating our whole attention on the progressive effects of the opium.
The company gathered in the studio, which had earlier been so noisy, had now fallen into silent meditation. At Ethal’s signal, the agile hands of the Javanese had unbuttoned our waistcoats and loosened the collars of our shirts in order to facilitate the effects of the drug. I was seated next to Welcome. Maud White – whose figure, freed from restraint, moved sinuously beneath her black velvet peplum – was stretched out beside her brother. The English formed a separate group, already subdued by the increasing oppression of the narcotic. Still seated in her armchair, rigidly encased in her armour of precious stones, the old Duchess of Althorneyshare was the only one present who was not smoking. Pipe in hand, Ethal was still caught up in the comings and goings, giving orders.
All the candles in the chandeliers had been extinguished. Only two had been replaced and relit, burning brightly in the middle of the room. Their flames lit up two opposite corners of a carpet laid out there, about which the negro had distributed flower-petals. He had strewn them around like a shower of rain, and had then retired.
Candles and flower-petals! One might have thought that we were at a solemn wake. The smoke from our pipes ascended in bluish spirals. A dreadful silence weighed upon the studio. Ethal came at last to stretch himself out between Welcome and myself, and the ceremonial dancing began.
In the mute and heavy atmosphere of that vast vapour-filled hall the two Javanese idols began to sway on the spot, the rhythmic movements of their feet extending through the length of their bodies into the contortions of their arms. Their extended hands seemed boneless and dead.
Standing in the midst of the flower-petals, in the spectral glow of the two candles, they feverishly crumpled the wool of the carpet beneath their hammering toes. Their legs glistened from their narrow ankles to their slim thighs in a flux of transparent gauzes. They were now wearing strange diadems on their heads, like conical tiaras, which made their faces seem triangular and intimidating.
While they silently shook themselves, with slow and cadenced undulations of their entire bodies, the scallop-shell breast-plates slipped gently from their torsos, and the jade rings slid along their bare arms. The two idols gradually divested themselves of their garments. Their finery accumulated at their feet with a light rustling sound, as of seashells falling on sand. The tunics of white silk followed the slow fall of the jewellery. Now, as they stood on tiptoe, very slender in their exaggerated nakedness, it was as if two long black serpents shot forth from the cones of the two diadems had begun a delicious and lugubrious dance within the bluish vapours.
The sound of snoring was already audible, but amid the plucked petals the naked idols continued to dance.
All of a sudden they took hold of one another at the waist, twirling while tightly interlaced, as though they had but a single body with two heads … and then they suddenly evaporated. Yes, evaporated, like smoke – and at the same time the hall was filled with a new light.
A whole section of the tapestry was moved aside. Dressed as a stage, Claudius’s model table appeared: cold and waxed like a parquet floor, lit from behind by the pearly and frosty glow of a wan nocturnal sky.
It was a sky padded with soft clouds, against which stood out the sharp and black silhouettes of roofs and chimney-stacks: an entire horizon of chimney-pots, acute angles and attics, formed in salt and iron filings. In the distance, the dome of Val-du-Grâce could be seen. It was a silent and fantastic Paris, as seen by a bird in flight – the same panorama that could be seen from Claudius’ windows, framed like a stage-set by the skylight of his hall.
Above this improvised stage, as if sprung from a dream, a whiteness appeared: a flocculence of tulle or of snow, something silver and impalpable. This frail whirling thing, which leapt and fluttered delicately beneath the moon, in the ennui of that corner of a deserted studio, was the slender naked form of a dancer.
She spun around in the mute air like a winter snowflake, and nothing disturbed the fearful silence save for the soft pitter-pat of her footfalls. Were it not for the silky rustling of her tulles she would have seemed supernatural in her transparence and thinness. Her legs like slender stems, the rigid projection of her bosom, her pallor blue-tinted by the moonlight, and her astonishingly fragile waist combined to give her the appearance of a phantom flower: a phantom and perverse flower, funereally pretty. The scenery of Parisian roofs and chimneys completed the illusion. It was some little ghost strayed from Montparnasse or Belleville which danced there, in the cold of the night. Her flat yet delicate face had the ghastly charm of a death’s-head; long black hair descended to either side of her head, and in her hollow eyes there burned an intense alcoholic flame, whose blue ardour made me shudder.
Where had I seen that girl before? She had the slenderness of Willie and the smile of Izé Kranile, that triangle of ironic pink flesh revealing the hardness of enamel … oh, the shadows playing about those shoulder-blades … it was as if the skeleton were showing through beneath the platitude of her breasts!
All around me, the rattle of heavy breathing emerged from somnolent chests, but they were no longer snoring. My head was heavy, and the moistness of icy sweat was all over me … and the snowflake danced on and on.
She flared up suddenly in a flash of violet, as if bathed in projected limelight … and instantly flew back up into the sky as the chimneys and the roofs invaded the studio. They were now in the friezes and in the bay-window dazzlingly lit by the same flash of light. It was as if the invisible houses beneath the roofs and chimneys had suddenly surged up from the ground – and I was lying, among my Asian cushions, on the pavement of a street in the middle of a deserted Paris.
No, not Paris, but at a road-junction in some lugubrious suburb: a place bordered with newly-built houses as yet uninhabited, their doors boarded up and their grounds concealed, stretching into the distance … it was a cold and frosty night. The sky was very clear, the pavement very hard. I had a harrowing impression of absolute solitude.
From one of the streets, all of whose buildings were white, two horrid louts were emerging. They wore velvet coats, linen jackets, red handkerchiefs tied around their necks, and had vile fishy profiles beneath their high-peaked caps. They hurtled forward like a whirlwind, dragging with them a struggling woman in a ballgown. A sumptuous fur-lined cloak slid from her bare shoulders. She was blonde and delectable, but her face could not be seen and I dreaded that I might recognise it. The violent scene was utterly noiseless.
I could see nothing of the silent and brutalised woman but her lustrous back and the soft blonde hair at the back of her head. The two thugs were gripping her tightly by the arms. She had fallen to her knees, paralysed by terror. I wanted to call out, to run to her aid, but I could not: two invisible hands, two talons, took me by the throat also. Suddenly, one of the bully-boys knocked the woman down, pressed her face to the ground, and knelt on top of her, sawing at her neck with a cutlass. Blood spurted out, splashing the green velvet pelisse, the white silk dress and the delicate golden hair with vivid red. I woke up, choking hoarsely on my stifled cries.
The other smokers were all around, sleeping heavily, with their faces contorted. The tapestry had fallen back into place over the studio skylight. The night was dark. The two candles were still burning, but the greenish light they emitted was distorting the faces. What a sight they were, those stretched-out bodies! Ethal’s studio was strewn with them. We were not like that to begin with; whence came all these cadavers? For those people were no longer sleeping; they were all dead, just so many corpses. A veritable human tide of cold green flesh had risen to the flood and broken like a wave … but an immobile wave, cast at the feet of the Duchess of Althorneyshare – who still remained, rigid, with her great eyes wide open, seated in her armchair like some macabre idol!
She too was greenish beneath her make-up; it was as if the purulence of all the bodies heaped at her feet cast a
humid glow upon her flaccid skin; her corruption was phosphorescent. Her diamonds had become so livid that she now seemed to be embellished with emeralds, like some bloated green goddess – and in her hieratic face, the colour of hemlock, only the gleaming eyes remained white.
I watched that abomination. The ancient idol – so stiff that she seemed to be on the point of breaking up – was leaning over the body of a young girl prostrate at her feet: a supple and white cadaver outstretched upon the floor, of whom nothing could be seen but the back of the head. The back of the head was blonde and broad, like that of Maud White. Althorneyshare, with a sinister mocking laugh, put her voracious mouth to the nape of the neck as though to bite it – or, rather, to suck at it like some vile cupping-glass, for in her haste the teeth had fallen from the rotten gums.
‘Maud!’ I cried, brought bolt upright by anguish – but it was not Maud after which the horrible hunger of the idol was lusting, for in that same instant I saw, shining in a violet halo, the smile and the oblique expression of the tragedienne. Her mysterious mask was all aflame in that aureole above the horrid Althorneyshare … and everything faded away into the shadows, while a familiar voice murmured in my ear:
The chastity of Evil is in my limpid eyes.
It was her voice – the voice of Maud White!
SMARA
At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted.
I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep.
