Very Woman (Sixtine): a Cerebral Novel
Copyright© 2024 by Remy de Gourmont
Chapter 21: The Mystic Bark
“L’épouvantable misère de ceux qui vivent
sans amour.”
Rusbrock l’Admirable,
De la Jouissance chaste.
“Do you know, Madame, that Monsieur Moscowitch has the firm intention of marrying you?”
“That is quite natural.”
“Yes, but what do you say to it?”
“It is agreeable to me.”
“Then,” asked Entragues, “why did you not let me know?”
“Ah! you would like to have the cards stacked. You do not wish to waste your time? At first, not any more than yourself, Monsieur Moscowitch never asked more than the pleasure of seeing me.”
“He is fascinating.”
“Isn’t he?” returned Sixtine. “He pleases me very much and I believe that with him I shall never be bored.”
“Ah! you are quite perverse, but perhaps that is why I love you.”
“Perverse, because I do not wish to be bored!”
“No, boredom is the terror of every woman, and they commit half of their crimes to escape its claws. But it is useless. Boredom, impassive, smokes his houka and maintains his slaves. I well know that passion is stronger than he is, but you are incapable of loving.”
“No more than another,” Sixtine nonchalantly said, “and, besides all I ask is to be given the chance. I have already told you I was dough waiting for the hands of the kneader; and, after all I can not fashion myself alone. But are you coming to warble such poor ditties of jealousy, and in such a vulgar style. I believed you had more disdain and a richer vocabulary. Ah, fie! to sing such a romanza to me: ‘You are incapable of loving.’ Well, Monsieur, to use your language, I am at least capable of being loved. You seem to think that in love there is a category of capacities as in the time of Louis-Philippe? Would it be a special string that the cithara lacks? All the human instruments are complete and even women have spare strings, if you care to know. But skillful citharists are rare and most men only know how to direct the preliminary chord of the instrument from which they pretend to draw music. Please speak to me in the language of a logician, since that is your intellectual profession, and do not imagine that I am a boarding-school girl who will feel herself burning with love, through a very noble spirit of contradiction, at the very moment when a man presents her adroit inaninity: ‘You are incapable of loving.’ For you are perhaps very skillful and capable, oh! very capable of demonstrating the patent lack of logic in my feminine deductions. But, question me!”
“I get,” said Entragues, “much pleasure in listening to you. Your voice is sweet.”
“This time,” he thought, “thanks to the mutual impertinences with which we are offending each other, things will end very well or very badly. She is very much unnerved and my own mental state lacks poise. We are going to reach, it is to be hoped, a surprising result.”
As she was silent, he resumed:
“There are instruments irremediably out of tune, like those which undergo the humidity of solitude; but it is not such a great disaster—you have but to change the strings.”
“A turn of the peg perhaps might suffice,” said Sixtine, “and first of all, a ray of sunshine.”
That word went straight to his heart. Yet the voice which had pronounced it was cold and brittle with irony, but he only kept its sense and saw rising before him, under the form of a sorrowful woman with imploring gestures, the very figure of Abandonment. Her fingers dropped arrows at his feet, he was naively touched:
“I have offended you, forgive me.”
“Yes,” Sixtine said, “you have been spiteful and it has hurt me. Let us become good friends, while awaiting something better, if it is to be our destiny that I put my hand in your hand forever. But do rot vent your anger against a weak woman, unfortunate enough already in not knowing what she wants. You have no cause to be jealous, and besides,” she smiled, but not mischievously, “you have not the right, my friend.”
He had placed a knee on the ground before her and held her hand in his hands, without pressing it, with precaution, like a fragile and precious porcelain.
“Here I am,” he thought, “in the attitude of Sidoine before Coquerette, I have but to bring these fingers and nails to my lips to complete the resemblance, making allowances for the different natures of the two women. Coquerette, that capricious and laughing child, might experience a sudden but momentary change of nature. Her very sincere passion for Sidoine will last as long as Sidoine does not respond —perhaps a few days. As Sidoine seeks no more in this pretty little woman than a diverting intrigue, he is quite capable of yielding on the very evening, despite the shocked nerves, when this would be but out of human respect. In that case, Coquerette’s passion would not be protracted: the wood would blaze and quickly become a little heap of ashes. But how singular! at the very moment of the thunderbolt, and during all those surprising electric effects, Coquerette is the woman to give Sidoine, if he quite openly scorned her, a truly great and real proof of love: she would throw herself through the window, if no revolver came to her hand. I could write this sequel, or some other, for there are two or three equally logical denouements in every love story ... Where was I? Sixtine is quite different from Coquerette...”
A long silence had followed the last words of Sixtine, during which Entragues, without ceasing to be absorbedly interested in the present, could nevertheless not curb his analytical imagination.
“I know it, I know it too well,” answered Hubert between two attitudes, “but you say bitter things with such sweetness and charm that they delight me like tender caresses. The future, where you let me glimpse the possibility of joy, appears to me like the thought and imagination of dawn to a poor pilgrim who has stayed too long in the horrors of a black forest...”
“Imagination, if such is your pleasure, my friend; but strike and the spring will gush. Strike boldly, make way to my heart, make my blood flow like a stream, and let me fall into the murderer’s arms, dying of joy and dying of love. I would like, I would like...”
“Ah! tell me just what I would like,” Sixtine continued inwardly, “evoke my will before me, let me see it with my eyes, let me touch it with my hands. You can do it, you should be able, since you are a man!...”
She waited a second: the aura of a nervous stroke hovered nearby and played along her spine, the swelling ball traveled along her neck; her fingers thrilled in the hand of Entragues, she felt the imperious necessity of shunning all contact and, suddenly rising, she went to her piano and feverishly played an incoherent piece of music which saved her.
“She is strange,” thought Entragues. “One might say that she was going to let herself go and suddenly she flies away from peril. She never loses her head and I should truly applaud the advice which a diabolic inspiration made me give this poor Moscowitch. She is not a Coquerette, she can master herself, but on the day when the river shall have been crossed, shoulder against shoulder, she will be united to her lover as iron to iron under the hammer of the good smith:
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