Ancient Manners; Also Known As Aphrodite Part 6

Then she rose.

Simply, like a beautiful slave posing, she undid her corselet, her bandelettes, her open drawers, took off the very bracelets from her arms, the rings from her ankles, and stood up erect, with her hands open before her shoulders, her head slightly thrown back, and her coral coif trembling upon her cheeks.

She was the daughter of a Ptolemy and a Syrian princess descended from all the G.o.ds, through Astarte, whom the Greeks call Aphrodite. Demetrios knew this, and that she was proud of her Olympian lineage. Accordingly he was not disconcerted when the queen said to him without moving: "I am Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and reveal me to the men of Egypt. I desire them to wors.h.i.+p my image."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I am Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and reveal me to the men of Egypt. I desire them to wors.h.i.+p my image."]

Demetrios looked at her, and divined, unerringly, the artless, novel sensuality with which this young girls body was animated. He said, "I am the first to wors.h.i.+p it," and he took her in his arms. The queen was not angry at this brusquerie, but stepped back a pace and asked, "You think yourself Adonis, that you dare to lay hands on the G.o.ddess?" He answered, "Yes." She looked at him, smiled a little, and concluded.

"You are right."

Thus was why he became insupportable, and his best friends left him; but he ravished the hearts of all women.

When he entered one of the apartments of the palace, the women of the court ceased talking, and the other women listened to him too, for the sound of his voice was an ecstasy. If he took refuge with the queen, their persecution followed him even there, under pretexts ever new. Did he wander through the streets, the folds of his tunic became filled with little papyri on which the women wrote their names with words of anguish. But he crumpled them up without reading them. He was tired of all that. When his handiwork was set up in the temple of Aphrodite, the sacred enclosure was invaded at every hour of the night by the crowd of his feminine adorers, who came to read his name chiselled in the stone and offer a wealth of doves and roses to their living G.o.d.

His house was soon enc.u.mbered with gifts, which he accepted at first out of negligence, but ended by refusing all, when he understood what was desired of him, and that he was being treated like a prost.i.tute. His very slave-women offered themselves. He had them whipped, and sold them to the little p.o.r.neion at Rhacotis. Then his men-slaves, seduced by presents, opened his door to unknown women whom he found at his bed-side when he came home, and whose att.i.tude left no doubt as to their pa.s.sionate intentions. The trinkets of his toilet-table disappeared one after the other; more than one of the women of the town had a sandal or a belt of his, a cup from which he had drunk, even the stones of the fruit he had eaten. If he dropped a flower as he walked, he did not find it again. The women would have picked up the very dust upon which his shoes had trampled.

In addition to the fact that this persecution was becoming dangerous and threatened to kill all his sensibility, he had reached the stage of manhood at which a thinking man perceives the urgency of dividing his life into two parts, and of ceasing to confound the things of the intellect with the exigencies of the senses. The statue of Aphrodite was for him the sublime pretext of this moral conversion. The highest realization of the queen's beauty, all the idealism it was possible to read into the supple lines of her body, Demetrios had evoked it all from the marble, and from that day onward he imagined that no other woman on earth would ever attain to the level of his dream. His statue became the object of his pa.s.sion. He adored it only, and madly divorced from the flesh the supreme idea of the G.o.ddess, all the more immaterial because he had attached it to life.

When he again saw the queen herself, she seemed to him dest.i.tute of everything which had const.i.tuted her charm. She served for a certain time to hoodwink his aimless desires, but she was at once too different from the Other, and too like her. When she sank down in exhaustion after his embraces, and incontinently went to sleep, he looked at her as if she were an intruder who had adopted the semblance of the beloved one and usurped her place in his bed. The arms of the Other were more slender, her breast more finely cut, her hips narrower than those of the Real one. The latter did not possess the three furrows of the groins, thin as lines, that he had graved upon the marble. He finally wearied of her.

His feminine adorers were aware of it, and though he continued his daily visits it was known that he ceased to be amorous of Berenice. And the enthusiasm on his account doubled. He paid no attention to it. In point of fact, he had need of a change of quite other importance.

It often happens that in the interval between two mistresses a man is tempted and satisfied by vulgar dissipation. Demetrios succ.u.mbed to it.

When the necessity of going to the palace was more distasteful to him than usual, he went off at night to the garden of the sacred courtesans.

This garden surrounded the temple on every side.

The women who frequented it did not know him. Moreover, they were so wearied by the superfluity of their loves that they had neither exclamations nor tears, and the satisfaction he was in search of was not dashed, in that quarter at least, by those frenzied cat-cries with which the queen exasperated him.

His conversation with these fair, self-possessed ladies was idle and unaffected. The day's visitors, the probable weather on the morrow, the softness of the gra.s.s, the mildness of the night-these were the charming topics. They did not beg him to express his theories in statuary, and they did not give their opinion upon the Achilleus of Scopas. If it befell that they dismissed the lover who had chosen them, and that they thought him handsome and told him so, he was quite at liberty not to believe in their disinterestedness.

When freed from the embrace of their religious arms, he mounted the temple steps and fell to an ecstatic contemplation of the statue.

Between the slim columns crowned with Ionian volutes, the G.o.ddess stood instinct with life upon a pedestal of rose-coloured stone laden with rich votive offerings. She was naked and fully s.e.xed, tinted vaguely and like a woman. In one hand she held her mirror, the handle of which was a priapus, and with the other she adorned her beauty with a pearl necklace of seven strings. A pearl larger than the others, long and silvery, gleamed between her two b.r.e.a.s.t.s, like the moon's crescent between two round clouds.

Demetrios contemplated her tenderly, and would fain have believed, like the common people, that they were real sacred pearls, born of the drops of water which had rolled in the sh.e.l.l of Anadyomene.

"O divine sister!" he would say. "O flowered one! O transfigured one!

You are no longer the little Asiatic woman whom I made your unworthy model. You are her immortal Idea, the terrestrial soul of Astarte, the mother of her race. You shone in her blazing eyes, you burned in her sombre lips, you swooned in her soft hands, you gaped in her great b.r.e.a.s.t.s, you strained in entwining legs, long ago, before your birth; and the food which the daughter of a sinner hungers for is your tyrant also, you, a G.o.ddess, the mother of G.o.ds and men, the joy and anguish of the world. But I have seen you, evolved you, caught you, O marvelous Cytherea! It is not to your image, it is to yourself that I have given your mirror, and yourself that I have covered with pearls, as on the day when you were born of the fiery heaven and the laughing foam of the sea.

like the dew-steeped dawn, and escorted with acclamations by blue tritons to the sh.o.r.es of Cyprus."

He had been adoring her alter this fas.h.i.+on when he entered the quay, at the hour when the crowd was melting away, and he heard the anguish and tears of the flute-girls' chant.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

But he had spurned the courtesans of the temple that evening, because a glimpse of a couple beneath the branches had stirred him with disgust and revolted him to the soul.

The kindly influence of the night penetrated him little by little. He turned his face of the wind, the wind that had pa.s.sed over the sea and seemed to carry to Egypt the lingering scent of the sweet-smelling roses of Amathus.

Beautiful feminine forms took shape in his brain. He had been asked for a group of the three Charites, enclasping one another, for the garden of the G.o.ddess, but it was distasteful to his youthful genius to copy conventions, and he dreamed of bringing together on the same block of marble the three graceful motions of woman. Two of the Charites were to be dressed, one holding a fan and half closing her eyelids to the gently-swaying feathers; the other dancing in the folds of her robe. The third should be standing naked behind her sisters, and, with her uplifted arms, would be twisting the thick ma.s.s of her hair upon her neck.

His mind conceived still other projects, as, for example, to erect, upon the rocks of Pharos, an Andromeda of black marble confronting the tumultuous monster of the sea, or to enclose the agora of Brouchion between the four horses of the rising sun, like wrathful Pegasi; and what was not his exultant rapture at the idea, which began to germinate within him, of a Zagreus terror-stricken by the approaching t.i.tans? Ah!

how beauty had once more taken him for its own! how he was escaping from the clutches of love! how he was separating from the flesh the supreme idea of the G.o.ddess! In a word, how free he felt!

Now, he turned his head towards the quays, and, in the distance, saw the yellow s.h.i.+mmer of a woman's veil.

IV

THE Pa.s.sER-BY

She carried slowly along the deserted quay, which was bathed in moonlight. Her head leaned over one shoulder. A little shadow danced and flickered before her footsteps.

Demetrios watched her as she drew near.

Diagonal folds intersected the little one saw of her body through the thin tissue; one of her elbows stood out in relief under the tight tunic, and the other arm, which she had left bare, carried the long train, holding it high out of the dust.

He recognised by her jewels that she was a courtesan. In order to avoid her salutation he crossed the road rapidly.

He did not want to look at her. He obstinately centered his thoughts upon the rough plan of his Zagreus. Nevertheless his eyes turned in the direction of the pa.s.ser-by.

Then he saw that she did not stop, that she paid no attention to him, that she did not even affect to look at the sea, or to raise the front of her veil, or to absorb herself in her reflections; but that she was merely taking a walk by herself and was in search of nothing but the freshness of the breeze, solitude, abandonment, the subtle thrill of silence.

Demetrios did not take his eyes off her, and fell into a singular astonishment.

She continued to walk like a yellow shadow in the distance, nonchalant, and preceded by the little black shadow.

He heard at each step the slight creak of her shoe in the dust.

She walked on as far as the island of Pharos and went up into the rocks.

Suddenly, and as if he had loved this unknown woman for a long time, Demetrios ran after her, then stopped, retraced his steps, trembled, got angry with himself, tried to leave the quay; but he had never utilised his will except in the service of his pleasure, and when it was time to set it in motion for the salvation of his character and the ordering of his life, he felt completely powerless and nailed to the spot on which he stood.

As he could not throw off the thought of this woman, he tried to find excuses in his own eyes for the preoccupation which was so violently distracting him. He imagined that his admiration for the graceful apparition was due to a purely aesthetic sentiment, and he said to himself that she would make at perfect model for the Charis with the fan which he intended to design on the morrow.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Then, suddenly, all his thoughts became confused, and a crowd of anxious questions surged up into his mind about this woman in yellow.

What was she doing in the island at this hour of the night? Why, for whom had she left home so late? Why had she not addressed him? She had seen him, certainly she had seen him while he was crossing the quay. Why had she gone her way without a word of salutation? It was rumoured that certain women sometimes chose the fresh hours before the dawn to bathe in the sea. But there was no bathing at Pharos. The sea was too deep.

Besides, how unlikely that a woman would be covered with all those jewels for no other object than to go bathing! Then what took her so far from Rhacotis? A rendezvous perhaps? Some young rake, avid of variety, who had chosen for a temporary bed the great rocks polished by the waves?

Demetrios wished to be certain. But the young woman was already returning, with the same calm and indolent step. The sluggish radiance of the moon shone full upon her face as she advanced, brus.h.i.+ng the dust of the parapet with the end of her fan.