Part 37 (1/2)
The princes were puzzled. ”Concessions by the five senses to an all-inscribing affective insanity; lat.i.tudes, alt.i.tudes, nebulae, Medusae of gentle water, affinities of the ineradicable, pa.s.sages over earth so eminently identical with incalculably numerous duplicates, alone in indefinite infinite. Do you take me? I mean that the pragmatic essence attracted self-ward dynamically but more or less in its own volition, whistling in the bag-pipes of the soul without termination.--But to be natural pa.s.sives, to enter into the cosmos of harmonics.--Hydrocephalic theosophies, act it, aromas of populace, phenomena without stable order, contaminated with prudence.--Fatal Jordans, abysmal Ganges--to an end with 'em--insubmersible sidereal currents--nurse-maid cosmogonies.”
She pushed back her hair dusty with pollens, the soft handclapping began; her eyelids drooped slightly, her faintly-suggested b.r.e.a.s.t.s lifted slightly, showed more rosy through the almond-shaped eyelets of her corsage. She was still fingering the ebony lyre.
”Bis, bis, brava!” cried her audience.
Still she waited.
”Go on! You shall have whatever you like. Go on, my dear,” said the Tetrarch; ”we are all so d.a.m.ned bored. Go on, Salome, you shall have any blamed thing you like: the Great-Seal, the priesthood of the Snow Cult, a job in the University, even to half of my oil stock. But inoculate us with ... eh ... with the gracious salve of this cosmoconception, with this parthenospotlessness.”
The company in his wake exhaled an inedited boredom. They were all afraid of each other. Tiaras nodded, but no one confessed to any difficulty in following the thread of her argument. They were, racially, so very correct.
Salome wound on in summary rejection of theogonies, theodicies, comparative wisdoms of nations (short s.h.i.+ft, tone of recitative).
Nothing for nothing, perhaps one measure of nothing. She continued her mystic loquacity: ”O tides, lunar oboes, avenues, lawns of twilight, winds losing caste in November, haymakings, vocations manquees, expressions of animals, chances.”
Jonquil colored mousselines with black spots, eyes fermented, smiles crucified, adorable umbilici, peac.o.c.k aureoles, fallen carnations, inconsequent fugues. One felt reborn, reinitiate and rejuvenate, the soul expiring systematically in spirals across indubitable definitive showers, for the good of earth, understood everywhere, palp of Varuna, air omniversal, a.s.sured if one were but ready.
Salome continued insistently: ”The pure state, I tell you, sectaries of the consciousness, why this convention of separations, individuals by mere etiquette, indivisible? Breathe upon the thistle-down of these sciences, as you call them, in the orient of my pole-star. Is it life to persist in putting oneself au courant with oneself, constantly to inspect oneself, and then query at each step: am I wrong? Species!
Categories! and kingdoms, bah!! Nothing is lost, nothing added, it is all reclaimed in advance. There is no ticket to the confessional for the heir of the prodigies. Not expedients and expiations, but vintages of the infinite, not experimental but in fatality.”
The little yellow vocalist with the black funereal spots broke the lyre over her knee, and regained her dignity. The intoxicated crowd mopped their foreheads. An embara.s.sing silence. The hyperboreans looked at each other: ”What time will they put her to bed?” But neither ventured articulation; they did not even inspect their watches. It couldn't have been later than six. The slender voice once more aroused them:
”And now, father, I wish you to send me the head of Jao Kanan, on any saucer you like. I am going upstairs. I expect it.”
”But ... but ... my dear ... this ... this....” However--the hall was vigorously of the opinion that the Tiara should accomplish the will of Salome.
Emeraud glanced at the princes, who gave sign neither of approbation nor of disapprobation. The cage-birds again began shrieking. The matter was none of their business.
Decide!
The Tetrarch threw his seal to the Administrator of Death. The guests were already up, changing the conversation on their way to the evening tepidarium.
IV
With her elbows on the observatory railing, Salome, disliking popular fetes, listened to her familiar poluphloisbious ocean. Calm evening.
Stars out in full company, eternities of zeniths of embers. Why go into exile?
Salome, milk-sister to the Via Lactea, seldom lost herself in constellations. Thanks to photo-spectrum a.n.a.lysis the stars could be cla.s.sified as to color and magnitudes; she had commanded a set of diamonds in the proportionate sizes to adorn nocturnally her hair and her person, over mousseline of deep mourning-violet with gold dots in the surface. Stars below the sixteenth magnitude were not, were not in her world, she envisaged her twenty-four millions of subjects.
Isolated nebulous matrices, not the formed nebulae, were her pa.s.sion; she ruled out planetiform discs and sought but the unformed, perforated, tentacular. Orion's gaseous fog was the Brother Benjamin of her galaxy.
But she was no more the ”little” Salome, this night brought a change of relations, exorcised from her virginity of tissue she felt peer to these matrices, fecund as they in gyratory evolutions. Yet this fatal sacrifice to the cult (still happy in getting out of so discreetly) had obliged her in order to get rid of her initiator, to undertake a step (grave perhaps), perhaps homicide;--finally to a.s.sure silence, cool water to contingent people,--elixir of an hundred nights' distillation.
It must serve.