Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you!
– Harry Dacre
From the glycerine water they pulled her up, first hauling on the sodden shreds of her robe, but these gave way, finally getting purchase on the bones of her corset which had not rotted. Her hair streamed back into the water, like weed, and in the pre-dawn nothing-light, she was no longer pretty, or easily to be recognized.
There were many who got their trade out of the river, that Styx of Paradys. By night suicides came down to the edge like parched deer. Others, murdered, were thrust out into the depths, surfacing days or weeks later, by this or that bridge or muddy bar, to render up, to the scavengers of the river, a pearl locket, a silver watch, or a jet in a ring of mourning.
But Jausande Marguerite, she was not quite of the usual order, for they had heard of her, perhaps been looking out, and for that reason, wrapped in an oilskin, her body was taken presently to one of the judiciary buildings behind the Scholars’ Quarter. Here, under the dreadful probing of the new electric lamps, she was identified, she was given back her name, which was no longer any use to her.
And soon after that the hunt was on, but the hunt found not a thing. Thereafter all this was sensational for a brief month, then passed into the mythology of the City, that makes itself from the ragbag of everything.
“Lower the lights,” said the young man in the loud coat. “He’ll perform a miracle.”
“What nonsense,” they said generally. And then, another: “It isn’t necessary to lower the gas. He’ll do it without.”
Across the salon, the man with whom they were spicing their conversation glanced at them, and the group fell silent.
“What eyes,” said one of the women feebly, once the man had turned away.
“Oh? I thought them surprisingly poor, considering he’s supposed to use them in order to entrance, and hypnotize.”
“Probably uses his ring for that,” said another.
The loud coat admired the ring, someone else remarked pointedly that it was very vulgar. But others had not at all observed a ring, and looked for it in vain.
Then the group began to discuss a different topic. Their flylike minds were unable to remain for long in any one spot.
The man they had spoken of, however, was now and then commented upon by all sides. His nickname was The Conjuror, for it was said of him that he had made some money in a vaudeville act to the north. He represented therefore to the bourgeois evening salons of Paradys all that was ludicrous, contemptible, quaint; a butt for jokes, and perhaps needful in a dry social season.
In appearance, certainly, The Conjuror was recognizable by his very ordinariness. Not short, decidedly not tall, thinly built, and neither well nor badly dressed, his hair was combed back and his face shaven, leaving – washed up there, as it were – two normal eyes, without exceptional luster, and actually apt to turn as dull as misted spectacle lenses.
His notoriety was founded on a collection of odd stories, the facts of which came always in an altered version.
Meanwhile, he had not said, written, done, or vowed to do anything at all celebrated. There was a rumor the walls of his narrow flat near the Observatory were plastered by bills and photographs depicting him as an archmagician, raising the dead from the floorboards of a stage. But who had been to the flat to see? He was unmarried, had no servant. He went out only to those functions to which some frustrated hostess had, on a whim, summoned him. With the perversity of the City, however, his utter dreariness – he had neither wit nor charm about him – soon lifted him to a bizarre pinnacle, that of the Anticipated. There he stayed, or nearly stayed, by now fading a little, for even if lighted by others, a candle must have wax enough to burn of itself.
“My dear,” said the hostess of the evening salon, as she led her niece into the room, “I should have been lost without you.”
“Why?” said her niece, who dreaded finding the salon tedious, and longed to escape.
“Your youth and prettiness,” said the flattering aunt, “your poise. That dress which is – oh, perfection.”
Jausande Marguerite smiled. She was one of those girls who had somehow always managed to draw genuine praise from both sexes. She was attractive enough to please but not beautiful enough to pose a threat, she was kind enough to be gentle, cruel enough to amuse, and young enough to be forgiven.
“Look there, what a fearful coat,” said Jausande, and avoided the eye of the loud young man swiftly, with a delicate, apparently spontaneous vagueness.
“Yes, his father has been a great help to your uncle. Vile people, but money … there we are …”
Jausande sighed, and cleverly concealed her sigh as she had learned to conceal a yawn at the opera.
Beyond the salon windows the evening, through which she had been driven, still had on it a light blush of promise. Jausande had caught the terrible sweet illness, often recurrent as malaria, and most unbearable in youth and middle age, the longing for that nameless thing given so many names – excitement, adventure, romance, love. Every dawn, each afternoon, all sunsets, aggravated the fever.
But through the promising dusk she had come, to this. Already her eyes had instinctively swept the room over, and found all the usual elements both inanimate and physical. There was nothing here for Jausande Marguerite. But she must pretend that there was.
Her aunt led the girl about, introducing her like a flower. Everyone liked Jausande at once, it was one of her gifts, and she perpetuated it by being nice to everyone, but not so nice that they felt under an obligation. Of course, Jausande’s aunt did not introduce her to any but the most deserving. And beyond the pale, no doubt, was The Conjuror, that awful little man. No, he did not meet Jausande in the formal way.
The gas lamps were already lit, and burned up steadily as the windows went out. The long room in which the gathering mingled grew close. White wine was being drunk, and small unsatisfying foods eaten. In half an hour, the evening party would break up, unless something should happen.
“Now what about” – shouted the young man in the loud coat – “a game of some sort? Some charade –” He winked at Jausande across the crowd, and she did not notice. He added, to a ripple of encouragement, “What if we have some magical tricks?”
“Now, now,” said Jausande’s aunt, “Philippe, we mustn’t turn my drawing room into a bear garden.”
“The idea,” said loud Philippe. “But surely there’s someone here can give us a show?”
At that, some of the heads turned, looking for the drab figure of The Conjuror. There he was, between the windows, a shadow with a glass of wine in its bony hand, and something repellent to him, like a smell – but he smelled of nothing at all.
To become abruptly the center of the room’s gaze did not seem to trouble him. Nor did he bloom. He did nothing.
“Monsieur,” said Jausande’s aunt, who had forgotten his name into the bargain, “you must forgive Monsieur Philippe Labonne.”
It was very strange. It was as if (as with a spell) this silly outburst, drawing attention to the supposed origins of The Conjuror, which in fact had never even been verified, were all hearsay, called up some power. The creature himself was not imbued by anything apparent. He did not change, in looks or manner (which were rather those of a funeral assistant caught out at the wake). And yet the salon, so boring a moment earlier, took on a dangerous quality, like the air during a bitter quarrel when any terrible truth may be said.
“Madame,” said The Conjuror, quietly, and there was nothing of note either in his voice or his accent, accept that the latter had a slight tinge of the streets. And he gave a nasty graceless little bow.
“There now,” said the aunt of Jausande. “But perhaps you, darling, will play for us on the piano?”
Jausande did not wilt or beam. She played the piano as she did all things – nicely, effectively, not brilliantly. It gave her sometimes a quiet pleasure to play in private, none in public, nor any qualms. She would do what she must.
But it was as she took a step toward the piano that she saw The Conjuror looking at her. She saw, and she could not help but see and show that she had seen. And a flush, of a sort of ghastly shame, spread over her face and neck. There was something so awful in The Conjuror’s look, for it said everything that must, by such as he, never be said, and so very openly, and so very intently. I love you, said the look. I love you at first sight.
“Whatever –?” began Jausande’s aunt.
“I’m very warm,” said Jausande. “Will you excuse me if I don’t play for a moment?”
She had averted her eyes, but still, still, she felt the eyes of him clinging on to her. Here and there in the recent past indecorous outpourings had been made to her. Never in that way.
And now other people in the room became aware of it, both the intensity of The Conjuror, and its object, and tiny, barely audible sounds were breaking across the audience, the whispers of sneers and laughs.
Perhaps what made it so appalling was its mediocrity. Here, in this unimportant drawing room, the birth of an obsession. And if he had been grotesque, and she amazingly beautiful, there would have been to it the dignity of tragedy. But she was only rather pretty, and he – He was nothing on earth.
And then he spoke again. They all heard him.
“If you like, madame, I can offer my poor skills, a few of them. If the ladies won’t be alarmed.”
“Why – monsieur –” and Jausande’s aunt actually stammered, so instinctively startled she was. Every line of her corseted form revealed she wanted to deny him. But it was absurd – why not? In hopes of something like this she had asked him here. It would be a coup. Nowhere else, that she knew of, had he “entertained.”
Besides, the mechanism was already in motion. As if at a signal, her guests were drawing back, leaving a broad space at the room’s far end into which The Conjuror propelled himself. He had discarded his wineglass. His hands were empty. He lifted them slightly. They were horribly bare, as if peeled.
“Look – nothing up his sleeve,” loudly said the loud Philippe.
And one of the others called, “Lower the gas!”
“No,” said The Conjuror, and from his position at their front, he had now taken some authority. “That won’t be necessary.”
And then the extraordinary did happen. He snapped his fingers (as the aunt of Jausande said afterward, for all the world like a grocer’s clerk) and each of the six gas fitments in the room was reduced to a smoky sublume. Contrastingly, the light in the area of The Conjuror was heightened. Its source was invisible.
Some of the ladies shrieked. Then there was chastened laughter.
Philippe said, “Been at the lamps – planted a helper in the basement –”
“Monsieur,” said The Conjuror, “please do yourself the kindness of becoming silent.”
This was nearly as dramatic as the trick of the lamps. It was so audacious, so frankly rude. It carried such weight. The stance of The Conjuror had changed, his voice had done so. This must be his stage presence, and as such, it was a good one.
“Now,” said The Conjuror. “Mesdames, messieurs. I must ask you all to remain as still as possible. Not to move about. To restrain your outcry. If you will do that, I can show you something, although very little. We are surrounded by wonders, kept from us only by a veil. You must understand,” he said, and now there was not a sound otherwise, “that I know how to twitch aside that veil, a fraction. To reveal more would be to endanger your sanity. You must trust me in this. You must trust me utterly. From this moment, your lives and hearts hang from my grip. I will not let you go. But your obedience is essential. How else can I protect you?”
The room was quiet as death. He had frightened and awed them. They would complain after they did not know how. But he was clever, give him that, he had done it. That common and unmusical voice had become an instrument by which he gained dominion over them. And the lamps burned low.
Then his pale hands darted out and seemed to lie there, suspended as if upon the surface of a pool.
A girl appeared. She appeared out of nothing, or the brocade wall, half transparent, ghostly, and then she grew quite solid, and was entirely there before them. She was no one they knew.
The girl was dressed in a long draped tunic with a diagonal pattern. Her hair was done up in a knot, with combs. She stretched to light a metal cup that apparently floated in the atmosphere. It blossomed out like a flower, and dimly at her back they saw the columns and cistern of a Roman atrium. Then she had turned, and the atrium was gone, rolled up with her into nothingness again.
The room was as it had been. Someone dared to speak, not Philippe Labonne. “Shadow play,” the man said, “images thrown up by a small projector.”
“Monsieur,” said The Conjuror, moving to look at him, but holding his arms still upward, the hands suspended, a position that should have been ridiculous, but was not, as if, now, he grasped gently by ropes two opposing forces, two great dogs, perhaps. “Monsieur, you must do as I asked. Or I can’t be responsible.”
“Devil take you,” said the guest.
“No, it is you he will take, monsieur. Be quiet, be quiet at once, or leave immediately.”
Jausande’s aunt said, rather tremulously, “Yes, do let’s all be obedient. This is so interesting.”
And somehow there was silence again, awkward and unwilling for a moment, and more fraught and nearly frightened than ever.
A man walked up out of the floor. (A woman screamed and her scream was choked down.) The man, solid as the Roman girl, solid as anyone present, wore hose and tunic, and the rounded, color-slashed sleeves of an alchemic century. He climbed an unseen stair out of the floor, up across the room, and through the air, and vanished into the ceiling.
The Conjuror spoke to them. “What I show you here are only the pictures of the past, the things that have been, on this spot. But there are other things that coexist with us, in past ages as now.”
He spread his arms a little wider, as if allowing the two great dogs to pull forward and away.
There in the middle of the cleared space, where the light had been, was a globe of night. Stars shone over a garden made to the formal measure of three hundred years before, and a woman in a high-waisted gown and cap of silver wire moved among the statues and the sculpted trees. She spoke words from a book, but though the watching salon heard a murmur of her voice, her words, the accent, were so alien, they could not make them out.
Perhaps it was ventriloquism, for The Conjuror too moved his lips, but not it seemed in the same rhythm as the woman.
The woman stopped, facing out into the salon and not seeing it. She closed the book together on a jeweled finger and her cold eyes glared. Then the ground cracked at her feet. It opened into a chasm. And the woman looked into it, not stepping back, nor seemingly dismayed. And something shouldered up from the chasm, pitch dark as the night, putting out all the stars. It had no proper form, yet it was there. And leaning to the woman it made a thin, sweet sound, like distant music. But she answered angrily in wild, ornamented words, what might have been a name. Then the creature from the pit flowed and lowered and compressed itself. It made itself over. And on the grass it alighted, and with a ratlike shake, it assumed the form of the woman, even to her dress and her silver cap, and to the book in her hand. Then she gave a cry of laughter or terror – it was impossible to tell which – a sort of sneezing derision or panic, and whirled into a hundred bits like a shattered vase, and these fell down into the crack, which then healed over. And the monster that had taken human form walked away between the statues.
There was something so horrible in this scene that the silence The Conjuror had induced was now augmented by a second silence, far deeper and less negotiable.
But the garden and the night went out. And The Conjuror pointed upward, and they looked, and saw a great glowing cloud hanging in the ceiling. It lay over the whole of the drawing room, sending down soft rays of light, and a sudden mild rain, which fell among them, moist and fragrant. There came a muted exclamation, another, and these were stifled at once. But the cloud brought a feeling of hope, of possibility. There was nothing fearful to it, until there began to be glimpsed in it an exquisite angelic face with pitiless eyes, looking at them as the other apparitions or demons had not.
And it was as if they thought, I hate this, it is too beautiful, it asks too much.
And Jausande Marguerite thought quite clearly, These things shouldn’t be shown. Make it go away.
At which, as if The Conjuror read her mind, it did. It dissolved like a warm ember.
A third change had come on the salon of Jausande’s aunt. There was a restlessness, an anger that had nothing to do with the petty anger of before. Throats began to clear themselves, women’s dresses rustled. There were faint muffled inquiries. And Jausande’s aunt, the hapless hostess, said, “Do you think, monsieur –?”
Then through the brocade wallpaper something burst like a bomb.
It was black, racing, lunging, roaring – there were cries and shouts – it was a carriage with six horses going full tilt. It tore into the room, into the crowd of evening guests, who fell and tumbled in front of it.
Jausande glimpsed the savage gaping mouths of horses pulled wide on reins, felt the wind of passage graze her and saw a man flung sideways from the impact. The stink of animal sweat and fear, heat and thunder. Hoofs like iron and wheels from which white sparks sprayed off. The carriage rushed headlong through the room and out, into some tunnel of the dimensions, and the walls were whole behind it.
The guests had scattered with the furniture, where they had thrown themselves or, as it seemed, been thrown. Women sobbed and men with sick faces ranted. Two of them had seized The Conjuror, that ineffectual little man.
“You must let go,” he said. “Do it, before I make you.”
And they let go of him, stepping back, offering him verbal violence instead. But he only shrugged.
Jausande’s aunt whispered, “Someone make him leave quickly, for heaven’s sake,” and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth.
It seemed to Jausande she stood on an island in the jumbled, tumbled room, she was quite alone, as if deserted by midnight in a waste. And to her, over the elaborate carpet that was the sea of sand and rock, he moved. He stood about three feet from her and said, quietly, “You will come to me.”
Jausande was unnerved but not afraid. She said, “How dare you? You don’t know what you’re saying.”
But she realized that no one else had heard, and that though there were men enough to throw him out of a window, not one would lay a finger on his dingy sleeve. She looked, and saw his insignificance. She imagined his fusty, pointless life, cramped in his little rooms by the Observatory, an area fallen into disfavor, a place she would never visit.
“But you’ll come to me,” he said again, “when I’m ready. Then.”
“You’re mad,” she said. She could not see his eyes. It was as if he had none. As if he had no physical shape at all.
And then he was gone, and in the distance over the desert her aunt was entreating her for sympathy, while round about, under the lonely mysterious howls of hyenas, ladies swooned and gentlemen swore vengeance.
At first from an embarrassment, presently from the reassembly of common sense, Jausande told no one what The Conjuror had said to her. Half an hour after his departure from the salon and her life, she had returned to earth and dismissed him as what he was, a fool and charlatan with a cunning line in tricks. It was his essential inferiority that drove him to attempt to distress the gathering. She was merely another intended victim. Some abrupt thought she had had of repairing to her father with the story was soon forgotten. The father of Jausande was elderly and bookish, and her mother long dead. Her uncle, meanwhile, was away on business in foreign climes.
Long after the curious and unpleasant evening, however, Jausande remained glad that no one had heard the invitation – the order – that The Conjuror had issued to her.
She did not believe in ghosts and demons. Her image even of God was that of a just, stern magistrate.
If she had turned a hair, then she plucked it out.
The year passed with a great chrysanthemum of summer, an autumnal pause, a snowy winter of festivals and feasts.
By the coming of spring, the flowers piercing the parks with their needles, the snowdrops, the showers that turned the building of the avenues to amazing edifices of wet newsprint, by then no rumors of The Conjuror were any longer heard. He had gone down again into his mouse hole under the boards of the City. Spring was not the time for him. It was as if he had been papered over, and the flowers grew out where he had stood.
And by then, anyway, she had truly forgotten.
Jausande Marguerite sat down before a window. It was late in the afternoon; the slanting champagne light looked sensational, as if new, as if the sun had never shone in this way, although it had in fact, since the dawning afternoon of time.… Jausande glanced at the light, where it invaded the stout trees of the Labonne garden. She felt middle-aged, the young girl, because she had seen through the wiles of sunfall. She had found it out: It promised nothing, neither adventure nor romance. In token, she was betrothed, to – of all people – the elder brother of Philippe Labonne. She had resigned herself to life.
For here was what life was, such long, quite pleasant, tiring, and tiresome mornings and evenings; the luncheon, the game of cards, the prospect of dinner, of more cards, of the male discussion of finance and politics.
Her fiancé was a good-looking and smart young man, who worked in his wealthy father’s business. It was Jausande’s aunt who had introduced them. Paul was “superior” to the rest of his family. But no, his family were in themselves perfectly delightful. It had come to be said more and more often. And Jausande had told it to herself over and over. Madame Labonne was not irritating, ignorant and saccharine. She was a good woman, full of kindness. And Philippe … well, Philippe might improve as he grew older. But Paul was elegantly mannered, and had impressed that upon Jausande from the start: his manners, financial expectations, and his looks, of which last he was a little secretly vain, but you could not tease him about it, for then he became stiff, reproachful. Jausande’s future would be, as her past had always been, a method of pleasing others, which she did so easily and so well. She would make an excellent wife. She would be weightless and charming, serious when required, firm with her children, fanciful prettily and properly within the fences of decorum and finesse. She had liked Paul at first, had almost been glad, almost excited at the first prospects of their meetings. But then she could not deceive herself quite so much. Paul, provided he was never openly crossed, always subtly praised, pampered, and respected, could make the ideal husband. “And Paul likes his books laid out just so, one must never touch. You must be sure the servant burnished the glasses. How he abhors a dusty goblet!” Such helpful hints Paul’s mother gave her. “Oh, he’s a stickler. What a boy!” Sometimes Jausande played the piano, at Madame Labonne’s request. Then Madame Labonne would doze, and minuscule snores would issue from her. Waking, she would say, as she said now, “Such a lovely piece. Such cleverness!” Today she added, “Paul should be here quite soon. And his father, I hope, but the hours that man works, why, a general on a battlefield couldn’t work harder.”
Jausande imagined for an idle moment saying to this woman, soon enough to be a form of mother to her, “What do you think of dreams?”
Jausande was sure that Madame Labonne had many notions on dreams, and would launch into a recital of them.
Herself, Jausande had no yardstick at all. She was one of those people who do not recall their dreams. It seemed to her all her nights had been dreamless, even in childhood. Never had she roused weeping, or crying out at a nightmare. Never had she known the extraordinary and fantastic happiness, the marvels of the slumbering consciousness, that pursues what we will not.
Last night, Jausande had dreamed. The dream had been long and complex. On waking it lay on her like a fine mist, and as she rose and went about her habitual day, the dream was remembered, grew clearer and closer, as if focused by reality.
And with the recollection there grew also the need to speak, like a pressure on heart, mind, and tongue. But speak to whom? Never this one, surely. Nor the correct, smug young man who was to marry her. Not her father, even, who only wanted her happiness, and had been relieved she came on it so modestly. There were many friends, but no confidantes. They could not understand. It would be as if she said to them, “Last night I flew to the moon.”
The fussy clock ticked on the mantel. All at once Madame Labonne, refreshed by her piano snooze, went trotting off to bully her cook. Jausande found that she reached out and drew toward herself some sheets of paper. She had meant to write letters. She dipped her pen into the ink and pressed its blackness on the paper. I had a strange dream. Jausande gazed at this sentence, looked up guiltily. The room was empty and the westered wild light streamed over it. She would have at least half an hour, for Madame Labonne would want to taste every dish in the kitchen. Jausande wrote: I never had a dream in all my life. But this is what I dreamed, in case I should forget, and never again –
And then she raised her head and murmured aloud, “I may never have another dream, as long as I live.” And something struck her in that, with its intimation of mortality. So she scored through the words she had written and put down, My Dream, like a child with an exercise.
It had been so vivid, so real, something that awed her, for she was of course unused to the persuasiveness of dreams.
She had woken from sleep into silence. It was the silence, in the dream, that woke her. She went to the window, to see.
There was a moon, in the dream. It was very large, low, white. She knew, in the dream, she had never seen a moon of such size, and yet it did not frighten her. She thought perhaps it had drawn nearer to the earth, and that this must change everything, but in what ways she did not consider. Beyond her window a flight of steps that never before existed ran down to the garden, and over the wall was the City of Paradys. She had a curious sense as she looked at it, in the dream, of the thousands who, as she did, must have regarded it by night through all the ages of its sentience. She saw towers and hills, the loops of the river, and yet it seemed to her that its architecture was not as she had remembered, some buildings more ruinous or in better repair than she had seen them, and some not in the places that she recalled, even to the mass of the cathedral-church, which, rather than dominating the heights of the City, had drawn down into a valley of the river, as if it went there to regard itself in the water. Nowhere were there any lights, the moon had canceled them.
And then she stepped out of the window and onto the stair. She descended, and went across the little garden, which suddenly in the dream was full of palm trees, the giants of an African shore, ages old, their pineapple stems firmly fixed amid the borders of wallflowers.
Outside the garden wall, the street she had known since childhood glided into the City. Jausande walked up the street. It was very wide. On either hand, the buildings, with their peaked roofs and striped railings, seemed half a mile off. The road was paved with huge white blocks. The buildings too were extremely white in the moon, and where there were shadows they made a sort of network of black.
Jausande walked up the street she had known since childhood, which went on for much longer than she remembered, between the moonlit white buildings fretted with shadow. She thought of two lines of a poem; she could not recollect who had written them. They moved in her head, again and again, as if they were a password for traveling the City by night.
The spider moon she spun with her glow
A marble web on the earth below
A password to travel was perhaps necessary, for there was no one else out on the street, nor when it ended and she turned in to another, was there anyone there. No windows were lit. There was no sound at all. She wondered if she could hear her own footsteps, and then she listened, and heard them very faintly, for her feet were bare, and she had on only her nightgown and dressing robe. She realized that none of the street lamps was burning. Or perhaps there were no street lamps anyway. Astride the second street was an arch of white stone, skeletal and strange, with slender shining tines that rayed against the moon’s disk.
A marble web on the earth below
Under the moon, the City had become marble, had become another city altogether, with bone-white towers, with terraces like ice.
She passed beneath the arch, and entered a park. Tall trees of a kind she did not know clustered across the smooth gray lawns, and things moved among them, grazing, but she could not tell what they were and did not want to see them distinctly. Above the park rose a rounded hill, and on its top was an eye of crystal. This did not startle her by now, not even when it moved, scanning over the sky. The eye was beautiful, like a great clear jewel. I am almost there now, she thought. But where?
Behind the park, rising up the hill where the observing eye tilted and quested on its axis, was a dark wood. She went into its nocturnal velvet and fragrance. And in the wood, deep inside, was a light that was not the moon. And even in the dream, she pictured to herself a shape, a kind of being, there in the light. She could not be certain of anything about it, save that its hair moved and was alive, and that it was winged.
Jausande felt then the feeling that had come to her since adolescence, at dawn, or with the westering sunfall. She felt that beckoning enticement. It was now so fierce, so heady, poignant to the edge of pain. For here the promise, whatever it was, was terrifyingly at hand, here the wish could come true.
I shall have to leave everything behind, she thought, and left her robe behind her on the bushes. And in an agony of excitement and abandon, a radiance of hungry fear, she began to run toward the burning center of the wood.
And woke. Woke. The shock – had been horrible. Like a fall, a faint. But she fainted into consciousness. She was in her bed. And that – had been a dream. Which in a few moments more was nothing but a mist upon her, vague, not urgent, until now. Now, in the Labonne house, when it had returned with such power.
Jausande got up and looked about at the few books teetering on the Labonne shelves. Would the library of her father furnish her the poem from the dream? The spider moon –
Outside the window, the light ravished, darker and more lush, more blatant than before. The spider moon would not rise until eleven o’clock.…
The door opened, and Madame Labonne bustled through.
“My dear, how pale you are!”
“I’m unwell,” said Jausande Marguerite. “I must go home.”
“But Paul –” exclaimed Madame Labonne.
And being a fool, amiably misinterpreted the violent toss Jausande gave with her head, like that of a starving lioness distracted a moment from her kill.
Because she had always been amenable, Jausande had her way. She was sent home in the carriage, and Paul, arriving ten minutes later, was vexed. He hoped aloud Jausande would not turn out after all to be one of those women given to “vapours.” She would not. He would never see her again. None of them would.
Those that did see her the last, they were an assorted crew.
Her own father was the first of them. He found her in his library, and was mildly surprised, thinking she had been going to dine with her fiancé. All about Jausande on the table were her father’s precious books of poetry. She glanced up at him, like a stranger. And that was usual enough, for they would meet in the house rather than dwell there together.
“Papa,” she said, “I can’t find my poem about the moon.”
“There are so many,” he said. He smiled, and quoted parts of them. Jausande interrupted him. She spoke the lines from her dream. He frowned, at the interruption – which was unlike her – and at the words. “Now, let me see. No, Jausande, it isn’t a poem. What you have is a peculiar doggerel … from Pliny, I believe, the other Pliny. Aranea luna plena … As I recall: The full moon, like a spider, lets down her light that covers the earth, as with a web, and there we mortals helplessly struggle, we flies of fate, until the night devours each one of us –” His daughter rose. He said, with mild disapproval, “A very poor translation. Where can you have discovered it?”
“I forget,” she said. Then she bade him good night and went away.
And this was the last he saw of her, the pretty, unimportant girl who lodged in his home.
In the dead of the dark, that was not dark at all, for the high round moon stood over Paradys at one in the morning, Jausande had let herself from the house. None of the servants witnessed this, but on the fashionable street outside, a flower seller wandering homeward from her post by the theater beheld a young woman with her hair undone, clad in a satin robe, and under this nothing, it would seem, but her petticoats and corset. The flower seller had, in her time, been shown many things. Jausande Marguerite in her robe was not the most amazing of these. Yet, she was odd, and the flower seller did not like her looks, and hurried away toward her burrow.
The City was not empty, nor especially quiet, even at that hour. In three more the sun would rise again, and the turmoil of the markets would begin; even now wagons were passing in from the country, while at the taverns and less salubrious hotels an all-night noise went on and the lights roared.
Near the Revolutionary Monument, two whores saw Jausande Marguerite and almost took her for one of their own. But as she went by, they thought otherwise. “Why, she’s had some fright,” said one. They stole up after her and asked what had happened to the lady, could they help her. But Jausande apparently did not hear or see them, and they fell back.
Perhaps through sheer accident, no police of the City happened on Jausande. Or maybe she directed herself away from the areas they frequented.
In a small park, near the Observatory, once a graveyard and still stuck here and there with an awkward blackened slab, a thief, resting from his night’s ingenuities, jumped up as Jausande moved by him. He assessed her fine robe and the sparkle of a gem on her finger. A somnambulist, he reckoned her, for so she looked to him. No one was near. He caught her up and walked at her side.
“Sleeping, are you?” he said. “You shouldn’t be out alone in the dark. You need Pierre to see you safe. Now, where is it you”re going? You can tell me,” he wheedled after a moment. His knowledge of those tranced was limited to an act he had once seen performed in the street, when a fellow hypnotized a girl from the crowd, whereat she would answer all types of lewd questions with a fascinating honesty. The sleepwalker, though, did not reply. Pierre the thief dogged her. She seemed about to go up into the cluttered streets above the park, where all manner of ruffians might be lurking. “Now, now, lovely,” said Pierre, “you’d be better off with me. Perhaps someone’s lost you? Perhaps they’d like to give me something nice for bringing you home?” And then he took her hand gently, to see if he could ease off the ring. It obliged him most kindly. It was new, a betrothal gift, and had not adhered to her flesh. Pierre slipped it in his pocket, and at that moment they had come out of the park of graves, into a winding alley.
Pierre later told his tale to his cronies. He was not ashamed, and did not believe he had imagined what he saw. No one taunted him. The places of the night they trod were filigreed with weirdness. Each had some anecdote of a haunt, of jewelry with a curse on it, for, moving outside the law, they were exposed to lawlessness of many conditions.
The walls of the alley, which were the sides and backs of decaying houses, were hung with weeds. The girl moved between them, with her sleepwalker’s eyes still fixed inward. And Pierre loitered after. And then it was as if a curtain, which all this while had hung across the alley and the sky, shivered and twitched aside. And for two or three seconds, only two or three, Pierre saw the girl was walking in a forest of gigantic trees. It was like, he said, the world of a million years before, for he had seen paintings of such scenes in a museum. A primeval landscape, great ferns that swung into the upper air, and the stars there glaring and flaming, and the moon too big, too low. And maybe there was a suggestion of buildings, also, but not any that he had ever seen, either in Paradys or in any painting. He did not care for them, or the forest. But that was only for one or two seconds. In the final second, Pierre saw a sort of bubbling and glowing up ahead.
“God knows,” said Pierre, “what that was.”
The girl ran toward it. And Pierre ran the other way. He ran, and somewhere he threw the ring he had stolen over his shoulder.
“It was as if there was a second curtain behind the first. The first was lifted up for me to see, but the second was being melted away. I had my choice, to run or to stay and look and turn into a pillar of salt.”
Pierre, then, was almost the last to see Jausande Marguerite on her journey.
Her ultimate witness was a sleepless small boy in the window of a poor apartment near the Observatory. He saw a lady with loose hair mount a flight of stairs toward a narrow door along the avenue. As she approached the door it turned molten, it blazed and gaped – and the child hid his eyes but knew better than to cry, for his drunkard father would beat him, any excuse. And in the morning, the door was only a door, as it had always been.
The disappearance of Jausande made far less motion in the pond of the City than her re-emergence, later, from its river. There was no hushing that up. And the police, who had formerly tried here, there, and everywhere, gathered themselves to the narrow flat of The Conjuror. It seemed certain persons had once overheard a whispered threat offered by this man to Jausande Marguerite. He had told her that he could make her do whatever he wanted. She, and they, had laughed at this. But suppose –?
The flat was vacant. Nothing was in it but for the rats in the walls. The windows had not been ventilated for years. Clouds of dust billowed about. The search extended itself, spreading like a ripple from Observatory Hill, beyond the rim of Paradys, out and away into the far bays of other cities. And like a ripple, growing less and less. Who had heard of him, The Conjuror? The very world seemed vacant of him, the rats busy in its walls, its shutters fastened, its dusts blowing. The curtain that encircled it closed tight.
There was one who searched about this graveyard, as we are doing, but more intently. He was looking for his lost love, who perished almost as a child. They had loved as children, uncarnally but surely, and she had been taken from him first by her parents, next by death. He did not know where she lay, save it was over some other’s grave, for she had been buried in secret during an epidemic of typhus. So he confused the authorities with tales of a buried treasure, a jewel, dropped in some grave, and uprooted all those of which he had a suspicion.
The jewel was really in his own possession. At length he pretended to find it and gave it over. A small price.… It was a black diamond, or some white pearl of unusual size.
By then he had unearthed his dead love. She was gone, she was bones, but he raised the skeleton and kissed the toothy lipless smile of the skull. To him she was beautiful still, fresh and childish, unwithered, let alone rotten.
Perhaps she had stayed for him, and dreamed that he could free her with a kiss, his forgiveness of her dying. Perhaps then she was able to sleep in peace.
But this is another marker, the memory of one lost in a far-off clime. He too searched out a sort of skull, and was in love with it. We all have our dreams. May we find them, and God have mercy on us when we do.