Part 34

“Then you needn’t tell me any more about it; it doesn’t interest me. The whole world isn’t worth a pin. I am miserable, for I am forsaken and betrayed. There’s no interest left in life for me. I am lost and undone, and no one troubles any more about me than if I were a frozen field-mouse. What dirty dogs they are!”

Suddenly she sprang from her stool and seized the Countess by the shoulders. “You were with the rest of us. I want to drum it into your head,” she continued with increasing vehemence, “that there never was anybody so treacherously betrayed as I have been. And there was no reason for doing it, for I was an artiste, a well-known and admired artiste, and here I am now, forsaken and betrayed! Cast aside like a squeezed-out orange!”

“Why did he forsake you?” asked the Countess shyly. In her own mind she seemed but a simple child in the presence of this wild and passionate personality. Yes, he had forsaken her, left her for ever, she reflected, and she shuddered at the thought. And now he was dead. At the moment she felt doubtful of the enterprise she had undertaken. “He is dead,” she said in a low voice which vibrated.

“Who?” cried Cara.

“Your friend ... Hull!” answered the Countess, preparing to enter sympathetically into the girl’s feelings, the image of Wenk growing yet fainter in her subconscious mind.

But the other exclaimed passionately, “What are you saying? The man I mean is not dead; he is alive, and yet I sit here in prison. Yonder in the town outside he stands, strong as a tower, firm as a rock, I tell you! How can a puny thing like you know what he was? All others were as dirt beneath his feet, and their faithlessness too small a trifle to consider! Hull is dead, but what does that matter? Who cares an atom about him? But that other, the master, the lord, he lives there in the free air, where there is light and love and life ... where he might bear to have me lying at his feet, like a rug that only serves to warm his toes. He is the great man, the lord, the master! He is a bear, a lion, a royal Bengal tiger, do you hear? He does not belong to this cold and frosty land; he comes from Bengal, from paradise, from a place I shall never see again! And I--I--am left to linger in this dungeon!”

Suddenly she said, quite calmly and seriously, “Tell me, do you think there are men whose will is so strong that they can break down even these walls when they know how passionately I desire it?”

“There are no such men outside, but within us there are!” answered the Countess, carried away by the vehemence of that passionate storm of feeling which had so lately broken over her. How contemptible it was of her, she thought, to have desired to outwit a human being. She felt mean in her own estimation, and casting all projects and promises to the winds, she began to glow in the presence of this strange personality like the spark of an electric current. “Yes, they are to be found in us!” she repeated.

“He! he! the conqueror!” sang Cara, with a sound of passion in her tone, and in the Countess’s heart, too, there sprang up, like a marble image, the form of the man she had met a few evenings before. On her heart this image was sculptured, and she allowed its impress to recur again and again and remain there.

“Do you love him?” she asked the dancer.

But the other answered, as if brushing away an unconsidered trifle, “I ... love? I adore him!”

“I do not love him!” hastily asseverated the Countess, pursuing the mental image she had conjured up. “But yet he is great, superhuman. He is a world in himself. In the midst of this tame and quiet existence he is as a jungle and primeval forest. It seems to me as if he must have both the tiger and the serpent within him, as well as all that is boldest in Nature, its gigantic trees, its wild and impenetrable forests. Do you know, one can creep within them, never coming to an end, and yet be in him!”

She broke off suddenly. She dared not put into words the fancies evoked within her. For the husband whose eccentricities she tolerated was no more to her than a brother--nay, a father. They were bound together by one voluptuous hour of which no human being knew or even suspected. It was such an hour as that in which two human personalities melted into one to create a new being that later on might emerge and begin a life bound by invisible ties to that mysterious hour. The threads might be torn from their place, snapped, distorted, yet they remained entwined. No other desire now possessed her than to yield her senses once more unrestrainedly to that consciousness of the depths of her being which enfolded her as in a dream, and which she nevertheless continually thrust aside.

The two women sat close together, the Countess on the ground. Both seemed alike to be struck down by an invisible and imperious fist, striking at these centres of abandonment and yearning and self-betrayal. After the hasty and intimate avowals forced from them, the shadow of silence fell upon them.

“Say something!” pleaded the Countess timidly.

“Be silent, or I shall strangle you ... with my own hands!” cried the dancer.

The Countess shrank back, feeling herself, beside the other, to resemble a hare in the claws of a mighty and powerful bird of prey.

Food was pushed into the cell, but neither of the women perceived it. It grew dark, and the dancer lay down, fully dressed, upon one of the plank beds. The Countess imitated her and stretched herself on the other straw pallet. The night passed by, and in the long sleepless hours their fancies flowed into a dark and turgid stream.

Suddenly in the gloom Cara’s voice was heard: “Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Why are you here?”

The Countess had not the courage to repeat her tissue of lies, and she remained silent. Cara, too, kept silent for a while, then she said suddenly:

“You were sent here to pump me! Have I told you anything?”

“Yes.”

“About him?”

“Yes.”

“Did I tell you his name?”

“No.”