– suddenly the apparition is here again. Behind the green screen through which the moonlight gleams so that it seems embroidered with silver, I again see the white figure, the woman of stone whom I adore, whom I fear and flee.
With a couple of leaps I am within the house and catch my breath and reflect.
What am I really, a little dilettante or a great big donkey?
A sultry morning, the atmosphere is dead, heavily laden with odours, yet stimulating. Again I am sitting in my honeysuckle arbour, reading in the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into beasts. A wonderful picture of antique love.
There is a soft rustling in the twigs and blades and the pages of my book rustle and on the terrace likewise there is a rustling.
A woman’s dress –
She is there – Venus – but without furs – No, this time it is merely the widow – and yet – Venus – oh, what a woman!
As she stands there in her light white morning gown, looking at me, her slight figure seems full of poetry and grace. She is neither large, nor small; her head is alluring, piquante – in the sense of the period of the French marquises – rather than formally beautiful. What enchantment and softness, what roguish charm play about her none-too-small mouth! Her skin is so infinitely delicate that the blue veins show through everywhere; even through the muslin covering her arms and bosom. How abundant her red hair – it is red, not blonde or golden-yellow – how diabolically and yet tenderly it plays around her neck! Now her eyes meet mine like green lightning – they are green, these eyes of hers, whose power is so indescribable – green, but as are precious stones, or deep unfathomable mountain lakes.
She observes my confusion, which has even made me discourteous, for I have remained seated and still have my cap on my head.
She smiles roguishly.
Finally I rise and bow to her. She comes closer, and bursts out into loud, almost childlike laughter. I stammer, as only a little dilettante or great big donkey can do on such an occasion.
Thus our acquaintance began.
The divinity asks for my name, and mentions her own.
Her name is Wanda von Dunajew.
And she is actually my Venus.
‘But, madame, what put the idea into your head?’
‘The little picture in one of your books –’
‘I had forgotten about it.’
‘The curious notes on its back –’
‘Why curious?’
She looked at me.
‘I have always wanted to know a real dreamer someday – for the sake of the change – and you seem one of the maddest of the tribe.’
‘Dear lady – in fact –’ Again I fell victim to an odious, asinine stammering, and in addition blushed in a way that might have been appropriate for a youngster of sixteen, but not for me, who was almost a full ten years older –
‘You were afraid of me last night.’
‘Really – of course – but won’t you sit down?’
She sat down, and enjoyed my embarrassment – for actually I was even more afraid of her now in the full light of day. A delightful expression of contempt hovered about her upper lip.
‘You look at love, and especially women,’ she began, ‘as something hostile, something against which you put up a defence, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.’
‘You don’t share it?’
‘I do not share it,’ she said quickly and decisively, shaking her head, so that her curls flew up like red flames.
‘The ideal which I strive to realise in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks – pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan.
Doest thou imagine long the goddess of love took
counsel
When in Ida’s grove she was pleased with the hero
Achilles?
These lines from Goethe’s Roman Elegy have always delighted me.
‘In nature there is only the love of the heroic age, “when gods and goddesses loved”. At that time “desire followed the glance, enjoyment desire”. All else is factitious, affected, a lie. Christianity, whose cruel emblem, the cross, has always had for me an element of the monstrous, brought something alien and hostile into nature and its innocent instincts.
‘The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not care to have a share in it.’
‘Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madame,’ I replied; ‘but we moderns can no longer support the antique serenity, least of all in love. The idea of sharing a woman, even if it were an Aspasia, with another, revolts us. We are jealous as is our God. For example, we have made a term of abuse out of the name of the glorious Phryne.
‘We prefer one of Holbein’s meagre, pallid virgins, which is wholly ours, to an antique Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful she is, who loves Anchises today, Paris tomorrow, Adonis the day after. And if nature triumphs in us so that we give our whole glowing, passionate devotion to such a woman, her serene joy of life appears to us as something demonic and cruel, and we read into our happiness a sin which we must expiate.’
‘So you too are one of those who rave about modern women, those miserable hysterical feminine creatures who don’t appreciate a real man in their somnambulistic search for some dream man and masculine ideal. Amid tears and convulsions they daily outrage their Christian duties; they cheat and are cheated; they always seek again and choose and reject; they are never happy, and never give happiness. They accuse fate instead of calmly confessing that they want to love and to live as Helen and Aspasia lived. Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman.’
‘But, my dear lady –’
‘Let me finish. It is only man’s egoism which wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavours to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have suffered shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows and legalities. Can you deny that our Christian world has given itself over to corruption?’
‘But –’
‘But you are about to say, the individual who rebels against the arrangements of society is ostracised, branded, stoned. So be it. I am willing to take the risk; my principles are very pagan. I will live my own life as it pleases me. I am willing to do without your hypocritical respect; I prefer to be happy. The inventors of the Christian marriage have done well, simultaneously to invent immortality. I, however, have no wish to live eternally.
