Ecstasy by Louis Couperus

Author:Louis Couperus [Couperus, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Classics
ISBN: 9781908968548
Google: xdmEAAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 17126665
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 1892-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

VI

He was gone and she was alone, waiting for the children. She neglected to ring for the lamp to be lighted, and the twilight of the late afternoon darkened in the room. She sat motionless, and looked out before her at the withered trees.

“Why should I not be happy?” she thought. “He is happy with me; he is himself with me only; he cannot be so among other people. Why then can I not be happy?”

She felt pain; her soul suffered, it seemed to her for the first time. This, perhaps, was because now for the first time her soul had not been itself but another. It seemed to her that another woman must have spoken to him, to Quaerts, just now.

An exalted woman: a woman of illusions – the woman, in fact, he saw in her, and not the woman she was: lowly, a woman of love. Ah, she had had to restrain herself not to ask him: “Why do you speak to me like that? Why do you raise up your beautiful thoughts to me? Why do you not rather let them drip down upon me? For see, I do not stand so high as you think; and see, I am at your feet, and my eyes seek you above me.”

Should she have told him that she deceived him? Should she have asked him: “How is it that I lower myself when I mix with other people? What then do you see in me? I am only a woman, a woman of feebleness and dreams. I have come to love you, I do not know why.”

Should she have opened his eyes and said to him: “Look upon your own soul in a mirror; look upon yourself and see how you are a god walking upon the earth: a god who knows everything because he feels it, feels it because he knows it …” Everything? … No … not everything; for he deceived himself, this god, and thought to find an equal in her, who was but his creature. Should she have declared all this, at the cost of her modesty and his happiness? For this happiness – she felt perfectly assured – lay in seeing her in the way that he saw her.

“With me he is happy!” she thought. “And sympathy is sealed between us … It was not friendship, nor did he speak of love; he called it simply sympathy … With me he feels only his real self, and not that other … the brute that is in him … the brute …”

Then there came drifting over her a gloom as of gathering clouds, and she shuddered before that which suddenly rolled through her: a broad stream of blackness, as though its waters were filled with mud, which bubbled up in troubled rings, growing larger and larger. She took fear before this stream, and tried not to see it; but it sullied all her landscapes – so bright before, with their horizons of light – now with a sky of ink smeared above, like filthy night.

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