Psyche by Louis Couperus

Author:Louis Couperus [Couperus, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908968579
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2013-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

XXIII

IT WAS STILL DARK when Psyche awoke. She looked up at Astra, who sat sleeping, her grey head on her breast; faintly shone her star. Very gently, so as not to wake her, Psyche rose, and left the terrace. She knew the way. She went through the halls and passages, down the steps, the endless steps. In the corners sat the sacred spiders, and wove …

Psyche went lower down, to the vaults. There burned the everlasting lamps. She went among the royal tombs, crystal sarcophagi, and found her father’s coffin. By the lamp, which was always kept burning, she recognised his embalmed, rigid face. The eyes were closed. He knew nothing about her: that she had gone away and come back. Death was between them, and severed them forever.

She kissed the glass, and her tears, round, hard, and red, clattered on the crystal.

She knelt down and tried to pray. In a corner of the vault, a black spot moved. It was a big spider with a white cross on its body.

“So, you have come back again … I knew that you would come. We can escape from nothing. Everything happens as it happens. Everything is as it is. Everything goes to dust; into the pits of the Past, into the power of Emeralda … Now become a spider like us, weave your web, and be wise …”

Psyche got up.

“No! …” she exclaimed, “I will not become a spider, I will weave no web. I have sinned, but I will weave no web; I have sinned and will do penance. The world is awful—desert and wood and space; life is awful—love and pain, joy and despair, sin and punishment. And if fate is as it is, it is in vain to weave a web and to heap up treasures of dust. Spider, were it not more human to love, to live, and even to sin, than to weave web upon web? Spider, I envy you not your sacredness! …”

The spider puffed itself out maliciously.

“You seem to be still proud of your murder and your immorality and shamelessness! Your princely name you have dragged through the mire, your wings you have given up for a panther’s skin and a grape-wreath, and know not yet what repentance is. If you had been wise and had become a spider, you would have served Emeralda, and there would have been no need to go down to the Underworld!”

But Psyche was no longer afraid. She had come to kiss her father’s coffin; she left her jewelled tears in the treasure, which the spiders watched over, and ascended the hundreds of steps and came on to the terrace of the battlements.

There as a child she had wandered and gazed, a child with wings, and innocent, her soul full of dreams. Now she wandered again along the ramparts and battlements high as a man; the doves fluttered about her, the swans looked up at her … and full of dejection for former innocence and youth, she wept and

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