Page:The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant.djvu/157

Rh "What? Where am I? What is the matter?"

Then she, who had not been asleep at all, looking at this unkempt man with red eyes and swollen lips replied in the haughty tone of voice in which she occasionally spoke to her husband.

"It is nothing; it is only a cock crowing. Go to sleep again Monsieur, it has nothing to do with you."

" I saw her for the first time," Louis d'Arandel said, with tha look of a man who was dreaming and trying to recollect something, "I thought of some slow and yet passionate music that I once heard, though I do not remember who was the composer. It told of a fair-haired woman, whose hair was so silky, so golden, and so vibrating that her lover had it cut off after her death, and had the strings of the magic bow of a violin made out of it, which afterward emitted such superhuman complaints and love melodies, that they made its hearers love until death.

"In her eyes there lay the mystery of deep waters; one was lost in them, drowned in them like in fathomless depths, and at the corners of her mouth there lurked the despotic and merciless smile of those women who do not fear that they may be conquered, who rule over men like cruel queens, whose hearts remain as virgin as those of the strictest Carmelite nuns, amid a flood of lewdness.

"I have seen her angelic head, the bands of her hair which looked like plates of gold, her tall, gracefull figure, her white, slender, childish hands, in stained glass windows in churches. She suggested pictures of the Annunciation, where the Archangel Gabriel descends with ultramarine colored wings, and Mary is sitting at her spinning wheel and spinning, while uttering pious prayers, seemingly a tall sister to the white lilies that are growing beside her and the roses.

"When she went through the acacia alley, she appeared on some first night in the stage box at one of the theaters, nearly always alone, and apparently feeling life a great burden, and angry because she could not change the eternal, dull round of human enjoyment, nobody would have believed that she went in for a fast life—that in the annals of gallantry she was catalogued under the strange name of "Lilie Lala," and that no man could rub against her without being irretrievably caught, and spending his last halfpenny on her.

"But with all that, Lilie had the voice of a school-girl, of some little innocent creature who still uses a skipping rope and wears short dresses, and had that clear, innocent laugh which reminds people of wedding bells. Sometimes, for fun, I would kneel down before her, like before the statue of a saint, and clasping my hands as if in prayer, I used to say:  'Sancta Lilies ora pro nobis!' 

"One evening, at Biarritz, when the