“Well, are you coming?”
The man was still searching in his pocketbook.
It was Lirat! Had the houses, the very sky crashed upon my head my astonishment would have been no greater! Lirat going home with Juliette. That could not be! I had lost my senses! I came still closer.
“Lirat!” I cried out, “Lirat! …”
He had paid the coachman and looked at me, terrified! Motionless, with gaping mouth, with outspread legs he was looking at me, without saying a word!
“Lirat! Is that you? It is not possible! It is not you, is it? You look like Lirat but you are not Lirat!”
Lirat was silent. …
“Come, Lirat! You are not going to do that … or I shall say that you have sent me away to Ploch in order to steal Juliette from me! You here, with her! Why that’s preposterous! Lirat! Remember what you told me about her … think of the beautiful things which you had planted in my soul. This despicable woman! Why she is good only for one like me who am lost. But you! You are an honorable man, you are a great artist! Is it to revenge yourself on me that you are doing this? A man like you does not revenge himself in such a manner! He does not besmirch himself! If I did not come to see you it was because I feared to incur your anger! Come, speak to me, Lirat. Answer me!”
Lirat was silent. Juliette was calling him in the hallway:
“Well, are you coming?”
I seized Lirat’s hands:
“Look here Lirat … she is mocking you. Don’t you understand it? One day she said to me: ‘I shall revenge myself on Lirat for his contempt, for his arrogant harshness! And that will be a farce!’ She is having that revenge now. You are going into her house, aren’t you … and tomorrow, tonight, this very minute, perhaps, she will chase you out in disgrace! Yes, that is what she is after, I can swear! Ah! Now I understand it all! She has pursued you! Foolish as she is, infinitely inferior to you as she is, she has known how to turn your head. She has a genius for evil, and you are chaste in body and mind! She has poured poison into your veins. But you are strong! You can’t do this after all that has taken place between us … or else you are a depraved man, a dirty pig, you whom I admire! You are a dirty pig! Come now!”
Lirat suddenly wriggled out of my hold, and, pushing me away with his two clenched fists:
“Well, yes!” he shouted, “I am a dirty pig! Leave me alone!”
A dull noise was heard which resounded in the air like a thunderbolt. It was the door shut after Lirat. The houses, the sky, the lights of the street were in a whirl. And I no longer saw anything. I stretched out my arms in front of me and fell on the sidewalk. Then in the midst of peaceful cornfields I saw a road, a white road upon which a man, seemingly tired, was walking. The man never stopped looking at the beautiful corn which ripened in the sun, and at the broad meadows where flocks of gamboling sheep grazed, their snouts buried in the grass. Apple-trees stretched out to him their branches weighted down with the purple fruit, and the springs purled at the bottom of their moss-covered recesses in the ground. He seated himself upon the bank of a river covered at this spot with little fragrant flowers, and listened rapturously to the music of nature. … From everywhere voices which rose up from the earth, voices which came down from heaven, soft voices were murmuring: “Come to me all ye who suffer, all ye who have sinned. We are the comforters who will restore to wretched people their repose of life and their peace of conscience. Come to us all ye who wish to live!” And the man with arms uplifted to heaven prayed: “Yes, I wish to live! What must I do in order not to suffer? What must I do in order not to sin?” The trees shook their crowns, the corn field moved its sea of stubble, a buzzing arose from every grass blade, the flowers swayed their little corollas on top of their stems, and from all this a unique voice was heard: “Love us!” said the voice. The man resumed his walk, birds were fluttering all around him.
The next day I bought a suit of working clothes.
“And so Monsieur is going away!” asked the errand boy of the premises to whom I had just given my old clothes.
“Yes, my friend!”
“And where is Monsieur going?”
“I don’t know.”
On the street, men appeared to me like mad ghosts, old skeletons out of joint, whose bones, badly strung together, were falling to the pavement with a strange noise. I saw the necks turning on top of broken spinal columns, hanging upon disjointed clavicles, arms sundered from the trunks, the trunks themselves losing their shape. And all these scraps of human bodies, stripped of their flesh by death, were rushing upon one another, forever spurred on by a homicidal fever, forever driven by pleasure, and they were fighting over foul carrion.
