The Crystal City Under the Sea (18 page)

“The Atlantes became gradually habituated to their new mode of life. Archytas with the greatest ingenuity contrived to supplant by artificial cultivation the fruits of the earth to which they had been accustomed. They are sadly shorn of their glory, these fertile fields, the outcome of human science, cultivated as they are now by an old man and a mere child, whose wants are few, and whose strength is small. But thou hast admired, and so has thy brave servant, the beauty of our conservatories, and our strange cereals, which have hitherto been sufficient to nourish numerous families. Archytas transformed and adapted all the industries; it was mere play to him to invent or improve something fresh every day. Thou hast admired the texture of our vestments. Would not one think that it was woven from the finest wool from the frisking lambs of which I have heard? It is a tissue of linen transformed by submarine cultivation to the softness and lustre of silk. Archytas held that the elements of all things being in the soil and the atmospheric air, it only needed a chemist to extract from them, if he chose, all the necessaries of life. The miracle was to fabricate artificial air to apply to the treatment of the soil in abnormal conditions. That was the miracle which Archytas accomplished at the outset, and of which our very existence is the proof. I am, as thou seest, the last of my race, and I can truly say that I have hardly ever regretted the loss of outside things. Thy arrival hither, stranger, has set me dreaming of the world outside; and has awakened in me the thought that I am an exceptional being, a prisoner of the sea, in this crystal cage.”

CHAPTER XVI
THE SONG OF THE SIREN.

A
TLANTIS ceased speaking. With eyes fixed vaguely on the moving perspective of the waves, outside the transparent walls of the garden, she seemed overpowered by the vision she had called up; by the grandeur and the melancholy of these past years, — too heavy a burden for her young shoulders, and which, poor solitary waif, she had come to recognize as her inheritance.

Deeply moved, René, to some extent, read in her expressive face what was passing in her mind. How touching she looked in her tearless sadness, in her half conscious surrender to a fate, the bitterness of which she could hardly measure! So noble, so beautiful, so absolutely free from anything coarse or vulgar; what homage she would have received, what care, what devotion, what affection would have been accorded her, if it had not pleased the capricious gods, after having endowed her with beauty enough to blind the eyes of the living, to hide this rare pearl in the depths of the ocean! What a strange existence hers had been I She never had looked upon a youth till she saw René. All the words she had listened to had been grave and solemn. She had known nothing of girlish chatter, of that sweet babbling of infancy. More than that, she was entirely ignorant of the most innocent fun; she had discoursed on learned subjects, and she, herself, used, in speaking, ample periods and flowery metaphors, which would have seemed out of place on such young lips, if they had not been touched with simplicity and grace.

“How much this young life needs joy and sunshine,” thought he, “What would I not give for her to know my mother, so good and kind; Hélène, so lively and amiable. Patrice will come to my help, I feel sure. When has he ever failed me, good-hearted fellow that he is? But he is only a man, and I could wish to see her among womankind, to fill up the blank, the most heartrending of all, in this existence so cruelly cut off from affection, from the love of a mother, a sister, a friend, or even a servant, from feminine affection of any kind.”

He longed to tell her of the sympathy he felt for her, and to speak words of encouragement and hope; to tell her that, while so near to losing all she held dear, she had a friend ready to bring brightness into the sombre setting of her life. But the reverence he felt for her, and the fear of displeasing the venerable Charicles, and, perhaps, the fear also of being misunderstood by Atlantis herself, kept him silent. For, with all her lofty Greek culture, the young girl was ignorant of many things, a complete stranger, one would think, to any sentiment of the modern mind! Before startling her by premature professions of love, would it not be better to try to bring about a better understanding of each other; to reveal to her something of her moral personality—her responsibility; to tell her something of the world above the sea-level, from which a strict law had severed her? Should he not, above all, endeavour to dissipate the dark cloud of loneliness and isolation which weighed on her like a yoke of lead; to teach her something of the liveliness and gaiety belonging to her age; to teach her to laugh; and, from the majestic isolation that enveloped her, to bring out the sweet and simple girl that she really was? There would be time then to accustom her to the thought of the future, to teach her that, though she had known nothing of family life, of the cradle or the fireside, or of the friendly circle, the most brilliant and happy future was hers if she cared to have it.

Thus, guided by the most prudent and delicate of motives, the young man refrained from expressing what he felt so strongly. By adroit questions, he sought merely to induce her to throw off the oppression that weighed her down. From the broad lines and overwhelming facts of the history of her race, he drew her on to tell him familiar and amusing details. He made her tell him about the life in the submerged city; how they first substituted art for nature for their daily needs; to what expedients necessity, the mother of invention, had brought the exiles, improving, by delicacy and finish, the most trifling objects they used; how tradition had been piously and devotedly clung to; how new generations had grown up; and how, when the last of the original inhabitants died, there remained not a single person who had seen the sun and breathed the upper air; how, a few months after her birth, a mysterious epidemic had carried off her mother, and swept away, at one stroke, relations and friends, and how the race, so strong and vigorous, became reduced to the two present representatives, Charicles and Atlantis. But, while encouraging her to tell him all this, René took care to keep the dark side of it in the background, dwelling upon the picturesque and humourous aspect; and the young girl, who till now knew nothing of laughter, save the boisterous mirth of Homer’s rough soldiers, was actually betrayed into a peal of merriment as astonishing as delightful, coming from one who hardly knew even how to smile. He seized every opportunity of teaching her, not only a few words of French, but the elementary notions of our world, its institutions, customs and fashions, its greatness and its folly; and he had the joy of seeing the gravity of her face relax little by little; and, as his language took a simple and familiar turn, a look of girlish amusement stole over her sweet face, and made her blue eyes sparkle with keen intelligence.

“It is not for nothing, that she is a distant cousin of Aristophanes!” said René to himself, delighted with the vivacity of the young Greek girl. “It would have been more wonderful still if, coming as she does from such a source, the consoling gift, common to his race, of seizing the amusing side of things, had been lacking in her. Dear Atlantis! what capacity, what talent lies dormant in her! How I long to give this noble creature the space she needs for developing herself freely and harmoniously. Ah! I can only repeat, what miracles my mother and Hélène could effect here. With her marvellous intuition, her Athenian suppleness, she would grasp things almost before they had time to explain them! I sometimes think that it would be a pity and almost impious to drape this antique muse in a costume bought in the Rue de la Paix, to exchange her sandals for boots, and the fillet which binds her hair for a hat trimmed with ribbon. Pure prejudice, however! I feel sure, if I understand her, that in a week’s time, in a few hours’ stay in Paris, she would understand and adopt the modern costume. It is only rusticity that is the innate foe of fashion, and who understood the worship of novelty better than the Greeks? And is. there, after all, an absolute standard of beauty in dress? Does it not all depend upon the grace of the wearer? And who could hope to compete with her in that? And it would be the same in everything; she would assimilate everything that is good and beautiful; she would become the most accomplished of French women.”

The long hours passed, so interesting, so full of new impressions, of reciprocal revelations, of excursions into unknown lands, where each in turn took the part of a guide, that it seemed impossible to them afterwards, in recalling those days, to believe that they were only measured by the ordinary length. And they were right, for hours, like centuries, have only a conventional limit, and these days were an epoch in their life.

Meanwhile, as Atlantis told her story, Charicles gradually relapsed into silence and immobility. Attentive at first, by and by his eyes closed, and his slow, deep breathing made it evident to them that his uneasy sleep had returned. Atlantis, poor child, did not understand the gravity of it; but this torpor seemed of bad augury to René’s more experienced eyes. Convinced that it was necessary to rouse the invalid, he made him swallow some more drops of his elixir, and tried by friction to restore heat to the cold limbs. But all efforts were in vain. If the old man gave any sign of life, it was but a feeble movement, and only manifested a painful desire to be left to die in peace. Now and then they fancied they discerned some trace of consciousness on the marble face, once even a slight contraction of the brows, like a hardly perceptible ripple stirred by the breeze on a smooth lake. Was he listening to them? Did he hear? Did he understand? René and Atlantis had never talked so freely as now. They had before told each other their history. Now they opened their hearts to each other. Did the old man perceive, in the animated words of the young man, in the ardent interest of the young girl, the inspiration of a life from which he had voluntarily shut himself out? Was his old heart wrung, on the threshold of the darkness on which he was about to enter, with a bitter regret for all that he might have known, for all that he was about to quit? The two young people bent over him, watching for some fresh sign of awakening consciousness; spoke to him affectionately; begged him to tell them by a sign if he wished for anything. But no, he lay absolutely still. They were deceived, no doubt, and they seated themselves by his couch. Hope had brought a brighter colour to Atlantis’s face than the delicate tint habitual to it. She looked at that moment so exquisitely beautiful that René could not take his eyes off her face, and the frank and unaffected look of inquiry of the reason of this persistent attention drew from him the remark: “I wonder how so lovely a flower can bloom without the sun’s rays ever having touched it. Excuse me,” he added, precipitately, when he saw deepen the blush that he had so praised. “Such observations are unpardonable, but I assure you it slipped from me without premeditation.”

The young girl knew nothing of the art of receiving or resenting a compliment. She blushed from innate modesty, but it never would have entered her head to be offended at what he said. “Why, if you think me beautiful, should you not tell me so?” replied she, simply. “ Beauty is a gift of the gods, my father has taught me, and I thank them for having made me beautiful, in his eyes and in yours. Besides, do not think that I have never seen the light of fair Phcebus.”

“What do you say?” cried René. “Did the science of the sublime old man extend as far as that? Could science find means to pierce the dense, dark mass of the waters and reach the light of day-? In truth that does puzzle me!”

“No,” said Atlantis, “it was not by any help of optical instruments that I saw the glorious fire which gives life to the world. Certainly the science which my father made use of, the legacy he received from ancient Egypt, added to his own profound thoughtfulness, seemed to me to far outstrip what you have told me of modern conquests in the domain of physical science; but it was with my own eyes that I saw the sun!”

“Is it possible? You have been in our world! You will perhaps be allowed to come back to it! I must be dreaming, surely. Do please tell me about it. You cannot think how happy that revelation has made me.”

“In your world?” repeated Atlantis, with an unconscious expression of melancholy. “No, I have never landed there, I have never left the kingdom of Thetis; my father would not have suffered it. I should never have dared to ask him to infringe, for my sake, the severe law under which we lived, by allowing me to rise to the surface of the water. My father is infallible, like the gods. He knows what is just and right, and it is not for a weak girl to question his decrees. But, when curiosity is roused by restlessness and by eyes opening and longing to see more, and has found its way into the heart, and brings sleeplessness to one’s pillow, how can one stifle it? Phœbus had just accomplished for the fifteenth time his revolution round the world, after I was born, when my father. Judging me to be worthy to listen to his confidences, revealed to me the complete history of our people. Till that time, I was ignorant of the fact that the Atlantes had ever lived in the upper world. What do I say? I did not know, even, that there was a world outside my home. Ah! would that he had kept the secret! From that day, my mind learnt what unrest, agitation, discontent was. I knew then that I was a prisoner. In vain Charicles boasted of the greatness of my ancestors, taught me to appreciate the advantage of being born of an opulent and noble race, and showed me how the great majority of my fellow men were bound under the yoke of powerful tyrants, debased and depressed by excessive toil, and not always succeeding in earning by their daily labour the bread necessary for their children’s miserable existence. Strange, indeed, it was, that this comparison only made me envy the fate of these defrauded people. My father called them slaves; ah! was I not much more a slave? Had they not the fresh air to breathe, the vault of heaven for a habitation, the sun for light and heat? These poor women that my father described, begging alms, trailing their rags on the roadside, often burdened by an infant their arms were barely strong enough to carry, — oh, how gladly would I have given up to them my rich clothing, the abundance and delicacies of our table, the glories of my past, the security of the present! I would gladly have had a taste of their misery, for the sake of breathing the fresh air, of feasting my eyes with the sight of my fellow creatures, of hearing their voices, and something of the noisy tumult of life. All these thoughts I kept to myself, but Charicles’s eyes were piercing, and he saw my face grow paler day by day, under the pressure of this indescribable longing.