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Venus In Furs 2
All stories on this web site are purely FICTIONAL. The people depicted within these stories only exist in someone's IMAGINATION. Any resemblence between anyone depicted in these stories and any real person, living or dead, is an incredible COINCIDENCE too bizarre to be believed. If you think that you or someone you know is depicted in one of these stories it's only because you're a twisted perverted little fucker who sees conspiracies and plots where none exist. You probably suspect that your own MOTHER had sex with ALIENS and COWS and stuff. Well, she didn't. It's all in your head. Now take your tranquilizers and RELAX.
Venus In Furs, an etext in eight sections.
This is section 2 of 8.
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I was breakfasting in my honeysuckle arbour and reading in the Book of
Judith. I envied the grim hero Holofernes because of the queenly woman who
cut off his head with a sword, I envied him his beautiful sanguinary end.
"The Lord hath punished him, and delivered him into the hands of a
woman."
The verse struck me.
How ungallant these Jews are, I thought. And their God might have
chosen more becoming expressions when speaking of the fair sex.
"The Lord hath punished him, and delivered him into the hands of a
woman," I repeated to myself. What shall I do, that he may so punish me?
Heaven preserve us! Here comes the landlady, who has again diminished
somewhat in size overnight. And up above, among the twining greenery and the
garlands, the white gown is gleaming again. Is it Venus, or the widow?
This time it is the widow, for Madame Tartakovska makes a curtsey and
asks me, on her behalf, for something to read. I run to my room and pick up a
couple of books at random.
Later I remember that my picture of Venus is in one of them, and now
both it and my effusions are in the hands of the lady in white upstairs. What
will she say?
I can hear her laughing.
Is she laughing at me?
A full moon. It is already peering over the tops of the low hemlocks
that fringe the park, and a silvery light fills the park, the clumps of trees,
the whole landscape as far as the eye can reach, fading gradually in the
distance like trembling waters.
I cannot resist, I feel a strange impulse and summons; I get dressed
again and go out into the garden. Some power draws me towards the meadow,
towards her, my goddess and my beloved.
The night is cool. I feel a slight chill. The air is heavy with the
odour of flowers and of the forest, it is intoxicating.
What solemnity! What music all around! A nightingale is sobbing. The
stars quiver faintly in the pale blue transparency. The meadow seems smooth
as a mirror, like a veil of ice on a pond.
The statue of Venus stands out, august and luminous.
But -- what has happened?
From the goddess' marble shoulders a great dark fur flows down to her
heels. I stand dumbfounded and stare at her in amazement, and once again an
indescribable fear seizes me and I take flight.
I quicken my steps, and find I have missed the main path. As I am about
to turn aside into one of the green alleys I see Venus sitting before me on a
stone bench: not the beautiful woman of marble but the very Goddess of Love
herself, with warm blood and throbbing pulses! Yes, this is really my
beloved, come to life like that statue which drew breath for its creator.
Indeed the miracle seems only half accomplished: her white-powdered hair
seems still to be of stone, and her white gown shimmers like moonlight -- or
is it only satin? From her shoulders the dark fur is flowing now -- but her
lips are surely red, her cheeks have the hue of life. Two diabolical green
rays from her eyes fall on me, and she is laughing.
Her laughter is so strange, so -- I cannot describe it, it takes my
breath away, and I run further, and every few steps I have to pause for
breath. And the mocking laughter pursues me through the dark leafy paths,
across the bright open spaces, through the thickets pierced by a single
moonbeam. I can no longer see my way, I wander about in utter confusion with
cold drops of sweat on my forehead.
At last I come to a halt, and engage in a short monologue.
It runs -- well, one is either very polite to oneself or very rude --
like this:
I say to myself: "Donkey!"
The word has a remarkable effect, like a magic formula which frees me
and restores my self-possession.
In a moment I become quite calm.
With great pleasure I repeat: "Donkey!"
Now my surroundings are once more clear and distinct. There is the
fountain, there the alley of boxwood, there the house which I am approaching
slowly.
And all at once the apparition is before me again. Behind the green
hedge, shot through by moonlight so that it seems fretted with silver, I see
the white figure again, the woman of stone whom I adore, whom I fear and flee
from.
With two bounds I am inside the house, and I catch my breath and
reflect. What am I, after all -- a little dilettante or a big donkey?
A sultry morning, the air is languid, heavily laden with odours, yet
exciting. Again I am sitting in my arbour, reading in the Odyssey about the
beautiful witch who turned her worshippers into beasts. A splendid picture of
antique love.
There is a sort rustling in the leaves and branches around me, the pages
of my book are rustling, and from the terrace beside me comes a rustling too.
A woman's dress --
There she is -- Venus -- but without her furs -- no, it is the widow --
and yet -- Venus... Oh, what a woman!
As she stands there in her light white morning gown, looking at me, her
slender figure seems full of poetry and grace. She is neither large nor
small; her head is alluring, piquant in the style of a French marquise rather
than beautiful -- but how enchanting, what softness, what a wayward charm
plays around her none too small mouth! Her skin is so infinitely delicate
that the blue veins show through, even through the muslin covering her arms
and splendid breasts. How luxuriant is her red hair -- it is red, not blond
or gold -- how diabolically and yet how tenderly it curls around her neck!
Now her eyes meet mine like green lightning -- yes, they are green, these eyes
of hers whose power is so indescribable -- green, but like precious stones or
unfathomable mountain lakes.
She studies my confusion, which has even made me forget myself, for I
have remained seated and still have my cap on my head. She smiles mockingly.
At last I rise and bow. She comes closer and bursts into loud, almost
childlike laughter. I stammer, as only a little dilettante or a big donkey
would at such a moment.
That was how our acquaintance began.
The goddess asks my name, and tells me her own.
Her name is Wanda von Dunaiev.
And she is really my Venus.
"But madam, how did that strange fancy come to you?"
"The little picture in one of your books..."
"I had forgotten it."
"The curious notes on the back..."
"Curious? "
She looked at me. "I have always wanted to know a real dreamer -- for
the sake of novelty -- and you seemed one of the maddest of the species."
"Dear lady -- indeed --" Again I lapsed into a miserable asinine
stammering, and even blushed in a manner proper to a youth of sixteen but not
a man fully ten years older.
"You were afraid of me last night."
"Really -- well... but won't you sit down?"
She did so, obviously enjoying my embarrassment. And now, in the light
of day, I was still more afraid of her. A charming expression of contempt
played over her upper lip.
"You seem to regard love, and particularly woman," she said, "as
something hostile, something to guard yourself against, even unsuccessfully --
as if its power were a kind of pleasant torment, a piquant cruelty. A truly
modern attitude."
"You do not share it?"
"I do not," she said quickly and with decision, shaking her head so that
her curls danced like red flames. "To me the serene sensuousness of the
Greeks -- pleasure without pain -- is the ideal we should aim at. The kind of
love preached by Christianity, by the moderns, the Knights of the Spirit -- I
don't believe in it. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a
pagan.
Dost thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel
When in Ida's grove she was pleased with the hero Anchises?
Those lines of the Roman Elegy have always pleased me.
"In Nature there is only the same love as in the heroic age, 'when gods
and goddesses loved.' Then
Desire followed love, and enjoyment desire.
Everything else is artificial, affected, lying. Christianity with its
cruel symbol of the cross has always had for me an element of the monstrous,
it has introduced something alien and hostile into Nature and her innocent
impulses. The contest of spirit with the world of sense is the gospel of
modern man. I will have none of it."
"Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madam," I replied. But
we moderns can no longer enjoy that antique serenity. Least of all in love.
The idea of sharing a woman repels us, even if she were an Aspasia. We are
jealous, like our God. For instance, we have made the name of the glorious
Phryne a term of reproach, even of abuse. We prefer one of Holbein's meagre
pallid virgins -- as long as she is wholly ours -- to an antique Venus no
matter how divinely beautiful, who loves Anchises today, Paris tomorrow,
Adonis the day after. And if our sensual nature so triumphs in us that we
give our complete, passionate, burning devotion to such a woman, her serene
joy in life seems to us something cruel and demonic, and we see in our own
bliss a sin we must expiate."
She looked at me scornfully. "So you too are one of the enthusiasts of
modern women, of those wretched hysterical females who in their somnambulistic
search for an ideal man cannot appreciate a real one, and in tears and spasms
violate the Christian ethic, cheating and being cheated, always hunting and
choosing and rejecting, never happy themselves nor giving happiness to others,
and forever accusing fate instead of quietly admitting they wish to love and
live like Helen or Aspasia. Nature knows no permanence in the tie between man
and woman."
"But, dear lady --"
"Let me finish. It is only man's egoism which seeks to bury woman
like a treasure in the earth. Every effort to impart some permanence to
love, that most fickle thing in our fickle humanity, has come to nothing
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