“ ‘You see,’ Armand said, ‘you really have no need of the rooms you have at the hotel. You really have need of very little. But each of us must decide how much he wants. These people in this house have a name for me; encounters with me cause talk for twenty years. They are only isolated instants in my time which mean nothing. They cannot hurt me, and I use their house to be alone. No one of the Theatre des Vampires knows of my coming here. This is my secret.’
“I had watched him intently as he was speaking, and thoughts which had occurred to me in the cell at the theater occurred to me again. Vampires do not age, and I wondered how his youthful face and manner might differ now from what he had been a century before or a century before that; for his face, though not deepened by the lessons of maturity, was certainly no mask. It seemed powerfully expressive as was his unobtrusive voice, and I was at a loss finally to fully anatomize why. I knew only I was as powerfully drawn to him as before; and to some extent the words I spoke now were a subterfuge. ‘But what holds you to the Theatre des Vampires?’ I asked.
“ ‘A need, naturally. But I’ve found what I need,’ he said. ‘Why do you shun me?’
“ ‘I never shunned you,’ I said, trying to hide the excitement these words produced in me. ‘You understand I have to protect Claudia, that she has no one but me. Or at least she had no one until…’
“ ‘Until Madeleine came to live with you…’
“ ‘Yes…’ I said.
“ But now Claudia has released you, yet still you stay with her, and stay bound to her as your paramour,’ he said.
“ ‘No, she’s no paramour of mine; you don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Rather, she’s my child, and I don’t know that she can release me…’ These were thoughts I’d gone over and over in my mind. ‘I don’t know if the child possesses the power to release the parent. I don’t know that I won’t be bound to her for as long as she…’
“I stopped. I was going to say, ‘for as long as she lives.’ But I realized it was a hollow mortal cliché. She would live forever, as I would live forever. But wasn’t it so for mortal fathers? Their daughters live forever because these fathers die first. I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened: that he listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on everything said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse — the things which often make dialogue impossible.
“And after a long interval he said, ‘I want you. I want you more than anything in the world.’
“For a moment I doubted what I’d heard. It struck me as unbelievable. And I was hopelessly disarmed by it, and the wordless vision of our living together expanded and obliterated every other consideration in my mind.
“ ‘I said that I want you. I want you more than anything in the world,’ he repeated, with only a subtle change of expression. And then he sat waiting, watching. His face was as tranquil as always, his smooth, white forehead beneath the shock of his auburn hair without a trace of care, his large eyes reflecting on me, his lips still.
“ ‘You want this of me, yet you don’t come to me,’ he said: ‘There are things you want to know, and you don’t ask. You see Claudia slipping away from you, yet you seem powerless to prevent it, and then you would hasten it, and yet you do nothing!
“ ‘I don’t understand my own feelings. Perhaps they are clearer to you than they are to me…’
“ ‘You don’t begin to know what a mystery you are!’ he said.
“ ‘But at least you know yourself thoroughly. I can’t claim that,’ I said. ‘I love her, yet I am not close to her. I mean that when I am with you as I am now, I know that I know nothing of her, nothing of anyone.’
“ ‘She’s an era for you, an era of your life. If and when you break with her, you break with the only one alive who has shared that time with you. You fear that, the isolation of it, the burden, the scope of eternal life.’
“ ‘Yes, that’s true, but that’s only a small part of it. The era, it doesn’t mean much to me. She made it mean something. Other vampires must experience this and survive it, the passing of a hundred eras.’
“ ‘But they don’t survive it,’ he said. ‘The world would be choked with vampires if they survived it. How do you think I come to be the eldest here or anywhere?’ he asked.
“I thought about this. And then I ventured, ‘They die by violence?’
“ ‘No, almost never. It isn’t necessary. How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening a vampire rises and realizes what he has feared perhaps for decades, that he simply wants no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to him has been swept off the face of the earth. And nothing remains to offer freedom from despair except the act of killing. And that vampire goes out to die. No one will find his remains. No one will know where he has gone. And often no one around him — should he still seek the company of other vampires — no one will know that he is in despair. He will have ceased long ago to speak of himself or of anything. He will vanish.’
“I sat back impressed by the obvious truth of it, and yet at the same time, everything in me revolted against that prospect. I became aware of the depth of my hope and my terror; how very different those feelings were from the alienation that he described, how very different from that awful wasting despair. There was something outrageous and repulsive in that despair suddenly. I couldn’t accept it.
“ ‘But you wouldn’t allow such a state of mind in yourself. Look at you,’ I found myself answering. ‘If there weren’t one single work of art left in this world… and there are thousands… if there weren’t a single natural beauty… if the world were reduced to one empty cell and one fragile candle, I can’t help but see you studying that candle, absorbed in the flicker of its light, the change of its colors… how long could that sustain you… what possibilities would it create? Am I wrong? Am I such a crazed idealist?’
“ ‘No,’ he said. There was a brief smile on his lips, an evanescent flush of pleasure. But then he went on simply. ‘But you feel an obligation to a world you love because that world for you is still intact. It is conceivable your own sensitivity might become the instrument of madness. You speak of works of art and natural beauty. I wish I had the artist’s power to bring alive for you the Venice of the fifteenth century, my master’s palace there, the love I felt for him when I was a mortal boy, and the love he felt for me when he made me a vampire. Oh, if I could make those times come alive for either you or me… for only an instant! What would that be worth? And what a sadness it is to me that time doesn’t dim the memory of that period, that it becomes all the richer and more magical in light of the world I see today.’
“ ‘Love?’ I asked. ‘There was love between you and the vampire who made you?’ I leaned forward.
“ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A love so strong he couldn’t allow me to grow old and die. A love that waited patiently until I was strong enough to be born to darkness. Do you mean to tell me there was no bond of love between you and the vampire who made you?’