Two days later, in the morning, Lubimoff saw the Colonel go out dressed
in black.
He was going to the funeral of Martinez. He and Novoa felt it was their
duty, as Spaniards, to accompany the hero on his last earthly journey.
On his return he told his impressions, with painful conciseness, to the
Prince. A few convalescent officers had followed the bier. The Professor
and he were the only ones in civilian clothes present. In spite of his
garb, those kindly heroic boys, seeing that he was a Colonel and a
compatriot of the dead man, had obliged him to preside over the funeral
services.
The Beausoleil Cemetery lay half way up the slope of the mountain on the
crest of which La Turbie is situated. On account of the war, it had been
necessary to enlarge it by several level plots of ground that formed a
series of terraces. From these esplanades the eye embraced a magnificent
view: Monte Carlo, Monaco, immediately below that, Cap-Martin advancing
out over the waves, finally the infinite expanse of sea that rose and
rose until it mingled with the sky. A monument with a rooster arrogant
and victorious on its summit held the remains of the combatants who had
died for France. Don Marcos was still much moved by the speech he had
delivered, while all stood hushed, at the entrance to this common tomb,
which was about to swallow up forever the body of Martinez.
"It was a speech for men," said Toledo, with pride, "for men who had
been crippled in warfare. Nothing but heroes before me! There wasn't a
single woman at the funeral."
This was the detail that interested the Prince most: "Not a single
woman." And he asked himself again what could have become of Alicia.
Toward the end of the afternoon, as he was walking about his gardens, he
saw Lady Lewis coming, preceded by the Colonel.
The Prince took refuge in his house. The nurse was undoubtedly arriving
with a group of convalescent Englishmen, and wanted to run about among
the trees and pick flowers. He did not feel he had the strength to
listen to her chatter, which was like the twittering of a gay but
wounded bird and was filled with a happiness that persisted tenaciously
in the midst of grief, and continued even to the threshold of death.
The Prince was going up the stairway to retire to the upper rooms, when
the Colonel overtook him; but before the latter could speak Lubimoff
turned on him in a rage. He didn't want to see the nurse! Let her take
her Englishmen over the gardens; she might go about in them as though
they belonged to her; but as for himself, he wanted her to leave him
alone.
"Marquis," said Toledo, "the noble woman has come alone and must talk
with your Highness. She has something important to say to you."
The Prince and the nurse sat down in wicker chairs out of doors in a
little open space surrounded by leafy trees. A fountain was laughing as
great drops of water scattered from its lazy jet.
The greenish light reflected through the grove made Lady Lewis appear
weaker and more anaemic. What was left of life seemed concentrated in her
eyes, before taking flight and vanishing like some volatile fluid, into
space. The Prince was beginning to forget his recent anger. Poor Lady
Mary! Once more he had a feeling of tenderness and respect for her. Her
physical wretchedness finally changed his pity into the kind of
admiration that disinterested sacrifice always inspires.
Accustomed to living amid the deepest sorrows, to witnessing the
greatest catastrophes, Lady Lewis paid little attention to the
conventions prevailing in ordinary life and spoke at once, with a
certain military abruptness, of the reason for her visit.
She was coming in behalf of the Duchess de Delille. She had spent the
last two days at Villa Rosa, sleeping there in order not to leave the
Duchess a single moment. First, Alicia's wild despair, followed later by
a complete collapse, had frightened her. The lady had tried to kill
herself.
"Poor woman!... She finally grew calm, seeing the true light, and
realizing the path she must take. I feel satisfied that I've
accomplished that much by my words."
Lubimoff's questioning glance remained fixed on the English woman. What
light and what path was she talking about? But there was something that
interested him more: the motive of her visit, the message that the
Duchess had given her for him.
Lady Lewis read his thoughts.
"She asked me to see you, Prince; that is her last wish as she leaves
the world. She begs you to forget her, never to seek her out, and above
all to forgive her for the harm she has done you involuntarily.
Forgiveness is what she most ardently yearns for. When I tell her that
you don't hate her, it will restore the serenity she needs for her new
life."
Michael had been absorbed in deep thought. Forgive her? Alicia had not
done him any harm. From himself, from his own desires and
disillusionments, his sufferings had come. If he had remained faithful
to the principles he had announced some months before when he hated
women, he would not have suffered the slightest change in the sensible
life he had been leading. Besides, where was she? Could he not see her?
This flood of questions was interrupted by Lady Lewis. She continued to
smile sweetly, but her voice revealed the firmness of an unalterable
will.
"The Duchess is no longer living in Monte Carlo; I have arranged
everything in regard to her trip. I am the only one who knows where she
is, and I shall never tell. Do not look for her; let her go away in
peace in her quest for truth; think of her as dead ... as others have
died, as thousands of beings are dying and will continue to die in this
period of ours, with each day's sun. Forgive and forget. Poor woman! She
is so unhappy."
Lubimoff understood how futile all his questions would be. His
curiosity, no matter how strong and subtle, would fail in contact with
that impenetrable reserve. Alicia had disappeared forever ... forever!
He now felt sadder and lonelier than ever before. As he sat there beside
this Amazon of human sorrow, he had a feeling of confidence similar to
that which the Duchess must have felt during those last few days. It was
a desire to make a confession to her, an instinctive impulse to bare his
soul, as though from that woman who brought to death beds the
light-hearted merriment of a bird, might come the supreme counsel of
wisdom.
The Prince nodded his head, murmuring his assent: "Yes, I forgive her."
He did not wish the other woman to bear the slightest burden of grief on
his account. He would shoulder all that, himself. But immediately
afterward he could not resist the impulse of that anguish to express
itself. He was himself astonished at the words which, overriding all
restraint, escaped from his lips.
"I, too, Lady Lewis, am very unhappy."
The nurse did not show any surprise at such a burst of confidence. She
simply continued to smile, and said laconically:
"I know."
Her smile was changing to a look of sweet pity, of beneficent
compassion, as though the Prince were a child in need of her advice.
She had guessed his unhappiness long before the Duchess had talked to
her in the hours of despairing confession. He believed he was unhappy
through being crossed in love; but actually, this sorrow was only the
outer shell of another which was deeper and more real, and which
depended on himself alone.
He had tried to live apart from his fellow-beings, ignoring their
troubles, selfishly withdrawing into a shell. He had wished, by
loitering on the margin of humanity which was suffering the greatest
crisis in all its history, to prolong the pleasures of peace into a time
of war. One could understand such aloofness in a coward, dominated by
the instinct of self-preservation; but _he_ was a brave man. One could
tolerate it in a man who was burdened with children, who constantly felt
the imperious duty of supporting them, and was afraid on that account;
but he was alone in the world.
"We are all unhappy, Prince. Who doesn't know grief and death these
days?"
And she talked in monotonous tones of her own misfortune, as though she
were reciting a prayer. Her smile, the smile that animated the anaemic
homeliness of her features with a vaporous light of dawn, gradually
faded.
Six of her brothers had been killed in one afternoon. They belonged to
the same battalion and she had received the news of the six deaths at
the same time. Thirty-two of her relatives were now beneath the ground
and very few of them had been soldiers in the beginning. Before the war
they had lived lives of pleasure. They enjoyed great wealth and titles:
Life had been as sweet to them as to Prince Lubimoff.... But when they
heard the call of duty!... "No one chooses the spot where he is born; no
one can decide which his country shall be and what his lineage. We come
into the world according to the whims of chance, in the upper or the
lower stories of society, and we mold our lives according to the place
designated by fate. Neither can any one choose the times he will live
in. Happy they who are born in peace times, when humanity is wrapped in
calm, and its prehistoric savagery is slumbering within the shell formed
by civilization; happy also they who are born into a powerful family and
find themselves exempted from the struggle of life."
"But when we are born into a period of madness," she continued, "we have
to resign ourselves and adapt ourselves to it, without seeking to avoid
the painful burden that falls on our shoulders. It is our duty to suffer
so that others later on may be happy as our forefathers suffered for our
sakes."
What grief she had felt on receiving at a single stroke the news of the
death of all her brothers! She did not consider herself an extraordinary
being; she was simply a woman like any other. She had wept. She had
abandoned herself to her despair. Then, an idea kept drifting through
her mind joyously refreshing her drooping spirits. Supposing men were
immortal in this life! Then despair would be horrible indeed. If you
considered that the dead might have saved their lives by keeping far
from every danger! But no one was immortal.
"Whether you die from a bullet wound or from microbes, makes little
difference. Only the external circumstances vary, and for many people
there is a greater fascination in returning to dust in a lightning-like
manner in the full intoxication of battle, with a generous idea in one's
mind, than in slowly fading away in confinement between two sheets,
defiled and degraded by the filth of a material nature beginning to
disintegrate.
"It is a sort of holy fear necessary, for that matter, to the
preservation of human life, and it troubles people and makes them hide
from themselves the terrible truth that waits at the end of every life.
Sensible people consider it madness to go out in quest of death. It is
all very well if death is something motionless which sets hands only on
those who draw near it of their own accord. But if man does not go
forward to meet death, death, with its hundred-league boots, runs in
search of man. Who can guess the moment of the meeting? The best thing,
then, is to scorn it; and not pay it the tribute of constant thought
which engenders anxiety and fear.
"Besides, death in bed is an unfruitful and sterile death. To whom could
it be of use, except one's heirs? The other kind of death, death for an
idea, even for an erroneous idea, means something positive. It is an act
of energy and faith and the aggregate of such acts makes up the noblest
history of humanity."
The Prince admired the simplicity with which this woman, who was almost
in a dying condition, exalted the heroism of life and scorned death.
She had placed her ideal very high beyond the selfish desires which form
the warp and woof of ordinary lives. If every one were to suit merely
his own convenience, humanity as a whole would have no reason to
consider itself superior to animals.
The noblewoman possessed an ideal: to sacrifice herself for her fellow
beings; to serve them even at the cost of her own life. She was almost
glad of the war, which had helped her to find her true path. In peace
times she would have done the same as every woman, linking her lot with
that of a man, bearing children and building up a family.
"Amorous affection reduces the world to two beings; a mother's love
finds nothing of interest beyond her own progeny. Only when old age is
reached and the illusory perspectives of life have faded away, is the
great truth apparent that people must be interested in every living
being, ready to sacrifice themselves for every living being. But the
exalted sympathy of old age is unfruitful and brief."
Mary Lewis considered herself fortunate in having rushed forward in the
right direction from the first moment, without the long evasions of
other people, who are late in reaching the truth.
"I have had my romance, like every one else."
She said this simply, but at the same time what blood was left in her
veins animated her features with a faint blush, as though she were
confessing something extraordinary.
She had been loved by a scholarly man, a former secretary of her father,
the Colonial Governor. Only once had they confessed their love.
Afterwards their life continued as before, both of them keeping the
secret, postponing the realization of their dreams to an indefinite
future.... But the war came.
He had hastened, among the first, to enlist as a volunteer: "Mary, I am
a soldier." And Mary had replied: "That is right." They wrote short
letters to each other at long intervals. They had more important things
to do. He did not have the handsome features and the strength of a hero,
like Lady Lewis' brothers. He even suspected that his bearing was
scarcely military because of the ungainliness that comes from a
sedentary life, spent in bending over a writing table. But he did his
duty, and more than once he had been cited for his cool audacity.
Their desires would now never be fulfilled. Even though she might
succeed in surviving the war, she would continue her present existence
in civilian hospitals, in far-off countries scourged by plagues. He
perhaps would marry another, or perhaps would remain faithful to her
memory, devoting himself for his part to relieving the pain and sorrows
of his fellow beings. But they would live apart, going where duty called
them, thinking constantly of each other, but without meeting, like the
cultivated monks and passionate nuns of other centuries, who filled
their lives with spiritual friendships maintained in widely separated
monasteries and convents.
Once more Michael admired her abnegation. Lady Lewis belonged to that
small group of the elect, who do not know what selfishness is and long
to sacrifice themselves for what is good. She was one of that immortal
line of saintly women who existed before the birth of religion and who
will continue to flourish just the same when skepticism has finally
ruined all our present beliefs.
"You are an angel," said the Prince.
"No," she protested; "I am a lover, a great lover."
Lubimoff smiled with a certain air of pity.
"You a lover?"
She went on talking as though her listener's surprise annoyed her. What
was other women's love compared to hers? They fixed their tenderness,
their desire for self-sacrifice, on one man only. Beyond him they found
nothing worthy of interest. She loved all men, all of them, even the
soldiers of the enemy whom she had often cared for in the ambulances at
the front. They were mistaken, and if they really were guilty souls and
wished to continue being so, all she could see in them was their
physical condition as, threatened by death, they lay stretched out on
their beds, with their flesh mangled. They were simply unfortunate
beings, and this was enough to make her forget their nationality.
She wanted her own side to triumph because the other represented the
exaltation of brute strength, the glorification of war, and it was her
desire that there should be no more wars. She longed for the time when
love would rule the whole world!... It was bad enough that men could not
suppress with like facility, poverty, pain and death, the black
divinities which seize us at our birth and with whom we struggle up to
the last moment.
"I love everything that is alive: People, animals, and flowers. Beside
such love, what is the affection between a man and a woman, which people
consider the only love and is simply the selfishness of two beings
setting themselves apart from their fellow beings, and living only for
themselves? My love is likewise a kind of selfishness. I realize it;
perhaps it is something worse: pride. If you only knew how gay I feel
when I have saved from death one of my 'flirts,' one of those poor
wounded men whom I shall never see again!... No, don't admire me,
Prince, and don't feel sorry for me. I am merely a poor woman! by no
means an angel! Moreover, I am very bad; I have my repentances, like
every one else."
"You, Lady Mary!" the Prince exclaimed again with a look of incredulity.
That he should have no doubts about it she hastened to relate the great
sin of her life. Traveling through Andalusia she had seen some boys on a
river bank who were trying to drown a stray dog, throwing stones at it.
Mary fell upon them, mad with rage, striking them with her parasol. One
of the little fellows wept, and blood spurted from his nostrils. This
unhappy memory had often troubled her in the night. Now she could not
see a child without caressing it with all the ardor occasioned by
remorse.
Also she had had quarrels in various countries with drivers who were
whipping their work animals and with hotel keepers who would not allow
her to keep in her room lost dogs and cats she found in the streets.
Before the war, her pity had been entirely for animals. Humanity was
able to defend itself. But now, the butchery of beings in uniforms had
turned her sweet tenderness toward mankind. They needed love and
protection more than the poor brutes.
The mention of her "flirts" suddenly brought her back to her duty. At
that very moment they were tossing, covered with bandages, in their
beds, and anxiously calling for her presence. Or else they were sitting
on a bench with motionless eyes turned toward the sun, refusing to take
a walk until they could feel the gentle support of her arm. "Good-by,
Prince!" She must go! Her lovers were waiting for her.
As she stood up, she thought again of the reason for her visit and spoke
once more in the tone that revealed the firmness of her will.
It was useless for him to seek the Duchess. The poor woman after
entering so many blind alleys in her life, had finally found the true
path, the one she herself, more fortunate, had discovered while still in
her youth. The Virgin Dolorosa spoke in a simple, natural way of
Alicia's past. She knew it all. In the silence of Villa Rosa, the other
woman had confessed it in despair, without the nurse feeling either
scandalized or amazed. What did the moral capacity of a mere individual
mean, when at every moment the world was beholding the most unheard of
crimes.
"She left this morning and is a long way off--a long way!" said the
gentle woman. "It is possible that you will never see each other again.
I will write her that you forgive her. That will afford her the peace of
mind she needs in her new life."
The Prince was going with her as far as the entrance to his gardens.
During the walk he began once more to lament his fate. He needed to
relieve by articulation the despair in which he was left by the refusal
of the English woman to tell him where Alicia was staying.
"I am very unhappy, Lady Mary."
"I know," she replied. "My misfortunes are greater than yours, but I
rise above them better."
For Mary life was a sort of balance. In one pan of the scales suffering
had perforce to fall. No one could free himself from that burden. But
the spirit must re-establish the equilibrium by placing in the other pan
something great, an ideal, a hope. She had found the necessary
counterweight: love for everything alive, sacrifice for one's fellow
beings, and consequent abnegation.
What did the Prince have to counter-balance the shocks of destiny?...
Nothing. He went on living the same as in peace times, thinking only of
himself. He was still just as the great mass of men had been, before the
war drew them from their selfish individualism, making the virtues of
solidarity and sacrifice flourish once more in their souls. For that
reason all he needed to feel desperate was a mere obstacle to his
desires, a disappointment in love, that should really be an affliction
only in the life of a mere boy. Oh, if only he could get a high ideal!
If only he could think less about himself and more about mankind!...
They shook hands beside the gate.
"Good-by, Lady Lewis!" said the Prince, bowing.
If Don Marcos had been present the Prince's voice at that moment would
have sounded familiar to him. It was the same as on the afternoon of the
duel, when he met the English woman with the two blind men; a
beautifully solemn voice which wavered close to tears.
Toledo did not appear until a few moments later, coming out of the
gardener's pavilion, to meet the Prince, who was returning pensively
toward the villa.
Lubimoff spoke and gave an order in stern tones.
"I am leaving for Paris. I want to go to-morrow. Make all the necessary
arrangements."
Then, as he gazed into the Colonel's eyes, he continued in a gentler
voice:
"I think I shall never return here.... I am going to sell Villa
Sirena."