by storm, and its defenders were all killed or scattered. The body of
Deville has not yet been found, and there is no reliable evidence as to
what took place in the town after the 21st. It must be conjectured, from
the state in which the town was found, that anarchy reached its last
limits. The gloomy streets, lit up by the glare of bonfires of furniture
and books, can be imagined. They obtained fire by striking iron on
flint. Crowds of drunkards and madmen danced wildly about the bonfires.
Men and women drank together and passed the common cup from lip to lip.
The worst scenes of sensuality were witnessed. Some sort of dark
atavistic sense enlivened the souls of these townsmen, and half-naked,
unwashed, unkempt, they danced the dances of their remote ancestors, the
contemporaries of the cave-bears, and they sang the same wild songs as
did the hordes when they fell with stone axes upon the mammoth. With
songs, with incoherent exclamations, with idiotic laughter, mingled the
cries of those who had lost the power to express in words their own
delirious dreams, mingled also the moans of those in the convulsions of
death. Sometimes dancing gave way to fighting--for a barrel of wine, for
a woman, or simply without reason, in a fit of madness brought about by
contradictory emotion. There was nowhere to flee; the same dreadful
scenes were everywhere, the same orgies everywhere, the same fights, the
same brutal gaiety or brutal rage--or else, absolute darkness, which
seemed more dreadful, even more intolerable to the staggered
imagination.
Zvezdny became an immense black box, in which were some thousands of
man-resembling beings, abandoned in the foul air from hundreds of
thousands of dead bodies, where amongst the living was not one who
understood his own position. This was the city of the senseless, the
gigantic madhouse, the greatest and most disgusting Bedlam which the
world has ever seen. And the madmen destroyed one another, stabbed or
strangled one another, died of madness, died of terror, died of hunger,
and of all the diseases which reigned in the infected air.
* * * * *
It goes without saying that the Government of the Republic did not
remain indifferent to the great calamity which had overtaken the
capital. But it very soon became clear that no help whatever could be
given. No doctors, nurses, officers, or workmen of any kind would agree
to go to Zvezdny. After the breakdown of the railroad service and of the
airships it was, of course, impossible to get there, the climatic
conditions being too great an obstacle. Moreover, the attention of the
Government was soon absorbed by cases of the disease appearing in other
towns of the Republic. In some of these it threatened to take on the
same epidemic character, and a social panic set in that was akin to what
happened in Zvezdny itself. A wholesale exodus from the more populated
parts of the Republic commenced. The work in all the mines came to a
standstill, and the entire industrial life of the country faded away.
But thanks, however, to strong measures taken in time, the progress of
the disease was arrested in these towns, and nowhere did it reach the
proportions witnessed in the capital.
The anxiety with which the whole world followed the misfortunes of the
young Republic is well known. At first no one dreamed that the trouble
could grow to what it did, and the dominant feeling was that of
curiosity. The chief newspapers of the world (and in that number our own
_Northern European Evening News_) sent their own special correspondents
to Zvezdny--to write up the epidemic. Many of these brave knights of the
pen became victims of their own professional obligations. When the news
became more alarming, various foreign governments and private societies
offered their services to the Republic. Some sent troops, others
doctors, others money; but the catastrophe developed with such rapidity
that this goodwill could not obtain fulfilment. After the breakdown of
the railway service the only information received from Zvezdny was that
of the telegrams sent by the Nachalnik. These telegrams were forwarded
to the ends of the earth and printed in millions of copies. After the
wreck of the electrical apparatus the telegraph service lasted still a
few days longer, thanks to the accumulators of the power-house. There is
no accurate information as to why the telegraph service ceased
altogether; perhaps the apparatus was destroyed. The last telegram of
Horace Deville was that of the 27th of June. From that date, for almost
six weeks, humanity remained without news of the capital of the
Republic.
During July several attempts were made to reach Zvezdny by air. Several
new airships and aeroplanes were received by the Republic. But for a
long time all efforts to reach the city failed. At last, however, the
aeronaut, Thomas Billy, succeeded in flying to the unhappy town. He
picked up from the roof of the town two people in an extreme state of
hunger and mental collapse. Looking through the ventilators Billy saw
that the streets were plunged in absolute darkness; but he heard wild
cries, and understood that there were still living human beings in the
town. Billy, however, did not dare to let himself down into the town
itself. Towards the end of August one line of the electric railway was
put in order as far as the station Lissis, a hundred and five kilometres
from the town. A detachment of well-armed men passed into the town,
bearing food and medical first-aid, entering by the northwestern gates.
They, however, could not penetrate further than the first blocks of
buildings, because of the dreadful atmosphere. They had to do their work
step by step, clearing the bodies from the streets, disinfecting the air
as they went. The only people whom they met were completely
irresponsible. They resembled wild animals in their ferocity and had to
be captured and held by force. About the middle of September train
service with Zvezdny was once more established and trains went
regularly.
At the time of writing the greater part of the town has already been
cleared. Electric light and heating are once more in working order. The
only part of the town which has not been dealt with is the American
quarter, but it is thought that there are no living beings there. About
ten thousand people have been saved, but the greater number are
apparently incurable. Those who have to any degree recovered evince a
strong disinclination to speak of the life they have gone through. What
is more, their stories are full of contradiction and often not confirmed
by documentary evidence. Various newspapers of the last days of July
have been found. The latest to date, that of the 22nd of July, gives the
news of the death of Horace Deville and the invitation of shelter in the
Town Hall. There are, indeed, some other pages marked August, but the
words printed thereon make it clear that the author (who was probably
setting in type his own delirium) was quite irresponsible. The diary of
Horace Deville was discovered, with its regular chronicle of events from
the 28th of June to the 20th of July. The frenzies of the last days in
the town are luridly witnessed by the things discovered in streets and
houses. Mutilated bodies everywhere: the bodies of the starved, of the
suffocated, of those murdered by the insane, and some even half-eaten.
Bodies were found in the most unexpected places: in the tunnels of the
Metropolitan railway, in sewers, in various sheds, in boilers. The
demented had sought refuge from the surrounding terrors in all possible
places. The interiors of most houses had been wrecked, and the booty
which robbers had found it impossible to dispose of had been hidden in
secret rooms and cellars.
It will certainly be several months before Zvezdny will become habitable
once more. Now it is almost empty. The town, which could accommodate
three million people, has but thirty thousand workmen, who are cleansing
the streets and houses. A good number of the former inhabitants who had
previously fled have returned, however, to seek the bodies of their
relatives and to glean the remains of their lost fortunes. Several
tourists, attracted by the amazing spectacle of the empty town, have
also arrived. Two business men have opened hotels and are doing pretty
well. A small café-chantant is to be opened shortly, the troupe for
which has already been engaged.
_The Northern-European Evening News_ has for its part sent out a new
correspondent, Mr. Andrew Ewald, and hopes to obtain circumstantial news
of all the fresh discoveries which may be made in the unfortunate
capital of the Republic of the Southern Cross.
THE MARBLE BUST:
A TRAMP’S STORY
He had been tried for burglary, and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.
I was struck by the behaviour of the old man in court and by the
circumstances under which the crime had been committed. I obtained
permission to visit the prisoner. At first he would have nothing to do
with me, and would not speak; but finally he told me the story of his
life.
“You are right,” said he. “I have seen better days, and I haven’t always
been a miserable wanderer about the streets, nor always slept in
night-houses. I had a good education. I--am an engineer. In my youth I
had a little money and I lived a gay life: every evening I went to a
party or to a ball and ended up with a drinking bout. I remember that
time well, even trifling details I remember. And yet there is a gap in
my recollections that I would give all the rest of my unworthy life to
fill up--everything which has anything to do with Nina.
“She was called Nina, dear sir; yes, Nina. I’m sure of that. Her husband
was a minor official on the railway. They were poor. But how clever she
was in making of the pitiful surroundings of her life something elegant
and, as it were, specially refined. She herself did the cooking, but her
hands were, as it were, carefully wrought. Of her poor clothes she made
a marvellous dream. Yes, and the whole everyday world, on contact with
her, became fantastical. I myself, meeting her, became other than I was,
better, and shook off, as rain from my clothes, all the sordidness of
life.
“May God forgive her sin in loving me. Everything around her was so
coarse that she couldn’t help falling in love with me, young and
handsome as I was and knowing so much poetry by heart. But when I first
made her acquaintance, and how--this I cannot now call to mind. Separate
pictures draw themselves out from the darkness. See, we are at the
theatre. She, happy, gay (this was so rare with her), is drinking in
every word of the play, and she is smiling at me.... I remember her
smile. Afterwards, we were together at some place or other. She bent her
head down to me, and said: ‘I know that you will not be my happiness for
very long; never mind, I shall have lived.’ I remember these words. But
what happened directly afterwards, and whether it is really true that
all this happened when I was with Nina, I don’t know.
“Of course, it was I who first gave her up. This seems to me so natural.
All my companions acted in this way: they flirted with some married
woman, and then, after a while, cast her off. I only acted as everybody
else did, and it didn’t even enter my mind that I was behaving badly. To
steal money, not to pay one’s debts, to turn informer--this was bad, but
to cast off a woman whom one has loved was only the way of the world. A
brilliant future was before me, and I could not bind myself to a sort of
romantic love. It was painful, very painful, but I gained the victory
over myself, and I even saw a _podvig_ in my resolution to overcome this
pain.
“I heard that Nina went away afterwards with her husband to the south,
and that soon after she died. But my memories of Nina were so tormenting
that I avoided at that time all news of her. I tried to know nothing
about her and not to think of her. I had not kept her portrait, I had
returned her letters, we had no mutual acquaintances--and so, little by
little, the image of Nina was erased from my soul. Do you understand? I
gradually came to forget Nina, forget her entirely, her face, her name,
and all her love. It came to be as if she had actually never existed at
all in my life.... Ah, there’s something shameful for a man in this
ability to forget!
“The years went by. I won’t tell you now how I ‘made a career.’ Without
Nina, of course I dreamed only of external success, of money. At one
time I had nearly obtained the complete success at which I aimed. I
could spend thousands, could travel abroad. I married and had children.
Afterwards, everything turned to loss; the works which I designed were
unsuccessful; my wife died; finding myself left with children on my
hands, I sent them away to relatives, and now, God forgive me, I don’t
even know if my little boys are alive. As you may guess, I drank and
played cards.... I started an agency--it did not succeed; it swallowed
up my last money and energy. I tried to get straight by gambling, and
only just escaped being sent to prison--yes, and not entirely without
reason. My friends turned against me and my downfall began.
“Little by little I got to the point where you now see me. I, so to
speak, ‘dropped out’ of intellectual society and fell into the abyss.
What place could I presume to take, badly dressed, almost always
drunken? Of late years I have worked for months, when not drinking, as a
labourer in various factories. And when I had a drinking bout--I would
turn up in the Thieves’ market and doss-houses. I passionately detested
the people I met, and was always dreaming that suddenly my fate would
change and I should be rich once more. I expected to receive some sort
of non-existent inheritance or something of that kind. And I despised my
companions because they had no such hope.
“Well, one day, all shivering with cold and hunger, I wander into
someone’s yard without knowing why, and something happens. Suddenly the
cook calls out to me, ‘Hallo, my boy, you don’t happen to be a
locksmith, do you?’ ‘Yes, I’m a locksmith,’ says I. They wanted someone
to mend the lock of a writing-table. I found myself in a luxurious
study, gold all about, and pictures. I began to work and did what was
wanted, and the lady gave me a rouble. I took the money, and, all of a
sudden, I saw on a little white pedestal, a marble bust. At first I felt
faint. I don’t know why. I stared at it and couldn’t believe: Nina!
“I tell you, dear sir, I had quite forgotten Nina, and at this moment
specially, for the first time, I understood it, understood that I had
forgotten her. Suddenly her image swam before my eyes, and a whole
universe of feelings, dreams, thoughts, buried in my soul as in some
sort of Atlantis--woke, rose again, lived again.... I look at the marble
bust, all trembling, and I say: ‘Permit me to ask, lady, whose bust is
that?’ ‘Oh, that,’ says she, ‘is a very valuable thing; it was made five
hundred years ago, in the fifteenth century.’ She told me the name of
the sculptor, but I didn’t catch it, and she said that her husband had
brought this bust from Italy, and that because of it there had arisen a
whole diplomatic correspondence between the Italian and Russian
Cabinets. ‘But,’ says the lady to me, ‘you don’t mean to say it pleases
you? What an up-to-date taste you have! Don’t you see that the ears,’
says she, ‘are not in the right place, and the nose is irregular
...?’--and she went away; she went away.
“I rushed out as if I were suffocating. This was not a likeness, but an
actual portrait; nay more--it was a sort of re-creation of life in
marble. Tell me, by what miracle could an artist in the fifteenth
century make those same tiny ears, set on awry, which I knew so well,
those same eyes, just a tiny bit aslant, that irregular nose, and the
high sloping forehead, out of which unexpectedly you got the most
beautiful, the most captivating woman’s face? By what miracle could
there live two women so much alike--one in the fifteenth century, the
other in our own day? And that she whom the sculptor had modelled was
absolutely the same, and like to Nina not only in face but in character
and in soul, I could not doubt.
“That day changed the whole of my life. I understood all the meanness of
my behaviour in the past and all the depth of my fall. I understood Nina
as an angel, sent to me by Destiny and not recognised by me. To bring
back the past was impossible. But I began eagerly to gather together my
remembrances of Nina as one might gather up the shattered bits of a
precious vase. How few they were! Try as I would I could get nothing
whole. All were fragments, splinters. But how I rejoiced when I
succeeded in making out in my soul something new. Thinking over these
things and remembering, I would spend whole hours; people laughed at me,
but I was happy. I was old; it was late for me to begin life anew, but I
could still cleanse my soul from base thoughts, from malice towards my
fellows and from murmuring against my Creator. And in my remembrances of
Nina I found this cleansing.
“I wanted desperately to look once more at the statue. I wandered whole
evenings near the house where it was and I tried to see the marble bust,
but it stood a long way from the windows. I spent whole nights in front
of the house. I knew all the people who lived there, how the rooms were
arranged, and I made friends with a servant. In the summer the lady went
away into the country. And then I could no longer fight against my
desire. I thought that if I could see the marble Nina once again, I
should at once remember everything, to the end. And that would be for me
ultimate bliss. So I made up my mind to do that for which I’ve been
sentenced. You know that I didn’t succeed. They caught me in the hall.
And at the trial it came out that I’d been in the rooms on pretence of
being a locksmith, and that I’d often been seen near the house.... I was
a beggar, I had forced the locks.... However, the story’s ended now,
dear sir!”
“But we’ll make an appeal for you,” said I. “They will acquit you.”
“But why?” objected the old man. “No one grieves over my sentence, and
no one will go bail for me, and isn’t it just the same where I shall
think about Nina--in a doss-house or in a prison?”
I didn’t know what to answer, but the old man suddenly looked up at me
with his strange and faded eyes and went on:
“Only one thing worries me. What if Nina never existed, and it was
merely my poor mind, weakened by alcohol, which invented the whole story
of this love whilst I was looking at the little marble head?”
FOR HERSELF OR FOR ANOTHER
I
“It is she! No, it can’t be, but yet of course it is!” said Peter
Andreyevitch Basmanof to himself, as a lady who had previously attracted
his attention passed for the fifth or sixth time the little table at
which he was sitting.
He no longer doubted that it was Elizavieta. Certainly, they had not met
for nearly twelve years, and no woman’s face could remain unchanged
during such a period. The features, formerly thin and sharply defined,
had become somewhat fuller; the glance, once confiding as a child’s, was
now cold and stern, and in the whole face there was an expression of
self-confidence which used not to be there. But were they not the same
eyes which Basmanof had loved to liken to St. Elma’s fires, was it not
that same oval which by its purity of outline alone had often calmed his
passion, were they not the same tiny ears which he had found so sweet to
kiss? Yes, it must be Elizavieta: there could not be two women so much
alike--as much alike as the reflections in two adjoining mirrors!
Basmanof’s mind went quickly over the history of his love for
Elizavieta. Not for the first time did he thus survey it, for of all his
memories none was dearer or more sacred than this love. The young
advocate, just stepping forth into life, had met a woman somewhat older
than himself who had loved him with all the blindness of a fierce,
unreasoning, ecstatical passion. Elizavieta’s whole soul had been
absorbed by this love, and nothing else in the world had mattered to her
except this one thing--to possess her beloved, give herself to him,
worship him. She had been prepared to sacrifice all the conventions of
their “set,” she had begged Basmanof to allow her to leave her husband
and go to live with him; and in society not only had she not been
ashamed of her connection with him--which, of course, had been talked
about--but she had, as it were, gloried in it. Basmanof had never since
come across a love so self-forgetful, so ready to sacrifice itself, and
he could not have doubted that if at any time he had demanded of
Elizavieta that she should kill herself she would have fulfilled his
behest with a calm submissive rapture.
How had Basmanof profited by such a love, which comes to us only once in
life? He had been afraid of it, afraid of its immensity and its
strength. He had understood that where infinite sacrifices are made they
are necessarily accompanied by great demands. He had been afraid to
accept this love because it would have been necessary to give something
in exchange for it, and he felt himself spiritually lacking. And he had
been afraid that his just-blossoming career might be checked....
Basmanof, like a thief, had stolen half a year’s love, which could not
have been his had he been frank and shown his real character from the
first, and then he had taken advantage of the first trifling excuse to
“break off the connection.”
Ah, how ashamed he was now to recall their last meeting before this took
place. Elizavieta, blinded by her love for him, could not understand,
could not see, that her beloved was too low for her to abase herself
before him, and she had begged him on her knees not to forsake her. He
remembered how she, sobbing, had embraced his feet and let herself be
dragged along the floor, how in despair she had beaten her head against
the wall. He had learnt afterwards that his desertion had sent
Elizavieta nearly out of her mind, that at one time she had wished to
enter a convent, and that later when she became a widow she had gone
abroad. Since then he had lost all trace of her.
Was it possible that here at Interlaken he was meeting her now again,
twelve years after their rupture, calm, stern, beautiful as ever, with
her inexplicable fascination for him and her tormentingly-sweet
reminders of the past? Basmanof, sitting at the little café table,
watched the tall lady in the large Paris hat as she went by, and his
whole being burned feverishly with images and sensations of the past,
suffusing in a moment the memory of his mind and the memory of his body.
It was she, it was she, Elizavieta, whom he had not allowed to love him
as fully as she had wished, and whom he himself had not dared to love as
fully as he might, as much as he had wished! It was she, his better
self, restored again to him when his life had almost passed, she, alive
still, the possibility incarnate of reviving that which had been, of
completing and restoring it.
In spite of his self-possession Basmanof’s head was in a whirl. He paid
the waiter for his ice, got up from his seat, and walked out by the path
along which the tall lady had passed.
II
When Basmanof overtook the tall lady he raised his hat deferentially and
bowed to her. But the lady showed no sign of recognition.
“Is it possible you do not recognise me, Elizavieta Vasilievna?” asked
Basmanof, speaking in Russian.
After some hesitation the lady answered in Russian, though with a slight
accent.
“Pardon me, but you’ve probably made a mistake. I am not an acquaintance
of yours.”
“Elizavieta Vasilievna!” exclaimed Basmanof deeply hurt by such a reply.
“Surely you must recognise me! I am Peter Andreyevitch Basmanof.”
“It’s the first time I’ve heard that name,” said the lady, “and I don’t
know you at all.”
For several seconds Basmanof gazed at the lady who thus spoke to him,
asking himself whether he had not made a mistake. But there was such an
undoubted likeness, he so definitely recognised her as Elizavieta, that
blocking up the pathway to this lady in the large Paris hat, he repeated
insistently--
“I recognise _you_, Elizavieta Vasilievna! I understand that _you_ may
have reasons for concealing your true name. I understand that you may
not wish to meet your former acquaintances. But you must know that it’s
absolutely necessary for me to speak a few words to you. I have gone
through too much since we separated. I must put myself right with you. I
don’t want you to despise me.”