We left for Kieff the same evening. Throughout the entire journey
Vassili never spoke. I sat mournful and silent opposite him and thought
of my brother-in-law, Peter. Not of the pale youth, already corrupted by
absinthe and women, whom we had left at Kieff a few months before, but
of the child Peter, in his short velvet suit and lace collar, whom I had
loved so dearly in the days of my girlhood--little Peter who used to run
to meet me in the sun-splashed avenues of the Villa Tarnowsky, trotting
up with his little bare legs and serious face, stopping to be kissed and
then trotting hurriedly off again, the nape of his neck showing fair and
plump beneath the upturned brim of his sailor-hat.
How well I remember that sailor-hat! The black ribbon round the crown
bore, between two anchors, the word, "_Implacable_"; and from under that
fierce device the round and gentle countenance of little Peter gazed
mildly out into the world.
Little Peter's legs were always cold. He was brought up in English
fashion, with short socks even in the depths of winter. From afar you
could see little Peter's chilly bare legs, crimson against a background
of snow. Sometimes, rubbing his knees, he would say to me: "I wish God
had made me of fur, instead of--of leather, like this." And again he
would remark: "I don't like being alive. Not that I want to die; but I
wish I had never begun."
And now little Peter had finished. Little Peter lay solemn and
magnificent in the _chambre ardente_ where his dead ancestors had lain
solemn and magnificent before him. "Implacable" indeed he lay, unmoved
by the tears of his mother and father; his lofty brow was marble; his
fair eyelashes lowered over his quenched and upturned eyes.
When I thought of him thus I felt afraid.
And it seemed strange to be afraid of little Peter.