After that all is dark. A blood-red abyss seems to open in my memory
wherein everything is submerged--even my reason.
My reason! I have felt it totter and fall, like something detached and
apart from myself; and I know that it has sunk into the grave that
covers Alexis Bozevsky.
Vaguely, from my distant childhood, a memory rises up and confronts me.
I am in a school. I know not where. It is sunset, and I am at play,
happy and alone, in the midst of a lawn; the daisies in the grass are
already closed and rose-tipped, blushing in their sleep. Some one calls
my name, and raising my eyes I see the small eager face of my playmate
Tatiana peering out of an oval window in an old turret, where none of us
are ever allowed to go. "Mura! Mura! Come quickly," she cries. "The
turret is full of swallows!"
"Full of swallows!" I can still recall the ecstasy of joy with which
those three words filled me. I ran to the entrance of the old tower and
helter-skeltered up the dark and narrow staircase; then, pushing aside a
mildewed door, I found myself with Tatiana in a gloomy loft, and yes,
yes! it was full of swallows!
They flew hither and thither, darting over our heads, brushing our
faces, making us shriek with delight. We managed to catch any number of
them. Many were even lying on the ground. Tatiana filled her apron with
the fluttering creatures, while I held some in my handkerchief and some
in my hands. Then we ran downstairs into the dining-hall: "Look, look!
we have caught a lot of swallows!" I can still see the girls crowding
round us, and the face of the mistress bending forward with an
incredulous smile; I see her shrink back, horrified and pale, with a cry
of disgust: "Mercy upon us! They are all bats!"
Even now the recollection of the shrieks we uttered as we flung them
from us makes my flesh creep; even now I seem to feel the slippery
smoothness of those cold membranes gliding through my fingers and near
my cheeks....
To what end does this childish recollection enter into the dark tragedy
of my life? This--that when I mount into the closed turret of my mind in
quest of winged thoughts and soaring fancies, alas! there glide through
my brain only the monstrous spirits of madness, the black bats of
hypochandria....
I remember little or nothing of those somber days in Yalta. I can
vaguely recollect Stahl telling me over and over again in answer to my
delirious cries for Bozevsky: "He is dead! He is dead! He is dead!" And
as I could not and would not believe him, he took me in a closed
carriage through many streets; then into a low building and through
echoing stone passages into a large bare room--a dissecting room!
The horror of it seals my lips.
Still more vaguely do I recollect the death of Stahl himself. I know
that one evening he shot himself through the heart, and was carried to
the hospital. I know that he sent me the following words traced in
tremulous handwriting on a torn piece of paper: "Mura! I have only half
an hour to live. Come to me, I implore you. Come!"
I did not go to him. The terrible lessons he had taught me were bearing
fruit; all I did when brought face to face with some new calamity was to
take injection after injection of morphia; and thus I sank down again
into the twilight world of unreality in which, during that entire
period, I moved like one in a dream.
I seemed to be living under water, in a perpetual dimness--a fluid,
undulating dusk.
No sooner did I find myself rising to the surface of consciousness, and
the noisy harshness of life confronted me again, than my trembling hands
sought the case that hid the little glass viper of oblivion--the
hypodermic syringe of Pravaz.
Over the tremulous flame of a candle I heated the phial of whitish
powder and watched it gradually dissolve into a clear crystalline liquid
that the hollow needle thirstily drank up: then I bared my arm and
thrust the steel point aslant into my flesh. Soothing and benumbing the
morphia coursed through my veins; and I sank once more into the
well-known beatific lethargy, the undulating dusk of unreality and
sleep....
But one day a call thrilled through the enveloping cloud and reached my
heart: it was the call of motherhood. Tioka! Tania! Where were my
children? Why, why were my arms empty when these two helpless and
beloved creatures were mine?
Horrified at myself and at the dream-like apathy in which I had strayed
so long, I tore myself from the degrading captivity of narcotics and
with trembling steps tottered towards the threshold of life once more.
With dazed eyes I beheld the altered world around me.
How everything had changed! I was no longer the Countess Tarnowska,
flattered, envied and beloved. The women who had formerly been my
friends turned their eyes away from me, while on the other hand men
stared at me boldly in a way they had never dared to look at me before.
Vassili--the frivolous, light-hearted Vassili--shut his door upon me, and
secluded himself in grim and formidable silence as in the walls of a
fortress. Vainly did I beat upon it with weak hands, vainly did I pray
for pity. Inexorable and inaccessible he remained, locked in his scorn
and his resentment. Nor ever have the gates of his home or of his heart
opened to me again.