poet in appearance as well; he wore his hair long, and tossed back; he
dressed with an artistic sobriety; he had fine brown hair, which went
well with his pale face, just as his black clothes did; but this pallor
was too anæmic, with a yellow tinge; his eyes glittered constantly,
but, because of his enervated face, they seemed feverish; and his chest
was so thin and flat, his legs were so thin, his hands so bony, that
one became somewhat ill at ease when he would grow immoderately lively
and would run through the street or garden, bending somewhat forward,
as though he were sliding, in order to hide his defect,--he had one leg
shorter than the other. In society he was disagreeable, supercilious;
he tried to be enigmatic, negligent; or, at times, exquisitely
impertinent, audacious, at others disdainfully absent-minded and
independent in all things; but only too frequently he did not sustain
his rôles to the end,--he would forget his part and begin speaking with
a certain naïve candour and impulsiveness. And, of course, he could not
manage to hide his feelings for long, to dissemble as an unbeliever in
love and happiness on this earth: the entire house soon knew of his
being in love. He had already begun to bore the master of the house
with his visits; he began to bring, every day, bouquets of the rarest
flowers from his villa, to sit at the Marots’ from morn till night, to
recite verses more and more incomprehensible,--the children heard him,
more than once, adjuring some one to die with him; while at nights
he took to disappearing in the native quarters, in those dives where
the Arabs, wrapped up in their dirty white _bournouses_, avidly watch
stomach dances and drink the most pungent of liquors.... To put it
briefly, not even a month and a half had gone before his inamoration
had passed into God only knows what.
His nerves ceased entirely to serve him. Once he sat through almost an
entire day in silence; then got up, took his hat, and went out,--and
half an hour later was brought in from the street in a dreadful
condition: he was writhing in hysterics; he was sobbing so vehemently
that he frightened both the children and the domestics. But Mme.
Marot, it seemed, did not attach any special significance even to
this transport. She herself was restoring him back to consciousness,
herself hastily untying his cravat and persuading him to be a man, and
she only smiled when he, without any restraint whatsoever before her
husband, caught at her hands, covering them with kisses and vowing his
disinterested devotion. Still, it was necessary to put an end to all
this. And so when Emile, whom the children had soon missed, again made
his appearance several days after the fit, already calmed, even though
he resembled a man who had gone through a severe illness, Mme. Marot
gently told him all that is usually said in such cases.
“My friend, you are really like a son to me,” she had said to him,
uttering for the first time this word, “son,” and really feeling almost
a maternal tenderness toward him. “Do not, then, put me in a ridiculous
and painful position.”
“But I swear to you that you are mistaken!” he exclaimed, with earnest
vehemence. “I am only devoted to you; I only want to see you, and no
more!”
And he suddenly fell down on his knees,--they were in the garden on a
calm, sultry, dusky evening,--impulsively seized her by the hips, on
the verge of fainting from passion.... And gazing upon his hair, upon
his white, slender neck, she, with anguish and rapture, reflected:
“Ah,--yes, yes, I could have had a son almost the same as he!”
Still, from that time until his very departure for France, he committed
no more insane actions. Essentially this was bad; it may have signified
that his passion had become deeper. But outwardly everything had
changed for the better,--only one other time he could not restrain
himself. After dinner one Sunday, in the presence of several strangers,
he said to her, without at all reflecting that this might attract
attention:
“I most earnestly entreat you to grant me one minute....”
She got up and went with him into the empty, half-dark parlour. He
walked up to the window, through which the evening light penetrated
from outside in narrow longitudinal streaks, and, looking her straight
in the face, said:
“To-day is the anniversary of my father’s death. I love you!”
She turned to go away. Frightened, he hastened to add as she was going
away:
“Forgive me,--this is the first time and the last!”
And truly, she heard no new admissions from him. “I was enchanted by
her confusion,” he wrote in his diary that evening, in his choice and
grandiloquent style; “I vowed to violate her peace no more: for am I
not beatified even as it is?” He continued going into the town,--he
only slept at the Villa Hassim; and his behaviour varied, but he always
observed a greater or lesser degree of seemliness. At times he was, as
formerly, inappropriately playful, naïve, romping with the children in
the garden; most frequently of all, however, he sat near her and “drank
in her presence,” read newspapers and novels to her, and “was happy
because she listened to him.” “The children did not interfere with us,”
he wrote of these days, “their voices, laughter, bustle, their very
beings, seemed to serve as the finest of conductors for our emotions;
thanks to them these emotions were still more enchanting; we held the
commonest of every day conversations, but something else could be
heard in them,--our happiness; yes,--yes; she, too was happy, I affirm
this. She liked to hear me declaim; of evenings, from the balcony, we
contemplated Constantine lying at our feet in the blue radiance of the
moon....” Finally, in August, Mme. Marot insisted upon his going away,
returning to his studies,--and won; and _en route_ he entered in his
diary: “I am going away! Going away, empoisoned by the bitter delight
of parting! She has bestowed upon me, in parting, a bit of velvet
ribbon that she had worn about her neck as a girl. When the last minute
came, she gave me her blessing, and I saw a humid sparkle in her eyes
when she said: ‘Farewell, dear son of mine!...’”
Whether he was right in his conjecture that Mme. Marot also was happy
in August, is not known. But that his departure proved painful to
her is beyond a doubt. This word “son,” which had stirred her even
previously, now took on such a sound for her that she could not hear it
in peace. Even formerly, upon meeting friends on her way to church, who
would jestingly say to her: “What should you pray about, Mme. Marot;
you are without sin and happy as it is!” she had, more than once,
replied with a sad smile: “I complain to God because he has deprived
me of a son....” Now the thought of a son, of that happiness which he
would have ceaselessly given her by his mere existence in this world,
never left her. And once, shortly after the departure of Emile, she had
said to her husband:
“Now I have comprehended everything! I now know surely, that every
mother ought to have a son; that every woman who has no son, if she
will but ponder upon herself, will check up her entire life, will see
that she is unhappy. You are a man, you cannot feel this, but it is
so.... Oh, how tenderly and passionately one can love a son!”
She was very kind to her husband that fall. Occasionally, when she
would be left alone with him, she would shyly say to him:
“Hector, listen.... I am ashamed now to ask you about it,--but
still.... Do you ever recall the March of ’seventy-six? ... Ah, if only
you and I had a son!”
“All this confused me very much,” Monsieur Marot would say
subsequently,--“it confused me all the more because she began to grow
very thin. She was growing weaker, was becoming more and more silent
and gentle in manner. She went less and less often to her friends,--she
avoided going to the city unless it were unavoidable.... I do not doubt
that some dreadful and incomprehensible ailment was taking possession
of her soul and body!” While the _bonne_ added that, whenever Mme.
Marot went out of the house that fall, she always put on a thick white
veil,--something she had never done before; that, returning home,
she would immediately raise her veil in front of a mirror and would
intently scrutinize her tired face. It is superfluous to explain
that which went on in her soul at this time. But did she want to see
Emile, did he write to her, and did she reply to him? He presented
two dispatches at court, purporting to be addressed to him, in answer
to his letters. One was dated the tenth of November: “You are driving
me mad. Calm yourself. Let me have immediate news of yourself.” The
other, the twenty-third of December: “No, no, do not come, I implore
you. Think of me, love me, as a mother.” But the certainty of these
dispatches having been sent by her could not be proven, of course. One
thing only is certain,--that from September until January Mme. Marot
led a distressed, troubled, painful existence.
The late autumn of that year in Constantine was cold and rainy. Then,
as is always the case in Algeria, a ravishing spring came on. And an
animation,--that beatific, exquisite headiness which is experienced at
the time of the blossoming of spring by people who have already left
their youth behind them,--again began to return to Mme. Marot. She
again began to go out; rode out a great deal with her children, went
with them to the garden of the deserted Villa Hassim; she contemplated
an excursion to Algiers,--to show her children Blidah, near which, in
the mountains, there is a wooded ravine, a spot beloved of monkeys....
And so things went right up to the seventeenth of January in the year
of 1890. On the seventeenth of January, she awoke from some unusually
joyous and tender emotion, which, so it had seemed to her, had stirred
her all night long. In the large room where she slept alone during the
absence of her husband, who had gone away for a long time on matters
connected with his post, it was almost dark because of the Venetian
blinds and the window curtains. Still, by that blueish pallor which
penetrated from behind them, one could gather that it was still early.
And, in confirmation, the little clock on the night-table pointed
to six. With an enjoyable sense of the morning freshness entering
from the garden, she rolled up in a light blanket and turned to the
wall.... “Why do I feel so fine?” she thought, dozing off. And, like
dim, beautiful visions, pictures of Italy, of Sicily, began to appear
before her, pictures of that distant spring when she was sailing in a
cabin whose windows looked out on deck, upon the chill silvery shimmer
of the sea; a cabin with portieres of red silk, shrivelled and faded
by time, and with a high threshold glittering with brass that had been
worn down by many years of cleaning.... Then she saw the limitless bays
of the sea; lagoons; lowlands; a great Arabian town, all white, with
flat roofs, and with undulating mistily blue knolls and foot-hills
beyond it. This was Tunis, in which she had been but once, on that
very same spring when she had been in Naples, and in Palermo.... But
here a wave of cold seemed to go through her,--and, with a shiver, she
opened her eyes. It was already going on nine o’clock; one could hear
the voices of the children, the voice of their _bonne_. She arose,
threw on a _peignoir_, and, stepping out on the balcony, descended
into the garden and sat down on a rocker, standing in the sand near
a round table underneath a mimosa in blossom, spreading its golden
canopy overhead, its fragrance heavy in the sun. The maid brought her
coffee. She again began to think of Tunis, and recalled that strange
experience she had gone through, that sweet fear and that beatific
abnegation of her will which was like that of pre-mortal moments,--an
experience she had undergone in that pale blue city in the warm, rosy
dusk, half-reclining in a rocker on the roof of a house, vaguely seeing
the dark face of the Arab hypnotist and magician who was squatting on
his heels before her, lulling her to sleep with his barely audible,
monotonous sing-song, and the slow movements of his thin hands. And
suddenly, even as she was thinking thus and mechanically gazing with
eyes wide-open upon a bright silvery spark with which a teaspoon in a
glass of water was aflame, she suddenly lost conscience. And when she
came to with a start, Emile was standing over her. All that took place
subsequent to this unexpected meeting is known from the words of Emile
himself,--from his story, from his answers to interrogations. “Yes, I
dropped into Constantine as though from heaven!” he had said. “I had
come because I had comprehended that the powers of heaven itself could
not stop me. On the morning of the seventeenth of January, straight
from the station, without any word of warning, I appeared at the house
of Monsieur Marot and ran into the garden. I was dumbfounded by that
which met my eyes; but I had scarce made a step when she came to.
She, it seemed, was also amazed, both by the unexpectedness of my
appearance, and that which she had just been through; but she did
not even emit an exclamation. Having looked at me, like a person just
awakened from a deep sleep, she got up from her seat, putting her hair
in order.
“‘That’s the very presentiment I had,’ she said, somehow without any
expression. ‘You did not obey me!’
“And with an accustomed gesture, having buttoned the _peignoir_ at her
breast, she took my head in both her hands and kissed me twice on the
forehead.
“I lost my head from rapture and passion, but she gently put me aside
and said:
“‘Let us go; I am not dressed,--I shall return at once, go to the
children....’
“‘But, for God’s sake, what was the matter with you?’ I asked,
ascending after her to the balcony.
“‘Oh, a mere nothing--a slight trance. I had gazed too long at a
glittering tea-spoon,’ she was answering, getting control of herself,
and beginning to speak with more animation. ‘But what have you done,
what have you done!’
“I did not find the children anywhere; the house was empty and quiet;
I sat down in the parlour. Suddenly I heard her begin singing in a
distant room in a strong, sonorous voice, but I did not then comprehend
all the horror of that sound, because I was all atremble with a nervous
ague. I had not slept all night; I had counted the minutes as the train
had sped me toward Constantine; I jumped into the first _fiacre_ I had
met upon running out of the depot; I did not expect to reach the height
of the city.... I knew, I, too, had a premonition, that my arrival
would be fatal for us; but still I could not expect that which I had
seen in the garden, this mystical meeting, and such a sharp change in
her attitude toward me! After ten minutes, she came out with her hair
dressed, in a light-gray dress of an iris tint.
“‘Ah,’ said she, as I was kissing her hand, ‘but I had forgotten that
to-day is Sunday, and that the children are in church; but then, I
have over-slept.... The children will go to the pine grove after
church,--were you ever there?’
“And, without waiting for my answer, she rang, ordered some coffee to
be served to me, and, sitting down, began to look at me intently, and,
without listening, began to question me as to how I had lived, what I
had been doing. She started to speak about herself, of the fact that
after two or three months, which had been very bad for her, during
which she had aged dreadfully,--these words were uttered with sort
of incomprehensible smile,--she was feeling well, as young as never
before.... I replied, I listened, but did not understand a great deal;
both of us said anything but that which we wanted to say; my hands
grew chill from the nearness of that other fearful, inevitable hour.
I do not deny that I was struck as if by lightning when she had said
‘I have aged....’ I suddenly saw that she was right: in the thinness
of her hands, and of the faded, even though really rejuvenated face,
in the slenderness of certain outlines of the body, I caught certain
signs of that which compels our hearts to contract so painfully, and
even somehow awkwardly,--yet all the more passionately,--at the sight
of an aging woman. ‘Ah, yes, how rapidly and sharply she had changed!’
I reflected. But she was beautiful, never the less. I was growing
intoxicated as I gazed upon her. I had grown accustomed to dreaming of
her without end; I had not forgotten that moment, when on the evening
of the eleventh of July, I had first embraced her knees. Her hands,
too, were slightly trembling, when she was putting her _coiffure_ in
order, smiling, and gazing at me; and suddenly--you will understand
all the catastrophic force of this moment!--suddenly, this smile was
distorted, somehow; and, with difficulty, but firmly, she uttered:
“‘Still, you ought to go home, to rest up from the journey; your
appearance is dreadful; you have such suffering, fearful eyes and such
burning lips, that I no longer have the strength to see them.... Do you
wish me to?--I shall go there in your company....’
“And, without letting me answer, she got up and went away to get her
hat and cloak....
“We arrived quickly at the Villa Hassim. I lingered near the entrance,
in order to pluck some flowers. She did not wait for me, opening the
door herself. I had no servants; there was only the caretaker,--he
did not see us. When I stepped into the ante-room, hot and half dark
because of the closed Venetian blinds, and offered her the flowers,
she kissed them, then embracing me with one hand, she kissed me. From
emotion her lips were hot, but her voice was clear.
“‘But listen ... how shall we ... have you anything with you?’ she
asked.
“I did not at first understand her,--so had this first kiss, this first
familiar ‘you’ overwhelmed me,--and I mumbled:
“‘What do you want to say?’
“She took a step back.
“‘What!’ she said in astonishment, almost sternly. ‘Can you possibly
have thought that I ... that we can live after this? Have you anything
with you that we may die?’
“I recovered my wits and hastened to show her a revolver loaded with
five bullets, with which I never parted.
“She rapidly went on, from room to room. The semi-darkness was
everywhere. Hearing only the rustle of her silken skirts, I followed
after her, with that confusion of all the senses with which a naked man
goes on a sultry day into the sea. Finally we arrived at the end of our
journey; she threw off her cloak and began to untie the ribbons of her
hat. Her hands were still trembling, and once more I remarked through
the dusk something pitiful and tired in her face....
“But she died without wavering. During the last moments she became
transformed. Kissing me, and leaning back in order to see my face, she
told me, in a whisper, a few words so tender and touching that I have
not the strength to repeat them.
“I wanted to go to pluck some more flowers, in order to strew our
funeral couch with them. She did not let me, she was hurried, she was
saying: ‘No, no, it is not necessary ... there are plenty of flowers
... here are your flowers’--and she kept on repeating:
“‘And so, I charge you, by all that you hold sacred, that you kill me!’
“‘Yes, and then myself,’ said I, not for a second doubting my
resolution.
“‘Oh, I believe you, I believe you!’ she answered, by now as if in a
trance....
“A minute before her death she said, very quietly, but simply: ‘My God,
this is a deed without a name!’
“And again:
“‘Where are the flowers you gave me? Kiss me--for the last time.’
“She herself put the muzzle of the revolver up to her temple. I wanted
to shoot, but she stopped me:
“‘No, that isn’t right,--let me show you the right way. Here, so, my
child.... And _afterward_ make the sign of the cross over me, and lay
the flowers upon my breast....’
“When I fired, she moved her lips slightly. I fired once more....
“She lay there, calm; in her extinguished gaze there was some bitter
beatitude. Her hair was spread out; a tortoise shell comb was thrown
upon the floor. Swaying, I got up, to put an end to myself. But,
despite the Venetian blinds, it was light in the room; and in this
light, and amid this quiet which had suddenly arisen all about me, I
distinctly saw her face, already grown pallid.... And here a sudden
madness possessed me,--I dashed to the window, throwing apart, flinging
open the shutters, and began to shout, and to shoot into the air....
The rest you know....”
* * * * *
In the spring, five years ago, travelling over Algeria, the writer of
these lines visited Constantine. He often recalls now those evenings,
rainy and chill, but spring evenings never the less, which he passed
by the fireplace in the reading room of a certain old and homelike
French hotel. Upon the heavy, elaborate _étagères_ there lay tattered
illustrated journals--in them one could find some faded portraits of
Mme. Marot, at different ages,--among them, one taken in Lausanne,
when she was a girl.... Her story is told here again, through a strong
desire of telling it in my own way.
_1916._
LIGHT BREATHING
In the graveyard, over the fresh clayey mound, stands a new cross
of oak,--strong, heavy, smooth,--of the sort that is pleasant to
contemplate.
It is April, but the days are raw; the monuments of the graveyard--a
spacious, truly provincial one,--can be seen through the bare trees
even from afar, and the chill wind makes the porcelain wreath at the
foot of the cross tinkle again and again.
As for the cross itself,--a rather large bronze medallion has been set
into it; while in the medallion is a photographic portrait of a well
dressed and alluring high-school girl, with eyes joyous, strikingly
alive.
This is Olliya Meshcherskaya.
As a girl she did not in any way stand out among that noisy crowd of
short brown dresses which so discordantly and youthfully hums in the
corridors and class-rooms; what could be said of her save that she was
one of a number of rather pretty, wealthy, and happy girls, that she
was bright, but mischievous and very much unconcerned about whatever
admonitions were made to her by an instructress? Then she began to
blossom out, to develop, not by the day but by the hour. At fourteen,
while her waist was slender and her little feet graceful, she already
had well-defined breasts and all those contours, the enchantment of
which human speech has never yet expressed; at fifteen she was famed
as a beauty. How painstakingly did certain of her mates dress their
hair, how meticulous about their persons they were, how carefully
watchful of their restrained motions! But she feared nothing,--neither
ink spots on her fingers, nor a flushed face, nor disheveled hair,
nor a knee bared in a running fall. Without any cares or efforts
on her part, and somehow imperceptibly, to her came all that which
distinguished her from all the rest of the high-school during her last
two years there,--elegance, good taste in dress, cleverness, a radiant,
yet an understanding sparkle in her eyes. No one danced like Olliya
Meshcherskaya; no one raced on skates as well as she did; no one was
sought after at balls as much as she; and, for some reason, no one was
so liked by the lower grades as she was. Imperceptibly, she became a
young lady, and imperceptibly her fame in school became secure; and
there were already rumours that she was inconstant, that she could
not live without admirers; that Shenshin, a student in the boys’
high-school, was madly in love with her; that apparently she was also
in love with him, but so changeable in her treatment of him that he had
made attempts at suicide....
During her last winter, Olliya Meshcherskaya lost her head entirely
from her pursuit of pleasure,--so they said in the high-school. The
winter was snowy, sunny, frosty; the sun sank early behind the tall fir
grove of the snow-covered school garden, but it was invariably serene,
many-rayed, holding forth a promise of both frost and sunlight for the
morrow as well; to say nothing of strolling through Cathedral Street,
of skating at the rink in the city park on a rose-tinged evening, to
music, and amid this throng gliding in all directions, among which
Olliya Meshcherskaya seemed the best dressed, the freest from care,
the happiest. And then one day, during the main interval, as she was
careering like a whirlwind through the assembly hall escaping from the
little girls of the first grade who were pursuing her and squealing
for joy, she was unexpectedly summoned to the directress. She stopped
in full career; giving a single deep sigh, with a rapid and by now
accustomed movement she put her hair in order, hitched up the little
corners of her apron at the shoulders, and, her eyes radiant, ran
upstairs. The directress, a small woman, young looking but gray haired,
was calmly sitting with some knitting in her hands, at a writing table
underneath a portrait of the Tsar.
“How do you do, Mlle. Meshcherskaya,” she said in French, without
raising her eyes from the knitting. “It is to be regretted that this is
not the first time I am compelled to summon you here, in order to speak
to you about your conduct.”
“I am listening, Madame,” answered Meshcherskaya, approaching the
table, looking at her radiantly and in animation, but without any
expression on her face, and she sat down with that lightness and grace
of which only she was mistress.