took his troops and went away. It was not fear that made him. Something
terrible is going to happen. Why do not the French suspect?
It is unimaginable--the effect of this silent, wonderful city. Who
would dream of a city here--on the barren plain that stretches eastward
to Asia! And such a city! Italian palaces by the side of Tartar huts!
Bazaars where the wonders of the Orient are displayed!
The soldiers are pillaging right and left. Entire squadrons go about
decked in gold and embroidered gauzes fit for the harems of Stamboul.
It is like a festival in honor of a pagan god. This illusion is
heightened by the fires which are burning everywhere, like incense.
Never before did the bitter North see anything like this. Like this
life must have been in the old days--in Alexandria and in Mitylene.
* * * * *
_September 17, 1812._ It has come! It could not be put off longer. Last
night the Emperor summoned me to him. He was in the Uspenski Sobore,
the cathedral where the Russian emperors are crowned. Here he has set
up his abode. The splendor of the room I entered was overpowering. It
was magnificent, imposing, glittering with marbles, with paintings,
and with decorations, made out of barbaric gold. It was lighted by a
thousand candles, each as tall as the body of a man. Yet the corners
and the roof were black and impenetrable.
No sooner had I entered than he drew me to him with that silent fury I
remembered. Then he hastened to make fast the door.
“Now I can unfold my plan--I, who am master of the world. For five
years I have loved you and asked nothing in return. Now is my time. You
are to be my Empress--Empress of the East. This shall be your capital,
Russia and the Orient your crown lands. You shall be what Yek-Katarina
dreamed always of being--Empress of the East.”
“But--Sire--the church! Could it bless a union like ours?”
“The church? Why, I shall be the church!”
I saw that he was drunk with the deadliest wine that can be given to
mortals--success, and the too great favors of destiny.
“Sire, I have considered. I will follow your will--on one condition.”
Here some one knocked at the door.
“The city is on fire! Lose no time. Save yourself!”
“And what is that?” paying not the slightest heed to the interruption.
“Sire, Russia’s supply of powder is under the Kremlin. In an instant we
may all be destroyed. Sire! Sire!”
“And what is that?”
The pounding on the door became deafening. The great windows were so
lighted by the flames outside that they dimmed the candles. The floor,
made of bricks of steel, was as red with the reflection as a sea of
blood.
“The freedom of Poland, Sire.”
“I grant it.”
“Why should you not? Poland was cut up to make presents for the lovers
of Catherine. Why should it not be united for the one love of Napoleon?”
“Sire! Sire! Open the door. Do not risk your life--the fate of France.
Open! Open!”
“Write then its freedom here,” snatching a piece of paper and spreading
it before him.
I felt no fear. I was conscious only of a great exaltation,--the
sensation he had first taught me to know. Death was nothing in
comparison with the goal I sought.
“Write, Sire, write!”
We were then in such an intensity of many-colored light that the
farthest top of the great dome shone red like a baker’s oven. The
knocking and the voices increased, grew deafening.
“An instant, just another instant!” I prayed, “until that paper is in
my hands!”
“Dictate; it shall be as you wish.”
“Write, then: ‘_que la République de Pologne soit maintenue dans son
état de libre élection et qu’il ne soit permis à personne de rendre le
dit royaume héréditaire dans sa famille ou de s’y rendre absolu_.’”
Just as he reached the place of signature, the door fell and the Prince
of Naples, followed by frightened soldiers, rushed in.
“What are you writing?” He snatched the paper from the table. By this
time the room was half filled with soldiers.
_The freedom of Poland!_
“Sire, this woman is the tool of Russia. See, here is the letter
written to her by Prince Adam Czartoryisky. Listen, Sire, listen!
“‘With you to help, we will lure Napoleon, who is now drunk with
success, to a banquet of death in the heart of White Russia.’”
The look on the face of the Great Emperor is one of the things which
the merciful God will never permit me to forget. Upon it dawned in
quick succession the intelligence of all those baffling defeats,
followed by a mingled look of anger, surprise, and that which cut me
deepest--grief.
“Sire,” continued the Prince of Naples, “outside waits her escort sent
by His Imperial Majesty, Alexander, to rescue her from burning Moscow.”
“Take her to her escort,” was the stern reply.
Not one word, not one glance, did he give to me.
As I drove away toward Warsaw, I saw him for one last instant standing
on the pictured Kremlin wall, fearless and calm, a pagan god for whom
a city fell in ruin. Behind and beside, the conflagration rolled its
waves of flame.
I had been faithful to my country, to my duty, yet I felt the greatest
contempt for myself.
You see, I was beneath his anger.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Great Catherine. In the middle of the Eighteenth Century the
Russians called Catherine II. _Yek-Katarina_, which is equivalent in
English to Arch-Catherine.
[2] Krasinski--Count Sigismund, a Polish writer best known as the
author of _Irydion_, which, under the thin covering of a fable, tells
the tragic story of Poland. He was a prominent figure in the Paris of
that day.
[3] Pan Kasimir Brodzinski, Polish critic.
[4] One of the greatest poets of Poland. His poems, ballads and his
sonnets--in which he pictures the Crimea and the mountain world of
Southern Russia--have been translated into the languages of the
Continent. He is numbered among the Polish patriots of 1830.
[5] Polish poet who wrote _Maria, An Heroic Tale of the Ukraine_.
[6] Slav proverb.
[7] Author’s translation.
THE PAINTER OF DEAD WOMEN
We were lingering over one of our honeymoon breakfasts in Naples, my
husband dividing his attention between _Il Corriere di Napoli_ and his
coffee, and I planning for my favorite pastime, swimming, in that sea
which looks like a liquid sapphire.
“‘No clue to the mysterious disappearance of the Contessa Fabriani,’”
he read. “‘After a month’s search, the police are baffled.’”
“That does not sound particularly remarkable to you, I suppose.
Women--and men, too, for that matter--have disappeared from other
cities. But this adds another chapter to a mysterious story of crime.
“For twenty-five years not only native Italian women, but visiting
women of other nations have disappeared from Naples, and nothing has
afterward been heard of them. The peculiar part about it is that they
have all been young and beautiful, and women of the upper class.”
I paid little heed to his words. I was thinking of other things.
Besides, Luigi was a Neapolitan and interested in all the happenings
of his native city. On my first visit to Naples I did not have time to
interest myself in a sensational story such as I could read any morning
in the London papers.
“You have not forgotten that to-night is the ball?” said my husband,
consulting his watch and jumping up. “I want you to look particularly
lovely. All my friends--and your old rivals--will be there. Business
takes me from the city for the day, and in case I should not return in
time to accompany you, I have arranged for Cousin Lucia to meet you at
ten at the door of the Cinascalchi Palace. I shall come later--in time
for part of the dancing. Tell Pietro to get you there at exactly ten,”
he called, after he had kissed me good-by.
When I took a last look at myself in the glass that night, I felt that
I had obeyed my husband’s instructions. I was looking particularly
lovely. I had dressed with the purpose of appearing as unlike Italian
women as possible.
My slim six feet of stature was arrayed in a plain white satin
princess, from which the shoulders rose scarcely less white and satiny.
My hair was the color of the upland furze, and my cheeks glowed like
the roses of an English garden.
“Pietro!” I called, after we had driven what seemed to me a very long
time. “Are you sure that you are going in the right direction? I did
not suppose that it was outside the city.”
He reassured me and drove on.
We entered the courtyard of a country estate. As I stepped from the
carriage, I saw in the distance the grouped lights of Naples. Pietro
whipped the horses and drove off before I had time to speak.
There were no other carriages in the yard. Could I have mistaken the
time? Lucia was not there to meet me, either. “She is probably within,”
I reflected, “since the palace is bright with light.”
Doors swung back softly and as if by magic. I entered. The blaze
of light that rushed out all but blinded me. Words cannot express
the horror of it nor the silence that accompanied it. There were no
servants moving about. No one was in sight. I was alone.
Imagine a sweep of majestic rooms whose floors were polished to the
surface consistency of stone; straight white walls of mirrored marble,
and, blazing from walls and ceiling, prisms of cut crystal. Wherever
you looked the glitter of light flashed back at you, confusing your
eyes and dazing your brain. I did not suppose that light could hold
such terror.
“There is surely some mistake,” I whispered. “This is no place for
dancing or merriment. It is more like a white and shining sepulchre.
I would rather trust myself to the night outside,” and I turned toward
the door with the purpose of leaving. But the space behind, where I
knew that I had entered, presented a smooth and evenly paneled surface.
There was no door. Nor was there place for lock or knob. As I stood
confused and hesitating, I learned to the full the demoniac power of
light. The slightest motion of my body, my head, my breathing, even,
sent from polished corners and cornice quivering arrows into my eyes.
The mirrors and the shining marble reflected floor and ceiling until
it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. It
seemed, after a time, that I was floating head downward in a sea of
light.
Then something righted me sharply. It was not sound nor was it thought.
It appealed to subtler senses. It was as if the material body was
endowed with a thinking machine and each pore contained a brain. It
aroused some consciousness which the hypnotism of light had dulled. I
knew then that I was standing, slim and white and frozen with terror,
in the focus of the light.
I felt the cold diamonds shift their position upon my throat and breast
and tremble as I breathed irregularly. I heard the sibilant slipping of
the stiff satin as it fell into a changed position.
A powerful and dominant brain had touched my own. For one unconscious
moment it had ruled it and set upon it the seal of its thought.
Such a passion of fear assailed me that it seemed as if I must choke.
My fascinated eyes turned toward the end of the farthest room. From
there the message came. There, I knew, was something compelling,
something electric. Exactly in the center of that far room, and very
erect, stood a man. He was coming toward me, too, slowly--very slowly.
Yet I heard not the slightest sound. Evidently he was shod with rubber.
He moved as I have seen a malevolent spider move toward a prisoned
fly, enjoying the pleasure of motion because he knows that there is no
escape for his victim. Just as gracefully and easily did he move toward
me. And as he came, I knew that he read my soul, measured my strength
and my power of resistance, and at the same time admired the white
erectness of my body.
Fear, as with a bitter acid, etched his picture on my brain. He was
very tall--taller than I by a good inch--and faultlessly attired; a
patrician, but a degenerate patrician, the body alone having preserved
its ancient dignity.
Ribboned decorations brightened his coat, and I saw a garter on his leg.
He was thinner than any one I ever saw and correspondingly supple. His
movements had the fascination of a serpent. Thus might a serpent move,
if its coiled length were poised erect.
His head would have been beautiful, had not the features been so
delicately chiseled that strength and nobility had been refined away,
and in their place had come effeminacy and a certain cold and delicate
cruelty.
He was an old man, too, and his heavy hair was white. His brows,
however, were black and youthful, and from beneath looked out blue
eyes. The eyes were the color of light when it shines through thick
ice. They were the color of the sharp edge of fine steel when it is
bared too quickly to the sun. In the same hard way the light ran across
them.
But the strangest part was that there seemed to be no limit to their
depth. However far you looked within, you could not find a person. You
could not surprise a consciousness. There was no soul there. In its
stead there was merely a keen and destructive intelligence.
I realized that the man coming toward me did not live by means of the
physical acts of life. He had learned to live by his brain. He was a
cerebral!
I sensed his dominant personality and struggled against it. I sensed,
too, the presence of a numbing mental fluid that crippled my will and
dulled me as does that sweet-smelling death which surgeons call the
anæsthetic.
He had stripped himself of human attributes. He knew nothing of fear,
pity, love.
“I have the honor of meeting, I believe, the bride of the Leopardi.” He
bowed and spoke in an even, unemotional voice.
I bowed in return. “How is it possible for you to know that? I do not
remember having met you.”
“It is not necessary to have met me. No beautiful woman comes to Naples
whom I do not know. I,” bowing again, “am Count Ponteleone, painter of
dead women. You have probably heard of me.”
“Who has not!” I exclaimed, somewhat reassured and wondering that this
could be the man whose name was resounding through two continents.
“This intrusion--which I beg you to pardon--is due to the coachman’s
mistake. I am expected at the Cinascalchi ball. My husband and cousin
await me there. If you will send me on in your carriage, I shall be
grateful.”
“Oh, no, your coachman made no mistake,” calmly ignoring my request. “I
brought him here and you, too, as I have brought other women--by this,”
tapping his forehead.
“You are graciously jesting to excuse my rudeness,” I managed to
stammer, summoning the ghost of a smile.
“Well, we may as well call it a jest if you wish. It is a jest which
ought to flatter. I entertain only beautiful women here.”
The glance that accompanied this enveloped me from head to foot. It was
a glance of admiration, and yet in it there was none of the desire of
would-be love. It was devoid of warmth and emotion. Nothing could be
more impersonal. No mark of material beauty had escaped it. It was the
trained glance of a connoisseur which measures accurately. I might
have been a picture or a piece of furniture.
I felt that he knew my racial standing, my rank as a human animal, by
the delicate roundness of my bones and the fine fiber of my flesh. I
had been as glass to his intelligent gaze. Somehow, then, I felt that
the body of me belonged to him because of this masterly penetration
which substance could not resist.
“Since you are to be my guest, we might seek a more comfortable place
to converse.”
He led the way to the center of the great rooms where, touching an
invisible spring, doors flew back, disclosing a drawing-room draped in
red. As he bowed me to a seat, he remarked: “Here you look like a pearl
dropped in a cup of blood.”
I, too, thought that I had never seen so wicked a red nor one so
suggestive of luxurious crime. The comparison jarred upon me and
prickled me with fear.
As he sank back in an easy-chair opposite, I saw how the red walls
touched with color the whiteness of his hair and sent occasional ruddy
gleams into the depth of his eyes.
“You are an Englishwoman, too,” he observed, with evident relish. “I
knew it. Only the mists and rains of England can make color like yours.
Did you notice how well we looked together as we walked along between
the mirrors? Are we not as if made for each other--tall and regal--both
of us? What a picture we would make!”
It occurred to me then, with unpleasant appropriateness, that he was
the painter of _dead women_.
“It is an English woman, too, that I lack for my collection,” he mused
meditatively.
“Collection! Have you a collection of women? That is certainly unique.
I have heard of collections of bugs, birds,--but women, never. Perhaps
you would like me to join it!”
“Indeed I should! I never saw a woman I admired so tremendously.”
I drew back in fear, silenced by the ardor of his words.
“Oh, you need not be afraid. I am not like other men. I do not love as
they love. I love only with my brain. While you have been sitting here,
I have caressed you a thousand times, and you have not even suspected
it. I do not want the bestial common pleasures which my coachman can
have, or my scullion can buy with a _lira_. Why should not I be as much
superior to them in my loves as in my life? If I am not, then I am not
their superior in any way. My pleasures are those of another plane of
life, of a brain touched to a keener fire, of nerves that have reached
the highest point of pleasurable vibration. Besides, when I love, I
love only dead women. Life reaches its perfection only when death
comes. _Life is never real until then_,” he added.
“Perhaps you would like to kill me for your amusement to-night,” I
replied, still trying to keep up the jest. “I have always flattered
myself, however, that I was better alive.”
No sooner were the words out than I regretted them. His face grew thin
and strained like a bird-dog’s on the scent. His lips became expressive
of a terrible desire, and his frail hands trembled with anticipation.
As I looked, his pupils disappeared, and his eyes became two pools of
blue and blazing light. Unwittingly I had hit upon his object. I had
surprised his purpose in a jest.
Who could have dreamed of this! At the worst, I thought, I might be
detained for two or three days, forced to serve him for a model, and
cause worry to my husband and gossiping comment.
But whose imagination could have reached this! Strangely enough, the
decree of death that I read in his face dissipated my fear. I became
calm and collected. In an instant I was mistress of myself and ready to
fight for life. The blood stopped pounding in my brain. I could think
with normal clearness.
“The worst of it is,” I reflected, “this man is not mad. If he were, I
might be able to play upon some delusion for freedom. He has passed the
point where madness begins. He has gone just so much too far the other
way.”
“Then you really think that you could love me if I were dead,” I
laughed, leaning toward him gayly. “Is it not rather a strange
requisite for winning a woman’s love? What would my reward be? Are you
sure you could not endure me any other way?”
“Do not jest about sacred things! Death,” he answered slowly and
reprovingly, “is the thing most to be desired by beautiful women. It
saves them from something worse--old age. An ugly woman can afford to
live; a beautiful woman can not. The real object of life is to ripen
the body to its limit of physical perfection, and then, just as you
would a perfect fruit, pluck and preserve it. Death sets the definite
seal upon its perfection, that is, if death can be controlled to
prevent decay. And that is what I can do,” he added proudly, getting
up in his abstraction and pacing up and down the room. “And what
difference does it make, what day it comes? All days march toward
death.”
I admired unreservedly the elegant, intellectualized figure, now that I
had thrown fear to the winds.
“Come,” he pleaded, “let me kill you! It is because I love you that I
ask you. It is because I think that your physical self is worth being
preserved. Your future will be assured. You will never be less happy
than now, less lovely, less triumphant. You will always be an object of
admiration.”
“What a magician you are to picture death attractively! But tell me
more about it first.”
Joy leaped up and sang in my heart at the prospect of the struggle.
I felt as the race-horse feels when, knowing the strength and the
suppleness of his limbs, he sees the long white track unfold before him.
“In ancient days my ancestors,” he began, “were Roman Governors in
Spain. At the court of one of them, Vitellius Ponteleone, lived a
famous Jewish physician (in old Spanish days the Jews were the first
of scientists), by name Ibn Ezra. He made a poison (poison is not the
right word, I regret greatly its vulgar suggestiveness) from a mineral
which has now vanished from the face of the earth. This poison causes
a delicious, pleasureful death, and at the same time arrests physical
decay. Now, if you will just let me inject one drop of it into that
white arm of yours, you will be immortal--superior to time and change,
indestructibly young. You do not seem to realize the greatness of the
offer. For this honor I have selected you from all the women in Naples.”
“It is an honor, of course; but, like a proposal of marriage, it seems
to me important and to require consideration.”
“Oh, no, it is not important. We have to prepare for life, but for
death we are always ready. Besides, I am offering you a chance to
choose your own death. How many can do that!”
“Do not think that I am ungrateful, good Count, but--”
“One little drop of the liquid will run through your veins like flame,
cutting off thought and all centers of painful sensation. Only a dim
sweet memory of pleasant things will remain. Gradually, then, cells
and arteries and flesh will harden. In time your body will attain the
hardness of a diamond and the whiteness of fine marble. But it is
months, years, before the brain dies. I am not really sure that it
ever dies. In it, like the iridescent reflections upon a soap bubble,
live the shadows of past pleasures. There is no other immortality that
can equal this which I offer. Every day that you live now lessens
your beauty. In a way every day is a vulgar death. It coarsens and
over-colors your skin, dulls the gold of your hair, makes this bodily
line, or this, a bit too full. That is why I brought you here to-night,
at the height of your beauty, just as love and life have crowned you.”
“It must be a remarkable liquid. Let me see it. Is it with you?”
“No, indeed! It is kept in a vault which it takes an hour to open. It
is guarded as are the crown jewels of Italy,” he responded proudly.
“There is no immediate danger,” I thought. “There is time. Now the road
lies long before me.”
“I suppose there is an antidote for--this liquid. I will not call it
poison, since you dislike the word so greatly.”
“None that is known now. You see it destroys instantly what only
patient nature can rebuild.”
“I am greatly interested in it. Show me the other women upon whom you
have tried it. I am eager to see its effect.”
“I knew you would be. Come this way.”
We ascended a staircase, where again I felt the sting of light. Upon a
landing, half-way up, he paused and pointed to our reflected figures.
“Are we not as if made for each other--you and I? When I sleep the
white liquid sleep, I shall arrange that it be beside you.”
My death evidently was firmly determined upon.
At the top he unlocked a door, and we entered a room where some fifty
women were dancing a minuet. Above them great crystal chandeliers
swung, giving to their jewels and their shimmering silks and satins
reflected life. Each one was in an attitude of arrested motion. It was
as if they had been frozen in the maddest moment of a dance. But what
a horrible sight--this dance of dead women, this mimic merriment of
death!
“You know my picture of this scene, do you not?” said he, turning on
more light. “They were perfect models, I can assure you. I can paint
them for hours in any light.
“When I die I shall bequeath to Naples this art gallery. Will it not be
a gift to be proud of? Nothing can surpass it in uniqueness. Then the
bodies of these women will have attained the hardness and the whiteness
of fine marble. They can in no way be distinguished from it except by
their hair.
“Of course now, if the outside world knew of this, I should be punished
as a murderer.”
How firmly it is settled in his mind that the outside world is mine no
more!
“But then I shall be revered as a scientist who preserved for posterity
the most perfect human specimens of the age in which I lived. I shall
be looked upon as a God. It is as great to preserve life as it is to
make it.”