Madame Krasinska hurried though the long black corridor, with its
slippery bricks and typhoid smell, and went slowly but resolutely up
the black staircase. Its steps, constructed perhaps in the days of
Dante's grandfather, when a horn buckle and leathern belt formed the
only ornaments of Florentine dames, were extraordinarily high, and worn
off at the edges by innumerable generations of successive nobles and
paupers. And as it twisted sharply on itself, the staircase was lighted
at rare intervals by barred windows, overlooking alternately the black
square outside, with its jags of overhanging roof, and a black yard,
where a broken well was surrounded by a heap of half-sorted chickens'
feathers and unpicked rags. On the first landing was an open door,
partly screened by a line of drying tattered clothes; and whence
issued shrill sounds of altercation and snatches of tipsy song. Madame
Krasinska passed on heedless of it all, the front of her delicate frock
brushing the unseen filth of those black steps, in whose crypt-like
cold and gloom there was an ever-growing breath of charnel. Higher and
higher, flight after flight, steps and steps. Nor did she look to the
right or to the left, nor ever stop to take breath, but climbed upward,
slowly, steadily. At length she reached the topmost landing, on to which
fell a flickering beam of the setting sun. It issued from a room, whose
door was standing wide open. Madame Krasinska entered. The room was
completely empty, and comparatively light. There was no furniture in it,
except a chair, pushed into a dark corner, and an empty bird-cage at the
window. The panes were broken, and here and there had been mended with
paper. Paper also hung, in blackened rags, upon the walls.
Madame Krasinska walked to the window and looked out over the
neighbouring roofs, to where the bell in an old black belfry swung
tolling the Ave Maria. There was a porticoed gallery on the top of a
house some way off; it had a few plants growing in pipkins, and a drying
line. She knew it all so well.
On the window-sill was a cracked basin, in which stood a dead basil
plant, dry, grey. She looked at it some time, moving the hardened earth
with her fingers. Then she turned to the empty bird-cage. Poor solitary
starling! how he had whistled to the poor old woman! Then she began to
cry.
But after a few moments she roused herself. Mechanically, she went to
the door and closed it carefully. Then she went straight to the dark
corner, where she knew that the staved-in straw chair stood. She dragged
it into the middle of the room, where the hook was in the big rafter.
She stood on the chair, and measured the height of the ceiling. It was
so low that she could graze it with the palm of her hand. She took off
her gloves, and then her bonnet--it was in the way of the hook. Then
she unclasped her girdle, one of those narrow Russian ribbons of silver
woven stuff, studded with niello. She buckled one end firmly to the big
hook. Then she unwound the strip of muslin from under her collar. She
was standing on the broken chair, just under the rafter. "Pater noster
qui es in caelis," she mumbled, as she still childishly did when putting
her head on the pillow every night.
The door creaked and opened slowly. The big, hulking woman, with the
vague, red face and blear stare, and the rabbit-skin muff, bobbing on
her huge crinolined skirts, shambled slowly into the room. It was the
Sora Lena.