Dead and wounded men lay on the red velvet sofas of the restaurant.
They had been carried here hurriedly, and people were trying to help
the living. Through the open doors there blew in an icy blast mixed
with snow. Random shots were still fired in the streets, soldiers
galloped up and down, an infantry squad appeared and disappeared.
Guests hovered at the windows. A German waiter said: “They have mounted
cannons on the Neva.” A gentleman in a fur-coat entered hastily and
said: “Kronstadt is in flames.”
In one of the halls which were used for exclusive banquets, there was
a brilliant company invited by Count Tutchkoff, one of the friends of
the Grand Duke Cyril. There were Lord and Lady Elmster, the Earl of
Somerset, Count and Countess Finkenrode, gentlemen belonging to the
German and Austrian embassies, the Marquis du Caille, and the Princes
Tolstoi, Trubetzkoi, Szilaghin, and their ladies.
The Grand Duke and Eva Sorel had come late. The dinner was over, and
the general conversation had ceased. The couples whispered. The Duke,
sitting between Lady Elmster and the Princess Trubetzkoi, had fallen
asleep. However animated the company, this would happen from time to
time; every one knew it, and had become accustomed to it.
Though he slept, his pose remained erect and careful. From time to
time his lids twitched; the furrow on his forehead deepened so that
it seemed black; his colourless beard was like a fern on the bark of
a tree. One might have suspected that he feigned sleep in order to
listen; but there was a slackness in his features that showed the
uncontrolled muscles of sleep, and lent his face the appearance of a
lemur. On his excessively long, lean hand, which rested on the cloth,
and, like his lids, twitched at times, gleamed a solitaire diamond, the
size of a hazelnut.
A restlessness had stolen over the company. When the rifles outside
began to rattle again, the young Countess Finkenrode arose and
turned frightened glances toward the door. Szilaghin approached her,
and calmed her with a smile. An officer of the guards entered, and
whispered a report to Tutchkoff.
Eva and Wiguniewski sat a little aside, in front of a tall mirror that
reflected a pallid image of them and of a part of the room.
Wiguniewski said to her: “Unhappily the report is vouched for. No one
thought of such a thing.”
“I was told he was in Petrograd,” Eva answered. “In a German newspaper,
moreover, I read a report that he was arrested in Moscow. And where are
your proofs? To condemn Ivan Becker on hearsay is almost as terrible as
the crime of which he is accused.”
Wiguniewski took a letter from his pocket, looked about him carefully,
unfolded it, and said: “From Nice he wrote this to a friend of his
who is also my friend. I am afraid it puts an end to all doubt.”
Painfully, and with many hesitations, he translated the Russian words
into French. “I am no longer what I was. Your suppositions are not
groundless, and the rumours have not lied. Announce and confirm it to
all who have set their hopes on me and given me their trust on definite
conditions. A terrible time lies behind me. I could not go farther on
my old and chosen path. You have been deceived in me, even as a phantom
has misled me. In a case like mine it requires greater courage and
strength to confess sincerely, and to wound those who had put their
faith and trust in me, than to mount the scaffold and give up one’s
life. Gladly would I have suffered death for the ideas to which all
my thoughts and feelings have been devoted hitherto. All of you know
that. For I had already sacrificed to them my possessions, my peace, my
youth, my liberty. But now when I have come to recognize these ideas
as destructive errors, I must not serve them for another hour. I fear
neither your accusations nor your contempt. I follow my inner light
and the God that is within. There are three truths that have guided
me in that searching of my soul which led to my conversion: It is a
sin to resist; it is a sin to persuade others to resistance; it is a
sin to shed the blood of man. I know all that threatens me; I know the
isolation that will be mine. I am prepared for all persecutions. Do
what you must, even as I do what I must.”
After a long silence Eva said: “That is he. That is his voice; that is
the bell whose chime none can resist. I believe him and I believe in
him.” She threw a sombre glance at the face of that sleeper beside the
radiant board.
Wiguniewski crushed the letter, and thrust forward his chin with a
bitter gesture. “His three truths,” he replied, “will be as effective
against our cause as three army divisions of Cossacks. They will
suffice to fill the dungeons on both sides of the Urals, to unman our
youth, to bury our hopes. Each one is a whip that will smite unto the
earth an hundred thousand awakened spirits. Crime? It is worse; it is
the tragedy of all this land. Three truths!” He laughed through his
compressed teeth. “Three truths, and a blood-bath I will begin that
will make those of Bethlehem and St. Bartholomew seem jests. You may
look at me. I do not weep; I laugh. Why should I weep? I shall go home,
summon the popes, and give them this rag; and let them made amulets of
it to distribute among those who wait for salvation. Perhaps that will
suffice them.”
Eva’s face grew hard. An evil fascination still drew her eyes toward
that sleeper’s face. Upon the edges of her lips hovered a morbid smile;
the skin of her cheek glimmered like an opal. “Why should he not
follow the command of his soul?” she asked, and for a moment turned
her diademed brow toward the prince. “Is it not better that a man
should express and embody himself completely than that many hundreds
of thousands be helped in the dreary mediocrity of their rigid lives?
He has said it in his own beautiful way: ‘I follow the inner light and
the God that is within.’ How many can do that? How many dare? And now I
understand something he once said”--more penetratingly she looked into
that sleeper’s face--“‘one must bow down before that!’ So that was in
his mind. Strange ploughs are passing over this earth of yours, prince.
In its lacerated body there streams a darkness into which one would
like to plunge in order to be born again. A primitive breath is there,
and chaos; there the elements thunder and the most terrible dream
becomes reality, an epic reality of immemorial ages. Of such life I
once had no perception, except in some great marble in which a nameless
woe had become rigid and eternal. I feel as though I were looking back
on this scene from the height of centuries to come or from a star, and
as though everything were vision.” All this she said in a trembling
voice and with an impassioned melancholy.
Wiguniewski, who had been a constant witness of her inner
transformations for months past, was not surprised at her speech. His
eyes, too, sought the sleeper’s face. With a deep breath he said,
“Yesterday a student of nineteen, Semyon Markovitch, heard of Ivan
Becker’s recanting and shot himself in his room. I went there and
saw the body. If you had seen that dead boy, Eva, you would speak
differently. A little differently, at all events. Did you ever see
a lad lie in his coffin with a little black wound in his temple? He
was charming and innocent as a girl, and yet he could experience this
unspeakable woe and entertain this determined despair at a loss beyond
measure.”
A shiver passed over Eva’s shoulders, and she smiled with a glittering
feverishness that made her seem strangely possessed and heartless.
The Prince continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “No doubt there’s a
good deal that is alluring about this letter. Why shouldn’t a man
like Ivan Becker render his breach of faith less repulsive by some
plausible psychological excuses? I am ready to grant you that he
acted neither in conscious hypocrisy nor from any self-seeking motive.
But he wouldn’t be the genuine Russian that he is--emotional, turbid,
fanatical, self-tormenting--if his transformation were not to entail
all the fatal consequences of a systematic and deliberate treachery.
He thinks that what he calls his awakening will serve mankind. In the
meantime, out of blindness and weakness, confusion and mistaken moral
fervour, he rushes into the claws of the beast that waits mercilessly
in every corner and nook of Europe seeking to destroy and annihilate.
And what I am doing now is passing a most charitable judgment. We
happen to know that he has opened negotiations with the Holy Synod and
is corresponding eagerly with the secret cabinet. Here in Moscow, as
well as in Kiev and Odessa, arrests have been made in rapid succession
which must be attributed to him. As things are, he alone could have
furnished the information without which the authorities would not have
ventured on these steps. These are facts that speak for themselves.”
Eva pressed her right hand against her bosom, and stared, as though
fascinated, into the air where she saw a vision that caused her to feel
a rapidly alternating horror and ecstasy. Her lips moved as though to
put a question, but she restrained herself.
With large and earnest eyes she looked at Wiguniewski, and, whispered:
“I suddenly have a longing that burns my heart, but I do not know after
what. I should like to climb a mountain far beyond the snowline; or
fare on a ship out into uncharted seas; or fly above the earth in an
aeroplane. No, it is none of these things. I should like to go into a
forest, to a lonely chapel, and cast myself down and pray. Will you go
on such a pilgrimage with me? To some far monastery in the steppes?”
Wiguniewski was puzzled. Passion and sadness were in her words, but
also a challenge that wounded him. Before he could formulate an
answer, the Marquis du Caille and Prince Szilaghin approached them.
The sleeper opened his eyes and showed their slothful stare.