“Were you frightened?” Christian asked, when they were in the street.
“A little,” Ruth answered. She smiled, but she was still trembling.
They did not turn homeward. They walked in the opposite direction and
passed through many streets. Christian walked swiftly, and Ruth had
difficulty in keeping up with him. A sharp wind blew, and her shabby
little cloak fluttered.
“Are you cold?” Christian asked. She said “No.” A cloud of yellow
leaves whirled up in front of them; and Christian strode on and on.
“The stars are coming out,” he said, and looked fleetingly at the sky.
They came to a wide, desolate street. A line of arc-lamps seemed to
stretch into infinity, but the houses looked empty.
They walked on and on.
“Say something,” Ruth begged. “Tell me something about yourself. Just
this once. Just to-day.”
“There’s little good to be told about myself,” he said into the wind.
“Whether it’s good or not, I’d like to know it.”
“But what?”
“Anything.”
“I must think. I have a poor memory for my own experiences.” But even
as he spoke there emerged the memory of a night which he had thought
quite faded. What had happened then seemed menacing now, and seemed in
some mysterious way related to Ruth; and the need of confession came
upon him like hunger.
“Don’t search in your mind,” said Ruth. “Tell what happens to occur to
you.”
He walked more slowly. Poor in words as he was, he strove first to
gather the bare facts in his mind.
Ruth smiled and urged him. “Just start. The first word is the hardest.”
“Yes, that is true,” he agreed.
“Did the thing you’re thinking of happen long ago?”
“You are right,” he said. “I am thinking of something definite. You
have clear perceptions.” He was surprised. “It’s four years ago. I
was motoring with two friends in the south of Italy.” He hesitated.
The words were so lame. But the lovely compulsion of Ruth’s glances
drew them from their hiding-places, and they gradually came forth more
willingly.
On a beautiful day of May he and his friends had reached the city of
Acquapendente in the Abruzzi. They had really intended to proceed to
Viterbo, but the little mountain town pleased his friends, and they
persuaded him to stay. He stopped in his story. “I seemed always to
want to race from one spot to another,” he said. His friends kept on
urging him, but when they stopped in front of the inn, it seemed so
dirty that he hated to think of passing the night there. At that moment
there came down the steps of the near-by church a girl of such majestic
loveliness as he had never seen before; and that vision determined him
to stay. The innkeeper, when he was asked who the girl was, pronounced
her name full of respect. She was the daughter of a stone-mason named
Pratti. Christian bade the innkeeper get ready a supper and invite
Angiolina Pratti to it. The innkeeper refused. Thereupon Christian
bade him invite the girl’s father, and this the man agreed to do. His
friends sought to dissuade Christian, telling him that the women of
this land were shy and proud, and that their favours were not easily
won. He would, at least, have to go about the business more delicately
than he was doing. Christian laughed at them. They reasoned and argued,
so that finally he grew stubborn, and declared to them that he would
bring about what they held to be quite impossible--that he would
accomplish it without artfulness or adroitness or exertion, but simply
through his knowledge of the character of these people.
The girl’s father came to wait upon the foreign gentlemen. He had white
hair and a white beard and a noble demeanour. Christian approached
and addressed him. He said that it would give him and his friends
pleasure if the Signorina Pratti would sup with them. Pratti wrinkled
his forehead and expressed his astonishment. He had not, he said,
the honour of the gentleman’s acquaintance. Christian looked sharply
into his eyes, and asked for how much money he would, that evening at
eight, conduct his daughter Angiolina naked into their room and to
their table. Pratti stepped back and gasped. His eyes rolled in his
head, and Christian’s friends were frightened. Christian said to the
old man: “We are perfectly decent. You may depend on our discretion.
We desire merely to admire the girl’s beauty.” With wildly raised arms
Pratti started to rush at him. But he was prepared for that, and said:
“Will five thousand suffice?” The Italian stopped. “Or ten thousand?”
And he took ten bank notes of a thousand lire each out of his wallet.
The Italian grew pale and tottered. “Twelve thousand?” Christian asked.
He saw that the sum represented an inconceivable treasure to the old
man; in a long life of toil he had never had so much. The perception
increased Christian’s madness, and he offered fifteen thousand. Pratti
opened his lips, and sighed: “Oh, Signore.” The sound should have
touched him, Christian said to Ruth. But nothing touched him in those
days; all that he cared for was to have his will. The man took the
money, and went away falteringly.
That evening the young men took their places at the charmingly arranged
table in some suspense. The innkeeper had brought forth old silver
vessels and cut-glass goblets. Roses were placed in vases of copper,
and thick candles had been lit. The room was like one in a castle.
Eight o’clock came, and then a quarter past eight. The conversation
lagged; they gazed at the door. Christian had commanded the innkeeper
not to appear until he was summoned, so that the promised discretion
should be observed. At last, at half-past eight, old Pratti appeared
carrying his daughter in his arms. He had wrapped her in a cloak. He
beckoned the young men to close the doors. When they had done so, he
pulled the cloak away and they beheld the naked body of the beautiful
girl. Her hands and feet were fettered. Her father placed her on the
empty chair beside Christian. Her eyes were closed; she was asleep. But
it was no natural sleep; she had been drugged, probably with the juice
of poppies. Pratti bowed and left.
The three friends looked at that lovely form, the gently inclined head,
the rosy face, the streaming hair. But their triumph and arrogant
delight had died within them. One went into the bed-room, fetched a
coverlet, and covered the girl with it; and Christian was grateful to
him for the action. Hastily they ate a few bites; the wine remained
untouched. Then they went down, paid their reckoning, summoned their
chauffeur, and drove through the night along the road to Rome. No
one spoke during the drive; none of them ever mentioned Angiolina
Pratti later. But Christian found it difficult to escape the picture
in his mind--the fettered, drugged girl alone in the room with the
roses and the yellow candle-light. But at last he forgot, for so many
other images crowded the old one out. “But just now,” he said, “as we
left the house, that image was as clear to me as it was that day in
Acquapendente. I had to keep thinking of it, I don’t know why.”
“How strange,” Ruth whispered.
They walked on and on.
“Where are we going?” Ruth asked.
Christian looked at her. “What is so strange? That I told you about it?
It really seemed superfluous, quite as though you knew it without being
told.”
“Yes,” she admitted shyly. “I often seem to stand within your soul as
within a flame.”
“It is brave of you to say a thing like that.” He disliked swelling
words, but this thing moved him.
“You must not be so ashamed,” she whispered.
He answered: “If I could talk like other people, much would be spared
me.”
“Spared you? Would you be a niggard of yourself? Then it would no
longer be you. That’s not the question. One should be a spendthrift of
oneself--give oneself without stint or measure.”
“Where have you learned to make such judgments, Ruth? To see and feel
and know, and to have the courage of your vision?”
“I’d like to tell you about something too,” said Ruth.
“Yes, tell me something about yourself.”
“About myself? I don’t think I can do that. But I will tell you about
some one to whom I felt very close. It was a sister; no bodily sister,
for I haven’t one. The reason I said ‘strange’ just now was because
this Angiolina Pratti seemed like a sister to me too. Suddenly there
seemed to be three sisters: Angiolina and I and the one I shall
tell you about. It is a rather sad story. At least, it is at first.
Afterwards it is no longer quite so sad. Oh, life is so wonderful and
so deeply moving and so rich and so full of power!”
“Ruth, little Ruth,” said Christian.
Then she told her story. “There was a little girl, a child. She lived
with her parents at Slonsk, far in the eastern part of the country.
Five years have gone since it all happened. Her father was very poor;
he was assistant bookkeeper in a cotton mill, but he was so poorly
paid that he could hardly scrape together the rent of their wretched
dwelling. His wife had been ailing for long. Sorrow over their failure
and suffering had robbed her of strength, and in the winter she died.
These people were the only Jews in Slonsk, and in order to bury the
body they had to take it to the nearest Jewish cemetery at Inowraztlaw.
Since no railroad connects the towns, they had to use a wagon. So at
seven o’clock in the morning--it was toward the end of December--the
wagon came, and the coffin with the mother’s body was lifted on it.
The father and the brother and the little girl followed on foot. The
girl was eleven years old and the boy eight and a half. Thick flakes
of snow fell, and soon the road had disappeared, and you could tell it
only from the line of trees on either hand.
“It was still dark when they started, and even when day came there was
only a murky twilight. The girl was unbearably sad, and her sadness
increased at every step. When day had fully come, a dim, misty day,
the crows flew thither from all directions. It may be that the body
in the coffin brought them. But the girl had never seen so many; they
seemed to pour from the sky. On great black wings they flew back and
forth, and croaked uncannily through the icy, murky silence. And the
girl’s sadness became so great that she wished to die. She lagged
behind a little, and neither her father nor her brother noticed it in
the snow-flurries, nor yet the man who led the horses. So she crossed
a field to a wood, and there she sat down and made up her mind to die.
Soon her senses were numbed.
“But an old peasant, who had been gathering wood, came from among
the trees, and when he saw her and perceived that she did not move
and was asleep, he first looked at her a while, and then he started
to strip her body of all she had, her cloak, her shoes, her dress,
her stockings, and even her shift; for the peasants are very poor
thereabouts. She could not resist. She felt what was happening only
as from the depth of a dream. So the peasant made a little bundle of
her things, and left her naked body there as dead and limped away. He
marched along for a while, and came upon the wagon with the coffin and
the two men and the boy. The wagon had stopped, for the child had been
missed. On the edge of the road a crucifix had been set up, and that
was the first thing that gave the peasant pause. It did not seem to him
to be chance that Christ was standing there beside the wagon with the
coffin. He confessed that later. Also he saw the hundreds of crows that
croaked wildly and hungrily, and he was frightened. Then he saw how
desperate the father was, and that he was preparing to turn back and
gazed in all directions and tried to halloo through the mist.
“The peasant’s conscience began to burn. He fell on his knees before
the cross and prayed. The father asked him whether he had seen the
child. He pointed and wanted to run away, and he did run across the
fields. But something within him forced him to run to the very spot
where he had robbed and abandoned the girl. He lifted her in his arms,
wrapped his coat about her, and held her to his breast. The father had
followed and received the child, and did not ask why she was naked
and bare. They rubbed her skin so long with snow till she was warm
and opened her eyes. Then the peasant kissed her forehead, and made
the sign of the cross over the Jewish child. The father rebuked him
for that, but the peasant said: ‘Forgive me, brother,’ and he kissed
his hand. From that time on no sadness of the old kind ever came to
the girl again. She had only a very faint recollection of the moment
when the peasant wrapped her in his coat and held her to his breast.
But I believe that she was born again in that moment, born better and
stronger than she had been before.”
“Ruth, little Ruth,” said Christian.
“And perhaps Angiolina, that other sister of mine, also awakened to a
happier life from that hour of dimness and of death.”
Christian did not answer. He felt as though a light were walking by his
side.
At a corner of that desolate street they came upon a very brilliant
show-window. They went up to it and stopped as by a common impulse. The
shop had long been closed, but in the window was draped a magnificent
coat of Russian sable, a symbol of wealth and warmth and adornment.
Christian turned to Ruth, and saw the threadbare little cloak in which
she shivered. And he saw that she was poor. Then it came into his mind
that he too was poor, poor like her, and irrevocably so. He smiled,
for the fact seemed significant to him, and he felt a joy that was
secret and almost ecstatic.