XV

On the alabaster mantelshelf candles were burning in the silver

Renaissance candlesticks. The more salient light of the burning logs

reached only far enough to envelop the figures of Eva and of Cornelius

Ermelang in its glow. It did not penetrate as far as the porphyry

columns or the gold of the ceiling. A dim, red flicker danced in the

tall mirrors, and the purple damask curtains before the huge windows,

which shut in the room more solemnly than the great doors, absorbed the

remnants of light without reflection.

The tea-gown of white lace which the dancer wore--experts declared each

square inch of it to have the value of a provincial governor’s annual

pay--was vivid as a fantastic pastel on the side turned to the fire.

“You have been very kind to me,” said Eva. “After you had been here

so many times in vain, I was afraid you would leave without having

seen me. But Susan probably told you how my days are spent. Men and

happenings whirl through them so that I find it hard to retain a

consciousness of my own self. Thus friends become estranged, and the

faces about me change and I hardly notice it. A mad life!”

“Yet you summoned me in spite of that,” Ermelang whispered, “and I have

the happiness of being with you at last. Now I have attained everything

that my stay in Russia promised. How shall I thank you? I have only

my poor words.” He looked at her with emotion, with a kind of ecstasy

in his watery blue eyes. He had a habit of repeating the formula

concerning his poor words; but despite the artifices of his speech,

his feeling was genuine. Indeed, there was always a trifle too much

feeling, too much soulfulness in his speech. Sometimes the impression

arose that he was in reality not quite so deeply stirred, and that, if

necessary, he could well limit his emotional expansion.

“What would one not do to please a poet?” Eva said with a courteous

gesture. “It is pure selfishness too. I would have the image of me made

perpetual in your mind. Both ancient and modern tyrants assure us that

the only man whom they strove to please is the poet.”

Ermelang said: “A being like you exists in so elemental a fashion that

any image is as negligible in comparison as the shadow of a thing when

the sun is at its zenith.”

“You are subtle. Yet images persist. I have so great a faith in your

vision that I should like you to tell me whether I am really so changed

as those friends assert who knew me in my Parisian days. I laugh at

them; but in my laughter there is a little rebellion of my vanity

and a little fear of withering and fading. Don’t say anything; a

contradiction would be trivial. Tell me, above all, how you came to be

travelling in Russia, and what you have seen and heard and experienced.”

“I have experienced very little. The total impression has been so

unforgettable that details have faded into insignificance. Various

difficulties made Paris unpleasant to me, and the Princess Valuyeff

offered me a refuge on her estate near Petrograd. Now I must return to

the West--to Europe, as the Russians mockingly say. And they are right.

For I must leave my spiritual home-land, and people who were close to

me, although I did not know them, and a loneliness full of melody and

presage, and return to senseless noise and confusion and isolation. I

have spoken to Tolstoi and to Pobiedonostzev; I have been to the fair

at Nijni-Novgorod, and been driven across the steppe in a troika. And

about all--the people and the landscape--there is a breath of innocence

and of the times to come, of mystery and of power.”

Eva had not listened very attentively. The hymns to Russia, intoned by

wayfaring literary men and observers, began seriously to bore her. She

made a faintly wry mouth. “Yes,” she said, “it’s a world all its own,”

and held out her lovely hands toward the warmth of the fire.

It seemed to Ermelang that she had never, in the old days, let some one

to whom she was talking thus drift out of the circle of her mind. He

felt that his words had had no friendly reception. He became diffident

and silent. Guardedly he observed her with his inner eye, which was

truly austere. He saw the change of which she had spoken, and recorded

the image as she had demanded.

The oval of her face had acquired a line hardened as by the will.

Nothing was left of goodness in it, little of serenity. An almost harsh

determination was about her mouth. There were losses, too. Shadows lay

on her temples and under her lids. Her body still betrayed her lordship

over it, precisely in its flowing ease, its expansion and repose,

such as one sees in wildcats. Ermelang had heard that she toiled

unceasingly, spending six to seven hours a day in practice, as in the

years of her apprenticeship. The result was evident in the satiation

with rhythm and grace which her limbs and joints showed and her perfect

control of them.

Yet nothing gracious, nothing of freedom came from her. Ermelang

thought of the rumours that accused her of an unquenchable lust after

power, of dangerous political plotting, fatal conspiracies, and a

definite influence upon certain secret treaties that threatened to

disquiet the nations, and of not being guiltless of journalistic

campaigns that in their blended brutality and subtlety menaced the

peace of Europe. It had seemed as though great coal deposits in the

depth of the earth were on fire; but the men above still lived and

breathed without suspicion.

Those who distrusted her declared her to be a secret agent of Germany,

yet she enjoyed the friendship of French and British diplomatists. Her

defenders asserted that she was used without her knowledge to cover

the plans and guile of the Grand Duke Cyril. Those who believed in her

wholly declared that she really crossed his plans and only feigned

to be his tool. The nobility disliked her; the court feared her; the

common people, goaded by priests and sectaries, saw in her the embodied

misfortune of their country. At a rebellion in Ivanova she had been

publicly proclaimed a witch, and her name had been pronounced accursed

with solemn rites. Not later than the day before, a deputation of

peasants from Mohilev, whom he had met in the fish market, had told him

that they had seen the Tsar at Tsarskoye Selo, and in their complaints

concerning the famine in their province had, in their stubborn

superstition, pointed out the wicked splendour of the foreign dancer’s

life. It had become proverbial among them. The Tsar, they said, had

been unable to give an answer, and had gazed at the floor.

All these things were incontrovertible parts of her life and fate. He

looked upon her lovely hands, rosy in the glow of the flames, and felt

a dread for her.

“Is it true,” he asked, with a shy smile, “that you entered the

forbidden fortress thrice in succession?”

“It is true. Has it been taken amiss?”

“It has certainly aroused amazement. No stranger has ever before

crossed that threshold, nor any Russian unless he entered as a

prisoner. No one seems able to fathom your impulse. Many suppose that

you merely wanted to see Dmitri Sheltov, who fired at the Grand Duke.

Tell me your motive; I should like to have a reply to the gossips.”

“They need no reply,” Eva said. “I do not fear them, and need no

defence. I don’t know why I went. Perhaps I did want to see Sheltov.

He had insulted me; he even took the trouble to publish a broadside

against me. Five of his friends were sent to Siberia for that--boys of

sixteen and seventeen. The mother of one of the boys wrote me a letter

imploring me to save him. I tried but failed. Perhaps I really wanted

to see Dmitri Sheltov. They say that he has vowed to kill Ivan Becker.”

“Sheltov is one of the purest characters in the world,” Ermelang said

very softly. “To force a confession from him, they beat him with whips.”

Eva was silent.

“With whips,” Ermelang repeated. “This man! And men still dare to laugh

and speak, and the sun to shine.”

“Perhaps I wanted to see a man writhing under the blows of the

knout,” Eva said. “Perhaps it meant much to me as a stimulus. I must

be nourished somehow, and the uncommon is my nourishment. A strange

twitching, an original posture in crouching--such things satisfy my

imagination. But as a matter of fact”--her voice grew sombre, and she

stared fixedly at a spot on the wall--“I did not see him at all. But

I saw others who have spent ten, twelve, fifteen years in dark cells

of stone. Once they moved about in the great world and busied their

minds with noble things; now they cower in their rags, and blink at

the light of a little lantern. They have forgotten how to look, to

walk, to speak. An odour of decomposition was about them, and all their

gestures were full of a gentle madness. But it was not for their sake

either that I went. I went for the sake of the imprisoned women, who,

on account of an intellectual conviction, have been torn from love

and life and motherhood and devotion, and condemned to death by slow

torture. Many of them had never been condemned by any tribunal. They

had merely been forgotten--simply forgotten; and if their friends were

to demand a trial, the same fate would threaten them. I saw one who

had been brought in when she was a girl; now she was an aged woman and

near her death. I saw Natalie Elkan, who was violated by a colonel of

gendarmes at Kiev, and killed the monster with his own sword. I saw

Sophie Fleming, who put out her own eyes with a piece of steel wire,

because they had hanged her brother in her presence. Do you know what

she said when I entered her cell? She lifted her blind face, and said:

‘That’s the way a lady smells.’ Ah, that taught me something concerning

women. I put my arms about her and kissed her, and whispered in her

ear, asking whether I should smuggle some poison to her; but she

refused.”

Eva arose and walked up and down. “Yes,” she said, “and still men speak

and laugh, and still the sun shines. This room is filled with precious

things. Lackeys stand on the stairs. Fifty feet from here is the bed

of state in which I sleep. It is all mine. What I touch is mine, what

I glance at is mine. They would give me the round earth itself if they

had it to give and I asked it. And I would cast it like a billiard-ball

into a noisome puddle, so that it might no longer defile the home of

stars with its filth and its torments. I am so full of hate! I no

longer know where to hide it or how to be redeemed from it! I no longer

believe in anything--neither in art, nor in poets, nor in myself. I

only hate and destroy. I am a lost soul!”

Ermelang folded his hands. “Wonderful as you are, you should remember

all you have given and to how many.”

Eva stood still. “I am a lost soul. I feel it.”

“Why lost? You are playing a sad game with yourself.”

She shook her head and whispered the verses of the _Inferno_:

“O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci,

Che le cose di Dio, che di bontate

Deono essere spose, e voi rapaci

Per oro e per argento adulterate.”[1]

[1]

“O Simon Magus, O forlorn disciples.

Ye who the things of God, which ought to be

The brides of holiness, rapaciously

For silver and for gold do prostitute.”

Thoughtfully Ermelang added:

“Fatto v’avete Dio d’oro e d’argento;

E che altro è da voi all’idolatre,

Se non ch’egli uno, e voi n’orate cento?”[2]

[2]

“Ye have made yourselves a god of gold and silver;

And from the idolater how differ ye,

Save that he one, and ye a hundred worship?”

“What is that I hear?” Eva asked, and listened. Raucous and angry

voices were heard from the street, and yells and hisses. Ermelang

listened too. Then he went to the window, pushed the draperies aside,

and looked out.

On the snow-covered street in front of the palace fifty or sixty mujiks

had assembled. One could clearly distinguish their sheepskin caps

and their long coats. They stood there silently and gazed up at the

windows. They had attracted a great crowd of people, men and women, and

these gesticulated, full of hatred, and seemed to urge the mujiks on.

“I believe those are the Mohilev peasants,” Ermelang said nervously. “I

saw them march through the city yesterday.”

Eva joined him for a moment at the window, and glanced out; then she

returned to the middle of the room. Her smile was contemptuous. At

that moment Susan Rappard came in, badly frightened. “There are people

downstairs. Pierre went out to ask them what they wanted. They want to

talk to you; they beg humbly to be admitted to your presence. What are

we to answer such riffraff? I’ve telephoned police headquarters. Good

heavens, what a country, what an abominable country!”

Eva lowered her eyes. “They are very poor people, Susan,” she said.

“Give them money. Give them all the money that is in the house.”

“Nonsense!” Susan cried, horrified. “Then the next time they’ll break

down the door and rob us.”

“Do as I tell you,” Eva replied. “Go to M. Labourdemont and tell him

to let you have all available cash. Then go out and take it to them.

No, you had better send some one who can speak to them, and let him

say that I have gone to bed and cannot receive them. And telephone the

police at once and assure them that we have no need of protection. Do

you understand?”

“Yes,” said Susan and went out.

The crowd had increased, the noise grew, and drunken men yelled. Only

the peasants remained silent. The oldest of them had come to the edge

of the sidewalk. A little white lump of snow lay on his cap, and to his

beard clung snow and ice. Pierre, the doorkeeper, in his livery set

with silver tresses, was facing him arrogantly. The old peasant bowed

low while the lackey spoke.

Eva turned to Ermelang. “Good-bye, dear friend. I am tired. Guard this

hour in your memory, but forget it when you speak of me to others. The

innermost things are revealed to but one. Good night.”

When Ermelang reached the door of the palace, he saw a troop of mounted

police appear at the other end of the street. The crowd melted away

with an agility that showed long experience. It took but a minute.

Only the peasants remained. Ermelang did not know whether money had

been given them as Eva had commanded. He did not care to witness the

play of crude force that was sure to occur on the arrival of the armed

men.