infamous and strange acts, one whose rule for some reason extended over
millions of people, and who, having lost his head through the absurdity
of such power, committed deeds which have established him for ever in
the memory of mankind; mankind which in the mass now rules the world
just as hideously and incomprehensibly as he ruled it then. And men come
here from all quarters of the globe to look at the ruins of the stone
house where that one man lived, on the brink of one of the steepest
cliffs in the island. On this exquisite morning all who had come to
Capri for that purpose were still asleep in the hotels, although through
the streets already trotted little mouse-coloured donkeys with red
saddles, towards the hotel entrances where they would wait patiently
until, after a good sleep and a square meal, young and old American men
and women, German men and women would emerge and be hoisted up into the
saddles, to be followed up the stony paths, yea to the very summit of
Monte Tiberio, by old persistent beggar-women of Capri, with sticks in
their sinewy hands. Quieted by the fact that the dead old Gentleman from
San Francisco, who had intended to be one of the pleasure party but who
had only succeeded in frightening the rest with the reminder of death,
was now being shipped to Naples, the happy tourists still slept soundly,
the island was still quiet, the shops in the little town not yet open.
Only fish and greens were being sold in the tiny piazza, only simple
folk were present, and amongst them, as usual without occupation, the
tall old boatman Lorenzo, thorough debauchee and handsome figure, famous
all over Italy, model for many a picture. He had already sold for a
trifle two lobsters which he had caught in the night, and which were
rustling in the apron of the cook of that very same hotel where the
family from San Francisco had spent the night. And now Lorenzo could
stand calmly till evening, with a majestic air showing off his rags and
gazing round, holding his clay pipe with its long reed mouth-piece in
his hand, and letting his scarlet bonnet slip over one ear. For as a
matter of fact he received a salary from the little town, from the
commune which found it profitable to pay him to stand about and make a
picturesque figure--as everybody knows.... Down the precipices of Monte
Solaro, down the stony little stairs cut in the rock of the old
Phœnician road came two Abruzzi mountaineers, descending from Anacapri.
One carried a bagpipe under his leather cloak, a large goat skin with
two little pipes; the other had a sort of wooden flute. They descended,
and the whole land, joyous, was sunny beneath them. They saw the rocky,
heaving shoulder of the island, which lay almost entirely at their feet,
swimming in the fairy blueness of the water. Shining morning vapours
rose over the sea to the east, under a dazzling sun which already burned
hot as it rose higher and higher; and there, far off, the dimly cerulean
masses of Italy, of her near and far mountains, still wavered blue as if
in the world's morning, in a beauty no words can express.... Halfway
down the descent the pipers slackened their pace. Above the road, in a
grotto of the rocky face of Monte Solaro stood the Mother of God, the
sun full upon her, giving her a splendour of snow-white and blue
raiment, and royal crown rusty from all weathers. Meek and merciful, she
raised her eyes to heaven, to the eternal and blessed mansions of her
thrice-holy Son. The pipers bared their heads, put their pipes to their
lips: and there streamed forth naive and meekly joyous praises to the
sun, to the morning, to Her, Immaculate, who would intercede for all who
suffer in this malicious and lovely world, and to Him, born of Her womb
among the caves of Bethlehem, in a lowly shepherd's hut, in the far
Judean land....
And the body of the dead old man from San Francisco was returning home,
to its grave, to the shores of the New World. Having been subjected to
many humiliations, much human neglect, after a week's wandering from one
warehouse to another, it was carried at last on to the same renowned
vessel which so short a time ago, and with such honour, had borne him
living to the Old World. But now he was to be hidden far from the
knowledge of the voyagers. Closed in a tar-coated coffin, he was lowered
deep into the vessel's dark hold. And again, again the ship set out on
the long voyage. She passed at night near Capri, and to those who were
looking out from the island, sad seemed the lights of the ship slowly
hiding themselves in the sea's darkness. But there aboard the liner, in
the bright halls shining with lights and marble, gay dancing filled the
evening, as usual....
The second evening, and the third evening, still they danced, amid a
storm that swept over the ocean, booming like a funeral service, rolling
up mountains of mourning darkness silvered with foam. Through the snow
the numerous fiery eyes of the ship were hardly visible to the Devil who
watched from the rocks of Gibraltar, from the stony gateway of two
worlds, peering after the vessel as she disappeared into the night and
storm. The Devil was huge as a cliff. But huger still was the liner,
many storeyed, many funnelled, created by the presumption of the New Man
with the old heart. The blizzard smote the rigging and the funnels, and
whitened the ship with snow, but she was enduring, firm, majestic--and
horrible. On the topmost deck rose lonely amongst the snowy whirlwind
the cosy and dim quarters where lay the heavy master of the ship, he who
was like a pagan idol, sunk now in a light, uneasy slumber. Through his
sleep he heard the sombre howl and furious screechings of the siren,
muffled by the blizzard. But again he reassured himself by the nearness
of that which stood behind his wall, and was in the last resort
incomprehensible to him: by the large, apparently armoured cabin which
was now and then filled with a mysterious rumbling, throbbing, and
crackling of blue fires that flared up explosive around the pale face of
the telegraphist who, with a metal hoop fixed on his head, was eagerly
straining to catch the dim voices of vessels which spoke to him from
hundreds of miles away. In the depths, in the under-water womb of the
_Atlantis_, steel glimmered and steam wheezed, and huge masses of
machinery and thousand-ton boilers dripped with water and oil, as the
motion of the ship was steadily cooked in this vast kitchen heated by
hellish furnaces from beneath. Here bubbled in their awful concentration
the powers which were being transmitted to the keel, down an infinitely
long round tunnel lit up and brilliant like a gigantic gun-barrel, along
which slowly, with a regularity crushing to the human soul, revolved a
gigantic shaft, precisely like a living monster coiling and uncoiling
its endless length down the tunnel, sliding on its bed of oil. The
middle of the _Atlantis_, the warm, luxurious cabins, dining-rooms,
halls, shed light and joy, buzzed with the chatter of an elegant crowd,
was fragrant with fresh flowers, and quivered with the sounds of a
string orchestra. And again amidst that crowd, amidst the brilliance of
lights, silks, diamonds, and bare feminine shoulders, a slim and supple
pair of hired lovers painfully writhed and at moments convulsively
clashed. A sinfully discreet, pretty girl with lowered lashes and hair
innocently dressed, and a tallish young man with black hair looking as
if it were glued on, pale with powder, and wearing the most elegant
patent-leather shoes and a narrow, long-tailed dress coat, a beau
resembling an enormous leech. And no one knew that this couple had long
since grown weary of shamly tormenting themselves with their beatific
love-tortures, to the sound of bawdy-sad music; nor did any one know of
that thing which lay deep, deep below at the very bottom of the dark
hold, near the gloomy and sultry bowels of the ship that was so gravely
overcoming the darkness, the ocean, the blizzard....
GENTLE BREATHING
In the cemetery above a fresh mound of earth stands a new cross of
oak--strong, heavy, smooth, a pleasant thing to look at. It is April,
but the days are grey. From a long way off one can see through the bare
trees the tomb-stones in the cemetery--a spacious, real country or
cathedral town cemetery; the cold wind goes whistling, whistling through
the china wreath at the foot of the cross. In the cross itself is set a
rather large bronze medallion, and in the medallion is a portrait of a
smart and charming school-girl, with happy, astonishingly vivacious
eyes.
It is Olga Meschersky.
As a little girl there was nothing to distinguish her in the noisy crowd
of brown dresses which made its discordant and youthful hum in the
corridors and class-rooms; all that one could say of her was that she
was just one of a number of pretty, rich, happy little girls, that she
was clever, but playful, and very careless of the precepts of her
class-teacher. Then she began to develop and to blossom, not by days,
but by hours. At fourteen, with a slim waist and graceful legs, there
was already well developed the outline of her breasts and all those
contours of which the charm has never yet been expressed in human words;
at fifteen she was said to be a beauty. How carefully some of her school
friends did their hair, how clean they were, how careful and restrained
in their movements! But she was afraid of nothing--neither of ink-stains
on her fingers, nor of a flushed face, nor of dishevelled hair, nor of a
bare knee after a rush and a tumble. Without a thought or an effort on
her part, imperceptibly there came to her everything which so
distinguished her from the rest of the school during her last two
years--daintiness, smartness, quickness, the bright and intelligent
gleam in her eyes. No one danced like Olga Meschersky, no one could run
or skate like her, no one at dances had as many admirers as she had, and
for some reason no one was so popular with the junior classes.
Imperceptibly she grew up into a girl and imperceptibly her fame in the
school became established, and already there were rumours that she is
flighty, that she cannot live without admirers, that the schoolboy,
Shensin, is madly in love with her, that she, too, perhaps loves him,
but is so changeable in her treatment of him that he tried to commit
suicide....
During her last winter, Olga Meschersky went quite crazy with happiness,
so they said at school. It was a snowy, sunny, frosty winter; the sun
would go down early behind the grove of tall fir-trees in the snowy
school garden; but it was always fine and radiant weather, with a
promise of frost and sun again to-morrow, a walk in Cathedral Street,
skating in the town park, a pink sunset, music, and that perpetually
moving crowd in which Olga Meschersky seemed to be the smartest, the
most careless, and the happiest. And then, one day, when she was rushing
like a whirlwind through the recreation room with the little girls
chasing her and screaming for joy, she was unexpectedly called up to the
headmistress. She stopped short, took one deep breath, with a quick
movement, already a habit, arranged her hair, gave a pull to the corners
of her apron to bring it up on her shoulders, and with shining eyes ran
upstairs. The headmistress, small, youngish, but grey-haired, sat
quietly with her knitting in her hands at the writing-table, under the
portrait of the Tsar.
"Good morning, Miss Meschersky," she said in French, without lifting her
eyes from her knitting. "I am sorry that this is not the first time that
I have had to call you here to speak to you about your behaviour."
"I am attending, madam," answered Olga, coming up to the table, looking
at her brightly and happily, but with an expressionless face, and
curtsying so lightly and gracefully, as only she could.
"You will attend badly--unfortunately I have become convinced of that,"
said the headmistress, giving a pull at the thread so that the ball
rolled away over the polished floor, and Olga watched it with curiosity.
The headmistress raised her eyes: "I shall not repeat myself, I shall
not say much," she said.
Olga very much liked the unusually clean and large study; on frosty days
the air in it was so pleasant with the warmth from the shining Dutch
fire-place, and the fresh lilies-of-the-valley on the writing-table. She
glanced at the young Tsar, painted full-length in a splendid hall, at
the smooth parting in the white, neatly waved hair of the headmistress;
she waited in silence.
"You are no longer a little girl," said the headmistress meaningly,
beginning to feel secretly irritated.
"Yes, madam," answered Olga simply, almost merrily.
"But neither are you a woman yet," said the headmistress, still more
meaningly, and her pale face flushed a little. "To begin with, why do
you do your hair like that? You do it like a woman."
"It is not my fault, madam, that I have nice hair," Olga replied, and
gave a little touch with both hands to her beautifully dressed hair.
"Ah, is that it? You are not to blame!" said the headmistress. "You are
not to blame for the way you do your hair; you are not to blame for
those expensive combs; you are not to blame for ruining your parents
with your twenty-rouble shoes. But, I repeat, you completely forget that
you are still only a schoolgirl...."
And here Olga, without losing her simplicity and calm, suddenly
interrupted her politely:
"Excuse me, madam, you are mistaken--I am a woman. And, do you know who
is to blame for that? My father's friend and neighbour, your brother,
Alexey Mikhailovitch Malyntin. It happened last summer in the
country...."
* * * * *
And a month after this conversation, a Cossack officer, ungainly and of
plebeian appearance, who had absolutely nothing in common with Olga
Meschersky's circle, shot her on the platform of the railway station, in
a large crowd of people who had just arrived by train. And the
incredible confession of Olga Meschersky, which had stunned the
headmistress, was completely confirmed; the officer told the coroner
that Meschersky had led him on, had had a _liaison_ with him, had
promised to marry him, and at the railway station on the day of the
murder, while seeing him off to Novocherkask had suddenly told him that
she had never thought of marrying him, that all the talk about marriage
was only to make a fool of him, and she gave him her diary to read with
the pages in it which told about Malyntin.
"I glanced through those pages," said the officer, "went out on to the
platform where she was walking up and down, and waiting for me to finish
reading it, and I shot her. The diary is in the pocket of my overcoat;
look at the entry for July 10 of last year."
And this is what the coroner read:
"It is now nearly two o'clock in the morning. I fell sound asleep, but
woke up again immediately.... I have become a woman to-day! Papa, mamma,
and Tolya had all gone to town, and I was left alone. I cannot say how
happy I was to be alone. In the morning I walked in the orchard, in the
field, and I went into the woods, and it seemed to me that I was all by
myself in the whole world, and I never had such pleasant thoughts
before. I had lunch by myself; then I played for an hour, and the music
made me feel that I should live for ever, and be happier than any one
else had ever been. Then I fell asleep in papa's study, and at four
o'clock Kate woke me, and said that Alexey Mikhailovitch had come. I was
very glad to see him; it was so pleasant to receive him and entertain
him. He came with his pair of Viatka horses, very beautiful, and they
stood all the time at the front door, but he stayed because it was
raining, and hoped that the roads would dry towards evening. He was very
sorry not to find papa at home, was very animated and treated me very
politely, and made many jokes about his having been long in love with
me. Before tea we walked in the garden, and the weather was charming,
the sun shining through the whole wet garden; but it grew quite cold,
and he walked with me, arm in arm, and said that he was Faust with
Margarete. He is fifty-six, but still very handsome, and always very
well dressed--the only thing I didn't like was his coming in a sort of
cape--he smells of English eau-de-Cologne, and his eyes are quite young,
black; his beard is long and elegantly parted down the middle, it is
quite silvery. We had tea in the glass verandah, and suddenly I did not
feel very well, and lay down on the sofa while he smoked; then he sat
down near me, and began to say nice things, and then to take my hand and
kiss it. I covered my face with a silk handkerchief, and several times
he kissed me on the lips through the handkerchief.... I can't understand
how it happened; I went mad; I never thought I was like that. Now I have
only one way out.... I feel such a loathing for him that I cannot endure
it...."
* * * * *
The town in these April days has become clean and dry, its stones have
become white, and it is easy and pleasant to walk on them. Every Sunday,
after mass, along Cathedral Street which leads out of the town, there
walks a little woman in mourning, in black kid gloves, and with an ebony
sunshade. She crosses the yard of the fire-station, crosses the dirty
market-place by the road where there are many black smithies, and where
the wind blows fresher from the fields; in the distance, between the
monastery and the gaol, is the white slope of the sky and the grey of
the spring fields; and then, when you have passed the muddy pools behind
the monastery wall and turn to the left, you will see what looks like a
large low garden, surrounded by a white wall, on the gates of which is
written "The Assumption of Our Lady." The little woman makes rapid
little signs of the cross, and always walks on the main path. When she
gets to the bench opposite the oak cross she sits down, in the wind and
the chilly spring, for an hour, two hours, until her feet in the light
boots, and her hand in the narrow kid glove, grow quite cold. Listening
to the birds of spring, singing sweetly even in the cold, listening to
the whistling of the wind through the porcelain wreath, she sometimes
thinks that she would give half her life if only that dead wreath might
not be before her eyes. The thought that it is Olga Meschersky who has
been buried in that clay plunges her into astonishment bordering upon
stupidity: how can one associate the sixteen-year-old school-girl, who
but two or three months ago was so full of life, charm, happiness, with
that mound of earth and that oak cross. Is it possible that beneath it
is the same girl whose eyes shine out immortally from this bronze
medallion, and how can one connect this bright look with the horrible
event which is associated now with Olga Meschersky? But in the depths of
her soul the little woman is happy, as are all those who are in love or
are generally devoted to some passionate dream.
The woman is Olga Meschersky's class-mistress, a girl over thirty, who
has for long been living on some illusion and putting it in the place of
her actual life. At first the illusion was her brother, a poor
lieutenant, in no way remarkable--her whole soul was bound up in him and
in his future, which, for some reason, she imagined as splendid, and she
lived in the curious expectation that, thanks to him, her fate would
transport her into some fairyland. Then, when he was killed at Mukden,
she persuaded herself that she, very happily, is not like others, that
instead of beauty and womanliness she has intellect and higher
interests, that she is a worker for the ideal. And now Olga Meschersky
is the object of all her thoughts, of her admiration and joy. Every
holiday she goes to her grave--she had formed the habit of going to the
cemetery after the death of her brother--for hours she never takes her
eyes off the oak cross; she recalls Olga Meschersky's pale face in the
coffin amid the flowers, and remembers what she once overheard: once
during the luncheon hour, while walking in the school garden, Olga
Meschersky was quickly, quickly saying to her favourite friend, the tall
plump Subbotin:
"I have been reading one of papa's books--he has a lot of funny old
books--I read about the kind of beauty which woman ought to possess.
There's such a lot written there, you see, I can't remember it all;
well, of course, eyes black as boiling pitch--upon my word, that's what
they say there, boiling pitch!--eye-brows black as night, and a tender
flush in the complexion, a slim figure, hands longer than the
ordinary--little feet, a fairly large breast, a regularly rounded leg, a
knee the colour of the inside of a shell, high but sloping shoulders--a
good deal of it I have nearly learnt by heart, it is all so true; but do
you know what the chief thing is? Gentle breathing! And I have got it;
you listen how I breathe; isn't it gentle?"
Now the gentle breathing has again vanished away into the world, into
the cloudy day, into the cold spring wind....
KASIMIR STANISLAVOVITCH
On the yellow card with a nobleman's coronet the young porter at the
Hotel "Versailles" somehow managed to read the Christian name and
patronymic "Kasimir Stanislavovitch."[1] There followed something still
more complicated and still more difficult to pronounce. The porter
turned the card this way and that way in his hand, looked at the
passport, which the visitor had given him with it, shrugged his
shoulders--none of those who stayed at the "Versailles" gave their
cards--then he threw both on to the table and began again to examine
himself in the silvery, milky mirror which hung above the table,
whipping up his thick hair with a comb. He wore an overcoat and shiny
top-boots; the gold braid on his cap was greasy with age--the hotel was
a bad one.
Kasimir Stanislavovitch left Kiev for Moscow on April 8th, Good Friday,
on receiving a telegram with the one word "tenth." Somehow or other he
managed to get the money for his fare, and took his seat in a
second-class compartment, grey and dim, but really giving him the
sensation of comfort and luxury. The train was heated, and that
railway-carriage heat and the smell of the heating apparatus, and the
sharp tapping of the little hammers in it, reminded Kasimir
Stanislavovitch of other times. At times it seemed to him that winter
had returned, that in the fields the white, very white drifts of snow
had covered up the yellowish bristle of stubble and the large leaden
pools where the wild-duck swam. But often the snow-storm stopped
suddenly and melted; the fields grew bright, and one felt that behind
the clouds was much light, and the wet platforms of the railway-stations
looked black, and the rooks called from the naked poplars. At each big
station Kasimir Stanislavovitch went to the refreshment-room for a
drink, and returned to his carriage with newspapers in his hands; but he
did not read them; he only sat and sank in the thick smoke of his
cigarettes, which burned and glowed, and to none of his
neighbours--Odessa Jews who played cards all the time--did he say a
single word. He wore an autumn overcoat of which the pockets were worn,
a very old black top-hat, and new, but heavy, cheap boots. His hands,
the typical hands of an habitual drunkard, and an old inhabitant of
basements, shook when he lit a match. Everything else about him spoke of
poverty and drunkenness: no cuffs, a dirty linen collar, an ancient tie,
an inflamed and ravaged face, bright-blue watery eyes. His
side-whiskers, dyed with a bad, brown dye, had an unnatural appearance.
He looked tired and contemptuous.
The train reached Moscow next day, not at all up to time; it was seven
hours late. The weather was neither one thing nor the other, but better
and drier than in Kiev, with something stirring in the air. Kasimir
Stanislavovitch took a cab without bargaining with the driver, and told
him to drive straight to the "Versailles." "I have known that hotel, my
good fellow," he said, suddenly breaking his silence, "since my student
days." From the "Versailles," as soon as his little bag, tied with stout
rope, had been taken up to his room, he immediately went out.
It was nearly evening: the air was warm, the black trees on the
boulevards were turning green; everywhere there were crowds of people,
cars, carts. Moscow was trafficking and doing business, was returning to
the usual, pressing work, was ending her holiday, and unconsciously
welcomed the spring. A man who has lived his life and ruined it feels
lonely on a spring evening in a strange, crowded city. Kasimir
Stanislavovitch walked the whole length of the Tverskoy Boulevard; he
saw once more the cast-iron figure of the musing Poushkin, the golden
and lilac top of the Strasnoy Monastery.... For about an hour he sat at
the Café Filippov, drank chocolate, and read old comic papers. Then he
went to a cinema, whose flaming signs shone from far away down the
Tverskaya, through the darkling twilight. From the cinema he drove to a
restaurant on the boulevard which he had also known in his student days.
He was driven by an old man, bent in a bow, sad, gloomy, deeply absorbed
in himself, in his old age, in his dark thoughts. All the way the man
painfully and wearily helped on his lazy horse with his whole being,
murmuring something to it all the time and occasionally bitterly
reproaching it--and at last, when he reached the place, he allowed the
load to slip from his shoulders for a moment and gave a deep sigh, as he
took the money.
"I did not catch the name, and thought you meant 'Brague'!" he muttered,
turning his horse slowly; he seemed displeased, although the "Prague"
was further away.
"I remember the 'Prague' too, old fellow," answered Kasimir
Stanislavovitch. "You must have been driving for a long time in Moscow."
"Driving?" the old man said; "I have been driving now for fifty-one
years."
"That means that you may have driven me before," said Kasimir
Stanislavovitch.
"Perhaps I did," answered the old man dryly. "There are lots of people
in the world; one can't remember all of you."