remained only the name. Now it was a large, first-class, though vulgar,
restaurant. Over the entrance burnt an electric globe which illuminated
with its unpleasant, heliotrope light the smart, second-rate cabmen,
impudent, and cruel to their lean, short-winded steeds. In the damp hall
stood pots of laurels and tropical plants of the kind which one sees
carried on to the platforms from weddings to funerals and _vice versa_.
From the porters' lodge several men rushed out together to Kasimir
Stanislavovitch, and all of them had just the same thick curl of hair as
the porter at the "Versailles." In the large greenish room, decorated in
the rococo style, were a multitude of broad mirrors, and in the corner
burnt a crimson icon-lamp. The room was still empty, and only a few of
the electric lights were on. Kasimir Stanislavovitch sat for a long time
alone, doing nothing. One felt that behind the windows with their white
blinds the long, spring evening had not yet grown dark; one heard from
the street the thudding of hooves; in the middle of the room there was
the monotonous splash-splash of the little fountain in an aquarium round
which gold-fish, with their scales peeling off, lighted somehow from
below, swam through the water. A waiter in white brought the dinner
things, bread, and a decanter of cold vodka. Kasimir Stanislavovitch
began drinking the vodka, held it in his mouth before swallowing it,
and, having swallowed it, smelt the black bread as though with loathing.
With a suddenness which gave even him a start, a gramophone began to
roar out through the room a mixture of Russian songs, now exaggeratedly
boisterous and turbulent, now too tender, drawling, sentimental.... And
Kasimir Stanislavovitch's eyes grew red and tears filmed them at that
sweet and snuffling drone of the machine.
Then a grey-haired, curly, black-eyed Georgian brought him, on a large
iron fork, a half-cooked, smelly shashlyk, cut off the meat on to the
plate with a kind of dissolute smartness, and, with Asiatic simplicity,
with his own hand sprinkled it with onions, salt, and rusty barbery
powder, while the gramophone roared out in the empty hall a cake-walk,
inciting one to jerks and spasms. Then Kasimir Stanislavovitch was
served with cheese, fruit, red wine, coffee, mineral water, liquers....
The gramophone had long ago grown silent; instead of it there had been
playing on the platform an orchestra of German women dressed in white;
the lighted hall, continually filling up with people, grew hot, became
dim with tobacco smoke and heavily saturated with the smell of food;
waiters rushed about in a whirl; drunken people ordered cigars which
immediately made them sick; the head-waiters showed excessive
officiousness, combined with an intense realization of their own
dignity; in the mirrors, in the watery gloom of their abysses, there was
more and more chaotically reflected something huge, noisy, complicated.
Several times Kasimir Stanislavovitch went out of the hot hall into the
cool corridors, into the cold lavatory, where there was a strange smell
of the sea; he walked as if on air, and, on returning to his table,
again ordered wine. After midnight, closing his eyes and drawing the
fresh night air through his nostrils into his intoxicated head, he raced
in a hansom-cab on rubber tyres out of the town to a brothel; he saw in
the distance infinite chains of light, running away somewhere down hill
and then up hill again, but he saw it just as if it were not he, but
some one else, seeing it. In the brothel he nearly had a fight with a
stout gentleman who attacked him shouting that he was known to all
thinking Russia. Then he lay, dressed, on a broad bed, covered with a
satin quilt, in a little room half-lighted from the ceiling by a
sky-blue lantern, with a sickly smell of scented soap, and with dresses
hanging from a hook on the door. Near the bed stood a dish of fruit, and
the girl who had been hired to entertain Kasimir Stanislavovitch,
silently, greedily, with relish ate a pear, cutting off slices with a
knife, and her friend, with fat bare arms, dressed only in a chemise
which made her look like a little girl, was rapidly writing on the
toilet-table, taking no notice of them. She wrote and wept--of what?
There are lots of people in the world; one can't know everything....
On the tenth of April Kasimir Stanislavovitch woke up early. Judging
from the start with which he opened his eyes, one could see that he was
overwhelmed by the idea that he was in Moscow. He had got back after
four in the morning. He staggered down the staircase of the
"Versailles," but without a mistake he went straight to his room down
the long, stinking tunnel of a corridor which was lighted only at its
entrance by a little lamp smoking sleepily. Outside every room stood
boots and shoes--all of strangers, unknown to one another, hostile to
one another. Suddenly a door opened, almost terrifying Kasimir
Stanislavovitch; on its threshold appeared an old man, looking like a
third-rate actor acting "The Memoirs of a Lunatic," and Kasimir
Stanislavovitch saw a lamp under a green shade and a room crowded with
things, the cave of a lonely, old lodger, with icons in the corner, and
innumerable cigarette boxes piled one upon another almost to the
ceiling, near the icons. Was that the half-crazy writer of the lives of
the saints, who had lived in the "Versailles" twenty-three years ago?
Kasimir Stanislavovitch's dark room was terribly hot with a malignant
and smelly dryness.... The light from the window over the door came
faintly into the darkness. Kasimir Stanislavovitch went behind the
screen, took the top-hat off his thin, greasy hair, threw his overcoat
over the end of his bare bed.... As soon as he lay down, everything
began to turn round him, to rush into an abyss, and he fell asleep
instantly. In his sleep all the time he was conscious of the smell of
the iron wash-stand which stood close to his face, and he dreamt of a
spring day, trees in blossom, the hall of a manor house and a number of
people waiting anxiously for the bishop to arrive at any moment; and all
night long he was wearied and tormented with that waiting.... Now in the
corridors of the "Versailles" people rang, ran, called to one another.
Behind the screen, through the double, dusty window-panes, the sun
shone; it was almost hot.... Kasimir Stanislavovitch took off his
jacket, rang the bell, and began to wash. There came in a quick-eyed
boy, the page-boy, with fox-coloured hair on his head, in a frock-coat
and pink shirt.
"A loaf, samovar, and lemon," Kasimir Stanislavovitch said without
looking at him.
"And tea and sugar?" the boy asked with Moscow sharpness.
And a minute later he rushed in with a boiling samovar in his hand, held
out level with his shoulders; on the round table in front of the sofa he
quickly put a tray with a glass and a battered brass slop-basin, and
thumped the samovar down on the tray.... Kasimir Stanislavovitch, while
the tea was drawing, mechanically opened the _Moscow Daily_, which the
page-boy had brought in with the samovar. His eye fell on a report that
yesterday an unknown man had been picked up unconscious.... "The victim
was taken to the hospital," he read, and threw the paper away. He felt
very bad and unsteady. He got up and opened the window--it faced the
yard--and a breath of freshness and of the city came to him; there came
to him the melodious shouts of hawkers, the bells of horse-trams humming
behind the house opposite, the blended rap-tap of the cars, the musical
drone of church-bells.... The city had long since started its huge,
noisy life in that bright, jolly, almost spring day. Kasimir
Stanislavovitch squeezed the lemon into a glass of tea and greedily
drank the sour, muddy liquid; then he again went behind the screen. The
"Versailles" was quiet. It was pleasant and peaceful; his eye wandered
leisurely over the hotel notice on the wall: "A stay of three hours is
reckoned as a full day." A mouse scuttled in the chest of drawers,
rolling about a piece of sugar left there by some visitor.... Thus half
asleep Kasimir Stanislavovitch lay for a long time behind the screen,
until the sun had gone from the room and another freshness was wafted in
from the window, the freshness of evening.
Then he carefully got himself in order: he undid his bag, changed his
underclothing, took out a cheap, but clean handkerchief, brushed his
shiny frock-coat, top-hat, and overcoat, took out of its torn pocket a
crumpled Kiev newspaper of January 15, and threw it away into the
corner.... Having dressed and combed his whiskers with a dyeing comb, he
counted his money--there remained in his purse four roubles, seventy
copecks--and went out. Exactly at six o'clock he was outside a low,
ancient, little church in the Molchanovka. Behind the church fence a
spreading tree was just breaking into green; children were playing
there--the black stocking of one thin little girl, jumping over a rope,
was continually coming down--and he sat there on a bench among
perambulators with sleeping babies and nurses in Russian costumes.
Sparrows prattled over all the tree; the air was soft, all but
summer--even the dust smelt of summer--the sky above the sunset behind
the houses melted into a gentle gold, and one felt that once more there
was somewhere in the world joy, youth, happiness. In the church the
chandeliers were already burning, and there stood the pulpit and in
front of the pulpit was spread a little carpet. Kasimir Stanislavovitch
cautiously took off his top-hat, trying not to untidy his hair, and
entered the church nervously; he went into a corner, but a corner from
which he could see the couple to be married. He looked at the painted
vault, raised his eyes to the cupola, and his every movement and every
gasp echoed loudly through the silence. The church shone with gold; the
candles sputtered expectantly. And now the priests and choir began to
enter, crossing themselves with the carelessness which comes of habit,
then old women, children, smart wedding guests, and worried stewards. A
noise was heard in the porch, the crunching wheels of the carriage, and
every one turned their heads towards the entrance, and the hymn burst
out "Come, my dove!" Kasimir Stanislavovitch became deadly pale, as his
heart beat, and unconsciously he took a step forward. And close by him
there passed--her veil touching him, and a breath of
lily-of-the-valley--she who did not know even of his existence in the
world; she passed, bending her charming head, all flowers and
transparent gauze, all snow-white and innocent, happy and timid, like a
princess going to her first communion.... Kasimir Stanislavovitch hardly
saw the bridegroom who came to meet her, a rather small,
broad-shouldered man with yellow, close-cropped hair. During the whole
ceremony only one thing was before his eyes: the bent head, in the
flowers and the veil, and the little hand trembling as it held a burning
candle tied with a white ribbon in a bow....
About ten o'clock he was back again in the hotel. All his overcoat smelt
of the spring air. After coming out of the church, he had seen, near the
porch, the car lined with white satin, and its window reflecting the
sunset, and behind the window there flashed on him for the last time the
face of her who was being carried away from him for ever. After that he
had wandered about in little streets, and had come out on the Novensky
Boulevard.... Now slowly and with trembling hands he took off his
overcoat, put on the table a paper bag containing two green cucumbers
which for some reason he had bought at a hawker's stall. They too smelt
of spring even through the paper, and spring-like through the upper pane
of the window the April moon shone silvery high up in the not yet
darkened sky. Kasimir Stanislavovitch lit a candle, sadly illuminating
his empty, casual home, and sat down on the sofa, feeling on his face
the freshness of evening.... Thus he sat for a long time. He did not
ring the bell, gave no orders, locked himself in--all this seemed
suspicious to the porter who had seen him enter his room with his
shuffling feet and taking the key out of the door in order to lock
himself in from the inside. Several times the porter stole up on tiptoe
to the door and looked through the key-hole: Kasimir Stanislavovitch was
sitting on the sofa, trembling and wiping his face with a handkerchief,
and weeping so bitterly, so copiously that the brown dye came off, and
was smeared over his face.
At night he tore the cord off the blind, and, seeing nothing through his
tears, began to fasten it to the hook of the clothes-peg. But the
guttering candle flickered and the paper bag, and terrible dark waves
swam and flickered over the locked room: he was old, weak--and he
himself was well aware of it.... No, it was not in his power to die by
his own hand!
In the morning he started for the railway station about three hours
before the train left. At the station he quietly walked about among the
passengers, with his eyes on the ground and tear-stained; and he would
stop unexpectedly now before one and now before another, and in a low
voice, evenly but without expression, he would say rather quickly:
"For God's sake ... I am in a desperate position.... My fare to
Briansk.... If only a few copecks...."
And some passengers, trying not to look at his top-hat, at the worn
velvet collar of his overcoat, at the dreadful face with the faded
violet whiskers, hurriedly, and with confusion, gave him something.
And then, rushing out of the station on to the platform, he got mixed in
the crowd and disappeared into it, while in the "Versailles," in the
room which for two days had as it were belonged to him, they carried out
the slop-pail, opened the windows to the April sun and to the fresh air,
noisily moved the furniture, swept up and threw out the dust--and with
the dust there fell under the table, under the table cloth which slid on
to the floor, his torn note, which he had forgotten with the cucumbers:
"I beg that no one be accused of my death. I was at the wedding of my
only daughter who...."
-----
Footnote 1:
_I.e._ There was no family name. The name is Polish, not Russian.
SON
Madame Maraud was born and grew up in Lausanne, in a strict, honest,
industrious family. She did not marry young, but she married for love.
In March, 1876, among the passengers on an old French ship, the
_Auvergne_, sailing from Marseilles to Italy, was the newly married
couple. The weather was calm and fresh; the silvery mirror of the sea
appeared and disappeared in the mists of the spring horizon. The newly
married couple never left the deck. Every one liked them, every one
looked at their happiness with friendly smiles; his happiness showed
itself in the energy and keenness of his glance, in a need for movement,
in the animation of his welcome to those around him; hers showed itself
in the joy and interest with which she took in each detail.... The newly
married couple were the Marauds.
He was about ten years her elder; he was not tall, with a swarthy face
and curly hair; his hand was dry and his voice melodious. One felt in
her the presence of some other, non-Latin blood; she was over medium
height, although her figure was charming, and she had dark hair and
blue-grey eyes. After touching at Naples, Palermo, and Tunis, they
arrived at the Algerian town of Constantine, where M. Maraud had
obtained a rather good post. And their life in Constantine, for the
fourteen years since that happy spring, gave them everything with which
people are normally satisfied: wealth, family happiness, healthy and
beautiful children.
During the fourteen years the Marauds had greatly changed in appearance.
He became as dark as an Arab; from his work, from travelling, from
tobacco and the sun, he had grown grey and dried up--many people mistook
him for a native of Algeria. And it would have been impossible to
recognize in her the woman who sailed once in the _Auvergne_: at that
time there was even in the boots which she put outside her door at night
the charm of youth; now there was silver in her hair, her skin had
become more transparent and more of a golden colour, her hands were
thinner and in her care of them, of her linen, and of her clothes she
already showed a certain excessive tidiness. Their relations had
certainly changed too, although no one could say for the worse. They
each lived their own life: his time was filled with work--he remained
the same passionate, and, at the same time, sober man that he had been
before; her time was filled up with looking after him and their
children, two pretty girls, of whom the elder was almost a young lady:
and every one with one voice agreed that in all Constantine there was no
better hostess, no better mother, no more charming companion in the
drawing-room than Madame Maraud.
Their house stood in a quiet, clean part of the town. From the front
rooms on the second floor, which were always half dark with the blinds
drawn down, one saw Constantine, known the world over for its
picturesqueness. On steep rocks stands the ancient Arab fortress which
has become a French city. The windows of the living-rooms looked into a
garden where in perpetual heat and sunshine slumbered the evergreen
eucalyptuses, the sycamores, and palms behind high walls. The master was
frequently away on business, and the lady led the secluded existence to
which the wives of Europeans are doomed in the colonies. On Sundays she
always went to church. On weekdays she rarely went out, and she visited
only a small and select circle. She read, did needle-work, talked or did
lessons with the children; sometimes taking her younger daughter, the
black-eyed Marie, on her knee, she would play the piano with one hand
and sing old French songs, in order to while away the long African day,
while the great breath of hot wind blew in through the open windows from
the garden.... Constantine, with all its shutters closed and scorched
pitilessly by the sun, seemed at such hours a dead city: only the birds
called behind the garden wall, and from the hills behind the town came
the dreary sound of pipes, filled with the melancholy of colonial
countries, and at times there the dull thud of guns shook the earth, and
you could see the flashing of the white helmets of soldiers.
The days in Constantine passed monotonously, but no one noticed that
Madame Maraud minded that. In her pure, refined nature there was no
trace of abnormal sensitiveness or excessive nervousness. Her health
could not be called robust, but it gave no cause of anxiety to M.
Maraud. Only one incident once astonished him: in Tunis once, an Arab
juggler so quickly and completely hypnotized her that it was only with
difficulty that she could be brought to. But this happened at the time
of their arrival from France; she had never since experienced so sudden
a loss of will-power, such a morbid suggestibility. And M. Maraud was
happy, untroubled, convinced that her soul was tranquil and open to him.
And it was so, even in the last, the fourteenth year of their married
life. But then there appeared in Constantine Emile Du-Buis.
Emile Du-Buis, the son of Madame Bonnay, an old and good friend of M.
Maraud, was only nineteen. Emile was the son of her first husband and
had grown up in Paris where he studied law, but he spent most of his
time in writing poems, intelligible only to himself; he was attached to
the school of "Seekers" which has now ceased to exist. Madame Bonnay,
the widow of an engineer, also had a daughter, Elise. In May, 1889,
Elise was just going to be married, when she fell ill and died a few
days before her wedding, and Emile, who had never been in Constantine,
came to the funeral. It can be easily understood how that death moved
Madame Maraud, the death of a girl already trying on her wedding dress;
it is also known how quickly in such circumstances an intimacy springs
up between people who have hardly met before. Besides, to Madame Maraud
Emile was, indeed, only a boy. Soon after the funeral Madame Bonnay went
for the summer to stay with her relations in France. Emile remained in
Constantine, in a suburban villa which belonged to his late step-father,
the villa "Hashim," as it was called in the town, and he began coming
nearly every day to the Marauds. Whatever he was, whatever he pretended
to be, he was still very young, very sensitive, and he needed people to
whom he could attach himself for a time. "And isn't it strange?" some
said; "Madame Maraud has become unrecognizable! How lively she has
become, and how her looks have improved!"
However, these insinuations were groundless. At first there was only
this, that her life had become a little bit jollier, and her girls too
had become more playful and coquettish, since Emile, every now and then
forgetting his sorrow and the poison with which, as he thought, the _fin
de siècle_ had infected him, would for hours at a time play with Marie
and Louise as if he were their age. It is true that he was all the same
a man, a Parisian, and not altogether an ordinary man. He had already
taken part in that life, inaccessible to ordinary mortals, which
Parisian writers live; he often read aloud, with a hypnotic
expressiveness, strange but sonorous poems; and, perhaps it was entirely
owing to him that Madame Maraud's walk had become lighter and quicker,
her dress at home imperceptibly smarter, the tones of her voice more
tender and playful. Perhaps, too, there was in her soul a drop of purely
feminine pleasure that here was a man to whom she could give her small
commands, with whom she could talk, half seriously and half jokingly as
a mentor, with that freedom which their difference in age so naturally
allowed--a man who was so devoted to her whole household, in which,
however, the first person--this, of course, very soon became clear--was
for him, nevertheless, she herself. But how common all that is! And the
chief thing was that often what she really felt for him was only pity.
He honestly thought himself a born poet, and he wished outwardly too to
look like a poet; his long hair was brushed back with artistic modesty;
his hair was fine, brown, and suited his pale face just as did his black
clothes; but the pallor was too bloodless, with a yellow tinge in it;
his eyes were always shining, but the tired look in his face made them
seem feverish; and so flat and narrow was his chest, so thin his legs
and hands, that one felt a little uncomfortable when one saw him get
very excited and run in the street or garden, with his body pushed
forward a little, as though he were gliding, in order to hide his
defect, that he had one leg shorter than the other. In company he was
apt to be unpleasant, haughty, trying to appear mysterious, negligent,
at times elegantly dashing, at times contemptuously absent-minded, in
everything independent; but too often he could not carry it through to
the end, he became confused and began to talk hurriedly with naïve
frankness. And, of course, he was not very long able to hide his
feelings, to maintain the pose of not believing in love or in happiness
on earth. He had already begun to bore his host by his visits; every day
he would bring from his villa bouquets of the rarest flowers, and he
would sit from morn to night reading poems which were more and more
unintelligible--the children often heard him beseeching some one that
they should die together--while he spent his nights in the native
quarter, in dens where Arabs, wrapped in dirty white robes, greedily
watch the _danse de ventre_, and drank fiery liqueurs.... In a word it
took less than six weeks for his passion to change into God knows what.
His nerves gave way completely. Once he sat for nearly the whole day in
silence; then he got up, bowed, took his hat and went out--and half an
hour later he was carried in from the street in a terrible state; he was
in hysterics and he wept so passionately that he terrified the children
and servants. But Madame Maraud, it seemed, did not attach any
particular importance to this delirium. She herself tried to help him
recover himself, quickly undid his tie, told him to be a man, and she
only smiled when he, without any restraint in her husband's presence,
caught her hands and covered them with kisses and vowed devotion to her.
But an end had to be put to all this. When, a few days after this
outbreak, Emile, whom the children had greatly missed, arrived calm, but
looking like some one who has been through a serious illness, Madame
Maraud gently told him everything which is always said on such
occasions.
"My friend, you are like a son to me," she said to him, for the first
time uttering the word son, and, indeed, almost feeling a maternal
affection. "Don't put me in a ridiculous and painful position."
"But I swear to you, you are mistaken!" he exclaimed, with passionate
sincerity. "I am only devoted to you. I only want to see you, nothing
else!"