Next day Christian received a telegram from Crammon, in which the
latter announced his arrival for the middle of the following week.
He gazed meditatively at the slip of paper, and had to reconstruct an
image of Crammon from memory, feature by feature. But it escaped him
again at once.
At Fyodor Szilaghin’s he found about twenty people. There were eight
or ten Russians, including Wiguniewski. Then there were the brothers
Maelbeek, young Belgian aristocrats, a French naval captain, Tavera,
Bradshaw, the Princess Helfersdorff and her mother (a very common
looking person), Beatrix Vanleer, and Sinaide Gamaleja.
Christian arrived a little later than the others, and Szilaghin was
half-sitting, half-lying on a _chaise-longue_. A young wolf crouched on
his knees, and on the arm of the _chaise-longue_ sat a green parrot. He
smiled and excused himself for not arising, pointing to the animals as
though they held him fast.
From Wiguniewski’s anecdotes Christian knew of Szilaghin’s fondness
for such trickery. At Oxford he had once gone boating alone and at
night with an eagle chained to his skiff; at Rome he had once rented
a palace, and given a ball to the dregs of the city’s life--beggars,
cripples, prostitutes, and pimps. The boastfulness of such things was
obvious. But as Christian stood there and saw him with those animals,
the impression he received was not only one of frantic high spirits,
but also one of despair. A retroactive oppression crept over him.
The lighting of the rooms was strikingly dim and scattered. A
thunderstorm was approaching, and the windows were all open on
account of the sultry heat; and every flicker of lightning flashed an
unexpected brightness into the rooms.
At the invitation of several guests, Sinaide Gamaleja sat down with a
lute under a cluster of long-stemmed roses, and began to sing a Russian
song. Over her shoulders lay a gold-embroidered shawl, and her hair
was held by a band of diamonds. Her figure was fragile. She had broad
cheekbones, a wide mouth, and dully-glowing, heavy-lidded eyes.
The greyish-yellow wolf on Szilaghin’s knees raised his head, and
blinked sleepily at the singer. The melody had awakened in him a dream
of his native steppes. But the parrot stirred too, and, croaking an
unintelligible word, he preened himself and displayed the gorgeous
plumage of his throat. Szilaghin raised a finger and bade the bird
be silent; obediently it hid its beak in the feathers which a breeze
lifted. A voluble old Russian kept talking to Szilaghin. The latter
overheard him contemptuously, and joined in the singing of the song’s
second stanza.
His voice was melodious--a deep, dark baritone. But to Christian there
seemed something corrupt in its music, as corrupt as the half-shut,
angry, melancholy eyes with their contempt of mankind; as corrupt as
the well-chiselled, waxen face, that could pass for eighteen, yet
harboured all the experiences of an evil old age; as corrupt as the
long, pale, sinuous, nerveless hand or the sweetish, weary, clever
smile.
The Maelbeeks, Wiguniewski, the Captain, and Tavera had settled down to
a game of baccarat in the adjoining room. In the pauses of the singing,
one could hear the click of gold and the tap of the cards on the table.
These strange noises excited the parrot; he forgot the command of his
master, and uttered a discordant cry. Sinaide Gamaleja threw the animal
a furious glance, and for a moment her hand twitched on the strings.
At that moment Szilaghin arose, grasped the bird’s feet with one
hand, its head with the other, and twisted the head of the screaming,
agonizedly fluttering animal around and around as on an axis. Then he
tossed the green, dead thing aside with an expression of disgust, and
calmly intoned the third stanza of the song.
A flame of satisfaction appeared in Sinaide Gamaleja’s eyes. The old
Russian, who had visited his endless babble on the sculptress, fell
suddenly silent. The wolf yawned, and, as though to confirm the fact of
his own obedience, snuggled his chin against his master’s arm.
Christian looked down at the dead bird, whose tattered plumage gleamed
in the lightning that flashed across the floor like a fantastic
emerald. Suddenly the dead animal became to him the seal and symbol of
all the corruption, vanity, unveracity, bedizenment, and danger of all
he saw and felt. He looked at Szilaghin, at Sinaide, at the chattering
dotard, at the gamesters, and turned away. There was an acridness in
his throat and a burning in his eyes. He approached the window. The
foliage rustled out there, and the thunder pealed. And the question
arose within him: Whence does all this evil come? Whence does it come,
and why is it so hard to separate oneself from it?
The night, the rain, and the storm drove him forth, lured him out. He
ached to lose himself in the darkness, far from men. He was afraid for
the first time in his life that he would shed tears. Never, in all
his conscious memory, had he wept. His whole body was shaken by an
emotional tumult such as he had never known, and he repressed it only
by using his utmost energy. Just as he was about to touch the knob of
the door, a lackey opened it, and Maidanoff and Eva appeared on the
threshold. Christian stood quite still; but every vestige of colour
left his face.
A vivid stir went through the company. Szilaghin jumped up to welcome
these two. Maidanoff’s weather-beaten leanness contrasted in a striking
and sombre fashion with Eva’s flower-like symmetry of form. She wore a
garment diaphanous as breathing; it was held to her shoulders by ropes
of pearls. Her skin had a faintly golden glow; her throat and arms and
bosom pulsed with life.
The vision absorbed Christian. He stared at her. His name was spoken,
with other names that were new to Maidanoff; and still he stared at
that unfathomable and fatal image. His heart, in its sudden, monstrous
loneliness, turned to ice; he felt both wild and stricken with
dumbness; the tension of his soul became unendurable. Curious glances
sought him out. He failed to move at the proper moment, and the moan
that arose from the confusion of his utter grief had made a thing of
mockery and scorn of him, before he fled past barren walls and stupid
lackeys into the open.
The rain came down in torrents. He did not call his car, but walked
along the road.