But towards me Death comes with a slower, more deliberate tread. For years, ever since the birth of my little daughter Tania,—my white rosebud born midst the snows of a dreary winter in Kieff—I have felt Death creeping towards me, slow, insidious, inexorable, holding in his hand a knot of serpents, each of which will fasten its poisoned fangs upon me. Disease, the venomous snake, will hide in my bosom and thrust its way through my veins. The heavy snake of Grief will coil round my heart and crush me in its spirals. Insanity will glide into my brain and nest there. Then—last but not least horrible—the little glass viper, the syringe of Pravaz, whose fang is a hollow needle, will draw me into the thraldom of its virulent grip. It will spurt its venom into my blood. The bland balm of coca, the milky juice of the poppy, will flow into my veins, soothing, assuaging, lulling me into sleep and forgetfulness—only to waken me in renewed agony of suffering to a renewed bite of the envenomed fang. For the only antidote to the poison of narcotics is the narcotic itself, the only alleviation to the tearing agony of the poison generated by morphia is morphia again. And so the fatal sequence swings on forever, in ever-widening circles of torment....
X
From Alexis Bozevsky to Stepan Nebrasoff.
Dear Stepan, my good Friend,—
I am here in the house of your cousin, Dr. Stahl, who seems to have grown longer and leaner than ever. He is a mere shadow. It is here that your letter reaches me. You tell me to write to you about myself. To-day, the 15th of October, 1903, I am twenty-four years old. What gift will Destiny give me for my birthday? Love? Wealth? A hero's death?
Your cousin Stahl, in his cavernous voice that seems to come echoing up from underground, says that the gift of Destiny is precisely these four-and-twenty years of mine! Perhaps he is right. I feel them eddying in my blood like four-and-twenty cyclones.
The world is a whirlwind of youth.
Kaufmann this morning lent me his sorrel stallion—the finest horse in the Empire—and I had a gallop along the bastions. All the women looked at me. In a phaeton I saw the brazen and beautiful Princess Theodora, blonde and torrid as a Mexican landscape. She was resplendent in amethyst and heliotrope, her red locks flaming to the sun; no one but a princess would permit herself to display such a riot of violent colors.
Soon afterwards I saw Vera Voroklizkaja, reclining in her carriage, aloof and severe as a vestal virgin; her glossy black tresses parted over her brow enclosed the narrow oval of her face like soft black wings. Beside her sat little Miriam Grey, clothed in her youthfulness as in an armor of roses. The beauty of all these women courses through my blood like sun and wine.
Upon my word life is an excellent institution.
And you—what are you doing?
Stepan, Stepan, Stepan!—
I am in love! Madly, sublimely, tragically in love! This morning I went to the parade-ground as in a dream; I found myself speaking to the colonel in a gentle winning voice that was perfectly ludicrous. When I drilled my company I could hear myself giving the words of command in an imploring tone which I still blush to remember. I am obsessed, hallucinated; there floats before my eyes a slender, ethereal creature, with red lips that never smile, and hair that looks like a cataract of champagne.
Stahl introduced me to her yesterday, here at his house. “Come,” he said, taking me by the arm. “You are going to make the acquaintance of a superior being, soft of voice and sad of countenance, who bears the gentle name of Marie.”
“Let me off,” I replied skeptically. “Sad and superior beings are not to my liking.”
“You will like this one,” said Stahl.
“I know I shan't,” I replied curtly. I saw Stahl's eye warn me, and, turning, found myself face to face with the subject of our conversation, a tall, flower-like vision, with translucent eyes and a mystic inscrutable face.
I knew she had overheard me, and as I bowed low before her, she said: “That you should like me is of no importance. What really matters is that I should be pleased with you.”
Her beauty and the scornful levity of her words struck me strangely. “Madame,” and I was surprised to feel that I spoke with sincerity, “to please you will be henceforward the highest aim of my desire.”
She looked at me a moment; then she spoke quietly: “You have attained your aim.”
She turned and left me. I stood thunderstruck by the brief and daring reply and by the flash of that clear gaze. She had spoken the words without a smile.
She did not address me during the rest of the evening. When she left, she barely glanced at me and vouchsafed neither smile nor greeting.
Just for an instant she raised her black-fringed eyes and gazed at me; then her lashes fell; and it was as if a light had been blown out.
I am in love with her! Madly, divinely, desperately in love. Ah, Stepan, love—what an ecstasy and what a disaster!
It was Dr. Stahl, the “Satanic Stahl,” who got these letters from his cousin Stepan Nebrasoff, and showed them to me. They bewildered and troubled me. What? Was I really so attractive and so perturbing in the eyes of the gallant young Pole—the handsomest officer in the Imperial Guard? I repeated to myself his disquieting epithets: “flower-like,” “ethereal,” “inscrutable”; and in my room at night when I loosened my hair, I wondered: “Does it really look like a cataract of champagne?” When I went out I never smiled, even when I felt inclined to do so, since my gravity had seemed so charming to him.
Night and day he followed me like a shadow—or rather, should I say, like a blaze of light. In whatever direction I turned I was sure to encounter his radiant smile and his flashing glance. His passion encompassed me; I felt like Brunnhilde surrounded by a sea of flame. I was elated yet terrified.
One evening at dinner I made up my mind to speak to Vassili about it.
“Vassili,” I said falteringly, “I think we ought to go away for a time.”
“Away? Where to?” asked my husband.
“Anywhere—anywhere away from Kieff.”
“Why?”
I felt myself turning pale! “I am afraid,” I stammered, “I am afraid—that Bozevsky—”
“Well?” asked Vassili serenely, pouring some vodka into his champagne and drinking it.
“I am afraid that Bozevsky is falling in love with me.”
“And who would not fall in love with you, dushka?” laughed Vassili. “As for Bozevsky, may the wolves eat him.”
And dinner being over, he lit his cigar and went out.
I go sadly upstairs to the nursery where Tioka and Tania, like blonde seraphs, lie asleep.
A dim lamp hangs between the two white cots and illumines their favorite picture—an artless painting of the Virgin Mary, holding in her youthful arms the infant Jesus with a count's coronet on His head.
I kneel down beside the two little beds and weep.
Aunt Sonia, rectilinear and asexual in her gray flannel dressing-gown, comes in softly and bends over me.
“You must trust in Providence,” she says, raising towards the ceiling her long virginal face. “And take a little camomile tea. That always does one good.”
I obey her meekly and gratefully. It comforts me to think that a day will come when I also shall be like Aunt Sonia; when I also shall be content to wear gray flannel dressing-gowns and turn in my sorrows to Providence and to camomile tea.
And I wish that that day of peace were near.
XI
So