Annie Vivanti
Marie Tarnowska
XXX
Count Kamarowsky came in shortly afterwards. He was gloomy and morose; but on seeing his friend, whom he had that morning invited to dine with us, he made a heroic effort to keep up an appearance of good temper and hospitality.
But his grief and anger were only too apparent. He sat beside me at table without speaking to me, nor did he ever turn his eyes in my direction.
Our guest seemed distressed and amazed at his behavior, and—doubtless remembering my recent tears—he gazed at me with his light-brown eyes eloquent of sympathy and compassion.
Once or twice I addressed a remark to Kamarowsky, but he scarcely answered me and I felt myself flushing and paling with humiliation.
Silence fell upon us at last. Painful and embarrassing as I felt it to be, I yet could find no word to say. A violent headache racked my temples, and I had to bite my lips to keep myself from bursting into tears.
Suddenly I got up and went into my room. With trembling hand I sought in my dressing-case for a bottle of cocaine, which for nearly a year I had not touched. I lifted it to my lips and sipped the exhilarating poison. Then I returned to the table.
Kamarowsky was sitting grim and silent with bent head and lowering brow, but the young stranger raised his golden eyes under their long fair lashes, and fixed them upon me as if to give me comfort. After a few moments, in order to break the well-nigh unbearable silence, he spoke to me in his low and gentle voice.
“I hear that Delphinus, the famous crystal gazer, has arrived in Orel. You ought to get him to tell you your fortune.”
“Is that so?” I said, smiling; and even as I spoke the prediction of that strange soothsayer flashed into my memory. I seemed to hear again the brief, prophetic words: “Two men are yet to enter into your life. One will be your salvation—the other your ruin.”
Two men! I glanced around me, startled and amazed. Two men were here; one on each side of me. Was the prophecy coming true? Were these the two men he had spoken of? Were the One and the Other sitting beside me now?
In my mind I could still hear the fortune-teller's nasal, dreamy accent:
“You will chose—the Other. It is your destiny.”
Overcome by a feeling of timorous superstition, I looked at my two table companions, of whom One, perhaps, might represent my destruction, the Other my last hope of happiness.
At my right hand sat Kamarowsky, sullen and sinister in his grief and anger against me; on my left the young unknown, with radiant face and gold-bright eyes that smiled at me. A flash of intuition seemed to illuminate my spirit; here was salvation! Nicolas Naumoff! This unknown youth, in whose eyes I had read such complete and instant devotion—it was he whom fate had sent to lead me back to joy.
Looking back to that hour I realize that it was the rhapsodical delirium of cocaine that whipped my brain into senseless aberration; but at the time I implicitly believed that by a miracle of divination I had rent the veil of the future, and could discern with inspired gaze the distant sweep of the years to come.
I saw Kamarowsky—somber, dark, with bent head—as the very incarnation of sorrow and misfortune; and, to make assurance twice sure, was it not he whom I had chosen? And had not the diviner foretold me that he whom I chose would be the one to lead me to destruction?
But I might still draw back, I might still trick the Fates and escape from my predestined doom. With the blind impulse of the hunted quarry seeking a refuge, I turned an imploring gaze on the young unknown; he read despair in my eyes, and his own responded with a flash of comprehension; he leaned toward me, and, as if in the throe of some instant emotion, I saw him thrill from head to foot like a tense string. At this immediate response of his nerves to mine, I also felt a tremor stir me, as the water of a lake is stirred by a gust of wind. What evil spirit possessed me? Was I ill? Was I demented? I cannot tell. I know that my soul pledged itself to him at that moment; and I know that he understood me.
Thus, in my attempt to escape it, the tragic prophecy was to be fulfilled.
When Nicolas Naumoff got up to take his leave I knew that he would return, that I should see him again, and this thought intoxicated me with such delight that even Kamarowsky, in spite of his anger and his suspicions, was swept away by the radiance and rapture of my joyfulness. I was then—well may I say it now!—at the zenith of my youthful beauty, notwithstanding, or perhaps by reason of the disease that burned within me like a consuming lamp; a constant fever lit my transparent flesh into delicate rose flushes, and blazed like lighted sapphires in my translucent eyes.
I was no sooner alone with him than, seeing me thus aflame with radiant happiness, Kamarowsky rose and came towards me with outstretched hands.
“Marie, I love you, I love you! I will trust you utterly. I want to know nothing that you do not wish to tell me.” And he bowed his head over my hands and kissed them.
But my wild thoughts went out to the unknown youth with the golden eyes who had left us, he through whom salvation was to come to me; and every fiber yearned for his presence. A sudden wave of almost physical repulsion for Paul Kamarowsky overcame me and I started away from his touch. “Leave me,” I cried, “leave me. Let me go away.” And I tried to go past him to my room.
But he stopped me, amazed and unbelieving. “Why, dearest, why? What is the matter?”
“It is over,” I murmured incoherently, “leave me. I do not wish to speak to you any more. I do not wish to marry you. I want to go away and never see you again.”
“Mura! you are dreaming, you are out of your mind! What have I done that you should speak to me like this?”
His bewilderment and despair only irritated me the more. “You will drag me to ruin and misfortune. I was told so; and I know, I feel that it is true.”
“You were told so?” gasped Paul. “What are you saying? Mura, come to your senses. Who has put such preposterous notions into your head?”
Notwithstanding my dazed and drugged state of mind, I felt that to tell him about the fortune-teller would neither convince nor impress him; he would probably laugh, and try to coax or scold me back to my senses. So I wrapped myself in an obstinate and mysterious silence.
The unhappy man was perplexed and distressed.
“Who has poisoned your mind against me, Mura? Think, think a moment; who in all the world could love you more than I do? Who could protect you and care for you better than I can, poor helpless creature that you are?”
But I was possessed by the blind obstinacy of madness. Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat. My destiny was coming upon me at the very time I thought to evade it.
“Let me be!” My hands twisted themselves from his grasp. “I will not see you again! I will not!”
“But I will,” cried Kamarowsky, clasping my wrist in an iron grip, and his long, languorous eyes opened wide and flamed into mine. “Do you think that because I am kind and patient you can play fast and loose with me? No indeed, no indeed; you have promised to be mine, and I shall make you keep your word.”
Never had I seen him like this nor dreamed that he could be so fierce and resolute. I felt dizzy and bewildered. I felt the bats of madness flying in my brain. I raised my eyes with a scornful smile to his: how could he keep me against my will?
As if he had divined my thought he bent forward with his passionate face close to mine. “Do not think you can escape me,” he said. “Do not imagine it for a moment. Mura, I know you well. You need to be mastered, and I shall master you. As long as I live, remember—as long as I live you shall not escape me.”
These words seemed to pierce my dizzy brain like red-hot needles. “As long as he lives I shall not escape him. As long as he lives—!”
I raised my eyes and looked at him; then I drooped my lashes—and smiled.
The subtle cunning of madness stirred within me.
XXXI
Paul Kamarowsky appeared not to notice it. He continued to speak agitatedly, holding my unwilling hand in his.
“I know, Mura, that you have done many unworthy things in the course of your life; I know that you are not what I would have you be; but my pity for your misfortunes is far greater than my resentment at your faults. I know that you are ill; I know that you have had none but rakes and reprobates around you; it shall be my duty to strengthen you and uphold you with my love. I will help you, Mura, whether you wish it or not; I will save you in spite of yourself.”
Ah, miserable creature that I was, why did I not throw myself upon his mercy and confide my doubts and my despair to his generous heart? Why did I not surrender my poor sick soul to his keeping? This was indeed the last time that salvation opened its haven to my shipwrecked soul; but I knew it not, and like a boat adrift in the darkness I swept on towards the storm.
He continued to speak. “If I have not wanted to know about your past, it has not been from cowardice nor from the fear of any man; but from distrust of my own heart, Mura, for fear lest my love for you should wane. Whereas it is my duty and my mission to love you, Marie Nicolaevna, to love and save you from your own weakness and the iniquity of the world. You are still so young—hardly less of a child than little Tioka—notwithstanding the storms of passion and sin that have passed over your head. All you need is to live among right-minded people who will love you. I shall love you, Mura; and my mother, gentle soul that she is, will take you to her heart; and so will my sisters. Then when you find yourself surrounded by such pure, kind and simple affections, you, too, will become simple, kind and pure again.”
His voice broke. “We shall be so happy; and Tioka and Grania will be happy; and so will your good old father. He shall come and live with us. How is it you never think of your father, Mura? The generous, broken-hearted old man in that desolate house of Otrada?”
Hot tears rushed to my eyes. My father! My stately father, with his venerable white hair, and his proud blue eyes—the “terrible O'Rourke,” living in that deserted house, widowed, desolate and alone. There was no one to coax him out of his grief or his anger; no arms went round his neck, no laughing voices cried to him: “Father, don't be the terrible O'Rourke!” I covered my face with my hands.
Kamarowsky bent over me. “Is it not wickedness, Mura, to throw away one's life as you do? To rush from place to place, from emotion to emotion, from misery to despair? Is it not more than wickedness—is it not madness?”
“Madness!” As if the word had rent a veil before my eyes, I looked my calamity full in the face. Yes, it was madness; it was the hereditary curse of my mother's people. I was like my mother's two wild-faced, frenzied sisters, whom we used to run away from and laugh at when we were children, Olga and I.... Madness! In my delicate blue veins it had taken root again, and now its monstrous flower opened its crashing petals in my brain. I was mad, there was no doubt of it and no help for it. I was mad.
I spoke the words softly to myself, and the very sound of them made me laugh. It amused me to think that no one knew my thoughts. I felt like a naughty little girl hiding in a dark cupboard while everybody is looking for her. The dark cupboard was my mind, and I had discovered madness there.
Undoubtedly I was bereft of reason; and my mother's sisters, now for so many years entombed in an asylum at Warsaw, were assuredly not more mad than I. The thought of this, also, made me laugh. I whispered to myself: “I am cleverer than they. I am as mad as they are, but no one shall ever know it!”
I have no other explanation to give, no other justification. I was demented, and I knew it. Sometimes in the night I started up wide awake, and the horror of the thought that I was alone with myself—with myself who was mad!—froze me into a statue of ice. As soon as I could stir a limb I would creep from my bed, steal out into the silent corridors of the hotel, and run with chattering teeth along the red-carpeted passages between the long double rows of boots, which to my eyes appeared like little monsters crouching at the thresholds; then up the great staircase, turning round every moment to look behind me, until I reached the fourth floor and the room of Elise and the children.
Softly I would tap at the door, and call:—“Elise!”
“Yes, madame.” Elise Perrier always answered immediately, as if she never slept.
“Elise, I want you.”
“Yes, madame, I shall come at once,” and I could hear her rising from her bed.
Then I ran back through the silent corridors, and when I passed Count Kamarowsky's door I trembled and shuddered and felt constrained to stop. I looked at his yellow boots—square and placid, with their mouths open and their tongues hanging out—and I experienced a wild sensation of fear and loathing for him and for them.
I made a grimace at those hateful boots and hurried away to shut myself in my room and await Elise.
She would come in, pale and tidy in her red woolen dressing-gown, with a little cap on her head. She sat down quietly by my bedside and held my hand. Sometimes she read aloud to me; sometimes she repeated Swiss poems and ballads that she remembered from her schooldays; and I soon grew calm again as I listened to her quiet voice and felt the clasp of her small roughened hand on mine.
Gradually a sort of frenzied fear of Kamarowsky took possession of me. I was obsessed continuously with the idea that I must escape from him at all costs, or die. My every fiber shrank at the slightest touch of his hand. I longed never to see him again. I longed to know that the world held him no more. It was a blind instinctive frenzy that I endured without reasoning about it. My constant and only preoccupation was to fly from him who spelt ruin, and to cling to Naumoff, my deliverer.
“Nicolas Naumoff! Nicolas Naumoff!” I repeated his name all day long like a kind of exorcism against Kamarowsky; sometimes I felt as if I were stifled, as if I must hold my breath until he was near.
On his side, Naumoff, who frequently came to see us, was reserved and shy, and did not venture to believe in what nevertheless he could not but read in my eyes. Knowing nothing of my insensate notion about the diviner's prophecy, and having no conception that to my fancy he was a rescuer sent to me by Providence, he thought I was making fun of him; or at other times he believed my predilection for him was merely the caprice of a frivolous creature accustomed to gratify every passing whim. So he held back, aggrieved and mistrustful.
And the more he held back the more was I impelled to pursue him, to hold and to vanquish him. The passionate gravity of his youthful face delighted me; I was thirsty for the unknown recesses of his soul as for a spring filled with mysterious sweetness. His voice perturbed me; his silence lashed my nerves; I lived in a perpetual quiver of rhapsodic sensibility.
I was in this frame of mind when Kamarowsky resolved to invite all his friends in Orel to a banquet in order to announce to them our imminent marriage.
At this banquet Naumoff also was present. Doubtless he already knew the announcement that his friend was going to make, yet when the Count rose to speak and laid his hand with a placid air of ownership upon mine, I saw Nicolas Naumoff turn pale. I watched with deep emotion the color slowly receding from his face; in its pallor his youthful countenance appeared to me still more beautiful; he looked indeed like the supreme deliverer—the angel of death.
I did not comprehend a word of Paul Kamarowsky's speech; I know that when it was ended he turned to me and placed a magnificent diamond ring upon my finger, and every one applauded and cheered.
Then the guests rose in turn to congratulate Kamarowsky, and to kiss my hand and wish me joy; and I know that I smiled and thanked them.
Naumoff alone had not left his place, but in the gay chatter and stir that surrounded us no one noticed it. He soon went away; he disappeared without taking leave of any one.
Toasts and speeches followed. The waiters came and went, carrying fruits and wines and sometimes leaving the large double doors of our dining-room open behind them.
Suddenly as I raised my eyes I saw a man standing on the threshold and gazing in at us.
It was Prilukoff.
XXXII
In truth I do not know whether I felt dismayed or glad. It was as if I were in a dream.
Since I had begun to take cocaine again, that twilight sensation of unreality had descended anew like a misty veil upon all my perceptions.
I could not distinguish facts from illusions. Prilukoff had immediately disappeared—or had I only fancied that I saw him?
Trembling a little, I rose from my place, and while many of the guests were still talking and laughing with their host I excused myself on the plea of fatigue. They toasted me a last time, and Kamarowsky kissed me ceremoniously before them all.
With cheeks and heart aflame I hurried to my apartments, glad to think that I should find them dark and silent. My temples were throbbing, the coronet of diamonds—a gift of Kamarowsky's—weighed heavy on my brow, and my eyes seemed to be pierced with red-hot needles.
I opened the door of my sitting-room, where a lamp, turned low, glimmered like a star veiled in red vapor. Behind it I could see yawning blackly the open door leading to my bedroom, which was in complete darkness.
I had a strange feeling that I was not alone. Some one was in the room—some one whom I could not discern was near to me.
Yes, a footstep approached; a strong arm encircled me. Nicolas Naumoff's voice spoke in thrilling accents: “Marie! Marie! My heart is breaking.”
With a sigh of infinite weariness merging into a sense of infinite repose I laid my head against his breast. I longed to die. I felt as if I had nothing more to ask for, nothing more to desire.
But the anguish that was passing from my soul seemed to have entered into his.
“You must not marry that man! You must not, you shall not!” He gripped my shoulders as if he would crush them. “Tell me, tell me that you do not love him.”
At that instant on the black background of my bedroom there appeared a form—Prilukoff! Erect in the doorway he stood watching us. Naumoff had his back to him, but across his shoulder I looked Prilukoff in the face, only a few steps from me.
My heart stood still. What would he do?
Knowing as I did his ungovernable frenzies of jealousy, his madness, his recklessness, I wondered whether he would leap forward and spring at Naumoff's throat? Would there be blows and groans and a death-struggle in my tranquil, shadowy room? Would there be a turmoil and a scandal, during which the bond of infamy that tied me to Prilukoff would be revealed to Naumoff? Revealed to Kamarowsky and to the world?
The fear of tragedy and disgrace kept me stark and terror-stricken, rooted to the spot. Then I saw Prilukoff move. Slowly he raised his right arm. His right hand clutched something which I could not see. Suddenly—incredible sight!—I saw him open his mouth wide; and never, never have I seen anything more grotesque and terrifying than that figure in the darkness with mouth gaping wide....
But still his right arm moved, rising slowly and relentlessly until it was on a level with that terrible open mouth. What did the hand hold? Did I not see a gleam of polished metal?
I tried to scream, but no sound issued from my parched throat. I could see the whites of his staring upturned eyes, and the hand now motionless just in front of the open mouth—
From my throat came a hoarse whisper: “Don't, for heaven's sake! Wait—”
Naumoff, in amazement at these words which he believed to be addressed to himself, relaxed his hold. “What is it?” he whispered. “Is any one there?”
Step by step I drew back from him, with my fascinated eyes still fixed upon Prilukoff, who stood motionless as a statue in the same dreadful attitude.
“Is any one there?” repeated Naumoff.
“Yes. Don't move.” The words formed themselves soundlessly on my lips, but Naumoff understood them and obeyed. He neither turned nor moved.
“Stand as you are,” I breathed; “do not stir.” And I glided snake-like from him.
Then with the quickness of lightning I darted upon Prilukoff, thrusting him back into the dark bedroom, clutching him by the wrist, and covering his rapid breathing with my hand. The carpet deadened our footsteps. With my elbow I pushed the door and, as it closed behind me, I turned and shot the bolt. I was locked in my room with Prilukoff.
“Hush, hush!” I whispered, my lips almost touching his face. “I implore you, I implore you! Do not betray me. Do not let them hear you.”
Through his closed and stifled lips there issued hideous, incoherent words of vituperation.
“Hush! hush! hush!” I pressed my hand still tighter to his lips. “Forgive me! Spare me! I am yours, yours only! Donat, forgive me and keep silence!”
“Mine, mine only,” breathed Prilukoff, hoarsely; “you swear it!”
“Yes! oh, yes!”
I could hear Naumoff trying the handle on the other side of the door.
“Marie! Marie! What are you doing? Why have you run away?”
Prilukoff's right hand was still uplifted, and now he held it close to his temple. As I clutched that hand I could also feel the cold contact with the steel of a revolver.
“Do you swear that you will be mine forever?”
I murmured something inarticulate. Naumoff was calling under his breath: “Marie! Marie! Open the door.”
Prilukoff raised his voice slightly. “Swear to me that you loathe that man and the other; swear that if I murdered them both you would still be mine.”
“Yes, yes. Speak softly!”
“Swear it! Swear that they shall both die, that you will help me to rid the world of them. Swear it.” I could feel his hand tenser against his temple, I could feel the first finger crooking itself over the trigger. “Unless you swear,” hissed Prilukoff, “I shall shoot myself here, this instant.”
I did so. He repeated the words softly with me: “I swear—that—they shall die.” And something within me kept saying: “I am dreaming all this.”
“That is not enough!” breathed Prilukoff. “Swear it on the life of Tioka.”
My parched lips opened, but the iniquitous words would not pass my throat.
Then Prilukoff pushed me from him and the fingers of his right hand moved. I heard a slight clicking sound. I threw myself forward.
“I swear it—”
And I swore it on the life of Tioka.
Prilukoff's hand dropped to his side; he seemed to reel slightly, and staggering backwards leaned against the foot of my bed.
Naumoff on the other side of the door was growing impatient. He shook the handle.
I bent over to Prilukoff. “Are you going to betray me? If I open this door, will you show yourself?”
He laughed derisively. “Go along, go along,” he muttered. And I opened the door.
“Why did you run away?” asked Naumoff, taking my hand.
I closed the door behind me. I felt no more fear of Prilukoff. I felt no more fear of any one or anything. My heart seemed turned to stone. And as I stood thus, some one else knocked at the outside door. It was Kamarowsky.
And the door was not locked! I turned quickly and blew out the lamp.
But Naumoff had taken a rapid step forward, and turned the key in the lock. Then he stood still, leaning against the door.
Kamarowsky outside heard him; and thinking it was I, murmured softly: “Good-night! Good-night, my darling!”
Then I was seized with a convulsive fit of laughter. I laughed and laughed, shaken from head to foot by a wild paroxysm of mirth. I could not leave off laughing. I laughed until the laughter became a spasm which racked and agonized me; my teeth chattered, I trembled and quaked; and still the hysterical laughter continued, shaking my entire frame as an aspen is shaken by a brutal hand. I laughed and laughed, trying to laugh softly in order that those three men standing in the dark should not hear me.
The thought of the three men motionless behind the doors made me laugh more than ever. Tears ran down my face, my head felt as if it would burst asunder. And still I rocked in the throes of frantic laughter until body and soul seemed to be shattered and rent....
I staggered and sank to the floor.
Naumoff bent over me. I felt his icy hands passing over my face. Then we remained quite silent in the dark.
Slowly, reluctantly Kamarowsky's footsteps had passed away down the corridor....
I mustered strength enough to whisper to Naumoff: “Go—send Elise to me—quickly!”
Naumoff obeyed.
Yes, Nicolas Naumoff—submissive soul!—has always obeyed.
