Annie Vivanti
Marie Tarnowska
VI
Soon after that my thoughts are adrift, my recollections grow confused. I see my mother with my baby in her arms, and myself in traveling attire, with my arms twined about them, weeping, despairing, refusing to leave them and set out on a journey of Vassili's planning. But Vassili grows impatient. Vassili grows angry. He is tired of playing the papa, tired of seeing me no longer a little “firebrand,” but calm as a young Madonna in the beatific purity of motherhood.
Vassili has taken it into his head that he wants to study singing. He has made up his mind to go to Italy, to Milan, to study scales and exercises; and I must go with him.
“But our baby, Vassili, our little Tioka! We must take our baby with us!”
No. Vassili does not want babies. He does not want to be bothered or hindered. “We are carting about eight trunks as it is!” he says, cynically.
And so we start for Italy—Italy, the yearned-for goal of all my girlish dreams.
At Milan Vassili sings. I seem always to see him with his handsome mouth open, singing scales and arpeggios. But a slow poison is creeping through my blood and I fall ill, ill with typhoid fever.
Again my thoughts go adrift and my recollections are confused. They dance in grotesque and hideous visions through my brain. I see livid hallucinated faces peering at me, towers and mountains tottering above me, undefined horrors all about me, and in the midst of them all I see Vassili—singing! He sings scales and arpeggios with his rounded open mouth. Now I can see a white spider—no, two white spiders—running about on a scarlet coverlet.... They are my hands. They frighten me. And Vassili is singing.
“Vassili, why are you singing? Don't sing! Don't sing!”
“No, darling, I am not singing. You only imagine it. You are ill; you are feverish. Calm yourself.”
········
“Vassili, where is my baby?”
“At home in Kieff, with grandmama. Dear grandmama is taking such good care of him!”
“And why are we not with him? Where are we?”
“We are at Pegli, darling.”
“Why? Why? Where is Pegli? What are we doing at Pegli?”
“Come now, dearest; you know—we came to Italy because I wanted to sing—”
“Ah, you see! You wanted to sing! Why do you want to sing when the baby is crying? The baby is so helpless. Why did you take me away from him? You sing, you sing so loud that I cannot hear my baby crying. Don't sing!”
But even as I speak I see that Vassili has his round mouth open again and he sings and sings, and the white spiders run over the scarlet counterpane and come close to my face—and the white spiders are my hands. I shriek and shriek to have them taken away. But the baby is crying and Vassili is singing and no one hears me.
········
Then I drop down to the bottom of a deep well. I feel myself falling, falling, until with a great shock I touch the bottom. And there I lie motionless in the dark.
········
When I open my eyes there is a great deal of light; the windows are open, the sun is pouring in; I know that outside there is the sea. Beside my bed sits a doctor with a gray beard, feeling my pulse. Under the light intermittent pressure of his fingers my pulse seems to grow quieter; I can see the doctor's head giving little nods as he counts the beats.
“Sixty-five. Excellent, excellent!” The doctor pats my hand gently and encouragingly. “That is first-rate. We are quite well again.”
Then I hear some one weeping softly, and I know it is my mother. I try to turn and smile at her, but my head will not move. It is like a ball of lead sunk in the pillow. Immediately afterwards—or have years passed?—I hear some one say: “Here is the Professor!” And again the same doctor with the gray beard comes in and smiles at me.
Before sitting down beside the bed he turns to my mother: “Has she not yet asked about her child?” My mother shakes her head and presses her handkerchief to her eyes. Then the doctor sits down beside my bed and strokes my forehead and speaks to me.
He speaks about a baby. He repeats a name over and over again—perhaps it is Tioka. Tioka? Who is Tioka? I watch his beard moving up and down, and do not know what he is saying. The ball of lead on my pillow rolls from side to side with a dull and heavy ache.
My mother weeps bitterly: “Oh, doctor, do not let her die!”
The white spiders are there again, running over the coverlet. And I fall once more, down, down, down, to the bottom of the well.
VII
For how many months was I ill? I do not know. Vassili, restless and idle, “carted” me and my medicines and my sufferings from Pegli to Genoa, from Genoa to Florence. He seemed to have forgotten that we had a home; he seemed to have forgotten that we had a child.
Our rooms at the hotel in Florence were bright with sunshine and with the frivolous gaiety of a graceful trio of Russian ladies—the Princess Dubinskaja, her sister Vera Vojatschek, and the fair-haired Olga Kralberg, who came to see us every day. But I felt lost and lonely, as if astray in the world. My mother had returned to Russia, and my vacant and aching heart invoked Vassili, who, alas! was never by my side.
“You must win him back,” said Olga Kralberg to me one day—she, whose fate it was on a not distant day to commit suicide for his sake. “Every man, especially if he is a husband, has—after some time—to be won back again.”
“That is sooner said than done,” I replied despondently. “To win a man is easy enough. But to win him back—”
“There are various ways of doing it,” she said. “Have you tried being very affectionate?”
“Yes, indeed,” said I.
“How did it answer?”
“He was bored to death.”
“Have you tried being cool and distant? Being, so to speak, a stranger to him?”
“Yes, I have.”
“And he?”
“He never even noticed that I was being a stranger to him. He was as happy and good-tempered as ever.”
Olga shook her head dejectedly. “Have you tried being hysterical?” she asked after a while.
I hesitated. “I think so,” I said at last. “But I do not quite know what you mean.”
“Well,” explained Olga sententiously, “with some men, who cannot bear healthy normal women, hysteria is a great success. Of course, it must be esthetic hysteria—you must try to preserve the plastic line through it all,” and Olga sketched with her thumb a vague painter's gesture in the air. “For example, you deluge yourself in strange perfumes. You trail about the house in weird clinging gowns. You faint away at the sight of certain shades of color—”
“What an absurd idea!” I exclaimed.
“Not at all. Not in the least,” said Olga. “On the contrary, it is very modern, very piquant to swoon away every time you see a certain shade of—of mauve, for instance.”
“But what if I don't see it?”
“Silly! You must see it. Give orders to a shop to send you ten yards of mauve silk. Open the parcel in your husband's presence. Then—then you totter; you fall down—but mind,” added Olga, “that you fall in a graceful, impressionist attitude. Like this.” And Olga illustrated her meaning in what appeared to me a very foolish posture.
“I think it ridiculous,” I said to her. And she was deeply offended.
“Good-by,” she said, pinning her hat on briskly and spitefully.
“No, no! Don't go away. Do not desert me,” I implored. “Try to suggest something else.”
Olga was mollified. After reflecting a few moments she remarked.
“Have you tried being a ray of sunshine to him?”
I lost patience with her. “What do you mean by a 'ray of sunshine'? You seem to be swayed by stock phrases, such as one reads in novels.”
This time Olga was not offended. She explained that in order to be a ray of sunshine in a man's life, one must appear before him gay, sparkling and radiant at all hours of the day.
“Always dress in the lightest of colors. Put a ribbon in your hair. When you hear his footsteps, run to meet him and throw your arms round his neck. When he goes out, toss a flower to him from the window. When he seems dull or silent, take your guitar and sing to him.”
“You know I don't play the guitar,” I said pettishly.
“That does not matter. What really counts is the singing. The atmosphere that surrounds him should be bright with unstudied gaiety. He ought to live, so to speak, in a whirlwind of sunshine!”
“Well, I will try,” I sighed, without much conviction.
I did try.
I dressed in the lightest of colors and I pinned a ribbon in my hair. When I heard his footstep, I ran to meet him and threw my arms round his neck.
“What is the matter?” he asked. “And what on earth have you got on your head? You look like a barmaid.”
To the best of my powers I was a whirlwind of sunshine; and as soon as I saw that he was dull and silent (and this occurred almost immediately) I said to myself that the moment was come for me to sing to him.
I sat down at the piano. I have not much ear, but a fine strong voice, even if not always quite in tune.
At the second bar Vassili got up, took his hat and left the house. I threw a flower to him from the window.
He did not come back for three days.
VIII
When I talked it over with Olga, she was very sympathetic.
“I know,” she mused, “that these things sometimes succeed and sometimes do not. Men are not all alike.” Then she added: “But there is one sure way of winning them back. It is an old method, but infallible.”
“What is it?” I asked skeptically.
“By making them jealous. It is vulgar, it is rococo, it causes no end of trouble. But it is infallible.”
We reviewed the names of all the men who could possibly be employed to arouse Vassili's jealousy. We could think of no one. I was surrounded by nothing but women.
“It is past belief,” said Olga, surveying me from head to foot, “that there should be no one willing to—”
I shook my head moodily. “No one on earth.”
Olga grasped my wrist. “Stay! I have an idea. We will get some one who is not on earth. Some one who is dead. It will be much simpler. I remember there was an idea of that kind in an unsuccessful play I saw a year or two ago. What we need is a dead man—recently dead, if possible, and, if possible, young. If he has committed suicide, so much the better.”
“What on earth do you want with a dead man?” I asked, shuddering.
“Why! can't you see? We will say that he died for your sake!” cried Olga, “that he killed himself on your account. We will have a telegram sent to us by some one in Russia. We will get them to telegraph to you: 'I die for your sake. Am killing myself. Farewell!'”
“But who is to sign it?”
“Oh, somebody or other,” said Olga vaguely. “Or we could have it signed with an imaginary name, if you prefer it. That would enable us to dispense with the corpse.”
“I most certainly prefer that,” I remarked. “But, frankly, I can't see—”
“What can't you see? Don't you see the effect upon Vassili of the news that a man has killed himself for your sake? Don't you see the new irresistible attraction which you will then exercise over him? Surely you know what strange subtle charm emanates from the 'fatal woman'—the woman whose lethal beauty—”
“Very well, very well,” I said, slightly encouraged. “Let us have the telegram written and sent to me.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon composing it.
Three days later Vassili entered the drawing-room where Olga and I were having tea; he held a telegram in his hand; his face was of a ghastly pallor.
“He's got it,” whispered Olga hysterically, pinching my arm.
“Mura,” said Vassili; “a horrible thing has happened. Horrible!” His white lips trembled as he uttered the incoherent words:
“Dead—he is dead—he has killed himself—”
He was unable to go on. His voice broke in a sob.
I sprang to my feet. “Who, Vassili? Who?”
Olga thought the moment had arrived for putting things in the proper light. She turned to me with a significant glance, and grasped my hand.
“Ah! It is the man who loved you!” she exclaimed. “And this—this is what you dreaded!”
“What! What!” shouted Vassili, clutching her arm and pushing her roughly aside. Then he turned upon me and seized me by the shoulder. “You—you knew of this? You dreaded this?”
I stood trembling, struck dumb with terror. I could hear the futile and bewildered explanations of Olga:
“Why, surely,” she was saying with an insensate smile, “it is a thing that might happen to anybody. It is not her fault if people love her to distraction.”
But Vassili was crushing my wrist. “My brother—he loved you?” he gasped.
“Your brother? Your brother—little Peter?” I stammered.
“Yes, yes! Peter,” shouted Vassili. “My brother! What have you to do with his death?”
“Nothing, nothing.” I groaned. “I swear it—nothing!”
And Olga, realizing at last that she stood in the presence of a genuine tragedy and not of the jest we had plotted, darted forward and caught his arm.
“Vassili, you are mistaken. She knows nothing about it; nothing whatever. We had planned a joke to play on you, and we thought—” She pursued her agitated and incoherent explanations.
Vassili looked from one to the other of us, scanning our faces, hardly hearing what Olga was saying. Suddenly he seemed to understand, and loosening his hold on my arm he fell upon the couch and buried his face in his hands.
The telegram had dropped on the carpet. Olga picked it up and read it; then she handed it to me:
Peter hanged himself last night. Come at once.
Tarnowsky.
We left for Kieff the same evening. Throughout the entire journey Vassili never spoke. I sat mournful and silent opposite him and thought of my brother-in-law, Peter. Not of the pale youth, already corrupted by absinthe and women, whom we had left at Kieff a few months before, but of the child Peter, in his short velvet suit and lace collar, whom I had loved so dearly in the days of my girlhood—little Peter who used to run to meet me in the sun-splashed avenues of the Villa Tarnowsky, trotting up with his little bare legs and serious face, stopping to be kissed and then trotting hurriedly off again, the nape of his neck showing fair and plump beneath the upturned brim of his sailor-hat.
How well I remember that sailor-hat! The black ribbon round the crown bore, between two anchors, the word, “Implacable”; and from under that fierce device the round and gentle countenance of little Peter gazed mildly out into the world.
Little Peter's legs were always cold. He was brought up in English fashion, with short socks even in the depths of winter. From afar you could see little Peter's chilly bare legs, crimson against a background of snow. Sometimes, rubbing his knees, he would say to me: “I wish God had made me of fur, instead of—of leather, like this.” And again he would remark: “I don't like being alive. Not that I want to die; but I wish I had never begun.”
And now little Peter had finished. Little Peter lay solemn and magnificent in the chambre ardente where his dead ancestors had lain solemn and magnificent before him. “Implacable” indeed he lay, unmoved by the tears of his mother and father; his lofty brow was marble; his fair eyelashes lowered over his quenched and upturned eyes.
When I thought of him thus I felt afraid.
And it seemed strange to be afraid of little Peter.
IX
After we had crossed the Russian frontier another thought—a thought that filled me with unspeakable happiness—put all others to flight: my child! I should see my child again! All our relations would certainly be assembled at the Tarnowskys' house, so I should find my parents and my little Tioka there too. The image of the living child soon displaced the tragic memory of the dead youth. As the train sped towards Kieff my fever of gladness and impatience increased. Yes, to-morrow would be poor Peter's funeral, but this very evening I should clasp little Tioka in my arms!
Raising my eyes, I saw that Vassili was looking at me with a scowl. “I have been watching you for some time,” he said. “Heartless creature that you are, to laugh—to laugh in the face of death.”
“I was thinking of Tioka,” I stammered. Vassili did not reply. But in the depths of my heart joy sang and whispered like a hidden fountain.
Thus, inwardly rejoicing, did I enter the house of death and hasten to the dark-red room—the very scene of Peter's suicide—in which they had placed my baby's cradle; thus, while others mourned with prayers and tears in the gloomy death-chamber, I ran across the sun-filled garden holding my infant to my breast. I hid myself with him in the orchard and laughed and laughed aloud, as I kissed his starry eyes and his tiny, flower-like mouth.
But Death, the Black Visitor, had entered my life. Little Peter had shown him the way, had opened the door to him.
From that day forward the dread Intruder never forsook my threshold.
Death, lurking at my door in terrifying silence, stretched out his hand at intervals and clutched some one belonging to me. Generally it was with a swift gesture—a fell disease or a pistol-shot—that he struck down and flung into the darkness those I loved.
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.
Kieff, Thursday.
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?
Ever yours,Bozevsky.
The next day
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!
Your Bozevsky.
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.
