Marie Tarnowska. Annie Vivanti

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ