VIII
We had navigated the cape of the New Year and spring was approaching. We had spent the winter in gay festivities, in intimate companionship, the three of us. But it had all been very dreary: we had quarrelled and become reconciled, fought battles and made armistices, teased one another and become the best of friends again. I had stayed away and had come back.
Now March was near, a fateful month in the countries of the north, because passion becomes all-powerful and the destinies of lovers are fulfilled: vows are broken, the ties of honour, of family, of friendship are set side.
The Baron was on duty early in the month, and invited me to spend a day with him at the guard-house. I accepted his invitation. A son of the people, a descendant of the middle-classes, cannot but be impressed by the insignia of the highest power in the land. At the side of my friend I walked along the passage, continually saluted by passing officers; I listened to the rattling of the swords; the “Who goes there?” of the sentinels, the beating of the drums. We arrived at the guard-room. The military decorations of the room stirred my imagination; the portraits of the great generals filled me with reverence; the colours taken at Lützen and Leipzic, the new flags, the bust of the reigning king, the helmets, the resplendent breast-pieces, the plans of battles, all these roused in me that feeling of uneasiness which the lower classes feel in contemplating the symbols of the ruling powers. And in his impressive surroundings the personality of the captain became more imposing; I kept close to his side in case any unpleasantness should arise.
As we entered a lieutenant rose and saluted, standing, and I, too, felt myself the superior of these lieutenants, the sworn foes of the sons of the people, and the authors’ rivals in the favour of the ladies.
A soldier brought us a bowl of punch, and we lighted our cigars. The Baron, anxious to amuse me, showed me the Golden Book of the regiment, an artistic collection of sketches, water paintings and drawings, all of them representing distinguished officers, who had during the last twenty years belonged to the Royal Guards; portraits of the men who had been the envy and admiration of my school friends, whom they had aped in their boyish games. It tickled my middle-class instincts to see all those favourites of fortune caricatured in this book, and counting on the applause of the democratic Baron, I indulged in little sallies at the expense of those disarmed rivals. But the boundary-line of the Baron’s democratic sympathies differed from mine, and he resented my sallies; the spirit of caste prevailed: he turned the leaves more quickly, and did not stop until he came to a large drawing representing the insurrection of 1868.
“Look at this!” he said, with a sarcastic smile, “how we charged into that mob!”
“Did you take part in it?”
“Didn’t I! I was on duty that day, and my orders were to protect the stand opposite the monument which the mob was attacking. A stone hit my helmet. I was Serving out the cartridges, when a royal messenger on horseback arrived and stopped my little band from firing. But I remained proof-butt and target for the stones thrown by the crowd. That’s all I ever got for my democratic sympathies.”
And after a pause he continued, still laughing and trying to catch my eye—
“You remember the occasion?”
“Perfectly,” I said; “I was walking in the procession of the students.” But I did not mention the fact that I was one of that special mob on which he had been so anxious to fire. My sense of justice had been outraged because that particular stand had been reserved for a favoured few and denied to the people on a public festival. I had been on the side of the attacking party, and had not forgotten the stones which I had flung at the soldiers.
The moment I heard him pronounce the word “mob” with aristocratic disdain, I remembered and understood my feeling of discomfort in entering the enemy’s fortress, and the sudden change which had come over my friend’s features at my sarcasms depressed me. The hatred of race, the hatred of caste, tradition, rose between us like an insurmountable barrier, and as I regarded him sitting there, the sword between his knees—a sword of honour, the hilt of which was ornamented with the name and crown of the royal giver—I felt strongly that our friendship was but an artificial one, the work of a woman, who constituted the only link between us. The haughty tone of his voice, the expression of his face, seemed more and more in harmony with his surroundings and took him further and further away from me. To bridge over the gulf which separated us, I changed the conversation and inquired after his wife and little daughter. Instantly his brow cleared, his features relaxed and resumed their normal expression of good-nature. Seeing him look at me with the benevolent eyes of the ogre caressing Tom Thumb, I made bold to pull three hairs out of the ogre’s beard.
“Cousin Matilda is expected at Easter, isn’t she?” I asked.
“She is.”
“I shall make love to her.”
He emptied his glass. “You can try,” he sneered, with a murderous scowl.
“Try? Is it possible that her affections are otherwise engaged?”
“Not... that I know of! But... I think I may say that.... Well, you can try!”
And with a tone of deepest conviction—
“You may be sure to get your money’s worth!”
This sneering remark was an insult, and roused my desire to defy him. If I made love to that other woman, it might not only save me from my criminal passion, but it would also give satisfaction to the Baroness, whose legitimate feelings had been outraged.
It had grown dark. I rose to go home. The captain accompanied me past the sentinels. We shook hands at the barrier gate, which he slammed after me as if he wanted to challenge me.
Spring had come. The snow had melted, the streets were free from ice. Half-starved children were selling little bunches of liverwort in the streets. The windows of the flower-shops glowed with azaleas, rhododendron and other early blossoms; golden oranges gleamed in the greengrocers’ shops; lobsters, radishes and cauliflower appeared on the costers’ barrows. Under the North Bridge the waves reflected the rays of the sun. On the quays the steamers were being newly rigged and painted in sea-green and scarlet. The men who had grown weak in the winter darkness, recovered in the sunlight. Woe to the weakling when love gives free play to the long-restrained passions!
The pretty little she-devil had arrived, and was staying with the Baroness.
I paid her a great deal of attention. She had apparently been informed of my designs, and consequently she amused herself with me. We had been playing a duet, and she was leaning against my left arm with her right shoulder. The Baroness noticed it and winced. The Baron glared at me with jealous rage. At one moment he was jealous of his wife, at the next he accused me of flirting with the cousin. Whenever he left his wife, to whisper in a corner to Matilda, and I started a conversation with the Baroness, he lost his temper and interrupted our conversation with an irrelevant question. I answered him with a sarcastic smile, and sometimes I took no notice whatever of him.
One evening we were all having supper in the strictest family circle. The mother of the Baroness was present. She had grown fond of me, and with the prevision frequently met with in old women, suspected that something was going on behind the scenes.
Following an impulse of motherly love, dreading some unknown danger, she seized my hands, and holding me with her eyes said gravely—
“I’m sure that you’re a man of honour. I don’t know what’s going on in this house. But promise me that you will watch over my daughter, my only child, and if ever anything should happen... which must not happen, promise that you will come to me and tell me everything.”
“I promise,” I answered, and kissed her hand in the Russian fashion, for she had been married to a Russian for many years and had been left a widow not very long ago.
And I shall keep my promise!
We were dancing on the edge of a crater. The Baroness had grown pale, emaciated, plain. The Baron was jealous, rude and insolent. If I stayed away for a day or two, he sent for me; received me with open arms and tried to explain everything by a misunderstanding, while in reality we understood each other only too well.
The Lord knows what was going on in this house!
One evening the charming Matilda had retired into her bedroom to try on a ball dress. The Baron quietly disappeared soon after, leaving me alone with his wife. After half-an-hour had gone by, I asked what had become of her husband?
“He’s playing lady’s maid to Matilda,” she replied.
I understood. Presently, evidently regretting her words, she added—
“There’s no harm in it; they’re relations. One shouldn’t be too ready to think evil!”
Then she changed her tone.
“Are you jealous?”
“Are you?”
“Perhaps I shall be by and by.”
“God grant that you will be soon! It’s the wish of a true friend.”
The Baron returned, and with him the girl, dressed in a pale green evening dress, cut very low.
I pretended to be dazzled by her appearance, and screening my eyes with both my hands, exclaimed—
“Don’t you know that it’s dangerous to look at you?”
“Isn’t she lovely?” asked the Baroness in a strange voice.
After a short time the couple withdrew, and for the second time we were left by ourselves.
“Why are you so unkind to me these days?” she asked, with tears in her voice, gazing at me wistfully, with the eyes of an ill-treated dog.
“I?... I had no idea that....”
“You’ve changed towards me; I wonder why.... If I’m to blame in any way....”
She pushed her chair closer to mine, looked at me with luminous eyes, trembled and... I jumped up.
“The Baron’s absence is really extraordinary, don’t you think so? This confidence on his part is insulting!”
“What d’you mean?”
“It’s not right of him to leave his wife alone with a young man and shut himself up with a girl....
“You’re right, it’s an insult to me.... But your manners!...”
“Never mind my manners! It’s hateful! I shall despise you if you won’t be more jealous of your dignity.... What are those two doing?”
“He’s interested in Matilda’s ball dress!” she answered, with an innocent face and a fleeting smile. “What do you want me to do?”
“A man doesn’t assist a woman at her toilet unless there are certain relations between them.”
“She is a child, he says, and looks upon him as a father.”
“I should never allow any children to play ‘papa and mamma,’ much less grown-up people.”
The Baroness rose, went out of the room and returned with her husband.
We spent the rest of the evening in making experiments with animal magnetism. I made a few passes over her forehead, and she acknowledged that it calmed her nerves. But all of a sudden, just as she was going into a trance, she shook herself, started to her feet, and looked at me with troubled eyes.
“Let me go!” she exclaimed; “I won’t! You are bewitching me!”
“It’s your turn now to try your magnetic powers,” I said, and I submitted to the same treatment to which I had subjected her.
I sat with half-closed eyes; there was deep silence on the other side of the piano; my glances strayed to the legs and the lyre-shaped pedal of the instrument and... I thought I must be dreaming, and sprang up from my chair. At the same moment the Baron appeared from behind the piano and offered me a glass of punch. The four of us raised our glasses. The Baron looked at his wife—
“Drink to your reconciliation with Matilda,” he pleaded.
“Your health, little witch!” exclaimed the Baroness with a smile, and turning to me she added—
“I must tell you we quarrelled about you!”
For a moment I did not know how to reply. Then I asked her to explain her words.
“No, no! no explanation!” answered a chorus of voices.
“That’s a pity,” I replied; “in my opinion we’ve been playing ‘hide-and-seek’ far too long.”
The rest of the evening passed amid general constraint.
“Well, I don’t care!” I muttered on my way home, searching my conscience.
What was the meaning of all this? Was it nothing but the innocent whim of a fantastic mind? Two women quarrelling over a man! They must be jealous, then. Was the Baroness mad that she gave herself away in such a manner? I did not think so. I felt sure there was something else at the bottom of it.
“What is going on in this house?” I asked myself, brooding over the strange scene which had startled me in the evening, the very improbability of which made me hesitate to believe that I had seen anything really wrong.
This senseless jealousy, the apprehension of the old mother, the love of the Baroness, stimulated by the spring air, all this confused my mind, seethed and fermented in my brain, and after spending a sleepless night, I decided for a second time not to see her again, and so prevent the threatening calamity.
With this intention I arose in the morning and wrote her a sensible, candid and humble letter; in carefully chosen language I protested against an excessive abuse of friendship; firmly, without any explanation, I asked for forgiveness of my sins, blamed myself for having caused ill-feeling between relatives, and goodness knows what else I said!
The result was that I met the Baroness, as if by accident, on leaving the library at my usual time. She stopped me on the North Bridge, and we walked together through one of the avenues leading to Charles XII Square. Almost with tears in her eyes she entreated me to come back, not to ask for explanations, but just to be one of them again as in the old days.
She was charming this morning. But I loved her too dearly to compromise her.
“Leave me! You are ruining your reputation,” I said, watching the passers-by, whose curious glances embarrassed us. “Go home at once, or I shall leave you standing here!”
She looked at me with eyes so full of misery that I longed to kneel down before her, kiss her feet and ask her forgiveness.
But instead I turned my back on her and hastily disappeared down a side street.
After dinner I went home to my attic, glowing with the satisfaction of a duty done, but with a broken heart. Her eyes haunted me.
A short rest gave me back my determination. I rose and looked at the almanac which hung on the wall. It was the thirteenth of March. “Beware the Ides of March!” These famous words, which Shakespeare quotes in his Julius Cæsar, sounded in my ears as the servant entered, bringing me a note from the Baron.
In it he begged me to spend a lonely evening with him, saying that his wife was not well and that Matilda was going out.
I had not the nerve to refuse, and so I went.
The Baroness, more dead than alive, met me in the drawing-room, pressed my hand against her heart and thanked me warmly for having resolved not to rob her of a friend, a brother, for the sake of a mere nothing, a misunderstanding.
“I really think she’s going out of her mind,” laughed the Baron, releasing me from her hands.
“I am mad, I know, mad with joy that our friend has come back to us after he had decided to leave us for ever.”
And she burst into tears.
“She’s been suffering a great deal,” explained her husband, disconcerted by this scene.
And, indeed, she looked as if she were in a high fever. A sombre fire burned in her eyes, which seemed to take up half of the little face; her cheeks were of a greenish pallor. The sight of her hurt me. Her frail body was shaken by fits of coughing.
Her uncle and father-in-law arrived unexpectedly. The fuel in the great stove was replenished, and we sat down before the fire, without lighting the lamps, to enjoy the cosy hour of the gathering twilight.
She took a seat by my side, while the three men began to talk politics.
I saw her eyes shine through the dusk, I felt the warmth which radiated from her body.
Her skirts brushed against me, she leaned over to say something meant for me alone, and attacked me with a whispered question—
“Do you believe in love?”
“No!”
My “no” struck her like a blow, for I had at the same time jumped up and changed my seat.
She must be mad, I thought; and afraid of a scene I suggested that we should have the lamps lighted.
During supper uncle and father-in-law discussed cousin Matilda to their heart’s content, praising her domesticity, her skill in needlework. The Baron, who had drunk several glasses of punch, burst out into extravagant eulogies and deplored, with alcoholic tears, the unkind treatment to which the “dear child” was subjected at home. But when apparently in the very depth of sympathetic sorrow, he suddenly pulled out his watch and prepared to leave us, as if called away by the stern voice of duty.
“You must excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “but I have promised Baby to meet her and see her home. Don’t let me disturb you, I shall be back in an hour.”
The old Baron, his father, vainly tried to detain him; his artful son insisted on keeping his word and slipped away, after having extracted a promise from me to await his return.
We remained at table for another quarter of an hour and then went into the drawing-room; the two old gentlemen soon left us and retired to the uncle’s room, which the nephew had fitted up for him a little while ago.
I cursed fate for having caught me in a trap which I had done my utmost to avoid. I steeled my throbbing heart; proudly, as a cock raises his comb, I raised my head; my hair bristled like the hair of a sheep dog, and I determined to crush at the outset any attempt to create a tearful or amorous scene.
Leaning against the stove I smoked my cigar, silent, cold and stiff, awaiting events.
The Baroness was the first to speak.
“Why do you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Remember how you treated me only this morning!”
“Please, don’t speak of it!”
The unaccustomed rudeness of my replies, for which there was no adequate reason, was a strategical error. She saw through me and changed her tactics.
“You wanted to run away from me,” she continued. “Shall I tell you why I suddenly went to Mariafred?”
“Probably for the same reason for which I decided to go to Paris.”
“Then... it’s clear,” she said.
“And now?”
I expected a scene. But she remained calm and regarded me mournfully. I had to break the silence which was fraught with more danger than any words could possibly contain.
“Now that you know my secret,” I said, “let me give you a word of warning. If you want me to come here occasionally, you mustn’t ever lose your head. My love for you is of such an exalted nature, that I could live contentedly at your side, without any other wish but to see you. If you should ever forget your duty, if you should betray by as much as a look the secret which lies locked in our hearts, then I shall confess everything to your husband, come what will!”
Carried away by my words, full of enthusiasm, she raised her eyes to heaven.
“I swear it to you!... How strong and good you are!... How I admire you! Oh! but I’m ashamed! I should like to surpass your honesty... shall I tell Gustav everything?”
“If you like... but then we shall never meet again. After all, it’s not his business. The feelings which animate my heart are not criminal; and even if he knew everything, would it be in his power to kill my love! No! That I love the woman of my choice is my own affair as long as my passion does not infringe the rights of another. However, do as you please. I am prepared for anything!”
“No, no! He must know nothing; and since he permits himself every licence——”
“There I don’t agree with you! The cases are not identical. If he chooses to degrade himself, so much the worse for him. But that’s no reason why——”
“No, no!...”
The ecstasy was over. We had come back to earth.
“No! No!” I repeated. “And don’t you agree that it’s beautiful, new, almost unique—to love, to tell one another of it.... Nothing else!”
“It’s as beautiful as a romance,” she cried, clapping her hands like a child.
“But it doesn’t generally happen like that in fiction!”
“And how good it is to remain honest!”
“The only thing to do!”
“And we shall always meet as before, without fear——”
“And without reproach——”
“And without misunderstandings! And you are sure that Matilda is nothing——”
“Oh! hush!”
The door opened. How commonplace! The two old gentlemen crossed the drawing-room carrying a dark lantern.
“Notice how life is a medley of petty troubles and divine moments!” I said to her; “notice how reality differs from fiction. Could I dare to draw a scene like this in a novel or a drama without being accused of being humdrum? Just think—a confession of love without kisses, genuflexions or protestations, terminated by the appearance of two old men throwing the light of a dark lantern on the lovers! And yet therein lies the secret of Shakespeare’s greatness, who shows us Julius Cæsar in dressing-gown and slippers, starting from his sleep at night, frightened by childish dreams.”
The bell rang. The Baron and pretty Matilda were returning home. As he had a guilty conscience, he overwhelmed us with amiability. And I, eager to show myself in my new part, told him a barefaced lie.
“I’ve been quarrelling with the Baroness for the last hour!”
He gave us a scrutinising look, full of vindictiveness, and scenting the air like a hound, seemed to catch the wrong scent.