Monsieur Jonquelle (7 page)

She looked at me strangely for a moment. Then she smiled.

“How can I go away, my friend? I can no more get out of this crowd now than I could before you came.”

“But to-morrow,” I said, “you will let me see you?”

She stood for some time before she answered; and when she spoke she did not look at me, and she seemed troubled and embarrassed.

“I don't think you will understand!” She hesitated and faltered with the words. “I am not quite at liberty—to do—to do as I like. I must be careful—very careful—just now. And our women are not free as they are in your happy country. And besides, my friend, it would be no kindness to you—it would only involve you in—in—I cannot say what misfortune. You are free. Remain free, my friend! No, I must not be seen with you. I am sorry!”

“Then you need me!” I said. “Let me help you.”

“No,” she replied; “it is impossible. You cannot help me. No one can help me! You must go away.”

“That I will not do,” I said. “I must see you again somewhere.”

“Oh,” she said, “how I hate things like this! I cannot pretend. I wish I could be quite frank with you. I wish I could tell you. But how can I! How can I!”

Her voice trembled with emotion. I clung to the floating plank.

“Once more,” I pleaded; “somewhere!”

She wavered.

“To-morrow afternoon, then, at three—at the gate of the convent on the hill above Cimiez.”

She took my arm and we went out into the Place Masséna. A shower of plaster pellets fell over us. The Place Masséna was a maelstrom. Madame Nekludoff gave a little cry and covered her face with her arm. A voice spoke at my elbow. I turned to find again the big Italian and his basket of wire masks.

“Two, meester?” And he leered at me, holding up a pair of fingers.

2

There is a narrow open aqueduct threading along the great mountain over Nice—a tiny canal that carries the water for the city. I do not know in what far-off lake of snow water it begins, but one can follow it for miles, trailing gently through the olive groves, disappearing under a little shoulder of the hills to come out in the sun beyond. A stream of crystal, uncovered and flowing gently, now and then a leaf or a wisp of grass or a bit of an olive twig on its surface. The grade of the aqueduct is almost imperceptible as it rises to the gap in the mountains, a V of blue descending like a wedge into the remote skyline.

There is a path along this fairy water. I had
come up on to the hill beyond Cimiez in the tram to the place where it ends abruptly in the middle of the road. There, a little farther on, I had found a white figure among the orange trees in the garden of the convent, and we had taken this path along the idling water into the mountains.

I had believed yesterday that there could be no better background for Madame Nekludoff's beauty than black and the severities of dress; but I was mistaken in that fancy. To-day she was in white—a thing imagined in Paris, but surely tailored in Bond Street—a French adaptation of an English shooting costume; the skirt in wide plaits; the coat with a belt and patch pockets, but fitting to the figure. The material was heavy Chinese silk, as firm and thick as duck, and only to be had of a tailor in London.

Two things, however, were alluringly blended in this costume—the crisp freshness of out-of-doors and the softness of all things feminine and delicate, as, for instance, the first blossoms of the wild brier that go to pieces under the human hand. I thought the thing by its happy charm returned Madame Nekludoff to the first morning of some immortal youthfulness—as though on this afternoon, as in some Arabian story, cracking a roc's egg, I had found her sleeping within it, her chin dimpling in her silk palm.

Moreover, the background of sadness in her
face was gone. She laughed and chatted like a schoolgirl escaped from a convent. She stooped to gather the little flowers along the path, to show them to me and to point out their beauties. She would catch my arm and nestle down in the dry grasses when a bird sang, and hunt him out among the gnarled limbs of the olive trees; or she would pluck a reed and, kneeling by the aqueduct, steer the dead leaves that floated along as though they were elfin ships on some mysterious voyage. She would dip her fingers in the water and fling the drops in my face, and then spring up and run along the path, screaming with laughter like a naughty child. When I caught up with her she was changed again into a woman I had not the courage to touch.… And she would show me the Mediterranean, lying below like a sheet of burnished azure metal.

I think there must be some law in Nice against traveling on the path along this aqueduct, for we met no one. The whole enchanted world belonged to our two selves. We wandered on, following this lost path through the great deserted mountain of olive groves.

I do not know how the thing happened! We had come upon one of those narrow blades of the mountain that the aqueduct burrowed under. I had helped my companion over it, and we were now in a little sunny pocket, with an abandoned
olive grove rising in terraces above us, and a great gorge below, full of reeds and opening like a door on the sea. There was no sound but the drone of far-off winged things in the air. I had Madame Nekludoff's hand, when suddenly, taken by the great flood of an impulse, I swung her into the hollow of my shoulder, caught her up in my arms and kissed her. She gave a little gasping cry that I smothered on her mouth.

“I love you!” I whispered. “I love you! I love you!”

She threw out her arm with her hand against my shoulder, as though she would free herself—but the force of resistance seemed to go out of her hand; it crept up on my shoulder, then round my neck. She hid her face to escape the smothering kisses; but she clung to me, murmuring something I did not understand. I held her with my left arm, put the hollow of my right hand under her chin, and turned her face out where I could see it.

It was like the face of some dream woman rising out of a mirage of opium—the great wealth of glorious silken hair massed round it; the eyes closed; the sensitive red mouth trembling; and the delicate satin skin bloodless as a ghost. I kissed her again, bedding her soft throat in the trough of my hand.

At that moment a great voice bellowed out in
the gorge under our feet. Madame Nekludoff wrenched herself out of my arms and sprang up. Far below us a big peasant slouched along a path through the reeds, on his way to Nice with a brace of pullets. He was lonely and had broken out into one of the booming songs of the carnival. He had a voice that would have filled the magnificent distances of opera; and all unconscious of us, having the great stage to himself, he bellowed notes that boomed through the cathedral of the hills.

Madame Nekludoff stood breathing deeply and staring wide-eyed at the distant singer. She put her hands up to her hair and adjusted it with little deft touches. The color came and went in her face. Finally she went over to the little bank running along the aqueduct carpeted with dry grasses and sat down. She covered her face with her hands.

There was something too personal and delicate in this simple act to intrude upon. She was so little and sweet, and the attitude so wistful and appealing, that I sat down on the grass beside her and waited with all the restraint that I could summon to my aid. It is not easily that one, a step across the sill from Paradise, waits at the door!

Presently, with her hands remaining over her face, she began to speak hurriedly, her voice
nervous, tense—running in and out of a whisper. And a story—big, vital, packed with tragedy—emerged. She etched it out with sure, deft strokes, leaving silences and inaudible words to furnish the background and the shadows. Her voice now scurried along like a frightened thing; now took the cover of silence; now crept along in the shadow of evil vaguely to be suggested; and then it became firm and sure, where a desperate resolution had been taken and carried out; and again fearful and hurried; then low and apprehensive.

I got the story warm and pulsing with life, as though, by some divine surgery, the woman had been thrown on to the slab of an amphitheater and the thing vivisected out of her bosom; and I listened, motionless and without a sound. But this equanimity was but an aspect of the shell of the man, as the body sometimes in sleep lies prone and motionless while the mind within it lives the wildest life.

She had been sold to the Grand Duke Dimitri Volkonsky, that abandoned and profligate noble whom the Czar had banished out of Russia. Why soften the term? Sold was the only word for it! Her mother she had never known. She had lived with a decayed aunt on a little wasting estate a hundred and fifty kilometers east of Moscow.

She had been educated in a convent and very carefully watched over. Poverty seemed to lie about her, but there had been money enough to give her every comfort, even in the dreary convent. There was always something sinister in this extreme care—in the good quality of the food always somehow provided—in the fire that always burned in her room—in the exaggerated attention given to her person.

Now and then her father came to visit her. He seemed to be a man of the world, always elegantly dressed; but she was not attracted to him, uneasy in his presence and always happy when he went away. His comings did not seem to be at the call of a paternal love for her. They appeared rather to be visits of inspection. He made the minutest inquiry into all the details of her daily life, and into her studies and accomplishments, and gave precise directions. He was particularly anxious that she could speak English, French and Italian as perfectly as she spoke Russian; and being himself an accomplished linguist he always spoke to her in these languages, changing from one to the other in the middle of a sentence and at the half of an idea.

His principal concern, however, was for her person. He wrote down instructions about her food, her baths, her exercise. When he had believed her throat to be too thin he had ordered
it massaged. He had prescribed gymnastics to develop her arms. She should walk but little, for he wished her feet to remain small and delicate. Thus her life ran until she was nineteen, when—two years before—her father had appeared, ordered her possessions packed and carried her to Paris.

He took her to a house of old Paris near the Faubourg St. Germain, inclosed by an ancient wall, studded with iron spikes. Here he delivered her into the hands of a woman loaded with jewels—a big, old woman with a Hapsburg nose.

“Princess,” he said, “my daughter lacks only one thing to make her the most attractive woman in Europe. Teach her that thing.”

The old woman's eyes blinked above the big pouches below her eyelids.

“Eh, Michaelovitch?” she said. “Let us see.” And she got up and, turning the girl about by the arm, examined her as one would examine a colt in a paddock. Then she went back and sat down in her big gilt chair. “How long do you give me?” she said.

“Six months, princess,” replied the man.

The old woman considered.

“A year, Michaelovitch!” she finally said, and held out her fat jeweled hand for the man to kiss. He carried the fingers to his lips and went away.

For a year, then, this girl from a Russian convent
was taught the arts and mysteries of dress and of the drawing room, under the eye and the hand of this terrible old drill-master, who had been a lady in waiting to a now vanished court. The great tradeswomen of the Rue de la Paix came and explained the secrets of their craft; the designers of the great houses studied her; charts were made setting out the colors and combinations of colors suited to her person. And always the old woman taught her every trick and every art whereby, in a setting of the most conventional manner, the feminine charm may be made alluring and sensuous.

“It is not what is shown,” she was accustomed to say, “but what is threatened to be shown that plays the devil.”

Then one day she sent for the girl's father and said to him:

“Michaelovitch, you have now in your hand the most merchantable commodity in the whole of France. Begone with it to the market!”

Her father took his daughter then to the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, and for a fortnight dangled her before the eyes of the Grand Duke Dimitri, who was forever experimenting with systems in the Casino. He showed her in all her varieties of plumage against the background of the freshness of her youth. “My daughter!” he
would say, as though his love had always inclosed her like a shell. And finally he had sold her.

The woman's voice hurried and stumbled on. Of course the conventions were to be followed! But it was a sale for all that, with a delivery of the article by the priest. The marriage was to be effected at the grand duke's château in Haute-Savoie. She was taken there by the old woman who was now with her. It was a wild, deserted district of the Alps in the severities of winter. Toward the summit was an ancient monastery, hidden by a
mer de glace
. But a great cross a hundred feet high emerged.

In the valley was a little village; and above, on a shelf of the rock, hung the red château, like a splotch of blood on the vast spotless carpet of white.

She was dressed for the wedding at the inn in the village. Then the woman with her gave her into the hands of a big monk who took her to the château, the woman remaining in the inn. There she was married. Then she was shown to the grand duke's retainers in a big, smoky hall, loaded with food and drink for a barbarian revel.

It was the custom for the lord to sit at the head of this barbarian feast and start it on the way on the bridal night. That this custom might be followed she was taken to the bridal chamber by the priest, who acted now as a guardian, and
the key turned in the lock—to wait the coming of her husband.

The body of the woman rocked; her hands tightened over her face; her voice took the cover of breaks and silences. The vast horror of the scene emerged—the horror of loneliness, of terror, of loathing. The girl stood in the middle of the great chamber, motionless with fear. A huge bed, raised on a dais, surmounted by a gilt crown and hung with curtains of silk, seemed to increase in size as under some hideous magic and crowd her into a corner. Shouts, songs and drunken voices mounted up through the walls to her. Then finally she heard the feet of men on the stair.