The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (6 page)

“I suppose you mean that you would like to re-establish your ownership, or at least obtain the authority to exploit the land?”

“Exactly. The income which I may derive from those oil lands would compensate me for the losses which I have been forced to accept. Yesterday morning, Sir Eric Blushmore, a diplomatic friend of Lord Wynham and a very good friend of mine, of whom I have frequently asked advice, dissuaded me from going directly to the Chief of the Commercial Delegation of the Soviets here in London. It seems that that particular personage is not
persona grata
in Moscow, that I could gain nothing through his efforts and that my only chance is to strike direct at Berlin. Gerard, dear, I count absolutely on you to replenish my safe deposit box. You must leave for Germany as soon as possible; arrange to meet Mr. Varichkine, the Communist leader there, and try to come out the winner in a combat of which the prize will be twenty naphtha springs.”

“Lady Diana, you have completely won my friendship. I will do the impossible for the sake of the opulence which is essential to your happiness although I may find that there is no oil in your wells.”

“You will take these papers with you. Just give the adversary a few little digs—I mean that you should inform yourself
as to the eventual venality of Mr. Varichkine. I give you
carte blanche
. If you find that the gentleman in question must be personally interested in the constitution of the organization, offer him five percent or ten percent of the capital stock—but get around him somehow. The news from India is getting worse and worse. The insurrection in Bengal, engineered by Russian emissaries, is in full sway. Already, Indian Oil stock has gone down forty-five shillings in one week. It is absolutely necessary that you get me floating again, or else, within three months, I shall be forced to do a graceful fall into the arms of a
nouveau riche
. You really are awfully fond of me, aren’t you, Gerard? You are almost a brother to me. You wouldn’t want to see your little Diana being embraced by a bloated millionaire full of beer and cheese! And so?”

Ah, how well she knew how to get under my skin! Darling Diana. My affection for her was really that of a brother for a sister, but a sister with a brain a trifle unbalanced—hardly responsible for her actions, incapable of distinguishing good from bad. I loved her with all the indulgence which one must have for something which is purely a luxury—for a woman different from other women because she has escaped from the bonds of conventional psychology.

Why should we classify all women on the basis of the worn out models on display in Destiny’s Bazaar? The Fatal Woman, the Cold Woman, the Honest Woman, the Capricious Woman? What conceited naturalist would dare to affirm the specific character of a Cold Woman who may be capricious tomorrow with no apparent transition, or a Fatal Woman who may one day shed her tears on Honesty’s doorstep?

It was in vain that I racked the fugitive fibers of my distracted mind. I was unable to convince myself that Lady Diana could ever be shelved anywhere in modern ethics. She
was the product of a libertine Duke and a sentimental, romantic Scotch woman—one of those women nourished by Walter Scott, reared on the elegiac banks of lochs with placid waters. Her maternal grandmother was a remarkable business woman who led the Highlanders around by the nose in the privacy of her own domain at Laurencekirk. Her paternal grandfather was a gentleman poet, very much appreciated at Edinburgh, who poured out the nostalgia of his heart in his archaic ballads. Diana inherited all that. Logic, when she chose to recognize it, was no stranger to her. On the other hand, she knew all the actions and reactions of a moonlight night and the intoxicating values of perfume. Completely instructed as to all moral contingencies, she lived her life, egotistical in her most generous moments, cruel and kind, voluptuous and cold, childlike and
mondaine
according to the hour, according to the dictation of her whims, according to the unforeseen impulses of a never-satisfied capriciousness.

On the 12
^th
of May at seven o’clock in the evening a taxicab dropped me at the Hotel Adlon which then embellished the corner of the Unter den Linden and the Pariser Platz with its austere gray attitude of a Berlin Palace.

I had not been in the Capital of the Imperial Republic since my honeymoon with Griselda. Little was changed. As we rolled down the Friedrichstrasse, I saw the same tireless girls who, ever since the birth of the demi-monde, have been strolling along the sidewalks of this celebrated avenue. Outside the Café Bauer, the same old men who were harangued by August Bebel in the heroic days of the Social Democracy were selling the same newspapers with Gothic titles and slipping into the pockets of their really good clients the latest copies of the
Rote Fahne
, a publication so terrible that it was even
suppressed by the Berlin Police. The black custodians of the Empire were now replaced by the green Schupo, who stood before the Brandenburger Tor. But the Stadtring tramway was still doing its endless circle around the metropolis, whose crest was a bear.

I dined that evening in a certain little Italian restaurant on the Dorotheenstrasse, where I hoped that I might recall the days when His Majesty was pluming himself on having immortalized the line of Hohenzollerns in lard-like sculpture; when Mr. Reinhardt was not yet producing Tartufe; when the
Bals de Veuves
still flourished back of the Spittlemarkt, with their gallant squadrons of crones still true to their wedding rings, enticing the dilettantes with crepe veils to which they had no right. Chance favored me. I bumped into Semevski, a Russian pianist, whom I had known at Milan and who made European concert halls applaud the technique and the velocity of Rubinstein, his maestro. I invited him to my table and proceeded to ask him some questions:

“What do you know about your fellow countryman, Varichkine, the Soviet leader here in Berlin?”

My friend Semevski seasoned his beer with some cigarette ashes, gazed at me ironically, and sneered:

“You mean Varichkine? The women call him Leonid. He is a gentleman who has made his way in Communism just the way other people go to the top in the steel business or the fur trade.”

“Do you insinuate that this party leader is not convinced of his own platform?”

Semevski waved his hands with a gesture of despair, put his cigarette in the celery dish, and said:

“My dear friend, there are two things in this world about which no one can be sure: whether or not one is being
deceived by a woman and whether or not a Communist is sincere. Suppose that you were a celebrated writer and the young would-be’s who worshiped your style called you ‘dear maestro,’ bowing at the same time. Would you be sure of their sincerity? In our poor Russia, as it is today, rest assured that the opportunists, or, in other words, the people who are hungry, are ready to grovel in the mud before the personality of Mr. Lenin, who was embalmed like a Pharaoh of Egypt.”

“Do you know Varichkine personally? Can you give me any details about his intimate life?”

“Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine was a student at St. Petersburg when I was teaching music. The son of a servant of the Minister of Finland, like all the other young prodigies of the epoch, he immediately and yet cautiously interested himself in the Russian Revolution of 1905. He was nineteen when that happened. I lost sight of him for something like twelve years. One day in 1917 I happened to glance at the Revolutionary paper called
Pravda
. And I found, sandwiched in between an article by Lenin and one by Lounatcharsky, a short paragraph signed by Varichkine. I said to myself, ‘Well well! my little friend Leonid is eating asparagus! Can it be possible that he has been disillusioned and that he has not been able to realize his ambitions?’ I was surprised beyond measure to find Varichkine in the regiment of Red Coocoos, although I fully appreciated that he must be receiving consideration, honor, and money. You know, old fellow, that in order to get a good Communist you have to find a broken-down, worn-out individual whose hopes have gone astray. I ran into Varichkine just after they swept out the Smolny Institute. He declared triumphantly, ‘That is proof enough for you. We are in power. We are going to make a real Revolution and we are going to show any of our compatriots who don’t stand by us what spring
weather is like in the cells of our prisons! Let me give you a bit of good advice. I don’t particularly care about seeing you killed. Get away tonight with your toothbrush and your music roll. Go by way of Helsingfors before they make you swallow the bristles.’ I don’t need to tell you that I went to Stockholm like a shot out of a gun, and that I was not sorry to see the Baltic between me and the New Kings made out of a scarlet Christ and Egotism! Since that day I have never seen Varichkine but I’ve heard a good deal about him. Don’t get the idea that he was suddenly touched by the grace of Socialism. That young Democratic Socialist of yesterday was simply looking with uncontrollable envy at the grapes of Capitalism. Destiny had never before allowed him to taste the luscious fruit nor to receive favors from the hand of a Princess of whom he was distantly amorous. So he conceived a sort of rancor against the established order, and with the help of his mistress, Madam Mouravieff, he entered the camp of the dynamiters of contemporary society.”

“Are you talking about the famous Madam Mouravieff who distinguished herself in 1918 by her cruelty?—the one who personally inspected the execution of twenty-six reactionary intellectuals in the fortress of Peter and Paul?”

He nodded. “For eight years that same charming Madam Mouravieff has been Varichkine’s official mistress. She inspires him. She directs him. She terrorizes him. Ah, my dear boy, that Irina Mouravieff is an extraordinary woman. She is one of those enlightened individuals who can conceive of human happiness by the way of machine-gun bullets and who sends the people who contradict her to do a little bit of uninterrupted meditation in the ice-fields of Solovki. Your occidental romanticists embroider whole pages with doubtful truths about the seductive charms of Russian women. They can have
all they want of Irina Mouravieff, brought up by a monster, whose right breast fed her the precepts of Marxism, and whose left breast filled her with the delights of morphine.… Irina Mouravieff,
the Marquise de Sade of Red Russia.…”

WE WERE SEATED FACE TO FACE. WE WERE ONLY separated by an unpretentious work-table. On the wall there hung a portrait of Karl Marx and some proclamations written in Russian. A small rock imprisoned the accumulation of papers spread at random on an innovation trunk. Through the two French windows, which gave on the Wilhelmstrasse, I could see the palace which was once occupied by Prince Joachim Franz.
This ancient palace was protected by a great many trees and it reminded me of a piece of cold meat surrounded by a quantity of water cress.

Mr. Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine was smoking a special cigarette. An oriental pearl adorned his cravat, which was plain but in perfect taste. I had asked myself, a little naïvely, if I would find this Soviet leader clad in a pair of overalls. And what a surprise I had! He was dressed like a perfect gentleman—even a super-perfect gentleman. Thanks to my letters of introduction, our initial interview had been cordial enough and devoid of any unnecessary formality. I had been informed in advance that titled persons from foreign countries were well received by the Communists. And I must say that Mr. Varichkine was more than kind to me. Nothing in his aspect suggested a proclivity for sanguinary reaction. His smooth
black hair, meticulously slicked back, his well controlled black beard, his olive complexion, and his rather high cheekbones betrayed a Tartarish atavism which did not prevent Mr. Varichkine from conducting himself with the perfect courtesy of an occidental diplomat.

He had inspected my papers thoroughly. He had brought out some official documents and compared the dates. Finally he had declared:

“It is absolutely authentic, my dear Prince. Lord Wynham’s claims to ownership were registered formerly when foreigners were capable of controlling our territories. I say
formerly
to impress upon you that we have now socialized everything. By the decree of the twenty-sixth of October, nineteen hundred and seventeen, the right to ownership has been annulled forever, and the land is now merely loaned to the workmen who choose to develop it. But in nineteen-twenty my friends in Moscow came to the conclusion that it would not be practical to repulse any offers of foreign capital and, accordingly, they decided that, in certain cases they would make exceptions to the general rule. You tell me that Lady Wynham wishes, along with some English capitalists, to exploit the petrolic riches of the territory to which she is the legal heir. I am going to look into the matter. It is naturally of considerable importance since it represents something like fifty to sixty millions of dollars.”

“Mr. Varichkine, Lady Wynham would be more than grateful to you if you could set the official machinery in motion.”

And we conversed along those lines. At the end of half an hour the Soviet delegate had a half-dozen cigarette butts in his ash-tray and our conversation had taken a more familiar turn. It was obvious that Varichkine was less interested in the business itself than in Lady Diana’s personality and that I was not upsetting his nervous equilibrium.

“I have heard a great deal about Lord Wynham’s widow. You must not forget that between two economic studies I still find time to thumb over the English illustrateds. They tell me that your friend is the most beautiful woman in London.”

“Well, she is certainly one of the most beautiful women.”

“She is something of a character, isn’t she?”

“I think of her as an exceptional woman.”

“Then I will tell you frankly that I never object to meeting an exceptional woman. Look here, my dear Prince, I would like to have you give me some real details about her, but as I am exceedingly busy this afternoon, would you do me the favor of dining with me this evening? You know—a little bachelor dinner in a
chambre séparée
, as they say in Berlin?”