The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (7 page)

“With pleasure.”

“Fine! I will pick you up at the Adlon at eight o’clock.”

I had arisen when the office door opened brusquely and a little brunette, in a very simple gray suit, came in with a step as deliberate as though she had access to the delegate’s private room at any hour. Although I was still in ignorance as to her identity I was struck by the straightforward look of the woman. She merely favored me with one authoritative glance. She was pretty enough in her way, but her thin lips expressed no great amount of kind-heartedness, and her pale blue eyes were not what one would call angelic. She had a long official telegram in her hand. She threw it disdainfully on Varichkine’s desk and announced in an unaffected contralto voice, accompanied by a shrug of her slight shoulders:

“Take a look at Stefanovitch’s last bit of stupidity. He has refused to give a visa to the experts from Hanover who are supposed to be taking care of the construction of the Kazan turbines. It’s outrageous!”

But Varichkine appeared less interested in the Kazan
turbines than in my mission. He presented me: “My dear—the Prince Séliman, from London—” And he added, looking at the tiny brunette, “Madam Irina Alexandrovna Mouravieff.”

I kissed the hand of the celebrated Madam Mouravieff, and, doing my best to conceal my surprise, I observed her carefully. Having heard Semevski’s impression I had expected to meet an Amazon who, boasting an amputated breast, would throw me out bodily. I decided, once again, that what one terms “Imagination” is but the type of woman who sleeps with ghosts and tries to blow reality out of sight with a whistle. Who could have thought that that little lady, dressed in gray, had played such a frightful role in the bloody demonstrations of 1918 and that death sentences had issued from her tender mouth?

Mr. Varichkine went on, “Darling, Prince Séliman is here to make a claim for certain oil concessions in Georgia on the part of Lord Wynham’s heirs. He has invited me to dine with him this evening. We want to talk business together.”

The delegate’s explanation gave me food for thought. He spoke of Lord Wynham’s heirs and not of Lady Diana. He attributed the dinner invitation to me although I was to be his guest. I wondered why.

Madam Mouravieff looked me over a second time. “Do you represent the heirs, Prince?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Are there many of them?”

I could feel Varichkine’s eyes piercing my very self. I had enough intuition to know that he would be grateful if I failed to tell the truth. I replied, “There are two minors, madam represented by a trustee.”

I glanced sideways at Varichkine and saw that he was greatly relieved.

But Madam Mouravieff renewed her attack: “I read only yesterday, in a London paper, a long article about Lady Wynham. It seems that she did a nude dance in a theater—thereby creating a great public scandal. Has she anything to do with Lord Wynham?”

“She is his widow. But she has an income from her own father and no right to any of the bequests of the defunct lord.”

I exchanged a few other bits of repartee with this redoubtable woman and took my leave. In the corridor, Mr. Varichkine wrung my hand with terrific force and murmured, “Thank you. Until tonight. You can rely upon me.”

I left the Soviet house a trifle perplexed, and until the dinner hour I could not drive the picture of that frail nervous Madam Mouravieff—
breaker of hearts and torturer of bodies—from my memory.

“Is this a picture of Lady Wynham?” Varichkine asked, as he nonchalantly picked up a gold frame which was decorating my dressing-table in my hotel bedroom.

“Right you are. Don’t you find her charming?”

“I think she is wonderful—” He stared a little harder at the photograph. His black eyes began to shine. His mouth looked as though it was convinced. He repeated, “She is wonderful! All the dignity of an entire race in one stylish body.”

Then in a rather harsh tone: “My dear chap, you’re a born diplomat. You made a good move when you denied Lady Wynham’s connection with this deal.”

“I thought you would like it better that way. If I am not mistaken, Madam Mouravieff has a great deal to do with your political situation.”

“A great deal to do with it! I’m laughing out loud!” Varichkine laughed so loud that he nearly broke the window. “I
suppose you are telling me that she has simply been managing me for eight whole years. That’s all she has done to me!”

“Well, it seems that all good fairies are something of a drain on the system,” I said.

“Madam Mouravieff would entirely wipe out my personality if I didn’t combat her. But I am getting a little bit personal in my conversation, you know.”

“You need not worry. Anything you tell me will go no further.”

“It’s a spontaneous friendship, isn’t it? Have a cigarette? No? It’s disgusting the way I smoke. I am constantly burning holes in the blankets.”

“I am all ready, Varichkine. Where shall we go for dinner?”

“To the
Walhalla
, Bellevuestrasse. I’m known there. We are going to have some fresh caviar, especially smuggled in by our diplomatic courier. I arrange about that whenever I dine there. That won’t go so badly with five or six bottles of 1911 Heidsick Monopol. The damned fools didn’t want to serve me the last time because of the situation in the Ruhr. But I told them, ‘If you occupy the Champagne country, do you think you are going to keep the French from drinking beer?’ They are a lot of old rustics—pretentious rustics with epaulettes. They have had only one ingenious idea in their entire history.”

“And when was that?”

“Lenin’s lead-colored wagon in 1917.”

Half an hour later we were seated alone in a private dining-room of the
Walhalla Weinrestaurant
. I can remember that it was done in pearl gray, black and dark purple—little quadrilaterals of the purest and most funereal chintz. A dish full of small gray balls—like so many ants’ eggs in mourning—graced the middle of the table, carefully guarded by four lemons at the cardinal points.

Varichkine plunged the wooden spoon into this tasty offering, helped me, and joked: “You know, we Communists can pass out two things: theories and caviar!”

Varichkine’s cordiality incited me to speak freely. As the lemon wept acid tears on the delicacy, I confessed, “You know, old chap, it’s a new sensation for me to be sitting opposite a representative of the really
élite
Communists. I hope you don’t mind my using the word
élite
in my connection with a Communist republic!”

“Why, not in the least, old fellow! Only the thick-headed logicians are astonished to find that there is an
élite
society in a country where everything is equal. But I must say that there are very few in the party to which I have the honor to belong. You can count them on the fingers of one hand: First, there is, or rather was, our well-beloved Lenin—God bless his soul—and after him Kamenev, Lounatcharsky, and myself. Trotsky is an intelligent
koustar
! But little more than an ordinary journalist, after all. As for our comrades Zinoviev, Kalinine, Dsierjinsky, and any quantity more, they are actually illiterate. That’s the way it should be. As long as everybody attends to his own job, the sturgeon’s eggs will be guarded.”

“I gather from what you say that, in a word, you are professional demagogues?”

“Professionals, yes. We specialize in demagogy just the same way that there are expert art connoisseurs. In Europe you have a band of little apprentice Communists, who make a lot of palaver at public meetings and play the tin soldier with new principles.”

Varichkine sneered as he bit into his caviar and continued, “All that’s a child’s game, old fellow. We people have experimented on a large scale with a hundred million specimens of flesh and blood. That is much more amusing. In order to get
the reaction of sulphuric acid on zinc to make hydrogen, you have only to perform one of the simplest chemical operations known to science. But if you can make human beings react under the revolver in order to acquire the golden age, then you can say that you have done something.”

“But you don’t impress me as being so cruel as all that, Varichkine.”

“What? Cruel? Why, I wouldn’t hurt a butterfly. I happen to have a little fox terrier whose back legs were crushed in an automobile accident during one of the raids in Moscow. Instead of shooting or chloroforming the poor half-paralyzed beast, I had a little wagon made for him to drive around in. Krassine said to me one day with a laugh, ‘Your dog is symbolical of all Russia, which gets along pretty well on the wheels we have placed underneath it!’ ”

“That’s a good comparison. But tell me, old fellow, what does one have to do to become a good Communist?”

“That’s the easiest thing in the world—all one has to do is to change every idea one ever had and know which way the wind is going to blow tomorrow. One venerated master, Illitch, known as Lenin, changed a great many of his ideas during his life. He became a revolutionary the way another man might have become a veterinary (because, in Russia, it happened to be a trade as good as any other). He figured out, with extraordinary cleverness, the precepts of Marx and Engels and Georges Sorel’s ‘Reflections on Violence.’ You must admit that he did a good job of it.”

“At the price of how many gallons of human blood?”

“Old boy, people don’t get happiness in this life when their leaders send them bouquets of flowers or when the man at the top pulls the petals off a daisy, asking as he does so, ‘She loves me? She loves me not?’ Don’t forget that the proletariat wants
to be led. It ought to be satisfied to know that half a dozen dictators are thinking for it and working in its name. But, the corollary of the dictatorship being a Draconian régime, it is quite natural that a few dishes should get broken now and then. After the last attempted murder of Lenin we deliberately shot five hundred hostages—officers and men alike—to avenge our master. That is the only way to make people feel the strength of a government.”

“Aren’t you afraid that the untold cruelty displayed during your régime will harm you in the eyes of posterity? Doesn’t it matter to you that history may pass a severe judgment on you?”

“Really and truly, my friend, you are naïve. Living is high since the war—but human life is cheap. When twenty million men have been the victims of inimical capitalists, what difference does it make if a few thousand Russians are incarcerated for the sake of severe principles? When hatred, violence, envy, and abject egotism have circulated at their own free will among civilized people, who has any right to reproach us for not having conducted our revolution with a shepherd’s staff in our hand and Pan’s pipes to our lips? Believe me, the world is always kind to successful tyrants, and moral mud is only thrown at the heads of political failures. Take, for example, your dear Kerensky, the white hope of the Western Liberals—he missed his mark, and you all reproached him bitterly for having been hypersensitive. All he would have had to do would have been to hang every one of us—Lenin and his following. With about fifty pretty little executions without trial, he might have been able to smash the egg of Communism under his heel; the constituency would then not have been overthrown by the sailor Jelesniakof, and you would have looked up to Kerensky as the greatest statesman in the world. Revolutions are not made with mittens. A social revolution conducted along legal lines is
a toy constructed for the use of dyspeptic Socialists nourished on noodles and black bread.”

“You are rapidly convincing me, old boy.”

The
maitre d’hotel
had just removed the
carpe à la chambord
to replace it with a succulent chicken
à la diable
, reclining comfortably on a bed of golden potatoes. Varichkine was doing well by this simple repast. Already two bottles of extra-dry were waving their parched throats in the air. He knocked his crystal drinking-cup against mine and his eyes shone with an indulgent smile. He ridiculed:

“Europe! Reproaching us for our crimes! Ha, ha! What a fine Utopian you are, my dear friend! Europe to try and drive us out like a lot of lousy dogs such as they send to the Bosphorus? Ha, ha! When kings are glad to shake hands with us? Do you remember the conference at Genoa, when the Pope’s emissaries didn’t object to rubbing their scarlet silk elbows against the red cotton of our shirts? When France took its ambassador out of the Vatican in order to send one to us? When the most authentic princesses would give the biggest pearls in their jewel boxes in order to get us to sit beside them in their own dining-rooms?”

He emptied his glass, frowned and added after a short silence, “And when Lady Diana Wynham manifests a desire to negotiate personally with me?”

I had been anticipating this inevitable transition for some time. “I am sure, my dear fellow, that Lady Diana would be fascinated with your personality.”

“Please don’t flatter me. Who am I in her eyes? An insignificant worm. She is well-born. I am nothing but the son of a lackey of Czarism. Her ancestors are prominent figures in the history of Scotland. Mine were eating roots a hundred years ago, and Pouchkine’s contemporaries used to walk around in bear skins—”

“Who can tell? If she were to meet you she might be carried away by the same strange attraction which Slavs seem to have for our beautiful women.”

Varichkine pretended to consider this a great joke. Throwing back his head, gently caressing his lovely black beard, like a young minister about to preach his first sermon, he hummed in his musical voice:

“Ah, yes. We are the Muscovites with wolves’ teeth, the Asiatics with avid, greedy eyes—the ones our great poet, Block, writes about—the Scythians who march, under the sign of the tempest, in the assault on occidental civilization, to violate the Three White Geese of your Capital: your Liberty, your Equality, and your Fraternity—that glorious trinity which sits back satisfied and watches the endless procession of its downtrodden proletariat. Sincerely, old fellow, do you think that Lady Wynham might just possibly find me attractive?”

“Varichkine, nobody under the vast sun can foresee the sentimental reactions of a woman, because—Woman plus Man plus the Time, the Place, and the Situation equals x. This equation is made a million times a day on this vast earth and is solved in a million ways.”