Part 3

_August 16, 1812._ We are under the walls of Smolensk, the city which the Cossack Hetmans wrested from the Commonwealth. This is on the borders of Old Poland.

I said to the Emperor in one last attempt: “There is Russia, Sire. Do you remember how it looks upon the map? A wilderness bounded by a river of blood and by blue and frozen seas. Those, Sire, are God’s awful prohibition.”

He looked toward it thoughtfully for a time, then turned and walked silently away.

* * * * *

_August 18, 1812._ Yesterday the French took Smolensk. Again I saw the policy of Russia. It was garrisoned by thirty thousand men. They gave us the victory that Napoleon may push on into the heart of the country. There, when winter comes, the snow and the frost will do what arms can not. There he will contend with a new army--the army of the elements. I saw the battle. It was terrible beyond description. The Emperor commanded in person. He was here, there, everywhere, all at once. He was the incarnate demon of joy. Bullets dared not touch him. Screaming, they fled past. It was frightful in that he really seemed to be protected by a superhuman power.

After it was over, he rode to where I sat.

“Was a woman ever entertained as I have entertained you? I do not amuse you with stupid balls, operas, soirées, but with the play of the best armies of Europe.”

His joy filled me with terror.

* * * * *

_August 20, 1812._ The soldiers are wild with hope. They see themselves master of the East. I alone know what awaits them. They are uplifted by such a burning desire of the future that the present is annihilated.

Along the way are the dead and dying. No one seems to care.

* * * * *

_August 22, 1812._ I am becoming infected with the general joy. Yet I know that the Russians have prepared their revenge.

* * * * *

_August 28, 1812._ The Russians are still retreating. Yesterday and the day before there were slight engagements in which the French were successful.

The Russians retired to Borodino. Now the invincible Kutusow is in command. The Emperor is delighted. He is eager to meet him.

* * * * *

_September 8, 1812._ Yesterday they fought by Borodino. Kutusow retired to Moscow.

* * * * *

_September 12, 1812. We can see Moscow!_

Imagine a yellow, barren plain, over it gold-dust haze, brightening and darkening as the wind sways it, through which rise a multitude of green and red and blue and silver domes, surmounted by gold, lace-work crosses. It floats in the air. It is the creation of a magician. At the same time it is very real, and touched with mystery and age--the immemorial age of the East.

* * * * *

_September 15, 1812._ We are in Moscow. The city is deserted. Kutusow took his troops and went away. It was not fear that made him. Something terrible is going to happen. Why do not the French suspect?

It is unimaginable--the effect of this silent, wonderful city. Who would dream of a city here--on the barren plain that stretches eastward to Asia! And such a city! Italian palaces by the side of Tartar huts! Bazaars where the wonders of the Orient are displayed!

The soldiers are pillaging right and left. Entire squadrons go about decked in gold and embroidered gauzes fit for the harems of Stamboul.

It is like a festival in honor of a pagan god. This illusion is heightened by the fires which are burning everywhere, like incense.

Never before did the bitter North see anything like this. Like this life must have been in the old days--in Alexandria and in Mitylene.

* * * * *

_September 17, 1812._ It has come! It could not be put off longer. Last night the Emperor summoned me to him. He was in the Uspenski Sobore, the cathedral where the Russian emperors are crowned. Here he has set up his abode. The splendor of the room I entered was overpowering. It was magnificent, imposing, glittering with marbles, with paintings, and with decorations, made out of barbaric gold. It was lighted by a thousand candles, each as tall as the body of a man. Yet the corners and the roof were black and impenetrable.

No sooner had I entered than he drew me to him with that silent fury I remembered. Then he hastened to make fast the door.

“Now I can unfold my plan--I, who am master of the world. For five years I have loved you and asked nothing in return. Now is my time. You are to be my Empress--Empress of the East. This shall be your capital, Russia and the Orient your crown lands. You shall be what Yek-Katarina dreamed always of being--Empress of the East.”

“But--Sire--the church! Could it bless a union like ours?”

“The church? Why, I shall be the church!”

I saw that he was drunk with the deadliest wine that can be given to mortals--success, and the too great favors of destiny.

“Sire, I have considered. I will follow your will--on one condition.”

Here some one knocked at the door.

“The city is on fire! Lose no time. Save yourself!”

“And what is that?” paying not the slightest heed to the interruption.

“Sire, Russia’s supply of powder is under the Kremlin. In an instant we may all be destroyed. Sire! Sire!”

“And what is that?”

The pounding on the door became deafening. The great windows were so lighted by the flames outside that they dimmed the candles. The floor, made of bricks of steel, was as red with the reflection as a sea of blood.

“The freedom of Poland, Sire.”

“I grant it.”

“Why should you not? Poland was cut up to make presents for the lovers of Catherine. Why should it not be united for the one love of Napoleon?”

“Sire! Sire! Open the door. Do not risk your life--the fate of France. Open! Open!”

“Write then its freedom here,” snatching a piece of paper and spreading it before him.

I felt no fear. I was conscious only of a great exaltation,--the sensation he had first taught me to know. Death was nothing in comparison with the goal I sought.

“Write, Sire, write!”

We were then in such an intensity of many-colored light that the farthest top of the great dome shone red like a baker’s oven. The knocking and the voices increased, grew deafening.

“An instant, just another instant!” I prayed, “until that paper is in my hands!”

“Dictate; it shall be as you wish.”

“Write, then: ‘_que la République de Pologne soit maintenue dans son état de libre élection et qu’il ne soit permis à personne de rendre le dit royaume héréditaire dans sa famille ou de s’y rendre absolu_.’”

Just as he reached the place of signature, the door fell and the Prince of Naples, followed by frightened soldiers, rushed in.

“What are you writing?” He snatched the paper from the table. By this time the room was half filled with soldiers.

_The freedom of Poland!_

“Sire, this woman is the tool of Russia. See, here is the letter written to her by Prince Adam Czartoryisky. Listen, Sire, listen!

“‘With you to help, we will lure Napoleon, who is now drunk with success, to a banquet of death in the heart of White Russia.’”

The look on the face of the Great Emperor is one of the things which the merciful God will never permit me to forget. Upon it dawned in quick succession the intelligence of all those baffling defeats, followed by a mingled look of anger, surprise, and that which cut me deepest--grief.

“Sire,” continued the Prince of Naples, “outside waits her escort sent by His Imperial Majesty, Alexander, to rescue her from burning Moscow.”

“Take her to her escort,” was the stern reply.

Not one word, not one glance, did he give to me.

As I drove away toward Warsaw, I saw him for one last instant standing on the pictured Kremlin wall, fearless and calm, a pagan god for whom a city fell in ruin. Behind and beside, the conflagration rolled its waves of flame.

I had been faithful to my country, to my duty, yet I felt the greatest contempt for myself.

You see, I was beneath his anger.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Great Catherine. In the middle of the Eighteenth Century the Russians called Catherine II. _Yek-Katarina_, which is equivalent in English to Arch-Catherine.

[2] Krasinski--Count Sigismund, a Polish writer best known as the author of _Irydion_, which, under the thin covering of a fable, tells the tragic story of Poland. He was a prominent figure in the Paris of that day.

[3] Pan Kasimir Brodzinski, Polish critic.

[4] One of the greatest poets of Poland. His poems, ballads and his sonnets--in which he pictures the Crimea and the mountain world of Southern Russia--have been translated into the languages of the Continent. He is numbered among the Polish patriots of 1830.

[5] Polish poet who wrote _Maria, An Heroic Tale of the Ukraine_.

[6] Slav proverb.

[7] Author’s translation.

THE PAINTER OF DEAD WOMEN

We were lingering over one of our honeymoon breakfasts in Naples, my husband dividing his attention between _Il Corriere di Napoli_ and his coffee, and I planning for my favorite pastime, swimming, in that sea which looks like a liquid sapphire.

“‘No clue to the mysterious disappearance of the Contessa Fabriani,’” he read. “‘After a month’s search, the police are baffled.’”

“That does not sound particularly remarkable to you, I suppose. Women--and men, too, for that matter--have disappeared from other cities. But this adds another chapter to a mysterious story of crime.

“For twenty-five years not only native Italian women, but visiting women of other nations have disappeared from Naples, and nothing has afterward been heard of them. The peculiar part about it is that they have all been young and beautiful, and women of the upper class.”

I paid little heed to his words. I was thinking of other things. Besides, Luigi was a Neapolitan and interested in all the happenings of his native city. On my first visit to Naples I did not have time to interest myself in a sensational story such as I could read any morning in the London papers.

“You have not forgotten that to-night is the ball?” said my husband, consulting his watch and jumping up. “I want you to look particularly lovely. All my friends--and your old rivals--will be there. Business takes me from the city for the day, and in case I should not return in time to accompany you, I have arranged for Cousin Lucia to meet you at ten at the door of the Cinascalchi Palace. I shall come later--in time for part of the dancing. Tell Pietro to get you there at exactly ten,” he called, after he had kissed me good-by.

When I took a last look at myself in the glass that night, I felt that I had obeyed my husband’s instructions. I was looking particularly lovely. I had dressed with the purpose of appearing as unlike Italian women as possible.

My slim six feet of stature was arrayed in a plain white satin princess, from which the shoulders rose scarcely less white and satiny. My hair was the color of the upland furze, and my cheeks glowed like the roses of an English garden.

“Pietro!” I called, after we had driven what seemed to me a very long time. “Are you sure that you are going in the right direction? I did not suppose that it was outside the city.”

He reassured me and drove on.

We entered the courtyard of a country estate. As I stepped from the carriage, I saw in the distance the grouped lights of Naples. Pietro whipped the horses and drove off before I had time to speak.

There were no other carriages in the yard. Could I have mistaken the time? Lucia was not there to meet me, either. “She is probably within,” I reflected, “since the palace is bright with light.”

Doors swung back softly and as if by magic. I entered. The blaze of light that rushed out all but blinded me. Words cannot express the horror of it nor the silence that accompanied it. There were no servants moving about. No one was in sight. I was alone.

Imagine a sweep of majestic rooms whose floors were polished to the surface consistency of stone; straight white walls of mirrored marble, and, blazing from walls and ceiling, prisms of cut crystal. Wherever you looked the glitter of light flashed back at you, confusing your eyes and dazing your brain. I did not suppose that light could hold such terror.

“There is surely some mistake,” I whispered. “This is no place for dancing or merriment. It is more like a white and shining sepulchre. I would rather trust myself to the night outside,” and I turned toward the door with the purpose of leaving. But the space behind, where I knew that I had entered, presented a smooth and evenly paneled surface. There was no door. Nor was there place for lock or knob. As I stood confused and hesitating, I learned to the full the demoniac power of light. The slightest motion of my body, my head, my breathing, even, sent from polished corners and cornice quivering arrows into my eyes. The mirrors and the shining marble reflected floor and ceiling until it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. It seemed, after a time, that I was floating head downward in a sea of light.

Then something righted me sharply. It was not sound nor was it thought. It appealed to subtler senses. It was as if the material body was endowed with a thinking machine and each pore contained a brain. It aroused some consciousness which the hypnotism of light had dulled. I knew then that I was standing, slim and white and frozen with terror, in the focus of the light.

I felt the cold diamonds shift their position upon my throat and breast and tremble as I breathed irregularly. I heard the sibilant slipping of the stiff satin as it fell into a changed position.

A powerful and dominant brain had touched my own. For one unconscious moment it had ruled it and set upon it the seal of its thought.

Such a passion of fear assailed me that it seemed as if I must choke. My fascinated eyes turned toward the end of the farthest room. From there the message came. There, I knew, was something compelling, something electric. Exactly in the center of that far room, and very erect, stood a man. He was coming toward me, too, slowly--very slowly. Yet I heard not the slightest sound. Evidently he was shod with rubber. He moved as I have seen a malevolent spider move toward a prisoned fly, enjoying the pleasure of motion because he knows that there is no escape for his victim. Just as gracefully and easily did he move toward me. And as he came, I knew that he read my soul, measured my strength and my power of resistance, and at the same time admired the white erectness of my body.

Fear, as with a bitter acid, etched his picture on my brain. He was very tall--taller than I by a good inch--and faultlessly attired; a patrician, but a degenerate patrician, the body alone having preserved its ancient dignity.

Ribboned decorations brightened his coat, and I saw a garter on his leg.

He was thinner than any one I ever saw and correspondingly supple. His movements had the fascination of a serpent. Thus might a serpent move, if its coiled length were poised erect.

His head would have been beautiful, had not the features been so delicately chiseled that strength and nobility had been refined away, and in their place had come effeminacy and a certain cold and delicate cruelty.

He was an old man, too, and his heavy hair was white. His brows, however, were black and youthful, and from beneath looked out blue eyes. The eyes were the color of light when it shines through thick ice. They were the color of the sharp edge of fine steel when it is bared too quickly to the sun. In the same hard way the light ran across them.

But the strangest part was that there seemed to be no limit to their depth. However far you looked within, you could not find a person. You could not surprise a consciousness. There was no soul there. In its stead there was merely a keen and destructive intelligence.

I realized that the man coming toward me did not live by means of the physical acts of life. He had learned to live by his brain. He was a cerebral!

I sensed his dominant personality and struggled against it. I sensed, too, the presence of a numbing mental fluid that crippled my will and dulled me as does that sweet-smelling death which surgeons call the anæsthetic.

He had stripped himself of human attributes. He knew nothing of fear, pity, love.

“I have the honor of meeting, I believe, the bride of the Leopardi.” He bowed and spoke in an even, unemotional voice.

I bowed in return. “How is it possible for you to know that? I do not remember having met you.”

“It is not necessary to have met me. No beautiful woman comes to Naples whom I do not know. I,” bowing again, “am Count Ponteleone, painter of dead women. You have probably heard of me.”

“Who has not!” I exclaimed, somewhat reassured and wondering that this could be the man whose name was resounding through two continents.

“This intrusion--which I beg you to pardon--is due to the coachman’s mistake. I am expected at the Cinascalchi ball. My husband and cousin await me there. If you will send me on in your carriage, I shall be grateful.”

“Oh, no, your coachman made no mistake,” calmly ignoring my request. “I brought him here and you, too, as I have brought other women--by this,” tapping his forehead.

“You are graciously jesting to excuse my rudeness,” I managed to stammer, summoning the ghost of a smile.

“Well, we may as well call it a jest if you wish. It is a jest which ought to flatter. I entertain only beautiful women here.”

The glance that accompanied this enveloped me from head to foot. It was a glance of admiration, and yet in it there was none of the desire of would-be love. It was devoid of warmth and emotion. Nothing could be more impersonal. No mark of material beauty had escaped it. It was the trained glance of a connoisseur which measures accurately. I might have been a picture or a piece of furniture.

I felt that he knew my racial standing, my rank as a human animal, by the delicate roundness of my bones and the fine fiber of my flesh. I had been as glass to his intelligent gaze. Somehow, then, I felt that the body of me belonged to him because of this masterly penetration which substance could not resist.

“Since you are to be my guest, we might seek a more comfortable place to converse.”

He led the way to the center of the great rooms where, touching an invisible spring, doors flew back, disclosing a drawing-room draped in red. As he bowed me to a seat, he remarked: “Here you look like a pearl dropped in a cup of blood.”

I, too, thought that I had never seen so wicked a red nor one so suggestive of luxurious crime. The comparison jarred upon me and prickled me with fear.

As he sank back in an easy-chair opposite, I saw how the red walls touched with color the whiteness of his hair and sent occasional ruddy gleams into the depth of his eyes.

“You are an Englishwoman, too,” he observed, with evident relish. “I knew it. Only the mists and rains of England can make color like yours. Did you notice how well we looked together as we walked along between the mirrors? Are we not as if made for each other--tall and regal--both of us? What a picture we would make!”

It occurred to me then, with unpleasant appropriateness, that he was the painter of _dead women_.

“It is an English woman, too, that I lack for my collection,” he mused meditatively.

“Collection! Have you a collection of women? That is certainly unique. I have heard of collections of bugs, birds,--but women, never. Perhaps you would like me to join it!”

“Indeed I should! I never saw a woman I admired so tremendously.”

I drew back in fear, silenced by the ardor of his words.

“Oh, you need not be afraid. I am not like other men. I do not love as they love. I love only with my brain. While you have been sitting here, I have caressed you a thousand times, and you have not even suspected it. I do not want the bestial common pleasures which my coachman can have, or my scullion can buy with a _lira_. Why should not I be as much superior to them in my loves as in my life? If I am not, then I am not their superior in any way. My pleasures are those of another plane of life, of a brain touched to a keener fire, of nerves that have reached the highest point of pleasurable vibration. Besides, when I love, I love only dead women. Life reaches its perfection only when death comes. _Life is never real until then_,” he added.

“Perhaps you would like to kill me for your amusement to-night,” I replied, still trying to keep up the jest. “I have always flattered myself, however, that I was better alive.”

No sooner were the words out than I regretted them. His face grew thin and strained like a bird-dog’s on the scent. His lips became expressive of a terrible desire, and his frail hands trembled with anticipation.

As I looked, his pupils disappeared, and his eyes became two pools of blue and blazing light. Unwittingly I had hit upon his object. I had surprised his purpose in a jest.

Who could have dreamed of this! At the worst, I thought, I might be detained for two or three days, forced to serve him for a model, and cause worry to my husband and gossiping comment.

But whose imagination could have reached this! Strangely enough, the decree of death that I read in his face dissipated my fear. I became calm and collected. In an instant I was mistress of myself and ready to fight for life. The blood stopped pounding in my brain. I could think with normal clearness.

“The worst of it is,” I reflected, “this man is not mad. If he were, I might be able to play upon some delusion for freedom. He has passed the point where madness begins. He has gone just so much too far the other way.”

“Then you really think that you could love me if I were dead,” I laughed, leaning toward him gayly. “Is it not rather a strange requisite for winning a woman’s love? What would my reward be? Are you sure you could not endure me any other way?”

“Do not jest about sacred things! Death,” he answered slowly and reprovingly, “is the thing most to be desired by beautiful women. It saves them from something worse--old age. An ugly woman can afford to live; a beautiful woman can not. The real object of life is to ripen the body to its limit of physical perfection, and then, just as you would a perfect fruit, pluck and preserve it. Death sets the definite seal upon its perfection, that is, if death can be controlled to prevent decay. And that is what I can do,” he added proudly, getting up in his abstraction and pacing up and down the room. “And what difference does it make, what day it comes? All days march toward death.”

I admired unreservedly the elegant, intellectualized figure, now that I had thrown fear to the winds.

“Come,” he pleaded, “let me kill you! It is because I love you that I ask you. It is because I think that your physical self is worth being preserved. Your future will be assured. You will never be less happy than now, less lovely, less triumphant. You will always be an object of admiration.”

“What a magician you are to picture death attractively! But tell me more about it first.”

Joy leaped up and sang in my heart at the prospect of the struggle. I felt as the race-horse feels when, knowing the strength and the suppleness of his limbs, he sees the long white track unfold before him.