by Andrei Bely
Thus did they reach an agreement.
As she immersed herself in thoughts about Madame Farnois, Pompadour and Maison Tricotons, Angel Peri felt tormentingly that again everything was all wrong, that something had happened that would make both Madame Farnois and Maison Tricotons vanish into thin air; but taking advantage of her state of semi-sleep, she was consciously unwilling to try to catch the elusive impression of the real events of the day before; at last she remembered – only two words: domino and letter; and she leapt out of bed, wringing her hands in aimless languor; there had been some third word, and with it she had fallen asleep last night.
But Angel Peri could not remember the third word; the third word might have been some quite unprepossessing sounds: husband, officer, second lieutenant.
As far as the first two words were concerned, Angel Peri firmly resolved not to think about them until the evening; while the third, unprepossessing word did not merit attention. But it was precisely this unprepossessing word that she ran up against; for no sooner, no sooner had she fluttered through to the drawing-room from her stuffy little bedroom and dashed, with perfect innocence, into her husband’s room, in the supposition that her husband, the officer, the second lieutenant Likhutin, had as always gone off to take charge of provisions, than suddenly: to her very great surprise that second lieutenant’s room proved to be locked and inaccessible to her: second lieutenant Likhutin, in spite of all his habits, in spite of the cramped quarters, the loss of comfort, common sense and honest decency – had evidently ensconced himself in there.
Only now did she remember yesterday’s outrageous scene; and with pouting lips slammed the bedroom door (he had locked himself in, and so would she). But, having locked herself in, she saw the broken dressing table.
‘Barynya, will you have coffee in your room?’
‘No, I don’t want any …’
‘Barin, will you have coffee in your room?’
‘No, I don’t want any.’
‘Barin, the coffee is cold.’
Silence.
‘Barynya, someone is here, barynya!’
‘From Madame Farnois?’
‘No, from the laundress!’
Silence.
In an hour there are sixty minutes; while a minute entirely consists of seconds; the seconds ran away, forming minutes; heavy, the minutes began to throng; and the hours dragged themselves along.
Silence.
In the middle of the day Her Majesty’s Yellow Cuirassier Baron Ommergau rang at the door with a two-pound bonbonnière of chocolates from Krafft’s.4 The two-pound bonbonnière was not refused admittance; but he was.
At about two o’clock in the afternoon His Majesty’s Blue Cuirassier Count Aven rang at the door with a bonbonnière from Ballet’s;5 the bonbonnière was received, but he was refused admittance.
A Leib Hussar in a tall fur hat was also refused; the Hussar shook his plumed hat and stood with a double bunch of brilliant lemon-coloured chrysanthemums; he called after Aven, shortly after four o’clock.
Verhefden also came flying with a box for the Mariinsky Theatre. Only Lippanchenko did not call: of Lippanchenko there was no sign.
At last, late in the evening, towards ten o’clock, a girl appeared from Madame Farnois with an enormous cardboard box; she was received at once; but as she was being received and there was tittering in the hallway apropos of this, the door of the bedroom clicked, and from there a tearful little face pushed inquisitively forth; an angry, hurried cry was heard:
‘Bring it quickly.’
But at the same time the lock of the study door also gave a click; from the study a shaggy head pushed forth: looked and disappeared. Was this really the second lieutenant?
Petersburg Slipped away into the Night
Who does not remember the evening before the memorable night? Who does not remember that day’s melancholy flight to rest?
Above the Neva an enormous and crimson sun ran behind the factory chimneys: the Petersburg buildings were covered by the finest puff of smoke and seemed to begin to melt, turning into the lightest, smoky amethyst lace; and from the window-panes a golden, flaming reflection cut through everywhere; and from the tall spires the radiance flashed like rubies. All the usual weights – both indentations and projections – were slipping away into a burning ardour: both the entrance porches with their caryatids and the cornices of the brick balconies.
The rust-red palace6 began to run violently with blood; this old palace had been built by Rastrelli; like a soft blue wall this old palace had stood then in a white flock of columns; with admiration the late Empress Yelizaveta Petrovna7 once used to open a window from there on to the distances of the Neva. In the reign of Emperor Aleksandr Pavlovich8 this old palace was repainted pale yellow; in the reign of Emperor Aleksandr Nikolayevich9 the palace was repainted a second time: from that time it became rust-red, running with blood towards sunset.
On that memorable evening all was aflame, even the palace was aflame; while all the rest, that did not enter the flame, darkened sluggishly; as did the row of lines and walls when there, in the fading lilac sky, in the little mother-of-pearl-like clouds, some kind of sparkling lamps kept languorously flaring up; as did, sluggishly, some sort of the very lightest of flames.
You would have said that the past was glowing there, sunset-red.
A short plump lady, all in black, who had paid off her cab driver down there by the bridge, had for a long time now been wandering to and fro beneath the windows of a yellow house; her hand trembled rather strangely; and in her trembling hand there barely trembled a tiny reticule, not in the Petersburg fashion. The plump lady was of considerable years and looked as though she suffered from shortness of breath; now and then her plump fingers plucked at her chin, which jutted imposingly from under her collar and was peppered here and there with small grey hairs. Standing opposite the yellow house, she was trying with trembling fingers to open the little reticule: the little reticule would not obey; at last the little reticule opened, and with a haste that was inappropriate to her years the lady took out a small, lace-patterned handkerchief, turned towards the Neva and began to cry. As she did so, her face was illumined by the sunset, and the small moustache above her lips was clearly visible; placing her hand on the stone, she looked with a childlike and quite unseeing gaze at the foggy, many-chimneyed distance and the watery depths.
At last, the lady hurried in agitation towards the entrance porch of the yellow house and rang the doorbell.
The door flew open; a little old man with gold braid on his lapels thrust his bald patch out of the opening at the sunset; the unendurable radiance from the other side of the Neva made him screw up his watery eyes.
‘What do you want? …’
The lady of considerable years began to grow excited: something between tender emotion and carefully concealed shyness lit up her features.
‘Dmitrich? … Don’t you recognize me?’
Here the lackey’s bald patch began to tremble and it fell into the tiny reticule (which was in the lady’s hand):
‘Little mother, barynya mine! … Anna Petrovna!’
‘Yes, Semyonych, it’s me …’
‘But how on earth? Where have you come from?’
The tender emotion which might have been carefully concealed shyness once again sounded in the pleasant contralto.
‘From Spain. Well, I wanted to see how you were managing here without me.’
‘Barynya of ours, our own … Please come in, ma’am! …’
Anna Petrovna ascended the staircase: the staircase was still covered by the same velvety carpet. On the walls gleamed the same ornamental display of weapons: under the barynya’s watchful eye a Lithuanian brass helmet had once been hung here, and there a Templar’s sword, rusted through everywhere; and today they gleamed just the same: from here, a Lithuanian brass helmet; from there, the cross-shaped hilts of completely rusted swords.
‘Only there’s no one here, ma’am; neither the young barin no
r Apollon Apollonovich.’
Above the balustrade the pedestal of white alabaster still stood as before, and, as before, the same Niobe raised to heaven her alabaster eyes; this before again clustered round (though three years had gone by, and in those years so much had been experienced). Anna Petrovna remembered the Italian cavalier, and again felt within herself that carefully concealed shyness.
‘Would you like some choclate, or coffee, ma’am? Would you like a samovar?’
Anna Petrovna barely managed to turn her back on the past (here all was the same as before).
‘So how have you been without me these past years?’
‘Oh, all right, ma’am … Only if I may be so bold as to say so, ma’am, when you’re not here there isn’t any order. But otherwise there haven’t been any consequences: it’s just been as it was before … Have you heard about the barin, Apollon Apollonovich?’
‘Yes, I have …’
‘Yes, ma’am, all the marks of distinction … the tsar’s favours … What do you expect: the barin’s an important man!’
‘Has the barin aged?’
‘The barin’s being appointed to a post: a senior one: – the barin’s just the same as a minister: that’s the sort of barin he is …’
It suddenly seemed to Anna Petrovna that the lackey was viewing her with a slightly reproachful look; but this was only how it seemed: he had merely frowned because of the unendurable radiance from the other side of the Neva, as he opened the door to the reception room.
‘Well, and Kolenka?’
‘Kolenka, ma’am, Nikolai Apollonovich, rather, is such a clever one, if I may permit myself to observe it, ma’am! His honour is good at learning; and he’s good at anything he puts his mind to … What a handsome fellow he’s become …’
‘Well, what do you expect? He was always like his father …’
As she said it, she lowered her eyes and turned the little reticule over in her fingers.
As before, the walls were set with high-legged chairs; from all sides between the chairs, which were upholstered in pale yellow plush, rose cold, white columns; and from each white column a stern male figure of cold alabaster looked reproachfully down at her. And with sheer hostility did the ancient, greenish glass, beneath which Anna Petrovna had had a decisive conversation with the senator, flash at her from the walls: and there – a pale-toned painting – Pompeian frescoes; the senator had brought those frescoes into her life when she had been his fiancée: thirty years had passed since that time.
Anna Petrovna was enveloped by the same drawing-room hospitality: she was enveloped by lacquers and lustres; she felt a pang in her breast as before; her throat constricted with the old enmity; Apollon Apollonovich might perhaps forgive her; but she would not forgive him: in the lacquered house the storms of life passed noiselessly, but the storms of life passed here disastrously.
Thus did a rush of dark thoughts drive her to the hostile banks; distractedly she leaned against the window – and saw the rosy little clouds racing above the waves of the Neva; the ragged little clouds were escaping from the funnels of small, receding steamers that threw from their sterns a stripe of gleaming sapphires to the banks: as it licked the stone pier, the stripe was thrown back and interlaced with the stripe that came to meet it, scattering its sapphires into a single, serpentine gold thread. Higher up, the lightest of flames turned to ashes in the clouds; the ash was strewn generously: all the openings in the sky were filled with ash; then everything changed insidiously with a single-coloured lightness; and for an instant it appeared as though the grey row of lines, spires and walls, with a barely descending shadowy darkness that fell on the masses of the stone walls – as though this grey row were the finest lace.
‘Will you be staying with us, barynya?’
‘I? … I’m in a hotel.’
In this melting greyness there suddenly dimly emerged a large number of dots, looking in astonishment: lights, lights, tiny lights filled with intensity and rushed out of the darkness in pursuit of the rust-red blotches, as cascades fell from above: blue, dark violet and black.
Petersburg slipped away into the night.
Their Dancing Shoes Tapped
The doorbell rang and rang.
Some sort of angel-like creatures came through from the hallway into the ballroom, dressed in blue, white, and pink gowns, silvery, sparkling; they fluttered gauze, fans and silks, exuding all around a beneficial atmosphere of violets, lily of the valley, lilies and tuberoses; their marble-white shoulders, dusted lightly with powder, would within an hour or two be flushed crimson and covered in perspiration; but now, before the dancing, their little faces, their shoulders and their thin, exposed arms seemed even paler and thinner than on ordinary days; all the more considerably did the charm of these creatures somehow restrainedly flare into sparks in their eyes, while the creatures, sheer angelets, formed both rustling and coloured swarms of fluttering muslin; their white fans coiled and uncoiled, causing a light breeze; their dancing shoes tapped.
The doorbell rang and rang.
Cheerfully into the ballroom from the hallway came some kind of firm-chested genii in tight-fitting tailcoats, uniform jackets and pelisses – law students, hussars, high-school students and people who were nothing in particular – with moustaches and without them – all without beards; they exuded all around a kind of reliable joy and reserve. Unobtrusively they penetrated the circle of brilliant gauze and seemed to the young ladies more malleable than wax; and one had only to take one look, and there, here a light, downy fan was already beginning to beat against the chest of a mustachioed genius like a butterfly’s wing that had settled trustfully on that chest, and the firm-chested hussar would shyly begin to exchange his frivolous hints with the young ladies; with precisely the same caution do we incline our face to a gentle moth that has happened to settle on our finger. And on the red background of the hussar’s gold-textured attire, as against the magnificent rising of a fabulous sun, the slightly rosy profile stood out clearly and simply; the accumulating whirlwind of the waltz would soon turn the slightly rosy profile of the innocent angel into the profile of a fiery demon.
The Tsukatovs were not, strictly speaking, giving a ball: it was at most only a children’s party in which grown-ups wanted to take part; to be sure, there was a rumour that maskers would be coming to the party; the prospect of their appearance surprised Lyubov’ Alekseyevna, it had to be said; after all, it was not Christmas; but such, evidently, were the traditions of her charming husband that for the sake of dancing and children’s laughter he was prepared to break all the statutes of the calendar; her charming husband, the possessor of two silver side-whiskers, was even to this day called Coco. In this dancing household he was, it goes without saying, Nikolai Petrovich, the household’s head and the father of two pretty daughters of eighteen and fifteen respectively.
These charming fair-haired creatures were dressed in gauzy gowns and silver dancing shoes. Ever since eight o’clock they had been waving their feathery fans at their father, at the housekeeper, at the chambermaid, and even … at the venerable zemstvo official10 of mastodon-like proportions (a relative of Coco’s) who was staying in the house. At last the long-awaited timid ring was heard; the door of the brightly lit ballroom flew open; and tightly clad in his tailcoat, a ballroom pianist, resembling a black, long-legged bird, rubbing his hands, very nearly tripped over a passing waiter (who had been summoned to this glittering house on the occasion of the ball); in the waiter’s hands a cardboard sheet completely covered with cotillion trinkets began to rattle, began to tremble: medals, ribbons and little bells. The modest ballroom pianist spread out a row of sheet music, raised and lowered the wing of the grand piano, carefully blew the dust off the keys and, without visible purpose, he pressed a pedal with his gleaming shoe, putting one in mind of a conscientious engine driver testing the boilers of his locomotive before the train left the station. Having convinced himself that the instrument was working properly, the modest ballroom pianist gat
hered up the tails of his coat, sat down on the low piano stool, flung back his whole body, let his fingers fall on the keys, for a moment froze – and a thunderous chord shook the walls: as though a whistle had been sounded, summoning to a long journey.