by Ouida
Poor stupid Geraldine would have been grateful to do so much, or Seliedoff, or so many others. Othmar alone had dared to say to her, ‘I will be nothing or all.’
Therefore his memory abided with her and moved her, and had power over her, and at times an irritable gnawing sense of something which might have been stole upon her. What could that child give him at Amyôt? — white limbs, clear eyes, a rose-bloom of blushes; but besides? what sympathy, comprehension, inspiration? what of the higher delights of the passions?
The thought of him irritated her. There was a defiance, an insolence, in his assumption of being able to command his destiny in independence of herself, which offended her; it was unlike what others did. She was aware that it was done out of bravado, or so she believed; but it was not thus that the fates on which she had deigned to lay her finger had usually been closed. Something even of contempt for him at seeking such a refuge from herself mingled with her irritation. It seemed to her weak and commonplace.
‘Madame,’ said the voice of Melville through the shadows, ’is it quite safe to ramble so late, despite the trusty Kossack and his lance?’
She turned; her head enwrapped in gossamer, till he saw nothing but the cloud of lace and the two dusky, jewel-like eyes.
‘I was just wishing, almost wishing,’ she answered, ‘that the trusty Kossack were of the new doctrines, and would take advantage of the opportunity to make away with his barina. I am not sure that I would have called out; it would have saved one a great deal of sameness. When my chocolate comes to my bedside I always think of Pierre Loti’s childish protest, “Toujours se lever, toujours se coucher, et toujours manger de la soupe qui n’est pas bonne!” Our soup is good, perhaps. It is rather the appetite which is lacking.’
‘Your generation is born tired,’ said Melville. ‘ Mine was happier; it believed in the possibility of enjoyment — an illusion, no doubt, but one which cheers life considerably. Princess, I wish you would pardon me an indiscretion; you are always so merciful to me, you make me over-bold; but I have always so much wanted to know whether a story that I heard, of a winter’s journey of yours across Russia, was true. It was in the newspapers, but one never knows what is true there, and I was in India at the time.’
She smiled. ‘Oh! I know what you mean. Yes, it was true enough. That was nothing; nothing at all. I had all kinds of people to help me. There was no difficulty of any sort. It was amusing — —’
‘It was a very heroic thing to do,’ said Melville gravely.
‘Not at all,’ she interrupted quickly. ‘There was no heroism about it. The Tzar was always very kind to me. I had every assistance, every comfort on my journey. You, imaginative being, have a picture instantly in your mind of me as enduring all the dangers of poor Elizabeth in the French classic; on the contrary, I slept nearly all the way, and read a novel the rest.’
‘All the same,’ said Melville, ‘no one but yourself will deny that it was a very noble thing to travel in November, the most hideous part of the year, through mud and snow, right across Russia, to have a few facts reach the Emperor in their true aspect, and then post to Tobolsk with his pardon, that a dying mother might know her son was free before she died — —’
Nadine Napraxine shrugged her shoulders slightly, with a gesture of indifference.
‘It amused me. I had a fancy to see Siberia in winter. The pity was that Fedor Alexowitch Boganof was an ugly and uninteresting fellow — with plenty of brains, indeed, which brought his ruin, but quite ugly, rather misshapen, and blessed with five children. If the hero of my journey had only been a fine officer of cuirassiers, or a romantic-looking revolutionist, the story would have been delightful, but poor Boganof no one could turn into a jeune premier; not even the gossips of Petersburg. He was only a clever writer, with a mother and a wife who idolised him. The truth is, I had read his novel and liked it; that is why, when his people came to me, I did what I could. Anybody who knew the Tzar as well as I could have done as much. As for going to Siberia — well, I went myself because I have a profound distrust of Russian officials. Even an Imperial pardon has a knack of arriving too late when it is desirable that it should do so. It was certainly a disagreeable season of the year, but behind strong horses one does not mind that. Very soon Siberia will have lost its terrors and its romance; there will be a railway across the Urals, and all chance of the little excitements attendant on such a journey as mine will be over. When the Governor saw me actually in Tobolsk, he could not believe his eyes. If his beard had not been dyed, it would have turned white with the extremity of his amazement. I think he could have understood my taking the trouble if it had been for a Tchin; but for a mere scribbler of books, a mere teller of stories! I told him that Homer, and Ariosto, and Goethe, and ever so many others had been only tellers of stories too, but that produced no impression on him. He was compelled to let Boganof go, because the Tzar ordered him, but he could not see any valid reason why Boganof should not be left to rot away, brain downwards, under the ice.’
She laughed a little at the recollection of it all; it had been called an eccentric hair-brained thing at the time by all her world, but she had taken Boganof back with her in triumph, and had not left him until she had seen him seated by the stove of his own humble house in Odessa.
It had been one of the best moments of her life — yes, certainly — but it did not seem to her that she had done anything remarkable. It had been so absurd to send a man to dwell amidst eternal snows and semi-eternal darkness because he had written a clever novel in which the wiseacres of the third section had seen fit to discover revolutionary doctrines, that when the wife and mother of Boganof, knowing her influence at Court, and having chance of access to her through her steward, threw themselves at her feet one day, and besought her compassion and assistance, she had been surprised into promising her aid, from that generosity and sympathy with courage which always lived beneath the artificiality and indifference of her habits and temper. No doubt they had succeeded because they had come upon her in a bon moment; no doubt they might have found her in moods in which they might as well have appealed to the Japanese bronzes in her vestibule; but, having been touched and surprised into a promise, she had kept it through much difficulty and with an energy which bore down all opposition.
‘She looks as frail as a reed, but she has the force of a lance,’ the autocrat to whom she appealed, and who was at the onset utterly opposed to her petition, had thought as he had answered her coldly that Boganof was a dangerous writer.
‘So were all the Encyclopædists; but the great Catherine was not afraid of them; will you, the Father of your people, refuse to one of those the protection which she was proud to grant to Frenchmen?’ she had said to the Emperor, with many another persuasive and audacious argument, to which he had listened with a smile because the lovely mouth of the Princess Napraxine had spoken them.
‘It was a very noble thing to do,’ repeated Melville.
‘Oh, no,’ she also repeated; ‘it amused me. It frightened everybody else. The Tzar was at Livadia unusually late; there was first to go to him from here; when I reached Livadia, he was everything that was kind to me personally, but I found him terribly angered against the poor novelist, and all his courtiers were of course ready to swear that Boganof was Satan; poor innocent Boganof, with his tender heart always aching over the sorrows of the poor, and the mysteries of animal suffering! I told the Emperor that Boganof was, on the contrary, a type of all that was best in the Russian people; of that obedience, of that faith, of that fortitude, which the Russian possesses in a stronger degree than any other of the races of man. Where will you find as you find in Russia the heroic silence under torture, the unwavering adherence to a lost cause, the power of dying mute for sake of an idea, the uncomplaining surrender of youth, of beauty, of all enjoyment, often of rank and riches, to a mere impersonal duty? They are all sacrificed to dreams, it is true; but they are heroic dreams which have a greatness that looks fine in them, beside the vulgar greeds, and
the vulgar content of ordinary life. I said something to that effect to the Tzar. “You fill your mines and prisons, sir, with these people,” I said to him. “Greece would have raised altars to them. They are the brothers of Harmodius; they are the sisters of Læna.” I suppose it is wonderful that he did not send me to the prisons; I dare say, if I had been an ugly woman he would have done; he was, on the contrary, very indulgent, and, though he was hard to move at first, he ended with the utmost leniency.
‘I was really quite in earnest at the time,’ she continued, now, with a little wondering astonishment at such remembrances of herself. ‘ I urged on the Tzar the truth that, when the intellect of a nation is suppressed and persecuted, the nation “dies from the top,” like Swift. I think I convinced him for the moment, but then there were so many other people always at his ear to persuade him that universal convulsion was only to be avoided by corking all the inkbottles, and putting all the writers and readers down the mines. Prince Napraxine, by the way, was in a terrible state when he heard of it all. He was away in Paris at the time, and you may imagine that I did not telegraph to ask his consent. Indeed, he first learnt what I had done from the Russian correspondent of Figaro, and took the whole story for one of Figaro’s impudent fictions. He went to the bureau in a towering rage, and, I think, broke a Malacca cane over a sub-editor. Then he telegraphed to me, and found it was all true enough; he might more wisely have telegraphed first, for the sub-editor brought an action for assault against him, and he had a vast deal of money to pay. He abhors the very name of Boganof. Last New Year’s day I had all Boganof’s novels in the Russian text, bound in vellum, as a present from him; I thought he would have had an apoplectic fit.’
Her pretty, chill laughter completed the sentence.
‘My honesty, however, compels me to confess,’ she continued, ‘that for an unheroic boulevardier and a strongly conservative tchin like my husband, the position was a trying one. He abhors literature, liberal doctrines, and newspaper publicity; and the story of my journey for and with Boganof met him in every journal, in every club, in every city of Europe. The publicity annoyed me myself very much. I think the way in which journalists seize on everything and exaggerate it to their own purposes will, in time, prevent any action, a little out of the common, ever taking place at all. People will shut themselves up in their own shells like oysters. I should have left Boganof to the governor of Tobolsk, who was so anxious to keep him, if I had ever foreseen the annoyance which the Press was destined to cause me about him. When I met the Tzar afterwards he said, “Well, Princess, are you still convinced now that the ink-bottle contains the most harmless and holy of fluids?” and I answered him that I granted it might contain a good deal of gas and a good deal of gall, yet still I thought it wiser not to cork it.’
‘Princess,’ said Melville, with a little hesitation, ‘one cannot but regret that a person capable of such fine sympathy and such noble effort as yourself should pass nearly the whole of her time in sedulously endeavouring to persuade the world that she has no heart and herself that she has no soul. Why do you do it?’
She gave a little contemptuous gesture. ‘I do not believe I have either,’ she said. ‘ When I was a tiny child, my father said to me, “Douchka, you will have no dower, but you will have plenty of wit, two big eyes, and a white skin.” The possession of these three things has always been the only fact I have ever been sure of, really! Do not begin to talk theologically; you are delightful as a man of the world, but as a priest you would bore me infinitely. One thinks out all that sort of thing for oneself: ostensibly, I am of the Greek Church; actually, I am of Victor Hugo’s creed, which has never been able to find a key to the mystery of the universe, “Quelle loi a donné la bête effarée à l’homme cruel?” The horse strains and shivers under the whip, the brutal drunkard kicks him in his empty stomach: God looks on, if He exist at all, in entire indifference throughout tens of thousands of ages. You say the patient animal has no soul, and that the sodden drunkard has one. I do not admire your religion, which enables you placidly to accept such an absurdity, and such an injustice, as a Divine creation. Do not say that poets do no good; they do more than priests, my dear friend. I had been reading that poem of Hugo’s, the Melancholia, at the moment when Boganof’s wife and mother brought their petition to me. It had made me in a mood for pity. You know that is the utmost a woman ever has of any goodness — a mere mood. It is why we are so dangerous in revolutions: we slay one minute, and weep the next, and dance the next, and are sincere enough in it all. If they had come to me when I had been annoyed about anything, or when I had had a toilette I disliked, or a visit that had wearied me, I should have said “No,” and left Boganof in Siberia. It was the merest chance, the merest whim — all due to the Melancholia.’
‘Whim, or will, I am sure Boganof was grateful?’ asked Melville.
Her voice softened: ‘Oh yes, poor soul! But he died six months afterwards of tubercular consumption, brought on by exposure and bad food in Siberia. You see, imperial pardons may arrive too late, even if one carry them oneself!’
‘But he died at home,’ said Melville; ‘think how much that is!’
‘For the sentimentalists,’ she added, with her cruel little smile, but her eyes were dim as she glanced upward at the stars in the north.
‘Poor Boganof!’ she said, after a pause, with a vibration of unresisted emotion in her voice. ‘There is another problem to set beside your Rose. The world is full of them. Your Christianity does not explain them. He was the son of a country proprietor, a poor one, but he had a little estate, enough for his wants. He was a man of most simple tastes and innocent desires: he might have lived, as Tourguenieff might have lived, happy all his humble days on his own lands; but he had genius, or something near it. He believed in his country and in mankind; he had passionate hopes and passionate faiths; he knew he would lose all for saying the truth as he saw it, but he could not help it; the truth in him was stronger than he, he could not restrain the fire that was in him — a holy fire, pure of all personal greed. Well, he has died for being so simple, being so loyal, being so impersonal and so unselfish. If he had been an egotist, a time-server, a sycophant, he would have lived in peace and riches. Your Christianity has no explanation of that! Musset’s “être immobile qui regarde mourir” is all we see behind the eternal spectacle of useless suffering and unavailing loss.’
She turned and drew her laces closer about her head, and passed quickly through the shadows to the house.
Melville in answer sighed.
That night, when Melville stood at his windows looking over the immense flat landscape, green with waving corn and rolling grass lands and low birch woods which stretched before him silvered by the effulgence of a broad white moon, he thought of Nadine Napraxine curiously, wistfully, wonderingly, as a man who plays chess well puzzles over some chess problem that is too intricate for him. The explanation we give of ourselves is rarely accepted by others, and he did not accept hers of herself; that she was the creature of the impression of the moment. It seemed to him rather that hers was a nature with noble and heroic impulses crusted over by the habits of the world and veiled by the assumption rather than the actuality of egotism. She, too, could have been a sister of Læna, he thought.
What waste was here of a fine nature, sedulously forcing itself and others to believe that it was worthless, wearied by the pleasures which yet made its only kingdom, cynical, lonely, incredulous, whilst at the height of youth and of all possession!
CHAPTER XXXII.
Othmar, faithful to his word, remained at the château of Amyôt throughout the spring and summer months, indifferent to the laughter of the world, if it did laugh. He divined very accurately that one person at least laughed and made many a satiric sketch to her friends of himself filant le parfait amour, and gathering wood violets, wood anemones, wood strawberries, beneath the shadows of his Valois trees in glades which had been old when the original of Jean Goujon’s Diane Chasseresse had been young.
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Amyôt seemed to him to suit the youth, the grace, and the gravity of Yseulte better than any babble of the great world; — Amyôt, which was like a stately illuminated chronicle of kingly and knightly history, which was as silent as the grave of a king in a crypt, and which was shut out from the fret of mankind by the screen of its Merovingian forests.
He was scarcely conscious that he lingered in this seclusion from an unacknowledged unwillingness to go where he would see and hear of another woman; he persuaded himself that he chose to stay on in the provinces partially because the tumult of the world was always vulgar, noisy, and offensive to him, chiefly because nowhere else in the world so surely as in one of his own country houses could he be certain not to meet the woman who had wounded him mortally, yet whom he loved far more than he hated her.
‘It is absolutely necessary that you should be seen in Paris, and that you should receive there; it is absolutely necessary that you should sustain your position in the world,’ said Friederich Othmar, with much emphasis as he sat at noon one day on the great terrace of Amyôt. Othmar laughed a little, and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Amyôt is magnificently kept up — that I admit,’ continued the elder man. ‘It is a place that it is well to have, to spend six weeks of the autumn in, to entertain princes at; it is quite royal, and was one of the best purchases that my father ever made. But to bury yourself here! — when the Kaiser comes to Paris, to whom you owe by tradition every courtesy — —’
‘The Othmars were never received at the Court of Vienna.’
The Baron made an impatient gesture.
‘We are Parisians, but we are Croats before all. Sometimes you are pleased to insist very strongly that we are Croats, and nothing else. If we are so, the Emperor is our sovereign.’