Kitabı oku: «The Enemies of Women (Los enemigos de la mujer)», sayfa 30

The Prince succeeded in walking from one end to the other of the lower promenade without once having to submit to contact with the crowd.

Suddenly he stopped, with a feeling of surprise and pain, as though he had just received a blow in the breast. Down the wide steps which joined the two terraces, a couple were descending. His instinct recognized them even before he could see them clearly. It was a soldier. It was Lieutenant Martinez … and she!

Alicia was dressed in mourning, just as he had seen her near the church; but she was walking less resolutely, shrinking and timid, on finding herself on that spot which shortly before had been occupied by all her neighbors from the city.

They were talking as they slowly descended. Absorbed in the view out upon the sea, they did not turn their eyes toward the spot where Lubimoff was standing motionless. At the bottom of the stairs they chose to walk in the opposite direction, and the Prince was able to follow them.

He felt that some extraordinary power of divination was sharpening his faculties; a sort of second sight which was enabling him to see and study both their faces, in spite of the fact that their backs were turned toward him.

Alas, that walk! It was the desire for light and open air, which people feel after a sweet confinement. It was the insolent need lovers have of displaying their happiness in public, when the joyous hours, through monotonous repetition, begin to weigh on them. It was the desire of prolonging in the sight of every one the sweet intimacy enjoyed in secret and now spiced with the added incentive of being obliged to feign, and to hide all real feelings.

Michael considered his intuitions as beyond all question. Of course! It was the officer who had proposed that walk. How proud he would be to walk in a public place with a celebrated lady, and in full consciousness of the new rights he had acquired over her! It was no longer possible for him to question the visualization which had made him groan in the silence of the night… It had taken place! It had taken place!

Alicia's appearance dispelled all doubts in advance. She was walking along with a certain dismay like a person obliged to go on in spite of herself. He could see her invisible features. They were sad, profoundly sad, with a melancholy look of the woman who has fallen and is conscious of her abasement, but considers it irremediable, the result of an irresistible destiny, of a cause beyond the radius of the will's action.

Her head kept bending down to one side toward her companion, for her eyes to gaze on him. It must have been the gaze of a willing prisoner anxious to forget the pangs of remorse and taking a sensuous satisfaction in her shameful slavery. While her soul shrank away at the memory, her body was bending under physical attraction to that other body, instinctively seeking the contact that was causing her youth to bloom again in a new spring-time; a sad spring-time, like all the surprises of fate, but sweeter far than the dull gray hours of solitude.

Hate, repugnance, and indignant jealousy caused the Prince to stop. Why should he follow them? They might turn their heads and see him. He was ashamed at the thought of meeting them. The wretches! There must be Some One above to punish such things!

And he left them, walking toward the other end of the promenade in order to descend to the harbor of La Condamine.

He was just leaving the terrace when something happened behind his back which brought him to a stop. The couples seated on the benches suddenly rose and ran shouting in the direction whence he had come. He could hear people calling to one another. Some news seemed to be circulating through both levels of the garden, bringing people forth from the walks, from the clusters of palm trees, and the walls of vegetation.

Lubimoff allowed himself to be carried along by this alarm, and retraced his steps. He saw in the distance a noisy mass of people ever increasing in size, a group which was being joined by the winding lines of curiosity seekers running down the steps. The garden, which a moment before had been deserted, was pouring forth people from every opening.

As he drew near the crowd, he could hear the comments of various detached onlookers, who were telling the news to the new arrivals.

"A convalescent officer… He was taking a walk with a lady… Suddenly he fell in a heap, as though struck by lightning. There he is."

Yes; there was Martinez, in the center of that human mass, a pitiful object, lying on the ground, with his body bent into the shape of a Z: his head made a right angle with his breast, and his legs were doubled, making another angle. Lubimoff came forward until he could look over the shoulders of the first row of stupefied onlookers. A constant sound of hard breathing, a rattle like that of some poor beast in the death agony kept coming from his foaming lips. In his motionless body, the only sign of life was that moan, repeated with clock-like regularity, with no change in the tone.

Officers were leaving their women companions to force their way into the center of the crowd. On recognizing Martinez, their surprise assumed a caressing brotherly expression.

"Antonio! Antonio!"

They bent over him to talk in his ear, as though he were asleep; but Antonio did not hear them. One of his eyes was hidden in the dirt of the walk; a small pebble was clinging to the eyelid of the other. All one side of his uniform was white with dust. The terrible harsh breathing was the only reply to their words of endearment.

A military doctor stepped through the crowd. He took hold of Martinez's hands, and felt his pulse. A look of helplessness came over the doctor's face. The Lieutenant had had many attacks like this one. They could only hope that it was not to be his last…

Lubimoff could see Alicia kneeling on the ground, stunned by the shock, showing the sinuous curves of her back, under her mourning garments, oblivious of everything about her, with her eyes fixed on the man who a few minutes before had been walking at her side, talking and smiling, convinced that life is happiness, and who now lay stretched in the dust, convulsed and inert, a pitiable vessel slowly emptying itself in dying gasps.

Suddenly she stood up, with an instinctive sense of danger. She did not care to remain in that posture before everybody's gaze. Her large eyes, with a blank, frightened look, began to move about over the crowd, without however recognizing any one. For a moment they rested on Michael and her gaze met his with an expression of anguished entreaty. But the Prince, lowering his head, concealed himself behind the front row of onlookers, and her eyes went on in their search about the circle, with a look that became dull and gray again. She believed, doubtless, that it had been an hallucination.

As Alicia remained standing there, people began to point her out. That was the lady who was with the officer. Some of them recognized her, and repeated her name: "The Duchess de Delille." Through an instinctive feeling of repulsion, or a cowardly desire not to get mixed up in any "affair," no one spoke to her. She was left alone in the center of the crowd, with a look of stupefaction in her eyes, that seemed to ask for help, though without knowing just what help.

Willing souls began to take the initiative with an air of authority.

"Air! Give him air!" They began to shove the crowd back in order to increase the circle around the fallen man. But the people immediately pushed forward again with useless suggestions of aid; and once more the space was narrowed, until the feet of the nearest spectators grazed the panting lips of the dying man.

A young girl had run of her own accord to the bar at the entrance of the Casino and was coming back with a glass of water.

"Antonio! Antonio!" his kneeling comrades vainly called the Lieutenant, using all their strength to open his jaws and force him to drink. His lips repelled the liquid, and went on repeating the painful moans.

Ladies, attracted by the news, began to arrive from the gambling rooms. They all knew the Duchess; and looked at her with a certain hostility, after gazing at the dying man. The Prince heard fragments of their comment: "A poor fellow rescued from death by a miracle… The slightest emotion… That woman…"

Beyond the group, park policemen were running about giving orders. The stretcher bearers had arrived; the same ones who, according to public rumor, were passed by magic through the walls of the Casino to carry away the gamblers dying in the play-rooms.

This time the stretcher was absent. The onlookers were separating to open the way for an extraordinary novelty. A hired carriage was coming across the terraces, which were forbidden to vehicles.

Suddenly Lubimoff saw the Duchess rise above the heads of the crowd. She had just gotten into the carriage and was standing in it, with a dazed look and the inexpressive features of a person walking in her sleep. Perhaps she had done it without thinking; perhaps the military doctor had invited her to get in, thinking she was a relative of the patient. Several men in uniform lifted the inert body of the officer.

The harsh breathing that rent his chest continued.

And then, in the presence of the crowd, whose eyes were sightless with stupefaction, the Duchess proceeded as though she were alone. She had just dropped to the seat. She had them lay the corpse-like body across her knees, and she herself, as she held Martinez with one arm, laid his panting head against one of her shoulders.

The carriage slowly started off in the direction of the officers' hotel, followed by a large part of the crowd. The doctor went along on foot, telling the driver to go slowly.

Michael saw Alicia pass, upright and rigid in her seat, her eyes wide open, with terror, her mouth tense with grief, and holding the dying man on her knees. Her attitude reminded him of the Divine Mother at the foot of the cross; but there was something impure and shameful in Alicia's sorrow that made the comparison inadmissible.

"Oh, Venus Dolorosa."

The Prince was interrupted in his reflections. He felt himself rudely shoved aside by a woman in uniform. It was Mary Lewis, running, as fast as her legs could carry her, to overtake the carriage. The Amazon of Good Deeds always arrived in time to catch up with suffering.

Lubimoff saw how the vehicle slowly drove away with its embroidery of people. Its journey as far as the hotel would be endless; all Monte Carlo would see it go by.

He felt sad, very, very sad. That officer was his enemy; but death!..

He was not so sorry for Alicia. He smiled a malicious smile as he looked for the last time at the carriage and its following, which was constantly increasing.

In the line of scandals there was nothing commonplace about this latest of the Duchess de Delille.

CHAPTER XI

TWO days later, in the morning, Lubimoff saw the Colonel go out dressed in black.

He was going to the funeral of Martinez. He and Novoa felt it was their duty, as Spaniards, to accompany the hero on his last earthly journey.

On his return he told his impressions, with painful conciseness, to the Prince. A few convalescent officers had followed the bier. The Professor and he were the only ones in civilian clothes present. In spite of his garb, those kindly heroic boys, seeing that he was a Colonel and a compatriot of the dead man, had obliged him to preside over the funeral services.

The Beausoleil Cemetery lay half way up the slope of the mountain on the crest of which La Turbie is situated. On account of the war, it had been necessary to enlarge it by several level plots of ground that formed a series of terraces. From these esplanades the eye embraced a magnificent view: Monte Carlo, Monaco, immediately below that, Cap-Martin advancing out over the waves, finally the infinite expanse of sea that rose and rose until it mingled with the sky. A monument with a rooster arrogant and victorious on its summit held the remains of the combatants who had died for France. Don Marcos was still much moved by the speech he had delivered, while all stood hushed, at the entrance to this common tomb, which was about to swallow up forever the body of Martinez.

"It was a speech for men," said Toledo, with pride, "for men who had been crippled in warfare. Nothing but heroes before me! There wasn't a single woman at the funeral."

This was the detail that interested the Prince most: "Not a single woman." And he asked himself again what could have become of Alicia.

Toward the end of the afternoon, as he was walking about his gardens, he saw Lady Lewis coming, preceded by the Colonel.

The Prince took refuge in his house. The nurse was undoubtedly arriving with a group of convalescent Englishmen, and wanted to run about among the trees and pick flowers. He did not feel he had the strength to listen to her chatter, which was like the twittering of a gay but wounded bird and was filled with a happiness that persisted tenaciously in the midst of grief, and continued even to the threshold of death.

The Prince was going up the stairway to retire to the upper rooms, when the Colonel overtook him; but before the latter could speak Lubimoff turned on him in a rage. He didn't want to see the nurse! Let her take her Englishmen over the gardens; she might go about in them as though they belonged to her; but as for himself, he wanted her to leave him alone.

"Marquis," said Toledo, "the noble woman has come alone and must talk with your Highness. She has something important to say to you."

The Prince and the nurse sat down in wicker chairs out of doors in a little open space surrounded by leafy trees. A fountain was laughing as great drops of water scattered from its lazy jet.

The greenish light reflected through the grove made Lady Lewis appear weaker and more anæmic. What was left of life seemed concentrated in her eyes, before taking flight and vanishing like some volatile fluid, into space. The Prince was beginning to forget his recent anger. Poor Lady Mary! Once more he had a feeling of tenderness and respect for her. Her physical wretchedness finally changed his pity into the kind of admiration that disinterested sacrifice always inspires.

Accustomed to living amid the deepest sorrows, to witnessing the greatest catastrophes, Lady Lewis paid little attention to the conventions prevailing in ordinary life and spoke at once, with a certain military abruptness, of the reason for her visit.

She was coming in behalf of the Duchess de Delille. She had spent the last two days at Villa Rosa, sleeping there in order not to leave the Duchess a single moment. First, Alicia's wild despair, followed later by a complete collapse, had frightened her. The lady had tried to kill herself.

"Poor woman!.. She finally grew calm, seeing the true light, and realizing the path she must take. I feel satisfied that I've accomplished that much by my words."

Lubimoff's questioning glance remained fixed on the English woman. What light and what path was she talking about? But there was something that interested him more: the motive of her visit, the message that the Duchess had given her for him.

Lady Lewis read his thoughts.

"She asked me to see you, Prince; that is her last wish as she leaves the world. She begs you to forget her, never to seek her out, and above all to forgive her for the harm she has done you involuntarily. Forgiveness is what she most ardently yearns for. When I tell her that you don't hate her, it will restore the serenity she needs for her new life."

Michael had been absorbed in deep thought. Forgive her? Alicia had not done him any harm. From himself, from his own desires and disillusionments, his sufferings had come. If he had remained faithful to the principles he had announced some months before when he hated women, he would not have suffered the slightest change in the sensible life he had been leading. Besides, where was she? Could he not see her?

This flood of questions was interrupted by Lady Lewis. She continued to smile sweetly, but her voice revealed the firmness of an unalterable will.

"The Duchess is no longer living in Monte Carlo; I have arranged everything in regard to her trip. I am the only one who knows where she is, and I shall never tell. Do not look for her; let her go away in peace in her quest for truth; think of her as dead … as others have died, as thousands of beings are dying and will continue to die in this period of ours, with each day's sun. Forgive and forget. Poor woman! She is so unhappy."

Lubimoff understood how futile all his questions would be. His curiosity, no matter how strong and subtle, would fail in contact with that impenetrable reserve. Alicia had disappeared forever … forever!

He now felt sadder and lonelier than ever before. As he sat there beside this Amazon of human sorrow, he had a feeling of confidence similar to that which the Duchess must have felt during those last few days. It was a desire to make a confession to her, an instinctive impulse to bare his soul, as though from that woman who brought to death beds the light-hearted merriment of a bird, might come the supreme counsel of wisdom.

The Prince nodded his head, murmuring his assent: "Yes, I forgive her." He did not wish the other woman to bear the slightest burden of grief on his account. He would shoulder all that, himself. But immediately afterward he could not resist the impulse of that anguish to express itself. He was himself astonished at the words which, overriding all restraint, escaped from his lips.

"I, too, Lady Lewis, am very unhappy."

The nurse did not show any surprise at such a burst of confidence. She simply continued to smile, and said laconically:

"I know."

Her smile was changing to a look of sweet pity, of beneficent compassion, as though the Prince were a child in need of her advice.

She had guessed his unhappiness long before the Duchess had talked to her in the hours of despairing confession. He believed he was unhappy through being crossed in love; but actually, this sorrow was only the outer shell of another which was deeper and more real, and which depended on himself alone.

He had tried to live apart from his fellow-beings, ignoring their troubles, selfishly withdrawing into a shell. He had wished, by loitering on the margin of humanity which was suffering the greatest crisis in all its history, to prolong the pleasures of peace into a time of war. One could understand such aloofness in a coward, dominated by the instinct of self-preservation; but he was a brave man. One could tolerate it in a man who was burdened with children, who constantly felt the imperious duty of supporting them, and was afraid on that account; but he was alone in the world.

"We are all unhappy, Prince. Who doesn't know grief and death these days?"

And she talked in monotonous tones of her own misfortune, as though she were reciting a prayer. Her smile, the smile that animated the anæmic homeliness of her features with a vaporous light of dawn, gradually faded.

Six of her brothers had been killed in one afternoon. They belonged to the same battalion and she had received the news of the six deaths at the same time. Thirty-two of her relatives were now beneath the ground and very few of them had been soldiers in the beginning. Before the war they had lived lives of pleasure. They enjoyed great wealth and titles: Life had been as sweet to them as to Prince Lubimoff… But when they heard the call of duty!.. "No one chooses the spot where he is born; no one can decide which his country shall be and what his lineage. We come into the world according to the whims of chance, in the upper or the lower stories of society, and we mold our lives according to the place designated by fate. Neither can any one choose the times he will live in. Happy they who are born in peace times, when humanity is wrapped in calm, and its prehistoric savagery is slumbering within the shell formed by civilization; happy also they who are born into a powerful family and find themselves exempted from the struggle of life."

"But when we are born into a period of madness," she continued, "we have to resign ourselves and adapt ourselves to it, without seeking to avoid the painful burden that falls on our shoulders. It is our duty to suffer so that others later on may be happy as our forefathers suffered for our sakes."

What grief she had felt on receiving at a single stroke the news of the death of all her brothers! She did not consider herself an extraordinary being; she was simply a woman like any other. She had wept. She had abandoned herself to her despair. Then, an idea kept drifting through her mind joyously refreshing her drooping spirits. Supposing men were immortal in this life! Then despair would be horrible indeed. If you considered that the dead might have saved their lives by keeping far from every danger! But no one was immortal.

"Whether you die from a bullet wound or from microbes, makes little difference. Only the external circumstances vary, and for many people there is a greater fascination in returning to dust in a lightning-like manner in the full intoxication of battle, with a generous idea in one's mind, than in slowly fading away in confinement between two sheets, defiled and degraded by the filth of a material nature beginning to disintegrate.

"It is a sort of holy fear necessary, for that matter, to the preservation of human life, and it troubles people and makes them hide from themselves the terrible truth that waits at the end of every life. Sensible people consider it madness to go out in quest of death. It is all very well if death is something motionless which sets hands only on those who draw near it of their own accord. But if man does not go forward to meet death, death, with its hundred-league boots, runs in search of man. Who can guess the moment of the meeting? The best thing, then, is to scorn it; and not pay it the tribute of constant thought which engenders anxiety and fear.

"Besides, death in bed is an unfruitful and sterile death. To whom could it be of use, except one's heirs? The other kind of death, death for an idea, even for an erroneous idea, means something positive. It is an act of energy and faith and the aggregate of such acts makes up the noblest history of humanity."

The Prince admired the simplicity with which this woman, who was almost in a dying condition, exalted the heroism of life and scorned death.

She had placed her ideal very high beyond the selfish desires which form the warp and woof of ordinary lives. If every one were to suit merely his own convenience, humanity as a whole would have no reason to consider itself superior to animals.

The noblewoman possessed an ideal: to sacrifice herself for her fellow beings; to serve them even at the cost of her own life. She was almost glad of the war, which had helped her to find her true path. In peace times she would have done the same as every woman, linking her lot with that of a man, bearing children and building up a family.

"Amorous affection reduces the world to two beings; a mother's love finds nothing of interest beyond her own progeny. Only when old age is reached and the illusory perspectives of life have faded away, is the great truth apparent that people must be interested in every living being, ready to sacrifice themselves for every living being. But the exalted sympathy of old age is unfruitful and brief."

Mary Lewis considered herself fortunate in having rushed forward in the right direction from the first moment, without the long evasions of other people, who are late in reaching the truth.

"I have had my romance, like every one else."

She said this simply, but at the same time what blood was left in her veins animated her features with a faint blush, as though she were confessing something extraordinary.

She had been loved by a scholarly man, a former secretary of her father, the Colonial Governor. Only once had they confessed their love. Afterwards their life continued as before, both of them keeping the secret, postponing the realization of their dreams to an indefinite future… But the war came.

He had hastened, among the first, to enlist as a volunteer: "Mary, I am a soldier." And Mary had replied: "That is right." They wrote short letters to each other at long intervals. They had more important things to do. He did not have the handsome features and the strength of a hero, like Lady Lewis' brothers. He even suspected that his bearing was scarcely military because of the ungainliness that comes from a sedentary life, spent in bending over a writing table. But he did his duty, and more than once he had been cited for his cool audacity.

Their desires would now never be fulfilled. Even though she might succeed in surviving the war, she would continue her present existence in civilian hospitals, in far-off countries scourged by plagues. He perhaps would marry another, or perhaps would remain faithful to her memory, devoting himself for his part to relieving the pain and sorrows of his fellow beings. But they would live apart, going where duty called them, thinking constantly of each other, but without meeting, like the cultivated monks and passionate nuns of other centuries, who filled their lives with spiritual friendships maintained in widely separated monasteries and convents.

Once more Michael admired her abnegation. Lady Lewis belonged to that small group of the elect, who do not know what selfishness is and long to sacrifice themselves for what is good. She was one of that immortal line of saintly women who existed before the birth of religion and who will continue to flourish just the same when skepticism has finally ruined all our present beliefs.

"You are an angel," said the Prince.

"No," she protested; "I am a lover, a great lover."

Lubimoff smiled with a certain air of pity.

"You a lover?"

She went on talking as though her listener's surprise annoyed her. What was other women's love compared to hers? They fixed their tenderness, their desire for self-sacrifice, on one man only. Beyond him they found nothing worthy of interest. She loved all men, all of them, even the soldiers of the enemy whom she had often cared for in the ambulances at the front. They were mistaken, and if they really were guilty souls and wished to continue being so, all she could see in them was their physical condition as, threatened by death, they lay stretched out on their beds, with their flesh mangled. They were simply unfortunate beings, and this was enough to make her forget their nationality.

She wanted her own side to triumph because the other represented the exaltation of brute strength, the glorification of war, and it was her desire that there should be no more wars. She longed for the time when love would rule the whole world!.. It was bad enough that men could not suppress with like facility, poverty, pain and death, the black divinities which seize us at our birth and with whom we struggle up to the last moment.

"I love everything that is alive: People, animals, and flowers. Beside such love, what is the affection between a man and a woman, which people consider the only love and is simply the selfishness of two beings setting themselves apart from their fellow beings, and living only for themselves? My love is likewise a kind of selfishness. I realize it; perhaps it is something worse: pride. If you only knew how gay I feel when I have saved from death one of my 'flirts,' one of those poor wounded men whom I shall never see again!.. No, don't admire me, Prince, and don't feel sorry for me. I am merely a poor woman! by no means an angel! Moreover, I am very bad; I have my repentances, like every one else."

"You, Lady Mary!" the Prince exclaimed again with a look of incredulity. That he should have no doubts about it she hastened to relate the great sin of her life. Traveling through Andalusia she had seen some boys on a river bank who were trying to drown a stray dog, throwing stones at it. Mary fell upon them, mad with rage, striking them with her parasol. One of the little fellows wept, and blood spurted from his nostrils. This unhappy memory had often troubled her in the night. Now she could not see a child without caressing it with all the ardor occasioned by remorse.

Also she had had quarrels in various countries with drivers who were whipping their work animals and with hotel keepers who would not allow her to keep in her room lost dogs and cats she found in the streets.

Before the war, her pity had been entirely for animals. Humanity was able to defend itself. But now, the butchery of beings in uniforms had turned her sweet tenderness toward mankind. They needed love and protection more than the poor brutes.

The mention of her "flirts" suddenly brought her back to her duty. At that very moment they were tossing, covered with bandages, in their beds, and anxiously calling for her presence. Or else they were sitting on a bench with motionless eyes turned toward the sun, refusing to take a walk until they could feel the gentle support of her arm. "Good-by, Prince!" She must go! Her lovers were waiting for her.

As she stood up, she thought again of the reason for her visit and spoke once more in the tone that revealed the firmness of her will.

It was useless for him to seek the Duchess. The poor woman after entering so many blind alleys in her life, had finally found the true path, the one she herself, more fortunate, had discovered while still in her youth. The Virgin Dolorosa spoke in a simple, natural way of Alicia's past. She knew it all. In the silence of Villa Rosa, the other woman had confessed it in despair, without the nurse feeling either scandalized or amazed. What did the moral capacity of a mere individual mean, when at every moment the world was beholding the most unheard of crimes.

"She left this morning and is a long way off – a long way!" said the gentle woman. "It is possible that you will never see each other again. I will write her that you forgive her. That will afford her the peace of mind she needs in her new life."