But the telling of all this takes too long, for it only lasted a moment. Before Lutetia could calclass="underline" Come in! — the door opened. And even before I looked around, I already had a presentiment as to who the newcomer was. You will guess it, my friends! Who was it? — It was my old friend, my very old friend, Jenö Lakatos!
“Good evening!” he said in Russian. Thereafter he carried on a long conversation with Lutetia in French. I understood little of what was said. He seemed not to have recognized me — or not to have wished to recognize me. Lutetia turned round and smiled at him. She said a few words and smiled again, half leaning over the back of her chair and still holding the powder puff in her hand. I could see her double, her living self and her reflection. Lakatos walked over to her; he still limped visibly. He was wearing a tailcoat and patent leather shoes, and in his buttonhole glowed a red flower of a species unknown to me. As for me, I might not have been there. I felt certain that neither for Lutetia nor for Lakatos was I existent. I would almost have doubted my own presence in the dressing room, had I not seen how Lakatos drew up his sleeve — his cuffs were slightly frayed — and how he took the powder puff out of Lutetia’s hand with two pointed fingers. And when he set to work, he did not simply powder the girl’s back, but started to outline a completely new back; with both hands he began describing inexplicable circles in the air, first bending down, and then standing on tiptoe, his whole body stretched taut, until finally, at last, he touched Lutetia’s back with the puff. And he powdered her back exactly as one would whitewash a wall. It took a long time, and Lutetia smiled — I could see her smile in the oval mirror. At last Lakatos turned to me, and in a matter-of-fact way, as though he had already seen me and greeted me, said: “Well, my friend, are you here too?” And at the same time he put his hand into his trouser pocket. There came a clinking of gold and silver coins. I knew the sound well enough.
“So, we have to meet again,” he went on. I answered nothing. Finally, after a long silence, he asked: “How much longer are you going to bother this lady?”
“I bother her against my will,” I said. “I am on duty here.”
He lifted both hands towards the ceiling and exclaimed: “Duty! He’s on duty!” And then he turned again to Lutetia and said something softly in French.
He beckoned me over to the oval mirror, close beside Lutetia, and said: “Your colleagues have all gone. All the other ladies have been left undisturbed. Understand?”
“I am on duty,” I replied.
“I bribed them all,” said Lakatos. “All of them. How much do you want?”
“Nothing!”
“Twenty? Forty? Sixty?”
“No!”
“A hundred?”
“No!”
“That is the most I am empowered to offer.”
“Go yourself!”
At that moment the warning bell rang. Lutetia left the room.
“You will regret it!” said Lakatos. He went out after Lutetia, and I remained behind, confused and embarrassed. There was a cloying odor of rouge, perfume, powder, and woman about the room. I had not smelled it before; or perhaps I had simply not noticed it; how could I tell? Suddenly this diversity of scents surrounded me like an insidious enemy, and it seemed as though they had been left behind, not by Lutetia, but by my friend Lakatos. It seemed as though, before his arrival, the perfume, the rouge, the powder, and the woman had had no perceptible odor, and that only in his presence had they awoken to life.
I left the dressing room. I looked down the corridor. I looked into one dressing room after another. Nowhere did I find my colleagues. They were obliterated, spirited away, swallowed up. Twenty, forty, sixty, or a hundred rubles had slipped into their pockets.
I stood behind the wings, between two firemen, and I could see, sideways on, a part of the distinguished audience which had collected there to welcome a ridiculous dressmaker from Paris and which stood in awe of his wretched girls, called by them “mannequins.” So the world had come down to this — I thought to myself — that it admired and reverenced a dressmaker! And Lakatos? Where had he come from? What wind had blown him here? He made me afraid. I felt plainly that I was in his power; I had long ago forgotten him, and therefore he made me doubly afraid. That is, I had never really forgotten him; I had only banished him, pushed him out of my thoughts, out of my consciousness. And so I was afraid — but with no ordinary fear, my friends, such as one has for one’s fellow men! Not until that hour, and from the peculiar nature of my fear, did I properly realize who Lakatos was. I knew it now, but it was as though I were afraid of my own knowledge and had at all costs to endeavour to hide this knowledge from myself. It was as though I had been condemned rather to fight against myself and guard myself against myself, than to fight against him and guard myself against him. To such an extent, my friends, is a man blinded when the great Tempter so desires it. Man is indeed mightily afraid of the Devil, but he trusts him far more than he trusts himself.
During the first interval I again took up my position in Lutetia’s dressing room. I persuaded myself that it was no more than my sense of duty demanded. But in reality it was the result of a remarkable impulse, a mixture of jealousy, obstinacy, amorousness, curiosity — and Heaven knows what else. Once again Lakatos appeared, while Lutetia was changing, and while I, exactly as before, stood with my back to her and stared at the door. Although I was actually standing in his way, he seemed to take as little notice of me as if I had been a wardrobe and not a human being at all. With a single elegant swing of his shoulders and hips, he evaded me. Already he stood behind Lutetia, so that she would see him in the mirror before which she had just sat down. His entry enraged me to such an extent that I even overcame my shame and forgot my love and promptly turned round. I was just in time to see Lakatos lay three fingers against his lips and blow a kiss to the reflection in the mirror. All the while he kept repeating incessantly the same French phrase: Oh, mon amour, mon amour, mon amour! Lutetia’s reflection smiled. The next moment — I could not conceive then how he did it, and I still do not know today — Lakatos laid a huge bouquet of dark red roses on the table in front of the mirror. And I had seen him come into the room with his hands empty! Lutetia’s reflection nodded lightly. Lakatos blew another kiss to her, turned round, and with the same circular motion by which he had eluded me on his entry, slipped past me and out of the room.
After I had seen with my own eyes that a bouquet of roses could suddenly be conjured out of nothingness, my professional alarm, so to speak, came to join my private fear. Like a pair of inseparable twins, they crouched within my breast. If a man could waft a bunch of roses out of thin air, then Lutetia, or even Lakatos, might easily produce with bare hands one of those bombs of which my superiors and their employers were so afraid. You must understand me: I was not worrying about the life of the Czar or the grand-dukes or the governors. What were the great men of this world to me, and why should I have bothered about them during those days? No, I trembled simply at the thought of the catastrophe, of the naked catastrophe, although I did not as yet know under what guise or in what form it would suddenly appear. But it seemed to me inevitable. And inevitable it seemed to me, also, that Lakatos should be its originator, must be its originator. I was never very religious by nature, and I had never trubled myself much with God and Heaven. But now I began to have a foretaste of Hell — and, just as one only calls the fire brigade after the fire has started, so I began during those days to offer up senseless, incoherent, but nevertheless desperately heartfelt and ardent prayers to the unknown Ruler of the world. They helped me little, evidently because I had not as then been tried sufficiently. Little did I suspect what lay in store for me.