“But our baby, Vassili, our little Tioka! We must take our baby with us!”
No. Vassili does not want babies. He does not want to be bothered or hindered. “We are carting about eight trunks as it is!” he says, cynically.
And so we start for Italy—Italy, the yearned-for goal of all my girlish dreams.
At Milan Vassili sings. I seem always to see him with his handsome mouth open, singing scales and arpeggios. But a slow poison is creeping through my blood and I fall ill, ill with typhoid fever.
Again my thoughts go adrift and my recollections are confused. They dance in grotesque and hideous visions through my brain. I see livid hallucinated faces peering at me, towers and mountains tottering above me, undefined horrors all about me, and in the midst of them all I see Vassili—singing! He sings scales and arpeggios with his rounded open mouth. Now I can see a white spider—no, two white spiders—running about on a scarlet coverlet.... They are my hands. They frighten me. And Vassili is singing.
“Vassili, why are you singing? Don't sing! Don't sing!”
“No, darling, I am not singing. You only imagine it. You are ill; you are feverish. Calm yourself.”
“Vassili, where is my baby?”
“At home in Kieff, with grandmama. Dear grandmama is taking such good care of him!”
“And why are we not with him? Where are we?”
“We are at Pegli, darling.”
“Why? Why? Where is Pegli? What are we doing at Pegli?”
“Come now, dearest; you know—we came to Italy because I wanted to sing—”
“Ah, you see! You wanted to sing! Why do you want to sing when the baby is crying? The baby is so helpless. Why did you take me away from him? You sing, you sing so loud that I cannot hear my baby crying. Don't sing!”
But even as I speak I see that Vassili has his round mouth open again and he sings and sings, and the white spiders run over the scarlet counterpane and come close to my face—and the white spiders are my hands. I shriek and shriek to have them taken away. But the baby is crying and Vassili is singing and no one hears me.
Then I drop down to the bottom of a deep well. I feel myself falling, falling, until with a great shock I touch the bottom. And there I lie motionless in the dark.
When I open my eyes there is a great deal of light; the windows are open, the sun is pouring in; I know that outside there is the sea. Beside my bed sits a doctor with a gray beard, feeling my pulse. Under the light intermittent pressure of his fingers my pulse seems to grow quieter; I can see the doctor's head giving little nods as he counts the beats.
“Sixty-five. Excellent, excellent!” The doctor pats my hand gently and encouragingly. “That is first-rate. We are quite well again.”
Then I hear some one weeping softly, and I know it is my mother. I try to turn and smile at her, but my head will not move. It is like a ball of lead sunk in the pillow. Immediately afterwards—or have years passed?—I hear some one say: “Here is the Professor!” And again the same doctor with the gray beard comes in and smiles at me.
Before sitting down beside the bed he turns to my mother: “Has she not yet asked about her child?” My mother shakes her head and presses her handkerchief to her eyes. Then the doctor sits down beside my bed and strokes my forehead and speaks to me.
He speaks about a baby. He repeats a name over and over again—perhaps it is Tioka. Tioka? Who is Tioka? I watch his beard moving up and down, and do not know what he is saying. The ball of lead on my pillow rolls from side to side with a dull and heavy ache.
My mother weeps bitterly: “Oh, doctor, do not let her die!”
The white spiders are there again, running over the coverlet. And I fall once more, down, down, down, to the bottom of the well.
VII
For how many months was I ill? I do not know. Vassili, restless and idle, “carted” me and my medicines and my sufferings from Pegli to Genoa, from Genoa to Florence. He seemed to have forgotten that we had a home; he seemed to have forgotten that we had a child.
Our rooms at the hotel in Florence were bright with sunshine and with the frivolous gaiety of a graceful trio of Russian ladies—the Princess Dubinskaja, her sister Vera Vojatschek, and the fair-haired Olga Kralberg, who came to see us every day. But I felt lost and lonely, as if astray in the world. My mother had returned to Russia, and my vacant and aching heart invoked Vassili, who, alas! was never by my side.
“You must win him back,” said Olga Kralberg to me one day—she, whose fate it was on a not distant day to commit suicide for his sake. “Every man, especially if he is a husband, has—after some time—to be won back again.”
“That is sooner said than done,” I replied despondently. “To win a man is easy enough. But to win him back—”
“There are various ways of doing it,” she said. “Have you tried being very affectionate?”
“Yes, indeed,” said I.
“How did it answer?”
“He was bored to death.”
“Have you tried being cool and distant? Being, so to speak, a stranger to him?”
“Yes, I have.”
“And he?”
“He never even noticed that I was being a stranger to him. He was as happy and good-tempered as ever.”
Olga shook her head dejectedly. “Have you tried being hysterical?” she asked after a while.
I hesitated. “I think so,” I said at last. “But I do not quite know what you mean.”
“Well,” explained Olga sententiously, “with some men, who cannot bear healthy normal women, hysteria is a great success. Of course, it must be esthetic hysteria—you must try to preserve the plastic line through it all,” and Olga sketched with her thumb a vague painter's gesture in the air. “For example, you deluge yourself in strange perfumes. You trail about the house in weird clinging gowns. You faint away at the sight of certain shades of color—”
“What an absurd idea!” I exclaimed.
“Not at all. Not in the least,” said Olga. “On the contrary, it is very modern, very piquant to swoon away every time you see a certain shade of—of mauve, for instance.”
“But what if I don't see it?”
“Silly! You must see it. Give orders to a shop to send you ten yards of mauve silk. Open the parcel in your husband's presence. Then—then you totter; you fall down—but mind,” added Olga, “that you fall in a graceful, impressionist attitude. Like this.” And Olga illustrated her meaning in what appeared to me a very foolish posture.
“I think it ridiculous,” I said to her. And she was deeply offended.
“Good-by,” she said, pinning her hat on briskly and spitefully.
“No, no! Don't go away. Do not desert me,” I implored. “Try to suggest something else.”
Olga was mollified. After reflecting a few moments she remarked.
“Have you tried being a ray of sunshine to him?”
I lost patience with her. “What do you mean by a 'ray of sunshine'? You seem to be swayed by stock phrases, such as one reads in novels.”
This time Olga was not offended. She explained that in order to be a ray of sunshine in a man's life, one must appear before him gay, sparkling and radiant at all hours of the day.
“Always dress in the lightest of colors. Put a ribbon in your hair. When you hear his footsteps, run to meet him and throw your arms round his neck. When he goes out, toss a flower to him from the window. When he seems dull or silent, take your guitar and sing to him.”
“You know I don't play the guitar,” I said pettishly.
“That does not matter. What really counts is the singing. The atmosphere that surrounds him should be bright with unstudied gaiety. He ought to live, so to speak, in a whirlwind of sunshine!”
“Well, I will try,” I sighed, without much conviction.