I did try.
I dressed in the lightest of colors and I pinned a ribbon in my hair. When I heard his footstep, I ran to meet him and threw my arms round his neck.
“What is the matter?” he asked. “And what on earth have you got on your head? You look like a barmaid.”
To the best of my powers I was a whirlwind of sunshine; and as soon as I saw that he was dull and silent (and this occurred almost immediately) I said to myself that the moment was come for me to sing to him.
I sat down at the piano. I have not much ear, but a fine strong voice, even if not always quite in tune.
At the second bar Vassili got up, took his hat and left the house. I threw a flower to him from the window.
He did not come back for three days.
VIII
When I talked it over with Olga, she was very sympathetic.
“I know,” she mused, “that these things sometimes succeed and sometimes do not. Men are not all alike.” Then she added: “But there is one sure way of winning them back. It is an old method, but infallible.”
“What is it?” I asked skeptically.
“By making them jealous. It is vulgar, it is rococo, it causes no end of trouble. But it is infallible.”
We reviewed the names of all the men who could possibly be employed to arouse Vassili's jealousy. We could think of no one. I was surrounded by nothing but women.
“It is past belief,” said Olga, surveying me from head to foot, “that there should be no one willing to—”
I shook my head moodily. “No one on earth.”
Olga grasped my wrist. “Stay! I have an idea. We will get some one who is not on earth. Some one who is dead. It will be much simpler. I remember there was an idea of that kind in an unsuccessful play I saw a year or two ago. What we need is a dead man—recently dead, if possible, and, if possible, young. If he has committed suicide, so much the better.”
“What on earth do you want with a dead man?” I asked, shuddering.
“Why! can't you see? We will say that he died for your sake!” cried Olga, “that he killed himself on your account. We will have a telegram sent to us by some one in Russia. We will get them to telegraph to you: 'I die for your sake. Am killing myself. Farewell!'”
“But who is to sign it?”
“Oh, somebody or other,” said Olga vaguely. “Or we could have it signed with an imaginary name, if you prefer it. That would enable us to dispense with the corpse.”
“I most certainly prefer that,” I remarked. “But, frankly, I can't see—”
“What can't you see? Don't you see the effect upon Vassili of the news that a man has killed himself for your sake? Don't you see the new irresistible attraction which you will then exercise over him? Surely you know what strange subtle charm emanates from the 'fatal woman'—the woman whose lethal beauty—”
“Very well, very well,” I said, slightly encouraged. “Let us have the telegram written and sent to me.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon composing it.
Three days later Vassili entered the drawing-room where Olga and I were having tea; he held a telegram in his hand; his face was of a ghastly pallor.
“He's got it,” whispered Olga hysterically, pinching my arm.
“Mura,” said Vassili; “a horrible thing has happened. Horrible!” His white lips trembled as he uttered the incoherent words:
“Dead—he is dead—he has killed himself—”
He was unable to go on. His voice broke in a sob.
I sprang to my feet. “Who, Vassili? Who?”
Olga thought the moment had arrived for putting things in the proper light. She turned to me with a significant glance, and grasped my hand.
“Ah! It is the man who loved you!” she exclaimed. “And this—this is what you dreaded!”
“What! What!” shouted Vassili, clutching her arm and pushing her roughly aside. Then he turned upon me and seized me by the shoulder. “You—you knew of this? You dreaded this?”
I stood trembling, struck dumb with terror. I could hear the futile and bewildered explanations of Olga:
“Why, surely,” she was saying with an insensate smile, “it is a thing that might happen to anybody. It is not her fault if people love her to distraction.”
But Vassili was crushing my wrist. “My brother—he loved you?” he gasped.
“Your brother? Your brother—little Peter?” I stammered.
“Yes, yes! Peter,” shouted Vassili. “My brother! What have you to do with his death?”
“Nothing, nothing.” I groaned. “I swear it—nothing!”
And Olga, realizing at last that she stood in the presence of a genuine tragedy and not of the jest we had plotted, darted forward and caught his arm.
“Vassili, you are mistaken. She knows nothing about it; nothing whatever. We had planned a joke to play on you, and we thought—” She pursued her agitated and incoherent explanations.
Vassili looked from one to the other of us, scanning our faces, hardly hearing what Olga was saying. Suddenly he seemed to understand, and loosening his hold on my arm he fell upon the couch and buried his face in his hands.
The telegram had dropped on the carpet. Olga picked it up and read it; then she handed it to me:
Peter hanged himself last night. Come at once.
We left for Kieff the same evening. Throughout the entire journey Vassili never spoke. I sat mournful and silent opposite him and thought of my brother-in-law, Peter. Not of the pale youth, already corrupted by absinthe and women, whom we had left at Kieff a few months before, but of the child Peter, in his short velvet suit and lace collar, whom I had loved so dearly in the days of my girlhood—little Peter who used to run to meet me in the sun-splashed avenues of the Villa Tarnowsky, trotting up with his little bare legs and serious face, stopping to be kissed and then trotting hurriedly off again, the nape of his neck showing fair and plump beneath the upturned brim of his sailor-hat.
How well I remember that sailor-hat! The black ribbon round the crown bore, between two anchors, the word, “Implacable”; and from under that fierce device the round and gentle countenance of little Peter gazed mildly out into the world.
Little Peter's legs were always cold. He was brought up in English fashion, with short socks even in the depths of winter. From afar you could see little Peter's chilly bare legs, crimson against a background of snow. Sometimes, rubbing his knees, he would say to me: “I wish God had made me of fur, instead of—of leather, like this.” And again he would remark: “I don't like being alive. Not that I want to die; but I wish I had never begun.”
And now little Peter had finished. Little Peter lay solemn and magnificent in the chambre ardente where his dead ancestors had lain solemn and magnificent before him. “Implacable” indeed he lay, unmoved by the tears of his mother and father; his lofty brow was marble; his fair eyelashes lowered over his quenched and upturned eyes.
When I thought of him thus I felt afraid.
And it seemed strange to be afraid of little Peter.
IX
After we had crossed the Russian frontier another thought—a thought that filled me with unspeakable happiness—put all others to flight: my child! I should see my child again! All our relations would certainly be assembled at the Tarnowskys' house, so I should find my parents and my little Tioka there too. The image of the living child soon displaced the tragic memory of the dead youth. As the train sped towards Kieff my fever of gladness and impatience increased. Yes, to-morrow would be poor Peter's funeral, but this very evening I should clasp little Tioka in my arms!
Raising my eyes, I saw that Vassili was looking at me with a scowl. “I have been watching you for some time,” he said. “Heartless creature that you are, to laugh—to laugh in the face of death.”