Glory (13 page)

“What nonsense,” muttered Martin, and tried to resume his reading, but this proved impossible. He recalled those nights of long ago when he waited for the ghost of his
father to make a scratching sound in a corner. Martin’s heart started to beat fast; the bed became hot and uncomfortable. He imagined how he himself would be dying some day, and felt as if the ceiling were coming down on him slowly and inexorably. Something began to drum rapidly in the darker part of the room, and his heart missed a beat. But it was merely water that had been spilled on the washstand and was now dripping onto the linoleum. Yet how strange: if ghosts exist, then all is well for it proves that souls
can
move after death—why then is it so frightening? “How shall I be dying myself?” thought Martin and began to pass mentally in review several varieties of death. He saw himself placed against a wall, standing there with as much air in his lungs as he could inhale, waiting for the volley of rifle shots and recollecting with wild despair this present minute, this bright room, the soft night, unconcern, safety. Then there were illnesses, dreadful illnesses rending one’s entrails. Or it might be a railway accident. Or, simply, the serene slowing down of old age, death in one’s sleep. Or else, a dark wood and pursuit. “Nonsense,” thought Martin. “I have plenty of time in reserve. Besides, every year represents a whole epoch. Why worry? Yet perhaps Nelly is here, and is seeing me now? Perhaps—now, this instant—she will give me a sign?” He looked at his watch, it was close to two. The tension was becoming unbearable. That silence seemed to be waiting: the distant hoot of an automobile horn would have been rapture. The level of silence kept rising, and all at once poured over the brim: someone on tiptoe was coming barefoot along the passage.

“Are you asleep?” came the whispered question through the door, and for an instant a constriction in his throat prevented Martin from replying. She slipped in, she softly shifted from tiptoe to heel. She wore yellow pajamas, her
black hair was rumpled. Thus she remained standing for a moment or two blinking through matted lashes. Martin, sitting up in bed, grinned foolishly. “Sleep is utterly out of the question,” said Sonia in an odd voice. “I’m jumpy. I’m scared. And on top of it, those horrors he talked about!” “Why are you barefoot, Sonia? Want my slippers?” She shook her head, pouting pensively, then tossed her hair and cast a vague glance at Martin’s bed. “
Allez hop,”
said Martin, tapping the blanket at the foot of the bed. She climbed onto the bed, first kneeled upon it, then moved about slowly, and finally curled up on the blanket in the corner formed by footboard and wall. Martin pulled out the pillow from under his head to place it behind her back. “
Spasibo
(thanks),” she said quite soundlessly: the outline of the word could only be guessed from the movement of her plump pale lips. “Are you comfortable?” asked Martin nervously, pulling up his knees so as not to be in her way, but presently he bent forward again, and taking his dressing gown from the adjacent chair, covered her bare feet with it. “Give me a cigarette,” she asked after a minute of silence. A waft of delicate warmth emanated from her; a thin chainlet of gold surrounded her adorable neck. She inhaled, slitting her eyes, and handed the cigarette to Martin. “Too strong,” she said sadly. “What did you do this summer?” inquired Martin struggling to subdue a dark something that was quite mad and unthinkable and that even induced a febrile chill. “Nothing in particular. We went to Brighton.” She sighed and added “I flew in a hydroplane.” “And I very nearly got killed,” said Martin. “Yes, yes, very nearly. High up in the mountains. Rock climbing. Lost my hold. Saved by a miracle.” Sonia smiled dimly and said “You know, Martin, she always maintained that the most important thing in life was always to do one’s duty and think of nothing else. It’s a very deep thought, isn’t it?” “Yes, possibly,” Martin
replied, shoving the unfinished cigarette into the ashtray with an uncertain hand. “Possibly. But sometimes a bit boring.” “Oh, no, not at all——You don’t understand, she didn’t mean work or job, but a kind of—well, the kind of thing which has an inner importance.” She paused, and Martin saw her shiver in her light little pajamas. “You are cold,” he said. “Yes, I think I am. And
that
was the duty to be performed, but some—I, for instance—do not have any such thing inside.” “Sonia,” said Martin, “maybe you’d like——?” He turned back a corner of the blanket, and she rose to a kneeling position and moved slowly in his direction. “And it seems to me,” she continued as she crawled under the bedclothes, which Martin, hearing nothing of what she was saying, awkwardly pulled over her and himself, “It seems to me that lots of people do not know this, and because they don’t——” With a deep intake of breath Martin embraced her and attached his lips to her cheek. Sonia seized him by the wrist, and forthwith rolled out of the bed. “Good God,” she said, “Good God!” Her dark eyes glistened with tears, and within an instant her whole face was wet, with bright long streaks creeping down her cheeks. “Oh please, please don’t—I merely—oh I don’t know, oh Sonia——” Martin kept muttering, not daring to touch her, losing his head at the thought that she might start screaming and arouse the entire household. “How couldn’t you see,” she said plaintively, “how couldn’t you see that this was the way I used to come to Nelly, and we talked and talked till dawn.” She turned away and left the room crying. Martin sat in a chaos of bedclothes with a helplessly ingratiating expression on his face. She closed the door behind her, but reopened it, and introduced her head: “Idiot,” she said in a perfectly calm, businesslike manner, whereupon the patter of her bare feet receded along the passage.

For some time Martin kept staring at the white door. Then he put out the light and attempted to sleep. This appeared to be hopeless. He reflected that at daybreak he must dress, get packed, and noiselessly leave the house to go straight to the station; unfortunately he fell asleep amidst those meditations and woke up only at a quarter past nine. “Maybe it was all a dream?” he said to himself with some hope, but at once shook his head and with a pang of excruciating shame wondered how he would meet Sonia again after this. He had an unfortunate morning: when he rushed in to take his bath, there, at the washstand, was Zilanov, his short legs in black trousers set wide apart, his torso in a thick flannel undershirt bent forward, dousing his face over the basin, rubbing cheeks and forehead until the skin squeaked, snorting under the spouting faucet, pressing each nostril in turn, fiercely relieving his nose, and expectorating. “Come in, come in, I’m through,” he exclaimed and, blinded by water, dripping, and holding his arms in the semblance of short wings, he dashed to his bedroom where he preferred to keep his towel.

Then, a little later, as Martin was on his way downstairs to the dining room to drink his cup of hemlock, he ran into Mrs. Zilanov: her face, livid and swollen, looked awful, and he felt dreadfully embarrassed, not daring to utter stock words of compassion, but not knowing any others. In acknowledgment of his silence she put her arms about him, kissed him on the forehead—and, with a hopeless wave of her hand, walked away, to the bottom of the corridor, where her husband mentioned to her something about a passport with a totally unexpected tender break in his voice of which he had seemed wholly incapable. Sonia met Martin in the dining room, and the first thing she said to him was, “I forgive you, because you are Swiss, and ‘cretin’ is a Swiss word, jot that down.” Martin had planned to explain that he had had
no wicked intentions, which on the whole was the truth, that all he had wanted to do was to lie close to her and keep kissing her cheek—but Sonia looked so cross and cheerless in her black dress that he thought it best to say nothing. “Papa is leaving today for Brindisi,” she said, “thank goodness they did give him a visa at last.” She contemplated with disapproval the poorly contained greed with which Martin, who always felt ravenous in the morning, was devouring his fried eggs. Martin told himself there was no point in hanging around, the day promised to be topsy-turvy, the seeing-off ritual and all the rest. “Darwin has telephoned,” added Sonia.

Darwin made his appearance with comedy precision—immediately in the wake of Sonia’s remark, as if he had been waiting in the wings. The seaside sun had given him a roast-beef complexion and he wore a marvelous pale-gray suit. Sonia’s greeting struck Martin as a little too languorous. Martin himself was grasped, hit on the shoulder, hit in the ribs, and asked repeatedly why he had not phoned. Indeed, the usually indolent Darwin displayed that day unprecedented energy. At Liverpool Street station he took a stranger’s trunk from the porter to carry it balanced on his nape. In the Pullman, midway between London and Cambridge, after a glance at his wristwatch, he called the conductor, handed him a banknote, and solemnly pulled the emergency cord. The train groaned agonizingly and came to a stop, while Darwin smugly explained to everybody at large that he was born exactly twenty-four years ago. A day later, one of the livelier newspapers had a note about it conspicuously headlined: “
YOUNG AUTHOR STOPS TRAIN ON BIRTHDAY
.” Meanwhile Darwin had been summoned by his
tutor whom he was now trying to hypnotize with a detailed report on the leech commerce, what were the better sorts and how they were bred.

The same damp greeted Martin in his bedroom; there was the same interchime of towers, and in the same old way Vadim would tumble in with a sample of the same rhymed Russian alphabet consisting of couplets, the first verse containing a didactic item of general interest (“Armenians like to fish and hunt” or “Balloons are never made of brick”) and the second, equally didactic, beginning with the same letter, but quite unrelated to the first line and considerably more improper.

Archibald Moon, however, although in a sense the same, seemed to be different: Martin could not manage to recapture the old enchantment. Moon told him that during the summer he had completed as many as sixteen new pages of his History of Russia, fully sixteen pages; he explained that he was able to accomplish so much because he devoted to work every hour of the long summer day, and as he said it he made with his fingers a gesture representing the ripple and plasticity of every phrase that he had nursed to life; in that gesture Martin seemed to discern something extremely depraved, and to listen to Moon’s rich speech was like chewing thick elastic Turkish Delight powdered with confectioner’s sugar. For the first time Martin felt personally offended by Moon’s treating Russia as an inanimate article of luxury. When he confided this to Darwin, Darwin laughed and nodded, and said that Moon was like that because of his addiction to uranism. This called for closer attention, and after one occasion when Moon without any excuse stroked Martin’s hair with trembling fingers, Martin stopped dropping in, and would noiselessly climb out of his window and down a rainpipe into the lane whenever there came that yearnful, lonesome knock on
the door of his room. He nevertheless continued to attend Moon’s lectures, but now in studying Russian literature he endeavored to efface from his hearing Moon’s intonations, which kept pursuing him, especially in the rhythm of verse. He ended by switching to another teacher, grand old Professor Stephens, whose interpretation of Pushkin and Tolstoy was as honest as it was ponderous, and who spoke Russian in gasps and barks with the frequent addition of Serbian and Polish. Still it took time to shake off Archibald Moon for good. He would recall with involuntary admiration the artistry of Moon’s discourse, but the moment after would perceive as a vivid reality the picture of Moon carrying away to his rooms a sarcophagus with Russia’s mummy. In the end Martin did get entirely rid of Moon, while appropriating this and that element, but converting it into his own property, and then, at last, the voices of the Russian muses began to sound in complete purity. Moon would occasionally be seen in the street in the company of a beautiful chubby youth with abundant blond hair who impersonated girls in the university productions of Shakespeare’s plays, whereat Moon would melt with tender emotion in an orchestra seat, and together with other amateurs try to shush Darwin, who, sprawling in feigned rapture, exploded with clownish applause at the wrong moments.

But Martin had some unsettled accounts with Darwin, too. It happened sometimes that Darwin went to London alone, and Martin spent Saturday night, till daybreak, till a total exhaustion of coal, sitting in the sepulchral draft of the fireplace and persistently, savagely, as if pressing upon an aching tooth, imagining Sonia and Darwin in a dark automobile. Once, when unable to stand it any longer, he set off for London, to attend a dance to which he had not been invited, and paced the halls under the impression that he looked very pale
and stern, but then happened to catch in a mirror the reflection of his pink round face with a bump on the forehead—the result of his diving for the ball under rushing feet the day before. Presently, they arrived: Sonia costumed as a gypsy girl, seemingly having forgotten that not quite four months had elapsed since her sister’s death; and Darwin dressed as an Englishman out of a Continental novel: a large-checked suit, a tropical helmet with a bandana to protect the nape from the Pompeiian sun, a Baedeker under his arm, and carotty sidewhiskers. There was music, there was
serpentin
, there was a snowstorm of confetti, and for one intoxicating moment Martin felt he was taking part in a subtle drama of masks. The music stopped. Ignoring Darwin’s obvious desire to be alone with Sonia, Martin climbed into the same taxicab with them. In a chance beam of light that penetrated the dark car he thought he noticed Darwin and Sonia holding hands and tried wretchedly to convince himself that it had only been a trick of shimmer and shadow. Even more depressing were the occasions when Sonia came to Cambridge: Martin felt unwanted, imagined they kept trying to shed him. His second summer in Switzerland was marked by his beating one of the best Swiss tennis players—but what did Sonia care about his triumphs in tennis, boxing, or soccer? Sometimes Martin visualized in a picturesque daydream how he would return to Sonia from fighting in the Crimea, and the word “cavalry” thundered by, the wind whistled, clods of black mud flew in one’s face—attack, attack!—tac-a-tac of the horseshoes, anapaest of the gallop. But it was too late now, fighting in the Crimea had ceased long ago, long gone was the day Nelly’s husband riding full speed at an enemy machine gun came nearer and nearer to it until he inadvertently swept across the invisible line into a region still tingling with echoes of earthly life, but where there are neither machine guns nor
cavalry attacks. “Always remiss, always remiss,” grumbled Martin at himself gloomily, and with the piercing sense that something had been missed forever, kept again and again imagining the ribbon of St. George, the light wound in the left shoulder (it had to be the left), and Sonia coming to meet him at Victoria Station. He was irritated by his mother’s tender smile, by the words she could not withhold: “Now you see it was all for nothing, and you would have perished for nothing. Nelly’s husband—that’s a different matter, he was a real professional soldier, such people cannot exist without a war, and he died the way he wanted to die. But those thousands of youngsters mowed down——” However, in the presence of foreigners, she would hotly insist on the necessity of continued military action—especially now that all was over, and there was nothing there that could lure her son. In later years, when she remembered her relief and her calm, Mrs. Edelweiss groaned aloud—oh yes, she could have preserved him, should not have so easily dismissed her forebodings, been more observant, been always on the lookout—and who knows? it might have been better had he really joined the White Army, been wounded, caught the typhus, and, at this price, got rid once for all of the attraction that danger has for young boys. But why harbor such thoughts, why give in to despair? More courage, more faith. People do get lost, and then come back. A rumor may circulate that someone has been seized at the border and shot as a spy, yet, all at once, there he is, alive, with his familiar laugh and deep voice, right there, in the entry hall. And if Henry again——