Glory (8 page)
On the way home he mentally replayed every shot, transforming defeat into victory, and then shaking his head: how very, very hard it was to capture happiness!
Brooks burbled, concealed among the foliage; blue butterflies fluttered up from damp spots on the road; birds bustled in the bushes: everything was depressingly sunny and carefree. That evening after dinner they sat as usual in the drawing room; the door to the piazza was wide open, and, since there had been a power failure, candles burned in the chandeliers. From time to time their flame would slant, and black shadows reach out from under the armchairs. Martin picked his nose as he read a small volume of Maupassant with old-fashioned illustrations: mustachioed Bel Ami, in a stand-up collar, was shown undressing with a lady’s maid’s skill a coy, broad-hipped woman. Uncle Henry had laid down his newspaper and, arms akimbo, considered the cards that Sofia was laying out on a green-baize table. The warm, black night pressed in through window and door. Suddenly Martin raised his head and hearkened as if there were a vague beckoning in this harmony of night and candle flame. “The last time this patience came out was in Russia,” said Sofia. “In general it comes out very seldom.” Spreading her fingers she collected the cards scattered about the table and began shuffling them anew. Uncle Henry sighed.
Tired of reading, Martin stretched and went out on the terrace. It was very dark out, and the air smelled of dampness and night-blooming flowers. A star fell: as so often annoyingly happens, it fell not quite in his field of vision, but off to the side, so that his eye caught only the twinge of a soundless change in the sky. The outlines of the mountains were indistinct, and here and there, in the folds of the darkness, dots of light scintillated in twos and threes. “Travel,” said Martin softly, and he repeated this word for a long time, until he had squeezed all meaning out of it, upon which he set aside the long, silky skin it had shed—and next moment the word had returned to life. “Star. Mist. Velvet. Travelvet,”
he would articulate carefully and marvel every time how tenuously the sense endures in the sound. In what a remote spot this young man had arrived, what far lands he had already seen, and what was he doing here, at night, in the mountains, and why was everything in the world so strange, so thrillful? “Thrillful,” Martin repeated aloud, and liked the word. Another star went tumbling. He fixed his eyes on the sky as, once upon a time, when they were driving home in the victoria from a neighbor’s estate along a dark forest road, a very small Martin, rocking on the brink of slumber, would throw back his head and watch the heavenly river, between the amassments of trees, along which he was floating. Where again in his life, he wondered, would he gaze—as then, as now—at the night sky? on what pier, at what station, in what town square? A feeling of opulent solitude, which he often had experienced amid crowds—the delight he took in saying to himself: Not one of these people, going about their business, knows who I am, where I am from, what I am thinking about right now—this feeling was indispensable to complete happiness, and Martin, in a breathless trance, imagined how, completely alone, in a strange city—say, London—he would roam at night along unfamiliar streets. He saw the black hansom cabs splashing through the fog, a policeman in a shiny black cape, lights on the Thames, and other images out of English novels. He had left his luggage at the station and was walking past innumerable illuminated English shops, excitedly looking for Isabel, Nina, Margaret—someone whose name he could give to that night. And she—who would she think
he
was? An artist, a sailor, a gentleman burglar? She would not accept his money, she would be tender, and in the morning she would not want to let him go. How foggy the streets were, though, and how crowded, and how difficult the search! And although there was much that looked different,
and the hansoms were mostly extinct, he nevertheless recognized certain things when, one autumn evening, he walked baggageless out of Victoria Station; he recognized the dark, greasy air, the bobby’s wet oilskin cape, the reflections, the swashy sounds. At the station he had taken an excellent shower in a cheerful, clean cubicle, dried himself with a warm, fluffy towel brought by a ruddy-cheeked attendant, put on clean linen and his best suit, and checked both his bags, and now he was proud that he had managed so sensibly. He hardly felt fatigued by his journey; there was only buoyant excitement. Huge buses fiercely, heavily splattered the pools on the asphalt. Lighted advertisements went running up dark-red façades and dissipating again. He would pass girls; he would turn to look; but the prettier the face, the harder it was to take the plunge. Inviting cafés such as in Athens or Lausanne did not exist here, and in the pub where he drank a glass of beer he found only men, inflamed, morose, with red veins on the whites of their prominent eyes. Little by little a vague sense of irritation overcame him: surely, the Russian family with which, by epistolary agreement, he was to stay for a week, was right then waiting for him, worrying. Should he quietly take a taxi and forget about that imaginary night? But his lack of faith in it struck him as shameful—how intensely he had longed for it that morning at dawn, looking out of the train window at the plains, the cold pink sky, the black silhouette of a windmill. “Cowardliness and betrayal,” Martin said softly. He noticed that he was walking along the same street for the second time, recognizing it by a shop window filled with pearl necklaces. He stopped and made a cursory check of his long-standing aversion for pearls: oysters’ hemorrhoids with a sickly sheen. A girl under an umbrella stopped beside him. Martin glanced out of the corner of his eye: slender figure, black suit, glittering
hat pin. She turned her face toward him, smiled, and, pursing her lips, made a small “oo” sound. In her eyes Martin saw the sparkling lights, the play of reflected colors, the shimmer of rain, and hoarsely muttered “Good evening.”
As soon as they were in the dark of the taxicab he embraced her, frenzied by the feel of her supple slenderness. She covered her face with her hands, giggling. Later, in the hotel room, when he awkwardly extracted his billfold, she said, “No, no. If you want, take me tomorrow to a fancy restaurant.” She asked where he came from, whether he was French, and at his behest started guessing: Belgian? Danish? Dutch? She did not believe him when he said he was Russian. Later he hinted that he lived by gambling on ocean liners, told her of his travels, embellishing a bit here, adding something there, and, as he described a Naples he had never seen, he gazed lovingly at her bare, childish shoulders and blond bob, and felt completely happy. Early next morning, as he slept, she dressed quickly and left, stealing ten pounds from his billfold. “Morning after the orgy,” thought Martin with a smile, slapping shut the billfold, which he had picked up from the floor. He doused himself from the pitcher, splashing water all over the place, and kept smiling as he thought of the blissful night. It was something of a pity that she had left so foolishly, that he would never meet her again. Her name was Bess. When he went out of the hotel and started walking the spacious morning streets, he felt like jumping and singing with joy and, to give release to his spirits, climbed a ladder leaning against a lamppost, and as a result had a long and comical argument with an elderly passer-by, who from below gestured threateningly with his cane.
A second scolding came from Olga Zilanov. The day before that lady had waited for him late into the night and, since she assumed for some reason that he was younger and more helpless than he actually turned out to be, she grew increasingly worried. He explained that on the previous day he had misplaced the address, had found it too late in a seldom-visited pocket, and had spent the night at a hotel near the station. Mrs. Zilanov wanted to know why he had not telephoned, and which hotel. Martin invented a good, uncommon name, Good-Night Hotel, explaining that he had looked for her number in the book but had not found it. “Shame on you,” said Mrs. Zilanov crossly, and suddenly smiled a marvelous, beautiful smile that completely transfigured her flabby, melancholy face. Martin remembered that smile from St. Petersburg days, and, as he had been a child then, and as women usually smile when addressing strange children, his memory had retained a radiant-faced image of Mrs. Zilanov, and he had at first been perplexed to find her so old and gloomy.
Her husband, who had been a well-known public figure in Russia, happened to be out of town, and Martin was lodged in his study. The study and the dining room were on the first floor, the parlor on the second, and the bedrooms on the third. The whole quiet, residential street consisted of such narrow houses, indistinguishable from each other, with an identical, vertical configuration of rooms inside. A dash of color was contributed by a plump red letter-pillar at the corner. Behind the right row of houses were gardens where rhododendrons bloomed in the summer, and behind the left
row a small park containing tall elms and a grass tennis court was growing yellow and bare of leaves.
Zilanov’s elder daughter Nelly had recently married a Russian army officer who had arrived in England after captivity in Germany. Sonia, the younger daughter, was about to finish a London preparatory school to which she had transferred from the Stoyunin Gymnasium in St. Petersburg. There was also Mrs. Zilanov’s sister Elena and her daughter Irina, a poor hideous half-witted creature.
The week he spent in that house, while getting used to England, seemed rather tiresome to him. The whole livelong day he was among strangers, and could not take one step alone. Sonia needled him, making fun of his wardrobe—shirts with starched cuffs and stiffish fronts, his favorite bright-purple socks, his orange-yellow knobby-capped shoes, bought in Athens. “These are American,” said Martin with a studied calm.
“The Americans make them specially to sell to Negroes and Russians,” glibly replied Sonia. Furthermore, it turned out that Martin had not brought a dressing gown with him, and when, in the mornings, he would go to the bathroom proudly wrapped in his bedclothes, Sonia would say that this reminded her of her cousins and their chums at the Lyceum school who, when visiting the Zilanovs’ country house, slept naked, walked around in the morning draped in bedsheets, and relieved themselves in the garden. In the end Martin made so many purchases in London that ten pounds was not enough, and he had to write to his uncle, which was particularly unpleasant because of the hazy explanations necessitated by the disappearance of the other ten pounds. Yes, it was a hard, unfortunate week. Even his English accent, on which Martin quietly prided himself, proved to be an occasion for
derisive corrections on Sonia’s part. Thus Martin quite unexpectedly found himself classified as ignorant, adolescent, and a mamma’s boy. He felt this was unfair, that he had had infinitely more experiences and adventures than a sixteen-year-old maiden. It was therefore with a certain malicious glee that he drubbed some young men of hers at tennis, and on his last night had a chance to show he could dance an impeccable two-step (which he had learned back in Mediterranean days) to Hawaiian wails from the phonograph.
At Cambridge he felt still more foreign. Upon talking to his English fellow students he noted with wonder his unmistakably Russian essence. From his semi-English childhood he retained only such things as had been relegated by native Englishmen of his age, who had read the same books as children, into the dimness of the past properly allotted to nursery things, while Martin’s life at a certain point had made an abrupt turn and taken a different course, and for this very reason his childhood surroundings and habits had assumed a certain fairy-tale flavor, and a book he had been fond of in those days was now more enchanting and vivid in his memory than the same book in the memory of his English coevals. He remembered various expressions that ten years ago had been current among English schoolboys, but now were considered either vulgar or ridiculously old-fashioned. Plum pudding, blazing with a blue flame, was served in St. Petersburg not only at Christmas, as in England, but any day of the year, and, in the opinion of many people, the Edelweiss chef made a better one than could be bought in a store. Petersburgers played soccer on hard ground, not on turf, and the penalty kick was called “pendel,” a term unknown in England. No longer would Martin dare wear the colors of the striped jersey bought once, long ago, at Drew’s, the English shop on the Nevski, for they corresponded to the athletic uniform
of a public school he had never attended. In truth, all this English-ness, really of a rather haphazard nature, was filtered through his motherland’s quiddity and suffused with peculiar Russian tints.
The splendid autumn he had just seen in Switzerland somehow kept lingering in the background of his first Cambridge impressions. In the mornings a delicate haze would enshroud the Alps. A broken cluster of rowan berries lay in the middle of the road, whose ruts were filmed with micalike ice. Despite the absence of wind the bright-yellow birch leafage thinned out with every passing day, and the turquoise sky gazed through it with pensive gaiety. The luxuriant ferns grew reddish; iridescent shreds of spiderweb, which Uncle Henry called “the Virgin’s hair,” floated about. Martin would look up, thinking that he heard the remote blare of migrating cranes, but no cranes were to be seen. He used to wander around a great deal, as if searching for something; he rode the dilapidated bicycle belonging to one of the menials along the rustling paths, while his mother, seated on a bench beneath a maple, pensively pierced the damp crimson leaves on the brown ground with the point of her walking stick. Such wild, varied beauty did not exist in England, where nature had a tame greenhouse quality, and an unimaginative autumn faded away in geometrical gardens under a drizzly sky. But the pinkish-gray walls, the rectangular lawns, frosted with pale silver on the rare sunny mornings, the narrow river, the stone bridge whose arch formed a full circle with its perfect reflection, all had a beauty of their own.
Neither the foul weather nor the icy chill of the bedroom,
where tradition forbade heating, could alter the meditative
joie de vivre
characteristic of Martin. He grew sincerely fond of his little living room, with its comfortable fireplace, its dusty pianola, innocuous lithographs on the walls, low wicker armchairs, and the cheap china bric-a-brac on the shelves. When, late at night, the sacred flame of the fireplace threatened to die, he would scrape the embers together, pile some wood chips on them, heap on a mountain of coal, fan the fire with the asthmatic bellows, and make the chimney draw by spreading an ample sheet of the
Times
across the mouth of the hearth. The taut sheet would grow warm and transparent, and the lines of print, mingling with the lines showing through from the reverse side, looked like the bizarre lettering of some mumbo-jumbo language. Then, as the hum and tumult of the fire increased, a fox-red, darkening spot would appear on the paper and suddenly burst through. The whole sheet, now aflame, would be instantly sucked in and sent flying up. And a belated passer-by, a gowned don, could observe, through the gloom of the gothic night, a fiery-haired witch emerge from the chimney into the starry sky. Next day Martin would pay a fine.
