“These odds and ends,” said Krug, touching a shelf near which he was passing, “have no special value, but he treasures them, and if you have slipped a little porcelain owl—which I do not see—into your bag——”
“Professor, we are not thieves,” she said very quietly, and he must have had a heart of stone who would not have felt ashamed of his evil thought as she stood there, a narrow-hipped blonde with a pair of symmetrical breasts moistly heaving among the frills of her white silk blouse.
He reached the telephone and dialled Hedron’s number. Hedron was not at home. He talked to Hedron’s sister. Then he discovered that he had been sitting on Hustav’s hat. The girl came towards him again and opened her white bag to show him she had not purloined anything of real or sentimental value.
“And you may search me, too,” she said defiantly, unbuttoning her jacket. “Provided you do not tickle me,” added the doubly innocent, perspiring German girl.
He went back to the bedroom. Near the window Hustav was turning the pages of an encyclopaedia in search of exciting words beginning with M and V. Ember stood half-dressed, a yellow tie in his hand.
“Et voilà … et me voici …” he said with an infantile little whine in his voice. “Un pauvre bonhomme qu’on traine en prison. Oh, I don’t want to go at all! Adam, isn’t there anything that can be done? Think up something, please! Je suis souffrant, je suis en détresse. I shall confess I had been preparing a coup d’état if they start torturing me.”
The valet whose name was or had been Ivan, his teeth chattering, his eyes half-closed, helped his poor master into his coat.
“May I come in now?” queried Miss Bachofen with a kind of musical coyness. And slowly she sauntered in, rolling her hips.
“Open your eyes wide, Mr. Ember,” exclaimed Hustav. “I want you to admire the lady who has consented to grace your home.”
“You are incorrigible,” murmured Miss Bachofen with a slanting smile.
“Sit down, dear. On the bed. Sit down, Mr. Ember. Sit down, Professor. A moment of silence. Poetry and philosophy must brood, while beauty and strength—your apartment is nicely heated, Mr. Ember. Now, if I were quite, quite sure that you two would not try to get shot by the men outside, I might ask you to leave the room, while Miss Bachofen and I remain here for a brisk business conference. I need it badly.”
“No, Liebling, no,” said Miss Bachofen. “Let us get moving. I am sick of this place. We’ll do it at home, honey.”
“I think it is a beautiful place,” muttered Hustav reproachfully.
“Il est saoul,” said Ember.
“In fact, these mirrors and rugs suggest certain tremendous Oriental sensations which I cannot resist.”
“Il est complètement saoul,” said Ember and began to weep.
Pretty Miss Bachofen took her boy friend firmly by the arm and after some coaxing he was made to convey Ember to the black police car waiting for them. When they had gone, Ivan became hysterical, produced an old bicycle from the attic, carried it downstairs and rode away. Krug locked the apartment and slowly went home.
8
THE TOWN was curiously bright in the late sunlight: this was one of the Painted Days peculiar to the region. They came in a row after the first frost, and happy the foreign tourist who visited Padukgrad at such a time. The mud left by the recent rains made one’s mouth water, so rich did it look. The house fronts on one side of the street were bathed in an amber light which brought out every, oh, every, detail; some displayed mosaic designs; the principal city bank, for instance, had seraphs amid a yuccalike flora. On the fresh blue paint of the boulevard benches children had made with their fingers the words: Glory to Paduk—a sure way of enjoying the properties of the sticky substance without getting one’s ears twisted by the policeman, whose strained smile indicated the quandary in which he found himself. A ruby-red toy balloon hung in the cloudless sky. Grimy chimney sweeps and flour-powdered baker boys were fraternizing in open cafés, where they drowned their ancient feud in cider and grenadine. A man’s rubber overshoe and a bloodstained cuff lay in the middle of the sidewalk and passers-by gave them a wide berth without, however, slowing down or looking at those two articles or indeed revealing their awareness of them in any way beyond stepping off the curb into the mud and then stepping back on to the sidewalk. The window of a cheap toyshop had been starred by a bullet, and, as Krug approached, a soldier came out carrying a clean paper bag into which he proceeded to cram the overshoe and the cuff. You remove the obstacle and the ants resume a straight course. Ember never wore detachable cuffs, nor would he have dared jump out of a moving vehicle and run, and gasp, and run and duck as that unfortunate person had done. This is becoming a nuisance. I must awake. The victims of my nightmares are increasing in numbers too fast, thought Krug as he walked, ponderous, black-overcoated, black-hatted, the overcoat flappily unbuttoned, the wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand.
Weakness of habit. A former official, a very ancien régime old party, had avoided arrest, or worse, by slipping out from his genteel plush-and-dust apartment, Peregolm Lane 4, and transferring his quarters to the dead elevator in the house where Krug dwelt. In spite of the “Not Working” sign on the door, that strange automaton Adam Krug would invariably try to get in and would be met by the frightened face and white goatee of the harassed refugee. Fright, however, would at once be replaced by a worldly display of hospitality. The old fellow had managed to transform his narrow abode into quite a comfortable little den. He was neatly dressed and carefully shaven and with pardonable pride would show you such fixtures as, for example, an alcohol lamp and a trousers press. He was a Baron.
Krug boorishly refused the cup of coffee he was offered and tramped up to his own flat. Hedron was waiting for him in David’s room. He had been told of Krug’s telephone call; had come over at once. David did not want them to leave the nursery and threatened to get out of bed if they did. Claudina brought the boy his supper but he refused to eat. From the study to which Krug and Hedron retired, they could indistinctly hear him arguing with the woman.
They discussed what could be done: planning a certain course of action; well knowing that neither this course nor any other would avail. Both wanted to know why people of no political importance had been seized: though, to be sure, they might have guessed the answer, the simple answer that was to be given them half an hour later.
“Incidentally, we are having another meeting on the twelfth,” remarked Hedron. “I am afraid you are going to be the guest of honour again.”
“Not I,” said Krug. “I shall not be there.”
Hedron carefully scooped out the black contents of his pipe into the bronze ash tray at his elbow.
“I must be getting back,” he said with a sigh. “Those Chinese delegates are coming to dinner.”
He was referring to a group of foreign physicists and mathematicians who had been invited to take part in a congress that had been called off at the last moment. Some of the least important members had not been notified of this cancellation and had come all the way for nothing.
At the door, just before leaving, he looked at the hat in his hand and said:
“I hope she did not suffer … I——”
Krug shook his head and hurriedly opened the door.
The staircase presented a remarkable spectacle. Hustav, now in full uniform, with a look of utter dejection on his swollen face, was sitting on the steps. Four soldiers in various postures formed a martial bas-relief along the wall. Hedron was immediately surrounded and shown the order for his arrest. One of the men pushed Krug out of the way. There was a vague sort of scuffle, in the course of which Hustav lost his footing and bumpily fell down the steps, dragging Hedron after him. Krug tried to follow the soldiers downstairs but was made to desist. The clatter subsided. One imagined the Baron cowering in the darkness of his unconventional hiding place and still not daring to believe that he remained uncaptured.
9
HOLDING YOUR CUPPED HANDS together dear, and pr
ogressing with the cautious and tremulous steps of tremendous age (although hardly fifteen) you crossed the porch; stopped; gently worked open the glass door by means of your elbow; made your way past the caparisoned grand piano, traversed the sequence of cool carnation-scented rooms, found your aunt in the chambre violette——
I think I want to have the whole scene repeated. Yes, from the beginning. As you came up the stone steps of the porch, your eyes never left your cupped hands, the pink chink between the two thumbs. Oh, what were you carrying? Come on now. You wore a striped (dingy white and pale-blue) sleeveless jersey, a dark-blue girl-scout skirt, untidy orphan-black stockings and a pair of old chlorophyl-stained tennis shoes. Between the pillars of the porch geometrical sunlight touched your reddish brown bobbed hair, your plump neck and the vaccination mark on your sunburned arm. You moved slowly through a cool and sonorous drawing room, then entered a room where the carpet and armchairs and curtains were purple and blue. From various mirrors your cupped hands and lowered head came towards you and your movements were mimicked behind your back. Your aunt, a lay figure, was writing a letter.
“Look,” you said.
Very slowly, rosewise, you opened your hands. There, clinging with all its six fluffy feet to the ball of your thumb, the tip of its mouse-grey body slightly excurved, its short, red, blue-ocellated inferior wings oddly protruding forward from beneath the sloping superior ones which were long and marbled and deeply notched——
I think I shall have you go through your act a third time, but in reverse—carrying that hawk moth back into the orchard where you found it.
As you went the way you had come (now with the palm of your hand open), the sun that had been lying in state on the parquetry of the drawing-room and on the flat tiger (spread-eagled and bright-eyed beside the piano), leaped at you, climbed the dingy soft rungs of your jersey and struck you right in the face so that all could see (crowding, tier upon tier, in the sky, jostling one another, pointing, feasting their eyes on the young radabarbára) its high colour and fiery freckles, and the hot cheeks as red as the hind wings basally, for the moth was still clinging to your hand and you were still looking at it as you progressed towards the garden, where you gently transferred it to the lush grass at the foot of an apple tree far from the beady eyes of your little sister.
Where was I at the time? An eighteen-year-old student sitting with a book (Les Pensées, I imagine) on a station bench miles away, not knowing you, not known to you. Presently I shut the book and took what was called an omnibus train to the country place where young Hedron was spending the summer. This was a cluster of rentable cottages on a hillside overlooking the river, the opposite bank of which revealed in terms of fir trees and alder bushes the heavily timbered acres of your aunt’s estate.
We shall now have somebody else arrive from nowhere—à pas de loup, a tall boy with a little black moustache and other signs of hot uncomfortable puberty. Not I, not Hedron. That summer we did nothing but play chess. The boy was your cousin, and while my comrade and I, across the river, pored over Tarrash’s collection of annotated games, he would drive you to tears during meals by some intricate and maddening piece of teasing and then, under the pretence of reconciliation, would steal after you into some attic where you were hiding your frantic sobbing, and there would kiss your wet eyes, and hot neck and tumbled hair and try to get at your armpits and garters for you were a remarkably big ripe girl for your age; but he, in spite of his fine looks and hungry hard limbs, died of consumption a year later.
And still later, when you were twenty and I twenty-three, we met at a Christmas party and discovered that we had been neighbours that summer, five years before—five years lost! And at the precise moment when in awed surprise (awed by the bungling of destiny) you put your hand to your mouth and looked at me with very round eyes and muttered: “But that’s where I lived!”—I recalled in a flash a green lane near an orchard and a sturdy young girl carefully carrying a lost fluffy nestling, but whether it had been really you no amount of probing and poking could either confirm or disprove.
Fragment from a letter addressed to a dead woman in heaven by her husband in his cups.
10
HE GOT RID of her furs, of all her photographs, of her huge English sponge and supply of lavender soap, of her umbrella, of her napkin ring, of the little porcelain owl she had bought for Ember and never given him—but she refused to be forgotten. When (some fifteen years before) both his parents had been killed in a railway accident, he had managed to alleviate the pain and the panic by writing Chapter III (Chapter IV in later editions) of his “Mirokonzepsia” wherein he looked straight into the eyesockets of death and called him a dog and an abomination. With one strong shrug of his burly shoulders he shook off the burden of sanctity enveloping the monster, and as with a thump and a great explosion of dust the thick old mats and carpets and things fell, he had experienced a kind of hideous relief. But could he do it again?
Her dresses and stockings and hats and shoes mercifully disappeared together with Claudina when the latter, soon after Hedron’s arrest, was bullied by police agents into leaving. The agencies he called, in an attempt to find a trained nurse to replace her, could not help him; but a couple of days after Claudina had gone, the bell rang and there, on the landing, was a very young girl with a suitcase offering her services. “I answer,” she amusingly said, “to the name of Mariette”; she had been employed as maid and model in the household of the well-known artist who had lived in apartment 30, right above Krug; but now he was obliged to depart with his wife and two other painters for a much less comfortable prison camp in a remote province. Mariette brought down a second suitcase and quietly moved into the room near the nursery. She had good references from the Department of Public Health, graceful legs and a pale, delicately shaped, not particularly pretty, but attractively childish face with parched-looking lips, always parted, and strange lustreless dark eyes; the pupil almost merged in tint with the iris, which was placed somewhat higher than is usual and was obliquely shaded by sooty lashes. No paint or powder touched her singularly bloodless, evenly translucid cheeks. She wore her hair long. Krug had a confused feeling that he had seen her before, probably on the stairs. Cinderella, the little slattern, moving and dusting in a dream, always ivory pale and unspeakably tired after last night’s ball. On the whole, there was something rather irritating about her, and her wavy brown hair had a strong chestnutty smell; but David liked her, so she might do after all.
11
ON HIS BIRTHDAY, Krug was informed by telephone that the Head of the State desired to grant him an interview, and hardly had the fuming philosopher laid down the receiver than the door flew open and—very much like one of those stage valets that march in stiffly half a second before their fictitious master (insulted and perhaps beaten up by them between acts) claps his hands—a dapper, heel-clicking aide-de-camp saluted from the threshold. By the time that the palace motor car, a huge black limousine, which made one think of first-class funerals in alabaster cities, arrived at its destination, Krug’s annoyance had given way to a kind of grim curiosity. Though otherwise fully dressed, he was wearing bedroom slippers, and the two gigantic janitors (whom Paduk had inherited together with the abject caryatids supporting the balconies) stared at his absent-minded feet as he shuffled up the marble steps. From then on a multitude of uniformed rascals kept silently seething around him, causing him to follow this or that course by means of a bodiless elastic pressure rather than by definite gestures or words. He was steered into a waiting room where, instead of the usual magazines, one was offered various games of skill (such as for instance, glass gadgets within which little bright hopelessly mobile balls had to be coaxed into the orbits of eyeless clowns). Presently two masked men came in and searched him thoroughly. Then one of them retired behind the screen while the other produced a small vial marked H2SO4, which he proceeded to conceal under Krug’s left armpit. Having had Krug assume a “natural position,” he called his companion, who approach
ed with an eager smile and immediately found the object: upon which he was accused of having peeped through the kwazinka [a slit between the folding parts of a screen]. A rapidly mounting squabble was stopped by the arrival of the zemberl [chamberlain]. This prim old personage noticed at once that Krug was inadequately shod; there followed a feverish search through the oppressive vastness of the palace. A small collection of footgear began accumulating around Krug—a number of seedy-looking pumps, a girl’s tiny slipper trimmed with moth-eaten squirrel fur, some bloodstained arctics, brown shoes, black shoes and even a pair of half boots with screwed on skates. Only the last fitted Krug and some more time elapsed before adequate hands and instruments were found to deprive the soles of their rusty but gracefully curved supplements.
Then the zemberl ushered Krug into the presence of the ministr dvortza, a von Embit of German extraction. Embit at once pronounced himself a humble admirer of Krug’s genius. His mind had been formed by “Mirokonzepsia,” he said. Moreover, a cousin of his had been a student of Professor Krug’s—the famous physician—was he any relation? He wasn’t. The ministr kept up his social patter for a few minutes (he had a queer way of emitting a quick little snort before saying something) and then took Krug by the arm and they walked down a long passage with doors on one side and a stretch of pale-green and spinach-green tapestry on the other, displaying what seemed to be an endless hunt through a subtropical forest. The visitor was made to inspect various rooms, i.e. his guide would softly open a door and in a reverent whisper direct his attention to this or that interesting item. The first room to be shown contained a contour map of the State, made of bronze with towns and villages represented by precious and semiprecious stones of various colours. In the next, a young typist was poring over the contents of some documents, and so absorbed was she in deciphering them, and so noiselessly had the ministr entered, that she emitted a wild shriek when he snorted behind her back. Then a classroom was visited: a score of brown-skinned Armenian and Sicilian lads were diligently writing at rosewood desks while their eunig, a fat old man with dyed hair and bloodshot eyes, sat in front of them painting his fingernails and yawning with closed mouth. Of special interest was a perfectly empty room, in which some extinct furniture had left squares of honey-yellow colour on the brown floor: von Embit lingered there and bade Krug linger, and mutely pointed at a vacuum cleaner, and lingered on, eyes moving this way and that as if flitting over the sacred treasures of an ancient chapel.