The Green Book Part 62

"Your G.o.dmother!"

"What can she have written about?"

Presently, as if it were intended for a joke, Bethsaba laughed heartily over the letter.

"Ha, ha, ha! She wants me to go to the Masinka Fete! Alone! Without Alexander! 'It is to be a grand affair; the Czar and Czarina and several foreign princes will be there; I shall have an opportunity to entreat the Czar to grant Alexander permission to go back to St. Petersburg!'

Ha, ha, ha! Did you hear that, Alexander Sergievitch? My G.o.dmother sends me an invitation to a ball without you! The letter could not have come at a more opportune moment--I just wanted it!"

And with these words she seized the precious epistle; it just covered the damage the dragon had sustained, and a couple of pins fixed it in place--the black seal just forming the pupil of the eye. (The court had gone into mourning for six weeks after Sophie's death, and society used black sealing-wax during the period.)

"A large case also arrived by post-chaise," said the dvornik.

"Put it on one side. I have no time now to look at it."

What more incomprehensible than that one of the fair s.e.x should have no time to look at a ball-dress sent direct from the capital? The dragon was mended, and ready now to resume its flight in the air.

Laughing and shouting, Bethsaba ran along with the tail of her kite dragging after her; the second child stood looking on, laughing, while the dragon disapprovingly waggled its foolish-looking head. While starting a kite, the flyer has to run back with head turned upward.

Bethsaba, therefore, was not aware that she was running directly against some one coming towards her from the English garden; and was startled to find herself suddenly embraced from behind, and a long kiss impressed upon her face. Then she gave a loud, joyous cry, and the next instant her arms were round the intruder's neck; and, not content with hanging upon that neck, she pulled its owner on to the gra.s.s, and, rolling over, kissed her enthusiastically, interposing the most endearing epithets: "You love!--you darling!--you precious!" Pushkin was fain to go to the rescue, and help them both up again.

It needed no extraordinary ac.u.men to guess who the guest, so affectionately welcomed, could be.

"Do not quite strangle me, you little goose!" exclaimed Zeneida. "Look; your dragon has meanwhile flown away."

"Let it fly out into the wide world, and my G.o.dmother's letter with it.

Do you know I have had a letter from my G.o.dmother? Do you know she has invited me to the Masinka Fete without Alexander? Do you know what I did with her letter? My dragon had a slit, and I mended the slit with it.

How dear and good of you to come and see us!"

"It is the correct thing. Six weeks after marriage it is the wedding-mother's duty to come and look after the young couple and see that they are happy together--and if they really care for each other.

Has your husband beaten you yet?"

"Oh, dreadfully," said Bethsaba, pretending to complain. "The last time it was here!" And she secretly rubbed a place on her arm until she had made it red; but a redness, Zeneida detected, which had come from no blows.

"And you, Pushkin, have you been writing many fine verses?"

"Not a line! You know my muse is never active in fine weather. It requires storm, rain, and snow."

"And your sky has remained sunny?"

"As you see. I have not written a word."

This was very possible. There are times in his life when a poet only feels poetry, does not write it.

"Why, we have not a sheet of paper in the house," said Bethsaba, whose woman's instinct whispers to her it is her greatest boast when a poet's wife can say that it has been through her that the poet has been faithless to his muse. "We really have not. I had to use my G.o.dmother's letter to make my dragon's eye."

"Indeed! Is that how you treat your correspondence? That is a good thing to know. I will never write to you then, but, when I have anything to tell you, will rather come myself."

"That will be nice."

"Or I will take you with me."

To this the same response, "That will be nice," did not come. Clinging to Alexander's arm she looked up to him, saying:

"You will not let me go, will you?"

Zeneida answered for him:

"To that we shall not ask Alexander Sergievitch. His business it is when his little wife wants to go visiting to order out the carriage and horses, and to take care of the house in her absence."

"But I could not go anywhere if I wished it. Do you not see how I am dressed? It is the Pleskow costume! Alexander tells me it was also the costume of the first Russian Christian, Princess Olga. And I like it so much. Admire this sarafan with its many b.u.t.tons, the pearl-embroidered povojnyik on my head, my red boots and striped silk stockings!" And with childish _navete_ she lifted up her dress to her knees. "How people would stare if I were to appear among them in this costume! I have no other dress; this is what pleases my Alexander to see me in!"

She told the truth. The ball-dresses sent her were not her own property yet; she had not accepted the present.

Alexander drew his little nestling wife closer to him.

"We have become thorough peasant farmers."

"Heaven grant that you may remain so!" thought Zeneida to herself. "I fear, however, that some day you will be leaving wife and village, and it will no longer be the pearl-embroidered cap upon your wife's head you will then consider the greatest adornment, but the Phrygian cap you will be running after!"

That which Dante omitted among the tortures of h.e.l.l was that a woman should be condemned to see the man she loves, who might have been hers, revelling in the love of another woman, and she his wife. Had Zeneida's love been that of ordinary women, it would have mattered little to her that the man, round whom her fetters had been cast, should, sooner or later, be dragged by these very fetters to the grave. The joys of the present would have outweighed the tortures of the future, the dread secrets of eternity. But so dearly had she loved Pushkin that she sought for him a happiness in which she had no part. It was an unnatural situation, and one requiring a n.o.bler courage than most possess. But is not the woman who devotes herself to play a part in politics an unnatural, abnormal creation? Upon the altar of politics the heart is the lamb of sacrifice. In the service of a Moloch sensual pa.s.sion may exist, but not love. Those who become political leaders have no longer father or mother, brother or sister, lover or friend; they recognize no difference between honesty and roguery, between the laws of G.o.d and the expediencies of man. Hence the pursuit of politics is an unnatural occupation for women, with whom love and justice are ruling principles.

The Amazon who went forth to war had first rooted out the gentler feelings.

The possibility of women taking up such a part is only comprehensible in countries where oppression is so unbearable, so utter, that the thirst for freedom extends from the starved hearts of the men to those of the women. The poet-laureate might love the court prima donna, but not the plenipotentiary of the Szojusz BlaG.o.denztoiga. Between those two lay "the green book"--a far more efficient obstacle than the green ocean.

But, all the same, the anchorites of St. George's Monastery had not carried their self-torture to greater perfection than had this woman who had forced herself to come as a guest to the house where she would be witness to the happiness denied her, and which she had voluntarily given to another. And now she has come to guard that happiness against the storms of the future. And she is not only witness to their happiness when they are together, but even when his farm-yard or stables tear Pushkin for a short hour from Bethsaba's side, the young wife can talk of nothing but to boast of her happiness. No peac.o.c.k is so proud of spreading his tail as is a fond wife of telling of her happy lot. She has so many things to tell. Her husband is a perfect model of virtue and perfection! And to all this Zeneida must listen with utmost composure; to see, if the husband were absent over the expected half-hour, how uneasy and distraught the young wife grows; to read from her face: "Oh, you dear benefactress mine, my good fairy, my G.o.ddess, how gladly, were you not with me, would I run out to seek him!" And this, too, must she bear with a smile on her face! Oh, this Moloch!

"Listen, child: my sole object in coming was to steal you away from Alexander Sergievitch for a time."

"Ah! If you want to steal either, take both of us. Alexander would not mind being run off with by you."

"Only, as it happens, he is neither invited, nor may he come. You must accept your G.o.dmother's invitation."

"What! The invitation to her ball!"

"There you will meet the Czar and Czarina; they will speak to you."

"I--there--without Alexander?"

"Upon you it depends that Pushkin may be free to go where you go. Your marriage with him has entirely marred his career. He does not feel it now, but in the course of a year or two he will remember that formerly every step he took was accompanied by the clank of spurs. The soul of a man is not to be confined in a cage like a tame bird, especially when he has eagle's wings. Be it your task to implore forgiveness from the Czar for your husband, that Pushkin may proceed on his interrupted career.

Now the meadows are still green; in another month they will be covered with snow, and the couple condemned to fireside and indoor life will not be so light-hearted as the one flying their kites in the open meadow."

"Then it is your wish that I should intercede for Alexander's return to St. Petersburg?"

"Not for all the world! No; a thousand times rather entreat the Czar to give him a mission that shall take you and him to your own people and country. Describe to the Czar and Czarina the land in which you were born, as it lives in your memory, with its genial climate, its aromatic woods, its fruit-bearing trees. Tell them all the lovely and beautiful things of it that your memory can recall, and entreat the Czar, as an act of mercy to yourself, to send your husband there."

"Oh, the tempting thought!" sighed Bethsaba.

"But he will never consent that I should leave him and go away, and stay days and weeks away from him."

"It would only be one week."