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——
24
Not only his mother’s fleeting smile of content had irritated Martin that second summer; there was something else besides, something far more unpleasant. Life at the chalet seemed to him strangely changed, as if moving on tiptoe, with bated breath: It was odd to hear Uncle Henry call Mrs. Edelweiss not “Sophie,” as before, but “chère amie”; and she, too, addressed him now and then as “my dear.” A new softness, an increased welling of sentiment, showed in him; his voice had grown lower, his movements gentler; one’s praise for the soup or the joint was now enough to veil his eyes with moisture. The cult around Martin’s father’s memory had acquired a tinge of unbearable mysticism; Mrs. Edelweiss was more than ever conscious of her guilt before her late husband, while Uncle Henry seemed to be tracing for her a difficult but sure road of expiation when remarking how happy Serge’s spirit must be to see her in his cousin’s house; once he even produced a nail file and with agreeable melancholy began to pass it back and forth over his nails, but at this Mrs. Edelweiss could not contain herself and emitted a hollow laugh, which unexpectedly became a fit of hysterics. In his haste to help, Martin opened the kitchen faucet so briskly that the water splashed his white flannels.
Not infrequently did he observe his mother as she walked in the garden leaning wearily on Henry’s arm, or as she fetched for Henry a bedtime cup of fragrant linden tea. It was all depressing, embarrassing, and strange. Just before his departure for Cambridge she obviously wanted to break the news to him, but she found it as embarrassing as he; she faltered and only said that she perhaps would soon write to him of an important event; and indeed, that winter, Martin received a letter, not from her but from his uncle, who on six pages informed him in a flowing hand in bombastic tear-jerking language that he was marrying Martin’s mother—a very modest ceremony at the village church—and only upon reaching the postscriptum Martin realized that the wedding had already taken place and mentally thanked his mother for having scheduled this grim celebration to coincide with his absence. At the same time he kept asking himself how he would face her again, what they would talk about, and would he manage to forgive her the betrayal. For no matter how you approached it, it was, beyond any doubt, a betrayal of his father’s memory. Furthermore, he was plagued by the thought that for stepfather he had Uncle Henry of the fluffy whiskers and limited wits. When Martin arrived for Christmas, his mother could not stop hugging him and weeping, as if forgetting, to oblige Uncle Henry, her usual restraint; and there was simply nowhere to hide from the soft emotion in his stepfather’s kindly eyes and from the solemnity of that little cough of his.
In general, during his last university year, Martin was made aware again and again of the presence of some malevolent force obstinately trying to convince him that life was not at all the easy happy thing he had imagined. Soma’s existence, the constant gratuitous attention it extorted from his soul, her visits that only tormented him, the derisive tone of the banter that had become established between them, all of it was extremely exhausting. That unrequited love did not prevent him, however, from running after every pretty girl, and tingling with bliss when, for instance, Rose, the goddess of the tearoom, consented to go with him for a motorcar drive. In that shop, much frequented by students, you could buy pastry of every imaginable color: bright-red with speckles of cream that made them look like one of the deadly varieties of amanitas; purplish-blue, like violet-scented soap; and glossy-black, Negroid, with a white soul. One went on devouring cake after cake till one’s innards got glued together, in the ever-present hope of at last discovering something really good. With a dusky flush on her velvety cheeks and a liquid gaze, clad in a black dress with a soubrette’s little apron, Rose tripped rapidly back and forth through the room nimbly evading collision with the other waitress navigating also at full speed. Martin immediately noticed Rose’s thick-fingered red hand not in the least embellished by the tiny star of a cheap ring, and decided wisely never again to look at her hands but to concentrate on her long eyelashes which she lowered so beautifully while writing out a check. One day, while drinking rich sweet chocolate, he passed her a note, and that same evening walked with her in the rain. On Saturday he hired the usual ramshackle limousine and spent the night with her at an ancient inn,
some fifty kilometers from Cambridge. He felt somewhat taken aback, though flattered, when she said it was her first affair; she made love stormily, clumsily, rustically, and Martin who had expected to find in her a frivolous and experienced siren, felt so disconcerted that he turned to Darwin for advice. “You’ll get kicked out of the university,” calmly said Darwin. “Nonsense,” retorted Martin frowning. Yet when, three weeks later, Rose, as she put down a cup of chocolate before him, informed him in a quick whisper that she was pregnant, it seemed as if that meteorite which ordinarily lands somewhere in the Gobi desert had fallen straight upon him.
“Congratulations,” said Darwin; after which, not without artistry, he began to delineate the fate of a sinful girl with a babe in her belly. “And you will be sent down. That’s a fact.” “No one will know, I shall straighten out everything,” stammered Martin. “It’s hopeless,” said Darwin.
Martin suddenly lost his temper and walked out banging the door. He ran out into the lane, and nearly crashed under the impact of a large pillow that his friend had skillfully aimed at his head from the second-floor window. When Martin reached the corner and glanced back, he saw Darwin come out, pick up the pillow, shake it, and return to the house. “Cruel brute,” muttered Martin and went straight to the tearoom. It was crowded. Bright-eyed, dusky Rose flitted from table to table, tripped along with a tray, or, tenderly moistening her pencil with the tip of her tongue, wrote out a check. He also wrote some lines on a leaf from his agenda, namely “I want you to marry me. Martin Edelweiss.” He thrust the leaflet into her hideous hand; then he left, spent a couple of hours roaming about the town, returned home, lay down on the sofa, and remained lying until nightfall.
25
At nightfall Darwin dropped in, magnificently flung off his gown, sat down by the fire, and immediately began livening up the coals with the poker. Martin lay in silence, full of self-pity, again and again imagining himself coming out of the church with Rose, who was wearing white kid gloves, pulled on with difficulty. “Sonia is coming alone tomorrow,” said Darwin unconcernedly. “Her mother’s got the flu, a bad case of flu.” Martin said nothing, but visualized with a stab of excitement tomorrow’s soccer match. “How are you going to play, though?” said Darwin. “That, of course, is the question.” Martin remained silent. “Badly, probably,” Darwin resumed. “Goalkeeping needs presence of mind, and you’re in one hell of a state. You know, I just had a chat with that woman.”
Silence. The tower chimes rang across the town.
“A poetic nature, inclined to fantasy,” Darwin went on a minute later. “She’s no more pregnant than, for instance, I am. Want to bet a fiver that I can twist this poker into a monogram?” (Martin lay like a dead man.) “I interpret your silence as assent. Let’s see.”
He grunted once, twice. “No, can’t do it today. The money’s yours. I paid exactly five pounds for your stupid declaration. We’re even, and everything’s in order.”
Martin was silent, only his heart had begun beating violently.
“But,” said Darwin, “just remember, if you ever set foot in that bad and expensive pastry shop again, you’ll get kicked out of the university. That lass can be impregnated by a mere handshake, don’t forget that.”
Darwin got up and stretched. “You’re not very talkative, chum. I must confess that you and your hetaera have somehow marred tomorrow for me—I mean the morrow one has in one’s mind.”
He went out, quietly closing the door behind him, and Martin had three simultaneous thoughts: that he was terribly hungry, that you couldn’t find another friend like that, and that tomorrow this friend would propose. At that moment he joyously and ardently wished that Sonia would accept, but the moment passed, and next morning, when he and Darwin met Sonia at the station, he felt the old familiar, dreary jealousy (his only, rather pathetic advantage over Darwin was his recent, wine-toasted transition to the intimate second-person singular, the Russian “ty,” with Sonia; in England that form had died out with the bowmen; nonetheless Darwin had also drunk auf Bruderschaft with her, and had addressed her all evening with the archaic “thou”).
“Hello, flower,” she said casually to Martin, alluding to his botanical last name; then, at once turning away, she began telling Darwin things that might have interested Martin too.
“What’s so attractive about her, after all?” he thought for the thousandth time. “All right, she has those dimples, that pale complexion—that’s not enough. Her eyes are so-so, gypsyesque, and her teeth are uneven. And her lips are so thick, so glossy—if one could just stop them, shut them up with a kiss. And she thinks she looks English in that blue suit and those low-heeled shoes. Don’t you people see she’s just a short little thing?” Who these “people” were Martin did not know; and they would have had a difficult time passing judgment, for, as soon as Martin achieved an attitude of indifference toward Sonia, he would suddenly notice what a graceful back she had, how she tilted her head—and her slanted eyes ran across him with a swift chill, and the undercurrent of mirth in her speech bathed the base of each phrase, until, abruptly, her laughter burst into the open; and she would stress her words with a shake of her tightly furled umbrella, which she held not by its handle but by its body of silk. And, ambling despondently, now behind them, now alongside, on the cobbled pavement (it was impossible for three people to walk abreast on the sidewalk because of the resilient cushion of air surrounding Darwin’s massive form, and because of Sonia’s short, weaving steps) Martin reflected that, adding up all the random hours he had spent with her, here and in London, the total would be no more than a month and a half of constant companionship—and to think that he had first met her more than two years ago, and that now the third, and last, Cambridge winter was already on the wane, yet he really could not tell what sort of person she was, and whether or not she was in love with Darwin, and how she would react if Darwin were to tell her about yesterday’s experience, and whether she had spoken to anyone about that night, that miserable, yet by now oddly ravishing and not in the least shameful night when, shivering, barefoot, in her skimpy yellow pajamas, she had been borne ashore by a wave of silence and gently deposited on his blanket.
They reached their destination. Sonia washed her hands in Darwin’s bedroom. She took out her puff, blew on it, and powdered her face. The luncheon table was laid for five. Vadim had of course been invited, but Archibald Moon had long since disappeared from their circle of friends, and it was even a little strange to recall that he had once been considered a desirable guest. The fifth member of the party was a slender, snub-nosed, blond youth, not handsome but nicely built and somewhat eccentrically dressed. He had the fine, elongated hands with which popular novelists endow artistic individuals, yet he was neither poet nor painter, and the graceful, delicate fluttery something about him, along with his knowledge of French and Italian and slightly un-British but very elegant manners, was attributed at Cambridge to his father’s Florentine origin. Teddy, kindly, ethereal Teddy, belonged to the Roman Church, liked climbing and skiing in the Alps, was a good oarsman, played the old royal game of court tennis, and, while he knew how to be very tender with women, carried chastity to a ridiculous extreme (a year later, however, he announced a certain change in a note to Martin from Paris: “Yesterday,” he wrote, “I got myself a wench, quite clean, and all that.” Underneath the studied vulgarity there was something sorrowful and nervous about that statement. Martin recalled his sudden fits of melancholy and self-castigation, his love for Leopardi and for snow, and how he had furiously smashed a perfectly innocent Etruscan vase upon receiving an insufficiently brilliant grade in an examination).
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