The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars

by Maurice DeKobra

  “Friend, you tempt me. But we are both risking our lives, you know.”

  “It’s nothing but a case of doubles or quits. And besides, it’s worth it! By collaborating with me, you will assure your future career and your fiancée’s happiness, for she can join you later in New York. At my expense, of course. Look here, Ivanof, you know the Communist state of mind better than I do. Do you think for one minute that Chapinski’s conviction can stand up against fifty thousand American dollars, fresh from the mint in Washington?”

  Ivanof closed his eyes. His meditation was of short duration. He took my hand, shook it convincingly and concluded:

  “You have my solemn word of honor. Doubles or quits. Give me your banknotes. I’ll hide them in my shirt and tomorrow morning I will put them to work.”

  The tedious passage of time after Ivanof’s departure was for me the bitterest sort of mental torture. Scarcely had he obtained his liberation than I began to speculate on his activities. I pictured his approach to the chief of the wireless station; the prudence and diplomacy which he would need to employ in a country where suspicion with its shrewd eyes scales the walls of houses and insinuates itself under the cracks of bolted doors.

  All that day I had no visitor except the jailer, who came with the customary rations of soup and black bread. Impatience frayed my shattered nerves still more. Hour after hour, I paced my narrow cell. I could see nothing but the vision of Ivanof. No woman whom I had adored ever haunted me as did he. Like an opium smoker with exaggerated senses, it seemed to me sometimes that the intactile waves of a radio were roaring by my ears on their way through space. The imaginary noises of a broadcasting station cradled my anxiety.

  And then the cold stream of doubt suddenly bathed me. Ivanof had departed with a thousand dollars. Could I surely depend on his trustworthiness? Why should he not keep the money for himself rather than risk the dangers of a double escape? He was free, after all, relatively free in a country which had lost that sense of honor and responsibility so dear to civilized people of the west.

  Night came. The yellow lantern flickered again. Lady Diana’s memory borrowed my thoughts. What was she doing at this hour? Doubtless she was in London with Varichkine. They must be worried at having received no news of me, no response to their telegrams addressed to the Hotel Vokzal and which the Tchekists had undoubtedly intercepted. I imagined the “Madonna of the Sleeping Cars” in her Berkeley Square boudoir, keeping Varichkine at arm’s length, awaiting my reports before opening her heart to him. Yes, Lady Diana at that very moment was probably exercising her seductive wiles from a divan of embroidered velvet. I could see her in her pink and white robe—a flaming vision framed in ermine—displaying the roundness of her arms and the perfection of her perfumed and powdered skin. I could see Varichkine, conquered, dazzled, beside himself—Varichkine with eyes shining with hope, stalking his prey, chained by the stubbornness of a panther’s heart hidden deep in the alluring body of a defenseless woman.

  Poor Varichkine—worshiping, on his knees, that fascinating, maddening creature. A lover hypnotized by a thing of beauty with a heart of ice. He was not characteristically, in spite of his Asiatic origin, a clever liar. Did he really hope to win this emancipated Englishwoman, freed from the bonds which the ethics of a society, devoid of ideals, impose upon us? Did he hope to break the spirit of this little daughter of Picts and Scots, a natural descendant of the Grampian mountaineers who in olden times defied the Roman invader and arrested the triumphant march of invincible legions?

  A Slav enamored of a Scot! A beautiful topic for dissertations of those scalpers of souls who comb the weeds out of the Land of Tenderness. A nice bit of tea-table conversation for the psychological parlor, patented by the preceptor of indirect supposition. An admirable mixture for the amateur who stares at the atomic notation of sighs in the cornucopia of great thrills. For my own part I renounced any prediction. I even lacked the courage to evoke, in my present distress, what would happen to the idyll, if the gorilla with the pallid brow, marked with a Red star, should turn the barrel of his gun toward my resigned heart.

  The next day they accorded me an hour’s walk in the courtyard. The bracing morning air did me good. I wanted to wash at the pump but the Red guard would permit no such luxury.

  Regretfully, I returned to my underground lodgings. My eyes, dazzled by the sunlight, were of no use at all at first. But a surprise awaited me. I recognized Irina’s silhouette in my cell.

  She saluted me with her usual irony, “Good morning, noble prisoner.”

  I bowed and said nothing. I was in no humor to wage a war of repartee. I sat down on my bed and pretended to ignore her presence.

  Irina observed me silently. Finally she declared, “Your beard is growing rapidly, Prince Séliman. In a few days you will look for all the world like a moujik—a vulgar proletarian who only shaves to give pleasure to the wives of capitalists.”

  I made an exasperated gesture.

  “Madam, please. No commonplaces on that subject! Keep your witticism for your public reunions and for the feebleminded people who listen to you with gaping mouths.”

  Irina paid no attention but only continued, “After all, what difference is there between a Prince Séliman and a lighterman painted by Gorki? A few strokes of a razor blade and a cake of soap. Gray matter? Rot! The anatomists have proven that an imbecile’s brain weighs as much as that of an intelligent man. The thyroid gland? Perhaps. We’ll know about that in a hundred years. For there are no great men except the inventors and developers of science. All the rest amount to more or less ris de veau surrounding an Adam’s apple.

  “Don’t get angry. I love to annoy you, Prince. I think I’m entitled to the little bit of pleasure it gives me. I came here to gloat over your gradual decay. If the Tcheka lends you your life for two weeks more, you will be a lovely sight. Your trousers will have lost all trace of those impeccable creases which are the two parallels of snobbish geometry. Your wrinkled coat, your grimy collar, your dirty nails, your sunken cheeks will blend together to make a charming picture. I already take delight in imagining you a perfect example, smelly and lousy, of a social outcast; of a bubble bouncing helplessly on the foam which crowns the boiled dinner of Democracy. Have you nothing to say?”

  “No, madam.”

  “Sarcasm fails to cut you? What a sudden change! So you no longer react to the prick of banderillos? The bull is getting tired? No more pride? Has that supreme ego died away so quickly?”

  My silence irritated Madam Mouravieff. She dug the heel of her black boot into the ground and cried, “Prince. You might do me the honor to answer me.”

  I gazed at her indifferently. “Madam, you might have the goodness to leave me alone.”

  We stared at one another in silence.

  She laughed cruelly and said, “One of these days you will undress in front of me the way Tchernicheff did. You will bare yourself to meet Death. That will be a new sensation for you. That will remind you of your bachelor apartment in Paris where you performed the same rite to subvert complaisant virtue. But this time, the fall will be definitive. No flowers, no champagne.”

  Irina had come near to me; her face radiated a veritable hatred. Her eyes burned into me like two hot irons.

  She went on, “You remember how Tchernicheff was ashamed to expose himself before me? Well, I shall see you stark naked. That will be the height of humiliation just before you finish.”

  I leaned against the wall. “Do you really hate me as much as all that? Why?”

  My question seemed to increase her fury. She made no answer.

  I went on, “I confess that I am incapable of understanding so intense a hatred. Were I your lover and had I deceived you, cheated you, humiliated and maltreated you, it would be, if not just, at least admissible that you should seek revenge. But as things are your anger should be vented on Varichkine. You are making me atone for your lover’s philanderings. Don’t you think that your behavior might shock justice considerably?”
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br />   Irina shrugged her shoulders. “Justice! A meaningless word. Did your Almighty God consider justice when he unloosed the Deluge and soaked the good and the bad without discrimination? Justice? An insurance policy to protect the weak from the strong! We Communists, we emanate strength! And the rest of the world be damned!”

  “The Iron Chancellor said the same thing, madam.”

  “And what then? Kraft ist Macht. Might is Right. Your fanatics who dream of a League of Nations are the laughing stock of Moscow. Why, that is a Punch and Judy show for old men enjoying second childhood, old fogies who play with Utopias while their nurses go boating on Lake Geneva. The League of Nations! Good Lord! When the whole world is fermenting with hatred? When the yellow races, edified by us, are gradually awakening? When the Germans, still a bit groggy, are slowly regaining their breath? When the Anglo-Saxons are embracing the French with every intention of strangling them? We can sensibly discuss that theory when human beings have become good, generous, reasonable, inaccessible to envy, to jealousy and cupidity. That will be in about three or four thousand years.

  “And, in the meantime, my dear, one must do justice to himself. That is the very good reason why you are a prisoner at the moment! I didn’t go for you without cause but since you, the Don Quixote of a haddock-fed female, have broken my heart by stealing my lover, what else do you expect? There are three guilty parties: Lady Diana, Varichkine, and yourself. Each in his turn. Chance enabled me to trap you first. When I have settled my account with you, Lady Diana will pay her debt. And, last of all, Varichkine. If it’s any satisfaction to you, I’ll tell you that you won’t expiate all by yourself.”

  “Madam Mouravieff, answer me frankly. Aren’t you inspired by a class hatred rather than by a desire to avenge an unfortunate love affair?”

  “A little of both. I don’t hate you and Lady Wynham solely because you are responsible for my sentimental misery, but also because you belong to an execrable social class.”

  “One which you envy, nevertheless.”

  “And because you are the real parasites of society. A legion of useless obstacles between us and the goal for which we strive. So many broken teeth which threaten to strip the gear of Communism. While I was wearing cotton stockings and studying at the University of Petrograd, with ten kopeks in my handbag, Lady Diana Wynham was wearing royal robes worth a thousand guineas and was throwing away more money in an hour than my comrades could earn in an entire year.”

  “Madam, you have no right to be sorry for yourself, since, in Berlin—that is to say, anywhere outside the Russian border—you dress like a woman of considerable wealth, in fine silk stockings and a tailor-made suit with a sober but undeniable elegance.”

  “The Revolution, sir!”

  “That’s exactly what I was about to say. You, who have become the Rose-colored Eminence of the new seigneurs of the Régime, you are exciting envy in the hearts of your own sisters, the nationalized working women, and you are sowing the seeds of jealousy in the souls of future Madam Mouravieffs. The wheel is turning. And just as long as your awful, rigorous equality fails to impose the same restrictions on clever people as on imbeciles, you will always be a trouble-maker. But I appreciate that your thirst for revolution is insatiable and that none of my arguments can do more than whet it. So I shall wait patiently here in my cell while you decide my fate. Then it will be your privilege to undress me and to offer my body to the unerring aim of the executioner.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A QUESTION OF CELLS

  THE DAY PASSED SLOWLY. IT SEEMED INTERMINABLE to me. That evening I was astonished to find that my jailer had been replaced by the Tchekist who had arrested me at the Hotel Vokzal. He gave me some stale bread and explained:

  “My comrade was ordered to Koutaïs. So I am commissioned to give you your soup.” He looked at me sidewise and added, “It won’t be for long, though.”

  “Are you going away, too?”

  “No. But you are going to be liberated. Or else shot within a few days. I heard them talking about you upstairs. They were reading a telegram from Moscow addressed to Madam Mouravieff. They said, ‘Tomorrow night.’ I suppose you will have some news tomorrow night. Death or liberty. Death, I suppose.”

  The consequence was that I endured another night of nightmares. I wondered what Ivanof was doing. Had he succeeded in sending the telegram? Completely exhausted, I went to sleep at dawn. They awakened me for my morning walk. The Red guard in the court, a guard whom I had never seen before, looked at me in a way which was most disconcerting. He invited me to follow him.

  He led me into a sort of woodshed and instructed me to open a door at the back. I obeyed. I had no more than entered the cabin when I trembled with astonishment. My friend, Ivanof, was there, concealed between two piles of wood.

  “You! By what miracle?”

  “Let’s be quick about it. We can talk for ten minutes. The first thing to tell you is that I’ve bought the silence of the Tchekist, who is commissioned to guard you.”

  “But my message?”

  “Wait a minute! Let me tell you what has happened in its proper course. The moment that I was liberated I went to the port. By taking a few drinks with the fishermen, I learned that the head of the radio station was a retired naval officer of the old régime, who had the good luck to be considered harmless by the Communists, and who lived unmolested in his signal tower. I introduced myself. His name is Gregor Lobatchof. I made an engagement with him for that evening. I listened attentively to his impressions of life—to the story of his past—to his opinions. Tete-à-tete, we opened our hearts to one another and we cursed the tyrants of today. He showed me his wireless apparatus. He explained to me that ordinarily he was forbidden to use it except to give information of an official nature to passing ships. Convinced that I could rely on him, I told him the truth—the entire truth. He immediately sympathized with your misfortune and told me that not only would he refuse to accept your thousand dollars, but that he would do his utmost to help you.”

  “He must be a good fellow!”

  “At ten o’clock in the evening, he sat down at his desk and tried to get into communication with the operator of the Northern Star. He had considerable difficulty, but after some time he managed to transmit the message and gave the signal for the reply. That was not long in coming. At a quarter past ten, the wireless operator of the yacht radiographed these words: Message received. Will be in the port of Nikolaïa at eleven tomorrow morning.

  “And there, my friend, is the good news which I wanted to give you. I have been loitering around the schoolhouse all this morning, and thanks to one hundred dollars, which is now resting in the pocket of a Red guard, I have managed this providential interview.”

  A kick on the door interrupted our conversation. I could hear some words whispered in Russian. Ivanof answered. Then in a low tone he added:

  “We must hurry. The guard is afraid that we will be overheard. I am going back to the port. The moment the yacht comes in sight I shall hire a boat and go aboard. For the rest, only God can decide.”

  “I beg you, Ivanof, do your best. They tell me that Mouravieff and Chapinski are to decide my fate this evening. Liberation or execution. My hours are numbered.”

  “Yes, yes! Continue your walk with the Red guard. I will accomplish the impossible to save you. Courage, my friend.”

  I could not even look at the food they brought to me. The fear that Ivanof would not be able to reach the yacht put me in a cold sweat. Another afternoon went by. At sunset the Tchekist came down and lighted the yellow lantern in the corridor. I heard him chatting with a comrade. The guttural accents of their animated conversation were far from comprehensible to me. I pushed open the peep-hole with my finger and looked at them. They were laughing. All of a sudden they lowered their voices. Then they spoke more loudly, and enjoyed another laugh. One of them pointed in my direction. They both approached. I lay down quickly and trembled in the expectation of hearing the scraping of the lock. Two
men stopped on the threshold.

  My jailer’s companion looked me over with apparent interest. The conversation was resumed, more animated than before and punctuated with raucous laughter.

  I asked, hiding my frightful anguish, “No news, Comrade?”

  My jailer exchanged a few words with his companion and replied, “Ah! Where you are sitting now we can safely tell you the situation. You will be dead tonight so you won’t have much time for any indiscretion but you may be pleased to hear that you are the cause of a beautiful quarrel between Mouravieff and Chapinski.”

  “I?”

  “Yes, you! That’s why my comrade wanted to get a good look at you—Moscow has telegraphed to leave it to the local chief of the Tcheka as to what decision to make in your case. Mouravieff, of course, decided that you should die but she couldn’t manage that without Chapinski’s consent—and that’s what’s funny! Ha, ha ha!”

  The Tchekist slapped his friend on the back, almost exploded with joy and continued:

  “The Comrade Chapinski is willing enough to sign—provided that Mouravieff gives him—you know what I mean—all she has and everything else—ha, ha, ha!—but the trouble is that the lady doesn’t want Chapinski and I can easily understand that. His face is enough to turn skimmed milk sour.”

  “And what then?”

  “Well, they had a terrible discussion. Mouravieff, who isn’t afraid of man or God, smashed her would-be admirer on the head with her cane with the result that he left the office, refusing to sign your death warrant.”

  “And what will be the outcome?”

  “As far as you are concerned, it makes no difference. Mouravieff will go over his head, that’s all. There is no chance for you. If Chapinski had the backing of Moscow, he would spare you for no other reason than to annoy Mouravieff. You see how things are, and I made it my business to tell you ahead of time because you don’t seem to be a bad sort of fellow. Now, you won’t be surprised when we come to take you out along about ten o’clock tonight.”