by John Jakes
Little Anton’s voice made him think of his promise to marry Dolly. He’d fulfill that promise. Stop wallowing in self-pity; stop speculating about whether things would have come out differently if Fochet had remembered to speak to her. The promise had been given. Besides, a part of him did want to go through with it.
But another part of him felt deep regret—the part that would be squeezed and shorted.
He heard Fochet.
A priesthood.
Priests are celibate for a very good reason. They can’t successfully serve both God and the flesh.
I’ve seen such a choice tear many a talented young fellow apart—
Goddamn it, if Fochet had only spoken to her!
Ah, what was the use? That was past. Finished.
The whole confused situation seemed summed up in two facts. He thought the Matamoras painting was the best work he’d ever done. And he had to leave it behind.
v
Before he and Dolly and the Strelniks set off through the darkness, Matt apologized to Madame Rochambeau for the trouble they’d caused. He gave her half of his remaining money—a decent sum—and she lapsed into maudlin murmurings of regret about their departure. Matt didn’t tell her they were going to the Gare du Nord. When the police called, as they surely would, she could honestly deny any knowledge of their destination.
She was so agreeable now, she readily consented to carry a message to a woman who worked at the Café Guerbois. She did say she hoped the message had nothing to do with Mr. Strelnik’s subversive interests or the mysterious turmoil of the past couple of days.
“No, it’s personal, not political,” Matt assured her. “Just tell her I said the obnoxious German customer would never bother her again. She’ll be pleased to hear it. She’ll probably give you a complimentary carafe of wine.”
“She will?” Madame Rochambeau’s brows shot up. “Perhaps I’ll take my friend Alice when I go.”
She dabbed her eyes. “I must say, Mr. Kent, you’re really a very—a very nice young man—for an American. But you certainly do get involved in some curious affairs.”
He smiled to hide hurt. “I do, don’t I? Not always on purpose, though. Goodbye, Madame Rochambeau.”
Chapter XII
Sanctuary
i
A NIGHT LOCAL carried them northwestward. Amiens, Boulogne, Calais. Matt was still feeling the physical and emotional effects of the struggle in the tenement. The memory of it was clear enough to start him shivering and bring Dolly’s hand over to clasp his.
The two of them were sharing one of the benches in a second-class compartment. Strelnik and his wife sat opposite. Anton was a blanketed bundle in his mother’s lap. Both parents were unusually quiet, and Strelnik’s face had lost its earlier enthusiasm. Had grown somber, in fact. Matt wondered if the little man was contemplating the family’s troubled past or its doubtful future. Either way, he felt sorry for his friend.
Repeatedly, his thoughts returned to the Rue Cujas. To stop it, he rested his forehead against the compartment’s outer wall, shut his eyes, tried to doze. It proved easier than he’d expected. Suddenly he was in the midst of a dream fully as vivid as his memories of Lepp’s pied-à-terre.
He saw a foul, littered room and a zinc-topped table on which Dolly lay with her skirt twisted above her legs. She wore nothing else below the waist.
A wizened woman in her seventies appeared. She had one filmy white eye and no teeth. She held a knife up near the unshielded gaslight, a huge, triangular-bladed knife that flashed like a sheet of silver. A knife for slicing bread, chopping meat—or helping girls in trouble.
Coming half awake, he tried to yell. He couldn’t break free of the nightmare. A shadowy assistant grabbed Dolly’s wrists, yanked her arms back over her head so she couldn’t interfere with the old woman, who first tested the knife’s point with her thumb and then pushed Dolly’s pale legs apart.
Dolly’s mouth came open. She screamed without sound. Matt started to flail. It did no good; no one paid the slightest attention. The old woman held Dolly’s legs open with one hand and, with the other, slowly and expertly inserted the knife up into—
Crying out, he bolted upright. He snapped his head away from the wall so hard that he hurt his neck. His eyes felt wet.
Dolly clutched his arm. “What’s wrong, Matt? You were groaning and making the most awful faces—a bad dream?”
“Yes, a nasty one.”
“What about?”
“Why, ah—” He rubbed his face. “The Prussian.”
He apologized to the Strelniks, then looked into her eyes. The compartment lamps had been extinguished, but this far north, there were no more rainclouds, and moonlight flooded through the dirt-streaked window onto her face.
He whispered to her, “As soon as we’re in England—the moment we get up to London—I want us to be married.”
A curious, apprehensive light filled her eyes. “Are you sure you mean that?”
“Sure,” he said after a pause so slight it might not have been a pause at all.
Dolly glanced at Leah Strelnik, who smiled at her almost like an approving mother. Dolly squeezed Matt’s hand and leaned against his shoulder as the train rattled on through the silver-and-black night toward the sea.
ii
As dawn broke, a pair of provincial policemen surveyed the passengers boarding the ferry at the Calais wharf. Matt didn’t know whether the police were watching for him or for someone else, but he took no chances. He hunched over to minimize his height and walked between Leah and Sime carrying Anton in his arms, just as if they were all part of a single family.
He went up the ferry gangplank, buffeted by the fierce wind blowing off the Channel. He wanted to look back at the phlegmatic policemen standing on the quay, arms folded and short capes snapping at their shoulders. He didn’t dare.
Presently the small steamer weighed anchor and turned into the whitecapped water. Matt got violently seasick on the rough trip across the Dover Strait. He still had a bilious countenance when he staggered off behind the others at Folkestone.
He hardly saw the little seaside village with its quaint cottages scattered over low hillsides. Strelnik fetched a pint of beer from a tavern near the rail depot. At first Matt couldn’t get any down. The Russian kept insisting it would brace him up. Matt took several small swallows, but it didn’t do much good. He was still feeling miserable when the train of sooty cars departed for London.
Once they reached the city Matt planned to head directly for James Whistler’s house at number seventeen Lindsey Row in Chelsea. During one of their conversations in Paris, the artist had once extended an invitation: Matt was welcome to drop in if he ever visited England. Certainly the painter wouldn’t be expecting four bedraggled people and a child to arrive on his doorstep. But Matt didn’t know where else to turn.
They arrived in the big, bustling city about three in the afternoon and located Lindsey Row about an hour later. A charming Irish lass with lovely dark red hair answered their knock. The girl obviously didn’t recognize Matt’s name. But she smiled, introduced herself as Jo Heffernan, and told them Whistler had gone for a stroll with his friend Rossetti. Matt was familiar with the name of the poet and painter, and with hers as well. She was the painter’s current mistress.
Yes, of course she could recommend a clean but inexpensive hotel. Soon the tired travelers were settled in two rooms just off Oxley Street, a couple of blocks north of the Thames and the busy Chelsea Embankment. Matt fell into a stuporous sleep practically at once and didn’t awake until noon the next day.
Feeling much better, he shaved, dressed and walked to Whistler’s. He received a warm and boisterous welcome from the little American, whose monocle reminded him unpleasantly of Lepp’s.
Whistler insisted Matt sit down and share a late breakfast of strong black coffee and stacks and stacks of the artist’s favorite buckwheat cakes. Naturally Whistler wanted to know the reason for Matt’s sudden arrival. The younger man said
he and Dolly had wanted a change of scene. His work had gone stale in Paris; ennui had set in. And Dolly was fretful about the war talk heard so often on the Continent of late.
The little artist, who was thirty-five or thirty-six, jammed a forkful of buckwheat cakes into his mouth, patted his lips with a napkin, and asked, “Is your stay going to be temporary or permanent?”
“Permanent, I think.”
“First-rate! We must start hunting for a suitable studio.”
Matt was unenthusiastic. “There’s no hurry.”
Whistler asked about the other couple Jo Heffernan had mentioned. Matt replied with a story about the Strelniks wanting better employment opportunity, here or in America.
The word brought a malicious grin to Whistler’s face. “Set ’em straight, Matty. England’s the only place. They don’t want to emigrate to the land of the free and the home of the gauche. Jo told me they looked like nice, honest people. If that’s true, they won’t be able to make a damn nickel back home.”
When Matt left Lindsey Row, he walked till he located a shop selling Paris newspapers. He bought one, the preceding evening’s edition. There was nothing in it about a murder.
Two days later, though—July 1—a brief story appeared. Colonel Gruen von Lepp, a military attaché connected with the Prussian diplomatic mission, had been found floating in the Seine near one of the piers of the Pont de l’Alma. The information had been released jointly by the Prussian ambassador and the French authorities, which indicated to Matt that the location and all the details of Lepp’s death had been cleaned up for public consumption. The concluding paragraph said no suspects were presently in custody, though an unidentified American art student was being sought for questioning.
Shivering, Matt threw the paper into a trash bin. How long would it take the police to follow the trail of his passport and track him to London?
iii
As it turned out, the police and all the other citizens of Paris soon had no interest in cooperating with the Prussians. On the second of July, late editions broke the very story that had led to the arrest of Yuri Strelnik and the harassment of his brother. The Spanish parliament, the Cortes, had adjourned without taking a vote on the candidacy of Prince Leopold Hohenzollern, and through an error on the part of a code clerk, word of the candidacy leaked. Matt often wondered later whether the clerk, like Yuri, was a member of an anti-Bismarck apparatus.
Just as Sime had predicted, the story was a political bombshell. French editorialists reacted with outrage. So did the foreign minister, Gramont. Unbelievably, he went so far as to say there would be a declaration of war unless the Prussians withdrew Prince Leopold from consideration by the Spaniards.
“I told you such matters were taken seriously!” Strelnik said. The young American just shook his head in amazement and horror.
The Prussians didn’t deny that Bismarck had been promoting Leopold’s candidacy at least since early spring. But the newspapers were soon full of dispatches from Berlin that were obviously designed to minimize the impact of the revelations. The Prince didn’t want the throne of Spain anyway, one story stated. He would refuse it unless he received contrary orders from his father, King William. Another dispatch said William was uninterested in the whole question. While London basked in bright summer weather and Matt’s memories of the Rue Cujas began to fade, it seemed for a little while that the whole affair might blow over.
Strelnik predicted otherwise. He warned Matt to hurry and write Fochet if he wanted his paints and the Matamoras picture crated and shipped while France was still at peace. “Don’t worry about giving the old man your address,” he said. “You don’t imagine the Sûreté’s going to lift a hand to find Lepp’s killer now, do you?”
Strelnik himself was agonizing about sending a telegraph message to Berlin. A message asking about Yuri. The little Russian claimed that the arrival of such a message might further compromise his brother. Hence, he hesitated. Matt suspected the real reason for the hesitation was fear of a grim reply.
Matt finally did mail a letter to Fochet. It certainly looked doubtful that the police would pursue him to England, considering the victim’s nationality and the comic-opera turns the diplomatic affair was taking.
The French ambassador, Count Benedetti, pursued King William to Ems, where the king was taking mineral bath treatments. Benedetti demanded that the Prussian monarch order Leopold to withdraw his candidacy. Ruffled, William publicly refused, despite widespread press speculation that a private order for the withdrawal would shortly be given if it hadn’t already.
Frightened by the specter of a unified Germany with a highly trained army at its disposal, the French weren’t satisfied. They wanted not only open apologies but open guarantees that no such plot to expand Prussian influence would be repeated in the future. King William rebelled and refused to grant all the demands, saying they were meant to humiliate the Prussian people. The King even refused to permit Benedetti to continue the discussion in his presence. That was the thirteenth of July.
The worsening crisis finally pushed Strelnik into sending a coded telegraph message to Berlin. The reply was, in a way, good news. Yuri Strelnik’s associates did not know what had happened to him. They had been trying to find out for days.
The message closed with mention of a rumor current in Berlin—one that the radicals felt should be communicated to the whole world. A telegraphic dispatch from Ems reporting Benedetti’s demands had supposedly been revised and expanded by Bismarck before its release for publication. The purpose was to make it seem as though the French demands had been even more insulting—and insultingly worded—than was actually the case. Thus, said Yuri’s friends, the power-mad Premier oiled the Prussian war machine and gave it a big push forward.
On the eighteenth of July a large crate and a second, smaller one arrived at Whistler’s residence. The artist put them into storage for their owner, who was vague about when he would remove them. Matt told Whistler that he’d lost interest in his work. The unfinished Matamoras canvas, safe in the large wooden box, no longer meant anything to him.
Whistler didn’t mince words. It was all very well for Matt to show this queer lethargy and to rant about giving up painting altogether. But he needed the space. All right, Matt said, he’d claim the things as soon as he found permanent quarters. The thought of searching for a studio was still unappealing, though. He preferred to spend the daylight hours just walking back and forth across the great city, or lounging in some pub, getting drunk. He didn’t admit all that to Whistler.
The same day that the crates arrived, a letter from Fochet was delivered to the hotel. First the teacher gave the pertinent shipping information, in case the crates had gotten lost. In his second paragraph he reported that a detective inspector had appeared at the atelier a week ago, inquiring after one of his students without explaining the reason for his interest. Fochet had told the policeman essentially the truth—he never kept track of the whereabouts of his pupils. The inspector hadn’t returned. Fochet hoped the foregoing made some sense to Matt, because it made none to him.
Then Fochet went on to talk briefly about the unbelievable political situation. The artistic community was polarized and in an uproar over the talk of war. Wanting to avoid possible conscription, Matt’s friend Paul had already left the city with his mistress. Meantime Renoir was telling everyone that he hoped to be drafted, preferably for a cuirassier regiment. Such madness! Fochet said.
Matt agreed. But evidently a great segment of the North European population was afflicted with the madness. On the nineteenth of July, over what some called no more than a matter of protocol, France declared war on Prussia, and the Emperor’s troops prepared to take the field against the armies of General Moltke.
Matt and Dolly learned of the war declaration late that night, when they returned to the hotel after a series of frantic visits to various government departments. They had spent the day taking care of the last requirements for a marriage in Britain.
M
att was tired and not in any mood to hear about a war. Europe was no better—no more rational—than his own country. It was disillusioning and even infuriating to realize that.
He was in a bad mood for personal reasons. Certain secret thoughts produced intense guilt feelings. Yet the thoughts persisted. He knew it was necessary to marry Dolly, but he’d lost his enthusiasm for it. And more and more often he found himself thinking of the forthcoming ceremony as some kind of execution. Painless, but an execution nonetheless.
iv
On the twenty-second of July, Matt and Dolly were married by an Anglican priest. The ceremony took place at St. James’s, the little Wren church on Piccadilly. Strelnik and his wife stood up for the couple. Whistler and the lovely Jo were present as well.
The newlyweds treated their friends to a fine supper at a splendid fish restaurant in nearby St. James’s Street. But they’d planned no honeymoon. It seemed superfluous. Besides, after buying the meal and the wine, Matt was nearly broke. Paying hotel bills and living expenses for the penniless Strelniks had been a big drain on his carefully budgeted allowance. He’d already written his father for an advance on the funds for the next six months. He hoped the money would arrive soon.
Matt saw Dolly was uncomfortable as they left the restaurant and put Whistler and Jo into a hack. He finally got Dolly to admit she was suffering from cramps undoubtedly caused by the pregnancy. He spent his last few shillings on a second hack to carry them back to the hotel. He helped her undress, put her to bed, kissed her forehead and laughingly dismissed her worried statements that she’d ruined the most important night of their lives.
He sat beside her in the twilight until she fell asleep. Then he went downstairs, overwhelmed again by the mental malaise that seemed to be his lot these days.
He found Strelnik seated in the hotel’s tiny lobby. The Russian had his hands pressed against his knees and his eyes focused on a blank wall opposite his chair. Matt punched his shoulder.
