LIGHT BREATHING

In the graveyard, over the fresh clayey mound, stands a new cross of oak,—strong, heavy, smooth,—of the sort that is pleasant to contemplate.

It is April, but the days are raw; the monuments of the graveyard—a spacious, truly provincial one,—can be seen through the bare trees even from afar, and the chill wind makes the porcelain wreath at the foot of the cross tinkle again and again.

As for the cross itself,—a rather large bronze medallion has been set into it; while in the medallion is a photographic portrait of a well dressed and alluring high-school girl, with eyes joyous, strikingly alive.

This is Olliya Meshcherskaya.

As a girl she did not in any way stand out among that noisy crowd of short brown dresses which so discordantly and youthfully hums in the corridors and class-rooms; what could be said of her save that she was one of a number of rather pretty, wealthy, and happy girls, that she was bright, but mischievous and very much unconcerned about whatever admonitions were made to her by an instructress? Then she began to blossom out, to develop, not by the day but by the hour. At fourteen, while her waist was slender and her little feet graceful, she already had well-defined breasts and all those contours, the enchantment of which human speech has never yet expressed; at fifteen she was famed as a beauty. How painstakingly did certain of her mates dress their hair, how meticulous about their persons they were, how carefully watchful of their restrained motions! But she feared nothing,—neither ink spots on her fingers, nor a flushed face, nor disheveled hair, nor a knee bared in a running fall. Without any cares or efforts on her part, and somehow imperceptibly, to her came all that which distinguished her from all the rest of the high-school during her last two years there,—elegance, good taste in dress, cleverness, a radiant, yet an understanding sparkle in her eyes. No one danced like Olliya Meshcherskaya; no one raced on skates as well as she did; no one was sought after at balls as much as she; and, for some reason, no one was so liked by the lower grades as she was. Imperceptibly, she became a young lady, and imperceptibly her fame in school became secure; and there were already rumours that she was inconstant, that she could not live without admirers; that Shenshin, a student in the boys’ high-school, was madly in love with her; that apparently she was also in love with him, but so changeable in her treatment of him that he had made attempts at suicide....

During her last winter, Olliya Meshcherskaya lost her head entirely from her pursuit of pleasure,—so they said in the high-school. The winter was snowy, sunny, frosty; the sun sank early behind the tall fir grove of the snow-covered school garden, but it was invariably serene, many-rayed, holding forth a promise of both frost and sunlight for the morrow as well; to say nothing of strolling through Cathedral Street, of skating at the rink in the city park on a rose-tinged evening, to music, and amid this throng gliding in all directions, among which Olliya Meshcherskaya seemed the best dressed, the freest from care, the happiest. And then one day, during the main interval, as she was careering like a whirlwind through the assembly hall escaping from the little girls of the first grade who were pursuing her and squealing for joy, she was unexpectedly summoned to the directress. She stopped in full career; giving a single deep sigh, with a rapid and by now accustomed movement she put her hair in order, hitched up the little corners of her apron at the shoulders, and, her eyes radiant, ran upstairs. The directress, a small woman, young looking but gray haired, was calmly sitting with some knitting in her hands, at a writing table underneath a portrait of the Tsar.

“How do you do, Mlle. Meshcherskaya,” she said in French, without raising her eyes from the knitting. “It is to be regretted that this is not the first time I am compelled to summon you here, in order to speak to you about your conduct.”

“I am listening, Madame,” answered Meshcherskaya, approaching the table, looking at her radiantly and in animation, but without any expression on her face, and she sat down with that lightness and grace of which only she was mistress.

“You will listen but badly to me,—I have, it is to be regretted, become convinced of that,” said the directress, and drawing a thread and making the ball of wool roll over the polished floor, upon which Meshcherskaya had cast a glance of curiosity, she raised her eyes: “I shall not repeat myself; I shall not speak at length,” she said.

Meshcherskaya liked very much this unusually tidy and large study; on frosty days its atmosphere was so cozy from the warmth of the glistening Dutch stove, and the freshness of the lilies-of-the-valley upon the writing table. She glanced at the young Tsar, drawn at full length in the midst of some resplendently glittering hall; at the straight parting of the milky, neatly waved hair of the directress, and kept an expectant silence.

“You are no longer a little girl,” said the directress with much significance, secretly beginning to grow irritated.

“Yes, Madame,” answered Meshcherskaya simply, almost gaily.

“But not yet a woman,” said the directress with still greater significance, and her dull-coloured face began to glow slightly. “First of all,—what sort of a coiffure is that? That is a woman’s coiffure!”

“Madame, I am not to blame if I have nice hair,” answered Meshcherskaya, giving the slightest of pats with both hands to her attractively dressed head.

“Ah, so that is it,—you are not to blame!” said the directress. “You are not to blame for your coiffure, nor to blame for these expensive combs, nor to blame for ruining your parents with buying little slippers at twenty roubles!⁠[1] But, I repeat to you, you lose sight of the fact that as yet you are only a high-school girl....”

And at this point, Meshcherskaya, without losing her simplicity and calmness, suddenly interrupted her with politeness:

“Pardon me, Madame, you are making a mistake: I am a woman. And—do you know who is responsible for this? Papa’s friend and neighbour, and also your brother, Alexei Mikhailovich Maliutin. This happened last summer in the country....”

And a month after this conversation an officer of the Cossacks, homely and of plebeian appearance, having absolutely nothing in common with that circle to which Meshcherskaya belonged, shot her on the platform of a railroad station, among a large crowd which had just arrived with the train. And the incredible confession of Olliya Meshcherskaya, which had dumbfounded the directress, was fully confirmed; the officer had declared to the examining magistrate that Meshcherskaya had enticed him, had had a liaison with him, had sworn to be his wife; but at the depot, on the day of the murder, when she was seeing him off to Novocherkassk, she had suddenly told him that she had never even as much as thought of loving him, that their talks about marriage were all merely a mockery of him, and she let him read that page in her diary which dealt with Maliutin.

“I ran over these lines, went out on the platform where she was promenading, waiting till I should finish reading, and shot her,” said the officer. “The diary remained in the pocket of my uniform coat; just glance at what was written on it on the tenth of July of last year.”

And the examining magistrate read something approximately as follows:

“It is now two o’clock at night. I had fallen fast asleep, but had immediately awakened.... This day I have become a woman! Papa, mamma, and Tolliya had all gone to the city, and I was left alone. I cannot express how happy I was over being alone! In the morning I strolled by myself in the garden, in the fields; I was in the forest,—it seemed to me that I was all alone in the entire universe, and my thoughts were more pleasant than they have ever before been in my life. I even dined alone, then I played for a whole hour; to the sounds of the music I felt as if I would live without end and would be as happy as never before! Then I fell asleep in papa’s study. And at four Katiya woke me up, saying that Alexei Mikhailovich had arrived. I was very glad he had come; it was so pleasant for me to receive and entertain him. He had driven up on his pair of very handsome horses, of a special small breed, and they stood all the time near the steps; but he remained, because it had been raining, and he wanted the ground to be dry toward evening. He was very sorry that he had not caught father in, was very animated, and bore himself like a gallant toward me; he joked a lot about having been in love with me for a long time. When we were strolling before tea in the garden, the weather was splendid again, the sun glistened through the entire wet garden, although it had become really downright chilly, and he walked about with my arm through his, and said that he was Faust with Marguerite. He is fifty-six, but he is still very handsome, and always very well dressed,—the only thing I did not like was that he had come in a kind of cape; he is all scented with English eau-de-cologne, and his eyes are altogether young,—and black; and his beard is attractively divided in two long parts and is perfectly silvery. At tea we sat in the glass enclosed veranda; I felt somehow unwell and laid down upon a low couch, while he smoked; then he changed his seat to where I was, and again began telling me some nice things; then to examine and kiss my hand. I covered my face with a silk handkerchief, and he kissed me several times on the lips through the handkerchief.... I cannot understand how it could have, happened; I lost my mind, I never thought that I was that kind! Now there is only one way out for me.... I feel such loathing for him, that I cannot live through this!...”

The town during these April days has become clean, dry, its stones have grown white, and it is easy and pleasant to walk over them. Every Sunday, after mass, a little woman in mourning, in black kid gloves, with an ebony umbrella, starts out walking through Cathedral Street, which leads to the city gates. She passes by the engine house, crosses, by means of a paved road, the dirty square where there are many sooty smithies, and the air from the fields is blowing fresher; farther on, between the monastery and the jail, the cloudy horizon shows white, and the spring fields gray; and then, when one has treaded his way among the puddles under the wall of the monastery and turns to the left, one sees something like a large, low garden, surrounded by a white enclosure, above the gates of which enclosure is painted the Assumption of the Mother of God. The little woman rapidly makes a sign of the cross several times, and like one who knows the way walks through the main path. Having reached the bench opposite the cross of oak, she sits in the wind and the spring chillness, for an hour, for two hours, until her feet in their light shoes and her hands in their tight kid gloves grow entirely benumbed. Listening to the birds of spring, sweetly singing even in the cold, listening to the tinkling of the wind through the porcelain wreath, she thinks at times that she would give half her life, if only that dead wreath might not be before her eyes. The thought that it was Olliya Meshcherskaya whom they had buried here, in this very clay, throws her into astonishment verging on stupefaction: how can one associate that sixteen year old school girl, who only some two or three months ago was so full of life, enchantment, gaiety, with this clayey hummock, and this oaken cross? Can it be possible that underneath it is the same girl whose eyes shine so deathlessly out of this bronze medallion, and how reconcile with this pure gaze that dreadful thing which is connected now with the name of Olliya Meshcherskaya? But deep in her soul the little woman is happy, as all people in love, or devoted to some passionate idea in general, always are.

This woman is a teacher of Olliya Meshcherskaya, a girl of over thirty, who has long lived upon some fiction or other that supplants her actual life. At first her brother, a poor ensign and in no way remarkable, was such a fiction,—all her soul was bound up with him, with his future, which for some reason appeared to her brilliant, and she lived in a strange expectancy, that her fate would somehow change magically, thanks to him. Later, when he was killed at Mukden, she assured herself, that she, to her great good fortune, it would seem, was not like others; that the lack of beauty and femininity were in her case compensated for by brains and higher interests; that she was a toiler in the world of ideas. The death of Olliya Meshcherskaya captivated her with a new dream. Now Olliya Meshcherskaya is an object of her ceaseless thoughts, of rapture, of joy. She goes to Olliya’s grave on every holiday,—she had formed the habit of going to the graveyard and of wearing mourning since the death of her brother. For hours she does not take her eyes off the oaken cross; she recalls the pale little face of Olliya Meshcherskaya in her coffin, among the flowers—and also that which she had once happened to overhear: once, during the main recess, strolling through the school garden, Olliya Meshcherskaya was saying, all in one breath, to her favourite mate,—the stout, tall Subottina:

“In one of papa’s books,—he has a lot of old-fashioned funny books,—I read what sort of beauty a woman ought to have ... you understand, there is so much said there that one can’t remember everything: well, of course, black eyes, like boiling pitch,—honest to God, it is written just so!—like boiling pitch,—eye-lashes as black as night; a softly mantling blush, a slender waist, a hand longer than the ordinary,—you understand, longer than the ordinary!—a little foot, a moderately large bosom, a regularly rounded calf, a knee the colour of a sea-shell, sloping—but high—shoulders.... I learned most of this by heart, that’s how true all this is! But do you know what the chief thing is?—Light breathing!... But then, I have it,—you just listen how I sigh,—really, haven’t I got it?”

Now this light breathing has been scattered anew upon the universe, upon this cloud-covered sky, upon this chill spring wind....

1916.