face to face with that strange and mournful figure, now that I have heard her story from her own pale lips, I am moved by the puissant impulse of art, which takes no heed of learned theory or ethical code, to narrate in these pages the profound impression made upon me by that tragic personality, by the story of that broken life.
I have endeavored to do so with faithfulness, exaggerating nothing, coloring nothing, extenuating nothing. It will be for the pontiffs of science and morals to achieve the more complex task of drawing conclusions and establishing theories that may one day diminish injustice and suffering in the world.
I
Ed or, che Dio mi tolga la memoria.
The verdant landscape of Tuscany swung past the train that carried me southward. The looped vineyards—like slim, green dancers holding hands—fled backwards as we passed, and the rays of the March sun pursued us, beating hotly through the open windows on the dusty red velvet cushions of the carriage.
Soon the train was throbbing and panting out of Pisa, and the barefooted children of the Roman Campagna stood to gaze after us, with eyes soft and wild under their sullen hair.
Since leaving the station of Genoa I had seen nothing of the fleeting springtide landscape; my gaze and thoughts were riveted on the pages of a copy-book which lay open on my knee—a simple school copy-book with innocent blue-lined sheets originally intended to contain the carefully labored scrawls of some childish hand. A blue ornamental flourish decked the front; and under the printed title, “Program of Lessons,” the words “History,” “Geography,” “Arithmetic,” were followed by a series of blank spaces for the hours to be filled in. Alas, for the tragic pupil to whom this book belonged, in what school of horror had she learned the lesson traced on these pages by her slim, white hand—the fair patrician hand which had known the weight of many jewels, the thrill of many caresses, and was now held fast in the merciless grip of captivity.
I turned the page: before me lay a flow of pale penciled words in a sloping handwriting. At every turn the flourish of some strange seignorial name met my eye: long Russian names of prince, of lover or of murderer. On every page was the convulsion of death or the paroxysm of passion; wine and morphia, chloral and cocaine surged across the pallid sheets, like the wash of a nightmare sea.
From the midst of those turbid billows—like some ineffable modern Aphrodite—rose the pale figure of Marie Nicolaevna Tarnowska.
The first words—traced by her trembling hand in the prison at Venice—are almost childish in their simplicity.
“When I was eight years old, I fell ill with measles and almost lost my eyesight. I wore blue spectacles. I was very happy. My mother loved me very much; so did my father. So did the servants. Everybody loved me very much.”
I pause in my reading, loth to proceed. I wish I could stop here with the little girl whom every one loved and who gazed out through her blue spectacles at a rose-colored world.
Ah! Marie Nicolaevna, had your luminous eyes remained for all time hidden behind those dim blue glasses, no one to-day would raise his voice in execration of you, nor call anathema upon your fair bowed head.
But when the little Russian countess was twelve years old an oculist from Kieff ordered that her eyes should be uncovered, and “Mura,” as her parents fondly called her, looked out upon the world with those clear light eyes that were one day to penetrate the darkest depths of crime.
I continue to read without stopping. The serried pages, scrawled feverishly and hurriedly in the cells of La Giudecca in defiance of prison rules, are in thin handwriting, with names and dates harshly underlined; but here and there whole sentences are struck out, as if the writer's memory wavered, or her feelings altered as she wrote.
Immediately, on the very first page, the bold figure of young Vassili Tarnowsky confronts us: the radiant, temerarious lover, who came to woo her in her marveling adolescence.
“His voice thrilled the heart like the tones of a violoncello; in his eyes were the lights of heaven, in his smile all the promises of love. I was already seventeen years old, and wise beyond my years. But, sagacious as I thought myself, I could never believe anything that was told me against Vassili. My eyes saw nothing but his beauty. On the twelfth day of April I ran away from home with him; and we were married in a little church far away on the desolate steppes. I never thought that life could hold such joy.”
But on the very next page we come face to face with the astounding list of Vassili's perfidies: a musical enumeration of feminine names which rings the knell of his child-wife's happiness. “I never thought,” writes Marie Tarnowska simply, “that life could hold such sorrow.”
Further on there are gaps and incoherences; here and there a passing efflorescence of literary phrase, or a sudden lapse into curt narrative, as if a wave of apathy had suddenly submerged the tragic heroine and left in her place only a passive narrator of fearful events. Now and then even a note of strident humor is struck, more poignant, more painful than pathos.
Ever and anon there appears throughout the funereal story—as if smiling out through the window of a charnel-house—the innocent face of a child: Tioka. He is all bright curls and laughter. Unaware of the carnage that surrounds him, he runs with light, quick feet through pools of blood to nestle in the gentle maternal breast which for him is all purity and tenderness.
As I read on and on the writing trembles and wavers, as if the hand and the heart of the writer wearied of their task. With a sudden break the sad story closes, unfinished, incomplete.
“If I could tell of the tears I have shed, if I could describe the anguish I have suffered, I am sure that pity would be shown to me. Surely if the world knew of my torment and my sufferings—”
Nothing more. Thus abruptly the tragic manuscript ends.
The train slackens speed, falters, shivers—stops. I am at Trani; at the furthermost end of Italy; almost beyond civilization; almost out of the world.
Soon I shall see before me the woman I have come so far to seek: the woman who never gave the gift of love without the gift of death.
The high white walls of the penitentiary glared down in the blazing southern sun. The languid Adriatic trailed its blue silken waters past the barred windows. I raised the heavy knocker; it fell from my hand with a reverberating clang, and the massive prison-door opened slowly before me.
The Mother Superior and two gentle-looking Sisters fluttered—black and white and timid as swallows—across the sunlit courtyard. They were expecting me.
“She whom you seek is in the chapel,” said the Mother Superior, in a low voice. “I will call her!” She left us. The two Sisters accompanied me up a broad stone staircase to a small waiting-room. Then they stood quietly beside me; and when I looked at them, they smiled.
In the silence that followed I could hear women's voices singing in the prison chapel, simple, untutored voices, clear and shrill:
“Kyrie eleison
Christe eleison…”
and the low notes of the organ rolled beneath the treble voices, full and deep;
“Mater purissima
Mater inviolata…”
“Number 315—that is the Countess Marie,” said one of the two Sisters, “plays the organ for the other prisoners. She plays every day at noon and evensong.”
“And at four o'clock in the morning,” added the other Sister.
(How far, how far away, Marie Nicolaevna, are the passionate days of Moscow, the glowing, unslept nights of Venice!)
“Rosa mystica
Stella matutina…”
Suddenly the music ceased and we stood waiting in the hot, white silence. Then the door opened, and on the threshold stood Marie Tarnowska—the murderess, the devastating spirit,