The Hippodrome Part 22

"Shall I read to you?" he asked. "Ah! I'd forgotten there was something I wanted to tell you. I found a poem the other day, a love-song of De Musset. Do you know that you lived in this very city years ago, Fatalite, and he saw you and loved you? How else could he have written this?

"_Avez-vous vu en Barcelone, Une Andalouse au sein bruni, Pale comme un beau soir d'Automne, C'est ma maitresse, ma lionne, La Marchesa d'Amagui._"

Arith.e.l.li listened, her eyes dilating, and a little flame of colour creeping up under the magnolia skin that made her likeness to the woman of the poem. Her awakening senses thrilled to the eager voice, the riotous challenging words:

"_J'ai fait bien de chansons pour elle_."

He broke off abruptly and continued: "I hate all the rest of it. The woman isn't like you, further on, and the lover laughs at his own pa.s.sion, and the whole thing jars. That first verse haunted me for days after I'd read it."--The sentence was finished by a convulsive fit of coughing, which he vainly tried to stifle.

"This is the first time to-day," he gasped, between the paroxysms.

"I'm quite well really. It's the cigarette. They often have that effect. Don't look so worried, or I shall think you hate me for being a nuisance."

"If you talk so foolishly I shall go."

She made an attempt to rise, but Vardri caught at her skirts. "You won't go! You don't want to make me worse, do you? Think how sorry you'll be if I cough and worry you all the evening!"

"Can't I get you anything? If only I were not so stupid about illness.

Don't try to talk if it makes you worse."

"I won't--if you'll stay."

To Arith.e.l.li caresses did not come easily, but during the last few weeks she had learnt many things. She stroked the dark head that rested against her knee, wondering how it was that she had never before noticed till to-day how feverishly brilliant Vardri's eyes were, and how his skin burnt. She had often heard him coughing before, but he had always gone away and left her when an attack came on, with some laughing excuse about the horrible noise he made. After a while he shifted his position, and smiled up at her.

"You're getting tired, Fatalite!"

"No. Tell me, have you anything important to do to-night?"

"No, dear, and if I had I shouldn't do it. Do you feel well enough to come out and have dinner with me somewhere? I'll take you to some place where it's quiet."

"Why not let us stay here all the evening, and have supper together?"

Arith.e.l.li suggested. "We'll take Emile's things. He loves cooking _cochonneries_, and there is sure to be a _quelque chose_ somewhere in the cupboard."

Vardri scrambled to his feet. "_Bon_! Sit still, and I'll go and _acheter les_--things! We'll leave Emile's _cochonneries_ alone. I'm rich now, so we will have luxuries."

"Yes, and I'll hunt for plates and dishes, and wash them properly (not like the Gentiles do) while you go and _acheter les_--things!"

Arith.e.l.li mocked. "What a dreadful mixture of languages we all use! I used to speak German quite well when I was at the convent, but now I have forgotten nearly all of it. This place is bad for both one's French and English, and Emile says that when I try and speak Spanish it sounds like someone sawing wood."

Vardri went out still coughing, and came back flushed and excitable, laden with various untidy parcels, from which some of the contents were protruding. Long rolls, the materials for a salad, a _pate_, flowers, and an enormous cl.u.s.ter of grapes. They pledged each other in the yellow wine of the country, and presently Vardri set about the manufacture of what he inaccurately described as Turkish coffee. That the result of his efforts was half cold and evil-tasting mattered not to either of them.

Arith.e.l.li's red hair was crowned with vine leaves that he had stripped from the grape-cl.u.s.ter and twisted into a Bacchante wreath. She leant her elbow on the table, resting her chin upon her hand. Her eyes glowed jewel-like, almost the same colour as her garland. The flame of love had melted into warmth her statue-like coldness, and given her the one thing she had lacked--expression. Yet the mystery, the charm that surrounded her clung to her even when she appeared most womanly. To the boy lover gazing with devouring eyes she seemed that night more than a woman. He thought of the tales he had heard as a child from the peasants on winter nights in his own country. Tales of the forests and legends of the Hartz Mountains, of lonely places haunted by nixies and wood maidens, fairy shapes with streaming hair and vaporous robes, seeing which a man would become for ever after mad with longing, and desire no mortal woman.

Arith.e.l.li's long limbs appeared nymphlike in her plain blue high-waisted gown of Emile's choosing, that had no superfluous bow or tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, and left free her beauty of outline. She possessed no jewellery now wherewith to deck herself, and there was no trace of artificial red on face and lips.

The candles on the table flickered to and fro in the draught from the open window and she shivered in the midst of some laughing speech and glanced over her shoulder at the door behind her.

Vardri, reading her thoughts, said, "You're afraid of something, dear, what is it?"

"Nothing, at least I thought someone was listening, was coming in. We are always talking of spies till one gets absurdly nervous and imagines all sorts of foolish things. I have never said so to anyone else, but there is always the feeling of being watched. It is so difficult to know who is for and who against us, and so easy to give evidence without meaning to be a traitor. Just before I got ill, Sobrenski sent me to a little newspaper shop down in the Parelelo quarter. I was to ask if they sold '_Le Flambeau_.' The man looked at me hard and asked if there was any connection between that journal and the one published at number 27 Calle de Pescadores. The sun must have made me feel stupid, and I answered _Yes_, without thinking. I had taken it for granted that the man was one of us, and then I knew suddenly that he wasn't."

Vardri bent forward across the table. "Did you tell anyone what you had said?"

"Not Sobrenski; I told Emile. He looked me up and down, and said something that I couldn't hear, and then, 'I thought you could hold your tongue, Fatalite. It seems, after all, you are a woman and can't!' and then he walked out of the room. Vardri, did you ever feel as I do when you first began to work for the Cause? Perhaps one gets used to it in the end and doesn't care."

"Yes," the boy answered between his teeth, "Yes! One gets used to it.

Dear, your hands are trembling. Do you think anyone can hurt you while I'm here? You are nervous because you've been ill, that's all. This is the first time you've been out and you are overtired. I'll take you back soon. You were all right a few minutes ago. You thing of moods!"

She tried to smile, "I warned you, _mon ami_."

"I know. It wasn't any use. That wreath makes you look like the statue of Ariadne in Rome."

"I wish you would talk to me about yourself."

"Myself!" Vardri shrugged expressively, "_Ma foi_!"

"Tell me what made you join the Cause."

"Because of a man I believed in. You have heard of Guerchouni who died early in the year? There was a great funeral in Paris. It was in all the papers."

Arith.e.l.li nodded, "Yes, I heard the men talking about it at one of the meetings. I wasn't interested enough to listen then. Was he--?"

"He was one of our greatest leaders. His death meant something to me, because it was really through him that I joined the Red Flag. He had a life sentence in Eastern Siberia and he escaped from there and got to America. For some time none of us knew exactly where he was, and then we heard rumours that he was dangerously ill at Geneva. Then came news of his death and his funeral in Paris. His friends had decided to bring the body there, so that all the comrades might be present, for there are many anarchists in Paris. They gave him a guard of honour of Russian students, men and women surrounding the coffin with linked hands, and there were hundreds of red roses and red carnations, though it was in the winter--there had been snow on the ground a few days before. There was a crown of thorns from those who had been his companions in prison, and the canopy of the hea.r.s.e was a red flag. If only I could have been there to do him homage!

"There are all sorts of wild stories about his escape from Siberia. I suppose he bewitched the jailers as he bewitched other men. He was the first man I ever heard speak about the Cause. He came to Vienna and held meetings for the propaganda and collected enormous crowds. I had just begun to take life seriously then, to think about things and to hate injustice.

"My father drank and wasted money and treated his servants brutally.

My mother was dead, and when she was alive she was an invalid, and could do nothing. Most of the people I knew seemed to think the serfs no better than animals. I remember how sometimes when we were starting off in the early morning for a boar hunt in the forest, they would come begging and whining round the horses' heels.

"They seldom got anything except a kick or a curse. They looked scarcely human, yet it was ourselves who were the brutes really.

"Well, Guerchouni spoke and I went and listened to him. A friend with whom I had gone to the meetings gave me an introduction to him. I was mad on the Cause long before the interview was over. He was a man that! If he had looked at me twice, I would have walked through flames to please him. Oh, I wasn't the only one! We all felt like that more or less with Guerchouni. I couldn't describe him. He was not a tall man, but he carried himself well, and he was dark and pale with wonderful blazing eyes. One knew him at once, and talked as if one had known him for years.

"Of course I accepted all his theories and doctrines except two. I don't believe in '_L'Union fibre_.' (They all do, you know, or nearly all) and I never was an atheist.

"A Catholic and an Anarchist! It sounds impossible, doesn't it, but"--he flushed boyishly--"I believe in _Le bon Dieu_, and the _union libre_ is hard on women. Yes, I adored Guerchouni. He worked day and night, he feared nothing, he did impossibilities himself and he made us do impossibilities."

"He was like Sobrenski."

"Yes, he was like Sobrenski in some ways. He will be a loss to the Cause."

For a few moments there was silence, and then Arith.e.l.li spoke. "Tell me one more thing. Now we are alone, we can speak the truth to each other, you and I. Vardri, do you still care for the Cause--in the same way you did before?" She whispered the question fearfully, yet knowing well what the answer must be.

"I don't feel the same about it since I have known you."

"I have not tried to make you a traitor, have I? Sobrenski always suspects me of that."

"My sweet, you have done nothing. I love you, therefore I must feel differently about the Cause. Why? Because I'm afraid of it for you.

Because these men have no consideration for you as a woman, because they always make you take the greatest risks. It is always so in this work. Look what happens to the women in Russia. When there is a political 'Execution' there, nine times out of ten it is a woman who throws the bomb. Look at the things they have done lately. At the printing office we see all the anarchist journals, and the comrades get news privately. The men do little in risking their lives compared to the women, and some of them are so young. An article in '_Les temps Nouveaux_' of last week said that, '_beside the men these young girls are as artistes beside artisans_.' The last case was Sophia Pervesky.

She was arrested for being in charge of a secret printing-press.