Part 22 (1/2)

Pleasant times. Also misunderstandings, as she called them. (She changed this, in time, to ”conversations.”) Chilly spells, breakups, near breakups, sudden geniality. A b.u.mpy trip around Europe, presenting themselves, openly and scandalously, as lovers.

She sometimes wondered whether he had other women. She herself toyed with the idea of marrying a German who paid court to her. But the German was far too punctilious, and she suspected him of wanting a hausfrau. Also, she was not in love with him. Her blood ran cooler and cooler as he spoke the scrupulous German words of love.

Maksim, once he had heard of this honorable courts.h.i.+p, said that she had better marry himself. Provided, he said, that she could be comfortable with what he had to offer. He pretended to be talking about money, when he said this. To be comfortable with his wealth was of course a joke. To be comfortable with a tepid, courteous offering of feeling, ruling out the disappointments and scenes which had mostly originated with her-that was another matter altogether.

She took refuge in teasing, letting him think she believed him not to be in earnest, and no more was decided. But when she was back in Stockholm she thought herself a fool. And so she had written to Julia, before she went south at Christmas, that she did not know whether she was going to happiness or sorrow. She meant that she would declare herself in earnest and find out if he was. She had prepared herself for the most humiliating disappointment.

She had been spared that. Maksim was after all a gentleman and he kept to his word. They would be married in the spring. That decided, they became more comfortable with each other than since the very beginning. Sophia behaved well, with no sulks or outbursts. He expected some decorum, but not the decorum of the hausfrau. He would never object, as a Swedish husband might, to her cigarettes and endless tea drinking and political outbursts. And she was not displeased to see that when his gout bothered him he could be as unreasonable, as irritating and self-pitying, as herself. They were countryfellows, after all. And she was guiltily bored with the reasonable Swedes who had been the only people in Europe willing to hire a female mathematician for their new university. Their city was too clean and tidy, their habits too regular, their parties too polite. Once they decided that some course was correct they just went ahead and followed it, with none of those exhilarating and probably dangerous nights of argument that would go on forever in Petersburg or Paris.

Maksim would not interfere with her real work, which was research, not teaching. He would be glad she had something to absorb her, though she suspected that he found mathematics not trivial, but somehow beside the point. How could a professor of law and sociology think otherwise?

The weather is warmer at Nice, a few days later, when he takes her to board her train.

”How can I go, how can I leave this soft air?”

”Ah, but your desk and your differential equations will be waiting. In the spring you won't be able to tear yourself away.”

”Do you think not?”

She must not think-she must not think that is a roundabout way of saying he wished they would not marry in the spring.

She has already written to Julia, saying it is to be happiness after all. Happiness after all. Happiness.

On the station platform a black cat obliquely crosses their path. She detests cats, particularly black ones. But she says nothing and contains her shudder. And as if to reward her for this self-control he announces that he will ride with her as far as Cannes, if she is agreeable. She can barely answer, she feels such grat.i.tude. Also a disastrous pressure of tears. Weeping in public is something he finds despicable. (He does not think he should have to put up with it in private either.) She manages to reabsorb her tears, and when they reach Cannes, he folds her into his capacious well-cut garments with their smell of manliness-some mixture of fur-bearing animals and expensive tobacco. He kisses her with decorum but with a small flick of his tongue along her lips, a reminder of private appet.i.tes.

She has not, of course, reminded him that her work was on the Theory of Partial Partial Differential Equations, and that it was completed some time ago. She spends the first hour or so of her solitary journey as she usually spends some time after a parting from him-balancing signs of affection against those of impatience, and indifference against a certain qualified pa.s.sion. Differential Equations, and that it was completed some time ago. She spends the first hour or so of her solitary journey as she usually spends some time after a parting from him-balancing signs of affection against those of impatience, and indifference against a certain qualified pa.s.sion.

”Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind,” her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. ”When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”

At least she has time now to discover that she has a sore throat. If he has caught it she hopes he won't suspect her. Being a bachelor in robust health he regards any slight contagion as an insult, bad ventilation or tainted breath as personal attacks. In certain ways he is really quite spoiled.

Spoiled and envious, actually. A while ago he wrote to her that certain writings of his own had begun to be attributed to her, because of the accident of the names. He had received a letter from a literary agent in Paris, starting off by addressing him as Dear Madam.

Alas he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man.

Indeed a great joke.

II.

She falls asleep before the lamps are lit in the train. Her last waking thoughts-unpleasant thoughts-are of Victor Jaclard, her dead sister's husband, whom she plans to see in Paris. It is really her young nephew, Urey, her sister's child, that she is anxious to see, but the boy lives with his father. She always sees Urey in her mind as he was at about the age of five or six, angelically blond, trusting and sweet natured, but not in temperament so much like his mother, Aniuta.

She finds herself in a confused dream of Aniuta, but of an Aniuta long before Urey and Jaclard were on the scene. Aniuta unmarried, golden haired, beautiful, and bad tempered, back at the family estate of Palibino, where she is decorating her tower room with Orthodox icons and complaining that these are not the proper religious artifacts for medieval Europe. She has been reading a novel by Bulwer-Lytton and has draped herself in veils, the better to impersonate Edith Swan-neck, the mistress of Harold of Hastings. She plans to write her own novel about Edith, and has already written a few pages describing the scene where the heroine must identify her butchered lover's body by certain marks known only to herself.

Having somehow arrived on this train she reads these pages to Sophia who cannot bring herself to explain to her how things have changed and what has come about since those days in the tower room.

When she wakes Sophia thinks how all that was true-Aniuta's obsession with medieval and particularly English history-and how one day that vanished, veils and all, as if none of it had ever been, and instead a serious and contemporary Aniuta was writing about a young girl who at her parents' urging and for conventional reasons rejects a young scholar who dies. After his death she realizes that she loves him, so has no choice but to follow him in death.

She secretly submitted this story to a magazine edited by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and it was printed.

Her father was outraged.

”Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?”

In this turmoil Fyodor himself appeared on the scene, behaving badly at a party but mollifying Aniuta's mother by a private call, and ending up by proposing marriage. Her father's being so decidedly against this did almost persuade Aniuta to accept, to elope. But she had after all a fondness for her own limelight, and perhaps a premonition of how that might have to be sacrificed, with Fyodor, so she refused him. He put her into his novel The Idiot The Idiot as Aglia, and married a young stenographer. as Aglia, and married a young stenographer.

Sophia dozes again, slips into another dream in which she and Aniuta are both young but not so young as when at Palibino, and they are together in Paris, and Aniuta's lover Jaclard-not yet her husband-has supplanted Harold of Hastings and Fyodor the novelist as her hero, and Jaclard is a genuine hero, though bad mannered (he glories in his peasant background) and, from the first, unfaithful. He is fighting somewhere outside of Paris, and Aniuta is afraid he will be killed, because he is so brave. Now in Sophia's dream Aniuta has gone looking for him, but the streets where she wanders weeping and calling his name are in Petersburg, not Paris, and Sophia is left behind in a huge Parisian hospital full of dead soldiers and bloodied citizens, and one of the dead is her own husband, Vladimir. She runs away from all these casualties, she is looking for Maksim, who is safe from the fighting in the Hotel Splendide. Maksim will get her out of this.

She wakes. It's raining outside and dark, and she is not alone in the compartment. An untidy-looking young woman sits next to the door, holding a drawing portfolio. Sophia is afraid she might have cried out in her dream, but she probably didn't, because the girl is sleeping undisturbed.

Suppose this girl had been awake and Sophia had said to her, ”Forgive me, I was dreaming of 1871. I was there, in Paris, my sister was in love with a Communard. He was captured and he might have been shot or sent to New Caledonia but we were able to get him away. My husband did it. My husband Vladimir who was not a Communard at all but only wanted to look at the fossils in the Jardin des Plantes.”

The girl would have been bored. She might have been polite but would still have conveyed the feeling that all this, in her opinion, might have happened before the banishment of Adam and Eve. She was probably not even French. French girls who could afford to travel second cla.s.s did not usually travel alone. American?

It was strangely true that Vladimir had been able to spend some of those days in the Jardin des Plantes. And untrue that he had been killed. In the midst of the turmoil he was laying the foundations of his only real career, as a paleontologist. And true too that Aniuta took Sophia along to a hospital from which all the professional nurses had been fired. They were considered counterrevolutionary, and were to be replaced by the wives and comrades from the Commune. The common women cursed the replacements because they did not even know how to make bandages, and the wounded died, but most of them might have died anyway. There was disease as well as the wounds of battle to be dealt with. The common people were said to be eating dogs and rats.

Jaclard and his revolutionaries fought for ten weeks. After the defeat he was imprisoned at Versailles, in an underground cell. Several men had been shot because they were mistaken for him. Or so it was reported.

By that time Aniuta and Sophia's father, the General, had arrived from Russia. Aniuta had been taken off to Heidelberg, where she collapsed in bed. Sophia went back to Berlin and her study of mathematics, but Vladimir remained, abandoning his tertiary mammifers to connive with the General to get Jaclard free. This was managed by bribery and daring. Jaclard was to be transferred under guard of one soldier to a jail in Paris, and taken along a certain street where there would be a crowd of people, because of an exhibition. Vladimir would s.n.a.t.c.h him away while the guard looked aside, as he was being paid to do. And still under Vladimir's guidance Jaclard would be hustled through the crowd to a room where a civilian suit of clothes was waiting, then taken to the railway station and supplied with Vladimir's own pa.s.sport, so that he could escape to Switzerland.

All this was accomplished.

Jaclard did not bother to mail back the pa.s.sport until Aniuta joined him, and then she returned it. No money was ever repaid.

Sophia sent notes from her hotel in Paris to Marie Mendelson and Jules Poincare. Marie's maid responded that her mistress was in Poland. Sophia sent a further note to say that she might ask her friend's a.s.sistance, come spring, in ”selecting whatever costume would suit that event which the world might consider the most important in a woman's life.” In brackets she added that she herself and the fas.h.i.+onable world were ”still on fairly confused terms.”

Poincare arrived at an exceptionally early hour of the morning, complaining at once about the behavior of the mathematician Weierstra.s.s, Sophia's old mentor, who had been one of the judges for the king of Sweden's recent mathematical prize. Poincare had indeed been awarded the prize, but Weierstra.s.s had seen fit to announce that there were possible errors in his-Poincare's-work which he, Weierstra.s.s, had not been given time to investigate. He had sent a letter submitting his annotated queries to the king of Sweden-as if such a personage would know what he was talking about. And he had made some statement about Poincare being valued in future more for the negative than the positive aspects of his work.

Sophia soothed him, telling him she was on her way to see Weierstra.s.s and would take the matter up with him. She pretended not to have heard anything about it, though she had actually written a teasing letter to her old teacher.

”I am sure the king has had much of his royal sleep disturbed since your information arrived. Just think of how you have upset the royal mind hitherto so happily ignorant of mathematics. Take care you don't make him repent of his generosity ...”

”And after all,” she said to Jules, ”after all you do have the prize and will have it forever.”

Jules agreed, adding that his own name would s.h.i.+ne when Weierstra.s.s would be forgotten.

Every one of us will be forgotten, Sophia thought but did not say, because of the tender sensibilities of men-particularly of a young man-on this point.

She said good-bye to him at noon and went to see Jaclard and Urey. They lived in a poor part of the city. She had to cross a courtyard where laundry was hung-the rain had stopped but the day was still dark-and mount a long, somewhat slippery outdoor staircase. Jaclard called out that the door was unbolted, and she entered to find him sitting on an overturned box, blacking a pair of boots. He did not stand up to greet her, and when she started to remove her cloak he said, ”Better not. The stove isn't lit till evening.” He motioned her to the only armchair, which was tattered and greasy. This was worse than she had expected. Urey was not here, had not waited to see her.

There were two things she had wanted to find out about Urey. Was he getting more like Aniuta and the Russian side of his family? And was he getting any taller? At fifteen, last year in Odessa, he had not looked more than twelve.

Soon she discovered that things had taken a turn that made such concerns less important.

”Urey?” she said.

”He's out.”

”He's at school?”

”He may be. I know little about him. And the more I do know the less I care.”