Alexis was twenty-five years old, tall, slim, narrow across the shoulders and in the chest; his face, too, was thin and strangely long, as if drawn out and pointed at the chin; it looked old, sickly, and sallow, like the face of people who suffer from kidney disease; his mouth was very small, pitiful and child-like; long tufts of straight black hair surrounded his large open arched brow. Such faces are common among monastic novices, country deacons, and choristers. Yet when he smiled his eyes would light up with intelligence and kindliness; his face would suddenly become young and handsome and shine as with some soft inner light. At such moments he resembled his grandfather, the gentle Tsar Alexis.
As he was now, wrapped in a dirty dressing gown, worn-out slippers on his bare feet, sleepy, unshaven, his hair unkempt, he little looked like Tsar Peter’s son. Last night’s drinking bout had given him a severe headache; the best part of the day had gone while he slept it off; it was well on towards evening when he got up. His disarranged couch, with its large crumpled feather bed and sheets, could be seen through the open door in the next room.
Upon the writing table there lay scattered before him sundry rusty mathematical instruments, covered with dust; a broken antique censer filled with frankincense, a tobacco grater, meerschaum pipes, an empty hair-powder box, now used as an ash tray, piles of paper and books, all in a muddle; notes on Baronius’ “Universal Chronicle,” in Alexis’ own handwriting, were covered up by a heap of packet tobacco; a half eaten cucumber was lying on the open page of a tattered book, whose title ran: “Geometry or Earth—measurement by root and compass, for the instruction of knowledge-loving painstakers”; a well picked bone was left on a pewter plate, and close by a sticky liqueur glass with a fly buzzing in it. Innumerable flies were crawling and buzzing in black swarms over the walls, hung with torn, dirty grass-green oilcloth, over the smoked ceiling, and the dim panes of the double windows, which had been left in regardless of the hot June weather.
Flies were buzzing all around him, and drowsy thoughts swarmed like flies in his mind. He remembered the fight which had ended last night’s drinking bout; Jibanda struck Sleepyhead, Sleepyhead Lasher, and then Father Hell. Starling and Moloch had rolled under the table. These were nicknames which Alexis had given to his boon companions, “for his private diversion.” Alexis also remembered beating and pulling somebody’s hair, but who this somebody was, he could not recall. Last night it had amused him, to-day he felt ashamed and miserable over it.
His head was again beginning to ache. He longed for another glass to cure this drunken headache; but he was too lazy to go and get one, too lazy even to call out to his servants. Yet the next moment he would be obliged to dress, pull on his tight-fitting uniform, buckle his sword, put on the heavy wig, which would only intensify his headache, and present himself at the Summer Garden for a masque where all were ordered to appear, under threat of terrible punishment for the defaulter.
He heard the voices of children skipping and playing in the courtyard. A sickly ruffled green-finch twittered plaintively from time to time in his cage over the window. The pendulum of a tall upright English striking clock, an old present from his father, was ticking monotonously. Seemingly interminable, melancholy runs of scales reached his ears from the apartment overhead. It was his wife the Crown Princess Charlotte, who was playing on a tinkling old German spinet. All at once he remembered how last night, when drunk, he had railed about her to Jibanda and Lasher: “I am encumbered with a devil of a wife. Come when I will to her, she is always bad tempered, and will not speak to me. Such a mighty personage!” “This won’t do,” he thought now, “I talk too much when I am drunk, and afterwards I am sorry for it.” Was it her fault that, when but a child, she was forced to marry him, and by what right did he mock her? Sick, lonely, abandoned by all, in a foreign land, she was as unhappy as himself. Yet she loved him, perhaps she was the only one who did love him. He remembered their recent quarrel; how she had called out: “The lowest cobbler in Germany treats his wife better than you do!” He had angrily shrugged his shoulders:—“Go back to Germany then, God speed you!” “Yes, I would, if I were not——” She had not continued, but had burst into tears pointing to herself: she was with child. How well he remembered those pale blue eyes, swollen with tears trickling down her cheeks, washing off the powder she, poor girl, had specially put on for him. Her usually plain features had become haggard and plainer yet during pregnancy: a pathetic, helpless face. And yet he himself loved her, or at any rate he pitied her, at times with some strange, hopeless, desperate, poignant, well nigh overwhelming feeling of pity. Why then did he torture her? Was he bereft of all sense of sin and shame? He would have to answer for her before God.
The flies seemed quite to distract him. A hot slanting ray of the red setting sun, coming through the window, just caught his eyes.
At last he altered the position of his arm-chair, turned his back to the window, and fixed his eyes on the stove. It was a huge stove, built of Russian glazed tiles imitated from the Dutch, clamped together at the corners with brass. It was decorated with carved pillars, flowered recesses, and sockets. Various curious animals, birds, human beings, and plants were represented on a white ground in thick red, green, and dark violet colours; under each design there was an inscription in Slavonic characters. The colours glowed with unusual brightness in the glare of the setting sun, and for the hundredth time Alexis looked at these designs with drowsy curiosity and read over the inscriptions: under a man with a musical instrument the legend: “I make melody;” under a man sitting in an arm-chair with a book, “Improving the mind;” under a full blown tulip the words: “My scent is sweet;” under an old man kneeling before a beauty the words: “No love for an old man!” under a couple sitting under a tree the words: “Taking good counsel together;” a birch elf, French comedians, a Japanese priest, the goddess Diana and the legendary bird Malkothea.
Meanwhile the flies go on buzzing; the pendulum ticks; the green-finch pipes in a melancholy tone; the sound of scales from above, the voices of children rise from the court below. The sharp red ray of sunlight grows duller and fainter, the coloured figures assume life, the French comedians play leap-frog with the birch elf, and the Japanese priest winks at the bird Malkothea.
Everything begins to lose precision; his eyelids grow heavy, and but for the large sticky black fly, no longer buzzing in the glass, but in his head, all would be so quiet, so peaceful, in this dark red gloom.