“I have received your beloved hair and am glad to learn you are well.”—“I am sending you, my sweetheart! a flower and a sprig of mint which you yourself have planted. I am glad to say all goes well here, only it feels so lonely without you in the garden.” This he wrote from Reval, from her favourite garden, Catherinenthal. The letter contained a withered blue flower, mint, and a cutting from an English newspaper: “Last year on the eleventh of October, there arrived in England from the county of Monmouth two people who had lived in wedlock one hundred and ten years, the man was one hundred and twenty-six years old, and the woman one hundred and twenty-five.” As much as to say: “May God grant us as long a time in the happy state of matrimony!”
And now, on the verge of old age, on this melancholy autumn morning, he mused over the life they had lived together. At the idea that Catherine might perchance be false to him, and exchange her “old man” for the first-come handsome boy, some German of base origin, he felt neither jealousy, nor anger, nor indignation, only the helplessness of a child forsaken by his mother.
He gave the reins to his orderly, and, sinking back, hung his head. The jolting of the carriage over the uneven road made his head shake, as if from old age, and his whole figure suggested age and decrepitude.
The clock beyond the Neva struck eleven. But the morning light as yet only suggested the lurid look of a dying man. It seemed day would never break. Snow mingled with rain. The horse’s hoofs splashed sonorously through the puddles, the wheels scattering mud.
Long trains of grey clouds were creeping slowly like fat-bellied spiders across the skies, so low that they completely shrouded the pinnacle on the Peter and Paul fortress; grey water, grey houses, trees and human beings, all losing their precision in mist, seemed but dull phantoms.
When Peter reached the wooden drawbridge across the Swan Channel there came from the Summer Garden a mortuary smell of earth and damp rotten leafage, which the gardeners were sweeping into heaps along the avenues. Rooks were cawing in the bare lime-trees. The clang of hammers was heard: men were busily engaged in nailing narrow long boxes over the marble statues to protect them from the winter’s snow and frost. It seemed as if the risen gods were again buried, nailed up in coffins.
Through the dark, lilac-hued, wet stems gleamed the bright yellow walls of a Dutch house, many-windowed, and with glazed doors opening on the garden; with its iron checkered roof, a weathercock in the shape of St. George the Dragonslayer, and white stucco bas-reliefs depicting sea monsters, Tritons and Nereides.
This was the Summer Palace.