She felt even Susan to be in the way. When the woman crept about her in foolish anxiety, she sent her out of the room. She desired not to be addressed nor to be beheld; she wanted to escape into a crystalline structure of loneliness. She had built it, and wanted the full experience of it; and suddenly she became aware of the fact that it estranged her from herself. Something had happened to make the blood of her heart cool and sick.
She could not read nor write letters nor consider plans. No hour seemed to grow out of another living hour. All day she walked alone by the sea or sat amid flowers in the garden. The greater part of the night she lay on an open terrace, in front of which the sky hung down like a curtain of dark-blue velvet. Often the dawn had arisen before she went to bed. She had a sensation within herself as of loosened organization and rhythms dissolved. At times she felt a sting of dread. Noon glowed on her like steel; evening was a gate into the unknown.
She had forbidden all messages. Letters that laid claim to any urgency were answered by Susan or Monsieur Labourdemont. Yet casting a chance and inattentive look at the letter of a friend she saw something about Ivan Becker. What she read took possession of her mind. It was like a presage and a touch of danger. When she lay at night on her terrace, there was a pallid flashing behind the azure curtain of the sky, and the silence breathed treachery.
At the head of fifteen thousand workingmen, all loyal to the Tsar, Ivan Becker had appeared in front of the Winter Palace, in order to effect a direct explanation and reconciliation between the Tsar and his people. Regiments of Cossacks had surrounded the peaceful demonstration, and it had ended in a shambles. Again the people had gathered, and Ivan Becker on a tribunal had stretched out his arms to heaven and cursed the Tsar. He was a fugitive in the land, hiding in monasteries and in peasants’ huts. Next the mutineers of the “Panteleymon” and the “Potemkin” sent him a message, bidding him join them. The crews of the two dreadnoughts had refused obedience to their officers in the harbour of Sebastopol. They had murdered their captains and other officers, and cast their bodies into the sea or into the ships’ fires. They had taken possession of the ships, elected their own officers, and had steamed out to sea. It was not known whether Ivan Becker had followed the summons of the mutineers; all trace of him had been lost. But many people asserted with assurance that he had sought security from the pursuit of the political police on board of the rebellious ships, and had acquired a remarkable influence over the savage seamen.
It was his third appearance in the midst of revolt and blood.
Rumours were brought and spread by gardeners, fishermen, and peasants. It was said that the mutineers had turned pirates, that they captured merchantmen and bombarded cities. During many nights rockets flared up in the sky, and the thunder of artillery was heard. Wherever they needed not to fear the attack of superior forces, it was said, they landed and looted towns and villages, killed all who resisted, and filled the province far inland with terror.
Eva was warned. She was warned by the elder of a village that lay on the confines of her park; she was warned by messengers sent by the naval commander at Nicolayev, who informed her that the mutinous sailors planned to attack all imperial estates in the Crimea, especially those of the Grand Duke; she was finally warned by an anonymous telegram from Moscow.
She did not heed these warnings. She had a feeling that she should not and must not fear this thing of all others—not this menace of degradation and ugliness. So she remained; but her stay was one long waiting. A conviction of a thing ineluctable had come over her. It proceeded not from the mutineers or their reign of crime, but from her own mind and from the profound logic of things.
One evening she mounted the golden stairs to the tower. Gazing from the platform across the dark tree-tops and over land and sea, she saw along the northern horizon a seam of scarlet. Wrapped in a filmy veil, she thoughtfully watched the spreading of that glow without anxiety or curiosity as to its cause. She had a penetrant feeling of the presence of fate, and bowed to it in fatalistic resignation.
Susan was waiting in the room with the Arabic frescoes. Walking up and down with the stride of a dervish, she fought against her darkening fears. The flame was burning low. How was it with Lucas Anselmo? Her deep awareness of him, her sense of living for him, had not grown feebler during these years of radiance and fulfilment. The dancer who was his work, into whom he had breathed the breath of life and art, had been to her, now as before, the assurance of his being and the message of his soul. And what was happening now? Darkness was creeping on; the shadow-creature of his making drooped in its lovely motions. Was the hand that had formed and commanded it stricken and cold? Had that lofty spirit grown weary, and lost the strength to project itself afar? Had the end come?