It was shortly after this that I obtained an introduction to Ivan Liustig’s goddess. She lived in the Vosseressenski quarter, on the third floor of a tall house, but with a degree of relative elegance that argued either some personal means or a thriving trade. I had expected to see an electric, opalescent person, with rouged face and a Cleopatra manner calculated to enmesh the unwary. I met instead a little blonde woman with great eyes, soft as black pearls and limpid as a brook. I had understood from Ivan that she had been married and widowed. But with her loops of flaxen braid tied deftly with ribbon, she looked no more matured than a schoolgirl. Her dress, from head to foot, was tasteful and pleasing, but of the simplest. And she had a way, after she had greeted you, of sitting upon the edge of chairs and sofas and listening in grave-eyed confidence that made you think of some precocious child forced, through the loss of its natural protectors, to face the blackness of an unfamiliar world alone. She was introduced as Wanda Waluiski.
“Your friend tells me that you are interested in psychical phenomena,” she said to me, after a few moments. “But I fear I can show you nothing much to-night. The conditions do not seem favourable, somehow.”
I made a murmur of regret.
“Are these things dependent on atmospheric conditions?”
“To a certain degree. But other obstacles step in—opposing mental attitudes and currents.” She passed her hands over her eyes as she spoke, as if to rid herself of some invisible oppression.
“A common charlatan, after all,” said I to myself. “She sees I am sceptical of the validity of her claims and that prevents the full operation of the trickery.”
Ivan ardently assured her that it was of no moment; that we would return another day. Wanda was silent for an instant, and I had begun to think her manner at least peculiar, when she turned her eyes full upon me.
“I ought not to let you come here again,” was her extraordinary remark. “I have been warned this moment, I was warned the moment you entered the roam that unhappiness must come to me through you. But one’s earthly fate cannot be fought against. My forbidding you to come here would not delay or turn aside the onward march of events.”
“I assure you I have no wish to inflict an unwelcome presence upon you,” I hastened to explain.