Wings: Tales of the Psychic/Disappointment
DISAPPOINTMENT
It was Paul Mayol, the inimitable low comedian of the Scala, who started the ball rolling, as far as Paris was concerned.
Perhaps he had the original tip from the desk clerk of the Hotel Saint James, where Prince Pavel Narodkine had put up temporarily; perhaps he had it from his mistress, who had it from her sister, the laundress of the hotel, who, in her turn, had it from the prince's Italian courier; perhaps, even, he had brought it back from the green-rooms of Moscow, where he had filled a triumphant engagement the season before, and whence Narodkine had recently arrived.
At all events, it was Paul Mayol who was first to sense the tang of mystery which clung to the big, melancholy Russian, and who—since in Paris it is the stage, and not, as in New York, the yellow press which does the scavenger work for society—included him among the characters whom he impersonated and satirized in the new Scala Revue.
Mayol came on in act two, in the burlesque make-up of a Russian aristocrat which was a farcical mingling of whiskers, sable furs, vodka bottles, ikons, and an obligato knout, did a Cossack dance with Argentine excrescences and George-cohanesque frills, and introduced himself to the audience with a tense, cavernous "Sh-sh! I am Pavel Narodkine, the great Moscovite enigma!" after which he peered right and left with all the time-hallowed stage business of a conspirator, caused his legs and his whiskers to shiver violently, whipped the property calves of the chorus girls with his property knout, and then danced off to the pizzicato of a dozen balalaikas which were striving to syncopate the Russian national anthem.
Thus the beginning; and the boulevards caught the ball of rumor and mystery which Mayol had tossed in the air. They gilded and tinseled and embossed it. They flung it wide and caught it again.
The next morning, cut in below a screaming bit of editorial hysterics which accused the ministry of having sold the country to the freemasons, the atheists, and the stock exchange, the royalist Gaulois brought half a dozen lines about Prince Pavel Narodkine speaking with pontifical unction about his great ancestry which partook of Rurik Vikings and Tartar Khans of the Silver Horde, and congratulating the legitimist clique of the Faubourg on the arrival of such a thumping blue-blood—and tossed the gossip ball to its editorial neighbor, the Vie Parisienne.
The latter weekly acted up splendidly. It printed a rotogravure portrait of the prince in a border of cupids, chorus girls, three-horse troikas, sacks of gold, and grisettes; mentioned that he was young, a bachelor, and immensely wealthy; and added that as yet he had not thrown his scented handkerchief at the feet of either mondaine or demi-mondaine.
"Why?"—demanded the final, tart, succinct word of the page in four-inch Gothic.
The next move was up to the Revue Diplomatique. In its personality column, entitled "Mustard and Cress," and signed "Junior Attaché," it alluded to the fact that even in his native Russia the prince was considered an engima. "The Sphinx" was the nickname by which he was known in the salons of Moscow and Petrograd.
And justly.
For he had no intimate friends; he had used all sorts of political influence until he was finally excused from military service; he never set foot in a dark place; he eschewed all sport; and he never went abroad without a body-guard of five heavily armed peasants.
"Sic semper tyrannis!" screamed the socialistic daily, La Patrie.
It stated boldly that Prince Pavel Narodkine was a reactionary, a leading member of the Black Hundred, a blood-gorged oppressor of the masses, and that it was his fear of becoming the target of a patriot s bullet which caused him to shun the dark and to seek the protection of steel-girt retainers—a report promptly branded by the Gaulois as "a filthy and reeking falsehood sired and darned in the fetid gray-matter of our socialistic colleague." The article added that the prince had no enemy either among the revolutionists or the reactionaries, that he had, in fact, never occupied himself with politics.
Here the Vie Parisienne scored again with a snap shot of the prince walking down the Boulevard des Italiens surrounded by his armed body-guard; the Patrie followed by demanding why "the titled blood-sucker" should thus be allowed to break the laws of the republic which enjoined the carrying of arms; the official Mercure de France explained that the prince had applied for a special permit, and had been granted it—and thus Paris discovered that it housed a deep, mysterious sensation, and began to wonder what it was all about.
From Montmartre to the Quartier Latin, from the Porte Saint Martin to the Ternes, the great macrocosm of Paris commenced to stir and buzz like a beehive.
A string of would-be visitors besieged the desk of the Hotel Saint James—shirt-makers and boot-makers and English breeches-makers, perfumers and florists and jewelers, cranks and reporters and solicitors for charitable institutions, beggars, genteel and ungenteel they came, they were met by the urbane Italian courier, and were sent on their way without having gratified either their curiosity or their greed.
The great society ladies fared no better. They littered the prince s writing-desk with invitations to balls and dinners and receptions and garden fetes and theater parties. Those with marriageable daughters made ready for a regular siege. They consulted with milliner and modiste, with Paquin and Virot and Doucet and Reboux; slim, clever fingers ma nipulated silk and lawn, satin and gauze, lace and embroidery, canvas and whalebone; the granite paving blocks of the Place Vendôme echoed under the rapid feet of models and saleswomen and errand-runners; mothers and daughters stuck their heads together—they consulted—they sought the advice of ancient dowagers versed in marital and premarital warfare—and still more invitations were heaped on the prince s breakfast table with every morning mail.
But the crested notes were acknowledged by the Russian s secretary, who read them, threw them away, while regretting "the inability of Monsieur le Prince to accept mad&me's so charming hospitality"—and then the real-estate brokers came to the rescue of Mme. Gossip, though they only succeeded in deepening the mystery which enveloped the prince.
It became known that he had sent for MM, Dufour and Cazanet, a reputable and well-known firm of real-estate men who in the past had sold palaces and châteaux to Chicago pork kings, Welsh coal barons, and Oriental potentates. They called on Narodkine—flattered, delighted, expectant; and they left—sadder, but no wiser.
For the prince refused to buy the sort of show place which befitted his rank and station in life. He asked, instead, MM. Dufour and Cazanet to get him a house somewhere in the most crowded quarter of Paris.
"No, no, no!" he exclaimed when Dufour spoke of an aristocratic old stone pile buried under the pink chestnut-trees of the Rue de Varenne. "I want light, gentlemen. I want crowds around me."
Here Dufour thought of the armed retainers who accompanied the prince everywhere, and he winked at his partner; but the Russian did not seem to see the incongruity of his remark.
"Yes," he continued, "I want to sense the stir and throb of life—life—right, left, everywhere!"
"But, Monsieur le Prince, I assure you this house in the Rue de Varenne is—"
"It is gray and dark and lonely," the prince cut in. "I know. And I want life"—he shivered a little—"life and the dear breath of life!"
He bent over a map of Paris and pointed at a certain section.
"Here, gentlemen," he went on in a tone which admitted of no further argument; "get me a house here—if not a house, then a flat, a hut, a hovel—anything, anything! But it must be here—where there are crowds and light and life!"
The two Frenchmen looked at the prince, who had dropped trembling into a chair. Then they looked at each other.
Dufour shrugged his expressive shoulders and motioned to his partner.
"Very good, Monsieur le Prince."
And they bowed themselves out of his presence and set about to fulfill his wish.
But of course they talked, and Paris listened and wonderedhovel—and laughed a little.
Society, still smarting under its recent defeat, tried to attribute Prince Narodkine's choice of residence to stinginess—a report quickly given the lie when it became known that he had been the anonymous donor of a lavish contribution to Paris's pet charity. The Patrie made sinister allusions to royalist intrigues; the Vie Parisienne to a tragic love-affair back home; but nobody could explain the prince's choice.
For, as soon as the lease had been negotiated, he moved to a little house of the Cour de Rouen—the tortuous alley which branches off from the Passage du Commerce, and which, generations ago, had been the Paris home of the Archbishops of Rouen—a packed, crowded, noisy alley where mansions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lean against each other for mutual support; where the windows are spotted with bird-cages and linen hung out to dry and the frowzy heads of housewives; where there is no verdure except an occasional sickly fig-tree straggling along a rusty, bent water-pipe, and here and there a dusty bit of clematis and convolvulus stretching up—a neighborhood echoing to the shrill sounds and shouts of its motley population, news-venders and fruiterers, bookbinders and cobblers, dealers in all kinds of second-hand odds and ends, locksmiths and knife-sharpeners—a neighborhood made yet more noisy with the screams and laughter and jests of a school for little girls who file through the alley twice a day, copy-books and satchels under their arms.
Indeed, an alley clanking and beating with life!
And Prince Pavel Narodkine moved in, together with his armed peasant retainers—while Paris sat on its haunches and waited developments.
There were none.
Prince Pavel Narodkine lived in his little house .of the Cour de Rouen as he had lived in the Hotel Saint James, and as formerly he had lived in Moscow; never leaving the house after dark, never setting foot in a lonely place nor where the shadows were blotched and deep, never moving an inch without his armed peasants—big, lumpish, brooding men, savagely silent and intensely loyal, who shook their heads and gave no reply when curious people addressed and questioned them about their master.
So, with the slow, pitiless swing of time and the familiarity which time breeds, Pavel Narodkine became part of the city's contemporary history—he became one more of Paris's unexplained and, in a way, accepted mysteries; like the tall, white-bearded Highland Scot who for years has walked every afternoon from the Porte Saint Martin to the Arc de Triomphe, dressed in kilts and plaid, horn-handled dagger in his stockings, sporran swinging rhythmically to the skirl of an imaginary war-pipe; like the blind American who twice a week, rain or shine, takes his seat on the pavement outside of the Café de Naples and distributes gold-pieces to all passers-by; like the plum-colored, turbaned Senegalese who promptly, every morning at five, prays in front of the statue of Strasbourg, his hands spread out like the sticks of a fan, his huge, round head bobbing up and down with the fervor of his incantations.
Another year came and passed. Another sensation boomed along and stirred the boulevards and set the tongues of Paris a-wagging; the personality of the prince blended still more deeply into the shadow of accepted things—and when strangers saw him walk down the street, accompanied by his armed servants, with his big body slightly trembling, his great purple-black eyes shooting anxiously from right to left as if expecting something or somebody to pop out at him from every corner and doorway, the people of Paris smiled—kindly and, too, tolerantly.
"Why, yes," they would say; "it's that Russian—Prince Pavel Narodkine—it's a habit of his, you know"—as if that were sufficient explanation.
Perhaps the whole mystery would have been forgotten for all time to come if it had not been for Dr. Marc Henri, who explained it, but only after the death of the prince, and even then very gently and apologetically—quite on the side of the prince, you understand.
For the doctor, a short, stocky, ugly little man with a clever, narrow face which sloped wedge-shaped to a pointed, inquisitive chin, was a Frenchman, with the sane, sweet logic and the sane, sweet sympathy of the Frenchman; a man who endeavored to understand everything and everybody, and to condone according to his understanding.
He lived just around the corner from the prince, in an old house of the Passage du Commerce, next door to Durel's quaint book-shop—a stone's throw from the spot where, many years ago, famed M. Guillotin had made experiments on sheep with the blade of his newly invented "philanthropic machine for beheading."
The doctor was a busy man. The bell of his little apartment was forever tinkling; he had no time to read more than the headlines of either Gaulois or Patrie, and he had never had sufficient leisure to speculate about Prince Pavel Narodkine's strange habits.
And then, late one warm spring evening, a lumpish Russian, in tall, oiled boots and silken blouse, burst into his office and implored him, in a terrible jargon and by half a dozen assorted Greek orthodox saints, to come at once to the bedside of his master—"He is sick, sick, very sick!" The doctor felt there was no time to lose, and so he picked up his ever-ready black leather case and was out of the house on a run.
"I am suffering! I cannot sleep!" was Narodkine's thin, querulous greeting, and the physician smiled.
"I don't wonder," he replied tartly, with a comprehensive gesture which took in the whole of the bedroom.
For the windows were tightly closed, in spite of the warm spring air; every lamp—there were half a dozen of them—was lit; and the air was yet more hot and stuffy with the presence of the prince's peasants—big, hulking men who filled the atmosphere with a tang of tobacco and leather and raw; spirits.
The doctor was astonished, and a little angry, too, when he had finished examining the patient. He was in the habit of being called away from his house at all hours; but the prince's messenger had led him to believe that his master was on the very point of death, and there was really nothing the matter with him except a slightly congested head and a corresponding rise in temperature—an ailment cured easily with a little aspirin, a sound night's sleep, and, of course, fresh air.
So it was with something like impatience that he threw open the window and ordered Narodkine's peasants to leave the bedroom, and he was more than ever astonished when the latter remained stolidly where they were and when the prince backed their dumb, passive refusal with eager, excited words.
"No, no!" he cried. "They will remain with me—I need them—I—"
"You tell em to clear out!" the doctor cut in impatiently. "You have to do as I tell you if you want me to treat you!"
It was only when he picked up his leather case and threatened to leave that Narodkine spoke to his servants in purring Russian, ordering them out of the room.
They left—and the doctor, keenly tuned to observations and impressions, was positive that they had only gone as far as the next room, ready to return at their master's slightest gesture or word. But he paid no further attention to them.
"You need sleep," he said to the prince, "and a cool, dark room."
But when he lifted his hand to turn out the great Venetian chandelier which swung from the center of the ceiling, a cry from the bed halted him. He turned—and he was aghast when he saw the prince's face. The man had suddenly turned a grayish yellow—"yellow as a dead man's bones," the doctor described it afterward—and his whole body was trembling with a terrible palsy.
"No, no!" he cried. "Leave the lamps burn—all of them!"
Then, in a sort of whine which was both ridiculous and pathetic, given the size of the man: "I will not have a dark room—by myself! The thing will come!"
"What thing?" asked the doctor, and he added jestingly: "You aren t afraid of the dark, are you?"
He was utterly amazed when he heard the prince's reply.
"Yes, doctor," in a hushed voice, but absolutely matter-of-fact, like stating a tiresome sort of truth, "I am afraid."
And when the doctor, who had no respect for titles, made a succinct allusion to "cowards," Narodkine told him.
Dr. Marc Henri never found out if it was because of a sudden liking Narodkine had taken to him, or because of a sudden, crushing feeling of loneliness, that the other confided in him. But he did confide.
"It was terrible," the doctor said afterward, when speaking of the whole happening to some colleagues of his at the Café des Reines; "it was dramatic, and it was true what he told me! You see, in a few words he gave me the reason for those strange habits of his which so intrigued Paris at the time.
"His choice of residence, there, in that packed, pulsing quarter—on the other hand, his refusal to take his share in the amenities of society—sport, dancing—anything in fact which in the slightest degree was connected with danger yes, danger!—accidents, you see; his hatred of dark places and of the hours of night; his demand for bright lights; the armed servants who accompanied him everywhere—why, my friends, it was nothing but a huge and intricate stage-setting for his daily, continuous fight with death.
"Yes!—he feared death! Nor was it the everyday, shivering fear of the coward. It was something more terrible, more gigantic. It was something in a way primitive and sublime—" and Dr. Marc Henri continued in the prince s own words:
"Doctor," had said the prince, "it is not that I love to live nor that I am afraid to die. I fear death—not dying. I fear that fraction of a second when my body will step from life to death, don't you understand? I dread the—ah—the utter uselessness of it—and, too, the utter ignorance! What is it? What does it feel like? What does the whole mystery consist in? Why are we so helpless against it?
"I—I have felt this fear all my life—since I can remember—waking and sleeping my life has been a continuous martyrdom—and I have always tried to fight death—to fight sickness and accidents—with light and life and even with steel. So I shun sport, I shun darkness and loneliness, and my servants never leave my side. But what is the use, doctor? What is the use?
"For death is a coward—death—may be watching me even now—from the corner of the room—about to pounce on me and strangle me!"
"You see/ the doctor went on as he told his colleagues across the marble-topped table of the Café des Reines, "the prince convinced me that there is a grain of truth in the Bible after all. His fear of death was not the result of his character, his temperament, his mode of life, his education, or his ancestry—as we reckon ancestry. It was an atavistic throw-back to our first forefather—Adam or perhaps Adam's son, Cain—when he realized first that there was such a thing as cessation of life, but before his racial memory and instinct allowed him to coin the word or to feel the meaning of death. That was the trouble with Prince Pavel Narodkine—"
"Was?" demanded Dr. Ruoz, and the other inclined his head. "Yes—he died just a moment after he finished telling me about his fear of death—"
"But—why—you said he had only a slight congestion—"
"Exactly! But you know how it is with these big, full-blooded people. His confession excited him terribly—a blood vessel burst in his brain—"
"Did he realize that he was dying?"
"Yes," Dr. Marc Henri smiled gently, "and he—why—he was disappointed! You see—right on the moment of death, when he knew that he had lost his life-long battle, he whispered a few words—to himself really—'Death!' he breathed; and then, not with relief, but in an agony of disappointment, 'Is that all?’"
"Yes," added the doctor, rising and calling for his check, "and he repeated it, I should say about a minute later—"
"When did he say it—just before he died, I suppose?" asked a young medical student who had joined the party. And the doctor replied rather wearily as he walked toward the door:
"No, no—he said it—just after he died, you know!"