The Garnet Bracelet

Ludwig van Beethoven. 2 Son. (op. 2, No. 2)

Largo Appassionato

I

In mid August, before the new moon, there suddenly came a spell of bad weather, of the kind peculiar to the north coast of the Black Sea. Dense, heavy fog lay on land and sea, and the huge lighthouse siren roared like a mad bull day and night. Then a drizzle, as fine as water dust, fell steadily from morning to morning and turned the clayey roads and foot-paths into a thick mass of mud, in which carts and carriages would be bogged for a long time And then a fierce hurricane began to blow from the steppeland in the north-west; the tree-tops rocked and heaved like waves in a gale, and at night the iron roofing of houses rattled, as if someone in heavy boots were running over it; window-frames shook, doors banged, and there was a wild howling in the chimneys. Several fishing boats lost their bearings at sea, and two of them did not come back; a week later the fishermen’s corpses were washed ashore.

The inhabitants of a suburban seaside resort – mostly Greeks and Jews, life-loving and over-apprehensive like all Southerners – were hurrying back to town. On the muddy highway an endless succession of drays dragged along, overloaded with mattresses, sofas, chests, chairs, wash-stands, samovars. Through the blurred muslin of the drizzle, it was a pitiful and dismal sight – the wretched bag and baggage, which looked so shabby, so drab and beggarly; the maids and cooks sitting atop of the carts on soaked tarpaulin, holding irons, cans or baskets; the exhausted, panting horses which halted every now and again, their knees trembling, their flanks steaming; the draymen who swore huskily, wrapped in matting against the rain. An even sorrier sight were the deserted houses, now bare, empty and spacious, with their ravaged flowerbeds, smashed panes, abandoned dogs and rubbish – cigarette ends, bits of paper, broken crockery, cartons, and medicine bottles.

But the weather changed abruptly in late August. There came calm, cloudless days that were sunnier and mellower than they had been in July. Autumn gossamer glinted like mica on the bristly yellow stubble in the dried fields. The trees, restored to their quietude, were meekly shedding their leaves.

Princess Vera Nikolayevna Sheyina, wife of the marshal of nobility, had been unable to leave her villa because repairs were not yet finished at the town house. And now she was overjoyed by the lovely days, the calm and solitude and pure air, the swallows twittering on the telegraph wires as they flocked together to fly south, and the caressing salty breeze that drifted gently from the sea.

II

Besides, that day – the seventeenth of September – was her birthday. She had always loved it, associating it with remote, cherished memories of her childhood, and always expected it to bring on something wonderfully happy. In the morning, before leaving for town on urgent business, her husband had put on her night-table a case with magnificent ear-rings of pear-shaped pearls, and the present added to her cheerful mood.

She was all alone in the house. Her unmarried brother Nikolai, assistant public prosecutor, who usually lived with them, had also gone to town for a court hearing. Her husband had promised to bring to dinner none but a few of their closest friends. It was fortunate that her birthday was during the summer season, for in town they would have had to spend a good deal of money on a grand festive dinner, perhaps even a ball, while here in the country the expenses could be cut to a bare minimum. Despite his prominence in society, or possibly because of it, Prince Sheyin could hardly make both ends meet. The huge family estate had been almost ruined by his ancestors, while his position obliged him to live above his means: give receptions, engage in charity, dress well, keep horses, and so on. Princess Vera, with whom the former passionate love for her husband had long ago toned down to a true, lasting friendship, spared no pains to help him ward off complete ruin. Without his suspecting it she went without many things she wanted, and ran “the household as thriftily as she could.

She was now walking about the garden, carefully clipping off flowers for the dinner table. The flower-beds, stripped almost bare, looked neglected. The double carnations of various colours were past their best, and so were the stocks – half in bloom, half laden with thin green pods that smelled of cabbage; on the rose-bushes, blooming for the third time that summer, there were still a few undersized buds and flowers. But then the dahlias, peonies and asters flaunted their haughty beauty, filling the hushed air with a grassy, sad autumnal scent. The other flowers, whose season of luxurious love and over-fruitful maternity was over, were quietly dropping innumerable seeds of future life.

A three-tone motor-car horn sounded on the nearby highway, announcing that Anna Nikolayevna Friesse, Princess Vera’s sister, was coming. She had telephoned that morning to say that she would come and help about the house and to receive the guests.

Vera’s keen ear had not betrayed her. She went to meet the arrival. A few minutes later an elegant sedan drew up at the gate; the chauffeur jumped nimbly down and flung the door open.

The two sisters kissed joyfully. A warm affection had bound them together since early childhood. They were strangely unlike each other in appearance. The elder sister, Vera, resembled her mother, a beautiful Englishwoman; she had a tall, lithe figure, a delicate but cold and proud face, well-formed if rather large hands, and charmingly sloping shoulders such as you see in old miniatures. The younger sister, Anna, had the Mongol features of her father, a Tatar prince, whose grandfather had not been christened until the early nineteenth century and whose forbears were descended from Tamerlane himself, or Timur Lenk, the Tatar name by which her father proudly called the great murderer. Standing half a head shorter than her sister, she was rather broad-shouldered, lively and frivolous, and very fond of teasing people. Her face, of a markedly Mongol cast – with prominent cheek-bones, narrow eyes which she, moreover, often screwed up because she was short-sighted, and a haughty expression about her small, sensuous mouth, especially its full, slightly protruding lower lip – had, nevertheless, an elusive and unaccountable fascination which lay perhaps in her smile, in the deeply feminine quality of all her features, or in her piquant, coquettish mimicry. Her graceful lack of beauty excited and drew men’s attention much more frequently and strongly than her sister’s aristocratic loveliness.

She was married to a very wealthy and very stupid man, who did absolutely nothing though he was on the board of some sort of charity institution and bore the title of Kammerjunker. She loathed her husband, but she had borne him two children – a boy and a girl; she had made up her mind not to have any more children. As for Vera, she longed to have children, as many as possible, but for some reason she had none, and she morbidly and passionately adored her younger sister’s pretty, anaemic children, always well-behaved and obedient, with pallid, mealy faces and curled doll hair of a flaxen colour.

Anna was all gay disorder and sweet, sometimes freakish contradictions. She readily gave herself up to the most reckless flirting in all the capitals and health resorts of Europe, but she was never unfaithful to her husband, whom she, however, ridiculed contemptuously both to his face and behind his back. She was extravagant and very fond of gambling, dances, new sensations and exciting spectacles, and when abroad she would frequent cafes of doubtful repute. But she was also generously kind and deeply, sincerely religious – so much so that she had secretly become a Catholic. Her back, bosom and shoulders were of rare beauty. When she went to a grand ball she would bare herself far beyond the limits allowed by decorum or fashion, but it was said that under the low-cut dress she always wore a hair shirt.

Vera, on the otter hand, was rigidly plain-mannered, coldly, condescendingly amiable to all, and as aloof and composed as a queen.

III

“Oh, how nice it is here! How very nice!” said Anna as she walked with swift small steps along the path beside her sister. “Let’s sit for a while on the bench above the bluff, if you don’t mind. I haven’t seen the sea for ages. The air is so wonderful here – it cheers your heart to breathe it. Last summer I made an amazing discovery in the Crimea, in Miskhor. Do you know what surf water smells like? Just imagine – it smells like mignonette.”

Vera smiled affectionately.

“You always fancy things.”

“But it does. Once everybody laughed at me, I remember, when I said that moonlight had a kind of pink shade. But a couple of days ago Boritsky – that artist who’s doing my portrait – said that I was right and that artists have known about it for a long time.”

“Is that artist your latest infatuation?”

“You always get queer ideas!” Anna laughed, then, stepping quickly to the edge of the bluff, which dropped in a sheer wall deep into the sea, she looked down and suddenly cried out in terror, starting back, her face pale.

“What a height!” Her voice was faint and tremulous. “When I look down from so high up it gives me a sort of sweet, nasty creeps, and my toes ache. And yet I’m drawn to it!”

She was about to look down again, but her sister held her back.

“For heaven’s sake, Anna dear! I feel giddy myself when you do that. Sit down, I beg you.”

“All right, all right, I will. But see how beautiful it is, how exhilarating – you just can’t look enough. If you knew how thankful I am to God for all the wonders he has wrought for us!”

Both fell to thinking for a moment. The sea lay at rest far, far below. The shore could not be seen from the bench, and that enhanced the feeling of the immensity and majesty of the sea. The water was calm and friendly, and cheerfully blue, except for pale blue oblique stripes marking the currents, and on the horizon it changed to an intense blue.

Fishing boats, hardly discernible, were dozing motionless in the smooth water, not far from the shore. And farther away a three-master, draped from top to bottom in white, shapely sails bellied out by the wind, seemed to be suspended in the air, making no headway.

“I see what you mean,” said the elder sister thoughtfully, “but somehow I don’t feel about it the way you do. When I see the sea for the first time after a long interval, it excites and staggers me. I feel as if I were looking at an enormous, solemn wonder I’d never seen before. But afterwards, when I’m used to it, its flat emptiness begins to crush me. I feel bored as I look at it, and I try not to look any more.”

Anna smiled.

“What is it?” asked her sister.

“Last summer,” said Anna slyly, “we rode in a big cavalcade from Yalta to Uch Kosh. That’s beyond the forester’s house, above the falls. At first we wandered into some mist, it was very damp and we couldn’t see well, but we climbed higher and higher, up a steep path, between pine-trees. Then the forest ended, and we were out of the mist. Imagine a narrow foothold on a cliff, and a precipice below. The villages seemed no bigger than match-boxes, the forests and gardens were like so much grass. The whole landscape lay below like a map. And farther down was the sea, stretching away for fifty or sixty miles. I fancied I was hanging in mid-air and was going to fly. It was so beautiful, and made me feel so light! I turned and said happily to the guide, ‘Well, Seyid Oghlu, isn’t it lovely?’ But he clicked his tongue and said, ‘Ah, leddy, you don’t know how fed up I am vid all dat. I sees it every day.’ “

“Thank you for the comparison,” said Vera with a laugh. “But I simply think that we Northerners can never understand the charm of the sea. I love the forest. Do you remember our woods back in Yegorovskoye? How could you ever be bored by them? The pine-trees! And the moss! And the death-cups – looking as if they were made of red satin embroidered with white beads. It’s so still, so cool.”

“It makes no difference to me – I love everything,” answered Anna. “But I love best of all my little sister, my dear sensible Vera. There are only two of us in the world, you know.”

She put her arm round her sister and snuggled against her, cheek to cheek. And suddenly she started.

“But how silly of me! We sit here like characters in a novel, talking about Nature, and I quite forgot about’ my present. Here, look. Only I’m afraid you may not like it.”

She took from her handbag a small notebook in an unusual binding: on a background of old blue velvet, worn and grey with time, there wound a dull-golden filigree pattern of exquisite intricacy and beauty, apparently the diligent handiwork of a skilful and assiduous artist. The notebook was attached to a gold chain, thin as a thread, and the sheets inside it had been replaced by ivory plates.

“What a beauty! It’s gorgeous!” said Vera, and kissed her sister. “Thank you. Where did you get this treasure?”

“In a curiosity shop. You know my weakness for rummaging in old trash. That was how I came upon this prayer-book. See how the ornament here shapes into a cross. I only found the binding, and everything else – the leaves, clasps and pencil – I had to think up myself. Hard as I tried to explain my idea to Mollinet, he simply refused to see what I wanted. The clasps should have been made in the same style as the whole pattern – dull in tone, of old gold, finely engraved – but he’s done God knows what. However, the chain is of genuine Venetian workmanship, very old.”

Admiringly Vera stroked the magnificent binding.

“What hoary antiquity! I wonder how old this notebook is,” she said.

“I can only guess. It must date from the late seventeenth or mid-eighteenth century.”

“How strange,” said Vera, with a pensive smile. “Here I am holding an object that may have been touched by the hand of Marquise de Pompadour or Marie Antoinette herself. Oh, Anna, it’s so like you, to make a lady’s carnet out of a prayer-book. But let’s go and see what’s going on inside.”

They went into the house across a large terrace paved with flagstone and enclosed on all sides by trellises of Isabella grape-vine. The black rich clusters smelling faintly of strawberries hung heavily amid the dark green, gilded here and there by the sun. The terrace was submerged in a green half-light, which cast a pale reflection on the faces of the two women.

“Are you going to have dinner served here?” asked Anna.

“I was at first. But the evenings are so chilly now. I prefer the dining-room. The men may come out here to smoke.”

“Will you have anybody worth seeing?”

“I don’t know yet. All I know is that our Grandad is coming.”

“Ah, dear Grandad! How lovely!” cried Anna, clasping her hands. “I haven’t seen him for ages.”

“Vasya’s sister is coming too, and Professor Speshnikov, I think. I was at my wits’ end yesterday. You know they both like good food – Grandad and the professor. But you can’t get a thing here or in town, for love or money. Luka came by quail somewhere – ordered them from a hunter – and is now trying his skill on them. The beef isn’t bad, comparatively speaking – alas! the inevitable roast beef! Then we have very nice lobsters.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound so bad, after all. Don’t worry. Between you and me, you like good food yourself.”

“But we’ll also have something special. This morning a fisherman brought us a gurnard. I saw it myself. It’s a monster, really. Terrible even to look at.”

Anna, who was eagerly inquisitive about everything whether it concerned her or not, wanted to see the gurnard at once.

Luka, a tall man with a clean-shaven sallow face, came in carrying a white oblong basin, which he held with difficulty by the lugs, careful not to spill the water on the parquet floor.

“Twelve and a half pounds, Your Highness,” he said, with the peculiar pride of a cook. “We weighed it a while back.”

The fish was too big for the basin and lay with its tail curled. Its scales were shot with gold, the fins were a bright red, and two long fan-like wings, of a delicate blue, stood out from the huge rapacious head. It was still alive and vigorously worked its gills.

The younger sister cautiously touched the fish’s head with her little finger. But the gurnard lashed out with its tail, and Anna with a scream snatched back her hand.

“You can depend on it, Your Highness, we’ll arrange everything in the best manner,” said the cook, obviously aware of Vera’s anxiety. “Just now a Bulgarian brought two pine-apple melons. They’re a bit like cantaloups, only they smell much nicer. And may I ask Your Highness what gravy you will have with the gurnard: tartare or polonaise, or simply rusk in butter?”

“Do as you like. You may go,” said the princess.