Her short, coarse eyelashes again glistened, and the tears crept down, visiting every dimple on her apple-rosy cheeks.
Cincinnatus took one of these tears and tasted it: it was neither salty nor sweet—merely a drop of luke-warm water. Cincinnatus did not do this.
Suddenly the door squealed and opened an inch; a red-haired finger beckoned to Marthe. She quickly went to the door.
“Well, what do you want, it isn’t time yet, is it, I was promised a whole hour,” she whispered rapidly. Something was said in reply.
“Not on your life!” she said indignantly. “You can tell him that. The agreement was that I should do it only with the direct—”
She was interrupted; she listened carefully to the insistent mumbling; she looked down, frowning, and scraping the floor with the toe of her slipper.
“Well, all right,” she blurted out, and with innocent vivacity turned to her husband: “I’ll be back in five minutes, Cin-Cin.”
(While she was gone he thought that not only had he not even begun his urgent talk with her, but that now he could no longer formulate those important things … At the same time his heart was aching, and the same old memory whimpered in a corner; but it was time, it was time to wean himself from all this anguish.)
She returned only in three quarters of an hour, snorting contemptuously. She put one foot on the chair, snapped her garter, and, angrily readjusting the pleats below her waist, sat down at the table, precisely as she had been sitting before.
“All for nothing,” she said with a sneer and began fingering the blue flowers on the table. “Well, why don’t you tell me something, my little Cin-Cin, my cockerel? … You know I picked them myself, I don’t care for poppies, but these are lovely. Shouldn’t try if you can’t manage it,” she added unexpectedly in a different tone of voice, narrowing her eyes. “No, Cin-Cin, I wasn’t speaking to you.” (Sigh) “Well, tell me something, console me.”
“My letter—did you …” began Cincinnatus, then cleared his throat. “Did you read my letter carefully?”
“Please, please,” cried Marthe, clutching her temples, “let’s talk about anything but that letter!”
“No, let us talk about it,” said Cincinnatus.
She jumped up, spasmodically straightening her dress, and began speaking incoherently, lisping a little, as she did when she was angry. “That was a horrible letter, that was some kind of delirium, I didn’t understand it, anyway; one might have thought you had been sitting here alone with a bottle and writing. I didn’t want to bring up that letter, but now that you … Listen, you know the transmitters read it—they copied it, and they said to themselves, ‘Oho! She must be in cahoots with him, if he writes to her like that.’ Can’t you see, I don’t want to know anything about your affairs, you have no right to send me such letters, to drag me into your criminal—”
“I did not write you anything criminal,” said Cincinnatus.
“That’s what you think, but everyone was horrified by your letter, simply horrified! Me, I’m stupid maybe, and don’t know anything about the laws, but still my instinct told me that every word of yours was impossible, unspeakable … Oh, Cincinnatus, what a position you put me in—and the children—think of the children.… Listen—please listen to me for just a minute—” she went on with such ardor that her speech became quite unintelligible, “renounce everything, everything. Tell them that you are innocent, that you were merely swaggering, tell them, repent, do it—even if it doesn’t save your head, think of me—already they are pointing fingers at me and saying, ‘That’s her, the widow, that’s her!’ ”
“Wait, Marthe, I don’t understand. Repent of what?”
“That’s right! Mix me up in it, ask me leading … If I knew all the answers, why, then I’d be your accomac … accomplice! That’s quite obvious. No, enough, enough. I’m dreadfully afraid of all this … Tell me one last time, are you sure you don’t want to repent, for my sake, for all our sakes?”
“Good-bye, Marthe,” said Cincinnatus.
She sat down and lapsed into thought, leaning on her right elbow, and sketching her world on the table with her left hand.
“How dreadful, how dull,” she said, heaving a deep, deep sigh. She frowned and drew a river with her fingernail. “I thought we would meet quite differently. I was ready to give you everything. And this is what I get for my pains! Well, what’s done is done.” (The river flowed into a sea—off. the edge of the table.) “You know, I’m leaving with a heavy heart. Yes, but how am I going to get out?” she remembered suddenly, innocently and even cheerfully. “They won’t be coming for me for a while yet, I talked them into giving me oodles of time.”
“Don’t worry,” said Cincinnatus, “every word we say … They will open it in a moment.”
He was not mistaken.
“Bye, bye-bye,” chirped Marthe. “Wait, stop pawing me, let me say good-bye to my husband. Bye-bye. If you need anything in the way of shirts or anything … Oh yes, the children asked me to give you a big, big kiss. There was something else … Oh, I nearly forgot—daddy took the wine-cup I gave you—he says you promised him—”
“Hurry, hurry, little lady,” interrupted Rodion, kneeing her in familiar fashion toward the door.
Chapter Nineteen
Next morning they brought him the newspapers, and this reminded him of the first days of his confinement. He noticed at once the color photograph: under a blue sky, the square, packed so densely with a motley crowd that only the very edge of the red platform was visible. In the column dealing with the execution half the lines were blacked out, and out of the remainder Cincinnatus could fish only what he already knew from Marthe—that the maestro was not feeling too well, and that the performance was postponed, possibly for a long time.
“What a treat you are getting today,” said Rodion, not to Cincinnatus but to the spider.
In both hands, most carefully, but at the same time squeamishly (care prompted him to press it to his chest, distaste made him hold it away) he carried a towel gathered together in a lump in which something large stirred and rustled.
“Got it on a window pane in the tower. The monster! See how it flops and flaps—you can hardly hold it …”
He was going to pull up the chair, as he always did, in order to stand up on it and deliver the victim to the voracious spider on his solid web (the beast was already puffing himself up, sensing the prey) but something went wrong—his gnarled, fearful fingers happened to release the main fold of the towel, and he immediately cried out and cringed, as people cry out and cringe whom not a bat but an ordinary house mouse inspires with revulsion and terror. Something large, dark, and furnished with feelers, disengaged itself from the towel, and Rodion emitted a loud yell, tramping in one place, afraid to let the thing escape but not daring to grab it. The towel fell; and the fair captive clung to Rodion’s cuff, clutching it with all six of its adhesive feet.
It was only a moth, but what a moth! It was as large as a man’s hand; it had thick, dark-brown wings with a hoary lining and gray-dusted margins; each wing was adorned in the center with an eye-spot, shining like steel.
Its segmented limbs, in fluffy muffs, now clung, now unstuck themselves, and the upraised vanes of its wings, through whose underside the same staring spots and wavy gray pattern showed, oscillated slowly, as the moth, groping its way, crawled up the sleeve, while Rodion, quite panic-stricken, rolling his eyes, throwing away, and forsaking his own arm, wailed, “Take it off’n me! take it off’n me!”
Upon reaching his elbow, the moth began noiselessly flapping its heavy wings; they seemed to outbalance its body, and on Rodion’s elbow joint, the creature turned over, wings hanging down, still tenaciously clinging to the sleeve—and now one could see its brown, white-dappled abdomen, its squirrel face, the black globules of its eyes and its feathery antennae resembling pointed ears.
“Take it away!” implored Rodion, beside himself, and his frantic gesturing caused the splendid insect to fall off; it struck the table, paused on it in mighty vibration, and suddenly took off from its edge.
But to me your daytime is dark, why did you disturb my slumber? Its flight, swooping and lumbering, lasted only a short time. Rodion picked up the towel and, swinging wildly, attempted to knock down the blind flyer; but suddenly it disappeared as if the very air had swallowed it.
Rodion searched for a while, did not find it, and stopped in the center of the cell, turning toward Cincinnatus, arms akimbo. “Eh? What a rascal!” he ejaculated after an expressive silence. He spat; he shook his head and pulled out a throbbing match box with spare flies, with which the disappointed animal had to be satisfied. Cincinnatus, however, had
