The Green Book Part 71

No one reads that.

Well, then, France: The French are content. How satisfactory! Turkey: Peace concluded with the Greeks. Evident enough! England: The Channel Fleet returned to Dover. And a good thing too! In Russia nothing of interest has transpired. Heaven be praised!

After which each, lighting his lantern, repairs home. The master of the house seeks his wife's room. The good little woman has had time for her first sleep, and is not angry with his friends for staying so long at cards. Good little wife! Next day they rise late, because the snow has fallen so deep in the night that their windows are blocked and they cannot see out. What matter! One is not merely a Nimrod, but a Tyrtaeus as well. If one cannot go forth to Diana, one can toy with the muses at home; they are good friends, too.

A man lights his pipe, paces the room, and poetizes, pausing at every comma and full stop to give his dear little wife a kiss; she, the while, busied in doing her hair in becoming fas.h.i.+on. If a rhyme be hard to find, he takes his wife on his knee and looks into her eyes, and--the rhyme is soon found.

In the afternoon the friends turn up again--the postmaster, a gentleman farmer, and a landed proprietor. They have not been deterred by the heavy snow. Two had driven over; for the third, Bethsaba had sent the sledge, that the party might be complete. She set out the card-table.

"It is paradise--perfect paradise!"

But once the serpent succeeded in wriggling into paradise.

At the end of the game, when the long score had to be reckoned up, in order to see how many copecks had been won, the postmaster was fain to turn out all his pockets to sc.r.a.pe together enough small coin wherewith to pay his debts. In so doing he extracted several letters.

"No news to-day?" the gentleman farmer asks him.

The only newspaper in that part came to Pushkin, so the neighbors always came to him to hear the news.

"What are you twaddling about? Did I not bring a paper yesterday? Do you think a press correspondent can afford to lie every day? Quite enough to have to do it three times a week. Poor devil! he must bless the intermediate days. If you must have a paper, read yesterday's."

"So we have, from beginning to end."

"I bet you've not read about the review."

"Right you are. Hand it over."

And it repaid the trouble of reading. For it stated that each regiment of guards quartered in St. Petersburg had severally taken the oath of allegiance in the chapel of the Winter Palace. And why not, if they liked to do so? It would do the soldiers no harm. Ah, but it was to Czar _Constantine_ that they had sworn allegiance.

"Czar _Constantine_? Who ever heard of a Czar Constantine?"

In the great confusion the press had _entirely forgotten_ to officially announce the death of Czar Alexander.

"It's a slip of the pen," quoth the postmaster. "Perhaps the correspondent was drunk. Why should they not get drunk, poor devils, just once a year?"

So the matter dropped. The writer of the article in question had been celebrating his name-day too freely, had got mixed, and had written, instead of Alexander, Constantine.

In the next number, under _errata_, the mistake would be rectified.

But the next number brought no correction; rather the "error" was repeated twofold, threefold--all edicts being published in the name of "His Majesty Czar Constantine."

The death of Czar Alexander was never officially announced.

The worthy news-reading public only saw from their Sunday papers what was going on. These papers gave full details of the funeral services held in all the churches of St. Petersburg, and the official odes to the dead, which sang the fame of the deceased Czar in Russian, Latin, and Greek.

After that no one wondered that future edicts were promulgated in Constantine's name; he was the Czarevitch, and, according to Russian laws of succession, heir to the throne. That the people did not love him did not affect the question. What had the people to do with it? The soldiers had sworn him allegiance, and the soldiers are the empire.

And what matters all this to those "happy folk" in the country-house?

Their home was dear to them in Czar Alexander's time; that Constantine now reigns in his stead only makes that home dearer.

The Winter Palace has got a new inmate more unwelcome than the last. The former, as he wandered silent and melancholy among his courtiers, was hard to serve; how much more the new one, who knouts, kicks, breaks men's bones, and swears! His cheerful moods excite more terror than did the other's depression.

On these accounts the officer of the guards, among whose private papers was a ukase, "by command of the Czar" forbidding him to leave Pleskow beyond a day's journey, might well be called a lucky fellow.

CHAPTER XLVII

THE TEMPTER

One stormy winter's day, on which not even his neighbors dared venture out of their houses to make their customary visit to Pushkin, a sledge, amid the tinkling of many bells, drove into the courtyard, and from out the midst of his fur wrappings and high felt boots emerged Chevalier Galban.

A host stifles all inimical feeling towards his guest, the more so when he comes in such vile weather. The road was invisible from snow-drifts; it was impossible to see where one was driving.

Pushkin welcomed Galban cordially. The pipe of peace was lighted in the warm, cosey room. Bethsaba prepared the tea.

"But, in the name of all that's wonderful, what brought you out of St.

Petersburg in such weather?"

"H'm! My dear fellow, that your own experience can give you a good inkling of! Your windows do not look on to Nevski Prospect either! You, too, have your reasons for being here."

"Right you are," said Pushkin, blowing the smoke in blue rings into the air, which rings gathered together over Bethsaba's head, as an aureole over the head of a saint; and, ostentatiously drawing his wife towards him, he put his arm round her waist as he said, "This is my reason!"

Galban laughed. "Well, I certainly cannot lay claim to such a reason! As far as I am concerned, it is _Veteres migrate coloni_" (Old cottagers take to wandering). "The world is topsy-turvy. The old set have to fly for their lives. Even Araktseieff is smoking his pipe at Grusino."

"That surprises me. Czar Constantine was his ideal. And I know that there is no one Araktseieff loves better than Czar Constantine."

"Yes; if Constantine were the Czar, I, too, should have known what I was about; but he is not."

"Not Czar?" said Pushkin, amazed. "But the papers give his name in all proclamations."

"But, my dear Alexander Sergievitch! You a writer yourself, and yet are nave enough to believe what is in the papers?"

"The devil! But one must believe them when they announce that the Senate has proclaimed Constantine to be Czar, and that the household troops have sworn the oath of allegiance to him."

"All the same, Constantine is not Czar. We live, my friend, in an age of miracles and absurdities. Official papers do not publish everything; still, in St. Petersburg people pretty well know what is happening. When Constantine was proclaimed Czar, and from Grand Dukes to guards all had duly sworn the oath of allegiance to him, the President of the Senate, Lapukhin, produces a sealed packet, upon which was inscribed, in the late Czar's handwriting--'To be opened in cabinet council after my death.' The seals were broken, and within was found a doc.u.ment in which Grand Duke Constantine, the Czarevitch, renounced his succession to the throne in favor of his younger brother, Grand Duke Nicholas. A second doc.u.ment contained in the packet was Alexander's will, wherein he states that he had accepted Constantine's renunciation of the throne, and naming Grand Duke Nicholas as his heir."

"So, then, Constantine is not Czar, but Nicholas. That is plain."

Pushkin said this in a tone from which it was easy to infer that it was a matter of indifference to him.

"Not quite so plain as you think. Grand Duke Nicholas refuses to accept the succession. He is a follower of the old regime, which suffers no changes, and now the war of high-mindedness runs high between St.

Petersburg and Warsaw. Grand Duke Michael, the third brother, acting as intermediary, goes from one brother to the other with the request that he should accept the crown."

"Anyway, a display of great brotherly love, unexampled in the world's history. Up to now princes have been more apt to dispute a crown!"

"And what makes the farce complete is that two accomplished facts, contradictory to each other, have to be surmounted. It is an accomplished fact that Constantine has been proclaimed Czar and cannot relinquish the throne; and, equally so, that he has taken to wife Johanna Grudzinska, a Pole, a Catholic, and only of aristocratic birth, three circ.u.mstances which render it impossible for her husband to wear the crown. And so, on the one hand, Constantine _cannot_ relinquish the throne; on the other, he _cannot_ ascend it."