Alexei Tolstoy: Cagliostro

Alexei did not shut his eyes all night. At daybreak, he put on a robe, went down to the river and jumped into the water, invisible through the mist. On the surface it was lukewarm, but deep down it was icy. After the bathe, he got dressed, had his hair waved, drank some hot milk with honey, and went down into the garden-his thoughts were excited, and his head was afire.

The morning was humid and still. Blackbirds, looking worried, were running about the grass. A golden oriole was whistling as if it were blowing into a warbler. In the bluish mist hovering over the pool with the fountains playing at half strength, a dove was sobbing tenderly somewhere in the tall, spreading trees.

The walks had been washed clean and were still damp, and on one of them Alexei noticed the prints of a woman's feet. He followed them, and in a glade where the outlines of a round folly and the huge black poplars beside it stood out from the bluish mist, he saw the Countess. She was standing on the steps with drooping arms and listening to the cuckoo calling in the grove.

When he came closer his heart began to hammer, for tears were pouring down the young woman's face, and her bare shoulders were jerking. Startled by the sound of his footsteps, she turned round, gasped and ran, holding up her full skirt with both hands. However, at the pond she stopped and faced him. A blush suffused her cheeks, and tears stood in her frightened blue eyes. She quickly wiped them with a tiny handkerchief and smiled contritely.

"I frightened you, forgive me," said Alexei.

"No, oh no," she replied, tucked the handkerchief into the low neck of her dress, and curtsied. Alexei kissed her hand politely. "The morning was so lovely, the cuckoo called so nicely, that I felt sad, and you gave me a fright." She walked beside Alexei along the shore. "Don't you feel sad when you see how lovely is God's world? You know, I was thinking about what you told us last night. You are living in such plenty, unattached. And young… But why, why is there no happiness?"

She stopped short and looked into his eyes. Alexei answered the first thing that came into his head-something about the coarseness of life and the impossibility of happiness. Saying this he gave her a wide smile and the smile remained on his lips.

As they continued their stroll and talked, he saw before him only her blue eyes-they seemed to be suffused with the morning's loveliness, he heard only the sound of her voice and the distant incessant calls of the cuckoo.

The Countess told him that she had been born in a village near Prague, she was an orphan, she was called Augusta, though her real name was Maria, that for three years now she had been travelling about the world with her husband, that what she had seen in that time was more than others saw in a lifetime, and that just now, in this morning mist, all her past flashed by before her mind's eye, and made her cry.

"I was married when I was a mere child, but during these three years my heart matured," she said, and again glanced gently and straight into Alexei's eyes. "I do not know you, but for some reason I trust you as if I've known you for a long time. You won't think ill of me for chattering, will you?"

He took her hand and, leaning low over it, kissed it several times, and at his last kiss her hand turned palm upward, pressed his lips lightly, and slipped away.

"Couldn't you have found a wife, could you not have fallen in love with a woman instead of some incorporeal dream or something?" Maria asked in a quivering voice. "You are inexperienced and naive… You don't know what a horror your dream is…"

She went to a stone seat and sat down. Alexei sat down beside her.

"But why a horror?" he asked. "What is so sinful in my dreaming of something that does not exist in life"?

"The more reason… On a morning like this you must not, you must not dream of something that cannot be," she said, and tears rose to her eyes again.

He moved closer to her and took her hand.

"I feel that you are unhappy…"

She nodded silently and quickly. She was touching like a little girl in her agitation. Alexei felt that she wanted with her whole heart and soul to draw his thoughts and emotions to her own self. His heart felt hot-a tenderness towards this woman swept over it like a gust of wind that, running through a field, causes the grass to lie low.

"Who makes you suffer?" he asked in a whisper.

And Maria replied hurriedly as if afraid to lose a minute of this conversation:

"I fear… I hate my husband… He's a monster, the world has never seen his like… He tortures me… Oh, if you only knew… I have no one in the whole world… My love has been sought by many, but what is it to me… Not one of them asked me with sympathy whether my life was happy or not… You and I have barely met, and we have to part, but I shall forever remember this minute when you asked me…" her lips began to quiver, she was obviously mastering her shyness with a great effort, and suddenly she blushed furiously and said: "The moment I saw you my heart told me: trust him."

"Oh good God … it's unbearable… I shall kill him!" cried Alexei, clenching the handle of his sword.

And in the next instant someone sneezed loudly behind them. Maria gave a feeble cry, like a bird. Alexei leapt to his feet and between the lime trees saw Cagliostro. He had on the same green overcoat and large-brimmed hat from which white ostrich feathers fell on his shoulders and back. Holding his snuff-box in his hand, he was making terrible faces with the next sneeze coming on. In the light of day his face seemed purple, for that is how full-blooded and swarthy he was.

Keeping his hand on the handle of his sword, Alexei glared at this extraordinary man. Cagliostro, changing his mind about sneezing, held out his snuff-box and said:

"Have a pinch."

Instinctively Alexei raised his hand, but gripped his sword handle again at once.

"Well, if you don't want to take a pinch, don't," said Cagliostro. "Countess, I've been looking for you all over the garden, my bag has been packed, but I have not touched your things." Turning to Alexei again, he said: "Well then, if our carriage has been repaired, we shall be on our way."

He offered an arm to Maria; meekly, without raising her head, she took her husband's arm, and they started towards the house walking along a path between tall grasses.

Alexei covered his face with his hands and sank down on the garden seat.

He sat thus for a long time in a trance, hearing neither the whistling of the birds nor the splashing of the fountains which the gardener had now turned full on. He stared at the sand under his feet and the bugs crawling about there. These were the flat red bugs each of which had a funny face painted on its back. Some crawled clutched together-one funny face next to another, while some crawled in and out of the crack in the hard-packed earth of the walk without any apparent need.

Alexei was thinking that the enchantment of the morning had wrecked his life. He could never go back now to the cosiness of his hopeless day-dreaming about ideal love: Maria's blue eyes, these twin blue rays, had reached into his heart and aroused it. Maria was going away and they would never meet again. Both dream and reality had been shattered-what other enchantments could he expect from life now?

Suddenly he remembered the crooked leer with which Cagliostro had offered him his snuff-box, and his blood boiled with fury. He sprang to his feet and, without knowing yet what he was going to do, but something resolute anyway, he pulled his hat down over his eyes and strode to the house.

In the door he was met by Fedosia Ivanovna.

"Alexis," she cried fretfully. "The blacksmith has just been and he told me, the rogue, that he simply could not get the Count's carriage fixed in less than two days from now."