Chapter 18
BEFORE THE END of their recuperative stay aboard the purification satellite, Prince Shcherbatsky, who had sojourned nearby on a Venusian colony orbiter to visit some Russian friends—to get a breath of Russian air, as he said—came back to his wife and daughter.
The prince returned thinner, with the skin hanging in loose bags on his cheeks, marked here and there by mild red burns from occasional exposure to the closer-than-usual sun, but in the most cheerful frame of mind. His good humor was even greater when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The news of Kitty’s friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the reports the princess gave him of some kind of change she had noticed in Kitty, troubled the prince and aroused his habitual feeling of jealousy of everything that drew his daughter away from him, and a dread that his daughter might have gone out of the reach of his influence into regions inaccessible to him. But these unpleasant matters were all drowned in the sea of kindliness and good humor that was always within him.
The evening after his arrival the prince, in his long overcoat, with his Russian wrinkles and baggy cheeks propped up by a starched collar, set off with his daughter down the long, brightly lit passageways of the orbiter. She had invited him to join her this night, in the company of Madame Stahl and Varenka, to take part in the joy she had discovered in the xenotheological ritual of invitation to the Honored Guests.
“Present me to your new friends,” he said to his daughter, squeezing her hand with his elbow as they arrived at the darkened arcade, with the wide windows looking out at the universe of stars, where Madame Stahl held the nightly ceremony. “Only it’s melancholy, very melancholy here. Who’s that?”
It was Varenka herself. She was walking rapidly toward them carrying an elegant red bag.
“Here is Papa,” Kitty said to her.
Varenka made—simply and naturally as she did everything—a movement between a bow and a curtsey, and immediately began talking to the prince, without shyness, naturally, as she talked to everyone.
“Of course I know you; I know you very well,” the prince said to her with a smile, in which Kitty detected with joy that her father liked her friend. Kitty saw that her father had meant to make fun of Varenka, but that he could not do it because he liked her.
“I look forward, too, to meeting the famous Madame Stahl,” he went on, “if she deigns to recognize me.”
“Why, did you know her, Papa?” Kitty asked apprehensively, catching the gleam of irony that kindled in the prince’s eyes at the mention of Madame Stahl.
“I used to know her husband, and her too a little, before she became a stargazer.”
“What do you mean by stargazer, Papa?” asked Kitty, dismayed by the teasing tone with which he had pronounced the word.
“I don’t quite know myself. I only know that she thanks these magical light-beings for everything, for every misfortune, and thanks them too that her husband died. And that’s rather droll, as they didn’t get on together.”
“Oh, here she is now,” said Kitty, as Varenka returned, now tugging laboriously on the Class I wheelbarrow in which lay, propped on pillows, something in gray and blue and lying under a sunshade—a sunshade, though they were quite well protected from outer space. This was Madame Stahl.
The prince went up to her, and Kitty detected that disconcerting gleam of irony in his eyes. He went up to Madame Stahl and addressed her with extreme courtesy and affability in that excellent French that so few speak nowadays.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but I must recall myself to thank you for your kindness to my daughter,” he said, taking off his hat and not putting it on again.
“Prince Alexander Shcherbatsky,” said Madame Stahl, lifting upon him her heavenly eyes, in which Kitty discerned a look of annoyance. “Delighted! I have taken a great fancy to your daughter.”
“You are still in weak health?”
“Yes, I’m used to it,” said Madame Stahl.
“You are scarcely changed at all,” the prince said to her. “It’s ten or eleven years since I had the honor of seeing you.”
“Yes, our Guests send the darkness and the strength to bear it. Often one wonders what is the goal of this life? . . . The other side!” she said angrily to Varenka, who had rearranged the rug over her feet not to her satisfaction.
“To do good, probably,” said the prince with a twinkle in his eye.
“That is not for us to judge,” said Madame Stahl, perceiving the shade of expression on the prince’s face.
“I meant to warn you, Madame,” said the prince, his tone losing its genial teasing quality and growing serious, “there is talk on Venus of a changing attitude among the Ministry, regarding the practice of xenotheology. To me and other tired old cynics like me, it is merely amusing, but I feel I should warn you, the Ministry seems to be finding it less amusing of late.”
“What do you mean?” she said, her eyes growing wary.
“What once was a silly fad is lately considered to be a form of Janusism.”
Kitty and Varenka gasped, and Tatiana in shock clapped a pink-clad metal hand before her mouth. Madame Stahl offered no reply to the prince. Instead she turned a cold eye to Kitty, apologized that she was not feeling well and there would be no ceremony tonight. Then she snapped her fingers, and Varenka dragged her from the room.
Kitty turned to her father and objected hotly to this treatment of her new mentor.
“Do not be cross with me, dear,” replied the Prince. “I only warn her as a caution, though I cannot pretend I did not take some pleasure in spoiling her fun.”
“Oh, Papa! How can you be so mocking? Varenka worships her.”
“Of course she does. And I suppose she has told you how the relations between Class IIIs and humans are against the good principles of xenotheologism? You might ask her, or her poor Varenka, how it can be thought more moral to treat fellow human beings as if they were the robots—or, to use the ancient word, servants.”
“But she does so much good! Ask anyone! Everyone knows her!”
“Perhaps so,” said the prince, squeezing her hand with his elbow, “but it’s better when one does good so that you may ask everyone and no one knows.”
Kitty did not answer, not because she had nothing to say, but because she did not care to reveal her secret thoughts even to her father. But, strange to say, although she had so made up her mind not to be influenced by her father’s views, not to let him into her inmost sanctuary, she felt that the heavenly image of Madame Stahl, which she had carried for a whole month in her heart, had vanished, never to return, just as the fantastic figure made up of some clothes thrown down at random vanishes when one sees that it is only some garment lying there. All that was left was a woman with short legs, who worried patient Varenka for not arranging her rug to her liking. And by no effort of the imagination could Kitty bring back the former Madame Stahl.
And nor was it necessary to do so, as four days later, the rumors the prince had heard on the Venusian colony were proved true in the most shocking way. Madame Stahl was arrested by the shipboard troop of 77s, denounced as a heretic and a traitor to Mother Russia; but the rumor on the orbiter was that the Ministry, having discovered that there may actually be aliens in the far reaches of the universe, ruled that those fervently awaiting their arrival were not religious fanatics, but conspirators with a potential enemy.
Kitty was devastated that this person she had come to love, even to worship, in such a short time, could turn out to be a Janus. With Varenka holding onto one trembling arm and Tatiana onto the other, she went to watch the sentence carried out; Madame Stahl struggled as she was lifted from her wheelbarrow and dragged all the way down the long hallway that led to the portal. She struggled as she was stripped of her clothing and bound head and feet. She struggled and wept as she was shoved into the exit dock, and the airlock was shut behind her. She pounded on the interior door as the exterior door was opened from within by remote telegraphy, and she screamed, wordlessly, as her body was launched into the cold vastness of the void. At last, as Kitty watched, weeping, from the bay window of the orbiter, Madame Stahl stopped screaming, stopped crying, and her body became entirely still, floating rapidly away into echoing black eternity.
After that solemn event, all the world in which she had been living was transformed for Kitty. She did not give up everything she had learned, but she became aware that she had deceived herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to be. Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of maintaining herself without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle that she had wished to mount. Moreover, she became aware of all the dreariness of the world of sorrow, of sick and dying people, in which she had been living. The efforts she had made to like it seemed to her intolerable, and she felt a longing to get back quickly into the fresh air, to Russia, to Ergushovo, where, as she knew from letters, her sister Dolly had already gone with her children.
But her affection for Varenka did not wane. As she said good-bye, Kitty begged her to come to them in Russia.
“I’ll come when you get married,” said Varenka.
“I shall never marry.”
“Well, then, I shall never come.”
“Well, then, I shall be married simply for that. Mind now, remember your promise,” said Kitty.
The doctor’s prediction was fulfilled. Kitty returned home to Russia cured. She was not so gay and thoughtless as before, but she was serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her.