Read Online The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice DeKobra - Free Book Online

naïve. Living is high since the war—but human life is cheap. When twenty million men have been the victims of inimical capitalists, what difference does it make if a few thousand Russians are incarcerated for the sake of severe principles? When hatred, violence, envy, and abject egotism have circulated at their own free will among civilized people, who has any right to reproach us for not having conducted our revolution with a shepherd’s staff in our hand and Pan’s pipes to our lips? Believe me, the world is always kind to successful tyrants, and moral mud is only thrown at the heads of political failures. Take, for example, your dear Kerensky, the white hope of the Western Liberals—he missed his mark, and you all reproached him bitterly for having been hypersensitive. All he would have had to do would have been to hang every one of us—Lenin and his following. With about fifty pretty little executions without trial, he might have been able to smash the egg of Communism under his heel; the constituency would then not have been overthrown by the sailor Jelesniakof, and you would have looked up to Kerensky as the greatest statesman in the world. Revolutions are not made with mittens. A social revolution conducted along legal lines isa toy constructed for the use of dyspeptic Socialists nourished on noodles and black bread.”
    “You are rapidly convincing me, old boy.”
    The
maitre d’hotel
had just removed the
carpe à la chambord
to replace it with a succulent chicken
à la diable
, reclining comfortably on a bed of golden potatoes. Varichkine was doing well by this simple repast. Already two bottles of extra-dry were waving their parched throats in the air. He knocked his crystal drinking-cup against mine and his eyes shone with an indulgent smile. He ridiculed:
    “Europe! Reproaching us for our crimes! Ha, ha! What a fine Utopian you are, my dear friend! Europe to try and drive us out like a lot of lousy dogs such as they send to the Bosphorus? Ha, ha! When kings are glad to shake hands with us? Do you remember the conference at Genoa, when the Pope’s emissaries didn’t object to rubbing their scarlet silk elbows against the red cotton of our shirts? When France took its ambassador out of the Vatican in order to send one to us? When the most authentic princesses would give the biggest pearls in their jewel boxes in order to get us to sit beside them in their own dining-rooms?”
    He emptied his glass, frowned and added after a short silence, “And when Lady Diana Wynham manifests a desire to negotiate personally with me?”
    I had been anticipating this inevitable transition for some time. “I am sure, my dear fellow, that Lady Diana would be fascinated with your personality.”
    “Please don’t flatter me. Who am I in her eyes? An insignificant worm. She is well-born. I am nothing but the son of a lackey of Czarism. Her ancestors are prominent figures in the history of Scotland. Mine were eating roots a hundred years ago, and Pouchkine’s contemporaries used to walk around in bear skins—”
    “Who can tell? If she were to meet you she might be carried away by the same strange attraction which Slavs seem to have for our beautiful women.”
    Varichkine pretended to consider this a great joke. Throwing back his head, gently caressing his lovely black beard, like a young minister about to preach his first sermon, he hummed in his musical voice:
    “Ah, yes. We are the Muscovites with wolves’ teeth, the Asiatics with avid, greedy eyes—the ones our great poet, Block, writes about—the Scythians who march, under the sign of the tempest, in the assault on occidental civilization, to violate the Three White Geese of your Capital: your Liberty, your Equality, and your Fraternity—that glorious trinity which sits back satisfied and watches the endless procession of its downtrodden proletariat. Sincerely, old fellow, do you think that Lady Wynham might just possibly find me attractive?”
    “Varichkine,