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Yet when she moaned, "Ah, Anna Zanidov!" it was with an accent of reproach as keen as though the prophetess of a tragedy must be the cause of it. The sunshine was dissolving the luxurious room. There came to her, like a dullness from a drug, the fancy that this world had no existence except that with which her credulity had endowed it.
At a general stir, one of the ladies suggested nervously: "Perhaps you'd better " But Madame Zanidov was saying: "The people in the clearing are black savages. They sit round a body that is stretched on the ground and covered with a cloth. Is it the savages who are so sad? I think not. I cannot describe the one who lies in the midst of them. The cloth is drawn up to cover even his face.
The prophesy of Anna Zanidov had gained a still greater power from those deep forests, those sudden apparitions in vaporous clearings of men armed with gleaming spears, and now from the greenish infiltration of the moonlight. Another lion roared in the depths of the night. "Why should one fear even these strange forms of death? What has my life been that I should find it precious?
Now, turning her sharp, dead-white profile to right and left, encountering everywhere a frivolous eagerness, Madame Zanidov protested: "Really, I ask you if this is the proper atmosphere!" She explained that she regarded very seriously "this gift" of hers, which had astonished people even in her childhood.
And the vague savor of stables and flowers, the statuesque postures of beasts and the expectant attitudes of human beings, were suddenly fused together into one hallucination a flood of sensory impressions at once unreal and too actual, in which Lilla found herself sinking and smothering. Anna Zanidov was looking at her intently.
"You do not often come to town, they tell me," the Russian murmured. "No, why should I?" Lilla returned, as if violently aroused from sleep. She saw beyond Anna Zanidov, on the steps of the box, a man whose visage was lined across the forehead and under the cheekbones, and who showed, under his heavy, mouse-colored mustache, a stony, courteous smile. It was the new face of Cornelius Rysbroek.
The huge tree trunks sprang up toward a firmament of somber green, from which descended dense festoons of vines. Through this twilight flitted birds of brilliant plumage and long-haired monkeys. The place had a morose, nefarious beauty, like the forest in the prophecy of Anna Zanidov. Now and then a glade appeared, hung with flowers of mustard yellow or diaphanous purple.
Then she glanced over the books in which the paragraphs were shortest, ran through a few magazines, kicked off her slippers, put her feet on a stool, lighted a cigarette, and fell back upon gossip. Madame Zanidov was now visiting in Maine. Cornelius Rysbroek had gone to Mexico. "Mexico! Aren't things rather unsettled there?"
Their necklaces flashed with the rising of their bosoms; their heads leaned forward in thought; and the mingled odors of their perfumes were like exhalations from the innermost recesses of their hearts. By this time, apparently, the proper atmosphere had been established. Madame Zanidov consented to display her powers. All the women drew their chairs closer.
She took the hand of a young girl whose features were alive with an invincible gay selfishness. Madame Zanidov hardly glanced at the other's palm. Closing her almond-shaped eyes, contracting her brows, she let an unnatural fixed smile settle upon her lips.
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