XX
ZUGDIDI
The capital of Mingrelia · Our little house · Labors on the Murat estate · Social life at the Murats’ and the Dedopali’s · Lonely summer at Zugdidi · New literary labors · Prototype of Es Löwos · New horizons · Study together
We changed our residence from Tiflis to Kutais again, then to Gordi and to Zugdidi, and to many other places; I cannot here recount in chronological order and in detail all the migrations that filled up our nine years of the Caucasus. Nor was it external events that were the “important thing” for us; it was inner experiences, there in our exile, that made of us two wholly new persons,—two happy persons, two good persons.
We spent a few lovely years in the little town of Zugdidi, the Mingrelian capital; only a village, although a capital. A long row of Oriental houses with open shops, stall on stall; for that reason the row was called “The Bazaar”; but it was also called “The Boulevard,” because the street was planted with a double row of tall trees. And what trees! Nothing less than mimosas, if you please. When they were in bloom the whole place was filled with drowsy fragrance. Besides this Oriental row there was a bunch of little peasant huts occupied by—Württemberg peasants: this was “the German colony.” Then, scattered about in larger and smaller fenced grassplots or fields of Indian corn, one-storied houses in the style of the Caucasus,—that is, built of wood and surrounded with verandas; also, in a garden, Count Rosmorduc’s villa; then the Princess’s provisional dwelling on the border of the great park, in the midst of which rose the unfinished magnificence of the castle,—this was Zugdidi.
There was to be something else added. Achille and Salomé Murat had decided to take up their residence in the Caucasus. A large uncultivated domain was assigned to them, and upon it a country house, farm buildings, stables, flower and kitchen gardens, greenhouses, and cultivated fields were to be created. And all this we actually saw created in the course of four years.
For ourselves we had rented the cottage of a German colonist. Paradisal, according to our ideas; in itself it was not so very pretentious. Level with the ground, three low-studded rooms and a kitchen. A wooden veranda in front of the entrance. The first room was our drawing-room. We had got at the bazaar a sufficient quantity of a very inexpensive red material, and we used it to tapestry the walls of the drawing-room and to provide the windows with hangings. We were our own upholsterers. The material was cut and sewed together, then tacked up, and it was done. For furniture our red drawing-room had a very large table which served both of us as a writing-table, a few chairs, another table, and a takhta. This is a piece of furniture which is never lacking in a Caucasian room,—a long, wide divan, uncovered and without a back. A rug is thrown over it and forms the covering; four long bolsters covered with carpeting serve as the back and arms. One can add a few fancy pillows, and it makes the most comfortable contrivance for sitting, lying down, or lounging. With the aid of a few bookcases, a few vases kept always full of fresh flowers, a mirror over the fireplace, and a carpet on the floor, the red drawing-room assumed an almost elegant appearance. We were to the last degree proud of it.
The two other rooms were arranged with corresponding luxury as a bedchamber and dressing-room. Our corps of servants consisted of the daughter of our Swabian landlord, who lived in another little house situated behind the grass-grown court; we also had a fundus instructus consisting of five geese. These marched forth independently to pasture every morning and came dignifiedly home toward evening. Of course they had been acquired for culinary purposes; but having watched them every day from our balcony returning home so unsuspiciously, we felt it so hard to betray their confidence that during our whole residence there we left them in possession of their lives. One may enjoy roast fowl, but it should not be personal acquaintances.
The reason for our settling in Zugdidi was that Prince Achille Murat had engaged my husband as overseer and assistant in the construction of his buildings and other improvements. Designing plans and directing workmen had become his specialty. Prince Murat himself was a sort of amateur architect, amateur farmer, and amateur gardener; so the two shared in making and executing plans. Gardens were plotted, wooden ceilings painted, ditches dug, wall-paper put on, horse-thief-proof stalls constructed, all with combined forces; I frequently saw the two, owner and manager, together enthroned on the top of a ladder or wading in the depths of a drainage-ditch. And now and then, in a short dress of rough cloth, the princess herself, armed with paint-brush, spade, or shovel, also gave her aid. I had another field of labor: for two hours every day I taught German and the piano to the two little boys, Lucien and Napo.
The princely couple’s servants did not take existence so easily as their masters; there was constant changing and friction; the correct English coachmen and grooms, the exquisite French chefs, could not put up with these primitive, inchoate conveniences. They would not remain in the wilderness and disorder. Except for a faithful valet of long years’ standing and a chambermaid of the same kind (and even these felt that they were martyrs), all rebelled. Then, each time, new regents of the kitchen and stable would be imported, for Prince Achille could not live without the finest French cookery and without sportsmanlike English appointments for his horses, his carriages, and his hunting.
Twice a week we used to eat in the villa on which they were working, and after dinner, at which, in contrast to the forenoon’s workaday garb, all appeared in evening dress, the evenings were spent in chatting, music, and chess-playing. Great amusement was afforded also by the caricatures which my husband made and brought with him; they presented a complete chronicle of the calamities which had attended the building operations and a whole portrait gallery of exaggerated but speaking likenesses of the various persons involved. Among the many talents with which My Own was endowed was that of wielding an extraordinarily witty pencil. Once he sent to the Fliegende Blätter a series of illustrations to the examples given in the Ollendorf grammars, such as “The candelabra of thy uncle is larger than the cat of my aunt,” “The industrious apprentice of the baker has seen the melancholy captain,” “The French gentleman has a long walking-stick and the poor Russian is cold,” and the like, which were accepted and made a great hit.
In the winter, when we stayed at Zugdidi with the Dedopali, Sunday was the day on which her children and we were regularly invited to dinner. In the summer, however, we were left at Zugdidi quite alone, and we enjoyed this life the most. My husband devoted a few hours in the morning to superintending the work on the Murat estate, and the rest of the time belonged wholly to me; and then both of us could write diligently. At this time were produced the novels Ein schlechter Mensch, Hanna, and the book entitled Inventarium einer Seele, by B. Oulot; and Daredjan, Ein Aznaour, and Kinder des Kaukasus, by A. G. von Suttner. Time also was ours for reading together, for studying together, for long conversations about everything between heaven and earth, and we evolved a philosophy of life, a view of the universe, which we should never have reached under other circumstances, nor either of us without the other; we had won for ourselves a genuine Eden of harmony, with new, wide, bright horizons.
But one cannot revel forever on the heights of thought; one must have one’s little corner of the earth, one’s humble everyday home; and the reason why we felt so utterly contented in ours was that we had quite unintentionally fulfilled that command of the Saviour which says, “Be ye therefore as little children.”
We talked nonsense, we did absurdities, we had invented a language of our own, we flung the most shocking insults at each other, we had the wildest romps and the most extraordinary songs, we played, not indeed with dolls, but with creatures of our fancy; in short, we were silly, silly, happy children. I embodied this phase of our life in a monograph entitled Es Löwos, which appeared first in the Munich monthly Die Gesellschaft, and then in book form. Many reproached me for it, saying, “One does not expose such privacies to the multitude.” As if one wrote for the multitude! One always imagines as one’s readers those in whom a string tuned to the same note is vibrating. There are never more than a few such in the multitude. In Es Löwos I went so far as to imagine only one, and always apostrophized as “One” this sympathetic, comprehending person, who perchance had experienced the like in his own life. And lo and behold! in the course of time I received something like a hundred letters from the reading public, in which the writers assured me that they had had all my experiences, and signed themselves “The One.”
Our studies had opened to us a new horizon, I said just now. That must be enlarged upon a little. It was especially through the natural sciences that undreamed-of lights broke upon our minds. But not as they were usually taught in the schools, mere classifications of plants and animals into species and orders, mere enumerations of mineralogical and geological formations, mere dry elements of physics and chemistry with their proper figures and symbols; no, we gained our knowledge from the works of the latest students of nature, those who are also philosophers of nature, and from whose investigations bursts the radiance of a new discovery, namely, that our whole glorious world is subject to the law of evolution. By evolution from the simplest origins it has developed into its present complexity and is assured of incalculable transformations yet to come. Then these other truths perceived by modern science, the transmutability of all forces one into another, the unbroken concatenation of all causality, the indestructibility of atoms, the uninterrupted continuity between the inorganic and the organic world, between physical and psychical life,—in short, the unity of the world, and the consequent inference that the development of human society also goes on in accordance with the same laws and that it also is assured of incalculable future transformations.
The authors in whose works we immersed ourselves were Darwin, Haeckel, Herbert Spencer, Whewell (“History of the Inductive Sciences”), Carus, Sterne, etc.; and, above all, the book which was a revelation to me, Buckle’s “History of Civilization.” I had already read this book, and several of those just mentioned, before my marriage; and I had brought them in my trunk. Now My Own had also to make their acquaintance. I had the advantage over him that I had read more works on the natural sciences than he had; he had the advantage over me of loving nature more passionately than I did. The magnificence of a beautiful landscape, the sublimity of the sea, and the glory of the glittering firmament inspired in him more than enjoyment and admiration; they inspired him with religious awe. And he had such ability to see what nature has of sweet and mighty fascination, that from it grew that force of description which he put into his books on the Caucasus. The landscapes which formed the background of his novels Daredjan and Aznaour were painted with glowing, brilliant colors, and won the unanimous praise of the critics. In analysis of character, construction of plot, inventiveness, his novels were less successful—it was for this reason that he achieved no abiding place in literature; but in the reproduction of nature he was a past master. The secret of this faculty was that he loved nature. Any love multiplies any power tenfold. As I have already said, we were mutually complementary,—we helped each other upward. He taught me to enjoy nature, I helped him to understand her. At my desire he had to read—read with me—all those works which I had already looked into, and in which I now for the first time thoroughly steeped myself. This grasping of a new truth by two together makes the possession twice as certain, the comprehension twice as clear.
A rich life we led there in that far-off peasant cottage, around which at night we often heard the jackals howling. Rich, although our income was the scantest; although our housekeeping was so insignificant that it happened when our only housemaid was ill that we ourselves got the midday meal ready, and once—full of gayety over it—scrubbed the floors ourselves with sand and scrubbing-brush. Rich in happenings and in experiences, although for weeks at a time we saw not a human being and nothing actually happened to us; the source of our happenings was in our books and our hearts. The rarest of all earthly fates was ours: complete, firmly-anchored happiness.