A Cigarette-Makers Romance | Page 4

a Polish girl, poorly dressed, her
heavy red-brown hair braided in one long neat tress, her face deadly
white, her blue eyes lustreless and sunken, her thin fingers actively
rolling bits of paper round a glass tube, drawing them off as the edges

are gummed together, and laying them in a prettily arranged pile before
her. She is Vjera, the shell-maker, invariably spoken of as "poor Vjera."
Vjera, being interpreted from the Russian, means "Faith." There is an
odd and pathetic irony in the name borne by the sickly girl. Faith--faith
in what? In shell-making? In Christian Fischelowitz? In Johann
Schmidt, the Cossack tobacco-cutter, whose real name is lost in the
gloom of many dim wanderings? In life? In death? Who knows? In
God, at least, poor child--and in her wretched existence there is little
else left for her to believe in. If you ask her whether she believes in the
Count, she will turn away rather hastily, but in that case the wish to
believe is there.
Beside Vjera sits another girl, less pale perhaps, but more insignificant
in feature, and similarly occupied, with this slight difference that the
little cylinders she makes are straw-coloured when Vjera is making
white ones, and white when her companion is using straw-coloured
paper. On the opposite side of the room, also before small black tables,
sit two men, to wit, Victor Ivanowitch Dumnoff and the Count. It is
their business to shape the tobacco and to insert it into the shells, a
process performed by rolling the cut leaf into a cylinder in a
tongue-shaped piece of parchment, which, when ready, has the form of
a pencil, and is slipped into the shell. The parchment is then withdrawn,
and the tobacco remains behind in its place; the little bunch of threads
which protrudes at each end is cut off with sharp scissors and the
cigarette is finished.
The Count, on the afternoon of the day on which this story opens, was
sitting before his little black table in his usual attitude, his head
stooping slightly forward, his elbows supported on each side of him,
his long fingers moving quickly and skilfully, his greyish blue eyes
fixed intently on his work. At five o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday,
the sixth of May, in the present year of grace one thousand eight
hundred and ninety, the Count was rapidly approaching the
two-thousandth cigarette of that day's work. Two thousand in a day was
his limit; and though he boasted that he could make three thousand
between dawn and midnight, if absolutely necessary, yet he confessed
that among the last five hundred a few might be found in which the

leaves would be too tightly rolled or too loosely packed. Up to his limit,
however, he was to be relied upon, and not one of his hundred score of
cigarettes would be found to differ in weight from another by a single
grain.
It is perhaps time to describe the outward appearance of the busy
worker, out of whose life the events of some six-and-thirty hours
furnish the subject of this little tale. The Count is thirty years old, but
might be thought older, for there are grey streaks in his smooth black
hair, and there is a grey tone in the complexion of his tired face. In
figure he is thin, broad shouldered, sinewy, well made and graceful. He
moves easily and with a certain elegance. His arms and legs are long in
proportion to his body. His head is well shaped, bony, full of
energy--his nose is finely modelled and sharply aquiline; a short, dark
moustache does not quite hide the firm, well-chiselled lips, and the
clean-cut chin is prominent and of the martial type. From under his
rather heavy eyebrows a pair of keen eyes, full of changing light and
expression, look somewhat contemptuously on the world and its
inhabitants. On the whole, the Count is a handsome man and looks a
gentleman, in spite of his occupation and in spite of his clothes, which
are in the fashion of twenty years ago, but are carefully brushed and all
but spotless. There are poor men who can wear a coat as a red Indian
will ride a mustang which a white man has left for dead, beyond the
period predetermined by the nature of tailoring as the natural term of
existence allotted to earthly garments. We look upon a centenarian as a
miracle of longevity, and he is careful to tell us his age if he have not
lost the power of speech; but if the coats of poor men could speak, how
much more marvellous in our eyes would their powers of life appear! A
stranger would have taken the Count for a half-pay officer of good birth
in straitened circumstances. The