Part 10
The letter actually was bespattered, and exhaled an odour of orange-flowers ... two white petals had adhered to the paper. This letter has excited me.... I have called to mind my sojourn in Naples.... The weather was magnificent then also; May was only just beginning; I had recently completed my twenty-second year; but I did not know any Ninetta. I roamed about alone, consumed with a thirst for bliss, which was both painful and sweet,--sweet to the point where it itself bore a sort of resemblance to bliss.... What a thing it is to be young!... I remember I once went out for a row on the bay at night. There were two of us: the boatman and I ... but what was it you thought? What a night it was, and what a sky, what stars--how they trembled and crumbled in the waves! With what a liquid flame did the water flow over and flash up under the oars, what perfume was wafted all over the sea--it is not for me to describe, however “eloquent” my pen may be. A French ship of the line lay at anchor in the roadstead. It glowed obscurely red all over with lights; long streaks of red light, the reflection of the illuminated windows, stretched across the dark sea. Merry music reached me in occasional bursts; I recall, in particular, the trill of a small flute amid the dull blaring of the horns; it seemed to flutter like a butterfly around my boat. I ordered the man to row to the ship; twice did we make the circuit of it. Women’s forms flitted past the windows, borne smartly past on the whirlwind of the waltz.... I ordered the boatman to put off, far away, straight out into the darkness.... I remember that the sounds pursued me long and importunately.... At last they died away. I stood up in the boat and stretched out my arms over the sea in the dumb pain of longing.... Oh, how my heart ached then! How oppressive was my loneliness! With what joy would I have given myself at that moment wholly, wholly ... wholly, if only there had been any one to whom to give myself! With what a bitter feeling in my soul did I fling myself, face down, in the bottom of the boat and, like Repetíloff, request him to take me somewhere or other!
But my friend here experienced nothing of that sort. And why should he? He has managed matters much more cleverly than I did. He is living ... while I ... not without cause has he called me a philosopher.... ’Tis strange! You, also, are called a philosopher.... Why should such a calamity overtake us?...
I am not living.... But who is to blame for that? Why do I sit here in Petersburg? What am I doing here? Why do I kill day after day? Why don’t I go to the country? Are not our steppes beautiful? Or cannot one breathe freely in them? Or is it stifling in them? What possesses me to pursue dreams, when, perchance, happiness is within my reach? It is settled: I am going away, I am going away to-morrow, if possible; I am going home, that is, to you--it is all the same: for we live only twenty versts apart. What’s the use, after all, in languishing here? And why is it that this idea did not occur to me earlier? My dear Márya Alexándrovna, we shall soon meet. But it is remarkable that this thought did not enter my head until this moment! I ought to have gone away long, long ago. Farewell until we meet, Márya Alexándrovna.
July 9th.
I have deliberately given myself twenty-four hours to think it over, and now I am definitively convinced that there is no reason why I should remain here. The dust in the streets is so biting that it makes one’s eyes ache. To-day I shall begin to pack; on the day after to-morrow, probably, I shall leave here; and ten days hence I shall have the pleasure of seeing you. I hope you will receive me as of old. By the way--your sister is still visiting your aunt, is she not?
Permit me, Márya Alexándrovna, to press your hand warmly, and to say to you from my soul: farewell until a speedy meeting. I was preparing to leave in any case, but this letter has precipitated my intention. Let us assume that this letter proves nothing; let us even assume that Ninetta would not please any one else--me, for example. Yet I am going, all the same; there is no doubt about that. Farewell for the present.
Yours, A. S.
XIII
_From Márya Alexándrovna to Alexyéi Petróvitch_
VILLAGE OF ... NO, July 16, 1840.
You are coming hither, you will soon be with us, will you not, Alexyéi Petróvitch? I will not conceal from you that this news both delights and agitates me.... How shall we meet? Will that spiritual bond be preserved which, so it seems to me, has already begun to unite us? Will it not break when we meet? I do not know; I am apprehensive, for some reason or other. I will not answer your last letter, although I might say a good deal; I will defer all this until we meet. My mother is greatly delighted at your coming.... She has been aware that I was corresponding with you. The weather is enchanting. We will walk a great deal; I will show you the new places which I have discovered ... one long, narrow valley is particularly nice: it lies between hillocks, covered with forest.... It seems to be hiding in their curves. A tiny brook blows along it and can barely force its way through the grass and flowers.... You shall see. Come: perhaps you will not find it tedious.
M. B.
P.S. You will not see my sister, I think: she is still visiting my aunt. I believe (this is between ourselves) that she is going to marry a very amiable young man--an officer. Why did you send me that letter from Naples? The life here perforce seems dim and pale in comparison with that luxury and that brilliancy. But Mademoiselle Ninetta is wrong: flowers grow and are fragrant--even with us.
XIV
_From Márya Alexándrovna to Alexyéi Petróvitch_
VILLAGE OF ... NO, January, 1841.
I have written to you several times, Alexyéi Petróvitch.... You have not answered me. Are you alive? Or perhaps our correspondence has begun to bore you; perhaps you have found for yourself a more agreeable diversion than the letters of a rustic young lady can afford you? Evidently you called me to mind for the lack of something to do. If that is the case, I wish you happiness. If you do not answer me this time, I shall not trouble you again; there will be nothing left for me to do but to regret my imprudence, that I have unnecessarily permitted myself to be roused up, have offered my hand and emerged, if only for a moment, from my isolated nook. I ought to remain in it forever, lock myself in--that is my portion, the portion of all old maids. I ought to accustom myself to that thought. There is no necessity for coming out into God’s sunlight, no necessity for craving fresh air, when the lungs will not bear it. By the way, we are now blocked up with dead drifts of snow. I shall be more sensible henceforth.... People do not die of boredom, but it is possible to perish with melancholy, I suppose. If I am mistaken, prove it to me. But I think I am not mistaken. In any case, farewell. I wish you happiness.
M. B.
XV
_From Alexyéi Petróvitch to Márya Alexándrovna_
DRESDEN, September, 1842.
I write to you, my dear Márya Alexándrovna, and I write only because I do not wish to die without having taken leave of you, and without having recalled myself to your mind. I am condemned by the doctors ... and I myself feel that my life is drawing to a close. On my table stands a rose; before it fades I shall be no more. But that comparison is not quite just. The rose is far more interesting than I am.
As you see, I am abroad. I have been in Dresden six months. I received your last letters--I am ashamed to confess: I lost several of them more than a year ago, and did not answer you.... I will tell you presently why. But, evidently, you have always been dear to me: with the exception of yourself, there is no one of whom I wish to take leave, and perhaps I have no one to whom I could bid farewell.
Soon after my last letter to you (I was quite ready to set out for your parts, and was making various plans in advance), there happened to me an episode which had, I may say, a strong influence on my fate,--so strong that here I am, dying, thanks to that event. To wit: I set out for the theatre, to see the ballet. I have never liked the ballet, and have always felt a secret disgust for all sorts of actresses, singers, and dancers.... But, obviously, one cannot change his fate, neither does any one know himself, and it is also impossible to foresee the future. In point of fact, nothing happens in life except the unexpected, and we do nothing all our life long but adjust ourselves to events.... But I believe I am dropping into philosophy again. Old habit!... In a word, I fell in love with a dancer.
This was all the more strange because she could not be called a beauty. She had, it is true, wonderful golden hair, with an ash tinge, and large, bright eyes, with a pensive and, at the same time, a bold glance.... Haven’t I cause to know the expression of that glance? I pined and languished for a whole year in its rays! She had a splendid figure, and when she danced her folkdance, the spectators used to stamp and shout with rapture.... But I do not think any one besides myself fell in love with her--at all events, no one fell in love with her as I did. From the very minute that I beheld her for the first time--(will you believe it? all I have to do even now is to shut my eyes, and immediately here stands before me the theatre, the almost empty stage, representing the interior of a forest, and she runs out from behind the side-scenes on the right, with a wreath of vine-leaves on her head and a tiger-skin over her shoulders)--from that fatal minute I belonged to her wholly,--just as a dog belongs to his master; and if now, when I am dying, I do not belong to her, it is merely because she has cast me off.
To tell the truth, she never troubled herself especially about me. She barely noticed me, although she good-naturedly made use of my money. I was for her, as she expressed it in her broken French jargon, “_oun Rousso buon enfan_,”--and nothing more. But I ... I could no longer live anywhere where she was not; I tore myself at one wrench from all that was dear to me, from my native land itself, and set out in pursuit of that woman.
Perhaps you think that she was clever?--Not in the least! It sufficed to cast a glance at her low brow, it sufficed to note, if only once, her lazy, heedless smile, in order instantly to convince one’s self as to the paucity of her mental abilities. And I never imagined her to be a remarkable woman. On the whole, I did not deceive myself for a single minute on her score. But that did not help matters in the least. Whatever I thought of her in her absence, in her presence I felt nothing but servile adoration.... In the German fairytales the knights often fall into that sort of stupor. I could not tear my eyes from her features; I could not hear enough of her remarks, or sufficiently watch every movement of hers; to tell the truth, I actually breathed to her breathing. However, she was good-natured, unconstrained--too unconstrained even; she did not put on airs, as the majority of artists do. She had a great deal of life, that is, a great deal of blood, of that splendid Southern blood, into which the sun of their land must have dropped a portion of his rays. She slept nine hours a day, was fond of good eating, never read a single line of print, unless, perhaps, the articles in the newspapers in which she was mentioned, and almost the sole tender sentiment in her life was her attachment to il signore Carlino, a small and greedy Italian who served as her secretary and whom she afterward married. And with such a woman as this I, who have tasted so many varied intellectual subtleties, I, already an old man, could fall in love! Who could have expected it? I never expected it, at all events. I did not anticipate the part which I should be compelled to play. I did not expect that I should haunt rehearsals, freeze and get bored behind the scenes, inhale the reek of the theatre, make acquaintance with various unseemly individuals ... what am I saying?--make acquaintance--bow to them. I had not expected that I should carry a dancer’s shawl, buy new gloves for her, clean her old ones with white bread (but I did it, I take my oath!), cart home her bouquets, run about to the anterooms of journalists and directors, wear myself out, give serenades, catch cold, lose my strength.... I had not expected that I should acquire at last in a certain little German town the ingenious nickname of “_der Kunst-barbar_.”... And all this in vain--in the fullest sense of the word, in vain! There, that is precisely the state of the case....
Do you remember how you and I, orally and by letter, argued about love, into what subtleties we entered? And when it is put to the proof, it turns out that real love is a feeling not at all resembling that which we imagined it to be. Love is not even a feeling at all; it is a malady, a well-known condition of the soul and body. It does not develop gradually; there is no possibility of doubting it; one cannot dodge it, although it does not always manifest itself in identically the same fashion. It generally takes possession of a man without being invited, suddenly, against his will--precisely like the cholera or a fever.... It lays hold upon him, the dear creature, as a hawk does upon a chicken; and it will bear him off whithersoever it wishes, struggle and resist as he may.... In love there is no equality, no so-called free union of souls and other ideal things, invented at their leisure by German professors.... No; in love one person is the slave, the other is the sovereign, and not without cause do the poets prate of the chains imposed by love. Yes, love is a chain, and the heaviest of chains at that. At all events, I have arrived at that conviction, and have reached it by the path of experience. I have purchased that conviction at the price of my life, because I am dying a slave.
Alack, what a fate is mine! one thinks. In my youth I was resolutely determined to conquer heaven for myself.... Later on, I fell to dreaming about the welfare of all mankind, the prosperity of my fatherland. Then that passed off: I thought only of how I might arrange my domestic, my family life ... and I tripped over an ant-hill--and flop! I went headlong on the ground, and into the grave.... What master hands we Russians are at winding up in that fashion!
However, it is high time for me to turn away from all this,--it was time long ago! May this burden fall from my soul along with my life! I wish for the last time, if only for a moment, to enjoy that good, gentle feeling which is diffused within me like a tranquil light as soon as I call you to mind. Your image is now doubly dear to me.... Along with it there surges up before me the image of my native land, and I waft to it and to you my last greeting. Live on, live long and happily, and remember one thing: whether you remain in that remote nook of the steppes, where you sometimes find things so painful, but where I should so like to spend my last day, or whether you shall enter upon another career, remember: life fails to disappoint him alone who does not meditate upon it, and, demanding nothing from it, calmly accepts its sparse gifts, and calmly makes use of them. Go forward, while you can: but when your feet fail you,--sit down near the road, and gaze at the passers-by without vexation and without envy: for they will not go far! I have said this to you before, but death will teach any man whomsoever; moreover, who shall say what is life, what is truth? Remember _who_ it was that gave no answer to this question.... Farewell, Márya Alexándrovna; farewell for the last time, and bear no ill will to poor--
ALEXYÉI.
THE REGION OF DEAD CALM
(1854)
I
In a fairly-large recently-whitewashed chamber of a wing of the manor-house in the village of Sásovo, *** county, T*** Government, a young man in a paletot was sitting at a small, warped table, looking over accounts. Two stearine candles, in silver travelling-candlesticks, were burning in front of him; in one corner, on the wall-bench, stood an open bottle-case, in another a servant was setting up an iron bed. On the other side of a low partition a samovár was murmuring and hissing; a dog was nestling about on some hay which had just been brought in. In the doorway stood a peasant-man in a new overcoat girt with a red belt, with a large beard, and an intelligent face--the overseer, judging by all the tokens. He was gazing attentively at the seated young man.
Against one wall stood a very aged, tiny piano; beside it an equally-ancient chest of drawers with holes in place of the locks; between the windows a small, dim mirror was visible; on the partition-wall hung an old portrait, which was almost completely peeled off, representing a woman with powdered hair, in a _robe ronde_, and with a black ribbon about her slender neck. Judging from the very perceptible sagging of the ceiling, and the slope of the floor, which was full of cracks, the little wing into which we have conducted the reader had existed for a very long time. No one lived in it permanently; it was put to use when the owners came. The young man who was sitting at the table was the owner of the village of Sásovo. He had arrived only on the previous day from his principal estate, situated a hundred versts[11] distant, and was preparing to depart on the morrow, after completing the inspection of the farming, listening to the demands of the peasants, and verifying all the documents.
“Well, that will do,”--he said, raising his head;--“I am tired. Thou mayest go now,”--he added, turning to the overseer;--“and come very early to-morrow morning, and notify the peasants at daybreak that they are to present themselves in assembly,--dost hear me?”
“I obey.”
“And order the estate-clerk to present to me the report for the last month. But thou hast done well,”--the gentleman went on, casting a glance around him,--“in whitewashing the walls. Everything seems cleaner.”
The overseer silently swept a glance around the walls also.
“Well, go now.”
The overseer made his obeisance and left the room.
The gentleman stretched himself.
“Hey!”--he shouted,--“Give me some tea!... ’Tis time to go to bed.”
His servant went to the other side of the partition, and speedily returned with a glass of tea, a bundle of town cracknels, and a cream-jug on an iron tray. The gentleman began to drink tea, but before he had had time to swallow two mouthfuls, the noise of persons entering resounded from an adjoining room, and some one’s squeaking voice inquired:
“Is Vladímir Sergyéitch Astákhoff at home? Can he be seen?”
Vladímir Sergyéitch (that was the name of the young man in the paletot) cast a glance of surprise at his man, and said in a hurried whisper:
“Go, find out who it is.”
The man withdrew, slamming behind him the door, which closed badly.
“Announce to Vladímir Sergyéitch,”--rang out the same squeaking voice as before,--“that his neighbour Ipátoff wishes to see him, if it will not incommode him; and another neighbour has come with me, Bodryakóff, Iván Ílitch, who also desires to pay his respects.”
Vladímir Sergyéitch made an involuntary gesture of vexation. Nevertheless, when his man entered the room, he said to him:
“Ask them in.” And he arose to receive his visitors.
The door opened, and the visitors made their appearance. One of them, a robust, grey-haired little old man, with a small, round head and bright little eyes, walked in advance; the other, a tall, thin man of three-and-thirty, with a long, swarthy face and dishevelled hair, walked behind, with a shambling gait. The old man wore a neat grey coat with large, mother-of-pearl buttons; a small, pink neckerchief, half concealed by the rolling collar of his white shirt, loosely encircled his neck; his feet shone resplendent in gaiters; the plaids of his Scotch trousers were agreeably gay in hue; and, altogether, he produced a pleasant impression. His companion, on the contrary, evoked in the spectator a less favourable sensation: he wore an old black dress-coat, buttoned up to the throat; his full trousers, of thick, winter tricot, matched his coat in colour; no linen was visible, either around his throat or around his wrists. The little old man was the first to approach Vladímir Sergyéitch, and, with an amiable inclination of the head, he began in the same shrill little voice:
“I have the honour to introduce myself,--your nearest neighbour, and even a relative, Ipátoff, Mikhaílo Nikoláitch. I have long wished to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. I hope that I have not disturbed you.”
Vladímir Sergyéitch replied that he was very glad to see him, and that he was not disturbed in the least, and would not he take a seat ... and drink tea.
“And this nobleman,”--went on the little old man, after listening with a courteous smile to Vladímir Sergyéitch’s unfinished phrases, and extending his hand in the direction of the gentleman in the dress-coat,--“also your neighbour ... and my good acquaintance, Iván Ílitch, strongly desired to make your acquaintance.”
The gentleman in the dress-coat, from whose countenance no one would have suspected that he was capable of desiring anything strongly in his life--so preoccupied and, at the same time, so sleepy was the expression of that countenance,--the gentleman in the dress-coat bowed clumsily and languidly. Vladímir Sergyéitch bowed to him in return, and again invited the visitors to be seated.
The visitors sat down.
“I am very glad,”--began the little old man, pleasantly throwing apart his hands, while his companion set to scrutinising the ceiling, with his mouth slightly open:--“I am very glad that I have, at last, the honour of seeing you personally. Although you have your permanent residence in a county which lies at a considerable distance from these localities, still, we regard you also as one of our own primordial landed proprietors, so to speak.”
“That is very flattering to me,”--returned Vladímir Sergyéitch.