CHAPTER V

The continual reverting to the past and its victims was bound to have its effect on Yudushka. The natural outcome--was it fear?--No, rather the awakening of conscience. He discovered he had a conscience, and oblivion and contempt, although blunting its sensitiveness, could not destroy it.

The awakening of a torpid conscience is usually fraught with pain. It brings no peace, holds no promise of a new life, but merely tortures, endlessly and fruitlessly. Man sees himself immured in a narrow prison, a helpless victim of the agonies of repentance, with no hope of ever returning to life. And he perceives no other way of allaying his gnawing pain than to break his head against the stony walls of the prison cell.

Never in the course of his long, useless life had it occurred to Yudushka that dire tragedies were interwoven with his existence. He had lived peacefully and calmly, with a constant prayer on his lips, and the thought had been far from him that this manner of life had caused so much sorrow. Least of all could he imagine that he himself had been the source of these tragedies. Suddenly the terrible truth was revealed to his conscience, but all too late--too late for him to make amends for the crimes of his life. He was unsociable, old, with one foot in the grave, and there was not a single human being who approached him with loving pity. Why was he alone? Why did he see nothing but indifference and hatred around him? Why was it that everything he touched had perished? This estate of Golovliovo was once so full, a human nest. How had it happened that now there was not a trace, not a feather left? Of the fledgelings nursed there his niece was the only one that remained alive, and she had come back only to sneer at him and deal him his deathblow. Even Yevpraksia, simple as she was, hated him. She lived at Golovliovo because Porfiry sent her father, the sacristan, provisions every month, but undoubtedly she hated him. He had made her unhappy, too, by robbing her of her child. What was the outcome of his existence? Wherefore had he lied, babbled, persecuted, hoarded? Who would inherit his wealth? Who was to enjoy the fruits of his life? Who?

I repeat, his conscience had awakened. Yudushka waited for the evening with feverish impatience not only in order to get bestially drunk, but also to drown his conscience. He hated the "dissolute wench," who lacerated his wounds with such cold cynicism, yet he was drawn to her irresistibly, as if there was still something to be said between them and some wounds to be torn open. Every evening he made Anninka retell the story of Lubinka's death, and every evening the idea of self-destruction became riper in his mind. At first, the idea occurred to him casually. But as his iniquities became more apparent to him, it sank deeper and deeper into his being and soon was the sole shining spot in all the gloom he saw ahead of him.

And his health began to decline rapidly. He coughed violently and at times had spells of asthma that in themselves were sufficient to make life intolerable, let alone the moral pangs from which he suffered. All the symptoms of the malady that had sent his brothers to their graves were present. He heard the groans of his brother Pavel, as he choked in the entresol of the Dubrovino manor-house. Still Yudushka was doggedly tenacious of life. His sunken, emaciated chest held out against the pain that grew from hour to hour. It was as if his body too were resisting with unexpected vigor so as to take revenge on him for his crimes.

"Is this the end?" he would wonder hopefully, whenever he felt the approach of a paroxysm. But death was slow in coming. Evidently it would be necessary to use violence to hasten the end. All his accounts with life were settled--it was both painful and useless to him. What he needed was death, but, to his sorrow, death was slow in coming. There is something mean and treacherous in the teasing hesitancy of death when it is called upon with all the strength of one's soul.

* * * * *

It was late in March and Passion Week was nearing its end. However abject Yudushka's condition was, he preserved an attitude of reverence toward the sanctity of these days implanted in him in his childhood. His thoughts of themselves took a serious turn, and there was no other desire in his heart than complete silence. In this mood the evenings were no longer spent in wild drinking, but passed in gloomy silence.

Porfiry Vladimirych and Anninka were sitting all alone in the dining-room. The evening service, accompanied by the reading of the gospel, had just ended, and the odor of incense still lingered in the room. The clock struck ten, the servants had retired, and deep, pensive quiet settled over the house. Anninka, her hands clasping her head, was deep in thought. Porfiry Vladimirych sat opposite, silent and sad.

Upon Anninka the Passion Week evening service always made an overwhelming impression. As a child she had wept bitterly at the priest's words: "And when they plaited a crown of thorns, they put it upon His head, and a reed in His right hand," and in a tremulous treble she used to sing after the sexton: "Glory be to Thy long-suffering, oh, Lord! Glory be to Thee!" After the service she used to run, all a-quiver with emotion, to the maids' room, and there, in the growing twilight (Arina Petrovna allowed no candles in that room when there was no work being done), she related "The Passion of our Lord" to the servants. Silent tears flowed from the eyes of the slaves, and they heaved deep sighs. The poor servants felt their Master and Redeemer with their whole hearts and believed He would arise from the dead, arise from the dead in truth. Anninka, too, felt and believed. Beyond the gloom of their life of suffering and persecution, all these poor in spirit beheld the radiant kingdom of freedom. Even the old lady, usually so redoubtable, was gentle during Passion Week. She did not grumble or remind Anninka that she was an orphan. On the contrary, she fondled her and soothed her with kindly words. But Anninka was restless even in bed, she tossed about and talked to herself in her sleep.

Then came her school years and wanderings, the first empty, the second painful. But even as a nomadic actress, Anninka had jealously observed the "holy days," calling back echoes of her distant past and moods of childlike devotion. But now when she saw her life clearly to its last detail, when she had cursed her life and when it became obvious that the future promised neither repentance nor forgiveness, when the source of devotion and the well-spring of tears had dried up, the effect of the tale of the Crucifixion upon her was truly overwhelming. In childhood a gloomy night had surrounded her, but beyond the darkness she had sensed the presence of light. Now nothing but interminable everlasting night stretched ahead endlessly. She neither sighed, nor was agitated, nor even thought. She merely sank into a state of profound torpor.

Porfiry Vladimirych, too, from his very childhood, had revered the "holy days," but, true idol-worshipper that he was, he had observed merely the rites. Every year on the eve of Good Friday he had had the priest come and read the gospel, had sighed, lifted up his arms, touched the ground with his forehead, marked the number of chapters read by means of wax balls, but had understood nothing. Not until now, when his conscience was awakened, had he grasped the fact that the gospel contained the story of how Untruth visited a bloody judgment on Truth.

Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that this discovery led him to definite conclusions about his own life, yet there is no doubt that it produced in him a commotion bordering on despair. This state of mind was the more painful the more unconsciously he lived through the past which was the source of his commotion.

There was something terrible in his past, he could not tell exactly what. It was as if a mountainous mass, hitherto motionless and hidden by an impenetrable veil, had suddenly moved upon him, threatening every moment to crush him. What he feared was that he might not be crushed, and he felt he must hasten the climax. He had been brooding over the idea for quite some time. "We shall have communion on Saturday," suddenly flashed through his mind. "It would be well to visit dear mother's grave and take leave of her."

"Shall we walk over to the cemetery?" he turned to Anninka and explained his idea to her.

"Why, if you wish, we'll drive out there."

"No, not drive, but----" started Porfiry Vladimirych, but halted abruptly, as if struck by the thought that Anninka might be in his way.

"I have sinned against my dear departed mother. I, I was the cause of her death!"

The thought preyed on him, and the desire to "take leave" grew stronger in his heart, to take leave not by mere conventional words, but by throwing himself on her grave and bursting out in the sobs of a death agony.

"So you say no one is to be blamed for Lubinka's death?" he suddenly asked, as if trying to cheer himself up.

At first Anninka paid no attention to his question. Two or three minutes later, however, she felt an irresistible impulse to return to the subject of Lubinka's death and torment herself with it.

"And her words were, 'Drink, you street-walker,'" he said, after she had repeated the story in detail.

"Yes, her very words."

"And you didn't drink?"

"I didn't. I am alive, as you see."

He rose and paced up and down the room several times, visibly affected. At last he went over to Anninka and stroked her head.

"My poor, poor Anninka!" he said softly.

At the touch of his hands a startling change took place in her. At first she was amazed, then her face began to work, and suddenly a violent torrent of hysterical, inhuman sobs burst from her chest.

"Uncle, are you good? Tell me, are you good?" she fairly shrieked.

In a broken voice, through tears and sobs, she kept on reiterating her query, the same she had asked him the day of her return to Golovliovo, to which he had given such an absurd reply.

"You are good? Tell me, answer me, are you good?"

"Did you hear what the priest read at the evening service?" he said, when she finally grew calm. "Oh, what sufferings He underwent! Only such sufferings can----And yet He forgave, forgave forever!"

He resumed his pacing, his very soul rent with suffering and his face covered with beads of perspiration.

"He pardoned every one," he reflected aloud. "Not only those who at that time gave Him vinegar mingled with gall to drink, but also those who are doing the same thing now and will do it again in future ages. What a horror!"

Suddenly he stopped before her and said:

"And you--have you forgiven?"

Instead of replying she threw herself on him and clasped him firmly.

"You must forgive me," he went on. "For every one--on your own account--and for those who are no longer here. What has happened?" he cried, looking round distractedly. "Where are they all?"

* * * * *

Utterly shaken and exhausted, they retired to their rooms. But Porfiry Vladimirych could not sleep. He tossed in his bed, all the while trying to recall an obligation that lay on him. Suddenly he clearly remembered the words that had flashed through his mind about two hours before, "I must walk to mother's grave and take leave of her."

An exhausting restlessness seized his being. At last he got up and donned his dressing-gown. It was still dark, and unbroken silence reigned in the house. For a while Porfiry Vladimirych paced back and forth in the room, stopped before the lighted ikon of the Saviour with a thorny crown, and scanned his face. Finally he determined upon a course of action, perhaps half-unconsciously. He stole into the antechamber and opened the outer door.

Outside a March blizzard was raging and blinded him with a torrent of sleet. Porfiry Vladimirych struggled along the road, splashing through the puddles, insensible to the wind and the snow. Instinctively he drew together the skirts of his dressing-gown.

* * * * *

Early next morning a messenger came speeding from the village near the churchyard where Arina Petrovna was buried. He brought the news that the frozen body of the Golovliovo master had been found by the roadside. The servants rushed into Anninka's room. She lay in her bed unconscious in delirium. A messenger was hastily dispatched to Nadezhda Ivanovna Galkina (daughter of Aunt Varvara Mikhailovna), who ever since the previous autumn had been keeping a watchful eye on everything taking place at Golovliovo.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's A Family of Noblemen, by Mikhaïl Saltykov