Chapter 12
"All that is very fine!" at last exclaimed Panshine with vexation. "But here are you, just returned to Russia; what do you intend to do?"
"To cultivate the soil," replied Lavretsky; "and to cultivate it as well as possible."
"No doubt that is very praiseworthy," answered Panshine, "and I hear you have already had great success in that line; but you must admit that every one is not fitted for such an occupation--"
"_Une nature poétique_," said Maria Dmitrievna, "certainly cannot go cultivating the soil--_et puis_, it is your vocation, Vladimir Nikolaevich, to do every thing _en grand_."
This was too much even for Panshine, who grew confused, and changed the conversation. He tried to turn it on the beauty of the starry heavens, on Schubert's music, but somehow his efforts did not prove successful. He ended by offering to play at piquet with Maria Dmitrievna. "What! on such an evening as this?" she feebly objected; but then she ordered the cards to be brought.
Panshine noisily tore open a new pack; and Liza and Lavretsky, as if by mutual consent, both rose from their seats and placed themselves near Marfa Timofeevna. They both suddenly experienced a great feeling of happiness, mingled with a sense of mutual dread, which made them glad of the presence of a third person; at the same time, they both felt that the uneasiness from which they had suffered during the last few days had disappeared, and would return no more.
The old lady stealthily tapped Lavretsky on the cheek, screwed up her eyes with an air of pleasant malice, and shook her head repeatedly, saying in a whisper, "You've done for the genius--thanks!" Then all became still in the room. Nothing was to be heard but the faint crackling of the wax lights, and sometimes the fall of a hand on the table, or an exclamation on the score of points, and the song of the nightingale which, powerful, almost insolently loud, flowed in a great wave through the window, together with the dewy freshness of the night.
* * * * *
NOTE.--The following is a tolerably literal translation of the poem of Lermontof's to which allusion is made on p. 208, and which created no slight sensation when it first appeared, in the year 1838:--
A THOUGHT.
Sorrowfully do I look upon the present generation! Its future seems either gloomy or meaningless, and meanwhile, whether under the burden of knowledge or of doubt, it grows old in idleness.
When scarcely out of the cradle, we reap the rich inheritance of the errors of our fathers, and the results of their tardy thoughts. Life soon grows wearisome for us, like a banquet at a stranger's festival, like a level road leading nowhere.
In the commencement of our career, we fall away without a struggle, shamefully careless about right and wrong, shamefully timid in the face of danger.
So does a withered fruit which has prematurely ripened--attractive neither to the eye nor to the palate--hang like an alien orphan among blossoms; and the hour of their beauty is that of its fall.
Our intellect has dried up in the pursuit of fruitless science, while we have been concealing the purest of hopes from the knowledge of those who are near and dear to us, and stifling the noble utterance of such sentiments as are ridiculed by a mocking spirit.
We have scarcely tasted of the cup of enjoyment, but for all that we have not husbanded our youthful strength. While we were always in dread of satiety, we have contrived to drain each joy of its best virtues.
No dreams of poetry, no creations of art, touch our hearts with a sweet rapture. We stingily hoard up within our breasts the last remnants of feeling--a treasure concealed by avarice, and which remains utterly unprofitable.
We love and we hate capriciously, sacrificing nothing either to our animosity or to our affection, a certain secret coldness possessing our souls, even while a fire is raging in our veins.
The sumptuous pleasures of our ancestors weary us, as well as their simple, childish diversions. Without enjoying happiness, without reaping glory, we hasten onwards to the grave, casting naught but unlucky glances behind us.
A saturnine crowd, soon to be forgotten, we silently pass away from the world and leave no trace behind, without having handed down to the ages to come a single work of genius, or even a solitary thought laden with meaning.
And our descendants, regarding our memory with the severity of citizens called to sit in judgment on an affair concerning the state, will allude to us with the scathing irony of a ruined son, when he speaks of the father who has squandered away his patrimony.
XXXII.
Liza had not uttered a single word during the dispute between Lavretsky and Panshine, but she had followed it attentively, and had been on Lavretsky's side throughout. She cared very little about politics; but she was repelled by the self-sufficient tone of the worldly official, who had never shown himself in that light before, and his contempt for Russia offended her. It had never occurred to Liza to imagine that she was a patriot. But she was thoroughly at her ease with the Russian people. The Russian turn of mind pleased her. She would chat for hours, without thinking anything of it, with the chief of the village on her mother's estate, when he happened to come into town, and talk with him as if he were her equal, without any signs of seigneurial condescension. All this Lavretsky knew well. For his own part, he never would have cared to reply to Panshine; it was only for Liza's sake that he spoke.
They said nothing to each other, and even their eyes but rarely met. But they both felt that they had been drawn closer together that evening, they knew that they both had the same likes and dislikes. On one point only were they at variance; but Liza secretly hoped to bring him back to God. They sat down close by Marfa Timofeevna, and seemed to be following her game; nay, more, did actually follow it. But, meantime, their hearts grew full within them, and nothing escaped their senses--for them the nightingale sang softly, and the stars burnt, and the trees whispered, steeped in slumberous calm, and lulled to rest by the warmth and softness of the summer night.
Lavretsky gave himself up to its wave of fascination, and his heart rejoiced within him. But no words can express the change that was being worked within the pure soul of the maiden by his side. Even for herself it was a secret; let it remain, then, a secret for all others also. No one knows, no eye has seen or ever will see, how the grain which has been confided to the earth's bosom becomes instinct with vitality, and ripens into stirring, blossoming life.
Ten o'clock struck, and Marfa Timofeevna went up-stairs to her room with Nastasia Carpovna. Lavretsky and Liza walked about the room, stopped in front of the open door leading into the garden, looked first into the gloaming distance and then at each other--and smiled. It seemed as if they would so gladly have taken each other's hands and talked to their hearts' content.
They returned to Maria Dmitrievna and Panshine, whose game dragged itself out to an unusual length. At length the last "king" came to an end, and Madame Kalitine rose from her cushioned chair, sighing, and uttering sounds of weariness the while. Panshine took his hat, kissed her hand, remarked that nothing prevented more fortunate people from enjoying the night or going to sleep, but that he must sit up till morning over stupid papers, bowed coldly to Liza--with-whom he was angry, for he had not expected that she would ask him to wait so long for an answer to his proposal--and retired. Lavretsky went away directly after him, following him to the gate, where he took leave of him. Panshine aroused his coachman, poking him in the neck with the end of his stick, seated himself in his droshky, and drove away. But Lavretsky did not feel inclined to go home, so he walked out of the town into the fields.
The night was still and clear, although there was no moon. For a long time Lavretsky wandered across the dewy grass. A narrow footpath lay in his way, and he followed it. It led him to a long hedge, in which there was a wicket gate. Without knowing why he did so, he tried to push it open; with a faint creak it did open, just as if it had been awaiting the touch of his hand. Lavretsky found himself in a garden, took a few steps along a lime-tree alley, and suddenly stopped short in utter amazement. He saw that he was in the Kalitines' garden.
A thick hazel bush close at hand flung a black patch of shadow on the ground. Into this he quickly passed, and there stood for some time without stirring from the spot, inwardly wondering and from time to time shrugging his shoulders. "This has not happened without some purpose," he thought.
Around all was still. From the house not the slightest sound reached him. He began cautiously to advance. At the corner of an alley all the house suddenly burst upon him with its dusky façade. In two windows only on the upper story were lights glimmering. In Liza's apartment a candle was burning behind the white blind, and in Marfa Timofeevna's bed-room glowed the red flame of the small lamp hanging in front of the sacred picture, on the gilded cover of which it was reflected in steady light. Down below, the door leading on to the balcony gaped wide open.
Lavretsky sat down on a wooden bench, rested his head on his hand, and began looking at that door, and at Liza's window. Midnight sounded in the town; in the house a little clock feebly struck twelve. The watchman beat the hour with quick strokes on his board. Lavretsky thought of nothing, expected nothing. It was pleasant to him to feel himself near Liza, to sit in her garden, and on the bench where she also often sat.
The light disappeared from Liza's room.
"A quiet night to you, dear girl," whispered Lavretsky, still sitting where he was without moving, and not taking his eyes off the darkened window.
Suddenly a light appeared at one of the windows of the lower story, crossed to another window, and then to a third. Some one was carrying a candle through the room. "Can it be Liza? It cannot be," thought Lavretsky. He rose. A well-known face glimmered in the darkness, and Liza appeared in the drawing-room, wearing a white dress, her hair hanging loosely about her shoulders. Quietly approaching the table, she leant over it, put down the candle and began looking for something. Then she turned towards the garden, and crossed to the open door; presently her light, slender, white-robed form stood still on the threshold.
A kind of shiver ran over Lavretsky's limbs, and the word "Liza!" escaped all but inaudibly from his lips.
She started, and then began to peer anxiously into the darkness.
"Liza!" said Lavretsky louder than before, and came out from the shadow of the alley.
Liza was startled. For a moment she bent forward; then she shrank back. She had recognized him. For the third time he called her, and held out his hands towards her. She passed out from the doorway and came into the garden.
"You!" she said. "You here!"
"I--I--Come and hear what I have to say," whispered Lavretsky; and then, taking her hand, he led her to the bench.
She followed him without a word; but her pale face, her fixed look, and all her movements, testified her unutterable astonishment. Lavretsky made her sit down on the bench, and remained standing in front of her.
"I did not think of coming here," he began. "I was led here--I--I--I love you," he ended by saying, feeling very nervous in spite of himself.
Liza slowly looked up at him. It seemed as if it had not been till that moment that she understood where she was, and what was happening to her. She would have risen, but she could not. Then she hid her face in her hands.
"Liza!" exclaimed Lavretsky; "Liza!" he repeated, and knelt down at her feet.
A slight shudder ran over her shoulders; she pressed the fingers of her white hands closer to her face.
"What is it?" said Lavretsky. Then he heard a low sound of sobbing, and his heart sank within him. He understood the meaning of those tears.
"Can it be that you love me?" he whispered, with a caressing gesture of the hand.
"Stand up, stand up, Fedor Ivanovich," she at last succeeded in saying. "What are we doing?"
He rose from his knees, and sat down by her side on the bench. She was no longer crying, but her eyes, as she looked at him earnestly, were wet with tears.
"I am frightened! What are we doing?" she said again.
"I love you," he repeated. "I am ready to give my whole life for you."
She shuddered again, just as if something had stung her, then she raised her eyes to heaven.
"That is entirely in the hands of God," she replied.
"But you love me, Liza? We are going to be happy?"
She let fall her eyes. He softly drew her to himself, and her head sank upon his shoulder. He bent his head a little aside, and kissed her pale lips.
* * * * *
Half an hour later Lavretsky was again standing before the garden gate. He found it closed now and was obliged to get over the fence. He returned into the town, and walked along its sleeping streets. His heart was full of happiness, intense and unexpected; all misgiving was dead within him. "Disappear, dark spirit of the Past!" he said to himself. "She loves me. She will be mine."
Suddenly he seemed to hear strange triumphal sounds floating in the air above his head. He stopped. With greater grandeur than before the sounds went clanging forth. With strong, sonorous stream did they flow along--and in them, as it seemed to him, all his happiness spoke and sang. He looked round. The sounds came from the two upper windows of a small house.
"Lemm!" he exclaimed, and ran up to the door of the house. "Lemm, Lemm!" he repeated loudly.
The sounds died away, and the form of the old man, wrapped in a dressing-gown, with exposed chest and wildly floating hair, appeared at the window.
"Ha! it is you," he said, with an air of importance.
"Christopher Fedorovich, what wonderful music! For heaven's sake let me in!"
The old man did not say a word, but with a dignified motion of the hand he threw the key of the door out of the window into the street. Lavretsky hastily ran up-stairs, entered the room, and was going to fling himself into Lemm's arms. But Lemm, with a gesture of command, pointed to a chair, and said sharply in his incorrect Russian, "Sit down and listen," then took his seat at the piano, looked round with a proud and severe glance, and began to play.
Lavretsky had heard nothing like it for a long time indeed. A sweet, passionate melody spoke to the heart with its very first notes. It seemed all thoroughly replete with sparkling light, fraught with inspiration, with beauty, and with joy. As it rose and sank it seemed to speak of all that is dear, and secret, and holy, on earth. It spoke too of a sorrow that can never end, and then it went to die away in the distant heaven.
Lavretsky had risen from his seat and remained standing, rooted to the spot, and pale with rapture. Those sounds entered very readily into his heart; for it had just been stirred into sensitiveness by the touch of a happy love, and they themselves were glowing with love.
"Play it again," he whispered, as soon as the last final chord had died away.
The old man looked at him with an eagle's glance, and said slowly, in his native tongue, striking his breast with his hand, "It is I who wrote that, for I am a great musician," and then he played once more his wonderful composition.
There were no lights in the room, but the rays of the rising moon entered obliquely through the window. The listening air seemed to tremble into music, and the poor little apartment looked like a sanctuary, while the silvery half-light gave to the head of the old man a noble and spiritual expression.
Lavretsky came up to him and embraced him. At first Lemm did not respond to his embrace--even put him aside with his elbow. Then he remained rigid for some time, without moving any of his limbs, wearing the same severe, almost repellent, look as before, and only growling out twice, "Aha!" But at last a change came over him, his face grew calm, and his head was no longer thrown back. Then, in reply to Lavretsky's warm congratulations, he first smiled a little, and afterwards began to cry, sobbing faintly, like a child.
"It is wonderful," he said, "your coming just at this very moment. But I know every thing--I know all about it."
"You know every thing?" exclaimed Lavretsky in astonishment.
"You have heard what I said," replied Lemm. "Didn't you understand that I knew every thing?"
* * * * *
Lavretsky did not get to sleep till the morning. All night long he remained sitting on the bed. Neither did Liza sleep. She was praying.
XXXIII.
The reader knows how Lavretsky had been brought up and educated. We will now say a few words about Liza's education. She was ten years old when her father died, who had troubled himself but little about her. Overwhelmed with business, constantly absorbed in the pursuit of adding to his income, a man of bilious temperament and a sour and impatient nature, he never grudged paying for the teachers and tutors, or for the dress and the other necessaries required by his children, but he could not bear "to nurse his squallers," according to his own expression--and, indeed, he never had any time for nursing them. He used to work, become absorbed in business, sleep a little, play cards on rare occasions, then work again. He often compared himself to a horse yoked to a threshing machine. "My life has soon been spent," he said on his death-bed, a bitter smile contracting his lips.
As to Maria Dmitrievna, she really troubled herself about Liza very little more than her husband did, for all that she had taken credit to herself, when speaking to Lavretsky, for having educated her children herself. She used to dress her like a doll, and when visitors were present, she would caress her and call her a good child and her darling, and that was all. Every continuous care troubled that indolent lady.
During her father's lifetime, Liza was left in the hands of a governess, a Mademoiselle Moreau, from Paris; but after his death she passed under the care of Marfa Timofeevna. That lady is already known to the reader. As for Mademoiselle Moreau, she was a very small woman, much wrinkled, and having the manners of a bird, and the character of a bird also. In her youth she had led a very dissipated life; in her old age she retained only two passions--the love of dainties and the love of cards. When her appetite was satiated, and when she was not playing cards or talking nonsense, her countenance rapidly assumed an almost death-like expression. She would sit and gaze and breathe, but it was plain that there was not a single idea stirring in her mind. She could not even be called good; goodness is not an attribute of birds. In consequence either of her frivolous youth or of the air of Paris, which she had breathed from her childhood's days, there was rooted in her a kind of universal scepticism, which usually found expression in the words, "_Tout ça c'est des bêtises_." She spoke an incorrect, but purely Parisian jargon, did not talk scandal, and had no caprices--what more could one expect from a governess? Over Liza she had but little influence. All the more powerful, then, was the influence exercised over the child by her nurse, Agafia Vlasievna.
That woman's story was a remarkable one. She sprang from a family of peasants, and was married at sixteen to a peasant; but she stood out in sharp relief against the mass of her peasant sisters. As a child, she had been spoilt by her father, who had been for twenty years the head of his commune, and who had made a good deal of money. She was singularly beautiful, and for grace and taste she was unsurpassed in the whole district, and she was intelligent, eloquent, and courageous. Her master, Dmitry Pestof, Madame Kalitine's father, a quiet and reserved man, saw her one day on the threshing-floor, had a talk with her, and fell passionately in love with her. Soon after this she became a widow. Pestof, although he was a married man, took her into his house, and had her dressed like one of the household. Agafia immediately made herself at home in her new position, just as if she had never led a different kind of life. Her complexion grew fairer, her figure became more rounded, and her arms, under their muslin sleeves, showed "white as wheat-flour," like those of a wealthy tradesman's wife. The _samovar_ never quitted her table; she would wear nothing but silks and velvets; she slept on feather-beds of down.
This happy life lasted five years; then Dmitry Pestof died. His widow, a lady of a kindly character, respected the memory of her late husband too much to wish to treat her rival with ignominy, especially as Agafia had never forgotten herself in her presence; but she married her to a herdsman, and sent her away from her sight. Three years passed by. One hot summer day the lady happened to pay a visit to the cattle-yard. Agafia treated her to such a cool dish of rich cream, behaved herself so modestly, and looked so clean, so happy, so contented with every thing, that her mistress informed her that she was pardoned, and allowed her to return into the house. Before six months had passed, the lady had become, so attached to her that she promoted her to the post of housekeeper, and confided all the domestic arrangements to her care. Thus Agafia came back into power, and again became fair and plump. Her mistress trusted her implicitly.
So passed five more years. Then misfortune came a second time on Agafia. Her husband, for whom she had obtained a place as footman, took to drink, began to absent himself from the house, and ended by stealing half-a-dozen of his mistress's silver spoons and hiding them, till a fitting opportunity should arise for carrying them off in his wife's box. The theft was found out. He was turned into a herdsman again, and Agafia fell into disgrace. She was not dismissed from the house, but she was degraded from the position of housekeeper to that of a needle-woman, and she was ordered to wear a handkerchief on her head instead of a cap. To every one's astonishment, Agafia bore the punishment inflicted on her with calm humility. By this time she was about thirty years old, all her children were dead, and her husband soon afterwards died also. The season of reflection had arrived for her, and she did reflect. She became very silent and very devout, never once letting matins or mass go unheeded by, and she gave away all her fine clothes. For fifteen years she led a quiet, grave, peaceful life, quarrelling with no one, giving way to all. If any one spoke to her harshly, she only bent her head and returned thanks for the lesson. Her mistress had forgiven her long ago, and had taken the ban off her--had even given her a cap off her own head to wear. But she herself refused to doff her handkerchief, and she would never consent to wear any but a sombre-colored dress. After the death of her mistress she became even more quiet and more humble than before. It is easy to work upon a Russian's fears and to secure his attachment, but it is difficult to acquire his esteem; that he will not readily give, nor will he give it to every one. But the whole household esteemed Agafia. No one even so much as remembered her former faults; it was as if they had been buried in the grave with her old master.