Chapter 13
So passed a few days. At last Anna Vassilyevna plucked up her courage, and one evening she shut herself up alone with her husband in her room. The whole house was hushed to catch every sound. At first nothing was to be heard; then Nikolai Artemyevitch’s voice began to tune up, then a quarrel broke out, shouts were raised, even groans were discerned.... Already Shubin was plotting with the maids and Zoya to rush in to the rescue; but the uproar in the bedroom began by degrees to grow less, passed into quiet talk, and ceased. Only from time to time a faint sob was to be heard, and then those, too, were still. There was the jingling of keys, the creak of a bureau being unfastened.... The door was opened, and Nikolai Artemyevitch appeared. He looked surlily at every one who met him, and went out to the club; while Anna Vassilyevna sent for Elena, embraced her warmly, and, with bitter tears flowing down her cheeks, she said:
‘Everything is settled, he will not make a scandal, and there is nothing now to hinder you from going--from abandoning us.’
‘You will let Dmitri come to thank you?’ Elena begged her mother, as soon as the latter had been restored a little.
‘Wait a little, my darling, I cannot bear yet to see the man who has come between us. We shall have time before you go.’
‘Before we go,’ repeated Elena mournfully.
Nikolai Artemyevitch had consented ‘not to make a scandal,’ but Anna Vassilyevna did not tell her daughter what a price he had put on his consent. She did not tell her that she had promised to pay all his debts, and had given him a thousand roubles down on the spot. Moreover, he had declared decisively to Anna Vassilyevna that he had no wish to meet Insarov, whom he persisted in calling ‘the Montenegrin vagrant,’ and when he got to the club, he began, quite without occasion, talking of Elena’s marriage, to his partner at cards, a retired general of engineers. ‘You have heard,’ he observed with a show of carelessness, ‘my daughter, through the higher education, has gone and married a student.’ The general looked at him through his spectacles, muttered, ‘H’m!’ and asked him what stakes would he play for.
XXXII
The day of departure drew near. November was already over; the latest date for starting had come. Insarov had long ago made his preparations, and was burning with anxiety to get out of Moscow as soon as possible. And the doctor was urging him on. ‘You need a warm climate,’ he told him; ‘you will not get well here.’ Elena, too, was fretting with impatience; she was worried by Insarov’s pallor, and his emaciation. She often looked with involuntary terror at his changed face. Her position in her parents’ house had become insupportable. Her mother mourned over her, as over the dead, while her father treated her with contemptuous coldness; the approaching separation secretly pained him too, but he regarded it as his duty--the duty of an offended father--to disguise his feelings, his weakness. Anna Vassilyevna at last expressed a wish to see Insarov. He was taken up to her secretly by the back stairs. After he had entered her room, for a long time she could not speak to him, she could not even bring herself to look at him; he sat down near her chair, and waited, with quiet respectfulness, for her first word. Elena sat down close, and held her mother’s hand in hers. At last Anna Vassilyevna raised her eyes, saying: ‘God is your judge, Dmitri Nikanorovitch’--she stopped short: the reproaches died away on her lips. ‘Why, you are ill,’ she cried: ‘Elena, your husband’s ill!’
‘I have been unwell, Anna Vassilyevna,’ answered Insarov; ‘and even now I am not quite strong yet: but I hope my native air will make me perfectly well again.’
‘Ah--Bulgaria!’ murmured Anna Vassilyevna, and she thought: ‘Good God, a Bulgarian, and dying; a voice as hollow as a drum; and eyes like saucers, a perfect skeleton; his coat hanging loose on his shoulders, his face as yellow as a guinea, and she’s his wife--she loves him--it must be a bad dream. But----’ she checked herself at once: ‘Dmitri Nikanorovitch,’ she said, ‘are you absolutely, absolutely bound to go away?’
‘Absolutely, Anna Vassilyevna.’
Anna Vassilyevna looked at him.
‘Ah, Dmitri Nikanorovitch, God grant you never have to go through what I am going through now. But you will promise me to take care of her--to love her. You will not have to face poverty while I am living!’
Tears choked her voice. She opened her arms, and Elena and Insarov flung themselves into her embrace.
The fatal day had come at last. It had been arranged that Elena should say good-bye to her parents at home, and should start on the journey from Insarov’s lodgings. The departure was fixed for twelve o’clock. About a quarter of an hour before the appointed time Bersenyev arrived. He had expected to find Insarov’s compatriots at his lodgings, anxious to see him off; but they had already gone before; and with them the two mysterious persons known to the reader (they had been witnesses at Insarov’s wedding). The tailor met the ‘kind gentlemen’ with a bow; he, presumably, to drown his grief, but possibly to celebrate his delight at getting the furniture, had been drinking heavily; his wife soon led him away. In the room everything was by this time ready; a trunk, tied up with cord, stood on the floor. Bersenyev sank into thought: many memories came rushing upon him.
Twelve o’clock had long ago struck; and the driver had already brought round the horses, but the ‘young people’ still did not appear. At last hurrying steps were heard on the stairs, and Elena came out escorted by Insarov and Shubin. Elena’s eyes were red; she had left her mother lying unconscious; the parting had been terrible. Elena had not seen Bersenyev for more than a week: he had been seldom of late at the Stahovs’. She had not expected to meet him; and crying, ‘You! thank you!’ she threw herself on his neck; Insarov, too, embraced him. A painful silence followed. What could these three say to one another? what were they feeling in their hearts? Shubin realised the necessity of cutting short everything painful with light words.
‘Our trio has come together again,’ he began, ‘for the last time. Let us submit to the decrees of fate; speak of the past with kindness; and in God’s name go forward to the new life! In God’s name, on our distant way,’ he began to hum, and stopped short. He felt suddenly ashamed and awkward. It is a sin to sing where the dead are lying: and at that instant, in that room, the past of which he had spoken was dying, the past of the people met together in it. It was dying to be born again in a new life--doubtless--still it was death.
‘Come, Elena,’ began Insarov, turning to his wife, ‘I think everything is done? Everything paid, and everything packed. There’s nothing more except to take the box down.’ He called his landlord.
The tailor came into the room, together with his wife and daughter. He listened, slightly reeling, to Insarov’s instructions, dragged the box up on to his shoulders, and ran quickly down the staircases, tramping heavily with his boots.
‘Now, after the Russian custom, we must sit down,’ observed Insarov.
They all sat down; Bersenyev seated himself on the old sofa, Elena sat next him; the landlady and her daughter squatted in the doorway. All were silent; all smiled constrainedly, though no one knew why he was smiling; each of them wanted to say something at parting, and each (except, of course, the landlady and her daughter, they were simply rolling their eyes) felt that at such moments it is only permissible to utter common-places, that any word of importance, of sense, or even of deep feeling, would be somehow out of place, almost insincere. Insarov was the first to get up, and he began crossing himself. ‘Farewell, our little room!’ he cried.
Then came kisses, the sounding but cold kisses of leave-taking, good wishes--half expressed--for the journey, promises to write, the last, half-smothered words of farewell.
Elena, all in tears, had already taken her seat in the sledge; Insarov had carefully wrapped her feet up in a rug; Shubin, Bersenyev, the landlord, his wife, the little daughter, with the inevitable kerchief on her head, the doorkeeper, a workman in a striped bedgown, were all standing on the steps, when suddenly a splendid sledge, harnessed with spirited horses, flew into the courtyard, and from the sledge, shaking the snow off the collar of his cloak, leapt Nikolai Artemyevitch.
‘I am not too late, thank God,’ he cried, running up to their sledge. ‘Here, Elena, is our last parental benediction,’ he said, bending down under the hood, and taking from his pocket a little holy image, sewn in a velvet bag, he put it round her neck. She began to sob, and kiss his hands; and the coachman meantime pulled out of the forepart of the sledge a half bottle of champagne, and three glasses.
‘Come!’ said Nikolai Artemyevitch--and his own tears were trickling on to the beaver collar of his cloak--‘we must drink to--good journey--good wishes----’ He began pouring out the champagne: his hands were shaking, the foam rose over the edge and fell on to the snow. He took one glass, and gave the other two to Elena and Insarov, who by now was seated beside her. ‘God give you----’ began Nikolai Artemyevitch, and he could not go on: he drank off the wine; they, too, drank off their glasses. ‘Now you should drink, gentlemen,’ he added, turning to Shubin and Bersenyev, but at that instant the driver started the horses. Nikolai Artemyevitch ran beside the sledge. ‘Mind and write to us,’ he said in a broken voice. Elena put out her head, saying: ‘Good-bye, papa, Andrei Petrovitch, Pavel Yakovlitch, good-bye all, good-bye, Russia!’ and dropped back in her place. The driver flourished his whip, and gave a whistle; the sledge, its runners crunching on the snow, turned out of the gates to the right and disappeared.
XXXIII
It was a bright April day. On the broad lagoon which separates Venice from the narrow strip of accumulated sea sand, called the Lido, a gondola was gliding--swaying rhythmically at every push made by the gondolier as he leaned on the big pole. Under its low awning, on soft leather cushions, were sitting Elena and Insarov.
Elena’s features had not changed much since the day of her departure from Moscow, but their expression was different; it was more thoughtful and more severe, and her eyes had a bolder look. Her whole figure had grown finer and more mature, and the hair seemed to lie in greater thickness and luxuriance along her white brow and her fresh cheeks. Only about her lips, when she was not smiling, a scarcely perceptible line showed the presence of a hidden constant anxiety. In Insarov’s face, on the contrary, the expression had remained the same, but his features had undergone a cruel change. He had grown thin, old, pale and bent; he was constantly coughing a short dry cough, and his sunken eyes shone with a strange brilliance. On the way from Russia, Insarov had lain ill for almost two months at Vienna, and only at the end of March had he been able to come with his wife to Venice; from there he was hoping to make his way through Zara to Servia, to Bulgaria; the other roads were closed. The war was now at its height about the Danube; England and France had declared war on Russia, all the Slavonic countries were roused and were preparing for an uprising.
The gondola put in to the inner shore of the Lido. Elena and Insarov walked along the narrow sandy road planted with sickly trees (every year they plant them and every year they die) to the outer shore of the Lido, to the sea.
They walked along the beach. The Adriatic rolled its muddy-blue waves before them; they raced into the shore, foaming and hissing, and drew back again, leaving fine shells and fragments of seaweed on the beach.
‘What a desolate place!’ observed Elena ‘I’m afraid it’s too cold for you here, but I guess why you wanted to come here.’
‘Cold!’ rejoined Insarov with a rapid and bitter smile, ‘I shall be a fine soldier, if I’m to be afraid of the cold. I came here... I will tell you why. I look across that sea, and I feel as though here, I am nearer my country. It is there, you know,’ he added, stretching out his hand to the East, ‘the wind blows from there.’
‘Will not this wind bring the ship you are expecting?’ said Elena. ‘See, there is a white sail, is not that it?’
Insarov gazed seaward into the distance to where Elena was pointing.
‘Renditch promised to arrange everything for us within a week,’ he said, ‘we can rely on him, I think.... Did you hear, Elena,’ he added with sudden animation, ‘they say the poor Dalmatian fishermen have sacrificed their dredging weights--you know the leads they weigh their nets with for letting them down to the bottom--to make bullets! They have no money, they only just live by fishing; but they have joyfully given up their last property, and now are starving. What a nation!’
‘_Aufgepasst_!’ shouted a haughty voice behind them. The heavy thud of horse’s hoofs was heard, and an Austrian officer in a short grey tunic and a green cap galloped past them--they had scarcely time to get out of the way.
Insarov looked darkly after him.
‘He was not to blame,’ said Elena, ‘you know, they have no other place where they can ride.’
‘He was not to blame,’ answered Insarov ‘but he made my blood boil with his shout, his moustaches, his cap, his whole appearance. Let us go back.’
‘Yes, let us go back, Dmitri. It’s really cold here. You did not take care of yourself after your Moscow illness, and you had to pay for that at Vienna. Now you must be more cautious.’
Insarov did not answer, but the same bitter smile passed over his lips.
‘If you like,’ Elena went on, ‘we will go along to the Canal Grande. We have not seen Venice properly, you know, all the while we have been here. And in the evening we are going to the theatre; I have two tickets for the stalls. They say there’s a new opera being given. If you like, we will give up to-day to one another; we will forget politics and war and everything, we will forget everything but that we are alive, breathing, thinking together; that we are one for ever--would you like that?’
‘If you would like it, Elena,’ answered Insarov, ‘it follows that I should like it too.’
‘I knew that,’ observed Elena with a smile, ‘come, let us go.’
They went back to the gondola, took their seats, told the gondolier to take them without hurry along the Canal Grande.
No one who has not seen Venice in April knows all the unutterable fascinations of that magic town. The softness and mildness of spring harmonise with Venice, just as the glaring sun of summer suits the magnificence of Genoa, and as the gold and purple of autumn suits the grand antiquity of Rome. The beauty of Venice, like the spring, touches the soul and moves it to desire; it frets and tortures the inexperienced heart like the promise of a coming bliss, mysterious but not elusive. Everything in it is bright, and everything is wrapt in a drowsy, tangible mist, as it were, of the hush of love; everything in it is so silent, and everything in it is kindly; everything in it is feminine, from its name upwards. It has well been given the name of ‘the fair city.’ Its masses of palaces and churches stand out light and wonderful like the graceful dream of a young god; there is something magical, something strange and bewitching in the greenish-grey light and silken shimmer of the silent water of the canals, in the noiseless gliding of the gondolas, in the absence of the coarse din of a town, the coarse rattling, and crashing, and uproar. ‘Venice is dead, Venice is deserted,’ her citizens will tell you, but perhaps this last charm--the charm of decay--was not vouchsafed her in the very heyday of the flower and majesty of her beauty. He who has not seen her, knows her not; neither Canaletto nor Guardi (to say nothing of later painters) has been able to convey the silvery tenderness of the atmosphere, the horizon so close, yet so elusive, the divine harmony of exquisite lines and melting colours. One who has outlived his life, who has been crushed by it, should not visit Venice; she will be cruel to him as the memory of unfulfilled dreams of early days; but sweet to one whose strength is at its full, who is conscious of happiness; let him bring his bliss under her enchanted skies; and however bright it may be, Venice will make it more golden with her unfading splendour.
The gondola in which Insarov and Elena were sitting passed _Riva dei Schiavoni_, the palace of the Doges, and Piazzetta, and entered the Grand Canal. On both sides stretched marble palaces; they seemed to float softly by, scarcely letting the eye seize or absorb their beauty. Elena felt herself deeply happy; in the perfect blue of her heavens there was only one dark cloud--and it was in the far distance; Insarov was much better that day. They glided as far as the acute angle of the Rialto and turned back. Elena was afraid of the chill of the churches for Insarov; but she remembered the academy _delle Belle Arti_, and told the gondolier to go towards it. They quickly walked through all the rooms of that little museum. Being neither connoisseurs nor dilettantes, they did not stop before every picture; they put no constraint on themselves; a spirit of light-hearted gaiety came over them. Everything seemed suddenly very entertaining. (Children know this feeling very well.) To the great scandal of three English visitors, Elena laughed till she cried over the St Mark of Tintoretto, skipping down from the sky like a frog into the water, to deliver the tortured slave; Insarov in his turn fell into raptures over the back and legs of the sturdy man in the green cloak, who stands in the foreground of Titian’s Ascension and holds his arms outstretched after the Madonna; but the Madonna--a splendid, powerful woman, calmly and majestically making her way towards the bosom of God the Father--impressed both Insarov and Elena; they liked, too, the austere and reverent painting of the elder Cima da Conegliano. As they were leaving the academy, they took another look at the Englishmen behind them--with their long rabbit-like teeth and drooping whiskers--and laughed; they glanced at their gondolier with his abbreviated jacket and short breeches--and laughed; they caught sight of a woman selling old clothes with a knob of grey hair on the very top of her head--and laughed more than ever; they looked into one another’s face--and went off into peals of laughter, and directly they had sat down in the gondola, they clasped each other’s hand in a close, close grip. They reached their hotel, ran into their room, and ordered dinner to be brought in. Their gaiety did not desert them at dinner. They pressed each other to eat, drank to the health of their friends in Moscow, clapped their hands at the waiter for a delicious dish of fish, and kept asking him for live _frutti di mare_; the waiter shrugged his shoulders and scraped with his feet, but when he had left them, he shook his head and once even muttered with a sigh, _poveretti_! (poor things!) After dinner they set off for the theatre.
They were giving an opera of Verdi’s, which though, honestly speaking, rather vulgar, has already succeeded in making the round of all the European theatres, an opera, well-known among Russians, _La Traviata_. The season in Venice was over, and none of the singers rose above the level of mediocrity; every one shouted to the best of their abilities. The part of Violetta was performed by an artist, of no renown, and judging by the cool reception given her by the public, not a favourite, but she was not destitute of talent. She was a young, and not very pretty, black-eyed girl with an unequal and already overstrained voice. Her dress was ill-chosen and naively gaudy; her hair was hidden in a red net, her dress of faded blue satin was too tight for her, and thick Swedish gloves reached up to her sharp elbows. Indeed, how could she, the daughter of some Bergamese shepherd, know how Parisian _dames aux camélias_ dress! And she did not understand how to move on the stage; but there was much truth and artless simplicity in her acting, and she sang with that passion of expression and rhythm which is only vouchsafed to Italians. Elena and Insarov were sitting alone together in a dark box close to the stage; the mirthful mood which had come upon them in the academy _delle Belle Arti_ had not yet passed off. When the father of the unhappy young man who had fallen into the snares of the enchantress came on to the stage in a yellow frock-coat and a dishevelled white wig, opened his mouth awry, and losing his presence of mind before he had begun, only brought out a faint bass _tremolo_, they almost burst into laughter. ... But Violetta’s acting impressed them.
‘They hardly clap that poor girl at all,’ said Elena, ‘but I like her a thousand times better than some conceited second-rate celebrity who would grimace and attitudinise all the while for effect. This girl seems as though it were all in earnest; look, she pays no attention to the public.’
Insarov bent over the edge of the box, and looked attentively at Violetta.
‘Yes,’ he commented, ‘she is in earnest; she’s on the brink of the grave herself.’
Elena was mute.
The third act began. The curtain rose--Elena shuddered at the sight of the bed, the drawn curtains, the glass of medicine, the shaded lamps. She recalled the near past. ‘What of the future? What of the present?’ flashed across her mind. As though in response to her thought, the artist’s mimic cough on the stage was answered in the box by the hoarse, terribly real cough of Insarov. Elena stole a glance at him, and at once gave her features a calm and untroubled expression; Insarov understood her, and he began himself to smile, and softly to hum the tune of the song.
But he was soon quiet. Violetta’s acting became steadily better, and freer. She had thrown aside everything subsidiary, everything superfluous, and _found herself_; a rare, a lofty delight for an artist! She had suddenly crossed the limit, which it is impossible to define, beyond which is the abiding place of beauty. The audience was thrilled and astonished. The plain girl with the broken voice began to get a hold on it, to master it. And the singer’s voice even did not sound broken now; it had gained mellowness and strength. Alfredo made his entrance; Violetta’s cry of happiness almost raised that storm in the audience known as _fanatismo_, beside which all the applause of our northern audiences is nothing. A brief interval passed--and again the audience were in transports. The duet began, the best thing in the opera, in which the composer has succeeded in expressing all the pathos of the senseless waste of youth, the final struggle of despairing, helpless love. Caught up and carried along by the general sympathy, with tears of artistic delight and real suffering in her eyes, the singer let herself be borne along on the wave of passion within her; her face was transfigured, and in the presence of the threatening signs of fast approaching death, the words: ‘_Lascia mi vivero--morir si giovane_’ (let me live--to die so young!) burst from her in such a tempest of prayer rising to heaven, that the whole theatre shook with frenzied applause and shouts of delight.
Elena felt cold all over. Softly her hand sought Insarov’s, found it, and clasped it tightly. He responded to its pressure; but she did not look at him, nor he at her. Very different was the clasp of hands with which they had greeted each other in the gondola a few hours before.