Part 8

‘And do you believe the rumours? And of what kind were the rumours?’

‘To tell the truth, Irina Pavlovna, such rumours very seldom reached me. I have led a very solitary life.’

‘How so? why, you were in the Crimea, in the militia?’

‘You know that too?’

‘As you see. I tell you, you have been watched.’

Again Litvinov felt puzzled.

‘Why am I to tell you what you know without me?’ said Litvinov in an undertone.

‘Why ... to do what I ask you. You see I ask you, Grigory Mihalitch.’

Litvinov bowed his head and began ... began in rather a confused fashion to recount in rough outline to Irina his uninteresting adventures. He often stopped and looked inquiringly at Irina, as though to ask whether he had told enough. But she insistently demanded the continuation of his narrative and pushing her hair back behind her ears, her elbows on the arm of her chair, she seemed to be catching every word with strained attention. Looking at her from one side and following the expression on her face, any one might perhaps have imagined she did not hear what Litvinov was saying at all, but was only deep in meditation.... But it was not of Litvinov she was meditating, though he grew confused and red under her persistent gaze. A whole life was rising up before her, a very different one, not his life, but her own.

Litvinov did not finish his story, but stopped short under the influence of an unpleasant sense of growing inner discomfort. This time Irina said nothing to him, and did not urge him to go on, but pressing her open hand to her eyes, as though she were tired, she leaned slowly back in her chair, and remained motionless. Litvinov waited for a little; then, reflecting that his visit had already lasted more than two hours, he was stretching out his hand for his hat, when suddenly in an adjoining room there was the sound of the rapid creak of thin kid boots, and preceded by the same exquisite aristocratic perfume, there entered Valerian Vladimirovitch Ratmirov.

Litvinov rose and interchanged bows with the good-looking general, while Irina, with no sign of haste, took her hand from her face, and looking coldly at her husband, remarked in French, ‘Ah! so you’ve come back! But what time is it?’

‘Nearly four, _ma chère amie_, and you not dressed yet--the princess will be expecting us,’ answered the general; and with an elegant bend of his tightly-laced figure in Litvinov’s direction, he added with the almost effeminate playfulness of intonation characteristic of him, ‘It’s clear an agreeable visitor has made you forgetful of time.’

The reader will permit us at this point to give him some information about General Ratmirov. His father was the natural ... what do you suppose? You are not wrong--but we didn’t mean to say that ... the natural son of an illustrious personage of the reign of Alexander I. and of a pretty little French actress. The illustrious personage brought his son forward in the world, but left him no fortune, and the son himself (the father of our hero) had not time to grow rich; he died before he had risen above the rank of a colonel in the police. A year before his death he had married a handsome young widow who had happened to put herself under his protection. His son by the widow, Valerian Alexandrovitch, having got into the Corps of Pages by favour, attracted the notice of the authorities, not so much by his success in the sciences, as by his fine bearing, his fine manners, and his good behaviour (though he had been exposed to all that pupils in the government military schools were inevitably exposed to in former days) and went into the Guards. His career was a brilliant one, thanks to the discreet gaiety of his disposition, his skill in dancing, his excellent seat on horseback when an orderly at reviews, and lastly, by a kind of special trick of deferential familiarity with his superiors, of tender, attentive almost clinging subservience, with a flavour of vague liberalism, light as air.... This liberalism had not, however, prevented him from flogging fifty peasants in a White Russian village, where he had been sent to put down a riot. His personal appearance was most prepossessing and singularly youthful-looking; smooth-faced and rosy-checked, pliant and persistent, he made the most of his amazing success with women; ladies of the highest rank and mature age simply went out of their senses over him. Cautious from habit, silent from motives of prudence, General Ratmirov moved constantly in the highest society, like the busy bee gathering honey even from the least attractive flowers--and without morals, without information of any kind, but with the reputation of being good at business; with an insight into men, and a ready comprehension of the exigencies of the moment, and above all, a never-swerving desire for his own advantage, he saw at last all paths lying open before him....

Litvinov smiled constrainedly, while Irina merely shrugged her shoulders.

‘Well,’ she said in the same cold tone, ‘did you see the Count?’

‘To be sure I saw him. He told me to remember him to you.’

‘Ah! is he as imbecile as ever, that patron of yours?’

General Ratmirov made no reply. He only smiled to himself, as though lenient to the over-hastiness of a woman’s judgment. With just such a smile kindly-disposed grown-up people respond to the nonsensical whims of children.

‘Yes,’ Irina went on, ‘the stupidity of your friend the Count is too striking, even when one has seen a good deal of the world.’

‘You sent me to him yourself,’ muttered the general, and turning to Litvinov he asked him in Russian, ‘Was he getting any benefit from the Baden waters?’

‘I am in perfect health, I’m thankful to say,’ answered Litvinov.

‘That’s the greatest of blessings,’ pursued the general, with an affable grimace; ‘and indeed one doesn’t, as a rule, come to Baden for the waters; but the waters here are very effectual, _je veux dire, efficaces_; and any one who suffers, as I do for instance, from a nervous cough----’

Irina rose quickly. ‘We will see each other again, Grigory Mihalitch, and I hope soon,’ she said in French, contemptuously cutting short her husband’s speech, ‘but now I must go and dress. That old princess is insufferable with her everlasting _parties de plaisir_, of which nothing comes but boredom.’

‘You’re hard on every one to-day,’ muttered her husband, and he slipped away into the next room.

Litvinov was turning towards the door.... Irina stopped him.

‘You have told me everything,’ she said, ‘but the chief thing you concealed.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You are going to be married, I’m told?’

Litvinov blushed up to his ears.... As a fact, he had intentionally not referred to Tanya; but he felt horribly vexed, first, that Irina knew about his marriage, and, secondly, that she had, as it were, convicted him of a desire to conceal it from her. He was completely at a loss what to say, while Irina did not take her eyes off him.

‘Yes, I am going to be married,’ he said at last, and at once withdrew.

Ratmirov came back into the room.

‘Well, why aren’t you dressed?’ he asked.

‘You can go alone; my head aches.’

‘But the princess....’

Irina scanned her husband from head to foot in one look, turned her back upon him, and went away to her boudoir.

XIII

Litvinov felt much annoyed with himself, as though he had lost money at roulette, or failed to keep his word. An inward voice told him that he--on the eve of marriage, a man of sober sense, not a boy--ought not to have given way to the promptings of curiosity, nor the allurements of recollection. ‘Much need there was to go!’ he reflected. ‘On her side simply flirtation, whim, caprice.... She’s bored, she’s sick of everything, she clutched at me ... as some one pampered with dainties will suddenly long for black bread ... well, that’s natural enough.... But why did I go? Can I feel anything but contempt for her?’ This last phrase he could not utter even in thought without an effort.... ‘Of course, there’s no kind of danger, and never could be,’ he pursued his reflections. ‘I know whom I have to deal with. But still one ought not to play with fire.... I’ll never set my foot in her place again.’ Litvinov dared not, or could not as yet, confess to himself how beautiful Irina had seemed to him, how powerfully she had worked upon his feelings.

Again the day passed dully and drearily. At dinner, Litvinov chanced to sit beside a majestic _belhomme_, with dyed moustaches, who said nothing, and only panted and rolled his eyes ... but, being suddenly taken with a hiccup, proved himself to be a fellow-countryman, by at once exclaiming, with feeling, in Russian, ‘There, I said I ought not to eat melons!’ In the evening, too, nothing happened to compensate for a lost day; Bindasov, before Litvinov’s very eyes, won a sum four times what he had borrowed from him, but, far from repaying his debt, he positively glared in his face with a menacing air, as though he were prepared to borrow more from him just because he had been a witness of his winnings. The next morning he was again invaded by a host of his compatriots; Litvinov got rid of them with difficulty, and setting off to the mountains, he first came across Irina--he pretended not to recognise her, and passed quickly by--and then Potugin. He was about to begin a conversation with Potugin, but the latter did not respond to him readily. He was leading by the hand a smartly dressed little girl, with fluffy, almost white curls, large black eyes, and a pale, sickly little face, with that peculiar peremptory and impatient expression characteristic of spoiled children. Litvinov spent two hours in the mountains, and then went back homewards along the Lichtenthaler Allee.... A lady, sitting on a bench, with a blue veil over her face, got up quickly, and came up to him.... He recognised Irina.

‘Why do you avoid me, Grigory Mihalitch?’ she said, in the unsteady voice of one who is boiling over within.

Litvinov was taken aback. ‘I avoid you, Irina Pavlovna?’

‘Yes, you ... you----’

Irina seemed excited, almost angry.

‘You are mistaken, I assure you.’

‘No, I am not mistaken. Do you suppose this morning--when we met, I mean--do you suppose I didn’t see that you knew me? Do you mean to say you did not know me? Tell me.’

‘I really ... Irina Pavlovna----’

‘Grigory Mihalitch, you’re a straightforward man, you have always told the truth; tell me, tell me, you knew me, didn’t you? you turned away on purpose?’

Litvinov glanced at Irina. Her eyes shone with a strange light, while her cheeks and lips were of a deathly pallor under the thick net of her veil. In the expression of her face, in the very sound of her abruptly jerked-out whisper, there was something so irresistibly mournful, beseeching ... Litvinov could not pretend any longer.

‘Yes ... I knew you,’ he uttered not without effort.

Irina slowly shuddered, and slowly dropped her hands.

‘Why did you not come up to me?’ she whispered.

‘Why ... why!’ Litvinov moved on one side, away from the path, Irina followed him in silence. ‘Why?’ he repeated once more, and suddenly his face was aflame, and he felt his chest and throat choking with a passion akin to hatred. ‘You ... you ask such a question, after all that has passed between us? Not now, of course, not now; but there ... there ... in Moscow.’

‘But, you know, we decided; you know, you promised----’ Irina was beginning.

‘I have promised nothing! Pardon the harshness of my expressions, but you ask for the truth--so think for yourself: to what but a caprice--incomprehensible, I confess, to me--to what but a desire to try how much power you still have over me, can I attribute your ... I don’t know what to call it ... your persistence? Our paths have lain so far apart! I have forgotten it all, I’ve lived through all that suffering long ago, I’ve become a different man completely; you are married--happy, at least, in appearance--you fill an envied position in the world; what’s the object, what’s the use of our meeting? What am I to you? what are you to me? We cannot even understand each other now; there is absolutely nothing in common between us now, neither in the past nor in the present! Especially ... especially in the past!’

Litvinov uttered all this speech hurriedly, jerkily, without turning his head. Irina did not stir, except from time to time she faintly stretched her hands out to him. It seemed as though she were beseeching him to stop and listen to her, while, at his last words, she slightly bit her lower lip, as though to master the pain of a sharp, rapid wound.

‘Grigory Mihalitch,’ she began at last, in a calmer voice; and she moved still further away from the path, along which people from time to time passed.

Litvinov in his turn followed her.

‘Grigory Mihalitch, believe me, if I could imagine I had one hair’s-breadth of power over you left, I would be the first to avoid you. If I have not done so, if I made up my mind, in spite of my ... of the wrong I did you in the past, to renew my acquaintance with you, it was because ... because----’

‘Because what?’ asked Litvinov, almost rudely.

‘Because,’ Irina declared with sudden force--‘it’s too insufferable, too unbearably stifling for me in society, in the envied position you talk about; because meeting you, a live man, after all these dead puppets--you have seen samples of them three days ago, there _au Vieux Château_,--I rejoice over you as an oasis in the desert, while you suspect me of flirting, and despise me and repulse me on the ground that I wronged you--as indeed I did--but far more myself!’

‘You chose your lot yourself, Irina Pavlovna,’ Litvinov rejoined sullenly, as before not turning his head.

‘I chose it myself, yes ... and I don’t complain, I have no right to complain,’ said Irina hurriedly; she seemed to derive a secret consolation from Litvinov’s very harshness. ‘I know that you must think ill of me, and I won’t justify myself; I only want to explain my feeling to you, I want to convince you I am in no flirting humour now.... Me flirting with you! Why, there is no sense in it.... When I saw you, all that was good, that was young in me, revived ... that time when I had not yet chosen my lot, everything that lies behind in that streak of brightness behind those ten years....’

‘Come, really, Irina Pavlovna! So far as I am aware, the brightness in your life began precisely with the time we separated....’

Irina put her handkerchief to her lips.

‘That’s very cruel, what you say, Grigory Mihalitch; but I can’t feel angry with you. Oh, no, that was not a bright time, it was not for happiness I left Moscow; I have known not one moment, not one instant of happiness ... believe me, whatever you have been told. If I were happy, could I talk to you as I am talking now.... I repeat to you, you don’t know what these people are.... Why, they understand nothing, feel for nothing; they’ve no intelligence even, _ni esprit ni intelligence_, nothing but tact and cunning; why, in reality, music and poetry and art are all equally remote from them.... You will say that I was rather indifferent to all that myself; but not to the same degree, Grigory Mihalitch ... not to the same degree! It’s not a woman of the world before you now, you need only look at me--not a society queen.... That’s what they call us, I believe ... but a poor, poor creature, really deserving of pity. Don’t wonder at my words.... I am beyond feeling pride now! I hold out my hand to you as a beggar, will you understand, just as a beggar.... I ask for charity,’ she added suddenly, in an involuntary, irrepressible outburst, ‘I ask for charity, and you----’

Her voice broke. Litvinov raised his head and looked at Irina; her breathing came quickly, her lips were quivering. Suddenly his heart beat fast, and the feeling of hatred vanished.

‘You say that our paths have lain apart,’ Irina went on. ‘I know you are about to marry from inclination, you have a plan laid out for your whole life; yes, that’s all so, but we have not become strangers to one another, Grigory Mihalitch; we can still understand each other. Or do you imagine I have grown altogether dull--altogether debased in the mire? Ah, no, don’t think that, please! Let me open my heart, I beseech you--there--even for the sake of those old days, if you are not willing to forget them. Do so, that our meeting may not have come to pass in vain; that would be too bitter; it would not last long in any case.... I don’t know how to say it properly, but you will understand me, because I ask for little, so little ... only a little sympathy, only that you should not repulse me, that you should let me open my heart----’

Irina ceased speaking, there were tears in her voice. She sighed, and timidly, with a kind of furtive, searching look, gazed at Litvinov, held out her hand to him....

Litvinov slowly took the hand and faintly pressed it.

‘Let us be friends,’ whispered Irina.

‘Friends,’ repeated Litvinov dreamily.

‘Yes, friends ... or if that is too much to ask, then let us at least be friendly.... Let us be simply as though nothing had happened.’

‘As though nothing had happened,...’ repeated Litvinov again. ‘You said just now, Irina Pavlovna, that I was unwilling to forget the old days.... But what if I can’t forget them?’

A blissful smile flashed over Irina’s face, and at once disappeared, to be replaced by a harassed, almost scared expression.

‘Be like me, Grigory Mihalitch, remember only what was good in them; and most of all, give me your word.... Your word of honour....’

‘Well?’

‘Not to avoid me ... not to hurt me for nothing. You promise? tell me!’

‘Yes.’

‘And you will dismiss all evil thoughts of me from your mind.’

‘Yes ... but as for understanding you--I give it up.’

‘There’s no need of that ... wait a little, though, you will understand. But you will promise?’

‘I have said yes already.’

‘Thanks. You see I am used to believe you. I shall expect you to-day, to-morrow, I will not go out of the house. And now I must leave you. The Grand Duchess is coming along the avenue.... She’s caught sight of me, and I can’t avoid going up to speak to her.... Good-bye till we meet.... Give me your hand, _vite, vite_. Till we meet.’

And warmly pressing Litvinov’s hand, Irina walked towards a middle-aged person of dignified appearance, who was coming slowly along the gravel path, escorted by two other ladies, and a strikingly handsome groom in livery.

‘_Eh bonjour, chère Madame_,’ said the personage, while Irina curtseyed respectfully to her. ‘_Comment allez-vous aujourd’hui? Venez un peu avec moi._’

‘_Votre Altesse a trop de bonté_,’ Irina’s insinuating voice was heard in reply.

XIV

Litvinov let the Grand Duchess and all her suite get out of sight, and then he too went along the avenue. He could not make up his mind clearly what he was feeling; he was conscious both of shame and dread, while his vanity was flattered.... The unexpected explanation with Irina had taken him utterly by surprise; her rapid burning words had passed over him like a thunder-storm. ‘Queer creatures these society women,’ he thought; ‘there’s no consistency in them ... and how perverted they are by the surroundings in which they go on living, while they’re conscious of its hideousness themselves!’... In reality he was not thinking this at all, but only mechanically repeating these hackneyed phrases, as though he were trying to ward off other more painful thoughts. He felt that he must not think seriously just now, that he would probably have to blame himself, and he moved with lagging steps, almost forcing himself to pay attention to everything that happened to meet him.... He suddenly found himself before a seat, caught sight of some one’s legs in front of it, and looked upwards from them.... The legs belonged to a man, sitting on the seat, and reading a newspaper; this man turned out to be Potugin. Litvinov uttered a faint exclamation. Potugin laid the paper down on his knees, and looked attentively, without a smile, at Litvinov; and Litvinov also attentively, and also without a smile, looked at Potugin.

‘May I sit by you?’ he asked at last.

‘By all means, I shall be delighted. Only I warn you, if you want to have a talk with me, you mustn’t be offended with me--I’m in a most misanthropic humour just now, and I see everything in an exaggeratedly repulsive light.’

‘That’s no matter, Sozont Ivanitch,’ responded Litvinov, sinking down on the seat, ‘indeed it’s particularly appropriate.... But why has such a mood come over you?’

‘I ought not by rights to be ill-humoured,’ began Potugin. ‘I’ve just read in the paper a project for judicial reforms in Russia, and I see with genuine pleasure that we’ve got some sense at last, and they’re not as usual on the pretext of independence, nationalism, or originality, proposing to tack a little home-made tag of our own on to the clear straightforward logic of Europe; but are taking what’s good from abroad intact. A single adaptation in its application to the peasants’ sphere is enough.... There’s no doing away with communal ownership!... Certainly, certainly, I ought not to be ill-humoured; but to my misfortune I chanced upon a Russian “rough diamond,” and had a talk with him, and these rough diamonds, these self-educated geniuses, would make me turn in my grave!’

‘What do you mean by a rough diamond?’ asked Litvinov.