During the first fortnight of Insarov’s stay in the Kuntsovo
neighbourhood, he did not visit the Stahovs more than four or five
times; Bersenyev went to see them every day. Elena was always pleased to
see him, lively and interesting talk always sprang up between them,
and yet he often went home with a gloomy face. Shubin scarcely showed
himself; he was working with feverish energy at his art; he either
stayed locked up in his room, from which he would emerge in a blouse,
smeared all over with clay, or else he spent days in Moscow where he
had a studio, to which models and Italian sculptors, his friends and
teachers, used to come to see him. Elena did not once succeed in talking
with Insarov, as she would have liked to do; in his absence she prepared
questions to ask him about many things, but when he came she felt
ashamed of her plans. Insarov’s very tranquillity embarrassed her; it
seemed to her that she had not the right to force him to speak out; and
she resolved to wait; for all that, she felt that at every visit however
trivial might be the words that passed between them, he attracted her
more and more; but she never happened to be left alone with him--and
to grow intimate with any one, one must have at least one conversation
alone with him. She talked a great deal about him to Bersenyev.
Bersenyev realised that Elena’s imagination had been struck by Insarov,
and was glad that his friend had not ‘missed fire’ as Shubin had
asserted. He told her cordially all he knew of him down to the minutest
details (we often, when we want to please some one, bring our friends
into our conversation, hardly ever suspecting that we are praising
ourselves in that way), and only at times, when Elena’s pale cheeks
flushed a little and her eyes grew bright and wide, he felt a pang in
his heart of that evil pain which he had felt before.
One day Bersenyev came to the Stahovs, not at the customary time, but at
eleven o’clock in the morning. Elena came down to him in the parlour.
‘Fancy,’ he began with a constrained smile, ‘our Insarov has
disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’ said Elena.
‘He has disappeared. The day before yesterday he went off somewhere and
nothing has been seen of him since.’
‘He did not tell you where he was going?’
‘No.’
Elena sank into a chair.
‘He has most likely gone to Moscow,’ she commented, trying to seem
indifferent and at the same time wondering that she should try to seem
indifferent.
‘I don’t think so,’ rejoined Bersenyev. ‘He did not go alone.’
‘With whom then?’
‘Two people of some sort--his countrymen they must have been--came to
him the day before yesterday, before dinner.’
‘Bulgarians! what makes you think so?’
‘Why as far as I could hear, they talked to him in some language I did
not know, but Slavonic... You are always saying, Elena Nikolaevna, that
there’s so little mystery about Insarov; what could be more mysterious
than this visit? Imagine, they came to him--and then there was shouting
and quarrelling, and such savage, angry disputing.... And he shouted
too.’
‘He shouted too?’
‘Yes. He shouted at them. They seemed to be accusing each other. And
if you could have had a peep at these visitors. They had swarthy, heavy
faces with high cheek bones and hook noses, both about forty years old,
shabbily dressed, hot and dusty, looking like workmen--not workmen, and
not gentlemen--goodness knows what sort of people they were.’
‘And he went away with them?’
‘Yes. He gave them something to eat and went off with them. The woman of
the house told me they ate a whole huge pot of porridge between the
two of them. They outdid one another, she said, and gobbled it up like
wolves.’
Elena gave a faint smile.
‘You will see,’ she said, ‘all this will be explained into something
very prosaic.’
‘I hope it may! But you need not use that word. There is nothing prosaic
about Insarov, though Shubin does maintain----’
‘Shubin!’ Elena broke in, shrugging her shoulders. ‘But you must confess
these two good men gobbling up porridge----’
‘Even Themistocles had his supper on the eve of Salamis,’ observed
Bersenyev with a smile.
‘Yes; but then there was a battle next day. Any way you will let me know
when he comes back,’ said Elena, and she tried to change the subject,
but the conversation made little progress. Zoya made her appearance
and began walking about the room on tip-toe, giving them thereby to
understand that Anna Vassilyevna was not yet awake.
Bersenyev went away.
In the evening of the same day a note from him was brought to Elena.
‘He has come back,’ he wrote to her, ‘sunburnt and dusty to his very
eyebrows; but where and why he went I don’t know; won’t you find out?’
‘Won’t you find out!’ Elena whispered, ‘as though he talked to me!’