It began well; he soon fell asleep, and when his aunt went into him
on tip-toe to make the sign of the cross three times over him in his
sleep--she did so every night--he lay breathing as quietly as a child. But
before dawn he had a dream.
He dreamed he was on a bare steppe, strewn with big stones, under a
lowering sky. Among the stones curved a little path; he walked along it.
Suddenly there rose up in front of him something of the nature of a thin
cloud. He looked steadily at it; the cloud turned into a woman in a white
gown with a bright sash round her waist. She was hurrying away from him. He
saw neither her face nor her hair ... they were covered by a long veil. But
he had an intense desire to overtake her, and to look into her face. Only,
however much he hastened, she went more quickly than he.
On the path lay a broad flat stone, like a tombstone. It blocked up the
way. The woman stopped. Aratov ran up to her; but yet he could not see her
eyes ... they were shut. Her face was white, white as snow; her hands hung
lifeless. She was like a statue.
Slowly, without bending a single limb, she fell backwards, and sank down
upon the tombstone.... And then Aratov lay down beside her, stretched out
straight like a figure on a monument, his hands folded like a dead man’s.
But now the woman suddenly rose, and went away. Aratov tried to get up too
... but he could neither stir nor unclasp his hands, and could only gaze
after her in despair.
Then the woman suddenly turned round, and he saw bright living eyes, in a
living but unknown face. She laughed, she waved her hand to him ... and
still he could not move.
She laughed once more, and quickly retreated, merrily nodding her head, on
which there was a crimson wreath of tiny roses.
Aratov tried to cry out, tried to throw off this awful nightmare....
Suddenly all was darkness around ... and the woman came back to him. But
this was not the unknown statue ... it was Clara. She stood before him,
crossed her arms, and sternly and intently looked at him. Her lips were
tightly pressed together, but Aratov fancied he heard the words, ‘If you
want to know what I am, come over here!’
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘Here!’ he heard the wailing answer. ‘Here!’
Aratov woke up.
He sat up in bed, lighted the candle that stood on the little table by his
bedside--but did not get up--and sat a long while, chill all over, slowly
looking about him. It seemed to him as if something had happened to him
since he went to bed; that something had taken possession of him ...
something was in control of him. ‘But is it possible?’ he murmured
unconsciously. ‘Does such a power really exist?’
He could not stay in his bed. He quickly dressed, and till morning he was
pacing up and down his room. And, strange to say, of Clara he never thought
for a moment, and did not think of her, because he had decided to go next
day to Kazan!
He thought only of the journey, of how to manage it, and what to take with
him, and how he would investigate and find out everything there, and would
set his mind at rest. ‘If I don’t go,’ he reasoned with himself, ‘why, I
shall go out of my mind!’ He was afraid of that, afraid of his nerves. He
was convinced that when once he had seen everything there with his own
eyes, every obsession would vanish like that nightmare. ‘And it will be
a week lost over the journey,’ he thought; ‘what is a week? else I shall
never shake it off.’
The rising sun shone into his room; but the light of day did not drive
away the shadows of the night that lay upon him, and did not change his
resolution.
Platosha almost had a fit when he informed her of his intention. She
positively sat down on the ground ... her legs gave way beneath her. ‘To
Kazan? why to Kazan?’ she murmured, her dim eyes round with astonishment.
She would not have been more surprised if she had been told that her Yasha
was going to marry the baker woman next door, or was starting for America.
‘Will you be long in Kazan?’ ‘I shall be back in a week,’ answered Aratov,
standing with his back half-turned to his aunt, who was still sitting on
the floor.
Platonida Ivanovna tried to protest more, but Aratov answered her in an
utterly unexpected and unheard-of way: ‘I’m not a child,’ he shouted,
and he turned pale all over, his lips trembled, and his eyes glittered
wrathfully. ‘I’m twenty-six, I know what I’m about, I’m free to do what I
like! I suffer no one ... Give me the money for the journey, pack my box
with my clothes and linen ... and don’t torture me! I’ll be back in a week,
Platosha,’ he added, in a somewhat softer tone.
Platosha got up, sighing and groaning, and, without further protest,
crawled to her room. Yasha had alarmed her. ‘I’ve no head on my shoulders,’
she told the cook, who was helping her to pack Yasha’s things; ‘no head at
all, but a hive full of bees all a-buzz and a-hum! He’s going off to Kazan,
my good soul, to Ka-a-zan!’ The cook, who had observed their dvornik the
previous evening talking for a long time with a police officer, would have
liked to inform her mistress of this circumstance, but did not dare, and
only reflected, ‘To Kazan! if only it’s nowhere farther still!’ Platonida
Ivanovna was so upset that she did not even utter her usual prayer. ‘In
such a calamity the Lord God Himself cannot aid us!’
The same day Aratov set off for Kazan.