After leaving Raisky, Vera listened for a while to make sure he was not
following her, and then, pushing the branches of the undergrowth aside
with her parasol, made her way by the familiar path to the ruined arbour,
whose battered doorway was almost barricaded by the fallen timbers. The
steps of the arbour and the planks of the floor had sunk, and rotten
planks cracked under her feet. Of its original furniture there was
nothing left but two moss-grown benches and a crooked table.
Mark was already in the arbour, and his rifle and huntsman’s bag lay on
the table. He held out his hand to Vera, and almost lifted her in over
the shattered steps. By way of welcome he merely commented on her
lateness.
“The weather detained me,” she said. “Have you any news?”
“Did you expect any?”
“I expect every day that you will be sent for by the military or the
police.”
“I have been more careful since Raisky played at magnanimity and took
upon himself the fuss about the books.”
“I don’t like that about you, Mark, your callousness and malice towards
everyone except yourself. My cousin made no parade of what he had done;
he did not even mention it to me. You are incapable of appreciating a
kindness.”
“I do appreciate it in my own way.”
“Just as the wolf in the fable appreciated the kindness of the crane.
Why not thank him with the same simplicity with which he served you. You
are a real wolf; you are for ever disparaging, detracting, or blaming
someone, either from pride or....”
“Or what?”
“Or by way of cultivating the ‘new strength.’”
“Scoffer!” he laughed, as he sat down beside her. “You are young, and
still too inexperienced to be disillusioned of all the charm of the good
old times. How can I instruct you in the rights of mankind?”
“And how am I to cure you of the slandering of mankind?”
“You have always a retort handy, and nobody could complain of dullness
with you, but,” he said, clutching meditatively at his head, “if I....”
“Am locked up by the police,” she finished. “That seems to be all that
your fate still lacks.”
“But for you, I should long ago have been sent off somewhere. You are
a disturbing element.”
“Are you tired of living peaceably, and already craving for a storm? You
promised me to lead a different life. What have you not promised me? And
I was so happy that they even noticed my delight at home. And now you
have relapsed into your old mood,” she protested, as he seized her hand.
“Pretty hand!” he said, kissing it again and again without any objection
from her, but when he sought to kiss her cheek she drew back.
“You refuse again. Is your reserve never to end? Perhaps you keep your
caresses for....”
She drew her hand away hastily.
“You know I do not like jests of that kind. You must break yourself of
this tone, and of wolfish manners generally; that would be the first
step towards unaffected manhood.”
“Tone and manners! You are a child still occupied with your ABC. Before
you lie freedom, life, love, happiness, and you talk of tone and manners.
Where is the human soul, the woman in you? What is natural and genuine
in you?”
“Now you are talking like Raisky.”
“Ah, Raisky! Is he still so desperate?”
“More than ever, so that I really don’t know how to treat him.”
“Lead him by the nose.”
“How hideous! It would be best to tell him the truth about myself. If he
knew all he would be reconciled and would go away, as he said he
intended to do long ago.”
“He will hate you, read you a lecture, and perhaps tell your Aunt.”
“God forbid that she should hear the truth except from ourselves. Should
I go away for a time?”
“Why? It could not be arranged for you to be away long, and if your
absence was short he would be only the more agitated. When you were away
what good did it do. There is only one way and that is to conceal the
truth from him, to put him on a wrong track. Let him cherish his passion,
read verses, and gape at the moon, since he is an incurable Romanticist.
Later on he will sober down and travel once more.”
“He is not a Romanticist in the sense you mean,” sighed Vera. “You may
fairly call him poet, artist. I at least begin to believe in him, in his
delicacy and his truthfulness. I would hide nothing from him if he did
not betray his passion for me. If he subdues that, I will be the first
to tell him the whole truth.”
“We did not meet,” interrupted Mark, “to talk so much about him.”
“Well, what have you done since we last met?” she asked gaily. “Whom
have you met? Have you been discoursing on the ‘new strength’ or the
‘dawn of the future,’ or ‘young hopes?’ Every day I live in anxious
expectation.”
“No, no,” laughed Mark. “I have ceased to bother about the people here;
it is not worth while to tackle them.”
“God grant it were so. You would have done well if you had acted up to
what you say. But I cannot be happy about you. At the Sfogins, the
youngest son, Volodya, who is fourteen, declared to his mother that he
was not going any more to Mass. When he was whipped, and questioned, he
pointed to his eldest brother, who had sneaked into the servants’ room
and there preached to the maids the whole evening that it was stupid to
observe the fasts of the Church, to go through the ceremony of marriage,
that there was no God....”
Mark looked at her in horror.
“In the servants’ room! And yet I talked to him for a whole evening as
if he were a man capable of reason, and gave him books....”
“Which he took straight to the bookseller. ‘These are the books you
ought to put on sale,’ he said. Did you not give me your promise,” she
said reproachfully, “when we parted and you begged to see me again?”
“All that is long past. I have had nothing more to do with those people
since I gave you that promise. Don’t be angry, Vera. But for you I would
escape from this neighbourhood to-morrow.”
“Escape--where? Everywhere there are the same opportunities; boys who
would like to see their moustaches grow quicker, servants’ rooms, if
independent men and women will not listen to your talk. Are you not
ashamed of the part you play?” she asked after a brief pause. “Do you
look on it as your mission?”
She stroked his bent head affectionately as she spoke. At her last words
he raised his head quickly.
“What part do I play? I give a baptism of pure water.”
“Are you convinced of the pureness of the water?”
“Listen, Vera. I am not Raisky,” said Mark, rising. “You are a woman, or
rather one should say a bud which has yet to unfold into womanhood. When
that unfolding comes many secrets will be clear to you that have no part
in a girl’s dreams and that cannot be explained; experience is the sole
key to these secrets. I call you to your initiation, Vera; I show you
the path of life. But you stand hesitating on the threshold, and your
advance is slow. The serious thing is that you don’t even believe me.”
“Do not be vexed,” begged Vera affectionately. “I agree with you in
everything that I recognise as right and honourable. If I cannot always
follow you in life and in experience it is because I desire to know and
see for myself the goal for which I am making.”
“That is to say, that you wish to judge for yourself.”
“And do you desire that I should not judge for myself?”
“I love you, Vera. Put your trust in me, and obey. Does the flame of
passion burn in me less strongly than in your Raisky, for all his poetry.
Passion is chary of words. But you will neither trust nor obey me.”
“Would you have me not stand at the level of my personality? You
yourself preached freedom to me, and now the tyrant in you appears
because I do not show a slavish submission.”
“Let us part, Vera, if doubt is uppermost with you and you have no
confidence in me, for in that fashion we cannot continue our meetings.”
“Yes, let us part rather than that you should exact a blind trust in you.
In my waking hours and in my dreams I imagine that there lies between us
no disturbance, no doubt. But I don’t understand you, and therefore
cannot trust you.”
“You hide under your Aunt’s skirts like a chicken under a hen, and you
have absorbed her ideas and her system of morals. You, like Raisky,
inshroud passion in fantastic draperies. Let us put aside all the other
questions untouched. The one that lies before us is simple and
straightforward. We love one another. Is that so or not?”
“What does that lead to, Mark!”
“If you don’t believe me, look around you. You have spent your whole
life in the woods and fields, and do you learn nothing from what you see
in all directions?” he asked, pointing to a swarm of flying pigeons, and
to the nesting swallows. “Learn from them; they deal in no subtleties!”
“Yes, they circle round their nests. One has flown away, probably in
search of food.”
“When winter comes they will all separate.”
“And return in spring to the same nest.”
“I believe you when you talk reasonably, Vera. You felt injured by my
rough manners, and I am making every effort. I have transformed myself
to the old-fashioned pattern, and shall soon shift my feet and smile
when I make my bow like Tiet Nikonich. I don’t give way to the desire to
abuse or to quarrel with anybody, and draw no attention to my doings. I
shall next be making up my mind to attend Mass, what else should I do?”
“You are in the mood for joking, but joking is not what I wanted,”
sighed Vera.
“What do you want me to do?”
“So far I have not even been able to persuade you to spare yourself for
my sake, to cease your baptisms, to live like other people.”
“But if I act in accordance with my convictions?”
“What is your aim? What do you hope to do?”
“I teach fools.”
“Do you even know yourself what you teach, for what you have been
struggling for a whole year? To live the life that you prescribe is not
within the bounds of possibility. It is all very new and bold, but....”
“There we are again at the same old point. I can hear the old lady
piping,” he laughed scornfully, pointing in the direction of the house.
“You speak with her voice.”
“Is that your whole answer, Mark? Everything is a lie; therefore, away
with it! But the absence of any notion of what truth is to supersede the
lies makes me distrustful.”
“You set reflexion above nature and passion. You are noble, and you
naturally desire marriage. But that has nothing to do with love, and it
is love and happiness that I seek.”
Vera rose and looked at him with blazing eyes.
“If I wished only for marriage, Mark, I should naturally make another
choice.”
“Pardon me, I was rude,” he said in real embarrassment, and kissed her
hand. “But, Vera, you repress your love, you are afraid, and instead of
giving yourself up to the pleasure of it you are for ever analysing.”
“I try to find out who and what you are, because love is not a passing
pleasure to me, but you look on it as a distraction.”
“No, as a daily need of life, which is no matter for jesting. Like
Raisky, I cannot sleep through the long nights, and I suffer nervous
torture that I could not have believed possible. You say you love me;
that I love you is plain? But I call you to happiness and you are
afraid....”
“I do not want happiness for a month, for six months--”
“For your life long, and even after death?” asked Mark, scornfully.
“For life! I do not want to foresee an ultimate limit. I do not and will
not believe in happiness with a term. But I do believe in another kind
of intimate happiness, and I want....”
“To make me embrace the same belief.”
“Yes, I know no other happiness, and I would scorn it if I knew it.”
“Good-bye, Vera. You do not love me, but are for ever disputing,
analysing either my character or the nature of happiness. We always get
back to the point from which we started. I think it is your destiny to
love Raisky. You can make what you will of him, can deck him out with
all your Aunt’s tags, and evolve a new hero of romance every day, for
ever and ever. I haven’t the time for that kind of thing. I have work to
do.”
“Ah work, and love, with happiness as an afterthought, a trifle....”
“Do you wish to build a life out of love after the old fashion, a life
such as that lived by the swallows who leave their nest only to seek
food.”
“You would fly for a moment into a strange nest, and then forget.”
“Yes, if forgetting is so easy; but if one cannot forget, one returns.
But must I return if I don’t want to? Is that compatible with freedom?
Would you ask that?”
“I cannot understand a bird’s life of that kind.”
“Farewell, Vera. We were mistaken. I want a comrade, not a school girl.”
“Yes, Mark, a comrade, strong like yourself, I agree. A comrade for the
whole of life, is that not so?”
“I thought,” said Mark as if he had not heard her last question, “that
we should soon be united, and that whether we separated again must
depend on temperament and circumstances. You make your analysis in
advance, so that your judgment is as crooked and twisted as an old
maid’s could be. You don’t look to the quarter whence truth and light
must come. Sleep, my child. I was mistaken. Farewell once more. We will
try to avoid one another in the future.”
“We will try. But can we really not find happiness together? What is the
hindrance?” she asked, in a low, agitated tone, touching his hand.
Mark shouldered his gun in silence, and walked out of the arbour into
the brushwood. Vera stood motionless as if she were in a deep sleep.
Overcome by grief and amazement, she could not believe he was really
leaving her. Where there is no trust there is no love, she thought. She
did not trust him, and yet, if she did not love him, why was her grief
and pain at his going so great. Why did she feel that death itself would
be welcome?
“Mark!” she cried in a low voice. He did not look round, and although
she repeated the cry he strode forward. “Mark!” she cried breathlessly a
third time, but he still pursued his path. Her face faded, but
mechanically she picked up her handkerchief and her parasol and mounted
the cliff. Were truth and love to be found there where her heart called
her? Or did truth lie in the little chapel that she was now approaching?
For four days Vera wandered in the park, and waited in the arbour, but
Mark did not come. There was no reply to the call of her heart. She no
longer hid her movements from Raisky, who came upon her from time to
time in the chapel. She allowed him to accompany her to the little
village church on the hill where she usually went alone. She remained on
her knees with bowed head for a long time, while he stood motionless
behind her. Then without a word or a glance, she took his arm, to return
wearily to the old house, where they parted. Vera knew nothing of his
secret suffering, of the passionate love which attracted him to her, the
double love of a man for a woman, and of an artist for his ideal.
Raisky wondered what the shots meant. It need not necessarily be love
that drove her to the rendezvous. There might be a secret of another
kind, but the key to the mystery lay in her heart. There was no
salvation for her except in love, and he longed to give her protection
and freedom.
Again he found her at twilight praying in the chapel, but this time she
was calm and her eyes clear. She gave him her hand, and was plainly
pleased to see him.
“You cannot imagine, Vera,” he said, “how happy it makes me to see you
calmer. What has given you peace?”
She glanced towards the chapel.
“You don’t go down there any more?” he said, pointing to the precipice.
She shook her head.
“Thank God!” he cried. “If you are going home now, take my arm,” he said,
and they walked together along the path leading across the meadow. “You
have been fighting a hard and despairing battle, Vera. So much you do
not conceal. Are you going to conquer this agonising and dangerous
passion?”
“And if I do, Cousin?” she asked despondently.
“The richer for a great experience, strengthened against future storms,
your portion will be a great happiness, sufficient to fill your whole
life.”
“I cannot comprehend any other happiness,” she said, thoughtfully. She
stood still, leaning her head on his shoulder, and her eyes filled with
tears. He did not know that he had probed her wound by touching on the
very point that had caused her separation from Mark.
At that moment there was the report of a shot in the depths below the
precipice, and the sound was re-echoed from the hills. Raisky and Vera
both started. She stood listening for a moment. Her eyes, still wet with
tears, were wide and staring now. Then she loosed her hold of his arm,
and hurried in the direction of the precipice, with Raisky hurrying at
her heels. When she had gone half way, she stopped, laid her hand on her
heart, and listened once more.
“A few minutes ago your mind was made up, Vera!”
Raisky’s face was pale, and his agitation nearly as great as hers. She
did not hear his words, and she looked at him without seeing him. Then
she took a few steps in the direction of the precipice, but suddenly
turned to go slowly towards the chapel.
“I am not going,” she whispered. “Why does he call me? It cannot be that
he has changed his attitude in the last few days.”
She sank down on her knees before the sacred picture, and covered her
face with her hands. Raisky came up to her, and implored her not to go.
She herself gazed at the picture with expressionless, hopeless eyes.
When she rose she shuddered, and seemed unaware of Raisky’s presence.
A shot sounded once more. With a cry Vera ran over the meadow towards
the cliff. Perhaps my conviction has conquered, she thought. Why else
should he call her? Her feet hardly seemed to touch the grass as she ran
into the avenue that led to the precipice.