“Come, mother. Even with us things change with years.”
Her voice was deep, almost harsh, and yet caressing in its harshness.
She had a dark complexion, with red lips and a full figure. She gave the
impression of strong vitality. The old lady sighed.
“You are both young--you two. It is easy for you to hope. But I, too, am
not hopeless. Indeed, how could I be with a son like this.”
I addressed Miss Haldin, asking her what authors she wished to read. She
directed upon me her grey eyes shaded by black eyelashes, and I
became aware, notwithstanding my years, how attractive physically
her personality could be to a man capable of appreciating in a woman
something else than the mere grace of femininity. Her glance was as
direct and trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world’s
wise lessons. And it was intrepid, but in this intrepidity there
was nothing aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is a better
definition. She had reflected already (in Russia the young begin to
think early), but she had never known deception as yet because obviously
she had never yet fallen under the sway of passion. She was--to look at
her was enough--very capable of being roused by an idea or simply by
a person. At least, so I judged with I believe an unbiassed mind; for
clearly my person could not be the person--and as to my ideas!...
We became excellent friends in the course of our reading. It was very
pleasant. Without fear of provoking a smile, I shall confess that I
became very much attached to that young girl. At the end of four
months I told her that now she could very well go on reading English
by herself. It was time for the teacher to depart. My pupil looked
unpleasantly surprised.
Mrs. Haldin, with her immobility of feature and kindly expression of the
eyes, uttered from her armchair in her uncertain French, “_Mais l’ami
reviendra._” And so it was settled. I returned--not four times a week
as before, but pretty frequently. In the autumn we made some short
excursions together in company with other Russians. My friendship with
these ladies gave me a standing in the Russian colony which otherwise I
could not have had.
The day I saw in the papers the news of Mr. de P---‘s assassination--it
was a Sunday--I met the two ladies in the street and walked with them
for some distance. Mrs. Haldin wore a heavy grey cloak, I remember,
over her black silk dress, and her fine eyes met mine with a very quiet
expression.
“We have been to the late service,” she said. “Natalka came with me.
Her girl-friends, the students here, of course don’t.... With us in
Russia the church is so identified with oppression, that it seems almost
necessary when one wishes to be free in this life, to give up all hope
of a future existence. But I cannot give up praying for my son.”
She added with a sort of stony grimness, colouring slightly, and
in French, “_Ce n’est peut etre qu’une habitude._” (“It may be only
habit.”)
Miss Haldin was carrying the prayer-book. She did not glance at her
mother.
“You and Victor are both profound believers,” she said.
I communicated to them the news from their country which I had just
read in a cafe. For a whole minute we walked together fairly briskly in
silence. Then Mrs. Haldin murmured--
“There will be more trouble, more persecutions for this. They may be
even closing the University. There is neither peace nor rest in Russia
for one but in the grave.
“Yes. The way is hard,” came from the daughter, looking straight before
her at the Chain of Jura covered with snow, like a white wall closing
the end of the street. “But concord is not so very far off.”
“That is what my children think,” observed Mrs. Haldin to me.
I did not conceal my feeling that these were strange times to talk of
concord. Nathalie Haldin surprised me by saying, as if she had thought
very much on the subject, that the occidentals did not understand the
situation. She was very calm and youthfully superior.
“You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict of interests, as
social contests are with you in Europe. But it is not that at all. It is
something quite different.”
“It is quite possible that I don’t understand,” I admitted.
That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the
understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very
Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all
the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world.
I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a
terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and
hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret
of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they
detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas
we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its
sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed....
I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they asked me to call in
the afternoon. At least Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her
Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner indulgently from the rear
platform of the moving car. The light of the clear wintry forenoon was
softened in her grey eyes.
Mr. Razumov’s record, like the open book of fate, revives for me the
memory of that day as something startlingly pitiless in its freedom from
all forebodings. Victor Haldin was still with the living, but with the
living whose only contact with life is the expectation of death. He must
have been already referring to the last of his earthly affections, the
hours of that obstinate silence, which for him was to be prolonged into
eternity. That afternoon the ladies entertained a good many of their
compatriots--more than was usual for them to receive at one time; and
the drawing-room on the ground floor of a large house on the Boulevard
des Philosophes was very much crowded.
I outstayed everybody; and when I rose Miss Haldin stood up too. I took
her hand and was moved to revert to that morning’s conversation in the
street.
“Admitting that we occidentals do not understand the character of
your...” I began.
It was as if she had been prepared for me by some mysterious
fore-knowledge. She checked me gently--
“Their impulses--their...” she sought the proper expression and found
it, but in French... _“their mouvements d’ame._”
Her voice was not much above a whisper.
“Very well,” I said. “But still we are looking at a conflict. You say
it is not a conflict of classes and not a conflict of interests. Suppose
I admitted that. Are antagonistic ideas then to be reconciled more
easily--can they be cemented with blood and violence into that concord
which you proclaim to be so near?”
She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey eyes, without answering
my reasonable question--my obvious, my unanswerable question.
“It is inconceivable,” I added, with something like annoyance.
“Everything is inconceivable,” she said. “The whole world is
inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to
our senses, and we exist in it. There must be a necessity superior to
our conceptions. It is a very miserable and a very false thing to belong
to the majority. We Russians shall find some better form of national
freedom than an artificial conflict of parties--which is wrong because
it is a conflict and contemptible because it is artificial. It is left
for us Russians to discover a better way.”
Mrs. Haldin had been looking out of the window. She turned upon me the
almost lifeless beauty of her face, and the living benign glance of her
big dark eyes.
“That’s what my children think,” she declared.
“I suppose,” I addressed Miss Haldin, “that you will be shocked if I
tell you that I haven’t understood--I won’t say a single word; I’ve
understood all the words.... But what can be this era of disembodied
concord you are looking forward to. Life is a thing of form. It has its
plastic shape and a definite intellectual aspect. The most idealistic
conceptions of love and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it were
before they can be made understandable.”
I took my leave of Mrs. Haldin, whose beautiful lips never stirred. She
smiled with her eyes only. Nathalie Haldin went with me as far as the
door, very amiable.
“Mother imagines that I am the slavish echo of my brother Victor. It
is not so. He understands me better than I can understand him. When he
joins us and you come to know him you will see what an exceptional soul
it is.” She paused. “He is not a strong man in the conventional sense,
you know,” she added. “But his character is without a flaw.”
“I believe that it will not be difficult for me to make friends with
your brother Victor.”
“Don’t expect to understand him quite,” she said, a little maliciously.
“He is not at all--at all--western at bottom.”
And on this unnecessary warning I left the room with another bow in
the doorway to Mrs. Haldin in her armchair by the window. The shadow of
autocracy all unperceived by me had already fallen upon the Boulevard
des Philosophes, in the free, independent and democratic city of
Geneva, where there is a quarter called “La Petite Russie.” Whenever two
Russians come together, the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging
their thoughts, their views, their most intimate feelings, their private
life, their public utterances--haunting the secret of their silences.
What struck me next in the course of a week or so was the silence of
these ladies. I used to meet them walking in the public garden near the
University. They greeted me with their usual friendliness, but I could
not help noticing their taciturnity. By that time it was generally known
that the assassin of M. de P--- had been caught, judged, and executed.
So much had been declared officially to the news agencies. But for the
world at large he remained anonymous. The official secrecy had withheld
his name from the public. I really cannot imagine for what reason.
One day I saw Miss Haldin walking alone in the main valley of the
Bastions under the naked trees.
“Mother is not very well,” she explained.
As Mrs. Haldin had, it seemed, never had a day’s illness in her life,
this indisposition was disquieting. It was nothing definite, too.
“I think she is fretting because we have not heard from my brother for
rather a long time.”
“No news--good news,” I said cheerfully, and we began to walk slowly
side by side.
“Not in Russia,” she breathed out so low that I only just caught the
words. I looked at her with more attention.
“You too are anxious?”
She admitted after a moment of hesitation that she was.
“It is really such a long time since we heard....”
And before I could offer the usual banal suggestions she confided in me.
“Oh! But it is much worse than that. I wrote to a family we know in
Petersburg. They had not seen him for more than a month. They thought
he was already with us. They were even offended a little that he should
have left Petersburg without calling on them. The husband of the lady
went at once to his lodgings. Victor had left there and they did not
know his address.”
I remember her catching her breath rather pitifully. Her brother had not
been seen at lectures for a very long time either. He only turned up now
and then at the University gate to ask the porter for his letters. And
the gentleman friend was told that the student Haldin did not come to
claim the last two letters for him. But the police came to inquire if
the student Haldin ever received any correspondence at the University
and took them away.
“My two last letters,” she said.
We faced each other. A few snow-flakes fluttered under the naked boughs.
The sky was dark.
“What do you think could have happened?” I asked.
Her shoulders moved slightly.
“One can never tell--in Russia.”
I saw then the shadow of autocracy lying upon Russian lives in their
submission or their revolt. I saw it touch her handsome open face
nestled in a fur collar and darken her clear eyes that shone upon me
brilliantly grey in the murky light of a beclouded, inclement afternoon.
“Let us move on,” she said. “It is cold standing--to-day.”
She shuddered a little and stamped her little feet. We moved briskly to
the end of the alley and back to the great gates of the garden.
“Have you told your mother?” I ventured to ask.
“No. Not yet. I came out to walk off the impression of this letter.”
I heard a rustle of paper somewhere. It came from her muff. She had the
letter with her in there.
“What is it that you are afraid of?” I asked.
To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of political plots and
conspiracies seem childish, crude inventions for the theatre or a novel.
I did not like to be more definite in my inquiry.
“For us--for my mother specially, what I am afraid of is incertitude.
People do disappear. Yes, they do disappear. I leave you to imagine what
it is--the cruelty of the dumb weeks--months--years! This friend of ours
has abandoned his inquiries when he heard of the police getting hold of
the letters. I suppose he was afraid of compromising himself. He has a
wife and children--and why should he, after all.... Moreover, he is
without influential connections and not rich. What could he do?...
Yes, I am afraid of silence--for my poor mother. She won’t be able
to bear it. For my brother I am afraid of...” she became almost
indistinct, “of anything.”
We were now near the gate opposite the theatre. She raised her voice.
“But lost people do turn up even in Russia. Do you know what my last
hope is? Perhaps the next thing we know, we shall see him walking into
our rooms.”
I raised my hat and she passed out of the gardens, graceful and strong,
after a slight movement of the head to me, her hands in the muff,
crumpling the cruel Petersburg letter.
On returning home I opened the newspaper I receive from London, and
glancing down the correspondence from Russia--not the telegrams but
the correspondence--the first thing that caught my eye was the name
of Haldin. Mr. de P---‘s death was no longer an actuality, but the
enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some
unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got
hold of Haldin’s name, and had picked up the story of the midnight
arrest in the street. But the sensation from a journalistic point of
view was already well in the past. He did not allot to it more than
twenty lines out of a full column. It was quite enough to give me a
sleepless night. I perceived that it would have been a sort of treason
to let Miss Haldin come without preparation upon that journalistic
discovery which would infallibly be reproduced on the morrow by French
and Swiss newspapers. I had a very bad time of it till the morning,
wakeful with nervous worry and night-marish with the feeling of
being mixed up with something theatrical and morbidly affected. The
incongruity of such a complication in those two women’s lives was
sensible to me all night in the form of absolute anguish. It seemed due
to their refined simplicity that it should remain concealed from them
for ever. Arriving at an unconscionably early hour at the door of their
apartment, I felt as if I were about to commit an act of vandalism....
The middle-aged servant woman led me into the drawing-room where there
was a duster on a chair and a broom leaning against the centre table.
The motes danced in the sunshine; I regretted I had not written a letter
instead of coming myself, and was thankful for the brightness of the
day. Miss Haldin in a plain black dress came lightly out of her mother’s
room with a fixed uncertain smile on her lips.
I pulled the paper out of my pocket. I did not imagine that a number
of the _Standard_ could have the effect of Medusa’s head. Her face went
stony in a moment--her eyes--her limbs. The most terrible thing was that
being stony she remained alive. One was conscious of her palpitating
heart. I hope she forgave me the delay of my clumsy circumlocution. It
was not very prolonged; she could not have kept so still from head to
foot for more than a second or two; and then I heard her draw a breath.
As if the shock had paralysed her moral resistance, and affected the
firmness of her muscles, the contours of her face seemed to have given
way. She was frightfully altered. She looked aged--ruined. But only for
a moment. She said with decision--
“I am going to tell my mother at once.”
“Would that be safe in her state?” I objected.
“What can be worse than the state she has been in for the last month?
We understand this in another way. The crime is not at his door. Don’t
imagine I am defending him before you.”
She went to the bedroom door, then came back to ask me in a low murmur
not to go till she returned. For twenty interminable minutes not a sound
reached me. At last Miss Haldin came out and walked across the room with
her quick light step. When she reached the armchair she dropped into it
heavily as if completely exhausted.
Mrs. Haldin, she told me, had not shed a tear. She was sitting up in
bed, and her immobility, her silence, were very alarming. At last she
lay down gently and had motioned her daughter away.
“She will call me in presently,” added Miss Haldin. “I left a bell near
the bed.”
I confess that my very real sympathy had no standpoint. The Western
readers for whom this story is written will understand what I mean. It
was, if I may say so, the want of experience. Death is a remorseless
spoliator. The anguish of irreparable loss is familiar to us all. There
is no life so lonely as to be safe against that experience. But the
grief I had brought to these two ladies had gruesome associations. It
had the associations of bombs and gallows--a lurid, Russian colouring
which made the complexion of my sympathy uncertain.
I was grateful to Miss Haldin for not embarrassing me by an outward
display of deep feeling. I admired her for that wonderful command
over herself, even while I was a little frightened at it. It was the
stillness of a great tension. What if it should suddenly snap? Even the
door of Mrs. Haldin’s room, with the old mother alone in there, had a
rather awful aspect.