“Or his very life”--then paused and stood still “For all I know, he may
have had to leave Geneva the very day he saw me.”
“Without telling you!” I exclaimed incredulously.
“I did not give him time. I left him quite abruptly. I behaved
emotionally to the end. I am sorry for it. Even if I had given him the
opportunity he would have been justified in taking me for a person not
to be trusted. An emotional, tearful girl is not a person to confide in.
But even if he has left Geneva for a time, I am confident that we shall
meet again.”
“Ah! you are confident.... I dare say. But on what ground?”
“Because I’ve told him that I was in great need of some one, a
fellow-countryman, a fellow-believer, to whom I could give my confidence
in a certain matter.”
“I see. I don’t ask you what answer he made. I confess that this is good
ground for your belief in Mr. Razumov’s appearance before long. But he
has not turned up to-day?”
“No,” she said quietly, “not to-day;” and we stood for a time in
silence, like people that have nothing more to say to each other and
let their thoughts run widely asunder before their bodies go off their
different ways. Miss Haldin glanced at the watch on her wrist and made a
brusque movement. She had already overstayed her time, it seemed.
“I don’t like to be away from mother,” she murmured, shaking her head.
“It is not that she is very ill now. But somehow when I am not with her
I am more uneasy than ever.”
Mrs. Haldin had not made the slightest allusion to her son for the last
week or more. She sat, as usual, in the arm-chair by the window, looking
out silently on that hopeless stretch of the Boulevard des Philosophes.
When she spoke, a few lifeless words, it was of indifferent, trivial
things.
“For anyone who knows what the poor soul is thinking of, that sort of
talk is more painful than her silence. But that is bad too; I can hardly
endure it, and I dare not break it.”
Miss Haldin sighed, refastening a button of her glove which had come
undone. I knew well enough what a hard time of it she must be having.
The stress, its causes, its nature, would have undermined the health
of an Occidental girl; but Russian natures have a singular power of
resistance against the unfair strains of life. Straight and supple, with
a short jacket open on her black dress, which made her figure appear
more slender and her fresh but colourless face more pale, she compelled
my wonder and admiration.
“I can’t stay a moment longer. You ought to come soon to see mother. You
know she calls you ‘_L’ami._’ It is an excellent name, and she really
means it. And now _au revoir_; I must run.”
She glanced vaguely down the broad walk--the hand she put out to me
eluded my grasp by an unexpected upward movement, and rested upon my
shoulder. Her red lips were slightly parted, not in a smile, however,
but expressing a sort of startled pleasure. She gazed towards the gates
and said quickly, with a gasp--
“There! I knew it. Here he comes!”
I understood that she must mean Mr. Razumov. A young man was walking up
the alley, without haste. His clothes were some dull shade of brown, and
he carried a stick. When my eyes first fell on him, his head was hanging
on his breast as if in deep thought. While I was looking at him he
raised it sharply, and at once stopped. I am certain he did, but that
pause was nothing more perceptible than a faltering check in his gait,
instantaneously overcome. Then he continued his approach, looking at us
steadily. Miss Haldin signed to me to remain, and advanced a step or two
to meet him.
I turned my head away from that meeting, and did not look at them
again till I heard Miss Haldin’s voice uttering his name in the way
of introduction. Mr. Razumov was informed, in a warm, low tone, that,
besides being a wonderful teacher, I was a great support “in our sorrow
and distress.”
Of course I was described also as an Englishman. Miss Haldin spoke
rapidly, faster than I have ever heard her speak, and that by contrast
made the quietness of her eyes more expressive.
“I have given him my confidence,” she added, looking all the time at Mr.
Razumov. That young man did, indeed, rest his gaze on Miss Haldin,
but certainly did not look into her eyes which were so ready for him.
Afterwards he glanced backwards and forwards at us both, while the faint
commencement of a forced smile, followed by the suspicion of a frown,
vanished one after another; I detected them, though neither could have
been noticed by a person less intensely bent upon divining him than
myself. I don’t know what Nathalie Haldin had observed, but my attention
seized the very shades of these movements. The attempted smile was given
up, the incipient frown was checked, and smoothed so that there should
be no sign; but I imagined him exclaiming inwardly--
“Her confidence! To this elderly person--this foreigner!”
I imagined this because he looked foreign enough to me. I was upon the
whole favourably impressed. He had an air of intelligence and even
some distinction quite above the average of the students and other
inhabitants of the _Petite Russie_. His features were more decided
than in the generality of Russian faces; he had a line of the jaw,
a clean-shaven, sallow cheek; his nose was a ridge, and not a mere
protuberance. He wore the hat well down over his eyes, his dark hair
curled low on the nape of his neck; in the ill-fitting brown clothes
there were sturdy limbs; a slight stoop brought out a satisfactory
breadth of shoulders. Upon the whole I was not disappointed.
Studious--robust--shy.
Before Miss Haldin had ceased speaking I felt the grip of his hand on
mine, a muscular, firm grip, but unexpectedly hot and dry. Not a word or
even a mutter assisted this short and arid handshake.
I intended to leave them to themselves, but Miss Haldin touched me
lightly on the forearm with a significant contact, conveying a distinct
wish. Let him smile who likes, but I was only too ready to stay near
Nathalie Haldin, and I am not ashamed to say that it was no smiling
matter to me. I stayed, not as a youth would have stayed, uplifted, as
it were poised in the air, but soberly, with my feet on the ground and
my mind trying to penetrate her intention. She had turned to Razumov.
“Well. This is the place. Yes, it is here that I meant you to come. I
have been walking every day.... Don’t excuse yourself--I understand.
I am grateful to you for coming to-day, but all the same I cannot
stay now. It is impossible. I must hurry off home. Yes, even with you
standing before me, I must run off. I have been too long away.... You
know how it is?”
These last words were addressed to me. I noticed that Mr. Razumov passed
the tip of his tongue over his lips just as a parched, feverish man
might do. He took her hand in its black glove, which closed on his,
and held it--detained it quite visibly to me against a drawing-back
movement.
“Thank you once more for--for understanding me,” she went on warmly. He
interrupted her with a certain effect of roughness. I didn’t like him
speaking to this frank creature so much from under the brim of his hat,
as it were. And he produced a faint, rasping voice quite like a man with
a parched throat.
“What is there to thank me for? Understand you?... How did I
understand you?... You had better know that I understand nothing.
I was aware that you wanted to see me in this garden. I could not come
before. I was hindered. And even to-day, you see...late.”
She still held his hand.
“I can, at any rate, thank you for not dismissing me from your mind as
a weak, emotional girl. No doubt I want sustaining. I am very ignorant.
But I can be trusted. Indeed I can!”
“You are ignorant,” he repeated thoughtfully. He had raised his head,
and was looking straight into her face now, while she held his hand.
They stood like this for a long moment. She released his hand.
“Yes. You did come late. It was good of you to come on the chance of
me having loitered beyond my time. I was talking with this good friend
here. I was talking of you. Yes, Kirylo Sidorovitch, of you. He was with
me when I first heard of your being here in Geneva. He can tell you
what comfort it was to my bewildered spirit to hear that news. He knew
I meant to seek you out. It was the only object of my accepting the
invitation of Peter Ivanovitch....
“Peter Ivanovitch talked to you of me,” he interrupted, in that
wavering, hoarse voice which suggested a horribly dry throat.
“Very little. Just told me your name, and that you had arrived here. Why
should I have asked for more? What could he have told me that I did not
know already from my brother’s letter? Three lines! And how much they
meant to me! I will show them to you one day, Kirylo Sidorovitch. But
now I must go. The first talk between us cannot be a matter of five
minutes, so we had better not begin....”
I had been standing a little aside, seeing them both in profile. At that
moment it occurred to me that Mr. Razumov’s face was older than his age.
“If mother”--the girl had turned suddenly to me, “were to wake up in my
absence (so much longer than usual) she would perhaps question me. She
seems to miss me more, you know, of late. She would want to know what
delayed me--and, you see, it would be painful for me to dissemble before
her.”
I understood the point very well. For the same reason she checked what
seemed to be on Mr. Razumov’s part a movement to accompany her.
“No! No! I go alone, but meet me here as soon as possible.” Then to me
in a lower, significant tone--
“Mother may be sitting at the window at this moment, looking down
the street. She must not know anything of Mr. Razumov’s presence here
till--till something is arranged.” She paused before she added a little
louder, but still speaking to me, “Mr. Razumov does not quite understand
my difficulty, but you know what it is.”
V
With a quick inclination of the head for us both, and an earnest,
friendly glance at the young man, Miss Haldin left us covering our heads
and looking after her straight, supple figure receding rapidly. Her walk
was not that hybrid and uncertain gliding affected by some women, but
a frank, strong, healthy movement forward. Rapidly she increased the
distance--disappeared with suddenness at last. I discovered only then
that Mr. Razumov, after ramming his hat well over his brow, was looking
me over from head to foot. I dare say I was a very unexpected fact for
that young Russian to stumble upon. I caught in his physiognomy, in his
whole bearing, an expression compounded of curiosity and scorn, tempered
by alarm--as though he had been holding his breath while I was not
looking. But his eyes met mine with a gaze direct enough. I saw then for
the first time that they were of a clear brown colour and fringed with
thick black eyelashes. They were the youngest feature of his face. Not
at all unpleasant eyes. He swayed slightly, leaning on his stick and
generally hung in the wind. It flashed upon me that in leaving us
together Miss Haldin had an intention--that something was entrusted to
me, since, by a mere accident I had been found at hand. On this assumed
ground I put all possible friendliness into my manner. I cast about
for some right thing to say, and suddenly in Miss Haldin’s last words I
perceived the clue to the nature of my mission.
“No,” I said gravely, if with a smile, “you cannot be expected to
understand.”
His clean-shaven lip quivered ever so little before he said, as if
wickedly amused--
“But haven’t you heard just now? I was thanked by that young lady for
understanding so well.”
I looked at him rather hard. Was there a hidden and inexplicable sneer
in this retort? No. It was not that. It might have been resentment. Yes.
But what had he to resent? He looked as though he had not slept very
well of late. I could almost feel on me the weight of his unrefreshed,
motionless stare, the stare of a man who lies unwinking in the dark,
angrily passive in the toils of disastrous thoughts. Now, when I know
how true it was, I can honestly affirm that this was the effect he
produced on me. It was painful in a curiously indefinite way--for,
of course, the definition comes to me now while I sit writing in the
fullness of my knowledge. But this is what the effect was at that time
of absolute ignorance. This new sort of uneasiness which he seemed to
be forcing upon me I attempted to put down by assuming a conversational,
easy familiarity.
“That extremely charming and essentially admirable young girl (I am--as
you see--old enough to be frank in my expressions) was referring to her
own feelings. Surely you must have understood that much?”
He made such a brusque movement that he even tottered a little.
“Must understand this! Not expected to understand that! I may have other
things to do. And the girl is charming and admirable. Well--and if she
is! I suppose I can see that for myself.”
This sally would have been insulting if his voice had not been
practically extinct, dried up in his throat; and the rustling effort of
his speech too painful to give real offence.
I remained silent, checked between the obvious fact and the subtle
impression. It was open to me to leave him there and then; but the sense
of having been entrusted with a mission, the suggestion of Miss Haldin’s
last glance, was strong upon me. After a moment of reflection I said--
“Shall we walk together a little?”
He shrugged his shoulders so violently that he tottered again. I saw it
out of the corner of my eye as I moved on, with him at my elbow. He
had fallen back a little and was practically out of my sight, unless
I turned my head to look at him. I did not wish to indispose him
still further by an appearance of marked curiosity. It might have
been distasteful to such a young and secret refugee from under the
pestilential shadow hiding the true, kindly face of his land. And the
shadow, the attendant of his countrymen, stretching across the middle of
Europe, was lying on him too, darkening his figure to my mental vision.
“Without doubt,” I said to myself, “he seems a sombre, even a desperate
revolutionist; but he is young, he may be unselfish and humane, capable
of compassion, of....”
I heard him clear gratingly his parched throat, and became all
attention.
“This is beyond everything,” were his first words. “It is beyond
everything! I find you here, for no reason that I can understand, in
possession of something I cannot be expected to understand! A confidant!
A foreigner! Talking about an admirable Russian girl. Is the admirable
girl a fool, I begin to wonder? What are you at? What is your object?”
He was barely audible, as if his throat had no more resonance than a dry
rag, a piece of tinder. It was so pitiful that I found it extremely easy
to control my indignation.
“When you have lived a little longer, Mr. Razumov, you will discover
that no woman is an absolute fool. I am not a feminist, like that
illustrious author, Peter Ivanovitch, who, to say the truth, is not a
little suspect to me....”
He interrupted me, in a surprising note of whispering astonishment.
“Suspect to you! Peter Ivanovitch suspect to you! To you!...”
“Yes, in a certain aspect he is,” I said, dismissing my remark lightly.
“As I was saying, Mr. Razumov, when you have lived long enough, you will
learn to discriminate between the noble trustfulness of a nature foreign
to every meanness and the flattered credulity of some women; though even
the credulous, silly as they may be, unhappy as they are sure to be, are
never absolute fools. It is my belief that no woman is ever completely
deceived. Those that are lost leap into the abyss with their eyes open,
if all the truth were known.”
“Upon my word,” he cried at my elbow, “what is it to me whether women
are fools or lunatics? I really don’t care what you think of them. I--I
am not interested in them. I let them be. I am not a young man in a
novel. How do you know that I want to learn anything about women?...
What is the meaning of all this?”
“The object, you mean, of this conversation, which I admit I have forced
upon you in a measure.”
“Forced! Object!” he repeated, still keeping half a pace or so behind
me. “You wanted to talk about women, apparently. That’s a subject. But
I don’t care for it. I have never.... In fact, I have had other
subjects to think about.”
“I am concerned here with one woman only--a young girl--the sister of
your dead friend--Miss Haldin. Surely you can think a little of her.
What I meant from the first was that there is a situation which you
cannot be expected to understand.”
I listened to his unsteady footfalls by my side for the space of several
strides.
“I think that it may prepare the ground for your next interview with
Miss Haldin if I tell you of it. I imagine that she might have had
something of the kind in her mind when she left us together. I believe
myself authorized to speak. The peculiar situation I have alluded to
has arisen in the first grief and distress of Victor Haldin’s execution.
There was something peculiar in the circumstances of his arrest. You no
doubt know the whole truth....”
I felt my arm seized above the elbow, and next instant found myself
swung so as to face Mr. Razumov.
“You spring up from the ground before me with this talk. Who the devil
are you? This is not to be borne! Why! What for? What do you know
what is or is not peculiar? What have you to do with any confounded
circumstances, or with anything that happens in Russia, anyway?”
He leaned on his stick with his other hand, heavily; and when he let go
my arm, I was certain in my mind that he was hardly able to keep on his
feet.
“Let us sit down at one of these vacant tables,” I proposed,
disregarding this display of unexpectedly profound emotion. It was not
without its effect on me, I confess. I was sorry for him.
“What tables? What are you talking about? Oh--the empty tables? The
tables there. Certainly. I will sit at one of the empty tables.”
I led him away from the path to the very centre of the raft of deals
before the _chalet_. The Swiss couple were gone by that time. We were
alone on the raft, so to speak. Mr. Razumov dropped into a chair, let
fall his stick, and propped on his elbows, his head between his hands,
stared at me persistently, openly, and continuously, while I signalled
the waiter and ordered some beer. I could not quarrel with this silent
inspection very well, because, truth to tell, I felt somewhat guilty of
having been sprung on him with some abruptness--of having “sprung from
the ground,” as he expressed it.
While waiting to be served I mentioned that, born from parents settled
in St. Petersburg, I had acquired the language as a child. The town I
did not remember, having left it for good as a boy of nine, but in later
years I had renewed my acquaintance with the language. He listened,
without as much as moving his eyes the least little bit. He had to
change his position when the beer came, and the instant draining of his
glass revived him. He leaned back in his chair and, folding his arms
across his chest, continued to stare at me squarely. It occurred to me
that his clean-shaven, almost swarthy face was really of the very mobile
sort, and that the absolute stillness of it was the acquired habit of
a revolutionist, of a conspirator everlastingly on his guard against
self-betrayal in a world of secret spies.
“But you are an Englishman--a teacher of English literature,” he
murmured, in a voice that was no longer issuing from a parched throat.
“I have heard of you. People told me you have lived here for years.”
“Quite true. More than twenty years. And I have been assisting Miss
Haldin with her English studies.”
“You have been reading English poetry with her,” he said, immovable now,
like another man altogether, a complete stranger to the man of the heavy
and uncertain footfalls a little while ago--at my elbow.
“Yes, English poetry,” I said. “But the trouble of which I speak was
caused by an English newspaper.”
He continued to stare at me. I don’t think he was aware that the story
of the midnight arrest had been ferreted out by an English journalist
and given to the world. When I explained this to him he muttered
contemptuously, “It may have been altogether a lie.”
“I should think you are the best judge of that,” I retorted, a little
disconcerted. “I must confess that to me it looks to be true in the
main.”
“How can you tell truth from lies?” he queried in his new, immovable
manner.
“I don’t know how you do it in Russia,” I began, rather nettled by his
attitude. He interrupted me.
“In Russia, and in general everywhere--in a newspaper, for instance. The
colour of the ink and the shapes of the letters are the same.”
“Well, there are other trifles one can go by. The character of the
publication, the general verisimilitude of the news, the consideration
of the motive, and so on. I don’t trust blindly the accuracy of special
correspondents--but why should this one have gone to the trouble of
concocting a circumstantial falsehood on a matter of no importance to
the world?”
“That’s what it is,” he grumbled. “What’s going on with us is of
no importance--a mere sensational story to amuse the readers of the
papers--the superior contemptuous Europe. It is hateful to think of. But
let them wait a bit!”
He broke off on this sort of threat addressed to the western world.
Disregarding the anger in his stare, I pointed out that whether the
journalist was well- or ill-informed, the concern of the friends of
these ladies was with the effect the few lines of print in question had
produced--the effect alone. And surely he must be counted as one of
the friends--if only for the sake of his late comrade and intimate
fellow-revolutionist. At that point I thought he was going to speak
vehemently; but he only astounded me by the convulsive start of his
whole body. He restrained himself, folded his loosened arms tighter
across his chest, and sat back with a smile in which there was a twitch
of scorn and malice.
“Yes, a comrade and an intimate.... Very well,” he said.
“I ventured to speak to you on that assumption. And I cannot be
mistaken. I was present when Peter Ivanovitch announced your arrival
here to Miss Haldin, and I saw her relief and thankfulness when your
name was mentioned. Afterwards she showed me her brother’s letter,
and read out the few words in which he alludes to you. What else but a
friend could you have been?”
“Obviously. That’s perfectly well known. A friend. Quite correct....
Go on. You were talking of some effect.”
I said to myself: “He puts on the callousness of a stern revolutionist,
the insensibility to common emotions of a man devoted to a destructive
idea. He is young, and his sincerity assumes a pose before a stranger,
a foreigner, an old man. Youth must assert itself....” As concisely
as possible I exposed to him the state of mind poor Mrs. Haldin had been
thrown into by the news of her son’s untimely end.
He listened--I felt it--with profound attention. His level stare
deflected gradually downwards, left my face, and rested at last on the
ground at his feet.
“You can enter into the sister’s feelings. As you said, I have only read
a little English poetry with her, and I won’t make myself ridiculous in
your eyes by trying to speak of her. But you have seen her. She is one
of these rare human beings that do not want explaining. At least I think
so. They had only that son, that brother, for a link with the wider
world, with the future. The very groundwork of active existence for
Nathalie Haldin is gone with him. Can you wonder then that she turns
with eagerness to the only man her brother mentions in his letters. Your
name is a sort of legacy.”
“What could he have written of me?” he cried, in a low, exasperated
tone.
“Only a few words. It is not for me to repeat them to you, Mr. Razumov;
but you may believe my assertion that these words are forcible enough to
make both his mother and his sister believe implicitly in the worth of
your judgment and in the truth of anything you may have to say to them.
It’s impossible for you now to pass them by like strangers.”
I paused, and for a moment sat listening to the footsteps of the few
people passing up and down the broad central walk. While I was speaking
his head had sunk upon his breast above his folded arms. He raised it
sharply.
“Must I go then and lie to that old woman!”
It was not anger; it was something else, something more poignant, and
not so simple. I was aware of it sympathetically, while I was profoundly
concerned at the nature of that exclamation.
“Dear me! Won’t the truth do, then? I hoped you could have told them
something consoling. I am thinking of the poor mother now. Your Russia
_is_ a cruel country.”
He moved a little in his chair.
“Yes,” I repeated. “I thought you would have had something authentic to
tell.”
The twitching of his lips before he spoke was curious.
“What if it is not worth telling?”
“Not worth--from what point of view? I don’t understand.”
“From every point of view.”