“I have waited for you anxiously. But now that you have been moved to
come to us in your kindness, you alarm me. You speak obscurely. It seems
as if you were keeping back something from me.”
“Tell me, Natalia Victorovna,” he was heard at last in a strange
unringing voice, “whom did you see in that place?”
She was startled, and as if deceived in her expectations.
“Where? In Peter Ivanovitch’s rooms? There was Mr. Laspara and three
other people.”
“Ha! The vanguard--the forlorn hope of the great plot,” he commented to
himself. “Bearers of the spark to start an explosion which is meant to
change fundamentally the lives of so many millions in order that Peter
Ivanovitch should be the head of a State.”
“You are teasing me,” she said. “Our dear one told me once to remember
that men serve always something greater than themselves--the idea.”
“Our dear one,” he repeated slowly. The effort he made to appear unmoved
absorbed all the force of his soul. He stood before her like a being
with hardly a breath of life. His eyes, even as under great physical
suffering, had lost all their fire. “Ah! your brother.... But on
your lips, in your voice, it sounds...and indeed in you everything is
divine.... I wish I could know the innermost depths of your thoughts,
of your feelings.”
“But why, Kirylo Sidorovitch?” she cried, alarmed by these words coming
out of strangely lifeless lips.
“Have no fear. It is not to betray you. So you went there?... And
Sophia Antonovna, what did she tell you, then?”
“She said very little, really. She knew that I should hear everything
from you. She had no time for more than a few words.” Miss Haldin’s
voice dropped and she became silent for a moment. “The man, it appears,
has taken his life,” she said sadly.
“Tell me, Natalia Victorovna,” he asked after a pause, “do you believe
in remorse?”
“What a question!”
“What can _you_ know of it?” he muttered thickly. “It is not for such as
you.... What I meant to ask was whether you believed in the efficacy
of remorse?”
She hesitated as though she had not understood, then her face lighted
up.
“Yes,” she said firmly.
“So he is absolved. Moreover, that Ziemianitch was a brute, a drunken
brute.”
A shudder passed through Natalia Haldin.
“But a man of the people,” Razumov went on, “to whom they, the
revolutionists, tell a tale of sublime hopes. Well, the people must
be forgiven.... And you must not believe all you’ve heard from that
source, either,” he added, with a sort of sinister reluctance.
“You are concealing something from me,” she exclaimed.
“Do you, Natalia Victorovna, believe in the duty of revenge?”
“Listen, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I believe that the future shall be merciful
to us all. Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner,
betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light
breaks on our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten; for without that
there can be no union and no love.”
“I hear. No revenge for you, then? Never? Not the least bit?” He smiled
bitterly with his colourless lips. “You yourself are like the very
spirit of that merciful future. Strange that it does not make it
easier.... No! But suppose that the real betrayer of your
brother--Ziemianitch had a part in it too, but insignificant and quite
involuntary--suppose that he was a young man, educated, an intellectual
worker, thoughtful, a man your brother might have trusted lightly,
perhaps, but still--suppose.... But there’s a whole story there.”
“And you know the story! But why, then--”
“I have heard it. There is a staircase in it, and even phantoms, but
that does not matter if a man always serves something greater than
himself--the idea. I wonder who is the greatest victim in that tale?”
“In that tale!” Miss Haldin repeated. She seemed turned into stone.
“Do you know why I came to you? It is simply because there is no one
anywhere in the whole great world I could go to. Do you understand
what I say? Not one to go to. Do you conceive the desolation of the
thought--no one--to--go--to?”
Utterly misled by her own enthusiastic interpretation of two lines in
the letter of a visionary, under the spell of her own dread of lonely
days, in their overshadowed world of angry strife, she was unable to
see the truth struggling on his lips. What she was conscious of was the
obscure form of his suffering. She was on the point of extending her
hand to him impulsively when he spoke again.
“An hour after I saw you first I knew how it would be. The terrors of
remorse, revenge, confession, anger, hate, fear, are like nothing to the
atrocious temptation which you put in my way the day you appeared before
me with your voice, with your face, in the garden of that accursed
villa.”
She looked utterly bewildered for a moment; then, with a sort of
despairing insight went straight to the point.
“The story, Kirylo Sidorovitch, the story!”
“There is no more to tell!” He made a movement forward, and she actually
put her hand on his shoulder to push him away; but her strength failed
her, and he kept his ground, though trembling in every limb. “It ends
here--on this very spot.” He pressed a denunciatory finger to his breast
with force, and became perfectly still.
I ran forward, snatching up the chair, and was in time to catch hold of
Miss Haldin and lower her down. As she sank into it she swung half round
on my arm, and remained averted from us both, drooping over the back.
He looked at her with an appalling expressionless tranquillity.
Incredulity, struggling with astonishment, anger, and disgust, deprived
me for a time of the power of speech. Then I turned on him, whispering
from very rage--
“This is monstrous. What are you staying for? Don’t let her catch sight
of you again. Go away!...” He did not budge. “Don’t you understand
that your presence is intolerable--even to me? If there’s any sense of
shame in you....”
Slowly his sullen eyes moved in my direction. “How did this old man
come here?” he muttered, astounded.
Suddenly Miss Haldin sprang up from the chair, made a few steps, and
tottered. Forgetting my indignation, and even the man himself, I hurried
to her assistance. I took her by the arm, and she let me lead her into
the drawing-room. Away from the lamp, in the deeper dusk of the distant
end, the profile of Mrs. Haldin, her hands, her whole figure had
the stillness of a sombre painting. Miss Haldin stopped, and pointed
mournfully at the tragic immobility of her mother, who seemed to watch a
beloved head lying in her lap.
That gesture had an unequalled force of expression, so far-reaching in
its human distress that one could not believe that it pointed out merely
the ruthless working of political institutions. After assisting Miss
Haldin to the sofa, I turned round to go back and shut the door Framed
in the opening, in the searching glare of the white anteroom, my eyes
fell on Razumov, still there, standing before the empty chair, as if
rooted for ever to the spot of his atrocious confession. A wonder came
over me that the mysterious force which had torn it out of him had
failed to destroy his life, to shatter his body. It was there unscathed.
I stared at the broad line of his shoulders, his dark head, the amazing
immobility of his limbs. At his feet the veil dropped by Miss Haldin
looked intensely black in the white crudity of the light. He was gazing
at it spell-bound. Next moment, stooping with an incredible, savage
swiftness, he snatched it up and pressed it to his face with both hands.
Something, extreme astonishment perhaps, dimmed my eyes, so that he
seemed to vanish before he moved.
The slamming of the outer door restored my sight, and I went on
contemplating the empty chair in the empty ante-room. The meaning
of what I had seen reached my mind with a staggering shock. I seized
Natalia Haldin by the shoulder.
“That miserable wretch has carried off your veil!” I cried, in the
scared, deadened voice of an awful discovery. “He....”
The rest remained unspoken. I stepped back and looked down at her, in
silent horror. Her hands were lying lifelessly, palms upwards, on her
lap. She raised her grey eyes slowly. Shadows seemed to come and go in
them as if the steady flame of her soul had been made to vacillate
at last in the cross-currents of poisoned air from the corrupted dark
immensity claiming her for its own, where virtues themselves fester into
crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt.
“It is impossible to be more unhappy....” The languid whisper of her
voice struck me with dismay. “It is impossible.... I feel my heart
becoming like ice.”