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Precipice

<h2> CHAPTER XXI </h2> Raisky laughed as he went out into the garden. He looked sadly at the closed shutters of the old house, and stood for a long time on the edge of the precipice, looking down thoughtfully into the depths of the thicket and the trees rustling and cracking in the wind. Then he turned to look at the long avenues, here forming gloomy corridors, and then opening out into open stately spaces, at the flower gardens now fading under the approach of autumn, at the kitchen garden, and at the distant glimmer of the rising moon, and at the stars. He looked out over the Volga, gleaming like steel in the distance. The evening was fresh and cool, and the withered leaves were falling with a gentle rustle around him. He could not take his eyes from the river, now silvered by the moon, which separated him from Vera. She had gone without leaving a word for him. A word from her would have brought tenderness and would have drowned all bitterness, he thought. But she was gone without leaving a trace or any kind remembrance. With bent head and full of anxious thought he made his way along the dark avenues. Suddenly delicate fingers seized his shoulders, and he heard a low laugh. “Vera!” he cried, seizing her hand violently. “You here, and not away over the Volga!” “Yes, here, not over there.” She put her arm in his and asked him, laughing, whether he thought she would let him go without saying good-bye. “Witch!” he said, not knowing whether fear or joy was uppermost. “I was this very moment complaining that you had not left a line for me, and now I can’t understand, as everyone in the house told me you had gone away yesterday.” “And you believed it,” she said laughing. “I told them to say so, to surprise you. They were humbugging.... To go away without two words,” she asked triumphantly, “or to stay, which is better?” Her gay talk, her quick gestures, the mockery in her voice, all these things seemed unnatural, and he recognised beneath it all weariness, strain, an effort to conceal the collapse of her strength. When they reached the end of the avenue he tried to lead her to an open spot, where he could see her face. “Let me look at you! How gay and merry you are, Vera!” he said timidly. “What is there to see?” she interrupted impatiently, and tried to draw him into the shadow again. He felt that her hands were trembling, and for the moment his own passion was stilled, and he shared her suffering. “Why do you look at me like that? I am not crazy,” she said, turning her face away. He was stricken with horror. The insane are always assuring everyone of their sanity. What was wrong with Vera? She did not confide in him, she would not speak out, she was determined to fight her own battles. Who could support and shelter her? An inner voice told him that Tatiana Markovna alone could do it. “Vera, you are ill,” he said earnestly. “Give Grandmother your confidence.” “Silence! Not a word of Grandmother! Goodbye! To-morrow we will go for a stroll, do some shopping, go down by the river, anything you like.” “I will go away, Vera,” he cried, filled with inexpressible fear. “I am worn out. Why do you deceive me? Why did you call me back to find you still here? Was it to mock my sufferings?” “So that we could suffer together,” she answered. “Passion is beautiful, as you yourself have said; it is life itself. You have taught me how to love, have educated passion in me, and now you may admire the result of your labour,” she ended, drawing in a deep breath of the cool evening air. “I warned you, Vera. I told you passion was a fierce wolf.” “No, worse, it is a tiger. I could not believe what you said, but I do now. Do you know the picture in the old house which represents a tiger showing his teeth at a seated Cupid? I never understood the picture, which seemed meaningless, but now I understand it. Passion is a tiger, lying there apparently so peaceful and inviting, until he begins to howl and to whet his teeth.” Raisky pursued the comparison in the hope that he might learn the name of Vera’s lover. “Your comparison is false, Vera. There are no tigers in our Northern climate. I am nearer the mark when I compare passion to a wolf.” “You are right,” she said with a nervous laugh. “A real wolf. However carefully you feed him he looks always to the woods. You are all wolves, and he, too, is a wolf.” “Who?” he asked in an expressionless voice. “Tushin is a bear, a genuine Russian bear. You may lay your hand on his shaggy head, and sleep; your rest is sure, for he will serve you all his life.” “Which of the animals am I?” he asked gaily, noting that Tushin was not the man. “Don’t beat about the bush, Vera, you may say I am an ass.” “No,” she said scornfully. “You are a fox, a nice, cunning fox, with a gift for deception. That’s what you are. Why don’t you say something?” she went on, as he kept an embarrassed silence. “Vera, there are weapons to be used against wolves, for me, to go away; for you, not to go down there,” he said, pointing to the precipice. “Tell me how to prevent myself from going there. Teach me, since you are my mentor, how not to go. You first set the house on fire, and then talk of leaving it. You sing in praise of passion, and then....” “I meant another kind of passion. Where both parties to it are honourable, it means the supreme happiness in life, and its storms are full of the glow of life....” “And where there is no dishonour, no precipice yawns? I love, and am loved, yet passion has me in its jaws. Tell me what I should do.” “Confess all to Grandmother,” whispered Raisky, pale with terror, “or permit me to talk to her.” “To shame me and ruin me? Who told me I need not obey her?” “At one moment you are on the point of telling your secret, at another you hide behind it. I am in the dark, and feel my way in uncertainty. How can I, when I do not know the whole truth, diagnose the case?” “You know what is wrong with me? Why do you say you are in the dark. Come,” she said, leading him into the moonlight. “See what is wrong with me.” He stood transfixed with terror and pity. Pale, haggard, with wild eyes and tightly pressed lips, this was quite another Vera. Strands of hair were loose from beneath her hood, and fell in gipsy-like confusion over her forehead and temples, and covered her eyes and mouth with every quick movement she made. Her shoulders were negligently clad in a satin wrap trimmed with swansdown, held in place by a loosely tied knot of silk. “Well,” she said, shaking her hair out of her eyes. “What has happened to the beauty whose praise you sang?” “Vera,” he said, “I would die for you. Tell me how I may serve you.” “Die!” she exclaimed. “Help me to live. Give me that beautiful passion which sheds its glorious light over the whole of life. I see no passion but this drowning tiger passion. Give me back at least my old strength, you, who talk of going to my Grandmother to place her and me on the same bier. It is too late to tell me to go no more to the precipice.” She sat down on the bench and looked moodily straight before her. “You yourself, Vera, dreamed of freedom, and you prided yourself on your independence.” “My head burns. Have pity on your sister! I am ashamed to be so weak.” “What is it, dear Vera?” “Nothing. Take me home, help me to mount the steps. I am afraid, and would like to lie down. Pardon me for having disturbed you for nothing, for having brought you here. You would have gone away and forgotten me. I am only feverish. Are you angry with me?” Too dejected to reply, he gave her his arm, took her as far as her room, and struck a light. “Send Marina or Masha to stay in my room, please. But say nothing to Grandmother, lest she should be alarmed and come herself. Why are you looking at me so strangely? God knows what I have been saying to you, to plague you and to avenge myself of all my humiliations. Tell Grandmother that I have gone to bed to be up early in the morning, and I pray you bless me in your thoughts, do you hear?” “I hear,” he said absently, as he pressed her hand and went out in search of Masha. He looked forward with anxiety to Vera’s awakening. He seemed to have forgotten his own passion since his imagination had become absorbed in the contemplation of her suffering. “Something is wrong with Vera,” said Tatiana Markovna, shaking her grey head as she saw how grimly he avoided her questioning glance. “What can it be?” asked Raisky negligently, with an effort to assume indifference. “Something is wrong, Borushka. She looks so melancholy and is so silent, and often seems to have tears in her eyes. I have spoken to the doctor, but he only talks the old nonsense about nerves,” she said, relapsing into a gloomy silence. Raisky looked anxiously for Vera’s appearance next morning. She came at last, accompanied by the maid, who carried a warm coat and her hat and shoes. She said good morning to her aunt, asked for coffee, ate her roll with appetite, and reminded Raisky that he had promised to go shopping with her in the town and to take a walk in the park. It amazed him that she should be once more transformed, but there was a certain audacity in her gestures and a haste in her speech which seemed forced and alien from her usual manner and reminded him of her behaviour the day before. She was plainly making a great effort to conceal her real mood. She chatted volubly with Paulina Karpovna, who had turned up unexpectedly and was displaying the pattern of a dress intended for Marfinka’s trousseau. That lady’s visit was really directed towards Raisky, of whose return she had heard. She sought in vain an occasion to speak with him alone, but seized a moment to sit down beside him, when she made eyes at him and said in a low voice: “Je comprends; dites tout, du courage.” Raisky wished her anywhere, and moved away. Vera meanwhile put on her coat and asked him to come with her. Paulina Karpovna wished to accompany them, but Vera declined on the ground that they were walking and had far to go, that the ground was damp, and that Paulina’s elegant dress with a long train was unsuited for the expedition. “I want to have you this whole day for myself,” she said to Raisky as they went out together, “indeed every day until you go.” “But, Vera, how can I help you when I don’t know what is making you suffer. I only see that you have your own drama, that the catastrophe is approaching, or is in process. What is it?” he asked anxiously, as she shivered. “I don’t feel well, and am far from gay. Autumn is beginning. Nature grows dark and sinister, the birds are already deserting us, and my mood, too, is autumnal. Do you see the black line high above the Volga? Those are the cranes in flight. My thoughts, too, fly away into the distance.” She realised halfway that this strange explanation was unconvincing, and only pursued it because she did not wish to tell the truth. “I wanted to ask you, Vera, about the letters you wrote to me.” “I am ill and weak; you saw what an attack I had yesterday. I cannot remember just now all that I wrote.” “Another time then!” he sighed. “But tell me, Vera, how I can help you. Why do you keep me back, and why do you want to spend these days in my society? I have a right to ask this, and it is your duty to give a plain answer unless you want me to think you false.” “Don’t let us talk of it now.” “No,” he cried angrily. “You play with me as a cat does with a mouse. I will endure it no longer. You can either reveal your own secrets or keep them as you please, but in so far as it touches me, I demand an immediate answer. What is my part in this drama?” “Do not be angry! I did not keep you back to wound you. But don’t talk about it, don’t agitate me so that I have another attack like yesterday’s. You see that I can hardly stand. I don’t want my weakness to be seen at home. Defend me from myself. Come to me at dusk, about six, and I will tell you why I detained you.” “Pardon me, Vera. I am not myself either,” he said, struck by her suffering. “I don’t know what lies on your heart, and I will not ask. I will come later to fetch you.” “I will tell you if I have the strength,” she said. They went into the shops, where Vera made purchases for herself and Marfinka, she talked eagerly to the acquaintances they met, and even visited a poor godchild, for whom she took gifts. She assented readily to Raisky’s suggestion that they should visit Koslov. When they reached the house, Mark walked out of the door. He was plainly startled, made no answer to Raisky’s inquiry after Leonti’s health, and walked quickly away. Vera was still more disconcerted but pulled herself together, and followed Raisky into the house. “What is the matter with him?” asked Raisky. “He did not answer a word, but simply bolted. You were frightened, too, Vera. Is it Mark who signalises his presence at the foot of the precipice by a shot? I have seen him wandering round with a gun,” he said joking. She answered in the same tone: “Of course, Cousin,” but she did not look at him. No, thought Raisky to himself, she could not have taken for her idol a wandering, ragged gipsy like that. Then he wondered whether the possibility could be entirely excluded, since passion wanders where he lists, and not in obedience to the convictions and dictates of man. He is invincible, and master of his own inexplicable moods. But Vera had never had any opportunity of meeting Mark, he concluded, and was merely afraid of him as every one else was. Leonti’s condition was unchanged. He wandered about like a drunken man, silent and listening for the noise of any carriage in the street, when he would rush to the window to look if it bore his fugitive wife. He would come to them in a few weeks, he said, after Marfinka’s wedding, as Vera suggested. Then he became aware of Vera’s presence. “Vera Vassilievna!” he cried in surprise, staring at her as he addressed Raisky. “Do you know, Boris Pavlovich, who else has read your books and helped me to arrange them?” “Who has been reading my books?” asked Raisky. But Leonti had been distracted by the sound of a passing carriage and did not hear the question. Vera whispered to Raisky that they should go. “I wanted to say something, Boris Pavlovich,” said Leonti thoughtfully, raising his head, “but I can’t remember what.” “You said some one else had been reading my books.” Leonti pointed to Vera, who was looking out of the window, but who now pulled Raisky’s sleeve “Come!” she said and they left the house. When they reached home Vera made over some of her purchases to her aunt, and had others taken to her room. She asked Raisky to go out with her again in the park and down by the Volga. “Why are you tiring yourself out, Vera?” he asked, as they went. “You are weak.” “Air, I must have air!” she exclaimed, turning her face to the wind. She is collecting all her strength, he thought, as they entered the room where the family was waiting for them for dinner. In the afternoon he slept for weariness, and only awoke at twilight, when six o’clock had already struck. He went to find Vera, but Marina told him she had gone to vespers, she did not know whether in the village church on the hill or in the church on the outskirts of the town. He went to the town church first, and after studying the faces of all the old women assembled there, he climbed the hill to the village church. Old people stood in the corners and by the door, and by a pillar in a dark corner knelt Vera, with a veil wrapped round her bowed head. He took his stand near her, behind another pillar, and, engrossed in his thoughts of her state of mind, watched her intently as she prayed motionless, with her eyes fixed on the cross. He went sadly into the porch to wait for her, and there she joined him, putting her hand in his arm without a word. As they crossed the big meadow into the park he thought of nothing but the promised explanation. His own intense desire to be freed from his miserable uncertainty weighed with him less than his duty, as he conceived it, of shielding her, of illuminating her path with his experience, and of lending his undivided strength to keep her from overstepping her moral precipice. Perhaps it was merely a remnant of pride that prevented her from telling him why she had summoned him and detained him. He could not, and, even if he could, he had not the right to share his apprehensions with anyone else. Even if he might confide in Tatiana Markovna, if he spoke to her of his suspicion and his surmises, he was not clear that it would help matters, for he feared that their aunt’s practical, but old-fashioned wisdom would be shattered on Vera’s obstinacy. Vera possessed the bolder mind, the quicker will. She was level with contemporary thought, and towered above the society in which she moved. She must have derived her ideas and her knowledge from some source accessible to her alone. Though she took pains to conceal her knowledge, it was betrayed by a chance word, by the mention of a name or an authority in this or that sphere of learning, and it was betrayed also in her speech; in the remarkable aptness of the words in which she clothed her thoughts and feelings. In this matter she held so great an advantage over Tatiana Markovna that the old lady’s efforts in argument were more likely to be disastrous than not. Undoubtedly Tatiana Markovna was a wise woman with a correct judgment of the general phenomena of life. She was a famous housewife, ruling her little tsardom magnificently; she knew the ways, the vices and the virtues of mankind as they are set out in the Ten Commandments and the Gospels, but she knew nothing of the life where the passions rage and steep everything in their colours. And even if she had known such a world in her youth it must have been passion divorced from experience, an unshared passion, or one stifled in its development, not a stormy drama of love, but rather a lyric tenderness which unfolded and perished without leaving a trace on her pure life. How could she lend a rescuing hand to snatch Vera from the precipice, she who had no faith in passion, but had merely sought to understand facts? The shots in the depths of the precipice, and Vera’s expeditions were indeed facts, against which Tatiana Markovna might be able to adopt measures. She might double the watch kept on the property, set men to watch for the lover, while Vera, shut up in the house, endured humiliation and a fresh kind of suffering. Vera would not endure any such rough constraint, and would make her escape, just as she had fled across the Volga from Raisky. These would be, in fact, no means at all, for she had outgrown Tatiana Markovna’s circle of experience and morals. No, authority might serve with Marfinka, but not with the clear-headed, independent Vera. Such were Raisky’s thoughts as he walked silently by Vera’s side, no longer desiring full knowledge for his own sake, but for her salvation. Perhaps, he thought, he would best gain his end by indirect efforts to make her betray herself. “Leonti said,” he began, “that you have been reading books out of my library. Did you read them with him?” “Sometimes he told me of the contents of certain books; others I read with the priest, Natasha’s husband.” “What books did you read with the priest?” “For the moment I don’t remember, but he read the writings of the Fathers, for instance, and explained them to Natasha and me, to my great advantage. We also read with him Voltaire and Spinoza. Why do you laugh?” she asked, looking at Raisky. “There seems a remarkable gap between the Fathers and Spinoza and Voltaire. The Encyclopædists are also included in my library. Did you read them?” “Nikolai Ivanovich read some to us, and talked about others.” “Did you also occupy yourselves with Feuerbach, with the Socialists and the Materialists?” “Yes, Natasha’s husband asked us to copy out passages, which he indicated by pencil marks.” “What was his object in this?” “I think he was preparing to publish a refutation.” “Where did you obtain the newer books that are not in my library? Not the exile,” he suggested as she gave no answer, “who lives here under police supervision, the same man about whom you wrote to me? But you are not listening.” “Yes, I am. Who gave me the books? Sometimes one person, sometimes another here in the town.” “Volokov borrowed these books.” “Perhaps so, I had them from professors.” The thought flashed through Raisky’s head that there might be other professors of the same kind as Monsieur Charles. But he merely asked what were the views of Nikolai Ivanovich on Spinoza and these other writers. “He says.” replied Vera, “that these writings are the efforts of bold minds to evade the truth; they have beaten out for themselves side paths which must in the end unite with the main road. He says too, that all these attempts serve the cause of truth, in that the truth shines out with greater splendour in the end.” “But he does not tell you where truth lies?” By way of answer she pointed to the little chapel now in sight. “And you think he is right?” “I don’t think, I believe. And don’t you also believe he is right.” He agreed, and she asked him why, that being so, he had asked her. “I wanted,” he said, “to know your opinion.” “But you have often seen me at prayer,” said Vera. “Yes, but I do not overhear your prayers. Do you pray for the alleviation of the restless sorrow that afflicts your mind?” They had reached the chapel, and Vera stood still for a moment. She did not appear to have heard his question, and she answered only with a deep sigh. It was growing dark as they retraced their steps, Vera’s growing slower and more uncertain as they approached the old house, where she stood still and glanced in the direction of the precipice. “To still the storm I must not go near the precipice, you say—I beg of you to stand by me, for I am sick and helpless.” “Will not Grandmother know better how to help you, Vera? Confide in her, a woman, who will perhaps understand your pain.” She shook her head. “I will tell you, Grandmother and you, but not now; now I cannot. And yet I beg of you not to leave me, not to allow me out of your sight. If a shot summons me, keep me away from the precipice, and, if necessary, hold me back by force. Things are as bad as that with me. That is all you can do for me. That is why I asked you not to go away, because I felt that my strength is failing, because except you I have no one to help me, for Grandmother would not understand. Forgive me.” “You did right, Vera,” he replied, deeply moved. “Depend on me. I am willing to stay here for ever, if that will bring you peace.” “No, in a week’s time the shots will cease.” She dried her eyes, and pressed his hand; then with slow, uneven steps, supporting herself by the balustrade she passed up the steps and into the house. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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