Chapter 21: Separation

‘_Ah, people, wicked people,_
_You separated their...._’

So my first letter to Natalie ended, and it is note-worthy that, frightened by the word ‘hearts,’ I did not write it. And I signed the letter ‘your brother.’

How dear ‘my sister’ was then to me and how continually in my thoughts is clear from the fact that I wrote to her from Nizhni, and from Perm on the very day after my arrival there. The word ‘sister’ expressed all that was recognised in our affection; I liked it immensely and I like it now, used not as the limit of the feelings but, on the contrary, as the mingling of them all; in it are united affection, love, the tie of kinship, a common devotion, the surroundings of childhood, and habitual association. I had called no one by that name before, and it was so precious to me that even in later years I often used it to Natalie.

Before I fully understood our relations, and perhaps just because I did not understand them fully, a temptation awaited me which has not left so bright a memory as my episode with Gaetana; a temptation that humiliated me and cost me much regret and inner distress.

Having very little experience of life, and being flung into a world completely strange to me, after nine months of prison, I lived at first carelessly without taking stock of what I saw; the new country, the new surroundings made me rather dizzy. My social position was transformed. In Perm and in Vyatka I was regarded very differently from in Moscow; there I had been a young man living in my father’s house, here in this stagnant waste I was independent, and was accepted as a government official, although I was not exactly one. It was not hard for me to perceive that without much effort I might play the part of a man of the world in the drawing-rooms beyond the Volga and the Kama, and be a lion in Vyatka society.

In Perm, before I had time to look about me, the landlady to whom I had gone to take lodgings asked me whether I wanted a kitchen garden and whether I was keeping a cow! It was a question by which I could, with horror, judge the depth of my descent from the academic heights of student life. But at Vyatka I made acquaintance with all the world, especially with the younger people of the merchant class, which is much better educated in these remote provinces than in those nearer the centre, though they are no less given to drink and debauchery. Distracted from my usual pursuits by office work, I led a restlessly idle life; owing to my peculiar impressionability, or perhaps mobility, of character and absence of experience, adventures of all sorts might well be expected.

From a coquettish passion _de l’approbativité_ I tried to please right and left indiscriminately, forced my sympathies, made friends over a dozen words, became far more intimate than I need, recognised my mistake a month or two later, said nothing from delicacy, and dragged a weary chain of false relations until it was broken by an absurd quarrel in which I was blamed for capricious impatience, ingratitude, and inconstancy.

At first I did not live alone in Vyatka. A strange and comic figure, which from time to time appears at all the turning points of my life, at all its important events, the person who drowns to make me acquainted with Ogaryov, and waves a handkerchief from Russia when I cross the frontier at Taurogen—K. I. Sonnenberg—was living with me in Vyatka; I forgot to mention this when I described my exile.

This was how it happened: at the moment when I was being sent to Perm, Sonnenberg was preparing to go to the Fair at Irbit. My father, who always liked to complicate everything simple, suggested to Sonnenberg that he should go to Perm and there _furnish my house_, in return undertaking to pay his travelling expenses.

At Perm Sonnenberg zealously set to work, that is, to the purchase of unnecessary articles, all sorts of crockery, saucepans, bowls, glass, and provisions. He went himself to Obva to procure a Vyatka horse _ex ipso fonte_. When everything was complete I was transferred to Vyatka. We sold, half-price, the goods he had purchased and left Perm. Sonnenberg, conscientiously carrying out my father’s wishes, thought it his duty to go to Vyatka too to furnish my house. My father was so well pleased with his devotion and self-sacrifice that he offered him a salary of a hundred roubles a month so long as he would stay with me. This was more profitable and more secure than Irbit—and he was in no hurry to leave me.

In Vyatka he bought not one but three horses, one of which belonged to himself, though it too was bought at my father’s expense. These horses raised us considerably in the esteem of Vyatka society. Karl Ivanovitch, as I have mentioned already, was, in spite of his fifty years and the rather glaring defects of his features, a great flirt, and entertained the agreeable conviction that every girl and woman who came near him risked the fate of the moth flying round a lighted candle. Karl Ivanovitch had no intention of wasting the effect produced by the horses, but tried to turn them to advantage on the erotic side. Moreover, all our circumstances were favourable to his designs; we had a verandah looking out into a courtyard beyond which there was a garden. From ten o’clock in the morning Sonnenberg, arrayed in Kazan morocco leather boots, a gold embroidered _tibiteyka_, and a Caucasian _beshmyet_, with an immense amber mouthpiece between his lips, would sit on watch, pretending to be reading. The _tibiteyka_ and the amber mouthpiece were all aimed at three young ladies who lived in the next house. The young ladies for their part were interested in the new arrivals and gazed with curiosity at the oriental-looking doll smoking on the verandah. Karl Ivanovitch knew when and how they secretly lifted their blind, thought that things were going swimmingly—and tenderly blew a light coil of smoke in the direction of the objects of his devotion.

Soon the garden gave us the opportunity of making our neighbours’ acquaintance. Our landlord had three houses, and the garden was shared in common by them. In one of the houses we were living, together with the landlord and his stepmother, a fat, flabby widow who looked after him so masterfully and with such jealousy that it was only on the sly that he ventured to speak to the ladies of the garden. In the second house lived the young ladies and their parents, and the third house stood empty. Within a week Karl Ivanovitch was quite at home with the ladies of our garden. He would spend several hours a day swinging the young girls in the swing and running to fetch their capes and sunshades, in fact he was _aux petits soins_. The young ladies were more free in their behaviour with him than with anybody else, because he was more beyond suspicion than Caesar’s wife: a mere glance at him was enough to check the faintest breath of scandal.

In the evening I too used to walk into the garden, from that herd instinct which makes people do what others are doing, apart from any inclination. To the garden came, besides the lodgers, their acquaintances; the chief subject of talk and interest was flirtation and watching one another. Karl Ivanovitch devoted himself to sentimental espionage with the vigilance of a Vidok,[7] and always knew who walked oftenest with whom, and who looked significantly at whom. I was a terrible bone of contention for all the secret police of our garden; the ladies and the men wondered at my reserve, and for all their efforts could not discover on whom I was dancing attendance, and who particularly attracted me; and indeed it was not easy to do so, for I was not dancing attendance on any one and I did not find any of the young ladies particularly attractive. In the end they were vexed and offended by this, they began to consider me proud and sarcastic, and the young ladies’ friendliness grew perceptibly cooler—though every one of them tried her most killing glances upon me when we were alone.

While things were like this, one morning Karl Ivanovitch informed me that the landlady’s cook had opened the shutters of the third house and was cleaning the windows. The house had been taken by a family who had arrived in the town.

The garden was entirely absorbed in details concerning the new arrivals. The unknown lady, who was either tired from the journey or had not yet had time to unpack, as though to spite us, refused to show herself outside. Every one tried to see her at a window or in the porch, some succeeded, while others watched for days together in vain; those who saw her reported her pale and languid, interesting, in short, and good-looking. The young ladies said that she looked melancholy and ill. A young clerk in the governor’s office, a sprightly and quite intelligent fellow, was the only one who knew the strangers. He had once served in the same provincial town with them, and every one besieged him with questions.

The sprightly clerk, pleased at knowing what other people did not know, held forth endlessly upon the charms of their new neighbour. He praised her to the skies, declared that you could see she was a lady from Petersburg or Moscow. ‘She is intelligent,’ he repeated, ‘charming, cultured, but she won’t look at fellows like us. Ah, upon my soul,’ he added, suddenly turning to me, ‘there’s a happy thought; you must keep up the honour of Vyatka society and get up a flirtation with her.... Why, you are from Moscow, you know, and in exile; no doubt you write verses. She’s a heaven-sent find for you.’

‘What nonsense you do talk,’ I said, laughing, but I flushed crimson: I longed to see her.

A few days later I met her in the garden and found that she really was a very charming blonde. The gentleman who had talked about her introduced me. I was agitated and was as little able to hide it as my companion his smile.

The shyness due to vanity passed and I got to know her; she was very unhappy and, deceiving herself by assumed composure, was pining away and languishing in a sort of indolence of the heart.

Madame R—— was one of those secretly passionate natures only to be met among women of a fair complexion. The ardour of their hearts is masked by the mildness and gentleness of their features; they turn pale with emotion, and their eyes do not flash but rather grow dim when feeling brims over. Her languid eyes looked exhausted with a vague craving, her yearning bosom heaved irregularly. There was something restless and electric in her whole being. Often when walking in the garden she would suddenly turn pale and, inwardly troubled or agitated, would answer absent-mindedly and hurry into the house. It was just at those moments that I liked to look at her.

I soon saw what was passing within her. She did not love her husband and could not love him; she was twenty-five, he was over fifty, yet that disparity she might have got over, but the difference of education, of interests, of temperament, was too great.

Her husband scarcely ever came out of his room; he was a dry, harsh, old man, an official with pretensions to being a landowner, irritable like all invalids and like most people who have lost their fortune. She was sixteen when she was married to him and then he had some property, but afterwards he had lost everything at cards and was forced to go into the service for a living. Two years before he was transferred to Vyatka he began to fall into ill-health, a sore on his leg developed into disease of the bone. The old man became surly and ill-humoured, was afraid of his illness, and looked with helpless suspicion and uneasiness at his wife. She waited upon him with mournful self-sacrifice, but she did this only as her duty. Her children could not give all that her yearning heart craved.

One evening, speaking of one thing and another, I said that I should very much like to send my cousin my portrait, but that I could not find a man in Vyatka who could hold a pencil.

‘Let me try,’ said the lady. ‘I used to draw rather successful portraits in pencil.’

‘I shall be delighted. When?’

‘To-morrow before dinner, if you like.’

‘Of course. I will come to-morrow at one o’clock.’

All this was in her husband’s presence; he said not a word.

Next morning I got a note from Madame R——. It was the first I had ever received from her. She very courteously and circumspectly informed me that her husband was not pleased at her having offered to draw my portrait, begged me not to judge harshly of the whims of an invalid, said that he must not be worried, and, in conclusion, offered to make the sketch some other day, saying nothing about it to her husband, that he might not be annoyed by it.

I warmly, perhaps excessively warmly, thanked her. I did not accept her offer to draw the portrait in secret, but nevertheless these two notes made us much more intimate. Her attitude to her husband, upon which I could never have touched, was openly expressed; a secret understanding, a league against him, was unconsciously formed between us.

In the evening I went to see them—not a word was said about the portrait. If her husband had been cleverer he must have guessed what had happened; but he was not clever. I thanked her with my eyes, she answered with a smile.

Soon they moved into another part of the town. The first time I went to see them I found her alone in a barely furnished drawing-room; she was sitting at the piano, her eyes were tear-stained. I begged her to go on; but the music halted, she played false notes, her hands trembled, the colour left her face. ‘How stifling it is!’ she said, getting up quickly from the piano.

In silence I took her hand, a weak, feverish hand; her head, like a flower grown too heavy, as though passively obeying some external force, sank on my breast, she pressed her forehead against me and instantly fled.

Next day I received a rather frightened note from her, trying to throw a sort of mist over what had passed; she wrote of the terribly nervous condition in which she had been when I came in, of scarcely remembering what had happened. She apologised for her behaviour—but the thin veil of her words could not conceal the passion that glowed through them.

I went to see them; that day her husband was a little better, though he had not risen from his bed since they had been in their new quarters. I was worked up by excitement, played the fool, fired off witty jokes, talked all sorts of nonsense, made the invalid almost die with laughter, and of course all that was to cover her embarrassment and my own. Moreover, I felt that the laughter was intoxicating her and drawing her on.

* * * * *

This orgy of love lasted for a month; then my heart was as it were tired, exhausted; I began to have moments of depression, I studiously concealed them, tried not to believe in them, wondered what was passing within me—while still love was cooling.

I began to feel constrained by the presence of the old man. It was awkward and hateful for me in his company. Not that I felt myself in the wrong as regards the man who had the civil and ecclesiastical rights of property in a woman who could not love him and whom he was incapable of loving, but my double part struck me as humiliating; hypocrisy and duplicity are the vices most foreign to my nature. While growing passion was in the ascendant I thought of nothing, but as soon as it was somewhat cooler I began to have doubts.

One morning Matvey came into my bedroom with the news that old R—— ‘had passed away.’ I was overcome by a strange feeling at this news, I turned on the other side and was in no hurry to dress. I did not want to see the dead man. Vitberg came in, quite ready to go out. ‘What!’ he said, ‘you’re still in bed! Haven’t you heard what’s happened? I expect poor Madame R—— is all alone, let us go and see, make haste and dress.’ I dressed—and we went.

We found Madame R—— in a swoon or in a sort of nervous lethargy. There was no pretence about it: her husband’s death had recalled her helpless position; she was left alone with her children in a strange town, without money, without friends or relations. Besides, she had on previous occasions fallen into this cataleptic condition, which was brought on by some violent shock and lasted several hours. Pale as death, with her face cold and her eyes closed, she lay, from time to time giving a gasp, and breathless in the intervals.

Not one woman came to help her, to show her sympathy, to look after the children or the house. Vitberg remained with her, the prophetic clerk and I undertook to see after things.

The old man, looking black and sunken, lay in his uniform on the drawing-room table, frowning as though he were angry with me. We laid him in the coffin, and two days later lowered him into the grave. After the funeral we went back to the dead man’s house; the children in their black frocks with crape weepers huddled in the corner, more amazed and frightened than grieved: they whispered together and walked on tiptoe. Madame R—— sat with her head leaning on her hands, as though pondering, and did not say a single word.

In that drawing-room, on that sofa I had waited for her, listened to the sick man moaning and the drunken servant swearing. Now everything was so black.... In the midst of funereal surroundings and the smell of incense, I was haunted by vague and gloomy recollections of words and minutes of which I still could not think without tenderness.

Her grief gradually subsided and she looked more resolutely at her position; then, little by little, other thoughts began to light up her careworn and despondent face. Her eyes rested upon me with a sort of agitated inquiry, as though she were waiting for something ... a question ... an answer....

I said nothing—and she, frightened, alarmed, began to feel doubts.

Then I saw that her husband had in reality been an excuse for me in my own eyes—love had burnt itself out in me. It was not that I had no feeling for her, far from it, but the feeling was not what she wanted. I was now occupied by a different order of ideas, and that outburst of passion seemed to have possessed me simply to make another feeling clear to myself. Only one thing I can say in my defence—I was perfectly sincere in my infatuation.

While I had lost my head and did not know what to do, while with cowardly weakness I was waiting for the chances of time and circumstance, time and circumstance complicated my position still further.

Tyufyaev, seeing the helpless position of a young and beautiful widow left without any support in a remote town in which she was a stranger, like the true ‘father of the province,’ showed her the tenderest solicitude. At first we all thought that he felt real sympathy for her. But soon Madame R—— observed with horror that his attentions were by no means so simple. Two or three dissolute governors before him had kept Vyatka ladies as mistresses, and Tyufyaev, following their example, lost no time but at once began making declarations of love to her. Madame R—— of course responded with cold disdain and mockery to his elderly blandishments. Tyufyaev would not recognise himself rebuffed, but persisted in his insolent attentions. Seeing, however, that he was making little progress, he gave her to understand that her children’s future lay in his hands, that without his assistance she could not place them in schools at government expense, and that he on his side would not exert himself in her favour if she did not adopt a less chilly attitude to him. The insulted woman sprang up like a wild beast wounded. ‘Kindly leave my house and don’t dare to set foot in it again,’ she said, pointing to the door.

‘Ough, what a temper you have got!’ said Tyufyaev, trying to turn things off with a jest.

‘Pyotr, Pyotr,’ she shouted in the entry, and the terrified Tyufyaev, fearing a public scandal, abashed and humiliated, fled to his carriage, gasping with fury.

In the evening Madame R—— told Vitberg and me all that had happened. Vitberg at once realised that the Lovelace put to flight and insulted would not leave the poor woman in peace; Tyufyaev’s character was pretty well known to us all. Vitberg resolved at all costs to save her.

Persecutions soon followed. The petition with regard to the children was presented in such a way that refusal was inevitable. The landlord and the shopkeepers demanded payment with remarkable insistence. God knows what might not be expected; the man who had done Petrovsky to death in a madhouse was not to be trifled with.

Though burdened with an immense family and weighed down by poverty, Vitberg did not hesitate for one minute, but invited Madame R—— to move with her children into his house two or three days after his wife’s arrival in Vyatka. In his house Madame R—— was safe, so great was the moral power of this exile. His inflexible will, his noble appearance, his fearless words, his scornful smile were dreaded even by the Vyatka Shemyaka.[8]

I lived in a wing apart in the same house and dined at Vitberg’s table, and so here we were under the same roof, just when we ought to have been seas apart.

In this close proximity she soon saw that there was no bringing back the past.

Why had she met me, at that time so unstable? She might have been happy, she deserved to be happy. The sorrowful past was over, a new life of love and harmony was so possible for her! Poor woman! Was it my fault that this storm-cloud of love which had swooped down upon me so irresistibly, so ardently, intoxicated me, drew me on, and then melted away?

I lived in a state of anxious perturbation. Perplexed, foreseeing trouble, and dissatisfied with myself, again I turned to dissipation and sought distraction in noise, was vexed at finding it and vexed at not finding it, and awaited a few lines from Natalie as for a breath of pure air in the midst of sultry heat. The gentle image of the child on the verge of womanhood rose brighter and brighter above all this ferment of passion. My outburst of passion for Madame R—— made my own heart clear to me and revealed its secret.

More and more absorbed by my feeling for my far-away cousin, I had not clearly analysed the sentiment that bound me to her. I was used to the feeling and did not watch closely to see whether it had changed or not.

My letters became more and more troubled; on the one hand I felt deeply not only the wrong I had done Madame R——, but the fresh wrong I did her in the lying of which I was guilty by my silence. It seemed to me that I had fallen, that I was unworthy of any other love ... while my love was growing and growing.

The name of _sister_ began to fret me, affection now was not enough for me, that gentle feeling seemed cold. Her love was apparent in every line of her letters, but that did not satisfy me. I wanted not only love but the very word itself, and I wrote: ‘I am going to put a strange question to you. Do you believe that the feeling you have for me is only affection? Do you believe that the feeling I have for you is only affection? I don’t believe it.’

‘You seem somewhat troubled,’ she answered. ‘I knew your letter frightened you much more than it frightened me. Set your mind at rest, dear, it has changed absolutely nothing in me, it could not make me love you more, or less.’

But the word had been uttered: ‘The mist has vanished,’ she writes, ‘all is clear and bright again.’

With unclouded joy she gave herself up to the feeling that had been given its name; her letters are one youthful song of love rising from a childish whisper to lyrical heights.

‘Perhaps at this moment,’ she writes, ‘you are sitting in your study, not writing, not reading, but pensively smoking a cigar, and your eyes are fixed on the vague distance and you have no answer for the greeting of any one who comes in. Where are your thoughts? What are you seeing? Do not answer, let them come to me....’

‘Let us be childish, let us fix an hour for both of us to be in the open air, an hour in which we can both be sure that nothing separates us but distance. At eight o’clock in the evening you, too, are surely free? Or else I go out as just now upon the steps—and come back at once thinking that you are indoors.’

‘Looking at your letters, at your portrait, thinking of my letters, of my bracelet, I wished I could skip a century and see what will be their fate. The things which have been for us holy relics, which have healed us, body and soul, with which we have talked and which have to some extent replaced us to each other in absence; all these weapons with which we have defended ourselves from others, from the blows of fate, from ourselves, what will they be when we are gone, will their virtue, their soul remain in them, will they awaken, will they warm some other heart, will they tell the story of us, of our sufferings, of our love, will they win one tear? How sad I feel when I imagine that your portrait will one day hang unknown in some one’s study, or a child perhaps will break the glass and efface the features.’

My letters were not like this[9]; in the midst of full, enthusiastic love there is a note of bitter vexation with myself and repentance; the dumb reproaches of Madame R—— were gnawing at my heart and troubling the clear radiance of my feeling; I seemed to myself a liar, and yet I had not been lying.

How could I acknowledge the position? How was I to tell Madame R—— in January that I had made a mistake in August when I spoke of my love? How could she believe in the truth of my story—a new love would have been easier to understand, treachery would have been simpler. How the far-away image of the absent could enter into conflict with the present, how another love could have crossed that mountain barrier and become stronger and more recognised—that I did not understand myself, but I felt that it was all true.

Moreover, Madame R—— herself with the elusive agility of a lizard slipped away from any serious explanation; she had an inkling of danger, was lost in conjecture, and at the same time was avoiding the truth. It was as though she had a foreboding that my words would reveal terrible facts, after knowing which all would be over, and she cut short all talk at the point where it was becoming dangerous.

At first she was looking about her; for a few days she thought she had found her rival in a charming, lively young German girl whom I liked as a child, with whom I was at ease just because it had never entered her head to flirt with me, nor mine to flirt with her. A week later she perceived that Paulina was not at all dangerous. But I cannot go further without saying a word about the latter.

In the government dispensary at Vyatka there was a German chemist, and there was nothing strange about that, but what is strange is that his assistant was Russian and was called Bolman. With this latter I became acquainted; he was married to the daughter of a Vyatka government clerk, a lady who had the longest, thickest, and most beautiful hair I have ever seen. The dispenser himself, Ferdinand Rulkovius, was at first absent, and Bolman and I used to drink together various ‘fizzing drinks’ and artistic cordials compounded from the pharmacy. The dispenser was away in Reval, there he made the acquaintance of a young girl and offered her his hand; the girl, who hardly knew him, married him rashly, as a girl generally does, and a German girl in particular; she had no notion even into what wilds he was taking her. But when after the wedding she had to set off, she was overcome with terror and despair. To comfort his bride, the dispenser invited a young girl of seventeen, a distant relation of his wife, to go with them to Vyatka. She, even more rashly, with no idea of what was meant by Vyatka, consented. Neither of the German girls spoke a word of Russian, and in Vyatka there were not four men who spoke German. Even the teacher of that language in the high school did not know it, a fact which surprised me so much that I actually ventured to ask him how he managed to teach it.

‘With the grammar,’ he answered, ‘and with dialogues.’

He further explained that he was really a teacher of mathematics, but that, as there was no post vacant, he was meanwhile teaching German, and that he received, however, only half the salary.[10] The Germans were dying of ennui, and seeing a man who, if he could not speak German well, could at least do so intelligently, were highly delighted, regaled me with coffee and some sort of ‘_Kalteschale_,’ told me all their secrets, their hopes and their wishes, and within two days called me their friend and still more hospitably treated me to sweet cakes and pastries flavoured with spices. Both were fairly well educated, that is, knew Schiller by heart, played the piano, and sang German songs. There the likeness between them ended. The dispenser’s wife was a tall, fair, lymphatic woman, very good-looking but sleepy and listless; she was extremely good-natured and, indeed, with her physique it would have been hard to be anything else. Being convinced once for all that her husband was her husband, she loved him quietly and steadily, looked after the kitchen and the linen, read novels in her leisure moments, and in due time successfully bore the chemist a daughter with white eyebrows and eyelashes and a scrofulous constitution.

Her friend, a short, dark brunette, vigorously healthy, with big black eyes and an independent air, was a beauty of the sturdy peasant type; a great deal of energy was apparent in her words and movements, and when at times the dispenser, a dull, close-fisted fellow, made somewhat discourteous observations to his wife, while she listened with a smile on her lips and a tear on her eyelash, Paulina would flush crimson and give the offending husband such a look that he would instantly subside, pretend to be very busy, and go off to his laboratory to pound and mix all sorts of nasty things for the preservation of the health of the Vyatka officials.

I liked the simple-hearted girl who knew how to stand up for herself, and I do not know how it happened, but it was to her I first talked of my love and translated some of Natalie’s letters. Only one who has lived for long years with people who are completely alien know how precious are these confidences of the heart. I rarely talk of my feelings, but there are moments, even now, when the longing to express myself becomes insufferable, and at that time I was four-and-twenty, and I had only just realised my love. I could bear separation, I could have borne silence too, but, meeting with another child on the threshold of womanhood, in whom everything was so unaffectedly simple, I could not refrain from giving away my secret. And how grateful she was for my confidence, and how much good she did me!

Vitberg’s always serious conversation sometimes wearied me; fretted by my difficult relations with Madame R——, I could not be at my ease with her. Often in the evening I used to go off to Paulina, read foolish stories aloud to her, listen to her ringing laugh and to her singing, especially for my benefit, ‘Das Mädchen aus der Fremde’—by which she and I understood another ‘maiden from a strange land,’ and the clouds were dissipated, there was an unfeigned gaiety, an untroubled serenity in my heart, and I would go home in peace when the dispenser, after stirring his last mixture and preparing his last ointment, began boring me with absurd political inquiries—not, however, before I had drunk a ‘draught’ of his mixing and eaten the herring salad mixed by the little white hands _der Frau Apothekerin_.

* * * * *

Madame R—— was wretched, while with pitiful weakness I waited for time to bring some chance solution and prolonged the half-deception. A thousand times I longed to go to Madame R——, to throw myself at her feet, to tell her everything, to face her wrath, her contempt ... but it was not indignation that I feared—I should have been glad of it—I feared her tears. One must have endured many evil experiences to be able to bear a woman’s tears, to be able to feel doubts while they trickle still warm over the flushed cheek. Besides, her tears would have been sincere.

A good deal of time passed like this. Rumours began to reach me that my exile might soon come to an end. The day no longer seemed so remote on which I should fling myself into a chaise and dash off to Moscow, familiar faces hovered before my imagination and among them, foremost of them, the cherished features; but scarcely did I abandon myself to these dreams when the pale, mournful figure of Madame R—— would rise up on the other side with tear-stained eyes, full of pain and reproach, and my joy was troubled: I felt sorry, terribly sorry for her.

I could no longer remain in a false position, and plucking up all my courage I made up my mind to get out of it. I wrote her a full confession. Warmly, openly, I told her the whole truth. Next day she said she was ill and did not leave her room. All the sufferings of a criminal, the fears that he will be unmasked, I passed through on that day. She had another attack of her nervous stupor—I dared not visit her.

I wanted my repentance to be complete. I shut myself up with Vitberg in his study and told him the whole story. At first he was astonished, then he listened to me not as a judge but as a friend, did not worry me with questions, did not preach to me with stale morality, but devoted himself to helping me find means for softening the blow—he alone could do that. His affection was very warm for those of whom he was fond. I had been afraid of his rigorous morals, but his affection for me and for Madame R—— completely outweighed that. Yes, in his hands I could leave the unhappy woman to whose hard lot I had given the finishing blow, in him she found strong moral support and authority. She respected him like a father.

In the morning Matvey gave me a note. I had scarcely slept all night. With a trembling hand I broke the seal. She wrote gently, in a noble and deeply mournful spirit; the flowers of my eloquence had not concealed the snake beneath them, in her words of resignation could be heard the stifled moan of a wounded heart, the cry of pain, repressed by a supreme effort. She blessed me on my way to my new life, wished me happiness, called Natalie a sister, and held out a pleading hand to us for forgetfulness of the past and friendship for the future—as though she had been to blame!

Sobbing, I read her letter over and over again. _Qual cuor tradisti!_

Later on I met her. She gave me her hand affectionately, but we felt awkward; each of us had left something unsaid, each of us tried to avoid touching on something.

A year ago I heard of her death.

When I left Vyatka I was for a long time worried by the thought of Madame R——. As I regained my composure I set to work to write a story of which she was the heroine. I described a young nobleman of the period of Catherine who has abandoned the woman who loves him and married another. She pines away and dies. The news of her death is a heavy blow to him, he becomes gloomy and pensive, and at last goes out of his mind. His wife, an ideal of gentleness and self-sacrifice, after trying everything, leads him in one of his quieter moments to the Dyevitchy Convent and kneels down with him at the unhappy woman’s grave, begging her forgiveness and her intervention. From the windows of the convent the words of a prayer reach them, soft feminine voices sing of forgiveness—and the young man recovers. The story was a failure. At the time when I wrote it Madame R—— had no thought of coming to Moscow, and the only man who guessed that there was anything between us was the ‘ubiquitous German,’ K. I. Sonnenberg. After my mother’s death in 1851, we had no news from him. In 1860 a tourist, describing his acquaintance with Karl Ivanovitch, now a man of eighty, showed me a letter from him. In a postscript the old man told him of the death of Madame R—— and said that my brother had had her buried in the Novo Dyevitchy Convent!

I need hardly say that neither of them knew anything about my story.