Chapter V: Golovin page 301 (3)

We were again alone, but this was not the past over again—everything bore the traces of the storm. Faith and doubt, weariness and irritation, the feeling of annoyance and indignation were a torture, but what was most fretting of all was that the thread of life was broken, that precious carelessness which had made life so easy was gone, nothing was left sacred. Since what had been had been, nothing was impossible. Thoughts of the past terrified me for the future. How many times we came in to dinner alone in the evening and, both scarcely touching anything and not uttering a word, got up from the table wiping away a tear, and seeing kind Rocca, with an angry face, shake his head as he carried away the dishes.

Idle days, sleepless nights ... misery—misery. I drank spirits of all sorts, cognac, old Bellet, drank at night alone and drank by day with Engelson—and that in the climate of Nice. The Russian weakness of drowning sorrow in drink is by no means so bad as is said. Heavy sleep is better than heavy sleeplessness, and the headache of the morning after is better than deadly gloom on an empty stomach.

Herwegh sent me a letter. I sent it back without reading it. He took to writing to Natalie, letter after letter. He wrote once more to me—I sent the letter back. I looked on gloomily at this. That time should have been a time of thorough testing, of peace and of freedom from external influences. What sort of peace, what sort of freedom could there be with letters coming from a man who posed as being frantic and threatened not only suicide but the most fearful crimes? Thus, for instance, he wrote that he had moments of frenzy when he longed to cut his children’s throats, to fling their corpses out of the window and to appear before us bathed in their blood. In another, he wrote that he should come to kill himself at my feet, and say: ‘See to what you have brought the man who loved you so!’ Side by side with this, he kept imploring Natalie to reconcile him with me, to take everything on herself, and to suggest that he should come as Sasha’s tutor.

A dozen times he wrote of his loaded pistol; Natalie still believed it all. He only asked her blessing on his death. I persuaded her to write to him that she at last agreed, that she was convinced there was nothing for it but death. He answered that her words came _too late_, that he was now in a different mood and felt he had not strength enough to do it, but that, forsaken by all, he would go away to Egypt. This letter did him great damage in Natalie’s eyes.

After that, Orsini came from Genoa, and he told us, laughing, how the husband and wife had tried to commit suicide.... Learning that Herwegh was in Genoa, Orsini went to see them and met him walking along the sea-front. Learning from him that his wife was at home, Orsini went to see her. She immediately explained to him that she had made up her mind to starve herself to death, that this form of suicide had been selected for him by himself, but that she wished to share his fate, and she besought Orsini not to desert Horace and Ada.

Orsini was petrified with astonishment.

‘We have touched nothing for thirty hours,’ Emma went on; ‘do persuade him to eat something, save the great poet for humanity,’ and she sobbed.

Orsini went out on to the verandah and at once returned with the joyful tidings that Herwegh was standing in the corner eating _salmis_. Emma, overjoyed, rang the bell and ordered a basin of soup. At that moment her husband came in gloomily, without a word of the _salmis_, but the tell-tale basin was standing there. ‘Georg,’ said Emma, ‘I was so delighted, hearing from Orsini that you were eating, that I, too, decided to ask for soup.’

‘I felt so sick, I took a little piece of _salmis_—but that’s of no consequence; death by starvation is most painful, I shall poison myself.’

His wife raised her eyes to the ceiling and glanced at Orsini as though to say: ‘You see, there is no saving him.’ He, too, had some soup.

Orsini is dead, but there are several witnesses of his story living, for instance, Karl Vogt, Mordini, and Charles Edmond. These antics made it very hard for Natalie. She was humiliated through him, I was humiliated through him, and she felt this poignantly.

In the spring Herwegh went away to Zurich and sent his wife to Nice (another outrageous indelicacy). I longed, after all that had happened, to rest. I took advantage of my Swiss naturalisation and went to Paris and Switzerland with Engelson.

Natalie’s letters were calm, her soul seemed to be more at ease.

On the way home I met Sazonov in Geneva. Over a bottle of wine, he asked me, with the most absolute nonchalance, how things were going now between my wife and me.

‘As always.’

‘Well, I know the whole story, and I am asking you from friendly sympathy.’

I looked at him with a shudder of horror; he noticed nothing. What was the meaning of it? I had reckoned on its all being a secret, and here, all at once, a man speaks to me of it over a glass of wine as though it were the most ordinary everyday affair.

‘What have you heard, and from whom?’

‘I have heard the whole story from Herwegh himself—and I tell you openly, I don’t think you are right at all. Why don’t you let your wife go, or else leave her yourself?—upon my soul, it’s such weakness—you could begin a new fresh life....’

‘But what makes you imagine that she wants to go? You can’t believe that I am able to _let_ her go or to prevent her.’

‘You coerce her morally, of course, not physically, by your words, your distress. I am very glad, though, to find you much more serene than I expected—and I don’t care to be open by halves with you. Herwegh left your house, in the first place, because he’s a coward, and is simply terrified of you, and in the second, because your wife promised him to come to Switzerland as soon as you were calmer.’

‘That’s a foul lie!’ I shouted.

‘That’s what he told me, I give you my word of honour on it.’

When I got home to the hotel, I flung myself, sick and shattered, on the bed, without undressing, in a state bordering on madness or death—did I believe it or not? I do not know, but I cannot say that I entirely disbelieved what Sazonov had told me.

And so, I repeated to myself, this is how our poetical life is ending, in deceit, and incidentally in a European scandal ... ha, ha, ha! They pity me, they spare me from compassion, they give me time to rest, like a soldier who is taken half-way through the flogging to the hospital, when his pulse is weak, and zealously tended that he may have the other half when he is stronger. I was insulted, outraged, humiliated.

In that state of mind I wrote at night a letter—my letter must have borne traces of frenzy, despair, and distrust. I repent, I bitterly repent that insult from afar—that wicked letter.

Natalie answered in words of black gloom. ‘I were better dead,’ she said; ‘your faith is shattered, every word now will call back all the past to you. What am I to do, and how can I ever convince you? I weep and weep.’

Herwegh had lied.

Her following letters were briefly mournful; she was sorry for me, she wanted to heal my wounds, and what must she herself have been suffering!... Why did that man turn up to repeat me that lie ... and why was there no other there to stop my letter, written in a fit of criminal fury?

2

TURIN. OCEANO NOX

On the night between the 7th and 8th of July, between one and two in the morning, I was sitting on the step of the Carignano Palace in Turin; the square was completely empty, at a little distance from me a beggar was dozing, and a sentinel was walking slowly up and down, whistling a tune from some opera and jingling with his gun.... It was a hot, soft night, saturated with the scent of the scirocco.

I felt extraordinarily happy, as I had not for ages; I felt again that I was still young and full of energy, that I had friends and convictions, that I was as full of love as I had been some thirteen years before. My heart was beating as I had not felt it for years; it was beating as on that March day in 1838, when I stood wrapped in my cloak under the lamp-post waiting for Ketscher in Povarsky Street.

Now, too, I was awaiting a meeting, a meeting with the same woman, and awaited it perhaps with even more love, though sad and gloomy notes were mingled with it; but on that night they were hardly audible. After the frantic crisis of bitterness and despair that had come over me on my way through Geneva, I felt better. Natalie’s gentle letters, filled with sadness, tears, pain, and love, had worked my healing. She wrote that she was coming from Nice to Turin to meet me, that she longed to spend a few days in Turin. She was right: we needed to look into each other once more alone, to wash the blood from each other’s wounds, to wipe away our tears and to find out once for all whether there was still happiness for us together, and all that in solitude, without the children even, and in another place too, not in the surroundings where the furniture, the very walls, might at the wrong moment bring reminder, whisper some half-forgotten word.

The posting-chaise was to arrive between one and two from the direction of the Col di Tenda; I was waiting for it at the gloomy Carignano Palace—it was to turn the corner not far from it.

I had arrived on the morning of the same day from Paris, through Mont Cenis to the Hotel Feder. I was given a large, lofty, rather handsomely furnished sitting-room and bedroom. I liked its holiday air, it was in keeping. I ordered a little supper for us and went to wander about the town, waiting for the night.

When the chaise drove up to the posting-station, Natalie recognised me. ‘You here!’ she said, nodding to me at the window. I opened the door, and she threw herself on my neck with such rapturous joy, with such an expression of love and thankfulness, that words from her letter flashed like lightning into my mind: ‘I come back like a ship to its own haven, after storms, shipwrecks, and misfortunes—broken but saved.’

One glance, two or three words, were enough ... all was explained and understood; I took her little travelling-bag, threw it on a stick over my back, gave her my arm, and we walked gaily along the empty streets to the hotel. There every one was asleep except the porter. On the table (laid for supper) stood two unlighted candles, bread, fruit, and a decanter of wine. I did not want to wake any one; we lighted the candles and, sitting down to an empty table, glanced at each other and at once both thought of our days at Vladimir.

She had on a white muslin dress or blouse, put on for the journey on account of the blazing heat, and at that first interview, when I came from exile, she had been in white, too, and her wedding dress had been white. Though her face wore deep imprints of violent agitations, anxieties, sufferings, and reflections, its expression recalled her features at that time.

And we ourselves were the same, only now we gave each other our hands, not as conceited young creatures, self-confident and proud in our faith in ourselves, in our faith in each other, and in our fate being somehow exceptional, but like veterans tempered in the struggle for life, who had tested not only our strength, but our weakness too, and had only just come safely from terrible blows and irretrievable mistakes.... Starting on the road anew, we shared the painful burden of the past together, with no settling of accounts.

We had to move forward with a humbler step for that burden, but our aching hearts still kept safe within all that was needed for settled mature happiness. Through our horror and dull agony we had seen the more clearly how inseparably years and circumstances, children and life in foreign lands, had welded us together.

At this meeting all was over, the broken threads grew together more firmly than ever, as sometimes parts of a broken bone will grow together, not without leaving a scar. The tears of sorrow, not yet dry in our eyes, united us by a new bond—the feeling of deep compassion for each other. I saw her conflict, her agony, I saw how exhausted she was. She saw me weak, unhappy, humiliated and humiliating others, ready for sacrifice and ready for crime.

We had paid too dear a price for each other not to know what we were worth, and what we had cost each other. ‘In Turin,’ I wrote at the beginning of 1852, ‘was our second wedding; it meant perhaps something deeper and more significant than the first, it was accompanied with full consciousness of all the responsibility which we took up anew in regard to each other, still in sight of terrible events....’

Love by some miracle survived the blow which might have destroyed it.

The last dark clouds passed further and further away, for hours we talked ... as though we had been separated for years; it was not till long after bright streaks of daylight had filtered through the shutters that we got up from the empty table....

Three days later we drove home together through the Riviera to Nice. We caught a glimpse of Genoa, a glimpse of Mentone, where we had so often been, and in such a different frame of mind, a glimpse of Monaco, thrusting its velvety grass and velvety sand into the sea; they all greeted us gaily, like old friends after a separation; and here were the little vineyards, the rose-bushes, the orange-trees, and the sea lying stretched before the house, and the children playing on the beach.... Now they had seen us and rushed to meet us, we were at home.

I am thankful to destiny for those days and for the four months which followed them. They made a glorious ending to personal life for me. I thank her, the old heathen, for crowning the doomed victims with the rich wreath of autumn flowers and strewing their path, if only for the time, with her poppy of forgetfulness and fragrance!

The differences that parted us had vanished, the barriers had fallen. Was not this the hand which had lain in mine through my whole life, were not these the same eyes though sometimes dimmed with tears? ‘Be comforted, sister, friend, comrade, all is over—and we the same as in our young, bright, holy years!’

‘After sufferings, you, perhaps, know how great, have come some minutes full of bliss; all the cherished beliefs of childhood, of youth, have not only come true, but have passed through terrible ordeals, losing neither their freshness nor their fragrance, and have blossomed with new splendour and new power. I have never been so happy as now,’ she wrote to her friend in Russia.

Of course, there was a sediment left from the past which could not be touched with impunity, something broken within, some lightly slumbering fear and pain.

The past is not a proof that can be corrected, but a guillotine knife; after it has once fallen there is much that cannot grow together again, and there is always something left that cannot be set right. It remains as though cast in metal, distinct, unalterable, dark as bronze. Men as a rule forget only what is not worth remembering, or what they do not understand. If only a man could forget two or three incidents, such and such happenings, such a day, such a word, he would be strong and young and bold, but burdened with them he sinks like a key to the bottom. One need not be a Macbeth to meet the ghost of Banquo; ghosts are not criminal judges, nor pangs of conscience, but the happenings that can never be obliterated from the mind.

But one ought not to forget; that is a weakness, that is a falsity of a sort; the past has its rights, it is fact, one has to get over it and not to forget it—and we moved towards that, keeping step.

Sometimes it would happen that a trivial word, uttered by outsiders, or some object that caught the eye, would pass like a razor over the heart, and blood would flow, and the pang would be insufferable, but at the same instant I would meet eyes full of alarm, looking at me with infinite distress and saying: ‘Yes, you are right, it can’t be helped, but——’ and I tried to chase away the gathering clouds.

Holy time of reconciliation, I think of it through my tears....

No, not reconciliation, that is not the word. Words are like ready-made clothes that fit all people of the same height up to a certain point and are equally unbecoming to every one. We had no need to be reconciled, we had never quarrelled; we had suffered for each other, but we had never drifted apart. At the blackest moments a sort of indissoluble unity, of which neither doubted, and a deep respect for each other remained intact. We were more like people recovering after a high fever; the delirium had passed, we knew each other again as we looked with dim and troubled eyes. The pain we had been through was fresh in the memory, and we were still conscious of exhaustion, but we knew that all the trouble was over and that we were safely on shore again.

An idea, that had several times occurred to Natalie before, absorbed her more and more now. She wanted to write the story of her heart. She was dissatisfied with the beginning and burnt the pages; only one long letter and one brief page have remained.... From these one can judge what has been lost.... Reading them almost terrifies one, one feels that one is touching a warm and suffering heart, one seems to hear the whisper of those unvoiced secrets, for ever hidden, and scarcely awakening into consciousness. In those lines one can trace the anguish of struggle leading up to new strength of spirit and of pain leading up to thought. If this work had not been cruelly interrupted, it would have been a precious document, filling the gap left by the evasive silence of woman and the haughty patronage of her by man. But the most senseless blow broke over our heads and shattered everything for ever.

* * * * *

_Dans une mer sans fond, par une nuit sans lune, sous l’aveugle
océan à jamais enfouis._ V. HUGO.

So ended the summer of 1851. We were quite alone. My mother, with Kolya and Spielmann, had gone to Paris to stay with Marya Kasparovna. We spent our days quietly with the children. It seemed as though all our troubles were behind us.

In November we received a letter from my mother to tell us she was setting off immediately, then another from Marseilles to say that next day, the 15th of November, they would take the steamer and come to us. During her absence we had moved into another house, also on the sea, in the suburb of St. Hélène. In this house, which had a large garden, there was a room for my mother; we decorated it with flowers, our cook went with Sasha to get Chinese lanterns, and we hung them about the walls and trees. Everything was ready. From three o’clock in the afternoon the children watched from the verandah; at last, between five and six, a dark coil of smoke could be discerned on the horizon and a few minutes later the steamer, too, could be seen, a motionless point growing larger and larger. All was bustle in the house. François ran down to the harbour, I got into the carriage and drove there.

When I reached the harbour the steamer had already arrived, boats were waiting for the permission of quarantine authorities for the passengers to land. One of them came up to the landing-stage. François was standing in it.

‘How is this?’ I asked, ‘you are back again already?’

He did not answer. I glanced at him and my heart sank; his face was livid, and he was trembling all over.

‘What is it?’ I asked, ‘are you ill?’

‘No,’ he answered, avoiding my eyes, ‘but our people have not come.’

‘Haven’t come?’

‘Something happened with the steamer, so some of the passengers haven’t come.’

I hastily got into a boat and told them to push off at once.

On the steamer I was met with a sort of ominous consideration and complete silence. The captain himself was waiting for me; all this was so unusual that I felt something awful was coming. The captain told me that between the island of Hyères and the mainland the steamer on which my mother was sailing had run into another vessel and sunk to the bottom, that most of the passengers had been picked up by him and by another steamer that was passing by. ‘I have only two young girls of your party,’ he said, and he led me to the upper deck—every one stepped aside with the same gloomy silence. I followed senselessly without even asking a question. My mother’s niece, who had been staying with her, a tall slender girl, was lying on deck with wet and dishevelled hair; beside her was the maid who looked after Kolya. Seeing me, the young girl tried to sit up, to say something, but could not; she turned away sobbing.

‘What has happened? Where are they?’ I asked, taking the maid’s hand with a sick dread.

‘We know nothing,’ she answered. ‘The steamer sank, we were pulled out of the water half dead. An Englishwoman gave us her clothes to change into.’

The captain looked mournfully at me, shook my hand and said: ‘You must not despair; go to Hyères, perhaps you will find some of them there.’

Leaving Engelson and François to look after the girls, I drove home in a sort of stupefaction; everything in my head was confused and shuddering, I only wished that our house had been a thousand miles away. But soon I caught a gleam between the trees, and more and more; it was the lanterns lighted by the children. At our gate stood our servants, Tata, and Natalie, with Olga in her arms.

‘What, you alone?’ Natalie asked me calmly. ‘Why, you might have brought Kolya, at least.’

‘They are not there,’ I said, ‘something happened to their steamer. They had to change on to another, this one did not take them all. Luise is here.’

‘They are not here!’ cried Natalie, ‘and only now I see you, your eyes are dim, your face is working. For God’s sake, what has happened?’

‘I am going to look for them in Hyères.’

She shook her head and added: ‘Not here, not here!’ Then without a word she pressed her forehead against my shoulder. We walked up the avenue without saying a word. I led her into the dining-room; as we passed, I whispered to Rocca: ‘For God’s sake, the lanterns’; he understood me and rushed to put them out. In the dining-room everything was ready—a bottle of wine in ice, a nosegay of flowers before my mother’s place, new toys before Kolya’s.

The terrible news quickly spread about the town, and our house began to be filled with friends, such as Vogt, Tessier, Hoetsky and Orsini, and even complete strangers; some wanted to find out what had happened, others to show their sympathy, others to give all sorts of advice, mostly foolish. But I will not be ungrateful; the sympathy shown me then in Nice touched me deeply. In face of these senseless blows of destiny, men wake up and feel their common bonds.

I decided to go to Hyères that same night. Natalie wanted to go with me; I persuaded her to remain behind; besides, there had been an abrupt change in the weather, the mistral was blowing cold as ice, and it was raining heavily. I had to get a permit to go to France across the Var bridge; I went to Léon Pilet, the French Consul; he was at the opera; I went to his box with Hoetsky. Pilet, who had already heard something of what had happened, said to me: ‘I have no right to give you permission, but there are circumstances in which it would be a crime to refuse. I give you on my own responsibility a permit to cross the frontier. Will you go for it to the Consulate in half an hour’s time?’

At the entrance to the theatre about a dozen of the people who had been with us were waiting for me. I told them that Léon Pilet would give the permit.

‘You go home and don’t trouble about anything,’ they said to me on all sides; ‘the rest shall be done; we will take the permit, we will get the _visa_ at the office, we will order the post-horses.’

My landlord, who was present, ran to get a carriage; an hotel-keeper offered his free of charge.

At eleven o’clock in the evening I set off in the pouring rain. It was an awful night; the squalls of wind were sometimes so violent that the horses stopped; the sea that had buried them only that day beat and roared almost unseen in the darkness. We mounted the Esterel, the rain changed into snow, the horses stumbled and almost fell on the slippery ice. Several times the driver, exhausted by his efforts, tried to warm himself; I offered him my flask of brandy and, promising him double fares, besought him to make haste.

What for? Did I believe in the possibility of finding any of them, of any one being saved? It was hard to suppose it after all I had heard—but to find out, to look at the very spot, to find something, some rag, to see an eye-witness even.... One needed to be convinced that there was no hope. I needed to be doing something, to be away from home, to come to myself.

While they were changing horses at Esterel, I got out of the carriage; my heart ached, and I almost sobbed as I looked round. It was near the very tavern where we had spent a night in 1847. I remembered the huge trees which formed a canopy over it; the same view lay stretched before it, only then it had been lighted up by the rising sun, while now it was hidden behind grey clouds, unlike Italy, and in places was white with snow.

I vividly recalled that time with every minute detail; I remembered how our hostess had regaled us with a hare, the highness of which was disguised by a terrible quantity of garlic, how bats had flown about the bedroom, how with the help of our Luise I drove them out with a towel, and how for the first time we felt the breath of the warm southern air....

At the time I wrote: ‘From Avignon one feels and sees the south. For a man who has always lived in the north, the first contact with a southern landscape is filled with solemn joy, one feels younger, one longs to sing, dance and weep; everything is so brilliant, so light, so gay, so luxuriant. After Avignon we had to cross the Maritime Alps. We went up the Esterel by moonlight; when we began to go down again the sun was rising, the mountain chains stood out from the morning mist, the rays of the sun threw a dazzling red light upon the snowy peaks; around was vivid green, flowers, sharply-cut shadows, immense trees and gloomy rocks, covered here and there with poor and rough vegetation; the air was intoxicating, extraordinarily limpid, refreshing, and resonant, our words and the notes of the birds sounded louder than usual, and all at once at a little curve in the road there was a fringe of brilliance round the mountains, and there, quivering with the flash of silver, lay the Mediterranean.’[18]

And now, after four years, I was in the same place again.

We could not reach Hyères before night; I went at once to the Commissaire of Police; with him and a brigadier of gendarmes I went first to the Commissaire of the Port. He had all sorts of things that had been saved; I found nothing among them. Then we went to the hospital. One of the victims was dying; the others told me they had seen an elderly woman, a child of five, and with him a young man with a fair bushy beard ... that they had seen them at the very last minute, and that therefore they, too, had gone to the bottom like every one else. But here again one asked oneself how was it these people were alive, though they too, like Luise and the maid, had no clear idea how they were saved.

The bodies that had been found were lying in the crypt of a nunnery. We went there from the hospital; the Sisters of Mercy met us and conducted us, lighting our way with church candles. In the crypt stood a row of closed boxes, each containing one body. The Commissaire ordered them to be opened; it appeared that they were nailed up. The brigadier sent a gendarme for a chisel and told him to break open one lid after the other.

This examination of the bodies was insufferably painful. The Commissaire had a little book in his hand, and in an official tone he asked at the opening of each box: ‘Do you testify in our presence that this body is not known to you?’ I nodded. The Commissaire made a mark with his pencil and, turning to the gendarme, ordered him to close it again. We passed on to the next. The gendarme lifted the lid; with a sort of terror I glanced at the dead and was, as it were, relieved when I met unfamiliar features, though in reality it was still more horrible to think that all three were lost without a trace, lying forsaken at the bottom of the sea, tossed by the waves. A body without a grave, without a tomb, is more dreadful than any burial, and we had not even our dead.

I found no one. One body impressed me; a beautiful woman of twenty, in Provençal holiday dress; her bosom was bare (she had had a baby in her arms, carried away, of course, by the waves) and a stream of milk was still trickling from her bosom. Her face was utterly unchanged, the brown sunburn made her look as though living.

The brigadier could not help saying: ‘What a beauty!’ The Commissaire made no comment; the gendarme, as he covered her, observed to the brigadier: ‘I knew her, she was a peasant woman living not far from the town, she was going to Grasse to her husband. Well, he’ll have to wait.’

My mother, my Kolya, and our good Spielmann had vanished without a trace. Nothing was left of them; among the articles saved there was not a scrap belonging to them. There could be no doubt of their death. All the saved were either in Hyères or on the steamer which had brought Luise. The captain had made up the tale to comfort me. I was told in Hyères of an elderly man who had lost his whole family, and would not stay in the hospital, but went off somewhere on foot, with no money, in a state bordering on madness; and of two English girls who had been sent to the English Consul—they had lost father, mother, and brother.

It was approaching daybreak; I ordered the horses. Before setting off, the waiter took me to a part of the shore that jutted out into the sea, and showed me from there the place of the shipwreck. The sea was still boiling and tossing, grey and muddy-looking from the storm of the previous day; in the distance, in one place, there was a peculiar patch, as though of a thicker, transparent liquid. ‘The steamer was taking a cargo of oil, you see it is floating, that’s where the accident happened.’ That floating patch was all.

‘And is it deep there?’

‘It must be one hundred and eighty metres.’

I stood a little; the morning was very cold, particularly by the sea. The mistral was still blowing, the sky was covered with the clouds of a Russian autumn. Farewell!... A hundred and eighty metres deep, in a floating patch of oil.

‘Nul ne sait votre sort, pauvres têtes perdues,
Vous roulerez à travers les sombres étendues,
Heurtant de vos fronts des écueils inconnus....’

I came back with a terrible certainty. Natalie, who had only just recovered, had not the strength to bear this blow. From the day of the death of my mother and Kolya, she never recovered her health again. The horror, the pain remained—it entered into her blood. Sometimes in the evening or the night, she would say to me, as though imploring my help: ‘Kolya, Kolya is always with me; poor Kolya, how frightened he must have been, how cold he was! and then the fishes, the crabs!’ She would take out his little glove, which had been in the maid’s pocket—and a silence would follow, that silence in which life flows away as though a sluice had been raised. At the sight of these agonies, which passed into nervous illness, at the sight of her glittering eyes and increasing thinness, I for the first time doubted whether I should save her.... The days dragged by in an anguish of uncertainty, something like the existence men lead between sentence and execution, when a man at once hopes and knows for certain that he will not escape the axe.

IV

THE YEAR 1852

1

Again the new year had come; we met it about Natalie’s bedside—at last her strength had failed, and she had been obliged to lie up.

The Engelsons, Vogt, and a couple of intimate friends were with us. We were all melancholy. The 2nd of December in Paris weighed like a stone on our hearts.... Everything—public and private—was rushing to ruin, and was already so far on its way that there was no stopping nor turning back; one could but wait, dully, miserably, till the headlong rush ended in destruction.

The usual healths were drunk. At twelve o’clock we forced a smile; within was death and horror, we were all ashamed to add any wishes for the new year. To glance forward was more terrible than to look back.

The symptoms became more definite; pleurisy in the left lung set in.

She spent a terrible fortnight between life and death, but for the time life conquered. Convalescence followed and with it a last ray of hope shed its pale radiance over our troubled life.

The powers of her spirit came back first ... there were marvellous moments—the last chords of a music that was to be hushed for ever.

A few days after the crisis of the illness, I went early in the morning into my study and fell asleep upon the sofa. I must have slept soundly, for I did not hear the servant come in. When I woke up I found a letter on the table. Herwegh’s handwriting. What excuse had he for writing, and how dared he write to me after all that had passed? I had given him no pretext whatever. I picked up the letter in order to send it back, but seeing on the envelope the words, ‘Containing an honourable challenge,’ I opened it. The letter was revolting, infamous. He said that by my _calumnies_ I had bewildered Natalie, that I had taken advantage of her weakness and my influence over her, that she had _betrayed him_. In conclusion, he made charges against her, and said that fate had decided between me and him: ‘it drowns in the sea your progeny (_votre progéniture_) and your mother. You wanted to end this in blood, while I supposed it was possible to end it humanely. Now I am ready and demand satisfaction.’ I never read this letter again, and only once opened it afterwards. In 1853, on Natalie’s birthday, the 23rd of October, I burnt it without reading it.

This letter was the first insult I had ever received in my life. I leaped up like a wounded beast, with a sort of moan of fury. Why was not that wretch in Nice ... why was a dying woman lying the other side of the passage?

After sousing my head two or three times in cold water, I went in to Engelson (after my mother’s death he had her rooms), and after waiting till his wife had gone out, I told him that I had received a letter from Herwegh.

‘So you have actually received it?’ said Engelson.

‘Why, did you know—did you expect it?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I heard about it yesterday.’

‘From whom?’

‘From Karl Vogt.’

I clutched at my head, it seemed to me I was going mad. Our silence had been so complete that neither my mother nor Marya Kasparovna Reihel had once spoken to me about what had happened. I was more intimate with Engelson than with other people—but to him I had only once, as we were walking in the environs of Paris, spoken of it in a brief answer to a question he put to me about the cause of my rupture with Herwegh. I had been overwhelmed in Geneva when I heard from Sazonov of the scoundrel’s gossip—but how could I have imagined that near me, close at hand, the other side of the door, every one knew, every one was talking of what I regarded as a secret buried between few persons ... that they even knew of letters which I had not yet received.

We went in to Vogt. He told me that two days previously Emma had shown him a letter from her husband, in which he said he would send me a _terrible letter_, that he would fling me down ‘from the height’ on which Natalie set me, ‘that he would cover us with disgrace, if he had to pass over the dead bodies of children, and bring us all, and himself too, into the prisoner’s dock of the criminal court.’ Finally, he wrote to his wife (and she had shown all this to Vogt, to Charles Edmond, and to Orsini), ‘you alone are pure and innocent, you ought to be the avenging angel,’ namely, I suppose, to cut our throats. There were people who said he had been driven out of his mind by love, by his rupture with me, by the wound to his _amour-propre_. That is nonsense. The man never took one _step_ that was dangerous or incautious, the madness was only in _words_, he raged in literature. His vanity was stung, silence was for him harder to bear than any scandal, the peace that had returned to our life gave him no rest. A petty bourgeois, like George Sand’s Horace, he talked to revenge himself upon the woman whom he loved and the man whom he had called brother and father, and, a bourgeois German, he threatened in melodramatic phrases, composed in pseudo-Schilleresque style.

At the very time when he was writing this letter to me and a string of insane letters to his wife, at that very time he was living with, and at the expense of, a former mistress of Louis Napoleon’s, a dissolute woman, who was notorious in Zurich. With her he spent his days and nights, at her expense he lived in luxury, drove about in her carriage and feasted in big hotels ... no, that is not madness!...

‘What do you intend to do?’ Engelson asked me at last.

‘Go and kill him like a dog. That he is a fearful coward you know and every one knows—the chances are all in my favour.’

‘But how can you go...?’

‘That’s the whole point. Write to him meanwhile that it is not for him to demand satisfaction of me, but for me to punish him, and that I will myself choose the means and the time to do it, that I will not leave a sick woman for that, and that I spit on his rudeness.’

To that effect I wrote to Sazonov, and asked whether he would help in the matter. Engelson, Sazonov, and Vogt received my proposition with eagerness. My letter was a great mistake, and gave him a pretext for saying afterwards that I had accepted his challenge, and that I had refused it later on.

To refuse a challenge is a difficult thing and requires much strength of mind or much weakness.

The feudal duel has a firm standing in modern society, betraying that it is not altogether so modern as it seems. Rarely does any one venture to attack this sacred relic set up by aristocratic honour and military _amour-propre_—and, indeed, it is rare for any one to be in a position so independent as to be able to insult the bloody idol with impunity and to accept the charge of cowardice.

To prove the absurdity of the duel is not worth while—in theory no one justifies it except a few bullies and fencing masters, but in practice every one gives in to it in order to prove—the devil knows to whom—his courage.

The worst thing about the duel is that it justifies any blackguard, either by giving him an honourable death, or by making him an honourable murderer.

A man is charged with cheating at cards—he insists on a duel, as though one cannot cheat at cards without being afraid of a pistol. And how shameful to put the card-sharper on a level with the man who denounces him!

A duel may sometimes be preferred as the means of escaping the gallows or the guillotine, although the logic is not clear even then, and I do not understand why a man under penalty of general contempt is bound not to fear his antagonist’s sword, though he may be afraid of the knife of the guillotine.

The death penalty has this advantage, that it is preceded by a trial, which may condemn a man to death, but cannot deprive him of the right of showing up his enemy, dead or alive. In a duel everything remains secret and concealed. It is an institution belonging to that pugnacious period when blood was still so fresh on men’s hands that the wearing of deadly weapons was looked on as a sign of nobility and exercise in the art of killing as an official duty.

So long as the world is governed by military men duels will not be abolished; but we may boldly demand that the choice should be left to us when we should bow the head to an idol we do not believe in, and when show ourselves free men in our full stature and—after battling with the gods and the powers of this world—dare to challenge the bloody, mediaeval ordeal.... How many men have passed with proud and triumphant faces through all the hardships of life, prison, poverty, sacrifice and toil, the tortures of the Inquisition, and I do not know what, and have succumbed to the impudent challenge of some trivial scoundrel? There must be no more such victims. The principle that regulates a man’s actions should lie within himself in his own reason; if it lies without himself, he is a slave, however valiant he may be.

I neither accepted nor refused the challenge; the chastisement of Herwegh was for me a moral necessity, a physical necessity—I tried to think of some sure means of revenge and one which could not redound to his glory. But whether by a duel or whether by a knife I attained it, was a matter of complete indifference to me. He himself suggested the solution. He wrote to his wife—and she, as she always did, showed the letter to every one she knew—that in spite of everything I was a head and shoulders above all the rabble round me, that I was influenced for harm by men like Vogt, Engelson, Golovin (!), that if he could see me for one minute, all would be set right—‘he (_i.e._, I) alone can understand me’; and this was written after his letter to me!

And for this reason the poet concluded, ‘What I should like best of all is that Herzen would accept a duel without witnesses. I am convinced that from the first word we should fall into each other’s arms, and all would be forgotten.’

And so a duel was proposed as a means for a theatrical reconciliation. If I could at that time have got away for five days or a week, I should certainly have set off to Zurich and gone to him to carry out his desire—and he would not have been left alive.

A few days after receiving Herwegh’s letter, Orsini came in to me one morning at nine o’clock. Orsini, through a sort of physiological absurdity, was passionately devoted to Emma; what there was in common between this handsome, ardent young Southerner and the ugly, lymphatic German woman, I never could imagine. His early arrival surprised me. He very simply and directly said to me that the news of Herwegh’s letter had revolted his whole circle, and that many common acquaintances had offered to form a court of honour. Then he began to defend Emma, saying that she was not in fault except in her senseless love for her husband and her slavish submission to him, that he himself had seen how much she had felt it all. ‘You ought,’ he said, ‘to hold out a hand to her, you ought to punish the guilty, but you ought also to rehabilitate an innocent woman.’

I gave a resolute and unconditional refusal. Orsini was too clear-sighted not to see that I should not change my mind, and so did not insist.

Among other things, speaking of a court of honour, he told me that he had already written about the whole story to Mazzini and asked his opinion. The court of honour was never held, but I received later on a letter that amounted to a verdict on Herwegh, signed by names that were dear to me—and among others the heroic martyr Pisacane, Mordini, Orsini, Bertani, Medici, Mezzacapo, Cosenz, etc. Was not that horrible again? Parties were formed, verdicts were passed, Mazzini was written to—and all this without my knowledge, and all this concerning events at which a week before no one had dared to hint in my presence. After seeing Orsini out, I took a sheet of paper and wrote a letter to Mazzini. Here I was confronted with a sort of Court of Wehm—and a self-invited court. I wrote to him that Orsini had told me of his letter, and that, fearing that he might not have presented the cause quite correctly, since he had never heard a word about it from me, I wanted to tell my story and to ask advice. Mazzini at once replied. ‘It would have been better,’ he wrote, ‘to bury the whole thing in silence, but I doubt whether that is possible for you now, and therefore you had better come boldly forward to the attack and leave us to form a court.’ That I believed in the possibility of such a court was, perhaps, my last illusion.

I was mistaken and paid dearly for my mistake.

Together with Mazzini’s letter I received a letter from Haug, to whom Mazzini, knowing that he was an intimate friend of mine, had shown Orsini’s letter and mine. After my first meeting with Haug in Paris, he had served under Garibaldi and distinguished himself in battle near Rome. There was much that was good in the man and a vast deal that was immature and absurd. He had slept the unbroken sleep of an Austrian lieutenant in his barracks, till he was suddenly awakened by the alarm bell of the Hungarian rising and the Vienna barricades. He snatched up a weapon, not to slay the insurgent people, but to take his place in its ranks. The transition had been too violent and left, as it were, traces of angularity and incompleteness.

A dreamy and rather impetuous man, generous and devoted, proud to the point of arrogance, a Bursch and a Cadet, a student and a lieutenant, he had a real affection for me. Haug wrote that he was going to Nice, and besought me to take no steps without him. ‘You have left your country and have come to us as a brother; do not imagine that we will permit any fellow-countryman of ours to go unpunished after adding calumny to all his previous treachery, and then covering it all up with his insolent challenge. No, we have a very different conception of our mutual responsibility. It is enough that a Russian poet[19] has been killed by the bullet of a western adventurer—a Russian revolutionist shall not be!’

In reply I wrote a long letter to Haug. This was the first time I had told the story. I told him everything that had happened—and waited for him to come....

And meanwhile, in the bedroom close by, a great life was feebly flickering out in a desperate struggle with bodily weakness and terrible forebodings. I spent day and night beside the sick-bed—she liked me to give her her medicine and to prepare her orangeade; at night I kept up the fire, and when she slept quietly I had hopes again of saving her. But there were moments of insufferable misery. I felt her thin, feverish hand, I saw her gloomy, anxious eyes fixed upon me with entreaty, with yearning and the terrible words: ‘The children will be left alone—they will be orphans—all will be lost, you are only waiting ... for the children’s sake drop it all, don’t defend yourself from the mud ... let me, me, defend you—you shall come out clean, if only I can get a little stronger physically—but no, no, strength will not come. Do not leave the children!’ And for the hundredth time I repeated my promise.

In one of these conversations Natalie suddenly said to me: ‘Has he written to you?’[20]

‘Yes.’

‘Show me the letter.’

‘What for?’

‘I want to see what he could write to you....’

I was almost glad that she had spoken of the letter; I passionately longed to know whether there was a grain of truth in one of the charges he made against her.... I could never have brought myself to ask, but now that she had herself spoken of the letter, I could not overcome my desire, I was horrified at the thought that the doubt would always remain, and, perhaps, grow stronger when her lips would be closed for ever....

‘I am not going to show you the letter, but tell me, did you say something like this...?’

‘How can you imagine such a thing!’

‘He writes it.’

‘It’s almost incredible—he writes that with his own hand...?’

I folded the letter back at the passage and showed her—she glanced at it, was silent for a little and then said mournfully: ‘How vile!’

From that moment her contempt passed into hatred, and never in one word or one hint did she forgive him or express pity for him.

A few days after this conversation she wrote him the following letter: