Part 23 (1/2)
”Are you frightened? The whole house fears him like fire?” And he explained how he got the coat. She listened absently as they went silently down the main path of the garden, Vera with her eyes on the ground.
Against his will he felt impelled to seek another argument with her.
”You seem to have something on your mind,” she began, ”which you do not wish to tell.”
”I did wish to, but I feared the storm I might draw upon myself.”
”You did not wish to discuss beauty once more?”
”No, no, I want to explain what my feeling for you is. I am convinced that this time I am not in error. You have opened to me a special door of your heart, and I recognise that your friends.h.i.+p would bring great happiness, and that its soft tones would bring colour into my dull life.
Do you think, Vera, that friends.h.i.+p is possible between a man and a woman?”
”Why not? If two such friends can make up their minds to respect one another's freedom, if one does not oppress the other, does not seek to discover the secret of the other's heart, if they are in constant, natural intercourse, and know how to respect secrets....”
His eyes blazed. ”Pitiless woman,” he broke in.
She had seen the glance, and lowered her eyes.
”We will go in to Grandmother. She has just opened the window, and will call us to tea?”
”One word more, Vera. You have wisdom, lucidity, decision....”
”What is wisdom?” she asked mischievously.
”Observation and experience, harmoniously applied to life.”
”I have hardly any experience.”
”Nature has bestowed on you a sharp eye and a clear brain.”
”Is not such a possession disgraceful for a girl?”
”Your wholesome ideas, your cultivated speech....”
”You are surprised that a drop of village wisdom should have descended on your poor sister. You would have preferred to find a fool in my place, wouldn't you, and now you are annoyed?”
”No, Vera, you intoxicate me. You do indeed forbid me to mention your beauty by so much as a syllable, and will not hear why I place it so high. Beauty is the aim and at the same time the driving power of art, and I am an artist. The beauty of which I speak is no material thing, she does not kindle her fires with the glow of pa.s.sionate desire alone; more especially she awakens the man in man, arouses thought, inspires courage, fertilises the creative power of genius, even when that genius stands at the culmination of its dignity and power; she does not scatter her beams for trifles, does not besmirch purity--she is womanly wisdom.
You are a woman, Vera, and understand what I mean. Your hand will not be raised to punish the man, the artist, for this wors.h.i.+p of beauty.”
”According to you wisdom lies in keeping these rules before one's eyes as the guiding thread of life, in which case I am not wise, I have not 'received this baptism.'”
An emotion closely related to sadness shone in her eyes, as she gazed upwards for a moment before she entered the house. Raisky anxiously told himself that she was as enigmatic as night itself, and he wondered what was the origin of these foreign ideas and whether her young life was already darkened.
CHAPTER XII
On Sunday Tatiana Markovna had guests for the second breakfast. The covers had been removed from the purple damask-covered chairs in the reception room. Yakob had rubbed the eyes of the family portraits with a damp rag, and they appeared to look forth more sharply than on ordinary days. The freshly waxed floors shone. Yakob himself paraded in a dress coat and a white necktie, while Egorka, Petrushka and Stepka, the latter of whom had been fetched from the village and had not yet found his legs, had been put into old liveries which did not fit them and smelt of moth.
The dining-room and the reception room had been fumigated just before the meal.