Part 14 (1/2)

Litvinov gave a constrained laugh. 'You think so?'

'There's no escape. Man is weak, woman is strong, opportunity is all-powerful, to make up one's mind to a joyless life is hard, to forget oneself utterly is impossible ... and on one side is beauty and sympathy and warmth and light,--how is one to resist it? Why, one runs like a child to its nurse. Ah, well, afterwards to be sure comes cold and darkness and emptiness ... in due course. And you end by being strange to everything, by losing comprehension of everything. At first you don't understand how love is possible; afterwards one won't understand how life is possible.'

Litvinov looked at Potugin, and it struck him that he had never yet met a man more lonely, more desolate ... more unhappy. This time he was not shy, he was not stiff; downcast and pale, his head on his breast, and his hands on his knees, he sat without moving, merely smiling his dejected smile. Litvinov felt sorry for the poor, embittered, eccentric creature.

'Irina Pavlovna mentioned among other things,' he began in a low voice, 'a very intimate friend of hers, whose name if I remember was Byelsky, or Dolsky....'

Potugin raised his mournful eyes and looked at Litvinov.

'Ah!' he commented thickly.... 'She mentioned ... well, what of it? It's time, though,' he added with a rather artificial yawn, 'for me to be getting home--to dinner. Good-bye.'

He jumped up from the seat and made off quickly before Litvinov had time to utter a word.... His compa.s.sion gave way to annoyance--annoyance with himself, be it understood. Want of consideration of any kind was foreign to his nature; he had wished to express his sympathy for Potugin, and it had resulted in something like a clumsy insinuation. With secret dissatisfaction in his heart, he went back to his hotel.

'Rotten to the marrow of her bones,' he thought a little later ... 'but proud as the devil! She, that woman who is almost on her knees to me, proud? proud and not capricious?'

Litvinov tried to drive Irina's image out of his head, but he did not succeed. For this very reason he did not think of his betrothed; he felt to-day this haunting image would not give up its place. He made up his mind to await without further anxiety the solution of all this 'strange business'; the solution could not be long in coming, and Litvinov had not the slightest doubt it would turn out to be most innocent and natural. So he fancied, but meanwhile he was not only haunted by Lina's image--every word she had uttered kept recurring in its turn to his memory.

The waiter brought him a note: it was from the same Irina:

'If you have nothing to do this evening, come to me; I shall not be alone; I shall have guests, and you will get a closer view of our set, our society. I want you very much to see something of them; I fancy they will show themselves in all their brilliance. You ought to know what sort of atmosphere I am breathing. Come; I shall be glad to see you, and you will not be bored. (Irina had spelt the Russian incorrectly here.) Prove to me that our explanation to-day has made any sort of misunderstanding between us impossible for ever.--Yours devotedly, I.'

Litvinov put on a frock coat and a white tie, and set off to Irina's.

'All this is of no importance,' he repeated mentally on the way, 'as for looking at _them_ ... why shouldn't I have a look at them? It will be curious.' A few days before, these very people had aroused a different sensation in him; they had aroused his indignation.

He walked with quickened steps, his cap pulled down over his eyes, and a constrained smile on his lips, while Bambaev, sitting before Weber's cafe, and pointing him out from a distance to Voros.h.i.+lov and Pishtchalkin, cried excitedly: 'Do you see that man? He's a stone! he's a rock! he's a flint!!!'

XV

Litvinov found rather many guests at Irina's. In a corner at a card-table were sitting three of the generals of the picnic: the stout one, the irascible one, and the condescending one. They were playing whist with dummy, and there is no word in the language of man to express the solemnity with which they dealt, took tricks, led clubs and led diamonds ... there was no doubt about their being statesmen now! These gallant generals left to mere commoners, _aux bourgeois_, the little turns and phrases commonly used during play, and uttered only the most indispensable syllables; the stout general however permitted himself to jerk off between two deals: '_Ce satane as de pique!_' Among the visitors Litvinov recognised ladies who had been present at the picnic; but there were others there also whom he had not seen before. There was one so ancient that it seemed every instant as though she would fall to pieces: she shrugged her bare, gruesome, dingy grey shoulders, and, covering her mouth with her fan, leered languis.h.i.+ngly with her absolutely death-like eyes upon Ratmirov; he paid her much attention; she was held in great honour in the highest society, as the last of the Maids of Honour of the Empress Catherine. At the window, dressed like a shepherdess, sat Countess S., 'the Queen of the Wasps,' surrounded by young men. Among them the celebrated millionaire and beau Finikov was conspicuous for his supercilious deportment, his absolutely flat skull, and his expression of soulless brutality, worthy of a Khan of Bucharia, or a Roman Heliogabalus. Another lady, also a countess, known by the pet name of _Lise_, was talking to a long-haired, fair, and pale spiritualistic medium. Beside them was standing a gentleman, also pale and long-haired, who kept laughing in a meaning way. This gentleman also believed in spiritualism, but added to that an interest in prophecy, and, on the basis of the Apocalypse and the Talmud, was in the habit of foretelling all kinds of marvellous events. Not a single one of these events had come to pa.s.s; but he was in no wise disturbed by that fact, and went on prophesying as before. At the piano, the musical genius had installed himself, the rough diamond, who had stirred Potugin to such indignation; he was striking chords with a careless hand, _d'une main distraite_, and kept staring vaguely about him. Irina was sitting on a sofa between Prince Koko and Madame H., once a celebrated beauty and wit, who had long ago become a repulsive old crone, with the odour of sanct.i.ty and evaporated sinfulness about her. On catching sight of Litvinov, Irina blushed and got up, and when he went up to her, she pressed his hand warmly. She was wearing a dress of black crepon, relieved by a few inconspicuous gold ornaments; her shoulders were a dead white, while her face, pale too, under the momentary flood of crimson overspreading it, was breathing with the triumph of beauty, and not of beauty alone; a hidden, almost ironical happiness was s.h.i.+ning in her half-closed eyes, and quivering about her lips and nostrils....

Ratmirov approached Litvinov and after exchanging with him his customary civilities, unaccompanied however by his customary playfulness, he presented him to two or three ladies: the ancient ruin, the Queen of the Wasps, Countess Liza ... they gave him a rather gracious reception.

Litvinov did not belong to their set; but he was good-looking, extremely so, indeed, and the expressive features of his youthful face awakened their interest. Only he did not know how to fasten that interest upon himself; he was unaccustomed to society and was conscious of some embarra.s.sment, added to which the stout general stared at him persistently. 'Aha! lubberly civilian! free-thinker!' that fixed heavy stare seemed to be saying: 'down on your knees to us; crawl to kiss our hands!' Irina came to Litvinov's aid. She managed so adroitly that he got into a corner near the door, a little behind her. As she addressed him, she had each time to turn round to him, and every time he admired the exquisite curve of her splendid neck, he drank in the subtle fragrance of her hair. An expression of grat.i.tude, deep and calm, never left her face; he could not help seeing that grat.i.tude and nothing else was what those smiles, those glances expressed, and he too was all aglow with the same emotion, and he felt shame, and delight and dread at once ... and at the same time she seemed continually as though she would ask, 'Well? what do you think of them?' With special clearness Litvinov heard this unspoken question whenever any one of the party was guilty of some vulgar phrase or act, and that occurred more than once during the evening. Once she did not even conceal her feelings, and laughed aloud.

Countess Liza, a lady of superst.i.tious bent, with an inclination for everything extraordinary, after discoursing to her heart's content with the spiritualist upon Home, turning tables, self-playing concertinas, and so on, wound up by asking him whether there were animals which could be influenced by mesmerism.

'There is one such animal any way,' Prince Koko declared from some way off. 'You know Melvanovsky, don't you? They put him to sleep before me, and didn't he snore, he, he!'

'You are very naughty, _mon prince_; I am speaking of real animals, _je parle des betes_.'

'_Mais moi aussi, madame, je parle d'une bete...._'

'There are such,' put in the spiritualist; 'for instance--crabs; they are very nervous, and are easily thrown into a cataleptic state.'

The countess was astounded. 'What? Crabs! Really? Oh, that's awfully interesting! Now, that I should like to see, M'sieu Luzhin,' she added to a young man with a face as stony as a new doll's, and a stony collar (he prided himself on the fact that he had bedewed the aforesaid face and collar with the sprays of Niagara and the Nubian Nile, though he remembered nothing of all his travels, and cared for nothing but Russian puns...). 'M'sieu Luzhin, if you would be so good, do bring us a crab quick.'

M'sieu Luzhin smirked. 'Quick must it be, or quickly?' he queried.

The countess did not understand him. '_Mais oui_, a crab,' she repeated, '_une ecrevisse_.'

'Eh? what is it? a crab? a crab?' the Countess S. broke in harshly. The absence of M. Verdier irritated her; she could not imagine why Irina had not invited that most fascinating of Frenchmen. The ancient ruin, who had long since ceased understanding anything--moreover she was completely deaf--only shook her head.