Liza; Or, "A Nest of Nobles" Part 20

"Tell me," he began again presently; "haven't you made up your mind yet?"

"What do you mean?" she replied, without lifting her eyes from the ground.

"Surely you understand me?"

Liza suddenly reddened.

"Don't ask me about anything!" she exclaimed with animation. "I know nothing. I don't know myself."

And she went hastily away.

The next day Lavretsky arrived at the Kalitines' after dinner, and found all the preparations going on there for an evening service. In a corner of the dining-room, a number of small icons[A] in golden frames, with tarnished little diamonds in the aureolas, were already placed against the wall on a square table, which was covered with a table-cloth of unspotted whiteness. An old servant, dressed in a grey coat and wearing shoes, traversed the whole room deliberately and noiselessly, placed two slender candle-sticks with wax tapers in them before the icons, crossed himself, bowed, and silently left the room.

[Footnote A: Sacred Pictures.]

The drawing-room was dark and empty. Lavretsky went into the dining-room, and asked if it was any one's name-day.[A] He was told in a whisper that it was not, but that a service was to be performed in accordance with the request of Lizaveta Mikhailovna and Marfa Timofeevna. The miracle-working picture was to have been brought, but it had gone to a sick person thirty versts off.

[Footnote A: A Russian keeps, not his birthday, but his name-day--that is, the day set apart by the church in honor of the saint after whom he is called.]

Soon afterwards the priest arrived with his acolytes--a middle-aged man, with a large bald spot on his head, who coughed loudly in the vestibule. The ladies immediately came out of the boudoir in a row, and asked him for his blessing. Lavretsky bowed to them in silence, and they as silently returned his greeting. The priest remained a little longer where he was, then coughed again, and asked, in a low, deep voice--

"Do you wish me to begin?"

"Begin, reverend father," replied Maria Dmitrievna.

The priest began to robe. An acolyte in a surplice humbly asked for a coal from the fire. The scent of the incense began to spread around.

The footmen and the maid-servants came in from the ante-chamber and remained standing in a compact body at the door. The dog Roska, which, as a general rule, never came down-stairs from the upper story, now suddenly made its appearance in the dining room. The servants tried to drive it out, but it got frightened, first ran about, and then lay down. At last a footman got hold of it and carried it off.

The service began. Lavretsky retired into a corner. His feelings were strange and almost painful. He himself could not well define what it was that he felt. Maria Dmitrievna stood in front of the rest, with an arm-chair behind her. She crossed herself carelessly, languidly, like a great lady. Sometimes she looked round, at others she suddenly raised her eyes towards the ceiling. The whole affair evidently bored her.

Marfa Timofeevna seemed pre-occupied. Nastasia Carpovna bowed down to the ground, and raised herself up again, with a sort of soft and modest sound. As for Liza, she did not stir from the spot where she was standing, she did not change her position upon it; from the concentrated expression of her face, it was evident that she was praying uninterruptedly and fervently.

At the end of the service she approached the crucifix, and kissed both it and the large red hand of the priest. Maria Dmitrievna invited him to take tea. He threw off his stole, a.s.sumed a sort of mundane air, and went into the drawing-room with the ladies. A conversation began, not of a very lively nature. The priest drank four cups of tea, wiping the bald part of his head the while with his handkerchief, stated among other things that the merchant Avoshnikof had given several hundred roubles towards the gilding of the church's "c.u.mpola," and favored the company with an unfailing cure for freckles.

Lavretsky tried to get a seat near Liza, but she maintained her grave, almost austere air, and never once looked at him. She seemed intentionally to ignore him. A kind of serious, cold enthusiasm appeared to possess her. For some reason or other Lavretsky felt inclined to smile, and to utter words of jesting; but his heart was ill at ease, and at last he went away in a state of secret perplexity.

There was something, he felt, in Liza's mind, which he could not understand.

On another occasion, as Lavretsky was sitting in the drawing-room, listening to the insinuating tones of Gedeonovsky's wearisome verbiage, he suddenly turned round, he knew not why, and caught the deep, attentive, inquiring look of Liza's eyes. That enigmatical look was directed towards him. The whole night long Lavretsky thought of it. His love was not like that of a boy, nor was it consistent with his age to sigh and to torment himself; and indeed it was not with a feeling of a merely pa.s.sionate nature that Liza had inspired him.

But love has its sufferings for every age--and he became perfectly acquainted with them.

x.x.xI.

One day Lavretsky was as usual at the Kalitines'. An overpoweringly hot afternoon had been followed by such a beautiful evening that Madame Kalitine, notwithstanding her usual aversion to a draught, ordered all the windows and the doors leading into the garden to be opened. Moreover, she announced that she was not going to play cards, that it would be a sin to do so in such lovely weather, and that it was a duty to enjoy the beauties of nature.

Panshine was the only stranger present. Influenced by the evening, and feeling a flow of artistic emotion, but not wishing to sing in Lavretsky's presence, he threw himself into poetry He read--and read well, only with too much consciousness, and with needlessly subtle distinctions--some of Lermontof's poems (Pushkin had not then succeeded in getting back into fashion). Suddenly, as if ashamed of his emotion, he began in reference to the well-known _Duma_,[A] to blame and attack the new generation, not losing the opportunity which the subject afforded him of setting forth how, if the power lay in his hands, he would alter everything his own way.

[Footnote A: For the poem, so-called, see note at end of chapter.]

"Russia," he said, "has lagged behind Europe, and must be driven up alongside of it. We are told that ours is a young country. That is all nonsense. Besides, we have no inventive power. Khomakof[A] himself admits that we have never invented so much as a mousetrap.

Consequently we are obliged to imitate others, whether we like it or no."

[Footnote A: A poet, who was one of the leaders of the Slavophile party.]

"'We are ill,' says Lermontof, and I agree with him. But we are ill because we have only half become Europeans. With that which has wounded us we must be cured." ("_Le cadastre_" thought Lavretsky.) "Among us," he continued, "the best heads, _les meilleures tetes_, have long been convinced of this. In reality, all peoples are alike; only introduce good inst.i.tutions, and the affair is settled. To be sure, one may make some allowance for the existing life of the nation; that is our business, the business of the people who are" (he all but said "statesmen") "in the public service; but if need arises, don't be uneasy. Those inst.i.tutions will modify that life itself."

Maria Dmitrievna admiringly agreed with him. "What a clever man to have talking in my house!" she thought. Liza kept silence, leaning back in the recess of the window. Lavretsky kept silence too. Marfa Timofeevna, who was playing cards in a corner with her friend, grumbled something to herself. Panshine walked up and down the room, speaking well, but with a sort of suppressed malice. It seemed as if he was blaming, not so much a whole generation, as some individuals of his acquaintance. A nightingale had made its home in a large lilac bush which stood in the Kalitines' garden, and the first notes of its even-song made themselves heard during the pauses in the eloquent harangue; the first stars began to kindle in the rose-stained sky above the motionless tops of the lime trees. Presently Lavretsky rose and began to reply to Panshine. A warm dispute soon commenced.

Lavretsky spoke in defence of the youth of Russia, and of the capacity of the country to suffice for itself. He surrendered himself and his contemporaries, but he stood up for the new generation, and their wishes and convictions. Panshine replied incisively and irritably, declared that clever people were bound to reform every thing, and at length was carried away to such an extent that, forgetting his position as a chamberlain, and his proper line of action as a member of the civil service, he called Lavretsky a retrogade conservative, and alluded--very distantly it is true--to his false position in society. Lavretsky did not lose his temper, nor did he raise his voice; he remembered that Mikhalevich also had called him a retrograde, and, at the same time a disciple of Voltaire; but he calmly beat Panshine on every point. He proved the impracticability of reforming by sudden bounds, and of introducing changes haughtily schemed on the heights of official self-complacency--changes which were not justified by any intimate acquaintance with the country, nor by a living faith in any ideal, not even in one of negation, and in ill.u.s.tration of this he adduced his own education. He demanded before every thing else that the true spirit of the nation should be recognized, and that it should be looked up to with that humility without which no courage is possible, not even that wherewith to oppose falsehood. Finally he did not attempt to make any defence against what he considered a deserved reproach, that of giving way to a wasteful and inconsiderate expenditure of both time and strength.

"All that is very fine!" at last exclaimed Panshine with vexation.

"But here are you, just returned to Russia; what do you intend to do?"

"To cultivate the soil," replied Lavretsky; "and to cultivate it as well as possible."

"No doubt that is very praiseworthy," answered Panshine, "and I hear you have already had great success in that line; but you must admit that every one is not fitted for such an occupation--"

"_Une nature poetique_," said Maria Dmitrievna, "certainly cannot go cultivating the soil--_et puis_, it is your vocation, Vladimir Nikolaevich, to do every thing _en grand_."

This was too much even for Panshine, who grew confused, and changed the conversation. He tried to turn it on the beauty of the starry heavens, on Schubert's music, but somehow his efforts did not prove successful. He ended by offering to play at piquet with Maria Dmitrievna. "What! on such an evening as this?" she feebly objected; but then she ordered the cards to be brought.

Panshine noisily tore open a new pack; and Liza and Lavretsky, as if by mutual consent, both rose from their seats and placed themselves near Marfa Timofeevna. They both suddenly experienced a great feeling of happiness, mingled with a sense of mutual dread, which made them glad of the presence of a third person; at the same time, they both felt that the uneasiness from which they had suffered during the last few days had disappeared, and would return no more.

The old lady stealthily tapped Lavretsky on the cheek, screwed up her eyes with an air of pleasant malice, and shook her head repeatedly, saying in a whisper, "You've done for the genius--thanks!" Then all became still in the room. Nothing was to be heard but the faint crackling of the wax lights, and sometimes the fall of a hand on the table, or an exclamation on the score of points, and the song of the nightingale which, powerful, almost insolently loud, flowed in a great wave through the window, together with the dewy freshness of the night.

NOTE.--The following is a tolerably literal translation of the poem of Lermontof's to which allusion is made on p. 208, and which created no slight sensation when it first appeared, in the year 1838:--

A THOUGHT.

Sorrowfully do I look upon the present generation! Its future seems either gloomy or meaningless, and meanwhile, whether under the burden of knowledge or of doubt, it grows old in idleness.

When scarcely out of the cradle, we reap the rich inheritance of the errors of our fathers, and the results of their tardy thoughts. Life soon grows wearisome for us, like a banquet at a stranger's festival, like a level road leading nowhere.

In the commencement of our career, we fall away without a struggle, shamefully careless about right and wrong, shamefully timid in the face of danger.

So does a withered fruit which has prematurely ripened--attractive neither to the eye nor to the palate--hang like an alien orphan among blossoms; and the hour of their beauty is that of its fall.

Our intellect has dried up in the pursuit of fruitless science, while we have been concealing the purest of hopes from the knowledge of those who are near and dear to us, and stifling the n.o.ble utterance of such sentiments as are ridiculed by a mocking spirit.

We have scarcely tasted of the cup of enjoyment, but for all that we have not husbanded our youthful strength. While we were always in dread of satiety, we have contrived to drain each joy of its best virtues.

No dreams of poetry, no creations of art, touch our hearts with a sweet rapture. We stingily h.o.a.rd up within our b.r.e.a.s.t.s the last remnants of feeling--a treasure concealed by avarice, and which remains utterly unprofitable.