Rudin Part 13

'But have you seen him?' inquired Volintsev.

'I saw him this morning at Darya Mihallovna's. You know he is her first favourite now. The time will come when she will part with him--Pandalevsky is the only man she will never part with--but now he is supreme. I saw him, to be sure! He was sitting there,--and she showed me off to him, "see, my good friend, what queer fish we have here!" But I am not a prize horse, to be trotted out on show, so I took myself off.'

'But how did you come to be there?'

'About a boundary; but that was all nonsense; she simply wanted to have a look at my physiognomy. She's a fine lady,--that's explanation enough!'

'His superiority is what offends you--that's what it is!' began Alexandra Pavlovna warmly, 'that's what you can't forgive. But I am convinced that besides his cleverness he must have an excellent heart as well. You should see his eyes when he----'

'"Of purity exalted speaks,"' quoted Lezhnyov.

'You make me angry, and I shall cry. I am heartily sorry I did not go to Darya Mihailovna's, but stopped with you. You don't deserve it. Leave off teasing me,' she added, in an appealing voice, 'You had much better tell me about his youth.'

'Rudin's youth?'

'Yes, of course. Didn't you tell me you knew him well, and had known him a long time?'

Lezhnyov got up and walked up and down the room.

'Yes,' he began, 'I do know him well. You want me to tell you about his youth? Very well. He was born in T----, and was the son of a poor landowner, who died soon after. He was left alone with his mother. She was a very good woman, and she idolised him; she lived on nothing but oatmeal, and every penny she had she spent on him. He was educated in Moscow, first at the expense of some uncle, and afterwards, when he was grown up and fully fledged, at the expense of a rich prince whose favour he had courted--there, I beg your pardon, I won't do it again--with whom he had made friends. Then he went to the university. At the university I got to know him and we became intimate friends. I will tell you about our life in those days some other time, I can't now. Then he went abroad....'

Lezhnyov continued to walk up and down the room; Alexandra Pavlovna followed him with her eyes.

'While he was abroad,' he continued, 'Rudin wrote very rarely to his mother, and paid her altogether only one visit for ten days.... The old lady died without him, cared for by strangers; but up to her death she never took her eyes off his portrait. I went to see her when I was staying in T----. She was a kind and hospitable woman; she always used to feast me on cherry jam. She loved her Mitya devotedly. People of the Petchorin type tell us that we always love those who are least capable of feeling love themselves; but it's my idea that all mothers love their children especially when they are absent. Afterwards I met Rudin abroad. Then he was connected with a lady, one of our countrywomen, a bluestocking, no longer young, and plain, as a bluestocking is bound to be. He lived a good while with her, and at last threw her over--or no, I beg pardon,--she threw him over. It was then that I too threw him over.

That's all.'

Lezhnyov ceased speaking, pa.s.sed his hand over his brow, and dropped into a chair as if he were exhausted.

'Do you know, Mihailo Mihailitch,' began Alexandra Pavlovna, 'you are a spiteful person, I see; indeed you are no better than Pigasov. I am convinced that all you have told me is true, that you have not made up anything, and yet in what an unfavourable light you have put it all! The poor old mother, her devotion, her solitary death, and that lady--What does it all amount to? You know that it's easy to put the life of the best of men in such colours--and without adding anything, observe--that every one would be shocked! But that too is slander of a kind!'

Lezhnyov got up and again walked about the room.

'I did not want to shock you at all, Alexandra Pavlovna,' he brought out at last, 'I am not given to slander. However,' he added, after a moment's thought, 'in reality there is a foundation of fact in what you said. I did not mean to slander Rudin; but--who knows! very likely he has had time to change since those days--very possibly I am unjust to him.'

'Ah! you see. So promise me that you will renew your acquaintance with him, and will get to know him thoroughly and then report your final opinion of him to me.'

'As you please. But why are you so quiet, Sergei Pavlitch?'

Volintsev started and raised his head, as though he had just waked up.

'What can I say? I don't know him. Besides, my head aches to-day.'

'Yes, you look rather pale this evening,' remarked Alexandra Pavlovna; 'are you unwell?'

'My head aches,' repeated Volintsev, and he went away.

Alexandra Pavlovna and Lezhnyov looked after him, and exchanged glances, though they said nothing. What was pa.s.sing in Volintsev's heart was no mystery to either of them.

VI

More than two months had pa.s.sed; during the whole of that period Rudin had scarcely been away from Darya Mihailovna's house. She could not get on without him. To talk to him about herself and to listen to his eloquence became a necessity for her. He would have taken his leave on one occasion, on the ground that all his money was spent; she gave him five hundred roubles. He borrowed two hundred roubles more from Volintsev. Pigasov visited Darya Mihailovna much less frequently than before; Rudin crushed him by his presence. And indeed it was not only Pigasov who was conscious of an oppression.

'I don't like that prig,' Pigasov used to say, 'he expresses himself so affectedly like a hero of a romance. If he says "I," he stops in rapt admiration, "I, yes, I!" and the phrases he uses are all so drawn-out; if you sneeze, he will begin at once to explain to you exactly why you sneezed and did not cough. If he praises you, it's just as if he were creating you a prince. If he begins to abuse himself, he humbles himself into the dust--come, one thinks, he will never dare to face the light of day after that. Not a bit of it! It only cheers him up, as if he'd treated himself to a gla.s.s of grog.'

Pandalevsky was a little afraid of Rudin, and cautiously tried to win his favour. Volintsev had got on to curious terms with him. Rudin called him a knight-errant, and sang his praises to his face and behind his back; but Volintsev could not bring himself to like him and always felt an involuntary impatience and annoyance when Rudin devoted himself to enlarging on his good points in his presence. 'Is he making fun of me?'

he thought, and he felt a throb of hatred in his heart. He tried to keep his feelings in check, but in vain; he was jealous of him on Natalya's account. And Rudin himself, though he always welcomed Volintsev with effusion, though he called him a knight-errant, and borrowed money from him, did not feel exactly friendly towards him. It would be difficult to define the feelings of these two men when they pressed each other's hands like friends and looked into each other's eyes.

Ba.s.sistoff continued to adore Rudin, and to hang on every word he uttered. Rudin paid him very little attention. Once he spent a whole morning with him, discussing the weightiest problems of life, and awakening his keenest enthusiasm, but afterwards he took no further notice of him. Evidently it was only a phrase when he said that he was seeking for pure and devoted souls. With Lezhnyov, who began to be a frequent visitor at the house, Rudin did not enter into discussion; he seemed even to avoid him. Lezhnyov, on his part, too, treated him coldly. He did not, however, report his final conclusions about him, which somewhat disquieted Alexandra Pavlovna. She was fascinated by Rudin, but she had confidence in Lezhnyov. Every one in Darya Mihailovna's house humoured Rudin's fancies; his slightest preferences were carried out He determined the plans for the day. Not a single _partie de plaisir_ was arranged without his co-operation.

He was not, however, very fond of any kind of impromptu excursion or picnic, and took part in them rather as grown-up people take part in children's games, with an air of kindly, but rather wearied, friendliness. He took interest in everything else, however. He discussed with Darya Mihailovna her plans for the estate, the education of her children, her domestic arrangements, and her affairs generally; he listened to her schemes, and was not bored by petty details, and, in his turn, proposed reforms and made suggestions. Darya Mihailovna agreed to them in words--and that was all. In matters of business she was really guided by the advice of her bailiff--an elderly, one-eyed Little Russian, a good-natured and crafty old rogue. 'What is old is fat, what is new is thin,' he used to say, with a quiet smile, winking his solitary eye.

Next to Darya Mihailovna, it was Natalya to whom Rudin used to talk most often and at most length. He used privately to give her books, to confide his plans to her, and to read her the first pages of the essays and other works he had in his mind. Natalya did not always fully grasp the significance of them.

But Rudin did not seem to care much about her understanding, so long as she listened to him. His intimacy with Natalya was not altogether pleasing to Darya Mihailovna. 'However,' she thought, 'let her chatter away with him in the country. She amuses him as a little girl now. There is no great harm in it, and, at any rate, it will improve her mind. At Petersburg I will soon put a stop to it.'

Darya Mihailovna was mistaken. Natalya did not chatter to Rudin like a school-girl; she eagerly drank in his words, she tried to penetrate to their full significance; she submitted her thoughts, her doubts to him; he became her leader, her guide. So far, it was only the brain that was stirred, but in the young the brain is not long stirred alone. What sweet moments Natalya pa.s.sed when at times in the garden on the seat, in the transparent shade of the aspen tree, Rudin began to read Goethe's _Faust_, Hoffman, or Bettina's letters, or Novalis, constantly stopping and explaining what seemed obscure to her. Like almost all Russian girls, she spoke German badly, but she understood it well, and Rudin was thoroughly imbued with German poetry, German romanticism and philosophy, and he drew her after him into these forbidden lands. Unimagined splendours were revealed there to her earnest eyes from the pages of the book which Rudin held on his knee; a stream of divine visions, of new, illuminating ideas, seemed to flow in rhythmic music into her soul, and in her heart, moved with the high delight of n.o.ble feeling, slowly was kindled and fanned into a flame the holy spark of enthusiasm.

'Tell me, Dmitri Nikolaitch,' she began one day, sitting by the window at her embroidery-frame, 'shall you be in Petersburg in the winter?'

'I don't know,' replied Rudin, as he let the book he had been glancing through fall upon his knee; 'if I can find the means, I shall go.'

He spoke dejectedly; he felt tired, and had done nothing all day.

'I think you are sure to find the means.'

Rudin shook his head.

'You think so!'

And he looked away expressively.

Natalya was on the point of replying, but she checked herself.

'Look.' began Rudin, with a gesture towards the window, 'do you see that apple-tree? It is broken by the weight and abundance of its own fruit.

True emblem of genius.'

'It is broken because it had no support,' replied Natalya

'I understand you, Natalya Alexyevna, but it is not so easy for a man to find such a support.'

'I should think the sympathy of others... in any case isolation always....'

Natalya was rather confused, and flushed a little.

'And what will you do in the country in the winter?' she added hurriedly.