Rudin Part 24

She asked Rudin to sit down. He sat down, but not like the old Rudin, almost master of the house, not even like an old friend, but like a guest, and not even a very intimate guest. All this took place in a single instant... so water is suddenly transformed into solid ice.

'I have come to you, Darya Mihailovna,' began Rudin, 'to thank you for your hospitality. I have had some news to-day from my little estate, and it is absolutely necessary for me to set off there to-day.'

Darya Mihailovna looked attentively at Rudin.

'He has antic.i.p.ated me; it must be because he has some suspicion,' she thought. 'He spares one a disagreeable explanation. So much the better.

Ah! clever people for ever!'

'Really?' she replied aloud. 'Ah! how disappointing! Well, I suppose there's no help for it. I shall hope to see you this winter in Moscow.

We shall soon be leaving here.'

'I don't know, Darya Mihailovna, whether I shall succeed in getting to Moscow, but, if I can manage it, I shall regard it as a duty to call on you.'

'Aha, my good sir!' Pandalevsky in his turn reflected; 'it's not long since you behaved like the master here, and now this is how you have to express yourself!'

'Then I suppose you have unsatisfactory news from your estate?' he articulated, with his customary ease.

'Yes,' replied Rudin drily.

'Some failure of crops, I suppose?'

'No; something else. Believe me, Darya Mihailovna,' added Rudin, 'I shall never forget the time I have spent in your house.'

'And I, Dmitri Nikolaitch, shall always look back upon our acquaintance with you with pleasure. When must you start?'

'To-day, after dinner.'

'So soon!... Well, I wish you a successful journey. But, if your affairs do not detain you, perhaps you will look us up again here.'

'I shall scarcely have time,' replied Rudin, getting up. 'Excuse me,'

he added; 'I cannot at once repay you my debt, but directly I reach my place----'

'Nonsense, Dmitri Nikolaitch!' Darya Mihailovna cut him short. 'I wonder you're not ashamed to speak of it!... What o'clock is it?' she asked.

Pandalevsky drew a gold and enamel watch out of his waistcoat pocket, and looked at it carefully, bending his rosy cheek over his stiff, white collar.

'Thirty-three minutes past two,' he announced.

'It is time to dress,' observed Darya Mihailovna. 'Good-bye for the present, Dmitri Nikolaitch!'

Rudin got up. The whole conversation between him and Darya Mihailovna had a special character. In the same way actors repeat their parts, and diplomatic dignitaries interchange their carefully-worded phrases.

Rudin went away. He knew by now through experience that men and women of the world do not even break with a man who is of no further use to them, but simply let him drop, like a kid glove after a ball, like the paper that has wrapped up sweets, like an unsuccessful ticket for a lottery.

He packed quickly, and began to await with impatience the moment of his departure. Every one in the house was very much surprised to hear of his intentions; even the servants looked at him with a puzzled air.

Ba.s.sistoff did not conceal his sorrow. Natalya evidently avoided Rudin.

She tried not to meet his eyes. He succeeded, however, in slipping his note into her hand. After dinner Darya Mihailovna repeated once more that she hoped to see him before they left for Moscow, but Rudin made her no reply. Pandalevsky addressed him more frequently than any one.

More than once Rudin felt a longing to fall upon him and give him a slap on his rosy, blooming face. Mlle. Boncourt often glanced at Rudin with a peculiarly stealthy expression in her eyes; in old setter dogs one may sometimes see the same expression.

'Aha!' she seemed to be saying to herself, 'so you're caught!'

At last six o'clock struck, and Rudin's carriage was brought to the door. He began to take a hurried farewell of all. He had a feeling of nausea at his heart. He had not expected to leave this house like this; it seemed as though they were turning him out. 'What a way to do it all!

and what was the object of being in such a hurry? Still, it is better so.' That was what he was thinking as he bowed in all directions with a forced smile. For the last time he looked at Natalya, and his heart throbbed; her eyes were bent upon him in sad, reproachful farewell.

He ran quickly down the steps, and jumped into his carriage. Ba.s.sistoff had offered to accompany him to the next station, and he took his seat beside him.

'Do you remember,' began Rudin, directly the carriage had driven from the courtyard into the broad road bordered with fir-trees, 'do you remember what Don Quixote says to his squire when he is leaving the court of the d.u.c.h.ess? "Freedom," he says, "my friend Sancho, is one of the most precious possessions of man, and happy is he to whom Heaven has given a bit of bread, and who need not be indebted to any one!" What Don Quixote felt then, I feel now.... G.o.d grant, my dear Ba.s.sistoff, that you too may some day experience this feeling!'

Ba.s.sistoff pressed Rudin's hand, and the honest boy's heart beat violently with emotion. Till they reached the station Rudin spoke of the dignity of man, of the meaning of true independence. He spoke n.o.bly, fervently, and justly, and when the moment of separation had come, Ba.s.sistoff could not refrain from throwing himself on his neck and sobbing. Rudin himself shed tears too, but he was not weeping because he was parting from Ba.s.sistoff. His tears were the tears of wounded vanity.

Natalya had gone to her own room, and there she read Rudin's letter.

'Dear Natalya Alexyevna,' he wrote her, 'I have decided to depart. There is no other course open to me. I have decided to leave before I am told plainly to go. By my departure all difficulties will be put an end to, and there will be scarcely any one who will regret me. What else did I expect?... It is always so, but why am I writing to you?

'I am parting from you probably for ever, and it would be too painful to me to leave you with a worse recollection of me than I deserve. This is why I am writing to you. I do not want either to justify myself or to blame any one whatever except myself; I want, as far as possible, to explain myself.... The events of the last days have been so unexpected, so sudden....

'Our interview to-day will be a memorable lesson to me. Yes, you are right; I did not know you, and I thought I knew you! In the course of my life I have had to do with people of all kinds. I have known many women and young girls, but in you I met for the first time an absolutely true and upright soul. This was something I was not used to, and I did not know how to appreciate you fittingly. I felt an attraction to you from the first day of our acquaintance; you may have observed it. I spent with you hour after hour without learning to know you; I scarcely even tried to know you--and I could imagine that I loved you! For this sin I am punished now.

'Once before I loved a woman, and she loved me. My feeling for her was complex, like hers for me; but, as she was not simple herself, it was all the better for her. Truth was not told to me then, and now I did not recognise it when it was offered me.... I have recognised it at last, when it is too late.... What is past cannot be recalled.... Our lives might have become united, and they never will be united now. How can I prove to you that I might have loved you with real love--the love of the heart, not of the fancy--when I do not know myself whether I am capable of such love?

'Nature has given me much. I know it, and I will not disguise it from you through false modesty, especially now at a moment so bitter, so humiliating for me.... Yes, Nature has given me much, but I shall die without doing anything worthy of my powers, without leaving any trace behind me. All my wealth is dissipated idly; I do not see the fruits of the seeds I sow. I am wanting in something. I cannot say myself exactly what it is I am wanting in.... I am wanting, certainly, in something without which one cannot move men's hearts, or wholly win a woman's heart; and to sway men's minds alone is precarious, and an empire ever unprofitable. A strange, almost farcical fate is mine; I would devote myself--eagerly and wholly to some cause,--and I cannot devote myself. I shall end by sacrificing myself to some folly or other in which I shall not even believe.... Alas! at thirty-five to be still preparing for something!...

'I have never spoken so openly of myself to any one before--this is my confession.

'But enough of me. I should like to speak of you, to give you some advice; I can be no use to you further.... You are still young; but as long as you live, always follow the impulse of your heart, do not let it be subordinated to your mind or the mind of others. Believe me, the simpler, the narrower the circle in which life is pa.s.sed the better; the great thing is not to open out new sides, but that all the phases of life should reach perfection in their own time. "Blessed is he who has been young in his youth." But I see that this advice applies far more to myself than to you.

'I confess, Natalya Alexyevna, I am very unhappy. I never deceived myself as to the nature of the feeling which I inspired in Darya Mihailovna; but I hoped I had found at least a temporary home.... Now I must take the chances of the rough world again. What will replace for me your conversation, your presence, your attentive and intelligent face?... I myself am to blame; but admit that fate seems to have designed a jest at my expense. A week ago I did not even myself suspect that I loved you. The day before yesterday, that evening in the garden, I for the first time heard from your lips,... but why remind you of what you said then? and now I am going away to-day. I am going away disgraced, after a cruel explanation with you, carrying with me no hope.... And you do not know yet to what a degree I am to blame as regards you... I have such a foolish lack of reserve, such a weak habit of confiding. But why speak of this? I am leaving you for ever!'

(Here Rudin had related to Natalya his visit to Volintsev, but on second thoughts he erased all that part, and added the second postscript to his letter to Volintsev.)

'I remain alone upon earth to devote myself, as you said to me this morning with bitter irony, to other interests more congenial to me.

Alas! if I could really devote myself to these interests, if I could at last conquer my inertia.... But no! I shall remain to the end the incomplete creature I have always been.... The first obstacle, ... and I collapse entirely; what has pa.s.sed with you has shown me that If I had but sacrificed my love to my future work, to my vocation; but I simply was afraid of the responsibility that had fallen upon me, and therefore I am, truly, unworthy of you. I do not deserve that you should be torn out of your sphere for me.... And indeed all this, perhaps, is for the best. I shall perhaps be the stronger and the purer for this experience.

'I wish you all happiness. Farewell! Think sometimes of me. I hope that you may still hear of me.

'RUDIN.'

Natalya let Rudin's letter drop on to her lap, and sat a long time motionless, her eyes fixed on the ground. This letter proved to her clearer than all possible arguments that she had been right, when in the morning, at her parting with Rudin, she had involuntarily cried out that he did not love her! But that made things no easier for her. She sat perfectly still; it seemed as though waves of darkness without a ray of light had closed over her head, and she had gone down cold and dumb to the depths. The first disillusionment is painful for every one; but for a sincere heart, averse to self-deception and innocent of frivolity or exaggeration, it is almost unendurable. Natalya remembered her childhood, how, when walking in the evening, she always tried to go in the direction of the setting sun, where there was light in the sky, and not toward the darkened half of the heavens. Life now stood in darkness before her, and she had turned her back on the light for ever....

Tears started into Natalya's eyes. Tears do not always bring relief.

They are comforting and salutary when, after being long pent up in the breast, they flow at last--at first with violence, and then more easily, more softly; the dumb agony of sorrow is over with the tears. ... But there are cold tears, tears that flow sparingly, wrung out drop by drop from the heart by the immovable, weary weight of pain laid upon it: they are not comforting, and bring no relief. Poverty weeps such tears; and the man has not yet been unhappy who has not shed them. Natalya knew them on that day.

Two hours pa.s.sed. Natalya pulled herself together, got up, wiped her eyes, and, lighting a candle, she burnt Rudin's letter in the flame, and threw the ash out of window. Then she opened Pushkin at random, and read the first lines that met her. (She often made it her oracle in this way.) This is what she saw:

'When he has known its pang, for him The torturing ghost of days that are no more, For him no more illusion, but remorse And memory's serpent gnawing at his heart.'

She stopped, and with a cold smile looked at herself in the gla.s.s, slightly nodded her head, and went down to the drawing-room.