The Precipice Part 47

"For Christ's sake let me go. I ask for alms like a beggar. I must be free! I take him to whom I prayed yesterday to witness that I am going for the last time. Do you hear? I will not break my oath. Wait here for me. I will return immediately, will only say farewell to the 'Wolf,'

will hear a word from him, and perhaps he will yield!" She rushed forward, fell to the ground in her haste, and tried in vain to rise. Tom by an unutterable pity, Raisky took no heed of his own suffering, but raised her in his arms and bore her down the precipice.

"The path is so steep here that you would fall again," he whispered.

Presently he set her down on the path, and she stooped to kiss his hand.

"You are generous, Cousin. Vera will not forget."

With that she hurried into the thicket, jubilant as a bird set free from his cage.

Raisky heard the rustle of the bushes as she pushed them aside, and the crackle of the dry twigs.

In the half-ruined arbour waited Mark, with gun and cap laid upon the table. He walked up and down on the shaky floor, and whenever he trod on one end of a board the other rose in the air, and then fell clattering back again.

"The devil's music!" he murmured angrily, sat down on a bench near the table, and pushed his hands through his thick hair. He smoked one cigarette after another, the burning match lighting up his pale, agitated face for a moment. After each shot he listened for a few minutes, went out on the steps, and looked out into the bushes. When he returned he walked up and down, raising the "devil's music" once more, threw himself on the bench, and ran his hands through his hair. After the third shot he listened long and earnestly. As he heard nothing he was on the point of going away. To relieve his gloomy feelings he murmured a curse between his teeth, took the gun and prepared to descend the path. He hesitated a few moments longer, then walked off with decision. Suddenly he met Vera.

She stood still, breathing with difficulty, and laid her hand on her heart. As soon as he took her hand she was calm. Mark could not conceal his joy, but his words of greeting did not betray it.

"You used to be punctual, Vera," he said, "and I used not to have to waste three shots."

"A reproach instead of a welcome!" she said, drawing her hand away.

"It's only by way of beginning a conversation Happiness makes a fool of me, like Raisky."

"If happiness gleamed before us, we should not be meeting in secret by this precipice," she said, drawing a long breath.

"We should be sitting at your Grandmother's tea-table, and waiting till someone arranged our betrothal. Why dream of these impossible things.

Your Grandmother would not give you to me."

"She would. She does what I wish. That is not the hindrance."

"You are starting on this endless polemic again, Vera. We are meeting for the last time, as you determined we should. Let us make an end of this torture."

"I took an oath never to come here again."

"Meanwhile, the time is precious. We are parting for ever, if stupidity commands, if your Grandmother's antiquated convictions separate us. I leave here a week from now. As you know the doc.u.ment a.s.suring my freedom has arrived. Let us be together, and not be separated again."

"Never?"

"Never!" he repeated angrily, with a gesture of impatience. "What lying words those are, 'never' and 'always.' Of course 'never.' Does not a year, perhaps two, three years, mean never? You want a never ending tenderness. Does such a thing exist?"

"Enough, Mark! I have heard enough of this temporary affection. Ah! I am very unhappy. The separation from you is not the only cloud over my soul.

For a year now I have been hiding myself from my Grandmother, which oppresses me, and her still more. I hoped that in these days my trouble would end; we should put our thoughts, our hopes, our intentions on a clear footing. Then I would go to Grandmother and say: 'This is what I have chosen for my whole life.' But it is not to be, and we are to part?" she asked sadly.

"If I conceived myself to be an angel," said Mark, "I might say 'for our whole lives,' and you would be justified. That gray-headed dreamer, Raisky, also thinks that women are created for a higher purpose."

"They are created above all for the family. They are not angels, neither are they, most certainly, mere animals. I am no wolf's mate, Mark, but a woman."

"For the family, yes. But is that any hindrance for us. You want draperies, for fine feeling, sympathies and the rest of the stuff are nothing but draperies, like those famous leaves with which, it is said, human beings covered themselves in Paradise."

"Yes, Mark, human beings!"

Mark smiled sarcastically, and shrugged his shoulders.

"They may be draperies," continued Vera, "but they also, according to your own teaching, are given by nature. What, I ask, is it that attaches you to me? You say you love me. You have altered, grown thinner. Is it not, by your conception of love, a matter of indifference whether you choose a companion in me, or from the poor quarter of our town, or from a village on the Volga. What has induced you to come down here for a whole year?"

"Examine your own fallacy, Vera," he said, looking at her gloomily.

"Love is not a concept merely, but a driving force, a necessity, and therefore is mostly blind. But I am not blindly chained to you. Your extraordinary beauty, your intellect and your free outlook hold me longer in thrall than would be possible with any other woman."

"Very flattering!" she said in a low, pained voice.

"These ideas of yours, Vera, will bring us to disaster. But for them we should for long have been united and happy."

"Happy for a time. And then a new driving force will appear on the scene, the stage will be cleared, and so on."

"The responsibility is not ours. Nature has ordered it so, and rightly.

Can we alter Nature, in order to live on concepts?"

"These concepts are essential principles. You have said yourself that Nature has her laws, and human beings their principles."

"That is where the germ of disintegration lies, in that men want to formulate principles from the driving force of Nature, and thus to hamper themselves hand and foot. Love is happiness, which Nature has conferred on man. That is my view."

"The happiness of which you speak," said Vera, rising, "has as its complement, duty. That is my view."

"How fantastic! Forget your duty, Vera, and acquiesce in the fact that love is a driving force of Nature, often an uncontrollable one." Then standing up to her embraced her, saying, "Is that not so, you most obstinate, beautiful and wisest of women?"

"Yes, duty," she said haughtily, disengaging herself. "For the years of happiness retribution will be exacted."

"How? In making soup, nursing one another, looking at one another and pretending, in harping on principles, as we ourselves fade? If one half falls ill and retrogresses, shall the other who is strong, who hears the call of life, allow himself to be held back by duty?"

"Yes. In that case he must not listen to the calls that come to him; he must, to use Grandmother's expression, avoid the voice as he would the brandy bottle. That is how I understand happiness."

"Your case must be a bad one if it has to be bolstered up by quotations from your Grandmother's wisdom. Tell me how firmly your principles are rooted."

"I will go to her to-day direct from here."

"To tell her what?"

"To tell her what there is between us, all that she does not know," she said, sitting down on the bench again.

"Why?"

"You don't understand, because you don't know what duty means. I have been guilty before her for a long time."

"That is the morality which smothers life with mould and dulness. Vera, Vera, you don't love, you do not know how!"

"You ought not to speak like that, unless you wish to drive me to despair. Am I to think that there is deception in your past, that you want to ruin me when you do not love me?"

"No, no, Vera," he said, rising hastily to his feet. "If I had wanted to deceive you I could have done so long ago."