Dream Tales and Prose Poems Read online

  'After that,' observed Anna, 'we saw each other very seldom…. When my father died, she came for a couple of days, would take nothing of her inheritance, and vanished again. She was unhappy with us … I could see that. Afterwards she came to Kazan as an actress.'

  Aratov began questioning Anna about the theatre, about the parts in which Clara had appeared, about her triumphs…. Anna answered in detail, but with the same mournful, though keen fervour. She even showed Aratov a photograph, in which Clara had been taken in the costume of one of her parts. In the photograph she was looking away, as though turning from the spectators; her thick hair tied with a ribbon fell in a coil on her bare arm. Aratov looked a long time at the photograph, thought it like, asked whether Clara had taken part in public recitations, and learnt that she had not; that she had needed the excitement of the theatre, the scenery … but another question was burning on his lips.

  'Anna Semyonovna!' he cried at last, not loudly, but with a peculiar force, 'tell me, I implore you, tell me why did she … what led her to this fearful step?'…

  Anna looked down. 'I don't know,' she said, after a pause of some instants. 'By God, I don't know!' she went on strenuously, supposing from Aratov's gesture that he did not believe her…. 'since she came back here certainly she was melancholy, depressed. Something must have happened to her in Moscow—what, I could never guess. But on the other hand, on that fatal day she seemed as it were … if not more cheerful, at least more serene than usual. Even I had no presentiment,' added Anna with a bitter smile, as though reproaching herself for it.

  'You see,' she began again, 'it seemed as though at Katia's birth it had been decreed that she was to be unhappy. From her early years she was convinced of it. She would lean her head on her hand, sink into thought, and say, "I shall not live long!" She used to have presentiments. Imagine! she used to see beforehand, sometimes in a dream and sometimes awake, what was going to happen to her! "If I can't live as I want to live, then I won't live,"… was a saying of hers too…. "Our life's in our own hands, you know." And she proved that!'

  Anna hid her face in her hands and stopped speaking. 'Anna Semyonovna,' Aratov began after a short pause, 'you have perhaps heard to what the newspapers ascribed … "To an unhappy love affair?"' Anna broke in, at once pulling away her hands from her face. 'That's a slander, a fabrication!… My pure, unapproachable Katia … Katia!… and unhappy, unrequited love? And shouldn't I have known of it?… Every one was in love with her … while she … And whom could she have fallen in love with here? Who among all the people here, who was worthy of her? Who was up to the standard of honesty, truth, purity … yes, above all, of purity which she, with all her faults, always held up as an ideal before her?… She repulsed!… she!…'

  Anna's voice broke…. Her fingers were trembling. All at once she flushed crimson … crimson with indignation, and for that instant, and that instant only, she was like her sister.

  Aratov was beginning an apology.

  'Listen,' Anna broke in again. 'I have an intense desire that you should not believe that slander, and should refute it, if possible! You want to write an article or something about her: that's your opportunity for defending her memory! That's why I talk so openly to you. Let me tell you; Katia left a diary …'

  Aratov trembled. 'A diary?' he muttered.

  'Yes, a diary … that is, only a few pages. Katia was not fond of writing … for months at a time she would write nothing, and her letters were so short. But she was always, always truthful, she never told a lie…. She, with her pride, tell a lie! I … I will show you this diary! You shall see for yourself whether there is the least hint in it of any unhappy love affair!'

  Anna quickly took out of a table-drawer a thin exercise-book, ten pages, no more, and held it out to Aratov. He seized it eagerly, recognised the irregular sprawling handwriting, the handwriting of that anonymous letter, opened it at random, and at once lighted upon the following lines.

  'Moscow, Tuesday … June.—Sang and recited at a literary matinée. To-day is a vital day for me. It must decide my fate. (These words were twice underlined.) I saw again….' Here followed a few lines carefully erased. And then, 'No! no! no!…. Must go back to the old way, if only …'

  Aratov dropped the hand that held the diary, and his head slowly sank upon his breast.

  'Read it!' cried Anna. 'Why don't you read it? Read it through from the beginning…. It would take only five minutes to read it all, though the diary extends over two years. In Kazan she used to write down nothing at all….'

  Aratov got up slowly from his chair and flung himself on his knees before

  Anna.

  She was simply petrified with wonder and dismay.

  'Give me … give me that diary,' Aratov began with failing voice, and he stretched out both hands to Anna. 'Give it me … and the photograph … you are sure to have some other one, and the diary I will return…. But I want it, oh, I want it!…'

  In his imploring words, in his contorted features there was something so despairing that it looked positively like rage, like agony…. And he was in agony, truly. He could not himself have foreseen that such pain could be felt by him, and in a frenzy he implored forgiveness, deliverance …

  'Give it me,' he repeated.

  'But … you … you were in love with my sister?' Anna said at last.

  Aratov was still on his knees.

  'I only saw her twice … believe me!… and if I had not been impelled by causes, which I can neither explain nor fully understand myself,… if there had not been some power over me, stronger than myself…. I should not be entreating you … I should not have come here. I want … I must … you yourself said I ought to defend her memory!'

  'And you were not in love with my sister?' Anna asked a second time.

  Aratov did not at once reply, and he turned aside a little, as though in pain.

  'Well, then! I was! I was—I'm in love now,' he cried in the same tone of despair.

  Steps were heard in the next room.

  'Get up … get up …' said Anna hurriedly. 'Mamma is coming.'

  Aratov rose.

  'And take the diary and the photograph, in God's name! Poor, poor Katia!… But you will give me back the diary,' she added emphatically. 'And if you write anything, be sure to send it me…. Do you hear?'

  The entrance of Madame Milovidov saved Aratov from the necessity of a reply. He had time, however, to murmur, 'You are an angel! Thanks! I will send anything I write….'

  Madame Milovidov, half awake, did not suspect anything. So Aratov left Kazan with the photograph in the breast-pocket of his coat. The diary he gave back to Anna; but, unobserved by her, he cut out the page on which were the words underlined.

  On the way back to Moscow he relapsed again into a state of petrifaction. Though he was secretly delighted that he had attained the object of his journey, still all thoughts of Clara he deferred till he should be back at home. He thought much more about her sister Anna. 'There,' he thought, 'is an exquisite, charming creature. What delicate comprehension of everything, what a loving heart, what a complete absence of egoism! And how girls like that spring up among us, in the provinces, and in such surroundings too! She is not strong, and not good-looking, and not young; but what a splendid helpmate she would be for a sensible, cultivated man! That's the girl I ought to have fallen in love with!' Such were Aratov's reflections … but on his arrival in Moscow things put on quite a different complexion.

  XIV

  Platonida Ivanovna was unspeakably rejoiced at her nephew's return. There was no terrible chance she had not imagined during his absence. 'Siberia at least!' she muttered, sitting rigidly still in her little room; 'at least for a year!' The cook too had terrified her by the most well-authenticated stories of the disappearance of this and that young man of the neighbourhood. The perfect innocence and absence of revolutionary ideas in Yasha did not in the least reassure the old lady. 'For indeed … if you come to that, he studies photography … and that's quite enough for
them to arrest him!' 'And behold, here was her darling Yasha back again, safe and sound. She observed, indeed, that he seemed thinner, and looked hollow in the face; natural enough, with no one to look after him! but she did not venture to question him about his journey. She asked at dinner. 'And is Kazan a fine town?' 'Yes,' answered Aratov. 'I suppose they're all Tartars living there?' 'Not only Tartars.' 'And did you get a Kazan dressing-gown while you were there?' 'No, I didn't.' With that the conversation ended.

  But as soon as Aratov found himself alone in his own room, he quickly felt as though something were enfolding him about, as though he were once more in the power, yes, in the power of another life, another being. Though he had indeed said to Anna in that sudden delirious outburst that he was in love with Clara, that saying struck even him now as senseless and frantic. No, he was not in love; and how could he be in love with a dead woman, whom he had not even liked in her lifetime, whom he had almost forgotten? No, but he was in her power … he no longer belonged to himself. He was captured. So completely captured, that he did not even attempt to free himself by laughing at his own absurdity, nor by trying to arouse if not a conviction, at least a hope in himself that it would all pass, that it was nothing but nerves, nor by seeking for proofs, nor by anything! 'If I meet him, I will capture him,' he recalled those words of Clara's Anna had repeated to him. Well, he was captured. But was not she dead? Yes, her body was dead … but her soul?… is not that immortal?… does it need corporeal organs to show its power? Magnetism has proved to us the influence of one living human soul over another living human soul…. Why should not this influence last after death, if the soul remains living? But to what end? What can come of it? But can we, as a rule, apprehend what is the object of all that takes place about us? These ideas so absorbed Aratov that he suddenly asked Platosha at tea-time whether she believed in the immortality of the soul. She did not for the first minute understand what his question was, then she crossed herself and answered. 'She should think so indeed! The soul not immortal!' 'And, if so, can it have any influence after death?' Aratov asked again. The old lady replied that it could … pray for us, that is to say; at least, when it had passed through all its ordeals, awaiting the last dread judgment. But for the first forty days the soul simply hovered about the place where its death had occurred.

  'The first forty days?'

  'Yes; and then the ordeals follow.'

  Aratov was astounded at his aunt's knowledge, and went off to his room. And again he felt the same thing, the same power over him. This power showed itself in Clara's image being constantly before him to the minutest details, such details as he seemed hardly to have observed in her lifetime; he saw … saw her fingers, her nails, the little hairs on her cheeks near her temples, the little mole under her left eye; he saw the slight movement of her lips, her nostrils, her eyebrows … and her walk, and how she held her head a little on the right side … he saw everything. He did not by any means take a delight in it all, only he could not help thinking of it and seeing it. The first night after his return he did not, however, dream of her … he was very tired, and slept like a log. But directly he waked up, she came back into his room again, and seemed to establish herself in it, as though she were the mistress, as though by her voluntary death she had purchased the right to it, without asking him or needing his permission. He took up her photograph, he began reproducing it, enlarging it. Then he took it into his head to fit it to the stereoscope. He had a great deal of trouble to do it … at last he succeeded. He fairly shuddered when through the glass he looked upon her figure, with the semblance of corporeal solidity given it by the stereoscope. But the figure was grey, as though covered with dust … and moreover the eyes—the eyes looked always to one side, as though turning away. A long, long while he stared at them, as though expecting them to turn to him … he even half-closed his eyelids on purpose … but the eyes remained immovable, and the whole figure had the look of some sort of doll. He moved away, flung himself in an armchair, took out the leaf from her diary, with the words underlined, and thought, 'Well, lovers, they say, kiss the words traced by the hand of the beloved—but I feel no inclination to do that—and the handwriting I think ugly. But that line contains my sentence.' Then he recalled the promise he had made Anna about the article. He sat down to the table, and set to work upon it, but everything he wrote struck him as so false, so rhetorical … especially so false … as though he did not believe in what he was writing nor in his own feelings…. And Clara herself seemed so utterly unknown and uncomprehended! She seemed to withhold herself from him. 'No!' he thought, throwing down the pen … 'either authorship's altogether not my line, or I must wait a little!' He fell to recalling his visit to the Milovidovs, and all Anna had told him, that sweet, delightful Anna…. A word she had uttered—'pure'—suddenly struck him. It was as though something scorched him, and shed light. 'Yes,' he said aloud, 'she was pure, and I am pure…. That's what gave her this power.'

  Thoughts of the immortality of the soul, of the life beyond the grave crowded upon him again. Was it not said in the Bible: 'Death, where is thy sting?' And in Schiller: 'And the dead shall live!' (Auch die Todten sollen leben!)

  And too, he thought, in Mitskevitch: 'I will love thee to the end of time … and beyond it!' And an English writer had said: 'Love is stronger than death.' The text from Scripture produced particular effect on Aratov…. He tried to find the place where the words occurred…. He had no Bible; he went to ask Platosha for one. She wondered, she brought out, however, a very old book in a warped leather binding, with copper clasps, covered with candle wax, and handed it over to Aratov. He bore it off to his own room, but for a long time he could not find the text … he stumbled, however, on another: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends' (S. John xv. 13).

  He thought: 'That's not right. It ought to be: Greater power hath no man.'

  'But if she did not lay down her life for me at all? If she made an end of herself simply because life had become a burden to her? What if, after all, she did not come to that meeting for anything to do with love at all?'

  But at that instant he pictured to himself Clara before their parting on the boulevard…. He remembered the look of pain on her face, and the tears and the words, 'Ah, you understood nothing!'

  No! he could have no doubt why and for whom she had laid down her life….

  So passed that whole day till night-time.

  XV

  Aratov went to bed early, without feeling specially sleepy, but he hoped to find repose in bed. The strained condition of his nerves brought about an exhaustion far more unbearable than the bodily fatigue of the journey and the railway. However, exhausted as he was, he could not get to sleep. He tried to read … but the lines danced before his eyes. He put out the candle, and darkness reigned in his room. But still he lay sleepless, with his eyes shut…. And it began to seem to him some one was whispering in his ear…. 'The beating of the heart, the pulse of the blood,' he thought…. But the whisper passed into connected speech. Some one was talking in Russian hurriedly, plaintively, and indistinctly. Not one separate word could he catch…. But it was the voice of Clara.

  Aratov opened his eyes, raised himself, leaned on his elbow…. The voice grew fainter, but kept up its plaintive, hurried talk, indistinct as before….

  It was unmistakably Clara's voice.

  Unseen fingers ran light arpeggios up and down the keys of the piano … then the voice began again. More prolonged sounds were audible … as it were moans … always the same over and over again. Then apart from the rest the words began to stand out … 'Roses … roses … roses….'