Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) (49 page)

XII

‘The conquering hero Insarov will be here directly!’ he shouted triumphantly, going into the Stahovs’ drawing - room, where there happened at the instant to be only Elena and Zoya.

‘
Wer
?’ inquired Zoya in German. When she was taken unawares she always used her native language. Elena drew herself up. Shubin looked at her with a playful smile on his lips. She felt annoyed, but said nothing.

‘You heard,’ he repeated, ‘Mr. Insarov is coming here.’

‘I heard,’ she replied; ‘and I heard how you spoke of him. I am surprised at you, indeed. Mr. Insarov has not yet set foot in the house, and you already think fit to turn him into ridicule.’

Shubin was crestfallen at once.

‘You are right, you are always right, Elena Nikolaevna,’ he muttered; ‘but I meant nothing, on my honour. We have been walking together with him the whole day, and he’s a capital fellow, I assure you.’

‘I didn’t ask your opinion about that,’ commented Elena, getting up.

‘Is Mr. Insarov a young man?’ asked Zoya.

‘He is a hundred and forty - four,’ replied Shubin with an air of vexation.

The page announced the arrival of the two friends. They came in. Bersenyev introduced Insarov. Elena asked them to sit down, and sat down herself, while Zoya went off upstairs; she had to inform Anna Vassilyevna of their arrival. A conversation was begun of a rather insignificant kind, like all first conversations. Shubin was silently watching from a corner, but there was nothing to watch. In Elena he detected signs of repressed annoyance against him — Shubin — and that was all. He looked at Bersenyev and at Insarov, and compared their faces from a sculptor’s point of view. ‘They are neither of them good - looking,’ he thought, ‘the Bulgarian has a characteristic face — there now it’s in a good light; the Great - Russian is better adapted for painting; there are no lines, there’s expression. But, I dare say, one might fall in love with either of them. She is not in love yet, but she will fall in love with Bersenyev,’ he decided to himself. Anna Vassilyevna made her appearance in the drawing - room, and the conversation took the tone peculiar to summer villas — not the country - house tone but the peculiar summer visitor tone. It was a conversation diversified by plenty of subjects; but broken by short rather wearisome pauses every three minutes. In one of these pauses Anna Vassilyevna turned to Zoya. Shubin understood her silent hint, and drew a long face, while Zoya sat down to the piano, and played and sang all her pieces through. Uvar Ivanovitch showed himself for an instant in the doorway, but he beat a retreat, convulsively twitching his fingers. Then tea was served; and then the whole party went out into the garden.... It began to grow dark outside, and the guests took leave.

Insarov had really made less impression on Elena than she had expected, or, speaking more exactly, he had not made the impression she had expected. She liked his directness and unconstraint, and she liked his face; but the whole character of Insarov — with his calm firmness and everyday simplicity — did not somehow accord with the image formed in her brain by Bersenyev’s account of him. Elena, though she did not herself suspect it, had anticipated something more fateful. ‘But,’ she reflected, ‘he spoke very little to - day, and I am myself to blame for it; I did not question him, we must have patience till next time... and his eyes are expressive, honest eyes.’ She felt that she had no disposition to humble herself before him, but rather to hold out her hand to him in friendly equality, and she was puzzled; this was not how she had fancied men, like Insarov, ‘heroes.’ This last word reminded her of Shubin, and she grew hot and angry, as she lay in her bed.

‘How did you like your new acquaintances?’ Bersenyev inquired of Insarov on their way home.

‘I liked them very much,’ answered Insarov, ‘especially the daughter. She must be a nice girl. She is excitable, but in her it’s a fine kind of excitability.’

‘You must go and see them a little oftener,’ observed Bersenyev.

‘Yes, I must,’ said Insarov; and he said nothing more all the way home. He at once shut himself up in his room, but his candle was burning long after midnight.

Bersenyev had had time to read a page of Raumer, when a handful of fine gravel came rattling on his window - pane. He could not help starting; opening the window he saw Shubin as white as a sheet.

‘What an irrepressible fellow you are, you night moth —
 
— ’ Bersenyev was beginning.

‘Sh — ’ Shubin cut him short; ‘I have come to you in secret, as Max went to Agatha I absolutely must say a few words to you alone.’

‘Come into the room then.’

‘No, that’s not necessary,’ replied Shubin, and he leaned his elbows on the window - sill, ‘it’s better fun like this, more as if we were in Spain. To begin with, I congratulate you, you’re at a premium now. Your belauded, exceptional man has quite missed fire. That I’ll guarantee. And to prove my impartiality, listen — here’s the sum and substance of Mr. Insarov. No talents, none, no poetry, any amount of capacity for work, an immense memory, an intellect not deep nor varied, but sound and quick, dry as dust, and force, and even the gift of the gab when the talk’s about his — between ourselves let it be said — tedious Bulgaria. What! do you say I am unjust? One remark more: you’ll never come to Christian names with him, and none ever has been on such terms with him. I, of course, as an artist, am hateful to him; and I am proud of it. Dry as dust, dry as dust, but he can crush all of us to powder. He’s devoted to his country — not like our empty patriots who fawn on the people; pour into us, they say, thou living water! But, of course, his problem is easier, more intelligible: he has only to drive the Turks out, a mighty task. But all these qualities, thank God, don’t please women. There’s no fascination, no charm about them, as there is about you and me.’

‘Why do you bring me in?’ muttered Bersenyev. ‘And you are wrong in all the rest; you are not in the least hateful to him, and with his own countrymen he is on Christian name terms — that I know.’

‘That’s a different matter! For them he’s a hero; but, to make a confession, I have a very different idea of a hero; a hero ought not to be able to talk; a hero should roar like a bull, but when he butts with his horns, the walls shake. He ought not to know himself why he butts at things, but just to butt at them. But, perhaps, in our days heroes of a different stamp are needed.’

‘Why are you so taken up with Insarov?’ asked Bersenyev. ‘Can you have run here only to describe his character to me?’

‘I came here,’ began Shubin, ‘because I was very miserable at home.’

‘Oh, that’s it! Don’t you want to have a cry again?’

‘You may laugh! I came here because I’m at my wits’ end, because I am devoured by despair, anger, jealousy.’

‘Jealousy? of whom?’

‘Of you and him and every one. I’m tortured by the thought that if I had understood her sooner, if I had set to work cleverly — But what’s the use of talking! It must end by my always laughing, playing the fool, turning things into ridicule as she says, and then setting to and strangling myself.’

‘Stuff, you won’t strangle yourself,’ observed Bersenyev.

‘On such a night, of course not; but only let me live on till the autumn. On such a night people do die too, but only of happiness. Ah, happiness! Every shadow that stretches across the road from every tree seems whispering now: “I know where there is happiness... shall I tell you?” I would ask you to come for a walk, only now you’re under the influence of prose. Go to sleep, and may your dreams be visited by mathematical figures! My heart is breaking. You, worthy gentlemen, see a man laughing, and that means to your notions he’s all right; you can prove to him that he’s humbugging himself, that’s to say, he is not suffering.... God bless you!’

Shubin abruptly left the window. ‘Annu - shka!’ Bersenyev felt an impulse to shout after him, but he restrained himself; Shubin had really been white with emotion. Two minutes later, Bersenyev even caught the sound of sobbing; he got up and opened the window; everything was still, only somewhere in the distance some one — a passing peasant, probably — was humming ‘The Plain of Mozdok.’

XIII

During the first fortnight of Insarov’s stay in the Kuntsovo neighbourhood, he did not visit the Stahovs more than four or five times; Bersenyev went to see them every day. Elena was always pleased to see him, lively and interesting talk always sprang up between them, and yet he often went home with a gloomy face. Shubin scarcely showed himself; he was working with feverish energy at his art; he either stayed locked up in his room, from which he would emerge in a blouse, smeared all over with clay, or else he spent days in Moscow where he had a studio, to which models and Italian sculptors, his friends and teachers, used to come to see him. Elena did not once succeed in talking with Insarov, as she would have liked to do; in his absence she prepared questions to ask him about many things, but when he came she felt ashamed of her plans. Insarov’s very tranquillity embarrassed her; it seemed to her that she had not the right to force him to speak out; and she resolved to wait; for all that, she felt that at every visit however trivial might be the words that passed between them, he attracted her more and more; but she never happened to be left alone with him — and to grow intimate with any one, one must have at least one conversation alone with him. She talked a great deal about him to Bersenyev. Bersenyev realised that Elena’s imagination had been struck by Insarov, and was glad that his friend had not ‘missed fire’ as Shubin had asserted. He told her cordially all he knew of him down to the minutest details (we often, when we want to please some one, bring our friends into our conversation, hardly ever suspecting that we are praising ourselves in that way), and only at times, when Elena’s pale cheeks flushed a little and her eyes grew bright and wide, he felt a pang in his heart of that evil pain which he had felt before.

One day Bersenyev came to the Stahovs, not at the customary time, but at eleven o’clock in the morning. Elena came down to him in the parlour.

‘Fancy,’ he began with a constrained smile, ‘our Insarov has disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’ said Elena.

‘He has disappeared. The day before yesterday he went off somewhere and nothing has been seen of him since.’

‘He did not tell you where he was going?’

‘No.’

Elena sank into a chair.

‘He has most likely gone to Moscow,’ she commented, trying to seem indifferent and at the same time wondering that she should try to seem indifferent.

‘I don’t think so,’ rejoined Bersenyev. ‘He did not go alone.’

‘With whom then?’

‘Two people of some sort — his countrymen they must have been — came to him the day before yesterday, before dinner.’

‘Bulgarians! what makes you think so?’

‘Why as far as I could hear, they talked to him in some language I did not know, but Slavonic... You are always saying, Elena Nikolaevna, that there’s so little mystery about Insarov; what could be more mysterious than this visit? Imagine, they came to him — and then there was shouting and quarrelling, and such savage, angry disputing.... And he shouted too.’

‘He shouted too?’

‘Yes. He shouted at them. They seemed to be accusing each other. And if you could have had a peep at these visitors. They had swarthy, heavy faces with high cheek bones and hook noses, both about forty years old, shabbily dressed, hot and dusty, looking like workmen — not workmen, and not gentlemen — goodness knows what sort of people they were.’

‘And he went away with them?’

‘Yes. He gave them something to eat and went off with them. The woman of the house told me they ate a whole huge pot of porridge between the two of them. They outdid one another, she said, and gobbled it up like wolves.’

Elena gave a faint smile.

‘You will see,’ she said, ‘all this will be explained into something very prosaic.’

‘I hope it may! But you need not use that word. There is nothing prosaic about Insarov, though Shubin does maintain —
 
— ’

‘Shubin!’ Elena broke in, shrugging her shoulders. ‘But you must confess these two good men gobbling up porridge —
 
— ’

‘Even Themistocles had his supper on the eve of Salamis,’ observed Bersenyev with a smile.

‘Yes; but then there was a battle next day. Any way you will let me know when he comes back,’ said Elena, and she tried to change the subject, but the conversation made little progress. Zoya made her appearance and began walking about the room on tip - toe, giving them thereby to understand that Anna Vassilyevna was not yet awake.

Bersenyev went away.

In the evening of the same day a note from him was brought to Elena. ‘He has come back,’ he wrote to her, ‘sunburnt and dusty to his very eyebrows; but where and why he went I don’t know; won’t you find out?’

‘Won’t you find out!’ Elena whispered, ‘as though he talked to me!’