She replied in a brief note:
“Come to me to - day,” she wrote to him: “he has gone away for the whole day. Your letter has greatly disturbed me. I keep thinking, thinking . . . and my head is in a whirl. I am very wretched, but you love me, and I am happy. Come. Yours, I.”
She was sitting in her boudoir when Litvinov went in.
He was conducted there by the same little girl of thirteen who on the previous day had watched for him on the stairs. On the table before Irina was standing an open, semi - circular, cardboard box of lace: she was carelessly turning over the lace with one hand, in the other she was holding Litvinov’s letter. She had only just left off crying; her eyelashes were wet, and her eyelids swollen; on her cheeks could be seen the traces of undried tears not wiped away. Litvinov stood still in the doorway; she did not notice his entrance.
“You are crying?” he said wonderingly.
She started, passed her hand over her hair and smiled.
“Why are you crying?” repeated Litvinov. She pointed in silence to the letter. “So you were . . . over that,” he articulated haltingly.
“Come here, sit down,” she said, “give me your hand. Well, yes, I was crying . . . what are you surprised at? Is that nothing?” she pointed again to the letter.
Litvinov sat down.
“I know it’s not easy, Irina, I tell you so, indeed, in my letter . . . I understand your position. But if you believe in the value of your love for me, if my words have convinced you, you ought, too, to understand what I feel now at the sight of your tears. I have come here, like a man on his trial, and I await what is to be my sentence? Death or life? Your answer decides everything. Only don’t look at me with those eyes. . . . They remind me of the eyes I saw in old days in Moscow.”
Irina flushed at once, and turned away, as though herself conscious of something evil in her gaze.
“Why do you say that, Grigory? For shame! You want to know my answer . . . do you mean to say you can doubt it? You are troubled by my tears . . but you don’t understand them. Your letter, dearest, has set me thinking. Here you write that my love has replaced everything for you, that even your former studies can never now be put into practice; but I ask myself, can a man live for love alone? Won’t it weary him at last, won’t he want an active career, and won’t he cast the blame on what drew him away from active life? That’s the thought that dismays me, that’s what I am afraid of, and not what you imagine.”
Litvinov looked intently at Irina, and Irina intently looked at him, as though each would penetrate deeper and further into the soul of the other, deeper and further than word can reach, or word betray.
“You are wrong in being afraid of that,” began Litvinov. “I must have expressed myself badly. Weariness? Inactivity? With the new impetus your love will give me? O Irina, in your love there’s a whole world for me, and I can’t yet foresee myself what may develop from it.”
Irina grew thoughtful.
“Where are we going?” she whispered.
“Where? We will talk of that later. But, of course, then . . . then you agree? you agree, Irina?”
She looked at him. “And you will be happy?”
“O Irina!”
“You will regret nothing? Never?”
She bent over the cardboard box, and again began looking over the lace in it.
“Don’t be angry with me, dear one, for attending to this trash at such a moment. . . . I am obliged to go to a ball at a certain lady’s, these bits of finery have been sent me, and I must choose to - day. Ah! I am awfully wretched!” she cried suddenly, and she laid her face down on the edge of the box. Tears began falling again from her eyes. . . . She turned away; the tears might spoil the lace. “Irina, you are crying again,” Litvinov began uneasily.
“Ah, yes, again,” Irina interposed hurriedly. “O Grigory, don’t torture me, don’t torture yourself! . . . Let us be free people! What does it matter if I do cry! And indeed do I know myself why my tears are flowing? You know, you have heard my decision, you believe it will not be changed. That I agree to . . . What was it you said? . . . to all or nothing . . . what more would you have? Let us be free? Why these mutual chains? We are alone together now, you love me. I love you; is it possible we have nothing to do but wringing our thoughts out of each other? Look at me, I don’t want to talk about myself, I have never by one word hinted that for me perhaps it was not so easy to set at nought my duty as a wife . . . and, of course, I don’t deceive myself, I know I am a criminal, and that he has a right to kill me. Well, what of it? Let us be free, I say. To - day is ours - - a life - time’s ours.” She got up from the arm - chair and looked at Litvinov with her head thrown back, faintly smiling and moving her eyebrows, while with one arm bare to the elbow she pushed back from her face a long tress on which a few tears glistened. A rich scarf slipped from the table and fell on the floor at Irina’s feet. She trampled contemptuously on it. “Or don’t you like me, today? Have I grown ugly since yesterday? Tell me, have you often seen a prettier hand? And this hair? Tell me, do you love me?”
She clasped him in both arms, held his head close to her bosom, her comb fell out with a ringing sound, and her falling hair wrapped him in a soft flood of fragrance.
XXIV
LITVINOV walked up and down his room in the hotel, his head bowed in thought. He had now to pass from theory to practice, to devise ways and means for flight, for moving to unknown countries. . . . But, strange to say, he was not pondering so much upon ways and means as upon whether actually, beyond doubt, the decision had been reached on which he had so obstinately insisted? Had the ultimate, irrevocable word been uttered? But Irina to be sure had said to him at parting, “Act, act, and when every thing is ready, only let me know.” That was final! Away with all doubts. . . . He must proceed to action. And Litvinov proceeded - - in the meantime - - to calculation. Money first of all. Litvinov had, he found, in ready money one thousand three hundred and twenty - eight guldens, in French money, two thousand eight hundred and fifty - five francs; the sum was trifling, but it was enough for the first necessities, and then he must at once write to his father to send him all he could; he would have to sell the forest part of the land. But on what pretext? . . . Well, a pretext would be found. Irina had spoken, it’s true, of her bijoux, but that must not be taken into his reckoning; that, who knows, might come in for a rainy day. He had besides a good Geneva watch, for which he might get . . . well, say, four hundred francs. Litvinov went to a banker’s, and with much circumlocution introduced the question whether it was possible, in case of need, to borrow money; but bankers at Baden are wary old foxes, and in response to such circumlocutions they promptly assume a drooping and blighted air, for all the world like a wild flower whose stalk has been severed by the scythe; some, indeed, laugh outright in your face, as though appreciating an innocent joke on your part. Litvinov, to his shame, even tried his luck at roulette, even, oh ignominy! put a thaler on the number thirty, corresponding with his own age. He did this with a view to augmenting and rounding off his capital; and if he did not augment it, he certainly did round off his capital by losing the odd twenty - eight guldens. There was a second question, also not an unimportant one; that was the passport. But for a woman a passport is not quite so obligatory, and there are countries where it is not required at all, Belgium, for instance, and England; besides, one might even get some other passport, not Russian. Litvinov pondered very seriously on all this; his decision was firm, absolutely unwavering, and yet all the time against his will, overriding his will, something not serious, almost humorous came in, filtered through his musings, as though the very enterprise were a comic business, and no one ever did elope with any one in reality, but only in plays and novels, and perhaps somewhere in the provinces, in some of those remote districts, where, according to the statements of travelers, people are literally sick continually from ennui. At that point Litvinov recalled how an acquaintance of his, a retired cornet, Batsov, had eloped with a merchant’s daugh
ter in a staging sledge with bells and three horses, having as a preliminary measure made the parents drunk, and adopted the same precaution as well with the bride, and how, as it afterwards turned out, he was outwitted and within an ace of a thrashing into the bargain. Litvinov felt exceedingly irritated with himself for such inappropriate reminiscences, and then with the recollection of Tatyana, her sudden departure, all that grief and suffering and shame, he felt only too acutely that the affair he was arranging was deadly earnest, and how right he had been when he had told Irina that his honor, even, left no other course open. . . . And again at the mere name something of flame turned with sweet ache about his heart and died away again.
The tramp of horses’ hoofs sounded behind him. He moved aside. . . . Irina overtook him on horseback; beside her rode the stout general. She recognized Litvinov, nodded to him, and lashing her horse with a sidestroke of her whip, she put him into a gallop, and suddenly dashed away at headlong speed. Her dark veil fluttered in the wind. . . .
“Pas si vite! Nom de Dieu! pas si vite!” cried the general, and he, too, galloped after her.
XXV
THE next morning Litvinov had only just come home from seeing the banker, with whom he had had another conversation on the playful instability of our exchange, and the best means of sending money abroad, when the hotel porter handed him a letter. He recognized Irina’s handwriting, and without breaking the seal - - a presentiment of evil, Heaven knows why, was astir in him - - he went into his room. This was what he read (the letter was in French):
“My dear one, I have been thinking all night of your plan. . . . I am not going to shuffle with you. You have been open with me, and I will be open with you; I cannot run away with you, I have not the strength to do it. I feel how I am wronging you, my second sin is greater than the first, I despise myself, my cowardice. I cover myself with reproaches, but I cannot change myself. In vain I tell myself that I have destroyed your happiness, that you have the right now to regard me as a frivolous flirt, that I myself drew you on, that I have given you solemn promises. . . . I am full of horror of hatred for myself, but I can’t do otherwise, I can’t, I can’t. I don’t want to justify myself, I won’t tell you I was carried away myself . . . all that’s of no importance; but I want to tell you, and to say it again, and yet again, I am yours, yours for ever, do with me as you will, when you will, free from all obligation, from all responsibility! I am yours. . . . But run away, throw up everything . . . no! no! no! I besought you to save me, I hoped to wipe out everything, to burn up the past as in a fire . . . but I see there is no salvation for me; I see the poison has gone too deeply into me; I see one cannot breathe this atmosphere for years with impunity. I have long hesitated whether to write you this letter, I dread to think what decision you may come to, I trust only to your love for me. But I felt it would be dishonest on my part to hide the truth from you - - especially as perhaps you have already begun to take the first steps for carrying out our project. Ah! it was lovely but impracticable. O my dear one, think me a weak, worthless woman, despise, but don’t abandon me, don’t abandon your Irina! . . . To leave this life I have not the courage, but live it without you I cannot either. We soon go back to Petersburg, come there, live there, we will find occupation for you, your labors in the past shall not be thrown away, you shall find good use for them . . . only live near me, only love me; such as I am, with all my weaknesses and my vices, and believe me, no heart will ever be so tenderly devoted to you as the heart of your Irina. Come soon to me, I shall not have an instant’s peace until I see you. - - Yours, yours, yours, I.”
The blood beat like a sledge - hammer in Litvinov’s head, then slowly and painfully sank to his heart, and was chill as a stone in it. He read through Irina’s letter, and just as on that day at Moscow he fell in exhaustion on the sofa, and stayed there motionless. A dark abyss seemed suddenly to have opened on all sides of him, and he stared into this darkness in senseless despair. And so again, again deceit, no, worse than deceit, lying and baseness. . . . And life shattered, everything torn up by its roots utterly, and the sole thing which he could cling to - - the last prop in fragments, too! “Come after us to Petersburg,” he repeated with a bitter inward laugh, “we will find you occupation. . . . Find me a place as a head clerk, eh? and who are we? Here there’s a hint of her past. Here we have the secret, hideous something I know nothing of, but which she has been trying to wipe out, to burn as in a fire. Here we have that world of intrigues, of secret relations, of shameful stories of Byelskys and Dolskys. . . . And what a future, what a lovely part awaiting me! To live close to her, visit her, share with her the morbid melancholy of the lady of fashion who is sick and weary of the world, but can’t live outside its circle, be the friend of the house of course, of his Excellency . . . until . . . until the whim changes and the plebeian lover loses his piquancy, and is replaced by that fat general or Mr. Finikov - - that’s possible and pleasant, and I dare say useful. . . . She talks of a good use for my talents? . . . but the other project’s impracticable, impracticable. . . .” In Litvinov’s soul rose, like sudden gusts of wind before a storm, momentary impulses of fury. . . . Every expression in Irina’s letter roused his indignation, her very assertions of her unchanging feelings affronted him. “She can’t let it go like that,” he cried at last, “I won’t allow her to play with my life so mercilessly.”
Litvinov jumped up, snatched his hat. But what was he to do? Run to her? Answer her letter? He stopped short, and his hands fell.
“Yes, what was to be done?”
Had he not himself put this fatal choice to her? It had not turned out as he had wished . . . there was that risk about every choice. She had changed her mind, it was true; she herself had declared at first that she would throw up everything and follow him; that was true, too; but she did not deny her guilt, she called herself a weak woman; she did not want to deceive him, she had been deceived in herself. . . . What answer could be made to that? At any rate she was not hypocritical, she was not deceiving him . . . she was open, remorselessly open. There was nothing forced her to speak out, nothing to prevent her from soothing him with promises, putting things off, and keeping it all in uncertainty till her departure . . . till her departure with her husband for Italy? But she had ruined his life, ruined two lives. . . . What of that?
But as regards Tatyana, she was not guilty; the guilt was his, his, Litvinov’s alone, and he had no right to shake off the responsibility his own sin had laid with iron yoke upon him. . . . All this was so; but what was left him to do now?
Again he flung himself on the sofa and again in gloom, darkly, dimly, without trace, with devouring swiftness, the minutes raced past. . . .
“And why not obey her?” flashed through his brain. “She loves me, she is mine, and in our very yearning towards each other, in this passion, which after so many years has burst upon us, and forced its way out with such violence, is there not something inevitable, irresistible, like a law of nature? Live in Petersburg . . . and shall I be the first to be put in such a position? And how could we be in safety together? . . .”
And he fell to musing, and Irina’s shape, in the guise in which it was imprinted for ever in his late memories, softly rose before him. . . . But not for long. . . . He mastered himself, and with a fresh outburst of indignation drove away from him both those memories and that seductive image.
“You give me to drink from that golden cup,” he cried, “but there is poison in the draught, and your white wings are besmirched with mire. . . . Away! Remain here with you after the way I . . . I drove away my betrothed . . . a deed of infamy, of infamy!” He wrung his hands with anguish, and another face with the stamp of suffering on its still features, with dumb reproach in its farewell eyes, rose from the depths. . . .
And for a long time Litvinov was in this agony still; for a long time, his tortured thought, like a man fever - stricken, tossed from side to side. . . . He grew calm at last; at last he came to a decision. From the very first instant he h
ad a presentiment of this decision; . . . it had appeared to him at first like a distant, hardly perceptible point in the midst of the darkness and turmoil of his inward conflict; then it had begun to move nearer and nearer, till it ended by cutting with icy edge into his heart.
Litvinov once more dragged his box out of the corner, once more he packed all his things, without haste, even with a kind of stupid carefulness, rang for the waiter, paid his bill, and despatched to Irina a note in Russian to the following purport:
“I don’t know whether you are doing me a greater wrong now than then; but I know this present blow is infinitely heavier. . . . It is the end. You tell me, ‘I cannot’; and I repeat to you, ‘I cannot . . .’ do what you want. I cannot and I don’t want to. Don’t answer me. You are not capable of giving me the only answer I would accept. I am going away to - morrow, early, by the first train. Good - by, may you be happy! We shall in all probability not see each other again.”
Till night - time Litvinov did not leave his room; God knows whether he was expecting anything. About seven o’clock in the evening a lady in a black mantle with a veil on her face twice approached the steps of his hotel. Moving a little aside and gazing far away into the distance, she suddenly made a resolute gesture with her hand, and for the third time went towards the steps. . . .
“Where are you going, Irina Pavlovna?” she heard a voice utter with effort behind her.
She turned with nervous swiftness. . . . Potugin ran up to her.
She stopped short, thought a moment, and fairly flung herself towards him, took his arm, and drew him away.
A Sportsman's Sketches: Works of Ivan Turgenev 1 Page 94