Chapter Two
II: The Veil Suddenly Fell
A couple of words first. Already a month ago I noticed a strange pensiveness in her, not silence now, but real pensive-ness. This, too, I noticed suddenly. She was sitting over her work then, her head bent to her sewing, and didn't see that I was looking at her. And right then it suddenly struck me that she had become so thin, so slender, her little face pale, her lips white—all that, as a whole, together with the pensiveness, struck me extremely and all at once.
Even before then I had heard a dry little cough, especially at night. I got up at once and went to invite Schroeder to come, telling her nothing.
Schroeder came the next day. She was very surprised and kept looking first at Schroeder and then at me.
"But I'm well," she said, with a vague smile.
Schroeder did not examine her much (these medical men are haughtily careless at times), and only told me in the other room that it was a leftover from her illness and that come spring it wouldn't be a bad idea to go somewhere to the sea, or if that was impossible, simply to take a country house. In short, he said nothing except that there was weakness or some such thing.
When Schroeder left, she suddenly said to me again, looking at me terribly seriously:
"I'm quite, quite well."
But having said this, she straightaway blushed all at once, apparently with shame.
Apparently, it was shame. Oh, now I understand: she was ashamed that I was still her husband, looking after her, still as if I were a real husband. But I didn't understand it then and ascribed her color to humility (the veil!).
And then, a month after that, between four and five o'clock, in April, on a bright sunny day, I was sitting in my shop making calculations. Suddenly I heard her, in our room, at her table, at her work, softly, softly . . . singing. This novelty produced a tremendous impression on me, and to this day
I haven't understood it. Up to then I'd hardly ever heard her sing, except in the very first days, when I brought her into my house and we could still frolic, shooting at a target with the revolver. Then her voice was still rather strong, ringing, though unsteady, but terribly pleasant and healthy. Now, however, her little song was so feeble—oh, not that it was plaintive (it was some romance), but in her voice there was something as if cracked, broken, as if her little voice couldn't manage it, as if the song itself were sick. She was singing in a half voice, and suddenly, after rising, the voice broke off— such a poor little voice, and it broke off so pitifully; she coughed and again softly, softly, barely, barely began to sing . . .
My alarm will be laughed at, but no one will ever understand why I was so alarmed! No, I wasn't sorry for her yet, it was something quite different as yet. To begin with, at least in the first minutes, there suddenly came perplexity and terrible astonishment, terrible and strange, painful and almost vengeful. "She's singing, and with me here! Has she forgotten about me, or what?"
All shaken, I sat where I was, then suddenly got up, took my hat, and walked out, as if uncomprehending. At least I don't know why or where. Lukerya started helping me with my coat.
"She sings?" I said to Lukerya involuntarily. She didn't understand and stared at me, continuing not to understand; however, it was actually impossible to understand me.
"Is it the first time she's singing?"
"No, she sometimes sings when you're out," Lukerya replied.
I remember everything. I went down the stairs, walked out, and let my feet take me wherever they wanted to go. I walked as far as the corner and began staring somewhere.
People were passing by, pushing me, I didn't feel it. I hailed a cab and told the driver to go to the Police Bridge, I don't know why. But then I suddenly dropped him and gave him twenty kopecks:
"It's for having bothered you," I said, laughing to him senselessly, but in my heart some sort of rapture suddenly began.
I turned toward home, quickening my pace. The cracked, poor, broken little note suddenly began to ring again in my soul. I was breathless. The veil was falling, falling from my eyes! If she'd begun singing with me there, it meant she'd forgotten about me—that's what was clear and terrible. This my heart felt. Yet rapture shone in my soul and overcame fear.
Oh, the irony of fate! There was and could have been nothing else in my soul all winter except this very rapture, but where had I myself been all winter? had I been there with my
soul? I ran up the stairs in great haste, I don't know whether I walked in timidly. I remember only that the whole floor was as if undulating and I was as if floating on a river. I walked into the room, she was sitting in the same place, sewing, her head bent, but no longer singing. She gave me a passing, un-curious glance—not a glance, but merely the gesture, ordinary and indifferent, when someone comes into a room.
I went straight over to her and sat down on a chair right beside her, like a crazy man. She gave me a quick look, as if frightened: I took her hand, and I don't remember what I said to her, that is, wanted to say, because I couldn't even speak properly. My voice faltered and wouldn't obey me. And I didn't know what to say, only I was suffocating.
"Let's talk . . . you know . . . say something!" I suddenly babbled some stupid thing—oh, as if intelligence was the point! She gave another start and drew back in great fright, looking me in the face, but suddenly—stern astonishment showed in her eyes. Yes, astonishment, and it was stern. She was looking at me with big eyes. This sternness, this stern astonishment, all at once demolished me: "So you also want love? love?"—this astonishment as if suddenly asked, though she was silent. But I could read everything, everything. Everything in me shook, and I simply collapsed at her feet. Yes, I fell at her feet. She quickly jumped up, but with extraordinary strength I held her back by both hands.
And I fully understood my despair, oh, I understood it!
But, would you believe, rapture was seething in my heart so irrepressibly that I thought I would die. I was kissing her feet in ecstasy and happiness. Yes, in happiness, boundless and endless, and that while understanding all my hopeless despair! I was weeping, I was saying something, yet I couldn't speak. Fright and astonishment were suddenly replaced in her by some worried thought, an extraordinary question, and she looked at me strangely, wildly even, she wanted to understand something very quickly, and she smiled. She was terribly ashamed that I was kissing her feet, and she kept pulling them away, but I at once kissed the place on the floor where her foot had been. She saw that and suddenly started laughing from shame (you know how one can laugh from shame). Hysterics were coming, I could see that, her hands twitched—I wasn't thinking about that and kept mumbling to her that I loved her, that I wouldn't get up, "let me kiss your dress . . . let me worship you like this all my life ..." I don't know, I don't remember—and suddenly she began sobbing and shaking; a terrible fit of hysterics came. I had frightened her.
I carried her over to the bed. When the fit passed, she sat up on the bed, seized my hands with a terribly crushed look, and begged me to calm down: "Enough, don't torment yourself, calm down!"—and again she started weeping. All that evening I never left her side. I kept telling her I'd take her to Boulogne10 to swim in the sea, now, at once, in two weeks, that she had such a cracked little voice, I'd heard it that day; that I'd close the shop, sell it to Dobronravov, that everything would begin anew, and, above all, to Boulogne, to Boulogne! She listened and kept being afraid. Kept being more and more afraid. But for me the main thing was not that, but that the desire kept growing greater and more irrepressible in me to lie at her feet again, and again to kiss, to kiss the ground on which her feet stood, and to worship her and—"nothing more, I'll ask nothing more of you," I kept repeating every moment, "don't answer me anything, don't notice me at all, just let me look at you from the corner, turn me into a thing of yours, into a little dog...” She was weeping.
"And I thought you'd just let me stay like that," suddenly escaped her involuntarily, so involuntarily that she perhaps didn't notice at all how she had said it, and yet—oh, this was her most important, her most fatal phrase, the clearest for me that evening, and it was as if my heart was slashed by this phrase as by a knife! It explained everything to me, everything, but as long as she was near, before my eyes, I hoped irresistibly and was terribly happy. Oh, I made
her terribly weary that evening, and I understood that, but I was constantly thinking I was going to remake it all right then! Finally, toward nighttime, she became totally strengthless, I convinced her to go to sleep, and she fell asleep at once, soundly. I expected delirium, there was delirium, but very little. During the night I got up almost every minute and went quietly in my slippers to look at her. I wrung my hands over her, looking at this sick being on this poor little cot, the iron bed I had bought for her then for three roubles. I knelt down, but didn't dare to kiss the sleeper's feet (without her will!). I'd start praying to God, but would jump up again.
Lukerya watched me closely and kept coming in from the kitchen. I went to her and told her to go to bed and that the next day "something quite different" would begin.
And I believed it blindly, insanely, terribly. Oh, rapture, rapture flooded me! I was only waiting for the next day. Above all, I did not believe in any calamity, despite the symptoms.
Sense had not fully returned, despite the fallen veil, and it took a long, long time to return—
oh, till today, till this very day!! And how, how could it return then: why, she was still alive then, she was right there before me, and I before her: "She'll wake up tomorrow, and I'll tell her all this, and she'll see it all." That was my reasoning then, simple and clear— hence the rapture! Above all, there was this trip to Boulogne. I kept thinking for some reason that Boulogne was—everything, that Boulogne contained something definitive. "To Boulogne, to Boulogne! ..." I waited insanely for morning.