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Precipice

<h2> CHAPTER XXIII </h2> In the evening the house was aglow with light. Tatiana Markovna could not do enough in honour of her guest and future connexion. She had a great bed put up in the guest-chamber, that nearly reached to the ceiling and resembled a catafalque. Marfinka and Vikentev gave full rein to their gay humour, as they played and sang. Only Raisky’s windows were dark. He had gone out immediately after dinner and had not returned to tea. The moon illuminated the new house but left the old house in shadow. There was bustle in the yard, in the kitchen, and in the servants’ rooms, where Marfa Egorovna’s coachman and servants were being entertained. From seven o’clock onwards Vera had sat idle in the dusk by the feeble light of a candle, her head supported on her hand, leaning over the table, while with her other hand she turned over the leaves of a book at which she hardly glanced. She was protected from the cold autumn air from the open window, by a big white woollen shawl thrown round her shoulders. She stood up after a time, laid the book on the table, and went to the window. She looked towards the sky, and then at the gaily-lighted house opposite. She shivered, and was about to shut the window when the report of a gun rolled up from the park through the quiet dusk. She shuddered, and seemed to have lost the use of her limbs, then sank into a chair and bowed her head. When she rose and looked wildly round, her face had changed. Sheer fright and distress looked from her eyes. Again and again she passed her hand over her forehead, and sat down at the table, only to jump up again. She tore the shawl from her shoulders and threw it on the bed; then with nervous haste she opened and shut the cupboard; she looked on the divan, on the chairs, for something she apparently could not find, and then collapsed wearily on her chair. On the back of the chair hung a wrap, a gift from Tiet Nikonich. She seized it and threw it over her head, rushed to the wardrobe, hunted in it with feverish haste, taking out first one coat, then another, until she had nearly emptied the cupboard and dresses and cloaks lay in a heap on the floor. At last she found something warm and dark, put out the light, and went noiselessly down the steps into the open. She crossed the yard, hidden in the shadows, and took her way along the dark avenue. She did not walk, she flew; and when she crossed the open light patches her shadow was hardly visible for a moment, as if the moon had not time to catch the flying figure. When she reached the end of the avenue, by the ditch which divided the garden from the park, she stopped a moment to get her breath. Then she crossed the park, hurried through the bushes, past her favourite bench, and reached the precipice. She picked up her skirts for the descent, when suddenly, as if he had risen out of the ground, Raisky stood between her and her goal. “Where are you going, Vera?” There was no answer. “Go back,” he said, offering his hand, but she tried to push past him. “Vera, where are you going?” “It is for the last time.” she said in a pleading, shamed whisper. “I must say good-bye. Make way for me, Cousin! I will return in a moment. Wait for me here, on this bench.” Without replying, he took her firmly by the hand, and she struggled in vain to free herself. “Let me go! You are hurting me!” But he did not give way, and the struggle proceeded. “You will not hold me by force,” she cried, and with unnatural strength freed herself, and sought to dash past him. But he put his arm round her waist, took her to the bench, and sat down beside her. “How rough and rude!” she cried. “I cannot hold you back by force, Vera. I may be saving you from ruin.” “Can I be ruined against my own will?” “It is against your will; yet you go to your ruin.” “There is no question of ruin. We must see one another again in order to separate.” “It is not necessary to see one another in order to separate.” “I must, and will. An hour or a day later, it is all the same. You may call the servants, the whole town, a file of soldiers, but no power will keep me back.” A second shot resounded. She pulled herself up, but was pressed down on the bench with the weight of Raisky’s hands. She shook her head wildly in powerless rage. “What reward do you hope from me for this virtuous deed?” she hissed. He said nothing, but kept a watchful eye on her movements. After a time she besought him gently: “Let me go, Cousin,” but he refused. “Cousin,” she said, laying her hand gently on his shoulder. “Imagine that you sat upon hot coals, and were dying every minute of terror, and of wild impatience, that happiness rose before you, stretching out enticing arms, only to vanish, that your whole being rose to meet it; imagine that you saw before you a last hope, a last glimmer. That is how it is with me at this moment. The moment will be lost, and with it everything else.” “Think, Vera, if in the hot thirst of fever you ask for ice, it is denied you. In your soberer moments yesterday you pointed out to me the practical means of rescue, you said I was not to let you go, and I will not.” She fell on her knees before him, and wrung her hands. “I should curse you my whole life long for your violence. Give way. Perhaps it is my destiny that calls me.” “I was a witness yesterday, Vera, of where you seek your fate. You believe in a Providence, and there is no other destiny.” “Yes,” she answered submissively. “I do believe. There before the sacred picture I sought for a spark to lighten my path, but in vain. What shall I do?” she said, rising. “Do not go, Vera.” “Perhaps it is my destiny that sends me there, there where my presence may be needed. Don’t try any longer to keep me, for I have made up my mind. My weakness is gone, and I have recovered control of myself and feel I am strong. It is not my destiny alone, but the destiny of another human being that is to be decided down there. Between me and him you are digging an abyss, and the responsibility will rest upon you. I shall never be consoled, and shall accuse you of having destroyed our happiness. Do not hold me back. You can only do it out of egoism, out of jealousy. You lied when you spoke to me of freedom.” “I hear the voice of passion, Vera, with all its sophistry and its deviations. You are practising the arts of a Jesuit. Remember that you yourself bade me, only yesterday, not to leave you. Will you curse me for not yielding to you? On whom does the responsibility rest? Tell me who the man is?” “If I tell you will you promise not to keep me back?” she said quickly. “I don’t know. Perhaps.” “Give me your word not to keep me any longer, and I give the name.” Another shot rang out. She sprang to one side, before he had time to take her by the hand. “Go to Grandmother,” he commanded, adding gently, “Tell her your trouble.” “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 document assuring 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.” “What a desperate war you wage against yourself, Mark, and how you ruin your own life!” she cried, wringing her hands. “Let us cease to quarrel, Vera. Your Grandmother speaks through you, but with another voice. That was all very well once, but now we are in the flood of another life where neither authority nor preconceived ideas will help us, where truth alone asserts her power.” “Where is truth?” “In happiness, in the joy of love. And I love you. Why do you torture me. Why do you fight against me and against yourself, and make two victims?” “It is a strange reproach. Look at me. It is only a few days since we saw one another, and have I not changed?” “I see that you suffer, and that makes it the more senseless. Now, I too ask what has induced you to come down here for all this time?” “Because I had not earlier realised the horror of my position, you will say,” she said, with a look that was almost hostile. “We might have asked one another this question, and made this reproach, long ago, and might have ceased to meet here. Better late than never! To-day we must answer the question, What is it that we wanted and expected from one another?” “Here is my irrefragable opinion—I want your love, and I give you mine. In love I recognise solely the principle of reciprocation, as it obtains in Nature. The law that I acknowledge is to follow unfettered our strong impression, to exchange happiness for happiness. This answers your question of why I came here. Is sacrifice necessary? Call it what you will there is no sacrifice in my scheme of life. I will no longer wander in this morass, and don’t understand how I have wasted my strength so long, certainly not for your sake, but essentially for my own. Here I will stay so long as I am happy, so long as I love. If my love grows cold, I shall tell you so, and go wherever Life leads me, without taking any baggage of duties and privileges with me; those I leave here in the depths below the precipice. You see, Vera, I don’t deceive you, but speak frankly. Naturally you possess the same rights as I. The mob above there lies to itself and others, and calls these his principles. But in secret and by cunning it acts in the same way, and only lays its ban on the women. Between us there must be equality. Is that fair or not?” “Sophistry!” she said, shaking her head. “You know my principles, Mark.” “To hang like stones round one another’s necks.” “Love imposes duties, just as life demands them. If you had an old, blind mother you would maintain and support her, would remain by her. An honourable man holds it to be his duty and his pleasure too.” “You philosophise, Vera, but you do not love.” “You avoid my argument, Mark. I speak my opinion plainly, for I am a woman, not an animal, or a machine.” “Your love is the fantastic, elaborate type described in novels. Is what you ask of me honourable? Against my convictions I am to go into a church, to submit to a ceremony which has no meaning for me. I don’t believe any of it and can’t endure the parson. Should I be acting logically or honourably?” Vera hastily wrapped herself in her mantilla, and stood up to go. “We met, Mark, to remove all the obstacles that stand in the way of our happiness, but instead of that we are increasing them. You handle roughly things that are sacred to me. Why did you call me here? I thought you had surrendered, that we should take one another’s hands for ever. Every time I have taken the path down the cliff it has been in this hope, and in the end I am disappointed. Do you know, Mark, where true life lies?” “Where?” “In the heart of a loving woman. To be the friend of such a woman....” Tears stifled her voice, but through her sobs she whispered: “I cannot, Mark. Neither my intellect nor my strength are sufficient to dispute with you. My weapon is weak, and has no value except that I have drawn it from the armoury of a quiet life, not from books or hearsay. I had thought to conquer you with other weapons. Do you remember how all this began?” she said, sitting down once more. “At first I was sorry for you. You were here alone, with no one to understand you, and everyone fled at the sight of you. I was drawn to you by sympathy, and saw something strange and undisciplined in you. You had no care for propriety, you were incautious in speech, you played rashly with life, cared for no human being, had no faith of your own, and sought to win disciples. From curiosity I followed your steps, allowed you to meet me, took books from you. I recognised in you intellect and strength, but strangely mixed and directed away from life. Then, to my sorrow, I imagined that I could teach you to value life, I wanted you to live so that you should be higher and better than anyone else, I quarrelled with you over your undisciplined way of living. You submitted to my influence, and I submitted to yours, to your intellect, your audacity, and even adopted part of your sophistry.” “But you soon,” put in Mark, “retraced your steps, and were seized with fear of your Grandmother. Why did you not leave me when you first became aware of my sophistry? Sophistry!” “It was too late, for I had already taken your fate too intimately to heart. I believed with all possible ardour that you would for my sake comprehend life, that you would cease to wander about to your own injury and without advantage to anyone else, that you would accept a substantial position of some kind....” “Vice-governor, Councillor or something of the kind,” he mocked. “What’s in the name? Yes, I thought that you would show yourself a man of action in a wide sphere of influence.” “As a well-disposed subject and as jack of all trades, and what else?” “My lifelong friend. I let my hopes of you take hold on me, and was carried away by them, and what are my gains in the terrible conflict? One only, that you flee from love, from happiness, from life, and from your Vera.” She drew closer to him and touched his shoulder. “Don’t fly from us, Mark. Look in my eyes, listen to my voice, which speaks with the voice of truth. Let us go to-morrow up the hill into the garden, and to-morrow there will be no happier pair than we are. You love me, Mark. Mark, do you hear? Look at me.” She stooped, and looked into his eyes. He got sharply to his feet, and shook his mass of hair. Vera took up her black mantilla once more, but her hands refused to obey her, and the mantilla fell on the floor. She took a step towards the door, but sank down again on the bench. Where could she find strength to hold him, when she had not even strength to leave the arbour, she wondered. And even if she could hold him, what would be the consequences? Not one life, but two separate lives, two prisons, divided by a grating. “We are both brusque and strong, Vera; that is why we torture one another, why we are separating.” “If I were strong, you would not leave Malinovka; you would ascend the hill with me, not clandestinely, but boldly by my side. Come and share life and happiness with me. It is impossible that you should not trust me, impossible that you are insincere, for that would be a crime. What shall I do? How shall I bring home to you the truth?” “You would have to be stronger than I, but we are of equal strength. That is why we dispute and are not of one mind. We must separate without bringing our struggle to an issue, one must submit to the other. I could take forcible possession of you as I could of any other woman. But what in another woman is prudery, or petty fear, or stupidity, is in you strength and womanly determination. The mist that divided us is dispersed; we have made our position clear. Nature has endued you with a powerful weapon, Vera. The antiquated ideas, morality, duty, principles, and faiths that do not exist for me are firmly established with you. You are not easily carried away, you put up a desperate fight and will only confess yourself conquered under terms of equality with your opponent. You are wrong, for it is a kind of theft. You ask to be conquered, and to carry off all the spoils! I, Vera, cannot give everything, but I respect you.” Vera gave him a glance in which there was a trace of pride, but her heart beat with the pain of parting. His words were a model of what a farewell should be. “We have gone to the bottom of the matter,” said Mark dully, “and I leave the decision in your hands.” He went to the other side of the arbour, keeping his eyes fixed upon her. “I am not deceiving you even now, in this decisive moment, when my head is giddy—I cannot. I do not promise you an unending love, because I do not believe in such a thing. I will not be your betrothed. But I love you more than anything else in the world. If, after all I have told you, you come to my arms, it means that you love me, that you are mine.” She looked across at him with wide open eyes, and felt that her whole body was trembling. A doubt shot through her mind. Was he a Jesuit, or was the man who brought her into this dangerous dilemma in reality of unbending honour? “Yours for ever?” she said in a low voice. If he said, “yes,” it would, she knew, be a bridge for the moment to help her over the abyss that divided them, but that afterwards she would be plunged into the abyss. She was afraid of him. Mark was painfully agitated, but he answered in a subdued tone, “I do not know. I only know what I am doing now, and do not see even into the near future. Neither can you. Let us give love for love, and I remain here, quieter than the waters of the pool, humbler than grass. I will do what you will, and what do you ask more. Or,” he added suddenly, coming nearer, “we will leave this place altogether....” In a lightning flash the wide world seemed to smile before her, as if the gates of Paradise were open. She threw herself in Mark’s arms and laid her hand on his shoulder. If she went away into the far distance with him, she thought, he could not tear himself from her, and once alone with her he must realise that life was only life in her presence. “Will you decide!” he asked seriously. She said nothing, but bowed her head. “Or do you fear your Grandmother?” The last words brought her to her senses, and she stepped back. “If I do not decide,” she whispered, “it is only because I fear her.” “The old lady would not let you go.” “She would let me go, and would give me her blessing, but she herself would die of grief. That is what I fear. To go away together,” she said dreamily, “and what then?” She looked up at him searchingly. “And then? How can I know, Vera?” “You will suddenly be driven from me; you will go and leave me, as if I were merely a log?” “Why a log? We could separate as friends.” “Separation! Do the ideas of love and separation exist side by side in your mind? They are extremes which should never meet. Separation must only come with death. Farewell, Mark! You can never promise me the happiness that I seek. All is at an end. Farewell!” “Farewell, Vera!” he said in a voice quite unlike his own. Both were pale, and avoided one another’s eyes. In the white moonlight that gleamed through the trees Vera sought her mantilla, and grasped the gun instead. At last she found the mantilla, but could not put it on her shoulders. Mark helped her mechanically, but left his own belongings behind. They went silently up the path, with slow and hesitating steps, as if each expected something from the other, both of them occupied with the same mental effort to find a pretext for delay. They came at last to the spot where Mark’s way lay across a low fence, and hers by the winding path through the bushes up to the park. Vera stood still. She seemed to see the events of her whole life pass before her in quick succession, but saw none filled with bitterness like the present. Her eyes filled with tears. She felt a violent impulse to look round once more, to see him once more, to measure with her eyes the extent of her loss, and then to hurry on again. But however great her sorrow for her wrecked happiness she dare not look round, for she knew it would be equivalent to saying Yes to destiny. She took a few steps up the path. Mark strode fiercely away towards the hedge, like a wild beast baulked of his prey. He had not lied when he said that he esteemed Vera, but it was an esteem wrung from him against his will, the esteem of the soldier for a brave enemy. He cursed the old-fashioned ideas which had enchained her free and vivacious spirit. His suffering was the suffering of despair; he was in the mood of a madman who would shatter a treasure of which the possession was denied him, in order that no one else might possess it. He was ready to spring, and could hardly restrain himself from laying violent hands on Vera. By his own confession to her he would have treated any other woman so, but not Vera. Then the conviction gnawed at his heart that for the sake of the woman who was now escaping him he was neglecting his “mission.” His pride suffered unspeakably by the confession of his own powerlessness. He admitted that the beautiful statue filled with the breath of life had character; she acted in accordance with her own proud will, not by the influence of outside suggestion. His new conception of truth did not subdue her strong, healthy temperament; it rather induced her to submit it to a minute analysis and to stick closer to her own conception of the truth. And now she was going, and as the traces of her footsteps would vanish, so all that had passed between them would be lost. And with her went all the charm and glory of life, never to return. He stamped his feet with rage and swung himself on to the fence. He would cast one glance in her direction to see if the haughty creature was really going. “One more glance,” thought Vera. She turned, and shuddered to see Mark sitting on the fence and gazing at her. “Farewell, Mark,” she cried, in a voice trembling with despair. From his throat there issued a low, wild cry of triumph. In a moment he was by her side, with victory and the conviction of her surrender in his heart. “Vera!” “You have come back, for always? You have at last understood. What happiness! God forgive....” She did not complete her sentence, for she lay wrapt in his embrace, her sobs quenched by his kisses. He raised her in his arms, and like a wild animal carrying off his prey, ran with her back to the arbour. God forgive her for having turned back. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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