Virgin Soil (Volume 2)/Chapter 18

by Ivan Turgenev

XXXVIII

Two days after all these events, there drove into the courtyard of the 'accommodating' priest Zosim a little cart in which sat a man and a woman, already well known to the reader, and the day after their arrival they were legally married. Soon afterwards they disappeared, and the worthy Zosim never regretted what he had done. At the factory Solomin had left a letter addressed to the owner and delivered to him by Pavel; in it was given a full and exact account of the state of the business (it was doing splendidly), and a request was made for three months' leave of absence. This letter had been written two days before Nezhdanov's death, from which it may be concluded that Solomin even then thought it necessary to go away with him and Marianna and keep out of sight for a time. Nothing was revealed by the inquiry held over the suicide. The body was buried; Sipyagin cut short all further search for his niece.

Nine months later Markelov was tried. At the trial he behaved himself just as he had done before the governor, with composure, a certain dignity, and some weariness. His habitual sharpness was softened, but not by cowardice; there was another, nobler feeling at work. He made no defence, expressed no regret, blamed no one and mentioned no names; his emaciated face with its lustreless eyes preserved one expression—submission to his fate, and firmness; his mild but direct and truthful answers awakened in his very judges a sentiment akin to sympathy. Even the peasants who had seized him and gave witness against him—even they shared this feeling, and spoke of him as a 'simple,' good-hearted gentleman. But his guilt was too apparent; he could not possibly escape punishment, and it seemed as though he himself accepted this punishment as his due. Of his fellow-conspirators, few enough, Mashurina kept out of sight; Ostrodumov was killed by a shopkeeper whom he was inciting to revolt, and who gave him an 'awkward' blow; Golushkin, in consideration of his 'heartfelt penitence' (he almost went out of his senses with alarm and agitation), received a light sentence; Kislyakov was kept a month under arrest and then set free, and even allowed to 'gallop' about the provinces unchecked; Nezhdanov was set free by death; Solomin, through lack of evidence, was left undisturbed though under suspicion. (He did not, however, avoid trial, and made his appearance when wanted.) Of Marianna nothing ever was said; and Paklin completely evaded all difficulties—indeed, no notice was taken of him at all.

A year and a half had gone by, the winter of 1870 had come. In Petersburg—Petersburg where the privy councillor and chamberlain Sipyagin was beginning to take an important position, where his wife patronised the arts, gave musical evenings, and founded soup-kitchens, and where Mr. Kallomyetsev was regarded as one of the most promising secretaries of his department—along one of the streets of Vassily Ostrov walked, hobbling and limping, a little man in a shabby overcoat with a catskin collar. It was Paklin. He had changed a good deal of late; a few silver threads could be seen among the long tufts of hair that stuck out below his fur cap. There chanced to be coming towards him along the pavement a rather stout, tall lady, closely muffled in a thick cloth cloak. Paklin cast an indifferent glance in her direction, passed her by . . . then suddenly stood still, thought a minute, flung up his arms, and quickly turning and overtaking her, he looked up under her hat at her face.

'Mashurina?' he said in a low voice.

The lady scanned him majestically, and without uttering a word walked on.

'Dear Mashurina, I recognise you,' Paklin went on, hobbling along beside her, 'only don't you, please, be afraid. I wouldn't betray you, I am too delighted to have met you! I'm Paklin, Sila Paklin, you know, Nezhdanov's friend.. . . Come and see me; I live only a step or two away. Please do!'

'Io sono contessa Rocca di Santo Fiume!' the lady answered in a low voice, but in a wonderfully pure Russian accent.

'Come, nonsense! . . . a fine contessa! . . . Come and see me. Let us have a chat.. . .'

'But where do you live?' the Italian countess asked suddenly in Russian. 'I've no time to lose.'

'I live here, in this street—that's my house, the grey one there, with three stories. How kind it is of you not to persist in trying to mystify me! Give me your hand, come along. Have you been here long? And how are you a countess? Have you married some Italian count?'

Mashurina had not married an Italian count. She had been provided with a passport made out in the name of a certain Countess Rocca di Santo Fiume, who had died not long before, and with this she had with the utmost composure returned to Russia, though she did not know a word of Italian and had the most Russian of faces.

Paklin conducted her to his humble lodgings. The hunchbacked sister with whom he was living came to meet the visitor from behind the screen that separated the tiny kitchen from the equally tiny passage.

'Here, Snapotchka,' he said, 'I commend to you a great friend of mine; give us some tea as quick as you can.'

Mashurina, who would not have gone to Paklin's if he had not mentioned Nezhdanov's name, took off her hat, and, passing her masculine hand over her still cropped hair, bowed and sat down in silence. She was altogether unchanged, she was even wearing the very same dress that she had worn two years before; but in her eyes there was a sort of immovable grief, which added something touching to the habitually stern expression of her face.

Snanduliya went for the samovar, while Paklin placed himself opposite Mashurina, lightly patted her on the knee, and hung down his head; but when he tried to speak, he was obliged to clear his throat; his voice broke and tears glistened in his eyes. Mashurina sat stiff and motionless, without leaning back, in her chair, and looked morosely away.

'Yes, yes,' began Paklin, 'those were times! Looking at you, I remember . . . many things, and many people, dead and living; my poll parrots too are dead . . . but you didn't know them, I fancy; and both on the same day, as I foretold. Nezhdanov . . . poor Nezhdanov! . . . you know, of course . . .?'

'Yes, I know,' said Mashurina, still looking away.

'And do you know about Ostrodumov, too?' Mashurina merely nodded. She wanted him to go on talking of Nezhdanov, but she could not bring herself to ask him about him. He understood her without that.

'I was told that in the letter he left he mentioned you—was that true?'

Mashurina could not answer at once.

'It is true,' she brought out at last.

'He was a marvellous fellow! Only, he got out of his right track! He was about as good a revolutionist as I was. Do you know what he really was? The idealist of realism! Do you understand me?'

Mashurina flung a rapid glance at Paklin. She did not understand, and indeed she did not care to take the trouble to understand him. It struck her as strange and unsuitable that he should dare to compare himself with Nezhdanov; but she thought, 'Let him brag now.' (Though he was not bragging at all, but rather, to his own ideas, humbling himself.)

'A fellow called Silin found me out here,' Paklin continued. 'Nezhdanov had written to him too just before his death. And he, this Silin, was inquiring whether one couldn't get hold of any of his papers. But Alyosha's things had been put under seal . . . and besides, there were no papers among them; he burned everything, he burned his poems too. You didn't know perhaps that he wrote poetry? I am so sorry about them; I am sure some of them must have been very good. All that has vanished with him, all lost in the common vortex, and dead for ever! Nothing's left but the memories of his friends till they pass away in their turn!'

Paklin paused.

'The Sipyagins,' he went on again: 'do you remember those condescending, dignified, loathsome swells? They're at the tip-top of power and glory by now!'

Mashurina did not 'remember' the Sipyagins in the least; but Paklin hated them both, especially Mr. Sipyagin, to such a degree that he could not deny himself the pleasure of 'pulling them to pieces.' 'They say there's such a high tone in their house! they're always talking about virtue! But I've observed, whenever there's too much talk about virtue, it's for all the world like too much smell of scent in a sickroom; you may be sure there's some hidden nastiness to conceal! It's a suspicious sign! Poor Alexey! they were the ruin of him, those Sipyagins!'

'How's Solomin doing?' asked Mashurina. She had suddenly ceased to feel any inclination to hear anything about him from this man.

'Solomin!' cried Paklin. ' That's a first-rate fellow. He has got on splendidly. He threw up his old factory and carried off the best workmen with him. There was one chap there . . . a regular firebrand, they say! Pavel was his name . . . he took him along with him. Now they say he has a factory of his own, a small one, somewhere out Perm way, on co-operative principles. He's a man that'll stick to what he's about! He'll carry anything through! He's a sharp fellow, ay, and a strong one too. He's first-rate! And the great thing is: he's not trying to cure all the social diseases all in a minute. For we Russians are a queer lot, you know, we expect everything; some one or something is to come along one day and cure us all at once, heal all our wounds, extract all our diseases like an aching tooth. Who or what this panacea is to be—why, Darwinism, the village commune, Arhip Perepentyev, a foreign war, anything you please! Only, we must have our teeth pulled out for us! It's all sluggishness, apathy, shallow thinking! But Solomin's not like that—no, he's not a quack doctor, he's first-rate!'

Mashurina waved her hand as though she would say, 'He may be dismissed, then.'

'Well, and that girl,' she inquired—'I've forgotten her name—who ran away with him, with Nezhdanov?'

'Marianna? Oh, she's that same Solomin's wife now. It's more than a year since she was married to him. At first it was only formal, but now they say she really is his wife. Yes, yes.'

Marianna waved her hand again. Once she had been jealous of Marianna for Nezhdanov's sake; now she felt indignant with her for being capable of infidelity to his memory. 'I dare say there's a baby by now,' she commented contemptuously.

'Very likely, I don't know. But where are you off to?' Paklin added, seeing that she was taking up her hat. 'Stay a little, Snapotchka will give us some tea directly.' It was not so much that he wanted to keep Mashurina particularly, as that he could not let slip an opportunity of giving utterance to all that had accumulated and was seething in his breast. Since Paklin had returned to Petersburg, he had seen very few people, especially of the younger generation. The Nezhdanov affair had scared him; he had grown very cautious and avoided society, and the younger men on their side looked very suspiciously upon him. One young man had even abused him to his face as an informer. With the elder generation he did not much care himself to consort; so that it had sometimes been his lot to be silent for weeks together. He did not speak out freely before his sister—not that he supposed her to be incapable of understanding him, oh no! He had the highest opinion of her intellect.. . . But with her he would have had to talk seriously and perfectly truthfully; directly he fell into 'playing trumps,' as they say, she would begin gazing at him with a peculiar intent and compassionate look; and he was ashamed. And how is a man to get on without a little 'trumping,' just a low 'trump' occasionally! And so life in Petersburg had begun to be a weariness of the flesh to Paklin, and he even thought about moving elsewhere, to Moscow perhaps. Reflections of all sorts, speculations, fancies, epigrams, and sarcasms, were stored up within him, like water in a closed mill.. . . The floodgates could not be raised; the water had grown stagnant and stale. Mashurina had turned up . . . so he lifted the floodgates and talked and talked.. . . He fell upon Petersburg, Petersburg life, and all Russia. No one and nothing was spared. Mashurina took a very limited interest in all this, but she did not contradict or interrupt him . . . and that was all he wanted.

'Yes, indeed,' he said, 'these are nice little times, I can assure you! In society the stagnation's absolute; every one bored to perdition! In literature a vacuum clean swept! In criticism . . . if an advanced young reviewer has to say that "it's characteristic of the hen to lay eggs," it takes him twenty whole pages to expound this mighty truth, and even then he doesn't quite manage it! They're as soft, these fellows, let me tell you, as feather-beds, as greasy as cold stew, and foaming at the mouth they utter commonplaces! In science . . . ha! ha! ha! we've a renowned Kant of our own indeed, if it's only the Kant' (i.e. braiding) 'on our engineers' collars! In art it's just the same! If you care to go to the concert to-day, you will hear the national singer Agremantsky.. . . He is having an immense success.. . . And if a stuffed bream, a stuffed bream, I tell you, were possessed of a voice, it would sing precisely like that worthy! And Skoropihin even—you know our time-honoured Aristarchus—praises him! It's something, he declares, quite unlike Western art! He praises our miserable painters too! He used once to rave, he says, over Europe, over the Italians; but he has heard Rossini and thought: "Pooh, pooh!" he has seen Raphael—"Pooh, pooh!" And that "pooh" is quite enough for our young men; they repeat "pooh" after Skoropihin, and they're contented if you please! And meanwhile the people's poverty is fearful, they are utterly crushed by taxes, and the only reform that's been accomplished is that all peasants have taken to caps while their wives have given up coifs.. . . And the famine! The drunkenness! The usurers!'

But at this point Mashurina yawned, and Paklin saw he must change the subject.

'You have not yet told me,' he said to her, 'where you have been these two years, and whether you have been here long, and what you have been doing and how you came to be transformed into an Italian, and why———'

'There's no need for you to know all that,' Mashurina interrupted; 'what's the use? That's not in your line now.'

Paklin felt a pang, and to hide his confusion he laughed a short, forced little laugh.

'Well, that's as you please,' he rejoined. 'I know I'm regarded as out-of-date by the present generation; and to be sure, I can't reckon myself . . . among the ranks of those who . . .' He did not complete his sentence. 'Here is Snapotchka bringing us some tea. You must take a cup, and listen to me.. . . Perhaps in my words you may find something of interest to you.'

Mashurina took a cup and a small lump of sugar, and began to sip the tea and nibble at the sugar.

Paklin's laugh was genuine this time.

'It's as well there are no police here, or the Italian Countess . . . what is it?'

'Rocca di Santo Fiume,' said Mashurina, with imperturbable gravity, as she imbibed the scalding liquid.

'Rocca di Santo Fiume!' repeated Paklin, 'and she sips her tea through the sugar! That's too unlikely! The police would be on the alert in a minute.'

'Yes,' observed Mashurina, 'a fellow in uniform bothered me abroad; he kept asking me questions; I couldn't stand it at last. "Let me alone, do, for mercy's sake!" I said.'

'Did you say that in Italian?'

'No, in Russian.'

'And what did he do?'

'He? Why, walked off, to be sure.'

'Bravo!' cried Paklin. 'Hurrah for the Contessa! Another cup, do! Well, what I wanted to say to you was, you spoke rather coolly of Solomin. But do you know what I can assure you? Fellows like him—they are the real men. One doesn't understand them at first, but they're the real men, take my word for it; and the future's in their hands. They're not heroes; not even "the heroes of labour," about whom some queer fish—an American or an Englishman—wrote a book for the edification of us poor wretches; they're sturdy, rough, dull men of the people. But they're what's wanted now! Just look at Solomin; his brain's clear as daylight, and he's as healthy as a fish.. . . Isn't that a wonder! Why, hitherto with us in Russia it's always been the way that if you're a live man with feelings and a conscience, you're bound to be an invalid! But Solomin's heart, I dare say, aches at what makes ours ache, and he hates what we hate—but his nerves are calm, and his whole body responds as it ought . . . so that he's a splendid fellow! Yes, indeed, a man with an ideal, and no nonsense about him; educated—and from the people; simple—and a little shrewd.. . . What more do you want . . .?

'And never you mind,' pursued Paklin, working himself up more and more, and not noticing that Mashurina had long ceased to attend, and was once more gazing away into the distance; 'never mind if there are swarms of all sorts in Russia: Slavophils and officials and generals, plain and decorated, and Epicureans and imitators and queer fish of all sorts. (I used to know a lady called Havronya Prishtehov, who suddenly without rhyme or reason turned legitimist, and assured every one that when she died they need only open her body and they would find the name of Henri V. engraved in her heart . . . on the heart of Havronya Prishtehov!) Never mind all that, my dear madam, but let me tell you our only true way lies with the Solomins, coarse, plain, shrewd Solomins! Recollect when I am saying this to you, in the winter of 1870, when Germany is making ready to crush France—when———'

'Silushka,' Snanduliya's soft little voice was heard saying behind Paklin's back, 'I think in your speculations on the future you forget our religion and its influence.. . . And besides,' she added hurriedly, 'Madame Mashurina is not listening to you.. . . You had better offer her another cup of tea.'

Paklin pulled himself together.

'Ah, yes, dear lady—won't you really?'

But Mashurina stared, turned her gloomy

Comte de Chambord

Comte de Chambord.

eyes upon him, and said absently, 'I wanted to ask you, Paklin, haven't you any notes of Nezhdanov's or his photograph?'

'I have a photograph... yes; and I fancy rather a good one, in the table. I'll find it for you directly.'

He began rummaging in the drawer, while Snanduliya went up to Mashurina, and with a long, intent look of sympathy she clasped her hand like a comrade.

'Here it is! I have found it!' cried Paklin, and he gave her the photograph. Mashurina, with hardly a glance at it, and without a word of thanks, crimsoning all over, thrust it quickly into her pocket, put on her hat, and was making for the door.

'Are you going?' said Paklin. 'Tell us, at least, where you live?'

'As it happens.'

'I understand, you don't wish me to know, then! Well, tell me, please, one thing any way: are you still working under the orders of Vassily Nikolaevitch?'

'What is that to you?'

'Or perhaps of some other—Sidor Sidoritch?'

Mashurina made no answer.

'Or does some one anonymous direct you?'

Mashurina was already across the threshold 'Perhaps it is some one anonymous!'

She slammed the door behind her.

A long while Paklin remained standing before this closed door.

'Anonymous Russia!' he said at last.

 

THE END