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.’
