The audience fell to applauding desperately, encoring....
One Little-Russian divinity student bellowed in so
deep a bass, ’Mill-itch! Mill-itch!’
that his neighbour civilly and sympathetically advised
him, ‘to take care of his voice, it would be
the making of a protodeacon.’ But Aratov
at once rose and made for the door. Kupfer overtook
him.... ’I say, where are you off to?’
he called; ’would you like me to present you
to Clara?’ ‘No, thanks,’ Aratov
returned hurriedly, and he went homewards almost at
a run.
He was agitated by strange sensations, incomprehensible
to himself. In reality, Clara’s recitation,
too, had not been quite to his taste ... though he
could not quite tell why. It disturbed him, this
recitation; it struck him as crude and inharmonious....
It was as though it broke something within him, forced
itself with a certain violence upon him. And
those fixed, insistent, almost importunate looks—what
were they for? what did they mean?
Aratov’s modesty did not for one instant admit
of the idea that he might have made an impression
on this strange girl, that he might have inspired
in her a sentiment akin to love, to passion!...
And indeed, he himself had formed a totally different
conception of the still unknown woman, the girl to
whom he was to give himself wholly, who would love
him, be his bride, his wife.... He seldom dwelt
on this dream—in spirit as in body he was
virginal; but the pure image that arose at such times
in his fancy was inspired by a very different figure,
the figure of his dead mother, whom he scarcely remembered,
but whose portrait he treasured as a sacred relic.
The portrait was a water-colour, painted rather unskilfully
by a lady who had been a neighbour of hers; but the
likeness, as every one declared, was a striking one.
Just such a tender profile, just such kind, clear eyes
and silken hair, just such a smile and pure expression,
was the woman, the girl, to have, for whom as yet
he scarcely dared to hope....
But this swarthy, dark-skinned creature, with coarse
hair, dark eyebrows, and a tiny moustache on her upper
lip, she was certainly a wicked, giddy ... ‘gipsy’
(Aratov could not imagine a harsher appellation)—what
was she to him?
And yet Aratov could not succeed in getting out of
his head this dark-skinned gipsy, whose singing and
reading and very appearance were displeasing to him.
He was puzzled, he was angry with himself. Not
long before he had read Sir Walter Scott’s novel,
St. Ronan’s Well (there was a complete
edition of Sir Walter Scott’s works in the library
of his father, who had regarded the English novelist
with esteem as a serious, almost a scientific, writer).
The heroine of that novel is called Clara Mowbray.
A poet who flourished somewhere about 1840, Krasov,
wrote a poem on her, ending with the words:
’Unhappy Clara! poor frantic Clara!
Unhappy Clara Mowbray!’
