Dream Tales and Prose Poems eBook

VIII

All the following day Aratov was in very low spirits.  ’What is it, Yasha?’ Platonida Ivanovna said to him:  ’you seem somehow all loose ends to-day!’...  In her own peculiar idiom the old lady’s expression described fairly accurately Aratov’s mental condition.  He could not work and he did not know himself what he wanted.  At one time he was eagerly on the watch for Kupfer, again he suspected that it was from Kupfer that Clara had got his address ... and from where else could she ’have heard so much about him’?  Then he wondered:  was it possible his acquaintance with her was to end like this?  Then he fancied she would write to him again; then he asked himself whether he ought not to write her a letter, explaining everything, since he did not at all like leaving an unfavourable impression of himself....  But exactly what to explain?  Then he stirred up in himself almost a feeling of repulsion for her, for her insistence, her impertinence; and then again he saw that unutterably touching face and heard an irresistible voice; then he recalled her singing, her recitation—­and could not be sure whether he had been right in his wholesale condemnation of it.  In fact, he was all loose ends!  At last he was heartily sick of it, and resolved to keep a firm hand over himself, as it is called, and to obliterate the whole incident, as it was unmistakably hindering his studies and destroying his peace of mind.  It turned out not so easy to carry out this resolution ... more than a week passed by before he got back into his old accustomed groove.  Luckily Kupfer did not turn up at all; he was in fact out of Moscow.  Not long before the incident, Aratov had begun to work at painting in connection with his photographic plans; he set to work upon it now with redoubled zest.

So, imperceptibly, with a few (to use the doctors’ expression) ’symptoms of relapse,’ manifested, for instance, in his once almost deciding to call upon the princess, two months passed ... then three months ... and Aratov was the old Aratov again.  Only somewhere down below, under the surface of his life, something like a dark and burdensome secret dogged him wherever he went.  So a great fish just caught on the hook, but not yet drawn up, will swim at the bottom of a deep stream under the very boat where the angler sits with a stout rod in his hand.

And one day, skimming through a not quite new number of the Moscow Gazette, Aratov lighted upon the following paragraph: 

‘With the greatest regret,’ wrote some local contributor from Kazan, ’we must add to our dramatic record the news of the sudden death of our gifted actress Clara Militch, who had succeeded during the brief period of her engagement in becoming a favourite of our discriminating public.  Our regret is the more poignant from the fact that Miss Militch by her own act cut short her young life, so full of promise, by means of poison.  And this dreadful deed was the more awful through the talented actress taking the fatal drug in the theatre itself.  She had scarcely been taken home when to the universal grief, she expired.  There is a rumour in the town that an unfortunate love affair drove her to this terrible act.’