Asbein Part 17

"How are you, Nikolas?" She turned to little Kolia, while she stroked his head in a friendly manner. "Please greet a person, or have I fallen as deeply in your displeasure as my Anna? I a.s.sure you that I cannot help it if she talks foolishly. Only think, Boris Nikolaivitch, he cudgelled my daughter Anna, day before yesterday, because she ventured to a.s.sert that a prince was greater than a genius. He answered her that not even an emperor was greater. A genius came next to the dear G.o.d, and as she would not agree to that, he struck her, and hard."

The Jeliagin laughed. Lensky also laughed involuntarily, but remarked in a tone of admonition to his son, who had shyly concealed himself behind his mother: "A boy should never strike a girl; that is not proper."

"But why did she say such foolish things?" little Nikolas defended himself, while he wrinkled his small forehead. "I cannot bear that, and then she is larger than I, so much"--he measured the width of his hand above his head.

"She gave him quite a scratch, she was not defenceless," said Barbara Alexandrovna, while she sat down and closed her umbrella. "But to come to something more interesting," she continued; "we have, in spirit, followed you on every step of your American triumphal march, Boris Nikolaivitch; the newspapers gave us the guide thereto. I hope we will now see very much of you. Natascha can tell you how well all artists are received at our house,--and h'm!--and if it is a question of a relation--_ propos_, could you not come and dine with us this evening?

We are quite _entre nous_, only Lis, Princess Zriny, that eccentric Hungarian, Marinia Lwenskiold, a good friend of yours, you remember her, a few diplomats, etc.; and we are bored as only _gens du monde_ are bored if they have been together under the same roof for ten days.

Natalie can tell you how bored we are--merely people from our coterie, who know each other by heart; if you please. And how stupid we are! ha, ha, ha! In desperation we arranged a race in the drawing-room yesterday. Arthur de Blincourt, while jumping a barrier, dislocated a joint, and now lies on a lounge, and lets himself be looked after. But we all long for a new element--_on vous attend comme le Messie_, Boris Nikolaivitch. You will come, will you not? We dine at eight o'clock."

While she chattered on with self-satisfied fluency, it seemed to Boris as if some one scratched a knife on a porcelain plate.

"Why does she roll her eyes so incessantly when she speaks? They do not look more beautiful when one sees so much of their orange-yellow whites," he thought to himself. Aloud he only remarked: "Do you really believe that I would amuse you better than a drawing-room race?"

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed she. "That is splendid! I must repeat it to Marinia Lwenskiold, who raves about you. You will come, will you not?"

"No, I will not come," replied he sharply. "I do not feel myself equal to the task of amusing a dozen _gens du monde_ who are bored."

"Well, as you will," said the Jeliagin, shrugging her shoulders. "Try to persuade him before evening, Natalie, and come, or send me word. I must go, we wish to ride out _en bande_, at eight. Adieu! Give me your hand, please, Kolia, and come and lunch with us. Anna will be pleased, and you shall have strawberries and whipped cream. Adieu!" With that she went away.

Lensky stared gloomily before him for a while, then he struck his clenched fist on the table so that all the dishes rattled: "From whence did this goose drop down so suddenly?" asked he.

"She lives in the castle in the park," said Natalie. "She has hired it for the summer."

"So!" grumbled Lensky. "Now if I had known that, I should never have thought of coming here."

"But I wrote you of it."

"Not a word."

"Certainly, in many letters; did you not have time to read them?"

Instead of replying to this, for him very unpleasant remark, Lensky said, in increasing rage: "Oh! now I understand the change which has taken place in you. She is horrible, your sister! For what does she hold me, that she takes this tone with me?"

"I cannot help her lack of tact," replied Natalie, gently and reproachfully.

"Ah, you are still influenced by your relations, by that narrow stupid crowd," he growled, crimson with rage. "You are condescending to me, yes, that is the right word, condescending, indulgent. Why do you start back from me when this silly machine comes near? Are you then ashamed of our love before her?"

"Our love!" repeated Natalie, with broken voice, strangely emphasizing the word "our."

He did not suspect anything from the trembling sadness of her voice, and did not once look at her.

Meanwhile he felt the anxious touch of a silky, soft child's hand.

Little Kolia had come up to his father, and whispered to him shyly and pleadingly: "Papa, mamma is crying."

Lensky looked up, frightened. Yes, she had done her utmost to courageously smile through the unpleasant scene, but her overexcited nerves could not bear it; she sobbed convulsively.

"But Natalie, my angel, my little dove!" He could not see any woman weep, least of all his wife, whom he loved. He sprang up, took her in his arms, covered her eyes, her mouth, her whole face with kisses. "Do not torment yourself, my treasure! You are much, much too good to me; you are an angel! How could you ever take such a rough clown as I am?

We are not suited to each other, Natascha."

"Oh, Boris! do you mean that?"

"Yes, I mean it," said he, gloomily. "Better, a hundred times better, would it have been for you if you had never seen me! You are so charming, so good, and I love you so idolatrously; but I am a fearful, a horrible man, and I cannot always govern myself--I cannot! I will yet torment you to death, my poor Natalie!" And he did not cease to caress and to kiss her.

Then she raised her head from his shoulder, and looking at him from eyes still s.h.i.+ning with tears, with a glance full of tender fanaticism she said: "What does it matter, even if you kill me? it would still be beautiful! I would change with no woman in G.o.d's world, do you hear, with none! Think of what I have said to you to-day when one day you give me a last kiss in my coffin!"

Lensky could no longer get back into the old ways at home; however much he tried, he could not. As in the former year, only more significantly, more tormentingly, the feeling of growing discontent made itself felt in him. It seemed to him as if he could not remain for any length of time on the same spot; as if he must incessantly seek something which was no longer anywhere to be found.

For a couple of days he ill-humoredly stayed away from the castle, but when his brother-in-law paid him a visit and repeated the invitation of Barbara Alexandrovna in the most polite manner,--when one day, all the ladies staying at the castle as guests had come out in a body to give him an ovation and especially when he had become immeasurably weary of the poetic monotony of life in the Hermitage; he replied to Natalie, when she once asked him smilingly, with the intention of freeing him from his own constraining obstinacy, whether he thought it was really worth the trouble to longer play the bear: "No!"

From that time, he pa.s.sed every evening in the castle.

At first Natalie had been glad that the social intercourse there offered him a distraction. But soon the evenings in "Les Ormes" became a torment to her. The hateful change which had taken place in him during his long absence from his family, that change which Natalie had predicted, and by which she yet had been frightened at his return, as by something quite unexpected, never became more significant than during these evenings at the castle.

If, during the first years of his marriage, through the lovely influence of his young wife, and especially through the wish to satisfy, to please her in everything, he had learned with quite incredible rapidity to follow the usual social customs of the country, and no longer to bear himself in the world as a genius, but as any other cultivated, well-bred man, he had completely forgotten it during his vagabond life, or rather it had become wearisome to him.

More than ever, his circle of action in a drawing-room limited itself to producing music and then being raved over by ladies. The incessant self-bewilderment in this smoke of incense how, where and whenever it might be, had become a necessity of existence for him. Everything in him had gone wild, even his art.

Together with a preference for perilous technical artifices, challenging musical unrestraint of every kind showed itself. Oftener than ever he fell into those mad moods in which he demanded things of his poor violin which it could not perform, until it groaned and screamed as if in the torments of h.e.l.l, and if he had formerly complained that he could not govern himself, he now boasted of it. It was his specialty, by which he was distinguished from all the virtuosos of his time. And, in spite of all the underlying lack of restraint and the impurity, that the sense-enslaving glow of his art now unfolded stronger than before, there could be no doubt. Especially over the feminine portion of his listeners his playing exercised a quite degrading charm. The triumphs which he achieved in "Les Ormes" proved this.

He profited by the situation. Although it would have been tiresome to him to have pa.s.sed a whole evening among these people of the world, far removed from all his most intimate interests of life, without playing, he sometimes let himself be urged almost to lack of taste before he took up his violin. It happened once that he waited until a particularly crazy enthusiast presented, kneeling, his violin to him.

One of the musical ladies present sat down to the piano to accompany him; the others grouped themselves as near as possible round him, while they anxiously tried to express by their positions a kind of dying-away charm. He felt the longing glances of their eyes resting on him while he played. He saw the beautiful heads bent forward. It went to his head like a stunning oppression; he no longer knew himself. But they no longer knew themselves. If in the bearing of the great ladies who frequented his house in ----, in spite of all their enthusiasm for his art, there had still been a trace of patronage with reference to the artist, many of these beauties now fawned upon him like slaves who would sue for his favor.

When he had finished, no one of them knew by what special insanity she should over-trump the others, in order to prove to him her enthusiasm.

And while the music-bewitched women crowded around him, to beg autographs or locks of hair from him, and carefully picked out the remains of his thrown-away cigarettes from the ash receiver, in order to keep them as relics, the Jeliagin told some new guest, in an adjoining room, the "romance of her sister," which she always concluded with the words: "My poor sister; so courted as she was! You know that she refused Prince Truhetzkoi. We were inconsolable when we heard of her betrothal with Lensky. He is really a great genius!" And then she sighed.

But Natalie stood on the terrace which opened out of the music-room, quite alone. She was happy if she could remain alone; if no one came up to her to ask if she had a headache, or if anything else was the matter. Was anything the matter with her? No one could feel what she suffered, and there was also no human consolation which she would not have felt as an insult, however tenderly it was offered to her.

What were the little pin p.r.i.c.ks which had excited her impatience in ---- to this pain!

Around her was the summer night, sultry and still. The black shadows of the trees stretched themselves in the moonlight over the gray-green turf on which not a single dew-drop sparkled.

Out into the stillness of the night sounded a loud, harsh laugh.

Natalie looked through one of the flower-encircled windows into the drawing-room. There sat Lensky in a circle of ladies.

Heated by his wearying performance, he wiped the perspiration from his temples, from his neck. He was relating something that Natalie could not hear distinctly, but which evidently seemed very droll to him, and which convulsed his listeners; they exhibited a kind of comically exaggerated irritation. An embarra.s.sed smile appeared on his lips, he seized the hand of the lady who sat nearest to him, played with it appeasingly, and drew it to his lips. This was his manner of making his apologies if he had said something too racy.

Natalie stepped back in the shadow. A desperation, which was mingled with aversion, lay hold of her. Then, hollow, paining, quenching all the pleasure of life, quite like a physical discomfort, something crept over her which she would not explain to herself, which at no price would she have called by its name--jealousy.

The whole mud of his inner nature was stirred up as a stream highly swollen and unsettled after a wild storm, raving and foaming, tumbles in its bed, and can no longer find peace and rest therein.

From time to time he invited guests from Paris; sometimes they came uninvited. They usually remained to luncheon only, but Natalie had always time enough to be alarmed at them and to wish them away. They were no longer artistic celebrities like those whom Natalie had charmed to the "Hermitage" the year before; no, Lensky had reached that point in his career when an artist only tolerates courtiers and court fools about himself.

What a motley rabble that sometimes was which a.s.sembled around him--artistic Bohemians, freed from all social and moral restraint!