Virgin Soil (Garnett)/Volume 2/Chapter 17

by Ivan Turgenev

XXXVII

Directly Solomin went out, Nezhdanov jumped up from the sofa, walked twice from one corner to the other, then stood still for a minute in a sort of petrified stupefaction in the middle of the room; suddenly he shook himself, hurriedly flung off his 'masquerading' get-up, kicked it into a corner, took out and put on his own former attire. Then he went up to the three-legged table, took out of the drawer two sealed envelopes and another small article, which he thrust into his pocket; the envelopes he left on the table. Then he crouched down before the stove, and opened the little door.. . . In the stove lay a whole heap of ashes. This was all that was left of Nezhdanov's manuscripts, of his book of verse.. . . He had burned it all during the night. But there in the stove, on one side, sticking close against one wall, was Marianna's portrait, given him by Markelov. It seemed he had not had the heart to burn the portrait too! Nezhdanov took it carefully out and laid it on the table beside the sealed envelopes. Then with a resolute gesture he clutched his cap and was making for the door . . . but he stopped short, turned back, and went into Marianna's room. There he stood a minute, looked round him, and, approaching her little narrow bed, bent down, and with one stifled sob pressed his lips, not to the pillow, but to the foot of the bed.. . . Then he got up at once, and, pulling his cap over his eyes, rushed out.

Meeting no one, either in the corridor, on the stairs, or below, Nezhdanov slipped out into the little enclosure. It was a grey day with a low-hanging sky, and a damp breeze that stirred the tops of the grasses and set the leaves on the trees shaking; the factory made less rattle and roar than at the same time on other days; from its yard came a smell of coal, tar, and tallow. Nezhdanov took a sharp, searching look round, and went straight up to the old apple-tree which had attracted his attention on the very day of his arrival, when he had first looked out of the window of his little room. The stem of this apple-tree was overgrown with dry moss; its rugged, bare branches, with reddish-green leaves hanging here and there upon them, rose crooked into the air, like old bent arms raised in supplication. Nezhdanov stood with firm tread on the dark earth about its roots, and took out of his pocket the small object that he had found in the table drawer. Then he looked attentively at the windows of the little lodge. . . . 'If any one catches sight of me this minute,' he thought, 'then, perhaps, I will put it off.' . . . But nowhere was there a sign of one human face . . . everything seemed dead, everything had turned away from him, gone for ever, left him to the mercy of fate. Only the factory thickly roared and hummed, and overhead fine keen drops of chilly rain began falling.

Then Nezhdanov, glancing through the crooked branches of the tree under which he was standing, at the low, grey, callously blind, damp sky, yawned, shrugged, thought, 'There's nothing else left—I'm not going back to Petersburg, to prison,' flung away his cap, and feeling already all over a sort of mawkish, heavy, overpowering languor, he put the revolver to his breast, pulled the trigger.. . .

Something seemed to strike him at once, not very violently even . . . but he was lying on his back, trying to understand what had happened to him, and how he had just seen Tatyana.. . . He even tried to call her, to say, 'Ah, I don't want . . .' but now he was numb all over, and there was a whirl of muddy green turning round and round over his face, in his eyes, on his head, in the marrow of his bones—and a sort of terrible flat weight seemed crushing him for ever to the earth.

Nezhdanov had really caught a glimpse of Tatyana at the very minute when he pulled the trigger of the revolver. She had gone up to one of the windows, and had caught sight of him under the apple-tree. She had hardly time to think, 'Whatever is he doing in this rain under the apple-tree without a hat on?' when he rolled over on his back like a sheaf of corn. She did not hear the shot—the report was very faint—but she at once saw something was wrong, and rushed in hot haste down into the garden.. . . She ran up to Nezhdanov. . . . 'Alexey Dmitritch, what's the matter?' But already darkness had overtaken him. Tatyana bent over him, saw blood.

'Pavel!' she cried in a voice not her own—'Pavel!'

In a few instants, Marianna, Solomin, Pavel, and two of the factory-hands were in the enclosure. They lifted Nezhdanov up at once, carried him into the lodge, and laid him on the very sofa on which he had spent his last night.

He lay on his back with half-closed, fixed eyes, and face fast turning grey. He gave slow, heavy gasps, sometimes with a sob, as though he were choking. Life had not yet left him. Marianna and Solomin were standing one on each side of the sofa, both almost as pale as Nezhdanov himself. Shaken, agitated, stunned, they were both—especially Marianna—but not astounded. 'How was it we did not foresee this?' they were thinking, and at the same time it seemed to them that they had . . . yes, they had foreseen it. When he had said to Marianna, 'Whatever I do, I tell you beforehand, nothing will come as a surprise to you,' and again when he had talked of the two men within him who could not live together, had not something stirred within her akin to a vague presentiment? Why had she not stopped at once and pondered on those words, on that presentiment? Why was it she did not dare now to look at Solomin, as though he were her accomplice . . . as though he too were feeling a sting of conscience? Why was it she was feeling, not only boundless, despairing pity for Nezhdanov, but a sort of horror and dread and shame? Could it be, it had rested with her to save him? Why was it they had neither dared utter a word? Scarcely dared breathe—and waited . . . for what? Merciful God!

Solomin sent for a doctor, though of course there was no hope. On the small wound, now black and bloodless, Tatyana laid a large sponge of cold water; she moistened his hair too with cold water and vinegar. All at once Nezhdanov ceased gasping and stirred a little.

'He is coming to himself,' whispered Solomin.

Marianna was on her knees near the sofa.. . .

Nezhdanov glanced at her . . . up till then his eyes had had the fixed look of the dying.

'Oh, I'm . . . still alive,' he articulated, scarcely audibly. 'Failed again . . . I'm keeping you.'

'Alyosha!' moaned Marianna.

'Oh, yes . . . directly.. . . You remember, Marianna, in my . . . poem . . . "With flowers then deck me . . ." where are the flowers? But you're here instead.. . . There, in my letter.. . .'

He suddenly shivered all over.

'Ah, here she is.. . . Give each other . . . both . . . your hands—before me.. . . Quick . . . take . . .'

Solomin grasped Marianna's hand. Her head lay on the sofa, face downwards, close to the wound.

Solomin stood stern and upright, looking dark as night.

'Yes . . . good . . . yes . . .'

Nezhdanov began to sob again, but in a strange, unusual way.. . . His breast rose, his sides heaved. . . .

He obviously was trying to lay his hand on their clasped hands, but his hands were dead already.

'He is passing,' murmured Tatyana, who stood in the doorway, and she began crossing herself.

The sobbing gasps grew briefer, fewer. . . . He still sought Marianna with his eyes . . . but a sort of menacing, glassy whiteness was overspreading them.. . .

'Good . . .' was his last word.

He was no more . . . and the linked hands of Solomin and Marianna still lay on his breast.

This was what he had written in the two short letters he left. One was addressed to Silin, and consisted of only a few lines:

'Good-bye, brother, friend, good-bye! By the time you get this scrap of paper, I shall be dead. Don't ask how and why, and don't grieve; believe that I'm better off now. Take our immortal Pushkin and read the description of the death of Lensky in Yevgeny Onyegin. Do you remember?—" The windows are white-washed; the mistress has gone.. . ." That's all. It's no good my talking to you . . . because I should have too much to say, and there's no time to say it. But I could not go away without telling you; or you would have thought of me as living still, and I should be wronging our friendship. Good-bye; live. Your friend.—A. N.'

The other letter was somewhat longer. It was addressed to Solomin and Marianna. This was what it contained: 'My children!' (Immediately after these words there was a break; something had been erased, or rather smudged over as though tears had fallen on it.) 'You will think it strange, perhaps, that I address you in this way. I am almost a child myself, and you, Solomin, are older of course than I am. But I am dying, and standing at the end of life I regard myself as an old man. I am much to blame to both of you, especially you, Marianna, for causing you such grief (I know, Marianna, you will grieve) and having given you so much anxiety. But what could I do? I could find no other way out of it. I could not simplify myself; the only thing left was to blot myself out altogether. Marianna, I should have been a burden to myself and to you. You are great-hearted, you would have rejoiced in the burden, as another sacrifice . . . but I had no right to take such a sacrifice from you; you have better and greater work to do. My children, let me unite you, as it were, from the grave.. . . You will be happy together. Marianna, you will infallibly come to love Solomin; as for him . . . he has loved you ever since he first set eyes on you at the Sipyagins'. That was no secret to me though we did run away together a few days after. Ah, that morning! How glorious it was, how sweet and young! It comes to me now as a token, as a symbol of your life together—yours and his—and I was merely by accident in his place that day. But it's time to make an end; I don't want to work on your feelings. . . . I only want to justify myself To-morrow you will have some very sorrowful moments.. . . But there's no help for it! There's no other way, is there? Good-bye, Marianna, my good, true girl! Good-bye, Solomin! I leave her in your care. Live happily—live to the good of others; and you, Marianna, think of me only when you are happy. Think of me as a man who was true and good too, but one for whom it was somehow more fitting to die than to live. Whether I really loved you, I don't know, my dear; but I know that I have never felt a feeling stronger, and that it would have been more terrible to me to die without that feeling to carry with me to the grave.

'Marianna! if you ever meet a girl called Mashurina—Solomin knows her, I fancy—by the way, you have seen her too—tell her I thought of her with gratitude not long before my death.. . . She will understand.

'But I must tear myself away. I looked out of window just now; among the rapidly moving clouds there was one lovely star. However rapidly they moved, they had not been able to hide it. That star made me think of you, Marianna. At this instant you are sleeping in the next room, and suspecting nothing.. . . I went to your door, listened, and I fancied I caught your pure, calm breathing.. . . Good-bye, good-bye, my dear! good-bye, my children, my friends!—Your A.

'Fie! fie! How came I, in a last letter before death, to say nothing of our great cause? I suppose because one can't tell lies on the point of death.. . . Marianna, forgive me this postscript.. . . The falsehood's in me, not in what you have faith in!

'Oh! something more: you will think, perhaps, Marianna, "He was afraid of the prison where they would certainly have put him, and he thought of this expedient to escape it." No; imprisonment's nothing of any consequence; but to be in prison for a cause you don't believe in—that's really senseless. And I am putting an end to myself, not from dread of being in prison. Good-bye, Marianna! Good-bye, my pure, spotless girl!'

Marianna and Solomin read this letter in turn. After that she put her portrait and the two letters in her pocket, and stood motionless.

Then Solomin said to her:

'Everything is ready, Marianna; let us go. We must carry out his wishes.'

Marianna approached Nezhdanov, touched his chill brow with her lips, and turning to Solomin said, 'Let us go.'

He took her by the hand, and together they went out of the room.

When a few hours later the police made a descent on the factory, they found of course Nezhdanov—but a corpse. Tatyana had laid the body out decorously, put a white pillow under his head, crossed his arms, and even put a nosegay of flowers on the little table beside him. Pavel, who was primed with all needful instructions, received the police-officers with the profoundest obsequiousness and a sort of derision, so that the latter hardly knew whether to thank him or to arrest him too. He described circumstantially how the suicide had taken place, and regaled them with Gruyère cheese and Madeira; but professed perfect ignorance of the whereabouts at the moment of Vassily Fedotitch and the lady who had been staying there, and confined himself to assuring them that Vassily Fedotitch was never away long, on account of his work; that he'd be back to-day, or else to-morrow, and he would then, without losing a minute, give notice of the fact. He was the man for that—accurate!

So the worthy police-officers went away with nothing, leaving a guard in charge of the body and promising to send the coroner.