“You have guessed right, my young friend,” he said, getting up, “you have seen through it all. You are not an author for nothing. I hope that we are parting as friends. Shan’t we drink bruderschaft together?”
“You are drunk, and that is the only reason that I don’t answer you as you deserve . . . .”
“Again a figure of silence! — you haven’t said all you might have said. Ha-ha-ha! You won’t allow me to pay for you?”
“Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll pay for myself.”
“Ah, no doubt of it. Aren’t we going the same way?” “I am not coming with you.”
“Farewell, my poet. I hope you’ve understood me . . . .”
He went out, stepping rather unsteadily and not turning to me again. The footman helped him into his carriage. I went my way. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. It was raining The night was dark . . . .
PART IV
CHAPTER I
I WON’T attempt to describe my exasperation. Though I might have expected anything, it was a blow; it was as though he had appeared before me quite suddenly in all his hideousness. But I remember my sensations were confused, as though I had been knocked down, crushed by something, and black misery gnawed more and more painfully at my heart. I was afraid for Natasha. I foresaw much suffering for her in the future, and I cast about in perplexity for some way by which to avoid it, to soften these last moments for her, before the final catastrophe. Of that catastrophe there could be no doubt. It was near at hand, and it was impossible not to see the form it would take.
I did not notice how I reached home, though I was getting wet with the rain all the way. It was three o’clock in the morning. I had hardly knocked at the door of my room when I heard a moan, and the door was hurriedly unlocked, as though Nellie had not gone to bed but had been watching for me all the time at the door. There was a candle alight. I glanced into Nellie’s face and was dismayed; it was completely transformed; her eyes were burning as though in fever, and had a wild look as though she did not recognize me. She was in a high fever.
“Nellie, what’s the matter, are you ill?” I asked, bending down and putting my arm round her.
She nestled up to me tremulously as though she were afraid of something, said something, rapidly and impetuously, as though she had only been waiting for me to come to tell me it. But her words were strange and incoherent; I could understand nothing. She was in delirium.
I led her quickly to bed. But she kept starting up and clinging to me as though in terror, as though begging me to protect her from someone, and even when she was lying in bed she kept seizing my hand and holding it tightly as though afraid that I might go away again. I was so upset and my nerves were so shaken that I actually began to cry as I looked at her. I was ill myself. Seeing my tears she looked fixedly at me for some time with strained, concentrated attention, as though trying to grasp and understand something. It was evident that this cost her great effort. At last something like a thought was apparent in her face. After a violent epileptic fit she was usually for some time unable
to collect her thoughts or to articulate distinctly. And so it was now. After making an immense effort to say something to me and realizing that I did not understand, she held out her little hand and began to wipe away my tears, then put her arm round my neck, drew me down to her and kissed me.
It was clear that she had had a fit in my absence, and it had taken place at the moment when she had been standing at the door. Probably on recovery she had been for a long time unable come to herself. At such times reality is mixed up with delirium and she had certainly imagined something awful, some horror. At the same time she must have been dimly aware that I was to come back and should knock at the door, and so, lying right in the doorway on the floor, she had been on the alert for my coming and had stood up at my first tap.
“But why was she just at the door,” I wondered, and suddenly I noticed with amazement that she was wearing her little wadded coat. (I had just got it for her from an old pedlar woman I knew who sometimes came to my room to offer me goods in repayment of money I had lent her.) So she must have been meaning to go out, and had probably been already unlocking the door when she was suddenly struck down by the fit. Where could she have been meaning to go? Was she already in delirium?
Meanwhile the fever did not leave her, and she soon sank into delirium and unconsciousness. She had twice already had a fit in my flat, but it had always passed off harmlessly; now, however, she seemed in a high fever. After sitting beside her for half an hour I pushed a chair up to the sofa and lay down, as I was, without undressing, close beside her that I might wake the more readily if she called me. I did not even put the candle out. I looked at her many times again before I fell asleep myself. She was pale; her lips were parched with fever and stained with blood, probably from the fall. Her face still retained the look of terror and a sort of poignant anguish which seemed to be still haunting her in her sleep, I made up my mind to go as early as possible next morning for the doctor, if she were worse. I was afraid that it might end in actual brain fever.
“It must have been the prince frightened her!” I thought, with a shudder, and I thought of his story of the woman who had thrown the money in his face.
CHAPTER II
A FORTNIGHT passed by. Nellie was recovering. She did not develop brain fever but she was seriously ill. She began to get up again on a bright sunny day at the end of April. It was Passion Week.
Poor little creature. I cannot go on with my story in the same consecutive way. Now that I am describing all this it is long past, but to this very minute I recall with an oppressive heart. rending anguish that pale, thin little face, the searching, intent gaze of her black eyes when we were sometimes left alone together and she fixed upon me from her bed a prolonged gaze as though challenging me to guess what was in her mind; but seeing that I did not guess and was still puzzled she would smile gently, as it were, to herself, and would suddenly hold out to me her hot little hand, with its thin, wasted little fingers. Now it is all over, and everything is understood, but to this day I do not know the secrets of that sick, tortured and outraged little heart.
I feel that I am digressing, but at this moment I want to think only of Nellie. Strange to say, now that I am lying alone on a hospital bed, abandoned by all whom I loved so fondly and intensely, some trivial incident of that past, often unnoticed at the time and soon forgotten, comes back all at once to my mind and suddenly takes quite a new significance, completing and explaining to me what I had failed to understand till now.
For the first four days of her illness, we, the doctor and I, were in great alarm about her, but on the fifth day the doctor took me aside and told me that there was no reason for anxiety and she would certainly recover. This doctor was the one I had known so long, a good-natured and eccentric old bachelor whom I had called in in Nellie’s first illness, and who had so impressed her by the huge Stanislav Cross on his breast.
“So there’s no reason for anxiety,” I said, greatly relieved.
“No, she’ll get well this time, but afterwards she will soon die.” “Die! But why?” I cried, overwhelmed at this death sentence.
“Yes, she is certain to die very soon. The patient has an organic defect of the heart, and at the slightest unfavourable circumstance she’ll be laid up again. She will perhaps get better, but then she’ll be ill again and at last she’ll die.”
“Do you mean nothing can be done to save her? Surely that’s impossible. ”
“But it’s inevitable. However, with the removal of unfavourable circumstances, with a quiet and easy life with more pleasure in it, the patient might yet be kept from death and there even are cases . . . unexpected . . . strange and exceptional . . . in fact the patient may be saved by a concatenation of favourable conditions, but radically cured — never.”
“But, good heavens, what’s to be done now?”
“Follow my advice, lead a
