On the Eve: Chapter 13

Chapter 13

During the first fortnight of Insarov's stay in the Kuntsovo
neighbourhood, he did not visit the Stahovs more than four or five
times; Bersenyev went to see them every day. Elena was always pleased
to see him, lively and interesting talk always sprang up between them,
and yet he often went home with a gloomy face. Shubin scarcely showed
himself; he was working with feverish energy at his art; he either
stayed locked up in his room, from which he would emerge in a blouse,
smeared all over with clay, or else he spent days in Moscow where he
had a studio, to which models and Italian sculptors, his friends and
teachers, used to come to see him. Elena did not once succeed in
talking with Insarov, as she would have liked to do; in his absence
she prepared questions to ask him about many things, but when he came
she felt ashamed of her plans. Insarov's very tranquillity embarrassed
her; it seemed to her that she had not the right to force him to speak
out; and she resolved to wait; for all that, she felt that at every
visit however trivial might be the words that passed between them, he
attracted her more and more; but she never happened to be left alone
with him--and to grow intimate with any one, one must have at least
one conversation alone with him. She talked a great deal about him to
Bersenyev. Bersenyev realised that Elena's imagination had been struck
by Insarov, and was glad that his friend had not 'missed fire' as
Shubin had asserted. He told her cordially all he knew of him down to
the minutest details (we often, when we want to please some one, bring
our friends into our conversation, hardly ever suspecting that we are
praising ourselves in that way), and only at times, when Elena's pale
cheeks flushed a little and her eyes grew bright and wide, he felt a
pang in his heart of that evil pain which he had felt before.

One day Bersenyev came to the Stahovs, not at the customary time, but
at eleven o'clock in the morning. Elena came down to him in the
parlour.

'Fancy,' he began with a constrained smile, 'our Insarov has
disappeared.'

'Disappeared?' said Elena.

'He has disappeared. The day before yesterday he went off somewhere
and nothing has been seen of him since.'

'He did not tell you where he was going?'

'No.'

Elena sank into a chair.

'He has most likely gone to Moscow,' she commented, trying to seem
indifferent and at the same time wondering that she should try to seem
indifferent.

'I don't think so,' rejoined Bersenyev. 'He did not go alone.'

'With whom then?'

'Two people of some sort--his countrymen they must have been--came to
him the day before yesterday, before dinner.'

'Bulgarians! what makes you think so?'

'Why as far as I could hear, they talked to him in some language I did
not know, but Slavonic . . . You are always saying, Elena Nikolaevna,
that there's so little mystery about Insarov; what could be more
mysterious than this visit? Imagine, they came to him--and then there
was shouting and quarrelling, and such savage, angry disputing. . . .
And he shouted too.'

'He shouted too?'

'Yes. He shouted at them. They seemed to be accusing each other. And
if you could have had a peep at these visitors. They had swarthy,
heavy faces with high cheek bones and hook noses, both about forty
years old, shabbily dressed, hot and dusty, looking like workmen--not
workmen, and not gentlemen--goodness knows what sort of people they
were.'

'And he went away with them?'

'Yes. He gave them something to eat and went off with them. The woman
of the house told me they ate a whole huge pot of porridge between the
two of them. They outdid one another, she said, and gobbled it up like
wolves.'

Elena gave a faint smile.

'You will see,' she said, 'all this will be explained into something
very prosaic.'

'I hope it may! But you need not use that word. There is nothing
prosaic about Insarov, though Shubin does maintain----'

'Shubin!' Elena broke in, shrugging her shoulders. 'But you must
confess these two good men gobbling up porridge----'

'Even Themistocles had his supper on the eve of Salamis,' observed
Bersenyev with a smile.

'Yes; but then there was a battle next day. Any way you will let me
know when he comes back,' said Elena, and she tried to change the
subject, but the conversation made little progress. Zoya made her
appearance and began walking about the room on tip-toe, giving them
thereby to understand that Anna Vassilyevna was not yet awake.

Bersenyev went away.

In the evening of the same day a note from him was brought to Elena.
'He has come back,' he wrote to her, 'sunburnt and dusty to his very
eyebrows; but where and why he went I don't know; won't you find out?'

'Won't you find out!' Elena whispered, 'as though he talked to me!'

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