STRAWBERRIES.
THAT walk to the trackman’s hut had kindled a new light in Pavel’s soul. He often found himself craving for a repetition of the experience—not merely for Clara’s companionship, but for another occasion to walk through the fields with her, to sit by her side in the breeze, and, above all, for the intimacy of seeing her fatigued and eating heartily. She dwelt in his mind as a girl comrade, self-possessed and plucky, gifted with grit, tact and spirit; at the same time she lingered in his consciousness as a responsive pupil, glowing with restrained enthusiasm over his talk, eagerly following him through an ecstasy of lofty dreams. These two aspects of her were merged in the sight and odour of healthy, magnificently complexioned girlhood between the glint of steel rails and the dusty geranium in a trackman’s window.
They had another appointment. When he called at the trunkmaker’s shop Clara greeted him with a hearty handshake. He blushed. His love seemed to be gaining on him by leaps and bounds.
“How are things?” he asked.
“First rate, Pavel Vassilyevich. The vegetable man will do it. He’s a trump, I tell you.” She went into details. She was in unusually good spirits. They talked business and of the adjustment of things under socialism. Pavel, too, was in good humour, yet floating in his mind was the same old question: And what if all fails and Makar is removed to St. Petersburg?
They met again and again. One day, after they had arrived at certain conclusions regarding Makar, Pavel said:
“Shall we take a walk?”
She nodded assent.
“I am again full of questions.”
“Again worrying about the future fate of humanity?”
“Yes, I seem to have no end of questions about it. I wonder whether I shall remember all those that have occurred to me since I last saw you. I ought to have jotted them down.”
“You don’t want to pump me dry in one day, do you?”
“Well, if the truth must be told, I rather do. You will soon be leaving us, I suppose, so I am anxious to strike the iron while it is hot.”
The personal question as to the length of his stay sent a little wave of warmth through his blood. They set out in the direction of the trackman’s hut as a matter of course. Instead of following their former route, however, they chose, upon a motion from Clara, who was more familiar with these suburbs than Pavel, a meandering, hilly course that offered them a far better view as well as greater privacy. A stretch of rising ground took them to the Beak, a promontory so called for the shape of a cliff growing out of its breast. The common people had some pretty stories to tell of a gigantic bird of which the rocky beak was a part and whose petrified body was now asleep in the bosom of the hill that had once been its nest.
Pavel and Clara sat down to rest on the freshly carpeted slope. The town clustered before them in a huddle of red, white, green and grey, shot with the glitter of a golden-domed cathedral, the river flashing at one end like the fragment of an immense sabre. It was warm and quiet. There was not a human soul for a considerable distance around. Now and again the breeze would gently stir the weeds and the wild-flowers, lingering just long enough to scent the hillside with pine odours and then withdrawing, on tiptoe, as it were, like a thoughtful friend taking care that the two young people were kept supplied with the bracing aroma without being disturbed more than was necessary. Once or twice Clara held out her chin, sniffing the enchanted air.
“Isn’t it delightful!” she said.
“It’s a specimen of what life under Society of the Future will feel like,” Pavel jested, with a wistful smile.
At one point when she addressed him as Pavel Vassilyevich, as she usually did, he was tempted to ask her to dispense with his patronymic. In the light of the hearty simplicity of manners which prevailed in the revolutionary movement they were well enough acquainted to address each other by their first names only. Yet when he was about to propose the change the courage failed him to do so. Whereupon he said to himself, with a deep inward blushing, that the cause of this hesitancy and confusion of his was no secret to him.
“Hello there! A strawberry!” she called out, with a childish glee which he had not yet seen in her. And flinging herself forward she reached out her white girlish hand toward a spot of vivid red. The berry, of that tiny oblong delicious variety one saucerful of which would be enough to fill a fair-sized room with fragrance, lay ensconced in a bed of sun-lit leaves—a pearl of succulent, flaming colour in a setting of green gold.
“Oh, I haven’t the heart to pick it,” she said, staying her hand and cooing to the strawberry as she would to a baby: “Won’t touch you, berry darling. Won’t touch you, sweetie.”
“Spare its life then,” he answered, “I’ll see if I can’t find others.”
And sure enough, after some seeking and peeping and climbing, Pavel came upon a spot that was fairly jewelled with strawberries.
“Quite a haul,” he shouted down.
She joined him and they went on picking together, each with a thistle leaf for a saucer.
“Why, it’s literally teeming with them,” she said, in a preoccupied voice, deeply absorbed in her work. “One, two, three, and four, and—seven; why, bless me,—and eight and nine. What a pity we have nothing with us. We could get enough to treat the crowd at Orlovsky’s.”
Pavel made no reply. Whenever he came across a berry that looked particularly tempting he would offer it to her silently and resume his work. He was oppressively aware of his embarrassment in her presence and the consciousness of it made him feel all the more so. He was distinctly conscious of a sensation of unrest, both stimulating and numbing, which had settled in him since he made her acquaintance. It was at once torture and joy, yet when he asked himself which of the two it was, it seemed to be neither the one nor the other. Her absence was darkness; her presence was light, but pain and pleasure mingled in both. It made him feel like a wounded bird, like a mutely suffering child. At this moment it blent with the flavour and ruddiness of the berries they were both picking, with the pine-breeze that was waiting on them, with the subdued lyrics of spring.
And he knew that he was in love.
He had never been touched by more than a first timid whisper of that feeling before. It was Sophia, the daughter of the former governor of St. Petersburg, whose image had formerly—quite recently, in fact—invaded his soul. He had learned immediately that she belonged to Zachar and his dawning love had been frightened away. Otherwise his life during these five years had been one continuous infatuation of quite another kind—the infatuation of moral awakening, of a political religion, of the battlefield.
From the Beak they proceeded by the railroad track, now walking over the cross-ties, now balancing along the polished top of one rail. She was mostly ahead of him, he following her with melting heart. By the time they reached the trackman’s place, the shadows had grown long and solemn. Pavel had no appetite. He ate because Clara did. “Here I am watching her eat again,” he thought. But the spectacle was devoid of the interest he had expected to find in it.
Nevertheless the next morning, upon waking, it burst upon him once more that seated within him was something which had not been there about a month ago. When he reflected that he had no appointment with Clara for these two days, that disquieting force which was both delicious and tantalising, the force which enlivened and palsied at once, swelled in his throat like a malady. But no, far from having such a bodily quality, it had spiritualised his whole being. He seemed unreal to himself, while the outside world appeared to him strangely remote, agonisingly beautiful, and agonisingly sad—a heart-rending elegy on an unknown theme. The disquieting feeling clamoured for the girl’s presence—for a visit to the scene of their yesterday’s berry-picking, at least. He struggled, but he had to submit.
To the Beak, then, he betook himself, and for an hour he lay on the grass, brooding. Everything around him was in a subdued agitation of longing. The welter of gold-cups and clover; the breeze, the fragrance and the droning of a nearby grasshopper; the sky overhead and the town at his feet—all was dreaming of Clara, yearning for Clara, sighing for Clara. Seen in profile the grass and the wild-flowers acquired a new charm. When he lay at full length gazing up, the sky seemed perfectly flat, like a vast blue ceiling, and the light thin wisps of pearl looked like painted cloudlets upon that ceiling. There were moments in this reverie of his when the Will of the People was an echo from a dim past, when the world’s whole struggle, whether for good or for evil, was an odd, incomprehensible performance. But then there were others when everything was listening for the sound of a heavenly bugle-call; when all nature was thirsting for noble deeds and the very stridulation of the grasshopper was part of a vast ecstasy.
“That won’t do,” he said in his heart. “I am making a perfect fool of myself, and it may cost us Makar’s freedom.” As he pictured the Janitor, Zachar and his other comrades, and what they would say, if they knew of his present frame of mind, he sprang to his feet in a fury of determination. “I must get that idiot out of the confounded hole he put himself into and get back to work in St. Petersburg. This girl is not going to stand in my way any longer.” He felt like smashing palaces and fortresses. But whatever he was going to do in his freedom from Clara, Clara was invariably a looker-on. When he staked his life to liberate Makar she was going to be present; after the final blow had been struck at despotism, she would read in the newspapers of his prominent part in the fight.
The next time he saw her he felt completely in her power.
Clara was in a hurry, but an hour after they had parted he found an honest excuse for seeing her again that very day. The appointment was made through Mme. Shubeyko, and in the afternoon he called at the trunk shop once more.
“We have been ignoring a very important point, Clara Rodionovna,” he said solicitously. “Since the explosion at the Winter Palace the spies have been turning St. Petersburg upside down. They literally don’t leave a stone unturned. Now, Makar went away before the examinations at the Medical Academy and he disappeared from his lodgings without filing notice of removal at the police station.”
“And if they become curious about his whereabouts the name of the Miroslav Province in his papers may put the authorities in mind of their Miroslav prisoner,” Clara put in, with quick intelligence.
He nodded gloomily and both grew thoughtful.
“They would first send word to Zorki, his native town, though,” Pavel then said, “to have his people questioned, and I shouldn’t be surprised if they brought his father over here to be confronted with him.”
“That would be the end of it,” Clara remarked, in dismay.
The next day Pavel telegraphed it all over to Makar, by means of his handkerchief, from the hill which commanded the prisoner’s window.
“I have a scheme,” Makar’s handkerchief flashed back.
“For God’s sake don’t run away with yourself,” Pavel returned. “It’s a serious matter. Consider it maturely.”
“Do you know anybody in Paris or any other foreign city you could write to at once?”
“I do. Why?” Pavel replied.
“Get me some foreign paper. I shall write two letters, one to my father and one to my wife, both dated at that place. If these letters were sent there and that man then sent them to my people at Zorki, it would mean I am in Paris. Understand?”
“I do. You are crazy.”
“Why? Father will let bygones be bygones. I should tell him the whole truth. He is all right.”
“He won’t fool the gendarmes.”
“He will!” the white speck behind the iron bars flicked out vehemently. “He’ll do it. Provided he is prepared for it.”
“You are impossible. If an order came from St. Petersburg your Zorki gendarmes would not dare think for themselves. They would just hustle him off to Miroslav.”
“Then get father away from there.”
“They would take your wife, anybody who could identify you.”
“Father is better after all. He would look me in the face and say he does not know me. He could do it.”
“And later go to Siberia for it?”
“You are right. But I don’t think the order will be to take him here at once. They’ll first examine him there. He’ll have a chance to fool them.”
Clara offered to go to Zorki at once, but Makar was for a postponement of her “conspiracy trip.” Saturday of Comfort was near at hand, and then the little Jewish town would be crowded with strangers, so that Mlle. Yavner might come and go without attracting attention even in the event the local gendarmes had already been put on the case.