XI
It began well; he soon fell asleep, and when his aunt went into him on tip-toe to make the sign of the cross three times over him in his sleep—she did so every night—he lay breathing as quietly as a child. But before dawn he had a dream.
He dreamed he was on a bare steppe, strewn with big stones, under a lowering sky. Among the stones curved a little path; he walked along it.
Suddenly there rose up in front of him something of the nature of a thin cloud. He looked steadily at it; the cloud turned into a woman in a white gown with a bright sash round her waist. She was hurrying away from him. He saw neither her face nor her hair ... they were covered by a long veil. But he had an intense desire to overtake her, and to look into her face. Only, however much he hastened, she went more quickly than he.
On the path lay a broad flat stone, like a tombstone. It blocked up the way. The woman stopped. Aratov ran up to her; but yet he could not see her eyes ... they were shut. Her face was white, white as snow; her hands hung lifeless. She was like a statue.
Slowly, without bending a single limb, she fell backwards, and sank down upon the tombstone.... And then Aratov lay down beside her, stretched out straight like a figure on a monument, his hands folded like a dead man’s.
But now the woman suddenly rose, and went away. Aratov tried to get up too ... but he could neither stir nor unclasp his hands, and could only gaze after her in despair.
Then the woman suddenly turned round, and he saw bright living eyes, in a living but unknown face. She laughed, she waved her hand to him ... and still he could not move.
She laughed once more, and quickly retreated, merrily nodding her head, on which there was a crimson wreath of tiny roses.
Aratov tried to cry out, tried to throw off this awful nightmare....
Suddenly all was darkness around ... and the woman came back to him. But this was not the unknown statue ... it was Clara. She stood before him, crossed her arms, and sternly and intently looked at him. Her lips were tightly pressed together, but Aratov fancied he heard the words, ‘If you want to know what I am, come over here!’
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘Here!’ he heard the wailing answer. ‘Here!’
Aratov woke up.
He sat up in bed, lighted the candle that stood on the little table by his bedside—but did not get up—and sat a long while, chill all over, slowly looking about him. It seemed to him as if something had happened to him since he went to bed; that something had taken possession of him ... something was in control of him. ‘But is it possible?’ he murmured unconsciously. ‘Does such a power really exist?’
He could not stay in his bed. He quickly dressed, and till morning he was pacing up and down his room. And, strange to say, of Clara he never thought for a moment, and did not think of her, because he had decided to go next day to Kazan!
He thought only of the journey, of how to manage it, and what to take with him, and how he would investigate and find out everything there, and would set his mind at rest. ‘If I don’t go,’ he reasoned with himself, ‘why, I shall go out of my mind!’ He was afraid of that, afraid of his nerves. He was convinced that when once he had seen everything there with his own eyes, every obsession would vanish like that nightmare. ‘And it will be a week lost over the journey,’ he thought; ‘what is a week? else I shall never shake it off.’
The rising sun shone into his room; but the light of day did not drive away the shadows of the night that lay upon him, and did not change his resolution.
Platosha almost had a fit when he informed her of his intention. She positively sat down on the ground ... her legs gave way beneath her. ‘To Kazan? why to Kazan?’ she murmured, her dim eyes round with astonishment. She would not have been more surprised if she had been told that her Yasha was going to marry the baker woman next door, or was starting for America. ‘Will you be long in Kazan?’ ‘I shall be back in a week,’ answered Aratov, standing with his back half-turned to his aunt, who was still sitting on the floor.
Platonida Ivanovna tried to protest more, but Aratov answered her in an utterly unexpected and unheard-of way: ‘I’m not a child,’ he shouted, and he turned pale all over, his lips trembled, and his eyes glittered wrathfully. ‘I’m twenty-six, I know what I’m about, I’m free to do what I like! I suffer no one ... Give me the money for the journey, pack my box with my clothes and linen ... and don’t torture me! I’ll be back in a week, Platosha,’ he added, in a somewhat softer tone.
Platosha got up, sighing and groaning, and, without further protest, crawled to her room. Yasha had alarmed her. ‘I’ve no head on my shoulders,’ she told the cook, who was helping her to pack Yasha’s things; ‘no head at all, but a hive full of bees all a-buzz and a-hum! He’s going off to Kazan, my good soul, to Ka-a-zan!’ The cook, who had observed their dvornik the previous evening talking for a long time with a police officer, would have liked to inform her mistress of this circumstance, but did not dare, and only reflected, ‘To Kazan! if only it’s nowhere farther still!’ Platonida Ivanovna was so upset that she did not even utter her usual prayer. ‘In such a calamity the Lord God Himself cannot aid us!’
The same day Aratov set off for Kazan.