XVI
Aratov found his sanguine friend at home. He chatted a little with him, reproached him for having quite forgotten his aunt and himself, listened to fresh praises of that heart of gold, the princess, who had just sent Kupfer from Yaroslav a smoking-cap embroidered with fish-scales ... and all at once, sitting just opposite Kupfer and looking him straight in the face, he announced that he had been a journey to Kazan.
‘You have been to Kazan; what for?’
‘Oh, I wanted to collect some facts about that ... Clara Militch.’
‘The one that poisoned herself?’
‘Yes.’
Kupfer shook his head. ‘Well, you are a chap! And so quiet about it! Toiled a thousand miles out there and back ... for what? Eh? If there’d been some woman in the case now! Then I can understand anything! anything! any madness!’ Kupfer ruffled up his hair. ‘But simply to collect materials, as it’s called among you learned people.... I’d rather be excused! There are statistical writers to do that job! Well, and did you make friends with the old lady and the sister? Isn’t she a delightful girl?’
‘Delightful,’ answered Aratov, ‘she gave me a great deal of interesting information.’
‘Did she tell you exactly how Clara took poison?’
‘You mean ... how?’
‘Yes, in what manner?’
‘No ... she was still in such grief ... I did not venture to question her too much. Was there anything remarkable about it?’
‘To be sure there was. Only fancy; she had to appear on the stage that very day, and she acted her part. She took a glass of poison to the theatre with her, drank it before the first act, and went through all that act afterwards. With the poison inside her! Isn’t that something like strength of will? Character, eh? And, they say, she never acted her part with such feeling, such passion! The public suspected nothing, they clapped, and called for her.... And directly the curtain fell, she dropped down there, on the stage. Convulsions ... and convulsions, and within an hour she was dead! But didn’t I tell you all about it? And it was in the papers too!’
Aratov’s hands had grown suddenly cold, and he felt an inward shiver.
‘No, you didn’t tell me that,’ he said at last. ‘And you don’t know what play it was?
Kupfer thought a minute. ‘I did hear what the play was ... there is a betrayed girl in it.... Some drama, it must have been. Clara was created for dramatic parts.... Her very appearance ... But where are you off to?’ Kupfer interrupted himself, seeing that Aratov was reaching after his hat.
‘I don’t feel quite well,’ replied Aratov. ‘Good-bye ... I’ll come in another time.’
Kupfer stopped him and looked into his face. ‘What a nervous fellow you are, my boy! Just look at yourself.... You’re as white as chalk.’
‘I’m not well,’ repeated Aratov, and, disengaging himself from Kupfer’s detaining hands, he started homewards. Only at that instant it became clear to him that he had come to Kupfer with the sole object of talking of Clara...
‘Unhappy Clara, poor frantic Clara....’
On reaching home, however, he quickly regained his composure to a certain degree.
The circumstances accompanying Clara’s death had at first given him a violent shock ... but later on this performance ‘with the poison inside her,’ as Kupfer had expressed it, struck him as a kind of monstrous pose, a piece of bravado, and he was already trying not to think about it, fearing to arouse a feeling in himself, not unlike repugnance. And at dinner, as he sat facing Platosha, he suddenly recalled her midnight appearance, recalled that abbreviated dressing-jacket, the cap with the high ribbon—and why a ribbon on a nightcap?—all the ludicrous apparition which, like the scene-shifter’s whistle in a transformation scene, had dissolved all his visions into dust! He even forced Platosha to repeat her description of how she had heard his scream, had been alarmed, had jumped up, could not for a minute find either his door or her own, and so on. In the evening he played a game of cards with her, and went off to his room rather depressed, but again fairly composed.
Aratov did not think about the approaching night, and was not afraid of it: he was sure he would pass an excellent night. The thought of Clara had sprung up within him from time to time; but he remembered at once how ‘affectedly’ she had killed herself, and turned away from it. This piece of ‘bad taste’ blocked out all other memories of her. Glancing cursorily into the stereoscope, he even fancied that she was averting her eyes because she was ashamed. Opposite the stereoscope on the wall hung a portrait of his mother. Aratov took it from its nail, scrutinised it a long while, kissed it and carefully put it away in a drawer. Why did he do that? Whether it was that it was not fitting for this portrait to be so close to that woman ... or for some other reason Aratov did not inquire of himself. But his mother’s portrait stirred up memories of his father ... of his father, whom he had seen dying in this very room, in this bed. ‘What do you think of all this, father?’ he mentally addressed himself to him. ‘You understand all this; you too believed in Schiller’s world of spirits. Give me advice!’
‘Father would have advised me to give up all this idiocy,’ Aratov said aloud, and he took up a book. He could not, however, read for long, and feeling a sort of heaviness all over, he went to bed earlier than usual, in the full conviction that he would fall asleep at once.
And so it happened ... but his hopes of a quiet night were not realised.