XXXIX.
Lavretsky spent a day and a half at Vasilievskoe, wandering about the neighborhood almost all the time. He could not remain long in any one place. His grief goaded him on. He experienced all the pangs of a ceaseless, impetuous, and impotent longing. He remembered the feeling which had come over him the day after his first arrival. He remembered the resolution he had formed then, and he felt angrily indignant with himself. What was it that had been able to wrest him aside from that which he had acknowledged as his duty, the single problem of his future life? The thirst after happiness—the old thirst after happiness. "It seems that Mikhalevich was right after all," he thought. "You wanted to find happiness in life once more," he said to himself. "You forgot that for happiness to visit a man even once is an undeserved favor, a steeping in luxury. Your happiness was incomplete—was false, you may say. Well, show what right you have to true and complete happiness! Look around you and see who is happy, who enjoys his life! There is a peasant going to the field to mow. It may be that he is satisfied with his lot. But what of that? Would you be willing to exchange lots with him? Remember your own mother. How exceedingly modest were her wishes, and yet what sort of a lot fell to her share! You seem to have only been boasting before Panshine, when you told him that you had come into Russia to till the soil. It was to run after the girls in your old age that you came. Tidings of freedom, reached you, and you flung aside every thing, forgot every thing, ran like a child after a butterfly."
In the midst of his reflections the image of Liza constantly haunted him. By a violent effort he tried to drive it away, and along with it another haunting face, other beautiful but ever malignant and hateful features.
Old Anton remarked that his master was not quite himself; and after sighing several times behind the door, and several times on the threshold, he ventured to go up to him, and advised him to drink something hot. Lavretsky spoke to him harshly, and ordered him out of the room: afterwards he told the old man he was sorry he had done so; but this only made Anton sadder than he had been before.
Lavretsky could not stop in the drawing-room. He fancied that his great grandfather, Andrei, was looking out from his frame with contempt on his feeble descendant. "So much for you! You float in shallow water!"[A] the wry lips seemed to be saying to him. "Is it possible," he thought, "that I cannot gain mastery over myself; that I am going to yield to this—this trifling affair!" (Men who are seriously wounded in a battle always think their wounds "a mere trifle;" when a man can deceive himself no longer, it is time to give up living). "Am I really a child? Well, yes I have seen near at hand, I have almost grasped, the possibility of gaining a life-long happiness—and then it has suddenly disappeared. It is just the same in a lottery. Turn the wheel a little more, and the pauper would perhaps be rich. If it is not to be, it is not to be—and all is over. I will betake me to my work with set teeth, and I will force myself to be silent; and I shall succeed, for it is not for the first time that I take myself in hand. And why have I run away? Why do I stop here, vainly hiding my head, like an ostrich? Misfortune a terrible thing to look in the face! Nonsense!"
[Footnote A: See note to page 142.]
"Anton!" he called loudly, "let the tarantass be got ready immediately."
"Yes," he said to himself again. "I must compel myself to be silent; I must keep myself tightly in hand."
With such reflections as these Lavretsky sought to assuage his sorrow; but it remained as great and as bitter as before. Even Apraxia, who had outlived, not only her intelligence, but almost all her faculties, shook her head, and followed him with sad eyes as he started in the tarantass for the town. The horses galloped. He sat erect and motionless, and looked straight along the road.