She was all flushed and ill at ease. She received no encouragement. Her sugared enunciation and the false ring of what she said grated on her hearer’s nerves. Anna Nicolayevna listened in silence. The lame princess was a sincere woman coated with a layer of insincerity. But the countess thought her the embodiment of affectation and hated her, bizarre beauty, enunciation, altered gowns, crutches and all.
Lydia Grigorievna was interrupted by the appearance of the assistant-procureur himself. He was tall and frail with a long straight straw-coloured mane and pontifical gestures. His figure made one think of length in the abstract. As you looked at him he seemed to be continually growing in height. Hélène had fallen in love with him because he resembled the baron in a play she had seen in Moscow.
“I’ve just looked in to bid you good afternoon, countess,” he said. “I saw your carriage through the window. But unfortunately—business before pleasure.” It was one of two or three English phrases which he kept for occasions of this character and which he mispronounced with great self-confidence.
When Anna Nicolayevna got into the street she felt as though she had emerged from the suffocating atmosphere of some criminal den. In the May breeze, however, and at sight of the river her spirits rose. She dismissed her carriage. When she reached the macadamised bank and caught the smell of the water it was borne in upon her afresh that it was spring. She had passed this very spot, in a sleigh only a short while ago, it seemed. Lawns and trees had been covered with snow then; all had been stiff with the stiffness of death; whereas now all was tenderly alive with verdure and bloom, and wild-flowers smiled upon her at every turn. Here it struck her as though spring had just been born; born in full attire overnight. Flushed and radiant, with her rusty chin in the air and her flat chest slightly thrown out, spinning her parasol, she was briskly marching along, a broad streak of water to the right of her, a row of orchards to the left. The river beamed. From somewhere underneath she heard the clanking of chains of lumber-horses, accompanied by the yell of boys. The greased wooden screws of a receding cable-ferry were squirming in the air like two erect snakes of silver; the brass buttons of a soldier-passenger burned like a column of flames. All this and the lilac-laden breeze and Anna Nicolayevna’s soul were part of something vast, swelling with light and joy. But the breath of spring is not all joy. Nature’s season of love is a season of yearning. One feels like frisking and weeping at once. Spring was with us a year ago, but the interval seems many years. It is like revisiting one’s home after a long absence: the scenes of childhood are a source of delight and depression at once. It is like hearing a long forgotten song: the melody, however gay, has a dismal note in it. Anna Nicolayevna had not been out many minutes when she began to feel encompassed by an immense melancholy to which her heart readily responded. There was a vague longing in the clear blue sky, in the gleaming water, in the patches of grass on either side of the public promenade, in the distant outlines across the river, but above all in the overpowering freshness of the afternoon air. The travail of an unhappy soul seemed to be somewhere nearby. A look of loneliness came into her eyes. She was burning to see Pavel, to lay bare her soul to him.
When a passing artisan in top-boots and with glass buttons in his waistcoat reverently took off his flat cap she returned the salute with motherly fervour and slackened her pace to a more dignified gait. “I’m respected and loved by the people,” she mentally boasted to Pavel.
Arrived at the bridge, she paused to hand a twenty-copeck piece to a blind beggar who sat on the ground by the tollman’s booth. He apparently recognised her by the way her gloved hand put the coin in his hand. She had given him alms as long as she could remember, and usually he made no more impression on her than the lamp-posts she passed. This time, however, it came back to her how her mother used to send her out of their carriage with some money for him. She paused to look at him and to listen to his song. She recalled him as a man of thirty or forty with thick flaxen hair. Now he was gray and bald. “Great heavens! how time does fly!” she exclaimed in her heart, feeling herself an old woman. The blind man seemed to be absorbed in his song. All blind beggars look alike and they all seem to be singing the same doleful religious tune, yet this man, as he sat with his eyes sealed and his head leaned against the parapet, gave her a novel sensation. He was listening to his own tones, as if they came from an invisible world, like his own, but one located somewhere far away.
Anna Nicolayevna gave him a ruble and passed on. Followed by the beggar’s benedictions, she made to turn into the street which formed the continuation of the bridge, when an approaching flour truck brought her to a halt. Besides several sacks of meal the waggon carried a cheap old trunk, and seated between the trunk and the driver was—Pavel; Pavel uncouthly dressed in the garb of an artisan. His rudimentary beard was covered with dust; his legs, encased in coarse grimy topboots, were dangling in the air. The visor of his flat cap was pushed down over his eyes, screening them from the red afternoon sun which sparkled and glowed in the glass buttons of his vest. It certainly was Pavel. Anna Nicolayevna was panic-stricken. She dared not utter his name.
The toll paid, the truck moved on. The countess followed her son with her eyes, until a cab shut him out of view, and then she remained standing for some time, staring at the cab. “What does it all mean?” she asked herself with sickening curiosity. Finally her eye went to the water below. She gazed at its rippling stretches of black and masses of shattered silver; at a woman slapping a heap of wash with a wash-beater, at a long raft slowly gliding toward the bridge. “Is he disguised? What does it all mean? Was it really Pasha?”
Doubt dawned in her mind. In her eagerness to take another look at the man on the truck she raised her eyes. After waiting for some moments she saw the waggon with the two men as it appeared and forthwith disappeared at the other end of the bridge. The thought of the arrested man stunned her. Was Pavel a Nihilist? The image of her son had assumed a new, a forbidding expression.
The revolutionists moved about on the verge of martyrdom, and as the mere acquaintance with one of their number meant destruction, the imagination painted them as something akin to living shadows, as beings whose very touch brought silence and darkness. People dared not utter the word “Nihilist” or “revolutionist” aloud. Anna Nicolayevna belonged to the privileged few, but at this moment she dreaded so much as to think of her son by these ghastly names. It now appeared to Anna Nicolayevna that all through her call at Lydia Grigorievna’s she had had a presentiment of an approaching calamity. She took the first cab that came along.