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.
XL.
Liza had written to Lavretsky the night before telling him to come and see her on this evening; but he went to his own house first. He did not find either his wife or his daughter there; and the servant told him that they had both gone to the Kalitines'! This piece of news both annoyed and enraged him. "Varvara Pavlovna seems to be determined not to let me live in peace," he thought, an angry feeling stirring in his heart. He began walking up and down the room, pushing away every moment, with hand or foot, one of the toys or books or feminine belongings which fell in his way. Then he called Justine, and told her to take away all that "rubbish."
"Oui, monsieur," she replied, with a grimace, and began to set the room in order, bending herself into graceful attitudes, and by each of her gestures making Lavretsky feel that she considered him an uncivilized bear. It was with a sensation of downright hatred that he watched the mocking expression of her faded, but still piquante, Parisian face, and looked at her white sleeves, her silk apron, and her little cap. At last he sent her away, and, after long hesitation, as Varvara Pavlovna did not return, he determined to go to the Kalitines', and pay a visit, not to Madame Kalitine (for nothing would have induced him to enter her drawing-room—that drawing-room in which his wife was), but to Marfa Timofeevna. He remembered that a back staircase, used by the maid-servants, led straight to her room.