It was like the shining arm of God who had come to take her soul. She had raised her weary hand to point upward--the hand sank, sank.
What a horrible time! He, to whom the thought of dying caused a terror that could not be overcome; he, who, if he met a funeral procession on the street, turned away his head, and could not bear the sight of a corpse, he had watched near her coffin for two nights long without moving, without eating. In the second night he had fallen asleep from unvanquishable weariness. He had dreamed of old times, of dead happiness. It seemed to him that he sat with her on the terrace of the country-house near St. Petersburg, where they had passed the mid-summer, the short northern summer. It was a bright August night; they sat together hand in hand, and her voice fell softly and caressingly on his ear. Sometimes she laughed, then he laughed also, only because she laughed, and pressed a kiss on her lips. Ah, how warmly her thirsty young lips met his!
Suddenly he awoke; an insect had flown across his face. Around him all was black--the walls, the floor, the ceiling--and there, near him, surrounded by tall, red flickering candles by a blooming wall of flowers--ah! how beautiful she still was! He bent over the coffin and raised her from the white satin cushions and kissed her. The chill of this touch penetrated to his marrow; for the first time he understood what a terrible gulf had opened between her and him.
When Colia had come to relieve his father from his watch over the corpse, he had found him lying senseless on his face near the coffin.
Yes, the one, the only one whom he had passionately loved; but she had not been able to protect him from himself, either by her life or by her death.
At first, really, in the first few days after her burial, he had thought the fever had left his veins. He no longer felt it. Miserable and weary, at that time, he had shut himself up for hours, for days in her room, in the room in which all had been left as it was before she had been carried out, in which all looked as if she must come back. And when he had at length resolved to leave Rome, he had passed a few months quietly and soberly with his children. He had even tried to work again, to compose--but he had accomplished nothing. Then despair at his wasted genius had come over him, and with despair the fever. He could not bear quiet, he simply could not. He needed noise, incessant change, excitement and stunning.
He sent Mascha to relatives--Maschenka, his charming little daughter, whom he adored, and whom he now pushed out of his way with a violent haste, as if she were merely an inconvenient burden for him. And then-- then he took up life again exactly at the point where he had left it before Natalie died.
From city to city, from concert hall to concert hall, from hotel to hotel he rushed, always the same, restless, joyless, without peace, always idolized, raved over, only still madder in the waste of his life than formerly, because sadness was greater in him, and it needed more excitement to kill it.
Now all that was to some degree bearable, but how would it be in a couple of years? Involuntarily his glance wandered to a pile of papers which lay on the table in the centre of the room--thirty, forty copies of that number of Figaro which contained the fable. He laughed at the people who had sent him this absurdity to flatter him.
"'I will lay a charm in your art which no one can resist,'" he murmured to himself. "Bah! how long could that yet last?" He did not deceive himself; things were going rapidly down with him, his violin playing, his health, all.