Ah, how ashamed he was now to recall their last meeting before this took place. Elizavieta, blinded by her love for him, could not understand, could not see, that her beloved was too low for her to abase herself before him, and she had begged him on her knees not to forsake her. He remembered how she, sobbing, had embraced his feet and let herself be dragged along the floor, how in despair she had beaten her head against the wall. He had learnt afterwards that his desertion had sent Elizavieta nearly out of her mind, that at one time she had wished to enter a convent, and that later when she became a widow she had gone abroad. Since then he had lost all trace of her.
Was it possible that here at Interlaken he was meeting her now again, twelve years after their rupture, calm, stern, beautiful as ever, with her inexplicable fascination for him and her tormentingly-sweet reminders of the past? Basmanof, sitting at the little café table, watched the tall lady in the large Paris hat as she went by, and his whole being burned feverishly with images and sensations of the past, suffusing in a moment the memory of his mind and the memory of his body. It was she, it was she, Elizavieta, whom he had not allowed to love him as fully as she had wished, and whom he himself had not dared to love as fully as he might, as much as he had wished! It was she, his better self, restored again to him when his life had almost passed, she, alive still, the possibility incarnate of reviving that which had been, of completing and restoring it.
In spite of his self-possession Basmanof’s head was in a whirl. He paid the waiter for his ice, got up from his seat, and walked out by the path along which the tall lady had passed.
II
When Basmanof overtook the tall lady he raised his hat deferentially and bowed to her. But the lady showed no sign of recognition.
“Is it possible you do not recognise me, Elizavieta Vasilievna?” asked Basmanof, speaking in Russian.
After some hesitation the lady answered in Russian, though with a slight accent.
“Pardon me, but you’ve probably made a mistake. I am not an acquaintance of yours.”
“Elizavieta Vasilievna!” exclaimed Basmanof deeply hurt by such a reply. “Surely you must recognise me! I am Peter Andreyevitch Basmanof.”
“It’s the first time I’ve heard that name,” said the lady, “and I don’t know you at all.”