The Precipice Part 65

Tatiana Markovna looked sad, but she pulled herself together and avoided sentiment.

"Stay with us," she said reproachfully. "You do not even know, yourself, where you are going."

"To Rome, Grandmother."

"What for? To see the Pope?"

"To be a sculptor."

"Wha-at?"

Marfinka also begged him to stay. Vera did not add her voice to the request, because she knew he would not stay; she thought sorrowfully that his manifold talents had not developed so far to give the pleasure they should do to himself and others.

"Cousin," she said, "if ever you grow weary of your existence abroad, will you come back to glance at this place where you are now at last understood and loved?"

"Certainly I will, Vera. My heart has found a real home here.

Grandmother, Marfinka and you are my dear family; I shall never form new domestic ties. You will always be present with me wherever I go, but now do not seek to detain me. My imagination drives me away, and my head is whirling with ideas, but in less than a year I shall have completed a statue of you in marble."

"What about the novel?" she asked, laughing.

"When I am dead anyone who has a fancy for them may examine my papers, and will find material enough. But my immediate intention is to represent your head and shoulders in marble."

"Before the year is out you will fall in love with somebody else, and will not know which to choose as your model."

"I may fall in love, but I shall never love anyone as I do you. I will carve your statue in marble, for you always stand vividly before my eyes.

That is certain," he concluded emphatically, as he caught her smiling glance.

"Certain again!" interrupted Tatiana Markovna. "I don't know what you are discussing there, but I know that when you say 'certain,' Boris, it is safe to say that nothing will come of it."

Raisky went up to Tus.h.i.+n, who was sitting in a corner silently watching the scene.

"I hope, Ivan Ivanovich, that what we all wish will be accomplished," he said.

"All of us, Boris Pavlovich? Do you think it will be accomplished?"

"I think so; it could hardly be otherwise. Promise to let me know wherever I am, because I wish to hold the marriage crown over Vera's head at the ceremony."

"I promise."

"And I promise to come."

Leonti took Raisky on one side, gave him a letter for Juliana Andreevna, and begged him to seek her out.

"Speak to her conscience," he said. "If she agrees to return, telegraph to me, and I will travel to Moscow to meet her."

Raisky promised, but advised him, in the meantime, to rest and to spend the winter with Tus.h.i.+n.

The whole party surrounded the travelling carriage. Marfinka wept copiously, and Vikentev had already provided her with no less than five handkerchiefs. When Raisky had taken his seat he looked out once more, and exchanged glances with Tatiana Markovna, with Vera and with Tus.h.i.+n.

The common experience and suffering of the six months, which had drawn them so closely together, pa.s.sed before his vision with the rapidity, the varying tone and colour, and the vagueness of a dream.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

As soon as Raisky reached St. Petersburg he hurried off to find Kirilov.

He felt an impulse to touch his friend to a.s.sure himself that Kirilov really stood before him, and that he had not started on the journey without him. He repeated to him his ardent confidence that his artistic future lay in sculpture.

"What new fancy is this?" asked Kirilov, frowning and plainly expressing his mistrust. "When I got your letter I thought you were mad. You have one talent already; why do you want to follow a sidetrack. Take your pencil, go to the Academy, and buy this," he said, showing him a thick book of lithographed anatomical drawings. "What do you want with sculpture? It is too late."

"I feel I have the right touch here," he said, rubbing his fingers one against the other.

"Whether you have the right touch or not, it is too late."

"Why too late? There is an ensign I know who wields the chisel with great success."

"An ensign, yes! But you, with your grey hair...." Kirilov emphasised his remarks with a vigorous shake of the head.

Raisky would wrangle with him no longer. He spent three weeks in the studio of a sculptor, and made acquaintance with the students there. At home he worked zealously; visited with the sculptor and his students the Isaac Cathedral, where he stood in admiration before the work of Vitali; and he spent many hours in the galleries of the Hermitage. Overwhelmed with enthusiasm he urged Kirilov to start at once for Italy and Rome.

He had not forgotten Leonti's commission, and sought out Juliana Andreevna in her lodgings. When he entered the corridor he heard the strains of a waltz and, he thought, the voice of Koslov's wife. He sent in his name and with it Leonti's letter. After a time the servant, with an air of embarra.s.sment, came to tell him that Juliana Andreevna had gone with a party of friends to Zarskoe-Selo, and would travel direct from there to Moscow. Raisky did not think it necessary to mention this incident to Leonti.

His former guardian had sent him a considerable sum raised by the mortgage of his estate, and with this in hand he set out with Kirilov at the beginning of January for Dresden. He spent many hours of every day in the gallery, and paid an occasional visit to the theatre. Raisky pressed his fellow-traveller to go farther afield; he wanted to go to Holland, to England, to Paris.

"What should I do in England?" asked Kirilov. "There, all the art-treasures are in private galleries to which we have no access, and the public museums are not rich in great works of art. If you are determined to go, you must go by yourself from Holland. I will wait for you in Paris."

Raisky agreed to this proposition. He only stayed a fortnight in England, however, and was very much impressed by the mighty sea of social life.

Then he hastened back to his eager study of the rich art treasures of Paris; but he could not possess his soul in the confusion and noisy merriment, in the incessant entertainments of Paris.

In the early spring the friends crossed the Alps. Even while he abandoned himself to the new impressions which nature, art, and a different race made on his mind, Raisky found that the dearest and nearest ties still connected him with Tatiana Markovna, Vera and Marfinka. When he watched the towering crests of the waves at sea or the snow-clad mountain tops his imagination brought before him his aunt's n.o.ble grey head; her eyes looked at him from the portraits of Velasquez and Gerard Dow, just as Murillo's women reminded him of Vera, and he recalled Marfinka's charming face as he looked at the masterpieces of Greuze, or even at the women of Raphael. Vera's form flitted before him on the mountain side; he saw once more before him the precipice overlooking the narrow plain of the Volga, and fought over again the despairing struggle from which he had emerged. In the flowery valleys Vera beckoned to him under another aspect, offering her hand with her affectionate smile. So his memories followed him even as he contemplated the mighty figures of Nature, Art and History as they were revealed in the mountains and the plains of Italy.

He gave himself up to these varied emotions with a pa.s.sionate absorption which shook the foundations of his physical strength. In Rome he established himself in a studio which he shared with Kirilov, and spent much of his time in visiting the museums and the monuments of antiquity.

Sometimes he felt he had suddenly lost his appreciation of natural beauty, and then he would shut himself up and work for days together.

Another time he was absorbed in the crowded life of the city, which appeared to him as a great, crude, moving picture in which the life of bygone centuries was reflected as in a mirror.

Through all the manifestations of this rich and glowing existence he remained faithful to his own family, and he was never more than a guest on the foreign soil. In his leisure hours his thoughts were turned homewards; he would have liked to absorb the eternal beauty of nature and art, to saturate himself with the history revealed in the monuments of Rome in order that he might take his spiritual and artistic gains back to Malinovka.

The three figures of Vera, Marfinka, and his "little mother" Tatiana Markovna, stretched out beckoning hands to him; and calling him to herself with even greater insistence than these, was another, mightier figure, the "great mother," Russia herself.

THE END