think he noticed us. We’ll probably find him.”
“I’ve said almost nothing, and you already have displeased tones in your voice. But tell me, am I not right? We could hide just as insecurely, at random, in Yuriatin. And if we were seeking salvation, then it should have been for certain, with a thought-out plan, as, in the end, was suggested by that well-informed and sober, though repulsive, man. While here I simply don’t know how much closer we are to danger than anywhere else. A boundless, windswept plain. And we’re alone as can be. We may get snowbound overnight and be unable to dig ourselves out in the morning. Or our mysterious benefactor who visits the house may drop in, turn out to be a robber, and put his knife in us. Do you have any sort of weapon? No, you see. I’m frightened of your lightheartedness, which you’ve infected me with. It muddles my thinking.”
“But in that case what do you want? What do you order me to do?”
“I don’t know myself how to answer you. Keep me in submission all the time. Constantly remind me that I’m your blindly loving, unreasoning slave. Oh, I’ll tell you. Our families, yours and mine, are a thousand times better than we are. But is that the point? The gift of love is like any other gift. It may be great, but without a blessing it will not manifest itself. And with us it’s as if we were taught to kiss in heaven and then sent as children to live in the same time, so as to test this ability on each other. A crown of concord, no sides, no degrees, no high, no low, equivalence of the whole being, everything gives joy, everything becomes soul. But in this wild tenderness, lying in wait every moment, there is something childishly untamed, illicit. It’s a self-willed, destructive element, hostile to peace in the home. My duty is to fear it and not to trust it.”
She threw her arms around his neck and, fighting back her tears, finished:
“You understand, we’re in different positions. Wings were given you so as to fly beyond the clouds, and to me, a woman, so as to press myself to the ground and shield my fledgling from danger.”
He terribly liked everything she said, but did not show it, so as not to fall into excessive sweetness. Restraining himself, he remarked:
“Our bivouac life really is false and overwrought. You’re profoundly right. But we didn’t invent it. A frantic casting about is everybody’s lot, it’s the spirit of the time.
“I myself have been thinking today, since morning, about approximately the same thing. I’d like to make every effort to stay on here longer. I can’t tell you how much I miss work. I don’t mean agricultural work. Once our whole household here threw itself into it, and it succeeded. But I wouldn’t be able to repeat that again. It’s not what I have in mind.
“Life on all sides is gradually being put in order. Maybe someday books will be published again.
“Here’s what I’ve been thinking over. Couldn’t we arrange it with Samdevyatov, on conditions profitable for him, to keep us supplied for six months, on the pledge of a work I would promise to write during that time, a textbook on medicine, let’s suppose, or something artistic, a book of poems, for example. Or let’s say I undertake to translate some world-famous foreign book. I have a good knowledge of languages, I recently read an advertisement from a big Petersburg publisher who specializes in bringing out works in translation. Work like that would probably acquire an exchange value that could be turned into money. I’d be happy to busy myself with something of that sort.”
“Thank you for reminding me. I was also thinking of something like that today. But I don’t believe we can hold out here. On the contrary, I have a presentiment that we’ll soon be carried somewhere further on. But while this stopover is at our disposal, I have something to ask you. Sacrifice a few hours for me during the next few nights and, please, write down everything you’ve recited to me from memory at various times. Half of it has been lost, the other half has never been written down, and I’m afraid you’ll forget it all afterwards and it will perish, as you say has often happened to you before.”
8
By the end of the day they had all washed with hot water, left over in abundance from the laundry. Lara bathed Katenka. Yuri Andreevich, with a blissful feeling of cleanness, sat at the desk by the window with his back to the room in which Lara, fragrant, wrapped in a bathrobe, her wet hair wound turbanlike in a Turkish towel, was putting Katenka to bed and settling for the night. All immersed in the foretaste of impending concentration, Yuri Andreevich perceived everything that was going on through a veil of softened and all-generalizing attention.
It was one o’clock in the morning when Lara, who until then had been pretending, actually fell asleep. The changed linen on her, on Katenka, and on the bed shone, clean, ironed, lacy. Even in those years Lara somehow contrived to starch it.
Yuri Andreevich was surrounded by blissful silence, filled with happiness and breathing sweetly with life. The light of the lamp cast its calm yellowness on the white sheets of paper, and its golden patches floated on the surface of the ink in the inkstand. The frosty winter night shone pale blue outside the window. Yuri Andreevich stepped into the next room, cold and unlit, from which he could better see outside, and looked through the window. The light of the full moon bound the snowy clearing with the tangible viscosity of egg white or white sizing. The luxuriance of the winter night was inexpressible. There was peace in the doctor’s soul. He went back to the bright, warmly heated room and got down to writing.
In a sweeping script, taking care that the appearance of the writing conveyed the living movement of his hand and did not lose its personality, becoming soulless and dumb, he recalled and wrote out in gradually improving versions, deviating from the previous ones, the most fully formed and memorable poems, “The Star of the Nativity,” “Winter Night,” and quite a few others of a similar kind, afterwards forgotten, mislaid, and never found again by anyone.
Then, from settled and finished things, he went on to things once begun and abandoned, entered into their tone, and began to sketch out their continuation, without the least hope of finishing them now. Then he warmed up, got carried away, and went on to new things.
After two or three easily poured-out stanzas and several similes that he was struck by himself, the work took possession of him, and he felt the approach of what is known as inspiration. The correlation of forces that control creative work is, as it were, stood on its head. The primacy no longer belongs to man and the state of his soul, for which he seeks expression, but to the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of external, audible sounds, but in terms of the swiftness and power of its inner flow. Then, like the rolling mass of a river’s current, which by its very movement polishes the stones of the bottom and turns the wheels of mills, flowing speech itself, by the force of its own laws, on its way, in passing, creates meter and rhyme and thousands of other forms and constructions, still more important, but as yet unrecognized, unconsidered, unnamed.
In such moments Yuri Andreevich felt that the main work was done not by him, but by what was higher than him, by what was above him and guided him, namely: the state of world thought and poetry, and what it was destined for in the future, the next step it was to take in its historical development. And he felt himself only the occasion and fulcrum for setting it in motion.
He was delivered from self-reproach; self-dissatisfaction, the feeling of his own nonentity, left him for a while. He looked up, he looked around him.
