“It would make us horribly unhappy,” said Anastasia Alexandrovna, “but I don’t know what else he could do. I couldn’t ask him to live without me. He would be like a ship without a rudder or a car without a carburettor. I know Vladimir so well. He will commit suicide.”
“How?” asked Ashenden, who had the realist’s passion for the exact detail.
“He will blow his brains out.”
Ashenden remembered Rosmerholm. In his day he had been an ardent Ibsenite and had even flirted with the notion of learning Norwegian so that he might, by reading the master in the original, get at the secret essence of his thought. He had once seen Ibsen in the flesh drink a glass of Munich beer.
“But do you think we could ever pass another easy hour if we had the death of that man on our conscience?” he asked. “I have a feeling that he would always be between us.”
“I know we shall suffer, we shall suffer dreadfully,” said Anastasia Alexandrovna, “but how can we help it? Life is like that. We must think of Vladimir. There is his happiness to be considered too. He will prefer to commit suicide.”
She turned her face away and Ashenden saw that the heavy tears were coursing down her cheeks. He was much moved. For he had a soft heart and it was dreadful to think of poor Vladimir lying there with a bullet in his brain.
These Russians, what fun they have!
But when Anastasia Alexandrovna had mastered her emotion she turned to him gravely. She looked at him with her humid, round and slightly protuberant eyes.
“We must be quite sure that we’re doing the right thing,” she said. “I should never forgive myself if I’d allowed Vladimir to commit suicide and then found I’d made a mistake. I think we ought to make sure that we really love one another.”
“But don’t you know?” exclaimed Ashenden in a low, tense voice. “I know.”
“Let’s go over to Paris for a week and see how we get on. Then we shall know.”
Ashenden was a trifle conventional and the suggestion took him by surprise. But only for a moment. Anastasia was wonderful. She was very quick and she saw the hesitation that for an instant troubled him.
“Surely you have no bourgeois prejudices?” she said.
“Of course not,” he assured her hurriedly, for he would much sooner have been thought knavish than bourgeois, “I think it’s a splendid idea.”
“Why should a woman hazard her whole life on a throw? It’s impossible to know what a man is really like till you’ve lived with him. It’s only fair to give her the opportunity to change her mind before it’s too late.”
“Quite so,” said Ashenden.
Anastasia Alexandrovna was not a woman to let the grass grow under her feet and so having made their arrangements forthwith on the following Saturday they started for Paris.
“I shall not tell Vladimir that I am going with you,” she said. “It would only distress him.”
“It would be a pity to do that,” said Ashenden.
“And if at the end of the week I come to the conclusion that we’ve made a mistake he need never know anything about it.”
“Quite so,” said Ashenden.
They met at Victoria Station.
“What class have you got?” she asked him.
“First.”
“I’m glad of that. Father and Vladimir travel third on account of their principles, but I always feel sick on a train and I like to be able to lean my head on somebody’s shoulder. It’s easier in a first-class carriage.”
When the train started Anastasia Alexandrovna said she felt dizzy, so she took off her hat and leaned her head on Ashenden’s shoulder. He put his arm round her waist.
“Keep quite still, won’t you?” she said.
When they got on to the boat she went down to the ladies’ cabin and at Calais was able to eat a very hearty meal, but when they got into the train she took off her hat again and rested her head on Ashenden’s shoulder. He thought he would like to read and took up a book.
“Do you mind not reading?” she said. “I have to be held and when you turn the pages it makes me feel all funny.”
Finally they reached Paris and went to a little hotel on the Left Bank that Anastasia Alexandrovna knew of. She said it had atmosphere. She could not bear those great big grand hotels on the other side; they were hopelessly vulgar and bourgeois.
“I’ll go anywhere you like,” said Ashenden, “as long as there’s a bathroom.”
She smiled and pinched his cheek.
“How adorably English you are. Can’t you do without a bathroom for a week? My dear, my dear, you have so much to learn.”
They talked far into the night about Maxim Gorki and Karl Marx, human destiny, love and the brotherhood of man; and drank innumerable cups of Russian tea, so that in the morning Ashenden would willingly have breakfasted in bed and got up for luncheon; but Anastasia Alexandrovna was an early riser. When life was so short and there was so much to do it was a sinful thing to have breakfast a minute after half-past eight. They sat down in a dingy little dining-room the windows of which showed no signs of having been opened for a month. It was full of atmosphere. Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she would have for breakfast.
“Scrambled eggs,” she said.
She ate heartily. Ashenden had already noticed that she had a healthy appetite. He supposed it was a Russian trait: you could not picture Anna Karenina making her midday meal off a bath-bun and a cup of coffee, could you?
After breakfast they went
