“For heaven’s sake, what is the matter, Rakhmétof?” cried Kirsánof, in horror.
“It is a trial; it is necessary; it’s incredible, of course; however, it is necessary. I see that I can stand it.”
Besides what Kirsánof saw, it may be judged from this that the khozyáïka also could relate a great many interesting things about Rakhmétof; but in her capacity of a simple-hearted and simply-dressed old woman, she was out of her wits in regard to him, and, of course, it was impossible to learn anything from her. This time she ran off to get Kirsánof only because Rakhmétof allowed her to do so to calm her. She wept so bitterly, thinking that he was going to commit suicide.
Two months after that was the end of May. Rakhmétof was away for a week or more, but at that time nobody noticed it, because it was a common occurrence for him to vanish in that way. Now Kirsánof told the following story of the way Rakhmétof spent those days. They constituted an erotic episode in Rakhmétof’s life. Love arose from an occurrence which was worthy of Nikitushka Lomof. Rakhmétof was going from the first Pargalof into town, lost in thoughts, and looking at the ground in his usual way. He was near the Forestry Institute; he was awakened from his thoughts by the desperate shrieks of a woman; he looked up: a horse attached to a sharaban, in which a lady was riding, was running away. The lady, herself, was driving, but she could not control him; the reins were trailing on the ground, and the horse was within two steps of Rakhmétof. He threw himself in the midst of the way, but the horse was already past him; he had no time to catch the reins; he had only time to catch the hind axle of the sharaban; he brought it to a stop, but it threw him down. A crowd gathered, helped the lady out of the sharaban, and lifted Rakhmétof to his feet. His chest was somewhat bruised, but the worst was that the wheel had torn out a large piece of flesh from his leg. The lady came to herself, and ordered him taken to her dacha, which was within half a verst. He consented because he felt weak from loss of blood, but he asked that Kirsánof should be sent for without fail, and no other doctor. Kirsánof found that the bruises on his chest were not serious, but Rakhmétof was weak from loss of blood. He lay there for ten days. The rescued lady, of course, took care of him herself. He could not do anything else in his weak condition, and so he talked with her—all the same the time would be wasted—he talked with her, and became quite friendly with her. The lady was a widow of nineteen; she was not poor, and, generally speaking, she was in an absolutely independent position, an intellectual and respectable woman. Rakhmétof’s fiery speeches, of course not on the subject of love, charmed her. “I see him in my dreams surrounded by a halo,” she said to Kirsánof. Rakhmétof also fell in love with her. She, judging by his dress, and by everything else, supposed that he was a man who had absolutely nothing, and therefore she was the first to confess her love, and she offered to marry him, when on the eleventh day he got up and said that he was able to go home.
“I have been more frank with you than with others. You see, such people as I have no right to unite the fate of anyone else with their own.”
“Yes, that is true,” she said; “you have no right to marry. But till the time when you must renounce me, love me.”
“No, I cannot accept that,” he said. “I must suppress love in my heart; to love you would tie my hands. Even as it is, they cannot be free so soon, for they are already tied. But I shall untie them; I must not love.”
What became of the lady? A crisis must have come into her life. In all probability she also became an extraordinary person. I wanted to find out about it, but I cannot. Kirsánof did not tell me her name, and he himself did not know what became of her. Rakhmétof asked him not to see her and not to inquire about her. “If I supposed that you knew anything about her, I could not refrain from asking, and that would not do.”
After hearing this story, all remembered that for a month or two afterwards, and maybe more, Rakhmétof was more melancholy than usual, did not get angry with himself, no matter how his “eyes were pinched” by his low weakness—that is, for cigars—and did not smile sweetly and broadly when he was flattered with the name of Nikitushka Lomof. And I recollected also more, that summer, three or four times in conversations with me (some time after our first conversation he began to be fond of me, because I laughed at him), when I was alone with him, and in reply to my rallying him, would utter such words as these: “Yes, pity me; you are right. I myself am not an abstract idea; I am a man who would like to love. Nu, it is nothing though; it will pass,” he would add. And in reality he got over it. Only once, after I had roused his spirits by some of my ridiculous speeches, even in the late fall, he still uttered these words.
The sapient reader, maybe, will guess from this that I know more about Rakhmétof than I am telling him. It may be;
