Varvara was shaken. “Can it be really all right?” she asked of the witnessing air. She was so well accustomed to thinking that everything had an odd contrary rightness of its own, if an Ostapenko thought it right. “Oh, Pavlik—if you would only come free of these words and tell me out of your own heart if it’s all right.”
He went on talking. She had known he would never come free of words. He could not. She knew the expression of his mouth—the set of lips determined to convince by words alone. Even when she asked him, as she often did, to think—Pavlik—think—she knew it was impossible for him to think as well as talk—to go behind his own plausible words, to compare them with the facts in his own brain, and trim his argument to the shape of his inmost conviction. She knew that words were in themselves the stuff of his conviction—he believed what he said, instead of saying what he believed. Yet this was Ostapenkoism; she did not criticize it; words were his genius, she thought. Outsiders might say that he quibbled, but his wife shaped his quibbling to fit into her pride in him. Only Pavlik could quibble as superbly as he quibbled. Only Pavlik could make a thing actually true by proving ingeniously that it was true. He could mold truth. She began to see that this elaborate quibble about Mr. Chew’s paper was sealing the paper itself with an actuality, a significance, that it had not seemed to possess. The paper had floated as negligibly as a dead leaf into Varvara’s notice, and now here it was, transmuted by Ostapenko argument into a heavy lawyer’s parchment, a thing to be kept in the safe, a thing solid enough for the future to be built on. It blew in like a leaf and settled like a stone. Pavlik’s talk and magic had turned the blowing fancy to stone—to the cornerstone of the house.
Varvara was in the grip of reaction from her first moment of furious anger with Pavlik and her suspicion of him. When she had first seen him walking toward the kitchen threshold, pointing out Tanya’s door to young Sergei Malinin, all her faith in him had seemed for a moment to be cracking. At that moment she could have torn him to pieces; he was something namelessly hideous—naked of words at last. Now that he had clothed his intentions with their usual fine wrappings of explanation, she felt like a child who, in the dark, thinks it sees in a moving shadow at the door a bogey arriving frightfully to devour it—and then in the next moment identifies the thing as the sweet familiar shadow of its mother and feels incredibly safe again. Varvara felt the remorse such a child might feel—remorse and sheepishness, for having so mistaken that loving shadow, misheard that dear step, repulsed with panic a friend so tried and so trusted. Must she not make up for her first panic of misunderstanding by understanding with double intensity?
It was the more possible for Pavel to convince Varvara, because she felt herself, in this matter, on his ground, not her own. She had no illusions about the incompleteness of her own nature, though she would have resented bitterly any suggestion that an outsider could see her lack of life. Living with the ebullient Pavel had taught her secret humility. She therefore attached no moral superiority to her fear of love—no you ought not—only an alas, I am not. Her natural instinct, even if Tatiana had been married with every possible rite of orthodoxy, would have been to lie awake with tears of horror throughout her daughter’s wedding night. This she recognized as morbidness, and was therefore the more inclined to distrust her own almost unbearable instinct of reluctance to believe in the sudden significance of this lawyer’s paper. Paper blessing—church’s blessing—archimandrite’s blessing—God’s blessing—her answer to each or all would have been—No—no—no—not for my Tanya. …
Among Ostapenkos, she was accustomed to being more sober but less inspired. She had felt essentially right as she barred her husband’s path to her daughter’s door, but she was used to
