Yet—in this case—Tanya—that white baffling door of Tanya’s fortress to be knocked upon—to be assailed with such abrupt news from the strong thick world of men. …
“I’ll just stand in the passage for a minute to listen if I hear voices,” she said. “He may be arguing with her, trying to persuade her against her will. He’s just a boy—it’s difficult for him. Supposing she’s crying. … She cries so quietly. …”
“A funny thing,” said Pavel, “to be expecting to hear the bride crying on a night like this. …”
Varvara stood in the passage for a minute or two. There was no sound. She turned. Through the front door, left open for coolness this hot night, she saw the houses of Mi-san roofed with silver; she heard the distant barking of a dog sounding like a beating on copper. The alchemist stillness transmuted to bright metal the polished leaves of the zinnias and shrubs in the garden. The sky shone like a spangled dragon’s wing. There were even stars in the dust of the street—a dust of stars, too, over the brick material of the frame of the door, and stars in every spider’s-web. After all, she’s just another flower in another garden, thought Varya dreamily, another starry seed on the wind, blowing home to earth. She was thinking wordlessly; she was seeing a vision of the breaking of dear loneliness, the breaking of the virgin round world by the forces of fire and water and wind, the breaking open of strong remote mountains, breaking into chasms and seas, craters, valleys and peaks—the dumb world breaking with a song of thunder, and broken, being clothed with intention at last—clothed with snows and flowers and blue veils of ice and deserts of corn-colored sand and feathers of fire—a world the richer for its broken integrity. To make a statue was to break a stone. Being alive was a breaking of death. To become something was to shatter the peace of being nothing.
Come home—come home—come home, Tanya. …
Varvara roused herself with a start, finding her lips parted to utter a call. She went back into the living-room and found her husband groaning again, his head in his hands.
“What is distressing you so, Pavlik? You are so sure it is all right, and yet you moan and mourn.”
“Tschah! I don’t know. Leave me alone. No, I’ll tell you. I’m not worrying about our Tanya—she’s all right. She has to grow up sooner or later, and she showed more feeling about this boy than she did about any of the others. I’m sure we were right to strike while the iron was hot. No, I worry about the boy—a decent bright boy—and my cousin’s son, too. What if it were really true that there’s a curse on any lover who comes near our Tanya? We couldn’t say we hadn’t had full warning—she really has sucked the life out of every one of the lads who were attracted by her good looks. Supposing it really is a fact that there is something deadly in her icy pretty looks. Supposing we find this nice boy dead by her side in the morning. … What should we say—how should we explain it? The neighbors would—all say ‘well, you’ve had fair warning, haven’t you? It’s as good as murder.’ One can’t disregard such a possibility. There’s something so very strange in the perfectly consistent string of disasters that has followed each of her affairs—disasters to the lads themselves, I mean. I’ve heard of such curses” (Pavel always had precedents ready). “I knew of a nice old woman—very rich, very quiet, very good-natured and considerate—whose servants always died before they had been in her service a year. She was obliged at last to go and live in a hotel at Yalta, and even there, they say, the chambermaids kept on developing mysterious diseases. There are such cases—it’s no good shutting one’s eyes to them. There certainly is something fatal about our Tanya’s effect on men—there isn’t a single one of her admirers that hasn’t reason to regret ever having set eyes on her. Sasha’s dead; Isaev, in the Chinese army, is as good as dead; young Stepan Soloviev is a hopeless sot; Boris threw up a respectable job to go and be a pimp in Shanghai; Vanya seems to have gone entirely off his head. One can’t ignore all that, Varya, one can’t say it’s coincidence—it does look like the work of some kind of devil that possesses our girl. Have we thrown away the life of this nice boy, Sergei Sergeievitch? His affair has gone further than any of the others—the curse would affect him more immediately and fatally. … Oh, Varya, I have a dreadful premonition … I have a terrible feeling that in the morning we shall find him dead—and Tanya icy and quiet as she always is, no sorrier than if she had crushed a spider by mistake. What could we say? How could we explain it to his father and mother?”
“It’s the night makes you have such fancies, Pavlik,” said Varvara. “Two or three o’clock in the morning is always the time when people who can’t sleep have their dreadful fancies.”
“Two or three o’clock in the morning is when people die,” said Pavel Ostapenko, shuddering. “O God! what have I done that my only child is so cursed that I have to fear so for everyone who comes near her? What a silence is in this house, Varya! One can hear no sound of life at all.”
“One couldn’t, anyway, from here.”
Ostapenko looked at the clock. “I wonder why people die in the small hours. I wonder if it’s because all the demons of the night have gathered strength out of the dark by then.”
“No, certainly it isn’t. It is because the pulse beats most weakly then.”
“Yes, but the demons of the
