Yet there was more to it than that. He was frankly flattered that this proud, clever woman should feel attracted to him. Indeed, he had to confess, he felt something for her, and if his first thought had been to humiliate her, now he found himself even wondering: Could she, perhaps, be saved?
‘I find you interesting,’ he said at last.
She smiled. ‘You’re just curious?’
‘Why not?’
Certainly he was curious. Suvorin impressed him. This was not a weakling, like a Bobrov, to be brushed aside. Suvorin was powerful and intelligent, one of the great capitalists whose final overthrow would begin the revolution. How could he not be curious about the man’s world? When he entered the Suvorin house, Popov also realized that it represented something else that had been missing in his life.
For though he had travelled, and studied history and economics, Popov had never taken much interest in the arts. When he was with Mrs Suvorin, he was sometimes reminded, with a wry smile, of a conversation he had had in Switzerland last year with his friend Lenin. They had been speaking of the countess in St Petersburg when Lenin burst out: ‘Do you know, she showed me a strange thing once. A postcard of a painting called the Mona Lisa.’ He had shaken his bald head. ‘Have you ever heard of it, Popov? I hadn’t. What on earth is it about? I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’ And though Popov was not quite so prosaic as the great revolutionary, he had often to confess a sense of ignorance in Mrs Suvorin’s presence; and he would let her lead him to one of the rooms where her husband’s modern paintings hung and stare at them, fascinated, while she explained them.
But now she was looking at him thoughtfully. ‘Tell me,’ she suddenly said, ‘if you knew, for a certainty, that all this was going to continue, that there would be no revolution for at least a hundred years, what would you do?’
It was a fair question. ‘Actually,’ he confessed, ‘I think Stolypin may succeed. So does Lenin. The revolution may not even come in my lifetime.’ He shrugged, then smiled. ‘I suppose the truth is,’ he admitted frankly, ‘I’ve spent all my life being a revolutionary and I wouldn’t know how to be anything else. It’s a vocation, you know, like any other.’
‘But in the long run, you think all this,’ she gestured round the beautifully furnished room, ‘has to go.’
‘Certainly. There isn’t room for such privilege. All men will be equal.’
‘And when the revolution comes, you will destroy the capitalists and their supporters ruthlessly.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then tell me this,’ she continued pleasantly. ‘If the revolution actually comes soon, and I choose to resist it,’ she smiled quizzically, ‘would you kill me too?’
At which, instead of answering, he frowned and paused to think.
That, she decided, was what she liked. However devious he might be in his dealings, there was still a strange if cruel honesty about him. Something almost pure. He was undoubtedly dangerous: perhaps her fascination with him was, in part, the excitement of a forbidden love. And now, rather than lie, he was calmly considering whether he would kill her or not.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t think it would be necessary. Actually,’ he added, ‘I think you could be saved.’
He did, too. She was like a bird in a cage, he often thought: trapped in this huge mansion and her bourgeois world, certainly; yet still a free spirit, capable of leaving all this behind if called to a higher purpose.
‘I suppose that’s a compliment,’ she smiled.
‘Yes. It is.’
For several more minutes they sat in silence, each conscious of the other, yet following their own thoughts.
And then the fire in the grate hissed, and spat.
The fire was low, just some brightly glowing embers amidst the ash, and the little piece of sparking cinder it threw out might easily have lain on the floor and slowly extinguished itself. But by chance it came to rest upon the edge of Mrs Suvorin’s peignoir and immediately flared up with a sharp flame. She gave a little cry and, intending to whisk her peignoir away, stupidly flicked the lighted cinder on to her lap instead.
It was nothing really. An instant more and she could have risen and stamped out the tiny fire. But seeing the fear on her face, Popov suddenly thought that she was catching fire and, without thinking more, threw himself forward, plucking the burning cinder from her in his bare hands and tossing it back into the grate. Then, grabbing a cushion, he smothered the little fire.
And now, finding him almost in her arms, Mrs Suvorin looked into his face and saw, to her surprise, a look of tenderness.
‘Don’t move,’ she said.
It was another two hours before, in the damp cold outside, young Alexander Bobrov gave up his lonely vigil. He could not understand it. The devil Popov was with her; there could be only one reason why.
And what on earth, he wondered, should be done?
1910
At first sight, in the years 1909 and 1910, it might have seemed that the household of Professor Peter Suvorin was a place of perfect harmony.
Everyone was busy. Dimitri had two music professors now and was making rapid strides. Karpenko had entered the School of Art and was already gaining a reputation as a fellow of ideas. As was his custom, kindly Vladimir had given the young man a helping hand, inviting him frequently to his house when distinguished members of the art world were gathered there, and introducing him to several artists. And Peter Suvorin himself was particularly busy: for it was during these years that he wrote his classic textbook, Physics for Students, which was to make his name familiar to a whole generation of Russian schoolboys.
These were quiet times for Russia too. To Dimitri, as he walked into the shady courtyard of the apartment building, if often seemed that, if great events were stirring in the world, their sounds had been muffled by the time they reached the narrow, tree-lined streets of Moscow. Of the doings of the Tsar, his German wife and their children in their private palaces in St Petersburg, he heard hardly anything.
Dimitri knew, too, that Stolypin and the Duma continued on their road of slow reform; though when he read the newspapers it seemed to him that the great minister, though he brought peace and prosperity, had few friends. ‘The liberals hate him for clamping down,’ Vladimir explained, ‘but the reactionaries hate him because his system of governing seems to weaken the absolute autocracy of the Tsar. He’s winning through though,’ he added.
To Dimitri, the evenings were the best of times, when the family sat together round the table and discussed the day’s events. How delightful it was, especially in the spring and summer months when his mother would prepare tea, served with raspberries, and through the open window one could see the mellow turquoise sky and hear, faintly, the singing of vespers from the church next door.
Karpenko was a constant source of conversation. While Dimitri’s studies at this time were of a gradual and private nature – he would be immersed for weeks at a time in the Beethoven piano sonatas, or in a Tchaikovsky symphony, which profound joys could not easily be shared in words – Karpenko was in a continual ferment of intellectual excitement, and hardly a week seemed to pass when he did not bring home some new discovery which changed the world. Sometimes it was a new school of painting, inaugurated in an exhibition with some name like The Blue Rose, or The Golden Fleece. One month he read the Confessions of the writer Gorky and some writings of a new group in St Petersburg who called themselves the God Builders, and each evening he would lecture the family: ‘Don’t you see, all through the centuries man has been like Prometheus, chained to a rock of superstition. But now, Dimitri, man is risen. The people is God. The people will be immortal. Think of it, Professor: first the people will create the revolution and be free; then, maybe one day we’ll even take over other planets, the universe.’ And afterwards he and Dimitri would continue these weighty discussions in the room they shared, late into the night.