In short, the two of us had been looking for each other, and something similar, as it were, had happened to each of us. We walked on, hurrying very much.
On the way he just uttered a few short phrases about having left mama with Tatyana Pavlovna, and so on. He led me, holding on to my arm. He lived not far away, and we got there quickly. I had, in fact, never been to his place. It was a small apartment of three rooms, which he rented (or, more correctly, Tatyana Pavlovna rented) solely for that “nursing baby.” This apartment had always been under Tatyana Pavlovna’s supervision, and was inhabited by a nanny with the baby (and now also by Nastasya Egorovna); but there had always been a room for Versilov as well—namely, the very first one, by the front door, rather spacious and rather well and plushly furnished, a sort of study for bookish and scribal occupations. In fact, there were many books on the table, in the bookcase, and on the shelves (while at mama’s there were almost none at all); there were pages covered with writing, there were tied-up bundles of letters—in short, it all had the look of a corner long lived in, and I know that, before as well, Versilov had sometimes (though rather rarely) moved to this apartment altogether and stayed in it even for weeks at a time. The first thing that caught my attention was a portrait of mama that hung over the desk, in a magnificent carved frame of costly wood—a photograph, taken abroad, of course, and, judging by its extraordinary size, a very costly thing. I hadn’t known and had never heard of this portrait before, and the main thing that struck me was the extraordinary likeness in the photograph, a spiritual likeness, so to speak—in short, as if it was a real portrait by an artist’s hand, and not a mechanical print. As soon as I came in, I stopped involuntarily before it.
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” Versilov suddenly repeated over me.
That is, “Isn’t it just like her?” I turned to look at him and was struck by the expression of his face. He was somewhat pale, but with an ardent, intense gaze, as if radiant with happiness and strength. I had never known him to have such an expression.
“I didn’t know you loved mama so much!” I suddenly blurted out, in rapture myself.
He smiled blissfully, though there was a reflection as if of some suffering in his smile, or, better, of something humane, lofty . . . I don’t know how to say it; but highly developed people, it seems to me, cannot have triumphant and victoriously happy faces. Without answering me, he took the portrait from the rings with both hands, brought it close, kissed it, then quietly hung it back on the wall.
“Notice,” he said, “it’s extremely rare that photographic copies bear any resemblance, and that’s understandable: it’s extremely rare that the original itself, that is, each of us, happens to resemble itself. Only in rare moments does a human face express its main feature, its most characteristic thought. An artist studies a face and divines its main thought, though at the moment of painting it might be absent from the face. A photograph finds the man as he is, and it’s quite possible that Napoleon, at some moment, would come out stupid, and Bismarck tenderhearted. But here, in this portrait, the sun, as if on purpose, found Sonya in her main moment—of modest, meek love and her somewhat wild, timorous chastity. And how happy she was then, when she was finally convinced that I was so eager to have her portrait! This picture was taken not so long ago, but all the same she was younger and better looking then; though there were already those sunken cheeks, those little wrinkles on her forehead, that timorous shyness in her eyes, which seems to be increasing in her more and more with the years. Would you believe it, my dear? I can hardly imagine her now with a different face, and yet once she was young and lovely! Russian women lose their looks quickly, their beauty is fleeting, and in truth that’s not only owing to the ethnographic properties of the type, but also to the fact that they’re capable of loving unreservedly. A Russian woman gives everything at once if she loves—moment and destiny, present and future. They don’t know how to economize, they don’t lay anything aside, and their beauty quickly goes into the one they love. Those sunken cheeks—that is also a beauty gone into me, into my brief bit of fun. You’re glad I loved your mother, and maybe you didn’t even believe I loved her? Yes, my friend, I loved her very much, yet I did her nothing but harm . . . There’s another portrait here—look at it as well.”
He took it from the desk and handed it to me. It was also a photograph, of an incomparably smaller size, in a slender oval wooden border—the face of a girl, thin and consumptive and, for all that, beautiful; pensive and at the same time strangely devoid of thought. Regular features, of a type fostered over generations, yet leaving a painful impression: it looked as though this being had suddenly been possessed by some fixed idea, tormenting precisely because it was beyond this being’s strength.
“This . . . this is the girl you wanted to marry there and who died of consumption . . . herstepdaughter?” I said somewhat timidly.
“Yes, wanted to marry, died of consumption, herstepdaughter. I knew you knew . . . all that gossip. However, apart from gossip, you couldn’t have known anything here. Let the portrait be, my friend, this is a poor madwoman and nothing more.”
“Quite mad?”
“Or else an idiot. However, I think she was mad as well. She had a child by Prince Sergei Petrovich (out of madness, not out of love; that was one of Sergei Petrovich’s meanest acts); the child is here now, in the other room, I’ve long wanted to show it to you. Prince Sergei Petrovich didn’t dare to come here and look at the baby; I made that stipulation with him while we were still abroad. I took it under my care with your mama’s permission. With your mama’s permission I also wanted then to marry that . . . unfortunate woman . . .”
“Was such permission possible?” I uttered hotly.
“Oh, yes! she gave it to me. One gets jealous of a woman, and that was not a woman.”
“Not a woman for anybody except mama! Never in my life will I believe that mama wasn’t jealous!” I cried.
“And you’re right. I realized it only when it was all over—that is, when she had given her permission. But let’s drop it. The affair didn’t work out on account of Lydia’s death, and maybe it wouldn’t have worked out even if she had remained alive, but even now I don’t let mama see the child. It was merely an episode. My dear, I’ve long been waiting for you to come here. I’ve long been dreaming of how we’d get together here. Do you know how long? For two years now.”
He looked at me sincerely and truthfully, with an unreserved warmth of heart. I seized his hand:
“Why were you so slow, why didn’t you invite me long ago? If you knew what has happened . . . and what wouldn’t have happened if you had called me long ago! . . .”
At that moment the samovar was brought in, and Nastasya Egorovna suddenly brought in the baby, asleep.
“Look at him,” said Versilov. “I love him, and I had him brought now on purpose, so that you could also look at him. Well, take him away again, Nastasya Egorovna. Sit down to the samovar. I’m going to imagine that we’ve lived like this forever and have come together every evening, never parting. Let me look at you; sit like this, so that I can see your face! How I love your face! How I kept imagining your face to myself, as I was waiting for you to come from Moscow! You ask why I didn’t send for you long ago? Wait, maybe now you’ll understand.”
“But can it be only this old man’s death that has loosened your tongue now? It’s strange . . .”
But though I did say that, I still looked at him with love. We talked like two friends in the highest and fullest sense of the word. He had brought me here to explain, to recount, to justify something to me; and yet everything was already explained and justified before any words. Whatever I was to hear from him now, the result had already been achieved, and we both happily knew it and looked at each other that way.