‘Then it is a great blessing,’ she said, ‘that the majority of mankind does not.’
But it was unequal, her voice knew.
‘It is time we were going,’ she said more gently.
It was unequal, because the room, with the ceiling which had been fumed over by Alyosha Sergei’s voice, and the black portraits, and the golden saints, and the other rooms, which creaked with emptiness and mice, the whole empty, expectant house was full of that desperate affection which she had never quite been able to give. So that now, on the point of leaving, her mouth trembled, and expressed something shapeless that was neither hatred nor love.
‘Of course, we are going,’ said Alyosha Sergei.
Now that the streets were quiet all emotion was unconvincing. It was several hours since the breath had come and gone in spasms, and that astonishing scene of men turning to wax in the gutters. But you could no longer hear the cries gush from paving stones. Now the silence lay in pools. It had quite congealed.
‘In three hours we shall reach P—, if we are fortunate,’ said Alyosha Sergei. ‘There we should meet Tomokin and Michael Ivanich.’
‘You have said that seven times.’
‘Conversation, Ludmilla, is one indiction of reality.’
But she could not convince herself that she was not about to attempt to cross the mysteriously open space which separates beginning from end. And here was Alyosha Sergei, who looked into the street, as if he expected a bear with a hand-organ, or dancing girls with streaming ribbons.
Here was Alyosha Sergei, who said, ‘I remember once meeting an old landowner from the Ukraine who had a cure for most things. He boiled nettles with a little kvass and took a soup night and morning. That amiable old imbecile, Ludmilla, was thrown from a piebald horse and dragged for several versts. When finally he was picked up by some peasant women who were gathering mushrooms in a wood, for all they knew he was offering his recipe of nettles to God.’
She turned her back, inside the big serge cloak which she had fished out of an attic for the journey, and which smelled of time, of childhood, nettles, rain, and the slow smell of dung, so that the act of turning was as much avoidance as exasperation.
She turned her back and said, ‘Have you got the money?’
‘Money? You should know, Ludmilla, that it is not possible to buy off God.’
‘Then, let us go,’ said Theodora. ‘There is nothing to wait for.’
She put up her hand to arrange her hair, which she found, of course, that she had cut off. She was a thin man in a cloak, with the trousers stuffed inside her boots, like a Cossack or a peasant.
Alyosha Sergei began to laugh.
‘You are the Pale Horse,’ he laughed. ‘The Pale Horse with his ears back.’
She would have laughed too, but sometimes she could not. And the whole house was aching with the laughter of Alyosha Sergei. So that Alyosha Sergei’s laughter was enough.
‘You are drunk,’ said General Sokolnikov, looking for the bottle in the debris of sprats, in the glare of light in which they sat, under a severe arrangement of suspended swords, in a mediocre bedroom. ‘You are drunk, but not yet drunk enough.’
‘No, but I am warm,’ said Theodora.
She was. She was enough. She had not yet unravelled the large, open pattern of the cotton quilt on the General’s bed.
‘You are intoxicated by your own melancholy,’ said Sokolnikov. ‘You expect too much of life.’
‘I have seen extraordinary things,’ Theodora said.
‘Everything is extraordinary,’ said Alyosha Sergei.
She looked at the cotton quilt on the bed. She arched her eyebrows, because at this moment the vodka leapt inside her. She looked at the cotton quilt, which was after all only a honeycomb.
It was both simple and extraordinary. It was a honeycomb, but without bees. There was no brown buzz. There was only the imprint which Alyosha Sergei’s body had left on it that afternoon.
‘Everything is so extraordinary,’ he said, ‘that there is some question of whether we can withstand the impact, whether we can survive.’
Theodora took the glass, which had begun to quiver and glow again amongst the stiff, salt spars of the little glittering sprats. She drank, and her head was electric, it was full of silver wires.
‘I have survived,’ she said.
She put down the glass on its small but heavy base.
‘You? You are an illusion.’
‘I beg to contradict. I can show you my passport,’ Theodora said.
But he had got up. He had gone to listen, scattering the fragments of food that hung, fastening his ear on the door as if he expected to suck up sounds. Then he came back and put his finger on her arm. He touched the strange and thoughtful substance of Theodora Goodman, which was not apparently flesh.
‘You, Ludmilla,’ he said, ‘are dead.’
So that she ebbed with the greatness of it.
‘It is difficult to believe,’ said Alyosha Sergei. ‘None of us could. Neither Tomokin, nor Michael Ivanich, and there was also a gentleman who had not yet made your acquaintance, and who had studied the toll system of Germany at Göttingen. This gentleman, whose name I have forgotten suggested that at the moment of death the soul chooses freely, which naturally removes much of the melancholy from the occasion. Michael Ivanich and I were considerably interested in this hypothesis, and were anxious to hold a little discussion. It was also unpleasant walking in the dark. But Tomokin, who was greatly moved, he kept mopping his face with a red cotton handkerchief which had been given him for the journey by his old nurse, Tomokin said it was our sacred duty to make for the frontier and join Yudenich. So it was decided we should walk, and the difficulty of this operation, and the pain from the wound in my left buttock, prevented me from explaining adequately to the gentleman from Göttingen that you had protested, Ludmilla, when they showed you the gun.’
It was moving towards her darkly across the clearing. Her feet were rooted now in mute needles. She stood close against the tree, which smelled strongly of resin, the tree which was rough and so close that it had ceased to be a comfort or protection, as she could feel its heart beating painfully, erratically in its side. Released by the lusty, palpitating gold and red of firelight, trees leapt skyward in sudden puffs of branch and crest. Across the clearing trees had begun to move. It was these that frightened. She smelled the fire. She smelled the voices, their smell of sweat, and dark hair, approaching out of the darkness, this was thick with hair. In the general disintegration of firelight, and darkness, and burning resin, and sailing trees, the belt round her waist was no great guarantee of personality.
‘Ah, here it is. I was right,’ said a voice. ‘It is a barin.’
Fire gave a face to the darkness, big and round, snub, with humorous nostrils.
‘You were right twice, Petya. There are two.’
‘Fetch them out, the bears. Into the light. Where we can see them. We’ll make them dance at least.’
Theodora heard the many voices, that were also one, and the faces one, the big, dappled, half-genial, half-hostile face of firelight with the gaping nose.
‘Yes, fetch them out, Petya,’ said a woman who smelled of excitement.
She wore a sailor’s cap on her head, but only just. She was as firm and pretty as polished apples.
‘There is no system to all this,’ said a precise fellow with a small beard. ‘Revolution means system.’
‘Long live the Republic!’
‘Long live Kerensky!’
‘No! Down with Kerensky! Long live Lenin!’
‘Long live Lenin! Kerensky is a windbag.’