The Torrents of Spring
his feet, turned away hurriedly, put on the coat he had flung down,
jerked out a word to Emil; the latter, too, put on his jacket, and they
both immediately made off.
It was late when they got back to Frankfort. “They’ll scold me,” Emil
said to Sanin as he said good-bye to him. “Well, what does it matter?
I’ve had such a splendid, splendid day!”
When he got home to his hotel, Sanin found a note there from Gemma. She
fixed a meeting with him for next day, at seven o’clock in the morning,
in one of the public gardens which surround Frankfort on all sides.
How his heart throbbed! How glad he was that he had obeyed her so
unconditionally! And, my God, what was promised … what was not
promised, by that unknown, unique, impossible, and undubitably certain
morrow!
He feasted his eyes on Gemma’s note. The long, elegant tail of the
letter G, the first letter of her name, which stood at the bottom of
the sheet, reminded him of her lovely fingers, her hand…. He thought
that he had not once touched that hand with his lips…. “Italian women,”
he mused, “in spite of what’s said of them, are modest and severe…. And
Gemma above all! Queen … goddess … pure, virginal marble….”
“But the time will come; and it is not far off….” There was that night
in Frankfort one happy man…. He slept; but he might have said of
himself in the words of the poet:
“I sleep … but my watchful heart sleeps not.”
And it fluttered as lightly as a butterfly flutters his wings, as he
stoops over the flowers in the summer sunshine.
XXVII
At five o’clock Sanin woke up, at six he was dressed, at half-past six
he was walking up and down the public garden within sight of the little
arbour which Gemma had mentioned in her note. It was a still, warm,
grey morning. It sometimes seemed as though it were beginning to rain;
but the outstretched hand felt nothing, and only looking at one’s
coat-sleeve, one could see traces of tiny drops like diminutive beads,
but even these were soon gone. It seemed there had never been a breath
of wind in the world. Every sound moved not, but was shed around in the
stillness. In the distance was a faint thickening of whitish mist; in
the air there was a scent of mignonette and white acacia flowers.
In the streets the shops were not open yet, but there were already some
people walking about; occasionally a solitary carriage rumbled along …
there was no one walking in the garden. A gardener was in a leisurely
way scraping the path with a spade, and a decrepit old woman in a black
woollen cloak was hobbling across the garden walk. Sanin could not for
one instant mistake this poor old creature for Gemma; and yet his heart
leaped, and he watched attentively the retreating patch of black.
Seven! chimed the clock on the tower. Sanin stood still. Was it
possible she would not come? A shiver of cold suddenly ran through his
limbs. The same shiver came again an instant later, but from a
different cause. Sanin heard behind him light footsteps, the light
rustle of a woman’s dress…. He turned round: she!
Gemma was coming up behind him along the path. She was wearing a grey
cape and a small dark hat. She glanced at Sanin, turned her head away,
and catching him up, passed rapidly by him.
“Gemma,” he articulated, hardly audibly.
She gave him a little nod, and continued to walk on in front. He
followed her.
He breathed in broken gasps. His legs shook under him.
Gemma passed by the arbour, turned to the right, passed by a small flat
fountain, in which the sparrows were splashing busily, and, going
behind a clump of high lilacs, sank down on a bench. The place was snug
and hidden. Sanin sat down beside her.
A minute passed, and neither he nor she uttered a word. She did not
even look at him; and he gazed not at her face, but at her clasped
hands, in which she held a small parasol. What was there to tell, what
was there to say, which could compare, in importance, with the simple
fact of their presence there, together, alone, so early, so close to
each other.
“You … are not angry with me?” Sanin articulated at last.
It would have been difficult for Sanin to have said anything more
foolish than these words … he was conscious of it himself…. But, at any
rate, the silence was broken.
“Angry?” she answered. “What for? No.”
“And you believe me?” he went on.
“In what you wrote?”
“Yes.”
Gemma’s head sank, and she said nothing. The parasol slipped out of her
hands. She hastily caught it before it dropped on the path.
“Ah, believe me! believe what I wrote to you!” cried Sanin; all his
timidity suddenly vanished, he spoke with heat; “if there is truth on
earth—sacred, absolute truth—it’s that I love, love you passionately,
Gemma.”
She flung him a sideway, momentary glance, and again almost dropped the
parasol.
“Believe me! believe me!” he repeated. He besought her, held out his
hands to her, and did not dare to touch her. “What do you want me to do
… to convince you?”
She glanced at him again.
“Tell me, Monsieur Dimitri,” she began; “the day before yesterday, when
you came to talk to me, you did not, I imagine, know then … did not
feel …”
“I felt it,” Sanin broke in; “but I did not know it. I have loved you
from the very instant I saw you; but I did not realise at once what you
had become to me! And besides, I heard that you were solemnly
betrothed…. As far as your mother’s request is concerned—in the first
place, how could I refuse?—and secondly, I think I carried out her
request in such a way that you could guess….”
They heard a heavy tread, and a rather stout gentleman with a knapsack
over his shoulder, apparently a foreigner, emerged from behind the
clump, and staring, with the unceremoniousness of a tourist, at the
couple sitting on the garden-seat, gave a loud cough and went on.
“Your mother,” Sanin began, as soon as the sound of the heavy footsteps
had ceased, “told me your breaking off your engagement would cause a
scandal”—Gemma frowned a little—that I was myself in part responsible
for unpleasant gossip, and that … consequently … I was, to some extent,
under an obligation to advise you not to break with your betrothed,
Herr Klüber….”
“Monsieur Dimitri,” said Gemma, and she passed her hand over her hair
on the side turned towards Sanin, “don’t, please, call Herr Klüber my
betrothed. I shall never be his wife. I have broken with him.”
“You have broken with him? when?”
“Yesterday.”
“You saw him?”
“Yes. At our house. He came to see us.”
“Gemma? Then you love me?”
She turned to him.
“Should … I have come here, if not?” she whispered, and both her hands
fell on the seat.
Sanin snatched those powerless, upturned palms, and pressed them to his
eyes, to his lips…. Now the veil was lifted of which he had dreamed the
night before! Here was happiness, here was its radiant form!
He raised his head, and looked at Gemma, boldly and directly. She, too,
looked at him, a little downwards. Her half-shut eyes faintly
glistened, dim with light, blissful tears. Her face was not smiling …
no! it laughed, with a blissful, noiseless laugh.
He tried to draw her to him, but she drew back, and never ceasing to
laugh the same noiseless laugh, shook her head. “Wait a little,” her
happy eyes seemed to say.
“O Gemma!” cried Sanin: “I never dreamed that you would love me!”
“I did not expect this myself,” Gemma said softly.
“How could I ever have dreamed,” Sanin went on, “when I came to
Frankfort, where I only expected to remain a few hours, that I should
find here the happiness of all my life!”
“All your life? Really?” queried Gemma.
“All my life, for ever and ever!” cried Sanin with fresh ardour.
The gardener’s spade suddenly scraped two paces from where they were
sitting.
“Let’s go home,” whispered Gemma: “we’ll go together—will you?”
If she had said to him at that instant “Throw yourself in the sea, will
you?” he would have been flying headlong into the ocean before she had
uttered the last word.
They went together out of the garden and turned homewards, not by the
streets of the town, but through the outskirts.
XXVIII
Sanin walked along, at one time by Gemma’s side, at another time a
little behind her. He never took his eyes off her and never ceased
smiling. She seemed to hasten … seemed to linger. As a matter of fact,
they both—he all pale, and she all flushed with emotion—were moving
along as in a dream. What they had done together a few instants
before—that surrender of each soul to another soul—was so intense, so
new, and so moving; so suddenly everything in their lives had been
changed and displaced that they could not recover themselves, and were
only aware of a whirlwind carrying them along, like the whirlwind on
that night, which had almost flung them into each other’s arms. Sanin
walked along, and felt that he even looked at Gemma with other eyes; he
instantly noted some peculiarities in her walk, in her movements,—and
heavens! how infinitely sweet and precious they were to him! And she
felt that that was how he was looking at her.
Sanin and she were in love for the first time; all the miracles of
first love were working in them. First love is like a revolution; the
uniformly regular routine of ordered life is broken down and shattered
in one instant; youth mounts the barricade, waves high its bright flag,
and whatever awaits it in the future—death or a new life—all alike it
goes to meet with ecstatic welcome.
“What’s this? Isn’t that our old friend?” said Sanin, pointing to a
muffled-up figure, which hurriedly slipped a little aside as though
trying to remain unobserved. In the midst of his abundant happiness he
felt a need to talk to Gemma, not of love—that was a settled thing and
holy—but of something else.
“Yes, it’s Pantaleone,” Gemma answered gaily and happily. “Most likely
he has been following me ever since I left home; all day yesterday he
kept watching every movement I made … He guesses!”
“He guesses!” Sanin repeated in ecstasy. What could Gemma have said at
which he would not have been in ecstasy?
Then he asked her to tell him in detail all that had passed the day
before.
And she began at once telling him, with haste, and confusion, and
smiles, and brief sighs, and brief bright looks exchanged with Sanin.
She said that after their conversation the day before yesterday, mamma
had kept trying to get out of her something positive; but that she had
put off Frau Lenore with a promise to tell her her decision within
twenty-four hours; how she had demanded this limit of time for herself,
and how difficult it had been to get it; how utterly unexpectedly Herr
Klüber had made his appearance more starched and affected than ever;
how he had given vent to his indignation at the childish, unpardonable
action of the Russian stranger—“he meant your duel, Dimitri,”—which he
described as deeply insulting to him, Klüber, and how he had demanded
that “you should be at once refused admittance to the house, Dimitri.”
“For,” he had added—and here Gemma slightly mimicked his voice and
manner—“‘it casts a slur on my honour; as though I were not able to
defend my betrothed, had I thought it necessary or advisable! All
Frankfort will know by to-morrow that an outsider has fought a duel
with an officer on account of my betrothed—did any one ever hear of
such a thing! It tarnishes my honour!” Mamma agreed with him—fancy!—but
then I suddenly told him that he was troubling himself unnecessarily
about his honour and his character, and was unnecessarily annoyed at
the gossip about his betrothed, for I was no longer betrothed to him
and would never be his wife! I must own, I had meant to talk to you
first … before breaking with him finally; but he came … and I could not