The Torrents of Spring
Sanin went on tiptoe into the shop at once. The boy wanted a quarter of
a pound of peppermints. “How much must I take?” Sanin whispered from
the door to Gemma. “Six kreutzers!” she answered in the same whisper.
Sanin weighed out a quarter of a pound, found some paper, twisted it
into a cone, tipped the peppermints into it, spilt them, tipped them in
again, spilt them again, at last handed them to the boy, and took the
money…. The boy gazed at him in amazement, twisting his cap in his
hands on his stomach, and in the next room, Gemma was stifling with
suppressed laughter. Before the first customer had walked out, a second
appeared, then a third…. “I bring luck, it’s clear!” thought Sanin. The
second customer wanted a glass of orangeade, the third, half-a-pound of
sweets. Sanin satisfied their needs, zealously clattering the spoons,
changing the saucers, and eagerly plunging his fingers into drawers and
jars. On reckoning up, it appeared that he had charged too little for
the orangeade, and taken two kreutzers too much for the sweets. Gemma
did not cease laughing softly, and Sanin too was aware of an
extraordinary lightness of heart, a peculiarly happy state of mind. He
felt as if he had for ever been standing behind the counter and dealing
in orangeade and sweetmeats, with that exquisite creature looking at
him through the doorway with affectionately mocking eyes, while the
summer sun, forcing its way through the sturdy leafage of the chestnuts
that grew in front of the windows, filled the whole room with the
greenish-gold of the midday light and shade, and the heart grew soft in
the sweet languor of idleness, carelessness, and youth—first youth!
A fourth customer asked for a cup of coffee; Pantaleone had to be
appealed to. (Emil had not yet come back from Herr Klüber’s shop.)
Sanin went and sat by Gemma again. Frau Lenore still went on sleeping,
to her daughter’s great delight. “Mamma always sleeps off her sick
headaches,” she observed. Sanin began talking—in a whisper, of course,
as before—of his minding the shop; very seriously inquired the price of
various articles of confectionery; Gemma just as seriously told him
these prices, and meanwhile both of them were inwardly laughing
together, as though conscious they were playing in a very amusing
farce. All of a sudden, an organ-grinder in the street began playing an
air from the Freischütz: “_Durch die Felder, durch die Auen_ …” The
dance tune fell shrill and quivering on the motionless air. Gemma
started … “He will wake mamma!” Sanin promptly darted out into the
street, thrust a few kreutzers into the organ-grinder’s hand, and made
him cease playing and move away. When he came back, Gemma thanked him
with a little nod of the head, and with a pensive smile she began
herself just audibly humming the beautiful melody of Weber’s, in which
Max expresses all the perplexities of first love. Then she asked Sanin
whether he knew “Freischütz,” whether he was fond of Weber, and added
that though she was herself an Italian, she liked _such_ music best of
all. From Weber the conversation glided off on to poetry and
romanticism, on to Hoffmann, whom every one was still reading at that
time.
And Frau Lenore still slept, and even snored just a little, and the
sunbeams, piercing in narrow streaks through the shutters, were
incessantly and imperceptibly shifting and travelling over the floor,
the furniture, Gemma’s dress, and the leaves and petals of the flowers.
XII
It appeared that Gemma was not very fond of Hoffmann, that she even
thought him … tedious! The fantastic, misty northern element in his
stories was too remote from her clear, southern nature. “It’s all
fairy-tales, all written for children!” she declared with some
contempt. She was vaguely conscious, too, of the lack of poetry in
Hoffmann. But there was one of his stories, the title of which she had
forgotten, which she greatly liked; more precisely speaking, it was
only the beginning of this story that she liked; the end she had either
not read or had forgotten. The story was about a young man who in some
place, a sort of restaurant perhaps, meets a girl of striking beauty, a
Greek; she is accompanied by a mysterious and strange, wicked old man.
The young man falls in love with the girl at first sight; she looks at
him so mournfully, as though beseeching him to deliver her…. He goes
out for an instant, and, coming back into the restaurant, finds there
neither the girl nor the old man; he rushes off in pursuit of her,
continually comes upon fresh traces of her, follows them up, and can
never by any means come upon her anywhere. The lovely girl has vanished
for him for ever and ever, and he is never able to forget her imploring
glance, and is tortured by the thought that all the happiness of his
life, perhaps, has slipped through his fingers.
Hoffmann does not end his story quite in that way; but so it had taken
shape, so it had remained, in Gemma’s memory.
“I fancy,” she said, “such meetings and such partings happen oftener in
the world than we suppose.”
Sanin was silent … and soon after he began talking … of Herr Klüber. It
was the first time he had referred to him; he had not once remembered
him till that instant.
Gemma was silent in her turn, and sank into thought, biting the nail of
her forefinger and fixing her eyes away. Then she began to speak in
praise of her betrothed, alluded to the excursion he had planned for
the next day, and, glancing swiftly at Sanin, was silent again.
Sanin did not know on what subject to turn the conversation.
Emil ran in noisily and waked Frau Lenore … Sanin was relieved by his
appearance.
Frau Lenore got up from her low chair. Pantaleone came in and announced
that dinner was ready. The friend of the family, ex-singer, and servant
also performed the duties of cook.
XIII
Sanin stayed on after dinner too. They did not let him go, still on the
same pretext of the terrible heat; and when the heat began to decrease,
they proposed going out into the garden to drink coffee in the shade of
the acacias. Sanin consented. He felt very happy. In the quietly
monotonous, smooth current of life lie hid great delights, and he gave
himself up to these delights with zest, asking nothing much of the
present day, but also thinking nothing of the morrow, nor recalling the
day before. How much the mere society of such a girl as Gemma meant to
him! He would shortly part from her and, most likely, for ever; but so
long as they were borne, as in Uhland’s song, in one skiff over the sea
of life, untossed by tempest, well might the traveller rejoice and be
glad. And everything seemed sweet and delightful to the happy voyager.
Frau Lenore offered to play against him and Pantaleone at “tresette,”
instructed him in this not complicated Italian game, and won a few
kreutzers from him, and he was well content. Pantaleone, at Emil’s
request, made the poodle, Tartaglia, perform all his tricks, and
Tartaglia jumped over a stick “spoke,” that is, barked, sneezed, shut
the door with his nose, fetched his master’s trodden-down slippers;
and, finally, with an old cap on his head, he portrayed Marshal
Bernadotte, subjected to the bitterest upbraidings by the Emperor
Napoleon on account of his treachery. Napoleon’s part was, of course,
performed by Pantaleone, and very faithfully he performed it: he folded
his arms across his chest, pulled a cocked hat over his eyes, and spoke
very gruffly and sternly, in French—and heavens! what French! Tartaglia
sat before his sovereign, all huddled up, with dejected tail, and eyes
blinking and twitching in confusion, under the peak of his cap which
was stuck on awry; from time to time when Napoleon raised his voice,
Bernadotte rose on his hind paws. “_Fuori, traditore!_” cried Napoleon
at last, forgetting in the excess of his wrath that he had to sustain
his rôle as a Frenchman to the end; and Bernadotte promptly flew under
the sofa, but quickly darted out again with a joyful bark, as though to
announce that the performance was over. All the spectators laughed, and
Sanin more than all.
Gemma had a particularly charming, continual, soft laugh, with very
droll little shrieks…. Sanin was fairly enchanted by that laugh—he
could have kissed her for those shrieks!
Night came on at last. He had in decency to take leave! After saying
good-bye several times over to every one, and repeating several times
to all, “till to-morrow!”—Emil he went so far as to kiss—Sanin started
home, carrying with him the image of the young girl, at one time
laughing, at another thoughtful, calm, and even indifferent—but always
attractive! Her eyes, at one time wide open, clear and bright as day,
at another time half shrouded by the lashes and deep and dark as night,
seemed to float before his eyes, piercing in a strange sweet way across
all other images and recollections.
Of Herr Klüber, of the causes impelling him to remain in Frankfort—in
short, of everything that had disturbed his mind the evening before—he
never thought once.
XIV
We must, however, say a few words about Sanin himself.
In the first place, he was very, very good-looking. A handsome,
graceful figure, agreeable, rather unformed features, kindly bluish
eyes, golden hair, a clear white and red skin, and, above all, that
peculiar, naïvely-cheerful, confiding, open, at the first glance,
somewhat foolish expression, by which in former days one could
recognise directly the children of steady-going, noble families, “sons
of their fathers,” fine young landowners, born and reared in our open,
half-wild country parts,—a hesitating gait, a voice with a lisp, a
smile like a child’s the minute you looked at him … lastly, freshness,
health, softness, softness, softness,—there you have the whole of
Sanin. And secondly, he was not stupid and had picked up a fair amount
of knowledge. Fresh he had remained, for all his foreign tour; the
disturbing emotions in which the greater part of the young people of
that day were tempest-tossed were very little known to him.
Of late years, in response to the assiduous search for “new types,”
young men have begun to appear in our literature, determined at all
hazards to be “fresh”… as fresh as Flensburg oysters, when they reach
Petersburg…. Sanin was not like them. Since we have had recourse
already to simile, he rather recalled a young, leafy, freshly-grafted
apple-tree in one of our fertile orchards—or better still, a
well-groomed, sleek, sturdy-limbed, tender young “three-year-old” in
some old-fashioned seignorial stud stable, a young horse that they have
hardly begun to break in to the traces…. Those who came across Sanin in
later years, when life had knocked him about a good deal, and the
sleekness and plumpness of youth had long vanished, saw in him a
totally different man.
Next day Sanin was still in bed when Emil, in his best clothes, with a
cane in his hand and much pomade on his head, burst into his room,
announcing that Herr Klüber would be here directly with the carriage,
that the weather promised to be exquisite, that they had everything
ready by now, but that mamma was not going, as her head was bad again.
He began to hurry Sanin, telling him that there was not a minute to
lose…. And Herr Klüber did, in fact, find Sanin still at his toilet. He
knocked at the door, came in, bowed with a bend from the waist,
expressed his readiness to wait as long as might be desired, and sat
down, his hat balanced elegantly on his knees. The handsome
shop-manager had got himself up and perfumed himself to excess: his
every action was accompanied by a powerful whiff of the most refined
aroma. He arrived in a comfortable open carriage—one of the kind called
landau—drawn by two tall and powerful but not well-shaped horses. A