Читать книгу Ivan Greet's Masterpiece - Allen Grant - Страница 21

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Three days later, two worn and haggard men floated hopelessly by themselves, with a waterlogged raft, on a boundless ocean. By good luck it had remained calm, and they had been caught by the Gulf Stream, which carried them eastward in its flow; but what words can tell, even so, the agony and suspense of those three nights on the open Atlantic? The wind was rising now, and the little lopping waves that it drove into small crests began to break over the raft, wetting the two men to the skin, already cold and wretched enough as they were in their thirst and misery.

For three whole days and nights they had not tasted water.

A thought rose up, as they sat there in despair, into Ivan’s mind. The Russian peasant nature doesn’t cling to life with the same unreasoning persistence as our more sophisticated English temperament. The raft was weighed down by two people’s weight. With one only it would ride higher, and the waves would take a longer time before they could sweep completely over it. He looked at Verstoff, who sat there, the picture of despondency, hugging his knees with his hands. In a few brief words, Ivan explained his idea. “Peter,” he added, calling him once more by the name he had always used, till then, from childhood, “you’re married; I’m single; you are Karen’s husband; it is right that I should go. If ever you reach land safe, tell her I leapt from the raft to save you.”

He stood up, and made ready to plunge headlong into the sea. In an agony of remorse, Verstoff rose, like one possessed, and laid his hand with a firm grip on his old friend’s arm. “No, Ivan,” he said, holding him back by main force. “Not you! Not you! If either of us goes, it must be I who do it. Anywhere but here, I wouldn’t have confessed it to you for a world. But here, face to face as I stand with death, I will tell you the truth. I have always known it. Ever since that day at Nijni Ouralsk, those words you said to her have been audible in my ears. You were right. I was wrong. I should never have taken her. You said, ‘Hold back your hand, Karen! It’s mine! I claim it!’ And ever since then I’ve known you spoke the truth. The Elders of the Church gave me her body that day. But they couldn’t give me her heart. It was yours! It was yours! Live on, and take it.”

As he spoke, with the wild energy of self-renunciation spurring him on beyond himself, Verstoff flung off the fur coat he was wearing, and stood, in act to leap, with one hand aloft to heaven. It was Ivan’s turn now to hold him back and restrain him. “Stop, Peter,” he cried, laying his hand upon that stalwart arm, with a fierce force of restraint. “You have no right to do this. You are her’s. You must live for her. I may do as I like. My life is my own. But your life is Karen’s. You must not get rid of it.”

Verstoff turned to him piteously. He was pale as death. How the real man came out at this juncture, from beneath the mere veneer of cosmopolitan polish! “Ivan,” he cried aloud, in the agony of his self-abasement; “she would be happier with you. She was your’s from the beginning. I sinned in taking her—the Church misled me. Let me die to atone for it. Go home and comfort her.”

Ivan glanced around with a bitter smile at the gathering waves. “There’s small hope for either of us to go home,” he answered, grasping his friend’s hand hard. “But, Peter, I could never allow you to do that. Sit down again, and let us both face it out together. After all, it would be more terrible still than it is, if either of us were to stand quite alone by himself in the midst of the ocean.”

For even as he spoke, a second thought, yet more terrible, rose spontaneous in his soul. How could either of them ever face Karen again, with this message on his lips—that he had allowed the other to die for her sake on the mid-Atlantic?