And now that he knew Lydia, now that he had listened to her last night and that day, now that he had eaten with her, and danced with her, now that for so many hours they had lived together in such close proximity, it seemed unbelievable that such things should have befallen her.
If ever anything looked like pure chance it was that Lydia and Robert Berger met at all.
Through the friends she lived with, who worked in a Russian restaurant, Lydia sometimes got a ticket for a concert, and when she couldn’t and there was something she very much wanted to hear, she scraped together out of her weekly earnings enough to buy herself standing-room.
This was her only extravagance and to go to a concert her only recreation.
It was chiefly Russian music she liked.
Listening to that she felt that somehow she was getting to the heart of the country she had never seen, but which drew her with a yearning that must ever remain unsatisfied.
She knew nothing of Russia but what she had heard from the lips of her father and mother, from the conversation between Evgenia and Alexey when they talked of old times, and from the novels she had read.
It was when she was listening to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazounov, to the racy and mordant compositions of Stravinsky, that the impressions she had thus gained gathered form and substance.
Those wild melodies, those halting rhythms, in which there was something so alien from Europe, took her out of herself and her sordid existence and overwhelmed her with such a passion of love that happy, releasing tears flowed down her cheeks.
But because nothing of what she saw with the mind’s eye had she seen with a bodily eye, because it was a product of hearsay and a fevered imagination, she saw it in a strangely distorted fashion; she saw the Kremlin, with its gilt and star-sprinkled domes, the Red Square and the Kitai Gorod, as though they were the setting of a fairy tale; for her Prince Andrey and the charming Natasha still went their errands in the busy streets of Moscow, Dmitri Karamazov, after a wild night with the gipsies, still met the sweet Alyosha on the Mostbaretsk Bridge, the merchant Rogozhin dashed past in his sled with Nastasya Filippovna by his side, and the wan characters of Chekov’s stories drifted hither and yon at the breath of circumstance like dead leaves before the wind; the Summer Garden and the Nevsky Prospekt were magic names, and Anna Karenina still drove in her carriage, Vronsky elegant in his new uniform climbed the stairs of the great houses on the Fontanka Canal, and the misbegotten Raskolnikov walked the Liteiny.
In the passion and nostalgia of that music, with Turgeniev at the back of her mind, she saw the spacious, dilapidated country houses where they talked through the scented night, and the marshes, pale in the windless dawn, where they shot the wild duck; with Gorki, the wretched villages where they drank furiously, loved brutally and killed; the turbid flow of the Volga, the interminable steppes of the Caucasus, and the enchanting garish Crimea.
Filled with longing, filled with regret for a life that had passed for ever, homesick for a home she had never known, a stranger in a hostile world, she felt at that moment one with the great, mysterious country.
Even though she spoke its language haltingly, she was Russian, and she loved her native land; at such moments she felt that there was where after all she belonged and she understood how it was that her father, despite the warnings, was obliged, even at the risk of death, to return to it.
It was at a concert, one where all the music was Russian, that she found herself standing next to a young man who, she noticed, now and then looked at her curiously.
Once she happened to turn her eyes on him and was struck by the passionate absorption with which he seemed to be listening; his hands were clasped and his mouth slightly open as though he were out of breath.
He was rapt in ecstasy.
He had clean-cut features and looked well-bred.
Lydia gave him but a passing glance and once more returned to the music and the crowding dreams it awoke in her.
She too was carried away and she was hardly aware that a little sob broke from her lips.
She was startled when she felt a small, soft hand take hers and give it a slight pressure.
She quickly drew her hand away.
The piece was the last before the interval and when it ended the young man turned to her.
He had lovely eyes, gray under bushy eyebrows, and they were peculiarly gentle.
“You’re crying, Mademoiselle.”
She had thought he might be Russian like herself, but his accent was purely French.
She understood that that quick pressure of her hand was one of instinctive sympathy, and was touched by it.
“Not because I am unhappy,” she answered, with a faint smile.
He smiled back and his smile was charming.
“I know.
This Russian music, it’s strangely thrilling and yet it tears one’s heart to pieces.”
“But you’re French.
What can it mean to you?”
“Yes. I’m French.
I don’t know what it means to me.
It’s the only music I want to listen to.
It is power and passion, blood and destruction.
It makes every nerve in my body tingle.”
He gave a little laugh at himself.
“Sometimes when I listen to it I feel there is nothing that man is capable of that I cannot do.”
She did not answer.
It was singular that the same music could say such different things to different people.
To her the music they had just heard spoke of the tragedy of human destiny, the futility of striving against fate, and the joy, the peace of humility and resignation.
“Are you coming to next week’s concert?” he asked then.
“That’s to be all Russian too.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
He was very young, he could be no older than herself, and there was an ingenuousness in him that made it impossible for her to answer too stiffly a question which in a stranger was indiscreet.
There was something in his manner that made her sure he was not trying to pick her up.
She smiled.
“I’m not a millionaire.