In bad company

Chapter Seven

I

That same autumn Evelina declared to her parents her unalterable decision to be married to the blind youth "from the manor". Her mother began to cry; but her father knelt before the icons and, after prayer, declared that such, to his mind, was God's very will in the matter.
They were married, and Pyotr's life was filled with a new, quiet happiness. And yet—behind this happiness, somewhere, lurked a haunting, undefined anxiety, of which he was never entirely free. Even at his most radiant moments there was a tinge of doubting sadness in his smile—as though he could not feel that his happiness was really justified, or really lasting. The news that he was, perhaps, to be a father brought a look of sudden apprehension to his face.
Still, the life that he now led left him no leisure for his former fruitless searchings. His days were occupied by serious study, and by growing anxiety for his wife and for the child that was to come. There were moments, too, when all else was crowded back by rising memories of the blind beggars' mournful chant. At such times he would go off to the village, where a new home had been built for Fyodor Kandiba and his pock-marked nephew. Kandiba would take up his kobza; or perhaps they would simply talk, of one thing and another; and, gradually, Pyotr's thoughts would grow calmer, and his plans regain their power to inspire.
He had become less sensitive to light, and the striving to apprehend it, which had cost him such inner effort, had subsided. The deep-lying forces that had been driving him now slumbered, and he no longer stirred them by the conscious effort to fuse heterogeneous sensations into some one understandable whole. The place that these fruitless endeavours had once occupied within him was now filled by vivid memories, and lively hopes. And yet—who knows?—perhaps this very peace that had come into his soul had the effect of promoting the subconscious workings of his inner being, of helping the formless, disparate impressions that reached his nerve centres in their quest for synthesis, for fusion. For does not our mind often, when we are asleep, easily mould ideas and concepts such as it could never achieve by conscious effort?