Sophia Pietrovna, the wife of the solicitor Loubianzev, a handsome
young woman of about twenty-five, was walking quickly along a forest
path with her bungalow neighbour, the barrister Ilyin. It was just
after four. In the distance, above the path, white feathery clouds
gathered; from behind them some bright blue pieces of cloud showed
through. The clouds were motionless, as if caught on the tops of the
tall, aged fir trees. It was calm and warm.
In the distance the path was cut across by a low railway embankment,
along which at this hour, for some reason or other, a sentry strode.
Just behind the embankment a big, six-towered church with a rusty roof
shone white.
“I did not expect to meet you here,” Sophia Pietrovna was saying,
looking down and touching the last year’s leaves with the end of her
parasol. “But now I am glad to have met you. I want to speak to you
seriously and finally. Ivan Mikhailovich, if you really love and
respect me I implore you to stop pursuing me! You follow me like
a shadow--there’s such a wicked look in your eye--you make love to
me--write extraordinary letters and ... I don’t know how all this is
going to end--Good Heavens! What can all this lead to?”
Ilyin was silent. Sophia Pietrovna took a few steps and continued:
“And this sudden complete change has happened in two or three weeks
after five years of friendship. I do not know you any more, Ivan
Mikhailovich.”
Sophia Pietrovna glanced sideways at her companion. He was staring
intently, screwing up his eyes at the feathery clouds. The expression
of his face was angry, capricious and distracted, like that of a man
who suffers and at the same time must listen to nonsense.
“It is annoying that you yourself can’t realise it!” Madame Loubianzev
continued, shrugging her shoulders. “Please understand that you’re not
playing a very nice game. I am married, I love and respect my husband.
I have a daughter. Don’t you really care in the slightest for all this?
Besides, as an old friend, you know my views on family life ... on the
sanctity of the home, generally.”
Ilyin gave an angry grunt and sighed:
“The sanctity of the home,” he murmured, “Good Lord!”
“Yes, yes. I love and respect my husband and at any rate the peace of
my family life is precious to me. I’d sooner let myself be killed than
be the cause of Andrey’s or his daughter’s unhappiness. So, please,
Ivan Mikhailovich, for goodness’ sake, leave me alone. Let us be good
and dear friends, and give up these sighings and gaspings which don’t
suit you. It’s settled and done with! Not another word about it. Let us
talk of something else!”
Sophia Pietrovna again glanced sideways at Ilyin. He was looking up.
He was pale, and angrily he bit his trembling lips. Madame Loubianzev
could not understand why he was disturbed and angry, but his pallor
moved her.
“Don’t be cross. Let’s be friends,” she said, sweetly.
“Agreed! Here is my hand.”
Ilyin took her tiny plump hand in both his, pressed it and slowly
raised it to his lips.
“I’m not a schoolboy,” he murmured. “I’m not in the least attracted by
the idea of friendship with the woman I love.”
“That’s enough. Stop! It is all settled and done with. We have come as
far as the bench. Let us sit down....”
A sweet sense of repose filled Sophia Pietrovna’s soul. The most
difficult and delicate thing was already said. The tormenting question
was settled and done with. Now she could breathe easily and look
straight at Ilyin. She looked at him, and the egotistical sense of
superiority that a woman feels over her lover caressed her pleasantly.
She liked the way this big strong man with a virile angry face and a
huge black beard sat obediently at her side and hung his head. They
were silent for a little while. “Nothing is yet settled and done with,”
Ilyin began. “You are reading me a sermon. ‘I love and respect my
husband ... the sanctity of the home....’ I know all that for myself
and I can tell you more. Honestly and sincerely I confess that I
consider my conduct as criminal and immoral. What else? But why say
what is known already? Instead of sermonizing you had far better tell
me what I am to do.”
“I have already told you. Go away.”
“I have gone. You know quite well. I have started five times and
half-way there I have come back again. I can show you the through
tickets. I have kept them all safe. But I haven’t the power to run away
from you. I struggle frightfully, but what in Heaven’s name is the use?
If I cannot harden myself, if I’m weak and faint-hearted. I can’t fight
nature. Do you understand? I cannot! I run away from her and she holds
me back by my coattails. Vile, vulgar weakness.”
Ilyin blushed, got up, and began walking by the bench:
“How I hate and despise myself. Good Lord, I’m like a vicious
boy--running after another man’s wife, writing idiotic letters,
degrading myself. Ach!” He clutched his head, grunted and sit down.
“And now comes your lack of sincerity into the bargain,” he continued
with bitterness. “If you don’t think I am playing a nice game--why
are you here? What drew you? In my letters I only ask you for a
straightforward answer: Yes, or No; and instead of giving it me, every
day you contrive that we shall meet ‘by chance’ and you treat me to
quotations from a moral copy-book.”
Madame Loubianzev reddened and got frightened. She suddenly felt the
kind of awkwardness that a modest woman would feel at being suddenly
discovered naked.
“You seem to suspect some deceit on my side,” she murmured. “I have
always given you a straight answer; and I asked you for one to-day.”
“Ah, does one ask such things? If you had said to me at once ‘Go away,’
I would have gone long ago, but you never told me to. Never once have
you been frank. Strange irresolution. My God, either you’re playing
with me, or....”
Ilyin did not finish, and rested his head in his hands. Sophia
Pietrovna recalled her behaviour all through. She remembered that she
had felt all these days not only in deed but even in her most intimate
thoughts opposed to Ilyin’s love. But at the same moment she knew that
there was a grain of truth in the barrister’s words. And not knowing
what kind of truth it was she could not think, no matter how much she
thought about it, what to say to him in answer to his complaint. It was
awkward being silent, so she said shrugging her shoulders:
“So I’m to blame for that too?”
“I don’t blame you for your insincerity,” sighed Ilyin. “It slipped out
unconsciously. Your insincerity is natural to you, in the natural order
of things as well. If all mankind were to agree suddenly to become
serious, everything would go to the Devil, to ruin.”
Sophia Pietrovna was not in the mood for philosophy; but she was glad
of the opportunity to change the conversation and asked:
“Why indeed?”
“Because only savages and animals are sincere. Since civilisation
introduced into society the demand, for instance, for such a luxury as
woman’s virtue, sincerity has been out of place.”
Angrily Ilyin began to thrust his stick into the sand. Madame
Loubianzev listened without understanding much of it; she liked the
conversation. First of all, she was pleased that a gifted man should
speak to her, an average woman, about intellectual things; also it gave
her great pleasure to watch how the pale, lively, still angry, young
face was working. Much she did not understand; but the fine courage
of modern man was revealed to her, the courage by which he without
reflection or surmise solves the great questions and constructs his
simple conclusions.
Suddenly she discovered that she was admiring him, and it frightened
her.
“Pardon, but I don’t really understand,” she hastened to say. “Why
did you mention insincerity? I entreat you once more, be a dear, good
friend and leave me alone. Sincerely, I ask it.”
“Good--I’ll do my best. But hardly anything will come of it. Either
I’ll put a bullet through my brains or ... I’ll start drinking in
the stupidest possible way. Things will end badly for me. Everything
has its limit, even a struggle with nature. Tell me now, how can one
struggle with madness? If you’ve drunk wine, how can you get over the
excitement? What can I do if your image has grown into my soul, and
stands incessantly before my eyes, night and day, as plain as that
fir tree there? Tell me then what thing I must do to get out of this
wretched, unhappy state, when all my thoughts, desires, and dreams
belong, not to me, but to some devil that has got hold of me? I love
you, I love you so much that I’ve turned away from my path, given up my
career and my closest friends, forgot my God. Never in my life have I
loved so much.”
Sophia Pietrovna, who was not expecting this turn, drew her body away
from Ilyin, and glanced at him frightened. Tears shone in his eyes. His
lips trembled, and a hungry, suppliant expression showed over all his
face.
“I love you,” he murmured, bringing his own eyes near to her big,
frightened ones. “You are so beautiful. I’m suffering now; but I swear
I could remain so all my life, suffering and looking into your eyes,
but.... Keep silent, I implore you.”
Sophia Pietrovna as if taken unawares began, quickly, quickly, to think
out words with which to stop him. “I shall go away,” she decided, but
no sooner had she moved to get up, than Ilyin was on his knees at her
feet already. He embraced her knees, looked into her eyes and spoke
passionately, ardently, beautifully. She did not hear his words, for
her fear and agitation. Somehow now at this dangerous moment when
her knees pleasantly contracted, as in a warm bath, she sought with
evil intention to read some meaning into her sensation. She was angry
because the whole of her instead of protesting virtue was filled with
weakness, laziness, and emptiness, like a drunken man to whom the ocean
is but knee-deep; only in the depths of her soul, a little remote
malignant voice teased: “Why don’t you go away? Then this is right, is
it?”
Seeking in herself an explanation she could not understand why she had
not withdrawn the hand to which Ilyin’s lips clung like a leech, nor
why, at the same time as Ilyin, she looked hurriedly right and left to
see that they were not observed.
The fir-trees and the clouds stood motionless, and gazed at them
severely like broken-down masters who see something going on, but have
been bribed not to report to the head. The sentry on the embankment
stood like a stick and seemed to be staring at the bench. “Let him
look!” thought Sophia Pietrovna.
“But ... But listen,” she said at last with despair in her voice. “What
will this lead to? What will happen afterwards?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he began to whisper, waving these
unpleasant questions aside.
The hoarse, jarring whistle of a railway engine became audible. This
cold, prosaic sound of the everyday world made Madame Loubianzev start.
“It’s time, I must go,” she said, getting up quickly. “The train is
coming. Audrey is arriving. He will want his dinner.”
Sophia Pietrovna turned her blazing cheeks to the embankment. First
the engine came slowly into sight, after it the carriages. It was not
a bungalow train, but a goods train. In a long row, one after another
like the days of man’s life, the cars drew past the white background of
the church, and there seemed to be no end to them.
But at last the train disappeared, and the end car with the guard and
the lighted lamps disappeared into the green. Sophia Pietrovna turned
sharply and not looking at Ilyin began to walk quickly back along the
path. She had herself in control again. Red with shame, offended, not
by Ilyin, no! but by the cowardice and shamelessness with which she,
a good, respectable woman allowed a stranger to embrace her knees.
She had only one thought now, to reach her bungalow and her family
as quickly as possible. The barrister could hardly keep up with her.
Turning from the path on to a little track, she glanced at him so
quickly that she noticed only the sand on his knees, and she motioned
with her hand at him to let her be.
Running into the house Sophia Pietrovna stood for about five minutes
motionless in her room, looking now at the window then at the writing
table.... “You disgraceful woman,” she scolded herself; “disgraceful!”
In spite of herself she recollected every detail, hiding nothing, how
all these days she had been against Ilyin’s love-making, yet she was
somehow drawn to meet him and explain; but besides this when he was
lying at her feet she felt an extraordinary pleasure. She recalled
everything, not sparing herself, and now, stifled with shame, she could
have slapped her own face.
“Poor Andrey,” she thought, trying, as she remembered her husband,
to give her face the tenderest possible expression--“Varya, my poor
darling child, does not know what a mother she has. Forgive me, my
dears. I love you very much ... very much!...”
And wishing to convince herself that she was still a good wife and
mother, that corruption had not yet touched those “sanctities” of hers,
of which she had spoken to Ilyin, Sophia Pietrovna ran into the kitchen
and scolded the cook for not having laid the table for Andrey Ilyitch.
She tried to imagine her husband’s tired, hungry look, and pitying him
aloud, she laid the table herself, a thing which she had never done
before. Then she found her daughter Varya, lifted her up in her hands
and kissed her passionately; the child seemed to her heavy and cold,
but she would not own it to herself, and she began to tell her what a
good, dear, splendid father she had.
But when, soon after, Andrey Ilyitch arrived, she barely greeted him.
The flow of imaginary feelings had ebbed away without convincing her of
anything; she was only exasperated and enraged by the lie. She sat at
the window, suffered, and raged. Only in distress can people understand
how difficult it is to master their thoughts and feelings. Sophia
Pietrovna said afterwards a confusion was going on inside her as hard
to define as to count a cloud of swiftly flying sparrows. Thus from
the fact that she was delighted at her husband’s arrival and pleased
with the way he behaved at dinner, she suddenly concluded that she had
begun to hate him. Andrey Ilyitch, languid with hunger and fatigue,
while waiting for the soup, fell upon the sausage and ate it greedily,
chewing loudly and moving his temples.
“My God,” thought Sophia Pietrovna. “I do love and respect him, but ...
why does he chew so disgustingly.”
Her thoughts were no less disturbed than her feelings. Madame
Loubianzev, like all who have no experience of the struggle with
unpleasant thought, did her best not to think of her unhappiness,
and the more zealously she tried, the more vivid Ilyin became to her
imagination, the sand on his knees, the feathery clouds, the train....
“Why did I--idiot--go to-day?” she teased herself. “And am I really a
person who can’t answer for herself?”
Fear has big eyes. When Andrey Ilyitch had finished the last course,
she had already resolved to tell him everything and so escape from
danger.
“Andrey, I want to speak to you seriously,” she began after dinner,
when her husband was taking off his coat and boots in order to have a
lie down.
“Well?”
“Let’s go away from here!”
“How--where to? It’s still too early to go to town.”
“No. Travel or something like that.”
“Travel,” murmured the solicitor, stretching himself. “I dream of it
myself, but where shall I get the money, and who’ll look after my
business.”
After a little reflection he added:
“Yes, really you are bored. Go by yourself if you want to.”
Sophia Pietrovna agreed; but at the same time she saw that Ilyin would
be glad of the opportunity to travel in the same train with her, in the
same carriage....
She pondered and looked at her husband, who was full fed but still
languid. For some reason her eyes stopped on his feet, tiny, almost
womanish, in stupid socks. On the toe of both socks little threads
were standing out. Under the drawn blind a bumble bee was knocking
against the window pane and buzzing. Sophia Pietrovna stared at the
threads, listened to the bumble bee and pictured her journey.... Day
and night Ilyin sits opposite, without taking his eyes from her, angry
with his weakness and pale with the pain of his soul. He brands himself
as a libertine, accuses her, tears his hair; but when the dark comes
he seizes the chance when the passengers go to sleep or alight at a
station and falls on his knees before her and clasps her feet, as he
did by the bench....
She realised that she was dreaming....
“Listen. I am not going by myself,” she said. “You must come, too!”
“Sophochka, that’s all imagination!” sighed Loubianzev. “You must be
serious and only ask for the possible....”
“You’ll come when you find out!” thought Sophia Pietrovna.
Having decided to go away at all costs, she began to feel free from
danger; her thoughts fell gradually into order, she became cheerful and
even allowed herself to think about everything. Whatever she may think
or dream about, she is going all the same. While her husband still
slept, little by little, evening came....
She sat in the drawing-room playing the piano. Outside the window the
evening animation, the sound of music, but chiefly the thought of her
own cleverness in mastering her misery gave the final touch to her
joy. Other women, her easy conscience told her, in a position like her
own would surely not resist, they would spin round like a whirlwind;
but she was nearly burnt up with shame, she suffered and now she had
escaped from a danger which perhaps was nonexistent! Her virtue and
resolution moved her so much that she even glanced at herself in the
glass three times.
When it was dark visitors came. The men sat down to cards in the
dining-room, the ladies were in the drawing room and on the terrace.
Ilyin came last, he was stern and gloomy and looked ill. He sat down
on a corner of the sofa and did not get up for the whole evening.
Usually cheerful and full of conversation, he was now silent, frowning,
and rubbing his eyes. When he had to answer a question he smiled
with difficulty and only with his upper lip, answering abruptly and
spitefully. He made about five jokes in all, but his jokes seemed crude
and insolent. It seemed to Sophia Pietrovna that he was on the brink
of hysteria. But only now as she sat at the piano did she acknowledge
that the unhappy man was not in the mood to joke, that he was sick in
his soul, he could find no place for himself. It was for her sake he
was ruining the best days of his career and his youth, wasting his last
farthing on a bungalow, had left his mother and sisters uncared for,
and, above all, was breaking down under the martyrdom of his struggle.
From simple, common humanity she ought to take him seriously....
All this was clear to her, even to paining her. If she were to go up
to Ilyin now and say to him “No,” there would be such strength in her
voice that it would be hard to disobey. But she did not go up to him
and she did not say it, did not even think it.... The petty selfishness
of a young nature seemed never to have been revealed in her as strongly
as that evening. She admitted that Byin was unhappy and that he sat
on the sofa as if on hot coals. She was sorry for him, but at the
same time the presence of the man who loved her so desperately filled
her with a triumphant sense of her own power. She felt her youth,
her beauty, her inaccessibility, and--since she had decided to go
away--she gave herself full rein this evening. She coquetted, laughed
continually, she sang with singular emotion, and as one inspired.
Everything made her gay and everything seemed funny. It amused her to
recall the incident of the bench, the sentry looking on. The visitors
seemed funny to her, Ilyin’s insolent jokes, his tie pin which she had
never seen before. The pin was a little red snake with tiny diamond
eyes; the snake seemed so funny that she was ready to kiss and kiss it.
Sophia Pietrovna, nervously sang romantic songs, with a kind of
half-intoxication, and as if jeering at another’s sorrow she chose sad,
melancholy songs that spoke of lost hopes, of the past, of old age....
“And old age is approaching nearer and nearer,” she sang. What had she
to do with old age?
“There’s something wrong going on in me,” she thought now and then
through laughter and singing.
At twelve o’clock the visitors departed. Ilyin was the last to go. She
still felt warm enough about him to go with him to the lower step of
the terrace. She had the idea of telling him that she was going away
with her husband, just to see what effect this news would have upon him.
The moon was hiding behind the clouds, but it was so bright that Sophia
Pietrovna could see the wind playing with the tails of his overcoat and
with the creepers on the terrace. It was also plain how pale Ilyin was,
and how he twisted his upper-lip, trying to smile. “Sonia, Sonichka,
my dear little woman,” he murmured, not letting her speak. “My darling,
my pretty one.”
In a paroxysm of tenderness with tears in his voice, he showered her
with endearing words each tenderer than the other, and was already
speaking to her as if she were his wife or his mistress. Suddenly and
unexpectedly to her, he put one arm round her and with the other hand
he seized her elbow.
“My dear one, my beauty,” he began to whisper, kissing the nape of her
neck; “be sincere, come to me now.”
She slipped out of his embrace and lifted her head to break out in
indignation and revolt. But indignation did not come, and of all her
praiseworthy virtue and purity, there was left only enough for her to
say that which all average women say in similar circumstances:
“You must be mad.”
“But really let us go,” continued Ilyin. “Just now and over there by
the bench I felt convinced that you, Sonia, were as helpless as myself.
You too will be all the worse for it. You love me, and you are making a
useless bargain with your conscience.”
Seeing that she was leaving him he seized her by her lace sleeve and
ended quickly:
“If not to-day, then to-morrow; but you will have to give in. What’s
the good of putting if off? My dear, my darling Sonia, the verdict has
been pronounced. Why postpone the execution? Why deceive yourself?”
Sophia Pietrovna broke away from him and suddenly disappeared
inside the door. She returned to the drawing-room, shut the piano
mechanically, stared for a long time at the cover of a music book, and
sat down. She could neither stand nor think.... From her agitation
and passion remained only an awful weakness mingled with laziness
and tiredness. Her conscience whispered to her that she had behaved
wickedly and foolishly to-night, like a madwoman; that just now she
had been kissed on the terrace, and even now she had some strange
sensation in her waist and in her elbow. Not a soul was in the
drawing-room. Only a single candle was burning. Madame Loubianzev sat
on a little round stool before the piano without stirring as if waiting
for something, and as if taking advantage of her extreme exhaustion
and the dark a heavy unconquerable desire began to possess her. Like a
boa-constrictor, it enchained her limbs and soul. It grew every second
and was no longer threatening, but stood clear before her in all its
nakedness.
She sat thus for half an hour, not moving, and not stopping herself
from thinking of Ilyin. Then she got up lazily and went slowly into
the bed-room. Andrey Ilyitch was in bed already. She sat by the window
and gave herself to her desire. She felt no more “confusion.” All her
feelings and thoughts pressed lovingly round some clear purpose.
She still had a mind to struggle, but instantly she waved her hand
impotently, realising the strength and the determination of the foe. To
fight him power and strength were necessary, but her birth, up-bringing
and life had given her nothing on which to lean.
“You’re immoral, you’re horrible,” she tormented herself for her
weakness. “You’re a nice sort, you are!”
So indignant was her insulted modesty at this weakness that she called
herself all the bad names that she knew and she related to herself many
insulting, degrading truths. Thus she told herself that she never was
moral, and she had not fallen before only because there was no pretext,
that her day-long struggle had been nothing but a game and a comedy....
“Let us admit that I struggled,” she thought, “but what kind of a
fight was it? Even prostitutes struggle before they sell themselves,
and still they do sell themselves. It’s a pretty sort of fight. Like
milk, turns in a day.” She realised that it was not love that drew her
from her home nor Ilyin’s personality, but the sensations which await
her.... A little week-end _type_ like the rest of them.
“When the young bird’s mother was killed,” a hoarse tenor finished
singing.
If I am going, it’s time, thought Sophia Pietrovna. Her heart began to
beat with a frightful force.
“Andrey,” she almost cried. “Listen. Shall we go away? Shall we? Yes?”
“Yes.... I’ve told you already. You go alone.”
“But listen,” she said, “if you don’t come too, you may lose me. I seem
to be in love already.”
“Who with?” Andrey Ilyitch asked.
“It must be all the same for you, who with,” Sophia Pietrovna cried out.
Andrey Ilyitch got up, dangled his feet over the side of the bed, with
a look of surprise at the dark form of his wife.
“Imagination,” he yawned.
He could not believe her, but all the same he was frightened. After
having thought for a while, and asked his wife some unimportant
questions, he gave his views of the family, of infidelity.... He spoke
sleepily for about ten minutes and then lay down again. His remarks had
no success. There are a great many opinions in this world, and more
than half of them belong to people who have never known misery.
In spite of the late hour, the bungalow people were still moving behind
their windows. Sophia Pietrovna put on a long coat and stood for a
while, thinking. She still had force of mind to say to her sleepy
husband:
“Are you asleep? I’m going for a little walk. Would you like to come
with me?”
That was her last hope. Receiving no answer, she walked out. It was
breezy and cool. She did not feel the breeze or the darkness but
walked on and on.... An irresistible power drove her, and it seemed to
her that if she stopped that power would push her in the back. “You’re
an immoral woman,” she murmured mechanically. “You’re horrible.”
She was choking for breath, burning with shame, did not feel her feet
under her, for that which drove her along was stronger than her shame,
her reason, her fear....