have special feelings unknown to the poor. Often as I passed by
Nadyezhda Lvovna's big fruit garden, in which stood the large, heavy
house with its windows always curtained, I thought: "What is she
thinking at this moment? Is there happiness behind those blinds?" and so
on. Once I saw her from a distance in a fine light cabriolet, driving a
handsome white horse, and, sinful man that I am, I not only envied her,
but even thought that in her poses, in her movements, there was
something special, not to be found in people who are not rich, just as
persons of a servile nature succeed in discovering "good family" at the
first glance in people of the most ordinary exterior, if they are a
little more distinguished than themselves. Nadyezhda Lvovna's inner life
was only known to me by scandal. It was said in the district that five
or six years ago, before she was married, during her father's lifetime,
she had been passionately in love with Prince Sergey Ivanitch, who was
now beside me in the chaise. The prince had been fond of visiting her
father, and used to spend whole days in his billiard room, where he
played pyramids indefatigably till his arms and legs ached. Six months
before the old man's death he had suddenly given up visiting the
Shabelskys. The gossip of the district having no positive facts to go
upon explained this abrupt change in their relations in various ways.
Some said that the prince, having observed the plain daughter's feeling
for him and being unable to reciprocate it, considered it the duty of a
gentleman to cut short his visits. Others maintained that old Shabelsky
had discovered why his daughter was pining away, and had proposed to the
poverty-stricken prince that he should marry her; the prince, imagining
in his narrow-minded way that they were trying to buy him together with
his title, was indignant, said foolish things, and quarrelled with them.
What was true and what was false in this nonsense was difficult to say.
But that there was a portion of truth in it was evident, from the fact
that the prince always avoided conversation about Nadyezhda Lvovna.
I knew that soon after her father's death Nadyezhda Lvovna had married
one Kandurin, a bachelor of law, not wealthy, but adroit, who had come
on a visit to the neighbourhood. She married him not from love, but
because she was touched by the love of the legal gentleman who, so it
was said, had cleverly played the love-sick swain. At the time I am
describing, Kandurin was for some reason living in Cairo, and writing
thence to his friend, the marshal of the district, "Notes of Travel,"
while she sat languishing behind lowered blinds, surrounded by idle
parasites, and whiled away her dreary days in petty philanthropy.
On the way to the house the prince fell to talking.
"It's three days since I have been at home," he said in a half whisper,
with a sidelong glance at the driver. "I am not a child, nor a silly
woman, and I have no prejudices, but I can't stand the bailiffs. When I
see a bailiff in my house I turn pale and tremble, and even have a
twitching in the calves of my legs. Do you know Rogozhin refused to
honour my note?"
The prince did not, as a rule, like to complain of his straitened
circumstances; where poverty was concerned he was reserved and
exceedingly proud and sensitive, and so this announcement surprised me.
He stared a long time at the yellow clearing, warmed by the sun, watched
a long string of cranes float in the azure sky, and turned facing me.
"And by the sixth of September I must have the money ready for the bank
. . . the interest for my estate," he said aloud, by now regardless of
the coachman. "And where am I to get it? Altogether, old man, I am in a
tight fix! An awfully tight fix!"
The prince examined the cock of his gun, blew on it for some reason, and
began looking for the cranes which by now were out of sight.
"Sergey Ivanitch," I asked, after a minute's silence, "imagine if they
sell your Shatilovka, what will you do?"
"I? I don't know! Shatilovka can't be saved, that's clear as daylight,
but I cannot imagine such a calamity. I can't imagine myself without my
daily bread secure. What can I do? I have had hardly any education; I
have not tried working yet; for government service it is late to begin,
. . . Besides, where could I serve? Where could I be of use? Admitting
that no great cleverness is needed for serving in our Zemstvo, for
example, yet I suffer from . . . the devil knows what, a sort of
faintheartedness, I haven't a ha'p'orth of pluck. If I went into the
Service I should always feel I was not in my right place. I am not an
idealist; I am not a Utopian; I haven't any special principles; but am
simply, I suppose, stupid and thoroughly incompetent, a neurotic and a
coward. Altogether not like other people. All other people are like
other people, only I seem to be something . . . a poor thing. . . . I
met Naryagin last Wednesday-you know him?-drunken, slovenly . . .
doesn't pay his debts, stupid" (the prince frowned and tossed his head)
. . . "a horrible person! He said to me, staggering: 'I'm being balloted
for as a justice of the peace!' Of course, they won't elect him, but,
you see, he believes he is fit to be a justice of the peace and
considers that position within his capacity. He has boldness and self-
confidence. I went to see our investigating magistrate too. The man gets
two hundred and fifty roubles a month, and does scarcely anything. All
he can do is to stride backwards and forwards for days together in
nothing but his underclothes, but, ask him, he is convinced he is doing
his work and honourably performing his duty. I couldn't go on like that!
I should be ashamed to look the clerk in the face."
At that moment Grontovsky, on a chestnut horse, galloped by us with a
flourish. On his left arm the basket bobbed up and down with the
mushrooms dancing in it. As he passed us he grinned and waved his hand,
as though we were old friends.
"Blockhead!" the prince filtered through his teeth, looking after him.
"It's wonderful how disgusting it sometimes is to see satisfied faces. A
stupid, animal feeling due to hunger, I expect. . . . What was I saying?
Oh, yes, about going into the Service, . . . I should be ashamed to take
the salary, and yet, to tell the truth, it is stupid. If one looks at it
from a broader point of view, more seriously, I am eating what isn't
mine now. Am I not? But why am I not ashamed of that. . . . It is a case
of habit, I suppose . . . and not being able to realize one's true
position. . . . But that position is most likely awful. . ."
I looked at him, wondering if the prince were showing off. But his face
was mild and his eyes were mournfully following the movements of the
chestnut horse racing away, as though his happiness were racing away
with it.
Apparently he was in that mood of irritation and sadness when women weep
quietly for no reason, and men feel a craving to complain of themselves,
of life, of God. . . .
When I got out of the chaise at the gates of the house the prince said
to me:
"A man once said, wanting to annoy me, that I have the face of a
cardsharper. I have noticed that cardsharpers are usually dark. Do you
know, it seems that if I really had been born a cardsharper I should
have remained a decent person to the day of my death, for I should never
have had the boldness to do wrong. I tell you frankly I have had the
chance once in my life of getting rich if I had told a lie, a lie to
myself and one woman . . . and one other person whom I know would have
forgiven me for lying; I should have put into my pocket a million. But I
could not. I hadn't the pluck!"
From the gates we had to go to the house through the copse by a long
road, level as a ruler, and planted on each side with thick, lopped
lilacs. The house looked somewhat heavy, tasteless, like a façade on
the stage. It rose clumsily out of a mass of greenery, and caught the
eye like a great stone thrown on the velvety turf. At the chief entrance
I was met by a fat old footman in a green swallow-tail coat and big
silver-rimmed spectacles; without making any announcement, only looking
contemptuously at my dusty figure, he showed me in. As I mounted the
soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of
india-rubber. At the top I was enveloped in an atmosphere found only in
museums, in signorial mansions and old-fashioned merchant houses; it
seemed like the smell of something long past, which had once lived and
died and had left its soul in the rooms. I passed through three or four
rooms on my way from the entry to the drawing-room. I remember bright
yellow, shining floors, lustres wrapped in stiff muslin, narrow, striped
rugs which stretched not straight from door to door, as they usually do,
but along the walls, so that not venturing to touch the bright floor
with my muddy boots I had to describe a rectangle in each room. In the
drawing-room, where the footman left me, stood old-fashioned ancestral
furniture in white covers, shrouded in twilight. It looked surly and
elderly, and, as though out of respect for its repose, not a sound was
audible.
Even the clock was silent . . . it seemed as though the Princess
Tarakanov had fallen asleep in the golden frame, and the water and the
rats were still and motionless through magic. The daylight, afraid of
disturbing the universal tranquillity, scarcely pierced through the
lowered blinds, and lay on the soft rugs in pale, slumbering streaks.
Three minutes passed and a big, elderly woman in black, with her cheek
bandaged up, walked noiselessly into the drawing-room. She bowed to me
and pulled up the blinds. At once, enveloped in the bright sunlight, the
rats and water in the picture came to life and movement, Princess
Tarakanov was awakened, and the old chairs frowned gloomily.
"Her honour will be here in a minute, sir . . ." sighed the old lady,
frowning too.
A few more minutes of waiting and I saw Nadyezhda Lvovna. What struck me
first of all was that she certainly was ugly, short, scraggy, and round-
shouldered. Her thick, chestnut hair was magnificent; her face, pure and
with a look of culture in it, was aglow with youth; there was a clear
and intelligent expression in her eyes; but the whole charm of her head
was lost through the thickness of her lips and the over-acute facial
angle.
I mentioned my name, and announced the object of my visit.
"I really don't know what I am to say!" she said, in hesitation,
dropping her eyes and smiling. "I don't like to refuse, and at the same
time. . . ."
"Do, please," I begged.
Nadyezhda Lvovna looked at me and laughed. I laughed too. She was
probably amused by what Grontovsky had so enjoyed-that is, the right of
giving or withholding permission; my visit suddenly struck me as queer
and strange.
"I don't like to break the long-established rules," said Madame
Kandurin. "Shooting has been forbidden on our estate for the last six
years. No!" she shook her head resolutely. "Excuse me, I must refuse
you. If I allow you I must allow others. I don't like unfairness. Either
let all or no one."
"I am sorry!" I sighed. "It's all the sadder because we have come more
than ten miles. I am not alone," I added, "Prince Sergey Ivanitch is
with me."
I uttered the prince's name with no arrière pensée, not prompted by
any special motive or aim; I simply blurted it out without thinking, in
the simplicity of my heart. Hearing the familiar name Madame Kandurin
started, and bent a prolonged gaze upon me. I noticed her nose turn
pale.
"That makes no difference . . ." she said, dropping her eyes.
As I talked to her I stood at the window that looked out on the
shrubbery. I could see the whole shrubbery with the avenues and the
ponds and the road by which I had come. At the end of the road, beyond
the gates, the back of our chaise made a dark patch. Near the gate, with
his back to the house, the prince was standing with his legs apart,
talking to the lanky Grontovsky.
Madame Kandurin had been standing all the time at the other window. She
looked from time to time towards the shrubbery, and from the moment I
mentioned the prince's name she did not turn away from the window.
"Excuse me," she said, screwing up her eyes as she looked towards the
road and the gate, "but it would be unfair to allow you only to shoot. .
. . And, besides, what pleasure is there in shooting birds? What's it
for? Are they in your way?"
A solitary life, immured within four walls, with its indoor twilight and
heavy smell of decaying furniture, disposes people to sentimentality.
Madame Kandurin's idea did her credit, but I could not resist saying:
"If one takes that line one ought to go barefoot. Boots are made out of
the leather of slaughtered animals."
"One must distinguish between a necessity and a caprice," Madame
Kandurin answered in a toneless voice.
She had by now recognized the prince, and did not take her eyes off his
figure. It is hard to describe the delight and the suffering with which
her ugly face was radiant! Her eyes were smiling and shining, her lips
were quivering and laughing, while her face craned closer to the panes.
Keeping hold of a flower-pot with both hands, with bated breath and with
one foot slightly lifted, she reminded me of a dog pointing and waiting
with passionate impatience for "Fetch it!"
I looked at her and at the prince who could not tell a lie once in his
life, and I felt angry and bitter against truth and falsehood, which
play such an elemental part in the personal happiness of men.
The prince started suddenly, took aim and fired. A hawk, flying over
him, fluttered its wings and flew like an arrow far away.
"He aimed too high!" I said. "And so, Nadyezhda Lvovna," I sighed,
moving away from the window, "you will not permit . . ."-Madame Kandurin
was silent.
"I have the honour to take my leave," I said, "and I beg you to forgive
my disturbing you. . ."
Madame Kandurin would have turned facing me, and had already moved
through a quarter of the angle, when she suddenly hid her face behind
the hangings, as though she felt tears in her eyes that she wanted to
conceal.
"Good-bye. . . . Forgive me . . ." she said softly.
I bowed to her back, and strode away across the bright yellow floors, no
longer keeping to the carpet. I was glad to get away from this little
domain of gilded boredom and sadness, and I hastened as though anxious
to shake off a heavy, fantastic dream with its twilight, its enchanted
princess, its lustres. . . .
At the front door a maidservant overtook me and thrust a note into my
hand: "Shooting is permitted on showing this. N. K.," I read.
Love and Oher Stories
LOVE
"THREE o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking in at my
windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I
am so happy!
"My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange,
incomprehensible feeling. I can't analyse it just now--I haven't the
time, I'm too lazy, and there--hang analysis! Why, is a man likely to
interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost from a belfry,
or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand? Is he in a
state to do it?"
This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girl of
nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times, and as
often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, and copied it all
over again. I spent as long over the letter as if it had been a novel I
had to write to order. And it was not because I tried to make it longer,
more elaborate, and more fervent, but because I wanted endlessly to
prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of
one's study and communes with one's own day-dreams while the spring
night looks in at one's window. Between the lines I saw a beloved image,
and it seemed to me that there were, sitting at the same table writing
with me, spirits as naïvely happy, as foolish, and as blissfully
smiling as I. I wrote continually, looking at my hand, which still ached
deliciously where hers had lately pressed it, and if I turned my eyes
away I had a vision of the green trellis of the little gate. Through
that trellis Sasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I
was saying good-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply
admiring her figure as every decent man admires a pretty woman; when I
saw through the trellis two big eyes, I suddenly, as though by
inspiration, knew that I was in love, that it was all settled between
us, and fully decided already, that I had nothing left to do but to
carry out certain formalities.
It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly putting
on one's hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the
treasure to the post. There are no stars in the sky now: in their place
there is a long whitish streak in the east, broken here and there by
clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses; from that streak the whole
sky is flooded with pale light. The town is asleep, but already the
water-carts have come out, and somewhere in a far-away factory a whistle
sounds to wake up the workpeople. Beside the postbox, slightly moist
with dew, you are sure to see the clumsy figure of a house porter,
wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin and carrying a stick. He is in a
condition akin to catalepsy: he is not asleep or awake, but something
between.
If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decision of
their fate, they would not have such a humble air. I, anyway, almost
kissed my postbox, and as I gazed at it I reflected that the post is the
greatest of blessings.
I beg anyone who has ever been in love to remember how one usually
hurries home after dropping the letter in the box, rapidly gets into bed
and pulls up the quilt in the full conviction that as soon as one wakes
up in the morning one will be overwhelmed with memories of the previous
day and look with rapture at the window, where the daylight will be
eagerly making its way through the folds of the curtain.
Well, to facts. . . . Next morning at midday, Sasha's maid brought me
the following answer: "I am delited be sure to come to us to day please
I shall expect you. Your S."
Not a single comma. This lack of punctuation, and the misspelling of the
word "delighted," the whole letter, and even the long, narrow envelope
in which it was put filled my heart with tenderness. In the sprawling
but diffident handwriting I recognised Sasha's walk, her way of raising
her eyebrows when she laughed, the movement of her lips. . . . But the
contents of the letter did not satisfy me. In the first place, poetical
letters are not answered in that way, and in the second, why should I go
to Sasha's house to wait till it should occur to her stout mamma, her
brothers, and poor relations to leave us alone together? It would never
enter their heads, and nothing is more hateful than to have to restrain
one's raptures simply because of the intrusion of some animate trumpery
in the shape of a half-deaf old woman or little girl pestering one with
questions. I sent an answer by the maid asking Sasha to select some park
or boulevard for a rendezvous. My suggestion was readily accepted. I had
struck the right chord, as the saying is.
Between four and five o'clock in the afternoon I made my way to the
furthest and most overgrown part of the park. There was not a soul in
the park, and the tryst might have taken place somewhere nearer in one
of the avenues or arbours, but women don't like doing it by halves in
romantic affairs; in for a penny, in for a pound--if you are in for a
tryst, let it be in the furthest and most impenetrable thicket, where
one runs the risk of stumbling upon some rough or drunken man. When I
went up to Sasha she was standing with her back to me, and in that back
I could read a devilish lot of mystery. It seemed as though that back
and the nape of her neck, and the black spots on her dress were saying:
Hush! . . . The girl was wearing a simple cotton dress over which she
had thrown a light cape. To add to the air of mysterious secrecy, her
face was covered with a white veil. Not to spoil the effect, I had to
approach on tiptoe and speak in a half whisper.
From what I remember now, I was not so much the essential point of the
rendezvous as a detail of it. Sasha was not so much absorbed in the
interview itself as in its romantic mysteriousness, my kisses, the
silence of the gloomy trees, my vows. . . . There was not a minute in
which she forgot herself, was overcome, or let the mysterious expression
drop from her face, and really if there had been any Ivan Sidoritch or
Sidor Ivanitch in my place she would have felt just as happy. How is one
to make out in such circumstances whether one is loved or not? Whether
the love is "the real thing" or not?
From the park I took Sasha home with me. The presence of the beloved
woman in one's bachelor quarters affects one like wine and music.
Usually one begins to speak of the future, and the confidence and self-
reliance with which one does so is beyond bounds. You make plans and
projects, talk fervently of the rank of general though you have not yet
reached the rank of a lieutenant, and altogether you fire off such high-
flown nonsense that your listener must have a great deal of love and
ignorance of life to assent to it. Fortunately for men, women in love
are always blinded by their feelings and never know anything of life.
Far from not assenting, they actually turn pale with holy awe, are full
of reverence and hang greedily on the maniac's words. Sasha listened to
me with attention, but I soon detected an absent-minded expression on
her face, she did not understand me. The future of which I talked
interested her only in its external aspect and I was wasting time in
displaying my plans and projects before her. She was keenly interested
in knowing which would be her room, what paper she would have in the
room, why I had an upright piano instead of a grand piano, and so on.
She examined carefully all the little things on my table, looked at the
photographs, sniffed at the bottles, peeled the old stamps off the
envelopes, saying she wanted them for something.
"Please collect old stamps for me!" she said, making a grave face.
"Please do."
Then she found a nut in the window, noisily cracked it and ate it.
"Why don't you stick little labels on the backs of your books?" she
asked, taking a look at the bookcase.
"What for?"
"Oh, so that each book should have its number. And where am I to put my
books? I've got books too, you know."
"What books have you got?" I asked.
Sasha raised her eyebrows, thought a moment and said:
"All sorts."
And if it had entered my head to ask her what thoughts, what
convictions, what aims she had, she would no doubt have raised her
eyebrows, thought a minute, and have said in the same way: "All sorts."
Later I saw Sasha home and left her house regularly, officially engaged,
and was so reckoned till our wedding. If the reader will allow me to
judge merely from my personal experience, I maintain that to be engaged
is very dreary, far more so than to be a husband or nothing at all. An
engaged man is neither one thing nor the other, he has left one side of
the river and not reached the other, he is not married and yet he can't
be said to be a bachelor, but is in something not unlike the condition
of the porter whom I have mentioned above.
Every day as soon as I had a free moment I hastened to my fiancée. As I
went I usually bore within me a multitude of hopes, desires, intentions,
suggestions, phrases. I always fancied that as soon as the maid opened
the door I should, from feeling oppressed and stifled, plunge at once up
to my neck into a sea of refreshing happiness. But it always turned out
otherwise in fact. Every time I went to see my fiancée I found all her
family and other members of the household busy over the silly trousseau.
(And by the way, they were hard at work sewing for two months and then
they had less than a hundred roubles' worth of things). There was a
smell of irons, candle grease and fumes. Bugles scrunched under one's
feet. The two most important rooms were piled up with billows of linen,
calico, and muslin and from among the billows peeped out Sasha's little
head with a thread between her teeth. All the sewing party welcomed me
with cries of delight but at once led me off into the dining-room where
I could not hinder them nor see what only husbands are permitted to
behold. In spite of my feelings, I had to sit in the dining-room and
converse with Pimenovna, one of the poor relations. Sasha, looking
worried and excited, kept running by me with a thimble, a skein of wool
or some other boring object.
"Wait, wait, I shan't be a minute," she would say when I raised
imploring eyes to her. "Only fancy that wretch Stepanida has spoilt the
bodice of the barège dress!"