walk from corner to corner. "It may be. But to me all this seems
amazing. They see a great achievement in my having passed through two
faculties at the university; they praise me to the skies because I have
written a work that will be thrown away and forgotten in three years'
time, but became I can't speak of prostitutes as indifferently as I can
about these chairs, they send me to doctors, call me a lunatic, and pity
me."
For some reason Vassiliev suddenly began to feel an intolerable pity for
himself, his friends, and everybody whom he had seen the day before
yesterday, and for the doctor. He began to sob and fell into the chair.
The friends looked interrogatively at the doctor. He, looking as though
he magnificently understood the tears and the despair, and knew himself
a specialist in this line, approached Vassiliev and gave him some drops
to drink, and then when Vassiliev grew calm undressed him and began to
examine the sensitiveness of his skin, of the knee reflexes....
And Vassiliev felt better. When he was coming out of the doctor's he was
already ashamed; the noise of the traffic did not seem irritating, and
the heaviness beneath his heart became easier and easier as though it
were thawing. In his hand were two prescriptions. One was for kali-
bromatum, the other--morphia. He used to take both before.
He stood still in the street for a while, pensive, and then, taking
leave of his friends, lazily dragged on towards the university.
MISFORTUNE
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 i 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 I 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 And 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 stem 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 dear 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.