deep; never had her soul surrendered to any feeling so spontaneously, so
disinterestedly, and so joyously as now that her maternal instincts were
aroused. For this little boy with the dimple in his cheek and the big
school cap, she would have given her whole life, she would have given it
with joy and tears of tenderness. Why? Who can tell why?
When she had seen the last of Sasha, she returned home, contented and
serene, brimming over with love; her face, which had grown younger
during the last six months, smiled and beamed; people meeting her looked
at her with pleasure.
"Good-morning, Olga Semyonovna, darling. How are you, darling?"
"The lessons at the high school are very difficult now," she would
relate at the market. "It's too much; in the first class yesterday they
gave him a fable to learn by heart, and a Latin translation and a
problem. You know it's too much for a little chap."
And she would begin talking about the teachers, the lessons, and the
school books, saying just what Sasha said.
At three o'clock they had dinner together: in the evening they learned
their lessons together and cried. When she put him to bed, she would
stay a long time making the Cross over him and murmuring a prayer; then
she would go to bed and dream of that far-away misty future when Sasha
would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have
a big house of his own with horses and a carriage, would get married and
have children. . . . She would fall asleep still thinking of the same
thing, and tears would run down her cheeks from her closed eyes, while
the black cat lay purring beside her: "Mrr, mrr, mrr."
Suddenly there would come a loud knock at the gate.
Olenka would wake up breathless with alarm, her heart throbbing. Half a
minute later would come another knock.
"It must be a telegram from Harkov," she would think, beginning to
tremble from head to foot. "Sasha's mother is sending for him from
Harkov. . . . Oh, mercy on us!"
She was in despair. Her head, her hands, and her feet would turn chill,
and she would feel that she was the most unhappy woman in the world. But
another minute would pass, voices would be heard: it would turn out to
be the veterinary surgeon coming home from the club.
"Well, thank God!" she would think.
And gradually the load in her heart would pass off, and she would feel
at ease. She would go back to bed thinking of Sasha, who lay sound
asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep:
"I'll give it you! Get away! Shut up!"
ARIADNE
ON the deck of a steamer sailing from Odessa to Sevastopol, a rather
good-looking gentleman, with a little round beard, came up to me to
smoke, and said:
"Notice those Germans sitting near the shelter? Whenever Germans or
Englishmen get together, they talk about the crops, the price of wool,
or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians
get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects--
but especially women."
This gentleman's face was familiar to me already. We had returned from
abroad the evening before in the same train, and at Volotchisk when the
luggage was being examined by the Customs, I saw him standing with a
lady, his travelling companion, before a perfect mountain of trunks and
baskets filled with ladies' clothes, and I noticed how embarrassed and
downcast he was when he had to pay duty on some piece of silk frippery,
and his companion protested and threatened to make a complaint.
Afterwards, on the way to Odessa, I saw him carrying little pies and
oranges to the ladies' compartment.
It was rather damp; the vessel swayed a little, and the ladies had
retired to their cabins.
The gentleman with the little round beard sat down beside me and
continued:
"Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract
subjects and women. We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter
nothing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order. The
Russian actor does not know how to be funny; he acts with profundity
even in a farce. We're just the same: when we have got to talk of
trifles we treat them only from an exalted point of view. It comes from
a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. We talk so often about
women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied. We take too ideal a view of
women, and make demands out of all proportion with what reality can give
us; we get something utterly different from what we want, and the result
is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, and inward suffering, and if any
one is suffering, he's bound to talk of it. It does not bore you to go
on with this conversation?
"No, not in the least."
"In that case, allow me to introduce myself," said my companion, rising
from his seat a little:
"Ivan Ilyitch Shamohin, a Moscow landowner of a sort. . . . You I know
very well."
He sat down and went on, looking at me with a genuine and friendly
expression:
"A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these incessant
conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it
down to our having been slave-owners and so on; I take quite a different
view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We
want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and
to everything in the world. When we are young we adore and poeticize
those with whom we are in love: love and happiness with us are synonyms.
Among us in Russia marriage without love is despised, sensuality is
ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by
those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical, and
exalted; and if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over
Raphael's Madonna, or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure
you there is no affectation about it. But the trouble is that when we
have been married or been intimate with a woman for some two or three
years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned: we pair off with
others, and again--disappointment, again--repulsion, and in the long run
we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair,
undeveloped, cruel--in fact, far from being superior, are immeasurably
inferior to us men. And in our dissatisfaction and disappointment there
is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk about what we've been so
cruelly deceived in."
While Shamohin was talking I noticed that the Russian language and our
Russian surroundings gave him great pleasure. This was probably because
he had been very homesick abroad. Though he praised the Russians and
ascribed to them a rare idealism, he did not disparage foreigners, and
that I put down to his credit. It could be seen, too, that there was
some uneasiness in his soul, that he wanted to talk more of himself than
of women, and that I was in for a long story in the nature of a
confession. And when we had asked for a bottle of wine and had each of
us drunk a glass, this was how he did in fact begin:
"I remember in a novel of Weltmann's some one says, 'So that's the
story!' and some one else answers, 'No, that's not the story-- that's
only the introduction to the story.' In the same way what I've said so
far is only the introduction; what I really want to tell you is my own
love story. Excuse me, I must ask you again; it won't bore you to
listen?"
I told him it would not, and he went on:
The scene of my story is laid in the Moscow province in one of its
northern districts. The scenery there, I must tell you, is exquisite.
Our homestead is on the high bank of a rapid stream, where the water
chatters noisily day and night: imagine a big old garden, neat flower-
beds, beehives, a kitchen-garden, and below it a river with leafy
willows, which, when there is a heavy dew on them, have a lustreless
look as though they had turned grey; and on the other side a meadow, and
beyond the meadow on the upland a terrible, dark pine forest. In that
forest delicious, reddish agarics grow in endless profusion, and elks
still live in its deepest recesses. When I am nailed up in my coffin I
believe I shall still dream of those early mornings, you know, when the
sun hurts your eyes: or the wonderful spring evenings when the
nightingales and the landrails call in the garden and beyond the garden,
and sounds of the harmonica float across from the village, while they
play the piano indoors and the stream babbles . . . when there is such
music, in fact, that one wants at the same time to cry and to sing
aloud.
We have not much arable land, but our pasture makes up for it, and with
the forest yields about two thousand roubles a year. I am the only son
of my father; we are both modest persons, and with my father's pension
that sum was amply sufficient for us.
The first three years after finishing at the university I spent in the
country, looking after the estate and constantly expecting to be elected
on some local assembly; but what was most important, I was violently in
love with an extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating girl. She was the
sister of our neighbour, Kotlovitch, a ruined landowner who had on his
estate pine-apples, marvellous peaches, lightning conductors, a fountain
in the courtyard, and at the same time not a farthing in his pocket. He
did nothing and knew how to do nothing. He was as flabby as though he
had been made of boiled turnip; he used to doctor the peasants by
homeopathy and was interested in spiritualism. He was, however, a man of
great delicacy and mildness, and by no means a fool, but I have no
fondness for these gentlemen who converse with spirits and cure peasant
women by magnetism. In the first place, the ideas of people who are not
intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult
to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have
nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect
on sensitive people. I did not care for his appearance either. He was
tall, stout, white-skinned, with a little head, little shining eyes, and
chubby white fingers. He did not shake hands, but kneaded one's hands in
his. And he was always apologising. If he asked for anything it was
"Excuse me"; if he gave you anything it was "Excuse me" too.
As for his sister, she was a character out of a different opera. I must
explain that I had not been acquainted with the Kotlovitches in my
childhood and early youth, for my father had been a professor at N., and
we had for many years lived away. When I did make their acquaintance the
girl was twenty-two, had left school long before, and had spent two or
three years in Moscow with a wealthy aunt who brought her out into
society. When I was introduced and first had to talk to her, what struck
me most of all was her rare and beautiful name--Ariadne. It suited her
so wonderfully! She was a brunette, very thin, very slender, supple,
elegant, and extremely graceful, with refined and exceedingly noble
features. Her eyes were shining, too, but her brother's shone with a
cold sweetness, mawkish as sugar-candy, while hers had the glow of
youth, proud and beautiful. She conquered me on the first day of our
acquaintance, and indeed it was inevitable. My first impression was so
overwhelming that to this day I cannot get rid of my illusions; I am
still tempted to imagine that nature had some grand, marvellous design
when she created that girl.
Ariadne's voice, her walk, her hat, even her footprints on the sandy
bank where she used to angle for gudgeon, filled me with delight and a
passionate hunger for life. I judged of her spiritual being from her
lovely face and lovely figure, and every word, every smile of Ariadne's
bewitched me, conquered me and forced me to believe in the loftiness of
her soul. She was friendly, ready to talk, gay and simple in her
manners. She had a poetic belief in God, made poetic reflections about
death, and there was such a wealth of varying shades in her spiritual
organisation that even her faults seemed in her to carry with them
peculiar, charming qualities. Suppose she wanted a new horse and had no
money--what did that matter? Something might be sold or pawned, or if
the steward swore that nothing could possibly be sold or pawned, the
iron roofs might be torn off the lodges and taken to the factory, or at
the very busiest time the farm-horses might be driven to the market and
sold there for next to nothing. These unbridled desires reduced the
whole household to despair at times, but she expressed them with such
refinement that everything was forgiven her; all things were permitted
her as to a goddess or to Cæsar's wife. My love was pathetic and was
soon noticed by every one--my father, the neighbours, and the peasants--
and they all sympathised with me. When I stood the workmen vodka, they
would bow and say: "May the Kotlovitch young lady be your bride, please
God!"
And Ariadne herself knew that I loved her. She would often ride over on
horseback or drive in the char-à-banc to see us, and would spend whole
days with me and my father. She made great friends with the old man, and
he even taught her to bicycle, which was his favourite amusement.
I remember helping her to get on the bicycle one evening, and she looked
so lovely that I felt as though I were burning my hands when I touched
her. I shuddered with rapture, and when the two of them, my old father
and she, both looking so handsome and elegant, bicycled side by side
along the main road, a black horse ridden by the steward dashed aside on
meeting them, and it seemed to me that it dashed aside because it too
was overcome by her beauty. My love, my worship, touched Ariadne and
softened her; she had a passionate longing to be captivated like me and
to respond with the same love. It was so poetical!
But she was incapable of really loving as I did, for she was cold and
already somewhat corrupted. There was a demon in her, whispering to her
day and night that she was enchanting, adorable; and, having no definite
idea for what object she was created, or for what purpose life had been
given her, she never pictured herself in the future except as very
wealthy and distinguished, she had visions of balls, races, liveries, of
sumptuous drawing-rooms, of a salon of her own, and of a perfect swarm
of counts, princes, ambassadors, celebrated painters and artists, all of
them adoring her and in ecstasies over her beauty and her dresses. . . .
This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of
the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold--to
me, to nature, and to music. Meanwhile time was passing, and still there
were no ambassadors on the scene. Ariadne went on living with her
brother, the spiritualist: things went from bad to worse, so that she
had nothing to buy hats and dresses with, and had to resort to all sorts
of tricks and dodges to conceal her poverty.
As luck would have it, a certain Prince Maktuev, a wealthy man but an
utterly insignificant person, had paid his addresses to her when she was
living at her aunt's in Moscow. She had refused him, point-blank. But
now she was fretted by the worm of repentance that she had refused him;
just as a peasant pouts with repulsion at a mug of kvass with
cockroaches in it but yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the
recollection of the prince, and yet she would say to me: "Say what you
like, there is something inexplicable, fascinating, in a title. . . ."
She dreamed of a title, of a brilliant position, and at the same time
she did not want to let me go. However one may dream of ambassadors
one's heart is not a stone, and one has wistful feelings for one's
youth. Ariadne tried to fall in love, made a show of being in love, and
even swore that she loved me. But I am a highly strung and sensitive
man; when I am loved I feel it even at a distance, without vows and
assurances; at once I felt as it were a coldness in the air, and when
she talked to me of love, it seemed to me as though I were listening to
the singing of a metal nightingale. Ariadne was herself aware that she
was lacking in something. She was vexed and more than once I saw her
cry. Another time--can you imagine it?--all of a sudden she embraced me
and kissed me. It happened in the evening on the river-bank, and I saw
by her eyes that she did not love me, but was embracing me from
curiosity, to test herself and to see what came of it. And I felt
dreadful. I took her hands and said to her in despair: "These caresses
without love cause me suffering!"
"What a queer fellow you are!" she said with annoyance, and walked away.
Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I should
have married her, and so my story would have ended, but fate was pleased
to arrange our romance differently. It happened that a new personage
appeared on our horizon. Ariadne's brother had a visit from an old
university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a charming man of whom
coachmen and footmen used to say: "An entertaining gentleman." He was a
man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a good-natured
bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and presentable, with a stiff,
well-kept moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam's apple.
He used to wear pince-nez on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not
pronounce either _r_ or _l_. He was always in good spirits, everything
amused him.
He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had acquired
two houses in Moscow as part of his wife's dowry. He began doing them up
and building a bath-house, and was completely ruined. Now his wife and
four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great poverty, and he had
to support them--and this amused him. He was thirty-six and his wife was
by now forty-two, and that, too, amused him. His mother, a conceited,
sulky personage, with aristocratic pretensions, despised his wife and
lived apart with a perfect menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to
allow her seventy-five roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of
taste, liked lunching at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dining at the
Hermitage; he needed a great deal of money, but his uncle only allowed
him two thousand roubles a year, which was not enough, and for days
together he would run about Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying
is, looking for some one to borrow from--and this, too, amused him. He
had come to Kotlovitch to find in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest
from family life. At dinner, at supper, and on our walks, he talked
about his wife, about his mother, about his creditors, about the
bailiffs, and laughed at them; he laughed at himself and assured us
that, thanks to his talent for borrowing, he had made a great number of
agreeable acquaintances. He laughed without ceasing and we laughed too.
Moreover, in his company we spent our time differently. I was more
inclined to quiet, so to say idyllic pleasures; I liked fishing, evening
walks, gathering mushrooms; Lubkov preferred picnics, fireworks,
hunting. He used to get up picnics three times a week, and Ariadne, with
an earnest and inspired face, used to write a list of oysters,
champagne, sweets, and used to send me into Moscow to get them, without
inquiring, of course, whether I had money. And at the picnics there were
toasts and laughter, and again mirthful descriptions of how old his wife
was, what fat lap-dogs his mother had, and what charming people his
creditors were.
Lubkov was fond of nature, but he regarded it as something long familiar
and at the same time, in reality, infinitely beneath himself and created
for his pleasure. He would sometimes stand still before some magnificent
landscape and say: "It would be nice to have tea here."
One day, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he
nodded towards her and said:
"She's thin, and that's what I like; I don't like fat women."
This made me wince. I asked him not to speak like that about women
before me. He looked at me in surprise and said:
"What is there amiss in my liking thin women and not caring for fat
ones?"
I made no answer. Afterwards, being in very good spirits and a trifle
elevated, he said:
"I've noticed Ariadne Grigoryevna likes you. I can't understand why you
don't go in and win."
His words made me feel uncomfortable, and with some embarrassment I told
him how I looked at love and women.
"I don't know," he sighed; "to my thinking, a woman's a woman and a
man's a man. Ariadne Grigoryevna may be poetical and exalted, as you
say, but it doesn't follow that she must be superior to the laws of
nature. You see for yourself that she has reached the age when she must
have a husband or a lover. I respect women as much as you do, but I
don't think certain relations exclude poetry. Poetry's one thing and
love is another. It's just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of
nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite
another."
When Ariadne and I were fishing, Lubkov would lie on the sand close by
and make fun of me, or lecture me on the conduct of life.
"I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live without a love affair," he
would say. "You are young, handsome, interesting--in fact, you're a man
not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Och! I can't stand these
fellows who are old at twenty-eight! I'm nearly ten years older than you
are, and yet which of us is the younger? Ariadne Grigoryevna, which?"
"You, of course," Ariadne answered him.
And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which we
stared at our floats he went home, and she said, looking at me angrily:
"You're really not a man, but a mush, God forgive me! A man ought to be
able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad,
to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and
insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!"
She was angry in earnest, and went on:
"To succeed, a man must be resolute and bold. Lubkov is not so handsome
as you are, but he is more interesting. He will always succeed with
women because he's not like you; he's a man. . . ."
And there was actually a note of exasperation in her voice.
One day at supper she began saying, not addressing me, that if she were
a man she would not stagnate in the country, but would travel, would
spend the winter somewhere aboard--in Italy, for instance. Oh, Italy! At
this point my father unconsciously poured oil on the flames; he began
telling us at length about Italy, how splendid it was there, the
exquisite scenery, the museums. Ariadne suddenly conceived a burning
desire to go to Italy. She positively brought her fist down on the table
and her eyes flashed as she said: "I must go!"
After that came conversations every day about Italy: how splendid it
would be in Italy--ah, Italy!--oh, Italy! And when Ariadne looked at me
over her shoulder, from her cold and obstinate expression I saw that in
her dreams she had already conquered Italy with all its salons,
celebrated foreigners and tourists, and there was no holding her back
now. I advised her to wait a little, to put off her tour for a year or
two, but she frowned disdainfully and said:
"You're as prudent as an old woman!"
Lubkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very cheaply,
and he, too, would go to Italy and have a rest there from family life.
I behaved, I confess, as naïvely as a schoolboy.
Not from jealousy, but from a foreboding of something terrible and
extraordinary, I tried as far as possible not to leave them alone
together, and they made fun of me. For instance, when I went in they
would pretend they had just been kissing one another, and so on. But lo
and behold, one fine morning, her plump, white-skinned brother, the
spiritualist, made his appearance and expressed his desire to speak to
me alone.
He was a man without will; in spite of his education and his delicacy he
could never resist reading another person's letter, if it lay before him
on the table. And now he admitted that he had by chance read a letter of
Lubkov's to Ariadne.
"From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad. My
dear fellow, I am very much upset! Explain it to me for goodness' sake.
I can make nothing of it!"
As he said this he breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and
smelling of boiled beef.