fascinating! She waked up every morning with the one thought of
"pleasing"! It was the aim and object of her life. If I had told her
that in such a house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not
attracted by her, it would have caused her real suffering. She wanted
every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I
was in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms
gave her the same sort of satisfaction that visitors used to feel in
tournaments. My subjection was not enough, and at nights, stretched out
like a tigress, uncovered--she was always too hot--she would read the
letters sent her by Lubkov; he besought her to return to Russia, vowing
if she did not he would rob or murder some one to get the money to come
to her. She hated him, but his passionate, slavish letters excited her.
She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that if
somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully
she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have vanquished all
Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended
me, and observing this, she would, when she was angry, to vex me, say
all sorts of vulgar things, taunting me. One day when we were at the
summer villa of a lady of our acquaintance, and she lost her temper, she
even went so far as to say: "If you don't leave off boring me with your
sermons, I'll undress this minute and lie naked here on these flowers."
Often looking at her asleep, or eating, or trying to assume a naïve
expression, I wondered why that extraordinary beauty, grace, and
intelligence had been given her by God. Could it simply be for lolling
in bed, eating and lying, lying endlessly? And was she intelligent
really? She was afraid of three candles in a row, of the number
thirteen, was terrified of spells and bad dreams. She argued about free
love and freedom in general like a bigoted old woman, declared that
Boleslav Markevitch was a better writer than Turgenev. But she was
diabolically cunning and sharp, and knew how to seem a highly educated,
advanced person in company.
Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant or
kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to read
about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.
For the life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great deal of
money. My poor father sent me his pension, all the little sums he
received, borrowed for me wherever he could, and when one day he
answered me: "Non habeo," I sent him a desperate telegram in which I
besought him to mortgage the estate. A little later I begged him to get
money somehow on a second mortgage. He did this too without a murmur and
sent me every farthing. Ariadne despised the practical side of life; all
this was no concern of hers, and when flinging away thousands of francs
to satisfy her mad desires I groaned like an old tree, she would be
singing "Addio bella Napoli" with a light heart.
Little by little I grew cold to her and began to be ashamed of our tie.
I am not fond of pregnancy and confinements, but now I sometimes dreamed
of a child who would have been at least a formal justification of our
life. That I might not be completely disgusted with myself, I began
reading and visiting museums and galleries, gave up drinking and took to
eating very little. If one keeps oneself well in hand from morning to
night, one's heart seems lighter. I began to bore Ariadne too. The
people with whom she won her triumphs were, by the way, all of the
middling sort; as before, there were no ambassadors, there was no salon,
the money did not run to it, and this mortified her and made her sob,
and she announced to me at last that perhaps she would not be against
our returning to Russia.
And here we are on our way. For the last few months she has been
zealously corresponding with her brother; she evidently has some secret
projects, but what they are--God knows! I am sick of trying to fathom
her underhand schemes! But we're going, not to the country, but to Yalta
and afterwards to the Caucasus. She can only exist now at watering-
places, and if you knew how I hate all these watering-places, how
suffocated and ashamed I am in them. If I could be in the country now!
If I could only be working now, earning my bread by the sweat of my
brow, atoning for my follies. I am conscious of a superabundance of
energy and I believe that if I were to put that energy to work I could
redeem my estate in five years. But now, as you see, there is a
complication. Here we're not abroad, but in mother Russia; we shall have
to think of lawful wedlock. Of course, all attraction is over; there is
no trace left of my old love, but, however that may be, I am bound in
honour to marry her.
----
Shamohin, excited by his story, went below with me and we continued
talking about women. It was late. It appeared that he and I were in the
same cabin.
"So far it is only in the village that woman has not fallen behind man,"
said Shamohin. "There she thinks and feels just as man does, and
struggles with nature in the name of culture as zealously as he. In the
towns the woman of the bourgeois or intellectual class has long since
fallen behind, and is returning to her primitive condition. She is half
a human beast already, and, thanks to her, a great deal of what had been
won by human genius has been lost again; the woman gradually disappears
and in her place is the primitive female. This dropping-back on the part
of the educated woman is a real danger to culture; in her retrogressive
movement she tries to drag man after her and prevents him from moving
forward. That is incontestable."
I asked: "Why generalise? Why judge of all women from Ariadne alone? The
very struggle of women for education and sexual equality, which I look
upon as a struggle for justice, precludes any hypothesis of a retrograde
movement."
But Shamohin scarcely listened to me and he smiled distrustfully. He was
a passionate, convinced misogynist, and it was impossible to alter his
convictions.
"Oh, nonsense!" he interrupted. "When once a woman sees in me, not a
man, not an equal, but a male, and her one anxiety all her life is to
attract me--that is, to take possession of me--how can one talk of their
rights? Oh, don't you believe them; they are very, very cunning! We men
make a great stir about their emancipation, but they don't care about
their emancipation at all, they only pretend to care about it; they are
horribly cunning things, horribly cunning!"
I began to feel sleepy and weary of discussion. I turned over with my
face to the wall.
"Yes," I heard as I fell asleep--"yes, and it's our education that's at
fault, sir. In our towns, the whole education and bringing up of women
in its essence tends to develop her into the human beast --that is, to
make her attractive to the male and able to vanquish him. Yes, indeed"--
Shamohiri sighed--"little girls ought to be taught and brought up with
boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained
so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or
she always thinks she's in the right. Instil into a little girl from her
cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover,
but her neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think
logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her brain weighs
less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the
sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The
apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller
size than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in
the general struggle for existence. We must give up our attitude to the
physiological aspect, too--to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in
the first place women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all
women have babies; and, thirdly, a normal countrywoman works in the
fields up to the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then
there ought to be absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a
lady his chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her
repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family
helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water--"
I heard no more, for I fell asleep.
Next morning when we were approaching Sevastopol, it was damp,
unpleasant weather; the ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me,
brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea, men with their coat-
collars turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below;
a young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the
Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with
the expression of a naughty, fretful child:
"Jean, your birdie's been sea-sick."
Afterwards when I was at Yalta I saw the same beautiful lady dashing
about on horseback with a couple of officers hardly able to keep up with
her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a Phrygian cap,
sketching on the sea-front with a great crowd admiring her a little way
off. I too was introduced to her. She pressed my hand with great warmth,
and looking at me ecstatically, thanked me in honeyed cadences for the
pleasure I had given her by my writings.
"Don't you believe her," Shamohin whispered to me, "she has never read a
word of them."
When I was walking on the sea-front in the early evening Shamohin met me
with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties.
"Prince Maktuev is here!" he said joyfully. "He came yesterday with her
brother, the spiritualist! Now I understand what she was writing to him
about! Oh, Lord!" he went on, gazing up to heaven, and pressing his
parcels to his bosom. "If she hits it off with the prince, it means
freedom, then I can go back to the country with my father!"
And he ran on.
"I begin to believe in spirits," he called to me, looking back. "The
spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the truth! Oh, if
only it is so!"
----
The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamohin's story ended I
don't know.
POLINKA
IT is one o'clock in the afternoon. Shopping is at its height at the
"Nouveauté's de Paris," a drapery establishment in one of the Arcades.
There is a monotonous hum of shopmen's voices, the hum one hears at
school when the teacher sets the boys to learn something by heart. This
regular sound is not interrupted by the laughter of lady customers nor
the slam of the glass door, nor the scurrying of the boys.
Polinka, a thin fair little person whose mother is the head of a
dressmaking establishment, is standing in the middle of the shop looking
about for some one. A dark-browed boy runs up to her and asks, looking
at her very gravely:
"What is your pleasure, madam?"
"Nikolay Timofeitch always takes my order," answers Polinka.
Nikolay Timofeitch, a graceful dark young man, fashionably dressed, with
frizzled hair and a big pin in his cravat, has already cleared a place
on the counter and is craning forward, looking at Polinka with a smile.
"Morning, Pelagea Sergeevna!" he cries in a pleasant, hearty baritone
voice. "What can I do for you?"
"Good-morning!" says Polinka, going up to him. "You see, I'm back again.
. . . Show me some gimp, please."
"Gimp--for what purpose?"
"For a bodice trimming--to trim a whole dress, in fact."
"Certainly."
Nickolay Timofeitch lays several kinds of gimp before Polinka; she looks
at the trimmings languidly and begins bargaining over them.
"Oh, come, a rouble's not dear," says the shopman persuasively, with a
condescending smile. "It's a French trimming, pure silk. . . . We have a
commoner sort, if you like, heavier. That's forty-five kopecks a yard;
of course, it's nothing like the same quality."
"I want a bead corselet, too, with gimp buttons," says Polinka, bending
over the gimp and sighing for some reason. "And have you any bead motifs
to match?"
"Yes."
Polinka bends still lower over the counter and asks softly:
"And why did you leave us so early on Thursday, Nikolay Timofeitch?"
"Hm! It's queer you noticed it," says the shopman, with a smirk. "You
were so taken up with that fine student that . . . it's queer you
noticed it!"
Polinka flushes crimson and remains mute. With a nervous quiver in his
fingers the shopman closes the boxes, and for no sort of object piles
them one on the top of another. A moment of silence follows.
"I want some bead lace, too," says Polinka, lifting her eyes guiltily to
the shopman.
"What sort? Black or coloured? Bead lace on tulle is the most
fashionable trimming."
"And how much is it?"
"The black's from eighty kopecks and the coloured from two and a half
roubles. I shall never come and see you again," Nikolay Timofeitch adds
in an undertone.
"Why?"
"Why? It's very simple. You must understand that yourself. Why should I
distress myself? It's a queer business! Do you suppose it's a pleasure
to me to see that student carrying on with you? I see it all and I
understand. Ever since autumn he's been hanging about you and you go for
a walk with him almost every day; and when he is with you, you gaze at
him as though he were an angel. You are in love with him; there's no one
to beat him in your eyes. Well, all right, then, it's no good talking."
Polinka remains dumb and moves her finger on the counter in
embarrassment.
"I see it all," the shopman goes on. "What inducement have I to come and
see you? I've got some pride. It's not every one likes to play
gooseberry. What was it you asked for?"
"Mamma told me to get a lot of things, but I've forgotten. I want some
feather trimming too."
"What kind would you like?"
"The best, something fashionable."
"The most fashionable now are real bird feathers. If you want the most
fashionable colour, it's heliotrope or _kanak_--that is, claret with a
yellow shade in it. We have an immense choice. And what all this affair
is going to lead to, I really don't understand. Here you are in love,
and how is it to end?"
Patches of red come into Nikolay Timofeitch's face round his eyes. He
crushes the soft feather trimming in his hand and goes on muttering:
"Do you imagine he'll marry you--is that it? You'd better drop any such
fancies. Students are forbidden to marry. And do you suppose he comes to
see you with honourable intentions? A likely idea! Why, these fine
students don't look on us as human beings . . . they only go to see
shopkeepers and dressmakers to laugh at their ignorance and to drink.
They're ashamed to drink at home and in good houses, but with simple
uneducated people like us they don't care what any one thinks; they'd be
ready to stand on their heads. Yes! Well, which feather trimming will
you take? And if he hangs about and carries on with you, we know what he
is after. . . . When he's a doctor or a lawyer he'll remember you: 'Ah,'
he'll say, 'I used to have a pretty fair little thing! I wonder where
she is now?' Even now I bet you he boasts among his friends that he's
got his eye on a little dressmaker."
Polinka sits down and gazes pensively at the pile of white boxes.
"No, I won't take the feather trimming," she sighs. "Mamma had better
choose it for herself; I may get the wrong one. I want six yards of
fringe for an overcoat, at forty kopecks the yard. For the same coat I
want cocoa-nut buttons, perforated, so they can be sown on firmly. . .
."
Nikolay Timofeitch wraps up the fringe and the buttons. She looks at him
guiltily and evidently expects him to go on talking, but he remains
sullenly silent while he tidies up the feather trimming.
"I mustn't forget some buttons for a dressing-gown . . ." she says after
an interval of silence, wiping her pale lips with a handkerchief.
"What kind?"
"It's for a shopkeeper's wife, so give me something rather striking."
"Yes, if it's for a shopkeeper's wife, you'd better have something
bright. Here are some buttons. A combination of colours--red, blue, and
the fashionable gold shade. Very glaring. The more refined prefer dull
black with a bright border. But I don't understand. Can't you see for
yourself? What can these . . . walks lead to?"
"I don't know," whispers Polinka, and she bends over the buttons; "I
don't know myself what's come to me, Nikolay Timofeitch."
A solid shopman with whiskers forces his way behind Nikolay Timofeitch's
back, squeezing him to the counter, and beaming with the choicest
gallantry, shouts:
"Be so kind, madam, as to step into this department. We have three kinds
of jerseys: plain, braided, and trimmed with beads! Which may I have the
pleasure of showing you?"
At the same time a stout lady passes by Polinka, pronouncing in a rich,
deep voice, almost a bass:
"They must be seamless, with the trade mark stamped in them, please."
"Pretend to be looking at the things," Nikolay Timofeitch whispers,
bending down to Polinka with a forced smile. "Dear me, you do look pale
and ill; you are quite changed. He'll throw you over, Pelagea Sergeevna!
Or if he does marry you, it won't be for love but from hunger; he'll be
tempted by your money. He'll furnish himself a nice home with your
dowry, and then be ashamed of you. He'll keep you out of sight of his
friends and visitors, because you're uneducated. He'll call you 'my
dummy of a wife.' You wouldn't know how to behave in a doctor's or
lawyer's circle. To them you're a dressmaker, an ignorant creature."
"Nikolay Timofeitch!" somebody shouts from the other end of the shop.
"The young lady here wants three yards of ribbon with a metal stripe.
Have we any?"
Nikolay Timofeitch turns in that direction, smirks and shouts:
"Yes, we have! Ribbon with a metal stripe, ottoman with a satin stripe,
and satin with a moiré stripe!"
"Oh, by the way, I mustn't forget, Olga asked me to get her a pair of
stays!" says Polinka.
"There are tears in your eyes," says Nikolay Timofeitch in dismay.
"What's that for? Come to the corset department, I'll screen you --it
looks awkward."
With a forced smile and exaggeratedly free and easy manner, the shopman
rapidly conducts Polinka to the corset department and conceals her from
the public eye behind a high pyramid of boxes.
"What sort of corset may I show you?" he asks aloud, whispering
immediately: "Wipe your eyes!"
"I want . . . I want . . . size forty-eight centimetres. Only she wanted
one, lined . . . with real whalebone . . . I must talk to you, Nikolay
Timofeitch. Come to-day!"
"Talk? What about? There's nothing to talk about."
"You are the only person who . . . cares about me, and I've no one to
talk to but you."
"These are not reed or steel, but real whalebone. . . . What is there
for us to talk about? It's no use talking. . . . You are going for a
walk with him to-day, I suppose?"
"Yes; I . . . I am."
"Then what's the use of talking? Talk won't help. . . . You are in love,
aren't you?"
"Yes . . ." Polinka whispers hesitatingly, and big tears gush from her
eyes.
"What is there to say?" mutters Nikolay Timofeitch, shrugging his
shoulders nervously and turning pale. "There's no need of talk. . . .
Wipe your eyes, that's all. I . . . I ask for nothing."
At that moment a tall, lanky shopman comes up to the pyramid of boxes,
and says to his customer:
"Let me show you some good elastic garters that do not impede the
circulation, certified by medical authority . . ."
Nikolay Timofeitch screens Polinka, and, trying to conceal her emotion
and his own, wrinkles his face into a smile and says aloud:
"There are two kinds of lace, madam: cotton and silk! Oriental, English,
Valenciennes, crochet, torchon, are cotton. And rococo, soutache,
Cambray, are silk. . . . For God's sake, wipe your eyes! They're coming
this way!"
And seeing that her tears are still gushing he goes on louder than ever:
"Spanish, Rococo, soutache, Cambray . . . stockings, thread, cotton,
silk . . ."
ANYUTA
IN the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan
Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro,
zealously conning his anatomy. His mouth was dry and his forehead
perspiring from the unceasing effort to learn it by heart.
In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat on a stool the girl who
shared his room--Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very
pale with mild grey eyes. Sitting with bent back she was busy
embroidering with red thread the collar of a man's shirt. She was
working against time. . . . The clock in the passage struck two
drowsily, yet the little room had not been put to rights for the
morning. Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, books, clothes, a
big filthy slop-pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette ends were
swimming, and the litter on the floor--all seemed as though purposely
jumbled together in one confusion. . . .
"The right lung consists of three parts . . ." Klotchkov repeated.
"Boundaries! Upper part on anterior wall of thorax reaches the fourth or
fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib . . . behind to the
_spina scapulæ_. . ."
Klotchkov raised his eyes to the ceiling, striving to visualise what he
had just read. Unable to form a clear picture of it, he began feeling
his upper ribs through his waistcoat.
"These ribs are like the keys of a piano," he said. "One must
familiarise oneself with them somehow, if one is not to get muddled over
them. One must study them in the skeleton and the living body . . . . I
say, Anyuta, let me pick them out."
Anyuta put down her sewing, took off her blouse, and straightened
herself up. Klotchkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began counting
her ribs.
"H'm! . . . One can't feel the first rib; it's behind the shoulder-blade
. . . . This must be the second rib. . . . Yes . . . this is the third .
. . this is the fourth. . . . H'm! . . . yes. . . . Why are you
wriggling?"
"Your fingers are cold!"
"Come, come . . . it won't kill you. Don't twist about. That must be the
third rib, then . . . this is the fourth. . . . You look such a skinny
thing, and yet one can hardly feel your ribs. That's the second . . .
that's the third. . . . Oh, this is muddling, and one can't see it
clearly. . . . I must draw it. . . . Where's my crayon?"
Klotchkov took his crayon and drew on Anyuta's chest several parallel
lines corresponding with the ribs.
"First-rate. That's all straightforward. . . . Well, now I can sound
you. Stand up!"
Anyuta stood up and raised her chin. Klotchkov began sounding her, and
was so absorbed in this occupation that he did not notice how Anyuta's
lips, nose, and fingers turned blue with cold. Anyuta shivered, and was
afraid the student, noticing it, would leave off drawing and sounding
her, and then, perhaps, might fail in his exam.
"Now it's all clear," said Klotchkov when he had finished. "You sit like
that and don't rub off the crayon, and meanwhile I'll learn up a little
more."
And the student again began walking to and fro, repeating to himself.
Anyuta, with black stripes across her chest, looking as though she had
been tattooed, sat thinking, huddled up and shivering with cold. She
said very little as a rule; she was always silent, thinking and
thinking. . . .
In the six or seven years of her wanderings from one furnished room to
another, she had known five students like Klotchkov. Now they had all
finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and, of course,
like respectable people, had long ago forgotten her. One of them was
living in Paris, two were doctors, the fourth was an artist, and the
fifth was said to be already a professor. Klotchkov was the sixth. . . .
Soon he, too, would finish his studies and go out into the world. There
was a fine future before him, no doubt, and Klotchkov probably would
become a great man, but the present was anything but bright; Klotchkov
had no tobacco and no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left.
She must make haste and finish her embroidery, take it to the woman who
had ordered it, and with the quarter rouble she would get for it, buy
tea and tobacco.
"Can I come in?" asked a voice at the door.
Anyuta quickly threw a woollen shawl over her shoulders. Fetisov, the
artist, walked in.
"I have come to ask you a favour," he began, addressing Klotchkov, and
glaring like a wild beast from under the long locks that hung over his
brow. "Do me a favour; lend me your young lady just for a couple of
hours! I'm painting a picture, you see, and I can't get on without a
model."
"Oh, with pleasure," Klotchkov agreed. "Go along, Anyuta."
"The things I've had to put up with there," Anyuta murmured softly.
"Rubbish! The man's asking you for the sake of art, and not for any sort
of nonsense. Why not help him if you can?"
Anyuta began dressing.