"Psyche; it's a fine subject. But it won't go, somehow. I have to keep
painting from different models. Yesterday I was painting one with blue
legs. 'Why are your legs blue?' I asked her. 'It's my stockings stain
them,' she said. And you're still grinding! Lucky fellow! You have
patience."
"Medicine's a job one can't get on with without grinding."
"H'm! . . . Excuse me, Klotchkov, but you do live like a pig! It's awful
the way you live!"
"How do you mean? I can't help it. . . . I only get twelve roubles a
month from my father, and it's hard to live decently on that."
"Yes . . . yes . . ." said the artist, frowning with an air of disgust;
"but, still, you might live better. . . . An educated man is in duty
bound to have taste, isn't he? And goodness knows what it's like here!
The bed not made, the slops, the dirt . . . yesterday's porridge in the
plates. . . Tfoo!"
"That's true," said the student in confusion; "but Anyuta has had no
time to-day to tidy up; she's been busy all the while."
When Anyuta and the artist had gone out Klotchkov lay down on the sofa
and began learning, lying down; then he accidentally dropped asleep, and
waking up an hour later, propped his head on his fists and sank into
gloomy reflection. He recalled the artist's words that an educated man
was in duty bound to have taste, and his surroundings actually struck
him now as loathsome and revolting. He saw, as it were in his mind's
eye, his own future, when he would see his patients in his consulting-
room, drink tea in a large dining-room in the company of his wife, a
real lady. And now that slop-pail in which the cigarette ends were
swimming looked incredibly disgusting. Anyuta, too, rose before his
imagination--a plain, slovenly, pitiful figure . . . and he made up his
mind to part with her at once, at all costs.
When, on coming back from the artist's, she took off her coat, he got up
and said to her seriously:
"Look here, my good girl . . . sit down and listen. We must part! The
fact is, I don't want to live with you any longer."
Anyuta had come back from the artist's worn out and exhausted. Standing
so long as a model had made her face look thin and sunken, and her chin
sharper than ever. She said nothing in answer to the student's words,
only her lips began to tremble.
"You know we should have to part sooner or later, anyway," said the
student. "You're a nice, good girl, and not a fool; you'll understand. .
. ."
Anyuta put on her coat again, in silence wrapped up her embroidery in
paper, gathered together her needles and thread: she found the screw of
paper with the four lumps of sugar in the window, and laid it on the
table by the books.
"That's . . . your sugar . . ." she said softly, and turned away to
conceal her tears.
"Why are you crying?" asked Klotchkov.
He walked about the room in confusion, and said:
"You are a strange girl, really. . . . Why, you know we shall have to
part. We can't stay together for ever."
She had gathered together all her belongings, and turned to say good-bye
to him, and he felt sorry for her.
"Shall I let her stay on here another week?" he thought. "She really may
as well stay, and I'll tell her to go in a week;" and vexed at his own
weakness, he shouted to her roughly:
"Come, why are you standing there? If you are going, go; and if you
don't want to, take off your coat and stay! You can stay!"
Anyuta took off her coat, silently, stealthily, then blew her nose also
stealthily, sighed, and noiselessly returned to her invariable position
on her stool by the window.
The student drew his textbook to him and began again pacing from corner
to corner. "The right lung consists of three parts," he repeated; "the
upper part, on anterior wall of thorax, reaches the fourth or fifth rib
. . . ."
In the passage some one shouted at the top of his voice: "Grigory! The
samovar!"
THE TWO VOLODYAS
"LET me; I want to drive myself! I'll sit by the driver!" Sofya Lvovna
said in a loud voice. "Wait a minute, driver; I'll get up on the box
beside you."
She stood up in the sledge, and her husband, Vladimir Nikititch, and the
friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, held her arms to prevent
her falling. The three horses were galloping fast.
"I said you ought not to have given her brandy," Vladimir Nikititch
whispered to his companion with vexation. "What a fellow you are,
really!"
The Colonel knew by experience that in women like his wife, Sofya
Lvovna, after a little too much wine, turbulent gaiety was followed by
hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they got
home, instead of being able to sleep, he would have to be administering
compresses and drops.
"Wo!" cried Sofya Lvovna. "I want to drive myself!"
She felt genuinely gay and triumphant. For the last two months, ever
since her wedding, she had been tortured by the thought that she had
married Colonel Yagitch from worldly motives and, as it is said, _par
dépit_; but that evening, at the restaurant, she had suddenly become
convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four
years, he was so slim, agile, supple, he made puns and hummed to the
gipsies' tunes so charmingly. Really, the older men were nowadays a
thousand times more interesting than the young. It seemed as though age
and youth had changed parts. The Colonel was two years older than her
father, but could there be any importance in that if, honestly speaking,
there were infinitely more vitality, go, and freshness in him than in
herself, though she was only twenty-three?
"Oh, my darling!" she thought. "You are wonderful!"
She had become convinced in the restaurant, too, that not a spark of her
old feeling remained. For the friend of her childhood, Vladimir
Mihalovitch, or simply Volodya, with whom only the day before she had
been madly, miserably in love, she now felt nothing but complete
indifference. All that evening he had seemed to her spiritless, torpid,
uninteresting, and insignificant, and the _sangfroid_ with which he
habitually avoided paying at restaurants on this occasion revolted her,
and she had hardly been able to resist saying, "If you are poor, you
should stay at home." The Colonel paid for all.
Perhaps because trees, telegraph posts, and drifts of snow kept flitting
past her eyes, all sorts of disconnected ideas came rushing into her
mind. She reflected: the bill at the restaurant had been a hundred and
twenty roubles, and a hundred had gone to the gipsies, and to-morrow she
could fling away a thousand roubles if she liked; and only two months
ago, before her wedding, she had not had three roubles of her own, and
had to ask her father for every trifle. What a change in her life!
Her thoughts were in a tangle. She recalled, how, when she was a child
of ten, Colonel Yagitch, now her husband, used to make love to her aunt,
and every one in the house said that he had ruined her. And her aunt
had, in fact, often come down to dinner with her eyes red from crying,
and was always going off somewhere; and people used to say of her that
the poor thing could find no peace anywhere. He had been very handsome
in those days, and had an extraordinary reputation as a lady-killer. So
much so that he was known all over the town, and it was said of him that
he paid a round of visits to his adorers every day like a doctor
visiting his patients. And even now, in spite of his grey hair, his
wrinkles, and his spectacles, his thin face looked handsome, especially
in profile.
Sofya Lvovna's father was an army doctor, and had at one time served in
the same regiment with Colonel Yagitch. Volodya's father was an army
doctor too, and he, too, had once been in the same regiment as her
father and Colonel Yagitch. In spite of many amatory adventures, often
very complicated and disturbing, Volodya had done splendidly at the
university, and had taken a very good degree. Now he was specialising in
foreign literature, and was said to be writing a thesis. He lived with
his father, the army doctor, in the barracks, and had no means of his
own, though he was thirty. As children Sofya and he had lived under the
same roof, though in different flats. He often came to play with her,
and they had dancing and French lessons together. But when he grew up
into a graceful, remarkably handsome young man, she began to feel shy of
him, and then fell madly in love with him, and had loved him right up to
the time when she was married to Yagitch. He, too, had been renowned for
his success with women almost from the age of fourteen, and the ladies
who deceived their husbands on his account excused themselves by saying
that he was only a boy. Some one had told a story of him lately that
when he was a student living in lodgings so as to be near the
university, it always happened if one knocked at his door, that one
heard his footstep, and then a whispered apology: "_Pardon, je ne suis
pas setul._" Yagitch was delighted with him, and blessed him as a worthy
successor, as Derchavin blessed Pushkin; he appeared to be fond of him.
They would play billiards or picquet by the hour together without
uttering a word, if Yagitch drove out on any expedition he always took
Volodya with him, and Yagitch was the only person Volodya initiated into
the mysteries of his thesis. In earlier days, when Yagitch was rather
younger, they had often been in the position of rivals, but they had
never been jealous of one another. In the circle in which they moved
Yagitch was nicknamed Big Volodya, and his friend Little Volodya.
Besides Big Volodya, Little Volodya, and Sofya Lvovna, there was a
fourth person in the sledge--Margarita Alexandrovna, or, as every one
called her, Rita, a cousin of Madame Yagitch--a very pale girl over
thirty, with black eyebrows and a pince-nez, who was for ever smoking
cigarettes, even in the bitterest frost, and who always had her knees
and the front of her blouse covered with cigarette ash. She spoke
through her nose, drawling every word, was of a cold temperament, could
drink any amount of wine and liquor without being drunk, and used to
tell scandalous anecdotes in a languid and tasteless way. At home she
spent her days reading thick magazines, covering them with cigarette
ash, or eating frozen apples.
"Sonia, give over fooling," she said, drawling. "It's really silly."
As they drew near the city gates they went more slowly, and began to
pass people and houses. Sofya Lvovna subsided, nestled up to her
husband, and gave herself up to her thoughts. Little Volodya sat
opposite. By now her light-hearted and cheerful thoughts were mingled
with gloomy ones. She thought that the man sitting opposite knew that
she loved him, and no doubt he believed the gossip that she married the
Colonel _par dépit_. She had never told him of her love; she had not
wanted him to know, and had done her best to hide her feeling, but from
her face she knew that he understood her perfectly --and her pride
suffered. But what was most humiliating in her position was that, since
her wedding, Volodya had suddenly begun to pay her attention, which he
had never done before, spending hours with her, sitting silent or
chattering about trifles; and even now in the sledge, though he did not
talk to her, he touched her foot with his and pressed her hand a little.
Evidently that was all he wanted, that she should be married; and it was
evident that he despised her and that she only excited in him an
interest of a special kind as though she were an immoral and
disreputable woman. And when the feeling of triumph and love for her
husband were mingled in her soul with humiliation and wounded pride, she
was overcome by a spirit of defiance, and longed to sit on the box, to
shout and whistle to the horses.
Just as they passed the nunnery the huge hundred-ton bell rang out. Rita
crossed herself.
"Our Olga is in that nunnery," said Sofya Lvovna, and she, too, crossed
herself and shuddered.
"Why did she go into the nunnery?" said the Colonel.
"_Par dépit_," Rita answered crossly, with obvious allusion to Sofya's
marrying Yagitch. "_Par dépit_ is all the fashion nowadays. Defiance of
all the world. She was always laughing, a desperate flirt, fond of
nothing but balls and young men, and all of a sudden off she went--to
surprise every one!"
"That's not true," said Volodya, turning down the collar of his fur coat
and showing his handsome face. "It wasn't a case of _par dépit_; it was
simply horrible, if you like. Her brother Dmitri was sent to penal
servitude, and they don't know where he is now. And her mother died of
grief."
He turned up his collar again.
"Olga did well," he added in a muffled voice. "Living as an adopted
child, and with such a paragon as Sofya Lvovna,--one must take that into
consideration too!"
Sofya Lvovna heard a tone of contempt in his voice, and longed to say
something rude to him, but she said nothing. The spirit of defiance came
over her again; she stood up again and shouted in a tearful voice:
"I want to go to the early service! Driver, back! I want to see Olga."
They turned back. The nunnery bell had a deep note, and Sofya Lvovna
fancied there was something in it that reminded her of Olga and her
life. The other church bells began ringing too. When the driver stopped
the horses, Sofya Lvovna jumped out of the sledge and, unescorted and
alone, went quickly up to the gate.
"Make haste, please!" her husband called to her. "It's late already."
She went in at the dark gateway, then by the avenue that led from the
gate to the chief church. The snow crunched under her feet, and the
ringing was just above her head, and seemed to vibrate through her whole
being. Here was the church door, then three steps down, and an ante-room
with ikons of the saints on both sides, a fragrance of juniper and
incense, another door, and a dark figure opening it and bowing very low.
The service had not yet begun. One nun was walking by the ikon-screen
and lighting the candles on the tall standard candlesticks, another was
lighting the chandelier. Here and there, by the columns and the side
chapels, there stood black, motionless figures. "I suppose they must
remain standing as they are now till the morning," thought Sofya Lvovna,
and it seemed to her dark, cold, and dreary--drearier than a graveyard.
She looked with a feeling of dreariness at the still, motionless figures
and suddenly felt a pang at her heart. For some reason, in one short
nun, with thin shoulders and a black kerchief on her head, she
recognised Olga, though when Olga went into the nunnery she had been
plump and had looked taller. Hesitating and extremely agitated, Sofya
Lvovna went up to the nun, and looking over her shoulder into her face,
recognised her as Olga.
"Olga!" she cried, throwing up her hands, and could not speak from
emotion. "Olga!"
The nun knew her at once; she raised her eyebrows in surprise, and her
pale, freshly washed face, and even, it seemed, the white headcloth that
she wore under her wimple, beamed with pleasure.
"What a miracle from God!" she said, and she, too, threw up her thin,
pale little hands.
Sofya Lvovna hugged her and kissed her warmly, and was afraid as she did
so that she might smell of spirits.
"We were just driving past, and we thought of you," she said, breathing
hard, as though she had been running. "Dear me! How pale you are! I . .
. I'm very glad to see you. Well, tell me how are you? Are you dull?"
Sofya Lvovna looked round at the other nuns, and went on in a subdued
voice:
"There've been so many changes at home . . . you know, I'm married to
Colonel Yagitch. You remember him, no doubt. . . . I am very happy with
him."
"Well, thank God for that. And is your father quite well?"
"Yes, he is quite well. He often speaks of you. You must come and see us
during the holidays, Olga, won't you?"
"I will come," said Olga, and she smiled. "I'll come on the second day."
Sofya Lvovna began crying, she did not know why, and for a minute she
shed tears in silence, then she wiped her eyes and said:
"Rita will be very sorry not to have seen you. She is with us too. And
Volodya's here. They are close to the gate. How pleased they'd be if
you'd come out and see them. Let's go out to them; the service hasn't
begun yet."
"Let us," Olga agreed. She crossed herself three times and went out with
Sofya Lvovna to the entrance.
"So you say you're happy, Sonitchka?" she asked when they came out at
the gate.
"Very."
"Well, thank God for that."
The two Volodyas, seeing the nun, got out of the sledge and greeted her
respectfully. Both were visibly touched by her pale face and her black
monastic dress, and both were pleased that she had remembered them and
come to greet them. That she might not be cold, Sofya Lvovna wrapped her
up in a rug and put one half of her fur coat round her. Her tears had
relieved and purified her heart, and she was glad that this noisy,
restless, and, in reality, impure night should unexpectedly end so
purely and serenely. And to keep Olga by her a little longer she
suggested:
"Let us take her for a drive! Get in, Olga; we'll go a little way."
The men expected the nun to refuse--saints don't dash about in three-
horse sledges; but to their surprise, she consented and got into the
sledge. And while the horses were galloping to the city gate all were
silent, and only tried to make her warm and comfortable, and each of
them was thinking of what she had been in the past and what she was now.
Her face was now passionless, inexpressive, cold, pale, and transparent,
as though there were water, not blood, in her veins. And two or three
years ago she had been plump and rosy, talking about her suitors and
laughing at every trifle.
Near the city gate the sledge turned back; when it stopped ten minutes
later near the nunnery, Olga got out of the sledge. The bell had begun
to ring more rapidly.
"The Lord save you," said Olga, and she bowed low as nuns do.
"Mind you come, Olga."
"I will, I will."
She went and quickly disappeared through the gateway. And when after
that they drove on again, Sofya Lvovna felt very sad. Every one was
silent. She felt dispirited and weak all over. That she should have made
a nun get into a sledge and drive in a company hardly sober seemed to
her now stupid, tactless, and almost sacrilegious. As the intoxication
passed off, the desire to deceive herself passed away also. It was clear
to her now that she did not love her husband, and never could love him,
and that it all had been foolishness and nonsense. She had married him
from interested motives, because, in the words of her school friends, he
was madly rich, and because she was afraid of becoming an old maid like
Rita, and because she was sick of her father, the doctor, and wanted to
annoy Volodya.
If she could have imagined when she got married, that it would be so
oppressive, so dreadful, and so hideous, she would not have consented to
the marriage for all the wealth in the world. But now there was no
setting it right. She must make up her mind to it.
They reached home. Getting into her warm, soft bed, and pulling the bed-
clothes over her, Sofya Lvovna recalled the dark church, the smell of
incense, and the figures by the columns, and she felt frightened at the
thought that these figures would be standing there all the while she was
asleep. The early service would be very, very long; then there would be
"the hours," then the mass, then the service of the day.
"But of course there is a God--there certainly is a God; and I shall
have to die, so that sooner or later one must think of one's soul, of
eternal life, like Olga. Olga is saved now; she has settled all
questions for herself. . . . But if there is no God? Then her life is
wasted. But how is it wasted? Why is it wasted?"
And a minute later the thought came into her mind again:
"There is a God; death must come; one must think of one's soul. If Olga
were to see death before her this minute she would not be afraid. She is
prepared. And the great thing is that she has already solved the problem
of life for herself. There is a God . . . yes . . . . But is there no
other solution except going into a monastery? To go into the monastery
means to renounce life, to spoil it . . . ."
Sofya Lvovna began to feel rather frightened; she hid her head under her
pillow.
"I mustn't think about it," she whispered. "I mustn't. . . ."
Yagitch was walking about on the carpet in the next room with a soft
jingle of spurs, thinking about something. The thought occurred to Sofya
Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only for one reason--that
his name, too, was Vladimir. She sat up in bed and called tenderly:
"Volodya!"
"What is it?" her husband responded.
"Nothing."
She lay down again. She heard a bell, perhaps the same nunnery bell.
Again she thought of the vestibule and the dark figures, and thoughts of
God and of inevitable death strayed through her mind, and she covered
her ears that she might not hear the bell. She thought that before old
age and death there would be a long, long life before her, and that day
by day she would have to put up with being close to a man she did not
love, who had just now come into the bedroom and was getting into bed,
and would have to stifle in her heart her hopeless love for the other
young, fascinating, and, as she thought, exceptional man. She looked at
her husband and tried to say good-night to him, but suddenly burst out
crying instead. She was vexed with herself.
"Well, now then for the music!" said Yagitch.
She was not pacified till ten o'clock in the morning. She left off
crying and trembling all over, but she began to have a splitting
headache. Yagitch was in haste to go to the late mass, and in the next
room was grumbling at his orderly, who was helping him to dress. He came
into the bedroom once with the soft jingle of his spurs to fetch
something, and then a second time wearing his epaulettes, and his orders
on his breast, limping slightly from rheumatism; and it struck Sofya
Lvovna that he looked and walked like a bird of prey.
She heard Yagitch ring the telephone bell.
"Be so good as to put me on to the Vassilevsky barracks," he said; and a
minute later: "Vassilevsky barracks? Please ask Doctor Salimovitch to
come to the telephone . . ." And a minute later: "With whom am I
speaking? Is it you, Volodya? Delighted. Ask your father to come to us
at once, dear boy; my wife is rather shattered after yesterday. Not at
home, you say? H'm! . . . Thank you. Very good. I shall be much obliged
. . . _Merci_."
Yagitch came into the bedroom for the third time, bent down to his wife,
made the sign of the cross over her, gave her his hand to kiss (the
women who had been in love with him used to kiss his hand and he had got
into the habit of it), and saying that he should be back to dinner, went
out.
At twelve o'clock the maid came in to announce that Vladimir Mihalovitch
had arrived. Sofya Lvovna, staggering with fatigue and headache,
hurriedly put on her marvellous new lilac dressing-gown trimmed with
fur, and hastily did up her hair after a fashion. She was conscious of
an inexpressible tenderness in her heart, and was trembling with joy and
with fear that he might go away. She wanted nothing but to look at him.
Volodya came dressed correctly for calling, in a swallow-tail coat and
white tie. When Sofya Lvovna came in he kissed her hand and expressed
his genuine regret that she was ill. Then when they had sat down, he
admired her dressing-gown.
"I was upset by seeing Olga yesterday," she said. "At first I felt it
dreadful, but now I envy her. She is like a rock that cannot be
shattered; there is no moving her. But was there no other solution for
her, Volodya? Is burying oneself alive the only solution of the problem
of life? Why, it's death, not life!"
At the thought of Olga, Volodya's face softened.
"Here, you are a clever man, Volodya," said Sofya Lvovna. "Show me how
to do what Olga has done. Of course, I am not a believer and should not
go into a nunnery, but one can do something equivalent. Life isn't easy
for me," she added after a brief pause. "Tell me what to do. . . . Tell
me something I can believe in. Tell me something, if it's only one
word."
"One word? By all means: tararaboomdeeay."
"Volodya, why do you despise me?" she asked hotly. "You talk to me in a
special, fatuous way, if you'll excuse me, not as one talks to one's
friends and women one respects. You are so good at your work, you are
fond of science; why do you never talk of it to me? Why is it? Am I not
good enough?"
Volodya frowned with annoyance and said: