“As a daughter she no longer exists for me. Can’t you understand? She
simply doesn’t exist. Still, I cannot possibly leave her to the charity
of strangers. I will arrange things so that she can live as she pleases,
but I do not wish to hear of her. Who would ever have thought . . . the
horror of it, the horror of it.”
He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, and raised his eyes. These
words were spoken by Prince Michael Ivanovich to his brother Peter, who
was governor of a province in Central Russia. Prince Peter was a man of
fifty, Michael’s junior by ten years.
On discovering that his daughter, who had left his house a year before,
had settled here with her child, the elder brother had come from St.
Petersburg to the provincial town, where the above conversation took
place.
Prince Michael Ivanovich was a tall, handsome, white-haired, fresh
coloured man, proud and attractive in appearance and bearing. His family
consisted of a vulgar, irritable wife, who wrangled with him continually
over every petty detail, a son, a ne’er-do-well, spendthrift and
roue--yet a “gentleman,” according to his father’s code, two daughters,
of whom the elder had married well, and was living in St. Petersburg;
and the younger, Lisa--his favourite, who had disappeared from home a
year before. Only a short while ago he had found her with her child in
this provincial town.
Prince Peter wanted to ask his brother how, and under what
circumstances, Lisa had left home, and who could possibly be the father
of her child. But he could not make up his mind to inquire.
That very morning, when his wife had attempted to condole with her
brother-in-law, Prince Peter had observed a look of pain on his
brother’s face. The look had at once been masked by an expression of
unapproachable pride, and he had begun to question her about their flat,
and the price she paid. At luncheon, before the family and guests, he
had been witty and sarcastic as usual. Towards every one, excepting the
children, whom he treated with almost reverent tenderness, he adopted an
attitude of distant hauteur. And yet it was so natural to him that every
one somehow acknowledged his right to be haughty.
In the evening his brother arranged a game of whist. When he retired to
the room which had been made ready for him, and was just beginning to
take out his artificial teeth, some one tapped lightly on the door with
two fingers.
“Who is that?”
“C’est moi, Michael.”
Prince Michael Ivanovich recognised the voice of his sister-in-law,
frowned, replaced his teeth, and said to himself, “What does she want?”
Aloud he said, “Entrez.”
His sister-in-law was a quiet, gentle creature, who bowed in submission
to her husband’s will. But to many she seemed a crank, and some did not
hesitate to call her a fool. She was pretty, but her hair was always
carelessly dressed, and she herself was untidy and absent-minded. She
had, also, the strangest, most unaristocratic ideas, by no means fitting
in the wife of a high official. These ideas she would express most
unexpectedly, to everybody’s astonishment, her husband’s no less than
her friends’.
“Fous pouvez me renvoyer, mais je ne m’en irai pas, je vous le dis
d’avance,” she began, in her characteristic, indifferent way.
“Dieu preserve,” answered her brother-in-law, with his usual somewhat
exaggerated politeness, and brought forward a chair for her.
“Ca ne vous derange pas?” she asked, taking out a cigarette. “I’m
not going to say anything unpleasant, Michael. I only wanted to say
something about Lisochka.”
Michael Ivanovich sighed--the word pained him; but mastering himself at
once, he answered with a tired smile. “Our conversation can only be
on one subject, and that is the subject you wish to discuss.” He spoke
without looking at her, and avoided even naming the subject. But his
plump, pretty little sister-in-law was unabashed. She continued to
regard him with the same gentle, imploring look in her blue eyes,
sighing even more deeply.
“Michael, mon bon ami, have pity on her. She is only human.”
“I never doubted that,” said Michael Ivanovich with a bitter smile.
“She is your daughter.”
“She was--but my dear Aline, why talk about this?”
“Michael, dear, won’t you see her? I only wanted to say, that the one
who is to blame--”
Prince Michael Ivanovich flushed; his face became cruel.
“For heaven’s sake, let us stop. I have suffered enough. I have now but
one desire, and that is to put her in such a position that she will
be independent of others, and that she shall have no further need of
communicating with me. Then she can live her own life, and my family and
I need know nothing more about her. That is all I can do.”
“Michael, you say nothing but ‘I’! She, too, is ‘I.’”
“No doubt; but, dear Aline, please let us drop the matter. I feel it too
deeply.”
Alexandra Dmitrievna remained silent for a few moments, shaking her
head. “And Masha, your wife, thinks as you do?”
“Yes, quite.”
Alexandra Dmitrievna made an inarticulate sound.
“Brisons la dessus et bonne nuit,” said he. But she did not go. She
stood silent a moment. Then,--“Peter tells me you intend to leave the
money with the woman where she lives. Have you the address?”
“I have.”
“Don’t leave it with the woman, Michael! Go yourself. Just see how she
lives. If you don’t want to see her, you need not. HE isn’t there; there
is no one there.”
Michael Ivanovich shuddered violently.
“Why do you torture me so? It’s a sin against hospitality!”
Alexandra Dmitrievna rose, and almost in tears, being touched by her own
pleading, said, “She is so miserable, but she is such a dear.”
He got up, and stood waiting for her to finish. She held out her hand.
“Michael, you do wrong,” said she, and left him.
For a long while after she had gone Michael Ivanovich walked to and fro
on the square of carpet. He frowned and shivered, and exclaimed, “Oh,
oh!” And then the sound of his own voice frightened him, and he was
silent.
His wounded pride tortured him. His daughter--his--brought up in the
house of her mother, the famous Avdotia Borisovna, whom the Empress
honoured with her visits, and acquaintance with whom was an honour for
all the world! His daughter--; and he had lived his life as a knight of
old, knowing neither fear nor blame. The fact that he had a natural son
born of a Frenchwoman, whom he had settled abroad, did not lower his
own self-esteem. And now this daughter, for whom he had not only done
everything that a father could and should do; this daughter to whom he
had given a splendid education and every opportunity to make a match in
the best Russian society--this daughter to whom he had not only given
all that a girl could desire, but whom he had really LOVED; whom he had
admired, been proud of--this daughter had repaid him with such disgrace,
that he was ashamed and could not face the eyes of men!
He recalled the time when she was not merely his child, and a member of
his family, but his darling, his joy and his pride. He saw her again, a
little thing of eight or nine, bright, intelligent, lively, impetuous,
graceful, with brilliant black eyes and flowing auburn hair. He
remembered how she used to jump up on his knees and hug him, and tickle
his neck; and how she would laugh, regardless of his protests, and
continue to tickle him, and kiss his lips, his eyes, and his cheeks.
He was naturally opposed to all demonstration, but this impetuous love
moved him, and he often submitted to her petting. He remembered also how
sweet it was to caress her. To remember all this, when that sweet child
had become what she now was, a creature of whom he could not think
without loathing.
He also recalled the time when she was growing into womanhood, and the
curious feeling of fear and anger that he experienced when he became
aware that men regarded her as a woman. He thought of his jealous love
when she came coquettishly to him dressed for a ball, and knowing that
she was pretty. He dreaded the passionate glances which fell upon her,
that she not only did not understand but rejoiced in. “Yes,” thought he,
“that superstition of woman’s purity! Quite the contrary, they do not
know shame--they lack this sense.” He remembered how, quite inexplicably
to him, she had refused two very good suitors. She had become more and
more fascinated by her own success in the round of gaieties she lived
in.
But this success could not last long. A year passed, then two, then
three. She was a familiar figure, beautiful--but her first youth had
passed, and she had become somehow part of the ball-room furniture.
Michael Ivanovich remembered how he had realised that she was on the
road to spinsterhood, and desired but one thing for her. He must get her
married off as quickly as possible, perhaps not quite so well as might
have been arranged earlier, but still a respectable match.
But it seemed to him she had behaved with a pride that bordered on
insolence. Remembering this, his anger rose more and more fiercely
against her. To think of her refusing so many decent men, only to end in
this disgrace. “Oh, oh!” he groaned again.
Then stopping, he lit a cigarette, and tried to think of other things.
He would send her money, without ever letting her see him. But memories
came again. He remembered--it was not so very long ago, for she was more
than twenty then--her beginning a flirtation with a boy of fourteen,
a cadet of the Corps of Pages who had been staying with them in
the country. She had driven the boy half crazy; he had wept in his
distraction. Then how she had rebuked her father severely, coldly, and
even rudely, when, to put an end to this stupid affair, he had sent the
boy away. She seemed somehow to consider herself insulted. Since then
father and daughter had drifted into undisguised hostility.
“I was right,” he said to himself. “She is a wicked and shameless
woman.”
And then, as a last ghastly memory, there was the letter from Moscow,
in which she wrote that she could not return home; that she was a
miserable, abandoned woman, asking only to be forgiven and forgotten.
Then the horrid recollection of the scene with his wife came to him;
their surmises and their suspicions, which became a certainty. The
calamity had happened in Finland, where they had let her visit her aunt;
and the culprit was an insignificant Swede, a student, an empty-headed,
worthless creature--and married.
All this came back to him now as he paced backwards and forwards on the
bedroom carpet, recollecting his former love for her, his pride in
her. He recoiled with terror before the incomprehensible fact of
her downfall, and he hated her for the agony she was causing him. He
remembered the conversation with his sister-in-law, and tried to imagine
how he might forgive her. But as soon as the thought of “him” arose,
there surged up in his heart horror, disgust, and wounded pride. He
groaned aloud, and tried to think of something else.
“No, it is impossible; I will hand over the money to Peter to give her
monthly. And as for me, I have no longer a daughter.”
And again a curious feeling overpowered him: a mixture of self-pity
at the recollection of his love for her, and of fury against her for
causing him this anguish.