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.