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.
"Excuse me for revealing the secret of this letter to you, but you
are Ariadne's friend, she respects you. Perhaps you know something
of it. She wants to go away, but with whom? Mr. Lubkov is proposing
to go with her. Excuse me, but this is very strange of Mr. Lubkov;
he is a married man, he has children, and yet he is making a
declaration of love; he is writing to Ariadne 'darling.' Excuse me,
but it is so strange!"
I turned cold all over; my hands and feet went numb and I felt an
ache in my chest, as if a three-cornered stone had been driven into
it. Kotlovitch sank helplessly into an easy-chair, and his hands
fell limply at his sides.
"What can I do?" I inquired.
"Persuade her. . . . Impress her mind. . . . Just consider, what
is Lubkov to her? Is he a match for her? Oh, good God! How awful
it is, how awful it is!" he went on, clutching his head. "She has
had such splendid offers--Prince Maktuev and . . . and others.
The prince adores her, and only last Wednesday week his late
grandfather, Ilarion, declared positively that Ariadne would be his
wife--positively! His grandfather Ilarion is dead, but he is a
wonderfully intelligent person; we call up his spirit every day."
After this conversation I lay awake all night and thought of shooting
myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all up.
Then I sobbed in the barn. Then I took a sum of money from my father
and set off for the Caucasus without saying good-bye.
Of course, a woman's a woman and a man's a man, but can all that
be as simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be
that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation,
ought to explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman
simply by the fact that her bodily formation is different from mine?
Oh, how awful that would be! I want to believe that in his struggle
with nature the genius of man has struggled with physical love too,
as with an enemy, and that, if he has not conquered it, he has at
least succeeded in tangling it in a net-work of illusions of
brotherhood and love; and for me, at any rate, it is no longer a
simple instinct of my animal nature as with a dog or a toad, but
is real love, and every embrace is spiritualised by a pure impulse
of the heart and respect for the woman. In reality, a disgust for
the animal instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of
generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of
my nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as natural and
inevitable in our day as my ears' not being able to move and my not
being covered with fur? I fancy that's how the majority of civilised
people look at it, so that the absence of the moral, poetical element
in love is treated in these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of
atavism; they say it is a symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of
insanity. It is true that, in poetizing love, we assume in those
we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source
of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my
thinking it is better, even so; that is, it is better to suffer
than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man
being man.
In Tiflis I received a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne
Grigoryevna had on such a day gone abroad, intending to spend the
whole winter away. A month later I returned home. It was by now
autumn. Every week Ariadne sent my father extremely interesting
letters on scented paper, written in an excellent literary style.
It is my opinion that every woman can be a writer. Ariadne described
in great detail how it had not been easy for her to make it up with
her aunt and induce the latter to give her a thousand roubles for
the journey, and what a long time she had spent in Moscow trying
to find an old lady, a distant relation, in order to persuade her
to go with her. Such a profusion of detail suggested fiction, and
I realised, of course, that she had no chaperon with her.
Soon afterwards I, too, had a letter from her, also scented and
literary. She wrote that she had missed me, missed my beautiful,
intelligent, loving eyes. She reproached me affectionately for
wasting my youth, for stagnating in the country when I might, like
her, be living in paradise under the palms, breathing the fragrance
of the orange-trees. And she signed herself "Your forsaken Ariadne."
Two days later came another letter in the same style, signed "Your
forgotten Ariadne." My mind was confused. I loved her passionately,
I dreamed of her every night, and then this "your forsaken," "your
forgotten"--what did it mean? What was it for? And then the
dreariness of the country, the long evenings, the disquieting
thoughts of Lubkov. . . . The uncertainty tortured me, and poisoned
my days and nights; it became unendurable. I could not bear it and
went abroad.
Ariadne summoned me to Abbazzia. I arrived there on a bright warm
day after rain; the rain-drops were still hanging on the trees and
glistening on the huge, barrack-like dépendance where Ariadne and
Lubkov were living.
They were not at home. I went into the park; wandered about the
avenues, then sat down. An Austrian General, with his hands behind
him, walked past me, with red stripes on his trousers such as our
generals wear. A baby was wheeled by in a perambulator and the
wheels squeaked on the damp sand. A decrepit old man with jaundice
passed, then a crowd of Englishwomen, a Catholic priest, then the
Austrian General again. A military band, only just arrived from
Fiume, with glittering brass instruments, sauntered by to the
bandstand--they began playing.
Have you ever been at Abbazzia? It's a filthy little Slav town with
only one street, which stinks, and in which one can't walk after
rain without goloshes. I had read so much and always with such
intense feeling about this earthly paradise that when afterwards,
holding up my trousers, I cautiously crossed the narrow street, and
in my ennui bought some hard pears from an old peasant woman who,
recognising me as a Russian, said: "Tcheeteery" for "tchetyry"
(four)--"davadtsat" for "dvadtsat" (twenty), and when I wondered
in perplexity where to go and what to do here, and when I inevitably
met Russians as disappointed as I was, I began to feel vexed and
ashamed. There is a calm bay there full of steamers and boats with
coloured sails. From there I could see Fiume and the distant islands
covered with lilac mist, and it would have been picturesque if the
view over the bay had not been hemmed in by the hotels and their
dépendances--buildings in an absurd, trivial style of architecture,
with which the whole of that green shore has been covered by greedy
money grubbers, so that for the most part you see nothing in this
little paradise but windows, terraces, and little squares with
tables and waiters' black coats. There is a park such as you find
now in every watering-place abroad. And the dark, motionless, silent
foliage of the palms, and the bright yellow sand in the avenue, and
the bright green seats, and the glitter of the braying military
horns--all this sickened me in ten minutes! And yet one is obliged
for some reason to spend ten days, ten weeks, there!
Having been dragged reluctantly from one of these watering-places
to another, I have been more and more struck by the inconvenient
and niggardly life led by the wealthy and well-fed, the dulness and
feebleness of their imagination, the lack of boldness in their
tastes and desires. And how much happier are those tourists, old
and young, who, not having the money to stay in hotels, live where
they can, admire the view of the sea from the tops of the mountains,
lying on the green grass, walk instead of riding, see the forests
and villages at close quarters, observe the customs of the country,
listen to its songs, fall in love with its women. . . .
While I was sitting in the park, it began to get dark, and in the
twilight my Ariadne appeared, elegant and dressed like a princess;
after her walked Lubkov, wearing a new loose-fitting suit, bought
probably in Vienna.
"Why are you cross with me?" he was saying. "What have I done to
you?"
Seeing me, she uttered a cry of joy, and probably, if we had not
been in the park, would have thrown herself on my neck. She pressed
my hands warmly and laughed; and I laughed too and almost cried
with emotion. Questions followed, of the village, of my father,
whether I had seen her brother, and so on. She insisted on my looking
her straight in the face, and asked if I remembered the gudgeon,
our little quarrels, the picnics. . . .
"How nice it all was really!" she sighed. "But we're not having a
slow time here either. We have a great many acquaintances, my dear,
my best of friends! To-morrow I will introduce you to a Russian
family here, but please buy yourself another hat." She scrutinised
me and frowned. "Abbazzia is not the country," she said; "here one
must be _comme il faut_."
Then we went to the restaurant. Ariadne was laughing and mischievous
all the time; she kept calling me "dear," "good," "clever," and
seemed as though she could not believe her eyes that I was with
her. We sat on till eleven o'clock, and parted very well satisfied
both with the supper and with each other.
Next day Ariadne presented me to the Russian family as: "The son
of a distinguished professor whose estate is next to ours."
She talked to this family about nothing but estates and crops, and
kept appealing to me. She wanted to appear to be a very wealthy
landowner, and did, in fact, succeed in doing so. Her manner was
superb like that of a real aristocrat, which indeed she was by
birth.
"But what a person my aunt is!" she said suddenly, looking at me
with a smile. "We had a slight tiff, and she has bolted off to
Meran. What do you say to that?"
Afterwards when we were walking in the park I asked her:
"What aunt were you talking of just now? What aunt is that?"
"That was a saving lie," laughed Ariadne. "They must not know I'm
without a chaperon."
After a moment's silence she came closer to me and said:
"My dear, my dear, do be friends with Lubkov. He is so unhappy! His
wife and mother are simply awful."
She used the formal mode of address in speaking to Lubkov, and when
she was going up to bed she said good-night to him exactly as she
did to me, and their rooms were on different floors. All this made
me hope that it was all nonsense, and that there was no sort of
love affair between them, and I felt at ease when I met him. And
when one day he asked me for the loan of three hundred roubles, I
gave it to him with the greatest pleasure.
Every day we spent in enjoying ourselves and in nothing but enjoying
ourselves; we strolled in the park, we ate, we drank. Every day
there were conversations with the Russian family. By degrees I got
used to the fact that if I went into the park I should be sure to
meet the old man with jaundice, the Catholic priest, and the Austrian
General, who always carried a pack of little cards, and wherever
it was possible sat down and played patience, nervously twitching
his shoulders. And the band played the same thing over and over
again.
At home in the country I used to feel ashamed to meet the peasants
when I was fishing or on a picnic party on a working day; here too
I was ashamed at the sight of the footmen, the coachmen, and the
workmen who met us. It always seemed to me they were looking at me
and thinking: "Why are you doing nothing?" And I was conscious of
this feeling of shame every day from morning to night. It was a
strange, unpleasant, monotonous time; it was only varied by Lubkov's
borrowing from me now a hundred, now fifty guldens, and being
suddenly revived by the money as a morphia-maniac is by morphia,
beginning to laugh loudly at his wife, at himself, at his creditors.
At last it began to be rainy and cold. We went to Italy, and I
telegraphed to my father begging him for mercy's sake to send me
eight hundred roubles to Rome. We stayed in Venice, in Bologna, in
Florence, and in every town invariably put up at an expensive hotel,
where we were charged separately for lights, and for service, and
for heating, and for bread at lunch, and for the right of having
dinner by ourselves. We ate enormously. In the morning they gave
us _café complet_; at one o'clock lunch: meat, fish, some sort of
omelette, cheese, fruits, and wine. At six o'clock dinner of eight
courses with long intervals, during which we drank beer and wine.
At nine o'clock tea. At midnight Ariadne would declare she was
hungry, and ask for ham and boiled eggs. We would eat to keep her
company.
In the intervals between meals we used to rush about the museums
and exhibitions in continual anxiety for fear we should be late for
dinner or lunch. I was bored at the sight of the pictures; I longed
to be at home to rest; I was exhausted, looked about for a chair
and hypocritically repeated after other people: "How exquisite,
what atmosphere!" Like overfed boa constrictors, we noticed only
the most glaring objects. The shop windows hypnotised us; we went
into ecstasies over imitation brooches and bought a mass of useless
trumpery.
The same thing happened in Rome, where it rained and there was a
cold wind. After a heavy lunch we went to look at St. Peter's, and
thanks to our replete condition and perhaps the bad weather, it
made no sort of impression on us, and detecting in each other an
indifference to art, we almost quarrelled.
The money came from my father. I went to get it, I remember, in the
morning. Lubkov went with me.
"The present cannot be full and happy when one has a past," said
he. "I have heavy burdens left on me by the past. However, if only
I get the money, it's no great matter, but if not, I'm in a fix.
Would you believe it, I have only eight francs left, yet I must
send my wife a hundred and my mother another. And we must live here
too. Ariadne's like a child; she won't enter into the position, and
flings away money like a duchess. Why did she buy a watch yesterday?
And, tell me, what object is there in our going on playing at being
good children? Why, our hiding our relations from the servants and
our friends costs us from ten to fifteen francs a day, as I have
to have a separate room. What's the object of it?"
I felt as though a sharp stone had been turned round in my chest.
There was no uncertainty now; it was all clear to me. I turned cold
all over, and at once made a resolution to give up seeing them, to
run away from them, to go home at once. . . .
"To get on terms with a woman is easy enough," Lubkov went on. "You
have only to undress her; but afterwards what a bore it is, what a
silly business!"
When I counted over the money I received he said:
"If you don't lend me a thousand francs, I am faced with complete
ruin. Your money is the only resource left to me."
I gave him the money, and he at once revived and began laughing
about his uncle, a queer fish, who could never keep his address
secret from his wife. When I reached the hotel I packed and paid
my bill. I had still to say good-bye to Ariadne.