"Entrez!"
In her room was the usual morning disorder: tea-things on the table,
an unfinished roll, an eggshell; a strong overpowering reek of
scent. The bed had not been made, and it was evident that two had
slept in it.
Ariadne herself had only just got out of bed and was now with her
hair down in a flannel dressing-jacket.
I said good-morning to her, and then sat in silence for a minute
while she tried to put her hair tidy, and then I asked her, trembling
all over:
"Why . . . why . . . did you send for me here?"
Evidently she guessed what I was thinking; she took me by the hand
and said:
"I want you to be here, you are so pure."
I felt ashamed of my emotion, of my trembling. And I was afraid I
might begin sobbing, too! I went out without saying another word,
and within an hour I was sitting in the train. All the journey, for
some reason, I imagined Ariadne with child, and she seemed disgusting
to me, and all the women I saw in the trains and at the stations
looked to me, for some reason, as if they too were with child, and
they too seemed disgusting and pitiable. I was in the position of
a greedy, passionate miser who should suddenly discover that all
his gold coins were false. The pure, gracious images which my
imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for so long, my plans,
my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman--all now
were jeering and putting out their tongues at me. "Ariadne," I kept
asking with horror, "that young, intellectual, extraordinarily
beautiful girl, the daughter of a senator, carrying on an intrigue
with such an ordinary, uninteresting vulgarian? But why should she
not love Lubkov?" I answered myself. "In what is he inferior to me?
Oh, let her love any one she likes, but why lie to me? But why is
she bound to be open with me?" And so I went on over and over again
till I was stupefied.
It was cold in the train; I was travelling first class, but even
so there were three on a side, there were no double windows, the
outer door opened straight into the compartment, and I felt as
though I were in the stocks, cramped, abandoned, pitiful, and my
legs were fearfully numb, and at the same time I kept recalling how
fascinating she had been that morning in her dressing-jacket and
with her hair down, and I was suddenly overcome by such acute
jealousy that I leapt up in anguish, so that my neighbours stared
at me in wonder and positive alarm.
At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I'm fond of
the winter; I'm fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest
frosts, it's particularly snug at home. It's pleasant to put on
one's fur jacket and felt overboots on a clear frosty day, to do
something in the garden or in the yard, or to read in a well warmed
room, to sit in my father's study before the open fire, to wash in
my country bath-house. . . . Only if there is no mother in the
house, no sister and no children, it is somehow dreary on winter
evenings, and they seem extraordinarily long and quiet. And the
warmer and snugger it is, the more acutely is this lack felt. In
the winter when I came back from abroad, the evenings were endlessly
long, I was intensely depressed, so depressed that I could not even
read; in the daytime I was coming and going, clearing away the snow
in the garden or feeding the chickens and the calves, but in the
evening it was all up with me.
I had never cared for visitors before, but now I was glad of them,
for I knew there was sure to be talk of Ariadne. Kotlovitch, the
spiritualist, used often to come to talk about his sister, and
sometimes he brought with him his friend Prince Maktuev, who was
as much in love with Ariadne as I was. To sit in Ariadne's room,
to finger the keys of her piano, to look at her music was a necessity
for the prince--he could not live without it; and the spirit of
his grandfather Ilarion was still predicting that sooner or later
she would be his wife. The prince usually stayed a long time with
us, from lunch to midnight, saying nothing all the time; in silence
he would drink two or three bottles of beer, and from time to time,
to show that he too was taking part in the conversation, he would
laugh an abrupt, melancholy, foolish laugh. Before going home he
would always take me aside and ask me in an undertone: "When did
you see Ariadne Grigoryevna last? Was she quite well? I suppose
she's not tired of being out there?"
Spring came on. There was the harrowing to do and then the sowing
of spring corn and clover. I was sad, but there was the feeling of
spring. One longed to accept the inevitable. Working in the fields
and listening to the larks, I asked myself: "Couldn't I have done
with this question of personal happiness once and for all? Couldn't
I lay aside my fancy and marry a simple peasant girl?"
Suddenly when we were at our very busiest, I got a letter with the
Italian stamp, and the clover and the beehives and the calves and
the peasant girl all floated away like smoke. This time Ariadne
wrote that she was profoundly, infinitely unhappy. She reproached
me for not holding out a helping hand to her, for looking down upon
her from the heights of my virtue and deserting her at the moment
of danger. All this was written in a large, nervous handwriting
with blots and smudges, and it was evident that she wrote in haste
and distress. In conclusion she besought me to come and save her.
Again my anchor was hauled up and I was carried away. Ariadne was
in Rome. I arrived late in the evening, and when she saw me, she
sobbed and threw herself on my neck. She had not changed at all
that winter, and was just as young and charming. We had supper
together and afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all the
time she kept telling me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov
was.
"Don't remind me of that creature!" she cried. "He is loathsome and
disgusting to me!"
"But I thought you loved him," I said.
"Never," she said. "At first he struck me as original and aroused
my pity, that was all. He is insolent and takes a woman by storm.
And that's attractive. But we won't talk about him. That is a
melancholy page in my life. He has gone to Russia to get money.
Serve him right! I told him not to dare to come back."
She was living then, not at an hotel, but in a private lodging of
two rooms which she had decorated in her own taste, frigidly and
luxuriously.
After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances
about five thousand francs, and my arrival certainly was the one
salvation for her.
I had reckoned on taking her back to the country, but I did not
succeed in that. She was homesick for her native place, but her
recollections of the poverty she had been through there, of privations,
of the rusty roof on her brother's house, roused a shudder of
disgust, and when I suggested going home to her, she squeezed my
hands convulsively and said:
"No, no, I shall die of boredom there!"
Then my love entered upon its final phase.
"Be the darling that you used to be; love me a little," said Ariadne,
bending over to me. "You're sulky and prudent, you're afraid to
yield to impulse, and keep thinking of consequences, and that's
dull. Come, I beg you, I beseech you, be nice to me! . . . My pure
one, my holy one, my dear one, I love you so!"
I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious
of nothing but rapture. To hold in one's arms a young and lovely
body, with bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from
sleep, and to remember that she was there--she, my Ariadne!--
oh, it was not easy to get used to that! But yet I did get used to
it, and by degrees became capable of reflecting on my new position.
First of all, I realised, as before, that Ariadne did not love me.
But she wanted to be really in love, she was afraid of solitude,
and, above all, I was healthy, young, vigorous; she was sensual,
like all cold people, as a rule--and we both made a show of being
united by a passionate, mutual love. Afterwards I realised something
else, too.
We stayed in Rome, in Naples, in Florence; we went to Paris, but
there we thought it cold and went back to Italy. We introduced
ourselves everywhere as husband and wife, wealthy landowners. People
readily made our acquaintance and Ariadne had great social success
everywhere. As she took lessons in painting, she was called an
artist, and only imagine, that quite suited her, though she had not
the slightest trace of talent.
She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her
coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster,
fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used
to bring up something, for instance roast beef, and she would eat
it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the
night she would eat apples and oranges.
The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was
an amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute,
apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an
impulse such as makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle
its antennæ. She was deceitful with me, with the footman, with the
porter, with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances;
not one conversation, not one meeting, took place without affectation
and pretence. A man had only to come into our room--whoever it
might be, a waiter, or a baron--for her eyes, her expression, her
voice to change, even the contour of her figure was transformed.
At the very first glance at her then, you would have said there
were no more wealthy and fashionable people in Italy than we. She
never met an artist or a musician without telling him all sorts of
lies about his remarkable talent.
"You have such a talent!" she would say, in honeyed cadences, "I'm
really afraid of you. I think you must see right through people."
And all this simply in order to please, to be successful, to be
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--"