"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:
"Why do you want science all of a sudden? Don't you perhaps want
constitutional government? Or sturgeon and horse-radish?"
"Very well, I am a worthless, trivial, silly woman with no convictions.
I have a mass, a mass of defects. I am neurotic, corrupt, and I
ought to be despised for it. But you, Volodya, are ten years older
than I am, and my husband is thirty years older. I've grown up
before your eyes, and if you would, you could have made anything
you liked of me--an angel. But you"--her voice quivered--
"treat me horribly. Yagitch has married me in his old age, and
you . . ."
"Come, come," said Volodya, sitting nearer her and kissing both her
hands. "Let the Schopenhauers philosophise and prove whatever they
like, while we'll kiss these little hands."
"You despise me, and if only you knew how miserable it makes me,"
she said uncertainly, knowing beforehand that he would not believe
her. "And if you only knew how I want to change, to begin another
life! I think of it with enthusiasm!" and tears of enthusiasm
actually came into her eyes. "To be good, honest, pure, not to be
lying; to have an object in life."
"Come, come, come, please don't be affected! I don't like it!" said
Volodya, and an ill-humoured expression came into his face. "Upon
my word, you might be on the stage. Let us behave like simple
people."
To prevent him from getting cross and going away, she began defending
herself, and forced herself to smile to please him; and again she
began talking of Olga, and of how she longed to solve the problem
of her life and to become something real.
"Ta-ra-ra-boomdee-ay," he hummed. "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!"
And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without
knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for
a minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever,
ironical face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.
"You have known that I love you for ever so long," she confessed
to him, and she blushed painfully, and felt that her lips were
twitching with shame. "I love you. Why do you torture me?"
She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the lips, and for
a long while, a full minute, could not take her lips away, though
she knew it was unseemly, that he might be thinking the worse of
her, that a servant might come in.
"Oh, how you torture me!" she repeated.
When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted, he was
sitting at lunch in the dining-room, she was kneeling before him,
gazing greedily into his face, and he told her that she was like a
little dog waiting for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat
her on his knee, and dancing her up and down like a child, hummed:
"Tara-raboom-dee-ay. . . . Tara-raboom-dee-ay." And when he was
getting ready to go she asked him in a passionate whisper:
"When? To-day? Where?" And held out both hands to his mouth as
though she wanted to seize his answer in them.
"To-day it will hardly be convenient," he said after a minute's
thought. "To-morrow, perhaps."
And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the nunnery to
see Olga, but there she was told that Olga was reading the psalter
somewhere over the dead. From the nunnery she went to her father's
and found that he, too, was out. Then she took another sledge and
drove aimlessly about the streets till evening. And for some reason
she kept thinking of the aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and
who could find no peace anywhere.
And at night they drove out again with three horses to a restaurant
out of town and listened to the gipsies. And driving back past the
nunnery again, Sofya Lvovna thought of Olga, and she felt aghast
at the thought that for the girls and women of her class there was
no solution but to go on driving about and telling lies, or going
into a nunnery to mortify the flesh. . . . And next day she met her
lover, and again Sofya Lvovna drove about the town alone in a hired
sledge thinking about her aunt.
A week later Volodya threw her over. And after that life went on
as before, uninteresting, miserable, and sometimes even agonising.
The Colonel and Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet,
Rita told anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless way, and Sofya
Lvovna went about alone in hired sledges and kept begging her husband
to take her for a good drive with three horses.
Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining
of her unbearable misery, weeping, and feeling as she did so that
she brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby.
And Olga repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by
rote, that all this was of no consequence, that it would all pass
and God would forgive her.