This was the more curious as one could not even call her a beauty. It is true she had marvellous hair of ashen gold colour, and great clear eyes, with a dreamy, and at the same time daring, look in them…. Could I fail to know the expression of those eyes? For a whole year I was pining and swooning in the light—of them! She was splendidly well-made, and when she danced her national dance the audience would stamp and shout with delight…. But, I fancy, no one but I fell in love with her,—at least, no one was in love with her as I was. From the very minute when I saw her for the first time (would you believe it, I have only to close my eyes, and at once the theatre is before me, the almost empty stage, representing the heart of a forest, and she running in from the wing on the right, with a wreath of vine on her head and a tiger-skin over her shoulders)—from that fatal moment I have belonged to her utterly, just as a dog belongs to its master; and if, now that I am dying, I do not belong to her, it is only because she has cast me off.
To tell the truth, she never troubled herself particularly about me. She scarcely noticed me, though she was very good-natured in making use of my money. I was for her, as she expressed it in her broken French, 'oun Rousso, boun enfant,' and nothing more. But I … I could not live where she was not living; I tore myself away once for all from everything dear to me, from my country even, and followed that woman.
You will suppose, perhaps, that she had brains. Not in the least! One had only to glance at her low brow, one needed only one glimpse of her lazy, careless smile, to feel certain at once of the scantiness of her intellectual endowments. And I never imagined her to be an exceptional woman. In fact, I never for one instant deceived myself about her. But that was of no avail to me. Whatever I thought of her in her absence, in her presence I felt nothing but slavish adoration…. In German fairy-tales, the knights often fall under such an enchantment. I could not take my eyes off her features, I could never tire of listening to her talk, of admiring all her gestures; I positively drew my breath as she breathed. However, she was good-natured, unconstrained—too unconstrained indeed,—did not give herself airs, as actresses generally do. There was a lot of life in her—that is, a lot of blood, that splendid southern blood, into which the sun of those parts must have infused some of its beams. She slept nine hours out of the twenty-four, enjoyed her dinner, never read a single line of print, except, perhaps, the newspaper articles in which she was mentioned; and almost the only tender feeling in her life was her devotion to il Signore Carlino, a greedy little Italian, who waited on her in the capacity of secretary, and whom, later on, she married. And such a woman I could fall in love with—I, a man, versed in all sorts of intellectual subtleties, and no longer young! … Who could have anticipated it? I, at least, never anticipated it. I never anticipated the part I was to play. I never anticipated that I should come to hanging about rehearsals, waiting, bored and frozen, behind the scenes, breathing in the smut and grime of the theatre, making friends with all sorts of utterly unpresentable persons…. Making friends, did I say?— cringing slavishly upon them. I never anticipated that I should carry a ballet-dancer's shawl; buy her her new gloves, clean her old ones with bread-crumbs (I did even that, alas!), carry home her bouquets, hang about the offices of journalists and editors, waste my substance, give serenades, catch colds, wear myself out…. I never expected in a little German town to receive the jeering nickname 'der Kunst-barbar.'… And all this for nothing, in the fullest sense of the word, for nothing. That's just it.
… Do you remember how we used, in talk and by letter, to reason together about love and indulge in all sort of subtleties? But in actual life it turns out that real love is a feeling utterly unlike what we pictured to ourselves. Love, indeed, is not a feeling at all, it's a malady, a certain condition of soul and body. It does not develop gradually. One cannot doubt about it, one cannot outwit it, though it does not always come in the same way. Usually it takes possession of a person without question, suddenly, against his will—for all the world like cholera or fever…. It clutches him, poor dear, as the hawk pounces on the chicken, and bears him off at its will, however he struggles or resists…. In love, there's no equality, none of the so-called free union of souls, and such idealisms, concocted at their leisure by German professors…. No, in love, one person is slave, and the other master; and well may the poets talk of the fetters put on by love. Yes, love is a fetter, and the heaviest to bear. At least I have come to this conviction, and have come to it by the path of experience; I have bought this conviction at the cost of my life, since I am dying in my slavery.
What a life mine has been, if you think of it! In my first youth nothing would satisfy me but to take heaven by storm for myself…. Then I fell to dreaming of the good of all humanity, of the good of my country. Then that passed too. I was thinking of nothing but making a home, family life for myself … and so tripped over an ant-heap—and plop, down into the grave…. Ah, we're great hands, we Russians, at making such a finish!
But it's time to turn away from all that, it's long been time! May this burden be loosened from off my soul together with life! I want, for the last time, if only for an instant, to enjoy the sweet and gentle feeling which is shed like a soft light within me, directly I think of you. Your image is now doubly precious to me…. With it, rises up before me the image of my country, and I send to it and to you a farewell greeting. Live, live long and happily, and remember one thing: whether you remain in the wilds of the steppes—where you have sometimes been so sorrowful, but where I should so like to spend my last days—or whether you enter upon a different career, remember life deceives all but him who does not reflect upon her, and, demanding nothing of her, accepts serenely her few gifts and serenely makes the most of them. Go forward while you can. But if your strength fails you, sit by the wayside and watch those that pass by without anger or envy. They, too, have not far to go. In old days, I did not tell you this, but death will teach any one. Though who says what is life, what is truth? Do you remember who it was made no reply to that question? … Farewell, Marya Alexandrovna, farewell for the last time, and do not remember evil against poor ALEXEY.
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The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories Page 20