Towards evening Ragin died of a stroke. At first he felt an overwhelming chill and nausea. Something repulsive seemed to be permeating his whole body, even his fingers, spreading from stomach to head and flooding his eyes and ears. Green lights flashed in his eyes. Ragin realized that his hour had come and he remembered that Gromov, Mikhail Averyanych and millions of others believed in immortality. And what if it really did exist? But he had no desire for immortality and he thought about it for only one fleeting moment. A herd of exceptionally beautiful and graceful deer, of which he had been reading the day before, darted past him; then a peasant woman held out a registered letter to him. Mikhail Averyanych said something. Then everything disappeared and Ragin sank into everlasting oblivion.
The male nurses came in, grabbed his feet and hands and carried him to the chapel. There he lay on the table with his eyes open, and at night the moon shone on him. In the morning Sergey Sergeich came, prayed devoutly before the crucifix and closed the eyes of his former superior.
Next day they buried Ragin. Only Mikhail Averyanych and Daryushka attended the funeral.
Ariadna
On the deck of a steamer sailing from Odessa to Sevastopol1 a rather good-looking gentleman with a small round beard came up to ask me for a light.
‘Take a look at those Germans sitting by the deck-house’, he said. ‘When the Germans or English meet they discuss the price of wool, crops, their private affairs. But for some reason, when we Russians meet, we can talk only of women and elevated matters. But mainly of women.’
This man’s face was already familiar. The previous day we had returned from abroad in the same train and I’d seen him standing with his female travelling companion at the Customs at Volochisk2 before a veritable mountain of trunks and baskets crammed with women’s dresses. How irritated and downhearted he had been when he had to pay duty on some bits of silk, while his companion protested and threatened to make a complaint. Later, on our way to Odessa, I saw him carrying pies and oranges to the ladies’ compartment.
It was rather damp, the sea was a little rough and the ladies had returned to their cabins. The gentleman with the round beard sat down beside me.
‘Yes’, he continued, ‘when we Russians get together we can only talk of higher matters and women. We’re so intellectual, so self-important, that we can only utter eternal verities and decide problems of the highest order. Russian actors can never play the fool – they even act seriously in light comedies. Even when we happen to talk about trifles, we can only discuss them from the most exalted viewpoint. We lack boldness, sincerity and simplicity. The reason why we talk about women so often is because – so it seems to me – we’re discontented. We idolize women too much and make demands out of all proportion to what we should expect in reality. What we get is poles apart from what we want and the result is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, spiritual anguish. And if someone has a pain he likes to talk about it… I’m not boring you, am I?’
‘No – not at all.’
‘In that case allow me to introduce myself’, said the gentleman, rising slightly from his seat. ‘Ivan Ilich Shamokhin, a Moscow landowner – after a fashion. But I know you very well.’
He sat down and continued, giving me a warm, open look.
‘Any second-rate philosopher, like Max Nordau,3 would explain this perpetual talk of women as a form of sexual mania or by the fact that we’re advocates of serfdom and so on. But I take a different view. I repeat: we’re dissatisfied because we’re idealists. We want the creatures who give birth to us and our children to be superior to us, superior to anything else in this world. When we are young we romanticize, we worship those with whom we fall in love; for us, love and happiness are synonymous. We Russians despise people who don’t marry for love, we find sensuality ludicrous and repulsive – and the most successful novels and short stories are those where women are beautiful, romantic and exalted. And if from time immemorial Russians have rhapsodized over Raphael’s Madonna or preoccupied themselves with women’s emancipation, I can assure you that there’s nothing artificial about it. But here is the root of the trouble: the moment we marry or have an affair it takes only two or three years for us to feel disappointed and let down. We have affairs with others – and there’s that terrible disappointment and horror again – until we’re finally convinced that women are perfidious, frivolous, unfair, naïve, undeveloped and cruel. In effect, far from being superior we consider them lower than men – by a long chalk! And all that’s left for us dissatisfied, disillusioned men is to grumble and to talk out of hand about how cruelly we’ve been deceived.’
As Shamokhin spoke I noticed that his native language and surroundings gave him infinite pleasure. Probably this was because he had been terribly homesick abroad. While he praised Russians and considered them highly idealistic, he had nothing to say about foreigners, which was in his favour. I could see he was experiencing some inner turmoil, that he wanted to talk about himself rather than about women and that I wasn’t going to escape without having to listen to some interminable story, a confession of sorts.
And in fact, when we had ordered a bottle of wine and had each drunk a glass, he began:
‘I seem to remember – in a story by Veltman4 – someone says: “What a story!” and someone else replies: “No, it’s not the story but just the introduction to one.” In the same way, what I’ve just told you is only the introduction, but what I really want to tell you about is my latest affair. You don’t mind if I ask again – I’m not boring you, am I?’
I told him that he was not, so he continued:
‘The action takes place in the province of Moscow, in one of the northern districts. The countryside there, I must tell you, is simply amazing. Our estate lies on the high bank of a fast-flowing river, near some rapids, where the water thunders past day and night. Just picture a large old garden, nice little flowerbeds, beehives, a kitchen garden, the river below with leafy willows which seem to lose their lustre after a heavy dew and turn grey. On the other side of the river is a meadow and beyond it, on a hill, is a dark, forbidding pine forest. In this forest there are masses and masses of saffron milk cap mushrooms, while in its very depths elk live. When I’m dead and lying in my coffin I think I’ll still be dreaming of those early mornings when the sun hurts your eyes, or of those wonderful spring evenings when nightingales and corncrakes call out in the garden and beyond, when the sounds of an accordion come drifting from the village, when someone in the house is playing the piano, when the river thunders – in brief, the kind of music that makes you want to cry and sing out loud. We don’t have much plough land, but the pastures help us out and together with the forest bring in about two thousand roubles a year.
I’m an only son – we’re both unpretentious people – and this money, together with Father’s pension, is quite enough for us to live on. I spent the first three years in the country after graduating, managing the farm and waiting for some settled job to turn up. But the main thing is that I was deeply in love with a stunningly beautiful, charming girl. She was the sister of my neighbour, a bankrupt landowner by the name of Kotlovich. On his estate there were pineapples, amazing peaches, lightning conductors, a fountain in the middle of the courtyard – but at the same time he didn’t have a copeck to his name. He was a lazy, ignorant, limp character, seemingly fashioned from boiled turnip. He treated his sick peasants by homoeopathy and dabbled in spiritualism. For all that, he was a gentle, sensitive kind of person and no fool. But I cannot stomach people who converse with spirits and treat peasant women with magnetism. Firstly, you always find these muddled ideas in people of limited intellectual horizons, and having a conversation with them is really hard going. In the second place, they don’t normally fall in love, they don’t live with women and this air of mystery tends to be disconcerting for impressionable people. And I didn’t like his appearance. He was tall, plump, white, with a small head, tiny sparkling eyes and chubby white fingers. He didn’t actually shake your hand – he kne
aded it. And he was constantly apologizing. Whenever he asked for something he’d say: “Sorry!”; if he gave you something – again, “Sorry!” As for his sister, she was quite another matter. I must point out that in my younger days I hadn’t known the Kotloviches, since my father was a professor in N— and for a long time we lived in the provinces. But when I did get to know them the girl was already twenty-two, she had long left boarding-school and had been living two or three years in Moscow with a rich aunt, who brought her out. When I met her and had my first talk with her, what struck me most of all was her unusual and beautiful name – Ariadna. It suited her so well! She was a brunette, very slim, lissom, shapely, extraordinarily graceful, with elegant, extremely refined features. She too had sparkling eyes, but whereas her brother’s had a cold, sickly glint, like boiled sweets, hers were radiant with youth, beauty and pride. I fell in love the very day we met – and it was inevitable. My first impressions were so powerful that to this day I still cannot rid myself of my illusions. I would still like to think that Nature had some majestic, grandiose design in mind when she created that girl. Ariadna’s voice, her walk, her hat – even the imprint of her feet on the sandy bank where she used to fish for gudgeon – filled me with joy and a passionate lust for life. From Ariadna’s beautiful face and figure I was able to judge her inner self, and her every word, her every smile enchanted, captivated me and led me to suppose that hers was a noble soul. She was affectionate, talkative, cheerful, unaffected. Her belief in God was truly poetic, as were her thoughts on death, and her cast of mind was so rich with delicate nuances that she could make even her faults appear unique and endearing. Let’s suppose she wanted a new horse but couldn’t afford one – well, so what! One could always sell or pawn something, and if the estate steward swore blindly that there was simply nothing to be pawned, then the iron roofs could be stripped off the outbuildings and sent to the factory. Or carthorses could be taken to market at the busiest season and sold for a song. These wild impulses often reduced the whole estate to despair, but she expressed them with such refinement that in the end all was forgiven, all was allowed, as if she were a goddess or Caesar’s wife. My love was truly touching and before long everyone – my father, the neighbours, the peasants – was aware of it. And all of them sympathized with me. When ever I treated the farm labourers to vodka they would bow and say: “God grant that you marry Miss Kotlovich, master.”
And Ariadna herself knew that I loved her. She would often ride over to see us, or come by cabriolet, and sometimes she would spend whole days with myself and my father. She became firm friends with the old man and he even taught her to ride a bicycle – that was his favourite pastime. I remember, when she was about to go for a ride one evening, helping her on to her bicycle – and then she struck me as so wonderful that I felt my fingers were on fire when I touched her. I trembled with delight, and when that handsome, graceful pair rode off down the road together a black horse ridden by the steward bolted to one side as they passed by. This, I thought, was because it too was staggered by her beauty. My love, my adulation, deeply moved Ariadna and she too yearned to be similarly enchanted and to reciprocate my love. Oh yes, it was so romantic!
But she was as incapable of true love as I was capable of it, since she was frigid and already pretty well corrupted. A demon was lurking inside her, whispering day and night that she was enchanting, simply divine. And she had no idea why she had come into this world, why she had been created: she could only visualize herself in the future as rich and famous. She had visions of balls, horse races, livery, luxurious drawing-rooms, her own salon with a swarm of counts, princes, ambassadors, famous painters and actors who would worship at her feet and go into ecstasies over her beauty and her fine dresses. Craving for power and constantly one-track ideas tend to make people cold. And Ariadna was cold: towards me, towards nature and towards music. Meanwhile time was passing and still no ambassadors turned up, still Ariadna continued to live with her spiritualist brother. Things went from bad to worse, until she couldn’t afford any more dresses or hats and had to resort to all sorts of evasion and cunning to conceal her poverty.
And sure enough, while she was still living at her aunt’s, a Prince Maktuyev – rich, but a complete nonentity – proposed to her. She refused him point-blank. But now she felt the occasional twinge of regret. Why had she turned him down? Just as your peasant blows in disgust on his kvass with cockroaches floating in it but still drinks it, so she frowned squeamishly on remembering the prince. Yet she would tell me: “Say what you like, but there’s something mysterious and fascinating about a title!”
She dreamt of titles, of the glamorous life, but at the same time she didn’t want to let me go. However much one may dream of ambassadors, all the same one’s heart isn’t a stone and you’re only young once. Ariadna tried to fall in love, pretended to be in love and even swore solemnly that she loved me. But I’m a highly-strung, sensitive man: I can tell at a distance when someone loves me – I don’t need assurances or vows. But this was like a draught of cold air and when she spoke to me of love I imagined I heard a mechanical nightingale singing. Ariadna herself felt that she lacked that vital spark – and this upset her. More than once I saw her in tears. Well, you can imagine what I was thinking when once, on a sudden impulse, she suddenly kissed and embraced me (it happened one evening, on the river bank), and I could see from her eyes that she didn’t love me but had only embraced me because she was curious and this was a kind of test to see what would happen. And I was shocked. I took her hands. “These loveless endearments make me feel terrible!” I said in desperation.
“What a strange person you are!” she replied irritably and went away.
I would most probably have married her after two or three years and that would have been the end of my story. But fate decided otherwise. It happened that a new personality made his appearance on our horizon. A university friend of Ariadna’s brother, Mikhail Ivanych Lubkov, a charming man of whom the coachmen and footmen would say: “A most amusing gent!” came to stay with Ariadna’s brother. He was of medium height, rather skinny, and bald. He had the face of a good bourgeois – rather uninspiring but attractive, pale, with a bristly well-tended moustache. He had goose pimples on his neck and an oversize Adam’s apple. He wore pince-nez on a wide black ribbon, couldn’t pronounce his r’s or l’s, so that “really” turned out “weawy”, for instance. He was always in high spirits and everything for him was one big joke. He had made a particularly stupid marriage, at the age of twenty, received two houses in Moscow near the Novodevichy Convent,5 carried out repairs on them, built a bath-house and utterly ruined himself. Now his wife and children were living in abject poverty at the Oriental Rooms and he had to support them: this he found funny. He was thirty-six and his wife forty-two – that was funny too. His mother, a smug, arrogant, terribly snooty woman, despised his wife and lived on her own with a whole horde of cats and dogs, and he had to pay her seventy-five roubles a month – in addition to his wife’s allowance. He himself was a man of taste, loved lunching at the Slav Fair Hotel6 and dining at the Hermitage.7 For this he needed a great deal of money, but his uncle allowed him only two thousand a year, which wasn’t enough, and for days on end he’d go running around Moscow – with his tongue hanging out, as the saying goes – trying to scrounge money from someone – that was great fun too. He had come to stay with Kotlovich, so he said, to relax in “nature’s bosom”, away from his family. At lunch and supper, during walks, he would tell us all about his wife, his mother, his creditors, bailiffs – and he would laugh at them. He would laugh at himself and claim that thanks to his flair for borrowing he had made a lot of nice new friends. In fact, he never stopped laughing – and we laughed too. While he was around we spent our time differently too. I was given to quiet, idyllic pleasures, so to speak. I loved fishing, evening strolls, picking mushrooms. But Lubkov preferred picnics, fireworks, hunting with the hounds. About three times a week he organized picnics, and Ariadna, with a serious, inspi
red expression would write out a list, with oysters, champagne, chocolates, and send me off to Moscow – naturally without first asking whether I had any money. And at our picnics toasts were drunk, there was laughter – and once again those stories, so full of joie de vivre, about how old his wife was, how fat his mother’s dogs were, what charming people creditors were…
Lubkov loved nature, but considered it something infinitely beneath him, created for his pleasure alone. Stopping before some magnificent view he would say: “Nice spot for a cup of tea!” Once, seeing Ariadna walking some way off with her parasol, he nodded towards her and said: “She’s thin, but I like that. I don’t care for plump ones.”
That really jarred on me. I asked him not to talk that way about women in my presence. He looked at me in amazement.
“What’s wrong if I prefer thin ones to fat ones?” he replied.
I made no answer. Then on another occasion when he was in an excellent mood and slightly tipsy he said:
“I’ve noticed that Ariadna likes you. I can’t understand why you’re letting the chance slip.”
These words made me feel awkward and in my embarrassment I told him rather bashfully my views on love and women.
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “As I see it, women are women. Ariadna may well be the romantic, exalted type you say she is, but that doesn’t mean the laws of nature don’t apply to her. You can see for yourself that she’s at an age when she needs a husband or a lover. I respect women no less than you, but I do think that certain relationships don’t rule out romance. Romance is one thing, a lover is another. It’s the same with farming! The beauty of nature’s one thing and income from forests and fields another.”
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories Page 13