“Why… why did you have to make me come out here?”
Clearly she guessed what I was thinking. She took my hand.
“I just want you to be here,” she said. “You’re so decent!”
I was ashamed of my distress and trembling. Next thing I’d be bursting into tears! I went out without another word and an hour later I was on the train. The whole day I kept visualizing Ariadna as pregnant – and she repelled me: for some reason all the women I saw in railway compartments and at stations seemed pregnant and I found them similarly repellent and pathetic. I was like a fanatical miser who suddenly discovers that all his gold coins are counterfeit. Those pure, gracious images which my imagination, inflamed by love, had cherished for so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my views of love and women – all this was mocking and taunting me. “How could Ariadna,” I asked myself in horror, “that exceptionally beautiful, intelligent girl, a senator’s daughter, be having an affair with that vulgar, dreary philistine? But then, why shouldn’t she love Lubkov? In what way was he worse than me? She could love anyone she liked – but why lie about it? And why on earth should she be honest with me?” And so on, all in the same vein, until I felt stupefied.
It was cold in the train. I was travelling first class, but there were three to a side, no double windows and no corridor. I felt that I was in the stocks – cramped, abandoned, pathetic; my feet were absolutely freezing. Meanwhile I kept remembering how seductive she had looked earlier that day in her jacket, with her hair down. And suddenly I was gripped by such violent pangs of jealousy that I leapt from my seat from the agony of it all, so that the passengers next to me looked at me in amazement – in terror, even.
Back home I was confronted by snowdrifts and twenty degrees of frost. I love the winter because then the house is particularly warm, even during severe frosts. On fine frosty days it’s so pleasant to put on a sheepskin jacket and felt boots, to do jobs in the garden or yard, or read in my well-heated room, or sit by the fire in my father’s study, or have a rustic-style steam-bath… Only, if there’s no mother, sister or children around, winter evenings can be somehow eerie, and they seem dreadfully long and quiet. The warmer and more comfortable it is the more keenly you feel their absence. After I returned from abroad that winter the evenings seemed endless. I was deeply depressed, so much so that I couldn’t even read. During the day this didn’t matter – I could always clear the snow in the garden, feed the hens and calves – but the evenings were sheer hell.
Before, I used to dislike having visitors, but now I was only too glad of them, since I knew that there was bound to be talk of Ariadna. Our spiritualist Kotlovich would often drive over for a chat about his sister and sometimes he brought along his friend Prince Maktuyev, who was no less in love with Ariadna than myself. To sit in Ariadna’s room, to run his fingers over the piano keys, to look at her music books was simply a necessity for the prince – life was impossible for him without it. Grandfather Ilarion’s ghost still predicted that she would be his wife sooner or later. The prince would usually stay with us for ages – roughly, from lunch to midnight – and he hardly opened his mouth. He would drink two or three bottles of beer without saying one word and only now and then, just to show he was still with us, would produce a staccato, inane laugh. Before going home he would always take me to one side.
“When did you last see Ariadna?” he would ask in an undertone. “Is she well? She’s not getting bored there, is she?”
Spring arrived, with woodcock shooting, and after that the spring wheat and clover had to be sown. I felt sad, but it was now a springtime sadness. As I worked in the fields and listened to the skylarks I wondered whether I should settle that question of personal happiness once and for all by marrying, unpretentiously, a simple country girl? But suddenly, when work was in full swing, I received a letter with an Italian stamp. Clover, beehives, calves, peasant girls all vanished into thin air. This time Ariadna wrote that she was profoundly, frightfully unhappy. She reproached me for not lending her a helping hand, for looking down on her from the dizzy heights of my virtue and for abandoning her in her hour of peril. All this was written in large, shaky handwriting, with smudges and blots – her letter was obviously dashed off in a great hurry and in great distress. She concluded by begging me to come and save her.
So once again I was torn from my moorings and swept away. Ariadna was living in Rome. I arrived at her place late one evening and when she saw me she burst into tears and threw herself around my neck. During the winter she hadn’t changed at all and she looked just as young and enchanting as ever. We had supper together and then drove around Rome until dawn. The whole time she kept telling me about what she had been doing. I asked her where Lubkov was.
“Don’t mention that fellow to me!” she cried. “He’s disgusting, loathsome!”
“But surely you loved him, didn’t you?” I said.
“Never! At first he seemed rather different and I felt sorry for him – but that was all! He’s insolent, he takes women by storm, which is attractive. But let’s not talk about him. It’s a sad chapter in my life. He’s gone to Russia to get some money – and good riddance! I told him not to dare come back.”
She wasn’t staying in a hotel any more, but in a two-roomed private apartment which she had furnished to her own taste in cold luxury. After Lubkov left she borrowed about five thousand francs from her friends and my arrival really was her salvation. I was counting on taking her back to the country, but I didn’t succeed. She was terribly homesick, but memories of the hardships she had suffered, of past shortcomings, of the rusty roof on her brother’s house, made her shake with revulsion, and when I suggested going home she grabbed my hands convulsively.
“Oh no, no! I’d die of boredom there!” she exclaimed.
And then my love entered its final stage, its last quarter.
“Be a darling again, love me a teeny bit,” Ariadna said, leaning towards me. “You’re so gloomy, so strait-laced, you’re scared of letting yourself go. All you think of is the consequences – and that’s a real bore. Well, I’m asking you, begging you, to be nice to me! Oh, my honest, saintly darling. I love you so much!”
I became her lover. For at least a month I was like a madman, crazy with delight. To hold that young, beautiful body in my arms, to enjoy it, feel her warmth every time I woke up and to realize that she was there – she, my Ariadna! Oh, that took some getting used to! But get used to it I did and gradually I began to take a more sober view of my new position. Most important, I understood that Ariadna didn’t love me any more than before, she yearned for serious love and she was afraid of being lonely. Most of all, I was young, healthy and strong, whilst she was sensual, like all unemotional people, and we both pretended that our affair was based on mutual, grand passion. Later a few other things came to light.
We stayed in Rome, Naples and Florence. We went to Paris, but found it cold there, so we returned to Italy. Everywhere we introduced ourselves as husband and wife and made ourselves out to be rich landowners, so people were eager to make friends with us. Ariadna was a great success. As she was taking painting lessons she was called an artist and as you can imagine this suited her down to the ground, although she didn’t have a scrap of talent. Every day she slept until two or three in the afternoon; she had coffee and lunch in bed. For dinner she had soup, lobsters, fish, meat, asparagus, game. And then, when she went to bed I would bring her something, such as roast beef for instance, which she would eat with a sad, worried expression. If she woke up at night she would eat apples and oranges.
The chief, so to speak basic, characteristic of this woman was her astonishing cunning. Constantly, every minute of the day, she was up to some trick, apparently without any need – instinctively, as it were, from the same urge which makes a sparrow chirp or a cockroach twitch its feelers. She played tricks on me, on the servants, on the porter, on shopkeepers, on friends. Not a single conversation or meeting took place without affectation and pretence on her part.
A man only had to come into our room – it made no difference whether waiter or baron – for the look in her eyes, her expression, her voice and even the outline of her figure to change. If you’d seen her then – if only once – you would have said that there were no more fashionable and wealthier people than us in the whole of Italy. Not one artist or musician escaped without her telling him a whole load of stupid lies about his remarkable talent.
“You’re a real genius!” she would chant in a sugary voice. “It’s quite frightening! I should think you can see straight through people.”
All this merely to please, to enjoy success.
Every morning she woke up with but one thought in mind: to please! And this was the sole purpose and object of her life. If I’d told her that in such-and-such a street, in such-and-such a house there lived someone to whom she didn’t appeal, she would have been terribly upset. Every day she needed to enchant, to captivate, to drive men out of their minds. To have me in her power, reduced to a complete nonentity by her witchlike charms, gave her the same pleasure once enjoyed by victors at knightly tournaments. It was as if my humiliation wasn’t enough and at night she would sprawl about like a tigress – naked, as she always felt too hot – and she would read Lubkov’s letters. He begged her to return to Russia: if she didn’t he vowed to rob or murder someone just to get the money to come and see her. Although she hated him, she was excited by his passionate, crawling letters. She had an extremely high opinion of her own charms: she felt that if people could see her superb figure at a large gathering somewhere, her complexion, she would have all Italy, the whole world at her feet. This talk of her figure, her complexion, appalled me and whenever she noticed this and was in a bad mood she would taunt me with all sorts of cheap remarks, just to annoy me. Things became so bad that once, at some lady’s country villa, she lost her temper and told me: “If you don’t stop boring me with your sermons I’ll take my clothes off here and now and lie naked on these flowers!”
Often, when I watched her sleeping, or eating, or trying to look innocent, I would ask myself why God had given her such remarkable beauty, grace, intelligence. Surely not just to sprawl around in bed, to eat, to tell lies – nothing but lies the whole time? But was she in fact intelligent? She thought that three candles in a row and the number thirteen were unlucky; she was terrified of the evil eye and of nightmares; she talked of free love and freedom in general like some pious old crone; she claimed that Boleslav Markevich12 was a better writer than Turgenev. But she was diabolically cunning and astute and knew how to pass herself off as a very educated, progressive woman in society.
When she was in a cheerful mood she thought nothing of insulting servants or killing insects. She loved bullfights and reading about murders, and she was angry when defendants were acquitted.
To live the kind of life Ariadna and I were leading a great deal of money was needed. My poor father sent me his pension, all his various scraps of income and borrowed on my behalf wherever he could. Once, when he replied non habeo,13 I sent him a desperate telegram, begging him to mortgage the estate. Shortly afterwards I asked him to take out a second mortgage somewhere. He did both without murmur and sent me the money down to the last copeck. But Ariadna felt contempt for the practical side of life – that kind of thing wasn’t her concern and while I was throwing around thousands of francs to satisfy her mad cravings, groaning like an ancient oak tree, she would light-heartedly hum Addio, bella Napoli.14 I gradually cooled towards her and began to feel ashamed of our affair. I don’t care for pregnancies and labour pains, but now I was sometimes dreaming of a child which would have been at least a formal justification of our life. To avoid becoming completely loathsome to myself I took to visiting museums and galleries and reading books. I ate little and I gave up drinking. If you keep on the go from dawn to dusk you somehow feel all the better for it.
And I bored Ariadna as well. Incidentally, it was only among mediocrities that she enjoyed success: those earlier visions of ambassadors and salons had evaporated. Money was short, which distressed her and reduced her to tears. In the end she announced that she would have no objection to returning to Russia after all. So, here we are on our way back. During the last months before our departure she had been furiously corresponding with her brother. Obviously she has some secret plans in mind – what they are, God only knows. I’m long sick and tired of trying to find out what cunning tricks she’s up to. We’re not going to the country, though, but to Yalta15 and then to the Caucasus. Now she can live only in holiday resorts – if you only knew how I detest all these places, how suffocated I feel in them, how ashamed. Now I want to go to the country! I want to work, earn my living by the sweat of my brow, atone for my sins. Now I feel brimful of energy and I think that if I buckled down I could clear the estate of debt within five years. But as you can see, there are complications. Here we’re not abroad but back in dear old Mother Russia and we need to think of lawful wedlock. Of course, the infatuation’s passed, not a trace of love any more. But come what may, I’m duty bound to marry her.” ’
Shamokhin (who was agitated after telling his story) and myself went below, still talking about women. It was late. As it happened we were sharing the same cabin.
‘These days’, said Shamokhin, ‘it’s only in villages that women don’t lag behind men. There they think and feel like them, fight just as hard against nature in the name of culture as men do. But the educated, middle-class urban woman fell behind long ago and is reverting to her primitive state. She is half animal now and it’s thanks to her that a great deal of what human genius has achieved has been lost. Women are gradually disappearing and their place is being taken by the primitive female. The backwardness of educated women is a serious threat to civilization. As women regress, they try to drag men after them and they’re retarding their progress. There’s no doubt about it.’
I asked him: why generalize? Why judge all women by Ariadna alone? Surely women’s striving for education and sexual equality – which I take as a striving towards justice – in itself rules out any idea of regression. But Shamokhin was hardly listening and smiled sceptically. Here was an impassioned, confirmed misogynist and it was impossible to make him change his mind.
‘Hey! Enough of that!’ he interrupted. ‘Once a woman doesn’t see me as a man or as an equal, but as the male of the species and spends her whole life worrying about how to please me – taking possession of me that is – then how can there be any talk of equal rights? Oh, don’t trust them, they are very, very crafty! We men go to enormous trouble about their freedom, but they don’t want freedom at all and are only pretending that they want it. Oh, they’re so very crafty! Dreadfully crafty!’
I was tired of arguing and wanted to sleep, so I turned my face to the wall.
‘Yes’, I heard as I was falling asleep. ‘Oh yes, sir! And our upbringing’s entirely to blame, old man! In the long run all that your urban woman’s upbringing and education essentially boils down to is that she’s turned into a human animal – that is, she can attract the male and knows how to conquer him. Yes, sir’, sighed Shamokhin. ‘Girls should be brought up and educated together with boys so that they’re always together. Women must be brought up so that, like men, they’re able to admit they’re in the wrong, otherwise they’ll always think that they’re in the right. We must instil into girls from the cradle that men are first and foremost not mere escorts or suitors, but their friends and neighbours, equal to them in every respect. Teach them to think logically, to make inferences, and don’t go telling them16 that their brain weighs less than a man’s and that therefore they don’t have to trouble themselves about science, art and cultural matters. A boy who is an apprentice cobbler or house-painter also has a brain that’s smaller than a grown man’s, but he plays a part in the general struggle for survival, working and suffering. And we must also abandon this habit of explaining everything away by physiology, pregnancy and childbirth. In the first place, a woman doesn’t give birth every month. Secondly,
not all women have children. Thirdly, a normal peasant woman will be working in the fields the day before she gives birth and she’s none the worse for it. There should be absolute equality in daily life. If a man offers his seat or picks up a woman’s handkerchief – then let her do the same for him! I don’t mind if a girl of good family helps me on with my coat or gives me a glass of water…’
That was all I heard, as I fell asleep. When we were approaching Sevastopol next morning the weather was wet and unpleasant. The sea was rather rough. Shamokhin sat with me in the deck-house silently brooding. When the tea bell rang gentlemen with turned-up collars and ladies with pale, sleepy faces started going below. One young and very beautiful lady – the same lady who had been furious with the Customs officials at Volochisk – stopped in front of Shamokhin and told him in the voice of a capricious, spoilt child:
‘Jean, your little birdie’s been sick!’
Later, when I was living in Yalta, I saw that beautiful lady on horseback, galloping so fast that two officers could barely keep up with her. And one morning I saw her in a Phrygian cap, wearing a small apron, sitting on the front sketching in oils, while a large crowd stood admiringly at a distance. And I was introduced to her. She shook my hand very firmly, looked at me with delight and thanked me in that sugary, singsong voice for the pleasure my writings gave her.
‘Don’t you believe her’, Shamokhin whispered. ‘She hasn’t read a word of yours.’
Towards evening, when I was strolling along the front, I bumped into Shamokhin. His arms were filled with large parcels of savouries and fruit.
‘Prince Maktuyev is here!’ he exclaimed delightedly. ‘He arrived yesterday with that spiritualist brother of hers. Now I understand what she was writing to him about! Heavens!’ he continued, gazing at the sky and pressing the parcels to his chest. ‘If she manages to hit it off with the prince that means I’m free and can go back to my father in the country!’
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories Page 15