Ariadne

On the deck of the steamer sailing from Odessa to Sevastopol, a certain gentleman, rather handsome, with a round little beard, came up to me to light his cigarette, and said:

"Take a look at those Germans sitting by the deckhouse. Whenever Germans or Englishmen get together, they talk about wool prices, the harvest, their own personal affairs; but for some reason, whenever we Russians get together, we talk only about women and lofty matters. But mostly about women."

This gentleman’s face was already familiar to me. The day before we had been returning on the same train from abroad, and at Volochisk I had seen him, during the customs inspection, standing beside a lady, his travelling companion, in front of a whole mountain of trunks and baskets full of women’s clothes, embarrassed and crestfallen as he paid duty on some scrap of silk while his companion protested and threatened to complain to someone; then on the way to Odessa I had seen him carrying pastries, and then oranges, into the ladies’ compartment.

It was a little damp, the ship rocked slightly, and the ladies had gone down to their cabins. The gentleman with the round little beard sat down beside me and went on:

"Yes, when Russians get together, they talk only about lofty matters and women. We’re so cultivated, so solemn, that we utter nothing but truths and can only settle questions of the highest order. A Russian actor doesn’t know how to play the fool – he acts a vaudeville with profundity; and so it is with us: when we have to talk about trifles, we treat them from no other than the highest point of view. That’s a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. And we talk about women so often, it seems to me, because we’re unsatisfied. We look on women too ideally, and make demands on them that reality simply cannot meet; we get far from what we want, and the result is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, heartache – and a man talks about whatever ails him. You’re not bored, going on with this conversation?"

"No, not in the least."

"In that case allow me to introduce myself," said my companion, half rising: "Ivan Ilyich Shamokhin, a Moscow landowner, in a manner of speaking... You, on the other hand, I know quite well."

He sat down again and went on, looking into my face with a warm and sincere gaze:

"These constant conversations about women would be explained by some second-rate philosopher, some Max Nordau or other, as erotic derangement, or as the leftover instincts of serf-owners, and so on – but I look at the matter differently. I repeat: we’re unsatisfied because we’re idealists. We want the beings who bear us and bear our children to be above us, above everything on earth. When we’re young, we turn into poetry and worship whomever we fall in love with; for us love and happiness are synonyms. Here in Russia a marriage not made for love is despised, sensuality is thought absurd and repellent, and the novels and stories that enjoy the greatest success are those in which the women are beautiful, poetic, and exalted; and if a Russian has for ages admired Raphael’s Madonna, or troubled himself over the emancipation of women, I assure you there’s nothing put-on about it. But here’s the trouble. No sooner do we marry, or take up with a woman, than some two or three years pass and we already feel disillusioned, deceived; we take up with others, and again disillusionment, again horror, and in the end we become convinced that women are false, petty, vain, unjust, undeveloped, cruel – in a word, not only not above us but immeasurably beneath us men. And we, unsatisfied, deceived, have nothing left to do but grumble and, in passing, talk about the very thing in which we’ve been so cruelly deceived."

While Shamokhin was talking, I noticed that the Russian language and the Russian surroundings were giving him great pleasure. That was probably because, abroad, he had grown terribly homesick. In praising Russians and crediting them with a rare idealism, he did not speak ill of foreigners, and that disposed me in his favor. It was also plain that something was wrong in his soul, that he wanted to talk more about himself than about women, and that I would not escape hearing some long story, something like a confession.

And indeed, when we called for a bottle of wine and had drunk a glass each, he began like this:

"I recall that in some story of Veltman’s, someone says: ’Now that’s a story!’ And another answers him: ’No, that’s not the story, only the introduction to the story.’ Well, everything I’ve said so far is only the introduction, and what I really want to do is tell you about my last romance. I’m sorry – I’ll ask you once more: you’re not bored, listening?"

I said I wasn’t, and he went on:

"The action takes place in Moscow province, in one of its northern districts. The countryside there, I must tell you, is astonishing. Our estate stands on the high bank of a swift little river, at what’s called a byrkoye mesto, a fast, roaring stretch where the water rushes day and night; picture, then, a big old garden, cozy flowerbeds, an apiary, a kitchen garden, below it the river with its curling willows that in a heavy dew look faintly dull, as though turning gray, and beyond it a meadow, and beyond the meadow, on a hill, a great dark forest. In that forest the saffron milk-caps grow thick beyond counting, and elk live in its very depths. I could die, they could nail me into my coffin, and I believe I’d still dream of those early mornings when your eyes ache from the sun, or of those wonderful spring evenings when the nightingales and corncrakes are calling in the garden and beyond it, and from the village comes the sound of an accordion, and in the house someone’s playing the piano, and the river roars – in a word, such music that you want both to weep and to sing aloud. Our tilled land isn’t large, but the meadows carry us through, and together with the woods they bring in about two thousand a year. I’m my father’s only son; we’re both modest people, and that money, together with my father’s pension besides, was quite enough for us. For the first three years after finishing university I lived in the country, ran the estate, and kept waiting to be elected to some post or other; but above all I was deeply in love with an unusually beautiful, enchanting girl. She was the sister of my neighbor, the landowner Kotlovich, a ruined gentleman on whose estate there were pineapples, remarkable peaches, lightning rods, a fountain in the middle of the courtyard – and at the same time not a kopeck of money. He did nothing, knew how to do nothing, was somehow flabby, as though made of steamed turnip; he treated the peasants with homeopathy and dabbled in spiritualism. He was, however, a delicate, gentle, and not stupid man, but my heart doesn’t warm to those gentlemen who converse with spirits and treat peasant women by magnetism. In the first place, people whose minds aren’t free always have a muddle of notions, and it’s extremely hard to talk with them; and in the second place, they generally love no one, don’t live with women, and this air of mystery has an unpleasant effect on impressionable people. And I didn’t care for his looks either. He was tall, stout, pale, with a small head, small glittering eyes, and plump white fingers. He didn’t shake your hand, he kneaded it. And he was always apologizing about something. Asking for something – forgive me; giving something – forgive me, too. As for his sister, though, that’s a face from a wholly different opera. I should tell you that in childhood and youth I had not known the Kotloviches, since my father was a professor in N. and we lived a long time in the provinces, and by the time I made their acquaintance, this girl was already twenty-two, and had long since finished her institute and lived two or three years in Moscow with a wealthy aunt, who brought her out into society. When I met her and first had occasion to speak with her, what struck me above all was her rare and beautiful name – Ariadne. It suited her so well! She was a brunette, very slender, very fine-boned, supple, graceful, extraordinarily elegant, with delicate, thoroughly noble features. Her eyes glittered too, but her brother’s glittered coldly and sweetly, like sugar candies, while in her gaze there shone a youth, beautiful and proud. She conquered me the very first day we met – and it could not have been otherwise. My first impressions were so overpowering that I haven’t parted with the illusion to this day; I still like to think that when nature created that girl, she had some grand, astonishing design in mind. Ariadne’s voice, her step, her little hat, and even the print of her small feet on the sandy riverbank, where she used to fish for gudgeon, stirred in me a joy, a passionate thirst for life. From her beautiful face and beautiful figure I judged the organization of her soul, and every word Ariadne spoke, every smile, delighted me, won me over, and made me suppose in her a lofty soul. She was affectionate, talkative, cheerful, simple in manner, believed in God poetically, discoursed on death poetically, and there was such a richness of shading in the makeup of her soul that even her faults she could invest with some peculiar, endearing quality. Suppose, say, she needed a new horse, and there was no money – well, what of it? One could sell something, or pawn it, and if the steward swore that nothing could be sold or pawned, then one could strip the iron roofs off the outbuildings and sell them to a factory, or, in the very busiest season, drive the plough horses to market and sell them for a song. These unbridled whims sometimes threw the whole estate into despair, but she expressed them with such grace that in the end everything was forgiven her and everything permitted her, as to a goddess, or to Caesar’s wife. My love was touching, and everyone soon noticed it – my father, the neighbors, the peasants. And they all sympathized with me. Whenever I happened to treat the laborers to vodka, they would bow and say:"

"God grant you marry the Kotlovich young lady."

"And Ariadne herself knew that I loved her. She often came riding over to us, or in a wagonette, and sometimes spent whole days with me and my father. She made friends with my old father, and he even taught her to ride a bicycle – that was his favorite amusement. I remember how one evening they were getting ready to ride, and I was helping her onto the bicycle, and just then she was so lovely that it seemed to me my hands were being scorched as I touched her; I trembled with rapture, and when the two of them, the old man and she, so handsome, so slender, went riding off side by side down the highway, an oncoming black horse, on which a steward was jogging along groaning, shied to one side, and it seemed to me that it shied because it too had been struck by their beauty. My love, my adoration, touched Ariadne, moved her, and she longed passionately to be enchanted too, as I was, and to answer my love with love of her own. It was so poetic, after all!"

"But she couldn’t love truly, as I did, since she was cold and already sufficiently spoiled. There already lived in her a demon that whispered day and night that she was enchanting, divine, and she, not really knowing what she had, in fact, been made for and why life had been given her, imagined her future as nothing less than very rich and grand; she dreamed of balls, races, liveried footmen, a sumptuous drawing room, a salon of her own, and a whole swarm of counts, princes, ambassadors, famous painters and artists, all of it worshiping her and marveling at her beauty and her gowns... This thirst for power and personal triumphs, and these constant thoughts running in one direction only, cool people down, and Ariadne was cold – cold toward me, toward nature, toward music. Meanwhile time went on, and no ambassadors appeared; Ariadne went on living at her spiritualist brother’s, matters kept getting worse, so that she already had nothing to buy dresses and hats with, and had to scheme and contrive to hide her poverty."

"As if on purpose, while she was still living in Moscow with her aunt, a certain Prince Maktuev had courted her, a wealthy but altogether insignificant man. She had refused him flatly. But now the worm of remorse sometimes gnawed at her: why had she refused? Just as our peasant blows in disgust on his kvass with cockroaches in it and drinks it all the same, so she would wrinkle up her face in distaste at the memory of the prince, and say to me all the same:"

"Say what you like, but there’s something inexplicable, something bewitching, in a title..."

"She dreamed of a title, of splendor, but at the same time she didn’t want to let me slip either. Dream as one might of ambassadors, still the heart isn’t made of stone, and one’s youth is a pity to lose. Ariadne tried to fall in love, made a show of loving me, even swore to me that she loved me. But I’m a nervous man, a sensitive one; when someone loves me I feel it even at a distance, without protestations or oaths – here, though, I felt a chill blowing on me at once, and when she spoke to me of love it seemed to me I was hearing the song of a mechanical nightingale. Ariadne herself felt she lacked the fire for it, it vexed her, and more than once I saw her weeping. And then, imagine, she suddenly threw her arms about me in a rush and kissed me – this happened one evening, on the riverbank – and I could see by her eyes that she didn’t love me, that she’d embraced me simply out of curiosity, to test herself, to see what would come of it. And I felt afraid. I took her by the hands and said in despair:"

"These caresses without love cause me suffering!"

"’What an odd creature you are!’ she said with vexation, and moved away."

"In all likelihood another year or two would have gone by, and I would have married her, and there the story would have ended, but fate saw fit to arrange our romance otherwise. It happened that a new figure appeared on our horizon. A university friend of Ariadne’s brother came to stay with him – Lubkov, Mikhail Ivanych, a charming man, of whom the coachmen and footmen used to say: ’no-o-ow there’s an interesting gentleman!’ Of about middling height, scrawny, balding, a face like a good bourgeois’s, not interesting but decent-looking, pale, with stiff well-groomed mustaches, a goose-pimpled neck, and a large Adam’s apple. He wore a pince-nez on a broad black ribbon, and he had a lisp – he pronounced neither r nor l – so that, for instance, the word ’sdelal’ (done) came out of him as ’sdevav.’ He was always cheerful, everything struck him as funny. He’d married somehow uncommonly stupidly, at twenty, received as dowry two houses in Moscow near the Devichye Pole, taken up remodeling and building a bathhouse, ruined himself down to his last shirt, and now his wife and four children were living in the ’Eastern Rooms,’ in want, and he had to support them – and that struck him as funny too. He was thirty-six, and his wife already forty-two – that was funny as well. His mother, a haughty, puffed-up person with pretensions to gentility, despised his wife and lived apart with a whole horde of dogs and cats, and he had to send her seventy-five roubles a month besides; and he himself was a man of taste, liked to have breakfast at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dine at the Hermitage; he needed a great deal of money, but his uncle allowed him only two thousand a year, which wasn’t enough, and so he ran about Moscow whole days long, tongue hanging out, so to speak, looking for someone to borrow from – and that too struck him as funny. He’d come to Kotlovich’s, he said, to rest from family life on nature’s bosom. At dinner, at supper, on walks, he told us about his wife, his mother, his creditors, the bailiffs, and laughed at them; laughed at himself too, and assured us that thanks to this talent for borrowing he’d acquired a great many pleasant acquaintances. He laughed without stopping, and we laughed too. With him around, we began to spend our time differently. I inclined more toward quiet, so to speak idyllic pleasures; I loved fishing, evening walks, gathering mushrooms; Lubkov, on the other hand, preferred picnics, fireworks, hunting with hounds. Two or three times a week he’d get up a picnic, and Ariadne, with a serious, inspired face, would write out on a slip of paper oysters, champagne, sweets, and send me off to Moscow, never asking, of course, whether I had the money. And at the picnics, toasts, laughter, and again cheerful stories about how old his wife was, how fat his mother’s little dogs were, what dear people creditors were..."

"Lubkov loved nature, but looked upon it as something long since familiar, and moreover, in essence, standing immeasurably beneath him and created solely for his pleasure. He’d stop, say, before some magnificent view and remark: ’Wouldn’t it be nice to have tea here?’ Once, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he nodded toward her and said:"

"She’s thin, and I like that. I don’t care for stout women."

"That grated on me. I asked him not to speak of women that way in my presence. He looked at me with surprise and said:"

"What’s wrong with liking thin women and not liking stout ones?"

"I made no answer. Then once, being in excellent spirits and slightly tipsy, he said:"

"I’ve noticed you’re liked by Ariadna Grigoryevna. I’m amazed at you – why do you sit there yawning?"

"I felt awkward at these words, and, embarrassed, I set out for him my own views on love and women."

"’I don’t know,’ he sighed. ’To my mind, a woman is a woman, a man is a man. Let Ariadna Grigoryevna be, as you say, poetic and exalted – that doesn’t mean she’s outside the laws of nature. You can see for yourself she’s already at the age when she needs a husband, or a lover. I respect women no less than you do, but I think that certain relations don’t exclude poetry. Poetry is one thing in itself, and a lover is another thing in itself. It’s the same as in farming: the beauty of nature is one thing in itself, and the income from the woods and fields is another thing in itself.’"

"When Ariadne and I were fishing for gudgeon, Lubkov would lie right there on the sand, teasing me or instructing me on how to live."

"’I’m amazed, my dear sir, how you can live without a romance!’ he’d say. ’You’re young, handsome, interesting – in a word, quite a fine figure of a man – and you live like a monk. Ah, these old men of twenty-eight! I’m nearly ten years older than you, and which of us is younger? Ariadna Grigoryevna, which of us?’"

"’You are, of course,’ Ariadne would answer him."

"And when he grew tired of our silence and of the attention with which we watched our floats, he’d go off to the house, and she’d say, looking at me angrily:"

"’Really, you’re not a man at all, you’re some sort of, God forgive me, milksop. A man ought to be carried away, ought to lose his head, make mistakes, suffer! A woman will forgive you insolence and effrontery, but she’ll never forgive you this good sense of yours.’"

"She was not joking now, she was really angry, and went on:"

"’To have success, one has to be resolute and bold. Lubkov isn’t as handsome as you, but he’s more interesting than you, and will always have success with women, because he’s not like you – he’s a man...’"

"And there was even a kind of bitterness audible in her voice. Once, at supper, without addressing me, she began saying that if she were a man, she wouldn’t be moldering in the country, she’d go traveling, she’d spend her winters somewhere abroad – in Italy, say. Oh, Italy! Here my father, without meaning to, poured oil on the fire; he talked at length about Italy, how fine it was there, what wonderful nature, what marvelous museums! Ariadne suddenly caught fire with a desire to go to Italy. She even struck her fist on the table, and her eyes flashed: I’m going!"

"And then there began talk, day after day, of how wonderful it would be in Italy – ah, Italy, ah and oh – and every single day the same, and when Ariadne looked at me over her shoulder, I could see, from the cold, stubborn expression on her face, that in her daydreams she had already conquered Italy with all its salons, its titled foreigners, its tourists, and that there was no holding her back any longer. I advised waiting a little, putting off the trip a year or two, but she wrinkled her face in distaste and said:"

"’You’re as sensible as an old woman.’"

"Lubkov, for his part, was all for the trip. He said it would come out very cheap, and that he too would gladly go to Italy and rest there from family life. I confess I behaved as naively as a schoolboy. Not out of jealousy, but out of a foreboding of something terrible, something extraordinary, I tried, whenever I could, not to leave them alone together, and they teased me for it; when I came in, for instance, they’d pretend they’d just been kissing, and so on."

"But then one fine morning her plump, pale spiritualist brother came to see me and expressed a wish to speak with me alone. He was a man without will; despite his upbringing and his delicacy, he could never restrain himself from reading someone else’s letter if it lay in front of him on the table. And now, in conversation, he confessed that he had accidentally read a letter from Lubkov to Ariadne."

"’From this letter I’ve learned that she’s going abroad shortly. My dear friend, I’m very much upset! Explain it to me, for God’s sake, I don’t understand a thing!’"

"As he said this he breathed heavily, breathing straight into my face, and he smelled of boiled beef."

"’Forgive me, I’m letting you in on the secrets of this letter,’ he went on, ’but you’re a friend of Ariadne’s, she respects you! Perhaps you know something. She wants to go away, but with whom? Monsieur Lubkov is planning to go with her too. Forgive me, but that’s even strange, on Monsieur Lubkov’s part. He’s a married man, he has children, and yet he declares his love, writes to Ariadne using ty. Forgive me, but it’s strange!’"

"I turned cold, my hands and feet went numb, and I felt a pain in my chest, as though someone had lodged a three-cornered stone there. Kotlovich sank into an armchair in exhaustion, and his hands hung down like whips."

"’What can I possibly do?’ I asked."

"’Talk sense into her, persuade her... Judge for yourself: what is Lubkov to her? Is he a match for her? Oh, God, how terrible this is, how terrible!’ he went on, clutching his head. ’She has such wonderful matches – Prince Maktuev, and... and others. The prince adores her, and only last Wednesday his late grandfather Ilarion positively confirmed, as certain as two times two, that Ariadne would be his wife. Positively! Grandfather Ilarion is dead, but he was a remarkably intelligent man. We call up his spirit every day.’"

"After that conversation I didn’t sleep the whole night, wanted to shoot myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all to shreds, then sobbed in the threshing barn, then took money from my father and left for the Caucasus without saying goodbye."

"Of course, a woman is a woman and a man is a man, but can it really be that all this is just as simple in our time as it was before the Flood, and can it really be that I, a cultivated man, endowed with a complex spiritual organization, must explain my powerful attraction to a woman merely by the fact that her bodily forms differ from mine? Oh, how dreadful that would be! I like to think that the human genius, which has struggled with nature, has struggled with physical love too, as with an enemy, and that, even if it hasn’t defeated it, it has still managed to entangle it in a net of illusions of brotherhood and love; and for me, at least, it’s no longer simply a function of my animal organism, as it is for a dog or a frog, but real love, and every embrace is spiritualized by a pure heartfelt impulse and by respect for the woman. In fact, an aversion to the animal instinct has been cultivated over centuries, in hundreds of generations; I’ve inherited it in my blood, and it forms part of my very being, and if I now turn love into poetry, isn’t that just as natural and necessary in our time as the fact that the shells of my ears don’t move and that I’m not covered in fur? It seems to me that most cultivated people think this way, since nowadays the absence, in love, of any moral or poetic element is already regarded as a case of atavism; they say it’s a symptom of degeneration, of various forms of madness. True, in turning love into poetry, we suppose in the ones we love merits they often don’t have, and that’s a constant source of errors and of constant suffering for us. But it’s better, to my mind, that it should be so – better, that is, to suffer than to console oneself with the notion that a woman is a woman, and a man is a man."

"In Tiflis I received a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadna Grigoryevna had left for abroad on such-and-such a date, meaning to spend the whole winter there. A month later I went home. It was already autumn. Every week Ariadne sent my father letters on scented paper, very interesting ones, written in beautiful literary language. I hold the opinion that every woman could be a writer. Ariadne described in great detail how hard it had been to make peace with her aunt and beg from her a thousand roubles for the journey, and how long she’d searched in Moscow for some distant relative of hers, an old lady, to persuade her to travel together. This excess of detail smacked far too much of invention, and I understood, of course, that she’d had no traveling companion at all. A little later I too received a letter from her, also scented and literary. She wrote that she missed me, missed my beautiful, intelligent, loving eyes, and reproached me, in a friendly way, for ruining my youth, molding in the country, when I could, like her, be living in paradise, under palm trees, breathing in the scent of orange trees. And she signed it: ’your abandoned Ariadne.’ Then, a couple of days later, another letter in the same vein, signed: ’forgotten by you.’ My head was in a fog. I loved her passionately, she came to me in dreams every night, and now on top of it ’abandoned,’ ’forgotten’ – what was that for? what for? – and on top of that the tedium of the country, the long evenings, the tiresome thoughts about Lubkov... The uncertainty tormented me, poisoned my days and my nights, became unbearable. I couldn’t hold out, and I went."

"Ariadne was calling me to Abbazia. I arrived there on a clear, warm day after rain, drops of which still hung on the trees, and put up at the same enormous dependance, looking like a barracks, where Ariadne and Lubkov were staying. They weren’t at home. I went off to the local park, wandered along the alleys, then sat down. An Austrian general walked past, hands clasped behind his back, with the same red stripes down his trousers our own generals wear. A pram was wheeled past with an infant in it, its wheels squealing on the wet sand. A decrepit old man with jaundice went by, then a crowd of Englishwomen, a Catholic priest, then again the Austrian general. Military musicians, just arrived from Fiume, trudged toward the bandstand with their gleaming trumpets; the band struck up. Have you ever been to Abbazia? It’s a dirty little Slavic town with just one street, which stinks, and along which, after rain, one can’t walk without galoshes. So often, and every time with such tenderness, had I read about this earthly paradise that when I later, trousers rolled up, carefully crossed the narrow street and, out of boredom, bought hard pears from an old woman who, recognizing me as a Russian, said ’chetiry,’ ’dvadtsat’ – and when, in bewilderment, I asked myself where on earth I should go and what I should do here, and when I inevitably kept running into Russians deceived just as I’d been – I grew vexed and ashamed. There is a quiet bay here, plied by steamers and boats with sails of every color; from it one can see Fiume, and distant islands wrapped in a lilac-colored haze, and it would have made a fine picture if the view of the bay weren’t blocked by the hotels and their dependances, of absurd petty-bourgeois architecture, with which greedy tradesmen have built up this whole green shore, so that for the most part one sees nothing in paradise but windows, terraces, and platforms with little white tables and black lackeys’ tailcoats. There’s a park here, the kind you’ll find now at every foreign resort. And the dark, motionless, silent green of the palm trees, and the bright-yellow sand of the alleys, and the bright-green benches, and the blare of the bellowing military trumpets, and the general’s red stripes – all of it grows tiresome in ten minutes. And yet for some reason you’re obliged to spend ten days here, ten weeks! Dragging myself around these resorts against my will, I became more and more convinced how uncomfortable and dull is the life of the well-fed and wealthy, how flabby and feeble their imagination is, how timid their tastes and desires. And how much happier than they are those old and young travelers who, having no money to live in hotels, live wherever they can, admire the view of the sea from high in the mountains, lying on the green grass, go on foot, see forests and villages close up, observe the customs of the country, hear its songs, fall in love with its women..."

"While I sat in the park it began to grow dark, and in the twilight my Ariadne appeared, elegant and finely dressed as a princess; behind her walked Lubkov, in all new and loose-fitting clothes, probably bought in Vienna."

"’What are you crosth about?’ he was saying. ’What have I done?’"

"On seeing me she cried out with joy, and had it not been in the park, she would surely have thrown herself on my neck; she pressed my hands firmly and laughed, and I laughed too and very nearly wept from the excitement. Questions began: how was it in the country, how was my father, had I seen her brother, and so on. She insisted I look into her eyes, and asked whether I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels, the picnics..."

"’In truth, how good all that was,’ she sighed. ’But we don’t find it dull here either. We know a great many people, my dear, my good one! Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to a certain Russian family here. Only, please, buy yourself another hat.’ She looked me over and made a face. ’Abbazia isn’t the country,’ she said. ’One has to be comme il faut here.’"

"Then we went to a restaurant. Ariadne laughed the whole time, played the mischief, and called me dear, good, clever, as though she couldn’t quite believe her own eyes that I was really there with her. We sat like that until about eleven, and parted very pleased both with our supper and with each other. The next day Ariadne introduced me to the Russian family: ’the son of the well-known professor, our neighbor on the estate.’ To this family she spoke only of estates and harvests, all the while appealing to me. She wanted to seem a very wealthy landowning lady, and, truth be told, she managed it. She carried herself splendidly, like a genuine aristocrat, which, for that matter, she was by birth."

"’But what do you think of my aunt!’ she said suddenly, looking at me with a smile. ’We had a little quarrel, and off she rolled to Merano. What do you think of that?’"

"Then, when we were walking together in the park, I asked:"

"’What aunt were you talking about just now? What aunt is that?’"

"’That’s a lie for a good cause,’ Ariadne laughed. ’They mustn’t know I’m here without a companion.’ After a moment’s silence she pressed close to me and said: ’My darling, my dear, make friends with Lubkov! He’s so unhappy! His mother and his wife are simply dreadful.’"

"She addressed Lubkov as vy, and when going off to bed said goodnight to him just as she did to me, ’until tomorrow,’ and they lived on different floors – this gave me hope that it was all nonsense and there was no romance between them at all, and, meeting him, I felt at ease. And when he once asked me to lend him three hundred roubles, I gave it to him with great pleasure."

"Every day we went for walks, and only for walks. Either we wandered about the park, or ate, or drank. Every day, conversations with the Russian family. Little by little I got used to the fact that if I went into the park I would certainly meet the old man with jaundice, the priest, and the Austrian general, who carried about with him a deck of small cards and, wherever he could, sat down and laid out a game of patience, jerking his shoulders nervously. And the band played the same thing over and over. At home, in the country, I used to feel ashamed before the peasants when, on a weekday, I went off with company on a picnic or fished; so here, too, I felt ashamed before the footmen, the coachmen, the laborers I passed; it always seemed to me they were looking at me and thinking: ’Why don’t you do anything?’ And I felt this shame from morning to night, every single day. A strange, unpleasant, monotonous time; the only variety in it was that Lubkov borrowed from me now a hundred, now fifty gulden, and money would suddenly revive him, the way morphine revives a morphine addict, and he’d begin laughing loudly at his wife, at himself, or at his creditors."

"But then the rains began, and it turned cold. We went to Italy, and I telegraphed my father asking him, for God’s sake, to send me eight hundred roubles by money order in Rome. We stopped in Venice, in Bologna, in Florence, and in every city we invariably ended up in an expensive hotel, where we were charged extra for everything – for lighting, for service, for heating, for bread with breakfast, and for the privilege of not dining in the common hall. We ate a terrible amount. In the morning we were served cafe complet. At one o’clock, breakfast: meat, fish, some sort of omelette, cheese, fruit, and wine. At six, dinner of eight courses, with long intervals, during which we drank beer and wine. Around eight, tea. Before midnight Ariadne would announce that she was hungry and demand ham and soft-boiled eggs. We would keep her company. And in the gaps between meals we ran about the museums and exhibitions, with the constant thought of not being late for dinner or breakfast. I grew weary before the paintings, longed to go home and lie down, tired myself out, searched with my eyes for a chair, and hypocritically repeated after everyone else: ’How exquisite! What air, what light!’ Like well-fed boas, we paid attention only to glittering objects, shop windows hypnotized us, and we went into raptures over fake brooches and bought a mass of useless, worthless things."

"It was the same in Rome. There it rained, a cold wind blew. After a rich breakfast we went to look at St. Peter’s, and, thanks to how full we were, or perhaps to the bad weather, it made no impression on us whatsoever, and, each accusing the other of indifference to art, we very nearly quarreled."

"Money arrived from my father. I set off to collect it, one morning, I remember. Lubkov went with me."

"’The present can’t be full and happy when there’s a past behind it,’ he said. ’From my own past I’ve got a great load left hanging round my neck. Still, if there were money, none of it would be so bad – but as it is, naked I came and naked shall I remain... Would you believe, I’ve got only eight francs left,’ he went on, lowering his voice, ’and meanwhile I have to send my wife a hundred and my mother the same. And one has to live here too. Ariadne, like a child, refuses to consider our situation and throws money about like a duchess. Whatever did she buy that watch for yesterday? And tell me, why do we go on playing at being such good little children? After all, the fact that she and I hide our relations from the servants and our acquaintances costs us an extra ten or fifteen francs a day, since I keep a separate room. What’s it for?’"

"A sharp stone turned over in my chest. There was no more uncertainty now, everything was clear to me; I went cold all over, and at once a decision formed in me: not to see either of them again, to flee them, to go home at once..."

"’Taking up with a woman is easy,’ Lubkov went on, ’all it takes is undressing her – but afterward, how heavy it all is, what nonsense!’"

"As I was counting the money I’d received, he said:"

"’If you don’t lend me a thousand francs, I’ll have to perish. Your money here is my only resource.’"

"I gave it to him, and he livened up at once and began laughing at his uncle, an odd fellow who couldn’t manage to keep his address secret from his wife. Back at the hotel, I packed and settled my bill. There remained only to say goodbye to Ariadne."

"I knocked at her door."

"’Entrez!’"

"In her room there was the morning’s disorder: on the table, tea things, a half-eaten roll, eggshells; a strong, stifling smell of perfume. The bed was unmade, and it was plain that two people had slept in it. Ariadne herself had only just gotten up and was now in a flannel blouse, her hair undone."

"I said good morning, then sat silent for a minute while she tried to put her hair in order, and asked, trembling all over:"

"’Why... why did you send for me to come out here?’"

"She seemed to guess what I was thinking; she took me by the hand and said:"

"’I want you to be here. You’re so pure!’"

"I felt ashamed of my agitation, of my trembling. What if I burst into sobs! I left without another word, and an hour later I was already sitting in the train carriage. The whole way, for some reason, I imagined Ariadne pregnant, and she disgusted me, and all the women I saw in the carriages and at the stations seemed to me, for some reason, pregnant too, and disgusting and pitiful as well. I was in the position of that greedy, passionate miser who suddenly discovers that all his gold pieces are counterfeit. The pure, graceful images that my imagination, warmed by love, had so long cherished – my plans, my hopes, my memories, my views on love and on woman – all of it now laughed at me and stuck out its tongue at me. Ariadne, I asked myself in horror, this young, remarkably beautiful, intelligent girl, a senator’s daughter, involved with such a commonplace, uninteresting vulgarian? But then, why shouldn’t she love Lubkov? I answered myself. How is he worse than I am? Oh, let her love whomever she pleases, but why lie? But on what grounds must she be candid with me? And so on, and so on, in the same vein, to the point of stupor. And it was cold in the carriage. I traveled first class, but there they seat three to a seat, there are no double window panes, the outer door opens straight into the compartment – and I felt as if I were in the stocks, squeezed, cast off, pitiful, and my feet were dreadfully cold, and at the same time, again and again, it came back to me how seductive she’d looked that morning in her blouse, with her hair loose, and such fierce jealousy suddenly seized me that I would jump up from the pain in my soul, and my fellow passengers looked at me with surprise, even with fear."

"At home I found snowdrifts and twenty degrees of frost. I love winter, I love it, because at that time of year, even in the sharpest frosts, I used to feel especially warm at home. It’s pleasant, putting on a sheepskin coat and felt boots, to do something in the garden or the yard on a bright frosty day, or to read in one’s own hot-stoved room, to sit in my father’s study in front of the fire, to wash in our own country bathhouse... Only if there’s no mother, sister, or children in the house, then it gets somehow eerie on winter evenings, and they seem extraordinarily long and quiet. And the warmer and cozier it is, the more strongly one feels this absence. That winter, when I came back from abroad, the evenings were long, terribly long; I pined badly and from the pining couldn’t even read; in the daytime it was still tolerable – now clearing snow in the garden, now feeding the chickens and calves – but in the evenings, one might as well have given up entirely."

"Before I hadn’t cared for guests; now, though, I was glad of them, since I knew there would certainly be talk of Ariadne. The spiritualist Kotlovich often came to talk about his sister, and sometimes brought along his friend Prince Maktuev, who was in love with Ariadne no less than I was. To sit in Ariadne’s room, run his fingers over the keys of her piano, look through her sheet music – for the prince this had become a need, he couldn’t live without it, while the spirit of grandfather Ilarion went on predicting that sooner or later she would be his wife. With us the prince would usually sit for a long time, from breakfast to midnight, and stay silent the whole while; in silence he’d drink two or three bottles of beer, and only now and then, to show that he too was taking part in the conversation, laugh a curt, mournful, rather foolish laugh. Before going home he’d always draw me aside and say in an undertone:"

"’When did you last see Ariadna Grigoryevna? Is she in good health? I don’t suppose she’s bored, out there?’"

"Spring came. It was time to go out for the woodcock, then to sow the spring wheat and clover. I felt sad, but sad in a spring sort of way: I wanted to make peace with my loss. Working in the field and listening to the larks, I asked myself: shouldn’t I put an end to this question of personal happiness once and for all, and simply, without further ado, marry some plain peasant girl? And then, just as the work was at its height, I received a letter with an Italian stamp. The clover, the apiary, the calves, and the peasant girl – all of it scattered like smoke. This time Ariadne wrote that she was deeply, endlessly unhappy. She reproached me for not lending her a helping hand, for looking at her from the heights of my own virtue and abandoning her at a moment of danger. All of this was written in a large, nervous hand, full of crossings-out and blots, and it was clear she’d written in a hurry and was suffering. In conclusion she implored me to come and save her."

"Once more I was torn from my moorings and swept away. Ariadne was living in Rome. I arrived late in the evening, and when she saw me she burst into sobs and threw herself on my neck. Over the winter she hadn’t changed a bit, and was just as young and lovely as before. We supped together and then drove about Rome until dawn, and the whole time she told me about her life. I asked where Lubkov was."

"’Don’t remind me of that creature!’ she cried. ’He’s repulsive and disgusting to me!’"

"’But surely you loved him,’ I said."

"’Never! At first he seemed original, and stirred pity – that was all. He’s insolent, he takes a woman by storm, and that’s attractive. But let’s not speak of him. It’s a sad page in my life. He’s gone back to Russia for money – good riddance to him! I told him not to dare come back.’"

"She was no longer living in a hotel but in private rooms, two of them, which she’d furnished to her own taste, coldly and luxuriously. Since Lubkov’s departure she’d run up debts of about five thousand francs among her acquaintances, and my arrival really was a rescue for her. I had counted on taking her back to the country, but that didn’t work out. She longed for her homeland, but the memories of the poverty she’d lived through, of the shortages, of the rusted-out roof on her brother’s house, stirred in her a revulsion, a shudder, and when I suggested going home she would clutch my hands convulsively and say:"

"’No, no! I’ll die of misery there!’"

"After that my love entered its last phase, its final quarter."

"’Be your old sweet self again, love me just a little,’ Ariadne would say, leaning toward me. ’You’re sullen and sensible, afraid to give yourself up to any impulse, and always thinking about the consequences, and that’s tiresome. Now come, I beg you, I implore you, be tender!... My pure one, my saint, my darling, I love you so!’"

"I became her lover. For about a month, at least, I was like a madman, knowing only rapture. To hold a young, beautiful body in my arms, to delight in it, to feel, every time I woke from sleep, its warmth, and to remember that she was there, she, my Ariadne – oh, that’s not an easy thing to grow used to! But grow used to it I did, all the same, and little by little I began to look consciously at my new situation. First of all I understood that Ariadne, as before, did not love me. But she wanted to love seriously, she was afraid of solitude, and, above all, I was young, healthy, strong, while she was sensual, as cold people generally are – and we both pretended that we’d come together out of mutual, passionate love. Then I understood something else besides."

"We lived in Rome, in Naples, in Florence; we set out once for Paris, but it seemed cold to us there, and we went back to Italy. Everywhere we introduced ourselves as husband and wife, wealthy landowners, people were glad to make our acquaintance, and Ariadne had great success. Since she was taking painting lessons, people called her an artist, and, would you believe it, it suited her wonderfully, though she hadn’t a scrap of talent. She slept every day until two or three; she took her coffee and her breakfast in bed. At dinner she’d eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and then, once she’d lain down, I’d bring her something in bed, roast beef, say, and she’d eat it with a sorrowful, preoccupied expression, and waking in the night she’d eat apples and oranges."

"The chief, one might say the basic, quality of this woman was an astonishing cunning. She schemed constantly, every minute, apparently without any need for it at all, but as though by instinct, from the same impulse that makes a sparrow chirp or a cockroach twitch its feelers. She schemed with me, with the footmen, with the hotel porters, with the shopkeepers, with our acquaintances; no conversation, no encounter, went by without some posturing or affectation. Let some man enter our rooms – whoever he might be, waiter or baron – and at once her glance, her expression, her voice would change, even the contours of her figure seemed to change. Had you seen her then, even once, you’d have said there were no people more fashionable, none richer, than we were, in the whole of Italy. She never let a single painter or musician pass without lying to him about his remarkable talent."

"’What a talent you are!’ she’d say in a sweet, singsong voice. ’One’s almost afraid, with you. I imagine you must see straight through people.’"

"And all of it, so as to please, to have success, to be enchanting! She woke every morning with a single thought: to please! And that was the aim and the meaning of her life. If I’d told her that in such-and-such a street, in such-and-such a house, there lived a man who didn’t like her, it would have made her genuinely suffer. Every day she needed to charm, to captivate, to drive people out of their minds. The fact that I was in her power and turned, before her spell, into a complete nonentity gave her exactly that pleasure victors once felt at tournaments. My humiliation wasn’t enough for her, either; at night, besides, sprawled out like a tigress, uncovered – she was always hot – she’d read the letters Lubkov sent her; he begged her to come back to Russia, or else swore he’d rob or kill someone, just to get the money and come to her. She hated him, but his passionate, slavish letters excited her. Of her own charms she held an extraordinary opinion; it seemed to her that if only, somewhere in some crowded gathering, people could see how splendidly she was built and what color her skin was, she would conquer all of Italy, the whole world. This talk of her figure, of the color of her skin, offended me, and, noticing this, she would, when she was in a temper, say all manner of vulgar things just to spite me and tease me, and it once got so far that at a certain lady’s country house she flew into a rage and said to me:"

"’If you don’t stop bothering me with your moralizing, I’ll take off my clothes this instant and lie down naked, right on these flowers!’"

"Often, watching her sleep, or eat, or try to give her gaze some naive expression, I would think: what, then, had God given her all this extraordinary beauty, grace, intelligence for? Was it really only to loll about in bed, eat, and lie, lie without end? And was she even intelligent? She was afraid of three candles, of the number thirteen, was terrified of the evil eye and of bad dreams, held forth about free love and freedom in general like some old churchgoing woman, and insisted that Boleslav Markevich was better than Turgenev. But she was diabolically sly and witty, and in company she knew how to seem a highly educated, progressive person."

"It cost her nothing, even in a merry moment, to insult a servant, to kill an insect; she loved bullfights, loved reading about murders, and grew angry when the accused were acquitted."

"Given the life Ariadne and I led, we needed a great deal of money. My poor father sent me his pension, all his little bits of income, borrowed for me wherever he could, and when he once answered me ’non habeo,’ I sent him a desperate telegram, imploring him to mortgage the estate. A little later I asked him to raise money somewhere against a second mortgage. Both requests he carried out without a murmur, and sent me all the money down to the last kopeck. Ariadne, meanwhile, despised the practical side of life, none of it was any concern of hers, and while I, throwing away thousands of francs to satisfy her mad whims, groaned like an old tree, she, with an untroubled soul, hummed ’Addio, bella Napoli.’ Little by little I cooled toward her, and grew ashamed of our liaison. I don’t care for pregnancy and childbirth, but now I sometimes dreamed of a child, who would at least be some formal justification of this life of ours. So as not to become completely repellent to myself, I took to visiting museums and galleries and reading books, ate little, and gave up drink. If you drive yourself on the longe from morning to evening like that, it’s as if your soul grows a little lighter."

"I too grew tiresome to Ariadne. Besides, the people with whom she had success were all mediocre people; still there were no ambassadors, no salon; money was short, and that offended her and made her weep, and at last she announced to me that, well, perhaps she wasn’t averse to Russia after all. And so we’re going. In the last months before our departure she corresponded diligently with her brother; she evidently has some secret designs of her own, but what they are, God only knows. I’ve grown tired of trying to fathom her schemes. But we’re not going to the country, we’re going to Yalta, and then from Yalta to the Caucasus. Now she can only live at resorts, and if you only knew to what degree I hate all these resorts, how stifled and ashamed I feel in them. What I want now is the country! What I want now is to work, to earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, to atone for my mistakes. Now I feel a surplus of strength in myself, and it seems to me that if I strained that strength, I could buy back the estate in five years. But here, you see, is a complication. This isn’t abroad, this is Mother Russia, and one has to think about a lawful marriage. Of course, the infatuation is long past, there’s not a trace left of the old love, but, be that as it may, I’m bound to marry her."

_____

Shamokhin, worked up by his own story, and I went down below and went on talking about women. It was already late. It turned out that he and I were berthed in the same cabin.

"Only in the villages does a woman still keep pace with a man," Shamokhin was saying, "there she thinks and feels the same way, and struggles just as hard against nature in the name of culture, as a man does. But the urban, bourgeois, cultivated woman has long since fallen behind and is returning to her primitive state; she’s already half beast-woman, and thanks to her a great deal that human genius has won has already been lost; woman, little by little, is disappearing, and in her place sits the primitive female. This backwardness of the cultivated woman threatens culture with serious danger; in her regressive movement she tries to drag man along with her and holds back his forward progress. That’s beyond doubt."

I asked: why generalize, why judge all women by one Ariadne? The very striving of women toward education and equality of the sexes, which I understand as a striving toward justice, in itself rules out any supposition of a regressive movement. But Shamokhin barely listened to me and smiled mistrustfully. He was by now a passionate, convinced woman-hater, and there was no talking him out of it.

"Oh, come now!" he broke in. "If a woman sees in me not a human being, not her equal, but a male, and spends her whole life fussing only over how to please me, that is, how to gain possession of me, then can there be any talk of equal rights here at all? Ah, don’t believe them, they’re very, very sly! We men fuss over their freedom, but they don’t want that freedom at all – they only pretend they do. Terribly sly, dreadfully sly!"

I was already tired of arguing and wanted to sleep. I turned to face the wall.

"Yes indeed," I heard, as I was falling asleep. "Yes indeed. And it’s all the fault of our upbringing, my dear fellow. In the cities, all of a woman’s upbringing and education, in their basic essence, come down to making a beast-woman out of her, that is, to making her please the male and know how to conquer him. Yes indeed" – Shamokhin sighed. "Girls ought to be brought up and taught together with boys, so that the two are always together. Woman must be brought up so that she, like a man, knows how to recognize when she’s wrong, instead of always supposing, as she does now, that she’s in the right. Impress on a girl from the cradle that a man is, before anything else, not a suitor and not a bridegroom, but her fellow creature, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalize, and don’t go telling her that her brain weighs less than a man’s and that therefore she may be indifferent to the sciences, the arts, to cultural tasks in general. A boy apprentice, a cobbler or a house-painter, also has a brain of smaller size than a grown man’s, and yet he takes part in the general struggle for existence, works, suffers. One must also drop this habit of appealing to physiology, to pregnancy and childbirth, since, in the first place, a woman doesn’t give birth every month; in the second place, not every woman gives birth at all; and in the third place, a normal peasant woman works in the fields the day before giving birth, and nothing happens to her. Then there should be full equality of rights in everyday life: if a man offers a lady a chair or picks up a dropped handkerchief, then let her return the favor in kind. I’ll have nothing against it if a girl from a good family helps me on with my coat, or hands me a glass of water..."

I heard nothing more after that, having fallen asleep. The next morning, as we were approaching Sevastopol, the weather was unpleasant and damp. There was a slight roll. Shamokhin sat with me in the deckhouse, thinking about something, silent. Men with the collars of their coats turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces, when the bell rang for tea, began going down below. One lady, young and very pretty, the very one who at Volochisk had been angry at the customs officials, stopped in front of Shamokhin and said to him, with the expression of a capricious, spoiled child:

"Jean, your little bird’s been seasick!"

Later, living in Yalta, I saw this pretty lady tearing along on a pacing horse, with two officers barely able to keep up with her, and I saw how, one morning, in a Phrygian cap and a little apron, she sat painting a sketch on the embankment, while a large crowd stood off at a distance admiring her. I too made her acquaintance. She shook my hand very, very firmly and, looking at me with admiration, thanked me in a sweet, singsong voice for the pleasure my writings gave her.

"Don’t believe her," Shamokhin whispered to me, "she hasn’t read a word of yours."

One evening, as I was strolling along the embankment, I ran into Shamokhin; in his hands were large bundles of appetizers and fruit.

"Prince Maktuev is here!" he said joyfully. "He arrived yesterday with her spiritualist brother. Now I understand what she was corresponding with him about back then! Lord," he went on, looking up at the sky and pressing his bundles to his chest, "if things go well with the prince, why, that means freedom, I can leave then, go to the country, to my father!"

And he ran off further on.

"I’m beginning to believe in spirits!" he called back to me, looking round. "The spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the truth! Oh, if only!"

The day after this meeting I left Yalta, and how Shamokhin’s romance ended, I do not know.