Love

"Three o’clock in the morning. The quiet April night looks in at my window and winks at me tenderly with its stars. I am not asleep. I feel so wonderful!

From head to heel I am filled with some strange, incomprehensible feeling. I cannot analyze it just now – there is no time, I am too lazy, and besides, to the devil with analysis! Does a man go looking for the meaning of his sensations when he is flying headlong from a bell tower, or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand roubles? Is that the moment for it?"

More or less that was how the love letter began, the one addressed to Sasha, the nineteen-year-old girl I had fallen in love with. I began it five times, and just as many times set about tearing up the paper, crossing out whole pages and copying them over again. I labored over that letter as long as over a commissioned novel, and not at all so that it should come out longer, more ornate, more full of feeling, but because I wanted to prolong indefinitely the very process of writing it, sitting in the stillness of my study, into which the spring night peered, conversing with my own daydreams. Between the lines I saw a beloved image, and it seemed to me that at the same table with me sat spirits just like myself, naively happy, foolish and blissfully smiling, who were scribbling too. I wrote, and every so often glanced at my hand, which still ached faintly from a recent handclasp, and whenever I had to turn my eyes aside, I saw the wrought-iron gate, painted green. Through that gate Sasha had looked at me after I said goodbye to her. When I was taking leave of Sasha I was thinking of nothing at all and only admired her figure, as any decent man admires a pretty woman; but the moment I caught, through the grating, a glimpse of two large eyes, I suddenly understood, as though by inspiration, that I was in love, that everything between us was already settled and done, and that all that remained to me was to observe a few formalities.

There is also great pleasure in sealing a love letter, dressing slowly, slipping quietly out of the house, and carrying that treasure to the postbox. There are no longer any stars in the sky; in their place, in the east, above the roofs of the sleepy houses, a long pale streak shows, broken here and there by clouds, and from that streak a pallor spreads over the whole heaven. The town is asleep, but already the water-carts have gone out, and somewhere at a distant factory a whistle is waking the workers. Beside the postbox, lightly filmed with dew, you are certain to find some clumsy porter in a bell-shaped sheepskin coat, leaning on his stick. He is in a state of catalepsy: neither asleep nor awake, but something in between...

If postboxes knew how often people turn to them to have their fate decided, they would not wear so humble a look. I, at least, very nearly kissed my postbox, and looking at it, remembered that the post is the greatest of blessings!..

To anyone who has ever been in love I recommend recalling how, once the letter has been dropped into the postbox, one hurries home, quickly gets into bed and pulls up the blanket, in the full certainty that no sooner will one wake tomorrow than the memory of yesterday will seize hold of one, and one will gaze with rapture at the window through whose curtain folds the daylight is already eagerly pressing...

But to business... The next day at noon Sasha’s maid brought me this reply: "I am very glad please come today please to us certainly I will wait for you. Yours S." Not a single comma. That absence of punctuation marks, the misspelling in the word "certainly," the whole letter, and even the long, narrow little envelope in which it had been enclosed, filled my soul with tenderness. In the sprawling, timid hand I recognized Sasha’s gait, her manner of raising her eyebrows high when she laughed, the movements of her lips... But the content of the letter did not satisfy me... In the first place, one does not answer poetic letters like that, and in the second, why should I go to Sasha’s house and wait there while her stout mother, her little brothers, and the old lady hangers-on made up their minds to leave us alone together? They would never think of it, and there is nothing more repellent than having to restrain one’s raptures on account of some animate trifle loitering near you, be it a half-deaf old woman or a little girl pestering you with questions. I sent back word with the maid proposing that Sasha choose for our rendez-vous some garden or boulevard. My proposal was gladly accepted. I had, as they say, struck exactly the right note.

At five in the afternoon I was making my way to the farthest and most deserted corner of the municipal garden. There was not a soul in the garden, and the meeting could well have been arranged somewhere nearer, on the avenues or in the arbors, but women do not care for romance by halves; if it is honey, then give them the spoon too; if it is a rendez-vous, then let it be in the most remote and impenetrable thicket, where one risks stumbling upon a thief or a tipsy shopkeeper.

When I came up to Sasha she was standing with her back to me, and in that back I read a devilish quantity of mystery. It seemed that her back, the nape of her neck, and the little black spots on her dress were all saying: hush! The girl was wearing a simple print frock, over which a light mantle had been thrown. For the sake of still greater mystery her face was hidden behind a white veil. I, so as not to spoil the harmony, was obliged to approach on tiptoe and begin speaking in a half-whisper.

As I understand it now, in that rendez-vous I was not the essence of the matter but only a detail. Sasha was occupied not so much with me as with the romance of the meeting, its air of mystery, the kisses, the silence of the somber trees, my vows... There was not a moment when she forgot herself, grew still, let the expression of mystery drop from her face; and truly, had some Ivan Sidorych or Sidor Ivanych stood in my place, she would have felt exactly as well. Just try, under such circumstances, to make out whether you are loved or not! And if loved, whether truly or not truly?

From the garden I led Sasha to my rooms. The presence, in a bachelor’s lodgings, of the woman one loves acts like music and wine. One usually begins to talk of the future, and one’s self-assurance and presumptuousness know no bounds. One builds projects, plans, holds forth heatedly about becoming a general while not yet even an ensign, and in general talks such eloquent nonsense that the listener needs a great deal of love and ignorance of life to keep agreeing. Fortunately for men, women in love are always blinded by their love and never know life. Not only do they keep agreeing, but they even turn pale with holy awe, are reverent, and catch up every word of the madman with greed. Sasha listened to me attentively, but soon I read distraction on her face: she did not understand me. The future I spoke of interested her only in its outward trappings, and it was in vain that I unrolled before her my projects and plans. She was keenly interested in the question of where her room would be, what wallpaper that room would have, why I had a piano and not a grand, and so forth. She examined attentively the little things on my table, the photographs, sniffed at the scent bottles, peeled old stamps off the envelopes, which she needed for some reason of her own.

"Please, do collect old stamps for me!" she said, putting on a serious face. "Please!"

Then she found a nut somewhere on the windowsill, cracked it loudly, and ate it.

"Why don’t you paste little labels on your books?" she asked, casting a glance over the bookcase.

"What for?"

"Oh, just so that every book would have its own number... And where am I going to put my books? I have books too, you know."

"And what books do you have?" I asked.

Sasha raised her eyebrows, thought a moment, and said:

"All sorts..."

And had I taken it into my head to ask her what thoughts, convictions, or aims she had, she would no doubt in just the same way have raised her eyebrows, thought a moment, and said: "all sorts"...

Later I walked Sasha home and left her a fully certified, patented fiance, which indeed I remained until we were married. If the reader will allow me to judge by my own personal experience alone, I assure him that it is very dull being a fiance, far duller than being a husband or being nothing at all. A fiance is neither one thing nor the other: he has left one shore and not reached the other; he is not married, and yet one cannot say he is a bachelor – something rather like the condition of that porter I mentioned above.

Every day, snatching a free moment, I hurried to my betrothed. Usually, walking to her, I carried with me a whole host of hopes, desires, intentions, proposals, phrases. Every time it seemed to me that no sooner would the maid open the door than I, stifled and cramped as I was, would plunge up to my neck in refreshing happiness. But in reality it turned out otherwise. Every time I came to my betrothed I found her whole family and household occupied with sewing the foolish trousseau. (A propos: they sewed for two months and turned out less than a hundred roubles’ worth.) There was a smell of flat-irons, stearin, and fumes. Glass beads crunched underfoot. The two main rooms were heaped with waves of linen, calico, and muslin, and out of those waves peeped Sasha’s little head with a thread between her teeth. All the sewing women greeted me with a joyful cry, but at once packed me off to the dining room, where I could not interfere or see what is permitted only to husbands to see. Against my will I had to sit in the dining room and converse with the old hanger-on Pimenovna. Sasha, preoccupied and harried, kept running past me every so often with a thimble, a skein of wool, or some other bit of tedium.

"Wait, wait... I’ll be right there!" she would say, when I raised imploring eyes to her. "Just imagine, that wretched Stepanida has spoiled the whole bodice of the barege dress!"

And without waiting for her mercy, I would grow angry, go away, and stroll about the pavements in the company of my fiance’s cane. Or, sometimes, wanting to go for a walk or a drive with my betrothed, I would call on her and find her already standing with her mama in the hall, fully dressed, twirling her parasol.

"We’re off to the arcade!" she would say. "We need to buy a bit more cashmere and change the hat."

There went the walk! I would attach myself to the ladies and go with them to the arcade. It is maddeningly dull to listen to women shopping, haggling, and trying to outwit a cheating shopkeeper. I would grow ashamed when Sasha, after turning over masses of material and beating the price down ad minimum, would leave the shop having bought nothing, or having ordered forty or fifty kopecks’ worth cut off. Coming out of the shop, Sasha and her mama, with worried, frightened faces, would talk at length about how they had made a mistake, bought the wrong thing, that the flowers on the print were too dark, and so on.

No, it is dull being a fiance! To the devil with it!

Now I am married. It is evening. I am sitting in my study, reading. Behind me on the sofa sits Sasha, loudly chewing something. I feel like having a beer.

"Sasha, look for the corkscrew, will you..." I say. "It’s lying around here somewhere."

Sasha jumps up, rummages disorderly through two or three stacks of papers, drops some matches, and, not finding the corkscrew, sits back down in silence... Five minutes pass, then ten... A little worm begins to gnaw at me – both thirst and vexation...

"Sasha, do look for the corkscrew!" I say.

Sasha jumps up again and rummages near me among the papers. Her chewing and the rustle of the paper affect me like the clash of knives being sharpened against one another... I get up and start looking for the corkscrew myself. At last it is found and the beer uncorked. Sasha stays by the table and begins telling me at length about something or other.

"You might read something, Sasha..." I say.

She takes a book, sits down facing me, and begins moving her lips... I look at her small, narrow forehead, her moving lips, and fall to thinking.

"She is going on twenty..." I think. "If one took an intelligent boy of the same age and made the comparison, what a difference! The boy has knowledge, convictions, and at least some wits."

But I forgive her that difference, as I forgive her narrow little forehead and her moving lips... There was a time, I remember, in the days of my philandering, when I would abandon women over a spot on a stocking, over one foolish word, over uncleaned teeth, but now I forgive everything: the chewing, the fuss over the corkscrew, the untidiness, the long conversations about a peeled egg. I forgive almost unconsciously, without forcing my will, as though Sasha’s faults were my own faults, and much that used to jar on me now moves me to tenderness and even rapture. The motives for such all-forgiveness lie somewhere in my love for Sasha, but where the motives of that love itself lie – that, truly, I do not know.