Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892-1895

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 kneaded 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, inspired 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.”

When Ariadna and I were fishing for gudgeon, Lubkov would lie nearby on the sand, make fun of me and instruct me in the art of living.

“I’m amazed, my dear sir, how you can possibly exist without having an affair,” he said. “You’re young, handsome, interesting – in short, a terrific chap, yet you live like a monk. Oh, I’ve no time for these old fogeys at twenty-eight! I’m almost ten years older than you, but who’s the younger? Ariadna Grigoryevna – who?”

“Well, you are of course,” Ariadna replied.

And when he grew bored with our silence and the close attention we were giving our fishing floats he returned to the house.

“In actual fact you’re not a man at all,” she told me with a furious look, “but a real ditherer, God forgive me! A man should get carried away, do mad things, make mistakes, suffer! Women will forgive you if you’re rude and insolent, but they’ll never forgive you for being so stodgy!”

She was really very angry.

“To be successful you must be decisive and bold,” she continued. “Lubkov’s not as good-looking as you, but he’s more interesting and he’ll always be more successful with women because – unlike you – he’s a man.”

And there was even a note of bitterness in her voice. Once over supper – ignoring me – she declared that if she were a man she wouldn’t be vegetating in the country but would have gone travelling, spending the winter somewhere abroad – Italy, for example. Oh, Italy! Here my father unwittingly added fuel to the fire. He gave us a long lecture on the wonders of Italy, how marvellous the weather, how remarkable the museums. Suddenly Ariadna was simply dying to go to Italy. She even struck the table with her fist and her eyes sparkled as if they were saying: “Let’s go!”

And this started everyone talking about how nice it would be in Italy – oooh, Italy! – and so it went on every day, and when Ariadna glanced over her shoulder at me I could tell from her cold, stubborn expression that in her dreams she already had Italy at her feet, with all its salons, famous foreigners, tourists, and that there was no stopping her now. I advised her to wait a little, to postpone the trip for a year or two, but she frowned disdainfully.

“You’re such a stick-in-the-mud – just like an old woman!” she said.

But Lubkov was in favour of the trip. He said that it would work out very cheaply and that he would be delighted to go to Italy as well and have a rest from family life. I must admit I behaved with the naïvety of a schoolboy. Whenever possible I tried not to leave the two of them alone – not from jealousy, but because I had the feeling that something awful would happen. And they would play jokes on me. For instance, when I came into the room they would pretend they’d just been kissing, and so on.

But then, one fine morning, her plump white spiritualist brother appeared and said he wished to have a few words in private with me. That man was completely lacking in all willpower. For all his education and sense of tact he couldn’t resist reading other people’s letters if they happened to be lying on a table. And now, as we were talking, he admitted that he had “accidentally” read Lubkov’s letter to Ariadna.

“I found out from this letter that she’s going abroad very soon. My dear chap, I’m terribly upset. For God’s sake explain it to me! I can’t make head or tail of it.”

As he spoke he was breathing heavily, right into my face – and his breath smelt of boiled beef.

“I do apologize for initiating you into the secrets of that letter,” he continued, “but you’re a friend of Ariadna, she has great respect for you. Perhaps you know something. She wants to go – but with whom? Lubkov intends going with her. I’m sorry to have to say this, but it’s most peculiar behaviour on his part. He’s a married man, with children, yet he declares his love to Ariadna and calls her sweetheart in his letter. It’s really most odd, I must say!”

I went cold all over, my arms and legs grew numb and I felt an extremely sharp pain in my chest. Kotlovich slumped into the armchair, utterly exhausted, his arms dangling limply at his sides.

“But what can I do?” I asked.

“Bring her to her senses, talk her round… Just judge for yourself: what does she want with Lubkov? Is he any sort of match for her? God, it’s terrible, simply terrible!” he continued, clutching his head. “She has such wonderful prospects – Prince Maktuyev and… all the others. The prince adores her and only last Wednesday his late grandfather Ilarion categorically affirmed – as plain as could be – that Ariadna would be his wife. Categorically! Grandfather Ilarion may be dead, but he’s an exceptionally brilliant man. We summon his spirit every day.”

After this conversation I didn’t sleep all night and I wanted to shoot myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all to shreds. Then I went to have a cry in the threshing barn, after which I borrowed some money from my father and left for the Caucasus without saying goodbye.

Of course, women are women and men are men, but can it really be as simple these days as it was before the Flood? Must I, a man of culture, with a complex spiritual make-up, explain my overwhelming attraction towards a woman by the sole fact that her body is a different shape from mine? Oh, what a dreadful thought! I would like to think that the genius of man, in his struggle against nature, has also done battle with physical love as if it were an enemy, and that if he hasn’t succeeded in defeating it he has at least managed to enmesh it in illusions of brotherhood and love. And for me at least all this wasn’t merely a function of my animal organism, as if I were a dog or a frog, but true love. And every embrace is inspired by a pure impulse of the heart and by respect for women. In fact, revulsion for the animal instinct has been nurtured for hundreds of centuries in hundreds of generations. It has been inherited by me, it is in my blood and is a part of my very being. And if I happen to be romanticizing love now, isn’t that as natural and necessary as the fact that I can’t wiggle my ears or that I’m not covered with fur? I think that most educated people think this way, since the absence of anything moral and romantic about love is nowadays considered an atavistic phenomenon. It’s said to be a symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of insanity. True, in romanticizing love we ascribe virtues to those whom we love that very often they don’t possess at all, and this is a source of repeated mistakes and constant suffering. But if you ask me, it’s better like this – I mean, it’s better to suffer than to try and console yourself with the thought that women are women and men are men.

In Tiflis⁸ I received a letter from my father. He wrote that on such-and-such date Ariadna had gone abroad with the intention of staying away all winter. A month later I went home. It was autumn. Every week Ariadna sent my father some very interesting letters written in excellent literary style, on scented paper. I really do think that every woman is a potential author. Ariadna described in great detail how difficult it was for her to make peace with her aunt and to borrow a thousand roubles for the journey, how long she’d spent in Moscow trying to track down a distant relative, an old lady, to persuade her to make the trip with her. This excessive detail struck me as pure invention and of course I realized that no such chaperone existed. Soon afterwards I too received a letter from her, also scented and most elegantly written. She wrote that she missed me and my clever, lovelorn eyes, and in friendly terms she reproached me for ruining my youth, for vegetating in the country when I could be living like her, under the palm trees, inhaling the fragrance of orange trees. And she signed herself “Your forsaken Ariadna”. Two days later another letter in the same style arrived, with the signature: “Your forgotten one.” My head went round. I loved her passionately, dreamt of her every night and now there were all these “forsakens”, “forgottens”. Why? What for? But then there was the boredom of living in the country, interminable evenings, nagging thoughts about Lubkov… The uncertainty tormented me, poisoned my days and nights, became insufferable. So I gave in and went abroad.

Ariadna asked me to come to Abbazia.⁹ I arrived there one fine warm day after a shower, when raindrops were still hanging on the trees, and I took a room in the same huge barrack-like hotel annexe where Ariadna and Lubkov were staying. They happened to be out, so I went to the local park, wandered along the paths for a while and then sat down. An Austrian general came by with his hands behind his back and with those same red stripes on his trousers as our generals wore. A baby was pushed past in a pram and the wheels squeaked on the damp sand. A decrepit old man with jaundice went by, followed by a group of Englishwomen, a Polish priest, then the same general again. Some military bandsmen who had just arrived from Fiume¹⁰ marched to the bandstand, their brass instruments gleaming in the sun, and struck up a tune. Were you ever in Abbazia? It’s a filthy little Slav town with only one street that stinks and which you can only get down in galoshes after it’s been raining. I’d read so much about this earthly paradise – and always with deep emotion – that later, when I was gingerly crossing the street with my trousers hitched up and out of sheer boredom bought some hard pears from an old woman who, seeing I was Russian, deliberately garbled her words; when I was at a loss where to go or what to do; when I was bound to meet other Russians as disenchanted as myself, I felt amazed and ashamed.

There’s a calm bay crossed by steamers and small boats with sails of every colour. From here you can see Fiume and some distant islands veiled in a lilac haze. All this would have been highly picturesque if the view hadn’t been obscured by hotels and their annexes, all constructed in that absurd suburban style used by greedy speculators developing the whole of this verdant coast, so that for the most part all you can see of the paradise is windows, terraces and little squares with small white tables and waiters’ black tailcoats. Here there’s a park, the kind you’ll find in any foreign resort. The dark, motionless, silent foliage of the palm trees, the bright yellow sand on the paths, the bright green benches, the gleam of the soldiers’ blaring trumpets and the general’s red stripes – all this bores you stiff within ten minutes. Meanwhile you’re stuck here for ten days, ten weeks! Having reluctantly dragged myself from one resort to another, I became even more convinced of the uncomfortable, mean lives led by the rich and overfed, of how dull and sluggish their imagination was, how narrow their tastes and desires. How infinitely happier are those tourists, young and old, who are unable to afford a hotel and live where they can, who admire the sea view as they lie on the green grass up in the hills, go everywhere on foot, see forests, villages close up, observe a country’s customs, listen to its songs, fall in love with its women…

While I was sitting in the park darkness began to fall and then my Ariadna appeared in the dusk – elegant and chic, as beautifully dressed as a princess. She was followed by Lubkov, wearing a loose-fitting suit, most likely bought in Vienna.

“Why are you so angwy?” he was saying. “What have I done?”

When she saw me she gave a joyful cry and if we hadn’t been in a park she would certainly have thrown her arms around my neck. She firmly squeezed my hands and laughed. I laughed too and almost wept from emotion. The cross-examination began: How were things in the country? How was my father? Had I seen her brother? And so on. She insisted that I look her in the eye and asked if I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels, the picnics… “Oh yes! How wonderful it all was,” she sighed. “But we’re not bored here either – we’ve loads of friends. My darling! My sweet! Tomorrow I’m going to introduce you to a Russian family. Only for heaven’s sake buy yourself another hat.” She looked me up and down and frowned. “Abbazia’s not a little village,” she said. “Here you must be comme il faut.”

Later we went to a restaurant. Ariadna laughed the whole time, was full of fun and kept calling me “darling”, “dear”, “clever”, as if she just couldn’t believe I was there. We stayed until eleven o’clock and departed highly satisfied with the supper and each other. Next day Ariadna introduced me to the Russian family as the “son of a distinguished professor who lives on the neighbouring estate”. All she could talk about with these people was estates and harvests, with constant reference to me. She wanted to create the impression that she came from a rich landowning family – and to be honest she succeeded. She bore herself superbly, like a true-born aristocrat – which in fact she was.

“Isn’t Auntie a scream!” she said suddenly, smiling at me. “We had a little tiff and she’s gone off to Merano.¹¹ What do you think of that?”

Later, when I was strolling in the park with her I asked:

“Whose aunt were you talking about yesterday? I didn’t know anything about an aunt.”

“That was a lie, for the sake of my reputation,” Ariadna laughed. “They mustn’t know I’m here without a chaperone.” After a minute’s silence she snuggled up to me and said:

“Darling, please be friends with Lubkov! He’s so unhappy. His mother and wife are simply awful.”

She was rather offhand towards Lubkov and when she went to bed she wished him goodnight with a “see you in the morning” – just as she did me. And their rooms were on different floors – this led me to hope that it was all nonsense about them having an affair – so I felt very relaxed with him. And once, when he asked for a loan of three hundred roubles, I was delighted to give him the money.

Every day we did nothing but enjoy ourselves. We’d wander around the park, eat and drink. Every day we had a conversation with the Russian family. Gradually I became used to the fact that if I went to the park I’d be bound to meet the old man with jaundice, the Polish priest and the Austrian general, who always carried a small pack of cards – wherever possible he would sit down and lay out patience, nervously twitching his shoulders. And the bandsmen would play the same tunes over and over. Back home in the country I would normally feel ashamed in front of the peasants whenever I drove out with friends for a picnic on a weekday, or went fishing. Similarly I felt ashamed here with all the servants, coachmen or workmen I happened to meet. I had the impression that they were looking at me and wondering why I did nothing. And I had this feeling of shame from morning to night, every single day. It was a strange, unpleasant, tedious time, relieved only when Lubkov borrowed one hundred, then fifty, francs – and like morphine for an addict the money would suddenly cheer him up and he would roar with laughter – at his wife, himself or his creditors.

But then the rains and cold weather set in. We travelled to Italy and I telegraphed my father, begging him – for God’s sake – to cable me a money order for eight hundred roubles, in Rome. We stopped in Venice, Bologna, Florence, and in each city we invariably stayed at an expensive hotel, where they fleeced us, charging extra for lighting, service and heating, for bread with lunch and for the privilege of dining in a private room. We ate a tremendous amount. In the morning we had a full breakfast. At one o’clock we lunched on meat, fish, some kind of omelette, cheese, fruit and wine. At six we had an eight-course dinner, with long pauses, when we drank beer and wine. After eight o’clock we had some tea. Towards midnight Ariadna would announce that she was starving and ordered ham and boiled eggs. We would eat too, to keep her company. In the intervals between meals we would dash around museums and exhibitions with the thought that we mustn’t be late for dinner or lunch uppermost in our minds. Pictures bored me, I just wanted to go back to the hotel and lie down. I would become exhausted, look for a chair with my eyes and hypocritically repeat with the others: “How magnificent! What a feeling for space!” Like bloated boa constrictors we took notice only of objects that glittered. Shop windows mesmerized us and we went into raptures over cheap brooches – and we bought a great deal of worthless, useless junk.

It was the same in Rome. There a cold wind blew and it rained. After a greasy breakfast we went off to look at St Peter’s and because we had been gorging ourselves – or perhaps because of the bad weather – it did not impress us at all and we almost started quarrelling, accusing one another of indifference to art.

The money arrived from Father. I remember going off in the morning to collect it. Lubkov came with me.

“When one has a past one can’t have a full and happy life in the present,” he said. “My past is like a millstone around my neck. However, it wouldn’t be so bad if I had some money… but I’m broke… Believe me, I’ve only eight francs left,” he continued, lowering his voice, “and yet I have to send my wife a hundred and my mother the same amount. And then I have to live here. Ariadna’s just like a child, she turns a blind eye to everything and throws money around like a duchess. Why did she have to go and buy a watch yesterday? And why do we have to go around acting as if we were little children? You tell me! With me staying in a separate room it’s costing me an extra ten to fifteen francs a day to hide our relationship from servants and friends. What’s the point?”

I felt that same sharp pain in my chest. The uncertainty was gone, everything was quite clear to me now. I felt cold all over and I decided immediately not to see either of them, to escape and return home without delay…

“Having sex is easy,” he continued. “All you need do is undress the woman. But it’s what comes afterwards that’s such a drag, such a load of nonsense!”

As I was counting the money he said:

“I’m finished if you don’t lend me a thousand francs. That money’s my very last hope.”

I gave him the money and he immediately cheered up and started laughing at his uncle, that silly old fool who hadn’t managed to keep his address a secret from his wife. Back in the hotel I packed and paid the bill. It only remained to say goodbye to Ariadna. I knocked at her door.

“Entrez!”

Her room was in the usual morning chaos – tea things on the table, a half-eaten roll, an eggshell. There was a strong, stifling smell of scent. The bed hadn’t been made and it was obvious that two people had slept in it. Ariadna had only just got up and she was wearing a flannel bed jacket; her hair was uncombed.

I said good morning, then I sat for a minute in silence while she tried to tidy her hair. Then, trembling all over, I asked:

“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!’

And he ran on further.

‘I’m beginning to believe in ghosts!’ he shouted to me as he looked back. ‘Grandfather Ilarion’s ghost seems to have predicted the truth! Oh, if only!’

The day after this encounter I left Yalta and I really don’t know how Shamokhin’s affair ended.