Part 9

Angrily Ilyin began to thrust his stick into the sand. Madame Loubianzev listened without understanding much of it; she liked the conversation. First of all, she was pleased that a gifted man should speak to her, an average woman, about intellectual things; also it gave her great pleasure to watch how the pale, lively, still angry, young face was working. Much she did not understand; but the fine courage of modern man was revealed to her, the courage by which he without reflection or surmise solves the great questions and constructs his simple conclusions.

Suddenly she discovered that she was admiring him, and it frightened her.

“Pardon, but I don’t really understand,” she hastened to say. “Why did you mention insincerity? I entreat you once more, be a dear, good friend and leave me alone. Sincerely, I ask it.”

“Good--I’ll do my best. But hardly anything will come of it. Either I’ll put a bullet through my brains or ... I’ll start drinking in the stupidest possible way. Things will end badly for me. Everything has its limit, even a struggle with nature. Tell me now, how can one struggle with madness? If you’ve drunk wine, how can you get over the excitement? What can I do if your image has grown into my soul, and stands incessantly before my eyes, night and day, as plain as that fir tree there? Tell me then what thing I must do to get out of this wretched, unhappy state, when all my thoughts, desires, and dreams belong, not to me, but to some devil that has got hold of me? I love you, I love you so much that I’ve turned away from my path, given up my career and my closest friends, forgot my God. Never in my life have I loved so much.”

Sophia Pietrovna, who was not expecting this turn, drew her body away from Ilyin, and glanced at him frightened. Tears shone in his eyes. His lips trembled, and a hungry, suppliant expression showed over all his face.

“I love you,” he murmured, bringing his own eyes near to her big, frightened ones. “You are so beautiful. I’m suffering now; but I swear I could remain so all my life, suffering and looking into your eyes, but.... Keep silent, I implore you.”

Sophia Pietrovna as if taken unawares began, quickly, quickly, to think out words with which to stop him. “I shall go away,” she decided, but no sooner had she moved to get up, than Ilyin was on his knees at her feet already. He embraced her knees, looked into her eyes and spoke passionately, ardently, beautifully. She did not hear his words, for her fear and agitation. Somehow now at this dangerous moment when her knees pleasantly contracted, as in a warm bath, she sought with evil intention to read some meaning into her sensation. She was angry because the whole of her instead of protesting virtue was filled with weakness, laziness, and emptiness, like a drunken man to whom the ocean is but knee-deep; only in the depths of her soul, a little remote malignant voice teased: “Why don’t you go away? Then this is right, is it?”

Seeking in herself an explanation she could not understand why she had not withdrawn the hand to which Ilyin’s lips clung like a leech, nor why, at the same time as Ilyin, she looked hurriedly right and left to see that they were not observed.

The fir-trees and the clouds stood motionless, and gazed at them severely like broken-down masters who see something going on, but have been bribed not to report to the head. The sentry on the embankment stood like a stick and seemed to be staring at the bench. “Let him look!” thought Sophia Pietrovna.

“But ... But listen,” she said at last with despair in her voice. “What will this lead to? What will happen afterwards?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he began to whisper, waving these unpleasant questions aside.

The hoarse, jarring whistle of a railway engine became audible. This cold, prosaic sound of the everyday world made Madame Loubianzev start.

“It’s time, I must go,” she said, getting up quickly. “The train is coming. Audrey is arriving. He will want his dinner.”

Sophia Pietrovna turned her blazing cheeks to the embankment. First the engine came slowly into sight, after it the carriages. It was not a bungalow train, but a goods train. In a long row, one after another like the days of man’s life, the cars drew past the white background of the church, and there seemed to be no end to them.

But at last the train disappeared, and the end car with the guard and the lighted lamps disappeared into the green. Sophia Pietrovna turned sharply and not looking at Ilyin began to walk quickly back along the path. She had herself in control again. Red with shame, offended, not by Ilyin, no! but by the cowardice and shamelessness with which she, a good, respectable woman allowed a stranger to embrace her knees. She had only one thought now, to reach her bungalow and her family as quickly as possible. The barrister could hardly keep up with her. Turning from the path on to a little track, she glanced at him so quickly that she noticed only the sand on his knees, and she motioned with her hand at him to let her be.

Running into the house Sophia Pietrovna stood for about five minutes motionless in her room, looking now at the window then at the writing table.... “You disgraceful woman,” she scolded herself; “disgraceful!” In spite of herself she recollected every detail, hiding nothing, how all these days she had been against Ilyin’s love-making, yet she was somehow drawn to meet him and explain; but besides this when he was lying at her feet she felt an extraordinary pleasure. She recalled everything, not sparing herself, and now, stifled with shame, she could have slapped her own face.

“Poor Andrey,” she thought, trying, as she remembered her husband, to give her face the tenderest possible expression--“Varya, my poor darling child, does not know what a mother she has. Forgive me, my dears. I love you very much ... very much!...”

And wishing to convince herself that she was still a good wife and mother, that corruption had not yet touched those “sanctities” of hers, of which she had spoken to Ilyin, Sophia Pietrovna ran into the kitchen and scolded the cook for not having laid the table for Andrey Ilyitch. She tried to imagine her husband’s tired, hungry look, and pitying him aloud, she laid the table herself, a thing which she had never done before. Then she found her daughter Varya, lifted her up in her hands and kissed her passionately; the child seemed to her heavy and cold, but she would not own it to herself, and she began to tell her what a good, dear, splendid father she had.

But when, soon after, Andrey Ilyitch arrived, she barely greeted him. The flow of imaginary feelings had ebbed away without convincing her of anything; she was only exasperated and enraged by the lie. She sat at the window, suffered, and raged. Only in distress can people understand how difficult it is to master their thoughts and feelings. Sophia Pietrovna said afterwards a confusion was going on inside her as hard to define as to count a cloud of swiftly flying sparrows. Thus from the fact that she was delighted at her husband’s arrival and pleased with the way he behaved at dinner, she suddenly concluded that she had begun to hate him. Andrey Ilyitch, languid with hunger and fatigue, while waiting for the soup, fell upon the sausage and ate it greedily, chewing loudly and moving his temples.

“My God,” thought Sophia Pietrovna. “I do love and respect him, but ... why does he chew so disgustingly.”

Her thoughts were no less disturbed than her feelings. Madame Loubianzev, like all who have no experience of the struggle with unpleasant thought, did her best not to think of her unhappiness, and the more zealously she tried, the more vivid Ilyin became to her imagination, the sand on his knees, the feathery clouds, the train....

“Why did I--idiot--go to-day?” she teased herself. “And am I really a person who can’t answer for herself?”

Fear has big eyes. When Andrey Ilyitch had finished the last course, she had already resolved to tell him everything and so escape from danger.

“Andrey, I want to speak to you seriously,” she began after dinner, when her husband was taking off his coat and boots in order to have a lie down.

“Well?”

“Let’s go away from here!”

“How--where to? It’s still too early to go to town.”

“No. Travel or something like that.”

“Travel,” murmured the solicitor, stretching himself. “I dream of it myself, but where shall I get the money, and who’ll look after my business.”

After a little reflection he added:

“Yes, really you are bored. Go by yourself if you want to.”

Sophia Pietrovna agreed; but at the same time she saw that Ilyin would be glad of the opportunity to travel in the same train with her, in the same carriage....

She pondered and looked at her husband, who was full fed but still languid. For some reason her eyes stopped on his feet, tiny, almost womanish, in stupid socks. On the toe of both socks little threads were standing out. Under the drawn blind a bumble bee was knocking against the window pane and buzzing. Sophia Pietrovna stared at the threads, listened to the bumble bee and pictured her journey.... Day and night Ilyin sits opposite, without taking his eyes from her, angry with his weakness and pale with the pain of his soul. He brands himself as a libertine, accuses her, tears his hair; but when the dark comes he seizes the chance when the passengers go to sleep or alight at a station and falls on his knees before her and clasps her feet, as he did by the bench....

She realised that she was dreaming....

“Listen. I am not going by myself,” she said. “You must come, too!”

“Sophochka, that’s all imagination!” sighed Loubianzev. “You must be serious and only ask for the possible....”

“You’ll come when you find out!” thought Sophia Pietrovna.

Having decided to go away at all costs, she began to feel free from danger; her thoughts fell gradually into order, she became cheerful and even allowed herself to think about everything. Whatever she may think or dream about, she is going all the same. While her husband still slept, little by little, evening came....

She sat in the drawing-room playing the piano. Outside the window the evening animation, the sound of music, but chiefly the thought of her own cleverness in mastering her misery gave the final touch to her joy. Other women, her easy conscience told her, in a position like her own would surely not resist, they would spin round like a whirlwind; but she was nearly burnt up with shame, she suffered and now she had escaped from a danger which perhaps was nonexistent! Her virtue and resolution moved her so much that she even glanced at herself in the glass three times.

When it was dark visitors came. The men sat down to cards in the dining-room, the ladies were in the drawing room and on the terrace. Ilyin came last, he was stern and gloomy and looked ill. He sat down on a corner of the sofa and did not get up for the whole evening. Usually cheerful and full of conversation, he was now silent, frowning, and rubbing his eyes. When he had to answer a question he smiled with difficulty and only with his upper lip, answering abruptly and spitefully. He made about five jokes in all, but his jokes seemed crude and insolent. It seemed to Sophia Pietrovna that he was on the brink of hysteria. But only now as she sat at the piano did she acknowledge that the unhappy man was not in the mood to joke, that he was sick in his soul, he could find no place for himself. It was for her sake he was ruining the best days of his career and his youth, wasting his last farthing on a bungalow, had left his mother and sisters uncared for, and, above all, was breaking down under the martyrdom of his struggle. From simple, common humanity she ought to take him seriously....

All this was clear to her, even to paining her. If she were to go up to Ilyin now and say to him “No,” there would be such strength in her voice that it would be hard to disobey. But she did not go up to him and she did not say it, did not even think it.... The petty selfishness of a young nature seemed never to have been revealed in her as strongly as that evening. She admitted that Byin was unhappy and that he sat on the sofa as if on hot coals. She was sorry for him, but at the same time the presence of the man who loved her so desperately filled her with a triumphant sense of her own power. She felt her youth, her beauty, her inaccessibility, and--since she had decided to go away--she gave herself full rein this evening. She coquetted, laughed continually, she sang with singular emotion, and as one inspired. Everything made her gay and everything seemed funny. It amused her to recall the incident of the bench, the sentry looking on. The visitors seemed funny to her, Ilyin’s insolent jokes, his tie pin which she had never seen before. The pin was a little red snake with tiny diamond eyes; the snake seemed so funny that she was ready to kiss and kiss it.

Sophia Pietrovna, nervously sang romantic songs, with a kind of half-intoxication, and as if jeering at another’s sorrow she chose sad, melancholy songs that spoke of lost hopes, of the past, of old age.... “And old age is approaching nearer and nearer,” she sang. What had she to do with old age?

“There’s something wrong going on in me,” she thought now and then through laughter and singing.

At twelve o’clock the visitors departed. Ilyin was the last to go. She still felt warm enough about him to go with him to the lower step of the terrace. She had the idea of telling him that she was going away with her husband, just to see what effect this news would have upon him.

The moon was hiding behind the clouds, but it was so bright that Sophia Pietrovna could see the wind playing with the tails of his overcoat and with the creepers on the terrace. It was also plain how pale Ilyin was, and how he twisted his upper-lip, trying to smile. “Sonia, Sonichka, my dear little woman,” he murmured, not letting her speak. “My darling, my pretty one.”

In a paroxysm of tenderness with tears in his voice, he showered her with endearing words each tenderer than the other, and was already speaking to her as if she were his wife or his mistress. Suddenly and unexpectedly to her, he put one arm round her and with the other hand he seized her elbow.

“My dear one, my beauty,” he began to whisper, kissing the nape of her neck; “be sincere, come to me now.”

She slipped out of his embrace and lifted her head to break out in indignation and revolt. But indignation did not come, and of all her praiseworthy virtue and purity, there was left only enough for her to say that which all average women say in similar circumstances:

“You must be mad.”

“But really let us go,” continued Ilyin. “Just now and over there by the bench I felt convinced that you, Sonia, were as helpless as myself. You too will be all the worse for it. You love me, and you are making a useless bargain with your conscience.”

Seeing that she was leaving him he seized her by her lace sleeve and ended quickly:

“If not to-day, then to-morrow; but you will have to give in. What’s the good of putting if off? My dear, my darling Sonia, the verdict has been pronounced. Why postpone the execution? Why deceive yourself?”

Sophia Pietrovna broke away from him and suddenly disappeared inside the door. She returned to the drawing-room, shut the piano mechanically, stared for a long time at the cover of a music book, and sat down. She could neither stand nor think.... From her agitation and passion remained only an awful weakness mingled with laziness and tiredness. Her conscience whispered to her that she had behaved wickedly and foolishly to-night, like a madwoman; that just now she had been kissed on the terrace, and even now she had some strange sensation in her waist and in her elbow. Not a soul was in the drawing-room. Only a single candle was burning. Madame Loubianzev sat on a little round stool before the piano without stirring as if waiting for something, and as if taking advantage of her extreme exhaustion and the dark a heavy unconquerable desire began to possess her. Like a boa-constrictor, it enchained her limbs and soul. It grew every second and was no longer threatening, but stood clear before her in all its nakedness.

She sat thus for half an hour, not moving, and not stopping herself from thinking of Ilyin. Then she got up lazily and went slowly into the bed-room. Andrey Ilyitch was in bed already. She sat by the window and gave herself to her desire. She felt no more “confusion.” All her feelings and thoughts pressed lovingly round some clear purpose. She still had a mind to struggle, but instantly she waved her hand impotently, realising the strength and the determination of the foe. To fight him power and strength were necessary, but her birth, up-bringing and life had given her nothing on which to lean.

“You’re immoral, you’re horrible,” she tormented herself for her weakness. “You’re a nice sort, you are!”

So indignant was her insulted modesty at this weakness that she called herself all the bad names that she knew and she related to herself many insulting, degrading truths. Thus she told herself that she never was moral, and she had not fallen before only because there was no pretext, that her day-long struggle had been nothing but a game and a comedy....

“Let us admit that I struggled,” she thought, “but what kind of a fight was it? Even prostitutes struggle before they sell themselves, and still they do sell themselves. It’s a pretty sort of fight. Like milk, turns in a day.” She realised that it was not love that drew her from her home nor Ilyin’s personality, but the sensations which await her.... A little week-end _type_ like the rest of them.

“When the young bird’s mother was killed,” a hoarse tenor finished singing.

If I am going, it’s time, thought Sophia Pietrovna. Her heart began to beat with a frightful force.

“Andrey,” she almost cried. “Listen. Shall we go away? Shall we? Yes?”

“Yes.... I’ve told you already. You go alone.”

“But listen,” she said, “if you don’t come too, you may lose me. I seem to be in love already.”

“Who with?” Andrey Ilyitch asked.

“It must be all the same for you, who with,” Sophia Pietrovna cried out.

Andrey Ilyitch got up, dangled his feet over the side of the bed, with a look of surprise at the dark form of his wife.

“Imagination,” he yawned.

He could not believe her, but all the same he was frightened. After having thought for a while, and asked his wife some unimportant questions, he gave his views of the family, of infidelity.... He spoke sleepily for about ten minutes and then lay down again. His remarks had no success. There are a great many opinions in this world, and more than half of them belong to people who have never known misery.

In spite of the late hour, the bungalow people were still moving behind their windows. Sophia Pietrovna put on a long coat and stood for a while, thinking. She still had force of mind to say to her sleepy husband:

“Are you asleep? I’m going for a little walk. Would you like to come with me?”

That was her last hope. Receiving no answer, she walked out. It was breezy and cool. She did not feel the breeze or the darkness but walked on and on.... An irresistible power drove her, and it seemed to her that if she stopped that power would push her in the back. “You’re an immoral woman,” she murmured mechanically. “You’re horrible.”

She was choking for breath, burning with shame, did not feel her feet under her, for that which drove her along was stronger than her shame, her reason, her fear....

AFTER THE THEATRE

Nadya Zelenina had just returned with her mother from the theatre, where they had been to see a performance of “Eugene Oniegin.” Entering her room, she quickly threw off her dress, loosened her hair, and sat down hurriedly in her petticoat and a white blouse to write a letter in the style of Tatiana.

“I love you,”--she wrote--“but you don’t love me; no, you don’t!”

The moment she had written this, she smiled.

She was only sixteen years old, and so far she had not been in love. She knew that Gorny, the officer, and Gronsdiev, the student, loved her; but now, after the theatre, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved and unhappy--how interesting. There is something beautiful, affecting, romantic in the fact that one loves deeply while the other is indifferent. Oniegin is interesting because he does not love at all, and Tatiana is delightful because she is very much in love; but if they loved each other equally and were happy, they would seem boring, instead.

“Don’t go on protesting that you love me,” Nadya wrote on, thinking of Gorny, the officer, “I can’t believe you. You’re very clever, educated, serious; you have a great talent, and perhaps, a splendid future waiting, but I am an uninteresting poor-spirited girl, and you yourself know quite well that I shall only be a drag upon your life. It’s true I carried you off your feet, and you thought you had met your ideal in me, but that was a mistake. Already you are asking yourself in despair, ‘Why did I meet this girl?’ Only your kindness prevents you from confessing it.”

Nadya pitied herself. She wept and went on.

“If it were not so difficult for me to leave mother and brother I would put on a nun’s gown and go where my eyes direct me. You would then be free to love another. If I were to die!”

Through her tears she could not make out what she had written. Brief rainbows trembled on the table, on the floor and the ceiling, as though Nadya were looking through a prism. Impossible to write. She sank back in her chair and began to think of Gorny.

Oh, how fascinating, how interesting men are! Nadya remembered the beautiful expression of Gorny’s face, appealing, guilty, and tender, when someone discussed music with him,--the efforts he made to prevent the passion from sounding in his voice. Passion must be concealed in a society where cold reserve and indifference are the signs of good breeding. And he does try to conceal it, but he does not succeed, and everybody knows quite well that he has a passion for music. Never-ending discussions about music, blundering pronouncements by men who do not understand--keep him in incessant tension. He is scared, timid, silent. He plays superbly, as an ardent pianist. If he were not an officer, he would be a famous musician.

The tears dried in her eyes. Nadya remembered how Gorny told her of his love at a symphony concert, and again downstairs by the cloak-room.

“I am so glad you have at last made the acquaintance of the student Gronsdiev,” she continued to write. “He is a very clever man, and you are sure to love him. Yesterday he was sitting with us till two o’clock in the morning. We were all so happy. I was sorry that you hadn’t come to us. He said a lot of remarkable things.”

Nadya laid her hands on the table and lowered her head. Her hair covered the letter. She remembered that Gronsdiev also loved her, and that he had the same right to her letter as Gorny. Perhaps she had better write to Gronsdiev? For no cause, a happiness began to quicken in her breast. At first it was a little one, rolling about in her breast like a rubber ball. Then it grew broader and bigger, and broke forth like a wave. Nadya had already forgotten about Gorny and Gronsdiev. Her thoughts became confused. The happiness grew more and more. From her breast it ran into her arms and legs, and it seemed that a light fresh breeze blew over her head, stirring her hair. Her shoulders trembled with quiet laughter. The table and the lampglass trembled. Tears from her eyes splashed the letter. She was powerless to stop her laughter; and to convince herself that she had a reason for it, she hastened to remember something funny.

“What a funny poodle!” she cried, feeling that she was choking with laughter. “What a funny poodle!”