Short Stories by Chekhov
already somewhat corrupted. There was a demon in her, whispering to her
day and night that she was enchanting, adorable; and, having no definite
idea for what object she was created, or for what purpose life had been
given her, she never pictured herself in the future except as very
wealthy and distinguished, she had visions of balls, races, liveries, of
sumptuous drawing-rooms, of a salon of her own, and of a perfect swarm
of counts, princes, ambassadors, celebrated painters and artists, all of
them adoring her and in ecstasies over her beauty and her dresses. . . .
This thirst for personal success, and this continual concentration of
the mind in one direction, makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold--to
me, to nature, and to music. Meanwhile time was passing, and still there
were no ambassadors on the scene. Ariadne went on living with her
brother, the spiritualist: things went from bad to worse, so that she
had nothing to buy hats and dresses with, and had to resort to all sorts
of tricks and dodges to conceal her poverty.
As luck would have it, a certain Prince Maktuev, a wealthy man but an
utterly insignificant person, had paid his addresses to her when she was
living at her aunt's in Moscow. She had refused him, point-blank. But
now she was fretted by the worm of repentance that she had refused him;
just as a peasant pouts with repulsion at a mug of kvass with
cockroaches in it but yet drinks it, so she frowned disdainfully at the
recollection of the prince, and yet she would say to me: "Say what you
like, there is something inexplicable, fascinating, in a title. . . ."
She dreamed of a title, of a brilliant position, and at the same time
she did not want to let me go. However one may dream of ambassadors
one's heart is not a stone, and one has wistful feelings for one's
youth. Ariadne tried to fall in love, made a show of being in love, and
even swore that she loved me. But I am a highly strung and sensitive
man; when I am loved I feel it even at a distance, without vows and
assurances; at once I felt as it were a coldness in the air, and when
she talked to me of love, it seemed to me as though I were listening to
the singing of a metal nightingale. Ariadne was herself aware that she
was lacking in something. She was vexed and more than once I saw her
cry. Another time--can you imagine it?--all of a sudden she embraced me
and kissed me. It happened in the evening on the river-bank, and I saw
by her eyes that she did not love me, but was embracing me from
curiosity, to test herself and to see what came of it. And I felt
dreadful. I took her hands and said to her in despair: "These caresses
without love cause me suffering!"
"What a queer fellow you are!" she said with annoyance, and walked away.
Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I should
have married her, and so my story would have ended, but fate was pleased
to arrange our romance differently. It happened that a new personage
appeared on our horizon. Ariadne's brother had a visit from an old
university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a charming man of whom
coachmen and footmen used to say: "An entertaining gentleman." He was a
man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a good-natured
bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and presentable, with a stiff,
well-kept moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam's apple.
He used to wear pince-nez on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not
pronounce either _r_ or _l_. He was always in good spirits, everything
amused him.
He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had acquired
two houses in Moscow as part of his wife's dowry. He began doing them up
and building a bath-house, and was completely ruined. Now his wife and
four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great poverty, and he had
to support them--and this amused him. He was thirty-six and his wife was
by now forty-two, and that, too, amused him. His mother, a conceited,
sulky personage, with aristocratic pretensions, despised his wife and
lived apart with a perfect menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to
allow her seventy-five roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of
taste, liked lunching at the Slavyansky Bazaar and dining at the
Hermitage; he needed a great deal of money, but his uncle only allowed
him two thousand roubles a year, which was not enough, and for days
together he would run about Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying
is, looking for some one to borrow from--and this, too, amused him. He
had come to Kotlovitch to find in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest
from family life. At dinner, at supper, and on our walks, he talked
about his wife, about his mother, about his creditors, about the
bailiffs, and laughed at them; he laughed at himself and assured us
that, thanks to his talent for borrowing, he had made a great number of
agreeable acquaintances. He laughed without ceasing and we laughed too.
Moreover, in his company we spent our time differently. I was more
inclined to quiet, so to say idyllic pleasures; I liked fishing, evening
walks, gathering mushrooms; Lubkov preferred picnics, fireworks,
hunting. He used to get up picnics three times a week, and Ariadne, with
an earnest and inspired face, used to write a list of oysters,
champagne, sweets, and used to send me into Moscow to get them, without
inquiring, of course, whether I had money. And at the picnics there were
toasts and laughter, and again mirthful descriptions of how old his wife
was, what fat lap-dogs his mother had, and what charming people his
creditors were.
Lubkov was fond of nature, but he regarded it as something long familiar
and at the same time, in reality, infinitely beneath himself and created
for his pleasure. He would sometimes stand still before some magnificent
landscape and say: "It would be nice to have tea here."
One day, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he
nodded towards her and said:
"She's thin, and that's what I like; I don't like fat women."
This made me wince. I asked him not to speak like that about women
before me. He looked at me in surprise and said:
"What is there amiss in my liking thin women and not caring for fat
ones?"
I made no answer. Afterwards, being in very good spirits and a trifle
elevated, he said:
"I've noticed Ariadne Grigoryevna likes you. I can't understand why you
don't go in and win."
His words made me feel uncomfortable, and with some embarrassment I told
him how I looked at love and women.
"I don't know," he sighed; "to my thinking, a woman's a woman and a
man's a man. Ariadne Grigoryevna may be poetical and exalted, as you
say, but it doesn't follow that she must be superior to the laws of
nature. You see for yourself that she has reached the age when she must
have a husband or a lover. I respect women as much as you do, but I
don't think certain relations exclude poetry. Poetry's one thing and
love is another. It's just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of
nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite
another."
When Ariadne and I were fishing, Lubkov would lie on the sand close by
and make fun of me, or lecture me on the conduct of life.
"I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live without a love affair," he
would say. "You are young, handsome, interesting--in fact, you're a man
not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Och! I can't stand these
fellows who are old at twenty-eight! I'm nearly ten years older than you
are, and yet which of us is the younger? Ariadne Grigoryevna, which?"
"You, of course," Ariadne answered him.
And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which we
stared at our floats he went home, and she said, looking at me angrily:
"You're really not a man, but a mush, God forgive me! A man ought to be
able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad,
to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and
insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!"
She was angry in earnest, and went on:
"To succeed, a man must be resolute and bold. Lubkov is not so handsome
as you are, but he is more interesting. He will always succeed with
women because he's not like you; he's a man. . . ."
And there was actually a note of exasperation in her voice.
One day at supper she began saying, not addressing me, that if she were
a man she would not stagnate in the country, but would travel, would
spend the winter somewhere aboard--in Italy, for instance. Oh, Italy! At
this point my father unconsciously poured oil on the flames; he began
telling us at length about Italy, how splendid it was there, the
exquisite scenery, the museums. Ariadne suddenly conceived a burning
desire to go to Italy. She positively brought her fist down on the table
and her eyes flashed as she said: "I must go!"
After that came conversations every day about Italy: how splendid it
would be in Italy--ah, Italy!--oh, Italy! And when Ariadne looked at me
over her shoulder, from her cold and obstinate expression I saw that in
her dreams she had already conquered Italy with all its salons,
celebrated foreigners and tourists, and there was no holding her back
now. I advised her to wait a little, to put off her tour for a year or
two, but she frowned disdainfully and said:
"You're as prudent as an old woman!"
Lubkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very cheaply,
and he, too, would go to Italy and have a rest there from family life.
I behaved, I confess, as naïvely as a schoolboy.
Not from jealousy, but from a foreboding of something terrible and
extraordinary, I tried as far as possible not to leave them alone
together, and they made fun of me. For instance, when I went in they
would pretend they had just been kissing one another, and so on. But lo
and behold, one fine morning, her plump, white-skinned brother, the
spiritualist, made his appearance and expressed his desire to speak to
me alone.
He was a man without will; in spite of his education and his delicacy he
could never resist reading another person's letter, if it lay before him
on the table. And now he admitted that he had by chance read a letter of
Lubkov's to Ariadne.
"From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad. My
dear fellow, I am very much upset! Explain it to me for goodness' sake.
I can make nothing of it!"
As he said this he breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and
smelling of boiled beef.
"Excuse me for revealing the secret of this letter to you, but you are
Ariadne's friend, she respects you. Perhaps you know something of it.
She wants to go away, but with whom? Mr. Lubkov is proposing to go with
her. Excuse me, but this is very strange of Mr. Lubkov; he is a married
man, he has children, and yet he is making a declaration of love; he is
writing to Ariadne 'darling.' Excuse me, but it is so strange!"
I turned cold all over; my hands and feet went numb and I felt an ache
in my chest, as if a three-cornered stone had been driven into it.
Kotlovitch sank helplessly into an easy-chair, and his hands fell limply
at his sides.
"What can I do?" I inquired.
"Persuade her. . . . Impress her mind. . . . Just consider, what is
Lubkov to her? Is he a match for her? Oh, good God! How awful it is, how
awful it is!" he went on, clutching his head. "She has had such splendid
offers--Prince Maktuev and . . . and others. The prince adores her, and
only last Wednesday week his late grandfather, Ilarion, declared
positively that Ariadne would be his wife--positively! His grandfather
Ilarion is dead, but he is a wonderfully intelligent person; we call up
his spirit every day."
After this conversation I lay awake all night and thought of shooting