The Bet, and other stories
and I can tell you more. Honestly and sincerely I confess that I
consider my conduct as criminal and immoral. What else? But why say
what is known already? Instead of sermonizing you had far better tell
me what I am to do.”
“I have already told you. Go away.”
“I have gone. You know quite well. I have started five times and
half-way there I have come back again. I can show you the through
tickets. I have kept them all safe. But I haven’t the power to run away
from you. I struggle frightfully, but what in Heaven’s name is the use?
If I cannot harden myself, if I’m weak and faint-hearted. I can’t fight
nature. Do you understand? I cannot! I run away from her and she holds
me back by my coattails. Vile, vulgar weakness.”
Ilyin blushed, got up, and began walking by the bench:
“How I hate and despise myself. Good Lord, I’m like a vicious
boy--running after another man’s wife, writing idiotic letters,
degrading myself. Ach!” He clutched his head, grunted and sit down.
“And now comes your lack of sincerity into the bargain,” he continued
with bitterness. “If you don’t think I am playing a nice game--why
are you here? What drew you? In my letters I only ask you for a
straightforward answer: Yes, or No; and instead of giving it me, every
day you contrive that we shall meet ‘by chance’ and you treat me to
quotations from a moral copy-book.”
Madame Loubianzev reddened and got frightened. She suddenly felt the
kind of awkwardness that a modest woman would feel at being suddenly
discovered naked.
“You seem to suspect some deceit on my side,” she murmured. “I have
always given you a straight answer; and I asked you for one to-day.”
“Ah, does one ask such things? If you had said to me at once ‘Go away,’
I would have gone long ago, but you never told me to. Never once have
you been frank. Strange irresolution. My God, either you’re playing
with me, or....”
Ilyin did not finish, and rested his head in his hands. Sophia
Pietrovna recalled her behaviour all through. She remembered that she
had felt all these days not only in deed but even in her most intimate
thoughts opposed to Ilyin’s love. But at the same moment she knew that
there was a grain of truth in the barrister’s words. And not knowing
what kind of truth it was she could not think, no matter how much she
thought about it, what to say to him in answer to his complaint. It was
awkward being silent, so she said shrugging her shoulders:
“So I’m to blame for that too?”
“I don’t blame you for your insincerity,” sighed Ilyin. “It slipped out
unconsciously. Your insincerity is natural to you, in the natural order
of things as well. If all mankind were to agree suddenly to become
serious, everything would go to the Devil, to ruin.”
Sophia Pietrovna was not in the mood for philosophy; but she was glad
of the opportunity to change the conversation and asked:
“Why indeed?”
“Because only savages and animals are sincere. Since civilisation
introduced into society the demand, for instance, for such a luxury as
woman’s virtue, sincerity has been out of place.”
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