The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
one was playing a stringed instrument and two voices were singing. How
delightful it was! How unlike it was to that Petersburg night when the
wet snow was falling and beating so rudely on our faces. If one looks
straight across the canal, one sees the sea, and on the wide expanse
towards the horizon the sun glittered on the water so dazzlingly that it
hurt one's eyes to look at it. My soul yearned towards that lovely sea,
which was so akin to me and to which I had given up my youth. I longed
to live--to live--and nothing more.
A fortnight later I began walking freely. I loved to sit in the sun, and
to listen to the gondoliers without understanding them, and for hours
together to gaze at the little house where, they said, Desdemona
lived--a naïve, mournful little house with a demure expression, as light
as lace, so light that it looked as though one could lift it from its
place with one hand. I stood for a long time by the tomb of Canova, and
could not take my eyes off the melancholy lion. And in the Palace of the
Doges I was always drawn to the corner where the portrait of the unhappy
Marino Faliero was painted over with black. "It is fine to be an artist,
a poet, a dramatist," I thought, "but since that is not vouchsafed to
me, if only I could go in for mysticism! If only I had a grain of some
faith to add to the unruffled peace and serenity that fills the soul!"
In the evening we ate oysters, drank wine, and went out in a gondola. I
remember our black gondola swayed softly in the same place while the
water faintly gurgled under it. Here and there the reflection of the
stars and the lights on the bank quivered and trembled. Not far from us
in a gondola, hung with coloured lanterns which were reflected in the
water, there were people singing. The sounds of guitars, of violins, of
mandolins, of men's and women's voices, were audible in the dark.
Zinaida Fyodorovna, pale, with a grave, almost stern face, was sitting
beside me, compressing her lips and clenching her hands. She was
thinking about something; she did not stir an eyelash, nor hear me. Her
face, her attitude, and her fixed, expressionless gaze, and her
incredibly miserable, dreadful, and icy-cold memories, and around her
the gondolas, the lights, the music, the song with its vigorous
passionate cry of "_Jam-mo! Jam-mo!_"--what contrasts in life! When she
sat like that, with tightly clasped hands, stony, mournful, I used to
feel as though we were both characters in some novel in the
old-fashioned style called "The Ill-fated," "The Abandoned," or
something of the sort. Both of us: she--the ill-fated, the abandoned;
and I--the faithful, devoted friend, the dreamer, and, if you like it, a
superfluous man, a failure capable of nothing but coughing and dreaming,
and perhaps sacrificing myself.
But who and what needed my sacrifices now? And what had I to sacrifice,
indeed?
When we came in in the evening we always drank tea in her room and
talked. We did not shrink from touching on old, unhealed wounds--on the
contrary, for some reason I felt a positive pleasure in telling her
about my life at Orlov's, or referring openly to relations which I knew
and which could not have been concealed from me.
"At moments I hated you," I said to her. "When he was capricious,
condescending, told you lies, I marvelled how it was you did not see,
did not understand, when it was all so clear! You kissed his hands, you
knelt to him, you flattered him ..."
"When I ... kissed his hands and knelt to him, I loved him ..." she
said, blushing crimson.
"Can it have been so difficult to see through him? A fine sphinx! A
sphinx indeed--a _kammer-junker!_ I reproach you for nothing, God
forbid," I went on, feeling I was coarse, that I had not the tact, the
delicacy which are so essential when you have to do with a
fellow-creature's soul; in early days before I knew her I had not
noticed this defect in myself. "But how could you fail to see what he
was," I went on, speaking more softly and more diffidently, however.
"You mean to say you despise my past, and you are right," she said,
deeply stirred. "You belong to a special class of men who cannot be
judged by ordinary standards; your moral requirements are exceptionally
rigorous, and I understand you can't forgive things. I understand you,
and if sometimes I say the opposite, it doesn't mean that I look at
things differently from you; I speak the same old nonsense simply
because I haven't had time yet to wear out my old clothes and
prejudices. I, too, hate and despise my past, and Orlov and my love....
What was that love? It's positively absurd now," she said, going to the
window and looking down at the canal. "All this love only clouds the
conscience and confuses the mind. The meaning of life is to be found
only in one thing--fighting. To get one's heel on the vile head of the
serpent and to crush it! That's the meaning of life. In that alone or in
nothing."
I told her long stories of my past, and described my really astounding
adventures. But of the change that had taken place in me I did not say
one word. She always listened to me with great attention, and at
interesting places she rubbed her hands as though vexed that it had not
yet been her lot to experience such adventures, such joys and terrors.
Then she would suddenly fall to musing and retreat into herself, and I
could see from her face that she was not attending to me.
I closed the windows that looked out on the canal and asked whether we
should not have the fire lighted.
"No, never mind. I am not cold," she said, smiling listlessly. "I only
feel weak. Do you know, I fancy I have grown much wiser lately. I have
extraordinary, original ideas now. When I think of my past, of my life
then ... people in general, in fact, it is all summed up for me in the
image of my stepmother. Coarse, insolent, soulless, false, depraved, and
a morphia maniac too. My father, who was feeble and weak-willed, married
my mother for her money and drove her into consumption; but his second
wife, my stepmother, he loved passionately, insanely.... What I had to
put up with! But what is the use of talking! And so, as I say, it is all
summed up in her image.... And it vexes me that my stepmother is dead. I
should like to meet her now!"
"Why?"
"I don't know," she answered with a laugh and a graceful movement of her
head. "Good-night. You must get well. As soon as you are well, we'll
take up our work ... It's time to begin."
After I had said good-night and had my hand on the door-handle, she
said:
"What do you think? Is Polya still living there?"
"Probably."
And I went off to my room. So we spent a whole month. One grey morning
when we both stood at my window, looking at the clouds which were moving
up from the sea, and at the darkening canal, expecting every minute that
it would pour with rain, and when a thick, narrow streak of rain covered
the sea as though with a muslin veil, we both felt suddenly dreary. The
same day we both set off for Florence.
XVI
It was autumn, at Nice. One morning when I went into her room she was
sitting on a low chair, bent together and huddled up, with her legs
crossed and her face hidden in her hands. She was weeping bitterly, with
sobs, and her long, unbrushed hair fell on her knees. The impression of
the exquisite marvellous sea which I had only just seen and of which I
wanted to tell her, left me all at once, and my heart ached.
"What is it?" I asked; she took one hand from her face and motioned me
to go away. "What is it?" I repeated, and for the first time during our
acquaintance I kissed her hand.
"No, it's nothing, nothing," she said quickly. "Oh, it's nothing,
nothing.... Go away.... You see, I am not dressed."
I went out overwhelmed. The calm and serene mood in which I had been for
so long was poisoned by compassion. I had a passionate longing to fall
at her feet, to entreat her not to weep in solitude, but to share her
grief with me, and the monotonous murmur of the sea already sounded a
gloomy prophecy in my ears, and I foresaw fresh tears, fresh troubles,
and fresh losses in the future. "What is she crying about? What is it?"
I wondered, recalling her face and her agonised look. I remembered she
was with child. She tried to conceal her condition from other people,
and also from herself. At home she went about in a loose wrapper or in a
blouse with extremely full folds over the bosom, and when she went out
anywhere she laced herself in so tightly that on two occasions she
fainted when we were out. She never spoke to me of her condition, and
when I hinted that it might be as well to see a doctor, she flushed
crimson and said not a word.
When I went to see her next time she was already dressed and had her
hair done.
"There, there," I said, seeing that she was ready to cry again. "We had
better go to the sea and have a talk."
"I can't talk. Forgive me, I am in the mood now when one wants to be
alone. And, if you please, Vladimir Ivanitch, another time you want to
come into my room, be so good as to give a knock at the door."
That "be so good" had a peculiar, unfeminine sound. I went away. My
accursed Petersburg mood came back, and all my dreams were crushed and
crumpled up like leaves by the heat. I felt I was alone again and there
was no nearness between us. I was no more to her than that cobweb to
that palm-tree, which hangs on it by chance and which will be torn off
and carried away by the wind. I walked about the square where the band
was playing, went into the Casino; there I looked at overdressed and
heavily perfumed women, and every one of them glanced at me as though
she would say: "You are alone; that's all right." Then I went out on the
terrace and looked for a long time at the sea. There was not one sail on
the horizon. On the left bank, in the lilac-coloured mist, there were
mountains, gardens, towers, and houses, the sun was sparkling over it
all, but it was all alien, indifferent, an incomprehensible tangle.
XVII
She used as before to come into my room in the morning to coffee, but we
no longer dined together, as she said she was not hungry; and she lived
only on coffee, tea, and various trifles such as oranges and caramels.
And we no longer had conversations in the evening. I don't know why it
was like this. Ever since the day when I had found her in tears she had
treated me somehow lightly, at times casually, even ironically, and for
some reason called me "My good sir." What had before seemed to her
terrible, heroic, marvellous, and had stirred her envy and enthusiasm,
did not touch her now at all, and usually after listening to me, she
stretched and said:
"Yes, 'great things were done in days of yore,' my good sir."
It sometimes happened even that I did not see her for days together. I
would knock timidly and guiltily at her door and get no answer; I would
knock again--still silence.... I would stand near the door and listen;
then the chambermaid would pass and say coldly, "_Madame est partie._"
Then I would walk about the passages of the hotel, walk and walk....
English people, full-bosomed ladies, waiters in swallow-tails.... And as
I keep gazing at the long striped rug that stretches the whole length of
the corridor, the idea occurs to me that I am playing in the life of
this woman a strange, probably false part, and that it is beyond my
power to alter that part. I run to my room and fall on my bed, and think
and think, and can come to no conclusion; and all that is clear to me is
that I want to live, and that the plainer and the colder and the harder
her face grows, the nearer she is to me, and the more intensely and
painfully I feel our kinship. Never mind "My good sir," never mind her
light careless tone, never mind anything you like, only don't leave me,