The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories
women and girls buried in these tombs who had been beautiful and
fascinating, who had loved, at night burned with passion, yielding
themselves to caresses. How wickedly Mother Nature jested at man's
expense, after all! How humiliating it was to recognise it!
Startsev thought this, and at the same time he wanted to cry out that he
wanted love, that he was eager for it at all costs. To his eyes they
were not slabs of marble, but fair white bodies in the moonlight; he saw
shapes hiding bashfully in the shadows of the trees, felt their warmth,
and the languor was oppressive....
And as though a curtain were lowered, the moon went behind a cloud, and
suddenly all was darkness. Startsev could scarcely find the gate--by now
it was as dark as it is on an autumn night. Then he wandered about for
an hour and a half, looking for the side-street in which he had left his
horses.
"I am tired; I can scarcely stand on my legs," he said to Panteleimon.
And settling himself with relief in his carriage, he thought: "Och! I
ought not to get fat!"
III
The following evening he went to the Turkins' to make an offer. But it
turned out to be an inconvenient moment, as Ekaterina Ivanovna was in
her own room having her hair done by a hair-dresser. She was getting
ready to go to a dance at the club.
He had to sit a long time again in the dining-room drinking tea. Ivan
Petrovitch, seeing that his visitor was bored and preoccupied, drew some
notes out of his waistcoat pocket, read a funny letter from a German
steward, saying that all the ironmongery was ruined and the plasticity
was peeling off the walls.
"I expect they will give a decent dowry," thought Startsev, listening
absent-mindedly.
After a sleepless night, he found himself in a state of stupefaction, as
though he had been given something sweet and soporific to drink; there
was fog in his soul, but joy and warmth, and at the same time a sort of
cold, heavy fragment of his brain was reflecting:
"Stop before it is too late! Is she the match for you? She is spoilt,
whimsical, sleeps till two o'clock in the afternoon, while you are a
deacon's son, a district doctor...."
"What of it?" he thought. "I don't care."
"Besides, if you marry her," the fragment went on, "then her relations
will make you give up the district work and live in the town."
"After all," he thought, "if it must be the town, the town it must be.
They will give a dowry; we can establish ourselves suitably."
At last Ekaterina Ivanovna came in, dressed for the ball, with a low
neck, looking fresh and pretty; and Startsev admired her so much, and
went into such ecstasies, that he could say nothing, but simply stared
at her and laughed.
She began saying good-bye, and he--he had no reason for staying now--got
up, saying that it was time for him to go home; his patients were
waiting for him.
"Well, there's no help for that," said Ivan Petrovitch. "Go, and you
might take Kitten to the club on the way."
It was spotting with rain; it was very dark, and they could only tell
where the horses were by Panteleimon's husky cough. The hood of the
carriage was put up.
"I stand upright; you lie down right; he lies all right," said Ivan
Petrovitch as he put his daughter into the carriage.
They drove off.
"I was at the cemetery yesterday," Startsev began. "How ungenerous and
merciless it was on your part!..."
"You went to the cemetery?"
"Yes, I went there and waited almost till two o'clock. I suffered...."
"Well, suffer, if you cannot understand a joke."
Ekaterina Ivanovna, pleased at having so cleverly taken in a man who was
in love with her, and at being the object of such intense love, burst
out laughing and suddenly uttered a shriek of terror, for, at that very
minute, the horses turned sharply in at the gate of the club, and the
carriage almost tilted over. Startsev put his arm round Ekaterina
Ivanovna's waist; in her fright she nestled up to him, and he could not
restrain himself, and passionately kissed her on the lips and on the
chin, and hugged her more tightly.
"That's enough," she said drily.
And a minute later she was not in the carriage, and a policeman near the
lighted entrance of the club shouted in a detestable voice to
Panteleimon:
"What are you stopping for, you crow? Drive on."
Startsev drove home, but soon afterwards returned. Attired in another
man's dress suit and a stiff white tie which kept sawing at his neck and
trying to slip away from the collar, he was sitting at midnight in the
club drawing-room, and was saying with enthusiasm to Ekaterina Ivanovna.
"Ah, how little people know who have never loved! It seems to me that no
one has ever yet written of love truly, and I doubt whether this tender,
joyful, agonising feeling can be described, and any one who has once
experienced it would not attempt to put it into words. What is the use
of preliminaries and introductions? What is the use of unnecessary fine
words? My love is immeasurable. I beg, I beseech you," Startsev brought
out at last, "be my wife!"
"Dmitri Ionitch," said Ekaterina Ivanovna, with a very grave face, after
a moment's thought--"Dmitri Ionitch, I am very grateful to you for the
honour. I respect you, but ..." she got up and continued standing, "but,
forgive me, I cannot be your wife. Let us talk seriously. Dmitri
Ionitch, you know I love art beyond everything in life. I adore music; I
love it frantically; I have dedicated my whole life to it. I want to be
an artist; I want fame, success, freedom, and you want me to go on
living in this town, to go on living this empty, useless life, which has
become insufferable to me. To become a wife--oh, no, forgive me! One
must strive towards a lofty, glorious goal, and married life would put
me in bondage for ever. Dmitri Ionitch" (she faintly smiled as she
pronounced his name; she thought of "Alexey Feofilaktitch")--"Dmitri
Ionitch, you are a good, clever, honourable man; you are better than any
one...." Tears came into her eyes. "I feel for you with my whole heart,
but ... but you will understand...."
And she turned away and went out of the drawing-room to prevent herself
from crying.
Startsev's heart left off throbbing uneasily. Going out of the club into
the street, he first of all tore off the stiff tie and drew a deep
breath. He was a little ashamed and his vanity was wounded--he had not
expected a refusal--and could not believe that all his dreams, his hopes
and yearnings, had led him up to such a stupid end, just as in some
little play at an amateur performance, and he was sorry for his feeling,
for that love of his, so sorry that he felt as though he could have
burst into sobs or have violently belaboured Panteleimon's broad back
with his umbrella.
For three days he could not get on with anything, he could not eat nor
sleep; but when the news reached him that Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone
away to Moscow to enter the Conservatoire, he grew calmer and lived as
before.
Afterwards, remembering sometimes how he had wandered about the cemetery
or how he had driven all over the town to get a dress suit, he stretched
lazily and said:
"What a lot of trouble, though!"
IV
Four years had passed. Startsev already had a large practice in the
town. Every morning he hurriedly saw his patients at Dyalizh, then he
drove in to see his town patients. By now he drove, not with a pair, but
with a team of three with bells on them, and he returned home late at
night. He had grown broader and stouter, and was not very fond of
walking, as he was somewhat asthmatic. And Panteleimon had grown stout,
too, and the broader he grew, the more mournfully he sighed and
complained of his hard luck: he was sick of driving! Startsev used to
visit various households and met many people, but did not become
intimate with any one. The inhabitants irritated him by their
conversation, their views of life, and even their appearance. Experience
taught him by degrees that while he played cards or lunched with one of
these people, the man was a peaceable, friendly, and even intelligent
human being; that as soon as one talked of anything not eatable, for
instance, of politics or science, he would be completely at a loss, or
would expound a philosophy so stupid and ill-natured that there was
nothing else to do but wave one's hand in despair and go away. Even when
Startsev tried to talk to liberal citizens, saying, for instance, that
humanity, thank God, was progressing, and that one day it would be
possible to dispense with passports and capital punishment, the liberal
citizen would look at him askance and ask him mistrustfully: "Then any
one could murder any one he chose in the open street?" And when, at tea
or supper, Startsev observed in company that one should work, and that
one ought not to live without working, every one took this as a
reproach, and began to get angry and argue aggressively. With all that,
the inhabitants did nothing, absolutely nothing, and took no interest in
anything, and it was quite impossible to think of anything to say. And
Startsev avoided conversation, and confined himself to eating and
playing _vint_; and when there was a family festivity in some household
and he was invited to a meal, then he sat and ate in silence, looking at
his plate.
And everything that was said at the time was uninteresting, unjust, and
stupid; he felt irritated and disturbed, but held his tongue, and,
because he sat glumly silent and looked at his plate, he was nicknamed
in the town "the haughty Pole," though he never had been a Pole.
All such entertainments as theatres and concerts he declined, but he
played _vint_ every evening for three hours with enjoyment. He had
another diversion to which he took imperceptibly, little by little: in
the evening he would take out of his pockets the notes he had gained by
his practice, and sometimes there were stuffed in his pockets
notes--yellow and green, and smelling of scent and vinegar and incense
and fish oil--up to the value of seventy roubles; and when they amounted
to some hundreds he took them to the Mutual Credit Bank and deposited
the money there to his account.
He was only twice at the Turkins' in the course of the four years after
Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone away, on each occasion at the invitation of
Vera Iosifovna, who was still undergoing treatment for migraine. Every
summer Ekaterina Ivanovna came to stay with her parents, but he did not
once see her; it somehow never happened.
But now four years had passed. One still, warm morning a letter was
brought to the hospital. Vera Iosifovna wrote to Dmitri Ionitch that she
was missing him very much, and begged him to come and see them, and to
relieve her sufferings; and, by the way, it was her birthday. Below was
a postscript: "I join in mother's request.--K."
Startsev considered, and in the evening he went to the Turkins'.
"How do you do, if you please?" Ivan Petrovitch met him, smiling with
his eyes only. "Bongjour."
Vera Iosifovna, white-haired and looking much older, shook Startsev's
hand, sighed affectedly, and said:
"You don't care to pay attentions to me, doctor. You never come and see
us; I am too old for you. But now some one young has come; perhaps she
will be more fortunate."
And Kitten? She had grown thinner, paler, had grown handsomer and more
graceful; but now she was Ekaterina Ivanovna, not Kitten; she had lost
the freshness and look of childish naïveté. And in her expression and
manners there was something new--guilty and diffident, as though she did
not feel herself at home here in the Turkins' house.
"How many summers, how many winters!" she said, giving Startsev her
hand, and he could see that her heart was beating with excitement; and
looking at him intently and curiously, she went on: "How much stouter