 The Darling by Anton Chekhov. Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor Plamyanikov, was sitting in her back porch lost in thought. It was hot, the flies were persistent and teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it would soon be evening. Dark rain-clouds were gathering from the east and bringing from time to time a breath of moisture in the air. Kukin, who was the manager of an open-air theatre called the Tivoli, and who lived in the lodge, was standing in the middle of the garden, looking at the sky. Again, he observed despairingly, it's going to rain again. Rain every day as though despite me. I might as well hang myself. It's ruin. Fearful losses every day. He flung up his hands and went on, addressing Olenka, there, that's the life we leave, Olga Semionovna. It's enough to make one cry. One works and does one's utmost, one wears one's self-out, getting no sleep at night, and racks one's brain what to do for the best. And then what happens? To begin with, one's public is ignorant, boorish. I give them the very best obrata. A dainty mask, first-rate music-hall artists. But do you suppose that's what they want? They don't understand anything of that sort. They want a clown. What they ask for is vulgarity. And then look at the weather. Almost every evening it rains. It started on the tenth of May, and it's kept up all May and June. It's simply awful. The public doesn't come, but I have to pay the rent just the same, and pay the artists. The next evening the clouds would gather again, and Kukin would say with a hysterical laugh, well, rain away then. Flood the garden, drown me. Damn my luck in this world and the next. Let the artists have me up. Send me to prison, to Siberia, to the scaffold. And next day the same thing. Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her. She grew to love him. He was a small, thin man with a yellow face, and curls combed forward on his forehead. He spoke in a thin tenor. As he talked, his mouth worked on one side, and there was always an expression of despair on his face, yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her. She was always fond of someone, and could not exist without loving. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who now sat in a darkened room breathing with difficulty. She had loved her aunt, who used to come every other year from Byansk. And before that, when she was at school, she had loved her Frenchmaster. She was a gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender eyes, and very good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind naive smile which came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant men thought, yes, not half bad, and smiled too, while lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, you darling. The house in which she had lived from her birth upwards, and which was left her in her father's will, was at the extreme end of the town, not far from the Tivoli. In the evenings and at night she could hear the band playing, and the crackling and banging of fireworks, and it seemed to her that it was Kukin struggling with his destiny, storming the entrenchments of his chief foe, the indifferent public. There was a sweet thrill at her heart. She had no desire to sleep, and when he returned home at daybreak, she tapped softly at her bedroom window, and showing him only her face and one shoulder through the curtain, she gave him a friendly smile. He proposed to her, and they were married, and when he had a closer view of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hands and said, you darling. He was happy, but as it rained on the day and night of his wedding, his face still retained an expression of despair. They got on very well together. She used to sit in his office to look after things in the Tivoli, to put down the accounts and pay the wages, and her rosy cheeks, her sweet naive radiant smile were to be seen now at the office window, now in the refreshment bar or behind the scenes of the theatre, and already she used to say to her acquaintances that the theatre was the chief and most important thing in life, and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane. But do you suppose the public understands that, she used to say? What they want is a clown. Yesterday we gave Faust inside out and almost all the boxes were empty, but if Venichkandai had been producing some vulgar thing, I assure you the theatre would have been packed. Tomorrow Venichkandai are doing Orpheus in Hell, Dukam. And what Kukin said about the theatre and the actors, she repeated. Like him she despised the public for their ignorance and their indifference to art. She took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the behaviour of the musicians and when there was an unfavourable notice in the local paper she shed tears, and then went to the editor's office to set things right. The actors were fond of her, and used to call her Venichkandai, and the darling. She was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums of money, and if they deceived her she used to shed a few tears in private, but did not complain to her husband. They got on well in the winter, too. They took the theatre in the town for the whole winter, and let it for short terms to a little Russian company, or to a conjurer, or a local dramatic society. Alenka grew stouter and was always beaming with satisfaction, while Kukin grew thinner and yellower, and continually complained of their terrible losses, although he had not done badly all the winter. He used to cough at night, and she used to give him hot raspberry tea or lime-flower water to rub him with euda-calone and to wrap him in her warm shawls. You're such a sweet pet, she used to say, with perfect sincerity stroking his hair. You're such a pretty deer. Towards Lent he went to Moscow to collect a new troupe, and without him she could not sleep, but sat all night at her window, looking at the stars, and she compared herself with the hens who are awake all night and uneasy when the cock is not in the hen-house. Kukin was detained in Moscow, and wrote that he would be back at Easter, adding some instructions about the Tivoli. But on the Sunday before Easter, late in the evening, came a sudden, ominous knock at the gate. Someone was hammering on the gate as though on a barrel. Boom, boom, boom. The drowsy cook went flopping with her bare feet through the puddles as she ran to open the gate. Please open, said someone outside, in a thick base, there is a telegram for you." Alenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time, for some reason, she felt numb with terror. With shaking hands she opened the telegram, and read as follows. Yvonne Petrovich died suddenly to-day, awaiting imate instructions for Funeral Tuesday. That was how it was written in the telegram, Funeral, and the utterly incomprehensible word, imate. It was signed by the stage manager of the operatic company. My darling sobbed, Olenka. Vanka, my precious, my darling, why did I ever meet you? Why did I know you and love you? Your poor, heart-broken Olenka is alone without you. Kukin's funeral took place on Tuesday in Moscow. Olenka returned home on Wednesday, and as soon as she got indoors she threw herself on her bed and sobbed so loudly that it could be heard next door and in the street. Poor darling, the neighbors said, as they crossed themselves, Olga Seminovna, poor darling, how she does take on. Three months later Olenka was coming home from Mass, melancholy, and in deep mourning. It happened that one of her neighbors, Vasily Andreevich Pustovolov, returning home from church, walked back beside her. He was the manager at Babakayev's, the timber merchants. He wore a straw hat, a white waistcoat, and a gold watch chain, and looked more a country gentleman than a man in trade. "'Everything happens as it is ordained, Olga Seminovna,' he said gravely, with a sympathetic note in his voice, and if any of our dear ones die it must be because it is the will of God, so we ought to have fortitude and bear it submissively.' After seeing Olenka to her gate he said good-bye and went on. All day afterwards she heard his sedately dignified voice, and whenever she shut her eyes she saw his dark beard. She liked him very much, and apparently she had made an impression on him, too, for not long afterwards an elderly lady, with whom she was only slightly acquainted, came to drink coffee with her, and as soon as she was seated at table began to talk about Pustovolov, saying that he was an excellent man whom one could thoroughly depend upon, and that any girl would be glad to marry him. Three days later Pustovolov came himself. He did not stay long, only about ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when he left Olenka loved him, loved him so much that she lay awake all night in a perfect fever, and in the morning she sent for the elderly lady. The match was quickly arranged, and then came the wedding. Pustovolov and Olenka got on very well together when they were married. Usually he sat in the office till dinner time, then he went out on business, while Olenka took his place, and sat in the office till evening, making up accounts and booking orders. Timber gets dearer every year. The price rises twenty percent, she would say, to her customers and friends. Only fancy, we used to sell local timber. And now Vasichka always has to go for wood to the Mogulov district. And the freight she would add, covering her cheeks with her hands in horror. The freight! It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and ages, and that the most important and necessary thing in life was timber, and that there was something intimate and touching to her in the very sounds of words such as bulk, post, beam, pole, scantling, batten, lath, plank, etc. At night when she was asleep she dreamed of perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber somewhere far away. She dreamed that a whole regiment of six-inch beams forty feet high, standing on end, was marching upon the timber-yard, that logs, beams, and boards knocked together with the resounding crash of dry wood, kept falling and getting up again, piling themselves on each other. Olenka cried out in her sleep, and Pustovolov said to her tenderly, Olenka, what's the matter, darling? Cross yourself. Her husband's ideas were hers. If he thought the room was too hot, or that business was slack, she thought the same. Her husband did not care for entertainments, and on holidays he stayed at home. She did likewise. You are always at home or in the office, her friends said to her, you should go to the theatre, darling, or to the circus. Vasechka and I have no time to go to theatres, she would answer sedately. We have no time for nonsense. What's the use of theatres? On Saturdays Pustovolov and she used to go to the evening service, on holidays to early mass, and they walked side by side with softened faces as they came home from church. There was a pleasant fragrance about them both, and her silk dress rustled agreeably. At home they drank tea with fancy bread and jams of various kinds, and afterwards they ate pie. Every day at twelve o'clock there was a savoury smell of beetroot soup and of mutton or duck in their yard, and on fast days of fish, and no one could pass the gate without feeling hungry. In the office the samovar was always boiling, and customers were regaled with tea and cracknals. Once a week the couple went to the baths and returned side by side, both red in the face. Yes, we have nothing to complain of, thank God Olenka used to say to her acquaintances. I wish everyone were as well off as Vasechka and I. When Pustovolov went away to buy wood in the mogul of district she missed him dreadfully, lay awake and cried. A young veterinary surgeon in the army called Smyrnin to whom they had let their lodge used sometimes to come in the evening. He used to talk to her and play cards with her, and this entertained her in her husband's absence. She was particularly interested in what he told her of his home life. He was married and had a little boy, but was separated from his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, and now he hated her and used to send her forty rubles a month for the maintenance of their son, and hearing all of this, Olenka sighed and shook her head. She was sorry for him. While God keep you she used to say to him at parting, as she lighted him down the stairs with a candle, thank you for coming to cheer me up, and may the mother of God give you health. And she always expressed herself with the same sedateness and dignity, the same reasonableness in imitation of her husband. As the veterinary surgeon was disappearing behind the door below, she would say, you know Vladimir Platonich, you'd better make it up with your wife. You should forgive her for the sake of your son. You may be sure the little fellow understands. And when Pustovolov came back, she told him in a low voice about the veterinary surgeon and his unhappy home life, and both sighed and shook their heads and talked about the boy, who no doubt missed his father, and by some strange connection of ideas they went up to the holy icons, bowed to the ground before them, and prayed that God would give them children. And so the Pustovolovs lived for six years quietly and peaceably in love and complete harmony. But behold! One winter day after drinking hot tea in the office, Vasily Andreyich went out into the yard without his cap on to see about sending off some timber, caught cold, and was taken ill. He had the best doctors, but he grew worse and died after four months' illness, and Olenka was a widow once more. I've nobody now you've left me, my darling, she sobbed after her husband's funeral. How can I live without you in wretchedness and misery? Pity me, good people, all alone in the world. She went about dressed in black with long weepers, and gave up wearing hat and gloves for good. She hardly ever went out except to church, or to her husband's grave, and lived the life of a nun. It was not till six months later that she took off the weepers and opened the shutters of the windows. She was sometimes seen in the mornings going with her cook to market for provisions, but what went on in her house and how she lived now could only be surmised. People guessed from seeing her drinking tea in her garden with the veterinary surgeon who read the newspaper aloud to her, and from the fact that, meeting a lady she knew at the post-office, she said to her, There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town, and that's the cause of all sorts of epidemics. One is always hearing of people's getting infection from the milk supply, or catching diseases from horses and cows. The health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of human beings. She repeated the veterinary surgeon's words, and was of the same opinion as he was about everything. It was evident that she could not live a year without some attachment, and had found new happiness in the lodge. In any one else this would have been censured, but no one could think ill of Olenka. Everything she did was so natural. Neither she nor the veterinary surgeon said anything to other people of the change in their relations, and tried indeed to conceal it, but without success, for Olenka could not keep a secret. When he had visitors, men serving in his regiment, and she poured out tea or served the supper, she would begin talking of the cattle-plague, or foot-and-mouth disease, and of the municipal slaughter-houses. He was dreadfully embarrassed, and when the guests had gone he would seize her by the hand and hiss angrily. I've asked you before not to talk about what you don't understand. When we veterinary surgeons are talking among ourselves, please, don't put your word in. It's really annoying. And she would look at him with astonishment, and dismay and ask him in alarm, but, Volodychka, what am I to talk about? And with tears in her eyes she would embrace him, begging him not to be angry, and they were both happy. But this happiness did not last long. The veterinary surgeon departed, departed forever with his regiment, when it was transferred to a distant place, to Siberia in Mayby, and Olenka was left alone. Now she was absolutely alone. Her father had long been dead, and his armchair lay in the attic, covered with dust and lame of one leg. She got thinner and planer, and when people met her in the street they did not look at her as they used to, and did not smile to her. Evidently her best years were over and left behind, and now a new sort of life had begun for her, which did not bear thinking about. In the evening Olenka sat in the porch, and heard the band playing and the fireworks popping in the tivoli, but now the sound stirred no response. She looked into her yard without interest, thought of nothing, wished for nothing, and afterwards, when night came on, she went to bed and dreamed of her empty yard. She ate and drank as it were, unwillingly. And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it is not to have any opinions. One sees a bottle, for instance, or the rain or a peasant driving in his car, but what the bottle is for, or the rain or the peasant, and what is the meaning of it one can't say, and could not even for a thousand rubles. When she had cookies or pustovol for the veterinary surgeon Olenka could explain everything, and give her opinion about anything you like, but now there was the same emptiness in her brain and in her heart as there was in her yard outside, and it was as harsh and as bitter as wormwood in the mouth. Little by little the town grew in all directions. The road became a street, and where the tivoli in the timber-yard had been there were new turnings and houses. How rapidly time passes. Olenka's house grew dingy, the roof got rusty, the shed sank on one side, and the whole yard was overgrown with docks and stinging nettles. Olenka herself had grown plain and elderly. In summer she sat in the porch, and her soul as before was empty and dreary and full of bitterness. In winter she sat at her window and looked at the snow. When she caught the scent of spring, or heard the chime of the church bells, a sudden rush of memories from the past came over her. There was a tender ache in her heart, and her eyes brimmed over with tears, but this was only for a minute, and then came emptiness again, and the sense of the futility of life. The black kitten Briska rubbed against her and purred softly, but Olenka was not touched by these feline caresses. That was not what she needed. She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason, that would give her ideas and an object in life, and would warm her old blood, and she would shake the kitten off her skirt and say with vexation, Get along, I don't want you. And so it was, day after day, year after year, and no joy, no opinions. Whatever maver the cook said, she accepted. One hot July day towards evening, just as the cattle were being driven away, and the whole yard was full of dust, someone suddenly knocked at the gate. Olenka went to open it herself, and was dumbfounded when she looked out. She saw Smyrna, the veterinary surgeon, gray-headed and dressed as a civilian. She suddenly remembered everything. She could not help crying and letting her head fall on his breast without uttering a word, and in the violence of her feeling, she did not notice how they both walked into the house and sat down to tea. My dear Vladimir Platonich, what fate has brought you, she muttered, trembling with joy. I want to settle here for good Olga Semynovna, he told her. I have resigned my post, and have come to settle down and try my luck on my own account. Besides, it's time for my boy to go to school. He's a big boy. I am reconciled with my wife, you know. Where is she, asked Olenka? She's at the hotel with the boy, and I am looking for lodgings. Good gracious, my dear soul! Lodgings, why not have my house? Why shouldn't that suit you? Why, my goodness, I wouldn't take any rent, cried Olenka in a flutter, beginning to cry again. You live here, and the lodge will do nicely for me. Oh, dear, how glad I am! Next day the roof was painted, and the walls were whitewashed, and Olenka, with her arms akimbo, walked about the yard, giving directions. Her face was beaming with her old smile, and she was brisk and alert as though she had waked from a long sleep. The veterinary's wife arrived, a thin, plain lady with short hair and a peevish expression. With her was little Sasha, a boy of ten, small for his age, blue-eyed, chubby, with dimples in his cheeks, and scarcely had the boy walked into the yard when he ran after the cat, and at once there was the sound of his gay, joyous laugh. Is that your puss, aunty? he asked Olenka. When she has little ones, do give us a kitten. Mama is awfully afraid of mice. Olenka talked to him and gave him tea. Her heart warmed, and there was a sweet ache in her bosom, as though the boy had been her own child. And when he sat at the table in the evening, going over his lessons, she looked at him with deep tenderness and pity as she murmured to herself, You pretty pet, my precious, such a fair little thing, and so clever. An island is a piece of land which is entirely surrounded by water, he read aloud. An island is a piece of land, she repeated, and this was the first opinion to which she gave utterance with positive conviction after so many years of silence and dearth of ideas. Now she had opinions of her own, and at supper she talked to Sasha's parents, saying how difficult the lessons were at the high schools, but that yet the high school was better than a commercial one, since with a high school education all careers were open to one, such as being a doctor or an engineer. Sasha began going to the high school. His mother departed to Harkov to her sisters and did not return. His father used to go off every day to inspect cattle, and would often be away from home for three days together, and it seemed to Olenka as though Sasha was entirely abandoned, that he was not wanted at home, that he was being starved, and she carried him off to her lodge and gave him a little room there. And for six months Sasha had lived in the lodge with her. Every morning Olenka came into his bedroom and found him fast asleep, sleeping noiselessly with his hand under his cheek. She was sorry to wake him. Sasha she would say mournfully, Get up, darling, it's time for school. He would get up, dress and say his prayers, and then sit down to breakfast, drink three glasses of tea, and eat two large crack-nose and half a buttered roll. All this time he was hardly awake and a little ill-humoured in consequence. You don't quite know your fable, Sashenka, Olenka would say, looking at him as though he were about to set off on a long journey. What a lot of trouble I have with you! You must work, and do your best, darling, and obey your teachers. Oh, do leave me alone, Sasha would say. Then he would go down the street to school, a little figure, wearing a big cap and carrying a satchel on his shoulder. Olenka would follow him noiselessly. Sashenka she would call after him, and she would pop into his hand a date or a caramel. When he reached the street where the school was, he would feel ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman. He would turn around and say, You better go home, auntie, I can go the rest of the way alone. She would stand still and look after him fixedly till he had disappeared at the school gate. Oh, how she loved him! Of her former attachments not one had been so deep. Never had her soul surrendered to any feelings so spontaneously, so disinterestedly, and so joyously as now that her maternal instincts were aroused. For this little boy with the dimple in his cheek and the big school cap she would have given her whole life. She would have given it with joy and tears of tenderness. Why? Who can tell why? When she had seen the last of Sasha she returned home, contented and serene, brimming over with love. Her face, which had grown younger during the last six months, smiled and beamed. People meeting her looked at her with pleasure. Good morning, Olga Seminovna, darling. How are you, darling? The lessons at the high school are very difficult now she would relate at the market. It's too much. In the first class yesterday they gave him a fable to learn by heart and a Latin translation and a problem. You know it's too much for a little chap. And she would begin talking about the teachers, the lessons and the school books, saying just what Sasha had said. At three o'clock they had dinner together. In the evening they learned their lessons together and cried. When she put him to bed she would stay a long time making the cross over him and murmuring a prayer. Then she would go to bed and dream of that far away misty future when Sasha would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, would have a big house of his own with horses and a carriage, would get married and have children. She would fall asleep still thinking of the same thing and tears would run down her cheeks from her closed eyes while the black cat lay purring beside her. Suddenly there would come a loud knock at the gate. Alenka would wake up breathless with alarm, her heart throbbing. Half a minute later would come with another knock. It must be a telegram from Harkov she would think, beginning to tremble from head to foot, Sasha's mother is sending for him from Harkov, oh mercy on us! She was in despair. Her head, her hands and her feet would turn chill and she would feel that she was the most unhappy woman in the world. But another minute would pass, voices would be heard, it would turn out to be the veterinary surgeon coming home from the club. Well, thank God she would think. And gradually the load in her heart would pass off and she would feel at ease. She would go back to bed thinking of Sasha, who lay sound asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep, I'll give it to you, get away, shut up! THE DARLING ARIADNE ON THE DECK OF A STEAMER SAILING FROM MODESA TO SEVASTOPOL A rather good-looking gentleman with a little round beard came up to me to smoke and said, Notice those Germans sitting near the shelter. Whenever Germans or Englishmen get together they talk about the crops, the price of wool or their personal affairs. But for some reason or other when we Russians get together we never discuss anything but women and abstract subjects. But especially women. This gentleman's face was familiar to me already. We had returned from abroad the evening before in the same train, and at the lotchisk when the luggage was being examined by the customs, I saw him standing with a lady, his travelling companion, before a perfect mountain of trunks and baskets filled with ladies' clothes, and I noticed how embarrassed and downcast he was when he had to pay duty on some piece of silk frippery and his companion protested and threatened to make a complaint. Afterwards, on the way to Odessa, I saw him carrying little pies and oranges to the lady's compartment. It was rather damp. The vessel swayed a little and the ladies had retired to their cabins. The gentleman with the little round beard sat down beside me and continued, Yes, when Russians come together they discuss nothing but abstract subjects and women. We are so intellectual, so solemn, that we utter nothing but truths and can discuss only questions of a lofty order. The Russian actor does not know how to be funny. He acts with profundity even in a farce. We're just the same. When we have got to talk of our trifles, we treat them only from an exalted point of view. It comes from a lack of boldness, sincerity, and simplicity. We talk so often about women, I fancy, because we are dissatisfied. We take too ideal of you of women, and make demands out of all proportion with what reality can give us. We get something utterly different from what we want, and the result is dissatisfaction, shattered hopes, and inward suffering, and if anyone is suffering he's bound to talk of it. It does not bore you to go on with this conversation? No, not in the least. In that case allow me to introduce myself, said my companion, rising from his seat a little. Ivan Ilyich Shamuhin, a Moscow land-owner of a sort, you I know very well. He sat down and went on looking at me with a genuine and friendly expression. A mediocre philosopher like Max Norda would explain these incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slave-owners, and so on. I take quite a different view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists. We want the creatures who bear us and our children to be superior to us and to everything in the world. When we are young, we adore and poeticise those with whom we are in love. Love and happiness with us are synonyms. Among us in Russia marriage without love is despised. Sensuality is ridiculed and inspires repulsion, and the greatest success is enjoyed by those tales and novels in which women are beautiful, poetical and exalted. And if the Russian has been for years in ecstasies over Raphael's Madonna, or is eager for the emancipation of women, I assure you there is no affectation about it. But the trouble is that, when we have been married or been intimate with a woman for some two or three years, we begin to feel deceived and disillusioned. We pair off with others, and again disappointment, again repulsion. And in the long run we become convinced that women are lying, trivial, fussy, unfair, undeveloped, cruel, in fact far from being superior, are immeasurably inferior to us men. And in our dissatisfaction and disappointment there is nothing left for us but to grumble and talk about what we have been so cruelly deceived in. While Shamekin was talking, I noticed that the Russian language and our Russian surroundings gave him great pleasure. This was probably because he had been very homesick abroad. Though he praised the Russians and ascribed to them a rare idealism, he did not disparage foreigners, and that I put down to his credit. It could be seen too that there was some uneasiness in his soul, that he wanted to talk more of himself than of women, and that I was in for a long story in the nature of a confession. And when we had asked for a bottle of wine, and had each of us drunk a glass, this was how he did in fact begin. I remember in a novel of Wealthman someone says, so that's the story, and someone else answers, no, that's not the story, that's only the introduction to the story. In the same way what I've said so far is only the introduction. What I really want to tell you is my own love story. Excuse me, I must ask you again, it won't bore you to listen. I told him it would not, and he went on. The scene of my story is laid in the Moscow province in one of its northern districts. The scenery there, I must tell you, is exquisite. Our homestead is on the high bank of a rapid stream where the water chatters noisily day and night. Imagine a big old garden, neat flower beds, beehives, a kitchen garden, and below it a river with leafy willows, which, when there is a heavy dew on them, have a lusterless look as though they had turned grey, and on the other side a meadow, and beyond the meadow on the upland a terrible dark pine forest. In that forest delicious red agorics grow in endless perfusion, and elks still live in its deepest recesses. When I am nailed up in my coffin I believe I shall still dream of those early mornings, you know, when the sun hurts your eyes, or those wonderful spring evenings when the nightingales in the land-rails call in the garden and beyond the garden, and sounds of the harmonica float across from the village, where they play the piano in doors and the stream babbles, when there is such music in fact that one wants at the same time to cry and to sing aloud. We have not much arable land, but our pasture makes up for it, and with the forest yields about two thousand rubles a year. I am the only son of my father, we are both modest persons, and with my father's pension that sum was amply sufficient for us. The first three years after finishing at the university I spent in the country, looking after the estate and constantly expecting to be elected on some local assembly, but what was most important, I was violently in love with an extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating girl. She was the sister of our neighbour Kotlovich, a ruined landowner who had on his estate pineapples, marvellous peaches, lightning conductors, a fountain in the courtyard, and at the same time, not a farthing in his pocket. He did nothing and knew how to do nothing. He was as flabby as though he had been made of boiled turnip. He used to doctor the peasants by homeopathy and was interested in spiritualism. He was, however, a man of great delicacy and mildness, and by no means a fool, but I have no fondness for these gentlemen who converse with spirits and cure peasant women by magnetism. In the first place the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult to talk to them. And secondly, they usually love no one and have nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sense of people. I did not care for his appearance, either. He was tall, stout, white-skinned, with a little head, little shining eyes and chubby white fingers. He did not shake hands but needed one's hands in his. And he was always apologizing. If he asked for anything, it was excuse me. If he gave you anything, it was excuse me, too. As for his sister, she was a character out of a different opera. I must explain that I had not been acquainted with the Kotlovitches in my childhood and early youth, for my father had been a professor at N, and we had for many years lived away. When I did make their acquaintance, the girl was twenty-two, had left school long before, and had spent two or three years in Moscow with a wealthy aunt who brought her out into society. When I was introduced and first had to talk to her, what struck me most of all was her rare and beautiful name, Ariadne. It suited her so wonderfully. She was a brunette, very thin, very slender, supple, elegant and extremely graceful, with refined and exceedingly noble features. Her eyes were shining, too, but her brothers shone with a cold sweetness, mawkish as sugar-candy, while hers had the glow of youth, proud and beautiful. She conquered me on the first day of our acquaintance, and indeed it was inevitable. My first impression was so overwhelming, that to this day I cannot get rid of my illusions. I am still tempted to imagine that nature had some grand, marvellous design when she created that girl. Ariadne's voice, her walk, her hat, even her footprints on the sandy bank where she used to angle for gudgeon filled me with delight and a passionate hunger for life. I judged of her spiritual being from her lovely face and lovely figure, and every word, every smile of Ariadne's bewitched me, conquered me, and forced me to believe in the loftiness of her soul. She was friendly, ready to talk, gay and simple in her manners. She had a poetic belief in God, made poetic reflections about death, and there was such a wealth of varying shades in her spiritual organization that even her faults seemed in her to carry with them peculiar, charming qualities. As opposed to she wanted a new horse and had no money, what did that matter? Something might be sold or pawned, or if the stewards swore that nothing could possibly be sold or pawned, the iron roofs might be torn off the lodges and taken to the factory, or at the very busiest time the farm horses might be driven to the market and sold there for next to nothing. These unbridled desires reduced the whole household to despair at times, but she expressed them with such refinement that everything was forgiven her. All things were permitted to her, as to a goddess or to Caesar's wife. My love was pathetic, and was soon noticed by everyone, my father, the neighbors, and the peasants, and they all sympathized with me. When I stood workman Vodka, they would bow and say, May the Kotlovitch young lady be your bride, please God. And Ariadne herself knew I loved her. She would often ride over on horseback or drive in the Charbonne to see us, and would spend whole days with me and my father. She made great friends with the old man, and he even taught her to bicycle, which was his favorite amusement. I remember helping her to get on the bicycle one evening, and she looked so lovely that I felt as though I were burning my hands when I touched her. I shuddered with rapture, and with the two of them, my old father and she, both looking so handsome and elegant, bicycled side by side along the main road, a black horse ridden by the steward dashed aside on meeting them, and it seemed to me that it dashed aside because it too was overcome by her beauty. My love, my worship touched Ariadne and softened her. She had a passionate longing to be captivated like me and to respond with the same love. It was so poetical. But she was really incapable of loving as I did, for she was cold and already somewhat corrupted. There was a demon in her, whispering to her night and day 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 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 Maktouf, a wealthy man but an utterly insignificant person, had paid his addresses to her when she was living at her aunts 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 cross 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 once hard is not 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 strong 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 enough 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, 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 caused 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 Mikhail Ivanovich 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 a goose-skin and a big Adam's apple. He used to wear pence 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 rubles a month also. He was, too, a man of taste, like 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 rubles 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 someone 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, his mother, his predators, 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, Lupkov 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 lapdogs his mother had, and what charming people his creditors were. Lupkov 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 at surprise and said, What is there a miss 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 Grigrievna 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 in women. I don't know, he sighed. To my thinking a woman's a woman and a man's a man. Ariadne Grigrievna 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 where 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 is 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 in 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 are a man not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Ah! 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 Grigrievna, which? You, of course, Ariadne answered. 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 and 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 abroad, 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 fists 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 is 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. Lupkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very chiefly, and he too would go to Italy, and have a rest there from family life. I behaved, I confess, naively 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 Lupkov's to Ariadne. From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad. My dear fellow, I am much upset. Explain 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. Lupkov is posing to go with her. Excuse me, but this is very strange of Mr. Lupkov. 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 and his sides. What can I do, I inquired. Persuade her? Impress her mind? Just consider what is Lupkov 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 Maktwef and—and others! The prince adores her, and only last Wednesday week his late grandfather, Elarion, declared positively that Ariadne would be his wife—positively! His grandfather, Elarion, 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 myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all up. Then I sobbed in the barn. Then I took a sum of money from my father, and set off for the Caucasus, without saying good-bye. Of course a woman's a woman, and a man's a man, but can all that be as simple in our day as it was before the flood? And can it be that I, a cultivated man endowed with a complex spiritual organization, ought to explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact that her bodily formation is different from mine? How awful that would be! I want to believe that in his struggle with nature the genius of man has struggled with physical love, too, as with an enemy, and that if he has not conquered it he has at least succeeded in tangling it in a network of illusions of brotherhood and love. And for me at any rate it is no longer a simple instinct of my animal nature, as with dog or toad, but is real love. And every embrace is spiritualized by a pure impulse of the heart and respect for the woman. In reality a disgust for the animal instinct has been trained for ages and hundreds of generations. It is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of my nature. And if I poetize love is not that as natural and inevitable in our day as my ears not being able to move and my not being covered with fur. I fancy that's how the majority of civilized people look at it, so that the absence of the moral poetical element in love is treated in these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of Atavism. They say that it is a symptom of degeneracy of many forms of insanity. It is true that in poetizing love we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them. And that is a source of continual mistake and continual misery for us. But to my thinking it is better even so. That is, it is better to suffer than to find complacency on the basis of woman being woman and man being man. In Tiflis I had received a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne Grigoreevna had on such a day gone abroad, intending to spend the whole winter away. A month later I returned home. It was by now autumn. Every week Ariadne sent my father extremely interesting letters on scented paper, written in an excellent literary style. It is my opinion that every woman can be a writer. Ariadne described in great detail how it had not been easy for her to make it up with her aunt and induce the latter to give her a thousand rubles for the journey and what a long time she had spent in Moscow trying to find an old lady, a distant relation, in order to persuade her to go with her. Such a perfusion of detail suggested fiction, and I realized, of course, that she had no chaperone with her. Soon afterwards I, too, had a letter from her also scented and literary. She wrote that she had missed me, missed my beautiful intelligent loving eyes. She reproached me affectionately for wasting my youth, for stagnating in the country when I might, like her, be living in paradise under the palms, breathing the fragrance of the orange trees. And she signed herself, your forsaken Ariadne. Two days later came another letter in the same style, signed, your forgotten Ariadne. My mind was confused. I loved her passionately. I dreamed of her every night, and then this, your forsaken, your forgotten. What did it mean? What was it for? And then the dreariness of the country, the long evenings, the disquieting thoughts of Lupkoff. The uncertainty tortured me, and poisoned my days and nights. It became unendurable. I could not bear it, and went abroad. Ariadne summoned me to Abatsia. I arrived there on a bright warm day after rain. The raindrops were still hanging on the trees and glistening on the huge, barrack-like dip and dance, where Ariadne and Lupkoff were living. They were not at home. I went into the park, wandered about the avenues, then sat down. An Austrian general with his hands behind him walked past me, with red stripes on his trousers such as generals wear. A baby was wheeled by in a perambulator, and the wheels squeaked on the damp sand. A decrepit old man with jaundice past, then a crowd of English women, a Catholic priest, then the Austrian general again. A military band only just arrived from Fium, with glittering brass instruments sauntered by to the bandstand. They began playing. Have you ever been at Abatsia? It's a filthy little slav town with only one street which stinks, and in which one can't walk after rain without galoshes. I had read so much, and always with such intense feeling about this earthly paradise, that when afterwards, holding up my trousers, I cautiously crossed the narrow street, and in my enweep bought some hard pairs from a peasant woman, who recognized me as a Russian, said, Chitiri for Chetri, for Dvatsa, for Dvatsa, twenty. And when I wondered in perplexity where to go and what to do here, and when I inevitably met Russians as disappointed as I was, I began to feel vexed and ashamed. There is a calm bay there full of steamers and boats with colored sails. From there I could see Fium and the distant islands covered with lilac mist, and it would have been picturesque if the view over the bay had not been hemmed in by the hotels and their dependances, buildings in an absurd trivial style of architecture, with which the whole of that green shore has been covered by greedy money-grubbers, so that for the most part you see nothing in this little paradise but windows, terraces, and little squares with tables and waders, black coats. There is a park such as you find now in a watering-place abroad, and the dark, motionless silent foliage of the palms, and the bright yellow sand in the avenue, and the bright green seats, and the glitter of the brained military horns, all this sickened me in ten minutes, and yet one is obliged, for some reason, to spend ten days, ten weeks there. Having been dragged reluctantly from one of these watering places to another, I have been more and more struck by the inconvenient and niggardly life led by the wealthy and well-fed, the dullness and feebleness of their imagination, the lack of boldness in their tastes and desires, and how much happier are those tourists, old and young, who not having the money to stay in hotels, live where they can, admire the view of the sea from the tops of the mountains, lying on the green grass, walk instead of riding, see forests and villages at close quarters, serve the customs of the country, listen to its songs, fall in love with its women. While I was sitting in the park, it began to get dark, and in the twilight, my Ariadne appeared, elegant, and dressed like a princess. After her walked Lupkov, wearing a new loose-fitting suit, bought, probably, in Vienna, why are you cross with me, he was saying? What have I done to you? Seeing me, she uttered a cry of joy, and probably, if we had not been in the park, would have thrown herself on my neck. She pressed my hands warmly and laughed, and I laughed too, and almost cried with emotion. Questions followed, of the village, of my father, whether I had seen her brother, and so on. She insisted on my looking her straight in the face, and asked if I remembered the gudgeon, our little quarrels, the picnics. How nice it all was, really, she sighed. But we're not having a slow time here, either. We have a great many acquaintances, my dear, my best of friends. Tomorrow I will introduce you to a Russian family here, but please, buy yourself another hat. She scrutinized me and frowned. Abatia is not the country, she said. Here one must be comifol. Then we went to the restaurant. Ariadne was laughing in mischievous all the time. She kept calling me dear, good, clever, and seemed as though she could not believe her eyes that I was with her. We sat on till eleven o'clock, and parted very well satisfied both with the supper and with each other. Next day Ariadne presented me to the Russian family as the son of a distinguished professor whose estate is next to ours. She talked to this family about nothing but estates and crops, and kept appealing to me. She wanted to appear to be a very wealthy landowner, and did in fact succeed in doing so. Her manner was superb, like that of a real aristocrat, which indeed she was by birth. But what a person my aunt is, she said suddenly, looking at me with a smile. We had a slight tiff, and she has bolted off to run. What do you say to that? Afterwards when we were walking in the park I asked her, What aunt are you talking of just now? What aunt is that? That was a saving lie, laughed Ariadne. They must not know I'm without a chaperone. After a moment's silence she came closer to me and said, My dear, my dear do be friends with Lupkov. He is so unhappy. His wife and mother are simply awful. She used the formal mode of address in speaking to Lupkov, and when she was going up to bed she said good night to him exactly as she did to me. And their rooms were on different floors. All this made me hope that it was all nonsense, and that there was no sort of love affair between them, and I felt at ease when I met him. And when, one day, he asked me for the loan of three hundred rubles, I gave it to him with the greatest pleasure. Every day we spent in enjoying ourselves, and in nothing but enjoying ourselves. We strolled in the park, we ate, we drank. Every day there were conversations with the Russian family, by degrees I got used to the fact that if I went to the park I should be sure to meet the old man with jaundice, the Catholic priest, and the Austrian general, who always carried a pack of little cards, and whenever it was possible sat down and played patience, nervously twitching his shoulders. And the band played the same thing over and over again. At home in the country I used to feel ashamed to meet the peasants when I was fishing or on a picnic party on a working day. Here, too, I was ashamed at the sight of the footmen, the coachmen, and the workmen who met us. It always seemed to me they were looking at me and thinking, Why are you doing nothing? And I was conscious of this feeling of shame every day from morning to night. It was a strange, unpleasant monotonous time. It was only varied by Lufkov's borrowing from me now a hundred, now fifty goldens. And being suddenly revived by the money as a Morphia maniac is by Morphia, beginning to laugh loudly at his wife, at himself, at his creditors. At last it began to be rainy and cold. We went to Italy, and I telegraphed to my father begging him for mercy's sake to send me eight hundred rubles to Rome. We stayed in Venice, in Bologna, in Florence, and in every town invariably put up in an expensive hotel, where we were charged separately for lights, and for service, and for heating, and for bread at lunch, and for the rife having nearby ourselves. We ate enormously. In the morning they gave us café complait. At one o'clock lunch, fish, some sort of omelet, cheese, fruits, and wine. At six o'clock dinner of eight courses with long intervals, during which we drank beer and wine. At nine o'clock tea. At midnight Ariadne would declare she was hungry, and ask for ham and bold eggs. We would eat to keep her company. In the intervals between meals we used to rush about the museums and exhibitions in continual anxiety, for fear we should be late for dinner or lunch. I was bored at the sight of the pictures. I longed to be at home to rest. I was exhausted, looked about for a chair, and hypocritically repeated after other people. How exquisite! What atmosphere? Like overfed boa constrictors we noticed only the most glaring objects. The shop windows hypnotized us. We went into ecstasies over imitation bruteses and bought a mass of useless trumpery. The same thing happened in Rome, where it rained and there was a cold wind. After a heavy lunch we went to look at St. George's, and thanks to our replete condition and perhaps the bad weather, it made no sort of impression upon us. And detecting in each other an indifference to art, we almost quarreled. The money came from my father. I went to get it. I remember in the morning. Lubkov went with me. The present cannot be full and happy when one has a past, said he. I have heavy burdens left on me by the past. However, if only I would get the money. It's no great matter. But, if not, I'm in a fix. Would you believe it? I have only eight francs left, yet I must send my wife a hundred and my mother another. And we must live here, too. Ariadne is like a child. She won't enter into the position and flings away money like a duchess. Why did she buy a watch yesterday? And tell me what object is there and are going on playing at being good children? Why are hiding our relations from the servants and our friends cost us from ten to fifteen francs a day, as I have to have a separate room? What's the object of it? I felt as though a sharp stone had been turned round in my chest. There was no uncertainty now. It was all clear to me. I turned cold all over, and at once made a resolution to give up seeing them, to run away from them, to go home at once. To get on terms with a woman is easy enough—Lufkoff went on—you have only to undress her. But afterwards, what a bore it is! What a silly business! When I counted over the money I received, he said, If you don't lend me a thousand francs, I'm faced with complete ruin. Your money is the only resource left to me. I gave him the money, and he had once revived and began laughing about his uncle, a queer fish who could never keep his address secret from his wife. When I reached the hotel, I packed and paid my bill. I had still to say good-bye to Ariadne. I knocked at the door. Entrez! In her room was the usual morning disorder—teethings on the table, an unfinished roll, an eggshell, a strong overpowering rink of scent. The bed had not been made, and it was evident that two had slept in it. Ariadne herself had only just got out of bed, and was now with her hair down in a flannel dressing jacket. I said good morning to her, and then sat in silence for a minute while she tried to put her hair tidy, and then I asked her, trembling all over, Why—why did you send for me here? Evidently she guessed what I was thinking. She took me by the hand and said, I want you to be here. You are so pure. I felt ashamed of my emotion, of my trembling, and I was afraid I might begin sobbing, too. I went out without saying another word, and within an hour I was sitting in the train. All the journey for some reason I imagined Ariadne with child, and she seemed disgusting to me. And all the women I saw in the trains and at the stations looked to me for some reason as if they too were with child, and they too seemed disgusting and pitiable. I was in the position of a greedy, passionate miser who should suddenly discover that all his gold coins were false. The pure, gracious images with my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman, all now were jeering and putting out their tongues at me. Ariadne I kept asking with horror, that young, intellectual, extraordinarily beautiful girl, the daughter of a senator carrying on an intrigue with such an ordinary, uninteresting vulgarian. But why should she not love Lupkov? I answered myself. And what is he inferior to me? Let her love any one she likes, but why lie to me? But why is she bound to be open with me? And so I went on, over and over again, till I was stupefied. It was cold in the train. I was travelling first-class, but even so there were three on a side. There were no double windows. The outer door opened straight into the compartment. And I felt as though I were in the stocks, cramped, abandoned, pitiful. And my legs were fearfully numb. And at the same time I kept recalling how fascinating she had been that morning in her dressing-jacket, and with her hair down. And I was suddenly overcome by such acute jealousy that I leapt up in anguish, so that my neighbors stared at me in wonder and positive alarm. At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I'm fond of the winter. I'm fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest frosts, it's particularly snug at home. It's pleasant to put on one's fur jacket and felt over boots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden or in the yard or to read in a well-warmed room, to sit in my father's study before the open fire, to wash in my country bath-house. Only, if there is no mother in the house, no sister and no children it is somehow dreary on winter evenings, and they seem extraordinarily long and quiet. And the warmer and snugger it is, the more acutely as this lack felt. In the winter, when I came back from abroad, the evenings were endlessly long. I was intensely depressed, so depressed that I could not even read. In the daytime I was coming and going, clearing away the snow in the garden or feeding the chickens and the calves, but in the evening it was all up with me. I had never cared for visitors before, but now I was glad of them, for I knew there was sure to be talk of Ariadne. Kotlovich, the spiritualist, used often to come to talk about his sister, and sometimes he brought with him his friend Prince Maktuv, who is as much in love with Ariadne as I was. To sit in Ariadne's room, to finger the keys of her piano, to look at her music was a necessity for the prince. He could not live without it, and the spirit of his grandfather Ilarian was still predicting that sooner or later she would be his wife. The prince usually stayed a long time with us, from lunch to midnight, saying nothing all the time. In silence he would drink two or three bottles of beer, and from time to time to show that he too was taking part in the conversation he would laugh, unabrupt, melancholy, foolish laugh. Before going home he would always take me aside and ask me in an undertone, when did you see Ariadne gregory of no last? Was she quite well? I suppose she's not tired of being out there. Spring came on. There was the harrowing to do, and then the sewing of spring-corn and clover. I was sad, but there was the feeling of spring. One longed to accept the inevitable. Working in the fields and listening to the larks I asked myself, couldn't I have done with this question of personal happiness once and for all? Couldn't I lay aside my fancy and marry a simple peasant girl? Finally when we were at our very busiest I got a letter with the Italian stamp, and the clover and the beehives and the calves and the peasant girl all floated away like smoke. This time Ariadne wrote me that she was profoundly, infinitely unhappy. She reproached me for not holding out a helping hand to her, for looking down at her from the heights of my virtue and deserting her at the moments of danger. All this was written in a large nervous handwriting with blots and smudges, and it was evident that she wrote in haste and distress. In conclusion she besought me to come and save her. Again my anchor was hauled up and I was carried away. Ariadne was in Rome. I arrived late in the evening, and when she saw me she sobbed and threw herself on my neck. She had not changed at all that way, and was just as young and charming. We had supper together, and afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all the time she kept telling me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov was. Don't remind me of that creature she cried. He is loathsome and disgusting to me. But I thought you loved him, I said. Never, she said. At first he struck me as original and aroused my pity, that is all. He is insolent and takes a woman by storm. And that's attractive. But we won't talk about him. That is a melancholy page in my life. He has gone to Russia to get money. Serves him right. I told him not to dare to come back. She was living then not at a hotel but in a private lodging of two rooms which she had decorated in her own taste, frigidly and luxuriously. After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances about five thousand francs, and my arrival certainly was the one salvation for her. I had reckoned on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed in that. She was homesick for her native place, but her recollections of the poverty she had been through there, of privations, of the rusty roof of her brother's house, roused a shudder of disgust. And when I suggested going home to her, she squeezed my hands convulsively and said, No, no, I shall die of boredom there. Then my love entered upon its final phase. Be the darling that you used to be. Love me a little, said Ariadne, bending over to me. You're sulky and prudent. You're afraid to yield to impulse and keep thinking of consequences. And that's dull. I beg you, I beseech you, be nice to me. My pure one, my holy one, my dear one, I love you so." I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious of nothing but rapture, to hold in one's arms a young and lovely body, with bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from sleep, and to remember that she was there, she, my Ariadne, or it was not easy to get used to that. But yet I did get used to it, and by degrees became capable of reflecting on my new position. First of all I realized, as before, that Ariadne did not love me. But she wanted to be really in love. She was afraid of solitude. And above all, I was healthy, vigorous, young, she was sensual, like all cold people, as a rule, and we both made a show of being united by a passionate, mutual love. Afterwards I realized something else too. We stayed in Rome, in Naples, in Florence. We went to Paris, but there we thought it cold, and went back to Italy. We introduced ourselves everywhere as husband and wife, wealthy landowners. People readily made our acquaintance, and Ariadne had such great social success everywhere. As she took lessons in painting she was called an artist, and only imagined that quite suited her, though she had not the slightest trace of talent. She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock. She had her coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up something, for instance roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy, care-worn expression, and if she waked in the night she would eat apples and oranges. The chief, so to say, fundamental characteristic of the woman was an amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute, apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an impulse such as makes the sparrowed chirrup and the cockroach waggle its antennae. She was deceitful with me, with the footmen, with the porter, with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances. Not one conversation, not one meeting took place without affectation and pretense. A man had only to come into our room, whoever it might be, a waiter or a baron, for her eyes, her expression, her voice to change, even the contour of her figure was transformed. At the very first glance at her then you would have said there were no more wealthy and fashionable people in Italy than we. She never met an artist or musician without telling him all sorts of lies about his remarkable talent. You have such a talent, she would say, in her cadences. I'm really afraid of you. I think you must see right through people. And all this simply in order to please, to be successful, to be fascinating. She waked up every morning with the one thought of pleasing. It was the aim and object of her life. If I had told her that in such a house, in such a street there lived a man who was not attracted by her, it would have cost her real suffering. She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I was in her power and reduced to a complete non-entity before her charms gave her the same sort of satisfaction that visitors used to feel in tournaments. My subjection was not enough, and at night stretched out like a tigress, uncovered, she was always too hot. She would read the letters sent her by Lupkov. He besought her to return to Russia, vowing if she did not he would rob or murder someone to get the money to come to her. She hated him, but his passionate, slavish letters excited her. She had an extraordinary opinion her own charms. She imagined that if somewhere, in great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully she was made, and the color of her skin she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended me. And observing this she would, when she was angry, to vex me, say all sorts of vulgar things, taunting me. One day when we were at the summer villa of a lady of our acquaintance, and she lost her temper, she even went so far as to say, if you don't leave off boring me with your sermons, I'll undress this minute and lie naked here on the flowers. Often looking at her asleep or eating or trying to assume a naïve expression, I wondered why that extraordinary beauty, grace, and intelligence had been given her by God. Could it be simply for lolling in bed, eating, and lying, lying endlessly? And was she intelligent really? She was afraid of three candles in a row, of the number thirteen, was terrified of spells and bad dreams, she argued about free love and freedom in general, like a bigoted old woman, declared that Bulislav Markovich was a better writer than Torgenev. But she was diabolically cunning and sharp, and knew how to seem a highly educated, advanced person in company. Even at a good humored moment she could always insult a servant or kill an insect without a pang. She liked bullfights, liked to read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted. For the life Ariadne and I were leading, we had to have a great deal of money. My poor father sent me his pension. All the little sums he received borrowed from me whenever he could, and when one day he answered me, known Habeo, I sent him a desperate telegram in which I besought him to mortgage the estate. A little later I begged him to get money somehow on a second mortgage. He did this too without a murmur, and sent me every farthing. Ariadne despised the practical side of life. All this was no concern of hers, and when flinging away thousands of francs to satisfy her mad desires, I groaned like an old tree. She would be singing Adio Bella Napoli with a light heart. Little by little I grew cold to her, and began to be ashamed of our tie. I am not fond of pregnancy and confinements, but I now sometimes dreamed of a child who would have been at least a formal justification of our life. That I might not be completely disgusted with myself. I began reading and visiting museums and galleries, gave up drinking, and took to eating very little. If one keeps oneself well in hand from morning to night, one's heart seems lighter. I began to bore Ariadne, too, the people with whom she won her triumphs were, by the way, all of the middling sort, as before there were no ambassadors, there was no salon, the money did not run to it, and this mortified her and made her sob, and she announced to me at last that perhaps she would not be against our returning to Russia. And here we are on our way. For the last few months she has been zealously corresponding with her brother. She evidently has some secret projects, but what they are, God knows, I'm sick of trying to fathom her underhand schemes. But we're going not to the country, but to Yalta, and afterwards to the Caucasus. She can only exist now at watering-places, and if you knew how I hate all those watering-places, how suffocate and ashamed I am in them. If I could be in the country now, if I could only be working now, earning my bread by the sweat of my brow, atoning for my follies, I'm conscious of a superabundance of energy, and I believe that if I were to put that energy to work I could redeem my estate in five years. But now, as you see, there is a complication. Here we're not abroad, but in Mother Russia. We shall have to think of lawful wedlock. Of course, all attraction is over. There is no trace left of my own love, but, however that may be, I am bound in honour to marry her. Shemohin, excited by his story, went below with me, and we continued talking about women. It was late. It appeared that he and I were in the same cabin. "'So far it is only in the village that woman has not fallen behind man,' said Shemohin, that she thinks and feels just as man does, and struggles with nature in the name of culture as zealously as he. In the towns the woman of the bourgeois or intellectual class has long since fallen behind, and is returning to her primitive condition. She is half a human beast already, and thanks to her a great deal of what had been won by human genius has been lost again. The woman gradually disappears, and in her place is the primitive female. This drooping back on the part of the educated woman is a real danger to culture. In her retrogressive movement she tries to drag man after her, and prevent him from moving forward. That is incontestable. I asked, why generalize? Why judge of all women from Ariadne alone? The very struggle of women for education and sexual equality, which I look upon as a struggle for justice, precludes any hypothesis of a retrograde movement. But Shemohin scarcely listened to me, and he smiled distrustfully. He was a passionate, convinced misogynist, and it was impossible to alter his convictions. Oh, nonsense he interrupted! When once a woman sees in me not a man not an equal but a male, and her one anxiety all her life is to attract me, that is to take a possession of me, how can one talk of their rights? Oh, don't you believe them? They are very, very cunning. We men make a great skir about their emancipation, but they don't care about their emancipation at all. They only pretend to care about it. They are horribly cunning things. Horribly cunning. I began to feel sleepy and weary of discussion. I turned her with my face to the wall. Yes, I heard as I fell asleep. Yes, and it's our education that's at fault, sir. In our towns the whole education and bringing up of women, in its essence, tends to develop her into the human beast, that is, to make her attractive to the male and able to vanquish him. Yes, indeed. Shamohin sighed. Little girls ought to be taught and brought up together with boys so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained so that she may be able, like a man, to recognize when she's wrong, or she always thinks she's in the right. In stilling to a little girl from her cradle, that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her neighbor, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalize, and do not assure her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size than the grown-up man, too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the general struggle for existence. We must give our attitude to the physiological aspect, too, to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in the first place women don't have babies every month. Secondly, not all women have babies. And thirdly, a normal country woman works in the fields up to the day of her confinement, and it does her no harm. Then there ought to be absolute equality in every day life. If a man gives a lady his chair, or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water. I heard no more. For I fell asleep. Next morning, when we were approaching Savasipal, it was damp, unpleasant weather. The ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me, brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea men with their coat-collars turned up, and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below. A young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the customs officers at the Walchik, stopped before Shamohin said with the expression of a naughty, fretful child, Jean, your birdie's been sea-sick. Afterwards, when I was at Yalta, I saw the same beautiful lady dashing about on horseback, with a couple of officers hardly able to keep up with her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a frigid cap, sketching on the sea-front with a great crowd admiring her a little way off. I, too, was introduced to her. She pressed my hand with great warmth, and looking at me ecstatically thanked me in honeyed cadences for the pleasure I had given her by my writings. Don't you believe her? Shamohin whispered to me. She has never read a word of them. When I was walking on the sea-front in the early evening, Shamohin met me with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties. Prince Makhtu of his here, he said joyfully, he came yesterday with his brother the spiritualist. Now I understand what she was writing to him about. Oh, Lord, he went on, gazing up to heaven and pressing his parcels to his bosom. If she hits it off with the prince's freedom, then I can go back to the country with my father. And he ran on. I begin to believe in spirits, he called to me, looking back. The spirit of grandfather Allerian seems to have prophesied the truth. Oh, if only it is so. The day after this meeting I left Yalta. And how Shamohin's story ended, I don't know. It is one o'clock in the afternoon. Shopping is at its height in the Nouveau-de-Staparie, a drapery establishment in one of the arcades. There is a monotonous hum of shopman's voices, the hum one hears at school when the teacher sets the boys to learn something by heart. This regular sound is not interrupted by the laughter of lady customers, nor the slam of the glass door, nor the scurrying of the boys. Pulinka, a thin, fair little person whose mother is the head of the dress-making establishment, is standing in the middle of the shop looking about for some one. A dark-browed boy runs up to her and asks, looking at her very gravely, What is your pleasure, madam? Nicolet Timofeyech always takes my order, answers Pulinka. Nicolet Timofeyech, a graceful dark young man, fashionably dressed, with frizzled hair and a big pin in his cravat, has already cleared a place on the counter and is craning forward, looking at Pulinka with a smile. Morning, Pelagea Sergenevna, he cries in a pleasant hearty baritone voice, What can I do for you? Good morning, says Pulinka, going up to him. You see I'm back again. Show me some gimp, please. Gimp? For what purpose? For a bodice-trimming, to trim a whole dress, in fact. Certainly. Nicolet Timofeyech lays several kinds of gimp before Pulinka. She looks at the trimmings languidly and begins bargaining over them. Oh, come, a ruble's not dear, says the shopman persuasively, with a condescending smile. It's a French-trimming, pure silk. We have a commoner sort, if you like, heavier. That's forty-five copics a yard. Of course, it's nothing like the same quality. I want a bead corselet, too, with gimp-button, says Pulinka, bending over the gimp and sighing for some reason. And have you any bead motifs to match? Yes. Pulinka bends still lower over the counter and asks softly. And why did you leave us so early on Thursday, Nicolet Timofeyech? Hm! It's queer you noticed it, said the shopman with a smirk. You were so taken up with that fine student that—it's queer you noticed it. Pulinka flushes crimson and remains mute. With a nervous quiver in his fingers the shopman closes the boxes, and for no sort of object piles them one on top of another. A moment of silence follows. I want some bead lace, too, says Pulinka, lifting her eyes guiltily to the shopman. What sort? Black or colored? Bead lace on tool is the most fashionable trimming. And how much is it? The black is from eighty copics and the colored from two-and-a-half rubles. I shall never come and see you again. Nicolet Timofeyech adds in an undertone. Why? Why? It's very simple. You must understand that yourself. Why should I distress myself? It's a queer business. Do you suppose it's a pleasure to me to see that student carrying on with you? I see it all and I understand. Ever since autumn he's been hanging about you and you go for a walk with him almost every day, and when he's with you you gaze at him as though he were an angel. You are in love with him. There's no one to beat him in your eyes. Well, all right, then, it's no good talking. Pulinka remains dumb and moves her finger on the counter in embarrassment. I see it all the shopman goes on. What inducement have I to come and see you? I've got some pride. It's not everyone likes to play gooseberry. What was it you asked for? Mama told me to get a lot of things, but I've forgotten. I want some feather trimming, too. What kind would you like? The best, something fashionable. The most fashionable now are real bird feathers. If you want the most fashionable colour it's heliotrope or kanak, that is, claret with a yellow shade in it. We have an immense choice. And what all this affair is going to lead to I really don't understand. Here you are in love, and how is it going to end? Patches of red come into Nikolai Timifej's face around his eyes. He crushes the soft feather trimming in his hand and goes on muttering. Do you imagine he'll marry you? Is that it? You'd better drop any such fancies. Students are forbidden to marry. And do you suppose he comes to see you with honourable intentions? A likely idea. Why, those fine students don't look on us as human beings. They only go to see shopkeepers and dress-makers to laugh at their ignorance and to drink. They're ashamed to drink at home and in good houses, but with simple, uneducated people like us. They don't care what anyone thinks. They'd be ready to stand on their heads. Yes, well, which feather trimming will you take? And if he hangs about and carries on with you we know what he's after. When he's a doctor or a lawyer he'll remember you. Ah, he'll say, I used to have a pretty fair little thing. I wonder where she is now. Even now, I bet you, he boasts among his friends that he's got his eye on a little dress-maker. Pulinka sits down and gazes pensively at the pile of white boxes. No, I won't take the feather trimming, she sighs. Mama had better choose it for herself. I may get the wrong one. I want six yards of fringe for an overcoat at forty-copex the yard. For the same coat I want coconut buttons perforated, so they can be sewn on firmly. Nikolai Timofaeich wraps up the fringe and the buttons. She looks at him guiltily and evidently expects him to go on talking, but he remains sullenly silent while he tidies up the feather trimming. I mustn't forget some buttons for a dressing-gown. She says, after an interval of silence, wiping her pale lips with a handkerchief. What kind? It's for a shopkeeper's wife, so give me something rather striking. Yes, if it's for a shopkeeper's wife, you'd better have something bright. Here are some buttons. A combination of colors—red, blue, and the fashionable gold shade. Very glaring. The more refined preferred dull black with a bright border. But I don't understand. Can't you see for yourself? What can these walks lead to? I don't know, whispers Polinka, and she bends over the buttons. I don't know myself what's come to me, Nikolai Timofaeich. A solid shopman with whiskers forces his way behind Nikolai Timofaeich's back, squeezing him to the counter, and beaming with the choicest gallantry shouts, Be so kind, madam, as to step into this department. We have three kinds of jerseys, plain, braided, and trimmed with beads, which may I have the pleasure of showing you. At the same time a stout lady passes by Polinka, pronouncing in a rich, deep voice, almost a bass, they must be seamless, with the trademark stamped in them, please. Pretend to be looking down at the things, Nikolai Timofaeich whispers, bending down to Polinka with a forced smile. Dear me, you do look pale and ill. You are quite changed. He'll throw you over, Pelagea Sargevna. Or if he does marry you, it won't be for love, but from hunger. He'll be tempted by your money. He'll furnish himself a nice home with your dowry and then be ashamed of you. He'll keep you out of sight of his friends and visitors because you're uneducated. He'll call you my dummy of a wife. You wouldn't know how to behave in a doctor's or a lawyer's circle. To them you're a dressmaker, an ignorant creature. Nikolai Timofaeich someone shouts from the other end of the shop. The young lady here wants three yards of ribbon with a metal stripe. Have we any? Nikolai Timofaeich turns in that direction, smirks and shouts, yes, we have. Ribbon with a metal stripe, ottoman with a satin stripe, and satin with a moire stripe. Oh, by the way, I mustn't forget, Olga asked me to get her a pair of stays, says Polinka. There are tears in your eyes, says Nikolai Timofaeich in dismay. What's that for? Come to the corset department. I'll screen you. It looks awkward." With a forced smile and exaggeratedly free and easy manner, the shopman racked-bidly conducts Polinka to the corset department, and conceals her from the public eye behind a high pyramid of boxes. What sort of corset may I show you, he asks aloud, whispering immediately, wipe your eyes. I want—I want—size forty-eight centimeters. Only she wanted one lined with real whale-bone. I must talk to you, Nikolai Timofaeich. Come to-day. Talk about what? There's nothing to talk about. You're the only person who cares about me, and I've no one to talk to but you. These are not reed or steel, but real whale-bone. What is there for us to talk about? It's no use talking. You're going for a walk with him to-day, I suppose. Yes, I—I am. Then what's the use of talking? Talk won't help. You're in love, aren't you? Yes—Polinka whispers hesitatingly, and big tears gush from her eyes. What is there to say, mutters Nikolai Timofaeich, shrugging his shoulders nervously and turning pale? There's no need of talk. Wipe your eyes, that's all. I—I ask for nothing. At that moment a tall, lanky shopman comes up to the pyramid of boxes, and says to his customer, Let me show you some good elastic garters that do not impede the circulation, certified by medical authority. Nikolai Timofaeich screens Polinka, and trying to conceal her emotion and his own. Wrinkles his face into a smile and says aloud, There are two kinds of lace, madam—cotton and silk—Oriental, English, Valencian, Crochet, Torchon, or cotton—and Rococo, Soutage, Cumbre are silk. For God's sake, wipe your eyes. They're coming this way. And seeing that her tears are still gushing, he goes on louder than ever. Spanish, Rococo, Soutage, Cumbre—Stalkings, Thread, Cotton, Silk. ANUTA This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Kirsten Ferreri. Tales of Chekhov. Volume I. Translated by Constance Garnett. ANUTA In the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments, Stepan Klochkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro, zealously conning his anatomy. His mouth was dry and his forehead perspiring from the unceasing effort to learn it by heart. In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat on a stool the girl who shared his room. ANUTA A thin little brunette of five and twenty, very pale with mild gray eyes. Sitting with bent back, she was busy embroidering with red thread the collar of a man's shirt. She was working against time. The clock in the passage struck too drowsily, yet the little room had not been put to rights for the morning. Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, books, clothes, a big filthy slop-pale filled with soap-suds in which cigarette ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor all seemed as though purposely jumbled together in one confusion. The right lung consists of three parts, Klochkov repeated. Boundaries, upper part on anterior wall of thorax reaches fourth or fifth rib on the lateral surface, the fourth rib, behind to the spina scapulae. Klochkov raised his eyes to the ceiling, striving to visualize what he had just read. Unable to form a clear picture of it, he began feeling his upper ribs through the waistcoat. "'These ribs are like the keys of a piano,' he said. One must familiarize oneself with them somehow, if one is not to get muddled over them. One must study them in the skeleton and the living body. I say, Anjuta, let me pick them out.' Anjuta put down her sewing, took off her blouse, and straightened herself up. Klochkov sat down, facing her, frowned, and began counting her ribs. "'Hm. One can't feel the first rib. It's behind the shoulder-blade. This must be the second rib. Yes, this is the third, this is the fourth. Hm. Yes, why are you wriggling? Your fingers are cold. Come, come, it won't kill you. Don't twist about. That must be the third rib, then. This is the fourth. You look such a skinny thing, and yet one can hardly feel your ribs. That's the second, that's the third. This is muddling, and one can't see it clearly. I must draw it. Where's my crayon?' Klochkov took his crayon and drew on Anjuta's chest several parallel lines corresponding with the ribs. First rate. That's all straightforward. Well, now I can sound you. Stand up.' Anjuta stood up and raised her chin. Klochkov began sounding her, and was so absorbed in this occupation that he did not notice how Anjuta's lips, nose, and fingers turned blue with cold. Anjuta shivered, and was afraid the student, noticing it, would leave off drawing and sounding her, and then perhaps might fail in his exam. Now it's all clear, said Klochkov when he had finished. You sit like that, and don't rub off the crayon, and meanwhile I'll learn up a little more. And the student again began walking to and fro, repeating to himself. Anjuta, with black stripes across her chest, looking as though she had been tattooed, sat thinking, huddled up and shivering with cold. She said very little as a rule. She was always silent, looking, and thinking. In the six or seven years of her wanderings from one furnished room to another she had known five students like Klochkov. Now they had all finished their studies, had gone out into the world, and of course, like respectable people, had long ago forgotten her. One of them was living in Paris. Two were doctors. The fourth was an artist, and the fifth was said already to be a professor. Klochkov was the sixth. Soon he too would finish his studies and go out into the world. There was a fine future before him, no doubt, and Klochkov probably would become a great man, but the present was anything but bright. Klochkov had no tobacco and no tea, and there were only four lumps of sugar left. She must make haste, and finish her embroidery, take it to the woman who had ordered it, and with the quarter ruble she would get for it, buy tea and tobacco. Can I come in? asked a voice at the door. Anjuta quickly threw a wooden shawl over her shoulders. Fetisoff the artist walked in. I have come to ask you a favour, he began, addressing Klochkov, and glaring like a wild beast from under the long locks that hung over his brow. Do me a favour, lend me your young lady for a couple of hours. I am painting a picture you see, and I can't get on without a model. Oh, with pleasure, Klochkov agreed. Go along, Anjuta. The things I have had to put up with there, Anjuta murmured softly. Rubbish, the man is asking you for the sake of art, and not for any nonsense. Why not help him if you can? I need to begin dressing. And what are you painting? Psyche, it's a fine subject, but it won't go somehow. I have to keep painting from different models. Yesterday I was painting one with blue legs. Why are your legs blue, I asked her. It's my stockings that stain them, she said, and you're still grinding, lucky fellow, you have patience. Medicine's a job one can't get on without grinding. Hm, excuse me, Klochkov, but you do live like a pig. It's awful the way you live. How do you mean? I can't help it. I only get twelve rubles a month from my father, and it's hard to live decently on that. Yes, yes, said the artist, frowning with an air of disgust, but still you might live better. An educated man is in duty bound to have taste, isn't he? And goodness knows what it's like here. The bed not made, the slops, the dirt, yesterday's porridge in the plates—thruf! That's true, said the student, in confusion, but Anjuta has had no time today to tidy up. She's been busy all the while. When Anjuta and the artist had gone out, Klochkov lay down on the sofa and began learning, lying down. Then he accidentally dropped asleep, and waking up an hour later, propped his head on his fists and sank into gloomy reflection. He recalled the artist's words that an educated man was in duty bound to have taste, and his surroundings actually struck him now as loathsome and revolting. He saw, as it were in his mind's eye, his own future, when he would see his patience in his consulting-room, drink tea in a large dining-room in the company of his wife, a real lady. And now that slot-pale in which the cigarette ends were swimming looked incredibly disgusting. Anjuta too rose before his imagination, a plain, slovenly pitiful figure, and he made up his mind to part with her at once at all costs. When, on coming back from the artists she took off her coat, he got up and said to her seriously, Look here, my good girl, sit down and listen. We must part. The fact is I don't want to live with you any longer." Anjuta had come back from the artists, worn out and exhausted. Standing so long as a model had made her face look thin and sunken, and her chin sharper than ever. She said nothing in answer to the student's words, only her lips began to tremble. You knew we should have to part sooner or later anyway, said the student. You're a nice good girl, and not a fool, you'll understand. Anjuta put on her coat again, in silence wrapped up her embroidery and paper, gathered together her needles and thread. She found the screw of paper with the four lumps of sugar in the window, and laid it on the table by the books. "'That's your sugar,' she said softly, and turned away to conceal her tears. Why are you crying?' asked Klochkov. He walked about the room in confusion and said, You're a strange girl, really. Why, you know we shall have to part. We can't stay together forever.' She had gathered together all her belongings and turned to say goodbye to him, and he felt sorry for her. "'Shall I let her stay on here another week?' he thought. She really may as well stay, and I'll tell her to go in a week. And vexed at his own weakness, he shouted to her roughly, Come, where are you standing there? If you're going, go, and if you don't want to, take off your coat and stay. You can stay.' Anjuta took off her coat, silently, stealthily, then blew her nose also stealthily, sighed, and noiselessly returned to her invariable position on her stool by the window. The student drew his textbook to him and began again, pacing from corner to corner. The right lung consists of three parts, he repeated. The upper part, on the anterior wall of thorax, reaches the fourth or fifth rib. In the passage, someone shouted at the top of his voice, the Samovar, end of Anjuta. The Helpmate by Anton Chekhov I've asked you not to tidy my table, said Nikolayev Gravich. There's no finding anything when you've tidied up. Where's the telegram? Where have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it. It's from Kazan, dated yesterday. The maid, a pale, very slim girl with an indifferent expression, found several telegrams in the basket under the table, and handed them to the doctor without a word. But all these were telegrams from patients. Then they looked in the drawing-room, and in Olga Dmitrievna's room. It was past midnight. Nikolayev Gravich knew his wife would not be home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried, and at the same time he despised his wife and her bed and her looking-glass and her boxes of sweets and the hyacinths and the lilies of the valleys which were sent her every day by some one or other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist's shop all over the house. On such nights he became petty, ill-humoured, irritable, and he fancied now that it was very necessary for him to have the telegram he had received the day before from his brother, though it contained nothing but Christmas greetings. On the table of his wife's room under the box of stationery he found a telegram, and glanced at it casually. It was addressed to his wife, care of his mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel. The doctor did not understand one word of it, as it was in some foreign language, apparently English. Who is this Michel? Why Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her mother? During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to being suspicious, guessing, catching at clues, and it had several times occurred to him that his exercise at home had qualified him to become an excellent detective. Going into his study and beginning to reflect, he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in Petersburg a year and a half ago, and had lunched with an old school fellow, a civil engineer, and how that engineer had introduced to him and his wife a young man of two or three and twenty, called Mihail Ivanovich, with rather a curious short surname—Riss. Two months later the doctor had seen the young man's photograph in his wife's album with an inscription in French, in remembrance of the present and in hopes of the future. Later on he had met the young man himself at his mother-in-laws, and that was at the time when his wife had taken to being very often absent and coming home at four or five o'clock in the morning, and constantly asked him to get her a passport for abroad, which he kept refusing to do, and a continual feud went on in the house which made him feel ashamed to face the servants. Six months before his colleagues had decided that he was going into consumption, and had advised him to throw everything up and go to the Crimea. When she heard of this, Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much alarmed. She began to be affectionate to her husband, and kept assuring him that it would be cold and dull in the Crimea, and they had much better go to Nice, and that she would go with him and there would nurse him, look after him, take care of him. Now he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to Nice. Her Michele lived at Monte Carlo. He took an English dictionary, and translating the words and guessing their meaning by degrees he put together the following sentence. I drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival. He pictured the pitiable ludicrous part he would play if he had agreed to go to Nice with his wife. He felt so mortified that he almost shed tears and began pacing to and fro through all the rooms of the flat in great agitation. His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness was revolted, glenching his fists and scowling with disgust he wondered how he, the son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain straightforward man, a surgeon by profession, could have let himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak, worthless, mercenary, low creature. Little foot he muttered to himself, crumpling up the telegram. Little foot. Of the time when he fell in love with her and proposed to her, and the seven years that he had been living with her, all that remained in his memory was her long, fragrant hair, a mass of soft lace, and her little feet, which certainly were very small, beautiful feet, and even now it seemed as though he still had from those old embraces the feeling of lace and silk upon his hands and face, and nothing more. Nothing more, that is, not counting hysterics, shrieks, reproaches, threats and lies, brazen treacherous lies. He remembered how in his father's house in the village a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house, and would struggle desperately against the windowpains and upset things. So this woman, from a class utterly alien to him, had flown into his life, and made complete havoc of it. The best years of his life had been spent as though in hell. His hopes for happiness shattered and turned into a mockery. His health had gone. His rooms as vulgar in their atmosphere as a cocots. And of the ten thousand he earned every year he could never save even ten rubles to send his old mother in the village, and his debts were already about fifteen thousand. It seemed that if a band of brigands had been living in his rooms his life would not have been so hopelessly, so irremediably ruined as by the presence of this woman. He began coughing and gasping for breath. He ought to have gone to bed and got warm, but he could not. He kept walking about the rooms or sat down to the table nervously fidgeting with a pencil and scribbling mechanically on a paper, trying a pen, a little foot. By five o'clock he grew weaker and threw all the blame on himself. It seemed to him now that if Olga Dmitrievna had married someone else who might have had a good influence over her, who knows, she might after all have become a good straightforward woman. He was a poor psychologist and knew nothing of the female heart. Besides, he was churlish, uninteresting. I haven't longed to live now, he thought. I am a dead man, and ought not to stand in the way of the living. It would be strange and stupid to insist upon one's rights now. I'll have it out with her. Let her go to the man she loves. I'll give her a divorce. I'll take all the blame on myself. Olga Dmitrievna came in at last, and she walked into the study and sank into a chair, just as she was, in her white cloak, hat, and over-boots. The nasty, fat boy, she said, with a sob, breathing hard. It's really dishonest. It's disgusting, she stamped. I can't put up with it. I can't. I can't. What's the matter? asked Nikolay Yevkovich, going up to her. That student, Azarbakov, was seeing me home, and he lost my bag, and there were fifteen rubles in it. I borrowed it from Mama. She was crying in a most genuine way, like a little girl, and not only her handkerchief, but even her gloves were wet with tears. It can't be helped, said the doctor. If he's lost it, he's lost it, and it's so good worrying over it. Calm yourself. I want to talk to you. I'm not a millionaire to lose money like that. He says he'll pay it back, but I don't believe him. He's poor. Her husband begged her to calm herself and listen to him, but she kept on talking of the student and of the fifteen rubles she had lost. I'll give you twenty-five rubles tomorrow if you only hold your tongue, he said irritably. I must take off my things, she said, crying. I can't talk seriously in my fur coat. How strange you are! He helped her off with her coat and over-boots, detecting as he did so the smell of the white wine she liked to drink with oysters. In spite of her etherealness she ate and drank a good deal. She went into her room and came back soon after, having changed her things and powdered her face, though her eyes still showed traces of tears. She sat down, retreating into her light, lacy dressing-gown, and in the mass of billowy pink her husband could see nothing but her hair, which she had let down, and her little foot wearing a slipper. What do you want to talk about, she asked, swinging herself into a rocking chair. I happened to see this, and he handed her the telegram. She read it and shrugged her shoulders. Well, she said, rocking herself faster. That's the usual New Year's greeting and nothing else. There are no secrets in it. You have reckoned on my not knowing English. No, I don't know it, but I have a dictionary. That telegram is from Ryss. He drinks to the health of his beloved and sends you a thousand kisses. But let us leave that, the doctor went unhurriedly. I don't in the least want to reproach you or make a scene. We've had scenes and reproaches enough. It's time to make an end of them. This is what I want to say to you. You are free and can live as you like. There was a silence. She began crying quietly. I set you free from the necessity of lying and keeping up pretenses. Nicolayev Kravich continued, If you love that young man, love him. If you want to go abroad to him, go. You are young and healthy, and I'm a wreck and haven't long to live. In short, you understand me. He was agitated and could not go on. Olga Dmitrievna, crying and speaking in a voice of self-pity, acknowledged that she loved Ryss and used to drive out of town with him and see him in his rooms, and now she really did long to go abroad. You see, I hide nothing from you, she added with a sigh. My whole soul lies open before you, and I beg you again, be generous. Get me a passport. I repeat, you are free. She moved to another seat nearer him to look at the expression on his face. She did not believe him, and wanted now to understand his secret meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish object in them, and when she looked searchingly into his face, it seemed to him that there was a gleam of green light in her eyes as in a cat's. When shall I get the passport? she asked softly. He suddenly had an impulse to say never, but he restrained himself and said, When you like? I shall only go for a month. You'll go to Ryss for good. I'll get you a divorce. Take the blame on myself, and Ryss can marry you. But I don't want a divorce. Oh, good amitrievna retorted quickly with an astonished face. I'm not asking you for a divorce. Get me a passport, that's all. But why don't you want the divorce, as the doctor, beginning to feel irritated? You're a strange woman. How strange you are. If you're fond of him in earnest, and he loves you in your position, you can do nothing better than get married. Can you really hesitate between marriage and adultery? I understand you, she said, walking away from him, and a spiteful vindictive expression came into her face. I understand you perfectly. You're sick of me, and you simply want to get rid of me to force a divorce on me. Thank you very much. I am not such a fool as you think. I won't accept the divorce, and I won't leave you. I won't. To begin with, I don't want to lose my position in society. She continued quickly, as though afraid of being prevented from speaking. Secondly, I am twenty-seven and Ryss is only twenty-three. He'll be tired of me in a year, and throw me over. And what's more, if you care to know, I'm not certain that my feeling will last long. So there, I'm not going to leave. Then I'll turn you out of the house, shouty Nikolaiyevgroovitch, stamping. I shall turn you out, you vile, lousome woman. We shall see, she said, and went out. It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor still sat at the table, moving the pencil over the paper and writing mechanically. My dear sir, little foot. Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage, and looked at it for a long time. It was a family group, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and himself in the role of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a clean-shaven, drop-sicle privy counselor, crafty and avaricious. His mother-in-law, a stout lady with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in everything. If her daughter were strangling someone, her mother would not have protested, but would have only screened her with her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna too had small predatory-looking features, but more expressive and bolder than her mother's. She was not a weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale. And Nikolay Yevkovich himself in the photograph looked such a guileless soul, such a kindly good fellow, so open and simple-hearted. His whole face was relaxed in the naïve, good-natured smile of a divinity student, and he had had the simplicity to believe that that company of beasts of prey into which destiny had chance to thrust him would give him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he used to sing the song, youth is wasted, life is not, when the heart is cold and loveless. And once more he asked himself in perplexity how he, the son of a village priest, with his democratic bringing up, a plain, blunt, straightforward man, could have so helplessly surrendered to the power of this worthless, false, vulgar, petty creature whose nature was so utterly alien to him. When at eleven o'clock he put on his coat to go to the hospital, his servant came into his study. What is it he asked? The mistress has got up and asks you for the twenty-five rubles you promised her yesterday. End of The Helpmate