There was a small hummock in the garden. I went up it and sat down. An enchanting feeling came over me. I knew for certain that I was about to embrace her luxurious body, to press myself to it, to kiss those golden eyebrows, and I wanted not to believe it, to excite myself, and was sorry that she had tormented me so little and yielded so soon.
But here I suddenly heard heavy footsteps. A man of average height appeared in the path, and I immediately recognized him as Forty Martyrs. He sat down on a bench and sighed deeply, then crossed himself three times and lay down. A minute later he sat up and turned on the other side. Mosquitoes and the night’s dampness kept him from sleeping.
“Ah, life!” he said. “Miserable, bitter life!”
Looking at his scrawny, bent body and hearing deep, hoarse sighs, I remembered the other miserable, bitter life confessed to me that day, and my blissful state became eerie and frightening to me. I left the hummock and headed home.
“Life, in his opinion, is frightening,” I thought, “so don’t stand on ceremony with it, break it, and, before it crushes you, take all you can grab from it.”
Maria Sergeevna was standing on the terrace. I silently embraced her and greedily started kissing her eyebrows, temples, neck…
In my room she told me that she had loved me for a long time, more than a year. She swore her love for me, wept, begged me to take her away with me. I kept bringing her to the window, so as to see her face in the moonlight, and she seemed like a beautiful dream to me, and I hurried to embrace her tightly, so as to believe in its reality. I had not experienced such raptures for a long time…But all the same, far off somewhere in the depths of my soul, I felt a certain awkwardness, and I was out of sorts. There was something troubling and burdensome in her love for me, as there was in Dmitri Petrovich’s friendship. It was a great, serious love, with tears and oaths, while I didn’t want anything serious—no tears, no oaths, no talk about the future. Let this moonlit night flash by in our lives like a bright meteor—and basta.
At exactly three o’clock she left my room, and as I followed her with my gaze, standing in the doorway, Dmitri Petrovich suddenly appeared at the end of the corridor. Running into him, she gave a start and made way for him, and disgust was written all over her. He smiled somehow strangely, coughed, and came into my room.
“I forgot my cap here yesterday,” he said, not looking at me.
He found his cap, put it on with both hands, then looked at my embarrassed face, at my slippers, and said in a strange, husky voice, not quite his own:
“I was probably predestined not to understand anything. If you understand something, then…I congratulate you. It’s all dark in my eyes.”
And he went out with a little cough. Then I saw through the window how he hitched up the horses by the stable. His hands were trembling, he was in a hurry and kept glancing at the house; he was probably frightened. Then he got into the tarantass and with a strange expression, as if fearing pursuit, whipped up the horses.
A little later I myself left. The sun was already rising, and the previous day’s mist timidly pressed itself to the bushes and hummocks. Forty Martyrs, who had already managed to have a drink somewhere, sat on the box and mouthed drunken nonsense.
“I’m a free man!” he cried to the horses. “Hey, you beauties! I’m a hereditary, honorary citizen, if you want to know!”
Dmitri Petrovich’s fear, which was on my mind, communicated itself to me. I thought about what had happened and understood nothing. I looked at the rooks, and found it strange and frightening that they were flying.
“Why did I do it?” I asked myself in bewilderment and despair. “Why did it happen precisely like this, and not some other way? To whom and for what was it necessary that she should love me seriously and that he should come to the room to get his cap? What has the cap got to do with it?”
That same day I left for Petersburg, and since then I have not seen Dmitri Petrovich and his wife even once. People say they’re still living together.
1892
BIG VOLODYA AND LITTLE VOLODYA
“LET ME! I WANT TO DRIVE MYSELF! I’ll sit beside the coachman!” Sofya Lvovna said loudly. “Coachman, wait, I’ll sit on the box with you.”
She was standing up in the sledge, and her husband Vladimir Nikitych and her childhood friend Vladimir Mikhailych were holding her by the arms to keep her from falling. The troika raced along quickly.
“I said not to give her cognac,” Vladimir Nikitych whispered vexedly to his companion. “What a one, really!”
The colonel knew from experience that in such women as his wife Sofya Lvovna violent, slightly drunken gaiety is usually followed by hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that now, when they came home, instead of sleeping, he would have to fuss with compresses and drops.
“Whoa!” cried Sofya Lvovna. “I want to drive!”
She was genuinely happy and triumphant. Over the past two months, ever since her wedding day, she had been beset by the thought that her marriage to Colonel Yagich was of convenience and, as they say, par dépit.1 Tonight, in a suburban restaurant, she had finally become convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years, he was so trim, adroit, supple, he quipped and sang along with the Gypsies so nicely. Really, nowadays older people are a thousand times more interesting than the young, and it looks as if old age and youth have exchanged roles. The colonel was two years older than her father, but could this circumstance have any meaning, if, in all conscience, there was immeasurably more of life’s force, vigor, and freshness in him than in her, though she was only twenty-three?
“Oh, my dearest!” she thought. “My wonderful one!”
In the restaurant she had also become convinced that there was not even a spark of the former feeling left in her heart. To her childhood friend Vladimir Mikhailych, or simply Volodya, whom still yesterday she had loved to the point of madness, of despair, she now felt herself totally indifferent. All that evening he had seemed listless to her, sleepy, uninteresting, insignificant, and this time the coolness with which he usually avoided paying the check in restaurants had outraged her, and she had barely kept herself from saying to him: “If you’re poor, stay home.” The colonel alone had paid.
Maybe because trees, telegraph poles, and snowdrifts kept flashing by her eyes, the most varied thoughts came into her head. She thought: a hundred and twenty to pay the check in the restaurant, and a hundred for the Gypsies, and tomorrow, if she likes, she can throw even a thousand roubles to the wind, yet two months ago, before the wedding, she didn’t have even three roubles to her name, and had to turn to her father for every trifle. What a change in life!
Her thoughts were confused, and she recalled how, when she was around ten years old, Colonel Yagich, now her husband, had paid court to her aunt, and everyone in the house said he ruined her, and in fact the aunt often came to dinner with tearful eyes and kept driving somewhere, and people said that the poor thing didn’t know what to do with herself. He was very handsome then and had extraordinary success with women, so that the whole town knew him, and the story went that he visited his lady admirers every day, the way a doctor visits his patients. And even now, despite the gray hair, the wrinkles, and the spectacles, his lean face sometimes looked very handsome, especially in profile.
Sofya Lvovna’s father was an army doctor and had once served in the same regiment with Yagich. Volodya’s father was also an army doctor and had also served in the same regiment with her father and Yagich. In spite of love adventures, often very complex and troublesome, Volodya was an excellent student; he finished his studies at the university with great success, chose foreign literature as his specialization, and is now said to be writing his dissertation. He lives in the barracks with his father, the army doctor, and has no money of his own, though he is already thirty. In childhood he and Sofya Lvovna lived in different apartments, but under the same roof, and he often came to play with her, and they took dancing and French lessons together. But when he grew up and became a slim, very handsome young man, she began to feel bashful with him, then fell madly in love with him, and loved him until quite recently, when she married Yagich. He, too, had extraordinary success with women, almost since the age of fourteen, and the ladies who were unfaithful to their husbands with him excused themselves by saying that Volodya was little. Not long ago someone told of him that, supposedly, when he was a student, he lived in furnished rooms close to the university, and each time someone knocked on his door, his footsteps would be heard and then a low-voiced apology: “Pardon, je ne suis pas seul.”2 Yagich went into raptures over him, gave him his blessing for the future, as Derzhavin had Pushkin,3 and apparently loved him. For hours at a time they silently played billiards or blackjack together, and if Yagich went somewhere in a troika, he took Volodya with him, and Volodya initiated Yagich alone into the mysteries of his dissertation. Earlier, when the colonel was younger, they often wound up in the position of rivals, but they were never jealous of each other. In society, where they appeared together, Yagich was called big Volodya and his friend little Volodya.