Little Volodya winced peevishly and said:
“Why do you suddenly want learning? Maybe you want a constitution? Or maybe sturgeon with horseradish?”
“Well, all right, I’m worthless, trashy, without principles, and none too bright. I’ve made no end of mistakes, I’m a psychopath, I’m spoiled, and I ought to be despised for it. But you’re ten years older than me, Volodya, and my husband is thirty years older. I grew up in your presence, and if you wanted, you could have made whatever you like out of me, even an angel. But you…” (her voice quavered) “behave terribly with me. Yagich married me when he was already old, but you…”
“Well, enough, enough,” said Volodya, sitting close to her and kissing both of her hands. “Let the Schopenhauers philosophize and prove whatever they like, but we will kiss these little hands.”
“You despise me, and if you only knew how I suffer from it!” she said hesitantly, knowing beforehand that he would not believe her. “And if you only knew how I want to change, to start a new life! I think of it with rapture,” she said, and she actually shed a few tears of rapture. “To be a good, honest, pure human being, not to lie, to have a goal in life.”
“Now, now, now, please don’t pretend! I don’t like it!” said Volodya, and his face acquired an annoyed expression. “By God, just as if you’re onstage! Let’s behave like human beings.”
So that he would not get angry and leave, she began to apologize and, to please him, even forced herself to smile, and again talked about Olya and about her own wish to resolve the question of her life, to become a human being.
“Tara…ra…boomdeay…,” he sang in a low voice. “Tara…ra…boomdeay!”
And suddenly he took her by the waist. And she, not knowing herself what she was doing, put her hands on his shoulders and for a moment, as if in a daze, stared with admiration at his intelligent, mocking face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard…
“You’ve known for a long time that I love you,” she confessed and blushed painfully, feeling that her lips had even twisted convulsively from shame. “I love you. Why do you torment me?”
She shut her eyes and kissed him firmly on the lips; and for a long time, perhaps a full minute, she could not end the kiss, though she knew it was improper, that he himself might disapprove of her, or a servant might come in…
“Oh, how you torment me!” she repeated.
When, half an hour later, having obtained what he wanted, he was sitting in the dining room and eating, she knelt before him and greedily looked into his face, and he told her she looked like a little dog waiting to be thrown a piece of ham. Then he sat her on his knee and, rocking her like a child, sang:
“Tara…raboomdeay…Tara…raboomdeay!”
When he was preparing to leave, she asked him in a passionate voice:
“When? Today? Where?”
And she reached both hands out to his mouth, as if wishing to seize the answer even with her hands.
“Today is hardly convenient,” he said on reflection. “Maybe tomorrow.”
And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the convent to see Olya, but they told her Olya was somewhere reading the psalter over a dead person. From the convent she went to her father and also did not find him at home. Then she changed cabs and started going aimlessly around the streets and lanes, and went on driving like that until evening. And for some reason she kept remembering that same aunt with the tearful eyes, who didn’t know what to do with herself.
At night they again drove off in the troika and listened to the Gypsies in the suburban restaurant. And when they went past the convent again, Sofya Lvovna remembered about Olya, and she felt eerie at the thought that for the girls and women of her circle there was no solution except to keep driving around in troikas and lying, or to go into a convent to mortify the flesh…The next day there was a rendezvous, and again Sofya Lvovna rode around town alone in a cab and remembered her aunt.
A week later little Volodya abandoned her. And after that, life went on as before, just as uninteresting, dreary, and sometimes even tormenting. The colonel and little Volodya played long rounds of billiards and piquet, Rita told jokes insipidly and flatly, Sofya Lvovna kept riding around in a cab and asked her husband to give her a ride in the troika.
She stopped by the convent almost every day, bothered Olya, complaining about her unbearable sufferings, wept, and felt all the while that something impure, pathetic, and shabby had entered the cell with her, while Olya kept telling her, mechanically, in the tone of a lesson learned by rote, that it was all nothing, it would all pass, and God would forgive.
1893
THE TEACHER OF LITERATURE
I
There was a drumming of horse hooves on the timber floor: first they led the black Count Nulin1 from the stable, then the white Giant, then his sister Maika. They were all excellent and expensive horses. Old Shelestov saddled Giant and said, turning to his daughter Masha:
“Well, Maria Godefroi,2 mount up. Hopla!”
Masha Shelestova was the youngest in the family; she was already eighteen, but the family was still in the habit of considering her little, and therefore they all called her Manya or Manyusya; and after a circus came to town, which she eagerly went to, they all started calling her Maria Godefroi.
“Hopla!” she cried, mounting Giant.
Her sister Varya got on Maika, Nikitin on Count Nulin, the officers on their own horses, and the long, elegant cavalcade, mottled with white officers’ tunics and black riding habits, slowly filed out of the yard.
Nikitin noticed that, as they were mounting their horses and then riding out to the street, Manyusya for some reason paid attention only to him. She anxiously examined him and Count Nulin and said:
“Keep him on the bit all the time, Sergei Vassilyich. Don’t let him shy. He’s pretending.”
And either because her Giant was great friends with Count Nulin, or it came about by chance, she rode next to Nikitin all the time, as she had yesterday and the day before. And he looked at her small, shapely body, seated on the proud white animal, at her fine profile, her top hat, which did not suit her and made her look older than she was, looked with joy, with tenderness, with rapture, listened to her, understood little, and thought:
“On my word of honor, I swear to God, I won’t be timid, I’ll propose to her today…”
It was past six in the evening—that time when the scent of white acacia and lilacs is so intense that it seems the air and the trees themselves swoon from it. Music was already playing in the town garden. The horses drummed resoundingly on the pavement; on all sides there was the sound of laughter, talk, the slamming of gates. Passing soldiers saluted the officers, schoolboys greeted Nikitin; and the promenaders, who were hurrying to the garden to listen to the music, were all obviously very pleased to see the cavalcade. And how warm it was, how soft the clouds looked, scattered in disorder across the sky, how meek and homey the shadows of the poplars and acacias—shadows that stretched all the way across the wide street and covered the houses on the other side up to the balconies and second floors!
They rode out of town and went at a trot down the high road. Here there was no scent of acacias and lilacs, no sound of music; instead there was the smell of the fields, the green growth of young rye and wheat, the squealing of gophers, the cawing of rooks. It was green everywhere you looked, with dark melon patches here and there and far to the left, by the cemetery, the white strip of a fading apple orchard.
They rode past the slaughterhouses, then past the brewery, overtook a crowd of military musicians hurrying to a park outside town.