“But could I have used guile successfully, even if I had tried? No one who was as much in love as I was could have done that. Some people can sometimes feign indifference, and make a point of staying away for a certain number of days – and it works. But as for me, to pretend to calculate, when I couldn’t look at her without having to catch my breath and without my knees trembling and giving way, when I was ready to suffer agonies just in order to see her… No! No matter what you say, it’s a greater delight for me to love with all my heart and soul, regardless of the suffering, than to be loved without loving, or just loving half-heartedly, for amusement, as part of some repugnant game, and to toy with a woman and then dismiss her like some lapdog.”
Pyotr Ivanych shrugged. “Well, go ahead and suffer, if that’s what you like,” he said. “Oh, the provinces. Oh, Asia! You should live in the East, where they still order women whom to love, and if they don’t obey, they are drowned. No, here” – he went on, as if speaking to himself – “to be happy with a woman – that is, not in your way, like a madman, but sensibly – there are a number of conditions which have to be accepted: you have to mould a woman out of the girl according to a well-designed plan – or method, if you like – of your own, so that she understands and plays the role she has been assigned. You must confine her within an invisible circle, but not too tight a circle, where she becomes aware of the boundaries and stays within them; you must contrive to take possession not only of her heart – which is a slippery and elusive thing to keep a grip on – but her mind and her will, and subordinate her tastes and habits to your own, so that she sees everything through your eyes and thinks with your mind—”
“In other words, she should become the puppet or the unquestioning slave of her husband,” said Alexander, cutting him off.
“But why? You have to arrange it so that nothing she does conflicts with her womanly attributes and virtues. Accord her freedom of action within her sphere, as long as you monitor vigilantly her every movement, every sigh and every action, so that each and every momentary mood change, outburst, the first sign of any feeling, always meets with the apparent equanimity, but ever watchful eye of her husband. You have to maintain constant vigilance, but without tyranny… and it must be done subtly and without her noticing; and in this way you will lead her in the desired direction… Oh, it’s a hard and complicated schooling in a school run by a clever and experienced husband – and that’s what it’s all about!”
He coughed pointedly, and drained his glass.
“Then,” he continued, “a husband can sleep peacefully even when his wife is not by his side, and can sit with his mind at ease in his study when his wife is sleeping…”
“So that’s it, that’s the famous secret of a happy marriage!” said Alexander. “Slyly taking control of a woman’s mind, heart and will – and taking comfort in the thought and even priding yourself on the achievement… that’s your happiness? And what happens if she does notice?”
“Priding oneself? No, there’s no need for that.”
“Judging by the carefree way you sit in your study,” Alexander went on, “while my aunt is sleeping, I can guess who that man is—”
“Shh! Shh!… Don’t say anything!” his uncle broke in, waving his arms. “It’s a good thing that she is sleeping, otherwise… you never know…”
At that moment the study door began to open slowly, although no one could be seen opening it.
A woman’s voice could be heard from the corridor. “But the woman should never let on that she knows all about her husband’s great school, but start her own little one, although never letting the fact slip out over a bottle of wine…”
Both Aduyevs rushed to the door, but by the time they reached it, nothing could be heard but the sound of rapid footsteps and the rustle of a dress dying away.
Uncle and nephew stood looking at each other.
It was the nephew who broke the silence. “Well, Uncle?”
“It’s nothing!” said Pyotr Ivanych, frowning. “It was the wrong time to be boasting. Let it be a lesson for you; but better still, don’t get married – or, if you do, choose a nincompoop: you’ll never manage with a clever woman; my school is very demanding!”
He thought for a moment, and then slapped his forehead.
“I should have realized that she would know you had called so late,” he said with annoyance, “and that a woman would never sleep knowing that two men were in the next room exchanging secrets, and that she would be sure either to send the maid or come herself… How stupid of me not to have foreseen it! And it’s all because of you and that damned Lafite! I let my tongue run away with me! And it only took a twenty-year-old woman to teach me such a lesson…”
“Are you afraid, Uncle?”
“What have I to be afraid of? No, not at all! I just slipped up; no need to lose my cool: I just need to find a way out of my awkward position.”
He started thinking again.
“She was just boasting,” he said after a moment or two. “What kind of school can she possibly have – at her age! She was just reacting out of annoyance. But now she has noticed the invisible circle and will cook up some ploy of her own… Oh, how well I know a woman’s mind! But we’ll see…”
He smiled confidently and cheerfully, and the furrows disappeared from his brow.
“Only now I need a different approach,” he added. “The old method is no damned good now. What I need to do is…”
He stopped himself suddenly in mid-sentence, looking apprehensively at the door.
“Anyway, I’ll deal with that later,” he went on. “Now let’s attend to your business, Alexander. Where were we at? Oh yes, you wanted to kill your… er… what’s-her-name, didn’t you?”
“She’s too far beneath my contempt,” said Alexander, sighing deeply.
“So you see, you’re already halfway cured. Or could I be mistaken? You’re still angry, I think. But anyway, go on despising her: it’s the best thing to do in your situation. Now there’s something I wanted to say – what was it?”
“Oh, say it, say it for God’s sake,” said Alexander. “I can hardly think straight right now. I’m in pain; I’m at the end of my tether… Give me the benefit of your cold good sense. Tell me whatever you can that will relieve and ease the pain in my heart…”
“Well, if I were to tell you, you would probably go back there.”
“Go back! The very idea! After everything that—”
“There are those who do go back even without that; give me your word that you won’t!”
“I’ll even swear it, if you want.”
“No, your word of honour will do: it’s more reliable.”
“My word of honour!”
“Well, you see, now we’ve decided that the Count is not to blame…”
“All right, if you like, and then what?”
“Now, what is it you blame that… what’s-her-name… for?”
“What do I blame Nadenka for?” Alexander retorted in amazement. “She’s not to blame!”
“No! But for what? Tell me! There’s no reason to despise her.”
“No reason! No, Uncle, that’s a wild exaggeration! Let’s suppose the Count… well, he didn’t know… but even so, no! And her? Then who is left to blame, me?”
“Well, you’re getting closer; the fact is no one is to blame. Tell me, why do you despise her?”
“Because what she did is contemptible.”
“And what was that exactly?”
“Repaying me for my noble, boundless passion with such ingratitude.”
“But where does gratitude come in? Did you love her just to do her a favour? To do her a service – so as to ingratiate yourself with her mother?”
Alexander looked at him, not knowing what to say.
“What you shouldn’t have done was to reveal to her the full strength of your
feelings. It makes a man less attractive to a woman when he opens up completely like that… You should have learnt more about her character first, and then have acted accordingly, instead of lying down at her feet like a lapdog. In any kind of relationship with another person, surely you must learn to know them? In that way, you would have discovered that there was nothing more to expect from her. She was acting out her affair with you to the hilt in just the same way as she is with the Count – and maybe with others… There’s nothing more you can ask of her: she’s incapable of moving further or higher – it’s not in her nature; and you saw God knows what in her…”
“Then how come she was able to love someone else?” Alexander put in miserably.
“Ah, so that’s what you’re blaming her for! That’s a good question, but it’s one you should be asking yourself. Then why did you fall in love with her? Anyway, fall out of love as soon as possible!”
“Does that really depend on me?”
“Well, did it depend on her when she fell in love with the Count? You yourself claimed that it’s impossible to stem the upsurge of feelings, but when matters reached that very point, now you ask why she fell in love! Why did this one die, and why did that other one go mad? – how can one answer such questions? Love has to end at some point, it can’t go on for ever.”
“You’re wrong: it can. I feel that my own heart has this power, and that my love would be eternal…”
“Oh yes? And if her love for you had been stronger… well, you would have beaten a hasty retreat! That’s the way it always is; and I’m someone who knows!”
“Even if she had to stop loving me,” said Alexander, “why did it have to end like this?…”
“Why? Does it matter? Isn’t it enough that you were loved, you revelled in it – and now it’s over?”
“She gave herself to another!” Alexander went pale as he said it.
“Then would you have preferred her to fall in love with someone else and keep quiet about it, while you continued to believe that it was you she loved? Well, decide for yourself – what was she to do? Did she do something wrong?”
“Oh, I’ll get my revenge on her!” said Alexander.
“You’re ungrateful,” Pyotr Ivanych continued. “That’s wrong of you. No matter how badly a woman has treated you – betrayed you, lost her feeling for you or acted, as the poets say, ‘perfidiously’ – you can only blame nature; in a case like this, you can always try to view the matter from a philosophical perspective, or blame the world, life itself, whatever, but never encroach on a woman’s personality in either word or deed. The weapon to use against a woman is indulgence, or at the outside the harshest weapon you should use is… indifference. These are the only weapons a decent man is entitled to use. Remember, for a year and a half you fell on everyone’s neck from sheer joy, you were beside yourself with happiness – eighteen months of sheer uninterrupted pleasure! But whichever way you look at it, you’re ungrateful!”
“But Uncle, there was nothing on earth more sacred to me than love – without that, life is unlivable—”
“I’m just sick of hearing such rubbish,” Pyotr Ivanych broke in with annoyance.
“I would have worshipped Nadenka, and would have begrudged her no happiness in the world; I dreamt of spending my whole life with Nadenka, and see what happened. Where is that noble, overwhelming passion of which I dreamt? It degenerated into a stupid, stunted farce of sighs, scenes, jealousy, lies and pretence. God help me!”
“What made you imagine something which doesn’t exist? Wasn’t I the one who told you that the kind of life you’ve chosen to live up to now doesn’t exist? As you see it, a man’s only purpose in life is to be a lover, a husband, a father… anything else you simply didn’t want to know about. Over and above that, a man is a citizen, has knowledge in some field, has a career – a writer, or a landowner, a soldier, a government official, an industrialist… But for you, all this is overshadowed by love and friendship… a kind of Arcadia! You’ve been reading too many novels, and spent too much time listening to your auntie down there in the backwoods, and that’s why you arrived with these ideas of yours. Now you’ve come up with a new one – a noble passion!”
“Yes, noble!”
“Please, no more of that! Do you really believe in ‘noble passions’?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just this. The word ‘passion’ means a feeling, a predilection, an attachment, which reaches a point where reason ceases to function. So where does ‘noble’ come in? I don’t understand: it’s sheer madness – not even human. In any case, why do you look at only one side of the medal? I’m talking about love – take a look at the other side, and you will see that love is not all bad. Just remember those moments of happiness when you practically deafened me…”
“Don’t remind me, please don’t remind me!” said Alexander, waving his arms. “It’s easy for you to think like that, because you can rest secure in the affections of the woman you love. What I would like to see is what you would do in my place.”
“What I would do? I would go somewhere to take my mind off it, like the factory. Would you like to go there tomorrow?”
“No: you and I will never see eye to eye,” Alexander responded sadly. “Your views, far from reconciling me to life, actually alienate me from it. I’m miserable; my heart is chilled. Up to now, it has been my love that has kept my heart warm. That love has gone, leaving my heart in anguish; I’m afraid, and all is bleak…”
“You should get back to work.”
“Everything you say is true, Uncle; you and others like you may be able to see it like that. But you are, by nature, a cold person, with a soul not given to strong emotion…”
“And you imagine that you’re the one with a soul of such great power! Yesterday, you were in the seventh heaven of delight, yet it took so little to… When you are hurt, you just can’t get over it.”
Alexander retorted feebly, barely able to offer a defence, “You think, feel and talk like a locomotive moving smoothly, evenly and calmly along its rails – I can even see the steam you’re puffing.”
“I hope there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s better than jumping off the rails and tumbling into a ditch – which is what’s just happened to you – and being unable to stand on your own feet. You talk about steam. Yes indeed! It’s that very vapour which does credit to man. It’s precisely the component of this invention which makes you and me human – any animal is capable of dying from grief. Dogs have been known to die on the graves of their masters, or to die suffocated by the intensity of their joy at seeing them again after a long separation. What on earth is the use of that? And you think that you’re some kind of special being, a cut above the rest of us, someone extraordinary…”
Pyotr Ivanych looked at his nephew and stopped suddenly.
“What’s this? You can’t be crying?” he asked, and his face darkened – in other words, he was blushing.
Alexander said nothing. His uncle’s last few words had knocked the stuffing out of him. He had nothing left to say in his defence: he was totally under the influence of his dominant feeling. All he could think of was his lost happiness, and that now it was another… and the tears poured down his cheeks.
“Come on! Control yourself! You should be ashamed!” said Pyotr Ivanych. “Be a man! If you must cry, for God’s sake do it out of my sight! That’s enough, stop it right now!”
“Uncle! Remember when you were young,” Alexander gasped out between sobs. “Were you really able to stand up calmly and unmoved to the bitterest humiliation that fate can mete out? To live such a full life for one and a half years and suddenly to have it snatched away – and be left with nothing… And for me to have all my sincerity repaid with cunning, secretiveness and indifference – my God! Can there be any pain worse than this? It’s easy enough to say about someone else, ‘They’ve changed,’ but to become the
victim of it yourself! And what a change! How she started dressing up for the Count! And when I came to see her, she would turn pale; she could hardly speak… and the lies… no!”
The tears were coming thicker and faster.
“If I had the consolation that it was circumstances which took her from me, or if I had done something unknowingly to make her leave me… even if she had died, then it would have been easier to bear, but no, no… it was someone else. It’s unbearable, horrible! And there’s no way for me to tear her away from that usurper; you have disarmed me… What am I to do? Tell me! I can’t breathe, I’m in pain, in torment – I’m desolate… I’ll shoot myself…”
He put his elbows on the table, covered his head with his hands and continued sobbing noisily.
Pyotr Ivanych felt helpless. He paced the length of the room twice and then stood in front of Alexander and scratched his head, at a loss for words.
“Drink some wine, Alexander,” said Pyotr Ivanych as gently as he was able. “Well, perhaps…”
The Same Old Story Page 19
