“Oh, don’t remind me, don’t remind me!” said Alexander with a gesture of rejection. “It’s easy for you to reason thus because you can trust the woman you love. I would like to see what you would do in my place…”
“What I would do?… I would distract myself… go to my factory. Do you want to come along tomorrow?”
“No, you and I will never be of the same mind,” Alexander declared sadly. “Your view of life does not comfort but repels me. I am sad, cold chills my soul. Until now love saved me from this cold; now it’s gone, and now there’s sorrow in my heart. I’m frightened, bored…”
“Get busy with something.”
“All that’s true, Uncle. You and your likes can think thus. You’re by nature cold… with a soul incapable of agitation…”
“And you imagine that you’re endowed with a powerful soul? Yesterday you were in seventh heaven for joy and just a bit later… and you can’t endure your grief.”
Alexander spoke weakly, hardly defending himself: “Steam, steam! Just like a locomotive gliding over the rails, you think, feel, and talk evenly, smoothly, calmly.”
“I hope that isn’t bad, better than jumping the track, bouncing down the embankment like you are now, and not being able to get up again. Steam! Steam! Yes, steam indeed, and you see, this is to a man’s credit. This metaphor embodies the essence of what makes you and me human, while even an animal can die of grief. There have been cases where dogs have died on their masters’ grave, or suffocated from joy after a long separation. What’s the achievement in that? But you thought you were a special creature of a higher order, an extraordinary man…”
Pyotr Ivanych glanced at his nephew and suddenly stopped.
“What’s this? You’re not crying, are you?” he asked, and his face darkened, that is, he blushed.
Alexander said nothing. The last argument had quite overwhelmed him. There was nothing to retort, yet he remained under the influence of his feelings, feelings of the moment. He remembered his lost happiness, that now another… And tears streamed down his cheeks.
“Uncle! Remember the years of your youth,” said Alexander, sobbing. “Could you really have endured with calm and indifference the most bitter insult fate ever delivers to a human being? To live such a full life for a year and a half and then suddenly there’s nothing! Emptiness… After such sincerity this hypocrisy, concealment, and coldness–toward me! God! Is there a stronger torture? It’s easy to say, of someone else, ‘he was betrayed,’ but to suffer it?… How she changed! How she began to dress up for the Count! It got so, I’d come and she would turn pale, could hardly speak… lies… Oh, no…”
The tears gushed harder.
“If I had the consolation,” he went on, “that I had lost her by force of circumstances, if she had been compelled against her will, say even that she died– then it would be easier to endure… but this way, no, no… Another man! That’s terrible, unendurable! And there’s no way to snatch her away from her abductor. You’ve disarmed me… What am I to do? Teach me! I can’t breathe, I feel sick… Grief, torment! I shall die… shoot myself…”
He leaned his elbows on the desk, covered his head with his hands and began to sob loudly…
Pyotr Ivanych was at a loss. He walked back and forth a couple of times, then stopped opposite Alexander and scratched his head, not knowing what to do.
“Have some wine,” said Pyotr Ivanych as gently as he could, “perhaps that…”
Alexander did not respond, but his head and shoulders jerked convulsively; he went on sobbing. Pyotr Ivanych frowned, gestured with his hand and left the room.
“What am I to do with Alexander?” he said to his wife. “He’s sobbing his heart out so in my study that I’ve had to leave. I’ve quite worn myself out with him.”
“And you’ve left him thus?” she asked. “Poor fellow! Let me try, I’ll go to him.”
“You won’t get anywhere either; it’s simply his nature. He quite takes after his aunt; she’s just such a crybaby. I’ve already been reasoning with him for some time.”
“You reasoned?”
“And I convinced him; he agreed with me.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it. You’re very reasonable and… cunning!” she added.
“Thank Heaven, if that’s so. Well, it seems I’ve done all that can be done.”
“It seems you have, but he’s still crying.”
“I’m not to blame; I’ve done everything to comfort him.”
“What did you do?”
“Too little, you think? I talked to him a whole hour… My throat has even gone dry… I exposed the whole theory of love as if spread out on my palm, and I offered him money… and supper… even did my best with the wine…”
“And he’s still crying?…”
“He’s absolutely howling! Ever worse at the end.”
“Amazing! Let me try. I’ll see what I can do, and you meanwhile think over your new method…”
“What, what do you mean?”
But like a ghost, she had slipped out of the room.
Alexander was still sitting, resting his head on his hands. Someone touched him on the shoulders. He raised his head: a young, beautiful woman stood before him in her dressing gown and a boudoir cap in the Finnish style.
“Dear Aunt,” he said.
She sat down beside him, looked at him fixedly as only women can sometimes look, then quietly dried his eyes with a handkerchief and kissed him on the forehead; then he pressed his lips to her hand. They talked for a long while.
An hour later he left, thoughtful but with a smile, and fell calmly asleep for the first time after many sleepless nights. She returned to her bedroom with tearstained eyes. Pyotr Ivanych had been snoring for a very long time.
PART TWO
I
A year had passed since the scenes and events described in the last chapter of Part One.
Little by little Alexander’s mood turned from gloomy despair to cold dejection. He had stopped thundering curses at the Count and Nadenka and grinding his teeth thereafter, but he displayed deep contempt towards them.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna, his aunt, comforted him with all the tenderness of a friend and sister. He gladly yielded to her kind concern. All such natures as his love to hand over responsibility to another. They need a nanny.
At last passion subsided in him; his true sadness passed, though he was sorry to part with it; he forced it to continue, created an artificial melancholy, played and showed off with it, and drowned in it.
Somehow he liked playing the role of a martyr. He was quiet, important, gloomy like a man who, in his words, has sustained a blow of fate. He spoke of noble sufferings, of sacred, elevated feelings, trampled upon and ground under foot in the mud–“and by whom?” he would add, “by a minx and coquette and a contemptible rake and tawdry dandy. Did fate really send me into the world in order that everything noble in me be sacrificed on the altar of insignificance?”
No man would have forgiven a fellowman this pose, nor a woman another woman, they would have pulled the other person from his pedestal right away. But what don’t young people of different sexes forgive each other?
Lizaveta Alexandrovna listened to his Jeremiads sympathetically and comforted as best she could. This in no way went against the grain with her, perhaps because she found in her nephew, after all, sympathy with her own emotions; she heard in his accusations against love a suffering not foreign to her own.
She eagerly lent an ear to the groans of his heart and responded to them with imperceptible sighs and tears which no one noticed. Even for her nephew’s simulated and high-flown outpourings of grief she found comforting words in a like tone and spirit, but Alexander wouldn’t even listen.
“Oh, don’t talk to me, dear Aunt,” he objected, “I don’t want to shame the sacred name of love by so calling my relationship with that…”
Here he made a contemptuous face and was ready, like Pyotr Ivanych, to ask, what’s her name?
; “She’s excusable, however,” he would add with still greater contempt. I was too far above her and the Count and all that pitiful and trivial ambiance; no wonder I remained a puzzle to her.”
And after these words he would keep his look of contempt for a long time.
“Uncle insists I should be grateful to Nadenka,” he went on, “for what? What was notable about this love? It was completely base and commonplace. Was there anything about it that transcended the ordinary circle of everyday squabbles? Was there any bit of heroism and self-denial in this love? No, she almost always acted with the knowledge of her mother! Did she depart even once from the rules of society, of duty for my benefit?–never! And this was love!!! The girl was not even able to put poetry in this emotion!”
“What kind of love would you ask of a woman?” asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.
“What kind?” answered Alexander. “I would ask for the first place in her heart. The woman I love should not notice, should not see other men beside me; they should all seem unbearable to her. Only I am higher, handsomer”–here he straightened up–“better, nobler than all of them. Every moment she endures without me is a lost moment. She is to find bliss in my eyes and in my conversation, and to know no other…”
Lizaveta Alexandrovna tried to hide a smile. Alexander didn’t notice.
“For me,” he went on with flashing eyes,” she must sacrifice everything, all contemptible advantages and calculations, she must throw off the tyrannical yoke of her mother, her husband, run away, if necessary, to the end of the world, energetically bear all deprivations, finally disdain death itself–that is love! But this…”
“And how would you reward this love?” asked his aunt.
“I? Oh!” Alexander began, raising his eyes to Heaven, “I’d dedicate my whole life to her. I’d lie at her feet. To look into her eyes would be my greatest happiness. Her every word would be law to me. I would celebrate in song her beauty, our love, nature:
And in her arms my lips will strain
For Petrarch’s and for love’s refrain… 6
But would you say I didn’t show Nadenka how I can love?”
“So you altogether doubt a feeling which isn’t displayed as you’d like? Powerful feeling is concealed…”
“Aren’t you trying to assure me, dear Aunt, that such a feeling as Uncle’s, for example, is concealed?”
Lizaveta Alexandrovna suddenly blushed. Inwardly she couldn’t but agree with her nephew that a feeling without any outward show is somehow suspicious, that perhaps it isn’t even there, that, if it were, it would break out and be seen, that alongside love itself, its ambiance embodies an inexplicable charm. At this point she ran through in thought the whole period of her married life and remained deep in thought. The overweening comment of her nephew stirred up a secret in her heart which she kept deeply hidden and it brought her to the question, was she happy?
She had no right to complain. She had been provided with all the external conditions of that happiness which the common herd pursues, as if according to a schedule. Great plenty, even luxury in the present, security in the future–all this rid her of those trivial bitter worries which eat at the heart and drain the breast of most poor people.
Her husband had worked untiringly and continued to work. But what was the chief goal of his labors? Was he working for a general human cause, fulfilling a task assigned him by fate, or was he working only for trivial reasons, so as to gain rank and financial importance among his fellows, so that in the end he need not bend to the yoke of need or circumstance? Heaven knows. He didn’t like to talk about higher goals and called such talk delirium; instead he spoke dryly and simply of doing a job.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna only came to the sad conclusion that the unique goal of his zeal and striving was not she or a love for her. He had worked before his marriage when he did not yet know his wife. He never spoke to her of love or asked her about it; he turned aside her questions about it with a joke, a witticism or sleepiness. Soon after he met her, he began to speak of marriage as if giving notice that love went without saying and there was no need to talk much about it…
He was opposed to any kind of grand gesture–well and good. But he didn’t like even sincere manifestations of feeling and didn’t believe in other people’s need for such. Meanwhile, with a single glance, a single word he could have aroused in her a deep passion for him, but he said nothing, didn’t want it. It didn’t even flatter his vanity.
She tried to make him jealous, thinking then that his love would show itself without fail… Nothing came of it. He hardly noticed that she singled out some young man in society; he’d hurry to invite him to their house, be friendly to him, himself couldn’t say enough in his praise and wouldn’t fear leaving him alone with his wife.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna sometimes pretended to herself, dreaming that Pyotr Ivanych was perhaps acting strategically, as if this were his secret method so as to keep her love alive by keeping doubt constantly alive in her. But her husband’s first comment about love immediately disillusioned her.
If he had also been rude, rough, unfeeling, slow-witted, one of those husbands whose name is legion, whom it is so innocuous, so necessary, so delightful to deceive for their and one’s own happiness–husbands, it seems, created in order that a woman should look around her and love another diametrically opposite–then that would have been different. She would perhaps have acted differently, as a majority of women act in such a case. But Pyotr Ivanych was a man of reason and tact such as is seldom encountered. He was subtle, perceptive, adroit. He understood all the agitations of the heart, all storms of the emotions; he understood–and that was all. The whole book of affairs of the heart was in his head, and not in his heart. In his judgments about such it was obvious that he said things he had heard, things that were accepted but that he had by no means experienced. He made fair judgments about the passions but did not acknowledge their power over him, even laughed at them, considering them mistakes, ugly transgressions against reality, something like sicknesses for which in time the proper medicine would turn up.
Lizaveta Alexandrovna felt his intellectual superiority over everything around him and was tormented by it. “If he weren’t so intelligent, I would be spared…,” she thought. He revered positive goals–that was clear, and he requested his wife not to lead a dreamer’s life.
“But, Heavens!” thought Lizaveta Alexandrovna, “could he have married only to have a hostess, to give his bachelor apartment the fullness and dignity of a family home, to have more prestige in society? A hostess, a wife–in the most prosaic sense of these words! With all his intellect could he possibly not comprehend that love is inevitably one of a woman’s positive goals…? Family obligations–these are her duties, but can she possibly fulfill them without love? Nannies, wet nurses and the like idolize the child they care for; how much more so a wife and mother! Oh, let me pay for my feeling with torments, let me endure all the sufferings which passion requires, if only I live a full life, feel my existence and don’t wither away!…”
She looked at the luxurious furniture and all the baubles and expensive trifles in her dressing room–all the comforts with which the beloved is provided by the caring hand of a loving man in other homes seemed to her a cold mockery of true happiness. She bore witness to two terrible extremes–in her nephew and her husband. The one was exalted to the point of folly, the other icy to the point of cruelty.
“How little they both–yes, and the majority of men–understand genuine feeling! And how I understand it!” she thought. “But what use is that? What for? Oh, if only…”
She closed her eyes and remained that way for several minutes, then she opened them, looked about her, gave a deep sigh and immediately put on her ordinary calm look. Poor thing! Nobody knew about this, no one saw it. They would have regarded these unseen, intangible, nameless sufferings as a crime without wounds or blood, and covered not with rags but velvet. But with heroic self-denial she kept her sadness secret; moreover, she
found sufficient strength to comfort others.
Soon Alexander stopped talking of noble sufferings and misunderstood and unappreciated love. He moved on to a more general theme. He complained of the boredom of life, the emptiness of his soul and wearisome melancholy.
“I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;” 7
“And now a black demon pursues me. Oh, dear Aunt, he’s with me everywhere: at night and when I chat with friends or have a drink with them and during moments of deep thought!”
Several weeks passed this way. It seems another two weeks and this strange fellow might perhaps have calmed down and become quite a regular person, simple and ordinary like others. But no! The particularity of his strange nature found occasion to show itself everywhere.
One day he came to his aunt in a fit of resentful anger directed at the whole race of man. His every word was a jibe, every opinion an epigram aimed at those one ought to respect. No one was spared. Even Pyotr Ivanych and she were targets. Lizaveta Alexandrovna began to seek the causes.
“You want to know,” he began quietly and solemnly, “what disturbs, enrages me. Listen, you remember I had a friend whom I did not see for several years, but for whom I always reserved a corner in my heart. When I first came here, Uncle made me write a strange letter to him which contained Uncle’s favorite rules and way of thinking, but I tore that one up and sent another; therefore, my friend had no reason to change. After this letter our correspondence ceased, and I lost touch with my friend. What happened? Three days ago walking along the Nevsky Prospect, I suddenly saw him and could not say a word for joy; my breath failed me. He took one hand and squeezed it. ‘Hello, Aduyev!’ he said in a tone as if he’d parted from me only the night before. ‘Have you been here long?’ He expressed surprise we hadn’t met till now, casually asked what I was doing, where I worked, felt himself obliged to inform me he had a wonderful job, liked his work, his bosses and comrades and everyone, and his luck… then said he had no time, that he was hurrying to a dinner invitation–do you hear, dear Aunt? On meeting a friend after a long separation, he couldn’t postpone dinner…”
An Ordinary Story Page 19
