The Beauties: Essential Stories Page 7

  “Your books have given me wisdom. All that the tireless human mind has created over the centuries is compressed in a small volume within my skull. I know that I am wiser than you all.

  “And I despise your books, I despise all the good things and all the wisdom of the world. All is worthless, fleeting, illusory, deceptive as a mirage. You may all be proud, wise and beautiful, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth like the mice below your floors, and your posterity, your history, the immortal memory of your geniuses, will freeze or burn along with the earthly globe.

  “You have lost your reason and are following the wrong path. You take lies for truth and ugliness for beauty. You would be astonished if circumstances caused frogs and lizards to grow on apple trees and orange trees, instead of their proper fruits; or if roses gave off the smell of a sweating horse; and so too I am astonished at you, who have exchanged heaven for earth. I do not wish to understand you.

  “To prove to you in practice how I despise all you live for, I renounce the two millions that I once dreamed of as a paradise, and which I now scorn. In order to deprive myself of any right to them, I shall walk out of here five hours before the agreed term, and thereby break the compact…”

  After reading this, the banker laid the paper on the table, kissed the strange man on the head, and wept; then he left the building. Never before, not even after heavy losses on the stock exchange, had he felt such contempt for himself as now. When he returned to his house, he lay down on his bed, but his agitation and tears kept him from sleep for a long time…

  Next morning the white-faced watchmen ran in to tell him that they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of his window into the garden, walk to the gates, and disappear. The banker immediately went over to the lodge with his servants and made sure that the prisoner had fled. To avoid unnecessary talk, he picked up the letter of renunciation from the table, returned home and locked it away in his fireproof safe.

  A MISFORTUNE

  SOFIA PETROVNA, Lubyantsev the notary’s wife, a good-looking young woman of twenty-five, was walking slowly along a forest track with Ilyin, a lawyer staying at a nearby lodge. It was a little after four in the afternoon. Fluffy white clouds had gathered above the track, with a few patches of bright blue sky peeping between them. The clouds hung motionless, as if caught on the tops of the tall old pines. The air was still and heavy.

  In the distance the forest cutting was crossed by a low railway embankment where, just then, a sentry with a gun was pacing up and down for some reason. Just beyond the embankment a large white church could be seen, with six domes and a rusty roof.

  “I wasn’t expecting to meet you here,” said Sofia Petrovna, looking down at the ground and prodding last year’s leaves with the tip of her umbrella. “But now I’m glad we’ve met. I need to have a serious talk to you, once and for all. Please, Ivan Mikhailovich, if you really love and respect me, then stop following me! You stick to me like a shadow, you’re always looking at me in a way that you shouldn’t, you declare you’re in love with me, you write me peculiar letters and… and I’ve no idea how all this is going to end! I mean, good God, what’s it all leading to?”

  Ilyin said nothing. Sofia Petrovna walked on a few steps, and continued:

  “You’ve suddenly changed, over two or three weeks, after we’ve known each other for five years. I don’t recognize you, Ivan Mikhailovich!”

  Sofia Petrovna stole a sideways glance at her companion. He had screwed up his eyes and was looking hard at the fluffy clouds. His face was angry, sulky and preoccupied, like a man in anguish who is being forced to listen to nonsense.

  “I’m surprised you can’t understand that yourself!” went on Lubyantseva, shrugging her shoulders. “You must see this game you’ve started playing with me isn’t a pretty one. I’m married, I love and respect my husband… I have a daughter… Don’t you care about any of that? Besides which – you’re a very old friend, you know my feelings about family life… what holds a marriage together…”

  Ilyin grunted crossly and sighed.

  “Holds a marriage together…” he muttered. “O God!”

  “Yes, yes… I love my husband, I respect him, and in any event I value our peaceful family life. I’d sooner let myself be killed than bring misery on Andrey and his daughter… So I beg you, Ivan Mikhailovich, in God’s name, leave me in peace. Let’s be good and kind friends again as we used to be, and please leave off all this sighing and lamenting – it doesn’t suit you. There now, that’s that! Not another word. Let’s talk about something different.”

  Sofia Petrovna gave Ilyin another sidelong look. He was staring upwards, his face was pale, and he was angrily biting his trembling lips. Lubyantseva couldn’t understand why he was cross or what was making him so indignant, but she was troubled by his pallor.

  “Come on, don’t be cross. Let’s be friends…” she said gently. “All right? Here’s my hand.”

  Ilyin took her plump little hand in both of his, squeezed it and slowly raised it to his lips.

  “I’m not a schoolboy,” he muttered. “I’m not in the least interested in being friends with the woman I love.”

  “Stop it, stop it! That’s decided and settled! Now we’ve got to this bench, let’s sit down…”

  A delicious sense of relief filled Sofia Petrovna’s heart. The most difficult and delicate part of what she needed to say had been said. The agonizing problem was dealt with and settled. Now at last she could take a deep breath in peace, and look Ilyin in the face. She looked at him, and was pleasantly flattered by the selfish feeling of superiority a beloved woman has over the man who loves her. She enjoyed seeing this huge, powerful man, with his angry, manly face and big black beard – intelligent, cultured, and, people said, talented – sit down obediently beside her and bow his head. They sat in silence for two or three minutes.

  “Nothing’s decided, and nothing’s finished with…” began Ilyin. “You sound as if you’re reciting words out of a schoolbook – ‘I love and respect my husband… what holds a marriage together…’ I know all that without you telling me, and I could go further. I tell you, honestly and truly, that I regard my behaviour as immoral and criminal. But where does that get us? What’s the point of saying what everybody already knows? Instead of feeding a nightingale with useless words, you’d better tell me what I’m to do.”

  “I’ve already told you: you have to leave!”

  “I’ve already left five times over, as you know perfectly well – and every time I turned back halfway! I can show you my express railway tickets; I’ve kept them all. I haven’t got the will to run away from you. I fight against it, I fight like mad, but what the devil am I good for, if I don’t have the backbone, if I’m a coward and a weakling! I can’t fight against nature! Do you understand? I can’t! I run away, and nature pulls me back by my coat-tails. It’s a shameful, loathsome weakness!”

  Ilyin flushed, stood up and started pacing back and forth near the bench.

  “I’m as furious as a dog!” he growled, clenching both fists. “I hate myself, I despise myself! My God, I’m like a perverted schoolboy, trailing around after another man’s wife, writing idiotic letters, humiliating myself… Ugh!”

  Ilyin clutched his head, grunted and sat down again.

  “And then, you’re so insincere!” he went on bitterly. “If you don’t like the ugly game I’m playing, why did you come here today? What made you come? All I’ve asked you for in my letters is a straight, final answer – yes or no. But instead of giving me a straight answer, you just contrive to meet me ‘accidentally’ day after day, and then treat me to quotations out of school textbooks!”

  Lubyantseva was startled, and blushed. She suddenly felt the same awkwardness that a respectable woman feels when someone catches her undressed.

  “You seem to suspect me of playing a game…” she said uncertainly. “I’ve always given you straight answers, and… and today I was begging you!”

  “Oh, what�
�s the good of begging in a situation like this? If you’d told me straight off, ‘Go away!’, I’d have been gone long ago; but you never said that. Not a single time have you given me a straight answer. Strangely indecisive of you! Honest to God, either you’re playing a game with me, or else…”

  Ilyin broke off, and rested his head on his clenched fists. Sofia Petrovna cast her mind back to her behaviour from the very first, until now. She remembered that she had resisted Ilyin’s courtship right from the start, not only in her deeds but even in her innermost thoughts; and yet at the same time she felt that there was some truth in what the lawyer said. She didn’t know exactly what that truth was, and try as she might, she couldn’t work out how to answer Ilyin’s accusations. Saying nothing was awkward, so she shrugged her shoulders and said:

  “So it’s my fault, then.”

  “I’m not blaming you for being insincere,” sighed Ilyin. “That just came out… Your insincerity is natural and inevitable. If everyone got together and agreed to talk sincerely all at once, everything would simply fall apart.”

  Sofia Petrovna was in no mood for philosophy, but glad of a chance to change the subject.

  “Why is that?” she asked.

  “Because the only creatures that are sincere are savages and animals. With the advent of civilization, we have come to need certain comforts in our lives, including virtue in women; and that makes sincerity impossible.”

  Ilyin angrily poked his stick into the sand. Lubyantseva listened to him without understanding much of what he said, but she liked his conversation. What she liked most of all was the fact that she, an ordinary woman, had a talented man talking to her about “clever subjects”. What was more, she was getting great pleasure from watching the movements of his pale, lively and still angry young face. There was a lot that she didn’t understand, but she could clearly see the attraction of this modern man so boldly settling important questions and drawing definitive conclusions, with no doubts or hesitation.

  She suddenly realized that she was looking admiringly at him, and took fright.

  “Excuse me, but I don’t understand,” she said hurriedly. “Why did you start talking about insincerity? Let me ask you again, please – will you be a dear, kind friend and leave me in peace? I’m asking you in all sincerity!”

  “All right. I’ll go on fighting with myself!” sighed Ilyin. “My pleasure, I’ll do my best… Only I doubt if all that fighting will do any good. I’ll either put a bullet in my brain, or… I’ll be really stupid and take to drink. There’s no hope for me! Everything has its limits, and fighting against nature does too. Tell me, how can one fight against madness? If you drink wine, how can you beat your intoxication? What can I do, if the image of you has grown into my very soul, so that it stands just as inexorably before my eyes as this pine tree here? Please, teach me – what exploit do I have to perform, to free myself from my abject, miserable condition, when all my thoughts, all my desires and dreams, belong not to me, but to some kind of demon that’s settled inside me? I love you, I love you so much that I’ve lost my way, given up my work and my friends, and forgotten my God! Never in my life have I loved like this!”

  Sofia Petrovna, who hadn’t expected this sudden outburst, drew back bodily from Ilyin and looked fearfully into his face. There were tears in his eyes now, his lips were trembling, and his whole face was bathed in a hungry, imploring expression.

  “I love you!” he muttered, bringing his eyes closer to her large, frightened eyes. “You’re so lovely! I’m suffering now, but I swear to you, I could spend my whole life like this, sitting and suffering and looking into your eyes. Only… don’t speak, I implore you!”

  Sofia Petrovna seemed to be taken by surprise; she was hurriedly trying to think of some words to stop Ilyin. “I’ll go away!” she decided, but before she could make any move to stand up, Ilyin was already kneeling at her feet… He was hugging her knees, gazing up at her face, and talking earnestly, passionately, beautifully. In her terror and confusion she did not hear what he was saying. Now, for some reason, at this dangerous moment, when her knees were being pleasantly held as though in a warm bath, she experienced a kind of wicked pleasure as she searched for some meaning in what she felt. She was angry at finding herself filled through and through not with virtuous protestations, but with helplessness, laziness and emptiness, like a drunken man who’s beyond caring. Only in the very depths of her soul was there a faraway part of her that malignantly taunted her: “Why don’t you walk away? This is how it has to be, then? Is that it?”

  Searching for some sense in it all, she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t pulled away her hand, to which Ilyin had attached himself like a leech; or why she had hurriedly looked to the right and left, at the same moment as Ilyin, to see if anybody was watching. The pines and the clouds stood motionless, looking sternly down at them like old school ushers watching the pupils misbehaving, but bribed not to tell the authorities. The sentry stood on his embankment, stiff as a post, and seemed to be looking at the bench.

  “Let him look!” thought Sofia Petrovna.

  “But… but listen!” she finally brought out in desperation. “Where’s all this going to lead? What’s going to happen next?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know…” he whispered, waving aside her awkward questions.

  There came the wheezy, tremulous whistle of a locomotive. That cold, irrelevant sound from the prosaic everyday world gave Lubyantseva a start.

  “I have to hurry… I must go!” she said, and hastily stood up. “The train’s coming… Andrey will be here! He has to have his dinner.”

  Sofia Petrovna turned her burning face towards the embankment. First the locomotive crawled slowly past, and then the wagons. It was not the local passenger train, as Lubyantseva had thought, but a goods train. A long procession of wagons, following one after another like the days of a man’s life, rolled past against the white background of the church; and there seemed to be no end to them!

  But finally the train had passed, and the last wagon with its lights and its guard vanished in the greenery. Sofia Petrovna abruptly turned away, and without looking at Ilyin, walked quickly off down the forest cutting. She was in control of herself again. Red-faced with shame, offended not by Ilyin, no, but by her own cowardice, and by the shameless way that she, a chaste and virtuous woman, had allowed a man who was not her husband to embrace her knees. She had only one thought now – how to get back to her home and family as quickly as possible. The lawyer could scarcely keep up with her. When she turned off the forest cutting onto a narrow path, she glanced back at him so quickly that all she saw was the sand on his knees. She gestured at him to drop back.

  She ran the rest of the way home and then stood motionless in her room for five minutes, gazing now at the window, now at her writing table…

  “You vicious creature!” she upbraided herself. “You vicious creature!”

  She tormented herself by recalling, in every detail, how for all these days she had objected to Ilyin’s lovemaking, and yet had been drawn to seek out a heart-to-heart talk with him. Worse still, when he was on the ground at her feet, she had enjoyed it enormously. She remembered it all, spared herself nothing, and now, breathless with shame, she would have been glad to slap herself in the face.

  “Poor Andrey,” she thought, and in recalling her husband she tried to give his face as tender an expression as she could. “Varya, my poor little girl, doesn’t know what sort of a mother she has! Forgive me, my darlings! I love you both… very, very much!”

  Wishing to prove to herself that she was still a good wife and mother, and that the corruption hadn’t yet extended to the things that “hold a marriage together”, as she had put it to Ilyin, Sofia Petrovna ran into the kitchen and shouted at the cook for not having yet laid the table for Andrey Ilyich. She tried to imagine her husband’s exhausted, famished look, said aloud how sorry she felt for him, and personally laid the table for him, which she had never done before. Then she fou
nd her daughter Varya, lifted her up and gave her a big hug. The girl seemed heavy and indifferent, but her mother tried not to admit that to herself, and began explaining to the child what a good, kind and honourable papa she had.

  On the other hand, when Andrey Ilyich arrived home, she barely greeted him. Her rush of contrived emotions had already passed, without changing her mind in any way, but merely irritating and annoying her with its falsehood. She was sitting by the window, miserable and angry. Only when misfortune strikes do people realize how hard it is to be master of one’s own feelings and thoughts. Later on Sofia Petrovna would explain that she was in “the sort of muddle that was as hard to sort out as to count a flock of sparrows flying around”. For instance, the fact that she wasn’t pleased to see her husband arrive, and didn’t like the way he behaved at table, suddenly led her to conclude that she was beginning to hate him.

  Andrey Ilyich, weary from hunger and fatigue, flung himself on a plate of cold sausage while waiting for his soup to be served, and ate it greedily, munching noisily and moving his temples.

  “My God,” thought Sofia Petrovna, “I love him and respect him, but… why does he have to chew so disgustingly?”