The darling / Душечка. Сборник рассказов. Антон Чехов

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “What a queer fellow you are!” she said with annoyance, and walked away.

      Another year or two might have passed, and in all probability I should have married her, and so my story would have ended, but fate was pleased to arrange our romance differently. It happened that a new personage appeared on our horizon. Ariadne’s brother had a visit from an old university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a charming man of whom coachmen and footmen used to say: “An entertaining gentleman.” He was a man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a good-natured bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and presentable, with a stiff, well-kept moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam’s apple. He used to wear pince-nez10 on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not pronounce either r or l. He was always in good spirits, everything amused him.

      He had made an exceedingly foolish marriage at twenty, and had acquired two houses in Moscow as part of his wife’s dowry. He began doing them up and building a bath-house, and was completely ruined. Now his wife and four children lodged in Oriental Buildings in great poverty, and he had to support them – and this amused him. He was thirty-six and his wife was by now forty-two, and that, too, amused him. His mother, a conceited, sulky personage, with aristocratic pretensions, despised his wife and lived apart with a perfect menagerie of cats and dogs, and he had to allow her seventy-five roubles a month also; he was, too, a man of taste, liked lunching at the Slavyansky Bazaar11 and dining at the Hermitage12; he needed a great deal of money, but his uncle only allowed him two thousand roubles a year, which was not enough, and for days together he would run about Moscow with his tongue out, as the saying is, looking for some one to borrow from – and this, too, amused him. He had come to Kotlovitch to find in the lap of nature, as he said, a rest from family life. At dinner, at supper, and on our walks, he talked about his wife, about his mother, about his creditors, about the bailiffs, and laughed at them; he laughed at himself and assured us that, thanks to his talent for borrowing, he had made a great number of agreeable acquaintances. He laughed without ceasing and we laughed too. Moreover, in his company we spent our time differently. I was more inclined to quiet, so to say idyllic pleasures; I liked fishing, evening walks, gathering mushrooms; Lubkov preferred picnics, fireworks, hunting. He used to get up picnics three times a week, and Ariadne, with an earnest and inspired face, used to write a list of oysters, champagne, sweets, and used to send me to Moscow to get them, without inquiring, of course, whether I had money. And at the picnics there were toasts and laughter, and again mirthful descriptions of how old his wife was, what fat lap-dogs his mother had, and what charming people his creditors were.

      Lubkov was fond of nature, but he regarded it as something long familiar and at the same time, in reality, infinitely beneath himself and created for his pleasure. He would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: “It would be nice to have tea here.”

      One day, seeing Ariadne walking in the distance with a parasol, he nodded towards her and said:

      “She’s thin, and that’s what I like; I don’t like fat women.”

      This made me wince. I asked him not to speak like that about women before me. He looked at me in surprise and said:

      “What is there amiss in my liking thin women and not caring for fat ones?”

      I made no answer. Afterwards, being in very good spirits and a trifle elevated, he said:

      “I’ve noticed Ariadne Grigoryevna likes you. I can’t understand why you don’t go in and win.”

      His words made me feel uncomfortable, and with some embarrassment I told him how I see love and women.

      “I don’t know,” he sighed; “to my thinking, a woman’s a woman and a man’s a man. Ariadne Grigoryevna may be poetical and exalted, as you say, but it doesn’t follow that she must be superior to the laws of nature. You see for yourself that she has reached the age when she must have a husband or a lover. I respect women as much as you do, but I don’t think certain relations exclude poetry. Poetry’s one thing and love is another. It’s just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite another.”

      When Ariadne and I were fishing, Lubkov would lie on the sand close by and make fun of me, or lecture me on the conduct of life.

      “I wonder, my dear sir, how you can live without a love affair,” he would say. “You are young, handsome, interesting – in fact, you’re a man not to be sniffed at, yet you live like a monk. Och! I can’t stand these fellows who are old at twenty-eight! I’m nearly ten years older than you are, and yet which of us is the younger? Ariadne Grigoryevna, which one?”

      “You, of course,” Ariadne answered him.

      And when he was bored with our silence and the attention with which we stared at our floats he went home, and she said, looking at me angrily:

      “You’re really not a man, but a mush, God forgive me! A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to go wild, to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!”

      She was angry in earnest, and went on:

      “To succeed, a man must be resolute and bold. Lubkov is not so handsome as you are, but he is more interesting. He will always succeed with women because he’s not like you; he’s a man …”

      And there was actually a note of exasperation in her voice.

      One day at supper she began saying, not addressing me, that if she were a man she would not stagnate in the country, but would travel, would spend the winter somewhere abroad – in Italy, for instance. Oh, Italy! At this point my father unconsciously poured oil on the flames; he began telling us at length about Italy, how splendid it was there, the exquisite scenery, the museums. Ariadne suddenly conceived a burning desire to go to Italy. She positively brought her fist down on the table and her eyes flashed as she said: “I must go!”

      After that conversations about Italy came every day: how splendid it would be in Italy – ah, Italy! – oh, Italy! And when Ariadne looked at me over her shoulder, from her cold and obstinate expression I saw that in her dreams she had already conquered Italy with all its salons, celebrated foreigners and tourists, and there was no holding her back now. I advised her to wait a little, to put off her tour for a year or two, but she frowned disdainfully and said:

      “You’re as prudent as an old woman!”

      Lubkov was in favour of the tour. He said it could be done very cheaply, and he, too, would go to Italy and have a rest there from family life.

      I behaved, I confess, as naїvely as a schoolboy.

      Not from jealousy, but from a foreboding of something terrible and extraordinary, I tried as far as possible not to leave them alone together, and they made fun of me. For instance, when I went in they would pretend they had just been kissing one another, and so on. But lo and behold, one fine morning, her plump, white-skinned brother, the spiritualist, made his appearance and expressed his desire to speak to me alone.

      He was a man without will; in spite of his education and his delicacy he could never resist reading another person’s letter, if it lay before him on the table. And now he admitted that he had by chance read a letter of Lubkov’s to Ariadne.

      “From that letter I learned that she is very shortly going abroad. My СКАЧАТЬ