The darling / Душечка. Сборник рассказов. Антон Чехов

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СКАЧАТЬ too were with child, and they too seemed disgusting and pitiable. I was in the position of a greedy, passionate miser who should suddenly discover that all his gold coins were false. The pure, gracious images which my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman – all now were jeering and putting out their tongues at me. “Ariadne,” I kept asking with horror, “that young, intellectual, extraordinarily beautiful girl, the daughter of a senator, carrying on an intrigue with such an ordinary, uninteresting vulgarian? But why should she not love Lubkov?” I answered myself. “In what is he inferior to me? Oh, let her love any one she likes, but why lie to me! But why is she bound to be open with me?” And so I went on over and over again till I sank into torpor.

      It was cold in the train; I was travelling first class, but even so there were three on a side, there were no double windows, the outer door opened straight into the compartment, and I felt as though I were in the stocks, cramped, abandoned, pitiful, and my legs were fearfully numb, and at the same time I kept recalling how fascinating she had been that morning in her dressing-jacket and with her hair down, and I was suddenly overcome by such acute jealousy that I leapt up in anguish, so that my neighbours stared at me in wonder and positive alarm.

      At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I’m fond of winter; I’m fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest frosts, it’s particularly snug at home. It’s pleasant to put on one’s fur jacket and felt overboots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden or in the yard, or to read in a well-warmed room, to sit in my father’s study before the open fire, to wash in my country bath-house … Only if there is no mother in the house, no sister and no children, it is somehow dreary on winter evenings, and they seem extraordinarily long and quiet. And the warmer and snugger it is, the more acutely is this lack felt. In the winter when I came back from abroad, the evenings were endlessly long, I was intensely depressed, so depressed that I could not even read; in the daytime I was coming and going, clearing away the snow in the garden or feeding the chickens and the calves, but in the evening I was all alone.

      I had never cared for visitors before, but now I was glad of them, for I knew there was sure to be talk of Ariadne. Kotlovitch, the spiritualist, often used to come to talk about his sister, and sometimes he brought with him his friend Prince Maktuev, who was as much in love with Ariadne as I was. To sit in Ariadne’s room, to finger the keys of her piano, to look at her music was a necessity for the prince – he could not live without it; and the spirit of his grandfather Ilarion was still predicting that sooner or later she would be his wife. The prince usually stayed a long time with us, from lunch till midnight, saying nothing all the time; in silence he would drink two or three bottles of beer, and from time to time, to show that he too was taking part in the conversation, he would laugh an abrupt, melancholy, foolish laugh. Before going home he would always take me aside and ask me in an undertone: “When did you see Ariadne Grigoryevna last? Was she quite well? I suppose she’s not tired of being out there?”

      Spring came on. There was the harrowing to do and then the sowing of spring corn and clover. I was sad, but there was the feeling of spring. One longed to accept the inevitable. Working in the fields and listening to the larks, I asked myself: “Couldn’t I have done with this question of personal happiness once and for all? Couldn’t I lay aside my fancy and marry a simple peasant girl?”

      Suddenly when we were at our very busiest, I got a letter with the Italian stamp, and the clover and the beehives and the calves and the peasant girl all floated away like smoke. This time Ariadne wrote that she was profoundly, infinitely unhappy. She reproached me for not holding out a helping hand to her, for looking down upon her from the heights of my virtue and deserting her at the moment of danger. All this was written in a large, nervous handwriting with blots and smudges, and it was evident that she wrote in haste and distress. In conclusion she besought me to come and save her. Again my anchor was hauled up and I was carried away. Ariadne was in Rome. I arrived late in the evening, and when she saw me, she sobbed and threw herself on my neck. She had not changed at all that winter, and was just as young and charming. We had supper together and afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all the time she kept telling me about her life. I asked where Lubkov was.

      “Don’t remind me of that creature!” she cried. “He is loathsome and disgusting to me!”

      “But I thought you loved him,” I said.

      “Never,” she said. “At first he struck me as original and aroused my pity, that was all. He is insolent and takes a woman by storm. And that’s attractive. But we won’t talk about him. That is a melancholy page in my life. He has gone to Russia to get money. Serves him right! I told him not to dare to come back.”

      She was living then not at an hotel, but in a private lodging of two rooms which she had decorated in her own taste, frigidly and luxuriously.

      After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances about five thousand francs, and my arrival certainly was the one salvation for her.

      I had reckoned on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed in that. She was homesick for her native place, but her recollections of the poverty she had been through there, of privations, of the rusty roof on her brother’s house, roused a shudder of disgust, and when I suggested to her going home, she squeezed my hands convulsively and said:

      “No, no, I shall die of boredom there!”

      Then my love entered upon its final phase.

      “Be the darling that you used to be; love me a little,” said Ariadne, bending over to me. “You’re sulky and prudent, you’re afraid to yield to impulse, and keep thinking of consequences, and that’s dull. Come, I beg you, I beseech you, be nice to me! … My pure one, my holy one, my dear one, I love you so!”

      I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious of nothing but rapture. To hold in one’s arms a young and lovely body, with bliss to feel her warmth every time one woke up from sleep, and to remember that she was there – she, my Ariadne! – oh, it was not easy to get used to that! But yet I did get used to it, and by degrees became capable of reflecting on my new position. First of all, I realised as before that Ariadne did not love me. But she wanted to be really in love, she was afraid of solitude, and above all I was healthy, young, vigorous; she was sensual, like all cold people, as a rule – and we both made a show of being united by a passionate, mutual love. Afterwards I realised something else, too.

      We stayed in Rome, in Naples, in Florence; we went to Paris, but there we thought it cold and went back to Italy. We introduced ourselves everywhere as husband and wife, wealthy landowners. People readily made our acquaintance and Ariadne had great social success everywhere. As she took lessons in painting, she was called an artist, and you know, that quite suited her, though she had not the slightest trace of talent.

      She would sleep every day till two or three o’clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up something, for instance roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she woke at night she would eat apples and oranges.

      The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute, apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an impulse such as makes a sparrow chirrup and a cockroach waggle its antennae. She was deceitful with me, with the footman, with the porter, with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances; not one conversation, not one meeting, took place without affectation and pretence. A man had only to come into our room – whoever it might be, a waiter or a baron – for her eyes, her expression, her voice to change, even the contour of her figure was transformed. At the very first glance at her then, you would have said there were no more wealthy and fashionable people in Italy than we are. She СКАЧАТЬ