Stories (45 page)

Lyzhin awoke and sat up in bed. What a disturbing, unpleasant dream! And why were the agent and the beadle together in his dream? What nonsense! And now, when Lyzhin’s heart was pounding hard, and he sat in bed holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him this insurance agent and the beadle really had something in common in life. Had they not gone side by side in life, too, holding on to each other? Some invisible but significant and necessary connection existed between the two men, even between them and Taunitz, and between everyone, everyone; in this life, even in the most d
esolate backwater, nothing was accidental, everything was filled with one common thought, everything had one soul, one purpose, and to understand it, it was not enough to think, not enough to reason, one probably had to have the gift of penetrating into life, a gift which apparently was not given to everyone. And the unfortunate, overstrained “neurasthenic,” as the doctor called him, who had killed himsel
f, and the old peasant, who every day of his life had been going from one man to another, were accidents, scraps of life, for someone who considered his own existence accidental, but were parts of one wonderful and reasonable organism for someone who considered his own life, too, a part of this common thing and was aware of it. So thought Lyzhin, and this had long been his secret thought, and only now did it unfold broadly and clearly in his mind.

He lay down and began to fall asleep; and suddenly they were walking together and singing again:

“We walk, walk, walk … We take what’s hardest and bitterest from life, and leave you what’s easy and joyful, and you, sitting over
your supper, can reason coolly and soberly about why we suffer and perish, and why we’re not as healthy and contented as you.”

What they sang had occurred to him before, but this thought had somehow sat behind other thoughts in his head and flashed timidly, like a distant lantern in misty weather. And he felt that this suicide and the peasant’s grievances lay on his conscience, too; to be reconciled with the fact that these people, submissive to their lot, heaped on themselves what was heaviest and darkest in life—how terrible it was! To be reconciled with that, and to wish for oneself a bright, boisterous life among happy, contented people, and to dream constantly of such a life, meant to dream of new suicides by overwo
rked, careworn people, or by weak, neglected people, whom one sometimes talked about with vexation or mockery over dinner, but whom one did not go to help … And again:

“We walk, walk, walk …”

As if someone were beating on his temples with a hammer.

In the morning he woke up early, with a headache, roused by noise; in the neighboring room von Taunitz was saying loudly to the doctor:

“You can’t go now. Look what it’s doing outside. Don’t argue, just ask the driver: he won’t take you in such weather even for a million roubles.”

“But it’s only two miles,” the doctor said in a pleading voice.

“Even if it was half a mile. When you can’t, you can’t. The moment you go out the gate, it will be sheer hell, you’ll instantly lose your way. Say what you like, I won’t let you go for anything.”

“It’s sure to quiet down towards evening,” said the peasant who was lighting the stove.

And the doctor in the neighboring room started talking about the influence of the harshness of nature on the Russian character, about the long winters which, by restricting freedom of movement, hampered people’s mental growth, and Lyzhin listened vexedly to these arguments, looked out the windows at the snowdrifts heaped up by the fence, looked at the white dust that filled all visible space, at the trees bending desperately to the right, then to the left, listened to the howling and banging, and thought gloomily:

“Well, what sort of moral can be drawn here? It’s a blizzard, that’s all …”

At noon they had lunch, then wandered aimlessly about the house, going up to the windows.

“And Lesnitsky’s lying there,” thought Lyzhin, gazing at the whirls of snow spinning furiously over the drifts. “Lesnitsky’s lying there, the witnesses are waiting …”

They talked of the weather, saying that a blizzard usually lasts two days, rarely longer. At six o’clock they had dinner, then played cards, sang, danced, ended with supper. The day was over, they went to bed.

Between night and morning everything quieted down. When they got up and looked out the windows, the bare willows with their weakly hanging branches stood perfectly motionless, it was gray, still, as if nature were now ashamed of her rioting, of the insane nights and the free rein she had given to her passions. The horses, harnessed in a line, had been waiting by the porch since five o’clock in the morning. When it was fully light, the doctor and the coroner put on their coats and boots, and, after taking leave of their host, went out.

At the porch, beside the driver, stood their acquaintance, the biddle Ilya Loshadin, hatless, with an old leather bag over his shoulder, all covered with snow; and his face was red, wet with sweat. The servant who came out to help the guests into the sleigh and cover their legs gave him a stern look and said:

“What are you standing here for, you old devil? Away with you!”

“Your Honor, folks are worried…” Loshadin began, with a naïve smile all over his face, obviously pleased to see the ones he had been waiting for so long. “Folks are very worried, the kids are crying … We thought you’d gone back to town, Your Honor. For God’s sake, take pity on us, dear benefactors …”

The doctor and the coroner said nothing, got into the sleigh, and drove to Syrnya.

J
ANUARY
1899

T
he talk was that a new face had appeared on the embankment: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov, who had already spent two weeks in Yalta and was used to it, also began to take an interest in new faces. Sitting in a pavilion at Vernet’s, he saw a young woman, not very tall, blond, in a beret, walking along the embankment; behind her ran a white spitz.

And after that he met her several times a day in the town garden or in the square. She went strolling alone, in the same beret, with the white spitz; nobody knew who she was, and they called her simply “the lady with the little dog.”

“If she’s here with no husband or friends,” Gurov reflected, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make her acquaintance.”

He was not yet forty, but he had a twelve-year-old daughter and two sons in school. He had married young, while still a second-year student, and now his wife seemed half again his age. She was a tall woman with dark eyebrows, erect, imposing, dignified, and a thinking person, as she called herself. She read a great deal, used the new orthography, called her husband not Dmitri but Dimitri, but he secretly considered her none too bright, narrow-minded, graceless, was afraid of her, and disliked being at home. He had begun to be unfaithful to her long ago, was unfaithful often, and, probably
for that reason, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were discussed in his presence, he would say of them:

“An inferior race!”

It seemed to him that he had been taught enough by bitter experience to call them anything he liked, and yet he could not have lived without the “inferior race” even for two days. In the company of men he was bored, ill at ease, with them he was taciturn and cold, but when he was among women, he felt himself free and knew what to talk about with them and how to behave; and he was at ease even being silent with them. In his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature there was something attractive and elusive that disposed women towards him and enticed them; he knew tha
t, and he himself was attracted to them by some force.

Repeated experience, and bitter experience indeed, had long since taught him that every intimacy, which in the beginning lends life such pleasant diversity and presents itself as a nice and light adventure, inevitably, with decent people—especially irresolute Muscovites, who are slow starters—grows into a major task, extremely complicated, and the situation finally becomes burdensome. But at every new meeting with an interesting woman, this experience somehow slipped from his memory, and he wanted to live, and everything seemed quite simple and amusing.

And so one time, towards evening, he was having dinner in the garden, and the lady in the beret came over unhurriedly to take the table next to his. Her expression, her walk, her dress, her hair told him that she belonged to decent society, was married, in Yalta for the first time, and alone, and that she was bored here … In the stories about the impurity of local morals there was much untruth, he despised them and knew that these stories were mostly invented by people who would eagerly have sinned themselves had they known how; but when the lady sat down at the next table, three steps away from
him, he remembered those stories of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a quick, fleeting liaison, a romance with an unknown woman, of whose very name you are ignorant, suddenly took possession of him.

He gently called the spitz, and when the dog came over, he shook his finger at it. The spitz growled. Gurov shook his finger again.

The lady glanced at him and immediately lowered her eyes.

“He doesn’t bite,” she said and blushed.

“May I give him a bone?” and, when she nodded in the affirmative, he asked affably: “Have you been in Yalta long?”

“About five days.”

“And I’m already dragging through my second week here.”

They were silent for a while.

“The time passes quickly, and yet it’s so boring here!” she said without looking at him.

“It’s merely the accepted thing to say it’s boring here. The ordinary man lives somewhere in his Belevo or Zhizdra and isn’t bored, then he comes here: ‘Ah, how boring! Ah, how dusty!’ You’d think he came from Granada.”

She laughed. Then they went on eating in silence, like strangers; but after dinner they walked off together—and a light, bantering conversation began, of free, contented people, who do not care where they go or what they talk about. They strolled and talked of how strange the light was on the sea; the water was of a lilac color, so soft and warm, and over it the moon cast a golden strip. They talked of how sultry it was after the hot day. Gurov told her he was a Muscovite, a philologist by education, but worked in a bank; had once been preparing to sing in an opera company, but had dropped it, ow
ned two houses in Moscow … And from her he learned that she grew up in Petersburg, but was married in S., where she had now been living for two years, that she would be staying in Yalta for about a month, and that her husband might come to fetch her, because he also wanted to get some rest. She was quite una
ble to explain where her husband served—in the provincial administration or the zemstvo council—and she herself found that funny. And Gurov also learned that her name was Anna Sergeevna.

Afterwards, in his hotel room, he thought about her, that tomorrow she would probably meet him again. It had to be so. Going to bed, he recalled that still quite recently she had been a schoolgirl, had studied just as his daughter was studying now, recalled how much timorousness and angularity there was in her laughter, her conversation with a stranger—it must have been the first time in her life that she was alone in such a situation, when she was followed, looked at, and spoken to with only one secret purpose, which she could not fail to guess. He recalled her slender, weak nec
k, her beautiful gray eyes.

“There’s something pathetic in her all the same,” he thought and began to fall asleep.

A week had passed since they became acquainted. It was Sunday. Inside it was stuffy, but outside the dust flew in whirls, hats blew off. They felt thirsty all day, and Gurov often stopped at the pavilion, offering Anna Sergeevna now a soft drink, now ice cream. There was no escape.

In the evening when it relented a little, they went to the jetty to watch the steamer come in. There were many strollers on the pier; they had come to meet people, they were holding bouquets. And here two particularities of the smartly dressed Yalta crowd distinctly struck one’s eye: the elderly ladies were dressed like young ones, and there were many generals.

Owing to the roughness of the sea, the steamer arrived late, when the sun had already gone down, and it was a long time turning before it tied up. Anna Sergeevna looked at the ship and the passengers through her lorgnette, as if searching for acquainta
nces, and when she turned to Gurov, her eyes shone. She talked a lot, and her questions were abrupt, and she herself immediately forgot what she had asked; then she lost her lorgnette in the crowd.

The smartly dressed crowd was dispersing, the faces could no longer be seen, the wind had died down completely, and Gurov and Anna Sergeevna stood as if they were expecting someone else to get off the steamer. Anna Sergeevna was silent now and smelled the flowers, not looking at Gurov.

“The weather’s improved towards evening,” he said. “Where shall we go now? Shall we take a drive somewhere?”

She made no answer.

Then he looked at her intently and suddenly embraced her and kissed her on the lips, and he was showered with the fragrance and moisture of the flowers, and at once looked around timorously— had anyone seen them?

“Let’s go to your place …” he said softly.

And they both walked quickly.

Her hotel room was stuffy and smelled of the perfumes she had bought in a Japanese shop. Gurov, looking at her now, thought: “What meetings there are in life!” From the past he had kept the memory of carefree, good-natured women, cheerful with love, grateful to him for their happiness, however brief; and of women—
his wife, for example—who loved without sincerity, with superfluous talk, affectedly, with hysteria, with an expression as if it were not love, not passion, but something more significant; and of those two or three very beautiful, cold ones, in whose faces a predator
y expression would suddenly flash, a stubborn wish to take, to snatch from life more than it could give, and these were women not in their first youth, capricious, unreasonable, domineering, unintelligent, and when Gurov cooled tow
ards them, their beauty aroused hatred in him, and the lace of their underwear seemed to him like scales.

But here was all the timorousness and angularity of inexperienced youth, a feeling of awkwardness, and an impression of bewilderment, as if someone had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergeevna, the “lady with the little dog,” somehow took a special, very serious attitude towards what had happened, as if it were her fall—so it seemed, and that was strange and inopportune. Her features drooped and faded, and her long hair hung down sadly on both sides of her face, she sat pondering in a dejected pose, like the sinful woman in an old painting.

“It’s not good,” she said. “You’ll be the first not to respect me now.”

There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

Anna Sergeevna was touching, she had about her a breath of the purity of a proper, naïve, little-experienced woman; the solitary candle burning on the table barely lit up her face, but it was clear that her heart was uneasy.

“Why should I stop respecting you?” asked Gurov. “You don’t know what you’re saying yourself.”

“God forgive me!” she said, and her eyes filled with tears. “This is terrible.”

“It’s like you’re justifying yourself.”

“How can I justify myself? I’m a bad, low woman, I despise myself and am not even thinking of any justification. It’s not my husband I’ve deceived, but my own self! And not only now, I’ve been deceiving myself for a long time. My husband may be an honest and good man, but he’s a lackey! I don’t kno
w what he does there, how he serves, I only know that he’s a lackey. I married him when I was twenty, I was tormented by curiosity, I wanted something better.
I told myself there must be a different life. I wanted to live! To live and live … I was burning with curiosity … you won’t understand it, but I swear to God that I couldn’t control myself any longer, something was happening to me, I couldn’t restrain myself, I told my husband I was ill and came here … And here I go about as if in a daze, as if I’m out of my mind … and now I’ve become a trite, trashy woman, whom anyone can despise.”

Gurov was bored listening, he was annoyed by the naïve tone, by this repentance, so unexpected and out of place; had it not been for the tears in her eyes, one might have thought she was joking or playing a role.

“I don’t understand,” he said softly, “what is it you want?”

She hid her face on his chest and pressed herself to him.

“Believe me, believe me, I beg you …” she said. “I love an honest, pure life, sin is vile to me, I myself don’t know what I’m doing. Simple people say, ‘The unclean one beguiled me.’ And now I can say of myself that the unclean one has beguiled me.”

“Enough, enough …” he muttered.

He looked into her fixed, frightened eyes, kissed her, spoke softly and tenderly, and she gradually calmed down, and her gaiety returned. They both began to laugh.

Later, when they went out, there was not a soul on the embankment, the town with its cypresses looked completely dead, but the sea still beat noisily against the shore; one barge was rocking on the waves, and the lantern on it glimmered sleepily.

They found a cab and drove to Oreanda.

“I just learned your last name downstairs in the lobby: it was written on the board—von Dideritz,” said Gurov. “Is your husband German?”

“No, his grandfather was German, I think, but he himself is Orthodox.”
¹

In Oreanda they sat on a bench not far from the church, looked down on the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist, white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves of the trees did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise of the sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. So it had sounded below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda were there, so it sounded now and would go on sounding with the same dull indifference when we are no longer here. And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to
the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection. Sitting beside the young woman, who looked so beautiful in the dawn, appeased and enchanted by the view of this magical décor—sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov reflected that, essentially, if you thought of it, everything was beautiful in this world, everything except for what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher goals of being and our human dignity