The darling / Душечка. Сборник рассказов. Антон Чехов
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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 dear fellow, I am very much upset! Explain it to me for goodness’ sake. I can make nothing of it!”
As he said this he breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiled beef.
“Excuse me for revealing the secret of this letter to you, but you are Ariadne’s friend, she respects you. Perhaps you know something of it. She wants to go away, but with whom? Mr. Lubkov is proposing to go with her. Excuse me, but this is very strange of Mr. Lubkov; he is a married man, he has children, and yet he is making a declaration of love; he is writing to Ariadne ‘darling.’ Excuse me, but it is so strange!”
I turned cold all over; my hands and feet went numb and I felt an ache in my chest, as if a three-cornered stone had been driven into it. Kotlovitch sank helplessly into an easy-chair, and his hands fell limply at his sides.
“What can I do?” I inquired.
“Persuade her … Influence her … Just consider, what is Lubkov to her? Is he a match for her? Oh, good God! How awful it is, how awful it is!” he went on, clutching his head. “She has had such splendid offers – Prince Maktuev and … and others. The prince adores her, and only last Wednesday week his late grandfather, Ilarion, declared positively that Ariadne would be his wife – positively! His grandfather Ilarion is dead, but he is a wonderfully intelligent person; we call up his spirit every day.”
After this conversation I lay awake all night and thought of shooting myself. In the morning I wrote five letters and tore them all up. Then I sobbed in the barn. Then I took a sum of money from my father and set off for the Caucasus without saying good-bye.
Of course, a woman’s a woman and a man’s a man, but can all that be as simple in our day as it was before the Flood, and can it be that I, a civilized man endowed with a complex spiritual organisation, ought to explain the intense attraction I feel towards a woman simply by the fact that her bodily formation is different from mine? Oh, how awful that would be! I want to believe that in his struggle with nature the genius of man has struggled with physical love too, as with an enemy, and that, if he has not conquered it, he has at least succeeded in tangling it in a net-work of illusions of brotherhood and love; and for me, at any rate, it is no longer a simple instinct of my animal nature as with a dog or a toad, but it is a real love, and every embrace is spiritualised by a pure impulse of the heart and respect for the woman. In reality, a disgust for the animal instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of my nature, and if I poeticize love, is not that as natural and inevitable in our day as my ears’ not being able to move and my not being covered with fur? I fancy that’s how the majority of civilised people look at it, so that the absence of the moral, poetical element in love is treated in these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of atavism; they say it is a symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of insanity. It is true that, in poeticizing love, we assume in those we love qualities that are lacking in them, and that is a source of continual mistakes and continual miseries for us. But to my thinking it is