STORIES OF YOUTH
A JOKE
It was noon of a bright winter’s day. The air was crisp with frost, and Nadia, who was walking beside me, found her curls and the delicate down on her upper lip silvered with her own breath. We stood at the summit of a high hill. The ground fell away at our feet in a steep incline which reflected the sun’s rays like a mirror. Near us lay a little sled brightly upholstered with red.
“Let us coast down, Nadia!” I begged. “Just once! I promise you nothing will happen.”
But Nadia was timid. The long slope, from where her little overshoes were planted to the foot of the ice-clad hill, looked to her like the wall of a terrible, yawning chasm. Her heart stopped beating, and she held her breath as she gazed into that abyss while I urged her to take her seat on the sled. What might not happen were she to risk a flight over that precipice! She would die, she would go mad!
“Come, I implore you!” I urged her again. “Don’t be afraid! It is cowardly to fear, to be timid.”
At last Nadia consented to go, but I could see from her face that she did so, she thought, at the peril ofher life. I seated her, all pale and trembling, in the little sled, put my arm around her, and together we plunged into the abyss.
The sled flew like a shot out of a gun. The riven wind lashed our faces; it howled and whistled in our ears, and plucked furiously at us, trying to wrench our heads from our shoulders; its pressure stifled us; we felt as if the devil himself had seized us in his talons, and were snatching us with a shriek down into the infernal regions. The objects on either hand melted into a long and madly flying streak. Another second, and it seemed we must be lost!
“I love you, Nadia!” I whispered.
And now the sled began to slacken its pace, the howling of the wind and the swish of the runners sounded less terrible, we breathed again, and found ourselves at the foot of the mountain at last. Nadia, more dead than alive, was breathless and pale. I helped her to her feet.
“Not for anything in the world would I do that again!” she said, gazing at me with wide, terror-stricken eyes. “Not for anything on earth. I nearly died!”
In a few minutes, however, she was herself again, and already her inquiring eyes were asking the question of mine:
“Had I really uttered those four words, or had she only fancied she heard them in the tumult of the wind?”
I stood beside her smoking a cigarette and looking attentively at my glove.
She took my arm and we strolled about for a long time at the foot of the hill. It was obvious that the riddle gave her no peace. Had I spoken those words or not? It was for her a question of pride, of honour, of happiness, of life itself, a very important question, the most important one in the whole world. Nadia looked at me now impatiently, now sorrowfully, now searchingly; she answered my questions at random and waited for me to speak. Oh, what a pretty play of expression flitted across her sweet face! I saw that she was struggling with herself; she longed to say something, to ask some question, but the words would not come; she was terrified and embarrassed and happy.
“Let me tell you something,” she said, without looking at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Let us—let us slide down the hill again!”
We mounted the steps that led to the top of the hill. Once more I seated Nadia, pale and trembling, in the little sled, once more we plunged into that terrible abyss; once more the wind howled, and the runners hissed, and once more, at the wildest and most tumultuous moment of our descent, I whispered:
“I love you, Nadia!”
When the sleigh had come to a standstill, Nadia threw a backward look at the hill down which we hadjust sped, and then gazed for a long time into my face, listening to the calm, even tones of my voice. Every inch of her, even her muff and her hood, every line of her little frame expressed the utmost uncertainty. On her face was written the question:
“What can it have been? Who spoke those words? Was it he, or was it only my fancy?”
The uncertainty of it was troubling her, and her patience was becoming exhausted. The poor girl had stopped answering my questions, she was pouting and ready to cry.
“Had we not better go home?” I asked.
“I—I love coasting!” she answered with a blush. “Shall we not slide down once more?”
She “loved” coasting, and yet, as she took her seat on the sled, she was as trembling and pale as before and scarcely could breathe for terror!
We coasted down for the third time and I saw her watching my face and following the movements of my lips with her eyes. But I put my handkerchief to my mouth and coughed, and when we were half-way down I managed to say:
“I love you, Nadia!”
So the riddle remained unsolved! Nadia was left pensive and silent. I escorted her home, and as she walked she shortened her steps and tried to go slowly, waiting for me to say those words. I was aware of the struggle going on in her breast, and of how she was forcing herself not to exclaim:
“The wind could not have said those words! I don’t want to think that it said them!”
Next day I received the following note:
“If you are going coasting, to-day, call for me. N.”
Thenceforth Nadia and I went coasting every day, and each time that we sped down the hill on our little sled I whispered the words:
“I love you, Nadia!”
Nadia soon grew to crave this phrase as some people crave morphine or wine. She could no longer live without hearing it! Though to fly down the hill was as terrible to her as ever, danger and fear lent a strange fascination to those words of love, words which remained a riddle to torture her heart. Both the wind and I were suspected; which of us two was confessing our love for her now seemed not to matter; let the draught but be hers, and she cared not for the goblet that held it!
One day, at noon, I went to our hill alone. There I perceived Nadia. She approached the hill, seeking me with her eyes, and at last I saw her timidly mounting the steps that led to the summit. Oh, how fearful, how terrifying she found it to make that journey alone! Her face was as white as the snow, and she shook as if she were going to her doom, but up she climbed, firmly, without one backward look. Clearly she had determined to discover once for all whether those wondrously sweet words would reach her ears if I were not there. I saw her seat herself on the sledwith a pale face and lips parted with horror, saw her shut her eyes and push off, bidding farewell for ever to this world. “zzzzzzz!” hissed the runners. What did she hear? I know not—I only saw her rise tired and trembling from the sled, and it was clear from her expression that she could not herself have said what she had heard; on her downward rush terror had robbed her of the power of distinguishing the sounds that came to her ears.
And now, with March, came the spring. The sun’s rays grew warmer and brighter. Our snowy hillside grew darker and duller, and the ice crust finally melted away. Our coasting came to an end.
Nowhere could poor Nadia now hear the beautiful words, for there was no one to say them; the wind was silent and I was preparing to go to St. Petersburg for a long time, perhaps for ever.
One evening, two days before my departure, I sat in the twilight in a little garden separated from the garden where Nadia lived by a high fence surmounted by iron spikes. It was cold and the snow was still on the ground, the trees were lifeless, but the scent of spring was in the air, and the rooks were cawing noisily as they settled themselves for the night. I approached the fence, and for a long time peered through a chink in the boards. I saw Nadia come out of the house and stand on the door-step, gazing with anguish and longing at the sky. The spring wind was blowing directly into her pale, sorrowful face. It remindedher of the wind that had howled for us on the hillside when she had heard those four words, and with that recollection her face grew very sad indeed, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. The poor child held out her arms as if to implore the wind to bring those words to her ears once more. And I, waiting for a gust to carry them to her, said softly:
“I love you, Nadia!”
Heavens, what an effect my words had on Nadia! She cried out and stretched forth her arms to the wind, blissful, radiant, beautiful....
And I went to pack up my things. All this happened a long time ago. Nadia married, whether for love or not matters little. Her husband is an official of the nobility, and she now has three children. But she has not forgotten how we coasted together and how the wind whispered to her:
“I love you, Nadia!”
That memory is for her the happiest, the most touching, the most beautiful one of her life.
But as for me, now that I have grown older, I can no longer understand why I said those words and why I jested with Nadia.
AFTER THE THEATRE
When Nadia Zelenia came home with her mother from the theatre, where they had been to see “Evgeni Onegin,” and found herself in her own room once more, she took off her dress, loosened her hair, and hastened to sit down at her desk in her petticoat and little white bodice, to write a letter in the style of Tatiana.
“I love you,” she wrote, “but you do not, no, you do not love me!”
As she wrote this she began to laugh.
She was only sixteen and had never been in love in her life. She knew that the officer Gorni and the student Gruzdieff both loved her, but now, after seeing the opera, she did not want to believe it. How attractive it would be to be wretched and spurned! It was, somehow, so poetical, so beautiful and touching, when one loved while the other remained cold and indifferent! Onegin was arresting because he did not love Tatiana, but Tatiana was enchanting because she loved so ardently. Had they both loved one another equally well and been happy, might not both have been uninteresting?
“No longer think that you love me,” Nadia continued, thinking of Gorni. “I cannot believe it. Youare clever and serious and wise; you are a very talented man, and may have a brilliant future before you. I am a stupid, frivolous girl and you know yourself that I should only hinder you in your life. You were attracted to me, it is true; you thought you had found your ideal in me, but that was a mistake. Already you are asking yourself: why did I ever meet that girl? Only your kindness prevents you from acknowledging this.”
Nadia began to feel very sorry for herself, she burst into tears and continued:
“If it were not so hard to leave mamma and my brother, I should take the veil and go away to the ends of the earth. Then you would be free to love some one else.”
Nadia’s tears now prevented her from seeing what she was writing; little rainbows were trembling across the table, the floor, and the ceiling, and it seemed to her as though she were looking through a prism. To go on writing was impossible, so she threw herself back in her chair and began thinking of Gorni.
Goodness, how attractive, how fascinating men were! Nadia remembered the beautiful expression that came over Gorni’s face when he was talking of music. How humble, how engaging, how gentle he then looked, and what efforts he made not to let his voice betray the passion he felt! Emotion must be concealed in society where haughtiness and chilly indifference are the marks of good breeding and a goodeducation, so he would try to hide his feelings, but in vain. Every one knew that he loved music madly. Endless arguments about music and the bold criticisms of Philistines kept his nerves constantly on edge, so that he appeared to be timid and silent. He played the piano beautifully, and if he had not been an officer he would certainly have become a musician.
The tears dried on Nadia’s cheeks. She remembered that Gorni had proposed to her at a symphony concert and had later repeated his proposal down-stairs by the coat rack, where they were standing in a strong draught.
“I am very glad that you have at last come to know Gruzdieff,” she went on. “He is a very clever man and you are sure to be friends. He came to see us yesterday evening and stayed until two. We were all in raptures over him, and I was sorry that you had not come, too. He talked wonderfully.”
Nadia laid her arms on the table and rested her head upon them, and her hair fell over the letter. She remembered that Gruzdieff was in love with her, too, and that he had as much right to her letter as Gorni had. On second thoughts, would it not be better to send it to him? A causeless happiness stirred in her breast; at first it was tiny, and rolled gently about there like a small rubber ball; then it grew larger and fuller, and at last gushed up like a fountain. Nadia forgot Gorni and Gruzdieff, and her thoughts grew confused, but her rapture rose and rose, until it flowedfrom her breast into her hands and feet, and a fresh, gentle breeze seemed to be fanning her head and stirring her hair. Her shoulders shook with soft laughter; the table shook, the lamp-chimney trembled, and tears gushed from her eyes over the letter. She was powerless to control her laughter, so she hastened to think of something funny to prove that her mirth was not groundless.
“Oh, what a ridiculous poodle!” she cried, feeling a little faint from laughing. “What a ridiculous poodle!”
She remembered that Gruzdieff had romped with their poodle Maxim yesterday after tea, and had told her a story of a very intelligent poodle, who chased a jackdaw around a garden. The jackdaw had turned round while the poodle was chasing him, and said:
“You scoundrel, you!”
Not knowing that it was a trained bird, the poodle had been dreadfully dismayed; he had slunk away in perplexity and had afterward begun to howl.
“Yes, I think I shall have to love Gruzdieff,” Nadia decided, and she tore up the letter.
So she began to muse on the student, and on his love and hers, but her thoughts were soon rambling, and she found herself thinking of many things: of her mother, of the street, of the pencil, and of the piano.... She thought of all this with pleasure, and everything seemed to her to be beautiful and good, but her happiness told her that this was not all, there was a greatdeal more to come in a little while, which would be much better even than this. Spring would soon be here, and then summer would come, and she would go with her mother to Gorbiki, and there Gorni would come on his holidays, and would take her walking in the garden and make love to her.
Gruzdieff would come, too; he would play croquet and bowls with her, and tell her funny and thrilling stories. She longed for the garden, the darkness, the clear sky, and the stars. Once more her shoulders shook with laughter; the room seemed to her to be filled with the scent of lavender, and a twig tapped against the window-pane.
She went across to the bed, sat down, and, not knowing what to do because of the great happiness that filled her heart, she fixed her eyes on the little icon that hung at the head of her bed, and murmured:
“Oh! Lord! Lord! Lord!”
VOLODIA
One Sunday evening in spring Volodia, a plain, shy, sickly lad of seventeen, was sitting, a prey to melancholy, in a summer-house on the country place of the Shumikins. His gloomy reflections flowed in three different channels. In the first place, to-morrow, Monday, he would have to take an examination in mathematics. He knew that if he did not pass he would be expelled from school, as he had already been two years in the sixth grade. In the second place, his pride suffered constant agony during his visits to the Shumikins, who were rich people with aristocratic pretensions. He imagined that Madame Shumikin and her nieces looked down upon his mother and himself as poor relations and dependents, and that they made fun of his mother and did not respect her. He had once overheard Madame Shumikin saying on the terrace to her cousin Anna Feodorovna that she was still pretending to be young, and that she never paid her debts and had a great hankering after other people’s shoes and cigarettes. Every day Volodia would implore his mother not to go to the Shumikins’ again. He painted for her the humiliating rôle which she played among these people, he entreated her and spokerudely to her, but the spoiled, frivolous woman, who had wasted two fortunes in her day, her own and her husband’s, yearned for high life and refused to understand him, so that twice every week Volodia was obliged to accompany her to the hated house.
In the third place, the lad could not free himself for a moment from a certain strange, unpleasant feeling that was entirely new to him. He imagined himself to be in love with Anna Feodorovna, the cousin and guest of Madame Shumikin. Anna Feodorovna was a talkative, lively, laughing little lady of thirty; healthy, rosy, and strong, with plump shoulders, a plump chin, and an eternal smile on her thin lips. She was neither pretty nor young. Volodia knew this perfectly well, and for that very reason he was unable to refrain from thinking of her, from watching her as she bent her plump shoulders over her croquet mallet, or, as she, after much laughter and running up and down-stairs, sank all out of breath into a chair, and with half-closed eyes pretended that she felt a tightness and strangling across the chest. She was married, and her husband was a staid architect who came down into the country once a week, had a long sleep, and then returned to the city. This feeling on Volodia’s part began with an unreasoning hatred of the architect, and a sensation of joy whenever he returned to the city.
And now, as he sat in the summer-house thinking about to-morrow’s examination and his mother, whom every one laughed at, he felt a great longing to seeNyuta, as the Shumikins called Anna Feodorovna, and to hear her laughter and the rustling of her dress. This longing did not resemble the pure, poetic love of which he had read in novels, and of which he dreamed every night as he went to bed. It was a strange and incomprehensible thing, and he was ashamed and afraid of it as of something wicked and wrong which he hardly dared to acknowledge even to himself.
“This is not love,” he thought. “One does not fall in love with a woman of thirty. It is simply a little intrigue; yes, it is a little intrigue.”
Thinking about intrigues, he remembered his invincible shyness, his lack of a moustache, his freckles, his little eyes, and pictured himself standing beside Nyuta. The contrast was impossible. So he hastened to imagine himself handsome and bold and witty, dressed in the latest fashion....
In the very heat of his imaginings, as he sat huddled in a dark corner of the summer-house with his eyes fixed on the ground, he heard light footsteps approaching. Some one was hurrying down the garden path. The footsteps ceased and a figure clad in white gleamed in the doorway.
“Is any one there?” asked a woman’s voice.
Volodia recognised the voice and raised his head in alarm.
“Who is there?” asked Nyuta, stepping into the summer-house. “Ah, is it you, Volodia? What are you doing in there? Brooding? How can you alwaysbe brooding and brooding? It’s enough to drive you crazy!”
Volodia rose and looked at Nyuta in confusion. She was on her way back from the bath-house; a Turkish towel hung across her shoulders, and a few damp locks of hair had escaped from under her white silk kerchief and were clinging to her forehead. She exhaled the cool, damp odour of the river, and the scent of almond soap. The upper button of her blouse was undone, so that her neck and throat were visible to the lad.
“Why don’t you say something?” asked Nyuta, looking Volodia up and down. “It is rude not to answer when a lady speaks to you. What a stick-in-the-mud you are, Volodia, always sitting and thinking like some stodgy old philosopher, and never opening your mouth! You have no vim in you, no fire! You are horrid, really! A boy of your age ought to live, and frisk, and chatter, and fall in love, and make love to the ladies.”
Volodia stared at the towel which she was holding in her plump, white hand and pondered.
“He won’t answer!” cried Nyuta in surprise. “This is too strange, really! Listen to me, be a man! At least smile! Bah! What a horrid dry-as-dust you are!” she laughed. “Volodia, do you know what makes you such a boor? It’s because you never make love. Why don’t you do it? There are no girls here, I know, but what is to prevent you from making love to awoman? Why don’t you make love to me, for instance?”
Volodia listened to her and rubbed his forehead in intense, painful irresolution.
“It is only proud people who never speak and like to be alone,” Nyuta continued, pulling his hand down from his forehead. “You are proud, Volodia. Why do you squint at me like that? Look me in the eye, if you please. Now then, stick-in-the-mud!”
Volodia made up his mind to speak. In an effort to smile he stuck out his lower lip, blinked his eyes, and his hand again went to his head.
“I—I love you!” he exclaimed.
Nyuta raised her eyebrows in astonishment and burst out laughing.
“What is this I hear?” she chanted as singers do in an opera when they hear a terrible piece of news. “What? What did you say? Say it again! Say it again!”
“I—I love you!” Volodia repeated.
And involuntarily, without premeditation and not realising what he was doing, he took a step toward Nyuta and seized her arm above the wrist. Tears started into his eyes, and the whole world seemed to turn into a huge Turkish towel smelling of the river.
“Bravo, bravo!” he heard a laughing voice cry approvingly. “Why don’t you say something? I want to hear you speak! Now, then!”
Seeing that he was permitted to hold her arm,Volodia looked into Nyuta’s laughing face and awkwardly, uneasily, put both arms around her waist, bringing his wrists together behind her back. As he held her thus, she put her hands behind her head showing the dimples in her elbows, and, arranging her hair under her kerchief, she said in a quiet voice:
“I want you to become bright and agreeable and charming, Volodia, and this you can only accomplish through the influence of women. Why, what a horrid cross face you have! You ought to laugh and talk. Honestly, Volodia, don’t be a stick! You are young yet; you will have plenty of time for philosophising later on. And now, let me go. I’m in a hurry to get back. Let me go, I tell you!”
She freed herself without effort, and went out of the summer-house singing a snatch of song. Volodia was left alone. He smoothed his hair, smiled, and walked three times round the summer-house. Then he sat down and smiled again. He felt an unbearable sense of mortification, and even marvelled that human shame could reach such a point of keenness and intensity. The feeling made him smile again and wring his hands and whisper a few incoherent phrases.
He felt humiliated because he had just been treated like a little boy, and because he was so shy, but chiefly because he had dared to put his arms around the waist of a respectable married woman, when neither his age nor, as he thought, his social position, nor his appearance warranted such an act.
He jumped up and, without so much as a glance behind him, hurried away into the depths of the garden, as far away from the house as he could go.
“Oh, if we could only get away from here at once!” he thought, seizing his head in his hands. “Oh, quickly, quickly!”
The train on which Volodia and his mother were to go back to town left at eight-forty. There still remained three hours before train time, and he would have liked to have gone to the station at once without waiting for his mother.
At eight o’clock he turned toward the house. His whole figure expressed determination and seemed to be proclaiming: “Come what may, I am prepared for anything!” He had made up his mind to go in boldly, to look every one straight in the face, and to speak loudly no matter what happened.
He crossed the terrace, passed through the drawing-room and the living-room, and stopped in the hall to catch his breath. He could hear the family at tea in the adjoining dining-room; Madame Shumikin, his mother, and Nyuta were discussing something with laughter.
Volodia listened.
“I assure you I could scarcely believe my eyes!” Nyuta cried. “I hardly recognised him when he began to make love to me, and actually—will you believe it?—put his arms around my waist! He has quite a way with him! When he told me that he lovedme, he had the look of a wild animal, like a Circassian.”
“You don’t say so!” cried his mother, rocking with long shrieks of laughter. “You don’t say so! How like his father he is!”
Volodia jumped back, and rushed out into the fresh air.
“How can they all talk about it?” he groaned, throwing up his arms and staring with horror at the sky. “Aloud, and in cold blood, too! And mother laughed! Mother! Oh, God, why did you give me such a mother? Oh, why?”
But enter the house he must, happen what might. He walked three times round the garden, and then, feeling more composed, he went in.
“Why didn’t you come in to tea on time?” asked Madame Shumikin sternly.
“Excuse me, it—it is time for me to go—” Volodia stammered, without raising his eyes. “Mother, it is eight o’clock!”
“Go along by yourself, dear,” answered his mother languidly. “I am spending the night here with Lily. Good-by, my boy, come, let me kiss you.”
She kissed her son and said in French:
“He reminds one a little of Lermontov, doesn’t he?”
Volodia managed to take leave of the company somehow without looking any one in the face, and ten minutes later he was striding along the road to the station, glad to be off at last. He now no longer feltfrightened or ashamed, and could breathe deeply and freely once more.
Half a mile from the station he sat down on a stone by the wayside and began looking at the sun, which was now half hidden behind the horizon. A few small lights were already gleaming here and there near the station, and a dim green ray shone out, but the train had not yet appeared. It was pleasant to sit there quietly, watching the night slowly creeping across the fields. The dim summer-house, Nyuta’s light footsteps, the smell of the bath-house, her laughter, and her waist—all these things rose up before Volodia’s fancy with startling vividness, and now no longer seemed terrible and significant to him as they had a few hours before.
“What nonsense! She did not pull her hand away; she laughed when I put my arm around her waist,” he thought. “Therefore she must have enjoyed it. If she had not liked it she would have been angry——”
Volodia was vexed now at not having been bolder. He regretted that he was stupidly running away, and was convinced that, were the same circumstances to occur again, he would be more manly and look at the thing more simply——
But it would not be hard to bring those circumstances about. The Shumikins always strolled about the garden for a long time after supper. If Volodia were to go walking with Nyuta in the dark—there would be the chance to re-enact the same scene!
“I’ll go back and leave on an early train to-morrow morning,” he decided. “I’ll tell them I missed this train.”
So he went back. Madame Shumikin, his mother, Nyuta, and one of the nieces were sitting on the terrace playing cards. When Volodia told them his story about having missed the train they were uneasy lest he should be late for his examination, and advised him to get up early next morning. Volodia sat down at a little distance from the card-players, and during the whole game kept his eyes fixed on Nyuta. He had already determined on a plan. He would go up to Nyuta in the dark, take her hand, and kiss her. It would not be necessary for either to speak; they would understand one another without words.
But the ladies did not go walking after supper; they continued their game instead. They played until one o’clock, and then all separated for the night.
“How stupid this is!” thought Volodia, with annoyance. “But never mind, I’ll wait until to-morrow. To-morrow in the summer-house—never mind!”
He made no effort to go to sleep, but sat on the edge of his bed with his arms around his knees and thought. The idea of the examination was odious to him. He had already made up his mind that he was going to be expelled, and that there was nothing terrible about that. On the contrary, it was a good thing, a very good thing. To-morrow he would be as free as a bird. He would leave off his schoolboy’s uniform forcivilian clothes, smoke in public, and come over here to make love to Nyuta whenever he liked. He would be a young man. As for what people called his career and his future, that was perfectly clear. Volodia would not enter the government service, but would become a telegraph operator or have a drug store, and become a pharmaceutist. Were there not plenty of careers open to a young man? An hour passed, two hours passed, and he was still sitting on the edge of his bed and thinking——
At three o’clock, when it was already light, his door was cautiously pushed open and his mother came into the room.
“Aren’t you asleep yet?” she asked with a yawn. “Go to sleep, go to sleep. I’ve just come in for a moment to get a bottle of medicine.”
“For whom?”
“Poor Lily is ill again. Go to sleep, child, you have an examination to-morrow.”
She took a little bottle out of the closet, held it to the window, read the label, and went out.
“Oh, Maria, that isn’t it!” he heard a woman’s voice exclaim. “That is Eau de Cologne, and Lily wants morphine. Is your son awake? Do ask him to find it!”
The voice was Nyuta’s. Volodia’s heart stopped beating. He hastily put on his trousers and coat and went to the door.
“Do you understand? I want morphine!” explainedNyuta in a whisper. “It is probably written in Latin. Wake Volodia, he will be able to find it!”
Volodia’s mother opened the door, and he caught sight of Nyuta. She was wearing the same blouse she had worn when she came from the bath-house. Her hair was hanging loose, and her face looked sleepy and dusky in the dim light.
“There, Volodia is awake!” she exclaimed. “Volodia, do get me the morphine out of the closet, there’s a good boy. What a nuisance Lily is! She always has something the matter with her.”
The mother murmured something, yawned, and went away.
“Come, find it!” cried Nyuta. “What are you standing there for?”
Volodia went to the closet, knelt down, and began searching among the bottles of medicine and pill-boxes there. His hands were trembling and cold chills were running down his chest and back. He aimlessly seized bottles of ether, carbolic acid, and various boxes of herbs in his shaking hands, spilling and scattering the contents. The smell overpowered him and made his head swim.
“Mother has gone—” he thought. “That’s good—good.”
“Hurry!” cried Nyuta.
“Just a moment—there, this must be it!” said Volodia having deciphered the letters “morph—” on one of the labels. “Here it is!”
Nyuta was standing in the doorway with one foot in the hall and one in Volodia’s room. She was twisting up her hair—which was no easy matter, for it was long and thick—and was looking vacantly at Volodia. In the dim radiance shed by the white, early morning sky, with her full blouse and her flowing hair, she looked to him superb and entrancing. Fascinated, trembling from head to foot, and remembering with delight how he had embraced her in the summer-house, he handed her the bottle and said:
“You are——”
“What?” she asked smiling.
He said nothing; he looked at her, and then, as he had done in the summer-house, he seized her hand.
“I love you—” he whispered.
Volodia felt as if the room and Nyuta, and the dawn, and he himself had suddenly rushed together into a keen, unknown feeling of happiness for which he was ready to give his whole life and lose his soul for ever, but half a minute later it all suddenly vanished.
“Well, I must go—” said Nyuta, looking contemptuously at Volodia. “What a pitiful, plain boy you are—Bah, you ugly duckling!”
How hideous her long hair, her full blouse, her footsteps and her voice now seemed to him!
“Ugly duckling!” he thought. “Yes, I am indeed ugly—everything is ugly.”
The sun rose; the birds broke into song; the sound of the gardener’s footsteps and the creaking of hiswheelbarrow rose from the garden. The cows lowed and the notes of a shepherd’s pipe trembled in the air. The sunlight and all these manifold sounds proclaimed that somewhere in the world there could be found a life that was pure, and gracious, and poetic. Where was it? Neither Volodia’s mother, nor any one of the people who surrounded the boy had ever spoken of it to him.
When the man servant came to call him for the morning train, he pretended to be asleep.
“Oh, to thunder with it all!” he thought.
He got up at eleven. As he brushed his hair before the mirror he looked at his plain face, so pale after his sleepless night, and thought:
“She is quite right. I really am an ugly duckling.”
When his mother saw him and seemed horrified at his not having gone to take his examination, Volodia said:
“I overslept, mamma, but don’t worry; I can give them a certificate from the doctor.”
Madame Shumikin and Nyuta woke at one o’clock. Volodia heard the former throw open her window with a bang, and heard Nyuta’s ringing laugh answer her rough voice. He saw the dining-room door flung open and the nieces and dependents, among whom was his mother, troop in to lunch. He saw Nyuta’s freshly washed face, and beside it the black eyebrows and beard of the architect, who had just come.
Nyuta was in Little Russian costume, and this was not becoming to her and made her look clumsy. The architect made some vulgar, insipid jests, and Volodia thought that there were a terrible lot of onions in the stew that day. He also thought that Nyuta was laughing loudly and looking in his direction on purpose to let him understand that the memory of last night did not worry her in the least, and that she scarcely noticed the presence at table of the ugly duckling.
At four o’clock Volodia and his mother drove to the station. The lad’s sordid memories, his sleepless night, and the pangs of his conscience aroused in him a feeling of painful and gloomy anger. He looked at his mother’s thin profile, at her little nose, and at the rain-coat that had been a gift to her from Nyuta, and muttered:
“Why do you powder your face? It does not become you at all! You try to look pretty, but you don’t pay your debts, and you smoke cigarettes that aren’t yours! It’s disgusting! I don’t like you, no, I don’t, I don’t!”
So he insulted her, but she only rolled her eyes in terror and, throwing up her hands, said in a horrified whisper:
“What are you saying? Heavens, the coachman will hear you! Do hush, he can hear everything!”
“I don’t like you! I don’t like you!” he went on, struggling for breath. “You are without morals orheart. Don’t dare to wear that rain-coat again, do you hear me? If you do, I’ll tear it to shreds!”
“Control yourself, child!” wept his mother. “The coachman will hear you!”
“Where is my father’s fortune? Where is your own? You have squandered them both. I am not ashamed of my poverty, but I am ashamed of my mother. I blush whenever the boys at school ask me about you.”
The village was two stations from town. During the whole journey Volodia stood on the platform of the car, trembling from head to foot, not wanting to go inside because his mother, whom he hated, was sitting there. He hated himself, and the conductor, and the smoke of the engine, and the cold to which he ascribed the shivering fit that had seized him. The heavier his heart grew, the more convinced he became that somewhere in the world there must be people who lived a pure, noble, warm-hearted, gracious life, full of love, and tenderness, and merriment, and freedom. He felt this and suffered so keenly from the thought that one of the passengers looked intently at him, and said:
“You must have a toothache!”
Volodia and his mother lived with a widow who rented a large apartment and let rooms to lodgers. His mother had two rooms, one with windows where her own bed stood, and another adjoining it, which was small and dark, where Volodia lived. A sofa, on which he slept, was the only furniture of this little room; allthe available space was taken up by trunks full of dresses, and by hat-boxes and piles of rubbish which his mother had seen fit to collect. Volodia studied his lessons in his mother’s room, or in the “parlour,” as the large room was called, where the lodgers assembled before dinner and in the evening.
On reaching home, Volodia threw himself down on his sofa and covered himself with a blanket, hoping to cure his shivering fit. The hat-boxes, the trunks, and the rubbish, all proclaimed to him that he had no room of his own, no corner in which he could take refuge from his mother, her guests, and the voices that now assailed his ears from the parlour. His school satchel and the books that lay scattered about the floor reminded him of the examination he had missed. Quite unexpectedly there rose before his eyes a vision of Mentone, where he had lived with his father when he was seven years old. He recalled Biarritz, and two little English girls with whom he had played on the beach. He vainly tried to remember the colour of the sky, and the ocean, and the height of the waves, and how he had then felt; the little English girls flashed across his vision with all the vividness of life, but the rest of the picture was confused and gradually faded away.
“It is too cold here,” Volodia thought. He got up, put on his overcoat, and went into the parlour.
The inmates of the house were assembled there at tea. His mother, an old maid music teacher withhorn spectacles, and Monsieur Augustin, a fat Frenchman, who worked in a perfume factory, were sitting near the samovar.
“I haven’t had dinner to-day,” his mother was saying. “I must send the maid for some bread.”
“Duniash!” shouted the Frenchman.
It appeared that the maid had been sent on an errand by her mistress.
“Oh, no matter!” said the Frenchman, smiling broadly. “I go for the bread myself! Oh, no matter!”
He laid down his strong, reeking cigar in a conspicuous place, put on his hat, and went out.
When he had gone, Volodia’s mother began telling the music teacher of her visit to Madame Shumikin’s, and of the enthusiastic reception she had had there.
“Lily Shumikin is a relative of mine, you know,” she said. “Her husband, General Shumikin, was a cousin of my husband’s. She was the Baroness Kolb before her marriage.”
“Mother, that isn’t true!” cried Volodia exasperated. “Why do you lie so?”
Now he knew that his mother was not lying, and that in her account of General Shumikin and Baroness Kolb there was not a word of untruth, but he felt none the less as if she were lying. The tone of her voice, the expression of her face, her glance—all were false.
“It’s a lie!” Volodia repeated, bringing his fist down on the table with such a bang that the cups and saucers rattled and mamma spilled her tea. “Whatmakes you talk about generals and baronesses? It’s all a lie!”
The music teacher was embarrassed and coughed behind her handkerchief, as if she had swallowed a crumb. Mamma burst into tears.
“How can I get away from here?” thought Volodia.
He was ashamed to go to the house of any of his school friends. Once more he unexpectedly remembered the two little English girls. He walked across the parlour and into Monsieur Augustin’s room. There the air smelled strongly of volatile oils and glycerine soap. Quantities of little bottles full of liquids of various colours cluttered the table, the window-sills, and even the chairs. Volodia took up a paper and read the heading: “Le Figaro.” The paper exhaled a strong and pleasant fragrance. He picked up a revolver that lay on the table.
“There, there, don’t mind what he says!” the music teacher was consoling his mother in the next room. “He is still young, and young men always do foolish things. We must make up our minds to that.”
“No, Miss Eugenia, he has been spoiled,” moaned his mother. “There is no one who has any authority over him, and I am too weak to do anything. Oh, I am very unhappy.”
Volodia put the barrel of the revolver into his mouth, felt something which he thought was the trigger, and pulled—Then he found another little hook and pulled again. He took the revolver out ofhis mouth and examined the lock. He had never held a firearm in his hands in his life.
“I suppose this thing ought to be raised,” he thought. “Yes, I think that is right.”
Monsieur Augustin entered the parlour laughing and began to recount some adventure he had had on the way. Volodia once more put the barrel into his mouth, seized it between his teeth, and pulled a little hook he felt with his fingers. A shot rang out—something hit him with tremendous force in the back of the neck, and he fell forward upon the table with his face among the bottles and glasses. He saw his father wearing a high hat with a wide silk band, because he was wearing mourning for some lady in Mentone, and felt himself suddenly seized in his arms and fall with him into a very deep, black abyss.
Then everything grew confused and faded away.