XX
The next morning, Dmitri does not go to call his wife to breakfast; she is there with him, clinging to him. She is still asleep, and he is looking at her, and thinking, “What can be the matter with her? what frightened her so? what caused that dream?”
“Stay here, Viérotchka; I will bring thee thy tea here. Don’t get up, my dear little girl.39 I will bring it to you, and you can wash your face and not get up.”
“No, I will not get up; I will be awhile, it is so comfortable for me here. How smart you are, mílenki! and how I love thee! And now I have washed my face, and now thou canst bring the tea here. No; first take me into thy arms.” And Viéra Pavlovna long holds her husband in her embrace. “Akh! my mílenki, how absurd I was! How did I happen to come running to your room? What will Masha think now? I shall hear from her how I woke up in your room. Kiss me, my mílenki, kiss me. I want to love thee; I must love thee. I am going to love thee as I never loved thee before.”
Viéra Pavlovna’s room is empty now. Viéra Pavlovna, without any concealment from Masha, has moved to her husband’s apartment. “How tender he is, how kind, my mílenki! and I could imagine that I did not love thee! How absurd I am!”
“Viérotchka, now that you are calmed down, tell me what you dreamed day before yesterday.”
“Akh! what nonsense! I only dreamed, as I told you, that you caressed me very little; but now it is good. Why didn’t we always live this way? Then I should not have dreamed that horrible dream; it was dreadful, disgusting! I don’t like to think about it.”
“Yes, but if it had not been for it, we should not be living as we do now.”
“That is true; I am very grateful to her; to that disgusting, no, not disgusting, I mean splendid, woman!”
“Whom do you mean by ‘she’? Have you found some new friend beside your former ‘beauty’?”
“Yes, I have. Some woman or other called on me with such a fascinating voice, much finer than Bosio’s, and what lovely hands she had! Akh! what wonderful beauty! but all that I could see of her was her hand; she, herself, was hidden behind the bed-curtain; I dreamed that at my bedside, and that was the reason I gave up that bed; because I had such a dream in it. There was a bed-curtain, and that my ‘visitor’ hid herself behind it; but what a wonderful hand she had, my dear; and she sang about love, and she revealed to me what the meaning of love was: now, I understand, my dear. What a stupid little thing I was because I did not understand; I was a mere girl, a foolish little girl.”
“My dear, my angel, everything has its time. The way we lived before was love, and the way that we live now is love; some people must have one kind of love, others another. Hitherto the one kind of love satisfied you; now you need another. Now you are a woman, my dear, and what you did not want then, you must have now.”
A week or two pass. Viéra Pavlovna makes herself comfortable. She is in her own room now, only when her husband is not at home, or when he is working, or rather when he is working she often sits in his library; when she sees that she disturbs him, that his work requires his full attention, then she does not interrupt him. But such work does not often come along; for the most part, it is scientific work, which is entirely mechanical, and accordingly three-fourths of the time he has his wife by his side, and at times they caress each other. But one contrivance was necessary; they had to buy another sofa a little smaller than the husband’s. And so Viéra Pavlovna, after dinner, ensconces herself in her little sofa;40 and her husband sits by her little sofa, and takes delight in looking at her.
“My dear, why do you kiss my hand? You know I don’t like it.”
“Oh! I forgot that you considered it an affront; well, [nu] I am going to keep on just the same.”
“My mílenki, you are saving me the second time; you saved me from bad people, and you have saved me from myself. Caress me, my dear; caress me!”
A month passes. Viéra Pavlovna after dinner ensconces herself comfortably on her wide, little, soft divantchik in her room and her husband’s; that is, in her husband’s library. He sat down on her little sofa, and she threw her arms around his neck; she bent her head to his bosom, but she is lost in thought; he kisses her, but her melancholy does not pass away, and her eyes are almost ready to shed tears.
“Viérotchka, my dear, what makes you so pensive?”
Viéra Pavlovna weeps, but she says nothing. “No,”—she wipes away her tears.—“No, don’t caress me, dear! That’s enough; thank thee.” And she looks so affectionately and frankly at him. “Thank thee, thou art so kind to me!”
“Kind, Viérotchka? What is it? what do you mean?”
“Yes, kind, my dear; thou art kind.”
Two days pass. Viéra Pavlovna again ensconces herself comfortably after dinner; no, she is not comfortable, but she is lying and thinking; and she is lying in her own room, on her own bed. Her husband is sitting near her with his arm around her; and he also is lost in thought.
“No, it is not this; it is not my fault,” thinks Lopukhóf.
“How kind he is; how ungrateful I am!” thinks Viéra Pavlovna. And that is what they think.
She says, “My dear, go to your room and work, or else
