Tatiana did not speak. She tried to make a loud secret story inside her mind to drown Katya’s voice. She pretended, as she wrung out the linen, that she was a hero, after a shipwreck, saving the drowning, applying artificial respiration. She did not know what artificial respiration was, but amused herself a little by pretending it was rather like this wringing process. Here, she thought, picking up one of her father’s thick unbleached nightgowns—here was a fat old rich Jew all sodden and limp, and here she folded him up and twisted him round, wringing, jerking, laughing as she thought of his dignity all mixed up and intertwisted, his nose and his toes, his eyeglasses and his ankles, all in a little buckled salutary wet lump, being saved by her—and then, shake, flap there he was, the old moneygrubber, flat, bloodless, and pale, but almost his own shape again, the light evening wind blowing him out as she ran him up on the clothesline.
“What do you think women are for?” went on Katya, gasping and wheezing as she pounded and wrung. “What do you think men want of women? Pretty talk—poetry—sitting side by side and looking at stars? Why, my girl, I can tell you men wouldn’t mind if women were dumb and imbecile, as long as the women could give them the one thing they want. I’ll tell you what marriage is, Tatiana Pavlovna—it’s just getting out of bed, cooking three meals, and getting back into bed again. Women can’t run away from that—unless they’re nuns. There’s nothing makes a man so angry as a woman who plays the coward in bed—nothing else that a woman can do can hurt his feelings at all, except, perhaps, bad cooking. It makes a man mad for a woman not to know her duty; it’s like stabbing him—it turns his love to bile. Love, indeed! … Why that’s what love is—just the hope of going to bed together. But running away from fate is what you’re doing, Tatiana Pavlovna, and I’m telling you for your good.”
Tatiana had been pounding one pillowcase ever since she saved the scorned Jew. It was an old pillowcase and now she suddenly pounded a hole in it.
“Why, you ought to have been proud to be wanted by all those fine young men,” persisted Katya, in a grinding voice. “A thin, white little thing like you—and all the good red-blooded Russian wenches that have to shrivel up as virgins, these days, or sleep with yellow men. God knows Piotr Isaev was no catch for your father’s daughter, and he a common gardener’s son; still, he was a man—the last man in Mi-san—and now he’s turned his back on you. You ought to be ashamed, breaking your father’s and mother’s hearts by your whimsies.”
“Real people like to be nagged at,” thought Tatiana. “Nagged at by love and other things—asked and asked to give something. Only hills and rivers and flowers and animals are allowed to be free—not to ask for anything. The more you ask of people the more sure they feel that they are people. It’s their me—to be nagged at. I don’t ask for anything, so I’m not allowed to be alive. I’ll be kind to them—I’ll cry for them—I’ll laugh for them—I’ll pretend I’m them—but people don’t want that; they want to claw my me and they want me to claw theirs. Not to nag is to insult them.”
She saw little circles in outline, flying about on blankness, each circle trying to pursue, attack, overlap and obliterate another. Whenever one circle succeeded in overlapping another, the area of their intersection was suffused with black; the words “wicked black” formed in her mind. No circle seemed content to let its outline rest coolly on another’s—to admit another’s integrity. Black trespass was the inspiration of all.
“It’s something not natural in you; it’s like a devil in you,” said Katya. “A devil sticking a knife into men’s stomachs. It’s like killing something—to scream and faint and kick up a fuss when a man offers to give you—all he has to give, poor beast. A man feels killed. It’s as if you’d killed those seven lovers of yours, Tatiana Pavlovna.”
“Yet they’re not dead. They’re offering it to someone else by now,” thought Tatiana. “And I’m alive, too.” Then that thought broke. “But am I? Am I? Is this a life—this seeing—this thinking for caterpillars and men? If in the morning I was hanging from a branch of that tree there, would there be one life less in the world—or only a pair of eyes shut for good? Where is Tanya—washing clothes—hanging from a tree? Tanya the nothing—who by her nothingness killed seven loves and broke the hearts of her father and mother. …”
And then, thinking of lovers, she saw the circles trespassing more and
