“Up to now I have tried to think of Tanya as a dear girl—a too charming, too lovely girl. … Every lovely girl, I have thought, has these adventures … fascinating danger to the young bloods … fatal gift of beauty … the kind of thing great-aunts in the ’fifties suffered from—love-tokens, duels, rivals sending rosebuds—you know what I mean—quite natural. … Now, suddenly, Varitchka, I don’t believe it is natural, or pretty. There’s something wrong. Something unnatural. Something unhealthy.” He said the last word almost in a choking voice. Health was one of his vanities.
“Unnatural? Unhealthy?” exclaimed Varvara, stitching in tense jerks. “What is unnatural? What is natural? Only the majority.”
“Well, youth is natural … and girlishness … and warmth and motherhood …” Pavel was shading his eyes with his hand, and from beneath his little finger tears that seemed unwarranted by the matter of what he said ran down his face. “There’s something about our Tanya that kills decent young creatures like Sasha Weber—even if they don’t cut their throats or join the Chinese army. Look at Piotr Isaev; look at Boris Andreievitch, or Stepan. One can’t wag a finger at all this and say, ‘A-ha! the saucy chit!’ O God! that’s the trouble—she’s not near enough to be saucy. You can’t smile at a thing a hundred miles off.”
Ideas that looked like the long-ignored truth seemed to come with appalling clarity into Pavel’s humming, giddy mind. He seemed to see his daughter all at once as a stillness, an interruption in loud and moving life—something pale suspended like a ghost, just higher than the ground—about which gay coarse heavy-footed life moved in vain, moved and dodged, seeking for glances from eyes that stopped warm hearts beating. A little figure of death surviving life. And this was his daughter. Her existence seemed to him, in his present mood, an insult to the life that dizzied him in himself. “What kind of a creature have I begotten?” he croaked. “Something that is a woman and is not.”
“There you are,” said Varvara, fiercely flattening the silk upon her knee. “There you are! Why should everything be a woman or a man?”
“What do you mean—men—women? What else is there? Out of men and women comes life—the only life there is.”
“Tanya is living.”
“Tanya—ah, tschah!—she is living.” He was silent, listening to the sound of Tanya’s whistling. “Yes,” he said, after a moment, in a different voice, “she is living.” He paused for some time, waving his head a little as though his eyes were trying to follow the twirl of a rather giddy world. “But because of her, Sasha Weber is dead.”
“Not because of her, exactly,” said Varvara, slowly. “Because of a collision between new things and old things … Sasha Weber comes at the end of something old—Tanya comes at the beginning, perhaps, of something new.”
“A bad beginning,” said Pavel, “since it seems our line is to stop with her. I don’t know what you mean, Varitchka. And whatever you mean, I’m sure it is unhealthy and ugly.”
“Everything’s unnatural when it begins. Everything’s ugly when we haven’t seen it before.”
“I don’t know what you mean. It is Tanya’s duty—it is every woman’s duty—to be natural and warm and young, not to suck life out of warm natural young things and remain cold as a cat herself.”
“We don’t know what is the duty of new things,” insisted Varvara. “Perhaps they haven’t any. Anyway, new or old, they’re all natural.”
“What is she, then, you silly woman, if she’s not the thing we know—a young woman, born to bear children?”
“Perhaps she’s a thing,” said Varvara. “That maple tree’s a thing. A man can love that without wanting to get into bed with it. Listen.”
Tatiana’s whistle fluted, stopped again, shaped itself into an unthinking trill or two.
“Listen,” said Varvara, “whose voice is that? That’s a thing’s voice.”
And as she applied this cruel word to her daughter, the word became somehow a word of praise—a proud word. It seemed suddenly common to be anything but a thing.
“Ah, tschah!” snorted Pavel, striking the trunk of the little maple tree with an outflung hand. “It is absurd. I have been talking nonsense. So have you. Tanya’s just an unawakened child. The little minx. She has no understanding of her effect on men. Perhaps the shock of hearing of Sasha’s death and knowing it to be the result of her childish heartlessness will—Tanitchka!” he shouted.
Tatiana in the ironing-shed heard his voice with an urgency that almost stopped her heart. She was so lost, so enclosed in her cooing forgetful space, that his voice seemed like a shot suddenly unwarrantably fired in time of peace. Her finger was jerked by surprise from the handle of the iron she was using and pressed for a second on the scorching metal. The pain of the finger sprang up her arm. After the first second, her burnt finger was interesting to her—a possession to be studied, to be proud of. She began prodding it, squeezing it, to make it hurt more. The skin thickened and whitened on the burn; she looked at it closely, feeling the finger grow hotter and hotter—more and more apoplectic, as though it were so full of blood that it would burst.
“Tanya!” roared her father again from the garden.
Tatiana left the iron burning a sheet and went out of the shed, through the house, and into the garden.
Her father stood with his arm crooked round a bough of the little maple, like one with his arm round the shoulders of a friend. He looked at Tatiana anxiously, breathing heavily. Her mother, sitting rigidly, jerking at stitches, did not look up.
“I heard a piece of news today,” said Pavel, “that may interest you. Or it may not.”
“I expect it will, papasha,” said Tatiana in a drowsy voice. She stood rocking a little on her feet, torturing her throbbing finger.
“I expect you hardly think it worth while to remember Alexander Petrovitch Weber,” said Pavel, who had become very angry again directly he saw his daughter. He fixed on her
