“Nothing.”
She lay down again. She heard the pealing of a bell, and perhaps it came from the same nunnery she had been visiting. Once again she remembered the dark gateway and the figures standing there, and there came to her the idea of God and of her own inevitable death, and she put her hands to her ears to keep out the sound of the bells. It occurred to her that a long, long life stretched before her until old age and death finally overcame her, and every day of her life she would have to live in close proximity to a man she did not love, this man who was now entering the bedroom and preparing to go to bed, and she would have to stifle her hopeless love for the other man, who was young and fascinating and in her eyes quite extraordinary. She looked up at her husband and tried to say good night to him, but instead she suddenly burst into tears. She was distraught.
“Well, here comes the music!” Yagich said, and he stressed the second syllable of “music.”
She remained distraught until ten o’clock the next morning, when she finally stopped crying and trembling all over; her tears gave place to a terrible headache. Yagich was in a hurry to attend late mass; he was growling at the orderly who was helping him to dress in the next room. Once he came into the bedroom to fetch something, and his footsteps were attended by the soft jingling of spurs, and then he came in again wearing his epaulettes and medals, limping slightly from rheumatism, and it occurred to Sophia Lvovna that he looked and walked like a ravening beast.
She heard him ringing up someone on the telephone.
“Be so good as to connect me with the Vasilyevsky barracks,” he said, and a minute later: “Vasilyevsky barracks? Would you please ask Dr. Salimovich to come to the telephone?” And then another minute later: “Who’s speaking? Is that you, Volodya? Delighted. Dear boy, ask your father to come to the telephone at once. My wife is a bit upset after yesterday. Not at home, eh? Well, thank you very much. Excellent. Much obliged.
For the third time Yagich entered the bedroom, and he bent over the bed and made the sign of the cross over her and gave her his hand to kiss—the women who had loved him invariably kissed his hand, and he had fallen into the habit of doing this. Then, saying he would be back for dinner, he went out.
At noon the maid announced that Vladimir Mikhailovich had arrived. Though she was staggering with fatigue and a headache, Sophia Lvovna quietly slipped into her wonderful new lilac-colored dressing gown, which was trimmed with fur, and she hurriedly arranged her hair. In her heart she felt a surge of inexpressible tenderness, and she was trembling with joy and the fear that he might leave her. She wanted only one thing—to gaze upon him.
Little Volodya was properly attired for calling upon a lady: he wore a frock coat and a white tie. When Sophia Lvovna entered the drawing room he kissed her hand and genuinely offered his sympathy over her illness. When they sat down, he praised her dressing gown.
“I was absolutely shattered by the visit to Olga yesterday,” she said. “At first I thought it was quite terrible, but now I envy her. She is like a rock which can never be destroyed, nothing can budge her. Tell me, Volodya, was there any other way out for her? Is burying oneself alive the answer to all life’s problems? It is death, not life …”
Little Volodya’s face was touched with deep emotion as he remembered Olga.
“Listen to me, Volodya, you are a clever man,” Sophia Lvovna went on. “Teach me how to rise above myself, as she has done. Of course, I am not a believer and could never enter a nunnery, but surely I could do something which is equivalent. My life is not an easy one,” she added after a pause. “Tell me something which will give me faith. Tell me something, even if it is only a single word.”
“One word? Well—
“Volodya, why do you despise me?” she asked, livid with anger. “You have a quite fatuous way of talking to me—I beg your pardon, but you do—people don’t talk to their friends and women acquaintances like that. You are so successful and so learned, and you love science, yet you never talk to me about scientific things. Why? Am I not worthy?”
Little Volodya’s brows were knit with vexation.
“Why this sudden interest in science?” he asked. “What about a discussion on the constitution—or maybe about sturgeon and horse-radish?”
“Very well. I’m an insignificant, silly, stupid woman without principles. I have an appalling number of faults. I’m a psychopath, I am utterly depraved—I should be despised for these things. But remember, you are ten years older than I am, and my husband is thirty years older. I’ve grown up before your eyes, and if you had wanted, you could have made anything out of me—even an angel. But instead”—and here her voice quivered—“you treated me abominably! Yagich married me when he was already an old man, but you could have …”
“We’ve had quite enough of that, haven’t we?” Volodya said, sitting close to her and kissing both her hands. “Let the Schopenhauers philosophize and prove whatever they like, while I kiss your little hands …”
“You despise me! If only you knew how you are making me suffer!” She spoke uncertainly, knowing already that he would not believe her. “If only you knew how much I want to change and start my life afresh! I think about it with such joy!” she went on, while tears of joy actually sprang into her eyes. “Oh, to be good, honest, pure, never to lie, to have an aim in life …”
“Please stop putting on those silly airs—I don’t like them at all,” Volodya said, and his face assumed a whimsical expression. “Dear God, it’s like being on the stage! Why don’t we behave like ordinary people?”
She was afraid he would be angry and go away, and so she began to justify herself, and she forced herself to smile to please him, and once again she talked about Olga and how much she wanted to solve the problem of her life and become human.
“
Quite suddenly he put his arm round her waist. Without knowing what she was doing she put her hands on his shoulders and for a full minute she gazed with a look of dazed rapture at his clever mocking face, his forehead, his eyes, his handsome beard.
“You have known for a long time how much I love you,” she confessed to him, and she blushed painfully, and she knew her lips were twisting convulsively with shame. “I love you! Why are you torturing me?”
She closed her eyes and kissed him fiercely on the lips, and it was a full minute before she was able to put an end to the kiss, even though she knew that kissing him was improper, and that he was standing in judgment over
