sweat of my brow, atoning for my follies. I am conscious of a superabundance of energy and I believe that if I were to put that energy to work I could redeem my estate in five years. But now, as you see, there is a complication. Here we're not abroad, but in mother Russia; we shall have to think of lawful wedlock. Of course, all attraction is over; there is no trace left of my old love, but, however that may be, I am bound in honour to marry her.
----
Shamohin, excited by his story, went below with me and we continued talking about women. It was late. It appeared that he and I were in the same cabin.
'So far it is only in the village that woman has not fallen behind man,' said Shamohin. 'There she thinks and feels just as man does, and struggles with nature in the name of culture as zealously as he. In the towns the woman of the bourgeois or intellectual class has long since fallen behind, and is returning to her primitive condition. She is half a human beast already, and, thanks to her, a great deal of what had been won by human genius has been lost again; the woman gradually disappears and in her place is the primitive female. This dropping-back on the part of the educated woman is a real danger to culture; in her retrogressive movement she tries to drag man after her and prevents him from moving forward. That is incontestable.'
I asked: 'Why generalise? Why judge of all women from Ariadne alone? The very struggle of women for education and sexual equality, which I look upon as a struggle for justice, precludes any hypothesis of a retrograde movement.'
But Shamohin scarcely listened to me and he smiled distrustfully. He was a passionate, convinced misogynist, and it was impossible to alter his convictions.
'Oh, nonsense!' he interrupted. 'When once a woman sees in me, not a man, not an equal, but a male, and her one anxiety all her life is to attract me -- that is, to take possession of me -- how can one talk of their rights? Oh, don't you believe them; they are very, very cunning! We men make a great stir about their emancipation, but they don't care about their emancipation at all, they only pretend to care about it; they are horribly cunning things, horribly cunning!'
I began to feel sleepy and weary of discussion. I turned over with my face to the wall.
'Yes,' I heard as I fell asleep -- 'yes, and it's our education that's at fault, sir. In our towns, the whole education and bringing up of women in its essence tends to develop her into the human beast -- that is, to make her attractive to the male and able to vanquish him. Yes, indeed' -- Shamohiri sighed -- 'little girls ought to be taught and brought up with boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or she always thinks she's in the right. Instil into a little girl from her cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the general struggle for existence. We must give up our attitude to the physiological aspect, too -- to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in the first place women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all women have babies; and, thirdly, a normal countrywoman works in the fields up to the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then there ought to be absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a lady his chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water --'
I heard no more, for I fell asleep.
Next morning when we were approaching Sevastopol, it was damp, unpleasant weather; the ship rocked. Shamohin sat on deck with me, brooding and silent. When the bell rang for tea, men with their coat-collars turned up and ladies with pale, sleepy faces began going below; a young and very beautiful lady, the one who had been so angry with the Customs officers at Volotchisk, stopped before Shamohin and said with the expression of a naughty, fretful child:
'Jean, your birdie's been sea-sick.'
Afterwards when I was at Yalta I saw the same beautiful lady dashing about on horseback with a couple of officers hardly able to keep up with her. And one morning I saw her in an overall and a Phrygian cap, sketching on the sea-front with a great crowd admiring her a little way off. I too was introduced to her. She pressed my hand with great warmth, and looking at me ecstatically, thanked me in honeyed cadences for the pleasure I had given her by my writings.
'Don't you believe her,' Shamohin whispered to me, 'she has never read a word of them.'
When I was walking on the sea-front in the early evening Shamohin met me with his arms full of big parcels of fruits and dainties.
'Prince Maktuev is here!' he said joyfully. 'He came yesterday with her brother, the spiritualist! Now I understand what she was writing to him about! Oh, Lord!' he went on, gazing up to heaven, and pressing his parcels to his bosom. 'If she hits it off with the prince, it means freedom, then I can go back to the country with my father!'
And he ran on.
'I begin to believe in spirits,' he called to me, looking back. 'The spirit of grandfather Ilarion seems to have prophesied the truth! Oh, if only it is so!'
----
The day after this meeting I left Yalta and how Shamohin's story ended I don't know.
NOTES
Max Nordau: Max Simon Nordau (1848-1923) was a Hungarian philosopher
Raphael's Madonna: Raphael (1483-1520) painted many madonnas
novel of Weltmann's: A. F. Weltmann (1800-1870) was a minor Russian novelist
reddish agarics: mushrooms
homeopathy: a pseudoscience that treats disease by administering minute doses of drugs that in massive amounts produce symptoms in healthy individuals similar to the disease itself
C?sar's wife: Julius C?sar (c. 102 B. C. - 44 B. C.); the wife of a dictator is very powerful
char-a-banc: bus (horse-drawn)
