'If you ask me,' said he, 'we'd be a sight better off without women, blast them!'
The friends finished dressing and went into the Pavilion, where .Samoylenko—one of the regulars—even had his cups, plates and so on. Every morning he was served a tray with a cup of coffee, a tall, cut-glass tumbler oficed water and a glass ofbrandy. First he would sip his brandy, then his hot coffee, then his iced water. They must have tasted good, for a glint would come into his eyes when he-had drunk, and he would stroke his whiskers with both hands.
'Remarkably fine view,' he would say, gazing at the sea.
After a long night frittered away on dism.al, futile thoughts which had kept him awake, seeming to intensify the stifling blackness, Layevsky felt haggard and jaded. His bathe and coffee had done him no good.
'About what we were saying, Alexander,' he said. 'I shan't hide anything, I'll tell you frankly, as a friend. Things are in a bad way v.ith me and Nadezhda, a very bad way. I'm sorry to be confiding in you, but I must get it off my chest.'
Sensing the conversation's drift, Samoylenko lowered his eyes and dr^med his fingers on the table.
'I've lived with her for two years and I don't love her any more,' Layevsky went on. 'Or rather I've come to see that I never did love her. These two years have been a snare and delusion.'
^^le speaking, Layevsky had the trick of scrutinizing the pink palms ofhis hands, biting his nails or crumpling his cuff He did so now.
'You can't help me, that I realize,' he said. 'But I'm telling you be- cause talk's the only escape for us failures and Superfluous Men. I have to base whatever I do on gencral principlcs. I must find an explana- tion, an excuse for my futile life in somebody's theories, in literary types—say in the fact that we, the gentry, are going to the bad, and so on. Last night, for instance, I kept consoling myself with the thought of Tolstoy—he's so right about things, so fiendishly right— and it made me feel better. He's a really great writer, old man—say what you like.'
Ncver having read Tolstoy, but meaning to every day, Samoylenko was abashed..
'Yes,' he said. 'All writers draw on their imagination, but he draws dircct from nature.'
'Ye Gods,' Layevsky sighed. 'How civilization does cripple us! I fall in love with a married woman, she falls in love \vith me. It all starts with kisses, quiet evenings, vows, Herbert Spencer, ideals and common interests. How utterly bogus! Wĉ're really running away from her husband, but we pretend we're escaping from the futility of our life as intellectuals. We see our future as follows. Firstly the Caucasus— getting to know the place and the people. I'm to dress up as a bureau- crat, and do an office job. Then we take a plot of land some\vhere in the v.;de open spaces. We live by the sweat of our face—we dig vineyards, we till fields and all that. In my place you—or your zoologist friend Von Koren—would probably have gone on living with Nadezhda for thirty years, and you'd have left your heirs a prosperous vineyard and a couple of thousand acres of maize. But I felt a complete flop from the fmt day. This town's unbearably hot and boring, there's no one to talk to. Take a trip into the country, and every bush and stone seems to hide monstrous spiders, scorpions and snakes, while further out there's just a wilderness of mountains. Foreign people, foreign scenery, a pathetic level of culture—these things, my friend, are a sight harder to take than dreaming about warm countries as you saunter dov."Tl the main street of St. Petersburg in a fur coat with Nadezhda on your arm. What's needed here is a man who'll fight tooth and nail. But I'm no fighter, I'm just a miserable, namby-pamby neurotic. My ideas about hard work and vineyards add up to damn all, I've known that from the first day. As for love, living with a woman who has read Herbert Spencer :md followed you to the ends of the earth—that'sjust as boring as cohabiting with any more common or garden specimen, you take it from me. There's the same smell of ironing, face-powder and medicines, there are the same curl-papers every morning, there's the same old pretence.'
'You can't run a house without ironing,' said Samoylenko, blushing because he knew the woman of whom Layevsky had spoken so frankly. 'You're in a bad mood this morning, Ivan, I see. Nadezhda's a splendid, cultivated woman and you're a highly intellectual chap yourself. «You two aren't married, of coursc,' Samoylenko went on with a glance at the next tablcs. 'But that's not your fault, is it? Besides, one mustn't be prcjudiced, 'one must move with the timcs. I'm all for civil marriage mysclf, indeed I am. But in my vicw, once you do start living togcther you should kccp it up for the rest of your life.'
'Without lovc?'
'I'll explain,' said Samoylenko. 'Eight ycars ago we had an old shipping-agent here, a highly intelligcnt chap. Wcll, he used to s.ay that the most important thing in family life is paticncc. Hear that, Ivan? Patience—not lovc. Love can't last. You've livcd and loved for a couple of years, and now your domestic life has obviously entcred a phase when you must call on all your patience—to preserve the balance, as i t were. '
'You believe your agent, but the old man's advice makes no sense to me. Perhaps he was only pretending. He may well have been tcsting his powers of endurance, and using his unloved partner as an object esscntial to such exercises. But I haven't yet sunk so low. Should I wish to practise endurance, I shall buy dumb-bclls or a high-spirited horse— and leave human beings out of it.'
Samoylenko ordercd chilled white wine.
'Tell me,' Layevsky asked him suddenly, when each had drunk a glass, 'what is softening of the brain?'
'It's—what shall I say ?—a disease which makes the brain soft, as if it was dissolving.'
'Can it be cured?'
'Yes, ifit hasn't gone too far. It needs cold showers, plasters—oh ycs, and something taken internally.'
'Ah. Well, you see how I'm fixed. I can't live with hcr, it's quite beyond me. When I'm with you I can pass the time of day like this and smile, but at home I'm utterly depressed. I feel so awful that if I was told I had to spend another month with her, say, I think I'd blow my brains out. Yet I can't leave her. She has no one else, she can't get a job, and neither of us has any money. Where can she go, who can she turn to? Ideas fail one. So come on, tell me what to do, can't you?'
'Well, er,' growled Samoylenko, at a loss for a reply. 'Does she love you ?'
'Yes—to the extent that a woman of her age and temperament requires a man. It would be as hard for her to part with me as to give up her face-powder or hair-curlers. I'm an essential component of her boudoir.'
Samoylenko was embarrassed.
'You're out of sorts this morning, Ivan,' he said. 'You must have had a bad night.'
'Yes, I slept badly. I'm in a pretty bad way altogether, old man—I feel so hopeless, my heart sinks, and I'm faint somehow. Must get away!'
'Where will you go?'
'Up north—back to the pines, the mushrooms, the people, the ideas. I'd give half my life to be somewhere in Moscow County or Tula now, plunge in a stream, cool off and then, you know, wander for about three hours with someone—even some dull little undergraduate would do—and talk, talk, talk. Remember the scent of hay? And evening strolls round the garden when you hear a piano in the house, a passing train '
Layevsky gave a delighted laugh. Tears came to his eyes, and to hide them he reached over for a box of matches on the next table without rising from his seat.
'It's eighteen years since I was last up north,' said Samoylenko. 'I've forgotten what it's like. The Caucasus is the fmest place in the world for my money.'
'There's a picture by Vereshchagin of some prisoners under sentence of death wasting away at the bottom of a deep well, and to me your wonderful Caucasus is a similar hell-hole. Given the choice of chimney- sweeping in St. Petersburg or lording it here, I'd take the chimneys every time. '
Layevsky fell into a reverie. Looking at the stooped body, the s.taring eyes, the pale, sweaty face, the sunken temples, the chewed nails and the slipper hanging at the heel to reveal a badly darned sock, Samoylenko was consumed with pity.