The station buffets have cabbage stew, mutton with kasha, sturgeon, beer—not oriental squalor, in other words, but Russia, the real thing. The passengers on the train discuss business, new singers and the Franco-Russian entente. Everything seems so vital, so cultured and intellectual, so high-spirited.
Faster, faster! Here at last is St. Petersburg's Nevsky Prospekt. Here are Great Morskoy Street and Kovensky Lane, where he had once lived as a student. Here are the dear, grey sky, the dear old drizzle, the drenched cab-drivers.
'Mr. Layevsky,' called someone from the next room, 'are you in?'
'Here,' Layevsky replied. 'What is it?'
'I have some papers.'
Layevsky stood up lazily, his head spinning, and went into the next room, ya^mng and shuffling ifr his slippers. There in the street by the open window stood one of his young colleagues, laying out official documents on his window-sill.
'Very well, old man,' said Layevsky gently, going to look for his ink- well. He returned to the window and signed the papers without reading them.
'It's hot,' he said.
'Yes indeed. Are you coming in today?'
'I doubt it, I don't feel too well. Tell Sheshkovsky I'll call on him after dinner, old man.'
The official left, and Layevsky lay downwn on his sofa again.
'Well,' he thought, 'I must weigh all the factors and work things out. I must pay off my debts before leaving here. I owe two thousand roubles odd. I have no money—but that's not important, of course. I'll pay part of it now somehow or other, and send some of it on later from St. Petersburg. The main thing is Nadczhda. We must fmst clarify our relations, indeed we must.'
A little later he was.reflecting whether he might not do better to go and ask Samoylenko's advice.
'I might do that,' he thought, 'but what would be the usc? I'd only speak out of tum again, all about boudoirs, women and doing the decent thing—or the indecent thing. Why, hang it, how can I possibly discuss what's decent or indecent if my very existence is at stake as I suffocate and fight for my life in these blasted shackles? To go on living like this would be so sordid and cruel as to dwarf all other con- siderations into nothingness, and it's about time that was realized!'
'Escape!' he muttered, sitting up. 'Must get away!'
The deserted beach, the sweltering heat, the monotony of the hazy, mauve mountains—for ever unchanging and silent, for ever lonely— filled him with sadness. They seemed to be lulling him to sleep, frustrating him. Perhaps he was highly intelligent and gifted—a remarkably honest man. Had he not been hemmed in on all sides by sea and mountains, he might have made an excellent rural welfare worker, a statesman, an orator, a publicist, or a great man of action— who could tell? And if so, how stupid to argue whether one .was doing the decent thing or not! Suppose some able, useful person—a musician or artist, say—broke down a wall and tricked his gaolers so that he could escape from prison? In such a situation any action is honourable.
Layevsky and Nadezhda sat down to lunch at two o'clock and the cook served rice soup with tomatoes.
'We have the same thing every day,' Layevsky said. 'Why can't she make cabbage. stew?'
'There's no cabbage.'
'Odd. At Samoylenko's they make cabbage stew, Mary Bityugov makes cabbage stew. Why am I alone forced to eat these sickly slops? It won't do, old girl.'
Like nearly all married couples, Layevsky and Nadezhda had once been unable to get through lunch without tantrums and scenes. But since Layevsky had decided that he was no longer in love, he had tried to let Nadezhda have everything her own way, addressing her gently and politely, smiling and calling her 'old girl'.
'This soup tastes like liquorice,' he said with a smile, but could not keep up this parade of amiability.
'No one does any housekeeping round here,' he said. 'If you're too ill or busy reading, all right—1'l1 handle our meals.'
In the old days she would have told him to go ahead, or said that she could see he only wanted to make a cook out of her. But now she only looked at him timidly and blushed.
'Well, how are you today?' he asked kindly.
'Not bad—a bit feeble, though.'
'Look after yourself, old girl. I'm very worried about you.'
Nadezhda suffered from some complaint. Samoylenko called it undulant fever and fed her quinine. The other doctor, Ustimovich, was a tall, lean, unsociable person who stayed at home by day and strolled quietly along the sea-front of an evening—coughing, with his hands clasped behind him and a cane held downwn his back. Ustimovich decided that she had some female complaint and prescribed hot com- presses. When Layevsky had loved Nadezhda her ill health had alarmed him and made him feel sorry for her, but now he thought even her illness a sham. Nadezhda's yellow, drowsy face, her lifeless look, the yawning fits which came over her after bouts of feverishness, her habit of lying under a rug during these attacks and looking more boyish than feminine—all these things, together with the unpleasantly stuffy smell of her room, wrecked any romantic illusion, he thought, and were a strong argument against love and marriage.
As his second course he was served spinach and hard-boiled eggs, while Nadezhda had jelly and milk because she was unwell. She touched the jelly with her spoon, looking preoccupied, and then began to eat it languidly between sips of milk. Hearing her gulps, Layevsky was seized by such utter loathing that it actually made his scalp tingle. His feelings would be insulting to a dog, even, he realized. But it was not himself he was annoyed with—he was annoyed With Nadezhda for provoking such emotions in him, and he could see why it is that lovers sometimes murder their mistresses. He would never do that himself, naturally—but were he serving on a jury at the moment, he would vote such a murderer not guilty.
'Thanks, old girl,' he said when the meal was over, and kissed Nadezhda on the forehead.
He went to his study, and paced up and downwn for five minutes, glancing sideways at his boots, then sat on the sofa.
'Get .away, must get away,' he muttered. 'Clanfy relations and escape.'
He lay on the sofa, and remembered once again that the death of Nadezhda's husband might be his fault.
'It's silly to blame people for falling in or out of love,' he admonished himself, lying down and.kicking up his legs to put on his riding-boots. 'Love and hate are oiitside om control. As for the husband, I may have been an indirect cause of his death—but once again, can I help it if his wife and I fall in love?'
He stood up, found his cap and went off to Sheshkovsky's—the colleague at whose house local officials met daily to play bridge and drink cold beer.
'I'm as bad as Hamlet,' Layevsky thought on the way there. 'How neatly Shakespeare hit him off—how very true to life.'
III
As there was no hotel in townwn, Dr. Samoylenko kept a sort of eating-house to relieve the general boredom, and meet the urgent needs of newcomers and people living on their who had nowhere else to eat. He had only two guests at present—the young zoologist Von Koren, who came to the Black Sea in summer to study the embryology of the jelly-fish, and Deacon Pobedov, fresh from college and assigned to the little town to stand in for the old deacon who had gone away to take a cure. They each paid twelve roubles a month for lunch and dinner, and Samoylenko made them swear to be punctual for two o'clock lunch.
Von Koren was usually first to arrive. He would sit downwn quietly in the drawing-room, pick up an album from the table, and scrutinize faded snap-shots of unknownwn men in wide trousers and top hats, and of ladies iJl crinolines and mob-caps. Samoylenko could name only a few of them, and of those whom he had forgotten he would sigh: 'Grand fellow, highly intelligent chap.' When he had done with the album, Von Koren would pick up a pistol from the shelves, screw up his left eye and take lengthy aim at a portrait of Prince Vorontsov. Or he would face the mirror and inspect his swarthy face, his large forehead, his black hair as curly as a Negro's, his shirt of neutral- coloured cotton printed with huge flowers like a Persian rug, and his wide leather belt worn instead of a waistcoat. This self-inspection gave him almost greater pleasure than his scrutiny of the snap-shots or of the pistol in its sumptuous case. He was well pleased with his face and handsomely trimmed beard, as with his broad shoulders—witness to good health and a strong frame. He was also delighted with his modish rig, from the tie matching his shirt down to his yellow boots.