'Then when do I get my passport?' she asked quietly.
'Never,' he suddenly wanted to answer, but took a grip on himself and said, 'Whenever you like.'
'I'm only going for a month.
'You can stay with Rees for good. I'm giving you a divorce and taking the blame, so Rces can marry you.'
Olga looked astonished. 'But I don't want a divorce!' she said force- fully. 'I'm not asking for one. Just give me the passport, that's all.'
'But why no divorce?' The doctor was beginning to lose his temper. 'YoU' a strange woman, I must say. If you're really fond of him and he loves you, you two can't do better than marry, placed as you are. Don't tell me that given the choice you acrually prefer adultcry to marriage!'
'Oh, I see,' she said, moving away. An evil, vindictive expression came into her face. 'I see your little game. You're fed up with me and you just want to get rid ot me by landing me with this divorce. But I'm not quite such a fool as you think, thank you very much. I'm not having a divorce and I'm not leaving you, oh dear me no. Firstly, I want to keep my social position,' she went on quickly as though afraid that he might stop her. 'Secondly, I'm twenty-seven and Rees is only twenty-three. In a year's time he'll tire of me and throw me over. And what's more, I'm not sure I shall be so keen on him much longer, if you want to know.... So there! I'm sitting tight!'
'Then out of this house you go!' shouted Nicholas, stamping. Tll throw you out! You're a vile, disgusting creature.'
'We'U see about chat,' she said and left the room.
It was broad daylight outside, but the doctor stiU sac at his desk doodling and automatically writing, 'My dear Sir.. . . A tiny foot... .'
Or else he walked about, stopping in the drawing-room in front of a photograph taken soon after his wedding seven years ago. He looked at it for some time.
It was a family group. There were his father-in-law, his mother-in- law and his wife Olga, then aged twenty. And there was he in his role of happy young husband. Father-in-law was clean-shaven, plump, dropsical, a senior civil servant, cunning and avaricious. Mother-in law, a stout woman with the small, predatory features of a ferret, loved her daughter to distraction and helped her as much as she could. If her daughter had strangled someone she would not have said a word to the girl, but would just have shielded her behind her apron.
Olga had small, predatory features too, but thcy were bolder and more expressive than her mother's—no ferret she, but a nastier: piece of work altogether!
Nicholas himself looked such a decent, straightforward fellow in the photograph—such a terribly nice chap! A hearty, good-natured, boyish grin lit up his whole face. He looked as if .he believed in his .simple way that this brood of vampires, into which fate had thrust him, was going to bring him adventure, happmess and aU that he had dreamt of when he was a student and sang, "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.'
Once again he asked himself in utter baffiement how he—son of a vilage priest and brought up at a church school, a plain, straight- forward, blunt man—could have surrendered so abjectly to this con- temptible, lying, vulgar, mean-spirited, wholly alien creature.
At eleven o'clock that morning he was putting on his coat before going to the hospital when the maid came into his study.
'What is it?'
'Madam has just got up. She wants the twenty-five roubles you promised her yesterday.'
A LADY WITH A DOG
I
There was said to be a new arrival on the Esplanade: a lady with a dog.
After spending a fortnight at Yalta, Dmitry Gurov had quite settled in and was now beginning to take an interest in new faces. As he sat outside Vernet's cafe he saw a fair-haired young woman, not tall, walking on the promenade—wearing a beret, with a white Pomeranian dog trotting after her.
Then he encountered her several times a day in the municipal park and square. She walked alone, always with that beret, always with the white Pomeranian. Who she was no one knew, everyone just called her 'the dog lady'.
'If she has no husband or friends here she might be worth picking up,' calculated Gurov.
He was still in his thirties, but had a twelve-year-old daughter and two schoolboy sons. His marriage had been arranged early—during his second college year—and now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was .a tall, dark-browed woman: outspoken, earnest, stolid and—she maintained—an 'intellectual'. She was a great reader, she favoured spelling reform, she called her husband 'Demetrius' instead of plain 'Dmitry', while he privately thought her narrow-minded, inelegant and slow on the uptake. He was afraid of her, and disliked being at home. He had begun deceiving her long ago, and his in- fidelities were frequent—which is probably why he nearly always spoke so disparagingly of women, caUing them an 'inferior species' when the subject cropped up.
He was, he felt, sufciently schooled by bitter experience to call them any name he liked, yet he still couldn't live two days on end without his 'inferior species'. Men's company bored him, making him ill at ease, tongue-tied and apathetic, whereas with women he felt free. He knew what to talk about, how to behave—he even found it easy to be with them without talking at al. In his appearance and character, in his whole nature, there was an alluring, elusive element which charmed and fascinated women. He knew it, and he was hi^^lf strongly attracted in rc^ra.
As experience multiple and—in the full sense of the word—bitter had long since taught him, every intimacy which so plcasantly divcrsi- fies one's life, which seems so easy, so delightfully adventurous at the outset .. . such an intimacy does, when reasonable people are involved (not least Muscovites—so hesitant and slow off the mark), develop willy-nilly into some vast, extraordinarily complex problem untii the whole business finally bccomcs quite an ordeal. Somehow, though, vn every new encounter with an attractive woman all this experience went for nothing—he wanted a bit of excitement and it all seemed so easy and amusing.
Well, he was eating in an open-air restaurant late one afternoon when the lady in the beret sauntered along and took the next table. Her expression, walk, clothes, hair-style .. . all told him that she was socially presentable, married, in Yalta for the first time, alone—and bored.
Much nonsense is talked about the looseness of morals in these parts, . and he despised such stories, knowing that they were largely fabricated by people who would have been glad to misbehave themselves, given the aptitude! But when the young woman sat do^ at the next table, three paces away, he recalled those tales of trips into the mountains and easy conquests. The seductive thought of a swift, fleeting flffflire—the romance with the stranger whose very name you don't know—sud- denly possessed him. He made a friendly gesture to the dog. It came up. rfe wagged his fmger. The dog growled and Gurov shook his fmger again.
The lady glanced at him, lowered her eyes at once.
'He doesn't bite.' She blushed.
'May I give ^m a bone?'
She nodded.
'Have you been in Yalta long, madam?' he asked courteously.
'Five days.'
'Oh, I've nearly survived my first fortnight.'
There was a short pause.
'Time goes quickly, but it is so boring,' she said, not looking at him.
'That's what they all say, what a bore this place is. Your average tripper from Belyov, Zhizdra or somewhere ... he doesn't know what boredom means tiU he comes here. Then it's "Oh, what a bore! Oh, what dust!" You might think he'd just blo^ in from s^my Spaui!'
She laughed. Then both continued their meal in silence, as strangers.
After dinner, though, they left together and embarked on the bantering chat of people who feel free and easy, who don't mind where they go or what they talk about. As they strolled they discussed the strange light on the sca: the watcr was of a soft, warm, mauve hue, crossed by a stripe of golden moonlight. How sultry it was after the day's hea.t, they said. Gurov described himself as a Muscovite who had studied literature but worked in a bank. He had once trained as an opera singer but had given that up and o^ed two houses in Moscow.