Whilз Shamokhin spoke I noticed how much he relished his native language and environment. He must have been terribly homesick abroad. He praised Russians and called them great idealists, but without disparaging foreigners, and that was rather in his favour. Clearly, too, he was feeling a little upset and it was himself rather than women that he wanted to talk about. I was in for a long story, a confession of some kind.
Sure enough, after we had ordered a bottle of wine and drunk a glass each, he began.
'I remember someone in a tale of Weltmann's remarking, "I say, what a story!" But someone else answers, "That's no story, it's only the beginning of one." Well, what I've told you so far is only the be^^ning. What I'd really like is to tell you my latest romantic adventure. Excuse my asking again, but would it bore you to hear it?'
I said no and he went on as follows.
The action takes place in the north of Moscow Province. The country round there is just wonderful, indeed it is. Our estate is on the high bank of a swift-flowing stream by some rapids, with water thundering past day and night. Picture a large, old garden, pleasant flower-beds, beehives, a vegetable-plot and the river downwn below with feathery willows that seem to lose their gloss and tum grey in heavy dew. Across the river there is a meadow and beyond it on a hill is a grim, dark pinewood with masses and masses oforange mushroonu. Elks live in the heart of it.
Those early mo^tings, you know, with the sun actually hurting your eyes—when I am dead and in my grave I think I shall stiU dream of them. Then there are the wonderful spring evenings with nightingales and corncrakcs calling in the garden and beyond, the strains of an accordion floating over from the village, someone playing the piano in the house and the river roaring past—such music, indeed, that you want to cry and sing out loud. We haven't much ploughland, but the pasture helps us out, bringing in about two thousand a year with what we get from the woods. I'm the only son. My father and I live modestly and with Father's pension this was quite enough for us to live on.
For three years after taking my degree I stayed in the country, running the farm and expecting all the time that some job would turn up. But the point is, I was very much in love with an extremely beautiful and charming girl. She was the sister of our neighbour Kotlovich, a bankrupt squire whose estate sported pineapples, superb peaches, lightning-conductors and a fountain in the courtyard, though he had not a copeck to his name. He was idle, incompetent and somehow mushy like a boiled turnip. He treated the peasants by homreopathy and went in for spiritualism. He was a mild, tactful sort of person, actually, and no fool, but I have no use for anyone who talks to spirits and treats village women by magnetism. To start with, this kind of limited outlook always goes with muddled thinking, and such people are very hard to talk to. And then they aren't fond of anyone usually and they don't live with women, which gives them an air of mystery that puts sensitive people off I didn't like his looks either. He was tall, fat and white, and had -a tiny head, tiny glittering eyes and plump white fingers. He didn't shake your hand, he massaged it. He was always saying how sorry he was—if he asked for something it was 'so sorry', and if he gave you something, it was 'so sorry' again.
But his sister was quite a different story. By the way, I hadn't known the Kotloviches when I was younger, for my father was a professor at N. and we lived in the provinces for years. The girl was twenty-two by the time I met them, had left school long ago, and had lived in Moscow for a year or two with a rich aunt who brought her oUt. The first time I met her I was greatly struck by her unusual and beautiful christian name—Ariadne. It suited her so well. She was a brunette, very slim, very dainty, svelte, elegant and amazingly graceful, with exquisite and reaUy handsome features. Her eyes were bright, like her brother's, but whereas his had a cold, sickly glint like boiled sweets, it was youthful beauty and self-confidence that shone in hers. I fell in love with her at first sight, and no wonder. First impressions were so strong that I have still nфt lost my illusions and would like to that nature created this girl as part of some splendid grand
design.
Ariadne's voice, her footsteps, her hat—even her footprints on the sandy bank where she fished for gudgeon—thrilled me, delighted me and put new life into me. To me her lovely face and figure were pledges of her inner self. Ariadne's every word and smile bewitched me, charmedme, made me feel that hers was indeed a noble nature. She was affectionate, talkative, gay and natural. Her belief in God seemed infused with poetry, as did her reflections on death. So rich and subtle was her inner nature that it lent even her faults delightful qualities all her o^.
Perhaps she wanted a new horse, but couldn't afford one. Well, why worry ? There was always something to sell or pa^. And ifthe estate- manager swore that there was not, then why not strip the metal roofs off the lodges and dispose of them to the local factory? Or take the cart-horses to market and let them go dirt cheap just when the farm work was at its height? These wild urges sometimes drove everyone on the estate quite frantic, but she expressed them with such style that she was always forgiven in the end and allowed to do as she pleased, ^tу a goddess or Caesar's wife.
There was something rather moving about my love andsoon everyone—Father, neighbours, village people—noticed it. They were all on my side and if I happened to stand the men a round of vodka, they would bow and say, 'Here's hoping you may wed Miss Kotlovich, sir.'
Ariadne herselfknew that I loved her. She often rode over to see us, or drove over by cabriolet, and sometimes spent whole days with me and Father. She made friends with the old man and he even taught her to ride a bicycle—his great hobby. I remember helping her onto her bicycle one evening when they were just going for a ride. She was so beautiful. I felt that touching her was like scorching my hands. I was trembling, I was in ecstasy. And when she and the old man, both so handsome and graceful, bowled off down the road together, a black horse—coming the other way and ridden by our manager— lurched to one side because it too was dazzled by her beauty, or so I thought. My love and adoration greatly moved Ariadne and she longed to feel the same magic and love me in return. That would be so romantic, you sec.
But unlike me she couldn't love truly, for she was cold and already rather corrupted. Day and night a devil inside her whispered that she was so charming, so divine. What was she doing in this world ? What had she been born for? She had no clear idea and saw her own future purely in terms of fame and fortune. She dreamt of dances, race- meetings, liveries, a sumptuous drawing-room, her o^n salon with a swarm of counts, princes, ambassadors, famous painters and entertainers—the whole lot at her feet, raving about her beauty and fine clothes.
This lust for power, this ambition and unswerving concentration on a single goal—it makes people insensitive. And insensitive Ariadne was, about me, about nature and about music.
Meanwhile time was passing and so far there were no ambassadors in evidence. Ariadne continued to live with her spiritualist brother and things went from bad to worse until she could not afford to buy dresses and hats and was put to all sorts of shifts and dodges to hide how badly off she was.
Typically enough, a Prince Maktuyev—rich, but an utter worm— had paid his addresses to her when she was living at her aunt's in Moscow. She had refused him out of hand, but now there was sometimes that little nagging doubt. Had she been right to turn him do^n ? Just as your peasant blows disgustedly on a glass of kvass with beetles in it, but stil drinks it, so she frowned and turned up her nose when she remembered the prince—yet remarked to me, 'Say what you like, but there's something mysterious and delightful about a title.'