She dreamt of titles and gracious living, yet she did not want to let me go either. Dream of ambassadors as you wil, you are not made of stone after all, and it's hard to forget that you are only yowig once. Ariadne tried to fall in love, pretended to be in love, and even swore that she loved me.
Now I am a highly strung, sensitive person. I can tell when someone loves me, even at a distance, and I need no assurances or vows. But this was like a breath of cold air. When she spoke of love I seemed to hear the singing of a mechanical nightingale. Ariadne herself felt that there was something missing. That distressed her and I often saw her in tears. Then once, believe it or not, she suddenly fl.Wlg her arms round me impetuously and kissed me—it happened on the river bank one evening. I could tell by her eyes that she did not love me, but had embraced me purely out of curiosity, as a sort of exercise. She wanted to sec what would happen. Uut it horrified me. I took her hands.
'It makes me so unhappy when you kiss me without loving me,' I brought out in desperation.
'Oh, you are a—funny boy!' she said irritably and went away.
I should probably have married her after a year or two, which would have been the end of my story, but fate decided to give our romance a different twist. A new personality happened to swim into our ken when Michael Lubkov, a university friend of Ariadne's brother, came to stay with him. He was a charming fellow and even the coachmen and servants called him 'the amusing gentleman'. He was of medium height, a bit scraggy and bald. His face was that of a good bourgeois—unattractive, but presentable, pale, with a bristly, carefully tended moustache. He had goose-flesh and pimples on his neck and a large Adam's apple. He wore pince-nez on a broad black ribbon and couldn't pronounce r or I properly. He was always in high spirits and found everything great fun. He had made a peculiarly stupid marriage at the age of twenty, and receiving two houses in Moscow near Devichy as part of his wife's dowry, had had them repaired, built a bath-house and then lost every penny. Now his wife and four children were living in terrible poverty at the Oriental Apartments and he had to support them. All this was great fun. He was thirty-six and his wife was forty-two and that was fun too. His mother, a stuck-up, pompous person—a frightful snob—looked down on his wife and lived alone with a horde of dogs and cats and he had to pay her seventy-five roubles a month, quite apart from what his wife got.
Lubkov himself was a man of taste and liked lwiching at the Slav Fair Hotel or dining at the Hermitage Restaurant. He needed a lot of money, but his uncle only let him have two thousand a year, which was not enough, and for days on end he ran round Moscow with his tongue practically hanging out, trying to cadge a loan. That was funny too. He said that he had come to stay with Kotlovich to recover from family life in the heart of the country. At lunch, at supper and on walks he talked about his wife and mother, about creditors and bailiffs, and laughed at them. He laughed at himself too and claimed to have met a lot of very nice people through his knack of borrowing.
He laughed all the time and we joined in. And during his stay we passed the time differently. I was given to quiet and 'idyllic' pleasures, being fond of fishing, evening walks and mushroom-picking. But
Liibkov preferred picnics, fireworks and hunting. Two or three times a week he arranged a picnic and Ariadne, looking solemn and dedicated, would list oysters, ch^pagne and chocolates, and dispatch me to Moscow—not asking, naturally, if I had any money. Toasts were drunk at the picnics, there were lots oflaughs, and more gleeful stories about how old his wife was, how fat his mother's dogs were, and what nice people creditors were.
Lubkov was fond of nature, but took it very much for granted, thinking it thoroughly beneath his notice and created only for his amusement.
'Not a bad place to have tea,' he would say, pausing in front ofsome magnificent view.
Once, seeing Ariadne walking some way off widi a parasol, he nodded towards her.
'What I like about her is, she's thin,' he said. 'I don't like fat women.'
I was shocked and asked him not to speak of women like that in my presence. He looked surprised.
'What's wrong about me liking thin ones and not fat ones ?' he asked.
I made no answer. Then there was another occasion, when he was in a good mood and had had a drop to dr^k.
'I've noticed that Ariadne likes you,' he said. 'But I can't make out why you're so slow off the mark.'
This embarrassed me and I rather shyly gave him my views on love and women.
'I don't know,' he sighed. 'Women are women, the way I see it, and men are men. Ariadne may be the poetical, exalted creature you make her out, but that doesn't put her outside the laws of nature. She's at an age when she needs a husband or lover, you can see that for yourself. I respect women every bit as much as you do, but I don't think certain relationships are incompatible with poetry. Poetry is one thing. A lover's another. It'sjust like agriculture—natural beauty's onething and the income from forests and fields is something else again.'
When Ariadne and I fished for gudgeon, Lubkov lay near us on the sand and poked fun at me or instructed me in the art of living.
'How do you manage without a mistress?' he asked. 'It baffles me, man. You're young, handsome, attractive—in fact, you're one hell of a fellow. But you live like a monk. I've no use for these old men of twenty-eight! I'm nearly ten years older than you, but which of us is the younger? You tell us, Ariadne.'
'You of course,' Ariadne answered.
When he tired of us saying nothing and keeping our eyes on tie floats, he would go indoors.
'It's a fact,' she would say, looking furiously at me. 'You're not a man. You're such a ninny, God forgive us! A man should be swept off his feet, do crazy things, make mistakes and suffer! A woman will forgive you if you're rude and impudent, but she'll never forgive you for being so stuffy.'
She was genuinely angry.
'You must be bold and dashing if you want to get anywhere,' she went on. 'Lubkov isn't as good-looking as you, but he's more attractive and he'll always be a success with women because he's not like you, he's a real man.'
She sounded really vexed. One evening at supper she started off without looking at me about how she wouldn't vegetate in the country if she was a man. She would travel and spend the winter abroad somewhere—in Italy, say. Oh, Italy! Now my father inadvertently added fuel to the flames by making a long speech about Italy—how splendid it was with its wonderful weather and museums. Ariadne suddenly yearned to go there. She actually banged the table with her fist and her eyes flashed as if to say, 'Let's be off!'
This started a lot of talk about how nice it would be in Italy. 'Oh, Italy, lovely Italy!' We had this every day. When Ariadne looked at me over her shoulder, her cold, stubborn look told me that in her day-dreams she already had Italy at her feet—salons, famous foreigners, tourists and all. There was no holding her back now. I advised her to wait—put the trip off for a year or two—but she frowned disdainfully.
'You're so stuffy!' she said. 'You're like an old woman.'
But Lubkov was in favour of the trip. He said that it would be very cheap and he would be glad to go along himself and recover from family life in Italy. I'm afraid I behaved as innocently as a schoolboy. I tried to leave them alone together as little as possible, not from jealousy, but because I thought that something outrageous might happen. They pulled my leg—pretended to have been kissing, say, when I came in the room and that kind of thing.
Then one fine morning her plump, white, spiritualist brother arrived and evinced a desire to speak to me in private.