He was a man with no will-power. If he saw other people's letters on a table, he simply couldn't stop himself reading them, for all his education and tact. Now, as we spoke, he admitted that he had happened to read a letter from Lubkov to Ariadne.
'This letter shows she's going abroad soon. I'm terribly upset, old boy. For goodness' sake tell me what it's all about. It makes no sense to me.'
He panted straight into my face as he spoke and his breath smelt of boiled beef.
'Excuse my revealing the secrets of this letter,' he went on. 'But you're a friend of Ariadne's and she thinks highly of you. You might know something. She wants to go away, but do you know who with ? Mr. Lubkov proposes to go with her. I must say, Lubkov's behaviour is decidedly odd. He's a married man with children, but he tells Ariadne he loves her and calls her "darling". All most peculiar, I must say!'
A chiH came over me. My arms and legs grew numb and I felt a sharp pain in my chest. Kotlovich flopped helplessly in an easy chair with his arms hanging limply downwn.
'But what can I do?' I asked.
'Influence her. Make her see sense. She and Lubkov—well, judge for yourself. They're not in the same street. Oh God, it's so awful!' he went on, clutching his head. 'Awful! She has such wonderful prospects—Prince Maktuyev and ... and the rest of them. The prince adores her and only last Wednesday his deceased grandfather Ilarion definitely confirmed in so many words that Ariadne would be his wife—no doubt about it! Grandfather Ьarion may be dead, but he's amazingly clever. We call up his spirit every day.'
I lay awake all night after this conversation and felt like shooting myself Next morning I wrote five letters and tore them all in little pieces. Then I wept in the bam. Then I borrowed money from Father and left for the Caucasus without saying good-bye.
Women are women, of course, and men are men, but is all that really as straightforward these days as it was before the flood? Must I, an educated man with a complex spiritual nature, really put downwn my yea^ung for a woman to the fact that her body is a different shape from my ownwn? What a ghastly thought! I should like to think that man's genius has taken up the cudgels against carnal love as part of his battle with nature, and that if he hasn't beaten it, he has at least managed to enmesh it in iHusions of comradeship and affection. For me at any rate these things were not just a function of my biological organism as if I were a dog or frog, but true love—every embrace inspired by a pure impulse of the heart, by respect for womankind.
Actually a revulsion against animal instincts has been built up over the centuries in hundreds of generations. I've inherited it—it is pan of my blood, part ofthe very fibre ofmy being. And ifl now romanticize love, isn't that just as natural and inevitable these days as the fact that I can't waggle my ears and am not covered with fur? I think this is what most educated people feel, since love without anything m(iol"al and poetical about it is treated as an atavistic phenomenon these days, and is said to be a symptom of degeneracy and many forms of derangement. Granted, when we romanticize love we do endow the loved one with virtues that are often just non-existent, and that's why we're always doing the wrong thing and suffering for it. But it's better that way in my opinion. I mean it's better to suffer than to console oneself with women being women and men men.
In Tiflis I had a letter from my father. He wrote that Ariadne had gone abroad on such-and-such a date and intended to be away all winter.
A month later I went home. It was autu^. Every week Ariadne sent my father letters on scented paper, most interesting letters too, written in an excellent literary style—1 think any woman could be an author. Ariadne described in great detail how hard she had found it to placate her aunt and obtain a thousand roubles from her for the trip, and how long she had spent in Moscow hunting up an old lady, a distant relative, to persuade her to go with them. There was a highly contrived air about this excess of detail and I realized of course that she was travelling without a chaperon.
Soon afterwards I too had a letter from her—also scented and well- written. She wrote how much she missed me and my beautiful, clever, love-lorn eyes, reproached me in a friendly way for wasting my youth and stagnating in the country when, like her, I might live in paradise under palm-trees and breathe the fragrance of orange groves. She signed herself, 'Ariadne, whom you have deserted'. A day or two later there was a second letter in the same style signed 'whom you have forgotten'. I was in a complete daze. I loved her passionately and dreamt of her every night, and here was all this 'deserted' and 'forgotten' stuff. Why ? What was I to make of it ? Besides, there was the tedium of country life to put up with, and the long evenings and nagging thoughts about Lubkov.
I was tortured by uncertainty that poisoned my days and nights until I could stand it no more. I gave in and left.
Ariadne wanted me to go to Abbazia. I arrived on a fine, warm day after a shower had left drops hanging on the trees, and took a room in the huge, barrack-like hotel annexe where Ariadne and Lubkov were staying. They were out. I went into the local park, strolled along the paths for a while and then sat down. An Austrian general passed by with his hands behind his back. He had red stripes down his trousers just like one of our own generals. A baby was pushed past in a pram, with a squeaking of wheels on the wet sand. A doddery old man with jaundice passed by, followed by a group of Englishwomen and a Polish priest, then the Austrian general came round again. Military bandsmen, just in from Fiume, plodded off to the bandstand, carrying their glittering trumpets, and struck up a tune.
Were you ever in Abbazia? It is a filthy little Slav townwn. Its only street stinks, and when it has been raining you can't get along it without galoshes. I had been so carried away by all the things I had read about this earthly paradise that I was annoyed and embarrassed to fmd myself hitching up my trousers as I gingerly crossed the narrow street and bought some hard pears from an old countrywoman out of sheer boredom. Seeing that I was a Russian, she made a pathetic attempt to talk our language. I was puzzled where on earth to go and what to do in the place, and was forever running across other Russians who felt as cheated as I did.
There is a quiet bay crossed by steamers and boats with coloured sails. You can see Fiume and distant islands shrouded in mauvish mist. It would be all very picturesque if the view of the bay wasn't blocked by hotels and their annexes in the inane suburban architectural style favoured by greedy speculators who have built up the whole of that green coast, so that you hardly see anything ofparadise butwindows, terraces and odd spaces with little white tables and waiters' black tail-coats. There is the sort of park that you find in any foreign resort nowadays. The dark, still, silent foliage of palms, the bright yellow sand on the paths, the bright green benches, the flash of soldiers' blaring trumpets and the red stripes on generals' trousers—it takes just ten minutes for al that stuff to bore you stiff Meanwhile you are somehow forced to spend ten days or ten weeks in the place!
Drifting from one resort to another, I have noticed more and more what mean, uncomfortable lives the rich and overfed lead. Their imaginations are so feeble and stunted, their tastes and desires so unadventurous. How much happier are travellers, young or old, who cannot afford hotels, but live where they can, admire the sea while lying on green grass high in the ^Ш, go about on foot, see forests and villages at close quarters, study a country's customs, listen to its songs and love its women.
It was growing dark as I sat in the park. Spruce aid elegant as any princess, Ariadne appeared in the twilight, followed by Lubkov in a new, loosely fitting suit that he must have bought in Vienna.
'Why do you look so cross?' he asked. 'What have I done wrong?'