The train was cold. I was traveUing first class, but there were three people to a side and no double windows. There was no corridor either and I felt like a man in the stocks—cramped, abandoned, pitiable. My feet were dreadfully cold. Meanwhile I kept thinking how seductive she had looked that morning in her jacket with her hair down. I felt such pangs ofjealousy and I jumped to my feet in such agony of mind that my neighbours looked surprised and even scared.
At home I found snow-drifts and nearly forty degrees of frost. I like winter because my home has always been so warm and snug even in the hardest frosts. I like putting on my furjacket and felt boots on a fine, frosty day and doing a job in the garden or yard, reading in my well-heated room, sitting in Father's study by the fire, or taking a country-style steam-bath. But when one has no mother, sister or children about the place, winter evenings are somehow eerie and fearfully long and silent. 'nte warmer and cosier the home, the more you feel that something is missing. After my return from abroad that winter the evenings seemed interminable. I was so dreadfully depressed that I could not even read. It wasn't so bad in the daytime when you could clear snow in the garden or feed the hens and calves, but the evenings were more than flesh and blood could stand.
I used to hate visitors, but I was glad to see them now, knowing that they were bound to talk about Ariadne. Kotlovich, our spiritualist, often drove over for a chat about his sister, and sometimes brought along his friend Prince Maktuyev who loved her as much as I did. To sit in Ariadne's room, strumming on her piano and looking at her music—this was a necessity for the prince. He could not live without it. And the spirit of Grandpa Ilarion was still predicting that she would be his wife one day. The prince usually stayed for a long time, from lunch to midnight perhaps, and hardly spoke. He would drink two or three bottles of beer without a word and now and then he would give a staccato, sad, silly laugh just to show that he was still with us. Before going home he always took me on one side.
'When did you last see Miss Kotlovich ?' he would ask in a low voice. 'Is she well? She's not bored there, is she?'
Spring came round with the woodcock-shooting and the com and clover to be so^n. There was a sad feeling, but this was springtime melancholy and one felt like making the best of things. Listening to the larks as I worked in the fields, I wondered if I should not settle this business of personal happiness once and for all by simply marrying an ordinary village girl. Then suddenly, when the work was in full swing, I had a letter with an Italian stamp.
Clover, beehives, calves and village girls ... all that vanished in a flash. Ariadne now wrote that she was profoundly, unutterably miserable. She blamed me for not corning to her rescue, for looking down on her from the pedestal of my o^n virtue, and deserting her in her hour of danger—all this in large, shaky writing with smears and blots, evidently dashed off in great distress. At the end she begged me to come and save her.
Once more I slipped my moorings and was swept away. Ariadne was living in Rome. I reached her late one evening and she burst into tears when she saw me and flung her arms round my neck. She had not changed at all during the winter and looked as young and lovely as ever. We had supper and drove round Rome till dawn while she told me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov was.
'Don't mention that man to me!' she shouted. 'Disgusting, loathsome creature!'
'But you did love him, I think.'
'Never! He seemed a bit unusual to start with and made me feel sorry for him, but nothing more. He's shameless and takes a woman by storm, which is attractive. But don't let's talk about him—that's a dreary chapter of my life. He's gone to Russia to fetch some money and jolly good riddance to him! I told him not to dare come back.'
She was not staying in a hotel now, but in a two-room private apartment which she had decorated to her o^n taste, with chilly luxury. She had borrowed about five thousand francs from friends since Lubkov's departure, and my arrival really was her last hope. I was counting on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed— though she was homesick for Russia, memories of past hardships and shortcomings, and of the rusty roof on her brother's house, made her shudder with disgust. When I suggested going home she clutched my hands convulsively.
'No, no!' she said. 'I'd be bored to death.'
It was now that my love entered its last, waning phase.
'Be a darling again and love me a little,' said Ariadne, leaning towards me. 'You're so solemn and stuffy. You're afraid to let yourself go and you keep worrying about what might happen, which is a bore. Please, please be nice, I beg you! My good, kind, precious darling, I love you so:
I became her lover. For at least a month I was crazy with sheer undiluted happiness. To hold her beautiful young body in my arms, to enjoy it, and feel her warmth every time one woke up and remember that she, she, my Ariadne, was here—well, it took a bit of getting used to! Still, I did get used to it and gradually found my bearings in my new position. The main thing was, I could see that Ariadne loved me no more now than she had before. Yet she longed for true love, fearing loneliness. And the point is, I was young, healthy and strong, while she, like all unemotional people, was sensual, so we both acted as if our affair was a grand passion. That, and a few other things, became clearer as time went on.
We stayed in Rome, Naples and Florence. We went to Paris for a while, but found it cold there and returned to Italy. We passed everywhere as man and wife, rich landowners. People were glad to meet us and Ariadne was a great success. She took painting lessons, so they called her an artist, and do you know, that really suited her, though she had not a scrap oftalent. She always slept til two or three in the afternoon and had coffee and lunch in bed. For dinner she took soup, scampi, fi.sh, meat, asparagus and game, and then when she went to bed I used to bring her something else—roast beef, say—which she ate with a sad, preoccupied look. And if she woke up in the night she ate apples and oranges.
The woman's main and more or less basic characteristic was her fabulous cunning. She was up to some trick every minute of the day. There was no obvious motive for it, it was just instinctive—the sort of urge that makes a sparrow chirp or a beetle waggle its antennae. She played these tricks on me, on servants, porters, shop-assistants and friends. She could not talk to anyone or meet anyone without all sorts of posturing and antics. Just let a man come into our room—waiter or baron, it made no difference—and the look in her eyes, her expression, her voice changed. Even the contours of her figure altered. If you had seen her then, you would have called us the smartest and richest people in all Italy. Not one artist or musician did she meet without telling him a string of fatuous lies about his remarkable genius.
'You're so brilliant!' she would say in a sickly drawl. 'You frighten me, really. I'm sure you see right through people.'
The point of al this was to be attractive, successful and charming. Every mo^rng she woke with but a single thought—to attract! That was the aim and object ofher life. Ifl h:id told her that in such-and-such a house in such-and-such a street there lived someone who did not find her attractive, it would really have spoilt her day. Every day she must bewitch, captivate, drive people out of their minds. To have me in her power, converted into an utter worm by her charms, gave her the pleasure that victors once felt at tournaments.
My humiliation was not enough, though, and at nights she lounged about like a tigress—with no clothes on, for she always felt too hot— reading letters from Lubkov. He begged her to come back to Russia, or else he swore he would rob or murder somebody to get money and come and see her. She hated him, but his ardent, abject letters excited her.