Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [105]
“We’ve had quite enough of that, haven’t we?” Volodya said, sitting close to her and kissing both her hands. “Let the Schopenhauers philosophize and prove whatever they like, while I kiss your little hands …”
“You despise me! If only you knew how you are making me suffer!” She spoke uncertainly, knowing already that he would not believe her. “If only you knew how much I want to change and start my life afresh! I think about it with such joy!” she went on, while tears of joy actually sprang into her eyes. “Oh, to be good, honest, pure, never to lie, to have an aim in life …”
“Please stop putting on those silly airs—I don’t like them at all,” Volodya said, and his face assumed a whimsical expression. “Dear God, it’s like being on the stage! Why don’t we behave like ordinary people?”
She was afraid he would be angry and go away, and so she began to justify herself, and she forced herself to smile to please him, and once again she talked about Olga and how much she wanted to solve the problem of her life and become human.
“Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay,” he sang under his breath. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay …”
Quite suddenly he put his arm round her waist. Without knowing what she was doing she put her hands on his shoulders and for a full minute she gazed with a look of dazed rapture at his clever mocking face, his forehead, his eyes, his handsome beard.
“You have known for a long time how much I love you,” she confessed to him, and she blushed painfully, and she knew her lips were twisting convulsively with shame. “I love you! Why are you torturing me?”
She closed her eyes and kissed him fiercely on the lips, and it was a full minute before she was able to put an end to the kiss, even though she knew that kissing him was improper, and that he was standing in judgment over her, and that a servant might come in at any moment.
“Oh, how you are torturing me!” she repeated.
Half an hour later, when he had got all he wanted from her, and was sitting over lunch, she knelt before him and gazed hungrily up at his face, while he told her she resembled a puppy waiting for some ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat her on one knee and danced her up and down, as though she were a child, singing: “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay … Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay …”
When he was about to leave, she asked in passionate tones: “When? Today? Where?”
She held out both arms toward his lips, as though she wanted to tear out his answer with her hands.
“Today would hardly be suitable,” he told her after some thought. “Tomorrow perhaps.”
And so they parted. Before dinner Sophia Lvovna went along to the nunnery to see Olga, and was told that Olga was reading the psalter over the dead somewhere. From the nunnery she went off to see her father, but he was not at home, and so she took another sleigh and drove aimlessly through the roads and side streets until evening. For some reason she kept remembering that aunt of hers whose eyes were filled with tears and who knew no peace.
That night they drove again to the restaurant outside the town in a troika and listened to the gypsies. Driving past the nunnery, Sophia Lvovna again thought about Olga, and it terrified her that for girls and women of her station in life there was no solution except to go driving around in troikas and tell lies, or else to enter a nunnery and mortify the flesh. The next day she met her lover, and afterwards she drove around the town alone with a coachman and thought about her aunt.
During the following week Little Volodya threw her over. Life went on as usual, dull, miserable, sometimes even agonizing. The colonel