Short Fiction, Anton Chekhov [websites to read books for free .TXT] 📗

and threw herself on my neck. She had not changed at all that winter, and was just as young and charming. We had supper together and afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all the time she kept telling me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov was.

“Don’t remind me of that creature!” she cried. “He is loathsome and disgusting to me!”

“But I thought you loved him,” I said.

“Never,” she said. “At first he struck me as original and aroused my pity, that was all. He is insolent and takes a woman by storm. And that’s attractive. But we won’t talk about him. That is a melancholy page in my life. He has gone to Russia to get money. Serve him right! I told him not to dare to come back.”

She was living then, not at an hotel, but in a private lodging of two rooms which she had decorated in her own taste, frigidly and luxuriously.

After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances about five thousand francs, and my arrival certainly was the one salvation for her.

I had reckoned on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed in that. She was homesick for her native place, but her recollections of the poverty she had been through there, of privations, of the rusty roof on her brother’s house, roused a shudder of disgust, and when I suggested going home to her, she squeezed my hands convulsively and said:

“No, no, I shall die of boredom there!”

Then my love entered upon its final phase.

“Be the darling that you used to be; love me a little,” said Ariadne, bending over to me. “You’re sulky and prudent, you’re afraid to yield to impulse, and keep thinking of consequences, and that’s dull. Come, I beg you, I beseech you, be nice to me!⁠ ⁠… My pure one, my holy one, my dear one, I love you so!”

I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious of nothing but rapture. To hold in one’s arms a young and lovely body, with bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from sleep, and to remember that she was there⁠—she, my Ariadne!⁠—oh, it was not easy to get used to that! But yet I did get used to it, and by degrees became capable of reflecting on my new position. First of all, I realised, as before, that Ariadne did not love me. But she wanted to be really in love, she was afraid of solitude, and, above all, I was healthy, young, vigorous; she was sensual, like all cold people, as a rule⁠—and we both made a show of being united by a passionate, mutual love. Afterwards I realised something else, too.

We stayed in Rome, in Naples, in Florence; we went to Paris, but there we thought it cold and went back to Italy. We introduced ourselves everywhere as husband and wife, wealthy landowners. People readily made our acquaintance and Ariadne had great social success everywhere. As she took lessons in painting, she was called an artist, and only imagine, that quite suited her, though she had not the slightest trace of talent.

She would sleep every day till two or three o’clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up something, for instance roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the night she would eat apples and oranges.

The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute, apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an impulse such as makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle its antennae. She was deceitful with me, with the footman, with the porter, with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances; not one conversation, not one meeting, took place without affectation and pretence. A man had only to come into our room⁠—whoever it might be, a waiter, or a baron⁠—for her eyes, her expression, her voice to change, even the contour of her figure was transformed. At the very first glance at her then, you would have said there were no more wealthy and fashionable people in Italy than we. She never met an artist or a musician without telling him all sorts of lies about his remarkable talent.

“You have such a talent!” she would say, in honeyed cadences, “I’m really afraid of you. I think you must see right through people.”

And all this simply in order to please, to be successful, to be fascinating! She waked up every morning with the one thought of “pleasing”! It was the aim and object of her life. If I had told her that in such a house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not attracted by her, it would have caused her real suffering. She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I was in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms gave her the same sort of satisfaction that visitors used to feel in tournaments. My subjection was not enough, and at nights, stretched out like a tigress, uncovered⁠—she was always too hot⁠—she would read the letters sent her by Lubkov; he besought her to return to Russia, vowing if she did not he would rob or murder someone to get the money to come to her. She hated him, but his passionate, slavish letters excited her. She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended me, and observing this, she would, when she