“Yes, yes, I remember,” Sanin answered hurriedly. He had long ago forgotten all his Latin, and had only very faint notions about the _Æneid_.
Maria Nikolaevna glanced at him, as her way was, a little from one side and looking upwards. “Don’t imagine, though, that I am very learned. Mercy on us! no; I’m not learned, and I’ve no talents of any sort. I scarcely know how to write … really; I can’t read aloud; nor play the piano, nor draw, nor sew—nothing! That’s what I am—there you have me!”
She threw out her hands. “I tell you all this,” she said, “first, so as not to hear those fools (she pointed to the stage where at that instant the actor’s place was being filled by an actress, also howling, and also with her elbows projecting before her) and secondly, because I’m in your debt; you told me all about yourself yesterday.”
“It was your pleasure to question me,” observed Sanin.
Maria Nikolaevna suddenly turned to him. “And it’s not your pleasure to know just what sort of woman I am? I can’t wonder at it, though,” she went on, leaning back again on the sofa cushions. “A man just going to be married, and for love, and after a duel…. What thoughts could he have for anything else?”
Maria Nikolaevna relapsed into dreamy silence, and began biting the handle of her fan with her big, but even, milkwhite teeth.
And Sanin felt mounting to his head again that intoxication which he had not been able to get rid of for the last two days.
The conversation between him and Maria Nikolaevna was carried on in an undertone, almost in a whisper, and this irritated and disturbed him the more….
When would it all end?
Weak people never put an end to things themselves—they always wait for the end.
Some one sneezed on the stage; this sneeze had been put into the play by the author as the “comic relief” or “element”; there was certainly no other comic element in it; and the audience made the most of it; they laughed.
This laugh, too, jarred upon Sanin.
There were moments when he actually did not know whether he was furious or delighted, bored or amused. Oh, if Gemma could have seen him!
“It’s really curious,” Maria Nikolaevna began all at once. “A man informs one and in such a calm voice, ‘I am going to get married’; but no one calmly says to one, ‘I’m going to throw myself in the water.’ And yet what difference is there? It’s curious, really.”
Annoyance got the upper hand of Sanin. “There’s a great difference, Maria Nikolaevna! It’s not dreadful at all to throw oneself in the water if one can swim; and besides … as to the strangeness of marriages, if you come to that …”
He stopped short abruptly and bit his tongue.
Maria Nikolaevna slapped her open hand with her fan.
“Go on, Dimitri Pavlovitch, go on—I know what you were going to say. ‘If it comes to that, my dear madam, Maria Nikolaevna Polozov,’ you were going to say, ‘anything more curious than _your_ marriage it would be impossible to conceive…. I know your husband well, from a child!’ That’s what you were going to say, you who can swim!”
“Excuse me,” Sanin was beginning….
“Isn’t it the truth? Isn’t it the truth?” Maria Nikolaevna pronounced insistently.
“Come, look me in the face and tell me I was wrong!”
Sanin did not know what to do with his eyes. “Well, if you like; it’s the truth, if you absolutely insist upon it,” he said at last.
Maria Nikolaevna shook her head. “Quite so, quite so. Well, and did you ask yourself, you who can swim, what could be the reason of such a strange … step on the part of a woman, not poor … and not a fool … and not ugly? All that does not interest you, perhaps, but no matter. I’ll tell you the reason not this minute, but directly the _entr’acte_ is over. I am in continual uneasiness for fear some one should come in….”
Maria Nikolaevna had hardly uttered this last word when the outer door actually was half opened, and into the box was thrust a head—red, oily, perspiring, still young, but toothless; with sleek long hair, a pendent nose, huge ears like a bat’s, with gold spectacles on inquisitive dull eyes, and a _pince-nez_ over the spectacles. The head looked round, saw Maria Nikolaevna, gave a nasty grin, nodded…. A scraggy neck craned in after it….
Maria Nikolaevna shook her handkerchief at it. “I’m not at home! _Ich bin nicht zu Hause, Herr P…! Ich bin nicht zu Hause…. Ksh-sk! ksh-sh-sh!_”
The head was disconcerted, gave a forced laugh, said with a sort of sob, in imitation of Liszt, at whose feet he had once reverently grovelled, “_Sehr gut, sehr gut!_” and vanished.
“What is that object?” inquired Sanin.
“Oh, a Wiesbaden critic. A literary man or a flunkey, as you like. He is in the pay of a local speculator here, and so is bound to praise everything and be ecstatic over every one, though for his part he is soaked through and through with the nastiest venom, to which he does not dare to give vent. I am afraid he’s an awful scandalmonger; he’ll run at once to tell every one I’m in the theatre. Well, what does it matter?”
The orchestra played through a waltz, the curtain floated up again…. The grimacing and whimpering began again on the stage.
“Well,” began Maria Nikolaevna, sinking again on to the sofa. “Since you are here and obliged to sit with me, instead of enjoying the society of your betrothed—don’t turn away your eyes and get cross—I understand you, and have promised already to let you go to the other end of the earth—but now hear my confession. Do you care to know what I like more than anything?”
“Freedom,” hazarded Sanin.
Maria Nikolaevna laid her hand on his hand.
“Yes, Dimitri Pavlovitch,” she said, and in her voice there was a note of something special, a sort of unmistakable sincerity and gravity, “freedom, more than all and before all. And don’t imagine I am boasting of this—there is nothing praiseworthy in it; only it’s _so_ and always will be _so_ with me to the day of my death. I suppose it must have been that I saw a great deal of slavery in my childhood and suffered enough from it. Yes, and Monsieur Gaston, my tutor, opened my eyes too. Now you can, perhaps, understand why I married Ippolit Sidoritch: with him I’m free, perfectly free as air, as the wind…. And I knew that before marriage; I knew that with him I should be a free Cossack!”
Maria Nikolaevna paused and flung her fan aside.
“I will tell you one thing more; I have no distaste for reflection … it’s amusing, and indeed our brains are given us for that; but on the consequences of what I do I never reflect, and if I suffer I don’t pity myself—not a little bit; it’s not worth it. I have a favourite saying: _Cela ne tire pas à conséquence_,—I don’t know how to say that in Russian. And after all, what does _tire à consequence_? I shan’t be asked to give an account of myself here, you see—in this world; and up there (she pointed upwards with her finger), well, up there—let them manage as best they can. When they come to judge me up there, _I_ shall not be _I_! Are you listening to me? Aren’t you bored?”
Sanin was sitting bent up. He raised his head. “I’m not at all bored, Maria Nikolaevna, and I am listening to you with curiosity. Only I … confess … I wonder why you say all this to me?”
Maria Nikolaevna edged a little away on the sofa.
“You wonder?… Are you slow to guess? Or so modest?”
Sanin lifted his head higher than before.
“I tell you all this,” Maria Nikolaevna continued in an unmoved tone, which did not, however, at all correspond with the expression of her face, “because I like you very much; yes, don’t be surprised, I’m not joking; because since I have met you, it would be painful to me that you had a disagreeable recollection of me … not disagreeable even, that I shouldn’t mind, but untrue. That’s why I have made you come here, and am staying alone with you and talking to you so openly…. Yes, yes, openly. I’m not telling a lie. And observe, Dimitri Pavlovitch, I know you’re in love with another woman, that you’re going to be married to her…. Do justice to my disinterestedness! Though indeed it’s a good opportunity for you to say in your turn: _Cela ne tire pas à conséquence_!”
She laughed, but her laugh suddenly broke off, and she stayed motionless, as though her own words had suddenly struck her, and in her eyes, usually so gay and bold, there was a gleam of something like timidity, even like sadness.
“Snake! ah, she’s a snake!” Sanin was thinking meanwhile; “but what a lovely snake!”
“Give me my opera-glass,” Maria Nikolaevna said suddenly. “I want to see whether this _jeune première_ really is so ugly. Upon my word, one might fancy the government appointed her in the interests of morality, so that the young men might not lose their heads over her.”
Sanin handed her the opera-glass, and as she took it from him, swiftly, but hardly audibly, she snatched his hand in both of hers.
“Please don’t be serious,” she whispered with a smile. “Do you know what, no one can put fetters on me, but then you see I put no fetters on others. I love freedom, and I don’t acknowledge duties—not only for myself. Now move to one side a little, and let us listen to the play.”