The road to Calvary

Front matter

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III

Unfastening her coat in the hall, Dasha asked the maid, “Is no one at home?”

The Great Mogul—it was thus the maid Lusha was nicknamed, for her bepowdered face with the high cheekbones was very like the face of an idol—took a peep at the looking-glass, and in a thin voice replied that the mistress was not at home, but that the master was at home, and in his study, and that supper would be served in half an hour.

Dasha went into the drawing-room, where she sat down by the piano, crossed her legs and embraced her knees.

Her brother-in-law, Nikolai Ivanovitch, was at home, which meant that he had quarrelled with his wife; he would be feeling injured and would complain. It was only eleven now and there was nothing to do until three when she would fall asleep. Should she read? But what? Besides, she did not want to. Think? But that, if anything, would be worse for her. How comfortless

‘life was at times!

Dasha sighed. She opened the piano and sitting sideways at it, began to play something of Scriabin’s with one hand. It was hard for any one at the awkward age of nineteen, especially for a girl, and not a stupid girl, by any means, and one who, moreover, from some absurd sense of purity was so very severe with all—and these were not few—who expressed a desire to dispel a maiden’s melancholy.

The year before Dasha had come from Samara to

Petersburg for a course in law and had settled with her elder sister Ekaterina Dmitrievna Smokovnikov. Her husband was a well-known advocate and they lived boisterously and in grand style.

Dasha was five years younger than her sister. When Ekaterina Dmitrievna married Dasha was still a child. For the last few years the sisters had seen little of each other and now a new relationship had sprung up between them, an attitude of adoration on the part of Dasha and gentle affection on the part of Ekaterina Dmitrievna.

At first Dasha imitated her sister in everything, admired her beauty, her taste, her manner with people. She was shy of her sister’s friends and in her nervousness said rude things to some. Ekaterina Dmitrievna tried to make her house a model of taste and modernity, of the kind that had not yet become popular. She did not miss a single exhibition and bought futurist pictures. On this account, during the last year, there had been stormy scenes with her husband, who liked paintings of the idealistic kind, while Ekaterina Dmitrievna, with all her feminine enthusiasm, resolved to suffer for the new art rather than be thought old-fashioned.

Dasha, too, admired these strange pictures which had been hung about the drawing-room, though she thought sometimes in sorrow that the square figures with their geometrical faces and superfluous quantity of arms and legs, and the thickly laid on paint which was like a headache—in fact the whole of the manufacturing, cast-iron, cynical poetry which had risen against the Lord God, was rather beyond her dull imagination.

Every Tuesday in the Smokovnikovs’ dining-room, a gay and noisy company was gathered to supper. There were talkative advocates, admirers of the opposite sex, and two or three journalists who carefully followed the new literary tendencies and knew well what attitude to adopt in home and foreign politics; there was the highly strung critic Chirva, who was working on one of his usual literary catastrophes. Sometimes, very early, young poets came, leaving manuscripts of their verses in the hall, in their coat pockets. Just before supper some celebrity would appear in the drawing-room, would walk slowly up to the hostess, bend over her hand and sit down with dignity in an armchair. Half way through supper one would hear some one in the hall noisily taking off his leather galoshes and a velvety voice would say “I greet you, O Great Mogul!” and then over the hostess’s chair would bend the clean-shaven face of the resigned stage-lover.

“Katusha,”’ he would say every time, “from today I’ve sworn not to drink any more. Really I have.”

For Dasha the most important person at these suppers was her sister. Dasha was angry with those who were not sufficiently attentive to the dear, kind, simple-hearted Ekaterina Dmitrievna and was jealous of those who were too attentive, casting angry glances at the culprits.

By degrees she grew accustomed to the crowds, so confusing to the inexperienced. Advocates’ assistants she now despised; besides their rough morning-coats, lilac neckties and partings in the middle of the hair, there was nothing else in them. The resigned stage-lover she hated. He had no right to call her sister Katie, or the Great Mogul, Great Mogul, nor had he any right whatever, when he finished a glass of vodka, to wink a protruding eye at Dasha and to say “I drink to the blossoming almond!”

Every time this happened Dasha choked with rage.

Her cheeks were certainly rosy and do what she would she could not get rid of the almond-blossom color. But at table Dasha’s face felt as red as a beetroot.

In the summer Dasha did not go to her father’s in hot, dusty Samara, but gladly agreed to stay by the sea with her sister in Sestroretska. The same people were there that one saw in the winter, only one met them more often, went boating with them, ate ices in the pine woods, listened to music in the evenings and supped noisily on the verandas of the boarding-houses beneath the stars.

Ekaterina Dmitrievna ordered Dasha a white embroidered dress, a pink gauze hat, trimmed with a black ribbon, and a broad silk sash to be tied in a large bow at the back, and suddenly, as though his eyes were only just opened, Kulichok, her brother-in-law’s assistant, fell in love with Dasha.

But he belonged to the “despised.’’ Dasha was furious. She took him for a walk in the woods and without giving him an opportunity to say a word in self-defence (he was merely able to wipe his brow with his pocket-handkerchief, rolled into a ball) she told him that she was not a bourgeois and would not allow herself to be regarded as a “female,” that she was annoyed and insulted, and considered him disgusting, and that she would that very day complain to her brother-in-law.

And complain to her brother-in-law she did that very evening. Nikolai Ivanovitch let her finish to the end while he stroked his thin beard and gazed in wonder at Dasha’s almond-blossom cheeks, grown a deeper shade with indignation, at her furiously agitated hat, at the whole of Dasha’s slim white figure; then he sat down on the sand by the water and began to laugh. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, saying, “Go away, Daria, go away, or I’ll die!’

Dasha went, comprehending nothing, confused and disturbed. Kulichok now dared not look at her; he grew thin and retired. Dasha’s honour was saved. But the whole incident unexpectedly aroused in her dormant feelings. Broken was that subtle calmness; it seemed as though into the whole of Dasha’s body, from her head to her heels, there had entered another being, suffocating, illusive, formless and disgusting. Dasha felt this being in her very bones; she was tormented by it as by something unclean: she wanted to wash off this invisible web, to be again fresh, cool and light-hearted.

She now played tennis for hours at a time, bathed twice a day, rose early in the morning, when large dewdrops were still shining on the leaves and vapour rose from the purple sea, as smooth as a mirror, and the wet tables were being placed on the deserted veranda, and the wet gravel paths were being swept.

But, when heated by the sun, or at night in her soft bed the other being revived from all these repressions ; carefully it found its way to her heart and squeezed it with its warm paw.

It could not be shaken off, nor, like the blood from Blue Beard’s key, could it be washed off.

All their friends, and most of all her sister, found that Dasha had improved this summer, in fact that she was growing prettier every day.

One day Ekaterina Dmitrievna, going into her sister’s room, said, ‘““What’s going to happen to us next?”

“What do you mean, Katia?’

Dasha, in her chemise, was sitting on the bed, twisting her ash-coloured hair into a large knot.

“You're getting too pretty. It’s quite frightening to think what you’ll do next.”

Dasha with her severe ‘‘thick-dashed” eyes looked at her sister and turned away. Her cheeks and ears went a bright red.

“Katia, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that; I don’t like it.”

Ekaterina Dmitrievna sat down on the bed, put her cheek against Dasha’s bare back and, laughing, kissed her between the shoulder blades.

“What a horned monster we are; not like a frog or a hedgehog or a wildcat.”

And her sister began to laugh just as Nikolai Ivanovitch had done. They did not care to understand what had happened to Dasha, or it seemed to them just as it should be and quite natural.

One day an Englishman appeared on the crowded tennis-court. He was thin, clean-shaven, had a protruding chin and childlike eyes. He was so immaculately dressed that certain of Ekaterina Dmitrievna’s younger followers grew quite depressed. He asked Dasha for a game and played like a machine. It seemed to Dasha the whole time they were playing that he did not look at her once, but stared past her. She lost and suggested another game. For greater freedom she rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse. A lock of hair came down from beneath her piqué cap; she did not stop to tidy it. Returning the ball with a strong drive by the net he thought :

“Here is a clever Russian girl with an inexplicable grace in her every movement and a flush on her cheek.”

The Englishman won this time, too. He bowed to Dasha and, putting on his blazer—he was quite unfeeling— lighted a fragrant cigarette, and sitting down near by, asked for a glass of lemonade.

Playing a third set with a distinguished schoolboy, He was sitting at the little table, nursing his foot, in a silk sock; his hat was pushed to the back of his head, and without moving, he was gazing at the sea.

At night, lying in bed, Dasha recalled all this. She could see herself rushing about the lawn with flushed _ face and hair coming down and she cried for very shame, from a feeling of self-pity and from some other cause that was stronger than herself.

From that day Dasha left off playing tennis. Once her sister said to her, “Dasha, Mr. Bales asks after you every day. Why don’t you play now?”

Dasha opened her mouth wide—she was so startled. Then she said angrily that she had no wish to listen to _ “Gdle gossip,” that she did not know a Mr. Bales and had no wish to know him, and that, anyhow, it was just like his impudence to think that she did not play at “the stupid game” because of him. Dasha refused to have any dinner. She took some bread and gooseberries and went into the woods, and there, amidst the sweet-smelling, warm resinous pines, wandering among the tall red trunks with their rustling tops, she decided that it was useless any longer to hide the truth; she was in love with the Englishman, was miserable and did not want to live.

Thus, raising its head little by little, this second being grew up in Dasha. The presence was revolting at first; it was like something unclean, unwholesome, or like decay. Then she grew accustomed to the dual position as, when ‘the summer had gone by, she would get used to cold winds, cold water, tightening herself in her corsets and to putting on a cloth dress.

Her “monstrous” love for the Englishman lasted for two weeks. Dasha. hated herself and was furious with the man. On several occasions she saw him playing tennis, lazily but well; at other times she saw him running races on the sands, or supping with Russian sailors, and in her despair she thought that he was the most fascinating man in the world.

And then she saw him about with a tall thin girl dressed in white flannel. She was English and his fiancée ~ —and then they went away. Dasha did not sleep the whole of that night. She loathed and hated herself and by morning resolved that this would be the last mistake she would make in her life.

With this she grew calmer and then wondered how | quickly and easily the whole incident had passed. But not everything had passed. Dasha felt how the second being seemed to be merged in her, dissolved in her—to disappear. She had grown different—fresh and light-hearted as of old, but more tender and gentle and incomprehensible; her skin even seemed to be finer; she scarcely knew her face in the glass; her eyes in particular were different—those wonderful eyes; if you looked into them, your head began to swim.

In the middle of August the Smokovnikovs and Dasha — returned to Petersburg to their large flat on the Znamen- — ska. Again there were the Tuesday at-homes, picture — exhibitions, stormy first nights in the theatres, sensational law cases, buying of pictures, hunting for antiques, — night excursions to the gipsies in Samarkand. Again | there appeared the resigned stage-lover, who had lost — twenty-three pounds in weight during his mineral-water — treatment, and, added to all these thrilling pleasures, there were vague, disturbing and joyous rumours that some change was in preparation.

Dasha now had little time to think or to feel. In the © morning there were lectures; in the afternoon shopping with her sister and in the evening theatres, suppers, — people—not a moment to be alone.

On one of the Tuesday at-homes, after supper, when they were all drinking liqueurs, Alexis Alexeyevitch Bezsonov came into the drawing-room. Catching sight of — him in the doorway, Ekaterina Dmitrievna flushed a deep red. General conversation ceased. Bezsonov sat down on the couch and Ekaterina Dmitrievna handed him a cup of coffee.

He was joined by two connoisseurs of literature—two advocates—but with a strange long glance at the hostess, Bezsonov unexpectedly announced that in general there was no art, that all we had was charlatanism, the fakir’s trick of making a monkey climb to heaven up a rope.

“The trick in itself is harmless; in art it is subtle, devilish deception. You’ve come to hear poetry. What does that mean, now? Some family man of thirty-five will suddenly get up and pretend that there is something in him that others haven’t got—something not human— and he’ll tell you in rhyme how he wants to corrupt a girl and you'll think it very exalted. I hate it. There’s no poetry in it. Everything has long been dead, art as well as people. Russia has fallen and a flock of crows are feasting on her body. All who write poetry will go to hell.”

He spoke quietly, in a deep voice. Two bright red spots appeared on his pale, sullen face. His soft collar was crumpled; his coat was covered with ash; the coffee in the cup he was holding was trickling on to the carpet.

The literary connoisseurs were ready to argue, but Bezsonov paid no attention to them; with bedimmed eyes he was watching Ekaterina Dmitrievna. He rose and went over to her, and Dasha heard him say, “I can’t stand people. Can I go?’

Timidly she asked him to read something. He shook his head and in taking leave, held her hand so long that Ekaterina Dmitrievna went red all over.

When he had gone a discussion arose. The men all agreed that “there are limits,” and “you can’t so openly despise our society.” Chirva, the critic, went from one to another saying that “he was dead drunk.” The ladies | concluded that “whether Bezsonov was drunk or merely in one of his moods, was no matter; he was a most exciting person and they would have them all know it.”

At dinner the next day, Dasha announced that Bezsonov seemed to her one of those rare “real” personalities, whose experiences, passions, sins, tastes, as a reflection of light, were reflected in the lives of all the people surrounding Ekaterina Dmitrievna, who live by them alone. “I can understand, Katia, how you can lose your head over such a man.” |

Nikolai Ivanovitch objected. “You are influenced, Dasha, by the fact of his being a celebrity.” Ekaterina Dmitrievna was silent. Bezsonov did not come again to the Smokovnikovs. There was a rumour that he was frequently behind the scenes with the actress, Charodeieva. Kulichok and his friends went to see this actress and © were disappointed. She was as thin as a bone; nothing of her but lace petticoats.

One day Dasha met Bezsonov at an exhibition. He was standing by the window indifferently turning over | the leaves of the catalogue and in front of him, as though standing before a wax image, were two sturdy girl students gazing at him with petrified smiles. Dasha walked past quickly and in the next room she sat down on a chair. Her legs suddenly gave way beneath her and she felt miserable without knowing why.

After this she bought Bezsonov’s photograph and put it on her table. His poems—there were three little white volumes—at first had the effect of poison on her. She went about for days distraught, as though she had be- — come a participant in some evil, mysterious rite. But rereading them again and again she began to enjoy the unwholesome feverish sensations; some one seemed to whisper to her to forget, to slacken, to trample on some precious thing, to long for something which never was.

It was on account of Bezsonov that she took to going to the meetings of the Philosophical Evenings Society. He used to come late and rarely spoke, but each time, Dasha returned home in a state of excitement and was glad if she found visitors there. Her pride was quiescent.

Tonight she had to play Scriabin in solitude. Like little balls of ice the notes fall on the heart, in the depths of a bottomless lake; falling they disturb the water and sink, and the water flows in and recedes, and in the burning darkness, the heart beats loudly and fast, and it seems that soon, now, this very moment, some impossible thing must happen.

Dasha let her hands fall on her knees and raised her head. In the soft light cast by the orange lamp-shade there stared at her from the walls purple, swollen, grinning faces with bulging eyes, looking like the ghosts of protoplasmic chaos greedily stuck in the garden of the Lord God on the first day of creation.

“Yes, my dear ladies, things are bad with us,” Dasha said. Then she played a scale, quietly shut the lid of the piano; from a little Japanese box standing on a small table by a couch, she took a cigarette, which she lighted, but it made her cough, so she crumpled it up on the _ash-tray.

“Nikolai Ivanovitch, what time is it?” Dasha called, loudly enough to be heard through four rooms. Something fell over in the study, but there was no reply. The Great Mogul appeared and taking a peep in the looking-glass, announced that supper was ready.

At the table she sat near a vase of fading flowers;

she pulled them to pieces and put the petals on the tablecloth. The Mogul served tea, cold meat and an omelette. Nikolai Ivanovitch appeared at last. He wore a new suit of blue clothes, but no collar. His hair was unkempt and on his beard, which was crushed on one side, there hung a piece of fluff from the sofa cushions.

Nikolai Ivanovitch nodded sullenly to Dasha, sat down at the end of the table, pulled the omelette dish over to himself and began to eat greedily.

Having finished, he leaned his elbow on the edge of the table, rested his cheek on his large, hairy fist, and fixing his eyes vacantly on the heap of torn petals, he said in a low, almost unnatural voice:

“Last night your sister was unfaithful to me.”

IV

Her own sister, Katia, had committed some incomprehensible, dark, terrible deed. Last night her head had lain on the pillow, averted from all things living dear and affectionate, and now her body was crushed and hidden. Shuddering, this is how she visualized what Nikolai Ivanovitch had called unfaithfulness. And _added to all, Katia was not at home, as though she no lenger existed on earth.

For the first few moments Dasha was stunned and her eyes grew dim. Without a movement she sat ex-

-pecting to hear Nikolai Ivanovitch burst out screaming or sobbing. But he did not add a word after his an- “nouncement ; he kept toying with a fork-rest lying on the ‘table. Dasha dared not look him in the face.

After a long silence, he moved his chair back with a clatter and went into his study. ‘“He’ll shoot himself,”

Dasha thought. But this, too, did not happen. In a momentary feeling of acute pity she recalled how his large, hairy arm rested on the table, but then he faded from her vision and Dasha kept on repeating to herself:

“What is to be done? What is to be done?” There was -a ringing sound in her brain; everything, everything was shattered and mutilated.

From behind the heavy curtains the Great Mogul ap-

_ peared with atray. Dasha looked into her powdered face and suddenly realized that there was no Great Mogul now, nor would there ever be. ‘Tears came into her eyes. She clenched her teeth and rushed into the draw- _ ing-room.

There, every little thing had been placed and every picture had been hung by Katia’s loving hand. But Katia’s soul had gone out of the room and everything in it was barren and desolate. Dasha sat down on the sofa. By degrees her gaze grew fixed on a recently acquired picture, which was hanging on the wall above the piano. For the first time she saw and understood its meaning.

It represented a naked woman, of a blear-red colour, like raw skin. The mouth was on one side; instead of a nose there was a triangular hole; the head was square with a piece of real stuff stuck on it; the legs and knees were in jointed sections; in the hand she held a flower. The other details were horrible. Most horrible of all was the corner in which she sat, bow-legged—a dull, browncoloured spot—such spots, no doubt, as there are in hell. The picture was called “Love,” but Katia used to call it “The Modern Venus.”

“T see now why Katia was so delighted with the abandoned woman. She is like that herself now, with a flower in some corner.” Dasha lay face downwards on the cushion, digging her teeth into it to prevent herself from screaming. She burst into tears. After a time, Nikolai Ivanovitch came into the room. He stood with his legs apart, snapped his cigarette-lighter viciously and blew out a cloud of smoke. Then he walked over to the piano and began to strum on it with one finger, unexpectedly strumming out the tune of “Chaffinch.” He banged down the lid of the piano and said, “It was to be expected.”

Dasha repeated the words to herself several times to comprehend their meaning. A loud ring was heard in the hall. Nikolai Ivanovitch raised his hand to stroke his beard, but with a smothered exclamation of “Q-o-o!”? he dropped it and walked quickly out of the room into his study. Along the passage came the sound of the Great Mogul’s footsteps, like horse-hoofs, Dasha sprang up from the sofa with bedimmed eyes and fast-beating heart and rushed out into the hall.

There stood Ekaterina Dmitrievna with her nose screwed up, clumsily trying to untie the mauve bow of her hood with reddened, cold fingers. She offered her cheek to Dasha, but receiving no kiss, she threw off her hood with a shake of the head and with her grey eyes looked intently at her sister.

“Has anything happened here? Have you quarrelled?”’ she asked in a deep, low voice, always so charmingly sweet.

Dasha’s gaze was fixed on Nikolai Ivanovitch’s leather galoshes, about which they used to say at home that they walked of themselves ; they now stood like a couple of orphans. Dasha’s chin quivered.

“It’s nothing. Nothing has happened.”

Ekaterina Dmitrievna slowly unfastened the large buttons of her squirrel coat, which she threw off, re- _vealing her bare shoulders. She looked so warm and soft and tired. Bending down to undo her gaiters, she said: ‘““We couldn’t find a motor at first and I got my feet wet!”

Dasha, still staring at Nikolai Ivanovitch’s galoshes, ‘asked coldly, ““Where have you been, Katia?’

“At some literary supper, my dear, but I don’t know in whose honour it was given, upon my word. ‘The usual thing. And I’m dead tired and sleepy.”

She went into the dining-room, where she threw her leather handbag on to the table and, wiping her nose, asked, ““Who’s been tearing the flowers? And where’s Nikolai Ivanovitch ?”

Dasha was nonplussed. No matter from what angle she regarded her sister, she did not seem a whit like the abandoned woman in the picture. She did not seem strange to her; on the contrary, she was so particularly dear and sweet tonight that she wanted to caress her all over. But gathering all her courage and digging her nails into the tablecloth at the exact spot where Nikolai Ivanovitch had eaten his omelette, she said:

‘Katia?

“What is it, my dear?”

“T know everything.”

“What do you know? What has happened, in God’s name ?”’ | | Ekaterina Dmitrievna sat down by the table, her knees touching Dasha’s legs, and looked her curiously

up and down.

“Nikolai Ivanovitch has told me all.”

She did not see her sister’s face, did not know what was passing within her.

After a silence which seemed so long that one must die of it, Ekaterina Dmitrievna said angrily:

“What shocking thing has Nikolai Ivanovitch been saying about me?’

“You know, Katia.”

ha don't.’

The words fell from her like an icicle.

Dasha threw herself at her feet. )

“Then it’s not true? Katia, my dear, beautiful sister, it isn’t true, is it?’ And she began to shower kisses on Katia’s warm, scented hands with the tiny blue veins running along them like rivulets.

“Of course, it’s not true,’ Ekaterina Dmitrievna replied, closing her eyes wearily. ‘You're going to cry now and your eyes will be red tomorrow and your nose swollen.” |

She lifted Dasha and ra a long time pressed her lips against her hair. “I’m so stupid,” Dasha mumbled into her breast. But at this moment, from behind the study door, Nikolai Ivanovitch’s voice said loudly and deliberately :

“She is lying.”

The sisters turned round quickly, but the door was shut.

“Go to bed, my child,” Ekaterina Dmitrievna said. “V’ll go and clear up the situation. A pleasant job, when I can barely stand.”

She led Dasha to her room and made the sign of the cross over her, then she returned to the dining-room, snatched up her handbag, rearranged the combs in her hair and with her finger knocked softly on the study door.

“Open the door, Nikolai.”

There was a sinister silence, then a snort and a turn of the key. Ekaterina Dmitrievna entered to see her husband’s broad back moving towards the table, near which he sat down on a leather armchair, rested his elbows on the arms of it, and taking up an ivory paper-knife, he savagely passed it along the back of a book (a novel by Wassermann entitled “A Man of Forty’’).

All this was done as though Ekaterina Dmitrievna ‘were not in the room.

She sat down on the couch, pulled her skirt over her legs, put her handkerchief into her handbag, which she shut with a snap. At the sound the tuft of hair on the top of Nikolai Ivanovitch’s head trembled.

“There is one thing I don’t understand,” she said. “You are free to think what you choose, but please don’t initiate Dasha into your moods.”

_ At this he turned quickly in his chair and stretching out his neck and beard, said, barely moving his lips:

“You have the impertinence to call this my mood?”

“T don’t understand you.”

“Hm! You don’t understand! You understand well enough how to behave like a woman of the streets!”

At these words Ekaterina Dmitrievna opened her lips slightly. She looked at her husband’s purple, perspiring face, distorted with rage, and said quietly:

“Since when did you learn to speak to me disrespectfully °’-

“T humbly beg your pardon, but I can’t talk in any other way. I want to know the details.”

“What details?”

“Don’t lie to me, to my face.”

“Oh, it’s about that, is it?” From exhaustion Ekaterina Dmitrievna rolled her large eyes. “The other day I said some absurd thing or other to you. . . . I had forgotten all about it.”

“With whom did it happen?”

“T don’t know.”

“For the second time, don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying. There’s no fun in lying to you. I did say something; I’d say anything when I’m angry, but I’d forgotten all about it.” |