The road to Calvary

Front matter

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II

“We don’t want to remember anything. We say, Enough, turn your back on the past! What is there in the past for me? Milo’s Venus? What use is she to me? You can’t eat her! She doesn’t even make the hair grow! What do I want with the stone carcass? But you must have art! art! You like to tickle your heels with the word. Look to the side of you! look before you! look under your feet! Aren’t those American boots you have on ? Three cheers for American boots! A red motor-car, rubber tires, a pool of petrol, a hundred miles an hour, there you have art! It makes you want to devour space. Or a poster ten yards long with a young man on it in a top-hat as brilliant as the sun, that’s art! It’s your tailor who’s your artist, your present-day genius! I want to devour life and you offer me some sweetened water, good for the sexually impotent. ...”

A burst of laughter and applause came from the back of the narrow hall, where a crowd of undergraduates from the universities were gathered behind the chairs. The speaker, Peter Petrovitch Sapojkov, smiled with his moist mouth. He steadied the wobbling glasses on his big nose and quickly walked down the steps of the wooden ros¬ trum.

To one side of it, at a long table lighted by two fivecandled sconces, sat the members of the Philosophical Evenings Society. There was the President, Antinovsky, a professor of theology, and the lecturer of the evening, the historian Veliaminov; the philosopher Borsky, who had been expelled from the Theological Academy for leanings toward socialism and had in turn abandoned the socialists and been reviled by them; there was the crafty writer, Sakunin, author of some cynical and remarkable books.

The Philosophical Evenings Society had this winter sustained an onslaught from pugnacious youngsters whom no one knew. They attacked venerable writers and esteemed philosophers with such audacity and said such impudently smart things that the detached old house on the Fontanka, where the meetings were held, was packed on Saturdays, the days of public meetings.

It was packed this evening. When Sapojkov disap¬ peared in the crowd amidst spasmodic hand-clapping, there got up on the platform a little man with a knobby shaven head, a young face, yellow skin and high cheek¬ bones. His name was Akundin. He had made his ap¬ pearance there quite recently, and his success, especially among the audience at the back of the hall, was enormous. When one asked who he was and where he came from, sensible people smiled mysteriously. His name was not Akundin, in any case. He had come from abroad; it was for no idle purpose that he had appeared there.

Akundin stroked his thin beard, looked round at the silenced audience, smiled and began to speak.

In the third row by the middle gangway, her chin supported on her closed hand, sat a young girl, in a black cloth dress cut high at the neck. Her fine, ash-coloured hair, drawn over the ears and rolled in a large knot, was caught with a comb. Without a movement or a smile she gazed at the men sitting at the green table; sometimes her eyes became fixed on the candles.

When Akundin, with a bang of his dry fist on the wooden rostrum, cried out, “World economics will strike the first blow of the iron fist on the dome of the Church'! The fight against the Church is purely a question of eco¬ nomics !” the girl sighed slightly and, taking her hand from her reddened chin, she put a caramel in her mouth.

Akundin went on.

“And you are still dreaming your muddled dreams ot the Kingdom of God on earth! Here you are snoring and seeing visions and mumbling Messiahism in your sleep. Yet for all your efforts the people are still asleep. Or do you hope they’ll wake up and speak like Balaam's ass? They’ll wake up, to be sure, but it won’t be the sweet voices of your poets that’ll wake them, nor the smoke of your incense. It will be the factory whistle that’ll wake them! The people will wake and speak, not of Messiahism, but of justice, and their voices will grate on your ears. Or do you still put faith in your rubbish and your bogs? You could go on sleeping here for an¬ other half a century, I believe, but don’t call it Messiah¬ ism. It is not coming; it is passing like a shadow over the earth! It was here in Petersburg, in this beautiful hall, that the Russian peasant was invented. Hundreds of books have been written about him, operas have been composed about him. It is like a game of shadows on a wall. I only fear that the game will end in blood¬ shed. ...”

At this point the President interposed. Akundin gave a faint smile. He took a large dirty pocket-handkerchief and with an habitual gesture, wiped his head and fore¬ head. From the back of the hall voices called out.

“Let him speak!”

“A shame to stop him!”

“It’s disgraceful!”

“Shut up, you there!”

“Shut up yourself!”

Akundin went on.

“The Russian peasant is a peg on which to hang ideas. But if these ideas are organically opposed to his instincts, to his age-long desires, to his primitive idea of justice, his understanding of humanity, your ideas will fall as a seed on a stone. Until the peasant is regarded as a man with an empty stomach, with a spine bent with toil, until you get rid of those Messianic qualities invented for him by some gentleman or other, until then will you have two tragically opposite poles—your excellent theories, born in dim studies, and a greedy, half bestial life. We are not really criticizing you. It would be a waste of time to examine all your mass of human fantasy. No. We say to you, turn your ideas into reality! Don’t sit and phi¬ losophize ! Experiment! Let your experiments be desperate, but you’ll prove the value of your ideas; you’ll know how to live. ...”

The girl in the black cloth dress did not think it worth while to reflect on the speaker’s words. Their arguments were, no doubt, impressive, but the important fact about them all was—well, for instance—and she was quite convinced of this—Akundin loved no one on earth but himself and would have felt no compunction in shooting a man if it were necessary to prove his theories.

While she was thinking this another man approached the green table. He sat slowly down near the President, nodded to right and to left, passed his reddened hand over his fair hair, wet from the snow, wiped his fingers on his pocket-handkerchief, put his hands beneath the table and pulled himself up in his narrow black jacket. He had a swarthy face, arched eyebrows, large grey eyes and hair falling over his forehead like a skull-cap. It was Alexis Alexeyevitch Bezsonov, just as he was pictured in the current number of a weekly journal.

The girl could see nothing now but his almost repul¬ sively handsome face. In a kind of terror she regarded the strange features of which she had dreamt so often in the stormy Petersburg nights.

There he was bending to his neighbor’s ear; he smiled and his smile was simple, but in the line of his nostrils, in the somewhat feminine brows, in some quiet force in his face there was treachery, conceit, and something else which she could not understand, but which excited her more than the rest.

At this moment the lecturer, Veliaminov, red-faced and bearded, with gold spectacles and tufty golden-grey hair around his large head, rose to answer Akundin.

“You are as right as the avalanche crashing down the mountains. We have long been expecting the advent of your terrible age and prophesied the triumph of your truth. It is you who control the elements, not we. We do not prop up your avalanche with our shoulders. We know that when it has rolled to the bottom, to the earth, its strength will be broken, and your higher truth, for the conquest of which you shriek with your factory hooters, will be a mass of broken fragments—chaos—amidst which man will wander stunned. Take care,” Velia¬ minov raised a finger as long as a pencil and looked severely through his spectacles at the audience. “In the paradise of which you dream, in the name of which you want to convert a living man into a syllogism, dressed in a hat and coat and with a rifle over his shoulder, in your terrible paradise a new revolution is preparing, more terrible perhaps than any revolution-—the revolution of the Spirit--”

Akundin interjected coldly from his place:

“That has been foreseen.”

Veliaminov stretched out his hands across the table.

The candles threw a light on the bald patch on his head. He spoke of the sin into which the world had fallen and of the future terrible reckoning. In the hall people began to cough.

During the interval the girl went into the refreshment-room and stood by the door, frowning and apart. Sev¬ eral advocates and their wives were drinking tea and talk¬ ing more loudly than most people. By the stove stood Chernobilin, the famous writer, eating fish and bilberries and glancing now and then with resentful and drunken eyes at the new-comers. Two middle-aged literary women with broad ribbons round their hair were munch¬ ing sandwiches by the counter. Several priests stood staidly aside, not mixing with the laymen. Under the chandelier, his hands behind the tails of his long coat and balancing himself on his heels, was a greyish man with matted hair. This was Chirva, the critic, waiting for some one to come and talk to him. Veliaminov ap¬ peared. One of the literary women rushed up to him and grabbed his sleeve, which he carefully tried to extri¬ cate during their conversation. The other literary wo¬ man also stopped munching and shook off the crumbs; she bent her head and opened her eyes wide. Bezsonoy came up to her, bowing to right and to left with a humble inclination of the head.

The girl in black felt in her bones how the literary woman straightened herself in her corsets and assumed an affected air. Bezsonov said something to her with an indolent smile. She clapped her hands and laughed, roll¬ ing her eyes.

'‘Horrible, dirty creature,” thought the girl and went out of the refreshment-room. Some one called to her. Pushing his way through the crowd was a dark, tired-look¬ ing youth in a velveteen jacket; he nodded joyfully, screwmg up his nose with pleasure. He took her hand. His palm was clammy, on his forehead was a clammy tuft of hair and his oval watery eyes gazed at her with a watery tenderness. It was Alexander Ivanovitch Jirov.

“Well, now, what are you doing here, Dasha Dmitriev¬ na?” he said.

“Just what you are doing,” she replied, withdrawing her hand, which she put into her muff and wiped on her pocket-handker chie f.

He laughed, and looking at her still more tenderly, said:

“How did you like Sapojkov tonight? He spoke like a prophet. His severity of expression is irritating, but his ideas ... At bottom, aren’t they what we all want? Only we’re afraid to say so, he isn’t. Have you seen his latest verse ?

Young, young, young are we all

With devilishly hungry stomachs.

Let us swallow the void. . . .

Very strong and original. Don’t you feel, Daria Dmi¬ trievna, that the new, the new is coming with a rush? It’s our very own, bold, greedy! There’s Akundin, now. There may be too much logic about him, but he hits the nail on the head every time. Another two or three winters like this and the whole thing will crumble; it’ll burst at the seams. Won’t that be good!” He spoke quietly, with a soft smile. Dasha felt him trembling all over as with some horrible excitement. She did not stop to listen, but nodded to him and pushed her way to the cloakroom.

The morose, medal-bedecked porter, who was dragging a bundle of coats and galoshes, paid no heed to Dasha’s proffered ticket. She had to wait long in the draught of the swinging door, where without, in the deserted vesti¬ bule, tall peasant-cabmen, in their wet blue coats, were

mi gaily and impudently offering their services to the people coming out.

“I’ve a fast horse, Your ’Cellency!”

“It’s on your way, on the Peski!”

Suddenly behind her Bezsonov’s voice was heard in a cold staccato: “Porter, my coat, hat and stick.”

Dasha had a sensation of pins and needles running down her back. She turned her head quickly and looked straight into Bezsonov’s eyes. He met her gaze calmly and indifferently, then his eyelids quivered; his grey eyes lighted up, yielding, and Dasha felt her heart beat fast.

“If I am not mistaken,” he said, “we have met at your sister’s.”

“We have,” Dasha replied boldly.

She snatched her coat from the porter and hastened to the door. In the street a damp cold wind caught her dress, dashing the stinging drops against her. Dasha muffled herself to her eyes in her fur collar. Some one catching up with her whispered near her ear: “What eyes! my pretty!”

Dasha walked quickly over the wet asphalt, along the purple quivering lines of electric light. From the swing¬ ing doors of a restaurant a sound of violins was heard playing a waltz. And Dasha, without turning round, hummed into her shaggy fur muff, “It’s not so easy, easy, easy!”

Ill

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

The Great Mpgul—it was thus the maid Lusha was nicknamed, for her bepowdered face with the high cheek¬ bones 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 side¬ ways 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 bois¬ terously 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 ideal¬ istic kind, while Ekaterina Dmitrievna, with all her femi¬ nine 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 head¬ ache—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 what¬ ever, when he finished a glass of vodka, to wink a pro¬ truding eye at Dasha and to say “I drink to the blossom¬ ing 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 embroi¬ dered 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 giv¬ ing him an opportunity to say a word in self-defence (he was merely able to wipe his brow with his pocket-hand¬ kerchief, rolled into a ball) she told him that she was not a bourgeois and would not allow herself to be re¬ garded 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 in¬ dignation, 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 dis¬ turbed. 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 feel¬ ings. 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 some¬ thing 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 homed 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 protrud¬ ing 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 an¬ other game. For greater freedom she rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse. A lock of hair came down from beneath her pique 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 “idle 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 din¬ ner. 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 run¬ ning 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 fiancee —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 mis¬ take 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 in¬ comprehensible ; her skin even seemed to be finer; she scarcely knew her face in the glass; her eyes in particu¬ lar 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 Znamenska. 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 ex¬ citing person and they would have them all know it.”