III
In his room upstairs, Voskresenski changed his clothes, pulled out from under the bed his old reddish box plastered all over with labels, and began to pack. Into it he flung furiously books and lectures, squeezed in his linen, crumpled anyhow in his precipitation, and furiously tightened the ropes and straps. As his physical force, whipped up by the recent explosion of still unsatisfied anger, was spending itself, he became slightly cooler and calmer.
His packing finished, he drew himself up and looked round. All of a sudden he regretted leaving his room, as if in it he were leaving a part of himself. As soon as he woke up in the morning, he had only to raise his head from the pillow to see right in front of him the dark blue stripe of the sea just level with the windows. The light, pink, transparent blind would be gently trembling from the breeze and the whole room would be so full of morning light, so impregnated by a strong and invigorating sea air, that in the early days, on waking up, the student used often to laugh aloud from some inner unconscious joy of life.
Voskresenski went on to the balcony. Far out in front, a long narrow cape, rounded at the end, jutted out into the sea. This rounded part was called the Battery, and behind it, circling it sharply, a small steamer was heading out to sea. Its panting snorts, like the heavy breathing of a dog, could be heard distinctly. Under the white awning, dark human figures were distinguishable. The steam-launch rocked a little, but boldly clambered up each wave and rolled over it, tucking its nose gallantly into the next, while the severed water washed over its deck. And still further out, as if midway between the shore and the horizon, the black, powerful mass of a huge steamer, with funnels bent behind, was moving with perfect balance noiselessly and evenly. And there came to Voskresenski in that moment, as through a tiny little cloud of invading sorrow, that delightful, audacious longing which he always experienced when thinking of long journeys, new impressions, new faces, all the limitless stretch of the young untasted life that lay before him.
“Tomorrow, I, too, shall find myself on board ship with others. I’ll make fresh acquaintances, look at new shores, at the sea,” he thought to himself. “It’s good.”
“Sachenka, where are you? Come here.” It was Anna Georgievna’s voice.
He returned quickly to his room, buttoning on the way the collar of his Russian shirt, and arranging his hair. A formless, vague fright, a sort of dark, enervating presentiment stirred for an instant in his soul.
“I’m tired,” Anna Georgievna was saying, slightly out of breath. “How nice it is in here, so cool.”
She sat down on the ledge of the window. Against the background of the dazzling whitish-blue sky and the deep blue of the sea beneath, the short, full figure, in its white peignoir, outlined itself with a soft and elegant precision. Her rough, reddish curls lit up her head in that light with a deep golden gleam.
“Well, what is it, my angry sparrow?” she asked, with tender familiarity. “Haven’t you cooled down yet?”
“Yes, I’ve cooled down. I’m going away at once,” he answered in a surly tone.
“Sacha.”
She pronounced his name in a low, strange, agitated tone that Voskresenski had never heard before in his life. He started and looked at her attentively. But she was sitting with her back to the bright light and it was impossible to distinguish her expression. For all that, it seemed to the student that her eyes were shining in an unusual way.
“Sacha, my own one,” she said suddenly in a hurried, stifled voice. “No, no, dear, you won’t go away. Do you hear? Come here to me … to me, I tell you. Oh, what a big stupid you are! Do you hear? You mustn’t think of going! I don’t wish it. My darling, you will stay …”
She seized his hands, pressed them tightly, and, without letting them out of her own, placed them on her knees so that, for an instant, he felt her firm and, as it were, sliding figure under the light rough material of her peignoir.
“You will stay? Yes?” she asked in a quick whisper, looking up into his face.
He raised his eyes and met her clouded, fixed, avid glance. A burning joy leaped from his heart, transfusing his breast, striking into his head and throbbing in his temples. All confusion and awkwardness had disappeared. On the contrary, it was a dreadful oppressive delight to gaze, so close and shamelessly, so endlessly, without pronouncing a single word, into those beautiful eyes, still shining with tears and senseless with passion. Half consciously he divined that her glance had fallen below his eyes, and he lowered his own to her full, bright, parted lips, behind which gleamed the moist whiteness of her teeth. Suddenly it seemed to him that the air in the room had become suffocating; his mouth was dry and he could scarcely breathe.
“You will stay? Yes? True?”
He put his arms round her and immediately felt the large beautiful body light and alive, obedient to every movement, every hint of his hands. A sort of burning, arid whirl caught him suddenly, crippling his will, his judgment, all his proud, chaste thoughts, everything in him that was clean and human. For some reason or other, he recalled the bathing before dinner and those warm, swinging insatiable waves.
“Darling, is it true, true?” she was repeating ceaselessly.
Roughly, like a savage animal, he caught her up and lifted her in his arms. Then, as if in delirium, he heard her frightened whisper: “The door—for God’s sake the—door—”
Mechanically he turned round, saw the wide-open door and beyond it the darkness of the corridor, but he did not understand the sense of these words, the significance of this door, and he immediately forgot it all. The dark, half-closed eyes were suddenly so close to his face that their contour seemed indefinite, blurred, and they themselves became enormous, fixed, monstrously shiny, and quite strange to him. Hot rocking waves broke on him, drowning his reason, burning him as with fiery circling coils. …
Later on he woke up and heard with surprise her voice, which seemed to be imploring him about something:
“I adore you … my young, strong, beautiful …”
She was sitting on his bed beside him, leaning her head against his shoulder with a submissive, fawning air and trying to catch his eye. But he was looking away, frowning and pulling nervously with a shaking hand at the fringe of his rug which was hanging on the foot of the bed. An invincible disgust was growing in him every second towards this woman, who had just given herself to him. He himself understood the injustice and selfishness of this feeling, but he could not overcome it, even out of gratitude, even out of compassion. Her proximity was physically repulsive to him, her touch, the noise of her rapid, jerky breathing; and though he blamed only himself for everything that had happened, a blind, senseless hatred and spite towards her was filling his soul.
“Oh, what a scoundrel I am! What a scoundrel!” he was thinking, and at the same time he was afraid of her reading his thoughts and feelings on his face.
“My darling adored one,” she was saying tenderly, “why have you turned away from me? Are you angry? Is anything the matter with you? Oh, my dear one, didn’t you really notice that I loved you? From the very beginning, from the very first day. … Ah, but no. When you came to us in Moscow I didn’t like you. What an angry one, I thought. But then afterwards … But, dearie, won’t you look at me?”
The student mastered himself and managed to give her awkwardly from under his eyebrows aside glance. His very throat contracted, so disgusting seemed the reddened face, splashed with powder at the nostrils and chin, the small wrinkles round the eyes and the upper lip, never noticed until this moment, and, above all, her suppliant, anxious, culpable devotion—a sort of dog’s look. A shudder of repulsion came over him as he turned his head away.
“But why am I not repulsive to her?” he was thinking in despair. “Why? Ah, what a scoundrel I am!”
“Anna Georgievna—Nina,” he stammered out in an unnatural, wooden voice, “you’ll forgive me. … You’ll excuse me. I’m agitated. I don’t know what I’m saying. … Understand me. Don’t be angry. … I must be by myself. My head is going round and round.”
He made an involuntary movement, as if to turn away from her, and she understood it. Her arms, that had been clinging round his neck, fell helplessly along her knees and her head bent down. She sat like this for a few more minutes and then rose silently with a resigned expression.
She understood better than the student what was happening to him now. She knew that for men the first steps in sensual passion produced the same terrible sickly sensation on beginners as the first draughts of opium, the first cigarette, the first drunken bout. She knew, too, that until this he had been intimate with no other woman, that for him she was the first; knew this from his own words before, felt it by his savage, severe shyness, his awkwardness and roughness with her.
She wanted to console, to calm him, to explain in tender motherly words the cause of his suffering, for she knew that he suffered. But she—ordinarily so bold, so self-assured—could find no words. She felt confused and shy like a young girl and she felt at fault for his fall, for his silent anxiety, for her thirty-five years, and because she did not know, and was unable to discover, how she could help him.
“Sacha, this will pass,” she said at last, almost under her breath. “This will pass, believe me. Calm yourself. But don’t go away. You hear me? You’ll tell me if you want to go away, won’t you?”
“Yes. … All right, yes—yes,” he repeated impatiently, looking at the door all the time.
She sighed and left the room noiselessly. Then Voskresenski clutched his hair with both hands and fell with a groan face downwards on the pillow.