III
“Well then, I’ll tell you. But do you really want to hear it?”
I repeated that I wished it very much. He paused, rubbed his face with his hands, and began:
“If I am to tell it, I must tell everything from the beginning: I must tell how and why I married, and the kind of man I was before my marriage.
“Till my marriage I lived as everybody does, that is, everybody in our class. I am a landowner and a graduate of the university, and was a marshal of the gentry. Before my marriage I lived as everyone does, that is, dissolutely; and while living dissolutely I was convinced, like everyone else in our class, that I was living as one has to. I thought I was a charming fellow and quite a moral man. I was not a seducer, had no unnatural tastes, did not make that the chief purpose of my life as many of my associates did, but I practiced debauchery in a steady, decent way for health’s sake. I avoided women who might tie my hands by having a child or by attachment for me. However, there may have been children and attachments, but I acted as if there were not. And this I not only considered moral, but I was even proud of it.”
He paused and gave vent to his peculiar sound, as he evidently did whenever a new idea occurred to him.
“And you know, that is the chief abomination!” he exclaimed. “Dissoluteness does not lie in anything physical—no kind of physical misconduct is debauchery; real debauchery lies precisely in freeing oneself from moral relations with a woman with whom you have physical intimacy. And such emancipation I regarded as a merit. I remember how I once worried because I had not had an opportunity to pay a woman who gave herself to me (having probably taken a fancy to me) and how I only became tranquil after having sent her some money—thereby intimating that I did not consider myself in any way morally bound to her … Don’t nod as if you agreed with me,” he suddenly shouted at me. “Don’t I know these things? We all, and you too unless you are a rare exception, hold those same views, just as I used to. Never mind, I beg your pardon, but the fact is that it’s terrible, terrible, terrible!”
“What is terrible?” I asked.
“That abyss of error in which we live regarding women and our relations with them. No, I can’t speak calmly about it, not because of that ‘episode,’ as he called it, in my life, but because since that ‘episode’ occurred my eyes have been opened and I have seen everything in quite a different light. Everything reversed, everything reversed!”
He lit a cigarette and began to speak, leaning his elbows on his knees.
It was too dark to see his face, but, above the jolting of the train, I could hear his impressive and pleasant voice.