LITMIR.BIZ

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why she attracted him so, and impatiently awaited the matter being brought to a conclusion. Because of the fact that all this – both the vodka and her familiarity – was in astonishing contradiction to her, he was inwardly getting more and more excited.

      “Well then, another one each and that’ll do!” he says.

      “Quite right, that’ll do,” she replies, striking the same note. “But it’s splendid vodka!”

      Of course, she had touched him with the way she had become so confused the day before when he had told her his name, the way she had been stunned by this unexpected acquaintance with a famous writer – sensing and seeing that confusion was, as always, pleasant, it always disposes you favourably towards a woman, if she is not utterly plain and stupid; it immediately creates a certain intimacy between you and her, lends you boldness in your treatment of her and as though a certain right to her already. But it was not this alone that aroused him: he had apparently struck her as a man as well, while it was with all her poverty and simple-heartedness that she had touched him. He had already adopted an unceremonious way with female admirers, an easy and rapid transition from the first minutes of acquaintance with them to a freedom of manner, ostensibly artistic, and that affected simplicity of questioning: who are you? where from? married or not? He had asked questions like that the day before too – he had gazed into the dusk of the evening at the multicoloured lights on the buoys forming long reflections in the darkening water around the steamboat, at the campfires burning red on the rafts, he had sensed the smell of the smoke from them, thinking: “This needs to be remembered – straight away there seems to be the smell of fish soup in that smoke,” and had asked:

      “May I learn your name?”

      She had quickly told him her first name and patronymic.

      “Are you returning home from somewhere?”

      “I’ve been in Sviyazhsk at my sister’s. Her husband died suddenly, and she was left in a terrible situation, you see.”

      At first she had been so confused that she had kept on looking somewhere into the distance. Then she had started answering more boldly.

      “And are you married too?”

      She had begun grinning strangely:

      “I am. And, alas, not for the first year…”

      “Why ‘alas’?”

      “In my stupidity I hurried into it too early. You don’t have time to look around before your life’s gone by!”

      “Oh, there’s still a long way to go until then.”

      “Alas, not long! And I’ve still experienced nothing in life, nothing!”

      “It’s still not too late to experience things.”

      And at that point, with a grin, she had suddenly shaken her head:

      “And I will!”

      “And what is your husband? A civil servant[113]?”

      She had waved her hand:

      “Oh, a very good and kind but unfortunately completely uninteresting man… The secretary of our District Land Board[114]…”

      “What a sweet, unfortunate woman,” he had thought, and had taken out his cigarette case:

      “Would you like a cigarette?”

      “Very much!”

      And she had clumsily, but courageously lit up, inhaling quickly, in a woman’s way. And inside him once again pity for her had stirred, pity for her familiarity, and, together with the pity – tenderness, and a voluptuous desire to exploit her naivety and tardy inexperience, which, he had already sensed, would be sure to be combined with extreme boldness. Now, sitting in the dining room, he looked with impatience at her thin arms, at the faded and for that reason still more touching little face, at the abundant dark hair, done up any old how[115], which she kept on giving a shake, having taken off her black hat and thrown her little grey coat off her shoulders, off her fustian dress[116]. He was moved and aroused by the frankness with which she had talked to him the day before about her family life, about her age, no longer young, and by the fact that now she had suddenly plucked up her courage[117] and was doing and saying the very things that were so amazingly unsuited to her. She had become slightly flushed from the vodka; even her pale lips had turned pink, and her eyes had filled with a sleepily mocking gleam.

      “You know,” she said suddenly, “there we were talking about dreams: do you know what I dreamt of most of all as a schoolgirl? Ordering myself calling cards! We’d become completely impoverished then, sold the remains of the estate and moved into town, and there was absolutely no one for me to give them to, but how I dreamt! It’s dreadfully silly…”

      He gritted his teeth and took her firmly by the hand, beneath the delicate skin of which all the bones could be felt, but, not understanding him at all, she herself, like an experienced seductress, raised it to his lips and looked at him languorously.

      “Let’s go to my cabin…”

      “Let’s… It really is stuffy somehow in here, full of smoke!”

      And, giving her hair a shake, she picked up her hat.

      He put his arms around her in the corridor. Proudly, voluptuously, she looked at him over her shoulder. With the hatred of passion and love he almost bit her on the cheek. Over her shoulder, she Bacchically[118] presented her lips to him.

      In the half-light of the cabin, with the slatted grille lowered at the window, hurrying to oblige him and make full and audacious use of all the unexpected happiness that had suddenly fallen to her lot with this handsome, strong and famous man, she at once unbuttoned and trampled on the dress that fell off her onto the floor, remaining, slim as a boy, in a light camisole, with bare shoulders and arms and white drawers, and he was agonizingly pierced by the innocence of it all.

      “Shall I take everything off?” she asked in a whisper, utterly like a little girl.

      “Everything, everything,” he said, growing ever more gloomy.

      She submissively and quickly stepped out of all the linen she had thrown down onto the floor, and remained entirely bare, grey-lilac, with that characteristic of a woman’s body when it feels nervously cold, becomes taut and chill and gets covered in goosebumps, wearing nothing but cheap grey stockings with simple garters and cheap little black shoes, and she threw a triumphantly drunken glance at him, getting hold of her hair and taking the pins out of it. Turning cold, he watched her. In body she proved better, younger than might have been thought. Thin collarbones and ribs stood out in conformity with the thin face and slender shins. But the hips were even large. The belly, with a small, deep navel, was sunken, the prominent triangle of dark, beautiful hair beneath it corresponded with the abundance of dark hair on her head. She took the pins out, and the hair fell down thickly onto her thin back with its protruding vertebrae. She bent to pull up the slipping stockings – the small breasts with frozen, wrinkled brown nipples hung down like skinny little pears, delightful in their meagreness. And he made her experience that extreme shamelessness which so ill became her, and which for that reason so aroused him with pity, tenderness, passion… Between the slats of the grille at the window, jutting upwards at an angle, nothing could have been seen, but in rapturous horror she cast sidelong glances at them when she heard the sound of carefree voices and the footsteps of people passing along the deck right by the window, and this increased still more terribly the rapture of her depravity. Oh, how close by they were talking and walking – and it would never even have occurred to anyone what was going on a step away from them, in this white cabin!

      Afterwards he laid her on the bunk like a dead woman. Gritting her teeth, she lay with closed eyes and already with mournful tranquility on her face, pale now, and utterly youthful.

      Just before evening, when the steamboat

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