"My youth is thrown away for nothing, like a useless cigarette end," I went on musing."My parents died when I was a little child; I was expelled from the high school, I was born of a noble family, but I have received neither education nor breeding, and I have no more knowledge than the humblest mechanic.I have no refuge, no relations, no friends, no work I like.I am not fitted for anything, and in the prime of my powers I am good for nothing but to be stuffed into this little station; I have known nothing but trouble and failure all my life.What can happen worse?"Red lights came into sight in the distance.A train was moving towards me.The slumbering steppe listened to the sound of it.My thoughts were so bitter that it seemed to me that I was thinking aloud and that the moan of the telegraph wire and the rumble of the train were expressing my thoughts.
"What can happen worse? The loss of my wife?" I wondered."Even that is not terrible.It's no good hiding it from my conscience:
I don't love my wife.I married her when I was only a wretched boy; now I am young and vigorous, and she has gone off and grown older and sillier, stuffed from her head to her heels with conventional ideas.What charm is there in her maudlin love, in her hollow chest, in her lusterless eyes? I put up with her, but I don't love her.What can happen? My youth is being wasted, as the saying is, for a pinch of snuff.Women flit before my eyes only in the carriage windows, like falling stars.Love I never had and have not.My manhood, my courage, my power of feeling are going to ruin....Everything is being thrown away like dirt, and all my wealth here in the steppe is not worth a farthing."The train rushed past me with a roar and indifferently cast the glow of its red lights upon me.I saw it stop by the green lights of the station, stop for a minute and rumble off again.After walking a mile and a half I went back.Melancholy thoughts haunted me still.Painful as it was to me, yet I remember I tried as it were to make my thoughts still gloomier and more melancholy.You know people who are vain and not very clever have moments when the consciousness that they are miserable affords them positive satisfaction, and they even coquet with their misery for their own entertainment.There was a great deal of truth in what I thought, but there was also a great deal that was absurd and conceited, and there was something boyishly defiant in my question: "What could happen worse?""And what is there to happen?" I asked myself."I think I have endured everything.I've been ill, I've lost money, I get reprimanded by my superiors every day, and I go hungry, and a mad wolf has run into the station yard.What more is there? I have been insulted, humiliated,...and I have insulted others in my time.I have not been a criminal, it is true, but I don't think Iam capable of crime -- I am not afraid of being hauled up for it."The two little clouds had moved away from the moon and stood at a little distance, looking as though they were whispering about something which the moon must not know.A light breeze was racing across the steppe, bringing the faint rumble of the retreating train.
My wife met me at the doorway.Her eyes were laughing gaily and her whole face was beaming with good-humor.
"There is news for you!" she whispered."Make haste, go to your room and put on your new coat; we have a visitor.""What visitor?"
"Aunt Natalya Petrovna has just come by the train.""What Natalya Petrovna?"
"The wife of my uncle Semyon Fyodoritch.You don't know her.She is a very nice, good woman."Probably I frowned, for my wife looked grave and whispered rapidly:
"Of course it is queer her having come, but don't be cross, Nikolay, and don't be hard on her.She is unhappy, you know;Uncle Semyon Fyodoritch really is ill-natured and tyrannical, it is difficult to live with him.She says she will only stay three days with us, only till she gets a letter from her brother."My wife whispered a great deal more nonsense to me about her despotic uncle; about the weakness of mankind in general and of young wives in particular; about its being our duty to give shelter to all, even great sinners, and so on.Unable to make head or tail of it, I put on my new coat and went to make acquaintance with my "aunt."A little woman with large black eyes was sitting at the table.My table, the gray walls, my roughly-made sofa, everything to the tiniest grain of dust seemed to have grown younger and more cheerful in the presence of this new, young, beautiful, and dissolute creature, who had a most subtle perfume about her.And that our visitor was a lady of easy virtue I could see from her smile, from her scent, from the peculiar way in which she glanced and made play with her eyelashes, from the tone in which she talked with my wife -- a respectable woman.There was no need to tell me she had run away from her husband, that her husband was old and despotic, that she was good-natured and lively; I took it all in at the first glance.Indeed, it is doubtful whether there is a man in all Europe who cannot spot at the first glance a woman of a certain temperament.
"I did not know I had such a big nephew!" said my aunt, holding out her hand to me and smiling.
"And I did not know I had such a pretty aunt," I answered.
Supper began over again.The cork flew with a bang out of the second bottle, and my aunt swallowed half a glassful at a gulp, and when my wife went out of the room for a moment my aunt did not scruple to drain a full glass.I was drunk both with the wine and with the presence of a woman.Do you remember the song?
"Eyes black as pitch, eyes full of passion, Eyes burning bright and beautiful, How I love you, How I fear you!"I don't remember what happened next.Anyone who wants to know how love begins may read novels and long stories; I will put it shortly and in the words of the same silly song:
