“But on the other hand,” he pursued his
reflections, “all that is at an end of course....
I must have appeared ridiculous to her."....
This thought was disagreeable to him, and again he
grew angry ... both at her ... and at himself.
On reaching home he locked himself in his study.
He did not wish to encounter Platosha. The kind
old woman came to his door a couple of times, applied
her ear to the key-hole, and merely sighed and whispered
her prayer....
“It has begun!” she thought.... “And
he is only five-and-twenty.... Akh, it is early,
early!”
Akatoff was very much out of sorts all the following
day.
“What is the matter, Yasha?” Platonida
Ivanovna said to him. “Thou seemest to
be tousled to-day, somehow."... In the old woman’s
peculiar language this quite accurately defined Aratoff’s
moral condition. He could not work, but even
he himself did not know what he wanted. Now he
was expecting Kupfer again (he suspected that it was
precisely from Kupfer that Clara had obtained his
address ... and who else could have “talked
a great deal” about him?); again he wondered
whether his acquaintance with her was to end in that
way? ... again he imagined that she would write him
another letter; again he asked himself whether he
ought not to write her a letter, in which he might
explain everything to her,—–as he
did not wish to leave an unpleasant impression of
himself.... But, in point of fact, what
was he to explain?—Now he aroused in himself
something very like disgust for her, for her persistence,
her boldness; again that indescribably touching face
presented itself to him and her irresistible voice
made itself heard; and yet again he recalled her singing,
her recitation—and did not know whether
he was right in his wholesale condemnation.—In
one word: he was a tousled man! At last
he became bored with all this and decided, as the
saying is, “to take it upon himself” and
erase all that affair, as it undoubtedly was interfering
with his avocations and disturbing his peace of mind.—He
did not find it so easy to put his resolution into
effect.... More than a week elapsed before he
got back again into his ordinary rut. Fortunately,
Kupfer did not present himself at all, any more than
if he had not been in Moscow. Not long before
the “affair” Aratoff had begun to busy
himself with painting for photographic ends; he devoted
himself to this with redoubled zeal.
Thus, imperceptibly, with a few “relapses”
as the doctors express it, consisting, for example
in the fact that he once came very near going to call
on the Princess, two weeks ... three weeks passed ...
and Aratoff became once more the Aratoff of old.
Only deep down, under the surface of his life, something
heavy and dark secretly accompanied him in all his
comings and goings. Thus does a large fish which
has just been hooked, but has not yet been drawn out,
swim along the bottom of a deep river under the very
boat wherein sits the fisherman with his stout rod
in hand.
