“And do you still believe, Ilya Stepanitch,”
I said, “that the voice we heard came from those
unknown realms....”
He stopped me with a peremptory gesture.
“Ridel,” he began, “I am in no mood
for jesting, and so I beg you not to jest.”
He certainly was in no mood for jesting. His
face was changed. It looked paler, longer and
more expressive. His strange, “different”
eyes kept shifting from one object to another.
“I never thought,” he began again, “that
I should reveal to another ... another man what you
are about to hear and what ought to have died ...
yes, died, hidden in my breast; but it seems it is
to be—and indeed I have no choice.
It is destiny! Listen.”
And he told me a long story.
I have mentioned already that he was a poor hand at
telling stories, but it was not only his lack of skill
in describing events that had happened to him that
impressed me that night; the very sound of his voice,
his glances, the movements which he made with his fingers
and his hands—everything about him, indeed,
seemed unnatural, unnecessary, false, in fact.
I was very young and inexperienced in those days and
did not know that the habit of high-flown language
and falsity of intonation and manner may become so
ingrained in a man that he is incapable of shaking
it off: it is a sort of curse. Later in
life I came across a lady who described to me the effect
on her of her son’s death, of her “boundless”
grief, of her fears for her reason, in such exaggerated
language, with such theatrical gestures, such melodramatic
movements of her head and rolling of her eyes, that
I thought to myself, “How false and affected
that lady is! She did not love her son at all!”
And a week afterwards I heard that the poor woman
had really gone out of her mind. Since then I
have become much more careful in my judgments and
have had far less confidence in my own impressions.
The story which Tyeglev told me was, briefly, as follows.
He had living in Petersburg, besides his influential
uncle, an aunt, not influential but wealthy.
As she had no children of her own she had adopted
a little girl, an orphan, of the working class, given
her a liberal education and treated her like a daughter.
She was called Masha. Tyeglev saw her almost
every day. It ended in their falling in love
with one another and Masha’s giving herself to
him. This was discovered. Tyeglev’s
aunt was fearfully incensed, she turned the luckless
girl out of her house in disgrace, and moved to Moscow
where she adopted a young lady of noble birth and
made her her heiress. On her return to her own
relations, poor and drunken people, Masha’s lot
was a bitter one. Tyeglev had promised to marry
her and did not keep his promise. At his last
interview with her, he was forced to speak out:
she wanted to know the truth and wrung it out of him.
“Well,” she said, “if I am not to
be your wife, I know what there is left for me to
do.” More than a fortnight had passed since
that last interview.
