The Chorus Girl and Other Stories | Page 8

cautiously to remove her
hands from her face, she smiled at him through her tears and said:
"I . . . love you!"
These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human
language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera,
and got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.
The sad, warm, sentimental mood induced by leave-taking and the
home-made wine suddenly vanished, and gave place to an acute and
unpleasant feeling of awkwardness. He felt an inward revulsion; he
looked askance at Vera, and now that by declaring her love for him she
had cast off the aloofness which so adds to a woman's charm, she
seemed to him, as it were, shorter, plainer, more ordinary.
"What's the meaning of it?" he thought with horror. "But I . . . do I love
her or not? That's the question!"
And she breathed easily and freely now that the worst and most
difficult thing was said. She, too, got up, and looking Ivan Alexeyitch
straight in the face, began talking rapidly, warmly, irrepressibly.
As a man suddenly panic-stricken cannot afterwards remember the
succession of sounds accompanying the catastrophe that overwhelmed
him, so Ognev cannot remember Vera's words and phrases. He can
only recall the meaning of what she said, and the sensation her words
evoked in him. He remembers her voice, which seemed stifled and
husky with emotion, and the extraordinary music and passion of her
intonation. Laughing, crying with tears glistening on her eyelashes, she
told him that from the first day of their acquaintance he had struck her
by his originality, his intelligence, his kind intelligent eyes, by his work
and objects in life; that she loved him passionately, deeply, madly; that
when coming into the house from the garden in the summer she saw his
cape in the hall or heard his voice in the distance, she felt a cold

shudder at her heart, a foreboding of happiness; even his slightest jokes
had made her laugh; in every figure in his note-books she saw
something extraordinarily wise and grand; his knotted stick seemed to
her more beautiful than the trees.
The copse and the wisps of mist and the black ditches at the side of the
road seemed hushed listening to her, whilst something strange and
unpleasant was passing in Ognev's heart. . . . Telling him of her love,
Vera was enchantingly beautiful; she spoke eloquently and passionately,
but he felt neither pleasure nor gladness, as he would have liked to; he
felt nothing but compassion for Vera, pity and regret that a good girl
should be distressed on his account. Whether he was affected by
generalizations from reading or by the insuperable habit of looking at
things objectively, which so often hinders people from living, but
Vera's ecstasies and suffering struck him as affected, not to be taken
seriously, and at the same time rebellious feeling whispered to him that
all he was hearing and seeing now, from the point of view of nature and
personal happiness, was more important than any statistics and books
and truths. . . . And he raged and blamed himself, though he did not
understand exactly where he was in fault.
To complete his embarrassment, he was absolutely at a loss what to say,
and yet something he must say. To say bluntly, "I don't love you," was
beyond him, and he could not bring himself to say "Yes," because
however much he rummaged in his heart he could not find one spark of
feeling in it. . . .
He was silent, and she meanwhile was saying that for her there was no
greater happiness than to see him, to follow him wherever he liked this
very moment, to be his wife and helper, and that if he went away from
her she would die of misery.
"I cannot stay here!" she said, wringing her hands. "I am sick of the
house and this wood and the air. I cannot bear the everlasting peace and
aimless life, I can't endure our colourless, pale people, who are all as
like one another as two drops of water! They are all good-natured and
warm-hearted because they are all well-fed and know nothing of
struggle or suffering, . . . I want to be in those big damp houses where
people suffer, embittered by work and need. . ."
And this, too, seemed to Ognev affected and not to be taken seriously.
When Vera had finished he still did not know what to say, but it was

impossible to be silent, and he muttered:
"Vera Gavrilovna, I am very grateful to you, though I feel I've done
nothing to deserve such . . . feeling . . . on your part. Besides, as an
honest man I ought