The Chorus Girl and Other Stories | Page 9

to tell you that . . . happiness depends on
equality--that is, when both parties are . . . equally in love. . . ."
But he was immediately ashamed of his mutterings and ceased. He felt
that his face at that moment looked stupid, guilty, blank, that it was
strained and affected. . . . Vera must have been able to read the truth on
his countenance, for she suddenly became grave, turned pale, and bent
her head.
"You must forgive me," Ognev muttered, not able to endure the silence.
"I respect you so much that . . . it pains me. . . ."
Vera turned sharply and walked rapidly homewards. Ognev followed
her.
"No, don't!" said Vera, with a wave of her hand. "Don't come; I can go
alone."
"Oh, yes . . . I must see you home anyway."
Whatever Ognev said, it all to the last word struck him as loathsome
and flat. The feeling of guilt grew greater at every step. He raged
inwardly, clenched his fists, and cursed his coldness and his stupidity
with women. Trying to stir his feelings, he looked at Verotchka's
beautiful figure, at her hair and the traces of her little feet on the dusty
road; he remembered her words and her tears, but all that only touched
his heart and did not quicken his pulse.
"Ach! one can't force oneself to love," he assured himself, and at the
same time he thought, "But shall I ever fall in love without? I am nearly
thirty! I have never met anyone better than Vera and I never shall. . . .
Oh, this premature old age! Old age at thirty!"
Vera walked on in front more and more rapidly, without looking back
at him or raising her head. It seemed to him that sorrow had made her
thinner and narrower in the shoulders.
"I can imagine what's going on in her heart now!" he thought, looking
at her back. "She must be ready to die with shame and mortification!
My God, there's so much life, poetry, and meaning in it that it would
move a stone, and I . . . I am stupid and absurd!"
At the gate Vera stole a glance at him, and, shrugging and wrapping her
shawl round her walked rapidly away down the avenue.

Ivan Alexeyitch was left alone. Going back to the copse, he walked
slowly, continually standing still and looking round at the gate with an
expression in his whole figure that suggested that he could not believe
his own memory. He looked for Vera's footprints on the road, and
could not believe that the girl who had so attracted him had just
declared her love, and that he had so clumsily and bluntly "refused" her.
For the first time in his life it was his lot to learn by experience how
little that a man does depends on his own will, and to suffer in his own
person the feelings of a decent kindly man who has against his will
caused his neighbour cruel, undeserved anguish.
His conscience tormented him, and when Vera disappeared he felt as
though he had lost something very precious, something very near and
dear which he could never find again. He felt that with Vera a part of
his youth had slipped away from him, and that the moments which he
had passed through so fruitlessly would never be repeated.
When he reached the bridge he stopped and sank into thought. He
wanted to discover the reason of his strange coldness. That it was due
to something within him and not outside himself was clear to him. He
frankly acknowledged to himself that it was not the intellectual
coldness of which clever people so often boast, not the coldness of a
conceited fool, but simply impotence of soul, incapacity for being
moved by beauty, premature old age brought on by education, his
casual existence, struggling for a livelihood, his homeless life in
lodgings. From the bridge he walked slowly, as it were reluctantly, into
the wood. Here, where in the dense black darkness glaring patches of
moonlight gleamed here and there, where he felt nothing except his
thoughts, he longed passionately to regain what he had lost.
And Ivan Alexeyitch remembers that he went back again. Urging
himself on with his memories, forcing himself to picture Vera, he
strode rapidly towards the garden. There was no mist by then along the
road or in the garden, and the bright moon looked down from the sky as
though it had just been washed; only the eastern sky was dark and
misty. . . . Ognev remembers his cautious steps, the dark windows, the
heavy scent of heliotrope and mignonette. His old friend Karo, wagging
his tail amicably, came up