“What does it all mean?” she would say to herself with a shudder. “Is there really anything more that I require, or that I need wish for? Whither am I travelling? I have no farther to go—my journey is ended. Yet have I really completed my cycle of existence? Is this really all—all?” Then she would glance timidly around her, and wonder, in doubt and trembling, what such whispers of the soul might portend. With anxious eyes she would scan the earth, the heavens, and the wilds, yet find therein no answer, but merely gloom, profundity, and remoteness. All nature seemed to be saying the same thing; in nature she could perceive only a ceaseless, uniform current of life to which there was neither a beginning nor an ending. Of course, she knew whom she could consult concerning these tremors—she knew who could return the needed answers to her questionings. But what would those answers import? What if Schtoltz should say that her self-questionings represented the murmurings of an unsympathetic, an unwomanly, heart—that his quondam idol possessed but a blasé, dissatisfied soul from which nothing good was to be looked for? Yes, how greatly she might fall in his estimation, were he to discover these new and unwonted pangs of hers! Consequently, whenever, in spite of her best efforts to conceal the fact, her eyes lost their velvety softness, and acquired a dry and feverish glitter; whenever, too, a heavy cloud overspread her face, and she could not force herself to smile, and to talk, and to listen indifferently to the latest news in the political world, or to descriptions of interesting phenomena in some new walk of learning, or to remarks upon some new creation of art—well, then she hid herself away, on the plea of illness.
Yet she felt no desire to give way to tears; she experienced none of those sudden alarms which had been hers during the period when her girlish nerves had been excited even to the point of self-expression. So if, while resting on some calm, beautiful evening, there came stealing upon her, even amid her husband’s talk and caresses, a feeling of weariness and indifference to everything, she would merely ask herself despairingly what it all meant. At one moment she would become, as it were, turned to stone, and sit silent; at another she would make feverish attempts to conceal her strange malady. Finally a headache would supervene, and she would retire to rest. Yet all the while it was a difficult matter for her to evade the keen eyes of her husband. This she knew well, and therefore prepared herself for conversation with him as nervously as she would have done for confession to a priest.
II
One evening she and Schtoltz were pacing the poplar avenue in their garden. She was suffering from her usual inexplicable lack of energy, and finding herself able to return but the briefest of answers to what he said.
“By the way,” he remarked, “the nurse tells me that Olinka is troubled with a night cough. Ought we not to send for the doctor to-morrow?”
“No. I have given her some hot medicine, and am going to keep her indoors for the present,” answered Olga dully.
In silence they walked to the end of the avenue.
“Why have you sent no reply to that letter from your friend Sonichka?” he inquired. “This is the third letter that you have left unanswered.”
“I would rather forget her altogether,” was Olga’s brief rejoinder.
“Then you are not well?” he continued after a pause.
“Oh yes; nothing is the matter with me. Why should you think otherwise’?”
“Then you are ennuyée?”
She clasped her hands upon his shoulder.
“No,” she said, in a tone of assumed cheerfulness—yet a tone in which the note of ennui was only too plainly apparent.
He led her clear of the shade of the trees, and turned her face to the moonlight.
“Look at me,” he commanded. He gazed intently into her eyes.
“One would say that you were unhappy,” he commented. “Your eyes have a strange expression in them which I have noticed more than once before. What is the matter with you, Olga?”
She took him by the sleeve and drew him back into the shade.
“Are you aware,” she said with forced gaiety, “that I am hungry for supper?”
“No, no,” he protested. “Do not make a jest of this.”
“Unhappy, indeed?” she said reproachfully, halting in front of him. “Yes, I am unhappy—but only from excess of happiness.” So tender was her tone, and so caressing the note in her voice, that he bent down and kissed her.
With that she grew bolder. The jesting supposition that she could be unhappy inspired her to greater frankness.
“No, I am not ennuyée,” she went on; “nor should I ever be so. You know that well, yet you refuse to believe my words. Nor am I ill. It is merely that, that well, that sometimes a feeling of depression comes over me. You are a difficult man to conceal things from. Sometimes I feel depressed, though I could not say why.”
She laid her head upon his shoulder.
“Nevertheless, what is the reason of it?” he asked her gently as he bent over her.
“I do not know,” she repeated.
“Yet there must be a reason of some sort. If that reason lies neither in me nor in your surroundings, it must lie in yourself. Sometimes such depression is a symptom of ill-health. Are you sure that you are quite well?”
“At all events I feel so,” she replied gravely. “See for yourself how I eat and walk and sleep and work! Yet every now and then there comes over me a mood in which life seems to me incomplete.... Do not mind this, however. It is nothing—nothing at all.”
“Tell me more,” he urged. “Certainly life is incomplete, but what would you add to it?”
“And sometimes,” she continued, “I grow afraid lest everything should be about to be changed, or to come to an end; while at other times I find myself torturing my brain with a stupid wondering as to what more is to be expected from the future, this happiness of ours, this life, with its joys and sorrows”—she had dropped her voice to a whisper, in a sort of shame at her own questionings—“I know to be quite natural; yet something seems still to be drawing me onwards, and to be making me dissatisfied with my lot. How ashamed I feel of my folly and fancifulness! But do not notice me: this despondency of mine will soon pass away, and I shall once more become bright and cheerful.”
She pressed herself closer with a timid caress, as though she were asking pardon for what she termed her “folly.” He questioned her as to her symptoms as a physician might have done, and, in return, she described to him her dull self-interrogations, her confusion of soul. Meanwhile Schtollz paced the avenue with his head on his breast and his mind filled with doubt and anxiety—anxiety at the fact that he so little understood his wife. At length she, in her turn, drew him into the light of