The Lagoon Read online

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!’

  These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one’s time, the better part of one’s strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.

  Gurov did not sleep all night, and was filled with indignation. And he had a headache all next day. And the next night he slept badly; he sat up in bed, thinking, or paced up and down his room. He was sick of his children, sick of the bank; he had no desire to go anywhere or to talk of anything.

  In the holidays in December he prepared for a journey, and told his wife he was going to Petersburg to do something in the interests of a young friend—and he set off for S—. What for? He did not very well know himself. He wanted to see Anna Sergeyevna and to talk with her—to arrange a meeting, if possible.

  He reached S—in the morning, and took the best room at the hotel, in which the floor was covered with grey army cloth, and on the table was an inkstand, grey with dust and adorned with a figure on horseback, with its hat in its hand and its head broken off. The hotel porter gave him the necessary information; Von Diderits lived in a house of his own in Old Gontcharny Street—it was not far from the hotel: he was rich and lived in good style, and had his own horses; every one in the town knew him. The porter pronounced the name ‘Dridirits’.

  Gurov went without haste to Old Gontcharny Street and found the house. Just opposite the house stretched a long grey fence adorned with nails.

  ‘One would run away from a fence like that,’ thought Gurov, looking from the fence to the windows of the house and back again.

  He considered: today was a holiday, and the husband would probably be at home. And in any case it would be tactless to go into the house and upset her. If he were to send her a note it might fall into her husband’s hands, and then it might ruin everything. The best thing was to trust to chance. And he kept walking up and down the street by the fence, waiting for the chance. He saw a beggar go in at the gate and dogs fly at him; then an hour later he heard a piano, and the sounds were faint and indistinct. Probably it was Anna Sergeyevna playing. The front door suddenly opened, and an old woman came out, followed by the familiar white Pomeranian. Gurov was on the point of calling to the dog, but his heart began beating violently, and in his excitement he could not remember the dog’s name.

  He walked up and down, and loathed the grey fence more and more, and by now he thought irritably that Anna Sergeyevna had forgotten him, and was perhaps already amusing herself with someone else, and that that was very natural in a young woman who had nothing to look at from morning till night but that confounded fence. He went back to his hotel room and sat for a long while on the sofa, not knowing what to do, then he had dinner and a long nap.

  ‘How stupid and worrying it is!’ he thought when he woke and looked at the dark windows: it was already evening. ‘Here I’ve had a good sleep for some reason. What shall I do in the night?’

  He sat on the bed, which was covered by a cheap grey blanket, such as one sees in hospitals, and he taunted himself in his vexation:

  ‘So much for the lady with the dog…so much for the adventure… You’re in a nice fix…’

  That morning at the station a poster in large letters had caught his eye. ‘The Geisha’ was to be performed for the first time. He thought of this and went to the theatre.

  ‘It’s quite possible she may go to the first performance,’ he thought.

  The theatre was full. As in all provincial theatres, there was a fog above the chandelier, the gallery was noisy and restless; in the front row the local dandies were standing up before the beginning of the performance, with their hands behind them; in the Governor’s box the Governor’s daughter, wearing a boa, was sitting in the front seat, while the Governor himself lurked modestly behind the curtain with only his hands visible; the orchestra was a long time tuning up; the stage curtain swayed. All the time the audience were coming in and taking their seats; Gurov looked at them eagerly.

  Anna Sergeyevna, too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that for him there was in the whole world no creature so near, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy, the one happiness that he now desired for himself, and to the sounds of the inferior orchestra, of the wretched provincial violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed.

  A young man with small side-whiskers, tall and stooping, came in with Anna Sergeyevna and sat down beside her; he bent his head at every step and seemed to be continually bowing. Most likely this was the husband whom at Yalta, in a rush of bitter feeling, she had called a flunkey. And there really was in his long figure, his side-whiskers, and the small bald patch on his head, something of the flunkey’s obsequiousness; his smile was sugary, and in his buttonhole there was some badge of distinction like the number on a waiter.

  During the first interval the husband went away to smoke; she remained alone in her stall. Gurov, who was sitting in the stalls, too, went up to her and said in a trembling voice, with a forced smile:

  ‘Good-evening.’

  She glanced at him and turned pale, then glanced again with horror, unable to believe her eyes, and tightly gripped the fan and the lorgnette in her hands, evidently struggling with herself not to faint. Both were silent. She was sitting, he was standing, frightened by her confusion and not venturing to sit down beside her. The violins and the flute began tuning up. He felt suddenly frightened; it seemed as though all the people in the boxes were looking at them. She got up and went quickly to the door; he followed her, and both walked senselessly along passages, and up and down stairs, and figures in legal, scholastic, and civil service uniforms, all wearing badges, flitted before their eyes. They caught glimpses of ladies, of fur coats hanging on pegs; the draughts blew on them, bringing a smell of stale tobacco. And Gurov, whose heart was beating violently, thought:

  ‘Oh, heavens! Why are these people here and this orchestra!…’

  And at that instant he recalled how when he had seen Anna Sergeyevna off at the station he had thought that everything was over and they would never meet again. But how far they were still from the end!

  On the narrow, gloomy staircase over which was written ‘To the Amphitheatre,’ she stopped.

  ‘How you have frightened me!’ she said, breathing hard, still pale and overwhelmed. ‘Oh, how you have frightened me! I am half dead. Why have you come? Why?’

  ‘But do understand, Anna, do understand…’ he said hastily in a low voice. ‘I entreat you to understand…’

  She looked at him with dread, with entreaty, with love; she looked at him intently, to keep his features more distinctly in her memory.

  ‘I am so unhappy,’ she went on, not heeding him. ‘I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you. And I wanted to forget, to forget you; but why, oh, why, have you come?’

  On the landing above them two schoolboys were smoking and looking down, but that was nothing to Gurov; he drew Anna Sergeyevna to him, and began kissing her face, her cheeks, and her hands.

  ‘What are you doing, what are you doing!’ she cried in horror, pushing him away. ‘We are mad. Go away today; go away at once… I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you… There are people coming this way!’

  Someone was coming up the stairs.

  ‘You must go away,
’ Anna Sergeyevna went on in a whisper. ‘Do you hear, Dmitri Dmitritch? I will come and see you in Moscow. I have never been happy; I am miserable now, and I never, never shall be happy, never! Don’t make me suffer still more! I swear I’ll come to Moscow. But now let us part. My precious, good, dear one, we must part!’

  She pressed his hand and began rapidly going downstairs, looking round at him, and from her eyes he could see that she really was unhappy. Gurov stood for a little while, listened, then, when all sound had died away, he found his coat and left the theatre.

  IV

  And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Once in two or three months she left S—, telling her husband that she was going to consult a doctor about an internal complaint—and her husband believed her, and did not believe her. In Moscow she stayed at the Slaviansky Bazaar hotel, and at once sent a man in a red cap to Gurov. Gurov went to see her, and no one in Moscow knew of it.

  Once he was going to see her in this way on a winter morning (the messenger had come the evening before when he was out). With him walked his daughter, whom he wanted to take to school: it was on the way. Snow was falling in big wet flakes.

  ‘It’s three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing,’ said Gurov to his daughter. ‘The thaw is only on the surface of the earth; there is quite a different temperature at a greater height in the atmosphere.’

  ‘And why are there no thunderstorms in the winter, father?’

  He explained that, too. He talked, thinking all the while that he was going to see her, and no living soul knew of it, and probably never would know. He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his ‘lower race,’ his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilized man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

  After leaving his daughter at school, Gurov went on to the Slaviansky Bazaar. He took off his fur coat below, went upstairs, and softly knocked at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, wearing his favourite grey dress, exhausted by the journey and the suspense, had been expecting him since the evening before. She was pale; she looked at him, and did not smile, and he had hardly come in when she fell on his breast. Their kiss was slow and prolonged, as though they had not met for two years.

  ‘Well, how are you getting on there?’ he asked. ‘What news?’

  ‘Wait; I’ll tell you directly… I can’t talk.’

  She could not speak; she was crying. She turned away from him, and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.

  ‘Let her have her cry out. I’ll sit down and wait,’ he thought, and he sat down in an armchair.

  Then he rang and asked for tea to be brought to him, and while he drank his tea she remained standing at the window with her back to him. She was crying from emotion, from the miserable consciousness that their life was so hard for them; they could only meet in secret, hiding themselves from people, like thieves! Was not their life shattered?

  ‘Come, do stop!’ he said.

  It was evident to him that this love of theirs would not soon be over, that he could not see the end of it. Anna Sergeyevna grew more and more attached to him. She adored him, and it was unthinkable to say to her that it was bound to have an end some day; besides, she would not have believed it!

  He went up to her and took her by the shoulders to say something affectionate and cheering, and at that moment he saw himself in the looking-glass.

  His hair was already beginning to turn grey. And it seemed strange to him that he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the last few years. The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own. Why did she love him so much? He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he had made their acquaintance, got on with them, parted, but he had never once loved; it was anything you like, but not love.

  And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really in love—for the first time in his life.

  Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.

  In moments of depression in the past he had comforted himself with any arguments that came into his mind, but now he no longer cared for arguments; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender…

  ‘Don’t cry, my darling,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your cry; that’s enough… Let us talk now, let us think of some plan.’

  Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time. How could they be free from this intolerable bondage?

  ‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. ‘How?’

  And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

  MARU

  Henry de Vere Stacpoole

  The night was filled with vanilla and frangipani odours, and the endless sound of the rollers on the reef. Somewhere away back amidst the trees a woman was singing; the tide was out, and from the verandah of Lygon’s house, across the star-shot waters of the lagoon, moving yellow points of light caught the eye. They were spearing fish by torchlight in the reef pools.

  It had been a shell lagoon once, and in the old days, men had come to Tokahoe for sandalwood; now there was only copra to be had, and just enough for one man to deal with. Tokahoe is only a little island, where one cannot make a fortune, but where you may live fortunately enough if your tastes are simple and beyond the lure of whisky and civilization.

  The last trader had died in this paradise of whisky—or gin—I forget which, and his ghost was supposed to walk the beach on moonlit nights, and it was apropos of this that Lygon suddenly put the question to me, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘Do you?’ replied I.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lygon. ‘I almost think I do, because everyone does. Oh, I know a handful of hardheaded super-civilized people say they don’t, but the mass of humanity does. The Polynesians and Micronesians do; go to Japan, go to Ireland, go anywhere and everywhere you will find ghost believers.’

  ‘Lombroso has written something like that,’ said I.

  ‘Has he? Well, it’s a fact, but all the same, it’s not evidence; the universality of a belief seems to hint at reality in the thing believed in�
�yet what is more wanting in real reason than Tabu? Yet Tabu is universal. You find men here who daren’t touch an arm tree because arm trees are Tabu to them; or cat turtle or touch a dead body. Well, look at the Jews; a dead body is Tabu to a Cohen; India is riddled with the business, so’s English Society—it’s all the same thing under different disguises.

  ‘Funny that talking of ghosts we should have touched on this, for when I asked you, did you believe in ghosts, I had a ghost story in mind, and Tabu comes into it. This is it.’

  And this is the story somewhat as told by Lygon:

  Some fifty years back, when Pease was in a pirate hold, and Hayes in his bloom, and the top-sails of the Leonora a terror to all dusky beholders, Mara was a young man of twenty. He was son of Malemake, King of Fukariva, a kingdom the size of a soup plate, nearly as round and without its middle; an atoll island, in short; just a ring of coral, sea beaten and circling, like a bezel, its sapphire lagoon.

  Fukariva lies in the Paumotus or Dangerous Archipelago, where the currents run every way, and the winds are unaccountable. The underwriters to this day fight shy of its Paumotus trader, and in the 1860s few ships came here, and the few that came were on questionable business. Maru, up to the time he was twenty years of age, only remembered three.

  There was the Spanish ship that came into the lagoon when he was only seven. The picture of her remained with him, burning and brilliant, yet tinged with the atmosphere of nightmare; its big top-sail schooner, that lay for a week mirroring herself on the lagoon water whilst she refitted; fellows with red handkerchiefs tied round their heads crawling aloft, and laying out the spars. They came ashore for water, and what they could find in the way of taro and nuts, and made hay on the beach, insulting the island women till the men drove them off. Then, when she was clearing the lagoon, its brass gun was run out and fired, leaving a score of dead and wounded on that salt white beach.

  That was the Spaniard. Then came a whaler, who took what she wanted, and cut down trees for fuel and departed, leaving behind the smell of her as an enduring recollection; and lastly, when Maru was about eighteen, a little old schooner slank in one early morning.