I was
happy--but of course I was not satisfied. I was jealous of that which
Andrey Vassilievitch had--and I lacked. My whole relationship to
Andrey Vassilievitch was a curious one. My friendship for his wife
must I am sure have been torture to him. He knew that she had given me
a great deal that she had never given to him. And yet, because he
loved her so profoundly, he was only anxious that she should be happy.
He saw that my friendship gave her new interests, new life even. He
encouraged me, then, in every way, to stay with them, to be with them.
He left us alone continually. During the whole of that four years he
never once spoke in anger to me nor challenged my fidelity. My
relationship to him was difficult. We were, quite simply as men, the
worst-suited in the world. He had not a trick nor a habit that did not
get on my nerves; he was intelligent only in those things that I
despised a man for knowing. This would have been well enough had he
not persisted in talking about matters of art and literature, of
which, of course, he knew nothing. He did it, I believe, to please his
wife and myself. I despised him for many things and yet, in my heart,
I knew that he had much that I had not. He was, and is, a finer man
than I.... And, last and first of all, he possessed part of his wife
that I did not. After all, she did, in her own beautiful way, love
him. She was a mother to him; she laughed tenderly at his foolishness,
cared for him, watched over him, defended him. Me she would never need
to defend. Our relationship was built rather on my defence of her.
Sometimes I would wish that I were such a _durak_ as Andrey
Vassilievitch, that I might have her protection.... There were many,
many times when I hated him--no times at all when he did not irritate
me. I wished.... I wished.... I do not know what I wished. Only I
always waited for the time when I should have all of her, when I
should hold her against all the world. Then, after four years of this
new life, she quite suddenly died. Again in that little house, on a
'white night,' just as when I had at first met her, the purple
curtains hanging in the little street, the _isvostchik_ sleeping, the
clocks in the house chattering in their haste to keep up with time....
Only two months before the outbreak of the war she caught cold, for a
week suffered from pneumonia and died. At the last Andrey
Vassilievitch and I were alone with her. He had her hand in his but
her last cry wa