The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

This was a man who had lived much and broadly, now far from young, about thirty-eight or even thirty-nine, and all this “old age”—as he himself put it—had come upon him “almost quite unexpectedly”; but he understood himself that he had aged not in the quantity, but rather, so to speak, in the quality of his years, and that if his infirmities had indeed begun, it was rather from within than from without. By the look of him, he still seemed a fine man. He was a tall and sturdy fellow, with thick, light brown hair and not a trace of gray on his head, and with a long brown beard almost halfway down his chest; as if somewhat clumsy and gone to seed at first sight, but, on closer inspection, you would at once discern in him a gentleman of excellent seasoning and who had once received a most high-society upbringing. Now, too, Velchaninov’s ma

ers were free, bold, and even graceful, despite all his well-acquired peevishness and bagginess. And even to this day he was filled with the most unshakable, most impudent high-society self-confidence, the extent of which he perhaps did not suspect in himself, despite his being not only an intelligent, but sometimes even a sensible man, almost educated and unquestionably gifted. The color of his face, open and ruddy, had been distinguished in the old days by a feminine tenderness and had attracted the attention of women; now, too, someone would look at him and say: “There’s a hale fellow! Hale and hearty!” And yet this “hale fellow” was cruelly afflicted with hypochondria. His eyes, large and pale blue, also used to have much winsomeness in them ten years ago; they were such light, such merry and carefree eyes, that they inadvertently attracted everyone he came across. Now, nearing the age of forty, the brightness and kindness had almost died out in these eyes, already surrounded with light wrinkles; there appeared in them, on the contrary, the cynicism of a weary and not entirely moral man, cu

ing, mockery most often, and another new shade that had not been there before: a shade of sorrow and pain—a sort of distracted sorrow, as if without object, but intense. This sorrow was especially manifest when he was left alone. And, strangely, this man, so boisterous, merry, and carefree just two years ago, who was so good at telling such amusing stories—now liked nothing better than to be left entirely alone. He deliberately abandoned his numerous acquaintances, whom even now he might not have abandoned, despite the definitive disorder of his financial situation. True, vanity also helped here: with his insecurity and vanity it was impossible to endure former acquaintances. But his vanity, too, began gradually to change in isolation. It did not diminish—even quite the contrary; but it began to degenerate into some peculiar sort of vanity, which had not been there before; he began to suffer sometimes from entirely different causes than usual before—from unexpected causes, entirely unthinkable before, from “more higher” causes than previously—“if it can be put that way, if there actually are higher and lower causes…” That he added himself.

Yes, he did come to that as well; he was now struggling with some higher causes, of which he had not even stopped to think before. In his mind and according to his conscience, he called “higher” all those “causes” which (to his surprise) he was in no way able to laugh at in himself—something which had not happened till then—in himself, naturally; oh, in society it was a different matter! He knew perfectly well that the circumstances needed only to arise—and the next day he would quite calmly renounce, aloud, despite all the mysterious and reverential decisions of his conscience, all these “higher causes” and himself be the first to make fun of them, naturally without admitting anything. And this was indeed so, despite the certain, even quite considerable, share of independence of thought he had won lately from the “lower causes” that had hitherto possessed him. And how many times, getting out of bed in the morning, had he begun to be ashamed of the thoughts and feelings he had lived through during the night’s insomnia! (And of late he had been suffering constantly from insomnia.) He had long since noticed that he was becoming extremely insecure in all things, both important and trifling, and therefore he resolved to trust himself as little as possible. However, certain facts stood out which could in no way be acknowledged as actually existing. Of late, at night sometimes, his thoughts and sensations changed almost completely as compared with his usual ones and for the most part did not at all resemble those that fell to the first half of his day. He was struck by this—and even consulted a famous doctor, though, true, the man was his acquaintance; naturally, he brought it up jokingly. He received the response that the fact of a change and even a splitting of thoughts and sensations at night during insomnia, and at night generally—is a universal fact among people of “strong thoughts and strong feelings”—that the convictions of a whole lifetime would sometimes change all at once under the melancholy influence of night and insomnia; suddenly, out of the blue, the most fateful decisions would be taken; but that, of course, there is measure in all things—and if, finally, the subject feels this split too much, so that it reaches the point of suffering, that is unquestionably a sign that illness has set in; and therefore something ought to be undertaken without delay. Best of all would be to change one’s way of life radically, to change one’s diet or even undertake a journey. A laxative would, of course, be helpful.

Velchaninov listened no further, but for him the illness was fully proven.

“And so all this is just an illness, all this ‘higher’ is just an illness and nothing more!” he sometimes exclaimed caustically to himself. He wanted very much not to agree.

Soon, however, the same thing that used to happen in exclusively nighttime hours began to repeat itself in the mornings, but with greater bile than at night, with anger instead of repentance, with mockery instead of tenderheartedness. Essentially, it was certain events from his past and long-past life that returned more and more often to his memory, “suddenly and God knows why,” but that returned in some special way. Velchaninov had long been complaining, for instance, of a loss of memory: he would forget the faces of his acquaintances, who would get offended with him when they met; a book read six months earlier would sometimes be completely forgotten in that length of time. And what then?—despite this obvious daily loss of memory (which worried him very much)—all that had seemed long past, all that had even been completely forgotten for ten, for fifteen years—all this now suddenly came back to his memory, but with such an amazing precision of impressions and details that it was as if he were living it over again. Some of the facts he remembered had been so well forgotten that it seemed miracle enough to him that they could be remembered. But that was not yet all; for who among people who have lived broadly does not have memories of a certain sort? But the thing was that all these remembrances now came back as if with some completely new, unexpected, and previously quite unthinkable point of view on the fact, as if prepared by someone. Why did certain memories now seem altogether criminal to him? And these mental judgments were not the only thing; his dark, solitary, and sick mind he might not have believed; but it went as far as curses and all but tears, inwardly if not outwardly. Two years ago he would not have believed it if he had been told he would one day weep! At first, however, what he remembered was more of a caustic than of a sentimental sort: he remembered certain social mishaps, humiliations; he recalled, for instance, how he had been “slandered by some intriguer,” with the result that he stopped being received in a certain house—how, for instance, and even not so long ago, he had been positively and publicly offended and had not challenged the offender to a duel—how he had once been brought up short by a most witty epigram, in a circle of the prettiest women, and had been at a loss for a reply. He even remembered two or three unpaid debts, trifling ones, true, but debts of honor, and to such people as he no longer kept company with and of whom he had even begun to speak ill. He also suffered (but only in the most evil moments) from the remembrance of two most foolishly squandered fortunes, each of them considerable. But soon he also began to have remembrances of “higher” things.