Yudushka looked at Anninka with such oily eyes that she became embarrassed.
"No, uncle, I don't want to stay here with you.
It's too dull."
"Oh, you silly little thing!
Why do you keep repeating 'dull, dull?'
You speak of dullness and I'll bet you don't know what's dull around here.
If you have something to keep you busy, and if you know how to manage yourself, you'll never feel dull.
Take me, for example, I don't notice how time flies.
On week days I'm busy with the affairs of the estate. I look at this and take a peep into that, and figure out one thing and discuss another thing. Before I know it, the day is gone.
And on a holiday—to church!
You will do the same thing.
Stay with us for a while. We'll find something for you to do. In your leisure time you may play fool with Yevpraksia, or go sleigh-riding—slide along as fast as you wish.
And when summer comes we'll go to the woods picking mushrooms. And we'll have tea on the lawn."
"No, uncle, it's no use trying to persuade me."
"Really, you ought to stay."
"No.
But the journey has tired me, so I should like to go to bed if possible."
"Yes, you can go rock-a-by.
I've got a nice little bed ready for you, everything in proper fashion.
If you want to go rock-a-by, go right ahead.
But I should advise you to think the matter over. I think it would be best for you to stay with us at Golovliovo."
_____ CHAPTER IV
Anninka spent a restless night.
The hysterical mood that had overtaken her at Pogorelka still persisted.
There are moments when a person who has been merely existing suddenly realizes that there is a vile ulcer of some kind festering in his life.
Where it came from, how it formed itself—one cannot always explain to oneself. In most cases it is not ascribed to the causes that have really brought it on. But an explanation is not even needed.
It is sufficient that such an ulcer exists.
The effects of such a sudden discovery, while equally painful to everyone, vary in their practical results, with the individual's temperament.
Some are rejuvenated and inspired with a determination to begin a new life on new foundations. Others feel but a passing pain that will not bring a profound change for the better, but is even sharper than when the disturbed conscience sees the faint hope of a brighter future.
Anninka was not of those in whom the consciousness of ulcers produces the impulse to rejuvenation. Nevertheless, she realized, being an intelligent person, that there was an abyss between the vague dreams of honest toil which had impelled her to leave Pogorelka forever and her position of provincial actress.
Instead of a life of quiet and toil, she had fallen upon a stormy existence, filled with perpetual debauchery, shameless obscenity and cynicism, with vain and everlasting bustle.
Instead of the privations and stern surroundings in which she had once lived, she had met comparative ease and comfort. She could not think of it now without a blush of shame.
She had hardly noticed the gradual transformation. She had wanted to go to a good place but had entered the wrong door.
Her desires had been very modest, indeed.
How often she had dreamed, in the attic of Pogorelka, of becoming an earnest girl, working, thirsting for education, bearing hardships with fortitude, all for the sake of the good. (It is true, "good" hardly had definite meaning to her.) But as soon as she had stepped out on to the highroad of independent activity, bitter reality had shattered her dreams at once.
An honest livelihood does not come of itself, but is attained only by persistent search and previous training which help in the quest to some extent.
But neither Anninka's temperament nor education provided her with this.
Her temperament was not marked by passion, it was simply sensitive. The material that her education had given her and on which she meant to build up her life of honest toil was so unreliable and poor that it could hardly serve as a basis for serious work.
Her education was of the boarding-school, music-hall kind, with the balance tipping to the side of the music-hall.
It was a chaotic heap in which problems were piled up about a flock of geese, dancing steps with a shawl, the sermons of Peter of Picardy, the exploits of Fair Helen, the Ode to Felitza, and the prescribed feeling of gratitude to the instructors and patrons of the institution.
What was left clear of this chaotic jumble in her soul might quite properly be called a tabula rasa. There was scarcely a thing to be read in it; it certainly offered no possibility of finding a starting-point in her for better things.
Whatever preparation she had had inspired not love for work but love for a "society" life, the desire to be surrounded by admirers and listen to their flattery, the desire to plunge into the social din, glamor and whirlwind.
If she had listened to herself, she would have discovered that even in Pogorelka, when just beginning to make plans for a life of honest toil as a deliverance from Egyptian bondage, she could have caught herself dreaming not so much of work as of being surrounded by a society of congenial people, frittering her time away in empty talk.
Of course, the people of her dreams were clever, and their conversation was honest and serious, but the idle side of life was always in the foreground.
Poverty was distinguished by neatness, privations amounted merely to a lack of luxuries.
So, when her dreams of a life of work came to a head and she was offered a part in one of the provincial theatres, she hesitated little, though the contrast between dream and reality was great.
She hastily freshened up her school information about the relations of Helen and Menelaus, supplemented it by some biographical details from the life of the splendid Prince of Tauris and decided that that was quite sufficient to produce Fair Helen and Episodes from the Life of the Duchess of Herolstein in the provincial theatres and at the fairs.
To clear her conscience she recalled the words of a student she had met in Moscow who used to exclaim repeatedly, "Sacred Art!" She made this her slogan, because it was the easiest way out, and gave at least outward decorum to the path she had chosen—the path toward which the whole of her being was instinctively tending.
The life of an actress upset her.
Alone, without the guidance of proper preparation, without a conscious aim, with only a temperament craving for din, glamor, and applause, she soon found herself surrounded by a chaos in which many persons thronged, some coming, others going, without apparent order or connection.