Should I go to a picture gallery, and stand before some quiet evening landscape, he would be sure to be on my heels, pushing me forward, and saying to a girl on his arm:
“Very sweetly drawn ... distance ... atmosphere ... the moon to the life.... Do you remember Nina—the coloured supplement of the Neva[1]—it was something like it....”
[1] A popular Russian journal.
I sit at the opera listening to “Carmen.” He is there, as everywhere. He is behind me, and has his feet on the lower bar of my fauteuil. He hums the tune of the duet in the last act, and through his feet communicates to my nerves every movement of his body. Then, in the entr’act, I hear him speaking in a voice pitched high enough for me to hear:
“Wonderful gramophone records the Zadodadofs have. Shalapin absolutely. You couldn’t tell the difference.”
Yes, it was he or someone like him who invented the barrel organ, the gramophone, the bioscope, the photophone, the biograph, the phonograph, the pathephone, the musical box, the pianino, the motor car, paper collars, oleographs, and newspapers.
There’s no getting away from him. I flee away at night to the wild seashore, and lie down in solitude upon a cliff, but he steals after me in the shadow, and suddenly the silencers broken by a self-satisfied voice which says:
“What a lovely night, Katenka, isn’t it? The clouds, eh, look at them! Just as in a picture. And if a painter painted them just like it, who would say it was true to Nature?”
He has killed the best minutes of my life—minutes of love, the dear sweet nights of youth. How often, when I have wandered arm in arm with the most beauteous creation of Nature, along an avenue where, upon the ground, the silver moonlight was in pattern with the shadows of the trees, and he has suddenly and unexpectedly spoken up to me in a woman’s voice, has rested his head on my shoulder and cried out in a theatrical tone:
“Tell me, do you love to dream by moonlight?”