Irene worked carefully and untiringly at herself and her own moral and mental development. She not only did not admit of any dishonourable action, but severely admonished and persecuted herself for every bad thought, every shade of feeling, that tended towards envy or revenge. And so, as always happens when one works long and obstinately for the achievement of a certain result, Irene really succeeded in raising her own honour and integrity to a point beyond reproach. The loftier grew her own ideal, however, the more difficult she found it to reconcile herself to the weaknesses of others. Day by day, her requirements in connection with her unknown hero increased, and day by day he became always more difficult to find. She submitted every man who crossed her path to so severe an examination that not one passed through it successfully. The young married women of her acquaintance, noticing how wistfully she looked at their children, advised her to marry, even without love, only to become a mother and thus attain the one real aim, the one true happiness that life can give to a woman. Irene listened to their advice with amazement. According to her ideas, a woman had no right to bring a new life into the world unless she had found a man who could pass on to the child only the highest and most irreproachable moral qualities. Such an idea is, of course, fundamentally good and logical—but, unfortunately, it is also somewhat difficult to carry out! Nature is so fantastic and capricious, that sometimes a child may bear no likeness whatever to its ideal parents, but may bear a striking and very unwelcome resemblance to some long-forgotten black sheep great-grandfather! On the whole, indeed, resignation, and faith in God’s mercy, are the most suitable frames of mind in this connection; but these are frames of mind that one could hardly expect from Irene! Idealists who passionately believe in their ideals, hypnotize themselves and become the slaves of their own thoughts.
At thirty, in order to avoid any future moral torment at the appearance of a grey hair or a decayed tooth, Irene decided that she was an old woman, and that there was no longer any occasion to think about love. She began to dress always in black, and assumed with men the air of an old maiden aunt. Her dream now was only of friendship, and she longed for the warmth of a friendly hearth.
Her women friends, however, did not believe in her sincerity, did not consider her as old as she imagined herself to be, and were afraid for their husbands. Year by year, Irene felt herself to be always increasingly lonely and isolated, and then, suddenly, came the Japanese War.
Pride in Russia, and in Russia’s might and wealth and brilliant future, was one of Irene’s greatest joys. The Russian people seemed to her to be a race of chivalrous knights, ever ready to fight for truth and Christianity, and to defend the weak and the persecuted. When the Japanese War broke out, she asked herself, with the sincerest astonishment, how such pitiful monkeys ever could have declared war on such indomitable knights. She even pitied the Japanese for having fallen victims to such madness! Her despair and suffering at the news of our first failures is therefore easy to imagine. None of Irene’s near relations were at the war, but each of our losses, nevertheless, found its echo in her heart, like a personal misfortune. Overwhelmed with grief, she attached no importance either to the Russian revolution, or to the reforms that followed. Like all passionate idealists when their ideal is shattered, Irene rushed to the other extreme—that of a profound contempt for Russia.
Everything became cold and indifferent to her in her homeland. She no longer believed in anybody; she trusted neither the masses nor the educated classes. They were all cowards, they were all narrow, lazy, and ignorant. She began to go abroad more frequently. There, in contrast, everything pleased her immensely. She admired the German peasants for their love of work, the Swiss for their orderliness, the French for their wit. In old days, after having passed three months abroad, she had always grown homesick, and on reaching the Russian frontier, had felt inclined to embrace the very railway porters for their good-humoured Slavonic faces! Now, she returned home with regret, found fault with Russian arrangements, and looked with disgust at the endless, monotonous fields, at the dull, slumbering type of life and nature that slipped placidly along outside the windows of the sleepy train.
Her contempt for Russia was encouraged by the countless critical and scathing articles that appeared in the newspapers as a result of the newly granted freedom of the Press. According to these articles all Russia’s resources had been used up by drink and by robbery, and the whole country was in a state of ruin and primitive savagery. They did not attempt to explain why, all this being so, Russia had not, long ago, died of starvation and famine, why our government stock stood higher than before the war, and why Europe set as much value as ever on Russian opinion. But Irene, like most women, did not measure the rights and wrongs of the newspaper accusations. They were in tune with her pessimistic mood, and she no longer believed in Russia, just as she no longer believed in her own happiness.
The most cruel pain of all, however, was that occasioned by a gradually awakening doubt about the justice of her own beliefs. It seemed to her that, logically, it was time God rewarded her in some way for her scrupulous honesty, and she suffered at the absence of this reward. In observing the lives of others, Irene could persuade herself that if they had no outward success, they enjoyed the greater blessing of inner peace and happiness. It was difficult, however, to deceive her own self in this matter; for, indeed, poor Irene not only had no happiness, but the boon of inner peace had not even been granted to her. Her soul had been wounded, torn, immersed in darkness and despair, from which there seemed no escape. And yet there, before her very eyes, wicked and dishonourable people triumphed and rejoiced. How was this to be explained? Could her credo have been a mistake, could she have been struggling and wandering all her life along the wrong path? Such an admission would have been, for Irene, equal to suicide—for she could never have reconciled herself to a world in which only wickedness and deceit triumph.
Life in Russia grew at last so unbearable that she decided to emigrate. Her first idea was to go and live in England, with which country she was acquainted through the medium of her beloved English novels. By chance, however, Zola’s “Rome,” with its magnificent descriptions of Roman life, fell into her hands, and she suddenly felt drawn towards Italy. It is for this reason that we find her, on this warm autumn day, sitting in the garden of the Monte Pincio.