I
The landlady’s room in the ‘Serbia.’ Yellow wallpaper; two windows
with dirty muslin curtains; between them an oval squinting mirror,
stuck at an angle of forty-five degrees, reflects a painted floor and
chair legs; on the window-sills dusty, pimply cactuses; a cage with
a canary hangs from the ceiling. The room is partitioned off by red
screens of printed calico: the smaller part on the left is the bedroom
of the landlady and her children; that on the right is blocked up with
varied odds and ends of furniture--bedridden, rickety, and lame. In the
corners all kinds of rubbish are in chaotic cobwebbed heaps: a sextant
in a ginger leather case, and with it a tripod and a chain, some old
trunks and boxes, a guitar without strings, hunting boots, a sewing
machine, a ‘Monopan’ musical box, a camera, about five lamps, piles of
books, dresses, bundles of linen, and a great many things besides. All
these things had been detained at various times by the landlady for
rent unpaid, or left behind by runaway lodgers. You cannot move in the
room because of them.
The ‘Serbia’ is a third-rate hotel. Permanent lodgers are a rarity, and
those are prostitutes. Mostly they are casual passengers who float
up to town on the Dnieper: small farmers, Jewish commission agents,
distant provincials, pilgrims, and village priests who come to town to
inform, or are returning home when the information has been lodged.
Rooms in the ‘Serbia’ are also occupied by couples from the town for
the night or a few days.
Spring. About three in the afternoon. The curtains of the open windows
stir gently, and the room smells of kerosene and baked cabbage. It
is the landlady warming up on her stove a _bigoss à la Polonaise_ of
cabbage, pork fat, and sausage, with a great deal of pepper and bay
leaves. She is a widow between thirty-six and forty, a strong, quick,
good-looking woman. The hair that she wears in curls over her forehead
has a strong tinge of grey; but her face is fresh, her big sensual
mouth red, and her young dark eyes moist and playfully sly. Her name
is Anna Friedrichovna. She is half German, half Pole, and comes from
the Baltic Provinces; but her close friends call her Friedrich simply,
which suits her determined character better. She is quick-tempered,
scolds and talks bawdy. Sometimes she fights with her porters and the
lodgers who have been on the spree; she drinks as well as any man, and
has a mad passion for dancing. She changes from abuse to laughing in a
second. She has but small respect for the law, receives lodgers without
passports, and with her own hands, as she says, ‘chucks into the
street’ those who don’t pay up--that is, she unlocks his door while
he is out, and puts all his things in the passage or on the stairs,
and sometimes in her own room. The police are friendly with her for
her hospitality, her cheerful character, and particularly for the gay,
easy, unceremonious, disinterested complaisance with which she responds
to man’s passing emotions.
She has four children. The two eldest, Romka and Alychka, have not yet
come back from school, and the younger, Adka, seven, and Edka, five,
strong brats with cheeks mottled with mud, blotches, tear-stains, and
the sunburn of early spring, are always to be found near their mother.
Both of them hold on to the table leg and beg. They are perpetually
hungry, because their mother does not pay much attention to food; they
eat anyhow, at different times, sending into a little general shop for
anything they want. Sticking out his lips in a circle, frowning, and
looking out under his forehead, Adka roars in a loud bass: ‘That’s what
you’re like. You won’t give me a taste.’ ‘Let me try,’ Edka speaks
through his nose, scratching his calf with his bare foot.
At the table by the window sits Lieutenant Valerian Ivanovich
Tchijhevich of the Army Reserve. Before him is the register, in which
he enters the lodgers’ passports. But after yesterday’s affair the
work goes badly; the letters wave about and crawl away. His trembling
fingers quarrel with the pen. There is a roaring in his ears like the
telegraph poles in autumn. At times it seems to him that his head is
beginning to swell, to swell ... and the table, the book, the inkstand,
and the lieutenant’s hand go terribly far away and become quite tiny.
Then again the book comes up to his very eyes, the inkstand grows and
repeats itself, and his head grows small, turns to queer strange sizes.
Lieutenant Tchijhevich’s appearance speaks of former beauty and lost
position; his black hair bristles, and a bald patch shows on the nape
of his neck. His beard is fashionably trimmed to a sharp point. His
face is lean, dirty, pale, dissipated. On it is, as it were written,
the full history of the lieutenant’s obvious weaknesses and secret
diseases.
His situation in the ‘Serbia’ is complicated. He goes to the
magistrates on Anna Friedrichovna’s behalf. He hears the children’s
lessons and teaches them deportment, keeps the house register, makes
out the lodgers’ accounts, reads the newspaper aloud in the morning
and talks of politics. He usually sleeps in one of the vacant rooms
and, in case of an influx of guests, in the passage on an ancient sofa,
whose springs and stuffing stick out together. When this happens the
lieutenant carefully hangs all his property on nails above the sofa:
his overcoat, cap, his morning coat, shiny with age and white in the
seams but tolerably clean, a ‘Monopole’ paper collar, an officer’s cap
with a blue band; but he puts his notebook and his handkerchief with
some one else’s initials under his pillow.
The widow keeps her lieutenant under her thumb. ‘Marry me and I’ll
do anything for you,’ she promises. ‘Full equipment, all the linen
you want, a fine pair of boots and goloshes as well. You’ll have
everything, and on holidays I’ll let you wear my late husband’s watch
with the chain.’ But the lieutenant is still thinking about it. He
values his freedom, and sets high store by his former dignity as an
officer. However, he is wearing out some of the older portions of the
deceased’s linen.