Just as the year before, the last to pay her visits were Krylin,
an actual civil councillor, and Lysevitch, a well-known barrister.
It was already dark when they arrived. Krylin, a man of sixty, with
a wide mouth and with grey whiskers close to his ears, with a face
like a lynx, was wearing a uniform with an Anna ribbon, and white
trousers. He held Anna Akimovna's hand in both of his for a long
while, looked intently in her face, moved his lips, and at last
said, drawling upon one note:
"I used to respect your uncle . . . and your father, and enjoyed
the privilege of their friendship. Now I feel it an agreeable duty,
as you see, to present my Christmas wishes to their honoured heiress
in spite of my infirmities and the distance I have to come. . . .
And I am very glad to see you in good health."
The lawyer Lysevitch, a tall, handsome fair man, with a slight
sprinkling of grey on his temples and beard, was distinguished by
exceptionally elegant manners; he walked with a swaying step, bowed
as it were reluctantly, and shrugged his shoulders as he talked,
and all this with an indolent grace, like a spoiled horse fresh
from the stable. He was well fed, extremely healthy, and very well
off; on one occasion he had won forty thousand roubles, but concealed
the fact from his friends. He was fond of good fare, especially
cheese, truffles, and grated radish with hemp oil; while in Paris
he had eaten, so he said, baked but unwashed guts. He spoke smoothly,
fluently, without hesitation, and only occasionally, for the sake
of effect, permitted himself to hesitate and snap his fingers as
if picking up a word. He had long ceased to believe in anything he
had to say in the law courts, or perhaps he did believe in it, but
attached no kind of significance to it; it had all so long been
familiar, stale, ordinary. . . . He believed in nothing but what
was original and unusual. A copy-book moral in an original form
would move him to tears. Both his notebooks were filled with
extraordinary expressions which he had read in various authors; and
when he needed to look up any expression, he would search nervously
in both books, and usually failed to find it. Anna Akimovna's father
had in a good-humoured moment ostentatiously appointed him legal
adviser in matters concerning the factory, and had assigned him a
salary of twelve thousand roubles. The legal business of the factory
had been confined to two or three trivial actions for recovering
debts, which Lysevitch handed to his assistants.
Anna Akimovna knew that he had nothing to do at the factory, but
she could not dismiss him--she had not the moral courage; and
besides, she was used to him. He used to call himself her legal
adviser, and his salary, which he invariably sent for on the first
of the month punctually, he used to call "stern prose." Anna Akimovna
knew that when, after her father's death, the timber of her forest
was sold for railway sleepers, Lysevitch had made more than fifteen
thousand out of the transaction, and had shared it with Nazaritch.
When first she found out they had cheated her she had wept bitterly,
but afterwards she had grown used to it.
Wishing her a happy Christmas, and kissing both her hands, he looked
her up and down, and frowned.
"You mustn't," he said with genuine disappointment. "I have told
you, my dear, you mustn't!"
"What do you mean, Viktor Nikolaitch?"
"I have told you you mustn't get fat. All your family have an
unfortunate tendency to grow fat. You mustn't," he repeated in an
imploring voice, and kissed her hand. "You are so handsome! You are
so splendid! Here, your Excellency, let me introduce the one woman
in the world whom I have ever seriously loved."
"There is nothing surprising in that. To know Anna Akimovna at your
age and not to be in love with her, that would be impossible."
"I adore her," the lawyer continued with perfect sincerity, but
with his usual indolent grace. "I love her, but not because I am a
man and she is a woman. When I am with her I always feel as though
she belongs to some third sex, and I to a fourth, and we float away
together into the domain of the subtlest shades, and there we blend
into the spectrum. Leconte de Lisle defines such relations better
than any one. He has a superb passage, a marvellous passage. . . ."
Lysevitch rummaged in one notebook, then in the other, and, not
finding the quotation, subsided. They began talking of the weather,
of the opera, of the arrival, expected shortly, of Duse. Anna
Akimovna remembered that the year before Lysevitch and, she fancied,
Krylin had dined with her, and now when they were getting ready to
go away, she began with perfect sincerity pointing out to them in
an imploring voice that as they had no more visits to pay, they
ought to remain to dinner with her. After some hesitation the
visitors agreed.
In addition to the family dinner, consisting of cabbage soup, sucking
pig, goose with apples, and so on, a so-called "French" or "chef's"
dinner used to be prepared in the kitchen on great holidays, in
case any visitor in the upper story wanted a meal. When they heard
the clatter of crockery in the dining-room, Lysevitch began to
betray a noticeable excitement; he rubbed his hands, shrugged his
shoulders, screwed up his eyes, and described with feeling what
dinners her father and uncle used to give at one time, and a
marvellous _matelote_ of turbots the cook here could make: it was
not a _matelote_, but a veritable revelation! He was already gloating
over the dinner, already eating it in imagination and enjoying it.
When Anna Akimovna took his arm and led him to the dining-room, he
tossed off a glass of vodka and put a piece of salmon in his mouth;
he positively purred with pleasure. He munched loudly, disgustingly,
emitting sounds from his nose, while his eyes grew oily and rapacious.
The _hors d'oeuvres_ were superb; among other things, there were
fresh white mushrooms stewed in cream, and sauce _provençale_ made
of fried oysters and crayfish, strongly flavoured with some bitter
pickles. The dinner, consisting of elaborate holiday dishes, was
excellent, and so were the wines. Mishenka waited at table with
enthusiasm. When he laid some new dish on the table and lifted the
shining cover, or poured out the wine, he did it with the solemnity
of a professor of black magic, and, looking at his face and his
movements suggesting the first figure of a quadrille, the lawyer
thought several times, "What a fool!"
After the third course Lysevitch said, turning to Anna Akimovna:
"The _fin de siècle_ woman--I mean when she is young, and of
course wealthy--must be independent, clever, elegant, intellectual,
bold, and a little depraved. Depraved within limits, a little; for
excess, you know, is wearisome. You ought not to vegetate, my dear;
you ought not to live like every one else, but to get the full
savour of life, and a slight flavour of depravity is the sauce of
life. Revel among flowers of intoxicating fragrance, breathe the
perfume of musk, eat hashish, and best of all, love, love, love
. . . . To begin with, in your place I would set up seven lovers--one
for each day of the week; and one I would call Monday, one Tuesday,
the third Wednesday, and so on, so that each might know his day."
This conversation troubled Anna Akimovna; she ate nothing and only
drank a glass of wine.
"Let me speak at last," she said. "For myself personally, I can't
conceive of love without family life. I am lonely, lonely as the
moon in the sky, and a waning moon, too; and whatever you may say,
I am convinced, I feel that this waning can only be restored by
love in its ordinary sense. It seems to me that such love would
define my duties, my work, make clear my conception of life. I want
from love peace of soul, tranquillity; I want the very opposite of
musk, and spiritualism, and _fin de siècle_ . . . in short"--she
grew embarrassed--"a husband and children."
"You want to be married? Well, you can do that, too," Lysevitch
assented. "You ought to have all experiences: marriage, and jealousy,
and the sweetness of the first infidelity, and even children. . . .
But make haste and live--make haste, my dear: time is passing;
it won't wait."
"Yes, I'll go and get married!" she said, looking angrily at his
well-fed, satisfied face. "I will marry in the simplest, most
ordinary way and be radiant with happiness. And, would you believe
it, I will marry some plain working man, some mechanic or draughtsman."
"There is no harm in that, either. The Duchess Josiana loved Gwinplin,
and that was permissible for her because she was a grand duchess.
Everything is permissible for you, too, because you are an exceptional
woman: if, my dear, you want to love a negro or an Arab, don't
scruple; send for a negro. Don't deny yourself anything. You ought
to be as bold as your desires; don't fall short of them."
"Can it be so hard to understand me?" Anna Akimovna asked with
amazement, and her eyes were bright with tears. "Understand, I have
an immense business on my hands--two thousand workmen, for whom
I must answer before God. The men who work for me grow blind and
deaf. I am afraid to go on like this; I am afraid! I am wretched,
and you have the cruelty to talk to me of negroes and . . . and you
smile!" Anna Akimovna brought her fist down on the table. "To go
on living the life I am living now, or to marry some one as idle
and incompetent as myself, would be a crime. I can't go on living
like this," she said hotly, "I cannot!"
"How handsome she is!" said Lysevitch, fascinated by her. "My God,
how handsome she is! But why are you angry, my dear? Perhaps I am
wrong; but surely you don't imagine that if, for the sake of ideas
for which I have the deepest respect, you renounce the joys of life
and lead a dreary existence, your workmen will be any the better
for it? Not a scrap! No, frivolity, frivolity!" he said decisively.
"It's essential for you; it's your duty to be frivolous and depraved!
Ponder that, my dear, ponder it."
Anna Akimovna was glad she had spoken out, and her spirits rose.
She was pleased she had spoken so well, and that her ideas were so
fine and just, and she was already convinced that if Pimenov, for
instance, loved her, she would marry him with pleasure.
Mishenka began to pour out champagne.
"You make me angry, Viktor Nikolaitch," she said, clinking glasses
with the lawyer. "It seems to me you give advice and know nothing
of life yourself. According to you, if a man be a mechanic or a
draughtsman, he is bound to be a peasant and an ignoramus! But they
are the cleverest people! Extraordinary people!"
"Your uncle and father . . . I knew them and respected them . . ."
Krylin said, pausing for emphasis (he had been sitting upright as
a post, and had been eating steadily the whole time), "were people
of considerable intelligence and . . . of lofty spiritual qualities."
"Oh, to be sure, we know all about their qualities," the lawyer
muttered, and asked permission to smoke.
When dinner was over Krylin was led away for a nap. Lysevitch
finished his cigar, and, staggering from repletion, followed Anna
Akimovna into her study. Cosy corners with photographs and fans on
the walls, and the inevitable pink or pale blue lanterns in the
middle of the ceiling, he did not like, as the expression of an
insipid and unoriginal character; besides, the memory of certain
of his love affairs of which he was now ashamed was associated with
such lanterns. Anna Akimovna's study with its bare walls and tasteless
furniture pleased him exceedingly. It was snug and comfortable for
him to sit on a Turkish divan and look at Anna Akimovna, who usually
sat on the rug before the fire, clasping her knees and looking into
the fire and thinking of something; and at such moments it seemed
to him that her peasant Old Believer blood was stirring within her.
Every time after dinner when coffee and liqueurs were handed, he
grew livelier and began telling her various bits of literary gossip.
He spoke with eloquence and inspiration, and was carried away by
his own stories; and she listened to him and thought every time
that for such enjoyment it was worth paying not only twelve thousand,
but three times that sum, and forgave him everything she disliked
in him. He sometimes told her the story of some tale or novel he
had been reading, and then two or three hours passed unnoticed like
a minute. Now he began rather dolefully in a failing voice with his
eyes shut.
"It's ages, my dear, since I have read anything," he said when she
asked him to tell her something. "Though I do sometimes read Jules
Verne."
"I was expecting you to tell me something new."
"H'm! . . . new," Lysevitch muttered sleepily, and he settled himself
further back in the corner of the sofa. "None of the new literature,
my dear, is any use for you or me. Of course, it is bound to be
such as it is, and to refuse to recognize it is to refuse to recognize
--would mean refusing to recognize the natural order of things,
and I do recognize it, but . . ." Lysevitch seemed to have fallen
asleep. But a minute later his voice was heard again:
"All the new literature moans and howls like the autumn wind in the
chimney. 'Ah, unhappy wretch! Ah, your life may be likened to a
prison! Ah, how damp and dark it is in your prison! Ah, you will
certainly come to ruin, and there is no chance of escape for you!'
That's very fine, but I should prefer a literature that would tell
us how to escape from prison. Of all contemporary writers, however,
I prefer Maupassant." Lysevitch opened his eyes. "A fine writer, a
perfect writer!" Lysevitch shifted in his seat. "A wonderful artist!
A terrible, prodigious, supernatural artist!" Lysevitch got up from
the sofa and raised his right arm. "Maupassant!" he said rapturously.
"My dear, read Maupassant! one page of his gives you more than all
the riches of the earth! Every line is a new horizon. The softest,
tenderest impulses of the soul alternate with violent tempestuous
sensations; your soul, as though under the weight of forty thousand
atmospheres, is transformed into the most insignificant little bit
of some great thing of an undefined rosy hue which I fancy, if one
could put it on one's tongue, would yield a pungent, voluptuous
taste. What a fury of transitions, of motives, of melodies! You
rest peacefully on the lilies and the roses, and suddenly a thought
--a terrible, splendid, irresistible thought--swoops down upon
you like a locomotive, and bathes you in hot steam and deafens you
with its whistle. Read Maupassant, dear girl; I insist on it."
Lysevitch waved his arms and paced from corner to corner in violent
excitement.
"Yes, it is inconceivable," he pronounced, as though in despair;
"his last thing overwhelmed me, intoxicated me! But I am afraid you
will not care for it. To be carried away by it you must savour it,
slowly suck the juice from each line, drink it in. . . . You must
drink it in! . . ."
After a long introduction, containing many words such as dæmonic
sensuality, a network of the most delicate nerves, simoom, crystal,
and so on, he began at last telling the story of the novel. He did
not tell the story so whimsically, but told it in minute detail,
quoting from memory whole descriptions and conversations; the
characters of the novel fascinated him, and to describe them he
threw himself into attitudes, changed the expression of his face
and voice like a real actor. He laughed with delight at one moment
in a deep bass, and at another, on a high shrill note, clasped his
hands and clutched at his head with an expression which suggested
that it was just going to burst. Anna Akimovna listened enthralled,
though she had already read the novel, and it seemed to her ever
so much finer and more subtle in the lawyer's version than in the
book itself. He drew her attention to various subtleties, and
emphasized the felicitous expressions and the profound thoughts,
but she saw in it, only life, life, life and herself, as though she
had been a character in the novel. Her spirits rose, and she, too,
laughing and clasping her hands, thought that she could not go on
living such a life, that there was no need to have a wretched life
when one might have a splendid one. She remembered her words and
thoughts at dinner, and was proud of them; and when Pimenov suddenly
rose up in her imagination, she felt happy and longed for him to
love her.
When he had finished the story, Lysevitch sat down on the sofa,
exhausted.
"How splendid you are! How handsome!" he began, a little while
afterwards in a faint voice as if he were ill. "I am happy near
you, dear girl, but why am I forty-two instead of thirty? Your
tastes and mine do not coincide: you ought to be depraved, and I
have long passed that phase, and want a love as delicate and
immaterial as a ray of sunshine--that is, from the point of view
of a woman of your age, I am of no earthly use."
In his own words, he loved Turgenev, the singer of virginal love
and purity, of youth, and of the melancholy Russian landscape; but
he loved virginal love, not from knowledge but from hearsay, as
something abstract, existing outside real life. Now he assured
himself that he loved Anna Akimovna platonically, ideally, though
he did not know what those words meant. But he felt comfortable,
snug, warm. Anna Akimovna seemed to him enchanting, original, and
he imagined that the pleasant sensation that was aroused in him by
these surroundings was the very thing that was called platonic love.
He laid his cheek on her hand and said in the tone commonly used
in coaxing little children:
"My precious, why have you punished me?"
"How? When?"
"I have had no Christmas present from you."
Anna Akimovna had never heard before of their sending a Christmas
box to the lawyer, and now she was at a loss how much to give him.
But she must give him something, for he was expecting it, though
he looked at her with eyes full of love.
"I suppose Nazaritch forgot it," she said, "but it is not too late
to set it right."
She suddenly remembered the fifteen hundred she had received the
day before, which was now lying in the toilet drawer in her bedroom.
And when she brought that ungrateful money and gave it to the lawyer,
and he put it in his coat pocket with indolent grace, the whole
incident passed off charmingly and naturally. The sudden reminder
of a Christmas box and this fifteen hundred was not unbecoming in
Lysevitch.
"Merci," he said, and kissed her finger.
Krylin came in with blissful, sleepy face, but without his decorations.
Lysevitch and he stayed a little longer and drank a glass of tea
each, and began to get ready to go. Anna Akimovna was a little
embarrassed. . . . She had utterly forgotten in what department
Krylin served, and whether she had to give him money or not; and
if she had to, whether to give it now or send it afterwards in an
envelope.
"Where does he serve?" she whispered to Lysevitch.
"Goodness knows," muttered Lysevitch, yawning.
She reflected that if Krylin used to visit her father and her uncle
and respected them, it was probably not for nothing: apparently he
had been charitable at their expense, serving in some charitable
institution. As she said good-bye she slipped three hundred roubles
into his hand; he seemed taken aback, and looked at her for a minute
in silence with his pewtery eyes, but then seemed to understand and
said:
"The receipt, honoured Anna Akimovna, you can only receive on the
New Year."
Lysevitch had become utterly limp and heavy, and he staggered when
Mishenka put on his overcoat.
As he went downstairs he looked like a man in the last stage of
exhaustion, and it was evident that he would drop asleep as soon
as he got into his sledge.
"Your Excellency," he said languidly to Krylin, stopping in the
middle of the staircase, "has it ever happened to you to experience
a feeling as though some unseen force were drawing you out longer
and longer? You are drawn out and turn into the finest wire.
Subjectively this finds expression in a curious voluptuous feeling
which is impossible to compare with anything."
Anna Akimovna, standing at the top of the stairs, saw each of them
give Mishenka a note.
"Good-bye! Come again!" she called to them, and ran into her bedroom.
She quickly threw off her dress, that she was weary of already, put
on a dressing-gown, and ran downstairs; and as she ran downstairs
she laughed and thumped with her feet like a school-boy; she had a
great desire for mischief.