is packing in his trunk his linen, scent bottles, prayer-books, braces,
ties. . . . All his correct figure, his trunk, his bedstead and the
table--all have an air of elegance and effeminacy. Great tears are
dropping from his big blue eyes into the trunk.
"Where are you off to?" asks Kamyshev, after standing still for a
little.
The Frenchman says nothing.
"Do you want to go away?" Kamyshev goes on. "Well, you know, but . . . I
won't venture to detain you. But what is queer is, how are you going to
travel without a passport? I wonder! You know I have lost your passport.
I thrust it in somewhere between some papers, and it is lost. . . . And
they are strict about passports among us. Before you have gone three or
four miles they pounce upon you."
Champoun raises his head and looks mistrustfully at Kamyshev.
"Yes. . . . You will see! They will see from your face you haven't a
passport, and ask at once: Who is that? Alphonse Champoun. We know that
Alphonse Champoun. Wouldn't you like to go under police escort somewhere
nearer home!"
"Are you joking?"
"What motive have I for joking? Why should I? Only mind now; it's a
compact, don't you begin whining then and writing letters. I won't stir
a finger when they lead you by in fetters!"
Champoun jumps up and, pale and wide-eyed, begins pacing up and down the
room.
"What are you doing to me?" he says in despair, clutching at his head.
"My God! accursed be that hour when the fatal thought of leaving my
country entered my head! . . ."
"Come, come, come . . . I was joking!" says Kamyshev in a lower tone.
"Queer fish he is; he doesn't understand a joke. One can't say a word!"
"My dear friend!" shrieks Champoun, reassured by Kamyshev's tone. "I
swear I am devoted to Russia, to you and your children. . . . To leave
you is as bitter to me as death itself! But every word you utter stabs
me to the heart!"
"Ah, you queer fish! If I do abuse the French, what reason have you to
take offence? You are a queer fish really! You should follow the example
of Lazar Isaakitch, my tenant. I call him one thing and another, a Jew,
and a scurvy rascal, and I make a pig's ear out of my coat tail, and
catch him by his Jewish curls. He doesn't take offence."
"But he is a slave! For a kopeck he is ready to put up with any insult!"
"Come, come, come . . . that's enough! Peace and concord!"
Champoun powders his tear-stained face and goes with Kamyshev to the
dining-room. The first course is eaten in silence, after the second the
same performance begins over again, and so Champoun's sufferings have no
end.
The Party and Other Stories
THE PARTY I
AFTER the festive dinner with its eight courses and its endless
conversation, Olga Mihalovna, whose husband's name-day was being
celebrated, went out into the garden. The duty of smiling and talking
incessantly, the clatter of the crockery, the stupidity of the servants,
the long intervals between the courses, and the stays she had put on to
conceal her condition from the visitors, wearied her to exhaustion. She
longed to get away from the house, to sit in the shade and rest her
heart with thoughts of the baby which was to be born to her in another
two months. She was used to these thoughts coming to her as she turned
to the left out of the big avenue into the narrow path. Here in the
thick shade of the plums and cherry-trees the dry branches used to
scratch her neck and shoulders; a spider's web would settle on her face,
and there would rise up in her mind the image of a little creature of
undetermined sex and undefined features, and it began to seem as though
it were not the spider's web that tickled her face and neck caressingly,
but that little creature. When, at the end of the path, a thin wicker
hurdle came into sight, and behind it podgy beehives with tiled roofs;
when in the motionless, stagnant air there came a smell of hay and
honey, and a soft buzzing of bees was audible, then the little creature
would take complete possession of Olga Mihalovna. She used to sit down
on a bench near the shanty woven of branches, and fall to thinking.
This time, too, she went on as far as the seat, sat down, and began
thinking; but instead of the little creature there rose up in her
imagination the figures of the grown-up people whom she had just left.
She felt dreadfully uneasy that she, the hostess, had deserted her
guests, and she remembered how her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and her
uncle, Nikolay Nikolaitch, had argued at dinner about trial by jury,
about the press, and about the higher education of women. Her husband,
as usual, argued in order to show off his Conservative ideas before his
visitors--and still more in order to disagree with her uncle, whom he
disliked. Her uncle contradicted him and wrangled over every word he
uttered, so as to show the company that he, Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch,
still retained his youthful freshness of spirit and free-thinking in
spite of his fifty-nine years. And towards the end of dinner even Olga
Mihalovna herself could not resist taking part and unskilfully
attempting to defend university education for women--not that that
education stood in need of her defence, but simply because she wanted to
annoy her husband, who to her mind was unfair. The guests were wearied
by this discussion, but they all thought it necessary to take part in
it, and talked a great deal, although none of them took any interest in
trial by jury or the higher education of women. . . .
Olga Mihalovna was sitting on the nearest side of the hurdle near the
shanty. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. The trees and the air were
overcast as before rain, but in spite of that it was hot and stifling.
The hay cut under the trees on the previous day was lying ungathered,
looking melancholy, with here and there a patch of colour from the faded
flowers, and from it came a heavy, sickly scent. It was still. The other
side of the hurdle there was a monotonous hum of bees. . . .
Suddenly she heard footsteps and voices; some one was coming along the
path towards the beehouse.
"How stifling it is!" said a feminine voice. "What do you think-- is it
going to rain, or not?"
"It is going to rain, my charmer, but not before night," a very familiar
male voice answered languidly. "There will be a good rain."
Olga Mihalovna calculated that if she made haste to hide in the shanty
they would pass by without seeing her, and she would not have to talk
and to force herself to smile. She picked up her skirts, bent down and
crept into the shanty. At once she felt upon her face, her neck, her
arms, the hot air as heavy as steam. If it had not been for the
stuffiness and the close smell of rye bread, fennel, and brushwood,
which prevented her from breathing freely, it would have been delightful
to hide from her visitors here under the thatched roof in the dusk, and
to think about the little creature. It was cosy and quiet.
"What a pretty spot!" said a feminine voice. "Let us sit here, Pyotr
Dmitritch."
Olga Mihalovna began peeping through a crack between two branches. She
saw her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and Lubotchka Sheller, a girl of
seventeen who had not long left boarding-school. Pyotr Dmitritch, with
his hat on the back of his head, languid and indolent from having drunk
so much at dinner, slouched by the hurdle and raked the hay into a heap
with his foot; Lubotchka, pink with the heat and pretty as ever, stood
with her hands behind her, watching the lazy movements of his big
handsome person.
Olga Mihalovna knew that her husband was attractive to women, and did
not like to see him with them. There was nothing out of the way in Pyotr
Dmitritch's lazily raking together the hay in order to sit down on it
with Lubotchka and chatter to her of trivialities; there was nothing out
of the way, either, in pretty Lubotchka's looking at him with her soft
eyes; but yet Olga Mihalovna felt vexed with her husband and frightened
and pleased that she could listen to them.
"Sit down, enchantress," said Pyotr Dmitritch, sinking down on the hay
and stretching. "That's right. Come, tell me something."
"What next! If I begin telling you anything you will go to sleep."
"Me go to sleep? Allah forbid! Can I go to sleep while eyes like yours
are watching me?"
In her husband's words, and in the fact that he was lolling with his hat
on the back of his head in the presence of a lady, there was nothing out
of the way either. He was spoilt by women, knew that they found him
attractive, and had adopted with them a special tone which every one
said suited him. With Lubotchka he behaved as with all women. But, all
the same, Olga Mihalovna was jealous.
"Tell me, please," said Lubotchka, after a brief silence--"is it true
that you are to be tried for something?"
"I? Yes, I am . . . numbered among the transgressors, my charmer."
"But what for?"
"For nothing, but just . . . it's chiefly a question of politics,"
yawned Pyotr Dmitritch--"the antagonisms of Left and Right. I, an
obscurantist and reactionary, ventured in an official paper to make use
of an expression offensive in the eyes of such immaculate Gladstones as
Vladimir Pavlovitch Vladimirov and our local justice of the peace--Kuzma
Grigoritch Vostryakov."
Pytor Dmitritch yawned again and went on:
"And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun
or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching
the Liberals! Heaven forbid! A Liberal is like the poisonous dry fungus
which covers you with a cloud of dust if you accidentally touch it with
your finger."
"What happened to you?"
"Nothing particular. The whole flare-up started from the merest trifle.
A teacher, a detestable person of clerical associations, hands to
Vostryakov a petition against a tavern-keeper, charging him with
insulting language and behaviour in a public place. Everything showed
that both the teacher and the tavern-keeper were drunk as cobblers, and
that they behaved equally badly. If there had been insulting behaviour,
the insult had anyway been mutual. Vostryakov ought to have fined them
both for a breach of the peace and have turned them out of the
court--that is all. But that's not our way of doing things. With us what
stands first is not the person--not the fact itself, but the trade-mark
and label. However great a rascal a teacher may be, he is always in the
right because he is a teacher; a tavern-keeper is always in the wrong
because he is a tavern-keeper and a money-grubber. Vostryakov placed the
tavern-keeper under arrest. The man appealed to the Circuit Court; the
Circuit Court triumphantly upheld Vostryakov's decision. Well, I stuck
to my own opinion. . . . Got a little hot. . . . That was all."
Pyotr Dmitritch spoke calmly with careless irony. In reality the trial
that was hanging over him worried him extremely. Olga Mihalovna
remembered how on his return from the unfortunate session he had tried
to conceal from his household how troubled he was, and how dissatisfied
with himself. As an intelligent man he could not help feeling that he
had gone too far in expressing his disagreement; and how much lying had
been needful to conceal that feeling from himself and from others! How
many unnecessary conversations there had been! How much grumbling and
insincere laughter at what was not laughable! When he learned that he
was to be brought up before the Court, he seemed at once harassed and
depressed; he began to sleep badly, stood oftener than ever at the
windows, drumming on the panes with his fingers. And he was ashamed to
let his wife see that he was worried, and it vexed her.
"They say you have been in the province of Poltava?" Lubotchka
questioned him.
"Yes," answered Pyotr Dmitritch. "I came back the day before yesterday."
"I expect it is very nice there."
"Yes, it is very nice, very nice indeed; in fact, I arrived just in time
for the haymaking, I must tell you, and in the Ukraine the haymaking is
the most poetical moment of the year. Here we have a big house, a big
garden, a lot of servants, and a lot going on, so that you don't see the
haymaking; here it all passes unnoticed. There, at the farm, I have a
meadow of forty-five acres as flat as my hand. You can see the men
mowing from any window you stand at. They are mowing in the meadow, they
are mowing in the garden. There are no visitors, no fuss nor hurry
either, so that you can't help seeing, feeling, hearing nothing but the
haymaking. There is a smell of hay indoors and outdoors. There's the
sound of the scythes from sunrise to sunset. Altogether Little Russia is
a charming country. Would you believe it, when I was drinking water from
the rustic wells and filthy vodka in some Jew's tavern, when on quiet
evenings the strains of the Little Russian fiddle and the tambourines
reached me, I was tempted by a fascinating idea--to settle down on my
place and live there as long as I chose, far away from Circuit Courts,
intellectual conversations, philosophizing women, long dinners. . . ."
Pyotr Dmitritch was not lying. He was unhappy and really longed to rest.
And he had visited his Poltava property simply to avoid seeing his
study, his servants, his acquaintances, and everything that could remind
him of his wounded vanity and his mistakes.
Lubotchka suddenly jumped up and waved her hands about in horror.
"Oh! A bee, a bee!" she shrieked. "It will sting!"
"Nonsense; it won't sting," said Pyotr Dmitritch. "What a coward you
are!"
"No, no, no," cried Lubotchka; and looking round at the bees, she walked
rapidly back.
Pyotr Dmitritch walked away after her, looking at her with a softened
and melancholy face. He was probably thinking, as he looked at her, of
his farm, of solitude, and--who knows?--perhaps he was even thinking how
snug and cosy life would be at the farm if his wife had been this
girl--young, pure, fresh, not corrupted by higher education, not with
child. . . .
When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Olga Mihalovna came out
of the shanty and turned towards the house. She wanted to cry. She was
by now acutely jealous. She could understand that her husband was
worried, dissatisfied with himself and ashamed, and when people are
ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and are
unreserved with strangers; she could understand, also, that she had
nothing to fear from Lubotchka or from those women who were now drinking
coffee indoors. But everything in general was terrible,
incomprehensible, and it already seemed to Olga Mihalovna that Pyotr
Dmitritch only half belonged to her.
"He has no right to do it!" she muttered, trying to formulate her
jealousy and her vexation with her husband. "He has no right at all. I
will tell him so plainly!"
She made up her mind to find her husband at once and tell him all about
it: it was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he was attractive to
other women and sought their admiration as though it were some heavenly
manna; it was unjust and dishonourable that he should give to others
what belonged by right to his wife, that he should hide his soul and his
conscience from his wife to reveal them to the first pretty face he came
across. What harm had his wife done him? How was she to blame? Long ago
she had been sickened by his lying: he was for ever posing, flirting,
saying what he did not think, and trying to seem different from what he
was and what he ought to be. Why this falsity? Was it seemly in a decent
man? If he lied he was demeaning himself and those to whom he lied, and
slighting what he lied about. Could he not understand that if he
swaggered and posed at the judicial table, or held forth at dinner on
the prerogatives of Government, that he, simply to provoke her uncle,
was showing thereby that he had not a ha'p'orth of respect for the
Court, or himself, or any of the people who were listening and looking
at him?
Coming out into the big avenue, Olga Mihalovna assumed an expression of
face as though she had just gone away to look after some domestic
matter. In the verandah the gentlemen were drinking liqueur and eating
strawberries: one of them, the Examining Magistrate--a stout elderly man,
blagueur and wit--must have been telling some rather free anecdote, for,
seeing their hostess, he suddenly clapped his hands over his fat lips,
rolled his eyes, and sat down. Olga Mihalovna did not like the local
officials. She did not care for their clumsy, ceremonious wives, their
scandal-mongering, their frequent visits, their flattery of her husband,
whom they all hated. Now, when they were drinking, were replete with
food and showed no signs of going away, she felt their presence an
agonizing weariness; but not to appear impolite, she smiled cordially to
the Magistrate, and shook her finger at him. She walked across the
dining-room and drawing-room smiling, and looking as though she had gone
to give some order and make some arrangement. "God grant no one stops
me," she thought, but she forced herself to stop in the drawing-room to
listen from politeness to a young man who was sitting at the piano
playing: after standing for a minute, she cried, "Bravo, bravo, M.
Georges!" and clapping her hands twice, she went on.
She found her husband in his study. He was sitting at the table,
thinking of something. His face looked stern, thoughtful, and guilty.
This was not the same Pyotr Dmitritch who had been arguing at dinner and
whom his guests knew, but a different man--wearied, feeling guilty and
dissatisfied with himself, whom nobody knew but his wife. He must have
come to the study to get cigarettes. Before him lay an open cigarette-
case full of cigarettes, and one of his hands was in the table drawer;
he had paused and sunk into thought as he was taking the cigarettes.
Olga Mihalovna felt sorry for him. It was as clear as day that this man
was harassed, could find no rest, and was perhaps struggling with
himself. Olga Mihalovna went up to the table in silence: wanting to show
that she had forgotten the argument at dinner and was not cross, she
shut the cigarette-case and put it in her husband's coat pocket.
"What should I say to him?" she wondered; "I shall say that lying is
like a forest--the further one goes into it the more difficult it is to
get out of it. I will say to him, 'You have been carried away by the
false part you are playing; you have insulted people who were attached
to you and have done you no harm. Go and apologize to them, laugh at
yourself, and you will feel better. And if you want peace and solitude,
let us go away together.'"
Meeting his wife's gaze, Pyotr Dmitritch's face immediately assumed the
expression it had worn at dinner and in the garden--indifferent and
slightly ironical. He yawned and got up.
"It's past five," he said, looking at his watch. "If our visitors are
merciful and leave us at eleven, even then we have another six hours of
it. It's a cheerful prospect, there's no denying!"
And whistling something, he walked slowly out of the study with his
usual dignified gait. She could hear him with dignified firmness cross
the dining-room, then the drawing-room, laugh with dignified assurance,
and say to the young man who was playing, "Bravo! bravo!" Soon his
footsteps died away: he must have gone out into the garden. And now not
jealousy, not vexation, but real hatred of his footsteps, his insincere
laugh and voice, took possession of Olga Mihalovna. She went to the
window and looked out into the garden. Pyotr Dmitritch was already
walking along the avenue. Putting one hand in his pocket and snapping
the fingers of the other, he walked with confident swinging steps,
throwing his head back a little, and looking as though he were very well
satisfied with himself, with his dinner, with his digestion, and with
nature. . . .
Two little schoolboys, the children of Madame Tchizhevsky, who had only
just arrived, made their appearance in the avenue, accompanied by their
tutor, a student wearing a white tunic and very narrow trousers. When
they reached Pyotr Dmitritch, the boys and the student stopped, and
probably congratulated him on his name-day. With a graceful swing of his
shoulders, he patted the children on their cheeks, and carelessly
offered the student his hand without looking at him. The student must
have praised the weather and compared it with the climate of Petersburg,
for Pyotr Dmitritch said in a loud voice, in a tone as though he were
not speaking to a guest, but to an usher of the court or a witness:
"What! It's cold in Petersburg? And here, my good sir, we have a
salubrious atmosphere and the fruits of the earth in abundance. Eh?
What?"
And thrusting one hand in his pocket and snapping the fingers of the
other, he walked on. Till he had disappeared behind the nut bushes, Olga
Mihalovna watched the back of his head in perplexity. How had this man
of thirty-four come by the dignified deportment of a general? How had he
come by that impressive, elegant manner? Where had he got that vibration
of authority in his voice? Where had he got these "what's," "to be
sure's," and "my good sir's"?
Olga Mihalovna remembered how in the first months of her marriage she
had felt dreary at home alone and had driven into the town to the
Circuit Court, at which Pyotr Dmitritch had sometimes presided in place
of her godfather, Count Alexey Petrovitch. In the presidential chair,
wearing his uniform and a chain on his breast, he was completely
changed. Stately gestures, a voice of thunder, "what," "to be sure,"
careless tones. . . . Everything, all that was ordinary and human, all
that was individual and personal to himself that Olga Mihalovna was
accustomed to seeing in him at home, vanished in grandeur, and in the
presidential chair there sat not Pyotr Dmitritch, but another man whom
every one called Mr. President. This consciousness of power prevented
him from sitting still in his place, and he seized every opportunity to
ring his bell, to glance sternly at the public, to shout. . . . Where
had he got his short-sight and his deafness when he suddenly began to
see and hear with difficulty, and, frowning majestically, insisted on
people speaking louder and coming closer to the table? From the height
of his grandeur he could hardly distinguish faces or sounds, so that it
seemed that if Olga Mihalovna herself had gone up to him he would have
shouted even to her, "Your name?" Peasant witnesses he addressed
familiarly, he shouted at the public so that his voice could be heard
even in the street, and behaved incredibly with the lawyers. If a lawyer
had to speak to him, Pyotr Dmitritch, turning a little away from him,
looked with half-closed eyes at the ceiling, meaning to signify thereby
that the lawyer was utterly superfluous and that he was neither
recognizing him nor listening to him; if a badly-dressed lawyer spoke,
Pyotr Dmitritch pricked up his ears and looked the man up and down with
a sarcastic, annihilating stare as though to say: "Queer sort of lawyers
nowadays!"
"What do you mean by that?" he would interrupt.
If a would-be eloquent lawyer mispronounced a foreign word, saying, for
instance, "factitious" instead of "fictitious," Pyotr Dmitritch
brightened up at once and asked, "What? How? Factitious? What does that
mean?" and then observed impressively: "Don't make use of words you do
not understand." And the lawyer, finishing his speech, would walk away
from the table, red and perspiring, while Pyotr Dmitritch; with a self-
satisfied smile, would lean back in his chair triumphant. In his manner
with the lawyers he imitated Count Alexey Petrovitch a little, but when
the latter said, for instance, "Counsel for the defence, you keep quiet
for a little!" it sounded paternally good-natured and natural, while the
same words in Pyotr Dmitritch's mouth were rude and artificial. II
There were sounds of applause. The young man had finished playing. Olga
Mihalovna remembered her guests and hurried into the drawing-room.
"I have so enjoyed your playing," she said, going up to the piano. "I
have so enjoyed it. You have a wonderful talent! But don't you think our
piano's out of tune?"
At that moment the two schoolboys walked into the room, accompanied by
the student.
"My goodness! Mitya and Kolya," Olga Mihalovna drawled joyfully, going
to meet them: "How big they have grown! One would not know you! But
where is your mamma?"